Top 6 Marketing Takeaways from iWeb Live 2019

Wednesday 5th June marked our big brother agency iWeb’s third annual eCommerce conference, iWeb Live 2019. The event saw industry experts, like Yotpo and PayPal, talking about upcoming eCommerce trends and offering insights and tips to help you get ahead of the competition.

With so much knowledge, insight and tips shared, there was a lot to take in, so we’ve put together a roundup of the top 6 marketing takeaways from the day.

Takeaway #1: 40% of shoppers are put off from purchasing when seeing only 1 negative review

Louise Read from BrightPearl taught us that we’re a nation behind the screen. Often, we feel more comfortable to talk to people online rather than speaking with people in the flesh and that’s especially true when it comes to discussing negative experiences.

Sadly, we’re not afraid to tell every man and his dog about a bad experience with a brand, often in the hope that we’ll get some benefit out of it – though people don’t like to admit it.

Recently, there has been a slight change in the types of reviews that are being left. Instead of being product led, they’re consumer experience led.

So, it’s important that you are trying to generate positive reviews by offering a better consumer experience. That’s giving them personalised marketing messages, offering lots of delivery options, being easy to shop on both mobile and desktop and more.

Unfortunately, if you avoid giving your users a good customer experience, you’ll find yourself falling into the trap too many retailers do: swamped with bad reviews on customer service complaints often relating to poor or late delivery.

Takeaway #2: We’re the “I want it now” generation

Payments specialists, Klarna, then went on to tell us that we’re the “I want it now” generation. To put it simply, we seek instant gratification and expect a lot from retailers. We’re super demanding and want the right information delivered to us quickly and in a format that we prefer. If not, we simply get up and leave and go elsewhere.

The time at which we usually decide to abandon the brand is often during the checkout process – probably the worst place if you’re looking at it from a merchant’s perspective. As a consumer, we can often find the checkout process to be too much like hard work. It can be clunky, complicated and a lengthy process.

However, Klarna can help you to reduce these steps by implementing the following best practices:

1. Leverage paid campaigns
2. Personalise your emails
3. Understand your customers
4. Personalise your marketing messages
5. Improve relevancy through data-driven recommendations 

Takeaway #3: Adopt a mobile-centric approach with your eCommerce site search

Our third takeaway was from Klevu, showcasing us the importance of adopting a mobile-centric approach with your eCommerce site search.

We know that mobiles currently have 67.2% share of eCommerce sales and by 2021 this is expected to be 72.9%. Therefore, it’s important that you prioritise the design of your search box on mobile to ensure that it fits the screen appropriately so that it’s inclusive for all users.

Your search box should be quickly identifiable, once identified it should include a prompt to get users to actually use it, then it should be spacious enough so that users can easily click on it and type in their query. Of course, the same rules apply for desktop and tablet devices but with the shift in mobile usage being so great, it’s important that the layout here is at your first and foremost.

Takeaway #4: 43% of shoppers head straight for the search box when browsing for a product

Another key takeaway from the Klevu talk was regarding the overall importance of search. We know that it’s important to get it right for mobile devices but there’s a lot more to why that’s so. Search is growing and growing as a preferred method for users to shop for your goods with menu-navigation slowly becoming less popular.

But why is this so? It’s deemed that users are becoming more demanding and the online world is sharing more information so that consumers are living in “micro-moments” where they have a better idea of the things they want and when they want them.

As a result, they head to the search box to specifically look for that good, rather than spending time trailing through your categories to wait until something jumps out and catches their eye.

Hence, consumers are acting more like “shoppers”, i.e. people searching for products who already have an interest in the good, compared to “browsers”, i.e. people searching for a product with no real good in mind, just a small curiosity in buying the item.

Consequently, it’s important to enhance your site search to the best it can be, may that be through using a third party tool like Klevu or other.

Takeaway #5: Make sure Google Analytics is giving you the right data

AWA Digital went on to highlight seven mistakes that we pretty much all make when it comes to CRO. But what was the most common mistake we come across? Sadly, probably one of the simplest – not setting up Google Analytics correctly.

It may sound fairly obvious, but there’s no point in running marketing campaigns and trying to monitor your website’s data if it’s not going to give accurate results. It’d give you no measurable benefit and so, it can seem like you’re wasting money which leads to retracting budget for marketing and will inevitably send your brand into a downward spiral.

But it could be worse. You could be thinking you’re accurately tracking your campaigns only to find out that the data is skewed and giving you inaccurate results of your marketing efforts and so, current business state.

As a marketing agency, we know that setting your Google Analytics account up correctly is vital. It’s key to helping you spot important statistics within the data and so it’s crucial you have it set up appropriately. That includes excluding any unwanted data like that from your employees and more in order to obtain a clear idea of how you’re performing which will ensure you make the right decisions moving forward.

Takeaway #6: The future of commerce is “brand commerce”

Our final takeaway is from the Yotpo talk, who was up to teach us about the future of commerce which is drifting towards “brand commerce”. So, what is it? Brand commerce is essentially when a merchant seeks to make each touchpoint with their customers more impactful, with less friction for transactions.

Let’s take a look at eCommerce powerhouse, Amazon. It’s a gigantic retailer but has no connection with brands. They simply act as a third party retailer, selling on other business’ products. As a merchant, this can seem soul destroying, though by being a brand, no matter how big or small, it can actually give you a key advantage for it’s not just about the products anymore.

You could be selling your product via your own website and also selling through Amazon. Your task as a brand is to show consumers that they should buy through you by offering a preferred shopping experience with yourselves. Amazon can no longer compete on just prices and products alone.

To Sum Up

There were plenty of actionable takeaways from the iWeb Live 2019 event and these are only a handful. It’s highly important that, as an eCommerce business or not, you consider each point mentioned to ensure that you’re delivering the best possible experience to your users in order to get the best possible results from them.

To help you out, we’re offering a free SEO, PPC and social media audit depending on your business needs. We’ll identify any issues within your business and get you on the road to success (and more importantly, increased sales) like many of our other clients. Simply get in touch below!