On Internet Business

Improving website performance. Long Tall Sally

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Long Tall Sally is a women’s retailer specialising in tall women classed as those above 5ft 8″. The business is a long established high street retailer that started life 31 years ago as a single shop in Chiltern Street, London. Since then the business has grown to become a £15 million business with 60% of all business being transacted through a catalogue or online.

 

At Internet World on Tuesday, Andrew Shapin Long Tall Sally CEO described how a new website was implemented in order to improve conversion, usability and business processes.

 

The background to the change was that the previous platform which was performing reasonably with a conversion rate between 4-5% had become outdated. Thje result of this was that tasks such updating content, changing design, improving the purchase funnel and SEO where difficult and time consuming and this was restricting business growth. Important functionality such as reviews and user generated content were extremely difficult to implement and expansion overseas was impossible.

 

It was therefore decided to create new sites on a new platform. A key requirement was that the new site could be quickly and easily improved and updated (design, merchandising and content) by the internal team.

 

Edigital research were brought in to bench march the old site against the best in class retailers. They conducted end to end customer research using mystery shoppers to create an actionable report showing areas for improvement.

 

Within 12 weeks the new site was specified, designed, built and tested on a Hybris platform.

 

The total cost of the implementation was £ 130 k.

 

Shapin described the success of the new platform. Although specific ROI was quoted, key stats showed major improvement. Average baskets size increased by 20% and conversion increased 28% and visitor numbers also increased. The objective of greater flexibility was also achieved. An example of this was the twice weekly change to the home page design. International sales also increased with US sales of £52,000 last week.

 

The biggest problem encountered was insufficient time was planned for content migration.

Selling More Online – Six Rules from head of John Lewis Online

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling John Lewis Direct has six rules to maximise sales on line which he presented at Internet World, Earls Court, London on 28th April 2009

Walmsley is responsible for the John Lewis website  its sales and marketing. He has previously worked at Yell and Microsoft.

John Lewis was founded in 1929 and is highly unusual in that it is a partnership with 68,000 partners. The internet part of the business was launched in 2001. Today the John Lewis website has 45,000 products online and sales in 2008 of £327 million.

The focus of the presentation was about the key things that can keep an ecommerce business successful also titled “things that aren’t done regularly enough”.

Some other interesting information was given:

• Linens and flowers have a 8-10% conversion rate on the John Lewis web site. Conversion for high value items such as rowing machines is much lower.

• A new John Lewis home page is going live this week.

• Greater detail will be focussed on fashion product pages in future.

“Retail is detail” and it is essential to make “make excellence a habit”.

Where should you spend your time?

1. Evolution not revolution.

Making major changes is a high risk strategy. Improve customer experience in small steps through multivariate testing. John Lewis can test out 10.000 variations over 2 days. They have made major changes some which were counter intuitive that have had a major impact on conversion.

It is about “What are you doing Today to drive conversion ?”. It is about small changes or improvements such as content changes which can improve performance ….Not huge projects. 

2. Listen

On site survey-rolling measures, verbatim are graet but what is needed is actionable feedback.

User testing is not just for big projects. Get users in to test navigation and hierarchy on a small scale basis. Find out the problems from users themselves.

Site analytics. John Lewis uses Omniture. Use analytics to get behavioural information to gain insight to create hypotheses to make changes.

Remove “speed bumps” (conversion blockages). Examples where given of John Lewis privacy statement and language regarding delivery information.In the case of privacy information the result of testing was to change the privacy statement which resulted in more ambiguity but none the less improved conversion.

Understand differences in your customer groups. For example men and women shop very differently.

3.Keep it simple

Value of an incremental increase in conversion across main site can be significant from small changes that keep the process simple.

Will value of resources used to implement some major new widget result in increased conversion?

What best enhances your brand experience ?

The key thing is the smoothness of the shopping experience.

4. Get and keep the right team

Find the right people at the right level that understand the objective. People that are able implement improvements. Ensure you keep these people.

5. Trade

Why do you do what you do and how does it contribute to sales?

Shop-keeping is about selling product not functionality.

Platforms need to be built to support trading.

Pay attention to details.

6.Keep Looking Outside

How often do you check out the competition?

Scan the horizon feeds, email, and twitter.

Talk to innovators.

Future trends

According to Walmlsley, the key trends are :

• Increasing focus on personalising the experience.

How are you improving your targeting. Email targeting, on site targeting?

• Fragmentation of messages.

Conversations rendering classic segmentation and data methods largely redundant.

• Customers are collaborating over what they see where and when diminishing role of push/broadcast targeting.

Websites that don’t work. Thetrainline.com

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Objective: Book a oneway ticket from to Manchester 7 days in advance. Simple enough I thought ! 

Response: “We cannot find any services that meet your request”.

 

 

My Comment: With 3 trains running per hour there certainly are services that meet my request. So I tried the the virgin trains website to make sure I wasn’t going mad. It did take a couple more steps to give me prices, but at least it gave me the information I needed.

 

Hopefully for thetrainline.com this only a temporary problem but it has already lost them business. A poor customer experience and I will not be returning to this website for a while. 

Stage 1 Enter travel details.

Stage 2 Wait for prices and details.

Stage 3 Get told that there are no services meeting my requirements.

 4. Give up and book a ticket at Virgin.

 

 

 

 

Common Email Marketing Errors

Posted by Michael under Email Marketing

This email from Ikea shows what not to do.

 

 

 

 

Is a business that previously bought office furniture from Ikea going to be interested in buying a birch dining table because the price has been reduced.?

 

Email is a cost effective means of marketing, however to maximise its potential use the following tip:

 

Create your emails on the basis of your customer requirements.

 

 

A business is not likely to want a dining table no matter what the cost. Response and conversion rate will be low if emails are not directed to groups of customers with similar wants and needs. 

 

UK Consumer Confidence Improving

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

At last some glimmers of hope that the UK economy will start improving. UK consumers are starting to believe that we are over the worst that the economic situation will improve over the next 12 months.

Source GFK NOP march 2009 Report.