Posts by: Cat Millar

The Best E-commerce Conferences and Events In 2020

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With many e-commerce events and retailer trade shows canceled due to COVID-19, we sourced some of the best e-commerce conferences you can still attend in 2020. Note: We’ll keep this list updated with new information.

COVID-19 has turned marketers’ lives upside down, with event marketing and B2B trade shows taking one of the hardest hits. At the beginning of March, we’ve seen numerous e-commerce conferences being canceled and trade show organizers pulling the plug after corporate partners and attendees backing out due to coronavirus uncertainty.

The “grim reaper” of e-commerce conferences took mercy on no one: we’ve seen global giants like Shoptalk, Shopify Unite, RetailX drop at the same rate as smaller niche events.

E-commerce conferences 2020 | Yieldify

Nevertheless, a major trend has emerged. Businesses that were either planning to attend or host their own physical event decided to shift their focus online. In a matter of days, virtual events started popping up promising the same immersive experiences and networking capabilities of a face-to-face event…but from the comfort of your sofa!

According to Bizzabo, 57% of marketers had to pivot their events to virtual due to the impact of COVID-19 with a whopping 92% saying they plan to incorporate virtual events into their strategy going forward even though almost ¾ haven’t run virtual events in the past.

Source: Event Outlook Report (Bizzabo)

So while we can still expect physical events to return sometime in Q4 or the beginning of 2021, they’ll likely never be the same. And not only due to post-COVID-19 safety regulations, but also the fact that event budgets will be relocated or cut significantly.

So where to go if you still want to network with your peers, learn about eCommerce trends and strategies from leading retailers, or simply showcase your eCommerce brand? Here’s our – continuously updated – list of best e-commerce conferences and retail events to attend in 2020.

Best e-commerce conferences and retail events in 2020

Events in June

Southeast eCommerce Mini Summit [VIRTUAL]
June 16, 2020, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM EDT
A day of networking, presentations, and panels from e-commerce industry leaders.

Selling With Conversational Commerce: The Unfair Advantage For Your Online Brand [VIRTUAL]
June 16, 2020, starting at 5:10 PM BST
A session on how to create engaging multi-channel messaging at scale, including chat campaigns, that boost conversion rates and improve ROAS and how to measure the impact on your brand growth.

Transformations: Change is hard – how do we own change and win? [VIRTUAL]
June 18, 2020, starting at 12:00 PM AEST
Organized by Trustpilot, this webinar will discuss transformation journeys faced by e-commerce brands right now. Panelists from Yieldify, Web Profits, Couriers Please, and Klarna.

eTail Canada Virtual Event [VIRTUAL]
June 18, 2020, 12:00 PM – 3:30 PM EST
The eTail Canada Virtual Event will give you tips, tricks, and lessons learned from the top minds in retail eCommerce and omnichannel.

eTail Virtual Event [VIRTUAL]
June 22-23, 2020, 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM ET
The eTail Virtual Event is an online free-to-attend summit, bringing together tops mind in e-commerce and omnichannel providing the latest insights with the convenience of an on-demand digital event.

#TrendsOfTomorrow Ep.1: Budget-friendly hacks for eCommerce growth [VIRTUAL]
June 24, 2020, 03:30 PM BST
#TrendsOfTomorrow is a new virtual event series by Yieldify. Each month, our industry experts will share their top recommendations on a key area of e-commerce, followed by open office hours where we’ll answer your burning questions.

Shoptalk Virtual: Resurgence of Retail: A New Era of Shoppers and Stores Emerges [VIRTUAL]
June 25, 2020, starting at 1:00 PM EDT
In this session, Shoptalk will conduct three 10-minute interviews with leaders at three different retailers to highlight how each of them has approached store reopenings and what they’ve learned about what does and doesn’t work as they strive to win over COVID-wary shoppers.

Signifyd FLOW Virtual Meetup [VIRTUAL]
June 25, 2020, 9:30 AM – 7:00 PM BST
Signifyd FLOW Virtual Happy Hour brings together like-minded thought leaders, local merchants, and members of the e-commerce community to collaborate and empower each other during this unprecedented time of COVID‑19.

Northeast eCommerce Mini Summit [VIRTUAL]
June 30, 2020, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM EDT
A day of networking, presentations, and panels from e-commerce industry leaders.

Events in July

eTailing Summit 2020 [PHYSICAL TURNED VIRTUAL]
July 06, 2020
The summit continues to follow the award-winning structure that brings key e-commerce and digital managers from online retailers together with leading solution providers for focused one-to-one meetings via a pre-arranged itinerary of virtual business meetings.

Shoptalk Virtual: Changes in Consumer Behavior: Shoptalk Retail Framework for COVID-19 [VIRTUAL]
July 09, 2020, starting at 1:00 PM EDT
During this session, the Shoptalk team will provide an update to the Shoptalk Retail Framework for COVID-19 based on recent data and analysis related to changing consumer behavior. This update will look at how the new era in retail is being shaped by shoppers transformed by the COVID-19 experience.

B2B Online Virtual Event [VIRTUAL]
July 15-16, 2020, 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
The B2B Online Virtual Event is an online free-to-attend forum, bringing together top minds in B2B manufacturing and distribution eCommerce and omnichannel providing the latest insights with the convenience of an on-demand digital event.

Events in August

eTail Asia 2020 [PHYSICAL]
August 04-06, 2020
eTail is designed to help e-commerce merchants increase the profits from their online business. Inspiring keynotes, over 30 hours of intimate discussion groups, disruptive strategies, peer to peer conversations, and connections with the top minds at Asia’s most successful retailers.

B2B Online Chicago 2020 [PHYSICAL]
August 05-06, 2020
The most disruptive digital, eCommerce, and omnichannel content. With 900+ B2B leaders exclusively in one place at one time, this is the only meeting place to shape the future of the industry.

iMedia Online Retail Summit: Australia [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: August 24-26, 2020
iMedia Online Retail Summit provides an intimate environment for senior online retail marketing executives to converge, debate, and discuss the major strategic issues they face in online retail. 2020 theme: Partnerships: great alone, better together.

#TrendsOfTomorrow: Personalization after COVID-19 [VIRTUAL]
August 26, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis has drastically changed the landscape of eCommerce, with the industry jumping forward 10 years in a 90-day period. But what does that mean for innovation, particularly in the field of personalization? Join Yieldify on August 26th to learn more about the results of a personalization survey conducted with 400 eCommerce leaders.

MivaCon 2020 Digital Day [PHYSICAL TURNED VIRTUAL]
Rescheduled to August/September 2020
The MivaCon 2020 Digital Day is all about empowering independent sellers. Merchant attendees will receive exclusive insights from top e-commerce experts on what they need to stay competitive, relevant, and profitable.

Events in September

eTail Asia & ANZ Virtual Summit Week [VIRTUAL]
September 07-11, 2020
Accelerate your digital transformation with proven strategies from leading retailers, get your eCommerce, digital marketing, and e-delivery capabilities ready for COVID-19, and discover how the latest strategies, tools, and technologies are being leveraged.

One-to-One Monaco 2020 [PHYSICAL]
September 01-03, 2020
The theme chosen for the 2020 edition will allow participants to better understand the expectations of a more committed and responsible consumer, and the challenges of market players who are massively accelerating in this process.

Shoptalk 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: September 14-17, 2020,
Everyone who’s anyone is at Shoptalk. Over 8,000 individuals attend Shoptalk each year from almost 3,000 established retailers and brands, startups, tech companies, investors, real estate operators, media, Wall Street analyst firms, and more.

iMedia Online Retail Summit: New Zealand [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: September 14-16, 2020
iMedia Online Retail Summit provides an intimate environment for senior online retail marketing executives to converge, debate, and discuss the major strategic issues they face in online retail. 2020 theme: Partnerships: great alone, better together.

Paris Retail Week [PHYSICAL]
September 15-17, 2020
Paris Retail Week 2020 will bring together trade professionals at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in an ever more experiential format. Conferences, Workshops, Pitching, Awards, Innovation Tours, Store Tours, and announcements of new innovations will energize this event dedicated to sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices.

Savant eCommerce London [PHYSICAL]
September 16-17, 2020
Savant eCommerce London will explore both established and innovative approaches for you to efficiently drive profitability within your organization.

eCommerce Under the MiCROscope: Cart abandonment [VIRTUAL]
September 23, 2020
With planning for peak season underway, Yieldify’s CRO experts are back with a special focus on cart abandonment and how to stop it. In this short session, we’ll be dissecting a selection of real eCommerce website live to show us best practice (and missed opportunities) when it comes to getting from cart to conversion.

Ecommerce Under the MiCROscope Episode 2

The Virtual B2B E-Commerce Summit [VIRTUAL]
September 24, 2020
Ready to get inspired by our virtual B2B summit for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors? You will learn the latest and most practical information on how to succeed in e-commerce.

E-commerce Summit 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: September 28-29, 2020
The E-commerce Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only conference for retailers and brands. Focusing on the European market and the following three verticals: Fashion & Lifestyle, Home & Living, and Food & Care-, the top trending topics on E-commerce will be widely addressed.

Savant eCommerce Stockholm 2020 [PHYSICAL]
September 29-30, 2020
This year, Savant eCommerce Stockholm will explore the methods and strategies, both tried and new, for you to effectively drive profitability within your organisation.

eTail Virtual Event [VIRTUAL]
September 29-30, 2020
The eTail September Virtual Event is a 2-Day online, free-to-attend summit, bringing together tops mind in retail and providing the latest insights with the convenience of an on-demand digital event.

E-commerce Expo London 2020 [PHYSICAL]
September 30-October 01, 2020
E-commerce Expo is the UK’s largest event dedicated exclusively to the e-commerce industry. Focusing on customer acquisition, retention, and fulfillment, E-commerce Expo addresses the key areas to get your business growing.

Events in October

E-Commerce Day REMOTE [VIRTUAL]
October 01, 2020
Get educated, motivated, and inspired by over 50 E-commerce Expert Speakers, Including Merchant Keynote Rebecca Minkoff.

Bloomreach Connect Global Online Summit [VIRTUAL]
October 06, 2020
Meet the brightest minds from the worlds of tech and commerce. The 5th edition of this flagship event will bring a global speaker lineup and an immersive digital experience live from your home.

Savant Supply Chain Congress [PHYSICAL]
October 06-07, 2020
Savant Supply Chain is always at the forefront of developments in your sector. An energizing and high-level event like no other in the supply chain space, it brings together 130+ Heads of Supply Chain, Logistics and Planning from Europe’s most established and most innovative B2C supply chains.

Drapers Digital Festival 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: October 07, 2020
An immersive festival featuring essential content from industry leaders, live awards judging, competitions, fringe events, and a celebration of the industry’s digital triumphs.

eTail East 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: October 13-15, 2020
eTail is a three-day conference designed to help e-commerce merchants increase the profits from their business. Action-packed stories, disruptive strategies, strategic conversations, and connections with top minds at America’s most successful retailers.

eTail Australia 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: October 13-15, 2020
With over 250+ retail decision makers exclusively in one place at one time, this is THE meeting place to benchmark your business with the best and shape the future of your industry.

Online Retailer Sydney 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: October 19-20, 2020
This October, hundreds of stakeholders, large and small, will come together to access the latest trends, strategic insights, solutions, tech and connections that will make a positive difference to their business in 2020 and beyond.

iMedia Online Retail Summit: South East Asia [PHYSICAL]
Rescheduled: October 26-28, 2020
iMedia Online Retail Summit provides an intimate environment for senior online retail marketing executives to converge, debate, and discuss the major strategic issues they face in online retail in a closed forum. 2020 theme: Partnerships: great alone, better together.

PI Live London [PHYSICAL]
October 27-28, 2020
PI LIVE London in an annual gathering of the brightest minds in e-commerce, affiliate, and performance marketing. Our events are carefully curated and designed with both retailers and publishers in mind giving access to great content, leading technologies, and potential partners across two action-packed days.

Events in November

B2B Marketing Expo 2020 London [PHYSICAL]
November 10-11, 2020
Europe’s leading marketing event, connecting the most proactive marketing professionals with the tools, techniques, and innovations they need to be at the forefront of the ever-evolving world of marketing.

Events in December

Digital Travel US 2020 [PHYSICAL]
December 14-15, 2020
Digital Travel is the premier interactive conference for travel executives who are looking to reimagine the customer journey. Join the top minds from hotels, OTAs, airlines, transportation companies, and everything in-between, to share practical insight on how to enhance personalization and improve their online strategies for better cross-channel experiences.

Other events

OroVibe 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Postponed until further notice

eTail Canada 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Postponed until 2021

CommerceNext 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Postponed until 2021

Alibaba Ecosystem Expo [PHYSICAL]
Postponed until 2021

IRCE 2020 at RetailX [PHYSICAL]
Canceled

Shopify Unite 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Canceled

Magento Imagine 2020 [PHYSICAL]
Canceled

Product Update: Q4 2019

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What’s new to the Yieldify Conversion Platform this quarter?

As we near the end of 2019, it’s time to recap a few of the many updates we’ve added to the Yieldify Conversion Platform over the last few months. 

From new ways to recapture abandoning visitors and keep your customers in the loop, to functionality that improves data collection and cleanliness, join us as we run down the latest features and formats now available.

Web Push Notifications

With the arrival of Web Push Notifications, we’re diversifying the channels you can use to re-engage your visitors after they’ve left your website.

How it works

  • When your visitor has opted-in via a Yieldify campaign, Web Push Notifications can then appear at any point in their online experience, creating a brand new re-engagement channel to encourage visitors to return and convert. 
  • In diversifying your touchpoints, you can look forward to an average open rate of 95%. Compared to other re-engagement channels such as display and social, Web Push has much higher visibility and engagement rate, with a 40% opt-in rate.

When to use it

You can use Web Push Notifications to drive traffic to your website around new product arrivals and promotions. For example:

  • Promote new products or ranges to certain segments
  • Reminders of start and end dates for sales and promotions
  • Send visitors a discount code and reminder when it’s close to expiry
  • Anything else you want to promote to your visitors!
Web Push Notifications

Add to calendar

Add to calendar is another nifty way to help your visitors stay on top of the latest product releases and key dates in your calendar.

How it works

  • This feature allows users to add an event to their calendar by clicking on a CTA. This functionality enables you to drive urgency by reminding users of key dates, times and more. 

When to use it

  • Help visitors be first in line for new product launches by adding a reminder to their calendar
  • Let users save the date of upcoming promotions or sales so they don’t miss out
Add to calendar
Add to calendar: allow customers to subscribe to upcoming product release notifications

Checkboxes and radio buttons

Effective personalization relies on actionable data, and this starts at the point of collection. We create thousands of lead generation forms every year (in the wake of GDPR, we created 3,000 in a single year), and have captured more than 15 million leads along the way. All this has given us a clear idea of how to improve the process, which we’ve done by adding new radio button and checkbox options to lead capture capture campaigns.

How it works

  • Add a checkbox or radio button to your lead capture campaign

When to use it

Both these new options allow for greater variation in the design of your lead capture campaigns, and make it easier for users to provide information, increasing the likelihood of form completion. Because the data collection can be restricted to predefined options, the data collected is error-free and easily segmentable.

One of the most powerful ways to use these new data collection options is to collect user preferences alongside their email, so that your follow-up and future campaigns can be more personalized. For example, you could:

  • collect information on the visitor’s gender
  • product preference
  • or any other segment you wish to create.

Marks and Spencer used this functionality to support promotional activity, creating competition entry forms for both onsite and in-store use. The forms utilized the radio button format to collect data on the gender of visitors, and the checkbox to provide a GDPR-compliant opt-in to marketing communications, supporting lead generation efforts across channels.

Multi-stage Campaigns

Sometimes when collecting data or displaying information to a user it can be difficult to get your message across in one campaign – especially on mobile where real estate is limited. We’ve created multi-stage campaigns to solve this challenge.

How it works

  • You can now have multiple format types at multiple stages of your campaign, similar to a multi-step form. 

When to use it

Multi-step campaigns allow you to split your campaign into stages to avoid bombarding users with too much information. It also improves the customer experience by showing the next stage only after the user shows interest. This functionality has multiple use cases:

  • Highlight a promotion, then show more details once a user interacts
  • Create tooltips that display further information upon interaction e.g. what’s included in a premium vs. economy ticket.
  • Gives you the ability to A/B test how different formats perform so that you can drive better results

Here’s how a three stage multi-step campaign might look:

Multi-step campaign

Not on the platform yet?

The Yieldify Conversion Platform hosts all this and more. If you’d like to see more about how it could help personalize your website 5x faster than other methods, then request a demo here and our friendly team will be in touch. For more detailed information and technical instructions, don’t forget to visit our Knowledge Base!

Customer Journeys 2020: US vs. UK

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How have marketers in the US and UK been optimizing the customer journey in 2019, and what’s in store for 2020? 

Our second annual State of Customer Journey Optimization report, published last month, takes a look at how marketers are tackling customer journeys, and how these plans will evolve into 2020. For the first time, we split the data into segments, examining how different verticals (retail and travel) and markets (UK and US) are approaching things differently. In this second blog post in a series of deeper dives into the research, we’re taking a look at the differences between marketers in the US and UK markets.

The State of Customer Journeys in the UK and US

One of the most striking findings from the overall data was the rise in satisfaction with customer journey optimization. We saw the same trends in both the UK and US, but there were a few areas where US marketers were more satisfied. 

This is interesting because last year US marketers were less satisfied than UK marketers. Here’s where US marketers made gains in 2019:

customer journey satisfaction

Last year, more than one third of US marketers were dissatisfied with their multichannel CJO efforts, compared to just 16% who said the same in the UK. This suggests that US marketers have made a good deal of progress with their customer journey strategies in the last year.

What customer journey tools do marketers use in each market?

In the overall results Marketing Automation and Website Personalization both featured high on the agenda for marketers in 2019. We saw the same when breaking down the results by market, but slightly more US marketers claimed to be using these strategies.

Customer journey tools

The two markets also diverged slightly when it came to their approaches to data. In the US marketers placed greater importance on artificial intelligence (AI) and testing, while in the UK the focus was more on data analysis via tools such as Google Analytics and Data Management, perhaps due to the implementation of data privacy legislation such as GDPR in the EU.

Customer journey tools

Challenges facing UK and US marketers

In the previous blog, we saw skills and privacy were areas that were troubling travel marketers, and we saw the same topics dominate when it came to the different markets. The US was unexpectedly perhaps, a lot more concerned than their UK counterparts about privacy regulations impacting CJO. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UK has already experienced GDPR, and had to get processes in place as a matter of business urgency:

Customer journey challenges

As new privacy regulations such as the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) come into effect from January 2020, the time has come for US marketers to ensure privacy is a foundation of their CJO strategy.

When it comes to matters of skills and people, both markets are under pressure but in different ways:

Customer journey challenges

The UK is facing a major skills shortage, which will likely not be helped by geo-political issues such as Brexit. Related to the skills shortage is a real pressure on time and resources, with 30% rating this as a challenge versus 23% in the US. Where the US does have issues is in ownership of CJO, and by extension the problem this raises with working across internal silos.

Finally, like our travel marketers, the US marketers have money on their mind. There was a much bigger concern about demonstrating ROI with 35% seeing this as a top challenge, versus just 28% in the UK.

What’s next for 2020?

So what does 2020 have in store for the customer journey? We saw quite a few differences between the UK and US when it came to planned 2020 investments. The top areas in the US for investment are tools and skills – is a little surprising  when remembering that skills were rated a bigger challenge in the UK. The UK seems to be planning to plug the skills gap by working with consultancies and agencies, with 44% planning this versus 30% of US marketers.

Customer journeys: 2020 investments

For 2020 customer journey tools and strategies marketing automation came out top for the UK (47% plan to use it), while customer feedback remained a priority for the US (45% plan to use it). 

The markets diverged in relation to website personalization – this is a higher priority in the US with almost 40% planning to use it in 2020 versus 35% in the UK. In preparation for personalization, US marketers were also more focused on understanding their data via tools like Google Analytics.

Customer Journeys: 2020 tools

What else will 2020 bring? Well, if 2019 was the year marketers began to crack CJO, 2020 could be the year they start to master it. Just 30% of UK and 25% of US marketers are doing more than 75% of what they’d ideally want to when it comes to the customer journey, meaning there’s lots of room for growth.

For the full report, featuring insights on the overall trends, and retail and travel click here.

Travel Customer Journeys 2020

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How have marketers been optimizing the travel customer journey in 2019, and what’s in store for 2020?

Our second annual State of Customer Journey Optimization report, published last month, takes a look at how marketers are tackling customer journeys, and how these plans will evolve into 2020. For the first time, we split the data into segments, examining how different verticals (retail and travel) and markets (UK and US) are approaching things differently. In this first blog post in a series, we’re taking a look at what travel marketers have been up to.

The State of Travel Customer Journeys

One of the biggest takeaways from the report overall was that 2019 was really the year that marketers started to crack customer journeys. But can we say the same for travel marketers specifically? The travel customer journey after all is much different to retail, so we wanted to understand if this was reflected in their approach.

One of the first things that jumps out is that, yes, travel marketers are satisfied with their approach, but a little less so than retail, or the average. However, it is interesting to note that of those who are satisfied, Travel marketers are more likely to be ‘very satisfied’ compared to retail, with 45% ‘very satisfied’ with their conversion rate, for example, compared to 38% who said the same in retail.

Travel customer journeys: conversion rate

Travel marketers were also more likely to be ‘very satisfied’ with their ability to action insights from the travel customer journey, with 44%, versus 36% in retail, or 39% overall.

Travel Customer Journey Tools

So if travel marketers are more likely to be ‘very satisfied’ with their efforts, it seems they are getting something right when it comes to the tools they are using. What are the top travel customer journey tools?

In 2019 the top three tools for travel marketers were Marketing Automation, Website Personalization and Data Analysis. The focus on marketing automation is one that we saw across the board, but Travel marketers are more likely to be using this tool, with nearly half (48.8%) versus 43% in retail, or 45% overall.

Travel’s other focuses fall in line with this trend toward automation – they are also much more likely to be using AI and Machine Learning. The other area of difference is testing – travel are more likely to be running MVT and A/B testing programs. This focus on testing and automating the travel customer journey perhaps explains the different levels of satisfaction we noted earlier in this blog.

Travel Customer Journey Challenges

So, we’ve got a pretty good idea of the current state of play, but what about heading into 2020? We wanted to understand the biggest challenges facing marketers, and how these have evolved over the last few years.

In travel, the top three challenges were privacy regulations (such as GDPR), demonstrating ROI and then followed by a few other concerns:

Travel Customer Journey Challenges

The travel industry’s issues with privacy regulations aligns with research released earlier this year that found travel was the industry most struggling to recover its databases one year on from GDPR. Compared to retail, 38% of travel marketers rated this as a challenge, versus just 26% retailers, and 31% overall. 

The greater concern travel has with demonstrating ROI is perhaps due to the more complex nature of the customer journey versus something like retail, making tracking success difficult. Just 28% of retail marketers expressed ROI as a challenge, coming in at #6 overall, versus 36% in travel and the #2 spot.

Travel Customer Journeys 2020

So how will travel marketers overcome these customer journey challenges in 2020? We tool a look at where marketers plan to invest their budgets and the tools they plan to use. The biggest takeaway from this data is that CJO is now very firmly on the agenda – just 1% of Travel marketers have no plans to optimize the customer journey in 2020, down from 15% of marketers who said the same going into 2019.

Here’s what else they’ve got planned…

Travel customer journey investments for 2020

As we can see from the data above, Travel marketers are much more focused on investing further into technology and tools, while they’re also more likely to invest in external specialists. The specific tools travel marketers plan to invest in are Customer Feedback, Marketing Automation and Customer Journey Mapping, which broadly aligns with what we see overall.

What else will 2020 bring? Well, if 2019 was the year marketers began to crack CJO, 2020 could be the year they start to master it. Just 23% of travel marketers are doing more than 75% of what they’d ideally want to when it comes to the travel customer journey, meaning there’s lots of room for growth.

For the full report, featuring insights on the overall trends, UK and US markets and retail, click here!

Infographic: Customer Journeys 2020

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Uncover how customer journeys have evolved over the last year and learn what 2020 will bring in this infographic…

Now in it’s second year, our State of Customer Journey Optimization (CJO) report examines how marketers are approaching the challenges associated with creating seamless customer journeys online. This year’s edition reveals some surprising shifts in marketer confidence and satisfaction with their customer journey efforts and the new challenges they’re facing.

Some of the key findings include:

  • 2019 marked a watershed moment for marketers understanding and optimization of customer journeys. We saw significant shifts, particularly in the optimization of customer journeys across multiple channels, which was up to 88% versus just 62% in 2018.
  • Over half of marketers (56%) are now realizing more than half of their customer journey ambitions. This progress was reflected across multiple areas of the discipline – satisfaction with conversion rates grew from 61% in 2018 to 85% this year.
  • Overall, customer journeys are now a near-universal priority: only 1% of marketers said they had no plans to work on them in 2020 (a drop from 15% in 2018). 
  • Marketers now have a much greater level of confidence in defining customer journey optimization (CJO) as distinct from conversion rate optimization (CRO) or personalization – 95% were confident doing so, compared to just 65% in 2018. 
  • When it comes to tools, it is all change. In 2018, having the right tools was ranked among the top three CJO challenges facing marketers – in 2019, this dropped to fifth place, indicating ground gained in the hunt for the right stack. 
  • For the coming year, there’s a clear pivot from a need for technology to a need for skills, as marketers cited ‘sourcing staff with the skills required to make sense of customer journey optimization efforts’ as their top CJO challenge overall, up from fourth place in 2018. 

Check out the infographic below for more insights into customer journey optimization heading into 2020, or download the full report here.

Infographic: Customer Journey Optimization 2020

How to Increase eCommerce Average Order Value (AOV)

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How to increase average order value | Yieldify

Get more from your e-commerce website visitors with these four tips on increasing average order value (AOV).

Today’s digital world means that e-commerce one of the best ways to sell products or services. But as competition heats up, and acquisition gets more expensive, it’s worth taking a few lessons from the offline world when it comes to increasing your average order value (AOV).

Utilizing tried and tested marketing concepts such as cross-selling, upselling, loyalty programs or product bundling on your website is a powerful way to increase your average order value significantly.

In this blog we’ll cover the following on AOV:
1. What does AOV mean?
2. Why Is Average Order Value Important?
3. How To Increase Your Average Order Value
3.1 Cross-selling
3.2 Upselling
3.3 Loyalty Programs
3.4 Product Bundles
4. Summary

What is the meaning of AOV?

Before we jump into the tactics you can try to increase average order value, let’s take a quick look at how to define it.

What is Average Order Value (AOV)? Average Order Value is an e-commerce marketing metric that measures the average amount customers spend on your website per transaction. Also referred to as basket value, it is a clear indication of how much customers are willing to spend on your products or services.

How to calculate Average Order Value (AOV)? Average Order Value can be easily calculated using the following formula:

Total Revenue / Total Number of Orders = AOV

For example, your e-store has a total revenue of $2,100 for the month of September, placed via 100 different orders. This means your AOV of $21. If your store is looking to drive revenue growth, increasing Average Order vs simply increasing the number of orders is one way to go.

Why Average Order Value is important?

Apart from the obvious goal of increasing the amount each customer spends with you, why should you be focusing on increasing average order value? One big reason is customer loyalty, which is strongly linked with AOV:

  • Your top 10% of customers order 3x more per order than the rest.
  • Your top 1% of customers order 5x more than the rest.
  • After 30 months of loyalty, customers spend 67% more than their first purchase.

So really, driving up your AOV is linked with the strategic goal of increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Let’s take a look now at some tactics that can help you accelerate your customer base to start performing like this top 10%.

How do I go about increasing Average Order Value?

1. Offer choice with cross-selling

We’ve already mentioned cross-selling, upselling, bundling and more, but how are they different? In this first section we’ll seek to answer:

  • What is cross-selling?
  • Why cross-selling works?
  • How cross-selling can be applied online?

Amazon is well known for its innovation in the product recommendations space, seeking to show visitors complementary items based on the product they are viewing. This tactic is a form of cross-selling, since Amazon is offering related items in an effort to increase their average order value. Here’s an example of the items it recommends when looking at a tent:

Source: Amazon.com

When done right, cross-selling is mutually beneficial for you and your visitors. You offer additional value by surfacing products they might need, and in turn, average order values increase.

Why does cross-selling work? It’s all about choice. Customers like having choices, but too many choices can actually be bad for sales. Providing visitors suggested products based on their shopping cart or what they’re currently looking at offers them more relevant choices, which may help them ultimately make the best decision on which product to buy.

Here’s another example from beauty brand Skyn ICELAND:

As part of its Customer Journey Optimization strategy, Skyn ICELAND incorporates recommended products into the customer journey to increase average order value.

A campaign targeting visitors purchasing Hydro Cool Firming Eye Gels, utilized Yieldify’s flexible targeting feature to recommended a complementary product. This resulted in a +23.1% uplift in conversion rate and boosted order value by 14.94%.

2. Customize or upgrade options through upselling

Customization is another way to help increase your AOV. One way to do this is through upselling. But, first things first…

What is upselling? Upselling occurs when you persuade a customer to increase the value of their purchase, typically through customization or upgrading. It’s similar to cross-selling, but different in that you’re trying to increase the money spent on an individual product or item rather than recommend additional ones.

For example, L.L.Bean has been upselling backpacks for years. For a small fee, you can personalize your backpack with your name or initials. As a buyer, you can opt for one of several choices in text, color and font — which makes your backpack 100% unique.

Another great example of upselling comes from the world of food delivery. Domino’s Pizza created a ‘stretch and save’ campaign to encourage returning visitors to increase the value of their order. In order to protect margin, this was tiered based on cart value.

3. Increasing AOV via customer loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to make repeat purchases easy and encourage customers to continue to buy from you: It not only helps you promote products but also helps you to foster ongoing customer relationships.

Often, loyalty programs include discounts. Discounts can often appear at odds with increasing profit margins when they clearly take away from the sale’s value. However, studies have proven that loyalty members spend roughly 120% more than new customers do every year. So offering a small discount can actually work out more beneficial in the long run, especially if you use a spend threshold.

You don’t always need to offer a discount either, many brands are turning toward recognition-based loyalty programs instead of a more traditional points-based approach.

One such example is Marks and Spencer Sparks scheme. As well as discounts to increase average order value the brand offers priority access to online sales, as well as other perks like in-store events and charity donations. While this is a more long term approach toward building customer relationships to increase average order values, it’s worth looking at alongside more short term tactics.

4. Complete solutions with product bundles

Customers enjoy feeling like they’ve made the best investment for their money. One way to give them this experience is through product bundling or bulk-buy packages.

Product bundles help provide your customers with a complete package solution. The implied value savings often encourage customers to make a single, larger purchase instead of lesser individual ones. This can save shoppers time since they don’t have to research each various item, even if they are all on your site somewhere. 

The important thing is to flag bundling options at the relevant moment in the customer journey. Take this example from Australian menswear retailer M.J. Bale:

Multi-buys are a key product category for the brand, particularly shirts and suits bundles. To improve the customer experience the brand highlighted the most popular bundles to visitors browsing these categories, driving an increase in conversion and allowing the brand to also increase average order value.

In summary

These are just a few ways that you can increase average order values on your e-commerce site. In order to identify the most effective route to take, you should first ensure you have an in-depth understanding of your visitors so that you can apply these tactics at the most relevant point in the customer journey.

? What is average order value (AOV)?

Average Order Value is an e-commerce marketing metric that measures the average amount customers spend on your website per transaction.

❤️ Why is average order value important?

Average order value is a very important metric as it represents the average amount of money a customer spends with you when they make a purchase. A falling AOV could spell trouble, whereas if your AOV is increasing it’s normally a good sign!

? How do you increase average order value?

Some easy ways you can increase your average order are:
1. Cross-selling
2. Upselling
3. Offering customization
4. Customer Loyalty programs
5. Offering product bundles

For more on increasing average order value check out this short guide:

How to Convert Affiliate Traffic

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Affiliate marketing is a popular way for brands to drive traffic to their site — but too often affiliate traffic is treated like any other traffic stream. In this blog we take a look at what marketers need to do differently.

As we’ve learned over the years, affiliate traffic is just a bit different. This traffic comes to your site in a unique way via third-party publishers — so converting affiliate traffic needs a unique approach.

The growth and importance of affiliate marketing for e-commerce brands is undeniable. 81% of brands and 84% of publishers already leverage the power of affiliate marketing, and spending is on the rise. For example, a study from Forrester shows that in the US spending is increasing by 10.1% each year, meaning it could reach $6.8bn by next year! So now is a great time to give a little more thought to improving the customer journey for your affiliate visitors.

The bad news? The average affiliate marketing conversion rate is around 0.5% to 1%, which of course isn’t particularly high. The good news is that there are ways to make the most of this traffic stream and covert it into lots of paying customers. Here are a few strategies that can help…

Personalize the customer journey

You’ve done a great job of driving affiliate traffic to your site. Now what?

The best brands identify where this traffic has come from, and then create a personalized customer journey to drive these visitors toward conversion. Let’s look at an example of how that could work.

Consumers today are hungry for discounts, and today that means coupon affiliate sites are a key part of many affiliate marketers’ strategy. Typically running in partnership via an affiliate network, such as Rakuten, coupon and vouchers sites represent low hanging fruit when it comes to optimizing the customer journey. Why? Because you already know the what motivates this traffic, and so you can tailor the journey to meet their price-sensitive behavior. Even better, you know the specific offer that tempted them to visit in the first place, so you can mirror this message on site:

Serving reminders of why visitors came to your site in the first place as they navigate through it is a powerful way to encourage conversion. Here at Yieldify we’ve seen this type of multi-touch tactic deliver better results than simply serving a reminder once upon arrival, particularly at key points in the customer journey such as checkout, where it’s adding value for these price-sensitive consumers, by making sure they don’t miss out on the deals they searched high and low for!

Get the UX and UI basics right

How your site looks can make a massive difference in terms of converting any visitor, not just affiliate traffic. As our own Head of Design, Lana Kropyvana puts it:

“People buy with their eyes. If something doesn’t look good, users won’t be interested in it – end of story. There’s a furious competition online for everything, so good design is the key to a successful user journey.”

Lana Kropyvana, Head of Design, Yieldify

But where to start? Well the pages your affiliate traffic are likely to land on are as good a place as any, first impressions count after all! Here’s what you should look out for:

  • Above all, be clear: As we discussed in the previous point, carrying your message through from your affiliate sites helps minimise confusion, and lets visitors know they’re in the right place.
  • Be attention grabbing: eye-catching, on-brand hero imagery can help direct visitors to the focal points you want them to engage with
  • Sell yourself: highlighting why users should buy from you, based on where they’ve arrived from is another great way to encourage conversion

Even better if you can test out tweaks and changes to your messaging to really get an understanding of what works best for your affiliate traffic. Simple changes can have a big impact, as shown by Megabus, who tested their messaging at every stage of the customer journey, driving a conversion rate uplift of +7.5%

Collect visitor data

Despite the fact that your affiliate traffic may be slightly further down the funnel than a brand new visitor, the reality is that the majority wont convert. But that doesn’t mean this traffic should goto waste.

Ensuring you have a smart lead capture strategy implemented means you’re able to collect data on your affiliate visitors, even if they don’t convert, and continue to market to them via your other channels, such as email.

For affiliate visitors, consider targeting your forms depending on the source your visitor has come from. This is an important way of ensuring that there’s complete alignment between the reality of the experience and the expectations set by whichever ad, email or post that’s brought your visitor to the site. Read more on lead capture forms here.

And on that note, we’ll wrap things up – we could fill multiple blog posts with our tips on lead capture (given we’ve captured more than 15 million for our clients!). Whatever approach you take, the key thing to think about when it comes to your affiliate traffic is how you can better personalize the journey, to drive more conversions, or leads from this traffic source.

Ready to get started? Book your free demo to learn more about how we work with leading brands to drive more value from their affiliate efforts.

Peak Perspectives: Philips

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Ahead of the launch of our retail peak research next week, we speak to Roel Overgoor, Global Digital Marketing Manager D2C at Philips.

Next week we’ll launch the findings from our new research looking at retail peak. Having surveyed over 400 UK and US marketers to understand what we can expect from Black Friday and the holidays in 2019, we also caught up with marketing leaders in the industry to get their perspectives. In this interview, we were joined by Roel Overgoor, Global Digital Marketing Manager D2C at Philips, to discuss his predictions and plans for the holiday season.

Hi Roel, first of all, it would be great if you could tell us a bit about peak planning at Philips?

So for peak we divide it up between what is centrally planned, organized and activated and what is activated and planned in the markets. For both aspects, we’ll start in summer, so pretty early! The first conversations and planning discussions for Black Friday, for example, kicked off in June. (Editor’s note – to give you a sneak peek at the research, 77.4% of retailers have started planning by August!)

As to what it involves, first we look at our proposition and our assortment for the holiday season. Then over July and August, we connect with the different markets on the actual planning, marketing budgets and forecasts.

It sounds like it can be quite complex, especially with lots of different markets. How do you prioritize what you need to do?

First, it’ll be the proposition we want to have, and then the level of discount, together with our assortment offering. That’s the basis of the campaign and therefore needs to happen first. After that, it’s really about forecasting demands and getting all the stock levels and planning in place. This ensures we have enough time for the last step; the actual execution of bringing Black Friday to life on our platform and in our marketing. The advertising and the activation part is really the last piece and that can be done from September onwards.

I’d be interested to know what you think future holds for shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, especially, now we have things like Prime Day from Amazon?

I think there will be more! Indeed, days like Black Friday are already a big deal for our industry. Maybe in the future, every brand will try to claim its own day and moment. I think these types of activities will become almost always on. There’s always an event or type of day you can jump on as a brand or manufacturer. It used to be only the traditional moments, which weren’t specific to an industry or a market place, like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s, that sort of thing. But now, brands are creating their own, so there’s a lot of opportunity.

Have you seen any impact from days like Black Friday and Prime Day on the traditional holiday shopping season?

Yes, during the holiday season we have noticed an impact. People are anticipating those big moments in the shopping calendar. Many retailers probably see a slow down in sales leading up to it. For example, if your normal growth rate is around 60%, in the weeks leading up to the Black Friday it can drop to like 20 or 30%, for example. Now Black Friday is getting so well known and consumers are so used to it, they’ll just postpone their purchase until the offers start.

Do you think that we’ll see any differences this year versus last year, or do you have any peak predictions you can share?

Other than generic trends such as mobile, and then the fact that days like Black Friday have become more well-known and mainstream across all industries, a big difference is the fact Black Friday will be pretty late this year. It’s really close to the holiday season compared to last year when there was still a gap between Black Friday and Christmas shopping. Based on this I anticipate that we’ll see a move toward consumers doing their Christmas shopping during Black Friday, as it’s so close together.

Aside from the shortened shopping time, what other challenges will you be contending with this peak season?

As a manufacturer, the sales we do ourselves are closely linked with really building a relationship with the consumer. Via a reseller or our retailers, we don’t really get that one-to-one relationship, so that’s always our main goal when we sell ourselves. So for example, ahead of Black Friday, offering visitors a chance to ‘pre-subscribe’ or opt-in via email so they come back to us on the day.

It’s a big reason why we sell anyway, especially during Black Friday, as for us it’s a bit newer than the pureplay e-tailers. We are looking to build up our data and get insights into how valuable these consumers are compared to our ‘every day’ new visitors.

So when you get these visitors and new traffic to your e-commerce site, are there any specific tactics you’re using to increase this data collection or increase conversions?

Yes, of course, so I’ve already mentioned the option to pre-subscribe to grow your base, for the people that are anticipating Black Friday. You can also use tactics like countdown timers and flash sales. But when it comes to the products and the assortments we carry, we’re steering more towards a subscription-based offering. 

A lot of our products naturally allow for a subscription model, so you already know that you can follow up. So, we’ll focus more on that side, products like the OneBlade razor, or toothbrushes with replacement brush heads than say, an air-fryer.

In the future, what would be interesting for us, at least, is to learn to which extent we can use Black Friday on Market Places and on platforms outside of our own webshop. We are in control of what we sell of course, but to what extent can we influence what happens with our brands and products during Black Friday on all the other places that we are being sold?


We’ll be releasing the full findings of our peak season research next week*, but until then… why not grab a sneak peek at some of the key insights to help you with your planning? Find the research report here

5 Back to School Marketing Ideas

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As Prime Day rolls around, it’s time to move on to the next big marketing event of the summer: back to school shopping!

If July is all about Prime Day, then August is time to really focus in on the next big summer event: your back to school marketing. Sure, the kids might not be too excited about this development, but e-commerce brands should be. Whether they’re browsing for deals on back to school supplies or seeking out that head-turning first day of school outfit, consumers see August as a chance to engage with their favorite brands. So it’s a great time for you to deliver relevant campaigns for parents and students alike.

The average family spends $70 on back to school supplies — slotting it in second place behind the winter holidays as the biggest spending season of the year. But when does back to school shopping peak? Google Trends data suggests searches start in August and spike toward the end of the month. And e-commerce is the choice for 45% of back to school shoppers, with more and more retailers seeing online as the primary way to reach consumers.   

So what are some examples of back to school campaigns that earn top honors from us?

Leveraging social proof with Everlane

Fitting in at school is tough. And what better way to empathize with that feeling than to use positive social media buzz in your back to school marketing? In Everlane’s back to school email campaign, they use the psychological concept of social proof to highlight how “people are talking” about their stylish selection of backpacks:

Back to school marketing from Everlane
Everlane’s back to school email campaign

Tip for top marks: Drum up FOMO and cut down on cart abandonment with Dynamic Social Proof, giving visitors real-time insights into the products others are interested in.

Thinking big with Urban Outfitters and Champion

Heading back to school is an aspirational time. It’s a chance for new beginnings, new goals, and a new attitude. Urban Outfitters teamed up with Champion for their “What Do You Champion?” campaign, which channeled this positive feeling and urged students to dream big and stand by their values. This is a powerful headspace — and the best back to school marketing highlights this emotion as September rolls around. 

Back to school marketing: Urban outfitters and Champion
Urban Outfitters and Champion

Tip for top marks: Working with “influencers” like Urban Outfitters did in this campaign is a great way to get social media talking. Fittingly, 72% of brands planned on increasing their social media investment for back to school 2018. Once you’ve got this traffic on-site, think about how you can link content and commerce, to push these users toward purchase.

Curating product pages with Uniqlo

Make it easy on your back to school shoppers by placing all of your deals and relevant products in one easy-to-navigate place. Uniqlo’s Back to School Basics did just this. And in addition to putting a selection of back to school-appropriate clothes on this page, Uniqlo goes the extra mile by giving style advice for the new school year. 

Back to school marketing: Uniqlo back to school campaign

Tip for top marks: Direct visitors to your curated landing page with a subtle notification triggered when they land on-site, or help them discover the specific items they are looking for with a quiz!

Remarketing with Kickers

Once you’ve got customers on your site, the goal is to keep them there! Remarketing is a powerful tool that should be top of your back to school marketing wish list! A staple of the back to school world in the UK, Kickers worked to spot and stop abandonment behaviour by offering users leaving the site a little something extra:

Tip for top marks: Don’t stop with a great offer. Also tell your users why your brand is different. Turning consumers toward the unique services your brand offers is a great way to drive engagement. For example luxury retailer Montblanc highlights its unique premium services, driving a 41% increase in conversion.  

Creating interactive campaigns with Elave Skincare

Back to school can be an exciting time. Why not tap into that excitement with some interactive back to school marketing? That was Elave Skincare’s idea with their creative back to school skincare competition, where users had the chance to win three skincare collections after following their Twitter account.

Tip for top marks: highlight competitions you’re running as part of your back to school marketing on your site using a Floating Button. See how the nail care brand Essie targeted new visitors with a competition using this tactic to boost entries and its customer database.

17 Amazon Prime Day 2019 Stats and Facts

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Amazon Prime Day 2019 is right around the corner. Here’s everything you need to know about the shopping holiday!

In less than a month (on July 15th in fact) Amazon Prime Day 2019 will once again excite shoppers with plenty of can’t-miss discounts and promotions. As always, there will be plenty of tactics e-commerce marketers can learn from, but ahead of the big day here are some key Amazon Prime Day stats you should know.

Amazon Prime Day 2018 Results

First up, what can we learn from Prime Day 2018?

1. The most popular Prime Day ever. Prime Day continues to get bigger every year, and in 2018 Amazon reported that they sold over 100 million products during Prime Day 2018.

2. Eclipsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Prime Day really is “Christmas in July”, with Prime Day 2018 once again outshining these popular holiday season consumer bonanzas in terms of sales.

3. Amazon’s own products rule Prime Day. Some worldwide bestsellers included Amazon heavyweights like the Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot.

4. The Echo resonates. Prime Day was another chance for Amazon’s Echo devices to dominate the smart-home product market, of which Amazon now owns a 75% market share.

5. The launch of Prime Day Launches. Prime Day isn’t just a good time to gain new Amazon Prime subscribers. It’s also become a time for Amazon to premier new products. Last year some new Echo products made their debuts around the time of Prime Day and some are likely to this year as well.

6. A whole lot of Whole Foods deals. Amazon made the most of its new Whole Foods acquisition, offering deals in the brick-and-mortar stores. The bestselling Whole Foods product last year? Organic strawberries.

7. What else did people buy? Parents made the most of Prime Day 2018, snapping up over 500,000 toys. Not to be outshined, pet moms and dads bought 190,000 pet products. According to Amazon.co.uk, 287,000 items of clothing, 400,000 beauty products and 48,000 lawn-and-garden products were also sold.

amazon prime day 2019: what did people buy last year?
What did people buy on Prime Day? Source: Percy Group

Amazon Prime Day 2019: What to Expect

And what should we expect from Amazon Prime Day 2019?

8. Prime Day becomes Prime DaysLast year, Prime Day extended to 36 hours. Rumor has it this year could go as long as 48 hours long.

9. Pre-Prime Day sales. Even if Prime Day 2019 goes longer than ever, Prime Day has stretched for weeks in the past, with sales being launched well in advance of the day itself. In fact, the Echo Show (2nd gen) is already $65 off.

10. Will it go off without a hitch? Last year some customers were disappointed to see the Amazon website crash at the outset of Prime Day. Still, this glitch didn’t slow down Amazon from having an enormous day of sales.

11. Ripples across the shopping landscape. Not to be outdone, past Prime Days have encouraged retailers like Target and Wal-Mart to offer their own special days of rival deals. Look for that to happen again in 2019.

Prime Day Deals to Know

Which products and product categories will Amazon be focusing on this Prime Day?

12. Electronics will once again take the lead. While you can get a good deal on just about anything on Prime Day, past deals and early discounts indicate that Amazon will once again focus on marking down smart home products, kitchen gadgets, robotic vacuums and other high-tech products.  

13. Apple enters the game. Amazon is now an authorized seller of Apple Products, so we may see markdowns on Macbooks and iPads.0

14. Gamers rejoice. Gaming products, such as premium gaming laptops and handhelds, have been significantly discounted in the past. As the gaming industry only grows, look for more of the same.0

15. Cooking up deals on kitchen products. Last year, the top-selling non-Amazon product during 2018 Prime Day was the Instant Pot. It’s actually been a great performer for the past three years, likely encouraging more sales and incentives on other kitchen gadgets.

Prime Day: A Marketer’s Perspective

What can marketers take away from Prime Day?

16. Mobile is the move. Prime Day continues to become more of an event on mobile, with the Amazon app being among the most popular across-app stores.

17. More deals, more conversions. In 2018, conversion rates on Amazon increased by 4.5%, up to 11.7% on the Monday of Prime Day. This number could spike even higher in 2019 assuming the servers hold up to all the traffic this time. Savyy retailers cashed in during 2018 Prime Day, running promotions at the same time to benefit from the Prime Day ‘halo effect’:

amazon prime day 2019: 2018 saw a boost in traffic for many retailers
Traffic on Prime Day vs. the average. Source: SimilarWeb

Shoppers around the world are already getting primed — and for good reason! Prime Day 2019 is already shaping up to be another game-changing day of deep discounts. Do you have plans to cash in on Prime Day this July?

As you begin to lock down plans for your own peak trading season, make sure to sign up to our mailing list for all the updates as we publish our latest resources. We’ll be sharing data, tips and tricks to help you get the most out of 2019.


CRO Tools: 5 Must-Have Features to Look Out For

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Finding the CRO tools that work best for your eCommerce site can be a challenge. Here are 5 tips to put you on the right path.

In this blog we’ll unpack what you need to be looking for when it comes to CRO tools.

The customer journey can be a long and winding road. Along the way there are twists and turns — and hopefully not too many speed bumps. Think of conversion rate optimization (CRO) as the process of improving this journey so that you can better drive customers toward a conversion.

The conversion rate optimization tools help you eliminate any detours that prevented conversions — and they ease the twists and turns on the path, making the customer journey as smooth and seamless as possible.

CRO for eCommerce stores - Get a Yieldify demo

Why CRO tools?

To answer why CRO tools, first let’s talk about why we need CRO (conversion rate optimization). Put simply: You get more conversions. Visitors become leads, and leads become paying customers. Simple as that.

But a broader benefit of effective conversion rate optimization is the sense of control it gives a marketer. You can finally begin to understand those enduring “why?” questions at the center of your brand experience. Why are customers falling out of the funnel before converting? Why are customers who do X convert but customers who do Y leave your site without a purchase?

Effective CRO is – and always will be – centered on providing a more cogent, logical and overall pleasant customer journey. (In fact, we’d argue that CRO is actually evolving to CJO – Customer Journey Optimization)

Once you can answer these questions, you can begin to solve for crucial problems in your customer journey, improve the experience for your customers and — of course — drive more conversions.

5 features to look out for in your CRO tools

1. A data-driven foundation

Understanding the customer journey shouldn’t be a guessing game. Finding a tool that leverages your existing data and makes it easy to parse and understand is essential for effective conversion rate optimization.

And with more channels and devices than ever, there’s more data to analyze regarding each customer’s journey. Using tools that help you map your customer journey will give you an understanding of things like the mobile experience and the channels users might be navigating via to get to your site – a crucial first step toward optimizing for conversions.

CRO tools: customer journey mapping is a key tool
Customer Journey map examples

Further reading: organize your data and know which sources to use and more in this guide to creating a customer journey map

2. Effective segmentation

How do different parts of your user base behave? For instance, are certain users filling up their shopping cart, but abandoning this cart before checkout? Finding a CRO tool that segments based on this behavior is the first step towards personalized marketing that delivers relevant messaging at the right time.

Maybe once you segment those users who abandon their cart before converting, you can instead deliver a special promotion to them that helps encourage a conversion — turning cart abandoners into paying customers.

Behavioral segmentation will also help you focus your efforts, as some visitor segments will be worth prioritising over others. For example, while your returning visitors might be less numerous than your new ones, on average they have the highest average order value:

CRO tools: look for behavioral segmentation capabilities
Source: Meet Your Visitors

Further reading: get ideas on 7 ways to segment your visitors in this guide to behavioral segmentation

3. Seamless A/B testing

The best conversion optimization tools make A/B testing a seamless process. If, for example, you’re running a test where the A group sees your existing landing page and your B group sees a new landing page that features adjusted graphics, you don’t want to be tying up IT resources to build and launch this new page.

Continuous improvement and analysis is a cornerstone of a successful e-commerce marketing program – allowing you to make decisions based on scientific data, learning constantly about what makes your customers click, sign-up or buy. It allows you to zero in on elements of the customer journey and optimize the key touch points, conversions and micro conversions by showing the right message to the right person at the right moment, all of which is knowable with good data.

Using CRO tools that enable you to quickly tweak your UX helps you uncover valuable insights about your customer journey at a faster rate so that you can launch improvements in no time.

Further reading: for more on A/B Testing, check out this guide.

4. Mobile focus

Any CRO tool you use must understand the modern customer experience. This journey is mobile-driven and non-linear — so your CRO tool must give you the insight needed to make such a modern journey as frictionless as possible.

The linear path belief likely springs from the outdated information of mobile’s poor conversion rate. Because mobile historically converted at a lower rate, it wasn’t worth our attention. It was a starting point in the journey and unthinkable for anyone to convert on such a small screen.

It’s certainly true that whilst traffic continues to increase across mobile devices, conversions aren’t keeping pace. But here’s the important thing: mobile conversion rates are increasing, and will only continue to do so as the way we shop develops further.

CRO tools: look for mobile focus
Share of conversions across mobile, desktop and tablet in 2018

Further reading: debunk Mobile and M-commerce myths with this guide.

5. Fast and easy personalization

Once you’ve gained an understanding of your visitors, mapped their journey, and prioritized your target audiences it all comes down to the execution.

One of the top CRO tactics in any modern marketers arsenal is personalization. But Personalization has always been kind of a drag – most platforms take months to get up-and-running and then demand hours upon hours of skilled time in order to execute. In fact, 30% of marketers rate personalization among their most difficult executions (it’s up there with machine learning).

When assessing your CRO tools, take into account the involvement needed from your IT team, as this will have a big impact on the velocity of your CRO program. The more you can launch and test, the faster you’ll be able to improve your customer journey (and your conversion rate). Look for tools that can integrate easily with your current stack, and deliver on personalization without the fuss.

And that’s it! Don’t forget to check out the further reading recommended for each of these 5 features, and if you need a little help getting started let us know.

CRO for eCommerce stores - Get a Yieldify demo

5 Fashion E-Commerce Trends & Analysis for 2020

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Which fashion e-commerce trends are taking off in 2020?

In 2020, the internet is a consumer’s first stop when looking for the latest fashion. So it’s no wonder fashion e-commerce is a fertile space for game-changing trends that set the tone for other industries. And in such a crowded, competitive space, the top brands are doing everything they can to innovate and stay at the front of the pack.

Now that we’re almost half way through 2020, here are some of the top fashion e-commerce trends to emerge.

The rise of experiential e-commerce

One of the biggest challenges in fashion e-commerce is the rate of returns. After all, online shoppers are tasked with finding clothes that fit even though they don’t have the opportunity to try these clothes on before buying. Online shoppers already tend to over-order to ensure they find the right size, and there’s a growing trend driven by social media to “snap and send back” whereby consumers buy simply for the purposes of posting an #OOTD (Outfit of the day) picture on Instagram, then return the item(s).

While some have taken extreme measures to tackle the latter issue, such as online fashion giant ASOS’ plan to block serial returners, there are other ways brands are innovating to fix the fit challenge.

To meet this challenge, brands are now investing in solutions such as augmented reality technology that enables shoppers to “try clothes on” in virtual fitting rooms, and fit tools that harness the power of big data to recommend the best size. Brands are also focusing on doing a better job at highlighting customer reviews, as well as surfacing fit information on product pages. These innovations are making users less reliant on brick and mortar stores and are reducing returns by up to 50% .

M&S showcase an average fit score based on customer ratings and reviews

Fashion e-commerce gets personal

Understanding customers is the first step toward offering them the right product at the right time. With more data and tools available to understand the customer journey, brands are doing a better job of creating a shopping experience that is personal and relevant to a user’s preferences.

It’s believed that 75% of consumers prefer it when brands offer personalized messaging, offers, and experiences. In the same way that Netflix recommends shows based on past viewing habits, fashion brands are doing a better job of offering relevant clothes and accessories based on previous purchases.

Don’t have enough data to do this? Innovative fashion retailers are borrowing from the beauty industry, creating a value exchange via consultative quiz content to help visitors discover the right products for them.

Fashion e-commerce trends: Ouidad
Ouidad shapes blog traffic via a ‘curl type’ quiz

Mobile becomes the standard

We live in a mobile world. With smartphones in their pockets at all times, more and more users are browsing and making purchase decisions on their phone rather than in front of a laptop. This reality is making an impact in fashion e-commerce — and it’s time for brands to keep pace.

Many brands have started to make their websites more mobile-friendly, offering optimized page layouts for easier scrolling. And while offering a good purchasing experience on mobile tends to be the hardest piece of the puzzle to get right, stores are making it easier for users by storing payment information, or integrating with payment providers so that buying that new dress you’ve had your eye on can be accomplished with just a tap of your screen. For more tips on mobile (and a few m-commerce myths debunked) check out our guide on the topic.

Fashion e-commerce trends: free ebook

Instagram leads the way

Anyone interested in fashion e-commerce trends should be paying attention to Instagram. The photo-sharing social media platform is quickly becoming the central hub for branded fashion content and powerful user-generated marketing. In the fashion industry, it can be difficult to build trust. By turning to influencers, fashion brands can gain endorsements from trusted product curators who boast massive followings.

Not only that, but retailers could learn a thing or two from Instagram when it comes to shopping on mobile. The app has made the customer journey to purchase easier than ever with a native payment integration into the app.

Fashion e-commerce trends: instagram checkout
Zara’s Instagram Checkout

The sharing economy extends to fashion

Services such as Airbnb and Uber leverage technology so that it’s easier and cheaper to book a place while traveling or to move from point A to point B. This ethos is now extending to the fashion industry, where the sharing economy is making it easier than ever for consumers to get expensive looks affordably, either through renting or swapping outfits.

While the idea has been around for a while, with services such as Rent-the-Runway catering to designer tastes, it’s Chinese consumers that are taking the concept mainstream. In a competitive economy, China’s post-’90s generation rents outfits to keep up with fast-changing trends. And since formalwear isn’t a key category in China, spend is focused on casual wear.

Fashion e-commerce trends: sharing economy
Source: Vogue Business

The impact on fashion e-commerce is dramatic. Brands can offer users great outfits without having to worry about wholesaling or manufacturing. Instead, they can simply focus on providing an easy-to-navigate customer experience. It’s no wonder such accessible and affordable models are taking their place among the top fashion e-commerce trends.

Fashion e-commerce trends: in conclusion

The major trends in fashion e-commerce revolve around novel solutions to enduring difficulties in the industry. By leveraging powerful technology, fashion brands are finding ways to mitigate the downsides of shopping online and are instead creating assistive, seamless experiences that inevitably lead to more conversions.

At the heart of great fashion e-commerce lies an empathy for the consumer. Understanding the journey they’re on — their goals, their preferences, their values — and then using tools to create an experience that adjusts to that journey is taking fashion e-commerce to new and exciting places. 

Fashion e-commerce trends: free ebook

GDPR and Marketing: One Year On

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As we approach the first anniversary of the regulation’s staging date we uncover the (surprising) impact of GDPR on marketing.

This time last year, marketers were waiting with bated breath to learn the impact of GDPR on marketing as it came into effect on 25th May 2018 across the EU. But while the weeks pre-GDPR saw 1000s of column inches dedicated to worst-case scenarios, the story since then has been less clear. One year on, we decided to investigate – and the results were a little surprising.

To understand the impact of GDPR on marketing, we surveyed 250 UK marketers in the lead-up to the first anniversary of the regulation’s staging date.

Overall, the story that emerged is a pleasant surprise – marketing databases have successfully recovered to 93% of their pre-GDPR levels.

But within the data lies more stories of struggle and areas for improvement – recovery has been hard work because the losses were at first pretty substantial. Read on to learn which industries were the biggest losers, which recovery tactics proved most popular (and successful!) and who still has work to do when it comes to mitigating against the impact of GDPR.

GDPR and marketing databases: the biggest losers

Perhaps the most surprising takeaway here was that more than one-fifth of marketers surveyed (21.6%) claim that they did not lose any of their email databases due to the impact of GDPR  (including, unsurprisingly, all the legal businesses surveyed).

The picture wasn’t so rosy for everyone else. The average marketer lost 23% of their database, and more than one-third lost more than 30%.

The majority of marketers saw losses due to taking a proactive approach toward consent, such as deleting contacts to ensure compliance. However, consumer action, such as choosing to opt out, also had a sizeable impact, with over 40% of marketers citing this as the main reason for database depletion post-GDPR:

GDPR and Marketing: compliance or consent?

What types of businesses were most impacted by GDPR?

The sectors who lost out the most were Travel & Transport, IT & Telecoms and Finance.

GDPR and Marketing: impact by size and by industry

But the good news is that they fought back. Within this group of hard-hit businesses, a trend toward greater database recovery emerged. For example, the media industry and IT/telecoms industry saw +27% and +29% regrowth respectively.

For some sectors, the picture is now better than ever: retail saw some of the best database regrowth since last year, reaching 101% of its pre-GDPR database size. Travel & Transport is the one industry that has the longest way to go, with travel marketing databases at 74% of last year’s levels.

GDPR and Marketing: database regrowth by industry

This pattern of the hardest-hit being the best-recovered continued as a trend in business sizes. Larger businesses generally lost a greater proportion of data last year, on average losing 29% of their contacts, but have recovered at a rate of 24%. In comparison, businesses with less than 100 employees have only recovered by 18%.

GDPR and Marketing: regrowth by size

How have marketers recovered from GDPR?

While recovery is not yet complete for many, efforts to date have yielded positive results. Particularly evident from the study is the diversity of data-capture tactics utilized. The high regrowth rate achieved by some of the hardest-hit, such as larger businesses, was driven by the usage of a wide range of lead generation strategies, from loyalty programs to content optimization, as well as more traditional approaches such as competitions and incentivized newsletter sign-ups.

GDPR and marketing

Romain Sestier, VP Product and Data at Yieldify, said: “The results of the study really confirm the trends that we’ve been seeing amongst many of our clients over the last year: recovery from GDPR is completely achievable if you employ a smart and diverse range of strategies.

“We’ve created nearly 3,000 lead capture journeys in the last year, resulting in over 2.6 million new email leads for our clients’ CRMs – and even better, these contacts are usually far more engaged than those that were lost in May last year.”

Thomas Cook Airlines was one of the first of Yieldify’s clients to prepare for GDPR by incorporating explicit opt-in into its Save My Booking functionality. This was designed to mitigate against booking abandonment by offering exiting users the option to save their booking for later by entering their email address and explicitly opting-in to re-engagement:

Thomas Cook Airlines: a GDPR compliant lead generation strategy

The business had previously sent booking recovery emails without explicit opt-in – a strategy that would no longer have been valid under GDPR.

This strategy succeeded in re-engaging visitors at high risk of being lost from the booking funnel, putting them on a journey towards conversion. The GDPR-friendly approach also surfaced key learnings: whilst send volumes were smaller, the open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates were significantly higher.

Did the impact of GDPR meet with marketers’ expectations?

Before GDPR came into effect, while there was a lot of speculation, there was no definitive answer as to what the impact on marketing would be. This lack of clarity was reflected in the expectations marketers had around the impact of GDPR…which turned out to be pretty inaccurate.

Despite the scaremongering around email marketing and ad personalization in particular, many marketers were still unpleasantly surprised: one-third (32.40%) and a quarter (24.4%) respectively said the impact was worse than predicted.

In contrast to this, the impact on other areas was better than expected, on average 25.5% of marketers said that the impact on overall acquisition, website personalization and single customer view was better – or much better – than expected.

GDPR and Marketing: how expectations were met

The impact of GDPR: in conclusion

This time last year, marketers were heading into the unknown – but our data shows largely positive results when it comes to the efforts being made to rebuild email databases in a post-GDPR world.

While the strategies to date have worked well for some, there are still areas for improvement when it comes to the GDPR, marketing, and future data governance strategies.

The focus now should be on making up for lost time by employing a smart range of data collection tactics to ensure you’re performing in line with the industry benchmarks outlined above. And if you need a hand with that, we’re here to help. We’re offering one month of free email capture to new clients, click here to request your free demo today.


This research was conducted by Censuswide, an independent market research consultancy, with 250 UK marketers who have access to an email database. Fieldwork was carried out between 09.05.2019 – 13.05.2019.

Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society. All survey panellists are double opted in, which is in line with MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR standards.

The Pitfalls of Website Personalization: What IT leaders should know

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Website personalization is now essential in today’s e-commerce landscape, but when it comes to success, marketing isn’t the only team involved.

Much has been written about how personalized marketing, and within this website personalization, can help marketers and drive commercial gains. But in today’s competitive landscape, the truth is that marketing is rarely the only team involved in getting personalization up and running, never-mind making a success of it. And nor should it be – personalization is more than just a marketing challenge, it’s an organizational challenge, and a complex one at that:

Website personalization organizational challenges

Source: BCG Global Survey on Personalization

Resources, roadmap, cross-functional co-ordination, and an inability to test and learn rapidly are just some of the barriers to personalization facing organizations today. Fortunately, IT teams are well placed to help marketing, and the wider business, overcome many of these issues. So how can IT teams get involved in rising to these challenges, and why should they care?

How does personalization benefit IT?

While personalization has long been seen as the preserve of the marketing team, attitudes are changing. In fact, 30% of IT professionals rank delivering real-time personalization as one of the most exciting opportunities of the next three years.

IT and personalization
Source: Adobe Digital Intelligence Briefing 2018 Digital Trends in IT

If we take a look at some of the top challenges to achieving personalization, then it becomes clearer as to why IT leaders are so excited. First up, resources – a tool that enables marketers to easily make front end changes to the website frees up resource in IT, freeing up time to focus on other priorities. Provided implementation is light, this ability to easily make changes to website also helps solve the issue of testing velocity. While traditional A/B tests might take a long time to set up, reach significance (and at the end of the day not actually reveal that much of value), testing changes via a website personalization tool can validate hypotheses and help prioritise a testing and development roadmap, increasing the time spent on meaningful experiments and site changes.

What role should IT take in a website personalization project?

Again, lets come back to the challenges within implementing personalization successfully. Aside from organizational barriers, one of the most oft-cited is data:

Barriers to website personalization goals for IT teams and the wider organization
Source: eMarketer

IT are often the gatekeepers of an organizations data, and while marketers may  have the technology they need to build and launch successful personalization programs, IT are the team that can help improve performance better by ensuring that all divisions of the organization, from personalization in marketing to customer support and product development are all on the same page when it comes to data.

From a more practical perspective, IT are also well versed in assessing technology and how it will integrate with the existing stack. According to Gartner, 35% of organisations’ technology budget will be spent outside of the IT department by 2020. IT is now pivotal across the organization in helping select the right tools, as well as driving value from those tools once implemented.

What are some personalization pitfalls to avoid?

As we’ve seen so far, personalization can get complicated, especially as it can involve so many stakeholders. So what are some pitfalls that IT in particular should be looking out for?

One of the top concerns for any IT professional is safety. Issues such as data breaches, technology failures and downtime have risen to the fore as the technology landscape has become more complicated. For e-commerce businesses in particular, downtime means revenue lost, and depending on the size of the business this can potentially run into the millions. At the extreme end, it’s estimated that one hour of downtime on prime day last year cost Amazon between $72 and $99 million dollars. Ensuring that your website and any integrated technologies such as personalization tools can cope with challenges such as large volumes of traffic during peak trading periods is an important consideration for IT.

Connected with this idea of safety is the importance of assessing the implementation and integrations involved with any personalization project. How long will it take to get up and running (and when will this start to drive value?), as well as the resource it will take to actually start your website personalization journey, are all questions that IT should have involvement in.

We’ve outlined more on the particular pitfalls IT should look out for in this short guide. Click below to download your copy, and learn more about the top three pitfalls IT can help your organization avoid, and what they should look for within each.

Free download: avoiding the pitfalls of personalization

How These Six Travel Trends Are Impacting the Customer Journey

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Understanding travel trends is essential to improving the customer journey in an increasingly competitive, but booming market. In the United States alone, domestic and inbound travelers generated almost $2.5 trillion in economic output in 2018. Internationally, the travel industry has seen remarkable growth over the last few years, much of which has been driven by the rise in online travel sales. Yet the rise of the online travel market has transformed the landscape completely, altering the traditional value chain forever. For marketers looking to capitalize on the growth of travel online, understanding consumer behavior and the customer journey toward booking is imperative.

For travel marketers today understanding the current travel trends and customer journey is essential, but with so much change it can be hard to know what to focus on. If you want to build a travel customer journey that converts, the below technology, demographic and behavioral trends are worth noting.

Technology has always been a big part of the travel industry. From the first airline computer reservation system launched back in the early 1960s by IBM and American Airlines, travel has grown to be one of the most significant e-commerce verticals. Yet, like others, it hasn’t always stayed on top of the technology trends impacting the customer journey. So what are the need-to-know travel trends driven by today’s technology?

Mobile optimization

Smartphones have become an essential part of traveling. For Americans, more than 70% of all travelers claim to “always” use their smartphone while on travel. Why? Smartphones give travelers easy access to researching activities, attractions, restaurants, shopping centers and directions in areas they are unfamiliar with. What does this mean for you?

Your website absolutely must be optimized for mobile devices. Some businesses have even focused totally on mobile, such as HotelTonight, an accommodation booking app that takes advantage of the location-based nature of mobile browsers, as well as tapping into the rise in last-minute booking behavior (but more on that later!). Recently acquired by Airbnb, it’s clearly doing something right.

HotelTonight capitalizes on the travel trend toward mobile and last minute booking
Source: HotelTonight mobile app

Website personalization

As the digital marketing world continues to evolve, the opportunities to personalize your website and marketing are unlimited. According to Infosys, customer surveys indicate that roughly 31% of all shoppers wish their visit was much more personalized. In fact, 71% of all consumers express some frustration regarding impersonal experiences while buying online.

In-destination context, data points and other insights can be utilized to help trigger targeted messages at exactly the right moments in the travel customer journey. For example, online travel agent TravelUp used behavioral data to target new visitors in research mode with a personalized ‘Fly Now Pay Later’ payment offer. This personalized experience drove a +5.24% uplift in conversion (read the full case study here!)

Travel trends: website personalization
TravelUp In-Page Personalization

Voice & Digital Assistants

Voice and digital assistants, also known as Artificial Intelligence (AI), are another rising travel trend to take note of. In fact, 1 in 3 travelers now utilize AI to research, book, and explore travel options before and after they arrive at their intended destination. As a customer journey tool, these features help provide customers with perfectly integrated automated support that gives their experience a personal touch. On the other hand, you can use AI to automate various customer care tasks. In this case, you will need to focus on good image segmentation techniques so that your model can learn its tasks more effectively

Understanding the demographic trends impacting travel is another key tool when developing your customer journey strategy. How different generations behave, and their preferences will determine how you market to them, so let’s take a look at 2 key groups.

Baby boomer behavior

Baby boomers continue to focus on leisure travel. Boomers travel primarily to spend time with family and friends (57%), relax (49%) and to get away from everyday life (47%). In the US, up to 49% of boomer travelers look to stay domestically, with Florida and California being the most common destinations. Those who look to visit both domestic and international locations (47%) tend to favor the Caribbean/Latin America and Europe. Boomers, while no longer the largest traveling demographic, are among the highest spenders; on average spending $6,395 on travel. So how can ensure your website caters to this lucrative group of travelers?

Reducing abandonment, and securing the booking with this group relies on understanding why they are choosing to exit. For specialist travel insurance provider StaySure this meant recognizing when their visitors were struggling during the purchase funnel. They were then able to serve a click to call option for visitors who preferred to complete the quote with an advisor:

travel trends: reduce abandonment

Millennials and Generation Z

Millennials, and increasingly Generation Z are becoming the new target audience when it comes to online travel trends. These younger travelers are more likely to combine a leisure trip with a purpose in an attempt to increase the value of their expenditures. Not only do these generations rely on social media for travel inspiration, they also post their reviews on the same platforms – learn how you can leverage this on your website to build trust in this blog post.

Thanks to a “living for the moment” mentality (think: YOLO), roughly 49% of these travelers take last-minute vacations, often influenced by pop-up deals and flash sales. Given the price-sensitive nature of these travelers, loyalty can be difficult to come by. Sam Willan, General Manager at youth travel company StudentUniverse, makes a compelling argument as to why it’s still worth focusing on building loyalty with millennials and Gen Z travelers, despite their fickle nature.

A repeat booker costs half as much to acquire and returns 2.5 times in income”

Sam Willan, General Manager, StudentUniverse UK

See more insights and travel trends form Sam in the presentation below:

Finally, let’s take a look at some changes in travel research and booking behavior that are key to the customer journey.

Last-minute booking

In total, roughly 60% of travelers are prone to last-minute travel plans. In 2019, more than half plan to take more last-minute weekend trips to maximize their free time. A solid website personalization strategy will enable you to take advantage of this trend, allowing for tactical promotion of sales and offers that help capitalize on these impulse buys.

Inspirational content focused on short-haul, last-minute trips can help capture interest at this early stage in the customer journey. Not only that, but with 80% of travelers saying that this kind of informative content actually influences their final decision, it sets you up for success down the line. As visitors show strong intent to buy, showcasing reviews from similar types of travelers is another great way to secure the booking with these micro-trip travelers.

And that’s our top 6 travel trends to take note of in 2019! Wan’t more ideas on personalizing the travel customer journey? Get our bitesize guide featuring 3 examples of personalization in action.

Travel Customer Journey FAQs

?️ How micro moments are reshaping the travel customer journey?

Travel micro-moments start as soon as people have the idea of a holiday. There are 4 main categories dreaming, planning, booking, and experiencing. This means that travel brands need to be present for each micro-moment to earn and re-earn each user’s consideration, in each micro-moment they have.

? How many touch points are there in the travel customer journey?

There can be hundreds of different touchpoints in the travel customer journey due to the amount of research and the time it takes for customers to book their holiday. From finding the right location, flights, accommodation etc. there will be many touchpoints.

Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics

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What’s the story so far for e-commerce?  Check out our Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics to find out!

2018 saw retail and travel e-commerce go through a dramatic period of change. Challenges such as Brexit and GDPR hit the UK market, while Amazon continued its dominance in the US.

Now that we’re a few months into 2019, we decided to look back at the data to understand what e-commerce brands need to know when it comes to traffic, conversions and adjusting their strategy for the rest of the year.

We’ve crunched the numbers from more than 400 million website visits to 180+ e-commerce websites to bring you the story so far via our Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics round-up!

Q1 2019 vs. Q4 2018

First things first – how has 2019 performed so far versus 2018? We compared Q1 2019 to our Q4 2018 e-commerce statistics.

Here are the headline stats:

As you might expect, there was a drop in traffic and conversions after the peak shopping season. Conversion rates were down too, the average conversion rate in Q1 was 1.78%. On the bright side, average order values increased. This is likely due to the fact that Q1 2019 is less discount focused than Q4.

A key takeaway for e-commerce marketers is the need to make the most of the traffic you do get during less busy periods. When you don’t have seasonal offers or discounts to tempt visitors to convert you need to ensure your abandonment recovery strategy is en pointe. Read our guide on 5 simple steps to save an abandoned cart to get some tips on improving yours!

When it comes to conversions, timing is everything

When it comes to successful e-commerce marketing time of day and  day of week can have a huge impact on the outcome of your efforts to optimize the customer journey and drive conversions. We decided to take a look at average traffic and conversions to get a better understanding of consumer behaviour. Here’s what traffic and conversion rate looks like by hour of day:

Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics: time of day data

Notice that traffic grows from 8am onwards, peaking between 5pm and 8pm as consumers finish the working day. Conversions peak at two key times – 12pm, so lunch time, and at 6pm.

What does this mean for marketers? Well, it presents an opportunity to personalize throughout the day to reflect the different stages in the journey your customers might be at. For example, employing social proof at lunchtimes or in the evening works well to convert shoppers as they’re already in this high-intent frame of mind.

This is exactly what soak.com did with a campaign utilizing time of day targeting. It used Dynamic Social Proof to create a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) among mobile users who would otherwise have been casually browsing at lunchtime. The notification showed how many other users had browsed the product in the last 24 hours, indicating popularity:

Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics: soak.com social proof example

With bathrooms being a high-consideration product with a long purchase cycle, this moved a high-funnel browser further down the path of purchase. As a result, the campaign generated an 11.2% conversion rate uplift in the target group.

Another day, another dollar (if it’s a Saturday)

As well as the time of day, it’s important to track customer behaviour across different days of the week. Our Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics show that Saturdays (followed by Fridays) see the most conversions, but Sundays actually see the most traffic.

Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics: day of week data

What does this mean for e-commerce marketers? Think about what else you can do to nudge your visitors toward purchase – on a Saturday this might involve creating urgency, while on a Sunday, when visitors are in browsing mode, you might need to help them discover the products that are right for them via personalization and recommendations.

Week by week, when were the peaks?

While Q1 is not as busy as Q4 when it comes to e-commerce shopping holidays, there are a few to take note of. Here are a few of the key dates to keep in mind:

  • Weeks 1-2: we saw increased traffic and conversions across the first two weeks of the quarter, likely thanks to the January sales!
  • Week 5: we saw conversions spike at the beginning of February and hold pretty strong until week 7 (the week of Valentine’s day!). This shows the importance of getting ready for this first peak of the year.
  • Weeks 11-13: Toward the end of Q1 traffic increases, but conversions didn’t tell the same story. What else can you do to convince visitors to become customers?

The key takeaways from these Q1 2019 e-commerce statistics

The statistics and trends we’ve examined here highlight a few opportunities for marketers to improve the customer journey going into Q2 and beyond. Here are a few things to try:

  • Test and learn what works during peak while traffic is high, so you can apply this during quieter periods
  • Ensure you’re collecting as much data as possible from these visitors so you can remarket to them, and personalize next time they visit
  • Delve into the data behind performance based on time and date – you could learn valuable lessons to improve your strategy!

Easter E-commerce Tips

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Easter e-commerce is expected to see 19% growth between 2018 and 2022. Capitalize on the opportunity with these tips to help make your spring marketing strategy a success.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2018 made up 9.6% of all sales. In fact, March and April of 2018 saw e-commerce sales totalling more than $18 billion. Analyzing and understanding what these trends mean can help marketers understand the opportunity and pinpoint the best strategies for conversion rate optimization, so let’s take a look at some Easter economics.

Easter Economics

Experts predict shoppers to spend an average of $151 each on Easter-related items. In fact, 2018 showed us that roughly eight out of every ten adults make plans to celebrate Easter. (For those who are not planning to celebrate the holiday, Easter sales still help increase seasonal spending.)

Source: NRF

Of those Easter consumers between 18 and 34 years of age, 85% are expected to celebrate Easter in 2019. (Additionally, 80% of 35- to 54-year olds and 74% of those 55-years and older are also expected to celebrate Easter based on previous stats.)

With consumers looking to personalize their traditions, e-commerce provides an easy way to research and retail the products they want. For many shopping for the holiday, Easter planning typically begins at least one week prior to the actual celebration. (In fact, Easter shopping has traditionally reversed downward trends previously observed around February each year.)

Easter celebration trends help e-commerce marketers and business owners to identify the specific reasons consumers visit their sites. For example, 65% of consumers shop for Easter items based on traditions. However, 31% of Easter shoppers are inspired by seasonal sales or social activities. Store displays attract 22% of Easter sales; exclusive products inspire another 21% of shoppers to buy. Finally, retailer events attract 11% of Easter shoppers.

Source: NRF

Easter Marketing Strategies

It’s clear Easter e-commerce represents a huge opportunity for retail marketers, so here are three Easter marketing strategies that will help boost your e-commerce potential this year.

1. Organize an Easter Egg Hunt

An Easter Egg hunt brings out the inner child in everyone. What better way to increase traffic, boost sales, and cater to younger consumers looking to celebrate Easter?0

To create your own digital Easter egg hunt, start with thinking about what types of “eggs” you can hide throughout your site as well as the rewards when consumers find them. For example, hide egg photos in some of your less visited pages. Share hints on email and across your social media channels to encourage your subscribers and followers to visit your website.

The reward for locating each egg or a number of eggs could mean your visitors receive a promo code or discount on certain items found on your e-commerce site. This gamification element helps drive engagement with easter traffic, capitalizing on visitors who are Easter celebrants and those simply looking for seasonal sales.

And it doens’t have to stay online. Marks and Spencer were one of the first brands to utilize Instagram stories to host an egg hunt within it’s flagship Singapore store, brining together the online and offline worlds to drive engagement with their followers and visitors.

M&S Singapore used Instagram to bring a digital egg-hunt to life in-store

2. Holiday personalization

Personalization comes in many flavors. Depending on the products you sell, your Easter marketing strategy may include various ways to personalize and customize consumer purchases. For example, personalized Easter eggs have long been a popular gift for spring. But how can you bring this idea of personalization to life on your e-commerce website?

Thorntons offer customizable, personalized eggs. How can you apply this to your website?

One of the easiest ways to deliver website personalization is via self-segmentation. Holidays tend to mean gifts, and from Easter baskets to a new spring wardrobe, Easter is no exception. Asking dwelling visitors if they’re shopping for themselves or someone else, re-engages them and makes it easy to personalize their journey.

Another tactic is to highight your unique personalization services to your visitors. This is something luxury brand Montblanc does successfully around key holiday periods – and year round!

Highlighting it’s free services such as engraving, embossing, gift wrapping and more helped the brand boost conversions significantly with different visitor segments. The campaign shown below generated a 41.4% uplift in conversions (read the full case study to learn more!)

Montblanc offers personalization and customization to visitors

3. Easter Urgency

Another powerful tactic to try as part of your Easter marketing strategy is to create a sense of urgency. This works well for any event with a natural deadline such as Black Friday, Christmas or your own sale periods.

Ensure you’re tying together your email campaigns with the experience the visitor gets when they arrive on-site. If you have a one-day sale happening, put this front and centre. Try a countdown timer to add to the feeling of urgency we get when we see time passing by. Adding an animated element to this is proven to drive more conversions, as we found with ticketing company We Are FSTVL.

Social proof is another great way to induce urgency. There are many ways this can be incorporated into your website to give consumers the confidence they need to buy.

One proven conversion optimization tactic in this area is to use Dynamic Social Proof to show how many other people are looking at a particular product online. But even within this, it’s important to A/B test what works best for your audience. Bathroom retailer Soak.com found that social proof worked best when its visitors had time to browse and consider their purchase at lunchtime. As consumers look to partake in some spring DIY it’s worth trying out this tactic to see how it impacts your conversions.

Do Your Homework

E-commerce marketing can be a challenge, even for experts. If you’re struggling with developing an Easter marketing strategy that will help conversion rate optimization, help is at hand. Download our Easter E-commerce tipsheet today to get 5 more conversion rate optimization ideas for your customer journey this spring season.

Meet Your Visitors: E-commerce Segmentation Statistics

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When it comes to creating personalized customer journeys, understanding your visitors is key. One way to achieve that is via segmentation.

There are many different ways to segment your visitors, but your ability to create, and then personalize for these segments rely on data. Not only that but knowing which visitor segments represent the biggest opportunity will help you prioritize your personalization strategy, ensuring you’re not wasting time and resource on ‘personalization for personalization’s sake’. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the type of data you might want to take a look at, sharing our benchmarks for 4 common visitor segments that should be familiar to every e-commerce marketer.

So, who are they?

We’ve aggregated these stats from over 30 billion data points to bring you insights on 4 crucial visitor segments for e-commerce:

  • New visitors
  • Returning visitors
  • Returning customers
  • Loyal customers

Personalizing for these four visitor segments is the first step toward an intelligent personalization strategy that focuses on the right data, to deliver the right message at the appropriate point in the customer journey. Let’s take a look at which segment has the highest conversion rate, and which drives the most revenue, and more, read on to see what we found…

Which visitor segment drives the most traffic?

When it comes to deciding on your perosnalization priorities, and segmentation strategy, is bigger, better? As we can see from the below chart, new visitors make up the largest percentage of traffic, and our data also shows that this holds true across both retail and travel.

Source: Yieldify data

What this means is that, on average, only around 8% of your visitors have bought from you before. So should discount them when it comes to your segmentation and website personalization strategy? Probably not, but we’ll explore why you might not want to miss out on them later in this blog. First, what else do we know about these new visitors?

“Only 8% of your visitors have bought from your website before”

Well, when it comes to devices, desktop visitors are the most likely to be new (62%). This falls to around 50% for mobile and tablet, where users might already be familiar with you, and driven back to your site via paid search, email or social (all of which drive more traffic on mobile than on desktop, as shown below):

Source: Yieldify data

Taking into account this data, and the fact that modern customer journeys are rarely linear when it comes to device usage demonstrates the importance of developing strategies that work across mobile, desktop and tablet, and continually testing what works best for each.

Another thing to think about here is the fact that most marketers are still strongly focused on acquisition. Our State of CJO report revealed that more than half of marketers are dedicating more than 60% of their time and resources on acquisition rather than retention, and this split is reflected in the visitors we see on the average e-commerce site.

How do different visitor segments compare when it comes to conversions?

Well, now we can reveal why you should never discount the loyal customer group, despite the fact they account for just 4% of traffic on the average e-commerce site. This group has the highest conversion rate of all your visitors, with a conversion rate of 31% in Retail and almost 34% in Travel.

Here’s how conversion rate stacks up across our 4 visitor segments:

Source: Yieldify data

What we can see is that a loyal retail customer, for example, is 8.5x more likely to convert than a new visitor.

“A loyal retail customer is 8.5x more likely to convert than a new visitor”

For travel, we can see that returning visitors and returning customers have a slightly higher propensity to convert than for retail. This is perhaps because this segement has invested more time in researching a more complex purchase or are being driven by urgency around the availability of inventory or their trip timelines.

And how about average order values?

Conversions lead us on to average order values, obviously, these can differ quite a lot between Travel and Retail, but we can see similar trends when it comes to our visitor segments.

Source: Yieldify data

Returning visitors spend the most on average ($62 for retail, and $309 for travel) and if you remember what we saw for conversion rate, this group had the lowest conversion rate for retail at 3.2%. This may indicate that repeat browsing and research leads returning visitors to purchase more, or higher value items.

“Returning visitors spend the most on average – $62 for retail, and $309 for travel.”

Loyal customers had the lowest AOV across retail and travel, but buy more regularly and have a higher chance of converting as we have seen. This might indicate that campaigns focused on increasing AOV, such as cross-sell or up-sell, should be a priority for this segment if you’re seeing the same trends in your own data.

Which visitor segments drive the most revenue?

There were a few differences when it came to revenue per segment across retail and travel. For example, in Travel less revenue came those who had purchased before (i.e. loyal customers and returning customers) compared with new and returning visitors, who were responsible for 82% of revenue.

Source: Yieldify data

This is not so surprising given what we’ve already learned about these visitor segments in regards to average order value, and the size of the segments themselves. Retail saw slightly more revenue from these visitor segments, with previous purchasers responsible for 28% of revenue

“New visitors represent the largest percentage of revenue, accounting for 40% within retail and 44% in travel”

Given the longer customer journey within travel, and the fact travel purchases are less frequent, this lack of revenue from previous customers is perhaps not so strange. However, remember that we saw much higher conversion rates for returning customers versus returning visitors for both retail and travel, indicating there is perhaps a missed opportunity here to tailor the customer journey better.

What are the average bounce rates for these visitor segments

So far we’ve look at how the different segments behave when it comes to purchase, but what about if they just leave? Looking at average bounce rates for the 4 visitor segments we noted a correlation between loyalty and bounce rate:

What this tells us, is that campaigns focused on reducing bounce rate should be focused primarily on new visitors, who are likely less familiar with your brand and so more likely to leave. Think about how you can highlight your USPs to re-engage them before they leave. Another consideration is device – bounce rates were lowest on desktop and highest on mobile, suggesting there is still some work to do optimizing the mobile customer journey.

Conclusion

Stats like these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to learning more about your visitors via segmentation. As you gather more data, map your customer journey, and benchmark your performance, you’ll be able to create a more detailed picture of how your visitors behave and spot the opportunities to improve their experience.

Want more data and insights like this? Check out our other resources.

Segmentation for e-commerce ebook

#Journey2019: An interview with James Boyle from Flight Centre

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With #Journey2019 just around the corner we’re going behind-the-scenes with our amazing speaker line-up. Today we talk with James Boyle from Flight Centre.

Hi James, thanks for speaking with us today! Can you tell us a bit more about you and your role at Flight Centre?

Yes sure. My role is Head of Performance Marketing for Flight Centre UK. I’m responsible for driving traffic and enquiry conversion through the site through our performance-based channels such as PPC, SEO, Display Retargeting, A/B Testing, and anything offline also that’s performance-based, so it’s a really varied and hands-on role. I’ve been working at the company since 2016, found my groove pretty early on, and work with a great team.

Essentially I am a digital marketer at heart, and although no two days are the same, my main focus is to ensure we get the best return on investment across our performance-based channels.

Nice, and how did you end up where you are today?

Primarily my background has mainly been in travel, I was working in the retail property market for a while prior to Flight Centre, but I quickly found that I really missed travel. Before that, I worked for an airline, Virgin Australia, in a similar role, so e-commerce focused, and prior to that, I lived in Edinburgh, working for the tourism board VisitScotland.

There’s a lot of similarities working at an airline, then in tourism, then where I am now at an online travel agent, but there’s also a lot of differences as you can imagine. At Flight Centre, we have 80+ retail stores, and we have a huge depth of product, we’re selling airline tickets, we’re selling hotel products.

In my past roles it was all about achieving a direct booking with the airline, or inspiring people to visit a particular location. It definitely helps with the learning curve being exposed to different organizations, and I can’t think of a more exciting industry to be in that travel.

And speaking of where you are today, can you tell us a bit about Flight Centre?

Flight Centre was founded in Australia, as part of the Flight Centre Travel Group, we’re a very large business – something that a lot of people usually find surprising if they’re not familiar with us.

We specialize in a variety of areas, but primarily in tailor-made holidays. As mentioned we’ve got 80+ stores in the UK, right across the country, so if there’s a busy high street we’re not too far away! We entered the UK market in the mid-90s and have expanded significantly over the last 20 years.

As a business a key differentiator for us is our people, we have a huge focus on driving customers in-store, so we can tailor make any holiday they need. There may be a view that travel agents are a thing of the past, but there’s so much choice now and everyone is so busy I think that’s changing. An example recently, I booked a trip to Oman, and it was somewhere I was not familiar with so having someone on hand to help me with the trip saved so much time when it came to research.

This really is a huge asset for our business, we get so many reviews from customers shouting out the individual consultants. The fact that in the last 12 months we’ve seen our Trustpilot score go from 8.8/10 to 9.7/10 is a testament to our people and is something we’re really proud of.

You’ve talked a bit about what differentiates Flight Centre as a business, what would you say are the key challenges in travel?

The thing that comes up the most for us, and particularly in the work we’ve done with Yieldify, is optimizing for the full customer journey. I think as consumers we now have such high standards when it comes to our experiences with brands, and this applies to travel but also to any industry.

This is especially true online, given how quickly technology develops, that as a business we need to ensure we’re giving the best experience of whatever touchpoint the customer has interacted with us via. And with Flight Centre this can be via live chat, phone, email, in-store, and more –  it’s a big challenge for any brand to ensure consistency across all those touchpoints.

This is particularly important for travel, as there’s not as much brand loyalty. Consumers have gotten used to booking flights and accommodation separately and will book activities either just before they leave or in-destination. Building loyalty is about really tapping into the customers’ needs at a deeper level, visitors can use metasearch, but we can provide a fully tailored trip, with personalized recommendations from someone who’s been to that destination multiple times.

And how are you going about understanding your customers and how their expectations are changing?

It’s really interesting, we kind of started this process last year, thinking about what we could do around the acronym CJO, Customer Journey Optimization, that Yieldify has popularized. So we’ve been working a lot more closely with our CRM teams, and making sure we’re analyzing the right data, as well as assessing every single touchpoint that a user can potentially come into contact with us both on our website and with our brand.

It’s been a lengthy process, but we want to ensure users are getting consistency, in terms of their brand experience, at every point in the journey. This ties back to the challenges a lot of brands have, particularly around organizational silos. We’re fortunate at Flight Centre that, for example, we have operations in the same meetings as marketing so we can quickly get a gauge and feedback on what’s working with the customers. This really helps in terms of the feedback loop and that we’re all thinking outside our own headspace, and more in line with the customer.

Are there any companies that you see as really meeting the level of experience that customers expect today in travel or other industries?

I think it’s the names that come up again and again at industry events, and also from my own experience, so the likes of Booking.com, where I usually have a seamless booking experience. I really like the convenience they offer and flexibility, they’ve nailed it.

Then for me, it’s really a lot of companies outside travel, particularly in retail. A really good example for me because they have that high street presence, as well as an online presence, is Argos. It again comes back to that level of customer expectation, people are ordering from the likes of Amazon so you need to compete with that. I think I ordered something from Argos recently, it wasn’t even next day delivery, it was same day delivery for something I ordered at midday. It’s that kind of level of service, as a brand that’s a huge advantage. I really like the way they give you the flexibility, either pick up your item via click and collect or get it delivered.

Finally, can you give us a bit of info about your session at Journey 2019 and what you’re looking forward to on the day?

Sure, so I’ll be joining the travel breakout panel session alongside Loco2 and Thomas Cook Airlines, so it should be a really good discussion. We’ll hopefully go a bit deeper into some of what we’ve discussed today actually and I’m looking forward to hearing what the other speakers have to say! These sessions are also great as a networking opportunity with like-minded professionals facing similar challenges.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Sam Willan from StudentUniverse as I’ve learnt a lot from his team while working on Yieldify so will be great to see his presentation. As for the rest of the line-up, it’ll be exciting also to see what we can learn from other brands not only in the travel space but in retail. I’m actually gutted I’ll be missing the retail breakout session with John Lewis and Oliver Bonas which is at the same time as my session, so hopefully, I’ll be able to get some notes on that!

Thanks James, looking forward to next week!

If you’re lucky enough to have nabbed a ticket to Journey2019 then check out the full line-up here to plan your visit, and we’ll see you there!

https://try.yieldify.com/travel-journeys

Campaigns of the Month: February 2019

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Check out the Campaigns of the Month for February 2019!

How NEST Fragrances helps visitors discover best-selling products

Leading fine and premium home fragrance brand NEST Fragrances wanted to help website visitors discover its world of luxurious yet approachable fragrance collections, here’s how they did that with Yieldify…

Alex Gold, Head of Beauty, Luxury & Lifestyle – Client Services & Strategy

“The sensory nature of fragrance means that visitors can be in need of further guidance when it comes to navigating and discovering products online.

Social proof is a powerful way to build trust with these consumers and can be utilized across the customer journey. NEST has already incorporated social proof into its site, for example, by allowing visitors to sort by best selling, and displaying customer reviews at the category level.

Utilizing Yieldify’s sticky campaigns functionality NEST Fragrances was able to take this further. A ‘Best Selling’ message was added to relevant product pages to ensure that this message was carried across the customer journey.

The campaign has already yielded positive results, driving a 30% uplift in conversion on mobile, and now the brand is A/B testing messaging to hone this further.”

Alexandra Gold, Head of Beauty, Luxury & Lifestyle at Yieldify


How Borough Kitchen drives awareness with returning visitors

Borough Kitchen sells everything the home chef needs for the kitchen and table. Not only that, but Borough Kitchen also offers London Cook School classes, which visitors can book via the website.

As an extremely popular option that sells out quickly, Borough Kitchen wanted to ensure returning visitors were aware of the new Cook School class calendar. Here’s how they did that with Yieldify.

Alice Ribton, Customer Success Manager, Yieldify

“We utilized a subtle floating button format to inform visitors of the new Cook School calendar. The campaign was targeted to particular pages on the site: the homepage, new-in and the gift guide, and displayed to returning visitors.

Appearing at the left-hand side of the screen, users had the choice to interact further – clicking the button opened a ‘Book Now’ CTA to drive users to the calendar.”

Alice Ribton, Customer Success Manager at Yieldify

Want more examples and inspiration? Check out our ebooks for insights on everything from personalization, to psychology, and more!