iWeb Live 2019 Event Round-Up: The Afternoon

We hope that you’ve already come across part 1 of iWeb Live 2019 and now you’re eager to learn more. The second part of the day involved lots more familiar faces from the eCommerce scene including Klarna, Akeneo, Nosto, Yotpo, Klevu, AWA Digital and Alteryx. This post will run you through more actionable tips to boost your online business, with lots that you can implement today!

Haven’t already read part 1 of iWeb Live 2019? Go and have a read.

Talk #6: How to cater for the immediate gratification generation

To kick off the second half of the day, payments specialists Klarna, discussed how we can cater our eCommerce sites for the ‘immediate gratification generation’. But what is the immediate gratification generation?

To put it simply, we’re the “I want it now” generation. We seek instant gratification. We expect so much. Our attention span is short and so, merchants need to learn how to give consumers the information they want, quickly. The consequence, if users can’t find what they want, is simply that they will leave and find it elsewhere.

53% of mobile visitors leave a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. (This is even higher for the 18-24-year-old age category, at 60%). – Klarna

What’s more worrying, particularly when looking at it from a sales side, is where consumers tend to exit your website. This is often within the checkout process, i.e. the place you’d presume they’re most likely to convert and generate sales.

Often users can find checkout processes too much like hard work with too many steps to take, limited delivery options and complicated, clunky forms to fill out.

45% of consumers abandon the cart if there is a long checkout process. 56% of 18-34 yr olds expect to have same day delivery. – Klarna

Thankfully, there are ways you can reduce the number of steps and complexity of the checkout process by implementing one-step checkout like eCommerce powerhouse Amazon, prefilling user details after they’ve used the service once with Klarna and integrating with top shipping companies (like ShipStation).

What are the benefits of Klarna?

So, now that you know some of the things you can do to prevent customers from ditching their goods, let’s take a closer look into the benefits of Klarna specifically:

• Klarna can help to deliver a smooth UX – this will ensure everything is quick across the whole customer journey, making their decision to purchase quick and more likely to happen.
• It can give your shoppers pleasure and peace of mind, knowing their details are not only stored for ease of use but also secure. Klarna is a highly trusted company with over 60 million customers using it to make payments.
• As a consumer, you can personalise the way you want to pay to your preference at the time. That’s paying there and then, paying later or slicing the payment for another day. This makes it super easy for users to get the goods when they want without having to worry about whether they are able to cover the cost yet.
• Klarna also creates engagement by allowing you to generate relevant content that appeals to your target audience. That way you are more likely to keep consumer attention in an age where attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter.

Talk #7: Product Experience Management: The Linchpin for your eCommerce Strategy

The seventh talk of the day was by James Barlow from Akeneo on how Product Experience Management is the Linchpin of Your eCommerce Strategy. Though many merchants within the eCommerce world have great products and services on offer and even a brilliant, speedy, up-to-date online store that the user can browse, they often fall short when it comes to having the right systems in place to manage everything else in the background.

When you think of Amazon, it can be quite daunting to even comprehend the number of products they have readily available to buy on their site and that’s just considering their UK products.

Having such a wide choice of products requires a CRM system that can handle this product data to ensure your consumers are getting the accurate information that they require. After all, your product information is your brand identity so it’s important you get it right.

More often than not, product details can be lacking, users can be sent the wrong items due to issues with CRM and operations and consumers can find the emotional aspect of shopping to be lacking when it comes to online buying. That’s because product experience is a quest but thankfully, there’s a way you can go about tackling it so you’re effective and generate success aka sales: implement a PIM (Product Information Management) system.

PIM is the CRM for your product data. – Akeneo

PIM systems like Akeneo collect your product information from any data source, enrich and control it before distributing it to multiple channels. That way you can be where your customers want you to be.

How does Akeneo work?

Akeneo PIM works at 3 levels to collect and sort through your product information so that you can easily get the right information in front of the right people at the right time.

• Level 1: Technical Information – Akeneo gathers information from suppliers about the product, for example, the fine details and product specification including price, measurements, ingredients, SKU codes (if it applies) and similar.
• Level 2: Usage Information – The next stage is to collect the information regarding how the products are going to fulfil the consumers’ needs. It’s inevitably the information needed to make a buying decision and includes product descriptions as well as information on how and where to use the product.
• Level 3: Emotional Information – This information is used to create positive experiences for your consumers and includes product stories and rich descriptions. 

Akeneo have helped reduce time to market from 9 months to 50 minutes with their highly efficient PIM system.

As Akeneo PIM partners, iWeb can help you consolidate all of your data into one easy to use solution. Better product information means more purchases and fewer returns.

Contact us today for a consultation on how Akeneo PIM can help overhaul your product management.

Talk #8: Personalisation Tactics You Can Implement This Month

Next up was Max Imfeld from Nosto to explain 5 of the best personalisation tactics that you can implement this month. We know that consumers are itching for a more personalised buying experience and it’s becoming an increasingly important factor in determining whether or not your consumer will become your customer.

When we analyse both transactional and behavioural data, we find that transactional data only accounts for 1.6% of data generated by shoppers. That leaves a whole load of space for behavioural data which is where you should look to find individual buying habits that you can then cater for through personalisation.

5 Personalisation Best Practises:

1. Leverage Paid Campaigns – Tailor your landing pages for Google and Facebook campaigns as these users can be very different, for example, Google users are actively seeking your products, Facebook users aren’t. (Your content often just pops up on their timelines).
2. Personalise your emails – Address the user by their name, remember their birthday, show them products relevant to their previous searches and send them deals or discount codes related to the products they actually want to buy.
3. Understand your customers – Analyse behavioural data to see where they sit in the life cycle. Are they focusing on a particular product, are they interested in adding it to their basket, have they abandoned the basket? All of the time they’re browsing your site, you should be showing them reasons to buy from you (that they want to see). Perhaps you offer next day delivery, one-step checkout, the item in multiple colours or similar.
4. Personalise your marketing messages – Just like you should personalise your emails, you should be ensuring all content they receive from you has a personal touch to make them feel like a valued customer and as though they’re talking with a friendly human rather than a cold, corporate business. Once you have personalised your content, don’t forget to change and update these messages accordingly.
5. Improve relevancy through data-driven recommendations – This step is easily achieved through implementing Nosto as their tool does a lot of the hard work for you; finding the right times and places to tailor relevant content to your users. It also picks up on where consumers aren’t happy with you, i.e. if they’re abandoning their basket of goods.

Talk #9: Growing D2C Business Through Customer Relationships

The ninth talk of the day was from Yotpo teaching us that the future of commerce is brand commerce. But, before we get into the details of the talk, it’s important to know what D2C selling is.

D2C stands for direct-to-consumer and is when the brand sources or manufacturers a white label product and then sells it directly to the customer, usually via a website. That’s different from B2C selling which usually contains a “middle man” like Amazon.

So, as we’ve previously mentioned, Amazon is the big retailer but has no connection with brands. Brands are becoming the key differentiator as it’s not just about the products anymore. You could be selling your product via your own website and also selling through Amazon, though the consumer may buy through Amazon as they prefer the shopping experience with that retailer over your brand.

Although that might seem like a hindrance to your company, it opens an opportunity for you to set up and offer exceptional service and customer care so that you become their preferred way to buy your goods. Amazon can no longer compete on just prices and products alone.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if, in 7 years from now there is only Amazon and then brands (which Amazon will sell). Anyone selling 3rd party products will die as we’ve sadly seen with Toys R Us. – Yotpo

How brands can differentiate themselves?

There are multiple ways that brands can stand out from their competitors, though some of the most popular and easy to implement tactics include:

• Build on your brand to make sure the impression you give online is seamless across every aspect whether that’s on mobile, desktop, on-site messaging, email marketing, social channels and offline marketing like your packaging of products, delivery service, leaflets and more.
• Use user-generated content to eliminate doubt and show that “real people” have shopped with you before and enjoyed the experience you gave them.
• Personalise their shopping experience because, after all, your customers want to feel like people and not mass-marketed demographic numbers. Use their name when you can, talk to them through their preferred method and send them messages/deals that they’ll want to read, at a time they want to read it.

Great talk by Ellys Moyes from @Yotpo on growing #D2C businesses through customer relationships🤞🏼

Key takeaways? Choose a path, loyalty is everything, perfect the intangibles and foster a community. #iWebLive #iWebLive2019 pic.twitter.com/hnDBOKJcXG

— iWeb (@iWebtweets) June 5, 2019

Talk #10: Actionable tips to boost revenue through eCommerce Site-Search

Moving on to our tenth talk by Markiyan Caseley from Klevu, we received actionable tips to boost our revenue through eCommerce site search. Search is growing in importance. From the various other talks we’ve witnessed, it’s clear consumers are more demanding than previous years; they want to feel special and catered for and search is a critical component of creating an overall great buying experience.

Search is important as 43% of shoppers head straight for the search box when browsing for a product. As a result, we see search converts 3x more than a category led journey. – Klevu

Without a good site search, you’re neglecting 43% of your shoppers and making their chances of buying with you a lot less likely from the get-go. They aren’t able to tell you what they want which makes finding your products hard and likewise for you, directing a shopper to where you want them to go, proves equally as difficult.

Implementing an in-depth site search plugin can help you to learn what your customers want which is a necessity in the evolving eCommerce climate if you want to be successful. So, with that in mind, let’s see some of the quick wins to boost your revenue through eCommerce site search.

Quick wins to boost revenue through site-search:

• Focus on the visual aspect of site-search. Add Javascript overlay to a box layout search bar. This will make it super easy for consumers to filter down through brand, colour, price etc.
• 68% of shoppers are more likely to click on the search results if they see relevant products within the quick search. This also gives them a visual representation of the kind of products they can expect to see for their search query so they know whether to change it or hit “enter”.
• Index beyond just purely products. Don’t stick to adding your products in the search results. You should include relevant blogs, how to guides and product pages as this increases blog engagement by 27% and shows consumers you know your stuff with having lots of great, easy-to-access information at their fingertips.
• Adopt a mobile-centric search approach. Mobiles currently have 67.2% share of eCommerce sales and by 2021 this is expected to be 72.9%. As a result, your search box should be suited to mobile so that it fits the screen nicely so that it’s easy to type into, users should be able to see the entire search query they’re entering and more.
• Use a layer of automated machine learning to optimise search results (but don’t rely solely on AI).
• Understand your customer intent and leverage advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing). By using this you should be able to understand your customers intent in a query i.e. how far down the consumer buying journey are they, are they simply browsing or do they have a real interest in making a purchase?
• Optimise “no results” queries. This means showing other relevant products instead of simply displaying a “no results” page. You could also include any blog articles, relevant product categories or similar to spark interest and curiosity with the consumer.

Learn more about the importance of consumer curiosity in iWeb Live 2019 – Part 1.

Talk #11: Dumb Mistakes (Almost) Everyone Makes in CRO

Next up was AWA Digital to highlight dumb mistakes that we pretty much all make when it comes to CRO. Let’s dive into four of them below:

1: Obsess about the right thing

Lots of us who work with and on eCommerce sites will initially obsess over the page layout. After all, we want our websites to look visually mind-blowing. However, when it comes to a consumer making a purchase, there’s plenty of other factors aside from page layout that will cause them to convert.

Make sure that you focus on every aspect of having an eCommerce website, particularly focusing on fixing any flaws that consumers want to bring up in reviews.

2: Qualitative Research

Most decisions are made by emotions and are then rationalised. System one thinking is the emotional aspect. Users have an interest or feel some kind of way about a product or service you are offering. They will then go to your site, browse your goods, see how easy it is to buy with you and how much value they’ll get from you and your product and will then make the decision whether to pursue the purchase or not. That is system two thinking, the logical side.

3: Make sure you have the correct data

There’s no point in running marketing campaigns and trying to monitor your website’s data if it’s not going to give accurate results. Too often we come across sites that have Google Analytics set up incorrectly and so it’s skewing figures and giving inaccurate representations of your current business state.

Your Google Analytics account is vital to helping you spot key findings in your data and so it’s vital that you have it set to exclude any unwanted data like office data so that you have a clear idea of how you’re performing to help make decisions moving forward.

4: Split-test developers

Finally, with anything, mistakes can be made. However, when it comes to your business, it’s important to get it right. Particularly within the development of your site or even of new processes that you’re trialling, you should be carrying out split-tests to really see what is going to work best for you.

Not only should you run tests but it’s important that you run multiple tests to really see whether you’re getting the same results or if anomalies occur.

You should also have a system in place to prioritise ruthlessly and ‘kill’ tests after a certain period if positive results are not seen – suggested time frame of 2 weeks to see positive results.

Talk #12: The Answer to our eCommerce Prayers

The final talk of the day is from Alteryx, giving us the answer to our eCommerce prayers. *Cue the angelic music*. Although lots of us have probably heard of the big names above, Alteryx is fairly new to our clients, so who are they and what do they do?

Alteryx makes it easy for data analysts to make critical business decisions and streamline reconciliation processes by combining data from multiple sources into one user-friendly interface. Unlike similar solutions on the marketplace, with Alteryx there’s no coding required which makes it super easy for businesses to implement – that’s whether you have high-class developers or not.

Once Alteryx is in place, it allows you to automate time-consuming, manual data tasks such as billing and invoicing. You can track your data sources at every step to optimise your workflows and make your life easier.

The final talk of the day is by Phil from @alteryx 😁… We’re learning about the answer to our eCommerce prayers 🙏 👏🏼

Big thanks again to all of our speakers, sponsors, attendees and of course staff members for pulling off another great event🥳! #iWebLive #iWebLive2019 pic.twitter.com/zykBGLyjNd

— iWeb (@iWebtweets) June 5, 2019

Fancy a free trial? Alteryx are offering a free trial to all of our clients, so speak with us to learn more or sign up for your free trial now.

Over and out!

Thanks again to all of the speakers, sponsors, attendees and of course staff members who helped to make iWeb Live 2019 such a success. Keep your eyes peeled for the next event and in the meantime, get implementing the above. Remember, we’re always here to help, just get in touch!

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