Opinion: Substance wins over style for etail sales

How does any brand which isn’t Amazon or Walmart compete online?

The answer is discovery and personalisation.

Amazon is famously behind the curve on discovery.

It’s like walking around Walmart to buy Prada. It is the retailer’s Achilles heel and where others can fight back.

To understand where retailers should focus, Qubit conducted analysis of optimisation and personalisation experiments across two billion user journeys, ranking the most valuable customer experience enhancements by their impact on revenue.

The art of persuasion

The most valuable techniques can be grouped around the idea of persuasiveness, tapping into purchase impetus.

Techniques that highlight scarcity, by indicating low stock levels, are the most effective experiences in our dataset, with a revenue per visitor uplift of 2.9%.

Similarly, experiences that create a sense of urgency, with time limits on when customers must complete their purchase, achieved a 1.5% uplift.

Many retailers within our dataset run multiple experiences across high-performing categories and achieve up to a 6% increase in revenue.

The most essential finding, however, concerns the impact of coupling these tactics with targeted personalisation based on user behaviour and preferences.

When experiences are personalised in this way, the average uplift increases by three times compared to non-targeted implementations.

Cosmetics changes

The results also show that marketers must step away from cosmetic optimisation tactics, like playing with the design of buttons or navigation.

They have an effectiveness ceiling and could negatively impact revenues.

“The end-game is customisation and matching discovery with the right type of persuasion at the right time”

Focusing on the wrong techniques means that retailers may lose customers.

More than 80% of consumers we surveyed would consider switching loyalty to sites that provide a more personalised service.

The end-game is customisation and matching discovery with the right type of persuasion at the right time.

Improved data collection, targeting, and machine-learning, enables retailers to seamlessly influence visitor behaviour, and potentially beat Amazon and Walmart at their game.