But while multichannel shopping grew, overall group sales rose by only 1.3% to £10bn in the year to March 30, and total UK sales grew by just 0.9%. Food sales rose by 3.9%, but general merchandise was down by 2.4%. Like-for-like sales, which strip out the effect of store openings and closures, fell by 1%, with food up by 1.7% but general merchandise sales, primarily fashion though also including homewares, were down by 4.1%.

Growth came in M&S’ international operations, where sales rose by 4.5%, and the company renewed its commitment towards becoming a leading international multichannel business. “As we enter the third year of our transformation, we are encouraged by the significant progress we have made,” the M&S full-year statement said.

Chief executive Marc Bolland said the company was working hard to get general merchandise “back on track.” He added: “Our international operations performed well in key markets and our multichannel business delivered strong growth.”

Highlights in the retailer’s multichannel development included the launch of free next-day collection from store, and seven new international websites launched in Europe and China. The company said its multichannel flagship store, Cheshire Oaks, had enjoyed a “strong sales performance” since it opened in August, along with positive customer feedback.

The company now sees 3.6m weekly visitors to its website, and says that online sales account for 13% of its general merchandise sales. Some 44% of online orders are now collected in store through the Shop Your Way service.

Across its estate, some 1,200 store staff now use iPads to assist customers, while Browse and Order points are available in stores. Mobile and tablet sales grew by almost 200% and now account for 18% of multichannel sales following the relaunch of its mobile optimized site, its first transactional iPhone app and a new M&S Home iPad app.

The company has also completed testing of the first phase of its multichannel platform, which is to launch in spring 2014, and is adapting its supply chain and logistics to fit multichannel sales. Its new dedicated ecommerce distribution centre at Castle Donington was launched earlier this month and the rest of a new network will be in place by 2015/2016. As a result the company said it would cut lead times by 70%, improving both availability and enabling later cut off times for deliveries.

Revenues at the upmarket fashion retailer grew by 8% to £1.998bn in the year to March 31, but but pre-tax profits fell by 4% to £350.7m. Before exceptional items, however, adjusted pre-tax profits rose by 14% to £428.1m.

Burberry pointed to digital investment in areas including its website, burberry.com, moves to bring its digital and physical retailing closer together, and improved customer service and merchandising. “Digital was further optimized,” Burberry’s full-year statement said, “with innovative marketing and monthly global messages leveraged and synchronised online and offline, responding to rapidly changing consumer behaviour.”

The company also launched its flagship store in London’s Regent Street in August, which it described as “the largest and most digitally advanced physical brand experience to date, bringing all aspects of burberry.com to life.” While in-store traffic to its 206 mainline stores, 214 department store concessions and 49 outlets was generally characterised as “soft,” Burberry said online traffic and conversion were “significantly” up. The company has maintained its strength in social media, where it now has more than 15m Facebook fans. The launch video of its Spring/Summer 2013 advertising campaign was viewed 1.7m times on YouTube. Burberry also continued to put money into its digital presence overseas, investing especially in China.

Some 71% of Burberry’s overall revenue came from retail during the year, where sales grew by 12% during the year to £1.4bn as the company opened 23 main line stores. A further 24% came from wholesale and the remaining 5% from licensing. During the year, retail and wholesale operating profit grew by 17% while that from licensing grew by 3%. But bottom-line profits were hit to the tune of £82.9m, with exceptional charges incurred as a result of the ending of its fragrance and beauty licensing relationship. The company is now directly operating its own beauty business, established as of April 1.

Chief executive Angela Ahrendts said: “Finishing the year with a strong retail performance both online and offline, Burberry achieved record revenue and profit in 2012/13.

“Looking ahead, although the macro environment remains uncertain, Burberry is well positioned with opportunity by channel, region and product. With the integration of Beauty in April, we have added another exciting growth platform. Our brand momentum, proven strategies and closely connected global team provide confidence in Burberry’s future performance.”

A High Court judge found in favour of the florist network, which claimed that Marks & Spencer’s use of the Interflora trade mark as a Google AdWord to advertise its M&S Flowers and Gifts website was trademark infringement.

The case was first brought in 2008, since when hearings have taken plae before the Court of Justice of the European Union and the UK Court of Appeal before coming back to the UK’s High Court for trial. The ruling may still be appealed by either side.

Mr Justice Arnold said: “The M&S advertisements which are the subject of Interflora’s claim did not enable reasonably well-informed and reasonably attentive internet users to ascertain whether the service referred to in the advertisements originated from [M&S or Interflora]. On the contrary, as at 6 May 2008, a significant proportion of the consumers who searched for ‘Interflora’ and the other signs, and then clicked on M&S’s advertisements displayed in response to those searches, were led to believe, incorrectly, that M&S’s flower delivery service was part of the Interflora network.”

Rhys Hughes, president of Interflora British Unit, said: “This ruling helps ensure that when consumers search on the internet for “Interflora”, they can be confident in knowing that the flowers bought online come from a member of the Interflora network.

“Keyword advertising is a very powerful tool and so it is vital for consumer protection that internet search results take consumers directly to the brands they are looking for. The Interflora brand stands for quality and service, a reputation we have been building, with our network of independent florists, since 1923.”

A Marks & Spencer spokesperson said: “We are disappointed by today’s judgement. As we are considering our position and all the options available to us it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further at this stage.”

Retailers – with the noted exception of Primark – are, and have been for a good while, striving to make online work for them. But the constantly shifting landscape of the online world means that the vast majority are behind the curve. Mobile optimisation is still far from being universal, user experiences range from the exceptional to the dire and in all of this the customer is caught in the crossfire. Yet one has consistently stood out from the crowd in terms of profits and customer satisfaction: John Lewis. Much has been made in the business pages up and down the country about its Christmas successes since the eponymous adverts of 2011 and 2012, as well as its downturn-defying sales and profits. It is the envy of the retail world, with many trying to emulate its success. Mark Lewis, the shop’s new online director, recently revealed to the Daily Telegraph one of the main reasons for the retailer’s current status – local store managers having responsibility for online sales in their region. It’s interesting to consider why this use of data works so well, and how other retailers can look to adopt similar tactics to maximise their offering.

The John Lewis success story has been achieved through providing linked up data access for everyone involved in sales; not just those at head office but those on the ground running the store. Giving on-the-ground managers control over the online sales strategy combines the best of both worlds: local customer understanding and data-driven insight. This ties in perfectly with the click and collect drive of late – tying the in-store experience with that of the online – but it also represents a strategy rarely (if at all) seen amongst other retailers.

Such a system requires a robust and effective data management and analysis approach. Customer behaviour on a regional level needs to be collated effectively and be available to all who need it. This delivers an overarching unifying view into customer demand and requirements, available to all in the organisation. John Lewis has clearly made fantastic use of such a system.

Yet one can be sure that it wasn’t just access to this data that has led to John Lewis’s successful online/offline integration. This complete view of all customers reveals trends on a national and local level that all areas of the business can use: C-suite for overarching strategic plans, marketing for campaign engagement and, as mentioned, managerial for local sales pushes.

These managers can separate out their local shoppers by demographic, product preferences, spending power; any number of variables to allow targeting by each outlet. This means that there isn’t one central marketing strategy where location is just one of a number of variables – it means the marketing strategies differ based upon locations – a far more targeted state of affairs.

Putting store managers in control of regional sales is just one way in which retailers are looking to emulate John Lewis’ online successes. The company has found its own method of combating the associated difficulties of managing multiple facets of data to provide a localised, or in other words, customer-centric, experience. As we move towards the realities of big data, retailers can look to invest in new systems that can help them achieve an overarching view of each individual customer; from what they buy, how they like to be contacted and what drives purchase decisions. M&S is one such retailer currently in flux, attempting to adapt its business to these 21st century necessities. It is not just its customer data management that needs overhauling but its stock data systems also. The Guardian recently extensively examined the failings in M&S’s distribution network thanks to its outdated data systems. Stock is still being counted by hand, meaning that stores simply don’t know fast enough what is selling and the current trends. This drastically limits the speed with which discounts can be offered to customers and effectively rules out any chance of personalised experiences for loyal shoppers. M&S has acknowledged these failings, so the industry will be watching with a very close eye to see how such a large retailer will embrace data.

This story is a perfect example of how the retail industry is starting to see a large volume of data requiring quick collation and analysis if it’s to offer the company any real value. This is why regional data becomes such a priority when evaluating the day-to-day changes in customer behaviour and the interactions customers have with personnel in store. M&S stock was held all over the country, meaning that it took days, if not weeks, to understand trends nationwide and get stock to where it needed to be, a state of affairs simply not tenable anymore. Data needs to be a priority for retailers with real-time data in particular holding the key to sales strategies at regional and national levels.

In building a strategy around its shops instead of neglecting them for the online world, John Lewis achieved something no other retailer has, yet all are trying to replicate. It has successfully bridged the divide between channels, so one could argue they have gone beyond multichannel. They are not simply using various platforms to push sales, they create an experience that is seamless across them – one of the few businesses today who can actually lay claim to being omnichannel. This is all due to effectively leveraging data. Whether it’s big or small, one can’t refute the power of it. Today, retailers need to consider where data is heading and what strategies they can incorporate to ensure they are utilising even the smallest bit of data to improve customer experience. Retailers can learn a lot from John Lewis and how putting data at the heart of a business model can drive success.

Francis Wallinger is chairman of Alchemetrics

The global ranking puts Apple, worth $185bn, in first place, followed by Google ($114bn) and IBM ($112bn).

While Amazon has overtaken fellow US retailer Walmart ($36.2bn, +5%) to head the list of brands that are primarily retail-focused, UK multichannel retailer Tesco comes in fifth place, despite losing 9% of its value over the last year to be worth $16.3bn, according to the study.

Other European brands in the top 10 retailers included Ikea, eBay and Aldi.

Robin Headlee, vice president of Millward Brown Optimor, said: “Amazon has retaken the top spot by putting the customer first. This year’s ranking shows that consumers are recognising the efficiency and good value they get from large retailers but our analysis reveals that brands’ desire, trust and user recommendation ratings have declined slightly in the retail category.

“To get to and stay at the top, a retailer also needs a strong, consistently executed promise and they must be innovative and responsive in creating ‘meaningful difference’ that makes them personally relevant to consumers.”

The BrandZ Top 5 most valuable retail brands of 2013

1. Amazon $45.7bn
2. Walmart $36.2bn
3. The Home Depot $18.5bn
4. Ebay $17.7bn
5. Tesco $16.3bn

Source: Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands

The study comes as the debate intensifies in the UK about the tax paid by many global brands, including online retailers. Both Amazon and Google have been questioned in the UK Parliament on their tax affairs. Objections have been raised to measures that see their European operations headquartered in low-tax areas of the EU. Both have corporate structures that mean most of their European tax bills are paid in Luxembourg (Amazon) and Ireland (Google) rather than in countries, including the UK, where many of their day-to-day operations take place.

Scott Dacko, associate professor of marketing and strategic management at Warwick Business School and Christine Elliott, chief executive of the Institute for Turnaround, were speaking in response to the news that the national town centre vacancy rate, as measured by the British Retail Consortium (BRC)/Springboard Footfall and Vacancies Monitor April 2013, has risen to unprecedented levels.

The figures showed a UK national town centre vacancy rate of 11.9% in April 2013, up from 10.9% in January 2013, and the highest rate since the survey began in July 2011.

Dacko said: “There is so much online competition stores need to differentiate themselves to survive. On the one hand they need to be seamlessly integrated with their online offerings. And at the same time they need to offer something different in their stores. It is too easy for consumers to make price comparisons these days, so it makes sense that stores look to make themselves different.

“They can do that by emphasising local needs, which could be the bakery or butchers using locally sourced food. Or they can offer a unique ambience, a unique shopping experience, Wi-Fi, high quality products or service. They could offer exceptional value like the 99p stores or click and collect.”

Meanwhile, Christine Elliott, chief executive of the Institute for Turnaround, told Economic Voice that: “Retailers must adapt quickly and adopt a new role alongside online retailers. To do so, high street businesses must develop a loyalty based relationship with their customers built on strong customer service and an engaging brand experience. High street businesses must also take advantage of the fact that in a shop customers can touch and experience their products, something that a specialist online retailer is unable to offer.”

This week’s BRC figures also showed a contrasting higher level of footfall in the high streets, up by 3.4%, compared to the same time last year, and the strongest performance since December 2011. Out-of-town footfall stayed flat (+0.3%) while shopping centre footfall fell by 3%.

Helen Dickinson, British Retail Consortium [IRDX VBRC] director general, said of the report: “It’s a major concern that the vacancy rate has reached a record high, driven by increases in almost every part of the UK, with some regions like the South West seeing a significant leap in empty shop numbers. With high streets topping the agenda for many now, there’s a real opportunity here to seize the moment and stem the tide of further closures. Comparatively small steps to tackle deep-rooted issues such as parking, accessibility and rising business costs could make a huge difference to the health of town centres.

“At least there’s some cheer on offer in the footfall figures, driven by a respectable showing for high streets, but this compares against a very rainy April 2012, when bad weather left a lot of shoppers running for cover.”

It’s that kind of approach that has taken Burberry to its dominance in social media – it now has 15m Facebook followers – and Marks & Spencer to the point where it is taking important steps to focus both its supply chain and its stores on its multichannel ambitions. Such investment costs and takes away from the bottom line, but, as our story on this week’s shop vacancy rates suggest, the future is as much online for high street businesses as for their etailing rivals.

In today’s newsletter we also report on Amazon’s new-found place as the world’s most valuable retail brand, according to a new study, and on Interflora’s keyword-related court victory. We have an extra guest comment this week, which comes from Francis Wallinger of Alchemetrics and considers the importance of Big Data for retailers.

Remember that tickets for the Internet Retailing Awards (more info here) are now available to book. We’ll be bringing the shortlist of award winners to you later this week, so keep watching the site for news.

And a reminder too that it’s catch up time for anyone who missed that vital briefing at Internet Retailing Expo (2013). Presentations and panels from the across the six conferences of the event, the workshops and Innovation TV Studio are now available to view online at InternetRetailingExpo.com.

Jumpstart events

Internet Retailing’s signature JumpStart events offer a chance for retailers to get quickly up to speed on the latest developments in a given area, hearing directly from expert suppliers and identifying and presenting the key questions retailers need to ask when procuring their own systems. Each full-morning event is held in Tower 42, 25 Old Broad Street, London and retailers can register to attend for free here.

On May 29, International and cross border trade is under examination. UK companies are seeing significant growth from trading internationally (outside the EU) and cross border (within the EU) and it’s never been easier to extend your online trading. Presenters at the Jumpstart will highlight the areas of concern, the pitfalls to avoid, as well as new opportunities in an event that will feature leading vendors in areas from multilingual to localisation, from payments to local customs and from logistics to usability.Find out more and register to attend here.

Cross-channel is the subject for the JumpStart event of June 5, where the focus will be on the customer, how they use as many touch points and channels as we’re willing and able to offer and how we combine behavioural data with service values, technology, people and process to deliver for them. Delegates will take away ideas, examples and case studies to extend selling activities beyond the web interface. Find out more and register to attend here.

The customer experience is in focus for the event of June 19, when we’ll be looking at how to provide an enhanced customer experience, not only optimising each channel but also considering how to bridge the experience over time and across channels. Topics will include interaction design, service planning, testing and customer service, delivery and logistics, and extend to how best practice analytics and behavioural tracking can help us towards that elusive ‘single view of the customer’ in order to sell more effectively. Find out more and register to attend here.

Today’s stories

Multichannel sales up but M&S profits falter

Burberry reports record digital engagement online and off, as it reveals full-year figures

Interflora wins five-year legal battle on keywords in the high court

GUEST COMMENT We all have data but how should you use it?

Amazon tops world’s most valuable retail brands, while Tesco comes fifth: study

High street shops must differentiate to survive, say experts as shop vacancy rates rise

The webinar Using web optimisation to deliver a significant boost to the bottom line webinar opened with a direct question. Have you increased the conversion rate on your website over the last 12 months? Of those webinar participants who responded, 0% said yes, by more than 100%, 6% said they had, by 50-99%, 75% said they had by 1-49% and 19% said not at all. One aim of the webinar, said opening speaker Jonny Steel, business development director at ClickTale, was to share ideas that would help participants move their conversion up a level.

In-page analytics
Steel started by explaining the difference between web analytics, and Clicktale’s in-page analytics. While web analytics, he said, measure the moves from one page to another, in-page analytics measure every keystroke, mouse move and scroll within the page itself. That information can be used to see what visitors are doing on the website, with sessions recorded for replaying afterwards to give insights into how people used the website in order to understand factors that may, for example, have caused them to leave the site. The results are shown through heatmaps that reflect mouse movements, clicks, and attention, while also analysing movement around links.

That’s important, said Steel, for the current era of agile online marketing, built on speed and accurate insights. “Agile online marketing requires for site changes to be based on true to life observations of your customers’ behaviour.”

Online optimisation cycle
Introducing the online optimisation cycle, developed from observation of how people best optimise their websites, Steel explains that it starts by monitoring KPIs through technologies such as web analytics in order to understand existing conversion rates. By then visualizing user behaviour, retailers can develop ideas about what could be improved, before moving to A/B testing. Analysing results can show how changes might help before site changes are made.

By putting this into practice, said Steel, online marketing moves from an art to a science. “It is no longer based on guesswork, the highest paid individual’s opinion,” he said. “You no longer say I think this is what my customers are doing or would like. Everything is based on observation, hypothesis and testing.”

In-page analytics in practice: Jellyfish Publishing

Guest speaker Carola York, managing director of Jellyfish, introduced her company as a specialist in PPC, SEO, social, analytics and optimisation. It generally works on behalf of clients, but its Jellyfish Publishing arm runs its own magazine subscription site, magazine.co.uk, which lists more than 700 magazines and attracts browsers considering buying a magazine subscription for themselves or as a gift. “It’s crucial that the site is fully optimised so that it makes it easy for [visitors] to search, to navigate and more importantly for us, that the potential conversions are maximized so we’re getting the maximum number of sales and revenue out of the site,” said York.

Showing ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of the magazine.co.uk home page, York explained how she briefed her optimisation team to improve the home page with the aims of increasing exposure for sale offers, improving search and making navigation easier.

Vassilis Toutouropoulos, senior conversion optimisation manager at Jellyfish Publishing, then explained how the optimisation team carried out the brief, using ClickTale to monitor user behaviour through mouse activity and click heatmaps. Attention and scroll-reach statistics were analysed to find weaknesses in the usability, and pinpoint conversion-sensitive areas that could be improved. During the course of the webinar he showed the initial and subsequent heat maps that were generated, and how they were used, along with Google Analytics, to analyse user activity on the site.

As a result
Findings included users’ high level of interest in the search box, and that because there were few prominent links to ‘corporate’ pages, users looking to be reassured about the authenticity of the site were scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

The team designed four new variations of the home page to test, all optimized for better navigation. These were tested for conversion rates against the original using Google Content experiments.

As a result of the tests, the team abandoned navigation on the left hand side of the page and instead, concentrated on the top of the page, while including a more prominent and highly-filtered search feature in the centre of the page. After the changes, magazine.co.uk found that clicks and hovers on the top bar were more evenly spread, and that clicks across the page were more uniformly spread above the first fold.  The final page also showed a 0.65% lift in conversion compared to the original, while heatmapping also showed that the final page, “does exactly what we wanted,” said Toutouropoulos, increasing search and navigability.

The results predicted a 28% increase in the number of subscriptions that could be achieved directly from landings on the homepage. Some months later, said Carola York, concluding the case study presentation, the winning variation can still be seen on magazine.co.uk. “That winning variation became our default home page and it still is,” she said, “though further optimisation has taken place. The results of the test have been phenomenal and really helpful for our business.”

Questions from the Q&A session at the end of the webinar ranged from whether heatmaps could distinguish between the behaviour of new and existing users, the filters that can be put in place when using them to what further optimisation magazine.co.uk now planned and whether Jellyfish found the heatmap results surprising.

To hear the webinar for yourself, to view the accompanying slides, see the heatmaps and hear the question and answer session, visit the Clicktale webinar page or visit the Internet Retailing webinar page  for details of more events.

“One of the main reasons why conversion rates haven’t improved over the last 10 years is because websites as they currently stand don’t serve unique users,” said Ian McCaig, CMO, Qubit. “Effectively what’s happening is every user is presented with the same web experience. We believe a big leap forward in improving conversion rates is personalisation.” Thus McCaig set out his stall as he opened a recent Internet Retailing/Qubit webinar, Website personalisation – the best way to boost your conversion rates. Conversion rates, he argued, are an important area on which to focus because they can drive growth in the business.

Evolving personalisation
Already, he said, most sites are already using personalisation, to some extent, as they introduce A/B testing or related methods to optimise their site for all users. Some are already introducing rules-based segmentation, but the next step will be to introduce individual personalisation that remembers each visitor’s preferences and integrates them with third party data. Ultimately, real time personalisation will be based on algorithmic predictive models that predict content around behaviour.
“There’s huge opportunities to evolve and we generally believe that getting down to individual personalisation will be the biggest level for improving conversion rates,” said McCaig. It will be a significant evolution – for today it’s reckoned that 92% of visitors to a website don’t buy.
Asked in a poll how much personalisation they already had in place on their website, 30% of the webinar audience cited remarketing, 40% product recommendations, 10% rules-based site personalisation, 0% individual personalisation and 20% basket abandonment.

Why is personalisation so important?
Consumers, educated by Apple, Google and Facebook and empowered by the internet, have high expectations – that are rising, said McCaig. “Unlike going into a physical store you literally are only a click away from a competitor’s website so it’s absolutely critical that you try and improve customer experience,” he said.
He cited three retail companies that he thought were innovating successfully using data. Pointing to US site Fab.com, he said more of its conversions were now coming from social sites than from Google. Meanwhile, John Lewis is now rebuilding itself around digital, with more than £1bn now coming from ecommerce sales. And Farfetch puts data at the centre of its strategy, using it to “generate insight and turn that into action.”
One size doesn’t fit all, said McCaig, and that’s the next big leap for conversion.

Back to the future
Graham Cooke, chief executive of Qubit, the second speaker in the webinar, continued by pointing out that personalisation had been taking place in retail for some time, citing Tesco’s use of clubcard data to influence store layout. Online, personalisation started with product recommendation but now messaging, offers, announcements and widgets are all personalised. In order to achieve this level of personalisation, retailers must understand what type of users they have, where they are in the buying cycle and what technologies to use to target them with. Are they basket cases, who put things in baskets and never buy, lost souls, who can’t find what they’re looking for, first timers, who need reassurance before buying, or careful spenders, who leave gaps between purchases?
At the moment, said Cooke, retailer see conversion rates of an average 3% but the company believes they could be seeing conversion rates of 10% by moving away from the one-size fits all website.
In a poll, Cooke asked the audience to name their biggest challenges with personalisation. Some 8% cited bad data, 48% lack of resources/expertise, 12% technology not delivering return on investment, 24% IT roadblocks and 8% privacy laws.
And asked what type of technologies they were using, 13% said tag management, 48% web analytics, 0% web diagnostics, 26% A/B testing while 13% cited onsite apps.

The fundamentals of personalisation
Cooke broke down the fundamentals of personalisation into four steps: collect the right data; find insights; personalise content; test, measure and evolve.
Just as 48% of poll respondents cited the lack of resources or expertise, Cooke points to the need to build an organisation for the future. Development teams currently work with digital marketing teams. But in the future, he predicted, those marketing teams will be spit into three: teams focused separately on acquisition, merchandising and retention. Supporting both will be the development scientist who supplies the information both need to make their decisions. But McKinsey has predicted, there will be 190,000 too few data scientists by 2017.

Changing visitor behaviour
The data’s needed, argued Cooke, as visitor behaviour on the website changes. Where once there was a purchase funnel, driving lots of users towards conversion, now the reality is a consumer decision journey in which retailers must understand consumers’ different interests and triggers targeting them at the point when they decide. “Social media marketing is changing dramatically and that’s influencing the way we purchase today,” said Cooke. All of this means that more advanced models are required that combine both qualitative and quantitative data.
He went on to cite some insights Qubit had found from data: among others, Wednesday is a bad day to have a sale, visitors arriving at lunchtime are 33% more likely to buy, and Safari users spend £30 more on technology than other browser users.

The future of personalisation
In future, predicted Cooke, a marketer-led delivery mechanism will include presentation and data layers, working in tandem with the website and content management system (CMS) to deliver personal content to the individual. “Where we’re seeing businesses work most effectively,” said Cooke, “is where development teams and marketing teams are no longer working in siloed organisations but in one unit and are feeding back to the development team on a weekly basis the changes they need to be making.” One organisation is rewarding engineers based on its net promotion score. And it’s important to keep measuring the effect of personalisation, in order to show how it’s lifting conversions.

Case studies: how is personalisation working in practice?

French Connection
Qubit code sitting behind the French Connection website collects data from customer journeys to understand what kind of users are not converting. Insights from that included the fact that paid and natural search had lower conversion rates than other traffic sources. Those segments also brought users more likely to leave feedback complaining about price. In response, the company displayed messaging offering free returns when visitors from paid or natural search visited the website. As a result the company saw a 7.3% uplift in conversion from that segment of visitors. “We were able to turn that rom an A/B test straight to always on,” said McCaig. “One of the issues we see with a lot of ecommerce businesses is that they can’t turn an A/B test to always on because they are tied to rigid content management systems and rigid development cycles. This whole process took only two weeks.”

Childrensalon
Childrensalon identified that in certain markets it had low conversion rates. It deployed a localised live chat application, offering to speak to customers in their own language. “We found that by deploying that to the right user at the right time we could boost conversion rates by 13%.”

“Personalisation is not something that’s new to retailers,” said McCaig. “We feel it’s actually come full circle. If we look back to the village store where you would go in, the person would know your name and what you want, we feel that web 3.0 is bringing back that original village store experience.” The intervening 100 years has been impersonal, but retailers like Apple are starting to challenge and change that experience. Today, said McCaig, the biggest lever for conversions is a more personalised experience.

Questions from the Q&A session at the end of the webinar ranged from whether website personalisation should differ for B2B to requests for more details on the French Connection case study, and what level of development work was required in order to create a personalised experience.

To hear the webinar for yourself, to view the accompanying slides, learn about more case studies and hear the question and answer session, visit the Qubit webinar page on the Internet Retailing site. or visit the Internet Retailing webinar page for details of more events.

The speakers in the half-hour event were Aurelien Dubot, product marketing manager, EMEA at Bazaarvoice, and Simon Walker, director, ecommerce innovation at Stibo Systems.

Research shows that a quarter of shoppers have researched a product over their mobile phone while standing in a shop, with more than half going on to buy from a competitor. When having a store is expensive, what’s the best approach to showrooming – aside from charging people to enter the shop, as one Australian retailer did? That was the subject tackled by Aurelien Dubot, product marketing maanger, EMEA at Bazaarvoice, the opening speaker in a recent Internet Retailing webinar. He explained how disconnected shopping experiences can see shoppers move elsewhere to buy.

Connected shopping experiences
A connected experience, he suggested, might start online with a search engine that pointed a shopper towards a site that had strong user-generated content in the form of ratings and reviews. That would give them social validation of the product they were looking at alongside the marketing descriptions. That makes it easier for consumers to narrow down their choices.

The shopper might then move to the store. In the US, said Dubot, Bazaarvoice is working with an app that shop assistants can use to help shoppers decide by comparing reviews from ‘people like them’. Reviews can also be placed on price tags in store in a “simple yet effective” move.

Shoppers are still likely to use mobile in the store, but enabling free wi-fi in store will take those who log in direct to the retailer’s home page, where in-store offers and discounts might be posted. “When I go to the till and use it, my purchase is linked to my email and the retailer has then a legitimate opportunity to reconnect with me later to ask for a review,” said Dubot. Argos estimates that each post-purchase email it sends out is worth £4 of retail sales. Over 10,000 sales, that adds up.

Competing on price is “tough” said Dubot, since being the cheapest hits the bottom line. But user experience enables another kind of competition. Allowing customers to comment and suppliers to answer their questions and reviews improves the shopping experience, he said. Dubot argues that a proactive approach is required when it comes to leveraging comments from suppliers and consumers. “This is a big data goldmine that you can start using for purposes from marketing to product assortment.”

Using Big Data to improve the experience
Simon Walker, director, ecommerce innovations, at Stibo Systems, continued the webinar with a look at how retailers can use Big Data to improve the customer experience. He started by considering the volumes of data that retailers now need in order to display their products across a wide variety of sales channels. Before Toys R Us, for example, implemented its own product information management (PIM) system (PIM), it found each product was described by 418 data attributes across its supply chain and ecommerce systems. Across the whole product range that meant more than 77,000 data attributes to be dealt with. But PIM systems can be used to connect data from suppliers and partners for use by consumers across sales channels, allowing retailers to manage that data more effectively. “PIM-powered commerce puts product data flexibility at the heart of multichannel selling, across all devices, all channels, all segments and markets,” said Walker.

PIM systems can also provide a home for data that comes from ratings, reviews and other areas. This can be used to improve the way products are displayed when merchandisers and copywriters analyse product performance to improve product descriptions. “For example poor product reviews may be due to product information not addressing customers’ questions or concerns, resulting in poor satisfaction,” said Walker. Two UK high street retailers are integrating Bazaarvoice with the Stibo Systems STEP PIM system in order to show social feedback alongside product information.

Reliable and consistent data, from product information, purchasing and sales measurements, to sales history and social comment, also ultimately improves personalisation and customer experience, said Walker. “By blending the structured data with controlled workflow and flexible usage, a PIM brings data alive for effective selling in a dynamic changing crosschannel world,” he said.

The half-hour webinar ended with a question and answer session covered questions ranging from examples of retailers who do ratings and reviews well to how PIM systems can help retailers improve their retail sales, to the importance of localising information for international markets, and integration with legacy systems.

To hear the webinar for yourself, to view the accompanying slides and hear the question and answer session in full, visit the Bazaarvoice/Stibo Systems webinar page. For details of our other webinars visit our webinars page.