IR Focus: Web Design + Mobile Commerce 2014 was held earlier this month in Orlando. Here are 7 takeawys from IR Focus sessions that you can use as you enhance and update your marketing campaigns and ecommerce sites.
Commerce, community and content
A retail site is not just about what to buy, but about how customers research and how customers interact. It’s specialty retail, said Newegg CMO Soren Mills – like meeting the guy at the hardware store who can tell you how to fix your sink.
Email a cheap usability test
Ask your customers how their experience was, said FitForCommerce president Bernardine Wu. It helps you collect data from numerous site users easily. If you do a focus group, your users may harp on one aspect and you won’t know how important that issue really is.
Use Facebook to engage
Deb Shops’s audience wants to be heard, said social media and brand manager Jennifer Fitzpatrick. In the below example, Deb Shops asks its Facebook followers to choose which prom dress it likes better. Posts like this help create conversation among its customers, which leads to more engagement in its Facebook community.
Use Facebook for comments
Based on comments on its product pages, CafePress designers said they were not getting useful customer feedback. Sumant Sridharan, president of CafePress, said the switch to Facebook’s comments platform helped put a human face on feedback, and raised the quality of product page comments.
What the customer wants
Staples had been so focused on what it wants its customer to do online, that it forgot all about the customer experience, said vice president-global ecommerce Faisal Masud. On Black Friday 2013, Staples replaced its traditional mobile home page with one that just included deals. The result: Staples sales via mobile devices grew 184% compared to Black Friday 2012.
Responsive design is for the future
Redesigning with responsive design in mind? Don’t just think about today’s devices, think about what future technology holds, said Yeti Coolers director of ecommerce Sara Kenton. For example, Apple is rumored to be coming out with an Internet-enabled watch. “We have to embrace the fact that our customer is not in front of a 17-inch monitor all the time,” Kenton said. “If someone has five minutes at a deer stand and they check their iPhone, we want to be able to engage with him.”
Hyper-target with your own customer data
During one of Winter 2014s many snow storms, apparel merchant Nicole Miller’s marketing team manually sifted through data, and had success with an email marketing campaign for winter coats that was sent to customers in “snowed in” areas of the country. Andrea Marron, director of ecommerce and retail for Nicole Miller, said the coats sold out quickly, and click-through rates were double the usual campaigns. “It’s not about applying algorithm, but taking advantage of your current information,” Marron said.