Part 2: iWeb Live 2018 Round-Up

Hopefully, you’ve already stumbled across part 1 of iWeb Live 2018 and now you’re eager to learn more in part 2. For those of you who don’t know, iWeb hosted an afternoon of inspiring talks from guest speakers like Amazon Pay, Temando and many others. This blog post will run you through the second half of the afternoon, giving you lots more actionable tips and tricks found in the various talks.

After a break filled with tea, coffee and cookies, it was time to return to our seats and begin the second half of the afternoon.

#5 Turning Shipping To Sales With Temando

The first talk of the second half – the fifth talk of the day – was from our friends at Temando. Audrey Williart, Temando’s Marketing Manager, took our guests through the key ways of enhancing their delivery and shipping, that in turn can help to increase sales.

Key Findings

1. Bad Delivery Reviews Do Damage

Retailers often think that once someone has ordered a product, that’s it. All the hard work is done. They can often slip up on the delivery of the goods which if done badly, can cause negative impacts on the brand’s future sales and customer retention levels.

It’s important to respond to users who may have received poor delivery to resolve their issues.  This could be by offering them a freebie or similar to try and convert a negative experience into a positive, returning buyer.

2. Offering Better Shipping Choices Increases Sales

39% of retailers found that offering better shipping options increases the number of sales they obtain. – Temando

With every customer being different, it’s important that your shipping choices cater to not just one but all of their needs. In order to do so, retailers must offer more shipping options in order to create experiences that validate cost and convenience expectations. So, what can you offer?

• Better parcel tracking
• Next Day Delivery
• Free Shipping
• Free Returns
• More choice of carriers (and better carrier services)
• Click & Collect
• After hours delivery

3. Retailers Aren’t Offering Shipping That Consumers Want

Consumer expectations are growing and will continue to grow as the world of technology develops and becomes more advanced. It’s crucial that businesses evolve with it, making use of the services out there or creating new methods to improve shipping.

Whether you understand what hyperlocal or timeslot delivery is, it’s important that retailers begin learning about them in order to start offering it to their customers.

As you can see, practically every service that consumers are wanting isn’t available from the majority of retailers. Which options are you offering and more importantly, which ones aren’t you?

#6 Amazon Pay Are Rethinking Convenience

Amazon Pay allows users to shop on thousands of sites using payment and delivery information stored in your Amazon account. Sean Casey, Heads of Sales at Amazon, is here to explain how to improve customer experience, how to get customers to trust you and why to choose Amazon Pay.

Key Findings

1. Why Amazon Pay?

At present, there are over 300 million people with active Amazon accounts and 170 countries using Amazon Pay. Those figures aren’t looking to slow down any time soon. Even though you might not be selling to an audience so big and broad,  it’s highly likely that your consumers can be found within this group of people using and trusting Amazon.

Pairing your company name with an already well-established, trusted brand can help to improve your brand awareness, authority and attract more willing buyers to your site.

2. Seamless Customer Experience

From using Amazon Pay on your store, you can create a seamless customer experience. It allows a consumer to use a single account with one username and password, to buy a product from you. This account being their Amazon account, including their digital wallet details and address book.

Although it may seem like consumers will no longer be connected to you for they aren’t required to sign up for an account, it’s likely to generate lots more sales. Plus, if customers feel that from integrating with Amazon you offer a seamless experience, they’ll become more inclined to buy from you creating a loyal, returning customer.

3. Get Your Customers To Trust You

A key point that I’ve mentioned above is getting customers to trust you. Trust is the most important factor in online decision making. Sometimes, even if the product you are offering is out of this world if the payment doesn’t seem secure or delivery costs are unreasonable, you’re customers won’t hit checkout.

90% of people say trust is very or extremely important in where they choose to shop.

Below are some of the ways to get customers to trust your brand:

• Be accessible to your customers. Allow them to interact with you and make yourself available to answer their questions in a timely manner.
• Give them reliable products and services. Of course, the product should be true to description and look but also the delivery, shipping and return services. If you promise Next Day Delivery, ensure it is Next Day Delivery.
• Bring them value. Put your customers first, think of their requirements and ensure you’re meeting that in whichever way possible. May that be easy site-search navigation, free returns or click and collect delivery.
• Maintain consistency. Don’t let other aspects of your business like customer service or after sales care, let you down. Implement live chat, offer out of hours buyer support and send follow-up emails to show you’re a brand that really does put the customer first.

#7 dotmailer Hit The Mark

Our final guest speaker of the day was Gavin Laugenie from dotmailer, blessing us with lots of marketing inspiration from the top 100 global retail brands.

What Is Hitting the Mark?

Hitting the Mark is dotmailer’s comprehensive guide giving insiders a look at the marketing tactics of UK, USA & Asia-Pacific retailers, both big and small. The guide analyses the good and bad in 100 retailers marketing efforts, using real-life case studies to show other retailers what to do and what not to do.

Key Findings

1. Brands Must Use Segmentation Tactics

Segmentation is the process of splitting up a market or your audience into different types of customers. This way, you can better target products to the most relevant customers and adopt different tactics, budget and so on to these groups in order to derive better conversions for each segment. But, why do markets or audiences need segmentation?

• Customers needs differ. Creating separate products or marketing tactics will better match different groups of customer needs.
• Increase customer retention. By marketing products that actually appeal to customers at the right stage in their “buying cycle”, you’re more likely to retain customers who before, may have ventured elsewhere to competing products and brands. You wouldn’t necessarily know this information without segmentation.
• More targeted communication. If you know where the relevant customer is for a particular product, you can tailor your marketing message to these consumers to reach them more often and usually at a lower cost. This is because you’re less likely to waste budget on irrelevant users not looking to buy.

2. Send Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails can be your ticket to ensure a user who previously left your site to return and complete their purchase. Usually, making this decision isn’t something they’ll do alone. Instead, they need your support and encouragement to remind them why it is they got to the “basket stage” of buying in the first place.

Retailers who don’t send an abandoned cart email lose contact with potential buyers. Potential buyers are the consumers that can help your business to grow. If you want to expand and sell more, you need to start converting basket abandoners to buyers.

3. Send An Aftersales Email Review

Once a customer has purchased a product a good retailer will send an aftersales email review. Buy why?

Aftersales email reviews help to keep users informed of every step of their journey with the brand after they’ve taken their money. When you look at it in that respect, it’s important to ensure that you reward the payment made by the consumer with detailed and timely delivery updates, first-time rewards or loyal discounts, detailed information for returns and so on.

Not only this but they offer the chance for brands to obtain feedback on their products and services. These prove to be extremely useful when finding out the flaws in the business from a customer’s perspective. Surprisingly, what you think you’re doing right doesn’t always match up in the customer’s eyes.

#8 GDPR Safety With iWeb’s Own

With GDPR very present, Andrew Pemberton aka Pembo, iWeb’s Development Director, shared steps to give your site a (late) spring clean in time for the new laws.

Step 1: Review Administrator Accounts

With members of staff leaving the business and new users coming, it’s important to continuously check who has access to what and monitor suspicious accounts in the Admin section of your site.

Step 2: Review Staff Policies

Next, it’s worth reviewing the ways in which your employees work. Are they practising good security? Are they sending passwords and other key information via email or similar? This is a big no-no, particularly with GDPR coming into place.

Step 3: Review Your Password

2 in 5 people in the past year have had either their personal information leaked, their account hacked or their password stolen.

In order to help make your password more secure, stop using birthdays, pet names or child names in your login details. Ensure you keep changing your passwords regularly.

21% of people use passwords that are over 10 years old and 47% use passwords that are over 5 years old.

Step 4: 2 Factor Authentication

2 Factor Authentication requires a password alongside, usually, a selection of numbers that only the user will be able to access via a mobile phone or key fob.

Research suggests around 80% of breaches could be prevented using 2FA.

Step 5: Unpatched Software

For all Magento users, running a Mage Report will help you to check whether your site is outdated or contains unpatched software. From the information obtained in the Mage Report, you can check whether you have any out of date modules that need updating or alternatively, we’re more than happy to help.

Step 6: If Hackers Get In

• Restrict users permissions to show them only what they need to see
  
• Check for signs of plain text payments/cc details
  
• Keep only the data you need and don’t keep it for longer than necessary

Summary

To finish a great event we ended with a quick quiz, giving users the chance to win a ticket to MagentoLive Europe. Hosted in the wonderful city of Barcelona, MagentoLive offers 2 days of engaging talks from some of the biggest innovators in eCommerce. The lucky winner was Hannah from Birchwood Price Tools. Congrats!

Finally, thanks again to all those who attended. We hope you had a great day and learnt a lot to better your businesses. Keep your eyes peeled for news of the next event.