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TURNING ANONYMOUS SHOPPERS INTO KNOWN CUSTOMERS

T H E D E F I N I T I V E G U I D E T O I N C R E A S I N G S H O P P I N G C A R T CO N V E R S I O N S T H R O U G H C U S TO M E R K N O W L E D G E

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The concept of “digital commerce” was hardly a glint in consumers’ eyes.

Fast-forward to an age of social networks, portable devices and big data, and even ecommerce as we’ve come to know it over the past several years continues to transform on a near daily basis.

The Evolution of the Shopping Experience

Twenty-five years ago, consumers made purchase decisions by flipping through catalogues and placing orders via “house phone,” or visiting physical store locations to compare products and write personal checks.

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When was the last time you made a large purchase without researching multiple options online? How about using your smartphone to compare prices of other retailers nearby? Or reading customer reviews and asking the opinion of your social network?

As consumer options, touchpoints and expectations grow, retail brands must start adopting the strategies, tools and technologies that support the new customer journey.

We’re discussing 5 key areas of opportunity to help ecommerce brands optimize the shopping experience to drive customer acquisition, conversion and retention in the modern consumer era:

1. Capturing Consumer Identity

2. Personalizing the Shopping Experience

3. Bridging Channels & Devices

4. Leveraging User-generated Content

5. Fostering Loyalty & Retention

Repaving the Path to Purchase

CAPTURING CONSUMER IDENTITY

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The rise of ecommerce led to the widespread use of third-party, browser-based cookies. These cookies are placed on a consumer’s device when she visits a site, and track her search history and behavior across the web in hopes of gleaning insights to improve targeting and conversion.

It’s not until the point of transaction that these sites capture any consumer information directly, and since the large majority of consumers leave without purchasing, marketers are usually left with only the hopes of leveraging cookie data to convert unknown shoppers the next time they visit.

Point of Entry vs. Transaction

3 WAYS THE COOKIE CRUMBLES

1) 3 in 10 consumers delete their cookies each month (Comscore)

2) 39% of consumers change their browser settings to block cookies (MediaPost)

3) Over 20% of consumers ages 18-49 visit websites from 4 different devices each week (Experian)

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Think about it: if someone were to describe you based purely on your web browsing behavior, what would you look like?

In between haphazardly clicking on banner ads of adorable kittens, searching for designer trends to inform your savvy bargain hunting, and letting your father borrow your tablet, you could appear to be a young animal lover, a wealthy fashionista or a seasoned businessman - none of which may fit your actual consumer profile.

From Unknown Shoppers...

While 3rd party cookies may give your brand some high-level insight into arbitrary event and page-level data, these insights are useless without understanding who these consumers are and the interests, relationships and experiences driving these behaviors.

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Making the transition from 3rd party to 1st party data, or data shared directly with your business by your customers, gives your brand the depth and accuracy of information needed to truly understand your audience.

...To Known Customers

Smart brands are beginning to capture consumer identity at site entry via user registration and login versus relying on cookies or waiting until the point of transaction. 1st party login data enables businesses to fuel more personal customer relationships by creating highly relevant and timely messages across touchpoints, resulting in increased conversion rates and lifetime customer value.

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Reducing Barrier to Entry & Checkout

In addition to increasing registration conversion rates by as much as 90%, social login also grants brands permission-based access to the rich insights housed within users’ social profiles, including location, relationships, interests, favorite sports, top brands and so much more.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, 50% of retail consumer identities will be social, up from just 5% in 2013.

According to a recent Gigya privacy survey, nearly 85% of consumers have abandoned a registration process because they were uncomfortable with the amount or type of information the site requested.

Social login is a great solution for authenticating consumer identity at the point of site entry while still providing users with a seamless user experience, particularly across smaller mobile screens. Social login gives consumers the option to register for and login to your site or app with just two clicks by using an existing social media account.

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Social Login Best Practices: Ecom Edition Developing an effective social login strategy requires a lot more than placing a few social network buttons on your homepage. Here are some best practices ecom brands can take into consideration when implementing a social login strategy:

Prominently display social login across site pages, and provide 3-5 network options for consumers to choose from.

Ask for basic, necessary information at registration, and request additional data points as consumers engage with your brand over time.

Offer login options from payment providers like Google, Amazon and PayPal to pre-populate checkout fields and streamline the purchase process.

!Evaluate and optimize these login options based on factors like conversion rate and ATV on a regular basis.

Choose networks that collect and provide the specific data points you want to collect. For example, LinkedIn probably wouldn’t be a good option for most retail brands, since consumers don’t share purchases on this professional network.

Give users a reason to register for your site by explaining the benefits of logging in up-front and how their data will be used to give them a more personalized user experience.

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WHY YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS A SOCIAL LOGIN STRATEGY

33% of consumers in Gigya’s 2014 Privacy vs. Personalization survey say they always use social login when given the option - that’s triple the number of respondents who chose this option in our 2012 survey!

The Anatomy of a Successful Registration Experience

Describe the benefits

Multiple social login options

Clearly displayed login options

Payment provider

PERSONALIZING THE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

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From Persona to PersonalAn identity-based view of consumers enables your brand to break demographic stereotypes and hypothetical personas to personalize user experiences based on consumers’ individual interests, actions and behaviors. Consider the following statistics:

79% of consumers agree that their relationships with brands are more personal than ever before (MediaPost)

73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that use personal information to make their shopping experiences more relevant (Digital Trends)

45% of consumers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations (Get Elastic)

In-house marketers who personalize their web experiences and are able to quantify the improvement see an average 19% uplift in sales (HubSpot)

Personalized emails improve CTR by 14% and conversion rates by 10% (HubSpot)

Let’s take a look at how some of today’s leading ecommerce brands are applying consumer data to create highly relevant and timely customer experiences.

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Product RecommendationsAmazon is a master at driving checkouts and basket size by providing customers with relevant recommendations for new and additional items based on their purchase histories, viewed items, shopping carts, wish lists and Facebook data.

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Personalized Discounts One strategy to drive customer retention and loyalty is to tailor discounts and special offers to consumer preferences and behaviors. While some retailers show customers they care by sending surprise coupons for recently viewed or favorited items, Birchbox helps combat shopping cart abandon by sending discounts to customers who didn’t quite make it through checkout.

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Recommendations from Friends When users login using their Facebook accounts, brands can request the ability to view their friend lists. When a user logs in to Netflix using his Facebook account, Netflix shows him a list of his Facebook connections’ favorite shows and movies, as well gives him the option to view individual friends’ recently watched items.

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Tailored Product Showcases Trunk Club makes style accessible and convenient by offering personalized clothing showcases and delivery to men. Customers are served a style questionnaire, paired with a personal stylist and mailed a monthly shipment of custom-selected clothing that fits their unique preferences and body measurements.

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Recognizing Life Events Consumers often share life events like engagements, marriages and new babies with their social networks. These are great triggers for celebratory messages and offers, like the “happy birthday” email and discount Total Wine & More sends its customers below.

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Targeted Advertisements

88% of US consumers claim that they have been inundated with “online ad spam,” and 9/10 say this has led them to take actions ranging from leaving a website to boycotting a brand (Marketing Charts). This means that harnessing information around consumer profiles and activities to inform media buys and serve relevant ads is becoming increasingly important to maintaining consumer relationships.

FOR EXAMPLE…

By prompting fans to login socially to its website, a major sports and athletics organization was able to collect rich, permission-based data around these users’ interests and on-site behaviors. It soon discovered a correlation between its most engaged customers and those within a particular demographic profile who shared interest in a certain TV show, sports team and mobile app.

The brand then used this information to build a look-alike target segment and reach users with similar profiles via Facebook promotions. This look-alike strategy resulted in twice the conversion rate at half the price!

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Segmenting Your Audience With personalization now at the forefront of the user experience, audience segmentation is ranked as the #3 most effective method for improving conversion rates (Monetate).

The ability to tie consumer identity and social profile data directly to purchase behaviors and KPIs enables your business to segment users in more meaningful and strategic ways by asking questions like:

What are the unifying demographics of your most loyal customers?

Are there any common interests between visitors that continuously abandon cart?

Which devices are consumers using to interact with your brand? To checkout?

Do consumers that share particular content spend more time on site?

Segmentation allows you to automate marketing campaigns while reaching consumers with personalized messages at scale. Here are just a few examples of consumer segments your business should identify and serve tailored user experiences:

INFLUENCERS

MILLENNIALS

BRAND LOYALISTS

MULTI-CHANNEL CONSUMERS

SERIAL ABANDONERS

BARGAIN HUNTERS

BRIDGING CHANNELS & DEVICES

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The Current State of Cross-Channel Commerce

Today’s customer journey is a winding pathway of websites, social networks, mailboxes (snail and electronic), mobile apps and brick-and-mortar stores.

According to Experian, 36% of US organizations interact with consumers in five or more channels – and if they’re smart, they’re connecting the dots between these interactions in strategic, cohesive ways.

51% of shoppers research online and visit store to purchase

44% research online and purchase online, too.

17% visit store first, then purchase online.

32% research online, visit store to try, then purchase online.

Source: Ipsos Mediact

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From Ecommerce to Mcommerce

Modern consumers are going beyond browsing sites or checking email via mobile - a growing number of consumers are actually completing the checkout process on smartphones and tablets. In fact, 32% of all online purchases are currently made over mobile devices (BusinessInsider).

But despite this growth in mobile commerce, retailers are still lagging behind. The average mobile checkout process requires over 24 steps, leaving mobile conversion rates at a dismal 3% (Google).

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Streamlining Mobile Checkout We’ve already mentioned that social login makes it easy for consumers to verify their identities via smaller mobile screens. Allowing consumers to login socially with payment providers like Google Wallet and Amazon creates a complete mobile experience by prepopulating payment fields or reducing the checkout process to a simple tap.

FOR EXAMPLE…

Rue La La gives mobile shoppers the option to sign-in to its mobile app using their Google+ account. These users are then given the option to quickly and securely buy with Google Wallet, which allows them to use funds from credit, debit and gift cards to make mobile purchases in just 2 taps.

By giving mobile shoppers the option to login and pay with Google, Rue La La saw a mobile traffic spike of nearly 50%, and a more than 50% increase in repeat purchases in the weeks following launch.

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Socializing the Shopping Experience Social networks have officially changed the way consumers interact with brands and other consumers, making them an increasingly important forum for product discovery and decision making.

Need proof? 74% of consumers say that they rely on their social networks to make purchase decisions (Go-On), and there was an astounding 357% increase in sales from social traffic just from 2012-2013 (ShopSocially).

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Creating Social Experiences On-siteThe reality is that brand visibility on social networks is shrinking, with brands’ updates being pushed increasingly faster and further down followers’ social feeds. Case in point: recent changes by Facebook to make room for paid placements have stunted organic brand page reach from 16% of fans to about 3% (Ignite Social Media).

Marketers must start taking ownership of their customer data and relationships by facilitating social, engaging user experiences on their own properties, where they can more effectively collect consumer insights and drive desired behaviors via solutions like social login, share and comments.

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Bridging Digital & In-store Experiences While retailers the world over are shifting increased budgets and attention to responsive design and mobile commerce, many are overlooking the evolution of one traditional yet highly critical piece of the multi-channel puzzle: in-store.

With modern consumers connecting with friends, family and brands via social networks, their real identities have become seamlessly intertwined with their “virtual lives,” requiring retailers to more effectively bridge the gap between consumers’ digital and in-store user experiences.

67% of online shoppers admit to having recently made a purchase that involved multiple channels (Zendesk)

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Connecting the Dots

Urban Hilton Weiner is one example of a retailer that successfully connected the dots between shoppers’ virtual and real-world experiences with its “Pay with a Selfie” campaign.

The rules were simple: follow @UrbanSelfie on Twitter, take a “selfie” with your desired item in store, and tweet the photo to @UrbanSelfie using the hashtag #urbanselfie.

Participants could then show their selfies at the register to receive $10 toward their purchase – and the shopper with the most retweeted selfie received an Urban Degree wardrobe worth $100!

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Many Channels, One Experience

Capturing consumer identity is only the first step to creating cross-channel relevance and unity. With consumers creating so much data across such a wide variety of channels and devices, building cohesive customer journeys is impossible without a single view of consumer identity.

4% of marketers cite not having a single view of customers across channels as the biggest roadblock in creating a successful cross-channel experience (Atelier).

Ecommerce brands must develop a consumer identity management strategy to help them manage this cross-channel identity data in a meaningful and real-time way. Selecting a single, master database that can bidirectionally consolidate information across data silos is the key to creating cohesive customer journeys where each channel and touchpoint informs the next.

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A Single View of Consumer Identity Consider the following poor and unfortunately common user experiences, and how a single view of consumer identity may improve these use cases:

Experience A Experience B

Without Identity

A consumer browses her favorite shoe store on her smartphone for upwards of 30 minutes until she finally finds the perfect pair of shoes. She returns to make a purchase via tablet, yet her shoes are nowhere to be found, and she must dig through pages of footwear to rediscover her desired pair.

Sarah’s husband, Steve, borrows her work laptop without asking to buy tickets to a local sporting event. Sarah is followed across the web by ads for sporting equipment and nearby games from various retailers and vendors for weeks.

With Identity

A consumer signs in to and browses her favorite shoe store on her smartphone for upwards of 30 minutes until she finally finds the perfect pair of shoes. She returns to make a purchase via tablet, and her favorite shoes are waiting for her in her “recently viewed” items when she logs in.

Sarah’s husband, Steve, borrows her work laptop without asking to buy tickets to a local sporting event. Sarah never finds out, but the next time Steve logs into Facebook on his tablet, he sees sponsored posts for other events in his area from the vendor.

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DICK’S Sporting Goods Drives Sales with Cross-Channel Commerce Using Social Login, DICK’S Sporting Goods created a highly relevant shopping experience by letting consumers log into and manage their own personal “Gift Lockers” from any device.

Consumers can add their favorite items to their lockers by browsing online, taking mobile photos of items in store, or scanning catalogue QR codes, as well as share these lockers directly with their social networks.

“Dick’s Sporting Goods saw an increase in online sales during the holiday season by incorporating Gigya’s Social Login and Share software into our Gift Locker experience. Allowing users to sign-in and share socially across devices has been instrumental in driving customer acquisition and retention.”

- Jay Basnight, Director of Digital at Dick’s Sporting Goods

The ability to tie user activity to a single social identity enables DSG to create a consistent and personalized cross-channel customer experience that drove holiday referral traffic and shopping cart conversions.

LEVERAGING USER-GENERATED CONTENT

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The Power of Word-of-Mouth

Social networks have given consumers proverbial megaphones to broadcast their experiences in real-time, and brand image and perception is increasingly shaped by social opinion. In fact, 70% of Millennials consider it their responsibility to share feedback with companies after both positive and negative experiences (AdAge).

When consumers have the power to tweet about the nasty cashier while she’s ringing them up, or that fantastic filet mignon directly from the table, letting disgruntled customers or brand advocates slip through the cracks can be the difference between widespread success and fast failure.

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Let Your Customers Sell for YouSmart brands are learning how to leverage user-generated content (UGC) to build brand awareness, influence brand perception, and foster authentic relationships with both potential and existing customers. Giving consumers an open forum to post reviews and leave comments essentially enables your customers to sell for you.

90% of consumers admit that their purchase decisions are influenced by consumer ratings and reviews (Marketing Land), and customer reviews are trusted 12x more than descriptions that come from manufacturers (Brick Marketing).

BONUS POINTS: Make ratings, reviews and comments sharable to social networks to maximize brand exposure and awareness. Better yet, prompt users to share at opportune, influential moments, like when a purchase is made.

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UGC for SEOLet’s face it - SEO in today’s overcrowded, highly competitive landscape is hard. As enterprise giants land grab as many keywords as possible, most brands wind up floating in the search abyss: page 2 of Google search results.

Relevant, quality content has become a necessity for brands looking to improve their search ranking, and UGC in the form of comments and reviews improves long-tail SEO by putting your product or service in terms consumers are actually using. In fact, websites that feature ratings and reviews typically experience a 10-20% increase in CTR on search engine results pages (Inchoo).

Long-tail search phrases perform better, with an overall organic CTR of 56% for phrases of four words, compared to a 30% CTR for single-word queries (The Next Web).

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Growing a Community of Trust Generating authentic customer feedback isn’t just great for SEO. The ability to closely monitor comments and reviews gives you insight into consumer needs and opinions to help nurture individual relationships and improve product strategy.

Letting consumers interact directly across web properties also creates a tight-knit, transparent community of new and loyal customers.

Millennials consider UGC 35% more memorable, 50% more trustworthy and 20% more influential than any other media type (Social Times).

FOSTERING LOYALTY & RETENTION

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Nurturing Brand VIPs In an industry driven by customer acquisition, brand advocacy tends to fall through the cracks. However, a recent Adobe report revealed that while repeat shoppers in the United States represent just 8% of all site visitors, they account for over 40% of total online sales (PracticalEcommerce).

Nurturing loyalty takes a lot more effort than hooking new customers with promises of free shipping and first-time discounts, but as consumers are confronted with an onslaught of choices each day, brand-loyal, VIP customers are like gold.

Not only do these consumers lead to increased revenue and extended opportunities, but they are also instrumental in creating highly valuable UGC that drives product discovery and acquisition.

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Thinking Outside the Coupon Box

Statistics show that companies that offer rewards card programs see 46% higher customer spending (LoyaltyLeaders). In addition to making consumers feel valued, these types of offers also stimulate feelings of exclusivity and membership, which result in repeat purchases over time.

However, 25% of consumers say they have received rewards for products and services they would never buy (ACI) - which can do more harm than good when it comes to establishing personal customer relationships and brand advocacy.

Ultimately, brands looking to retain customers should think outside the coupon box. Constructing customized loyalty programs that incorporate multi-step processes and stretch across various channels creates an immersive customer experience that builds lifetime value and long-term relationships.

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4 Hour Fitness Drives Over $600K in LTV Revenue in One Month

Using Gigya’s social sharing software, 24 Hour Fitness was able to optimized its member referral process by allowing existing customers to share unique guest passes with their friends via email or a variety of social networks.

As customers refer their friends, 24 Hour Fitness uses Gigya’s influencer reporting to rank its top advocates. The fitness club then rewards these influencers with customized rewards packages, promoting brand loyalty and future referrals.

Thanks to its new online social sharing referral program, 24 Hour Fitness was able to foster member loyalty while increasing new club sign-ups, resulting in over 8,400 new direct referrals and lifetime value revenue of more than $600,000 in just one month.

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Winning Loyalty with Gamification Gamification, or the process of applying game elements to non-game applications, helps grow a loyal customer base by rewarding consumers for taking valuable, desired actions.

However, while gamification continues to grow in popularity, with game mechanics expected to generate $1.6 billion in revenues by 2015 (Fast Company), Gartner predicted that 80% of gamified applications would fail to meet business objectives due to poor design.

That’s because there’s a lot more to gamification than badges and leaderboards - it requires a detailed analysis of the behaviors driving KPIs for your business, as well as offering real, valuable incentives for taking these actions.

For example, if a brand were to discover that social shares were integral to generating referral traffic and new customers, it could reward top sharers with points redeemable toward real in-store merchandise.

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New Belgium Grows Repeat Logins by 5X with Gamification

With the release of its seasonal Accumulation White IPA beer, New Belgium teamed up with Gigya to launch a gamified user experience that rewards participants for taking desired actions across channels.

Gamified actions include viewing new beer pages on Newbelgium.com and participating in posted challenges. Gigya’s Social Login enables participants to take additional game actions like sharing their favorite beers and New Belgium blog content to their social networks, as well as using the Beer mode mobile app.

This immersive, cross-channel, gamified experience helped drive repeat engagement and customer retention by increasing average daily logins by 5x!

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Automated Follow-up EmailsFostering brand loyalty lies not just in rewarding consumers for desired behaviors, but in remembering them when you haven’t seen them in a while. Consumer relationships are two-sided, and sometimes you have to give a little more than you take to show your customers you care.

The ability to tie consumer identities and activities directly to purchase behaviors enables you to automatically schedule and trigger emails after a certain period of inactivity has passed. With insight into consumers’ interests and preferences, you can personalize these emails to let your customers know just how much you value their business and loyalty.

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Ready, Set, Sell We’ve covered how your brand can better manage customer relationships from first touch through checkout.

We don’t doubt that ecommerce will continue to evolve on a near daily basis. But a clear view of consumer identity, interests and actions across channels will make your business prepared to drive acquisition, conversion and retention no matter what the future brings

ABOUT GIGYAGigya's Customer Identity Management Platform helps companies build better customer relationships by turning unknown visitors into known, loyal and engaged customers. With Gigya’s technology, businesses increase registrations and identify customers across devices, consolidate data into rich customer profiles, and provide better service, products and experiences by integrating data into marketing and service applications. Gigya's platform was designed from the ground up for social identities, mobile devices, consumer privacy and modern marketing. Gigya provides developers with the APIs they need to easily build and maintain secure and scalable registration, authentication, profile management, data analytics and third-party integrations. More than 700 of the world’s leading businesses such as Fox, Forbes, and Verizon rely on Gigya to build identity-driven relationships and to provide scalable, secure Customer Identity Management. !For more details about Gigya, visit www.gigya.com. !© 2014 Gigya Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gigya, the Gigya logo, and Customer Identity Management Platform are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Gigya Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Gigya does not own any end user data or maintain any other rights to this data, other than utilizing it to make Gigya's services available to our clients and their end users. Gigya acts as an agent or back-end vendor of its client's website or mobile application, to which the end user of our client granted permissions (if applicable). Gigya facilitates the collection, transfer and storage of end user data solely on behalf of its clients and at its clients' direction. For more information, please see Gigya's Privacy Policy, available at http://www.gigya.com/privacy-policy/.

To learn more about how Gigya can help your business increase new and repeat shopping cart conversions, visit gigya.com, or call us at 888.660.1469.