B2B vendors are already in the holiday marketing swing to help their retailers fulfill inventory, while B2C brands are brainstorming and executing holiday campaign strategy for their stores, websites, emails, and more.

Everyone wants a piece of that huge holiday pie. Last year, holiday sales during November and December increased 5.5% over 2016 to $691.9 billion.

A smart digital strategy is step one to getting a big, fat piece of that seasonal spending. Of course, the best way to map out a winning digital strategy is to first look back at what worked last year.

To get started, we’ve outlined 3 Google Analytics metrics to benchmark from last season to help you develop this year’s marketing plan.

Conversions + most popular shopping days

First, identify the days your website saw the highest conversions last year.
To benchmark high-level conversion numbers from last season in Google Analytics, navigate to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview.

The Overview graph at the top of the page displays the E-commerce Conversion Rate by default, but can be modified by clicking the dropdown. You can click “Select a Metric to add additional metrics, like Average Order Value, Quantity, Revenue, Transactions, and Unique Purchases. We selected Revenue and E-commerce Conversion Rate.

Continue reading Analytics tip – 3 metrics to benchmark holiday success →

Product detail pages make or break the shopping experience and directly impact conversions. Today, we’re highlighting 5 retailers exceeding our product detail page expectations with easy-to-scan and relevant product details, interesting imagery, and clever upsell features to enhance the customer purchase experience.

Sizing

We’ve all been there: you find the perfect item online, but you’re unsure of how it will fit. Should you order your normal size, a size down, and a size up just in case? Anthropologie, PinkBlush, and Asos feel your pain and are taking some of the guess work out of online sizing.

Anthropologie
Anthropologie is a brand under Urban Outfitters’ umbrella, focused on women’s wear and home décor. Their product detail pages are clean, utilizing easy to read fonts, colors, and multiple images.

What caught our eye is a quick statement underneath the size options – “Customers say Runs a Little Large”. This fit prediction comes from the mix of “True to Size” and “Runs Large” comments from reviewing customers, offering important real-time feedback to help unsure shoppers. In this case, we’d get our size and the size down.

PinkBlush
PinkBlush carries women’s maternity and non-maternity apparel.

We like that  PinkBlush’s product detail page includes a “Model Stats” section under “Size and Fit.” It’s not new for a retailer to include the model’s clothing size, but what sets PinkBlush apart is they include both the model’s picture (so you can double check the model  is the same one featured in the product images) and the model’s measurements. Customers can compare their own measurements  to the model’s , making it easier to assess the item’s fit.

Asos
Asos is a men and women’s wear company based in the UK. They recently started testing a new feature within their product images for a select group of products.

You may not notice at first glance, but they’re showing models with different body shapes and skin colors to reflect the products’ wear on diverse customers (yay!). Similar to PinkBlush, a “Model Stats” section breaks down the models’ height and  size (UK, EU, US sizing).

Sale End Dates + Discounts

Bauble Bar

Bauble Bar is a women’s jewelry online retailer, hosting frequent sales and games to engage customers.

The product detail pages for final sale items has a lot of thoughtful information, but we love how they call out sale details. The sale deadline is prominently displayed above the price in red, with copy under the CTA calling out “Psst: You’re Saving 64%”.

There’s no way a customer will overlook the red font and other need-to-know details! We also like the clever “Psst” text under the CTA, enticing the customer to buy more.

Personal Shopper

Nordstrom

Nordstrom is currently testing a new feature on their product detail pages that builds a complete head-to-toe outfit based on the item you’re viewing This interactive feature allows customers to view different options within the outfit, based on style and price.

We took this feature for a test spin. The top of the maxi dress product detail page looks normal , but  scrolling down under the product specifications reveals a new section showing a head-to-toe outfit idea built around the dress.  Shop the items shown without leaving the page, or  “refresh” the page to see another outfit idea.

Check out the product page for yourself here.

Simple to Sophisticated

Are you ready to test-run any of these ideas on your own product detail pages? Adding a sale end date or percentage off are fairly simple adds, while photographing multiple models or adding a full-outfit feature like Nordstrom is more sophisticated.

Think about how to ease friction for your customers and provide all the information necessary to compel them to convert  from the product page.

Marketers use email and website personalization to deliver a hyper-relevant online experience to every customer, but succeeding with online personalization isn’t easy.

According to Evergage, 88% of marketers say their customers expect a personalized experience, while 55% admit the marketing industry isn’t personalizing to those standards.  What’s more, 46% of marketers would give their own company’s personalization efforts a “C” grade, or less.

Developing user personas is key to executing a successful personalization strategy. Personas, fictional representations of key audience segments, help marketers understand the needs and interests of their audience segments, so they can make their customer journey more personal and relevant.

To get started, we collect and analyze available data (both qualitative and quantitative) to understand what makes different audience segments tick, so we can group them within logical and actionable personas. Today, we’ll walk through how to use Google Analytics Demographics and Interests data (a free tool) to capture additional quantitative data to develop detailed personas.

(Already have your data? Get detailed steps on creating user personas and our handy persona worksheet here.)

Continue reading Google Analytics Tip – Using Demographics and Interests Data to Develop Personas →

The Skinny

Google is beta testing a new landing page testing and optimization tool that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager called: Google Optimize.

Doesn’t This Already Exist?

Sort of. Google has been trying to get into the optimization game for a while now. It started with Google Website Optimizer which was discontinued in 2012 for Content Experiments in Google Analytics. This brought A/B testing into the Google Analytics tool. Google Optimize is their latest iteration. Google Optimize 360 is also in beta, but the main difference between Optimize and Optimize 360 is price. Google Optimize (sans 360) is free and thus a little more limited than the 360 enterprise version.

The Google Analytics 360 suite is the premium, paid-for suite of Google products. There are free versions of these but they have some limits to their capabilities.

Want to see the full comparison breakdown of the two versions? Check it out here.

Continue reading Analytics Tip – Google Optimize →