EDITOR’S MAILBOX
Dear Editor, New research from Qubit has
indicated that online retailers missed out on £1.5 billion during the Christmas shopping period last year by not embracing personalisation in their promotion strategy. The study found that despite
retailers experiencing a massive spike in visitors to websites between 24-26 December, they failed to convert into sales. It suggests that the cause of this
lack of conversion is due to the fact that most retailers’ promotional strategies remain focused on the products they want to sell and when to push these items on sale, rather than considering wider factors relating to the individual who is engaging with them online and the context of that engagement. Our experience indicates that this
issue is not isolated to the Christmas period and that the vast majority of online retailers are focused on the transactional aspects of the online customer journey, which is why online conversion rates remain low compared to store conversions. Looking into the personality traits
of customers and the motivation behind their online behaviour is the key to a more personalised and relevant customer journey and will change the marketing focus from promoting sales, to promoting the overall brand experience. The key to this is embedding a
psychometric data layer within the existing digital marketing activity based on the ‘big-five’ personality traits or OCEAN framework for psychometric evaluation. This data set can be integrated
with tools already used by the majority of digital businesses, from Google Adwords and A/B and multivariate testing solutions to analytics platforms such as Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst), email service providers and display
54 Autumn 2014
side platforms. These integrations make it a simple process to plan and deliver campaigns to specific customer audiences based on their emotive, motivational and behavioural data. Crucially, there is now no need
to wait for an individual to put something in the basket or make a payment – the usual triggers required to begin some form of content personalisation. Instead, tailoring the customer
experience can begin long before a consumer reaches a website, within search or display ads, and continue onsite. In the run up to Christmas, those
online retailers that can develop a foundational data layer enabling deeper customer understanding will be better positioned to provide their customers with relevant interactions that are more akin to the traditional in store face-to-face experience than the bland, one-size-fits all that has dominated online retail to date. Yours faithfully, Harry Parkes, Product director for WHY Analytics at VisualDNA
Dear Editor, Online sales turned 20 years old
this summer. Most shoppers today find it hard to remember a time when you couldn’t shop online. Today, having an online presence
for retailers is just not enough. Consumers now expect to be able to shop anywhere, anytime and anyhow they choose. This can mean any mixture of ordering in-store but being delivered to home, ordering online for home delivery, ordering online but collecting from the store, starting a transaction at home and picking that transaction up to complete when you reach the store. Twenty years on from the first
ever online purchase, it’s evident that some retailers have fared better
than others at creating an engaging ecommerce presence that ties into their in-store solutions. Retailers that weren’t forward
thinking enough to unite their in- store and online presences from the beginning are now faced with the seemingly herculean task of uniting their systems to live up to consumer expectations and providing a seamless experience across all channels. Yours sincerely, Martin Smethurst, Managing director of retail at Wincor Nixdorf
Dear Editor, It’s actually refreshing to see how
well [US retailer] SuperValu has handled the incident (Data breach at US supermarket chain Supervalu.
RetailTechnology.co.uk. 19 August 2014). Numerous companies have
experienced harsh criticism for covering up breaches and not being transparent with customers, leaving them vulnerable to phishing attacks. Supervalu on the other hand is
a brilliant example of how a breach should be managed: openly providing information, opening the investigation and offering free identity management service for those who could have been affected by the breach. Organisations need to accept
that hackers don’t discriminate. Any company can become a victim, no matter how big or small. The stakes are no longer about
keeping your company’s name out of the headlines, but about dealing with the attack effectively and in a timely manner. In the new cyber reality, as more
organisations learn how to deal with an attack in an effective way, this type of incident will no longer make news. Yours sincerely, George Anderson Director at Webroot
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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