HAI attended the AB Commerce Magico Retailer Summit 2024, a celebration of the latest and upcoming eCommerce tools and trends that retailers could consider to optimise their online presence and trading.
We look at some of the key insights offered by the summit’s experts on how to use existing tools, systems and data to get the best performance.
Using Analytics from Growth
Magico’s Orla Cooney opened the Retailer Summit in The Glasson Lakehouse, Athlone, which also marked Magico’s 25 years in business. Those 25 years saw great growth for the company, for technology, and for its relationships: “Technology has gone from strength to strength, but the biggest thing we are proud of is our relationship with our clients.” explains Orla.
She was joined on stage by her colleague Jillian O’Leary to discuss their recommended analytics that retailers can use. Orla and Jillian agreed the important figures that retailers should keep track of are:
Sales by month
Merchandising insights, such as:
o Top brands
o Top categories
o Top products
Top products viewed but not added to cart (abandoned baskets)
Marketing insights (what is driving traffic to your website – social media, organic marketing, paid advertising, etc.)
They moved on to an interesting demonstration of how to drive online growth and revenue, which can be done in one of three ways:
Traffic x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value = Revenue
– Increase Traffic
– Increase Conversion Rate
– Increase Order Value
To build traffic, Orla recommends more consistent communications, and the best way to do this is with a
Marketing Calendar.
Orla advises prioritising stockholding for top-moving products to improve conversion rates, (the ratio of orders placed to unique website visitors).
For Average Order Value, understanding why a product isn’t selling is crucial. They demonstrated on a sample webpage how enhancing product information like descriptions, additional images, videos, and testimonials can boost engagement and sales.
How to Future-Proof your Paid Media Strategy
Paul Walsh from Adhere Digital shared key advice for enhancing paid media strategy. He highlighted the importance of utilising analytics tools for data optimisation, defining metrics for campaign success, implementing scripts for extracting extra insights from analytics, automating processes for efficiency, monitoring competitors, and tapping into free resources such as the Google Merchant Centre.
Paul concluded his session by showcasing the Merchant Centre and Keyword Planner’s ability to offer real-time cross-comparisons of competitor products and keywords. He highlighted the platform’s capacity to swiftly adjust product prices and information, enabling quick responses to market fluctuations and gaining a competitive edge.
Creating Winning Content
Breige Grogan from Little Rock Digital explored how to create and share engaging content that will help retailers reach their customers. The first step: know your customer. To do so she posed a series of questions to attending retailers: Who is your target customer? What do they want to hear about? What marketing channels do they favour? Are your future-proofing your audience?
She recommends customer personas as a helpful template to input customer demographics to help build communications more specific to their needs.
Briege offered three key tips for retailers to optimise their content:
Use forward planning to sustain creativity and consistency, particularly around key events.
Adopt a through-the-line approach by aligning every channel with your social media calendar.
Harness all available data sources (interactions, shop floor insights, marketing/sales analytics, etc) to inform content decisions effectively.
The key lesson from these presentations was how small changes can make big differences in deliverables, while also highlighting the options available to online retailers to optimise data and performance.
In the next issue we will look at other insights shared by presenters, including what’s coming in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) and how retailers can (and should!) be using them.
