Perfect Together

Last month, Hearst Digital Media partnered with Pixazza Inc. to integrate e-commerce into select advertising on sites just as Housebeautiful.com. In May, New York Media launched New York Deals, a New York City-specific online program that offers weekly round-ups of deals for dining, shopping, spas, activities and events. In the meantime, J.P. Morgan Chase last month took a minority stake in Ebony and Jet publisher Johnson Publishing, putting a cash infusion towards the publisher's growth plan, which includes a retail business.

The possibility isn't limited to large consumer publishers, either. City and regional publisher Moon Tide Media offers e-commerce functionality with a series of online directories. Groupon, the industry leader in deep discount deals, started targeting its business users with something more than cut-rate massages and discount picture framing. IT consulting firm Ajilitee launched a Groupon deal for $25,000 worth of business intelligence and cloud computing services for the bargain basement price of $12,500.

Meanwhile, F+W Media, which recently announced that it will be opening its 25th e-commerce store in a joint venture with Hoffman Media, says e-commerce earnings are up more than 50 percent.

"The e-commerce business is in the tens of millions of dollars and is our fastest growing segment with 50 percent year-over-year growth rates, says Nussbaum. "We expect it will be our second largest business-otherwise the largest-by 2014."

F+W ultimately chose open source platform Magento. "It's good for a medium-sized e-commerce business like ours. It's scalable and developers are widely available," says Phelps. "It's as well able to handle our different products-selling both physical and digital products is a big consideration."

The back end

On the back end, F+W consolidates information in a customer database housed at its e-mail service provider. "In that database we store every piece of relevant information we can: how we brought that customer in-was it the bookstore, an event, a free download," says Phelps. "Once we know that, we tailor our marketing to that customer. We spend a lot of time tailoring the database so it serves as an e-mail/customer-of-record repository. That e-mail database is in effect our direct channel of communications with clients."

Building a Successful E-Commerce Business Without Breaking the BankContexo Online director Jonathan Ray identifies seven essentials. 

Two years ago, b-to-b publisher Access Intelligence acquired Contexo Media, a Salt Lake City-based firm offering information products and software for the medical coding market. AI moved Contexo to an updated e-commerce platform developed out of its own homegrown CMS web store. "The web store is where we're bringing in the bulk of our revenue online," says Jonathan Ray, director of Contexo Online.

Here, Ray shares what he considers to be the biggest takeaways for publishers who want to ramp up their e-commerce business.

The freedom to say

"This provided us with the freedom to say, 'We need to do some fine-tuning here'," he adds. "It can be very specific to the way we're selling a product, just as with the shipping logic. Some of our products are the size of a phone book, others are a single page."

"I cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining good communication with your customer support team," says Ray. "As well, keep them updated with all new product launches and planned marketing campaigns, as this provides them with the information to up-sell when they have the customer's attention."

Contexo recently entered into a partnership to resell selected products from another publisher. "As part of our agreement, we will be taking orders directly through our web store and automatically passing along the order details to the publisher to fulfill," says Ray. "They invoice us monthly for their share of the revenue and we've barely lifted a finger since we're not inventorying their products and we removed ourselves from the fulfillment process."

Number of tools to measure e-commerce performance

Contexo uses a number of tools to measure e-commerce performance. "We look at a variety of data ranging from transaction counts and revenue generated from our shopping cart, as then as traffic and activity data from our web analytics tools," says Ray. "We've recently taken our measurement a step furthermore to more accurately track the effectiveness of specific digital tactics. In other words than just looking at the performance of a marketing channel in general, just as e-mail, or SEM or web advertising, we can more accurately measure the elements within that channel as it relates to a conversion. So we can see specific links/gfx within an e-mail that lead to an order, also as specific SEM campaigns and advertising or navigation items."

The KPIs Ray and his team are paying close attention are transactions, average order values, revenue per visitor and conversion rates. "Comparing this data month-over-month can help you identify opportunities, seasonal trends and problem areas," he says.

The past year to send triggered messages both online

Contexo tailored its store communication tool over the past year to send triggered messages both online and in e-mail to clients based on actions they take. "For instance, we can send a cross-promo message with a customer's order confirmation based on a specific product they purchased," says Ray. "Looking ahead, relevancy is where we will be concentrating our optimization efforts."

Thursday, July 21, 2011 -- Custom publishing is nothing new, however today it's taking on new urgency as "content marketing" and "brand journalism." This Webinar offers two case studies on how independent publishers are landing and executing custom business, from new services that are attracting first-time customers to how outsourcing select functions can improve the bottom line.