Second edition of The Eccomplished Quarterly highlights loyalty and retention as the main areas for new investment next year
Second edition of The Eccomplished Quarterly highlights loyalty and retention as the main areas for new investment next year
New research based on detailed interviews with e-commerce directors and heads of e-commerce suggests customer loyalty and retention will be the main areas of IT investment in the coming months.
The second edition of The Eccomplished Quarterly examined the extent to which those investment plans, and investment targeting, reflect respondents’ revenue ambitions for the year.
Online revenues holding strong
Of the 100 e-commerce executives of firms selling more than £3 million annually online, 88% of retailers reported 2011 revenue performance in line with or above expectations, while two-fifths (42%) said revenues exceeded expectations. Only 2% said it fell ‘way below’ them.
The report identified that in a climate of economic uncertainty, retailers are planning for growth. Three quarters (74%) of online retailers were investing in customer loyalty and retention.
Darren Hitchcock, European vice president at personalisation vendor RichRelevance and a founding member of Eccomplished, commented that this priority “reflects the relative maturity of the online retail market”.
Knowing your potential customer
“Within their core markets there are few untapped consumer segments, which makes retention and loyalty critical,” he said.
Over the longer term, the report predicted that investments in social, mobile and personalisation would start to play out.
Dominic Edmonds, president of shopping cart software vendor SaleCycle and fellow Eccomplished founding member, wondered which brands would take the lead in responding to consumer demand for a new kind of e-commerce experience in the longer term.
“Personalised shopping experiences are a case in point and I wonder who will be brave enough to offer a full optimised shopping experience, showing only products they believe to be relevant to each individual customer,” said Edmunds.
The report paints a perhaps surprisingly optimistic picture when it comes to growth expectations, but also suggests that economic and technological pressures are playing a key role in shaping investments in innovation.
Delivering on consumer expectations
Steve Rivers, managing director of data feed provider Intelligent Reach (formerly Ultimate Feed) and the last of Eccomplished’s founding members, said that the overall picture painted by the survey findings was one of optimism and ambition – but backed by real investment in innovation.
“Retailers are determined to get to grips with the increasingly sophisticated and fickle demands of constantly connected consumers – the digital natives who have grown up with social and touch and who retailers must learn to attract and retain all over again across a whole range of new channels,” Rivers concluded.
Eccomplished is a free resource for online retailers, providing research and insight into how online consumers are behaving and retailers responding. Eccomplished is run on behalf of its members, which include RichRelevance, Intelligent Reach and SaleCycle.
