IRCE Session: Five Hot New Technology Developments
This is the IRCE Session: Five Hot New Technology Developments from the technology workshop. Presented by Aaron Mandelbaum, Howard Blumenthal, Marta Dalton, Ross Higgins and Ryan West. Please forgive any typos - my Macbook battery is drained and my external battery pack for it apparently has failed, so I'm doing my best to keep you updated from my iPad.
SEO & Social
Manual penalties are now being applied to guest posts - SEO now depends on solid content and inbound marketing.
Responsive design is now a must - adaptive design is the next thing etailers need.
Personalization
Personalization takes a village - need buy-in and integration across all departments and tools - CMS, POS, CRM, marketing automation all have to work together to make personalization work well.
Flavors of personalization:
Email SEM Products Mobile Content
Targets:
Anonymous visitor Known customer/lead eCommerce Sales Lead
Personalization Journey:
Awareness -> Interest -> Consideration -> Intent -> Evaluation -> Purchase.
Don't isolate customers from information and products that might be interesting to them through personalization - don't over-personalize.
Don't overpersonalize in the awareness, interest, consideration or intent portions of the journey, or it can seem creepy and scare off customers.
Personalization has driven average order value up 30%, conversion rates up 15% and 150% increase in line items per order.
Have initial segments & targets - don't try to target too many segments in your first personalization attempt.
Geolocation
Macro to Micro - macrolocation is provided by geoip, converting their IP address to their general location. For instance, for store-pickup-only items, use geoip to target customers local to your stores with those.
iBeacons and similar technology are powering microlocation - targeting offers and providing payment services for customers based on their exact location in a store.
Advanced Analytics
Tag management - leveraging all of the different data to create and analyze segments on the fly.
Use tag management to feed what server a user is on to your customer satisfaction survey, so you can identify server-specific issues.
New tag management technologies give you new ways to better leverage your existing tools and provide new views of data.
Usability & Design
NewEgg adds hundreds of new features every year. NewEgg used QR codes for MSRP/MAP policies so that users can get prices without providing personal information or starting checkout.
Your site should be easy to use, meet customer needs and never give customers a reason to leave. Remember if customers can't find a product, they can't buy it.
For UX - look for the voice of the customer and the behavior of the customer. Use social media, feedback surveys and comments on the web to see what customers are saying, then use website analytics, split and multivariate testing and user testing to measure the behavior of the customer.
Do usability testing - even if you do it at a Starbucks or in your conference room, just do it. Start with 1-5 participants.
Test early & often, test the old design and test your competition.