The 50 Best Tips of 2015
Analytics
1. Applying predictive analytics to real-time social data can identify which new products will be the most sought after by your target customer, therefore enabling you to place those items in your store windows or feature on the homepage of your website.
Greg Petro, First Insight, “Has Social Media Killed the Mall? Part 1,” Feb. 4, Total Retail Report
Attribution
2. Using one vendor for multiple channels is the modern solution to attribution. When you minimize your vendor partners and consolidate interactions across multiple touchpoints, you can simplify the complicated attribution process and achieve significant cost savings.
Chip Overstreet, MyBuys, “The Simple Answer to Solving the Attribution Equation,” April 3, Total Retail Report
Catalog Marketing
3. Obtain print and paper bids at least once a year to check the market. Don’t contract with any printer for more than one year at a time.
Stephen R. Lett, Lett Direct, “50 Best Tips for 2015,” Feb. 10, Print-Plus blog
4. Rented email prospect lists don’t work for catalog offers. A print catalog increases pay-per-click and search engine optimization performance. Every time a catalog goes into the mail, digital marketing programs benefit. That’s why it’s important to coordinate web-based marketing programs with catalog circulation plans.
Stephen R. Lett, Lett Direct, “Who Killed the Catalog,” Spring, Total Retail
Customer Service
5. Prioritize web and mobile chat. Only one-third of call centers offer live chat online for customer service, and just 22 percent offer live chat on mobile for customer service. Call centers need to embrace every channel of customer engagement.
Ross A. Haskell, LogMeIn, “5 Ways to Keep Up With New Customer Service Trends,” May 21, Total Retail Report
Database Marketing
6. To keep your data clean, consolidated and up-to-date, it’s essential to refresh your database every 30 days to 60 days or less. Your bottom line depends on it.
Mike Shanker, QuickPivot, “4 Tips for Overcoming the Omnichannel Challenge,” Feb. 3, Total Retail Report
E-Commerce
7. Place your call-to-action button close to your product image, but also at the end of the “options flow,” which includes all of the possible options visitors can choose when buying an item (e.g., size, quantity, color, etc.).
Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark, “5 Areas for Improving E-Commerce Conversion Rates,” Jan. 19, Total Retail Report
8. When running a speed test, you’ll see a breakdown of how long it takes each individual file to load. This breakdown will point out particularly slow-loading files. This is your opportunity to trim and remove “expensive" code. Some quick wins include compressing CSS/JS files, using GZIP compression for files and minimizing the number of images loaded.
Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark, “5 Areas for Improving E-Commerce Conversion Rates,” Jan. 19, Total Retail Report
9. Defer rendering “below the fold.” Ensure that the user sees the page quicker by delaying the loading and rendering of any content that’s below the initially visible area (aka, below the fold). To eliminate the need to reflow content after the remainder of the page is loaded, replace images initially with placeholder tags that specify the correct height and width of the image.
Kent Alstad, Radware, “3 Ways E-Tailers Can Make Their Sites Faster,” April 7, Total Retail Report
10. Let visitors enter information the way they enter information. Fault tolerance for things like entering credit card information is key. With spaces, without spaces, your system should be able to handle it all.
Tim Ash, SiteTuners, “3 Usability Issues That Keep Visitor Groups From Buying,” April 27, Designed to Convert blog
