Ecommerce Discussion - Personalisation, Customer Profile & Brand Parnterships

We had a great time hosting our first roundtable in September - felt like a great time to do it: lockdown had ended a few weeks back (in the main, watch this space on the next round table notes), people were back from their holibobs, staycations all round? It just feels like we’re getting back into the swing of things. With a massive Asterix – this is against the backdrop of massive uncertainty but people are plugging away and it’s great to see.

Lockdown presented an unprecedented invitation to know your customers better than ever providing the platform for better, more relevant communication with them. Unsurprisingly this dominated the conversation with some key takeaways below.

Personalisation and Questions to consider

When considering personalisation it’s of course important to understand your business and customer and how you engage them and this will vary depending on what it is you do. However consistently asking these questions when planning your personalisation strategy and applying the answers to your business is a fantastic place to start

1. Where should personalisation occur? 
2. What information do we require? 
3. How do we mix technology with human insights? 

As we have seen, the entire world and especially the digital world are on (an absolutely rapid) spectrum of evolution, so it’s important to continuing to review answers and adapt to the ever changing online customer behaviours and needs (happening at warp speed) in order to remain relevant and avoid obsolescence in this vital piece of the digital puzzle.

Personalisation should happen every time we touch:

This isn’t news but, as we’re all stuck on our phones, laptops and desktops we spent more time online than ever.  It would’ve been criminal to not take advantage. This has shifted the focus from personalisation to relevancy: the interventions have to be at the right time. It allows you to layer personalisation – because you bought these shows, yes here’s an email with matching outfit that you also get to see on your next visit to the site.

This doesn’t change once the stores open up – the questions is how do you ensure the customer journey remains seamless instore to online and back again. How can you personalise the journey based on their habits, preferences to gain optimal engagement and return based on how they decide to shop with you. A few noteworthy suggestions were as simple as hosting events in local stores to increase footfall, and more complex through store based promotional campaigns, vouchers and discounting.

Personalisation with acquisition

Found this particularly interesting – it’s easy once you have the info but what about that initial interaction?

Solution hammers home the importance of cohesive digital marketing strategy. Personalising landing pages based on search terms; “cheap” or “best” would dictate the landing page you were directed to and the products you’re shown.

By showing that it’s never too early in the customer journey to personalise, it opens up the prospect of affinity -based profiling. Certain search terms (think “cheap” or “best” again for ease of simplicity) might suggest a level of expertise, understanding of a product which can again be leveraged with more relevant onsite comms.

We know you’re only as good as your data, but are you only as good as your tech stack to capture the data?

We also discussed the ever changing nature of the customer profile.

Businesses invest a lot in understanding and then categorising their customers into different profiles. The impact of Covid has of course shunted and significantly skewed some of this data in the short term, can we see this having a long term impact and even becoming (excuse the tired and overused phrase) “the new normal” and they’d need to re-categorise customers based on new data collected from March when we went into lockdown, with all the new online shoppers a lot of who have been converted to digital first customers now. Anecdotally, so under supreme authority, I haven’t had anyone tell me how they can’t wait to buy from shops again, have you? The challenge will be to understand the why. How much of this is moment-in-time vs longer-lasting change.

That’ll hold the key to figuring out who will be spending big in Q4. Could it be the largest amount spent online in a Q4 ever against a backdrop of a global recession thrust upon us by a global pandemic?! Green shoots anyone?

The final topic which was discussed was Brand Partnerships and its impact on ecommerce

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

We are seeing a lot of brands collaborate in what appears to be mutually beneficial partnerships, they’re able to identify a skills gap and utilise their partner to help plug it.

It was quickly and correctly pointed out that actually this wasn’t exclusive to ecommerce performance but can actually have a sizeable impact on the business as a whole. As you could utilise brand partnerships to actually increase store based footfall – easy example would be Amazon lockers in store, or click and collect which can be done as local as independent convenience stores – this localisation of collection can increase conversion rate onsite as you aren’t necessarily having to collect your package from a neighbour, your garden, your doorstep OR a personal favourite from my repertoire is rearranging a delivery from the post office depot, only to miss it 5 more times as my doorbell isn’t working and for them to passive aggressively tell me the number of visit it is all over the “we missed you card”.

Companies are becoming more and more savvy, and when they going into partnership they can both see the benefits this will have on their business, ecommerce or otherwise. It’s not exclusive to the UK either, with Myer going into partnership with Amazon in Australia. Companies will continue to leverage other company’s skills, networks, database, store space, online capability, and technology where cost effective especially during a time where everything is uncertain apart from that treading water will lead to drowning in the current environment, and it’s this collaborative, mutually beneficial approach which will likely see an uplift in results. I don’t think it would take anyone by surprise to see an increase in these collaborations over the next 12-18 months.

Cheers

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging discussion and we are really grateful to all of those who took part and look forward to following up with another session with you all in the future!

These discussions are a regular thing in the Michael Page ecommerce team, as we look to build a community of great ecommerce professionals who can continue to network and build professional partnerships from this platform.

We are always excited to invite and engage with new attendees and it’s everyone’s first time once (the first time) so if you are interested in taking part in the next session on the 25th September or the 9th October after that, then do let myself or Leroy know and we can facilitate!

Have a great Monday!