Six Ecommerce Top Tips From The Experts
Involved in ecommerce? Grab a few top tips from industry insiders ahead of their webinar at this week's eCommerce summit.
Involved in ecommerce? If so, you’ll probably jump at the chance of some insider insights from industry experts to help you improve ecommerce performance for increased conversions.
In planning the eCommerce Summit
@YourDesk (
27 – 29 May) I’ve been chatting to a few summit speakers for their top tips on the likely challenges familiar to most ecommerce professionals today.
Read on for a few sound bites tasters of what will be covered in more depth in 9 webinars at the online summit.
On personalisation…“Most e-commerce businesses lack access to the rich store of data that’s required to deliver personalization at scale. To solve for this, marketers should seek to capitalize on each recipient’s real-time personal context: geolocation, time, device, weather, etc. All of this can be done at the moment a recipient opens his email, thereby enabling 1:1 personalization to everyone in the database.” - Dave Holland, European Regional Director of Liveclicker
Find out more on this in Dave’s session on
‘Exploring the Benefits of Real-Time Email’ (28 May, 11.00 BST)
On A/B Testing for email…"While many marketers utilize A/B testing with email, the focus is often on the subject line. To increase ecommerce conversions, incorporate new and varied A/B tests into your email marketing. One of my favorite things to test is preview text—the little bit of copy that follows the subject line in many email programs. Instead of the all-too-common "click here to see images in this email" (or even worse, "having trouble?") copy that is often standard in this space, highlight a promotion, free shipping offer, or other content that will encourage the subscriber to open.” - Justine Jordan, Marketing Director of Litmus
Hear more copy optimisation tips in the Litmus summit session
‘Optimizing the Email Experience’ (28 May, 15.00 BST)
On campaign optimisation…“One of the most under-utilized aspects of e-commerce optimization is to create specific experience for each of your most competitive features/benefits and business advantages. If you have same day delivery, next day delivery, locally sourced ingredients etc. you should be running paid search campaigns to capture those searches, and drive them to landing pages that confirm that your business has this feature before you send them to your site and further down the funnel. Without this you risk your website not communicating these things in a timely enough manner – especially if you send campaign traffic to your homepage. If you can own these types of search queries you will have a large competitive advantage.” - Oli Gardner, Co-Founder of Unbounce
Oli will talk in more detail in his session on
‘How to Create Campaigns That Actually Convert Using Conversion-Centered Design’ (28 May, 17.00 BST)
On email segmentation and targeting… "Email marketers get excited about subject lines and responsive designs and rightly so since they’re creative and testing these will boost response. But to make an Ecommerce email marketing campaign effective you have to personalise emails based on a solid segmentation and targeting scheme. Using dynamic content to tailor the hero offer and other panels in the email will pay dividends into the future as you standardise your targeting process. It’s best to think through your targeting options as different layers from product categories purchases, position in lifecycle based on Recency and Frequency, current and potential and demographics. See my 6 layered Email targeting options for some examples.” - Dave Chaffey, Founder of Smart Insights
Join Dave for the latest email trends for 2015 in his webinar
‘10 Email Marketing Trends for 2015’ (28 May, 17.00 BST)
On campaign measurement… "When it comes to conversions there is a tendency for people to try to think in terms of conversion rates. My advice would be to focus on total conversions rather that conversion rates. With the possible exception of revenue per customer I do not value any KPI that tracks or targets rates such as open rate, click rate, conversation rate, even revenue per email. I always advise clients to measure and target totals. Total opens, total clicks, total revenue, total conversions, total unsubscribes etc. Once you start measuring totals rather than rates you begin to see tactics such as segmentation and deliverability in a very different light" - Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx
Catch Dela for more expert insights in his summit session
‘Stop segmenting start personalizing!’ (28 May, 16.00 BST)
On the power of persuasion in email…"Stay focused on the objective of the email and ensure you take advantage of your role as the Director of the email. Use persuasive elements such as implicit (e.g. line of sight) and explicit (e.g. arrows) visual cues to guide them."
Additionally, remember that there are 3 steps within the conversion path of the email:
- Persuade them to open the email
- Persuade them to click through to the landing page
- Once on the Landing page, persuade them to convert to the final objective
"The objective of the email is not to convert them to the end conversion within the email, but rather to convert them to take action within the email in order for them to arrive at the landing page – where the actual conversion takes place." – Kath Pay, Marketing Director at cloud.IQ
You can hear more from me on this in my summit webinar ‘How to Create a Persuasive Customer Journey’ (28 May, 12.00 BST)
This ecommerce pick and mix is just a little food for thought, for the full story on all of these topics you can catch training sessions from these speakers and more at the summit.
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