Awards & Press
eTail West 2019:
Perfecting Micro Moments to Drive Commerce
Focusing on the micro moments throughout a consumer’s journey will pay dividends on the macro metrics retailers obsess over measurement-wise, whether it’s conversion rate, average order value or another KPI deemed proper to track effectiveness.
Micro moments? Tell me more …
The brand, the messaging, the ads, the digital and in-store experiences.
The way you leverage landing page optimization to increase email acquisition rates.
The customer service along the way to commerce and after the sale.
The friendly nudge from a brand when they’re ready to guide you to a recommendation.
The ___________ you’ve now thought of for your brand after seeing a few examples.
Metrics like conversion rate and average order value are the sum of the individual micro parts along the path to purchase. Polish and perfection of the individual components of the consumer journey ripple effect into smooth omni-channel experiences and improved macro metrics.
While there was a lot to take in at eTail West 2019 last week, this stood out to us as the most actionable insight marketers can start working on now. We attended 10+ sessions while we were there and highlighted relevant perspectives from speakers that accentuate this insight.
“The purchase is the result of many micro-conversions that people have on your site. Giving their email address or starting to check out. When you focus your efforts on the areas where micro-conversations happen, progress is made toward e-commerce.”
– Alex Banys, Director, Global eCommerce and Digital Marketing, Specialized Bicycle Components
Consumer Journey Mapping
When you dig into the micro components of your consumer’s journey, the complexity grows exponentially. Especially given the number of touch points and interactions people have with brands before purchasing. Mapping this journey can be overwhelming, but there’s value in spending a few hours white boarding and identifying immediate opportunities to improve.
“What’s helpful with consumer journey mapping is identifying the paint points. I’m a big believer in talking to customers and making sure I understand what they want.”
– Valerie Hoecke – Chief Digital Officer, LVMH Perfumes and Cosmetics, LVMH
“There’s not one journey for all. If you’re looking from start to finish, you’re already wrong.”
– Alan Wizemann – Chief Digital Officer, Dollar Shave Club
“When it comes to the journey, it comes down to your brand and the experience. Don’t get overwhelmed about the entire customer journey, but focus on a few areas and make sure the personality of your brand comes through. That’s personalization.”
– John Hazen – Chief Digital Officer, Boot Barn
As indicated from the quotes above, deciding which micro moment opportunity is right for your brand is the most difficult choice to make. At this point, it makes sense to zoom out and consider the macro metrics as you prioritize. If you were to improve on each of the micro moments, what impact would it have on conversion rate and average order value?
Removing Friction
Once you decide which moments to focus on, be relentless about removing friction.
“When we think about removing friction, we ask ourselves, ‘What benefit does this provide to the consumer?’ first and then design and build experiences from there. As you remove friction, personalization and humanization become real.”
– Kathryn Money – VP, Strategy & Merchandising, Brilliant Earth
BrilliantEarth.com has removed friction on multiple fronts, including virtually trying on rings with different skin tones and “Drop A Hint” functionality on product pages. In 2020, they’ll be launching augmented reality for trying on rings, creating joint accounts for partners to share notes and making it easy to create Instagram moments while in store.
For GameStop, digital ad creative is a friction point. “Creative is a friction point that doesn’t allow us to get to an individually personalized state, according to Jim Edgett – Head of Digital Ecosystem & Channels. He continued to say, “We’re making better use of customized landing page templates for certain audiences, but having a hard time keeping up with digital ad versioning.”
Causality and Incrementality
Whatever micro moment you decide to focus on, create a learning agenda, define which micro metrics to measure and then build a forecast that makes assumptions about the impact you can have on conversion rate and average order value.
“Whatever we do, we have to understand the deterministic thing that influenced a sale.”
– Jim Edgett – Head of Digital Ecosystem & Channels, GameStop
At Ovative Group, we measure causal impact with our marketing analytics platform by analyzing incrementality. If you’re interested in learning more about how we do that, or how we can increase revenue on your digital media channels by 25%, we’d love to hear from you.
