Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Deal With It Direct had a full house for this year's list roundtable. Considering all the additional responsibilities on brokers' plates, that's impressive... See Full July Issue

Brad Fallon is not a serial entrepreneur; that would imply starting up one company, fostering it for a while, and then turning his attention to an entirely different one. He’s more of a parallel entrepreneur, bringing e-commerce sites to life in rapid succession and keeping them all spinning at the same time.

In January 2004, Fallon and his wife Jennifer started a Yahoo! store that became MyWeddingFavors.com. The pair now has other sites that sell baby shower favors, customized gaming equipment, cigars and electric scooters, as well as an Internet-based wholesaling business; Fallon also serves as CEO of interactive marketing firm Smart Marketing and treks the country delivering search engine optimization seminars and running small SEO boot camps.

The MyWeddingFavors site grew quickly: from $10,000 in sales the first month to $50,000 two months later and $250,000 a month during the peak wedding season of 2004. It sold $1.2 million in its first full year. Now, MyWeddingFavors and wholesaling site KateAspen.com should do about $5 million in sales each this year, Fallon says, with the other sites adding another $5 million.

But going into the 2006 spring/ summer wedding season, MyWeddingFavors.com was faced with the problem of where to grow next. The site already earned top rankings on Google and Yahoo! for the keywords around “wedding favors” and received almost 90% of its traffic from natural search. “Once you’re number one on Google, there’s not really a lot more you can to do improve your ranking,” he says. “But as a little made-at-home Yahoo! store, we found there was a lot of ground we could make up on the conversions side.”

To improve conversions, MyWeddingFavors turned to Kefta, an e-tailing services provider whose software produces customized landing pages for Internet searchers based on their past shopping behavior and Web search patterns. “We enable consumer Web sites to provide the most relevant experience to their online users, translating into higher user satisfaction and increased conversion rates,” says Philippe Suchet, CEO of San Francisco-based Kefta.

Online commerce has become so competitive, Suchet says, that companies are being forced to expand their search marketing efforts to longer and longer keyword lists, with diminishing returns in sight. At the same time, consumers have grown familiar enough with e-commerce that they are beginning to expect a highly personalized experience and to show their exasperation with marketing offers that don’t make sense for them.

“People want to be treated in a fashion unique to them as decision-makers,” Suchet says. “That led us to develop what we call Dynamic Targeting, a best-message/ best-time/ best-channel tool that lets marketers differentiate themselves with the best, most relevant user experience. In turn, that should produce long-term customers and higher conversion rates.”

Kefta’s hosted targeting solution starts by building an on-the-fly profile of site visitors, minus any personally identifiable information. The software runs a “whois” lookup to find the visitor’s IP address and geographic location, and also digs out information on the connection speed the visitor is using to access the site. It also notes the search terms that brought the first-time visitor to the site and targets them with a landing page appropriate to that term.

As to behavior, Kefta can monitor visit frequency, the products and offers viewed, purchases made, forms completed and responses to online and e-mail offers.

Once the visitor is profiled and a cookie dropped for future visits, Kefta can help the marketer communicate with that prospective shopper based on recent behavior and across a number of channels, including display ads, Web content and e-mail campaigns.

“We combine the profile with sophisticated business rules, to determine that if this person used this keyword in search, they should be seeing this landing page and these images,” Suchet says. “If they drop off the site, we should be sending them this e-mail two hours later. We combine marketing intelligence with who the user is and deliver an experience across online channels: Not just a personalized, optimized Web site but targeting pop-ups, layered ads, chat, e-mail even change banner ads based on those profiles and past behavior.” Kefta also enables automated multi-variant testing for these creative elements on a site.

Kefta’s client roster includes some very large companies both in the U.S. and Europe, ranging from financial services providers to telecom and broadband suppliers. MyWeddingFavors is one of the first small e-commerce sites to use the platform. But Fallon says he felt getting Kefta involved in his site last January was an important step in setting new growth targets before the start of the 2006 wedding season.

“We wanted to get the most bang for the buck right away, so we just dove in and chose what we thought were our leading keywords and terms,” Fallon says. “We chose ‘unique wedding favors’, ‘beach weddings’, ‘butterfly weddings’, ‘wine wedding favors’ and a few others.” Landing pages were optimized based on what MyWeddingFavors learned about visitors coming in on those search terms, with content and graphics configured to appeal to the segment’s past behavior.

And it has very apparently paid off. MyWeddingFavors has seen a 65% increase in online conversion rates since implementing Kefta Dynamic Targeting. The boosts have come in nine optimized customer segments and are only an average; the increases in some segments has been much higher, he says, including a 168% jump in conversions for visitors searching on the keyphrase “unique wedding favors” and a 78% lift in conversions among price-sensitive visitors.

In addition, Kefta’s platform allowed MyWeddingFavors more visibility into some of those segments that let the site market more effectively. For example, Fallon and company realized through Kefta’s solution that special promotions involving bridesmaids’ gifts were particularly successful when they were surrounded by especially engaging content, including links to wedding-related blogs run by the manufacturers. So MyWeddingFavors made sure to show those links to searchers who came in looking for bridesmaid gifts.

Fallon says more small online businesses should be thinking in terms of streamlining their operations to improve conversions and optimization. “I’m constantly counseling small online business people to stop looking for a $20/hour Web designer and go hire a $200/hour designer for a few hours to spruce up their sites,” he says.

Fallon is now considering applying Kefta’s targeting solution to some of his company’s other e-tail sites, particularly CornerStorkBabyGifts.com. But he says even the gaming equipment niche site could benefit from improved targeting.

“If someone comes in from a search for ‘folding poker table’, right now they might see an image of the table halfway down the page,” he says. “It’s beyond question that a highly targeted landing page can be a doubling factor in online conversions. So when you can deliver an entire landing page that’s 100% targeted to a search term, that’s going to be huge.”