6 Tips from #Journey2018 e-commerce conference

6 Tips from the #Journey2018 e-commerce conference in London

#Journey2018 - programme picture
Last week was the #Journey2018 e-commerce conference in London which promised to take us on “the road to e-commerce success”. I had the privilege to attend and it was a great day with talks, workshops and networking opportunities. The organiser Yieldify had done a brilliant job with great speakers, great venue and great people.

Here is my personal summary of the 6 main takeaways from the #Journey2018 conference:

1. Emotions in Ecommerce

One of the biggest discussion points this year was about emotions in ecommerce. A panel session was dedicated to this subject and a large part of the presentation from soak.com was also about emotions.

I big tip to remember was the suggestion that emotions, and subsequently loyalty to a brand, is one of the few ways we retailers can get customers to come to our websites instead of going to giant market places such as Amazon.

Emotions isn’t just a great marketing tool but it is predicted to be the next big thing in analytics in order to understand how our ecommerce sites interacts with our customers or vice versa. Today’s technology is limited to NPS scores, reviews and survey data unless you have the resources to conduct physical tests on how the visitors reacts emotionally while using your website.

Soak.com presentation

Todd Bullion, Communications Marketing Manager at soak.com, gave a very interesting #Journey2018 presentation about how to get loyalty from customers who buys bathroom suites. At first glance it seems a long time between a repeat purchases of bathroom suites to be relevant or possible to measure. Todd gave us some great examples though of how personal recommendations to friends and family has increased their revenue thanks to emotional attachment to their brand. Do you remember their TV advert with Tully the elephant which caused a mass request for this cute elephant toy. The tip about emotions in e-commerce was how this campaign continued the story on social media and the website which helped the user to connect emotionally with the brand.

 

2. Get the data foundation right from the start

Mike Fisher, the direct to consumer e-commerce manager at Philips, made a great talk about Philips new journey and taking us back to basics regarding capturing the right data in order to succeed.

Mike Fisher, Philips - presentationEven though there were no new jaw-dropping techniques announced, it was refreshing to hear someone talking about the similar work we’re doing for many clients here at Poplar Tree Digital. Getting the tracking right from the start is one of the most important ecommerce tasks and it is surprising how many SMEs and Enterprise companies that don’t have the data tracking setup correctly.

Finally, it’s worth a shout-out about Philips admirable new journey to enhance people’s life with new healthcare products.  Philips is the company that invented the classic music cassette and the DVD but their new challenge is to educate their consumers about their new mission. Best way to explain it was to share the video which was also played at the conference. Unfortunately, it was later removed from youtube but we will aim to get hold of it again.

 

3. International e-commerce tips from M&S

Hannya Boulos, the senior international e-commerce manager at Marks and Spencer, used her Journey2018 presentation to share their learnings from expanding the M&S websites internationally. The expansion covers 32 markets and has been made in three stages:

  • 2012: Launched in Europe on a .eu domain
  • 2016: Launches included Australia, US and Canada
  • 2018: Launches included Japan and Israel

The best advice from her presentation was “Don’t do it all for all markets”. The internal team is understandably not able to cope with creating every promotion and localisation for all countries. This is why they adopted a 3 tier approach for prioritising their work. Each country was put in to one of the tiers depending on their profits and growth potential. The team then prioritised the promotions and localisation tasks based on the tier each country fell in to.

 

4. GDPR – it’s not too late to become compliant.

Manish Soni, senior counsel at Macfarlanes LLP, gave us a good reminder and re-assurance that it is still possible to get your website compliant for the GDPR deadline on the 25th May and the new e-privacy regulations due early 2019.

It was refreshing to be presented with an alternative to the GDPR doom, gloom and lawyer fees. The suggested approach of how to resolve it was summarised in 5 steps:

  1. Get clarity
  2. Develop your data map
  3. Benchmark / assess GDPR readiness
  4. Create an GDPR GAP analysis
  5. Implement your Privacy Framework

 

5. How e-commerce companies should use social media for marketing

A fun and informative talk from Vanessa Mallia, the PR and social media manager at Scribbler. The most striking figure from this presentation was that 75{9f0e9f8e91e6cd5a84b871501a50e63262fa678f252c8f691e47fda7c68e6394} of people buy products they saw on Social Media. This may not be news to everyone but it is a good reminder to take Social Media seriously for e-commerce campaigns.

Vaness took us through a very useful check list of social media tasks which covers the bases for most retailers. I won’t go through all the details but here is the check list for you to explore:

  1. Content
  2. Blog
  3. Reviews
  4. Influencers
  5. Hashtags
  6. Interact
  7. Paid advertising
  8. Private messages
  9. In-post purchasing
  10. Promotions
  11. Scheduling

 

6. CRO is Dead, the final message from #Journey2018

The CRO is dead presentationThis was the bold statement from Yieldify who are on a crusade to get us talking about CJO instead, Conversion Journey Optimisation. Jay Radia, their CEO, did a great talk to explain the meaning of CJO and how to use the Yieldify platform to increase revenues.

The title might be nothing more than a headline grabber and it seems that CRO is included within the CJO and is far from dead as we first were meant to believe in the slide. If you want to learn more about CJO, head over to Yieldify’s website www.yieldify.com .