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Chapter 1 Introduction to e-business and e-commerce 7

Real-world E-Business experiences The Econsultancy interview

Ted Speroni, Director, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia), HP.com

Overview and main concepts covered

Ted Speroni heads the European operations of HP.com, as well as the tech giant’s regional
preferred online partner programme. This practitioner interview highlights some of the
challenges and opportunities for a traditional organization in managing e-commerce. It
also introduces some of the important online marketing communications techniques such
as search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, social media and widget marketing which
are described in Chapter 9.

The interview
Q. Can you briefly summarise your role at HP.com?
Ted Speroni, HP.com: I look after HP.com for the EMEA region. We have around 40
country websites throughout the region in something like 28 languages, so that’s my
responsibility. I’m also responsible for all of our electronic content management across
Europe, which is where we intersect with the online retail community.
At HP, we have a clear strategy of making our products available wherever our
customers want to buy them – through high street shops, proximity resellers, online
retailers, e-resellers and direct through HP.
We only sell direct through HP.com in five countries in Europe – the UK, France,
Germany, Switzerland and Spain. So in most countries, we connect in with the
leading etailers. We get daily feeds from all of them on their product availability and
pricing, and we display them on HP.com. We then deep link into the shopping basket
on each etailer, so we’re generating leads for them.
It’s just like an affiliate programme [a commission-based sales arrangement
covered in Chapter 9], but we don’t get a commission because it’s for our own prod-
ucts. We track the number and quality of leads we are sending each retailer and their
conversion rates. We have all the data on which products sell and which cross-sell.
It’s a pretty big programme – we have about 150 partners in Europe that are part of
it and we generate quite a considerable amount of leads and traffic for them. You have
to qualify to be part of it – there are certain criteria you have to meet.

Q. What are you doing at the moment to drive more traffic to these etailers?
Ted Speroni, HP.com: The first thing is the integrated marketing approach we have.
Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are probably the
two biggest areas we are working on.
The fundamental principle is that we want to drive all that traffic to pages where we
give the customer choice. All the marketing traffic drives people to landing pages that
give people a choice about where to purchase the product.
Our investment in SEM is probably in line with the growth we see overall in the
industry. We’re also making quite heavy investments internally in SEO, because a much
higher percentage of our traffic comes from natural search and the conversion rate is
not that dissimilar to SEM.
Natural search is a big area of focus for us at the moment. With SEM, we always
get people to the right page, to specific landing pages. With natural search, we’re not
as convinced we’re always getting people to the correct page.