A few weeks ago LogicSpot had the pleasure of attending the Sheerluxe B2B conference, hosted at The Worx in Parsons Green. It was an informative and inspiring session, with some excellent speakers, and some great insights into ecommerce. The conference covered a wide range of subjects within ecommerce, including national retail trends and forecasts, the importance of customer service, how to work with bloggers, how to segment customers… all the way through to programmatic marketing and web development. We thought we’d share our highlights and takeaways!
Increase Conversion by Focussing on the Details
One of the highlights of the conference was hearing about how Oka, the luxury homewares retailer, have improved conversions on their site. Ben Blackwell spoke about how they have gathered data about how their customers behave, and developed their website accordingly, to boost sales. Two examples were:
Automatically sending an email to customers who purchased a re-fillable product. The purpose was to remind them to purchase the refills – just at the right moment, based on the product’s shelf life. This led to a 12% increase in revenue for this product line.
Creating a bundled product page template, allowing customers buying a cushion cover to buy the cushion pad at the same time. This generated a 46% increase in combined sales in this category.
These examples are really inspiring because they were simple, low-cost, quick to implement, and made a tangible difference to their bottom line. By putting themselves in their customers’ shoes they have improved the user experience – and seen the difference.
OKA: Using customer insight to drive conversion rate.
Test Quick, Fail Fast
Parry Malm of Phrasee talked about Programmatic, and how to gather data. One of the key takeaways was about A/B testing – and how not to test.
Keeping your A/B tests quick, controlled, small and straightforward is essential if you want to get meaningful data. Comparing apples with oranges isn’t going to be helpful, and you aren’t going to be able to replicate your improvements elsewhere on your site, or in your business. Don’t be afraid to scale it back – test single words, font sizes, button colours: test quickly, and move on immediately if you’re not getting anywhere. Defining your goals, however, has to come first. Once you have a clear handle on what you want to test, and what metric you’re watching, it’s much easier to run lots of small tests to help you chip away at achieving that one, specific goal. Check out this blog if you’re interested in setting up some key goals and KPIs for your website.
Who are your customers?
Jennifer Roebuck (follow her on twitter @jroebuck), spoke about ‘Marketing to Millennials’, explaining how people born between 1980 and 2000 interact with and respond to brands, and their marketing. She explained the social currency that brands like Pact Coffee or The Reformation have in this segment due to their engagement with a wider social goal, and how these companies tap into that to create content. There was lots of food for thought for those who are trying to increase their customer engagement by creating content that their customers will care about.
Customer Segmentation was a key theme of the conference – that’s identifying different groups within your customer database based on their spending and shopping behaviour. Combining this with wider social insight and external demographic research, like the insights presented by Jennifer, can be really powerful.
Stop Making Assumptions
We talk a lot here at LogicSpot about how to gather good data, so we were pleased to see that one of the key messages of the conference was about breaking down your assumptions, and rebuilding your digital strategy from the insights you get from your data. Running customer surveys is a great way of gathering immediate data, however you also have to plan for your customers not necessarily knowing, or being honest, about their true shopping or browsing patterns. Companies using personalisation are seeing a 19% uplift in sales – it might be time to look at how you can use your data to drive content and sales on site automatically, and cut the assumption-maker (you) right out of the picture. If you need any help getting a handle on either how to gather data, or what to do with it once you’ve got it – get in touch.
We look forward to joining Sheerluxe next year!
