Timberline Interactive

Back in 1989, Ann Clark started out with little more than a pig-shaped Christmas ornament and a dream. After years of painting and creating small handmade gifts for her children to give away, she set up shop in her garage and turned a hobby into a business. In 1991, armed with a small amount of start-up cash and unbridled enthusiasm, Ann tackled her first trade show, setting up a booth at the Philadelphia Gift Show with six cookie cutter designs and several other hand-made crafts. She came home with $3,500 in orders, and Ann Clark, the person, became Ann Clark, Ltd., the company.

Thirteen years of love and labor later, Ann’s creative flair and love for baking has produced a broad product line of handcrafted cookie cutters and associated giftware, making Ann Clark, Ltd. the largest cookie cutter company in the gift industry. With accounts throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, "The Cookie Cutter People from Vermont" are invited into the kitchens of consumers worldwide.

A Family Affair
With the success of Ann Clark, Ltd., cookie cutters became a family affair. Although very supportive from the outset, Ann’s late husband, John, was promoted to the more official role of Vice President in 1996. Her late son, John Jr., also served as a key player when he moved back to Vermont in 1996. Daughter Elizabeth joined the team as Sales Manager around the same time, and son Ben came on board as General Manager in 1998. Even granddaughters Margaret and Rebecca lend their services as cookie tasters, eagerly approving of Ann’s special butter cookie recipe handed down from her mother.

Ann Clark Ltd. is today the biggest American maker of cookie cutters, and the company recently commissioned an improved new ecommerce website, designed and built by Timberline Interactive on the CommerceV3 platform. The new website was launched June 15, 2009, featuring a new graphic look and feel, product ratings and reviews, cookie recipes, and registered user functionality including wholesale -- to support the large number of retail gift stores carrying Ann Clark products for resale.

The company produces about 250 cookie cutters in shapes ranging from traditional favorites like gingerbread men, stars, and heart-shaped cookie cutters to more contemporary novelties including martini glasses and high heeled shoes.

Ann Clark Ltd. also does a brisk corporate promotional business producing cookie cutters in the shape of company logos.

Each cookie cutter is handsomely packaged with a cookie recipe card. The product line includes traditional tin cookie cutters with handles, and -- even more nostalgic -- old school copper cookie cutters just like the ones in Grandma's kitchen.

Alan Rimm Kaufman offers a good post today on how to use the new hProduct "microformat" to mark up your ecommerce website's HTML to convey product data to Google.

hProduct markup will enable Google to capture product names, brand names, categories, descriptions, URLs and photos, each in discrete fields -- similar in fashion to the Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) . The big difference, of course is that where you have to regularly, manually push a feed up to Google Product Search, the new hProduct spec works automatically, every time Google crawls your properly formatted website.

It's still unclear how the data will impact search results, but fielding your product data like this is part of a Web 2.0 trend (Alan is seeing it as Web 3.0) for more logic, meaning and sortable information -- the "Semantic Web." Alan speculates on whether -- and if so, when -- this development will be game-changing for ecommerce. The main incentive, for online retailers, is simple: more sales.

To me, this lengthens the checklist that any online marketer should use to amplify the reach of your product line, and grow sales:

• Submit product data feed to Google Product Search. They'll appear free, both at the underutilized Google Product Search site, but also more importantly, withing Google search results as "Shopping Results."
• Submit product data feeds to any Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) that gives you good ROI. Shopping.com, Gifts.com, FindGift, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla are the ones that work best for us.
• Enable customer reviews and ratings and syndicate them to the world through services like SyndicateVoice and Buzzillions
• Produce news releases for your new or noteworthy products. They have a shot at appearing under "News results"
• Optimize product images for image search

I might have suggested "produce RSS-formatted feeds of your new or noteworthy products," but this is a marginal one -- at the consumer level there has been too little adoption of RSS feeds to put this on your front burner.

For details on how the hProduct and other microformats work, check out "Product Information" on Google Webmaster Central.

The "2009 State of Retailing Online" report recently issued by Forrester Research and Shop.org makes a fairly rosy forecast of ecommerce revenue.

The researchers predict 11% growth in sales for online retailers. In dollars, the growth would amount to $14.8 billion, bringing the total e-retail sales to $156.1 billion.

Percentage growth would be a bit off the 2008 pace of 13%, but it sure beats a sharp stick in the eye!

Complete article on Internet Retailer.

We'll be at the ACCM Conference May 3 - 7 in New Orleans, and look forward to learning a lot, catching up with old friends, and making new ones.

Timberliners Bud Reed and Tom Funk will be present. Tom Funk speaks Wednesday alongside Jay Greenberg, ecommerce director of Spencer's Gifts, with an aptly titled presentation and Q&A called "Squeeze Better Performance From Your Website In Tough Economic Times." We'll present several case studies and A/B test results from real online merchants demonstrating sales lifts you can achieve on your site with relatively small efforts. It's all about ROI!

As in past years, Bud Reed will be judging the annual Multichannel Merchant Awards, in the website division.

If you're interested in any of the ways Timberline can help your business, we would love to get together with you at ACCM and chat -- ideally over some creole coffee and beignets, or crawfish and mint juleps!

Here are the services we offer:

• Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search-Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Email Marketing
• Google Analytics Consulting
• Google Website Optimizer A/B Testing
• eCommerce Website Design & Development

Of course, the tighter the economy gets, the more vital all these elements are to your online business success.

Call Tom at 802-388-8377 x 203 or email tfunk@timberlineinteractive.com and let's meet!

While bricks-and-mortar retailing is still mired in recession, Forrester and eMarketer tell us that online retail is bucking the trend: On average, ecommerce revenues are up 10%, year-over-year, for the first quarter of 2009.

However, that average number masks weaker performance by a sizable chunk of online retailers surveyed. While 58% reported sales increases, 42% reported flat or declining sales.

Meanwhile, Internet Retailer reported NetElixir findings that total paid search traffic took a downturn in the same period, Q1 2009, compared to the prior year. NetElixir studied a cross-section of clients in the pet supplies, consumer electronics, flowers and gifts, housewares, and food and drug markets.

In the study, Net Elixir found that total paid search traffic declined 9%, and the cost per click declined 7%.

Net Elixir founder and CEO Udayan Bose predicted the SEM slowdown would continue into next quarter: "We think Q2 this year will be slower than Q1 for search advertising,” said Bose. “The continuing pessimism about the economy is the main culprit. Also, historically, Q2 tends to be slower than Q1—the number of paid search clicks in Q2 2008 was 12% lower than in Q1 2008.”

If the two studies are to be understood together, we at Timberline would suggest that the overall growth was driven by migration of customers from offline channels -- including mall shoppers and phone orders from catalog customers -- who are increasingly turning to the web to transact their business.

The New York Times reported mall vacancies are at a ten-year high, and sales per square foot down over 5%. With anchor tenants vanishing, malls are becoming less of a draw, potentially driving more shoppers to the online channel.

We at Timberline Interactive would like to thank Penton Media, publisher of Direct, Multichannel Merchant, Chief Marketer and other publications, for adding Tom Funk to their regular columnists.

I will be writing a monthly ecommerce article for i-Merchant online newsletter. I recommend you subscribe for free, as all Penton's e-newsletters bring together useful and well-written articles from several industry folks.

Here are my first two pieces:

Best Practices for Abandoned Cart E-mails

Is Your E-mail Program Healthy? Check Its Vital Signs

"TV and Magazine Ads More Effective Than Ads on Internet," asserts the headline of a press release announcing new research from McPheters & Company.

It's a mere coincidence that the dateline of this press release is April Fools Day, but it's definitely a foolish assertion.

What the headline should say is "TV and Magazine Ads Are More Effective than Banner Ads." And that's a point that will surprise no one!

The McPheters research, conducted in a lab setting, gave test subjects 30 minutes to watch television, surf the web, or browse a magazine of their choice. The experiment quantified how many ads each person was exposed to, employed eye-tracking to gauge whether the ads were noticed, and then -- after the lab session -- surveyed participants to see how many ads they recalled seeing.

But the online study focused on "Internet banner ads in standard sizes," ignoring the leading form of online advertising, which is Search Engine advertising.

At 45% of the total online advertising pie, search is the single biggest form of online advertising and more than double the spending on banner ads.

The big distinction between search and all these other forms of advertising is that search is the only "pull" medium, the only environment where the audience drives the advertising by request. TV ads, magazine ads and banners are all "push" media -- what Seth Godin disparages as "Interruption Marketing." Paid search ads produce by far the best direct ROI of all these media; search is the quintessential direct-response marketing today. I'd bet the recall of ads seen in response to a search would also demonstrate high recall.

Magazines topped the media in terms of sheer number of ads delivered in the 30 minutes, more than twice the number of ad impressions as TV and more than six times the number of display ads delivered online. But when it came to recall, TV trumped magazines. Online banners trailed behind both offline media.

I don't fault McPheters' research for comparing these three types of "push media." It's a fair comparison, and an interesting one. What I do object to is the headline, which uses that all-inclusive and misleading phrase "Ads on Internet," when it's really talking just about the much-maligned banner.

Other findings:

The research was performed in cooperation with Conde Nast and CBS Vision.

A new research report from eROI surveying some 500 companies found that 18% of them -- almost one in six -- are not even tracking the performance of their email marketing.

Talk about marketing blind!

The reasons given for failing to track included:

• Not knowing how
• Lacking the time
• Lacking the budget

It's hard to read those rationales without hearing them as enormous cop-outs. Come on! Email (like online marketing in general) is the most trackable ad medium in the history of marketing.

"The final results reveal some alarming habits," noted eROI, "showing that many marketers are still taking an extremely careless approach to email marketing."

If you're not tracking email performance, get with the program. You'll likely find three things:

1) Your house email marketing program will be one of your most dependable revenue generators and enjoy one of the largest single slices of your online revenue pie.
2) You'll identify signs of whether you're mailing too little or too much
3) You'll see huge swings (think 100% range) between your highest and lowest revenue-per-campaign, depending on the season, the economy, and of course the innate strength of a partcular offer or product.

P.S. Here's a little email rule of thumb we're seeing: assuming you have an average order value of $100, aim for around $0.15 to $0.20 revenue per email message delivered. Based on our customers, with niche audiences and active, healthy house email lists, the math works like this:

• Send 10,000 messages 
• Open rate is 20%  (2,000 opens)
• Click-through rate is 10% (200 clicks)
• And Conversion rate is 10% (20 orders)
• 20 orders x $100 AOV = $2,000, or $0.20 revenue per message delivered

I'd be interested in knowing if it holds true for you!

Gourmet chocolate Easter eggs from Lake Champlain chocolates.

Easter sales will be down 14% according to a survey released today by the National Retail Federation.

In 2009 Americans will spend about $117, on average, for Easter candy, gifts, food and decorations, down from an average of $135 last year. Multiplying those survey results across all US households, the NRF pegged Easter holiday spending at $12.7 billion overall.

Americans' largest Easter expense will be in preparing a meal, with the average person expected to spend $38 on food (down from $41). People will also spend on gifts ($17 vs. $21 last year), flowers ($8 vs. $9) and candy ($17 vs. $18). 

Fewer consumers are planning to purchase new spring attire this year. According to the survey, Americans will spend an average of $19.44, down from $23.82 last year.

Easter candies from the Washington-state confectioner Liberty Orchards.

Despite the results, NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin sounded a hopeful note: “With Easter falling so late this year, retailers will have plenty of time to entice shoppers with deals on spring apparel and other Easter merchandise,” said Mullin. “Retailers are hopeful that a late Easter will bring warmer weather and put shoppers in the mood to buy clothing, flowers and other holiday gifts.”

The NRF data covers all retail sales, be it brick-and-mortar, catalog, or online. For years online sales have managed revenue increases while brick-and-mortar retailers have generally not. Even the online channel has flattened out of late, but we're optimistic leading niche ecommerce marketers will buck the trend.

Our local Dakin Farm is already busy shipping Easter hams, for instance, in what is generally their second busiest season of the year.

Liberty Orchards, the Washington-based makers of Aplets & Cotlets candies, has a wide selection of Easter cookies, baskets, and gourmet Easter candy gifts, and online sales are up over last year.

In Vermont, Lake Champlain Chocolates offers a variety of gourmet Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies, and chocolate gift baskets wrapped in colorful Spring gift packaging. For LCC Easter ranks third, after the Holiday season, and Valentine's Day.

Google's blog announced two changes to how it returns search results.

First, Google says it will be delivering more and better refinements to the "related searches" that you see suggested at the bottom of many results pages.

Second, when you use a longer search query, like "earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun" your results will contain longer descriptive text (the blocks of black text below the blue titles), which Google calls "snippets" and HTMLers think of as "meta description." The reason for the longer text descriptions is that they'll help searchers to see their phrases in context.

Except, that is, for one little problem: It looks like spammers have already created garbage pages that rank well for the query "earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun."

And the other example shown on Google's blog, a search for "spice market review shrimp starter dessert" is no longer such a great test case. All the results are now blog posts and other pages talking about -- you guessed it -- Google's algorithm change.