All About That Bass(ics): The Importance of Getting Your Commerce Groove On

I’ve been a musician for over 80% of my life — classical violin, mostly (OK, there was that time I played Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” in a bar in Oregon — thanks, Chris), a little piano, some voice. When I was a little girl, first deciding what to play, I considered bass or cello, but there was just no way I wanted to carry something that large and heavy. So, violin it was and it suits me.

Good thing I didn’t pick drums. :) If you’re a drummer, you’ve heard all of the jokes by now. If you’re a bassist, you don’t even get jokes usually. You’re admired, sure, but more often, you’re taken for granted, underappreciated, even overlooked.

If you’ve heard this tune from the aptly named The Internet just out this Summer 2018: 

or this from The Pixies from 1988:

or this from Interpol from 2007:

or certainly this classic from Pink Floyd from 1973:

you know how captivating a great bass line can be. Even when a bass line isn’t catchy, it’s doing something really critical. It’s foundational. The drummer’s got the beat, but the bassist’s got the undercurrent, the tide, the ebb and the flow. The bassist keeps the structure and narrative and holds the song together. This is called the groove.

Many businesses try to run without the bass. 

I spent over 15 years successfully building digital commerce and B2C businesses in retail, entertainment, and classifieds verticals. Why was I successful — not because I chased after the latest and greatest, not because I copied my competitors — but because my team and I did the hard grind day in, day out of looking at numbers, doing analysis, talking with customers, building a plan, allowing for creativity and innovation, and focusing on consistent execution. I certainly wasn’t perfect. But I generally got great results and most people who worked with me don’t hate me. 

Now that I focus on enterprise product management and strategy and don’t run a commerce business every day, I have an even broader view. Many of the largest businesses in the world use the solution our team builds, and in product management, we work with and get insights from our customers through a variety of ways – from strategy workshops, technical deep dives, advisory boards, and customer success efforts to user testing and hands-on how-to and enablement sessions. That means I'm in contact with many more people who do the job I used to do. I see the commerce challenges every day across industries and the impact of businesses trying to wail like Robert Plant without John Paul Jones to keep 'em honest.

I get it. The pressure of running a commerce business has never been greater. Retail is challenged, Amazon is crushing, customer behavior is changing and expectations are greater, technology options are more complicated than they’ve ever been. And yet, businesses still can’t answer rudimentary questions about their customer base. They still have trouble executing campaigns. They still talk about the same concepts we did 10-15 years ago — from how to optimize a landing page and how to do a valid A/B test to which segments to focus on and how to lower acquisition spend and get increased dollar and margin efficiencies. (I wanted to find a good example for you, but the shop.org interview I did with Scott Silverman on A/B testing was so old they finally pulled it from the interwebs. I did, however, find this ancient post from Analytics Demystified that talks about A/B testing on Offermatica!)

Somewhere between the flip phone and the iPhoneX, we seem to have lost a decade plus of commerce learnings about what worked and what didn’t and we seem to be starting all over again, often answering (or not) the same questions, but tweaking them just slightly for the day (hello, AI). There's no doubt that times have changed and you'd be foolish not to take into account the considerable changes in customer behavior and the technology shift that has occurred in the last 15 years. But you also need to pay attention to the bass line of your business—the foundation that is going to ground you as you try to pivot, innovate, lead in your industry—bassics like (but definitely not limited to):

1) Hire a good analyst. I have never regretted hiring an experienced, dedicated analyst. A good one will bring you actionable insights that you should listen to and use to optimize your strategies—everything from your promotional cadence and offers to which customers, channels, pages, products, and terms to focus on first and what to try next to drive conversions. A good analyst spots trends, anticipates issues, finds opportunities. You need one. Probably many more than one.

2) Work your budget and your strategy. Budgets and strategies are not immovable objects. They live. They breathe. They are made to work for you, not the other way around. Focusing on basics does not equal not changing. Be willing to break with tradition. Upend those so-called “truths” or “rules" in your business that keep you from trying new things (e.g. oh, we don’t do that). Or worse, keep you from trying new things more than once (e.g. we did that a year ago and it didn’t work).

3) Optimize your key touchpoints. Again, basic. When you are planning your commerce marketing and merchandising calendars, you should account for all of your key touchpoints across the customer journey and determine how those should change (or not) for new campaigns. I don't mean just your online or website touchpoints. These should span channels and devices, and ideally customer segments as well. This should be a key component of your ongoing, proactive messaging and communication strategy to drive engagement, loyalty, conversions, and a stellar, differentiated customer experience.

4) Listen to your customers. This should certainly include ongoing user testing and interacting with customers in real settings (e.g. call center, email customer service, chat, retail stores, social media). It should also ideally include heat map and other visual analysis tools. Whatever you do, do what works more often and incorporate the learnings into your business tactics and strategy. If you are worried about making changes too quickly or with too small a customer data set — run A/B tests against the changes. Most importantly, this should not be a once a year event. 

5) Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Where you can, forecast or model anticipated value of new efforts, but leave room for innovation and trying new things that your gut tells you is the right thing to do, but that you can’t put a number value to. That said, numbers help. One year, I put all efforts into driving conversion for the business— that was the number one goal, the number one metric to drive. All other work didn’t stop, but if you want to talk about focus, that was it for one whole year, and our strategy, our tactics, our marketing, merchandising, customer approach, web development efforts — everything — was built around driving that rate up by at least 10%. We grew it over 30%. You could say, we were in a groove.

At the recent Pipeline Pros Oracle Commerce User Group Conference, Insight 2018, which was run and funded by our customers and partners (pretty cool community effort by the way and the next event is Insight Europe 2018, September 17-18 in Lisbon), the CEO of Object Edge, Rohit Garewal, gave a great presentation on the importance of focusing on low-hanging fruit before getting too caught up in implementing “personalization” — a word that has become so overused, and a strategy often so poorly executed, that it has obscured the fact that personalization works when done well...just like everything else in life. (Hey, when you do something right, it’s successful, imagine that!)

Rohit's argument was that before you even try to tackle personalization, which often has a tangible impact to production, resourcing, and processes, there are many optimization efforts you should focus on first — from optimizing key paths on your site and effectively handling top and no result search terms to determining the right layouts for the right kinds of products and categories, merchandising the right offers and selling messages, and convincingly answering the why buy (you know, more bassics, and incidentally, all tactics that are easy to do using Oracle Commerce Cloud, but I digress).

I mostly agree with Rohit, but I actually don’t think it has to be either or. A key component of building a solid foundation is stretching and trying new things, whether those are truly new innovations or just new to you. Certainly it is worth exploring making your content, commerce, and experiences more relevant and that is why we focus so much on helping enable those capabilities in our service. The danger is often in the extremes and focusing on features instead of value — trying to do too much or feeling like you can’t even start without boiling the ocean which results in lots of PowerPoint decks and meetings about personalization that never go anywhere or doing so little that it is meaningless and results in no positive change, no impact. Again, put together a strategy. Something brief with a measurable goal that will mean something to your business. Pick one tactic to try and prioritize it high so it doesn’t get lost. Don’t be afraid to fail. You will learn something that you can build on. 

Successful businesses often find that magic, the bass line that drives them forward and gives them the stability and the trust in the team and the song to flourish and hit the high notes. Doing the bassics right isn't boring and it doesn’t have to mean not innovating. It’s critical to having a healthy business. Can you have a successful business without the groove? Sure, but it’s a whole lot harder.

At Oracle Commerce Cloud, we help customers find their groove. Find out more at Oracle Commerce Cloud or email me: so.young.park at oracle dot com.