Time to recap on another great event. However, unlike Magento Imagine this event was a lot closer to the home: iWeb Live 2018. It consisted of a day of insightful talks from big brands like Magento, Amazon and dotmailer, plus lots of free food and drink – we wouldn’t have it any other way. This post will explore the first half of the afternoon and shower you with lots of actionable tips from our speakers.

Over 80 individuals from 60+ different companies gathered to learn how to increase customer conversions through various marketing tactics and inevitably grow their eCommerce store. So, with that in mind, let’s get into it.

#1 Nosto To Kick Off The Day

iWeb Live 2018 Event Round-up Part 1 | iWeb

After some time munching through a selection of sandwiches and getting to know the friendly faces behind each business, our guests took to their seats and the first speaker was up: Rory Gilmore from Nosto Solutions. Below are some of the tips and tricks behind creating an online personalisation journey.

Key Findings

1. Transactional Data Vs. Behavioural Data

Transactional data, which is the information collected once someone has made a purchase, accounts for only 1.6% of data generated by shoppers. That means onsite behavioural data accounts for 98.4% of key information that many of us are ignoring.

In order to sell your customer a personalised, user-friendly, experience that they actually want, you need to get hold of this data and actually use it.

2. Why Personalise?

So, you know what information you need in order to sell a personalised experience but why should you personalise in the first place?

iWeb Live 2018 | Nosto | Why Personalise

Customer retention is one of the main reasons as to why a brand should personalise. If you can make a customer feel like you know them and are suggesting products they’ll actually like and want to buy, you can turn them into a loyal buyer. Converting new customers to returning customers, even if it’s a small number of users, can have a huge impact on profitability.

3. Shopping Recommendations

Adding an area to show “Product Recommendations” to users is one of the easiest and most successful ways to incorporate personalisation. It also helps to improve cross session purchases and improve the site’s user-friendliness.

Nosto does this by looking at the consumer’s browsing history to find what they’re most likely to buy next and displays recommendations based on this.

#2 Let’s Talk PIM With Akeneo

iWeb Live 2018 Event Round-up Part 1 | iWeb

Next up, James Barlow from Akeneo graced our B2B businesses in the room, explaining the ways to improve B2B commerce using B2C tactics. The main point we learnt was that by improving critical aspects of product experience such as findability and emotional connections, you can improve the likelihood for businesses to buy with you.

Key Findings

1. Product Experience

The experience someone has with your goods determines whether they’re likely to buy from you or not. When we display product imagery on our site, it’s important to go above and beyond supplying the basic information. Users want to see more than just the technical details like product name, size, colour and reference number.

Product experience is not (only) attractive imagery and a list of attributes but instead, it’s a science of creating emotion, may that be for B2B or B2C.

Instead, you should be giving them detailed descriptions, lots of high-quality imagery or video content as well as reviews and customer case studies.

2. Findability

30% of your website visitors will use “site search” in an attempt to find exactly what they want. “Site Searchers” are 90% more likely to buy from your website, though, only 50% of searches end up succesful.

For both B2B and B2C sellers, findability is a major factor to consider when selling products online. As you can see from the above statistics, a large chunk of your website visitors will come to your site and search for a specific type of product. It’s then up to you to make your goods easily identifiable. If you don’t your sales can suffer massively.

3. Product Experience and Emotion

There are 3 main emotions that your product experience should pass onto the customer. These include security that they can trust entering their purchase details with you, confidence that the product is true to description and of good quality and finally that the customer will gain something from this product. May that be happiness, allow them to perform a task or similar.

#3 Klevu Search in eCommerce

iWeb Live 2018 Event Round-up Part 1 | iWeb

As product findability is such a key aspect of generating conversions, it was on to Paul Rogers from Klevu, a Magento Search plugin. Klevu is used to help eCommerce sites improve their site search to make finding specific products extremely easy.

Key Findings

1. Consumers Expect More from Search Functions

Nowadays, users expect to complete a search on your website and be displayed the exact product, similar products or the category it is related to. If you don’t optimise your site search, you’ll end up with a frustrated user who was interested in buying a product from you but sadly is now venturing to another seller who makes this product easy to find.

2. Encourage Users To Be Detailed In Search

If you’re able to process complex queries, perhaps because you use a tool such as Klevu or similar, you’ll want to encourage users to be more detailed when searching. But why? As your site search is a lot more advanced, you’re more likely to find the exact product a user is looking for, with the more information you are given.

For every 1 second a potential buyer doesn’t find what they are looking for, they are 7% more likely to leave. – Akeneo

However, if you’re site’s search isn’t able to process complex queries, the more detail, the harder it can be to find the product. This is because you can be overloaded with information that although describes the product, isn’t understood by your site. The end result is the user is navigated to an “error page”.

3. Voice Search Is Becoming More Prominent

iWeb Live 2018 | Amazon Alexa | Voice Search

40% of millennials already making search queries through a voice assistant, prior to purchasing.

Although voice search isn’t completely dominating site search at present, it’s definitely something that’s on the rise. With voice search devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apply Homepod, it’s crucial that online retailers consider how they can optimise their site search in line with this.

To learn more about Klevu, check out our Klevu Lunch ‘n’ Learn post.

#4 NEW Generation of Magento Commerce

iWeb Live 2018 Event Round-up Part 1 | iWeb

The final talk of the first half was from key speaker David Wise, who’d come to discuss the next generation of Magento Commerce. For our Magento users, there was plenty of new features announced that have now been built into the platform. As a user, you now get lots of advanced capabilities and support without the need for platform integrations.

Key Findings

1. NEW Robust Out-of-Box Platform Capabilities

  • Content Management
  • Layered Navigation and Search
  • Order and Inventory Management
  • Responsive Design Reference Themes
  • Personalisation, Merchandising and Segmentation
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • Promotions and Coupons
  • Detailed Reporting
  • Global Currency, Language and Tax Support
  • Modern Business User Tools
  • Integrated Shipping and Payment Options
  • Fast 2-Step Checkout

2. Better Shopping Experiences

Thanks to the upgrades done on the Magento 2 Commerce Cloud you can now deliver better shopping experiences to customers. From streamlining checkout processes to payment enhancements, you have the tools to generate conversions a lot simpler and smoother for both you and the customer.

  • Checkout now requires only 2 steps rather than 5. This reduces the time it takes to buy a product and the number of “hurdles” that a consumer has to jump, in order to buy from you. This can also help to boost customer registration numbers.

  • Payments can now be made without the shopper having to leave your site to PayPal or Amazon Pay. This also makes it faster for them to make repeat purchases whilst keeping their details secure and with an already trusted company. In turn, if the user trusts PayPal whom you use, you’re also likely to be trusted by the customer.

Summary

That just about wraps up the first half of the talks. Stay tuned to get some more actionable insights from the second half of the afternoon, found in our part 2 post of iWeb Live 2018.