An everything guide on how to be a successful omnichannel retailer in 2014

Tips From Our Editorial Advisory Board

"In 2014, the successful omnichannel retailers will be those who can evolve into fully integrated brands. Integrated retailing means going beyond synchronized marketing and synchronized merchandise  assortments across the customer touchpoints. It means integrating the full retail value chain across touchpoints — customer data, marketing programs, assortment, pricing strategy, product data, supply chain, inventory visibility, markdown strategy and customer care. The successful integrated retailers will optimize their businesses by leveraging the digital channels — price and space optimization, personalization, multivariate testing, traffic drivers to the store, and in-store sales associate empowerment  and training." — Richard Last,  chairman of the board  of directors, Shop.org

"Try trust-based pricing. Yes, you heard it right. Let your customer determine the price. Just as money-back guarantees concerned retailers about the chances of getting ripped off when first introduced, trust-based pricing is just as scary, but it results in more customers trying your products and most of them paying the full price and being totally honest with the transaction." — Mike Faith,  CEO and president,  Headsets.com

"Step out of your silos and talk to each other — including your support departments. Don't let these true stories (only a small sample!) happen to you: An offer was printed before asking IT if the system could handle it (it couldn't). Customers called to order an emailed offer that no one had informed the call center about. Web product copy gave different facts than the catalog copy because no one had compared the two or asked the merchandising team to proof. To paraphrase, try 'marketing by walking around.' Better for your department, better for your brand, better for your customer." — Susan J. McIntyre, founder and chief strategist, McIntyre Direct

"Shopper expectations are at an all-time high, so omnichannel success means keeping pace with rapidly evolving technologies, ensuring these technologies are in an easy-to-access, always available, simple-to-use format. Thoughtful execution that allows for shoppers to research and buy requires sharp pricing, relevant promotions, flawless execution and superior customer service. Given the complexity and demands on every retailer, prioritizing and investing accordingly must be their mandate." — Lauren Freedman,  president, the e-tailing group

"Anyone who interacts with customers, retailer or otherwise, must be prepared to engage their market on any device in any channel as the internet of everything accelerates. The internet of everything is going to force us to go far beyond optimized channels to exceed customer expectations. We're going to have to learn how to sell a toaster on a flexible screen stuck to someone's refrigerator!" — Richard Sexton,  founder and president, Carolina Rustica

"Know your customers and what they want, whether they're shopping with you online or at your brick-and-mortar locations. Some may shop through both channels, while others may shop via only one of those outlets, so it's important to make sure programs and promotions complement each other so customers have a similar experience with your brand. Customer service continues to be key. If you aren't helping people get the products they want, when they want them, they're going to find another retailer that will." — Kathy Doyle Thomas,  executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Half Price Books

"Smart CEOs prepare for the next recession when times are good. Focus efforts on shoring up your infrastructure. If your database causes your team headaches, fix it. If your fulfillment operation hasn't been updated in the past decade, invest in an overhaul. Do you carry a large number of SKUs? Consider an asset management system to organize your product images, copy and pricing. You'll be amazed at how it streamlines your workflow. You can afford these large system investments when the economy is strong, and their cost savings will benefit you during good times and especially in bad." — George Hague,  principal,  HAGUEdirect

3 Ways to Generate More Retail Sales Using Email in 2014

Retail e-commerce sales for 2013 were expected to reach $262.3 billion, an increase of 16.4 percent over 2012, according to eMarketer. So what's driving the traffic that generates these sales? Social media may be the darling of online marketing, but email is still the workhorse. Email provides over three-and-a-half times the website traffic of social media and nearly eight times the website traffic of display advertising for retailers, according to the Digital IQ Index: Specialty Retail report from think tank L2.

Here are three ways to teach your old email program new tricks. Before you discount these ideas, remember, the devil is in the details. You may be doing some or all of these things now, but are you testing your execution to optimize performance? If not, take a fresh look and start!

1. Turn new email subscribers into fans with your welcome program. Offer new subscribers more than just a hello. Provide a discount on their next purchase, use what you know about them via interests reported at sign-up and/or items bought if the opt-in was part of the checkout process to personalize the email with images or product offerings. Even better, invite them to share the discount with friends to extend your brand's reach.

2. Take cart abandonment one step further with browse retargeting. Cart abandonment campaigns are good, but consider moving upstream. Smart retailers are identifying serious browsers that don't put items in their cart, and then are using triggered emails to reach out to them as soon as they leave the site with product offerings related to what they were browsing. Automate this process and you have high conversion rates at a low ongoing cost.

3. Use order confirmations to drive future sales. Order confirmations are an underutilized marketing tool. You know what the email subscriber bought, so use this information to recommend other products they might like right in the order confirmation email. Once the rules are in place and the automation set up, it's an ongoing tool for driving additional sales and revenue.

Jeanne Jennings is the vice president of global strategic services at Alchemy Worx, a full-service email marketing agency. Jeanne can be reached at jjennings@alchemyworx.com.

Tips for Increasing Mobile Sales

According to an IBM report, 39.7 percent of all online retail traffic this past Black Friday came from a mobile device, and that traffic was responsible for 7.2 percent of the total online sales that day.

With that in mind, the biggest challenge retailers now face is the gap between mobile and desktop conversion. The average retailer's mobile conversion rate is only 35 percent of their desktop conversion rate. When 15 percent of a retailer's traffic is only converting at a fraction of what it used to, it's bound to have a serious impact on its bottom line.

With most retailers already having a mobile website in place, their focus this year should be on improving conversion.

Principles of Conversion-Driven Design
Conversion is a journey rather than a destination. In order to practice conversion-first design, consider the following tips:

1. Offer a fully customized mobile user interface (UI). You need to be able to build a mobile website that best serves the needs of your customers on mobile phones. This means the UI has to be driven by usability and not by templates. You shouldn't be constrained to use a few cookie-cutter designs or have limitations around what features you can put on various pages of your mobile site. The best mobile websites have a unique design specific to that retailer.

2. Have a mobile website decoupled from your desktop website. Your mobile website needs to have its own navigation stack and site map, and it shouldn't be forced to be the same as your desktop site map. You're not looking to "mobilize" your desktop site, and you shouldn't be constrained to only doing a one-to-one mapping between your mobile site and desktop site. Usability and conversion principles should define your mobile website.

3. Provide rapid iterations of your mobile site. The launch of your mobile site is the beginning of your m-commerce journey, not the end. Continuously monitor and improve the site by adding/removing features in an agile manner. Your m-commerce platform and/or vendor has to be able to help you in this journey. If you're not able to make rapid updates and improvements post-launch, you risk losing customers to your competitors.  An important note to keep in mind is that customer loyalties on mobile are different from desktop. If a user doesn't like your site on their phone, even if she is a loyal user on desktop, you risk losing her to a competitor who is providing a more convenient mobile experience.

4. Feature shallow navigation. Reduce depth in your navigation stack.  The average number of steps back a mobile user takes is one. Very rarely does a user switch departments/categories by navigating multiple levels back.

5. Prevent early exits. Exit rates on mobile product detail pages are much higher than site average — it's about two times site average — while the homepage is less than the site average. Visitors are trying to find what they're looking for quickly and easily; if they can't, they give up and move on. They don't go back or continue to go back and look. Therefore, create an experience where they'll continue to search by moving forward and provide nonlinear ways to find products.

6. Leverage promotions and deals. Price matters. Deals and promotions drive traffic to pages, increasing pages viewed in the session and, ultimately, overall conversion. Promote on header, promote on homepage, promote on every page.

Danielle McCormick is the director of marketing at Skava, a provider of multichannel e-commerce solutions to retailers. Danielle can be reached at danielle@skava.com.

Merchants Know Thy Verbs!

The best advice I can offer merchants this year is to know what verbs your brand stands for. That's right. Your verbs. It all starts with an action orientation. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen reminds us that products have a job to do for their customers. I wholeheartedly agree and believe that products also have a job to do for your brand. Each and every product becomes a brand signal — it either enhances your brand or detracts from it. There are no neutral products.

So take a new "verby" look at your top 50 product performers for each key selling season. These are the items that tell the best story about your brand — from your customers’ viewpoint. These are the products that your customers are coming to you specifically for. They have a need and your product offers a solution. Pay attention to the lessons underneath each of your products’ sales. Mine those lessons and identify those action-creating verbs. Let those insights become the blueprint for future product development. Create more products like these that customers will clamor for.

I encourage product developers to look up and outside of their industry to see how products from a wide range of sectors — e.g., gourmet food, fashion, nonprofits, publishing, home building and many others — can generate fresh thinking for your brand. When creating new products with my clients, I've always found it beneficial to pause and take a purposeful "thinkabout" together to look and learn from unlikely places. By exploring the product verbs from industry leaders like Tommy Bahama, Ben & Jerry's, Chobani, Title Nine, and Pendleton, merchants can reinvigorate their product planning efforts.

Andrea Syverson is the founder and president of IER Partners, a marketing and sales consulting firm. Andrea can be reached at asyverson@ierpartners.com.

4 Video Commerce Tips for 2014

As today's consumers increasingly expect to view product videos as part of the online shopping experience, retailers need to craft marketing strategies that leverage the medium's inherent storytelling strengths to engage shoppers and grow their top line. Here are four ways how:

1. Focus on quality content development, then scale. A July 2013 study from my company, Liveclicker, explored video production trends across 45 of the top 500 web retailers (by sales) and found that over 80 percent of videos produced are under 90 seconds in length and focus on demonstrating or explaining the features and benefits of products. With a few exceptions, these videos can be produced at semi-professional to professional-level quality at scale (15-plus per day) using inexpensive hardware totaling no more than $2,500 while featuring an on-camera host. Product videos may not be the best fit for every brand, but producing quality content and then scaling that content across more SKUs is a smart strategy to boost return on investment for most retailers.

2. Measure what matters. It may be important to your video program to understand that viewers watch, on average, 50 percent of your videos to completion. For most retailers, the majority of production efforts focus on transactional content, with higher-up-the-funnel videos focused on engagement rather than revenue accountability. To gauge your program's success, focus on what really matters. Looking at dollars per play and revenue per video as key performance metrics can greatly improve video's contribution to overall online marketing and site merchandising efforts.

3. A/B test video presentations. Running a video program on autopilot is dangerous. Without testing presentation of video on your site (A/B thumbnail testing) or videos across multiple attributes (e.g., host gender, presence of music, product orientation/presentation), it's easy to leave money on the table. The most successful video programs run audits quarterly, if not monthly. Such audits can be a valuable source of knowledge and deliver incremental program performance over time.

4. Open new video channels at low cost. Since video is the most persuasive storytelling medium, it makes sense to expose as many people as possible to your brand or product story. One oft-overlooked yet extremely low-cost channel is email. Embedded video in email drives, on average, 35 percent more video plays compared to video linked from email that plays on a retailer's website, according to VideoEmail.com. "In the first mailing that we launched using embedded video in email, our clickthrough rate doubled compared to prior video emails," said Marissa Oyadomari, senior digital marketing specialist at Bare Escentuals.

Justin Foster is the co-founder and vice president of market development at Liveclicker, a video commerce solutions provider. Justin can be reached at justin@liveclicker.com.

3 Social Trends to Be Aware of in 2014

Consumers are constantly connected, plugged in and online. In 2013, social earned its place as a marketing necessity as it had a huge impact on retailers’ bottom lines. It also saw a lot of changes. Businesses must adapt and change with it in order to remain relevant. Here are three trends to keep your eye on this year:

1. An increasingly visual web: 2014 will be the year told in pictures and videos, with visual social sites calling the shots. Instagram and Snapchat exploded in 2013 as consumers readily adopted the idea of sharing photos with one another. This changed the social landscape, forcing Facebook to adopt an 80-20 rule, where a Facebook post must be 80 percent visual and 20 percent text. Twitter expanded its traditional timeline to include photos in-stream. Take advantage of these updates by adding images to every post. On average, social posts with images and branded videos result in four times the user engagement.

2. Rise of user-generated content: We've all heard that "content is king"; 2014 will be the year user-generated content reigns supreme. Consumers are constantly sharing and uploading their own content. They're driving product discovery by pinning photos and creating brand awareness by uploading their own. Brands are capitalizing on this social phenomenon by creating unique hashtags to collect fan and product photos for unique product galleries. Add these hashtags to marketing campaigns to instantly generate fan images across all social channels. Create contests around user-generated content, asking fans to take real-life product photos to double up on user engagement and lay the foundation for a loyal community.

3. Collect and use social data: 2013 was the year of big data. In 2014, businesses will get better at aggregating and sorting through this data for optimal targeting and smarter remarketing. Consumers are becoming more willing to use social login, allowing businesses to collect rich consumer data through social networks. In addition, Pinterest introduced its API in 2013, which allows businesses to gather valuable insights on their most pinned products. Social login simplifies the registration process, reducing the number of steps to check out and the possibility of shopping cart abandonment.

Al Lalani is the founder of Social Annex, a social commerce platform provider. Al can be reached at alalani@socialannex.com.

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