Commentary

3 essential elements of e-commerce optimization

Zimm Zimmerman, senior vice president, personalization and analytic solutions at Wunderman, writes retail is no longer a game of access to products as much as a game of relationships. And that all begs the question: How can anyone compete in today's e-commerce-based retail market?

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February 8, 2019

By Zimm Zimmerman, senior vice president, personalization and analytic solutions, Wunderman

In spite of the closing of several well-established store chains, you can easily argue that we are in the golden age of retail. From the big-box stores and small mom-and-pop shop to boutique e-commerce sites, we're seeing an explosion of different forms of retail. Every day, it seems a thousand e-commerce businesses are launched on Amazon offering everyone a variety of new, niche products.

As a result, retail is no longer a game of access to products as much as a game of relationships. Consumers can easily find products with a tap, a click, or even a shout out to a smart speaker. A quick price comparison, check on delivery details, and the product is in the mail — even if it's not from the retailer where the search began.

This all begs the question: How can anyone compete in today's e-commerce-based retail market?

In the past, retailers often lived by a "beat yesterday" mentality — which is a slight misnomer, in that it typically meant "beat last year." They would keep statistics on performance every day and week, and look to do better on any given time period this year vs. last year.

To beat the numbers, they tried to improve everything from the physical layout and local advertising to special offers and end-cap displays.

Today, nothing much has changed, expect that the task is more, if not entirely, digital. Where retailers used to spend hours of every day working on merchandising and advertising, today those same hours are spent working on the e-commerce site and digital presence.

At this point, a discussion on email best practices or machine learning basics would not be out of order, as each has a direct impact on customer experience and the bottom line. However, in order to be competitive, retailers must understand that another task is equally critical: e-commerce optimization, the continual and incremental improvement of the customer experience. To understand why, let's look at three optimization scenarios that every e-commerce store should be performing on a regular basis:

Site optimization

Site optimization is definitely an ongoing task. From product placement and purchase mapping to offers and checkout processes, retailers should be constantly evaluating their stores to understand how to provide a more seamless and personalized experience.

In doing this, reviewing and optimizing the visual aspects is not enough. Good site optimization requires getting underneath the hood and putting everything that affects the experience under the microscope. A good and sometimes overlooked example is coding. Clean code increases organic search performance while improving the customer experience. Websites with poor coding can result in poor page-load times (after three seconds, bounce rates soar) — this applies to both website and mobile experience.

Another key issue is tag management. Retailers should constantly improve tracking to gain the best insights possible about their customers and what they want. Tagging is not a one-and-done task, but an ongoing process in which insight continually feeds improvements in understanding.

Experience optimization

Experience optimization covers a range of important tasks. From checkout to email delivery, every point in the customer journey must be reviewed and improved. To do this, retailers need insights and analytics that go beyond the standard view-through and click-through metrics. For a simple example, when considering email, you should look at multi-views and multi-clicks. If a person opens an email more than once, that demonstrates a high level of interest, which in turn allows us to retarget him or her with additional, enticing emails. If there's still no conversion, perhaps a discount is in order. The differences in such metrics can be rather small, but they help identify highly engaged customers who deserve a more personalized offer.

Testing optimization

Testing optimization involves figuring out what works better, understanding why it works better, and improving on it. In the digital world, it's essential to maintain a testing and optimization mentality for absolutely everything. It's also important to note that certain assumptions are changing. It is no longer safe to say that short email subject lines do better than long subject lines or that white space is an important aspect of every e-commerce website. In testing, start by finding the baseline assumptions required of an e-commerce experience and implement those. Then test each of the assumptions and validate that they are the best baselines for your customer experience.

While these three types of optimization may seem obvious, it's surprising how many companies forget them — if they ever practiced them in the first place. In the past, we would sweep the floors, organize the shelves, and stock the incoming product. Today, we improve the design, tag our products, and dig through a set of insights to better understand and improve overall performance. Because if we want to succeed in today's competitive marketplace and beat our digital yesterday, optimization has to be part of every retailer's daily schedule.