June 13, 2018

Retail & Ecommerce: Digital Marketing Spotlight Roundup 7 June 2018

By Caity Dalby, Content Manager, at Figaro Digital

Last Thursday Figaro Digital were joined by digital marketers interested in retail and ecommerce at The Hospital Club, Covent Garden, for an informative morning of networking, thought leadership presentations, and engaging interactive roundtables. Industry experts shared their insights and answered questions, covering the latest trends in retail and ecommerce. Here, we take a look at the key takeaways from the #FigDigRetail spotlight and roundtable.

The Power Of Digital Body Language: Using Personalisation To Build A Stronger Marketing Strategy

Everyone and their mum has heard of personalisation and we all use services that utilise it and interact with brands on a daily basis that are leaders in the world of personalisation: Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc. For companies of any size and particularly in the retail and ecommerce industry, understanding the needs of your online customers is the first step towards building a profitable marketing strategy. By leveraging behavioural data from customers throughout their shopping journey, brands can now deliver fully tailored content on multiple touchpoints. Personalising these touchpoints can range from delayed pop-ups offering deals or free shipping if you sign up, to re-targeting abandoned shopping baskets. The result? Fully-personalised communication, higher customer engagement, and a marketing game plan that works. In his presentation, James White, eCommerce Consultant at personalisation agency Nosto, discussed how to leverage digital body language to improve the shopping journey onsite, via email and social ads. As an agency founded by retailers for retailers, Nosto’s integrated personalisation platform really enables online retailers to bridge the gap between the on and off-site experience, creating a more intelligent marketing strategy as a result.

View James’ presentation here.

Cutting Through The AI BS: How To Identify The Right AI To Improve Your Bottom Line

When it comes to email marketing, especially within retail and ecommerce, it’s no surprise that subject lines matter – that’s obvious. Busy content teams are often focusing on other aspects of a brand’s marketing strategy, so putting time and effort into email campaign subject lines can be seen as a waste of valuable time or can be shoved to the bottom of the to-do-list as a lesser priority. But what if artificial intelligence could write better subject lines than you and in the meanwhile freed up time for your content writers so they can write meaningful copy elsewhere? In his quick fire presentation Stefan Britton, CCO at Phrasee, tells you to forget what you thought you knew about email marketing and to listen up to learn how modern, innovative tech is getting brands more opens, clicks, and conversions. Working with big brands such as eBay, Next, Marks & Spencer, and Domino’s Pizza, Phrasee have developed a system of curating a unique algorithm for each client using natural language generation, machine learning, deep learning, text analytics, and a sentiment analysis tool to diagnose, and avoid, audience fatigue. This works by teaching the Phrasee neural network a specific brand tone, and, coupled with the neural network’s previous knowledge of grammar and language, creates a whole vocabulary specific to that brand resulting in end-to-end learning with each campaign. Although, importantly, Stefan reminds us that there is no point in investing in an AI powered solution if you don’t know what problem you are attempting to fix. You need to start with a problem, or shortfall, and then work out what you need to resolve the issue – if AI happens to be the answer, then go for it! Stefan also tackles the all important question on every marketer’s lips, do emojis make a difference to subject lines? Watch the presentation to find out!

View Stefan’s presentation here.

Practical Techniques For Re-growing Your Lists Post GDPR

Email distribution lists have been dramatically reduced by the recent implementation of GDPR, and this is a pinch that every company that sends email marketing campaigns will be feeling. But no where is this more felt than in the heavily email reliant industries of retail and ecommerce. With email distribution lists smaller, and the demands on retail and ecommerce companies ever growing in an unstable economic climate, it is more important than ever to invest in techniques that will re-grow your lists. Although, possibly the biggest change we can takeaway from the post-GDPR atmosphere is email marketers learning how to deliver the same results with significantly less customers. Ricardas Montvila, Director of Solution Strategy at Mapp Digital, took the delegates through some of the practical techniques they can use to re-grow their lists post-GDPR, especially re-engaging active email recipients that simply didn’t opt-in to marketing emails again. These techniques range from pre-GDPR ‘Are you in?’ email campaigns attempting to retain as many of the email addresses in their current email distribution lists as possible, offering digital receipts in brick-and-mortar stores to re-acquire costumer’s emails and match transaction data back to specific purchases, to refer-a-friend campaigns, expensive but extremely valuable Twitter cards, and partnerships with affiliate voucher companies. Watch Ric’s presentation to see what you can be doing to re-grow your lists post-GDPR.

View Ric’s presentation here.

Advanced Adwords

Gareth Morgan, Managing Director at Liberty Marketing, finished off the morning’s presentations, and prepared our delegates for the interactive roundtables, by divulging how you can get ahead using advanced adwords techniques and how to get the most out of your Pay Per Click budget. In this quick fire presentation, Gareth outlined 10 targeting options in 10 minutes to show you how you can really figure out how you should be spending money on targeting using the incredible targeting options Adwords offers. These ranged from utilising ready-made affinity audiences to bid modifiers – using location, device, and time of day to modify what you are willing to spend on an ad. This is important for retail in particular, Gareth explains: when someone is in walking distance of your store within store opening hours, it is worth modifying your bid to optimise your PPC.

View Gareth’s presentation here.

For more information regarding the Figaro Digital events see our events calendar and to attend our next event, simply register for the Figaro Digital Marketing Summit 20 June 2018 online here.


Written by

By Caity Dalby, Content Manager, at Figaro Digital