Speaker Bio

Erick Barney

VP of Marketing, Motorcycle Superstore

Erick has been with Motorcycle Superstore for over nine years.  As the VP of Marketing, his responsibilities include overseeing all aspects of the company's marketing efforts.  Erick earned a Bachelor's degree in Marketing with a minor in Communications from Southern Oregon University in 1999.  His personal e-commerce marketing strengths include SEO, email and affiliate marketing.  Erick enjoys motorcycles, snowboarding, mountain biking and beer brewing in his free time.

Erick's Presentation Thoughts

We asked Erick the following questions about his upcoming presentations at Online Retailer. Here are his responses...

Please summarise the content of your sessions (in your own words):
One-to-One Merchandising Presentation: My presentation chronicles our experiences transitioning from an in-house email platform to outsourcing with a leading email marketing solution. I discuss our optimisation strategy focusing on improving deliverability, open rates, click rates and ultimately conversions. I talk about factors influencing these areas and testing methods and KPI metrics we use to gauge our strategy refinements. I share tangible discoveries regarding many subjects including send frequency, day of week, time of day, subject lines and list segmentation. I then introduce our recent efforts to leverage the power of social networking and I conclude by explaining our highly successful launch of a new dynamic one-to-one email merchandising feature which integrates our analytics and email platforms.

What can attendees expect to take away from your sessions?
My goal is for attendees to understand the significance of increasing relevance and value proposition in email marketing.  I lay out a logical path from the basics to the cutting edge and offer tangible discoveries they can take home and test along with their current strategies.

The hottest thing in online retailing right now is:
I would say the biggest untapped resource for marketers is social networks. With that said, it's also the biggest challenge. Social network environments are dictated by consumers and we as marketers need to learn how to diligently insert ourselves. Again, I believe relevance and value proposition are two important factors. We've found some success in heavily engaging our audience at an interactive social level, meanwhile balancing a moderate level of promotional activity.

The biggest danger in online retailing is:
The biggest danger in online retailing is losing sight of a core strategy focusing on the customer experience.

Some of the best examples of online retail best practice are:
It will always be a best practice to aim for maximum relevancy. Implementing personal recommendations, email segmentation, behavioral retargeting and other one-to-one features will help to improve the overall value proposition you're presenting to customers.