Using the right personalisation and optimisation techniques could help ecommerce businesses add as much as 6% to their revenues, suggests new analysis.
Marketing personalisation company Qubit has analysed data from more than two billion user journeys and 120m purchases for its Getting 6% more report to find which strategies succeed in boosting overall sales.
“Now is the moment for transparency in our industry,” said Graham Cooke, founder and chief executive of Qubit . “Ecommerce leaders have to get personalisation right when they’re trying to compete against the likes of Amazon, and yet it’s so hard to know what really works. We want every marketer to know precisely what tactics will help them beat the 800-pound ecommerce gorilla, and I invite other vendors in our industry to do the same.”
It found that messages around scarcity, urgency or social proof were all shown to increase sales. Highlighting items that were low in stock raised lifted average revenue per customer by 2.9%, while showing how products are trending or popular with other users, via social media proof, gave a 2.3% lift, and using a time limit to encourage purchase gave a 1.5% boost. Less positive results came from navigation changes (-0.2%), button changes (-0.2%) and signficant page redesigns (+0.2%).
The study found that programmatic and personalisation experiences that use customer, product or business data brought between and two and 14 times more incremental revenue per visitor than traditional optimisation work focusing on changes to button colours and siting.
“At Arcadia we have always been focused on making sure our digital marketing investments drive true, incremental value to the business. Personalisation is helping us build relationships with our customers that translate into increased engagement, loyalty and revenue,” said Simon Pritchard, group digital director at Arcadia . “All of the Arcadia brands – Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop, and Wallis – are working with Qubit and seeing great returns by investing in a platform that delivers personalisation at scale.”
Our view: At InternetRetailing we tend to take a somewhat jaundiced approach to research that flags up the importance of using the commissioning company’s software. But this report has some interesting insights into exactly what works and what doesn’t that make it worth consideration.
