This month's issue takes a look at what worked for online holiday shoppers in 2001.  It may seem obvious that online customer service has grown in importance (web users are more savvy now, after all), and that the more integrated our channels are, the better (not all consumers head straight to the mall), but let's take a closer look. 

Doesn't it seem like the things that are important to "all consumers" are becoming a direct reflection of what we know to be the hot issues for women consumers?   Can these general holiday findings serve as confirmation that focusing on the specifics of a woman's online experience will result in higher customer satisfaction overall?  Maybe more marketers will now be following our cause...

Either way, at least we can all congratulate ourselves on knowing it all along.  A round of applause, please!

  Multi-channel shoppers, consumers who browse or purchase through more than one channel (retail store, catalog, Internet), reported using all three channels in symbiosis for browsing and purchasing over the holiday season. Consumers cited price, selection and convenience of catalogs, the speed and the 24-hour availability of the Internet, and the ability to see and sample products at retail stores, as reasons for purchasing through respective channels.  However, in general, the retail channel still dominated holiday purchasing for the multi-channel consumer.

  In general, more women tend to be channel switchers than men (a consumer who browses in one channel and purchases in another). 46% of women and 43% of men browsed on the Internet and purchased at retail stores.  Whereas, 37% of women and 28% of men browsed through catalogs and purchased at retail stores.

"Results from this data demonstrate the need for marketers to have tools in place in order to better measure how one channel is driving sales to another channel," said David Rosenblatt, President, DoubleClick.

See www.doubleclick.net for a copy of the study's executive summary.

2.  The "4th Quarter 2001 Mystery Shopping of 100 e-commerce Sites" study conducted by the Direct Marketing Association and the e-tailing group has been released.  Overall, to get better conversion and improve ROI, the study found that merchants are refining customer service functionality and features on their sites.  A few highlights of the report include:

Customer Service Information - Adding contact and policy information to a site is easily implemented and well worth the heightened customer trust levels that result in increased sales.  For example, 99% of the sites shopped provided toll free telephone numbers for customer service, and the home pages of 90% of the merchants surveyed provided links to their privacy policies.

The Order Process -Quick and easy shopping is essential to meet the expectations of today's online consumer.  Although time to shop may be dependent on connection speeds, clicks to checkout is a more constant metric for measuring shopping ease --and the average number in this study was 5.36 clicks vs. 8.76 a year ago in the DMA/e-tailing 4Q 2000 study.  Furthermore, tales of customer frustration last year led to the measurement of "# of shopping attempts" in 2001.  93% of the sites visited could be shopped on the first attempt, which seems to confirm that merchants have prioritized infrastructure improvements to meet growing demand.

Visit www.etailing.com for more information.

3.  Nineteen percent of store purchases over the holidays were influenced directly by customers' visits to BestBuy.com.  Furthermore, traffic to BestBuy.com was up 20% over last year's holiday season traffic, according to a recent article in InternetRetailer.com.  "Best Buy's technology-oriented consumer is responding well to the integrated information and sales experience offered by Best Buy stores and BestBuy.com," said John Walden, president of BestBuy.com. "We believe we are at the forefront of discovering the power of clicks-and-mortar."

...Since women are likely Best Buy's key consumers (I emailed them to see if they'd run the study by gender, but they hadn't), we should certainly take note of the success of their integrated marketing and sales efforts.  Could such a strategy work as well for your brand as it did for Best Buy?

4. If it counted as a retail store, Bebe`s web site would be the biggest.  As reported by Internetretailer.com recently, web sales at Bebe Stores Inc. grew 240% and exceeded sales of any offline store in 2001. Chainwide sales at Bebe were $45.1 million in December, up 8.7% from $41.5 million in December a year earlier. (Bebe operates 160 stores in the U.S. and Canada selling women's apparel and accessories under the bebe, bbspand bebe moda brands.)

...There seems to be a theme here.  People, and women specifically, in the case of Bebe, are indeed using the web frequently for consumer purchases.  Whether or not they actually conduct the transactions online, they are heading online first to do research.

5. "Glass Ceiling Gets Thicker; gender earnings gap grows" was the title of an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently.  A congressional (General Accounting Office) study across 10 industries has found that most female managers earned less money compared with men in 2000 than they did five years earlier.  The report further notes that the pay gap is widest among parents, and that women find it harder to balance career and children.

...From a marketer's perspective (among others), won't it be interesting when (there's always hope) the gender gap in earnings closes and women have their complete purchasing power? 

I couldn't find the link for the study quickly on the GAO site, s o here's the link for the article: http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/business/55576_glassceiling24.shtml

6. ReachWomen News:

Sponsorship Opportunity: ReachWomen has begun holding "listening events" with small groups of women around the country on the topic of their personal health and nutrition, specifically as it relates to breast cancer risks.  This work is being conducted on behalf of a client who will be launching a related product this fall.  We are seeking potential "listening event" sponsors on both a regional and national level to help us collect these voices.  For more information, please email my colleague, Lisa Johnson, at: lisa@reachwomen.com and put "sponsorship potential" in the subject line.