Last week we attended the eCommerce Show North at Event City. It promised to be a show packed with speakers from a range of businesses covering a vast array of topics.
When we arrived, we headed over to the Keynote Theatre (after picking up a brew of course) where we heard from experts including Google, Lo-Dough Ltd – the revolutionary alternative to bread, Express Gifts and On The Beach, to name but a few.
The Senior UX Designer from On The Beach took us through how the pages during their booking process weren’t working for them, they were seeing users searching all over the page to find out how to move onto the next stage, their call-to-action buttons weren’t consistent and were placed in varying places around their pages and much more. By making small changes to these pages, On The Beach experienced a 5% increase in conversion rates and lower drop-off rates.
We also saw an interesting talk from Fraser Doherty, Co-Founder of Beer 52. He introduced us to the world’s most popular beer club and spoke about how eCommerce technology enhances the customer experience, enabling them to discover beers from all over the world. After his talk, Fraser invited us to visit their stand where we could get our xhands on a bottle of beer, but with our caricature drawn on the front! We love freebies, especially personalised ones…..not sure what to think about the caricatures though?!?
Day two was just as informative and busy as day one. The highlights for us were listening to Smartebusiness and Dotmailer.
Ian Hammersley from Smartebusiness gave an energetic speech about ‘how to scale your eCommerce revenue to £10million’. Throughout his talk, Ian revealed several up to date insights into what really works for eCommerce sites and what doesn’t. He also shared with us the average stats that eCommerce sites should aim for such as that 8% of traffic should use search, the ‘middle review ratings’ could be hidden source of improvements, defining KPIs is important, monitor internal search and carry out searches yourself, etc.
Shortly after, we listened to Skip Fidura from Dotmailer who went through the top-level learnings from their Email Benchmark report of 2018. The key takeaway from Skip was that if you’re not personalising your email campaigns and delivering content that your customers find relevant and interesting then they will think you don’t care. They then become disengaged, underwhelmed and soon enough will unsubscribe. You can download Dotmailer’s complete Benchmark Report from their website.
Overall, Team Teepee really enjoyed this year’s eCommerce Show North. Learning insights from companies such as Google was invaluable, and we also met some great contacts along the way. We’ll see you at next year’s event!