Multichannel

45% of UK online consumers used click-and-collect for Christmas shopping: report

Click-and-collect has proven to be a popular service among shoppers, with UK retailer Argos revealing that its ‘check and reserve’ service accounted for 31% of total online sales in Q4 2012. 

Similarly, Halfords introduced click-and-collect three years ago and now 86% of all its sales are for in-store collection.

The main benefit is the added convenience of being able to choose when and where to collect your purchases, rather than wasting time searching different stores for items that may or may not be in stock.

A new Econsultancy survey into Christmas shopping habits found that 45% of online consumers used reserve and collect over the Christmas period, which underlines the fact that retailers need to cater to customer demand for convenient delivery services.

How marketers can drive engagement at every phase of the purchase cycle

It’s not just the moment of purchase that matters. To successfully build customer loyalty requires fresh marketing strategies at every phase of the purchase cycle: before, during, and after.

Before deciding to spend their hard-earned money with your brand, consumers receive countless messages that detail product announcements and ways to save money. To break through this noise, a streamlined and efficient engagement strategy is critical.

At the time of purchase, on the other hand, with consumers facing options from dozens of competitors, brands must change the shopping game to aid consumers in making an educated buying decision.

Finally, after a purchase is made, your brand has a choice of either allowing the customer to walk away in anonymity or continue the conversation by creating an identified and meaningful ongoing relationship.

Online retailers offering more delivery options: stats

In 2013, 83% of retailers gave customers a choice of home delivery options, though less than half (47%) of retailers offered three or more services.

Micros has released its 2014 Multichannel Retail Delivery Report, in which 239 retail websites were tested for their delivery flexibility, customer service and delivery performance.

Here we’ll be taking a specific look at the range of delivery options available from retail websites and how they compare year-on-year.

The BRC and IPA Bellwether reports point towards digital effectiveness

On January 10, the British Retail Consortium released official figures reporting a 19.2% year on year growth in online purchases between December 2012 and 2013.  

Online trading in general represented 18.6% of total non-food sales for the final month of 2013, a substantial increase from 16.5% a year earlier.

During busy shopping periods, British consumers have embraced the opportunity to purchase online, having enjoyed Black Friday sales just as much as their US counterparts and effectively created a buzz around Cyber Monday- where unprecedented consumer and sales figures made it the busiest online shopping day of the season.

Figures from eBay showed that mobile visits increased nearly 116% on Cyber Monday, with mobile orders increasing by almost 98% over the Thanksgiving weekend.

From analysing our own data management platform, we have found that since September 2013, 30% of online traffic now originates from mobiles.

Three ways to approach advanced attribution

The marketing potential of Advanced Attribution is huge, and many companies struggle to devise a strategy that’s suitable for them.

Everyone is talking about it, yet marketers find themselves confused, stuck, overwhelmed by the many options, model types, and data sets.

Although adoption is gaining momentum, with brands allocating more resources and budget to attribution modeling, only 26% of companies use advanced attribution that goes beyond last-click according to an Econsultancy Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing.

This is truly alarming, considering that companies spend sums of up to and more than £5m annually to drive customer acquisition in online marketing alone. This is huge investment that is not necessarily ROI proven.

So, how can you use the platform to turn data into insight and action?

Here are three ways marketers can approach it, without becoming stuck.

Retailers should be emailing checkout dropouts

Though the majority of companies in the UK are failing to send emails to customers who have abandoned their shopping baskets, yet 46% of consumers say they would be likely to complete a purchase if they received a reminder. 

An e-Dialog survey revealed the latter statistic, while our Email Marketing Census earlier this year found that 67% of companies were not employing this tactic to attempt to revive abandoned sales.

The email survey also revealed some useful stats about email’s effectiveness as a direct marketing channel, and the potential for driving offline sales. Some highlights after the jump…

Evans Cycles on the key drivers for multichannel shopping

Will Lockie is Multichannel Head at Evans Cycles, responsible for helping a 90 year old retail brand bridge the gap between online and offline. 

He’ll be presenting at our JUMP event on October 9, on the subject of identifyng drivers for multichannel shopping behaviour to improve multichannel experience. 

Here, Will talks about the company’s approach to multichannel retail, the value of a physical presence, click and collect, using QR codes and more…

Why it’s worth your while to join up online and offline marketing: a #JUMPchallenge post

This guest post from Anthony Burke is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.

It was originally published on the WSI blog, and looks at how some offline marketing techniques can be integrated with online marketing… 

eBay partners with Argos to launch new ‘Click and Collect’ service

Ebay has launched ‘Click and Collect’ for UK merchants, who will be able to use their own collection services or utilise the click and collect points at Argos stores.

This is to be followed in 2014 by eBay Now, a pilot one-hour delivery service beginning in London.

Amazon lockers and Amazon Collect+ stores are also springing up, as well as many supermarkets allowing timed locker collection of online orders, so it seems the click and collect invasion is gathering pace.

How to optimise your images for SEO

Images are increasingly important to the customer experience and search yet many sites are not optimised to take advantage.

In the early days of the web images were typically small and of low quality. We all remember the little animated men at work icons that littered the web in its infancy.

However, as users have moved from dial-up to broadband connections, the number, size and quality of images on the web has increased significantly. 

Is the RFP broken? Part two

The question of whether the ecommerce RFP is fit for purpose raised its head again recently.

I’ve received a few since the last post and have come to the conclusion that they have all entirely missed a rather large point, to paraphrase the intro from my first post.

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