Case Study: Baynote Strikes Positive Chord with Customers

By Jennifer Schiff

What if you could purchase software that could read visitors' minds and dynamically guide them to the product or service they were looking for in just one or two clicks, significantly increasing the chance that they would buy that product or service? Assuming the price tag wasn't too steep, you would probably buy it, right? That's the promise — and, so it seems, reality — of Baynote , a new community-guided content guidance service that's been hitting all the right notes with customers.


The company just marked its one-year anniversary, so we thought we'd check in with some clients to see where things stand, and so far, so good.

While Amazon may have pioneered the concept of using buyer recommendations to help visitors pick and purchase products, the makers of Baynote have taken that concept to a whole new level. Using its trademarked "Wisdom of Invisible Crowds" approach, Baynote offers e-commerce sites and search engines the ability to dynamically display product and content based on users' behavior and desires, getting them to the right product or service in just one or two clicks.

This significantly improves their chances of making a purchase. (See Community-Guided Solution Nets Revenue.) Said Baynote customer, Chris Walshe, the chief marketing officer for the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety, "Baynote's service is like Amazon's suggestion system on steroids."

Baynote's entry into the online marketplace could not be better timed. With e-commerce analysts like Forrester Research and Jupiter Research predicting a slowdown in online sales as customers experience Internet fatigue, online retailers and service providers are struggling to come up with new ways to get visitors to their sites and keep them there long enough to make a purchase.

While online advertising, such as Google AdWords, can help drive traffic to a particular site, product or service, once on a particular site, Baynote's Affinity Engine intuitively leads visitors to the products, information or issue that best satisfies their needs. This is done through boxes with labels like "Most Popular," "Shoppers' Picks" and "People also Considered."

And, the system appears to be working. Less than six-months-old, Baynote's Community-Guided eCommerce service has not only generated buzz but financial results for customers using the service, with some users achieving double-digit increases in conversion rates.

US Appliance Gets Good Deal with Baynote
Founded in Michigan in 1963 and on the Internet since 1999, US Appliance is one of the largest appliance retailers in the United States, with tens of thousands of customers. Yet even with a PC World "Best of the Web" award and customer accolades, US Appliance, like many online retailers, was looking for a way to improve its online sales.

While US Appliance founder Joe Nashif is frequently approached by software vendors looking to make a sale, Baynote, he says, stood out. "It looked like a good way to improve conversion rates," said Nashif. "The methodology they used seemed unique, not just based on page views but on usage, how customers [think]. To have some guidance to help you with the selection process [particularly with a big-ticket purchase like a home appliance] is invaluable."

Nashif also liked that the software was easy to implement, both from a resource point of view and financially. Best of all, though, Baynote's sytem delivered.

Now when users visit US Appliance online, they see a box with the heading "Most Popular Products" on the home page. Similarly, when they do a search for, say, side-by-side refrigerators, they get a list of "Shoppers' Picks" in addition to side-by-side refrigerators listed by brand. This gives them a quick read of the product and how popular it is with other shoppers, helping them to make that all-important buying decision a little bit faster.

"Since we installed Baynote a couple months ago, we have had a significant improvement in our conversion rates. It's been trending towards a double-digit increase," said Nashif, who declined to be more specific. "And I don't take that lightly. There are a lot of claims out there, that you'll see an X percent increase if you use this service or that that service. This is the first one that's really delivered."

Baynote Gives Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety Visitors Right Diagnoses
Like US Appliance, the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety gets a lot of calls from software vendors. But when a friend of a friend told chief marketing officer Chris Walshe about Baynote, Walshe agreed to check out the service as a courtesy.

"Frankly, I was surprised by how well it worked and how quickly we ended up implementing it," said Walshe. "I think marketers, both online and offline, are always looking for ways to meet customers' needs. The challenge is, how do you meet hundreds or thousands of different customers at their need? How do you speak to all of them in the right language without ostracizing people and having them tune out? It's a very complex problem.

"Then in comes Baynote and the short answer is, we saw it as a simple, cost-efficient way to tackle a complex and expensive problem," said Walshe. "Basically, it customizes the site user experience for every single individual over thousands of profiles."

In production since early 2007, Baynote has been delivering consistent results for the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. "Users stay on our site longer. They visit more pages. Consequently our conversion rate has increased by over 20 percent. It's generated 20 percent more in revenue for us without any increase in advertising — and it's pennies compared to what we would spend on advertising," said Walshe.

And the software was easy to implement, taking the IT team less than a day. "They just dropped in the tags with some code," said Walshe. "And the good news is you can turn it on and off whenever you want. It doesn't change the layout and functionality of your site and your ordering at all, because all it really is is an intelligent map. It just takes on a piece of real estate and when you close it, everything goes back to where it was," he said.

Now when visitors arrive at the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety's home page, they are greeted with a box with the heading "Visit the most popular pages…" that guides them to specific sections of the site in just a click. The Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety also configured Baynote to detect previous searches, whether from a search engine, such as Google, or the site itself, to better customize visitors' experience and get them the help or information they need more quickly.

"Of all the technology implementations that we've done, and we've done a lot of them, Baynote has been the easiest and most profitable," said Walshe. "It's been the best return on investment both in time and money."

To learn more about Baynote and its methodology, visit the company's Web site. For pricing information, which Baynote offers on a pay-for-performance basis or at a flat rate, contact sales@baynote.com.

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com and writes about issues facing small and mid-sized businesses.