eTail Virtual Event: Win the CX Battle

Phenomenal CX is one of the few remaining ways to stay competitive and keep your business afloat. Today’s “NOW Customer” is always ON—through chat, messaging, email, and social media. Anything short of meeting the NOW Customer where they are amounts to customer neglect... and millions of dollars in missed revenue.

Tune in as Simplr’s CMO, Daniel Rodriguez, reveals challenges and dangers that are emerging for CX professionals, and how to prevent and correct customer neglect so you can steer your company’s CX in the right direction.

COVID-19 has changed who shops online and how. Customers’ embrace of curbside pickup has soared (3-5X vs. pre-pandemic levels) even as non-essential stores opened for business. As we look to the holiday surge, shipping surcharges threaten to eat into margins and capacity limitations threaten to limit potential. This session will discuss how curbside can be a profit-friendly fulfillment channel and lessons learned from early implementations.

●      How to keep your staff and customers safe in a time of COVID-19.

●      The key logistical concerns for running your store like a warehouse.

●      The key statistics that prove the massive value of a curbside pickup program.

●      How to protect your business, while still delivering the rapid fulfillment required to make good on curbside pickup’s promise.

The executives on this panel represent companies that have this in common: obsessed with customer experience; a unique and connected value prop is what is driving the most innovative retailers; Let’s learn from these leaders advice on how to truly share and maintain an inspirational holistic experience:

• Defining what it means to be truly “inspirational” with your shopping experience

• Are there personalized experiences from outside of retail that can influence what can be done in a retail setting

• Contemplating how to engage with your customers and truly personalize their experience – going above and beyond the ‘standard’ shopping experience

• Thinking about the total experience you are building for customers 

• Building uniquely differentiated experiences that truly connect with your customers based on customer data

• Putting in place the infrastructure to use that data to inform and shape the ‘ideal’ experience 

Launched in 2016, Michelle and the LIVELY team have fostered a network of 100,000+ ambassadors, opened four stores with more to come, and coined “Leisurée,” a new category blurring the aesthetic lines of lingerie, active, and swim, focusing on the best elements of high style and ultimate comfort. Michelle started with the intention of inspiring women to live passionately, purposefully, and confidently by introducing a new type of lingerie and has since sold the company for $100M whilst building a community of 100,000+ ambassadors that she contributes LIVELY's success to. She has done this by creating an environment for her community to interact and engage with and allowing them to share their passions and interests through several LIVELY platforms. Learn from Michelle on why this community experience is a two-way street, how she leans on the community's input in decision making, the keys to a successful ambassador program, why a strong community is your best advertiser, and how she's utilized the community to exponentially fuel the growth of her company.

How do you convert more customers? How do you find bugs? This session will explain how real-time user feedback brings value to your product development process. Seamless journeys for better conversion and a more agile process to act faster on user's needs and expectations.

The old saying goes "the customer is always right;" so how are you listening to them? What data is creting a better online experience for buyers? The executives on this panel dive into omni-channel experiences they have created for customer interactions and shopping to be "time well spent" versus "time well saved":

• Listening to your customer communities and taking their lead on what products are hot and what are not
• Building meaningful experiences that are thoughtful to make the customer feel catered to
• Fostering a closer customer relationship to create better experiences and offer more relevant products across channels--a mutual benefit for both the customer and retailer

Want to know the secret to converting customers on Facebook? Spoiler alert - it’s all about the creative. From our first-hand experience leading digital ad strategy for clients in multiple industries, we have cracked the code on how develop creative that actually converts. Learn how we helped one of our leading clients increase their conversion rate by 46%, increase on-site revenue 80%, increase revenue on Facebook 151%, and increase ROAS by 49%, all with the help of - you guessed it – better creative.

This session will discuss:

• How Facebook Ad Auctions work and the 3 major factors that contribute to success
• What ‘Conversion Creative’ is and why it’s essential to any paid social campaign
• How a lift in digital advertising metrics can be attributed to the quality of creative
• 5 common creative mistakes that could be hurting your ad campaigns
• Blue Wheel’s ‘Conversion Creative’ Checklist – 10 types of content you need now to improve ad quality and performance

1. Incorporating New Technologies Into The In-Store Retail Model

Matt Thoman is the Product Manager for Retail and Leasing, Vertex Inc.

In Store retail is often fraught with limitations coming from their network, local building infrastructure and a lack of any available downtime to build new technology into their shopping experience. This roundtable will discuss:

• How much time retailers invest into researching new technology
• How important it is to keep the shopping experience modernized
• How they go about incorporating new technology into their stores while navigating technical and practical roadblocks
• How the need and opportunity has changed due to Covid-19

2. CX Trends Every Retailer Should Be Following

Robert Sullivan, North America AI Solutions Lead, LogMeIn

This year showcased the power and importance of having a digital customer experience strategy. Online sales grew nearly 50% at the pandemic's peak, and more people than ever are shopping online. Customers seek out brands that understand them and their needs, along with those that make it easy to work with and embrace the flexibility customers now require. During this roundtable discussion, we will discuss:

• What the future of eCommerce looks like in the digital-first era
• How to utilize the advantages of frictionless customer experiences
• CX and customer service technologies for brands to consider moving into 2021

3. Stop the Scroll: Creating Content That Converts

Trevor George, Founder and CEO, Blue Wheel Media; Zach Riegle, VP of Sales, Blue Wheel Media

Many people think that CX starts the second a user lands on your site… but unless they’re arriving direct, they’re usually coming from some form of digital advertising. Social media ads are often the first touchpoint a user has with your brand, and in order to get them to click, they have to stop scrolling. So how do you stop the scroll? We have identified the most crucial piece to any digital ad strategy – the creative. Did you know 56% of a brand’s lift from digital advertising can be attributed to the quality of creative? It’s simple - better creative will get you more conversions per impression. We have mastered the formula that drives results, and we call it ‘Conversion Creative’.

This interactive roundtable will discuss:

• Our approach to ‘Conversion Creative’ and why it works
• How one D2C brand leveraged conversion creative to dominate a new category
• Tips and tricks for producing thumb-stopping content
• Your brand’s specific creative challenges and our recommendations

Wander Beauty uses a combination of on-site automation and personalization, triggered email campaigns, and targeted audience segmentation to ensure that customers are always being educated about the products that are most interesting and relevant to them. As competition in eCommerce increases, tailoring search results, product recommendations, and marketing communications to the individual needs of the user has helped Wander Beauty continue to optimize conversion rates and improve acquisition and retention efforts. 

This presentation will address:

• The use of artificial intelligence and A/B testing to optimize on-site search and browse results

• Triggered email campaigns that educate customers about purchases and cross-sell related products

• Targeted segmentation based on on-site browse, search, and purchase behavior

While indirect tax may seem a common phenomenon in the United States and throughout the world, it is undeniably complicated. Not surprisingly, many businesses are not managing it correctly. There are literally thousands of state and local jurisdictions for tax in the United States. A company’s sales and use tax compliance is complicated already, so the addition of value added tax (VAT) and goods and services tax (GST) can expose unprepared companies to significant risk.

This presentation by Vertex, Inc. will focus on the new world reality facing global retailers who are seeking to minimize risk and uncertainty in their finance and operations.

The executives on this panel know what is leading the continued direct-to-consumer gold rush. And as they expand, they are building a feedback loop with their customers to be as close to 1:1 as possible to ensure growth. Learn from these D2C players their secrets to success and how they continue to disrupt their verticals.:

·        Scaling up and replicating your targeting capabilities to a broader audience

·        Pulling learnings from an affinity audience and applying them to a broader audience

·        Moving from one type of environment to a broad market

·        Building on your strategy of finding affinity groups

·        Identifying the implications of going offline to gain scale

·        Rethinking segmentation, targeting and marketing as a D2C brand as you scale

Etail giants run on massive amounts of data and millions of recurring shoppers to deliver the personalized experiences that are now the expected norm. Yet most shoppers do not log into ecommerce sites, and up to 90% return less than 3 times a year. So how can you personalize without the benefit of perfect data? A clue lies in leveraging applied AI and product embeddings to determine a shopper’s intent early in the shopping journey to quickly tailor accordingly.

In this session, Ciro Greco, Director of Artificial Intelligence at Coveo, will detail ways that you can be successful in using each shopper interaction to create more relevant experiences at scale.

Focusing on in-house efforts has helped grow Lovevery to what it is today compared to what it was years ago. Join Jessica and Roderick and their lessons as to how working in-house makes for more cognitive diversity, and makes the process of going from concept to design to product much faster. Learn:

• Working internally which has improved product design and product sourcing for the brand.
• Focusing on people and mission as the keys to success: make what you’re obsessed with something that matters to you
• How Lovevery has seen brand love go up with loyal customers
• Other factors that in-house efforts/focuses have helped improve: content, products, influencer marketing, ad impressions, and more

Faced with the demands of a rapidly evolving and high-pressure engagement landscape, Retail companies are reassessing their approach and taking a hard look at whether their digital platform has what it takes to meet the needs of their business challenges now and into the future. Our session will take you through a 5-step approach to helping your business mitigate current pains and future proof of their engagement strategy. 

The 5 phases we will discuss are: 

1.   Fortify your digital self-service 

2.   Amplify your digital support 

3.   Empower your employees  

4.   Optimize your support strategy  

5.   Evolve to the next level of self-service

We live in a culture of disposability. Plastic straws, IKEA tables, last summer’s trendy crop top... Our retail economy is fueled by a rapid cycle of “new and improved” - we produce, they purchase, we produce something better, they toss + repurchase. But do the economic rewards outweigh the environmental impact? 

The EPA estimates that more than 10M tons of furniture is tossed out in U.S. landfills annually. Alex O'Dell launched Floyd with co-founder Kyle Hoff back in 2014 because they thought that was absolutely crazy. Tired of seeing sofas sitting out on their city sidewalks, Alex and Kyle set out on a mission to design truly sustainable products that are made to last a lifetime - not a lifestage. In this presentation, Floyd Co-Founder and COO Alex O'Dell will explore deep sustainability beyond greenwashed marketing and reveal how communicating this authentic mission to customers has grown Floyd's early cult-following into a substantial eight-figure business.

Retail marketers can easily envision a great customer experience, but amid the crowded MarTech landscape, realizing this dream state seems like an endlessly complex research project. This is especially true for enterprise brands, whose substantial budgets can bloat technology stacks to the point of steeply diminishing returns. In this presentation, Simon Data SVP of Growth Matt Butlein will: 

• Describe the dream state customer experience in real-world terms
• Demonstrate how complex stacks work against marketers’ best intentions, and show exactly how a streamlined, well-integrated stack can deliver a great experience to both your customers and your team