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Spring Forward & Happy Easter

DigitasLBi Commerce and hybris invite you to join us for an exclusive lunch at The Hoxton Shoreditch on Wednesday 13th April. At this invitation-only gathering, we will discuss how brands can harness the power of individual-level behavioural data in order to create more relevant, personalised and engaging customer experiences. Our experts will reveal how brands can use the huge volumes of real-time customer data they can now access to develop dynamic, personalised experiences across multiple channels.
This event is for Senior Digital Decision Makers at B2B manufactoring CPG and retail brands. 
To apply please email charlotte@mixingdigital.com

Join us at the Ecommerce Club Working Lunch London: The Trials and Tribulations of The Niche Retailer on Wednesday 20th April 2016 from 12:30 - 3:00pm. You will hear from, David Kohn, Customer & eCommerce Director at Heals. David will be talk to us about the challenges that face niche retailers and how they can effectively overcome them. We will look at the how niche retail runs counter to trends in large general retailers that sell all types of goods and how best to adapt to these. And how do you maintain customer loyalty across multiple channels, as larger retailers do?There should be some interesting take-aways for other niche retailers but we also think that the larger retailers could gain some ideas too or may be able to offer advice back to the group.
This lunch event is for ecommerce at retailers and brands only, no vendors please.
For register here


Join us at the next Ecommerce Club Working Lunch London: Replatforming on Thursday 12th May from 12:30 - 15:00 at Maze Grill Mayfair. Consumers demand faster, more engaging shopping experiences across multiple channels-in-store, of course, but increasingly also mobile and online. But how effective are your online and mobile platforms? And what factors do you have to consider to ensure your platform yields success.Come along to our working lunch where you will be able to share learnings, network with your peers and to hear from Demandware about architecting the best platform for your enterprise.
This 4' course seated lunch event is for ecommerce practitioners at retailers and brands only, no vendors please. 
Please register here 


We will have the pleasure of hearing from Mic Conetta, Head of CRM at Arsenal Football Club. Arsenal Football Club have multiple touchpoints with both their domestic and international fan base and are keen to ensure they are able to adapt to the emergence of new channels in driving customer engagement. Return on investment is an important factor but not the main driver. Driving value is. Mic Conetta, Head of CRM at Arsenal Football Club will share his thoughts on how they achieve relevance in a rapidly evolving landscape. Please join us for a 3-course dinner, keynote talk and networking at the well-loved Pescatori on Charlotte Street for £99 per head.
Please register here




We look forward to seeing you soon 

All the best

Miss Charlie Lines
Director and Co-founder
Mixing Digital


Business Intelligence in a Networked World,

Data Analytics and Sentiment Analysis as Sources of Business Intelligence,

and Transforming and Innovating with Disruptive Technologies

are three co-located conferences that will be held by UNICOM in London, on April 14.

Have a look at the events’ programmes, topics and speakers.

 

You are also invited to register for the following free-to-attend webinars:

Business Intelligence and Disruptive Technologies – Fact or Fiction
Date:
 23 March 2016, Wednesday | Time: 12.00 GMT
Presenter: Prof. Clive Holtham, Cass Business School, City University London
 

An Introduction to Most Common Cyber Security Challenges and Threats
Date:
 1 April 2016, Friday | Time: 12.00 BST
Presenter: Jean Lehmann,CEO and founder, Cybercapital hq


Visual Analytics: Making Sense of Big Data
Date: 27 April 2016, Wednesday | Time: 12.30 BST
Presenter: Kai Xu, Associate Professor in Data Analytics, Middlesex University

 

 

The Power of Social for Sports Brands
For any professional sports club, having lots of fans is always a good thing, but having lots of fans who also engage with the club itself is even more valuable. And in today’s world, the best way to get involved with the club you love  is most definitely via social media.

For any professional sports club, having lots of fans is always a good thing, but having lots of fans who also engage with the club itself is even more valuable. And in today’s world, the best way to get involved with the club you love  is most definitely via social media.

Sports fans are dedicated, vocal and emotional and most importantly tribal – they want to share. For sports teams and leagues looking to boost business, social media is a game-changer, delivering unprecedented, real-time engagement with this legion of fans eager for interaction.

Arsenal Football Club have proved remarkably successful in maintaining multiple touch-points with their domestic and international fan base and are working hard to ensure they adapt successfully to the emergence of new channels. Driving customer engagement is key to its success.

Getting to grips with consumers’ emotional connection to the brand is essential to being able to use technology to market a brand. Studies show that we make over 200 decisions each day about food alone and that most of these decisions are actually made unconsciously rather than rationally. This means there’s a clear need for brands to connect emotionally with consumers in order to play a part in their purchase decision making process.

The Club has dominated social media for some time, although in February Manchester United finally took the lead in a long fought battle for greatest  number of Twitter followers (with only a few hundred between the leaders and over 500,000 differences before number three, Chelsea). With mobile rapidly becoming the device of choice, especially with the under 24s a strong presence on social media is vital to keep fan engagement high.

Arsenal FC @Arsenal is massive online, with over 7 million followers on Twitter (during a recent match their account was sending a Tweet a minute) and they have 5.6 million followers on Instagram.  They regularly publish behind the scenes images, as well as match day snaps. And provide useful and interesting video content to their followers. They have a weekly podcast, the team and the individual players are online and on Facebook the Club has 35 million likes. That’s to say nothing of the legion of bloggers who interact with the Club, fans and each other.

And in football, it matters that you get it right. Arsene Wenger recently warned about the dangers of disgruntled fans saying, “”Before your opinion was a bit more isolated. Today straight away it becomes a stream of people who think the same way and they become a force. Maybe that’s the reason, I don’t know.”

But social media is about bringing fans closer to the club and what’s happening. While it’s also a driver for CRM to help funnel people onto its own platforms and essentially commercialise them for advertising, the goal is to keep the Club in its fans hearts.

And the growing interconnectedness of globalised communications means a huge new opportunity. Worldwide Arsenal boasts 124 officially recognised supporters’ clubs in more than 62 countries, with another 20 countries currently in the process of submitting applications, and catering to the global fanbase is another important part of Arsenal’s social strategy.

What to do when your platform doesn’t match your aspirations

In order to succeed in today’s multichannel world, retailers have to work hard to differentiate themselves from the competition. According to Gartner research, 89 per cent of marketing leaders expect customer experience to be their primary basis for competitive differentiation by 2017. Ecommerce websites often have to be redesigned, rescaled and replatformed for businesses to deliver a better customer experience, as legacy systems don’t offer the features and functionality that consumers have become accustomed to and expect.

When your ecommerce project roadmap isn’t keeping up with your new, customer-focused ambitions it’s time to look for ways in which those aspirations can be realised. There are a number of platforms available on the market, so what are the key features and functionality they need to offer to deliver a market-leading customer experience?


In order to succeed in today’s multichannel world, retailers have to work hard to differentiate themselves from the competition. According to Gartner research, 89 per cent of marketing leaders expect customer experience to be their primary basis for competitive differentiation by 2017. Ecommerce websites often have to be redesigned, rescaled and replatformed for businesses to deliver a better customer experience, as legacy systems don’t offer the features and functionality that consumers have become accustomed to and expect.

When your ecommerce project roadmap isn’t keeping up with your new, customer-focused ambitions it’s time to look for ways in which those aspirations can be realised. There are a number of platforms available on the market, so what are the key features and functionality they need to offer to deliver a market-leading customer experience?

Truly personalised customer experiences

Personalisation used to be an ecommerce buzz word, and in its early days online businesses were limited to offering shoppers simple personalised product recommendations. However, these never converted unknown browsers into buyers. Only true personalisation can do that – where shoppers receive personalised and different sets of display banners, different promotions, exclusive (and again different) product ranges or VIP content.

Shop Direct predicts that the “pace of innovation in how the online customer journey is personalised will accelerate in 2016.” The emphasis for many retailers is now on tailoring these journeys by eliminating irrelevant product recommendations and messages. Then what matters is focusing on staying touch with the customer after acquisition.

The personal touch

Relevancy is the key to delivering a personal shopping experience. It’s important that retailers recognise shoppers as the same person across all channels and touchpoints. Next level personalisation gleans information like customer location, how they came to your website and which campaigns they responded to (e.g. display advertising.)

Knowing these elements helps retailers build up a profile for each shopper and create a relationship with them. This opens up the opportunity for behavioural targeting. Having the capability to add features like:

  • ‘save for later’
  • ‘add to wish list’
  • a bespoke, fully tailored view for each customer
  • bespoke product imagery and site banners

ensures that customers are loyal to your brand and are checking-out with more in their baskets. A study by Marketing Tech News revealed 74 per cent of consumers say that personalised promotions would persuade them to buy relevant goods and services they hadn’t previously purchased. More sophisticated ecommerce platforms have the capability to personalise a user’s experience in real-time.

A single customer experience

It’s important for retailers who have physical premises to cater for bricks and mortar as well as digital. Where you might see multiple channels and separate units that need their own management and growth plans, your customer just sees one.

The offline and online merge

Channel agnostic shopping is blurring the line between offline and online. Your channels must join up to promote a seamless customer experience. For example, when a representative of your brand engages with a customer, they’ll know what the customer would like without being explicitly informed by looking at their account – all activity will be tracked.  Enterprise grade ecommerce platforms will cater for this – as opposed to paying a systems integrator to create this as a bespoke piece of development.

Beacon technology

Beacon technology is becoming more popular with retailers. It is imperative that communication is completely personalised – otherwise it could be treated as spam. The use of beacons is still in its infancy, even though it has been talked about for the last few years, and we will see the use of this technology take-off in the next 12 months – mainly in part due to retailers changing their platforms to support the capability and make the art of the possible into reality.

Apple-iBeacon-1024x597

Image credit: Liberty Voice

Managing a single customer view

Having a single customer view creates more accurate cross-selling opportunities because you’ll have relevant, and synced, customer information – so you can make those personalised product recommendations (as detailed above) across multiple touch points.

You can also reduce any negative experiences customers may have along their purchasing journey. For example, if they add something to their basket online on one device but don’t check-out, when they next visit your site the item will show in the basket, across any device. Ultimately, at a time when customer service is everything, the single customer view improves customer service levels, customer retention and conversion rates.

Single customer view challenges your next ecommerce platform should overcome:

  • Poor data quality – third-party lacks the recency, accuracy and context that first-party data can provide.
  • Lack of relevant technology – leverage technology that can deal with data that is high in volume, velocity and variety.
  • Siloed data – identify providers who can respond to customers and engage with them as individuals.

Responsive website design and adaptive support

One of the biggest debates in ecommerce is whether websites should be developed in responsive or adaptive design. When 34 er cent of consumers shop over three channels (shop.org), it’s important to choose wisely.

Responsive:

  • Responsive design needs to work at absolutely all screen resolutions and sizes.
  • Requires less work to maintain, but doesn’t offer the same element of site control.
  • If not properly implemented, responsive sites can suffer when it comes to load speed.
  • Responsive shifts content around to provide the best fit – so take care of your visual hierarchy to ensure important messages are not lost.

 

Adaptive:

  • Delivers a pure “device only” journey that is not constrained having to support a “best of all worlds” approach.
  • Requires the continued maintenance of separate HTML and CSS coding to ensure each device layout is catered for.
  • Useful for refitting an existing site to make it more mobile friendly – giving you more control over specific viewpoints.
  • Useful when organising how content should appear over set screen sizes.

When debating over responsive or adaptive capabilities it’ll come down to how much you invest in channel specific customer engagement. You’ll need to understand how customers want to shop and what devices they tend to access your site on. Factors like content, site layout and so forth will become a lot easier to determine.

Social commerce

Between 2014 – 2015 ecommerce referrals from social media sites increased by 200 per cent. Long gone are the days where likes and shares were the extent of what businesses assumed to be a good social media strategy; ecommerce platforms now have to support social checkouts as well as aid the purchasing journey.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter have become important resources for the connected shopper where user generated content has become champion. Retailers need to ensure a positive social shopping experience that increases this efficacy.

Social data aggregation is everything. You’ll need to be able to track customer and transactional data that exists both online and offline (ie. apps used in-store) and then offer intelligent communication with customers in way of seamless, real-time and relevant engagement.

Looking forward, the social commerce experience will only become more integrated. At the moment, social platforms funnel customers over to your website to shop or make further purchases. Next should be the ability to make the actual purchases on the social network.

API Access: The Next Best Support for business future-proofing

Smartphones, tablets, connected TV, app stores and social are just some of today’s customer touch points – we don’t know what others will be coming. These channels have propelled service orientated architecture to the forefront of ecommerce. We’re now looking at full-featured shopping APIs that can distribute ecommerce functionality across channels, making it easier to plug new ones in. Having a platform that allows you to access core commerce services will give retailers the opportunity to expand on features and functionality without a major headache when it comes to future support and upgrades.

Conclusion

Trying to advance your ambitious growth plans with legacy systems can often be expensive, painful and ultimately never achieve your desired results, therefore it’s not surprising that according to research conducted last year 53 per cent of retail business technology executives expect to implement a unified commerce platform in the next few years.

If you’re serious about improving your ecommerce offering then you’ll want to consider functionality that will deliver a personalised, seamless brand experience across digital and physical commerce touch points as well as boost your revenue. Only a handful of platform providers offer the rich features customers expect of current commerce solutions, and also have a roadmap to continue developing market-leading features that match the future trends of the industry.

Investing in a unified commerce platform now will keep you at the forefront of ecommerce and ahead of your competitors, without the headache of redesigns and large customer investments further down the line.

Source: This article first appeared on Greenlight Commerce

Millenial 20/20











Future Events


Transforming Data-Driven Marketing (23rd March)

Successful data-driven customer experiences (13th March)


Millenial2020 (13th-14th April)


E-commerce Berlin EXPO (27th April) 


Ecommerce Club Working Lunch: Replatforming (12th May)


Internet Leaders Dinner: Arsenal FC and the Proliferation of Digital Channels & Maintaining Relevance Across Them (24th May)



Global E-commerce Summit (29th May-1st June)


Etail Europe (21th-23rd June)


Millenial 20/20










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