By Garrett Eastham, Co-Founder and CEO, Compare Metrics
More than ever, online shopping expectations have risen and customers expect, no, demand to have similar experiences online that they have grown accustomed to in the store. A recent study by Marketing Charts showed that two-thirds of Americans prefer to shop in a store rather than online. The reason given? They preferred to shop with a brand that provides them with a superior product discovery experience — which includes relevance, control and simplicity.
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Relevance
Aside from competitive pricing, providing the most relevant engagement is golden, and it is expected because today’s customers make the leap from conducting just “transactions” to having “shopping experiences.” No matter what the purchase may be, consumers want to interact with retailers in ways that are customized to their own preferences and to use natural humanized language to reference specific events they are shopping for — not terminology driven by standardized merchandising keywords. Let’s take a look at what this might mean through a hypothetical search and discovery scenario played out in-store and online.
Jonathan is looking for a new shirt to wear to a few outdoor weddings this summer. After greeting him at the entrance to the men’s department, the sales associate listens to his preferences and pulls a few shirts that match his specifications. He requests for one of them to have a pocket and the sales associate procures the perfect match, allowing Jonathan to leave the store satisfied and more loyal to the retailer than ever before. What if Jonathan opted to shop online for this shirt — would he have had the same optimal experience? If he has typed “Casual yet polished and modern shirt with pocket for an outdoor summer wedding” in the search box — what options would have been given to him? Perhaps a “no results found” response or, even worse, eight pages of only moderately relevant shirts that he would have to comb through? In this case, a satisfying product discovery experience would have been thrown out with the bath water.
Control
In today’s retail marketplace, consumers are now in control thanks to new technologies and platforms (smart phones, social media, etc.) that provide access to endless amounts of pricing and product information. Shoppers still love the in-store experience, but they also expect to have a seamless multichannel shopping experience. A recent Accenture study found that 49% of consumers said the best thing retailers can do to make shopping more convenient for consumers is to better integrate in-store, online and mobile shopping and 89% of respondents said it is important for retailers to let them shop the way they want. But with this newfound control, customers also want retailers to be available on their decision journey, when and if they need the help. In the store, that could mean the sales associate is available if the shopper has a specific question about a product but to not ask the shopper if they need help every five minutes. In the e-Commerce world, shoppers want and expect the ability to search and pull information on products on their own timetables — research from Cisco shows that 85% of shoppers want self-service access to digital content. However, if they can’t find the exact product that they need, shoppers will not hesitate to click away from the site in the blink of an eye. Retailers must give shoppers the option to drive their unique “decision journey” on their own terms and in their own language. In a recent webinar, Forrester analyst Julie Ask suggested that retailers move towards a “Big Mother” model instead of “Big Brother.” Retailers need to be helpful, not creepy, by delivering online shoppers relevant and contextual information, when, where and how they want to see it.
Simplicity
We have already established that retailers must provide the building blocks of relevancy and control to nurture the shopper-decision journey, but they must come together in an elegant and simple way for the experience to feel natural and fulfilling. A recent Corporate Executive Board study looked at the impact on stickiness in more than 40 different variables, and the single biggest driver was “decision simplicity” or the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product. According to the study, “the best tool for measuring consumer-engagement efforts is the ‘decision-simplicity index,’ or a gauge of how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options. The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score.” It is not surprising to find that the study indicated that brands scoring in the top quarter were 86% more likely to be purchased by consumers considering them, compared to those in the bottom quarter. In addition, consumers were 115% more likely to recommend the top-scoring brands to others. We all know that shoppers today are overwhelmed with the vast amounts of marketing and advertising information that they receive every day. To win consumer trust — and dollars — retailers must find better ways to create a more humanized discovery process that caters to the informational needs of each individual shopper. By providing a simplified and efficient shopper-decision journey, engagement will be maximized and shoppers will be satisfied in their purchase decisions. This in turn will equate to improved conversion rates and repeat purchases for retailers.
Garrett Eastham is a marketing technologist with a knack for helping leading brands create, capture, and deliver value from their digital consumer experiences. He played a key role in developing the big data and analytics initiatives at Bazaarvoice as the Data & Analytics Product Manager. As the founder and CEO at Compare Metrics, he drives overall business and product strategy while also leading the day-to-day execution of the company’s vision. Garrett holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University, where his research work in semantic search and human computer interaction (HCI) formed the theoretical basis for the Compare Metrics solution and architecture, and he has been tapped to speak publicly as an expert on these topics.
