With double-digit e-commerce growth and rising consumer expectations of Internet and cross-channel shopping, consumer product manufacturers need to create the right online brand presence.  Consumers are already “going direct” to manufacturers for consideration, purchase, and post-purchase support.  If you are a consumer product manufacturer, even if you don’t sell online, your Web presence is one of your most valuable opportunities to have a direct relationship with your consumers – to not only influence consumer purchase, but also support the full product life cycle – including usage, satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

In our January 12^th webinar, Getting Serious About Going Direct, How Manufacturers Can Develop an Optimal Ecommerce Strategy for their Brand with Viking Range and Forrester Research, learn how you can benefit by selling direct to drive and maintain sales growth, maintain brand value, and capture valuable information about consumers, their wants, and their expectations.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How Viking Range uses the Web to present a consistent brand, sell to, and service different audiences, and maintains a direct connection with its consumers
• How to build a business case for investment in your direct-to-consumer channel
• How to leverage your direct customer relationship to ensure satisfaction with knowledge, communities and service
• How to marry your B2C and B2B solution to improve operational efficiencies

Register

When we walk into a store, bank, or hotel, chances are we’re instantly greeted with a friendly, “Hello, can I help you with anything today?” As customers we usually welcome this proactive offer of support because it helps us get what we need more quickly. However, what many companies don’t always appreciate yet is that people want the same level of support across all channels – and especially online. In fact, nearly 85 percent of consumers say they want access to online live help.

Are you offering this support? Live help solutions provide quick and easy access to a sales or service associate via click to call and click to chat technologies. Online live help can boost sales, increase customer loyalty, and reduce abandonment rates.

Join ATG’s Ryan Hoppe this Thursday at 1 p.m. EST for a complimentary 1to1 Media Webinar entitled, “Engage the Right Customers at the Right Time,” and learn how including a live help option like click to call and click to chat can be the difference between satisfaction and site abandonment.

The Webinar will also address:

• How to use online service as a sales channel
• The three myths about live online service
• How to engage your best customers in the moment

Click here to register for this free video webinar.

Remember the days of yesteryear when we booked airline reservations through travel agents and received paper tickets in the (snail) mail? Well, those days are long gone and the bulk of all flight reservations are booked online, challenging airlines to create an efficient and seamless online shopping experience.

Join us tomorrow for a free webinar to hear Continental Airlines explain how they did just that by optimizing their online booking process with live help technology.

Ken Penny, managing director of marketing communications at Continental Airlines, will discuss how ATG’s live help technology not only reduced Continental’s Web site abandonment, but improved customer satisfaction, decreased customer service costs and helped the company obtain real-time, detailed analytics.

Tune in tomorrow at 11 a.m. EST for the ATG video webinar entitled, “How Continental Airlines Increased Customer Satisfaction with Live Help,” and see in more detail how Continental used proactive live help to identify areas for optimization and drive measurable results.

Also hear from travel industry guest speaker and expert, Henry Harteveldt, principal analyst at Forrester Research, about the importance of live help within the travel industry.

Please register for this free interactive video webinar. We hope to connect with you then.

It may very well need both, according to Ronit Weinberg, VP of e-Commerce and Online Marketing at Diane von Furstenberg and Bernardine Wu, Founder and CEO of FitForCommerce. The answer entirely depends on your site and webstore goals.

In a recent webinar, “Outgrowing Your Webstore? Should You Re-design or Re-platform?”  Bernardine and Ronit shared their perspective on this difficult, yet important decision.  Bernardine kicked off the session with a poll to understand why participants felt they were outgrowing their site.

Over 70% of respondents felt their site was either not flexible enough or needed web design usability improvements.  The detailed answers broke out as follows:

• 37.9% Not flexible enough
• 34.4% Web design/usability improvements
• 10.3% Limitations to increasing conversions difficult/impossible/too expensive to make
• 6.8% Not search engine friendly enough
• 6.8% Need to leverage mobile commerce
• 3.4% Need to leverage social media
• 0.4% Other

Bernardine explained that the answer to the question of whether to re-design or re-platform starts with business objectives.  “Our clients follow a process called ‘e-commerce diligence,’ which emphasizes requirements and research as equally important as evaluating platform choices.” For the requirements phase, Bernardine then offered a 10-step process:

 1. Align with business objectives
 2. Define functional requirements in detail
 3. Know relevant best practices
 4. Perform competitive analysis
 5. Prioritize and time-phase requirements
 6. Document use cases
 7. Diagram workflow design
 8. Apply creative design
 9. Test and adjust requirements …again and again
 10. Keep requirements updated …always

Ronit of DVF.com explained that her organization had both re-platformed and re-designed since the initial launch of its webstore in 2005.  “There are advantages to both,” she stated.

Pros of re-platforming:

• Implement current e-commerce best practices
• Expand on merchandising features
• Customize: DVF needed the ability to express the uniqueness of the brand and a cookie-cutter solution was not the answer
• Innovate: With the rapid pace in which ecommerce is evolving, DVF needed to stay on the cutting edge

Pros of re-designing:

• Keep the customer’s curiosity piqued
• Help with SEO
• Evolve with technology

To hear the full insight of these industry experts, just follow this link to view the ATG webinar recording, “Outgrowing your Webstore? Should you Re-design or Re-platform?”