My Next Career Challenge
Why Comparison Shopping?
The past six years of my career have been spent with companies that provide online marketing services. At Digital River's Fireclick division, I had the opportunity to learn the web analytics industry, and at WhatCounts I gained loyalty e-communications expertise. I love online marketing because of its metrics-oriented nature. Almost everything can be broken down into a replicable ROI equation - put in X and you should get Y. If not, try A versus B and we'll figure out which one to repeat in the future. Gone are the days of marketing teams that have their heads in the clouds and their fingers crossed for good results.
While I wanted to remain in the online marketing services community, I found inherent flaws with each of the past two industries. Web analytics is great for pointing out all of the inefficiencies in your conversion funnel, but it does little to solve those bottlenecks. I have learned from working with companies of all shapes, sizes and budgets that every e-marketing team is short on resources and very few people know how to properly optimize a site based on web analytics data. Loyalty email has been the second biggest no-brainer in the online marketing world (after search engine optimization/management) for a number of years, but it comes along with its own issues. Regardless of the purity of the intentions or the explicitness of the permission that goes into initiating a sender-recipient relationship, I feel like most marketers end up abusing that priviledge eventually. Whether it's the 17 promotional emails a month I'm currently getting from Performance Bicycle or the unsolicited credit card offers I get from my favorite airlines, I wholeheartedly believe that there isn't much of a fine line between permissible messages and spam. There is just a big gray area, most of which proves to be an annoying rain cloud.
I find CSO to be a much more beneficial (and credible, as I mentioned in an earlier post) form of marketing. People are proactively searching for products and shopping engines are already trying to convert those visitors into buyers. The ROI on submitting feeds to additional engines is a bigger no-brainer than email marketing, but managing those feeds can be even more confusing than juggling one's paid keywords. After all, there is only one Google (alright, two if you count the little Bing that could) but there are dozens of leading CSE's that each have their own non-standardized formatting nuances. Scaled correctly, the CSO space will someday solve complex and time-consuming advertising challenges for retailers while offering unparalleled conversion rates and ROI.
Why SingleFeed?
There are a few vendors in the CSO space which span the continuum of merchants from large to small. There are only a couple of companies that truly focus on data feed optimization and services meant to develop a retailer's comparison shopping success. Of those providers, only one is led by Brian Smith, the world's premier expert on comparison shopping optimization. I feel like SingleFeed is uniquely poised to gain a significant market share while developing technology that can save smaller merchants time and concurrently offering the sophistication that the world's largest retailers need.
SingleFeed is at a compelling point of inflection right now. Their team is at a similar stage of development as WhatCounts was when I joined their organization, but their customer acquisition traction is significantly higher. I'm excited about building a sales and marketing strategy and team in the years to come and I have no doubt that SingleFeed will be a "household" name amongst the Internet Retailer Top 500 and beyond very soon.
Comments