by Mark Wheeler, CMO at enterprise CMS Storyblok
In the wake of a challenging 2023 holiday season, marked by an enduring cost of living crisis and cutbacks, the good news is that retailers can look forward to a welcome boost during this year’s festivities. As the economy recovers, spending is expected to rise by four percent to £88.29bn – the highest amount to date. That equates to an extra £3.39bn compared to last year and £14.03bn more than ten years ago.1 Of course, that is not to say that retailers can afford to rest on their laurels. The retail industry is more dynamic than ever. In this age of rapidly shifting consumer behaviours, evolving technologies, and intensified competition, consumer demands remain firmly on the ascent. This means it’s even more important to ensure that your business does everything it can to create a compelling customer experience that drives sales and secures seasonal share.
The key interface with your customer is more likely than not your website. However, our research, which surveyed 6,000 consumers and 500 businesses, found that 48% of businesses admit they are embarrassed by their website. Even so, many continue
to undervalue the importance of their website with only 28% citing improving website design as a priority and only 36% stating they would add more features. This is even though 60% of consumers regularly abandon purchases due to poor website user experience – costing retailers billions each year.
Of course, with the holiday season nearly here, that’s not to ignite unnecessary panic for busy marketers. Rather, my advice is simply to take the time to cast a sharpened, more critical gaze at your online offering.
The fact is that nearly every website can be improved and even making small incremental enhancements can have an outsized impact on conversions. Better still, thanks to the ease of integration and flexibility of modern martech solutions, there is still time to make changes.
To begin with, let’s consider some of the key reasons why your website might not be firing on all cylinders. Another useful data point our survey uncovered is that 42% of consumers say they decide whether to stay on or leave a website within 10 seconds with 20% saying they made that decision within 5 seconds. The top reasons for bouncing from a website are limited payment options, poor navigation or layout, and slow loading speeds.
Slow page loading times can also lead to lower performance in search engine ranking and higher costs per lead. This is because many of the factors that search engines such as Google use to determine rankings are influenced by load times. For example, user experience – faster loading pages leads to more engagement with content and return visitors, bounce rates – as mentioned people are more likely to quickly leave a slow loading website leading to higher rates and a lower ranking, dwell time – spending longer on a site tells Google that the content is potentially more valuable, which helps to boost rankings and mobile-friendliness – load times are a crucial factor in mobile SEO. Given that search budgets and SEO costs can often be 20-30% or more of a marketing budget, a poor performing website often results in severely reduced ROI. In short, speed is not just about a better customer experience, it’s about making your search spend go much further.
This provides a good starting point for looking at how you can make improvements. Your website data is an invaluable way to track customer behaviour and pick up clues on aspects of your website that are driving people away. So too is asking your existing customers. This might seem counterintuitive – surely they have purchased so they must think your site is fine? Well, chances are some may have converted despite your website, not because of it. Information collected directly from customers is often the most valuable you can obtain. A simple incentivised survey can help get the ball rolling on collecting this feedback.
When you’ve identified where your potential problem points are you can prioritise, in line with your budget and time you have available, where to make changes. How simple these issues are to rectify will depend on the marketing infrastructure you have in place. If you have a big monolithic tech stack you may find that integrating the tools and functionality you need is an expensive and labour-intensive undertaking. If this is the case, you should really consider taking steps to move towards composable architecture.
This opens the door to a range of new possibilities and is appropriate for businesses big and small. One of the key advantages, in the context of making quick and impactful upgrades to a website, is that it’s very easy to integrate tools specifically tailored to your requirements via APIs. Need more payment options? No problem, you can have them all integrated with minimal development costs and time. A great example of the huge gains to be had by investing in an agile, modern tech stack can be found in our recent work with the world’s largest retail association, the National Retail Federation (NRF). By migrating from an outdated legacy system to our headless solution, NRF has reduced website development time by a huge 70%.
Outside of making incremental improvements to your website, consider how your current setup enables you to maximise the impact of your marketing. Today’s digital-first consumers continue to demand more from the online experience. More than ever it’s about hyper-personalisation and customer centricity, anticipating and addressing their individual needs, inspiring demand, and providing products that are simple to purchase and supported with flexible after-care for a seamless digital transaction. Ideally, your business should have a system that allows you to quickly respond to these evolving needs and preferences on every relevant marketing channel with the right content at the right time. It should integrate into your sales and website analytics so you can easily track the effectiveness of each campaign, and decide which products need a harder push. Each conversion should also be followed up. If you find that your business is incapable of achieving this, then look at what you might be able to achieve in the short term.
Finally, when it comes to the bigger, long term picture, it may be worth considering whether there is a genuine business case for investing in a new tech stack. Ultimately, marketing effectiveness is only ever as good as the technology that underpins it. The reality is that if your current setup is overly complex and restrictive it could have real commercial impact if not addressed, as our research shows all too well. It’s also worth remembering that while mobile may still be a smaller proportion of the traffic, apps do still still deliver a material audience that can make a tangible impact to your bottom line. Using a legacy CMS system to support an app is often very time consuming and costly due to the duplication of work or the need for custom work to essentially maintain multiple environments versus one that ensures consistency across every digital channel.
Realistically speaking, investing in a new marketing approach and the infrastructure needed to support it, while a lot easier than you may think, might not be achievable in time for the holiday season. But, for the shrewd business looking to ensure relevance, create stand-out, and grow market share in 2025, it’s certainly one New Year’s resolution to add to the list.
1https://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/savings-guides/guides-reports/shopping-for-christmas-2024-the-christmas-period
