Month: November 2015

4 Secrets to Reduce Holiday Returns [Infographic]

With holiday sales in full swing, retailers can expect the inevitable spike in returns. Depending on the goods being sold, return rates vary between 5% and 18%. Making the returns process transparent encourages repeat sales and builds customer loyalty.

There are some ways to reduce your return rate, and sampling the process for customers.

blog-holiday-ecommerce-returns-shorr-packaging

Infographic courtesy of Shorr Packaging Corp. http://www.shorr.com

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We Need to Talk: Critical Commerce Conversations To Have Today With Your C-Suite

The Future of Commerce

Consumer technology, and in particular mobile, has tipped the scales of power in the favor of consumers. Researchers are now calling this trend the “Age of the Consumer”. This has resulted in more and more organizations looking to implement “experience-driven commerce”. But as with all major corporate initiatives, getting leaders onboard is paramount. The C-Suite needs to understand the potential of experience-driven commerce for your organization. The question is: how do you go about starting the conversation?

Different executives will have varying levels of understanding regarding what the strategy should consist of. Each will have their own set of driving forces to harness and myths to challenge. In this post, we discuss some of their perceptions, goals, and concerns that you may encounter, and how to address them.

The CEO
CEOs are confronting the need to transform while still growing annually and they are facing an era of unprecedented change. Disruptive technologies have blind-sided whole industries and continue to do so.

Their main concern is to identify technologies that have the potential to sideline the business and understand how they can use them to their advantage – before getting wiped out.

When discussing commerce strategy with the CEO, make these points:

  • Customers expect a uniform experience across the brand.
  • Customers are expecting great digital experiences in step with their other digital experiences.
  • Ask the CEO to champion an omnichannel strategy.

The CMO
Of all of the people in an organization, the marketing decision maker or CMO will likely best understand an omnichannel strategy, because they are already contending with multi-channel communications.

They also probably already have some kind of content management system that might span multiple touchpoints, for example across their web site, Facebook and mobile application.

CMOs are concerned with brand image and speed to market. CMOs know that there is a window that might close if your organization can’t rapidly shift to omnichannel commerce.

Here’s what you should keep in mind when chatting with the CMO:

  • We can start with a showcase project to demonstrate success.
  • There are technologies available that will accelerate the process.
  • Ask them where they think the biggest “wins” would be.

The CIO
Your organization’s CIO has spent years building systems to support multiple business processes. Or, they have inherited them. Either way, the new imperative for multiple customer touchpoints has thrown a monkey wrench into these heavily orchestrated legacy systems. A lot of money has been spent trying to get them to talk to other systems.

If you find yourself speaking directly with the CIO, make these points:

  • Omnichannel commerce is a reality that we need to move toward quickly.
  • APIs can help us get there. And integrate seamlessly with what we already have running in the backend, preserving existing IT investments.
  • Ask them to help make an omnichannel strategy possible.

What’s stopping your organization from achieving omnichannel, experience-driven commerce? You can get there. Use the tips in this post to help frame your conversations with the C-Suite, and they’ll help you to progress on experience- driven commerce maturity faster.

This post is an except from the new ebook “The Future of Commerce: Critical Conversations To Have Today With Your C-Suite.” There’s more great material available in the free ebook. Download a copy at http://ift.tt/1MogTfH

video-assessment-small-12 Find out your digital maturity
The Advanced Commerce Maturity Scale™ is a new way to measure the ability of your company to deliver omnichannel, experience-driven commerce. Take the test today. View short demo video

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Tips for Increasing Sales on Black Friday

split-test

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, and that means retailers are already fretting about how to maximize online revenue and steal customers from competitors. According to Forrester Research, U.S. online holiday sales will exceed US$95-billion in 2015, up 11% over last year. For Black Friday (the day immediately preceding the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on Nov. 26), that means more shoppers will be clamoring to get the best deals online than any other time of the year.

Recently, Get Elastic participated in an online Twitter chat with Optimizely. We discussed the best ways retailers can capitalize on Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic by using A/B testing and personalization techniques, and what pitfalls they should avoid.

Q: What are the most impactful marketing tactics to drive #BlackFriday sales?

One of the tactics retailers can employ is to offer unique, personalized services to complement a sale. For example, hand-written notes are popular options if you can scale it across your business. If not, reserve it for repeat customers and high-margin orders. Loyalty can be a powerful driver of repeat business, so retailers should encourage it whenever possible.

During the Twitter chat, other experts offered advice such as creating gift guides by for different demographics or shopper behaviors.

Q: What is the biggest mistake you see online retailers making during holiday time?
Performance, performance, performance. If your online store isn’t loading quickly, or worse isn’t loading at all, then you’re pretty much doomed. Customers will quickly leave for a competitor.

Of course, mobile plays a big part here. When it comes to optimizing online stores for mobile, retailers are still delivering sub-optimal results. The entire customer experience should be optimized for mobile.

Q: What’s the number one thing retailers can do to improve their site today?
Similar to the biggest mistake above, the answer here is also performance. Most retailers have dozens of 3rd party scripts loading on their site, dragging down speed. Measure and tweak should be the correct course of action here. Managers should ask themselves if they really need that extra JavaScript to rotate a banner. And if your CSS and JavaScript files aren’t minimized, you need to go back and talk with your web dev team. Every little bit of speed matters, so tweak your site, measure, then tweak again.

Q: What are the special considerations for testing during #BlackFriday?
A/B testing can yield significant findings. Just remember to compare apples to apples. Visitor behavior is unique and unusual during this high traffic period. Test results from holidays like BlackFriday are unique due to the frenzied shopping activity. Results may not apply to non-holiday periods.

Another tip: Run A/B tests on pages that will receive enough traffic to drive valid results in a single day. If you need a primer on statistics for A/B testing, Optimizely has a great ebook available.

Q: What do you think are the most impactful A/B tests retailers can run with this holiday traffic?
The most impactful tests that you can run are the ones that will address a customer’s FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Test value proposition and urgency messaging. Experiment with different banners and featured categories.

Experts agree that you should avoid running tests that involve radical changes to store structure or backend functions. These test will just slow performance. Saves those test for another less critical time of the year.

Q: How do you keep sales momentum going after #CyberMonday?
While it’s true that the bulk of online sales will be realized during the holidays, that doesn’t mean you should stop testing your store throughout the rest of the year. A/B testing should never end, and you should always be looking to squeeze out more performance.

As e-commerce is now almost two decades old, the playbook for success is well established. Delight your customers, focus on the online experience, speed matters, and constantly test your store to maximize performance.

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To Get Digital Experiences Right, Think Integration

forrester_blogpost_small.jpgThere isn’t an organization in existence today that hasn’t had some internal dialog about digital experiences, and for good reason. Digital experience investments, either in technology, people, or process (or all of those), represent a unique opportunity.

Done properly, digital experiences can drive higher revenue and act as a catalyst for change throughout an organization. An effective digital experience strategy can help win, serve, and retain customers, while leaving your competitors behind.

Done poorly, digital experiences become Black Swan events that can prove ruinous. Take departmental technology investments, for example. Let’s say your marketing team wants to do something new with mobile. They’re sold a get-live-quick suite that eschews elegant integration with core back office systems. This results in overlapping soiled customer data. Overlapping data leads to duplication, errors, and eventually failure. In the end, the digital experience suffers.

Sadly, this is not a far-flung scenario. In a recent survey by Forrester Research of 135 digital executives, respondents said they are seeing lots of barriers to success in customer-facing mobile and web experiences. Chief among them was a failure to effectively integrate people, process, and technology across an organization.

Monolithic technology stacks are driving a wedge between data views of the customer. Customer data silos are the biggest barrier to top-line revenue growth initiatives such as omnichannel and personalization. Customer data is fragmented between phases of the customer journey — lead generation, marketing, commerce, social, and support.

The solution is to treat integration as a strategic initiative. The question should not be does it integrate, but how well does it integrate.

Forrester advocates embodying integration, as a discipline and strategic goal, into a digital experience reference platform. A flexible, modular experience platform will help guide digital experience investments across organizational silos. In addition, the reference architecture will unify investments across the organization and from one project to the next.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Organizations must work on the engine while it’s still running. But taking stock of your foundational strategies, practices, and technologies will help lay the groundwork for creating exceptional digital experiences.

To find out more about digital experience strategy, download this free whitepaper from Forrester “The Integration Imperative Of Digital Experiences”, a $499 value available for free to subscribers of Get Elastic.

Harry Chemko is CEO of Elastic Path Software, a leading provider of commerce software designed to maximize revenue from the next generation of digital experiences.

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