A well-structured and accurate product feed can be an extremely important source of revenue for eCommerce retailers. Applications of product feeds in online marketing have increased significantly in recent years to create brand new revenue streams.
While product feeds have been used in price comparison and affiliate marketing for several years, marketers are now realizing the huge potential that can be unlocked by applying their data to other online marketing channels. Those that have invested in feed marketing are seeing fantastic returns in both KPIs as well as increased efficiencies in their processes.
So, if this area of online marketing is delivering results, why isn’t everyone doing it and why isn’t there a stream of research papers analyzing the returns?
Well, there are three main factors that are currently slowing feed marketing projects down:
1. Quality of merchant data feeds: While product feeds play an important role in partnerships, their actual production is often seen as a lower priority and feed quality suffers as a result.
2. Perceived complexities of dealing with data files: The most important considerations should always come back to the business goals and application, so don’t leave it all to Information and Communication Technology staff.
3. Education and best practice guidance in the marketplace: There are very few resources available to help you determine your strategy and execution with product feed marketing.
So what applications exist for marketers who want to make use of their product data? As previously mentioned, price comparison or comparison shopping engines are powered entirely by product feeds and give us a very good example of a well defined use, as well as how data feeds allow affiliates to create innovative and useful representations of merchant data to convert sales.
Google Product Search is another application of product feeds and is often one of the first product feeds that a merchant will produce and utilize (free traffic!). The issue here can often be that once a merchant has produced a feed to integrate with the Google Merchant Center platform, they will seek to use the same format for other applications.
E-mail marketing tends to take a back seat in most conversations about innovative online marketing. However, by merging eCRM and data feeds you can create very powerful, tactical e-mail campaigns aligned with your general product marketing strategy.
Most online retailers have tried some kind of behavioural retargeting or contextual advertising. Again, the use of feeds here can significantly improve interaction and conversions of online display advertising when combined with these powerful techniques of targeting users.
As data feeds are simply representations of your products that you sell on your sites, iPhone and Android apps can be easily constructed if you have a well formatted feed. Look at your own business environment and determine how feeds fit in with your particular environment. Happy feed marketing to you.
Lee Brignell-Cash is the Co-Founder and COO of FusePump Ltd.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07
