Chapter 7

Make your brand your customers’

When you deliver excellent customer service, you get great reviews. Customers are becoming more accustomed to checking reviews routinely before buying and are happy to return the favour to future customers by sharing their own experience after completing their purchase. In other words, reviews are fast becoming the new currency for anyone selling online. Companies without reviews look unprofessional; a company with many bad reviews will struggle to turn their luck, whilst companies with good reviews seem to do better and better – encouraged by the response to its good behaviour.

Why do people rely so heavily on the words of others? Does it make a difference beyond warm words and good feelings? Well, to understand the impact of a good review, we turn to search engine rankings.

An SEO advisory firm, Moz.com, analysed the actions of 1,000 people in terms of their search engine behaviour. When the team asked how far down the results people looked, 36 per cent of respondents said that they looked at the first two pages and beyond. However, their actual behaviour showed a different pattern. Data shows that people are more likely to look at less than 2 per cent of searches below the top five results on the first page. This shows us that people are not only unaware of their behaviour, but also much more discretionary in their decision making than they understand. What it did show was that people were prepared to look at both the first and second page of the Google search results, but only under test conditions. That means that they are unlikely to display these behaviours when working in their own time or carrying out ‘normal’ searches.

How do reviews impact on this?

Since search engines now include review ratings as part of their ranking algorithms, good companies tend to show further up, as the search engine deems them to be more recommendable businesses. Moz.com went back to its test group to ask how important online reviews were in terms of online purchase decision making. The research showed 67.7 per cent of respondents’ purchasing decisions were impacted by online reviews. More interestingly, more than half of the respondents (54.7 per cent) also claimed that online reviews are fairly, very or absolutely an important part of their decision-making process.

Not only will positive rankings generate the possibility of a potential customer finding your review before they find you, but a healthy number of positive reviews can help counteract any negative reviews you might get.

Some people are just never happy, though

The best thing you can do as a brand owner is to engage directly, by replying to negative feedback particularly (but also positive, just to say thanks). This is your chance to not just put things right for this particular customer, but, perhaps more importantly, show your prospective customers that you are a responsible business owner that always tries to put things right on the rare occasions things do not work out as planned.

Moz.com’s research showed that almost a quarter, 22 per cent, of customers will reconsider when one negative article is found by users thinking about buying a product. If three negative articles are found in one search, the potential for lost custom jumps to 59.2 per cent and a massive 70 per cent of customers will have doubts if they find four or more negative reviews.

How can you minimise the impact of a negative article?

Check the first two pages of Google searches, and other search engines, for negative reviews. Negative reviews are more likely to generate clicks and so will climb the rankings faster than positive reviews. This is a regular check and one that should be done in conjunction with taking the temperature of the online world. Are they feeling warmly towards you or are you getting the digital equivalent of a cold shoulder? Make a list of review sites important to you and your industry and review them.

The answer to counteracting negative reviews lies in increasing the number of positive reviews and it often falls to a brand’s digital team to ensure that they have control of the messaging contained in the reviews – not trickery, simply ensuring that your brand experience is up to scratch and driving your users to review.

How good are good reviews?

Good reviews increase customer conversion. Stats reveal that 47 per cent of Britons have reviewed products online. According to Reevoo stats, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6 per cent increase in conversion rates. Sixty-three per cent of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews.

Customer Strategy Consulting and think tank organisation thinkJar conducted research showing that 55 per cent of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. thinkJar CEO, Esteban Kolsky, highlights the word ‘guaranteed’, saying that customers are no longer satisfied with just being promised a good experience.

How do I start to get (good) reviews?

The first thing that you can do is to shake off the idea that you are imposing on your customers. If 67 per cent consider reviews in their purchase-making decision, it demonstrates that they are receptive to the idea in some way. There is a core of sensible approaches that can help you target the good reviews you have worked so hard to generate:

  1. Ask the right people
    Do not wait for the unhappy customers to start reviewing you; approach those you think have no reason to dislike you and ask them for help. If you are struggling to get anyone to say anything nice, you have to address their feedback in your offering to put a stop at least to future reviewers that are unhappy about the same thing.
  2. Timing is everything
    Knowing when to ask for a review is as important as knowing how to ask nicely. You need to capture both their imaginations and their comments when their experience is fresh in their minds.
    There are several smart touchpoints that you can use to collect reviews:
    • just after their last visit or transaction;
    • when they have passed a certain value spend or time loyal to the brand;
    • when you invoice them;
    • when they interacted with you or your team for any reason.
  3. Do not put words in their mouth
    Be transparent but not dishonest. When you ask them if they would like to review your product/brand/service, it is crucial to make sure that you do not try to sway their opinion in any way. Do not ask them for a good review or even a positive comment. Simply ask them for their honest opinion – it is perfectly fine to say that you use their reviews as an opportunity to improve your business, but it is also a chance to develop a trusting relationship with your clients. Yes, they will tell you what they do not like, and so they should, but they will also be able to tell you what they did like. Bear in mind that, often, it is harder to get a positive response from someone than a negative one.
  4. You can ask more than once
    Often, people genuinely want to support your business through a review, but finding the time might be a little trickier. Whilst your marketing software, like MailChimp, may show you that emails have been opened, it will not capture the intent of your customers. You may have caught them at a bad time and then they forget about it as it drifts down their inbox.
    Instead of sending the same thing out to the same people, simply segment the list into two and prompt the openers to have another go at your review. Send the same email with a different subject line to the non-opens. Just maybe, they will like this one better.
  5. Manners cost nothing
    When your customer has been kind enough to submit your review, make sure to have some way of monitoring what they said. Then, get back to them with a thank you for a good review. For a negative review, it may need a little more consideration. It is rarely a totally lost cause and how you respond to a negative review can turn the situation on its head.
  6. Use a third party
    Strategically, this is a clever move. Whilst that sounds mercenary, it is not. The objective is to secure as many reviews as you can and hope that they are more positive than negative. Using a review provider means that your customers are talking to an independent, third party and are more likely to be honest, than in a situation where they have to talk to you directly.
    People are increasingly getting used to dealing with these sites and may well have some form of trust with the third-party review provider. Review providers have also been finessed to make it as easy as possible for someone to leave a review. This means that you can leverage the investment that the review provider has made in their system, when you have an easy-to-use system.

Lessons for you

There is also an element of courage needed to seek reviews online, but, if you have your brand ducks in a line, this should be easier to bridge. As reviewers grow in strength and publishing prowess, it is likely that the power of the review only will increase as time goes on.

If reviews can increase sales and brand loyalty, the question must, then, surely, be not ‘If I decide to ask for reviews …’, but, rather, ‘How soon can I start?’ and ‘What format shall I use?’

Recommended actions

  • Short term/quick win
    Create an account with the review site that seems to have the biggest clout in your industry. Complete your profile and start to invite individual customers you think have had a good experience.
  • Medium
    Whenever you get reviews, good or bad, be quick to respond to thank them or offer a solution to put things right. This shows your future customers that you are taking them seriously.
  • Long term
    When a customer has received their goods or service (and are at their happiest), make sure you automatically send everyone an invite to review you. Sometimes, an entire review is too much effort for customers, so just ask them, at the very least, to let you know how likely they are to recommend you to a friend on a scale of 1–10 (see Google NPS for more details).

7.1 Expert commentary: Bazaarvoice

I met up with Prelini Udayan-Chiechi, vice-president marketing EMEA at Bazaarvoice, a marketing leader with over 20 years’ experience from SAAS, Software, IT, Telco and the finance sectors. She’s an accomplished public speaker and thought leader on social, marketing and customer experience specifically. Over the years, she has held senior positions with a range of high-profile organisations, such as Lithium, Adobe, IBM and Lotus Software among others. We talked about how profound the importance of consumer feedback has become and how it can affect not only a brand’s image, traffic to a website or online sales, but also offline results, such as instore purchases.

Bazaarvoice powers a network that connects brands and retailers to the voices of their consumers. Each month, more than 700 million people view and share authentic opinions, questions, and experiences about tens of millions of products in the Bazaarvoice network. The company’s technology platform amplifies these voices into the places that influence purchase decisions. Network analytics help marketers and advertisers provide more engaging experiences that drive brand awareness, considerations, sales, and loyalty. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Bazaarvoice has offices across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, Bazaarvoice has over 4,000+ customers globally.

Online reviews driving instore purchases

As the lines between online and offline platforms continue to blur, it’s crucial for both brands and retailers to understand the profound importance of consumer feedback and how it can affect not only a brand’s image, traffic to a website or online sales, but also offline results, such as instore purchases. As an example, according to a recent study Bazaarvoice conducted, 54 per cent of online buyers read online reviews before purchase, while 39 per cent of instore buyers read online reviews before purchase. Similarly, 31 per cent of online shoppers share recommendations and reviews with friends and social-network connections about what they bought, while consumers surveyed trusted the opinions of strangers online over those of friends and family.

Prelini says that authentic customer feedback has huge potential to positively influence buying intent and audience opinion. Acquiring more authentic consumer-generated content (CGC) will help businesses achieve higher conversion rates and create lasting, valuable relationships. It is important to note, as experiences have become richer, so has the need for richer content in the form of photos and videos. Thus, when we think of content that consumers are engaging with, and how organisations need to interact with their consumers, they need to evolve and use content that their customer base is using, whether that is text-based, visually enhanced or both.

It is crucial to remember that consumers have a fundamental right to trust the content they encounter, and it is a business’s responsibility to ensure authenticity of content at all times

Therefore, sharing authentic content is essential to building customers’ trust, particularly with today’s growing informed and connected consumers. A step a brand should consider towards earning this trust is displaying a trust mark along with the review, as it can demonstrate the brand’s commitment to authentic consumer feedback. In fact, in a research commissioned by Bazaarvoice, 84 per cent of consumers stated that they would feel more trusting of reviews if they knew the reviews were screened for fraud, moderated and displayed by a neutral, credible third party.

Contrary to business sense, brands still fear negative customer feedback; they consider it a threat to their image and reputation. This is because they simply cannot see the great value behind displaying and engaging with negative content, and treat these as insights and opportunities to improve their offering; CGC is a precious form of R&D for brands and retailers, as it can provide valuable insight that can inform better business decisions, lead to innovation and ameliorate the customer experience. Furthermore, there is also a lack of education among internal stakeholders on how to gather, respond to and leverage that feedback, which requires more of a paradigm shift to be accomplished, a change in the brand’s mentality about CGC as a whole. Additionally, given the cost involved and the technology required, some businesses may be reluctant to build a CGC-related strategy – that is why it is crucial to be properly informed about the ROI of investing into CGC.

When it comes to measuring a campaign’s success, it is no longer about traditional marketing results. Several forms of ROI manifest at different levels of interaction, extending beyond conversion increases to drive search traffic and reveal product improvement suggestions. As products continue to build volume of CGC, over time we have found that the conversion lift is just phase one of the cross-business benefits. Conversion rates see a steep incline as reviews stack up, and continue showing incremental increases well past 1,000 reviews. The SEO value of fresh CGC continually grows stronger as volume increases, even into the several hundreds and thousands.

As an example of this, Bazaarvoice have worked with Sealskiz and GHD. Their aim was to provide impartial information to make it easier for consumers to select products and improve conversion. GHD has experienced a 30 per cent uplift in conversion as a result of having ratings and reviews content on product pages in the UK, and even more in secondary markets in other countries, where they’re seeing anywhere from a 35 per cent to 127 per cent uplift in conversion when people interact with reviews. With Sealskinz, they worked to increase shopper-purchaser conversion and use input from customer reviews to learn about new customer demographics to target. As a result, in December of 2014 alone, Sealskinz saw a 102.6 per cent lift in conversion from visitors who engage with reviews compared to those who didn’t.

7.2 Case study: Gopak

British furniture manufacturer and retailer Gopak reveals how increased competition on page one of Google and the lack of 5-star ratings within search results led to a major new digital strategy and website project that included:

  • the development of new ecommerce SEO and PPC strategies;
  • the selection of an independent review platform to meet Google’s technical requirements for displaying Rich Snippets reviews in organic search results and ad seller ratings in paid search results;
  • reviews migration, launch and ongoing management.

Key findings

  • Adding 5-star ad seller ratings to PPC ads increased click-through rate by 29 per cent.
  • Ecommerce PPC revenue increased by 44.69 per cent year on year after launch.
  • Ecommerce SEO revenue increased by 96.88 per cent year on year after launch.

Interviewee

Diane Ponting is the sales and marketing director at Gopak. She joined the firm in 1984 and, over the last 32 years, has pioneered the adoption of innovative multi-channel sales and marketing strategies. Having been selling online for more than a decade, Ponting recently launched Gopak’s new ecommerce website with enhanced online marketing and business system integration capabilities.

About Gopak

Gopak is a British manufacturer and retailer of furniture, specialising in folding tables. Established in 1947, the original design included an innovative table top with steel folding legs that could be constructed without the need for screws or fixings. From humble workshop beginnings, Gopak’s range of over 6,000 tables, stacking benches and storage trolleys are now sold UK-wide with clients such as the BBC, Pinewood Studios and hundreds of schools.

Its online retail strategy

The Gopak online retail strategy is part of a wider multi-channel strategy that includes ecommerce, partner and catalogue sales. Therefore, the online retail strategy needs to support and work in tandem with the other sales channels to create a cohesive omni-channel customer experience.

Over more than a decade that Gopak has sold online, the online marketing channels that drive eCommerce sales have been continuously tested, honed and developed.

Whilst initially starting with marketing investment in niche directories, PR and advertising targeting specific segments of the market such as schools and universities, the Gopak ecommerce marketing channels now include Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns, Google Shopping campaigns, Bing Ads, SEO, content marketing and email marketing.

In recent years, new market entrants with considerable online brand authority, such as Amazon, Tesco and Ikea, made online trading conditions through search engines considerably more challenging and competitive.

With search marketing being a major source of online revenue, a significant investment in a new website with enhanced search engine friendly functionality and improved user experience for all sources of traffic was launched.

As part of this project, a brand new ecommerce SEO strategy was devised to combat the increased page-one competition in Google for high-traffic volume terms such as ‘folding tables’.

The new search marketing strategies deployed included identifying a wider selection of more audience-relevant keyword terms with higher buying intent and less competition such as ‘school folding tables’.

This led to constructing a completely new website architecture and URL structure to enable every type of new and returning visitor to arrive on the most appropriate page for their search, reducing the number of duplicate versions of pages in Google’s index and increasing both ecommerce SEO and PPC conversion rates.

After implementing the new website and correctly redirecting old pages using Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, new visitors who do not yet know the Gopak brand that are making category searches such as ‘school folding tables’ and returning visitors who know the brand already and are making more specific, longer tail searches such as ‘Gopak contour folding tables’ can find the Gopak website on page one of Google’s search results.

For the next 12 months, the expansion of the online product optimisation strategy is key. Product innovation is central to how Gopak established itself as a market leader and, therefore, ensuring integrated marketing communications of the existing and new product inventory across all channels will be the top priority for continued record-breaking ecommerce revenue.

The Case

The problem

Having previously experienced significant traffic and revenue from both the SEO and PPC channels, Gopak’s ecommerce SEO and PPC performance was suffering due to increased competition, together with an old website that was slow to load and not particularly user friendly.

Gopak had recently seen an explosion of competition on page one of Google from online supermarkets and market places, like Amazon and Tesco, offering low-cost folding tables for consumers, as well as third-party websites selling Gopak-branded products. Therefore, Gopak needed to protect brand terms as a priority to dominate the search engine results pages for product keywords, as well as increase brand awareness with new B2B customers.

As an established British manufacturer and retailer of folding tables for over 60 years, Gopak already had an extensive number of customer reviews on its website – many more than its new search competitors. However, Gopak’s 5-star ratings were not appearing in Gopak’s organic or paid search results.

As a result of this, Gopak wanted to launch a brand new ecommerce website in July 2014 that built on previous SEO successes as well as devising new ecommerce SEO, PPC and content strategies to be integrated within the site from launch to increase ecommerce revenue and conversions as soon as possible.

Background

Developing a new website presented Gopak with the opportunity to gain first mover advantage by displaying customer reviews within both organic and paid Google search results.

At the time, Gopak’s competitors, including Tesco, Ikea and Amazon, were not displaying 5-star customer reviews within their folding-table-related search results.

The advantages of including the customer reviews within organic search results were:

  • increased organic click-through rate due to attracting more attention than listings without any star ratings;
  • increased organic traffic to product pages which are more likely to have a higher conversion rate;
  • increased organic conversion rate due to independent verification of the brand in other customers’ own words;
  • increased organic revenue as a result of all the above;
  • increased organic rankings due to increased Google listing interaction and landing-page engagement.

The advantages of including the customer reviews within paid search results were:

  • increased paid ad click-through rate due to attracting more attention than adverts without any star ratings;
  • increased paid clicks to product pages that are more likely to have a higher conversion rate;
  • increased paid conversion rate due to independent verification of the brand in other customers’ own words;
  • increased paid revenue as a result of all the above;
  • increased paid positions and reduction in average pay-per-click cost due to an increased Google AdWords quality score that rewards increased Google ad interaction and landing-page conversion.

The major challenge for Gopak with enabling customer reviews to display into both organic and paid search results was that Google’s technical requirements were different for both SEO and PPC channels.

Gopak’s existing customer reviews published on their website were not being shown in the organic search results as they were not contained within the correct ‘Rich Snippets’ format that the Google search engine robots recognised.

However, even if the new website was coded in a way that the search engine robots could understand Gopak’s existing online reviews, these 5-star ratings would still be shown only in organic search results and not be shown at all within pay-per-click ads. This was because reviews published via Gopak’s own website were not independently verified by a Google-approved third-party review platform and therefore did not meet Google’s PPC requirements for reviews.

Whilst implementing a third-party review platform had the potential to display 5-star ratings in both SEO and PPC search results, this would still include only new reviews via the new platform from launch onwards and exclude all the existing reviews that had previously been provided via the website.

The solution

Ultimately, Gopak wanted to be found in both Google’s organic and paid search results with gold 5-star ratings, as well as presenting online shoppers with all of their historic reviews already published via their website.

Ecommerce SEO and PPC strategy

Gopak’s specialist ecommerce SEO and PPC agency, ThoughtShift, assessed the independent review platforms on the market to deliver the best solution for Gopak’s new ecommerce SEO and PPC strategies, which also met all of Google’s requirements and could work in conjunction with the existing website reviews.

Independent review platform strategy

Feefo was selected as the review platform because it provided Gopak with the features it was looking for.

Ecommerce SEO reviews strategy

As part of Gopak’s ecommerce SEO strategy for the new website, existing customer reviews were migrated across into the new website content and new independent third-party reviews were incorporated into the new product page design by Gopak’s web design agency, Lightmaker.

Table 7.1 Summary of review platform options

Table 7.1 Summary of review platform options

This was achieved by using a tabbed user experience so that customers would be able to switch between their choice of customer reviews, including organisation names that they may recognise and/or independently verified reviews where 100 per cent of reviews are guaranteed to be published. From the search engine’s perspective, both types of review content for each product is on one page, as the URL remains the same, providing Gopak with an extensive number of reviews per product page.

Rich Snippets markup was added to the schema code for all product pages containing parameters such as 5-star ratings, review comment, product price and product stock availability.

Rich Snippets code was then tested using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool available within Gopak’s Google Search Console to ensure the 5-star ratings were recognisable by Google and had the potential to be displayed in organic search results when deemed relevant by Google.

Where in the old web design there previously had been three different product URLs per product, these were combined into one product URL with the old variations being permanently redirected to the new master URL. This would reduce the number of similar pages within the organic search results, enable all of the disparate SEO equity that each separate URL had to be accumulated into each new product page and also display all the disparate reviews into one master set of reviews per product to further increase the amount of social proof.

The permanent 301 redirect server protocol for the new website architecture restructure was used for SEO migration best practice. This meant that search engine users finding existing organic search results would be automatically redirected to the new location and Google would transfer the accumulated authority of the old pages across to the new pages, rewarding the improvement with increased organic rankings, leading to increased SEO traffic and SEO revenue.

Ecommerce PPC reviews strategy

Due to 30 independent reviews being required by Google before the 5-star ratings are included within PPC ads, Gopak began setting up the new review platform processes months in advance of the new website going live so that the new ecommerce PPC campaigns would include the Ad Seller Ratings immediately from launch.

The new eCommerce PPC strategy for Gopak included researching new keywords that Gopak’s Google AdWords ads could appear in paid search results for, especially promoting products with independent reviews so that the gold 5-star ratings would be shown within the adverts.

Research techniques included analysing the voice of the customer identified from new and existing review comments, as well as product keywords proven previously to drive PPC revenue using data from Google Analytics.

New PPC ads were created featuring a combination of proven revenue driving keywords and new keyword gaps where the language matched that of previous customers that had left reviews. The new AdWords ads also included as many Google Ad Extensions as possible, such as Ad Seller Ratings, which not only increases the visibility of the adverts to increase click-through but is also a proven technique to increase Google AdWords Quality Score and grow PPC ROI.

Product Listing Ads (PLAs) were also created to display the 5-star Ad Seller Ratings within Gopak’s Google Shopping campaigns.

Reviews migration and launch

Before launch, tracking code for Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Remarketing, Bing Ads and Google Search Console was added to the website code to ensure that current ecommerce traffic, revenue and conversion rate results were benchmarked and future performance could be measured.

The ecommerce SEO and PPC reviews strategies were implemented and, as the number of reviews and independent reviews grew, ongoing adjustments were made to maximise the visibility of the gold 5-star ratings within Google’s organic and paid search results.

Results

The new ecommerce SEO and PPC review strategies launched at the end of July 2014 and monthly reports showed the impact as follows:

  • AB tests of PPC ads with and without Ad Seller Ratings found the gold 5-star increased click-through rate by 29 per cent.
  • PPC revenue for the three-month period immediately after launch between Aug–Oct 2014 increased 10.7 per cent to £113,342, compared to the same period the previous year (£102,378).
  • PPC revenue increased 44.69 per cent year on year to £49,559 by the third month after launch (Oct 2014).
  • The total paid media spend, including agency management fees for the three-month period between Aug–Oct 2014 was £13,522 and therefore the return on investment for PPC for the three-month campaign was 7.4 per cent.
  • SEO revenue over the three-month period between Aug–Oct 2014 (£79,950) was up 96.88 per cent year on year when compared to the same period in 2013 (£40,608).
  • SEO transactions between Aug–Oct 2014 increased 70.77 per cent year on year (130 v. 222).
  • The conversion rate increased 19.90 per cent year on year when comparing Aug–Oct 2014 to the same period the previous year.

Critical success factors

The critical success factors for implementing reviews that meet Google’s complex requirements were:

  • a fantastic team who work incredibly hard to continuously improve the customer experience;
  • innovative products that deserve great reviews;
  • a high volume of lovely customers who are keen to share their experiences;
  • new website design investment that presented the opportunities to solve the review problems, whilst increasing user experience and conversion rates;
  • specialist ecommerce SEO and PPC consultancy to advise on best practice for migrating existing reviews and adding new Google-approved reviews;
  • an independent review platform that automates the ecommerce review process, so Gopak reviews are displayed in both paid and organic search results, on the website and via a third-party directory of trusted sellers.

Lessons learned

Diane Ponting, sales and marketing director of Gopak, sums up the journey:

‘Jumping through the hoops that are necessary to get the 5-star ratings to appear in paid and organic Google search engine results is well worth the investment.

I would recommend that you certainly need to allow a number of months for the initial planning, redesign of product pages, migration of any existing reviews, set-up of new review processes and creation of newly optimised PPC and SEO campaigns.

Luckily we had a great ecommerce SEO and PPC strategy team to advise us on the pros and cons of the different review options and how our web designers should best incorporate our existing reviews with the new independent reviews.

Gopak has a fantastic 98 per cent Feefo Review Score from hundreds of reviews, our 5-star ratings appear within many of our organic and paid search results and that, combined with the new website and revamped ecommerce SEO and PPC campaigns, has seen PPC revenue increase 44.69 per cent year on year, SEO revenue increase by 96.88 per cent year on year and our conversion rate increase by 19.90 per cent year on year.

So, ultimately, implementing an integrated ecommerce SEO and PPC review solution has been invaluable, as our customers continue to provide social proof that Gopak is the UK’s leading folding table brand.’

Recommendations

  • Choose an independent Google-approved third-party review platform that provides product reviews as well as brand/service reviews, as only product reviews can be displayed in PPC ads.
  • Find a specialist ecommerce SEO and PPC company with proven experience of implementing reviews for both paid and organic search results.
  • Set up automated review processes, where possible, to be able to respond immediately to feedback and continuously improve the customer experience.

7.3 Expert commentary: authentic customer dialogue

I met up with Carl Waldekranz, co-founder and CEO of Tictail, to discuss why offering your customers the option to chat to you is the key to success in customer service. Waldekranz was listed on the ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ in the ecommerce and retail category and his company Tictail is an ecommerce platform that makes it easy to build an online store. So far, over 100,000 SMEs have already done it. For more information about Tictail, visit: https://tictail.com.

Waldekranz explains, ‘At Tictail we spend a lot of time helping to arm small business owners with the tools they need to best build global brands. Throughout our research, across the board, live chat is the preferred communication channel. Ninety-five per cent of shoppers opt for it when given the choice.’

Large companies like Facebook, WhatsApp and WeChat are giving brands a voice to serve their customers’ needs. And this makes sense. We all use messaging as our primary form of communication with friends and colleagues. It is intuitive and real-time. It is asynchronous. It is mobile-centric.

Waldekranz thinks the next phase for online retailers will be to bring live chat functionality in-house. Just as customers hate the feeling of calls being outsourced, so, too, do online shoppers literally give up on a sale if they do not have access to the help they need, when they need it.

First step: mobile integration. By the end of 2015, Facebook Messenger was being used by 800 million active users, the perfect proof point to how friends want to engage with their friends on the platform home to all their friends. And via mobile.

Tictail’s own stats confirmed the story we have discussed in this book already: over 60 per cent of all purchases on their system are now on mobile devices, with the numbers only increasing. Mobile is not only a growing sales channel, but a channel where engagement actually multiplies business. According to Waldekranz, they see that engaged mobile buyers are spending 40 per cent more than the average buyer.

Carl continues, one of the biggest assets a small business owner has over huge, faceless companies, is the ability to create a lasting and personal relationship with each and every customer. Whilst Jeff Bezos does not have enough time in a day to reach out to each and every Amazon customer and thank them for their business, small business owners do.

Building these relationships and establishing engagement leads to active consumers. Shoppers that engage with a Tictail brand, for example by liking products, following the store and sending direct messages, are almost twice as likely to make a repeat purchase from the same store.

Recommendation

Waldekranz’s recommendation to growing online retailers is to create an engagement tool where shoppers can interact as much as possible with a brand – even before a sale takes place. Furthermore, use that tool as an ongoing log of individual customer conversations. In-app messaging helps to extend a relationship beyond the sale. Merchants can follow up with shoppers to check in and see how they like their product, to offer discount codes and send first-look images of new collections.

Direct chat creates an equally accessible channel of communication from either party: the shoppers who want additional details beyond what is available online, and the small business owner who wants to engage proactively with a shopper regarding an upcoming sale, event, restocking or more.

7.4 Case study: Grabble.com – getting mobile right

Whilst some online retailers are focusing on understanding offline retailing, the founders of the fashion discovery site Grabble.com were busy building an addictive mobile experience.

This is a case about Grabble’s mission to make discovering fashion and trends simple. However, Grabble’s journey to developing a ‘sticky’ app to accomplish that was anything but.

Initially having invested over a year into looking to optimise a web-based user experience, Grabble realised that its not-yet launched product was already outdated, as Millennials were flocking to mobile instead.

With a matter of weeks before Angel investment ran out, the company used insights gleaned along the way to quickly develop an app. It was launched to the younger end of its audience first, in the belief that they would be the easiest to convert if marketed to authentically. The approach and plan paid off.

Key findings

Fourteen months on, the social commerce platform has now found its winning formula. It puts the market, not the product, first and is focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience.

  • Highly engaged audience – 26 per cent monthly active users.
  • Investment focused on delivering customer service and real-time messaging.
  • Constant product development to satisfy Millennials’ high expectations of being able to access curated content and personalised experiences whenever suits them.

Interviewee

Daniel Murray is the co-founder and CMO at Grabble. A serial entrepreneur, Murray’s inspiration for Grabble came whilst working at a daily deals site he co-founded. As one of Drapers’ ‘30 under 30’, he represents the next generation of the UK fashion industry.

About Grabble

Founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Daniel Murray and Joel Freeman, Grabble is a social commerce platform that seeks to change the way Millennials discover fashion online. The app, tipped by Forbes as one of ‘London’s hottest start-ups to watch,’ takes a different approach from the fashion retail industry.

Handpicked by a team of expert stylists led by Cherry Collins (Ex Grazia, Selfridges and Net-A-Porter), the mobile-only app is a daily edit of the best designer and high-street pieces. It allows users to take inspiration, save and buy from curated fashion, lifestyle and beauty collections.

As a young entrepreneur, Murray turned to the Shell LiveWIRE Youth Enterprise programme, which secured him a £1,000 start-up grant. A few months later, he won the annual competition, providing £10,000 in funding. The funding helped with the development and marketing of the app ahead of launch. Within the first two months, Grabble generated 20,000 downloads, trended nationally on Twitter and featured on the iTunes and GooglePlay stores as ‘Best New App’ in 34 countries.

Within 12 months, Grabble raised £1.2 million from high-profile Angel investors in London and Silicon Valley, and grew from a team of 3 to 20 in a few months.

Hosting products from over 200 brands, such as Topshop, Mango and Zara, Grabble has become popular with retailers because the app integrates seamlessly with their websites and provides a user-friendly way of showcasing products on mobile devices.

Since launching the app in August 2014, 350,000 users have signed up, ‘Grabbing’ more than 900 million items worth £63 billion. Since adding a native checkout, they have tracked over £750,000 worth of sales. For more information, visit: www.grabble.com.

Its online retail strategy

As brands and technology continue to evolve, it became clear to Grabble that mobile retail is the future for connecting to, and winning over, Millennials. In reality, this meant that the brand’s mobile strategy has had to be agile enough to continually adapt to meet the ever-changing demands of its users.

Millennials are a challenging bunch who are very active, typically in transit, and hold down competitive, premium jobs. Mobile is their playground because it keeps them up to date when they do not have the time or inclination to investigate the latest products from major retailers or read magazines.

These audience insights led Grabble to develop a product that would build up meaningful, trusted relationships with users through enhanced user experience, content curation and by providing real-time solutions to their needs. Product development remains an iterative, ongoing process because the audience is both difficult to satisfy and has high expectations of being able to get their hands on curated content and personalised experiences whenever suits them.

Customer service is also crucial to winning the support of Millennials who define themselves by being ‘busy’, and will gravitate towards companies who create a personalised relationship of trust with them, becoming part of their world.

Grabble recognises that the single biggest challenge to, and impact on, ecommerce in the coming years will be how messenger apps become an essential open platform to communicate with customers. Phone support, waiting on hold and talking to automated systems will become defunct as people expect the ability to message and receive an immediate response. Since launching its live chat option, Grabble has seen the volume of support emails fall by 73 per cent, demonstrating Millennials’ strong preference for messaging.

The winners in mobile commerce will be those committed to customer experience, and Grabble is investing in driving this mission forward.

The Case

The problem

At launch, Grabble was operating in what was expected to be a high growth area – social commerce. Social commerce had taken off in the USA but not yet in the UK, so the company believed there was an opportunity to build a product for a Millennial audience. At the heart of their mission was taking a fresh approach to product discovery, in response to the web becoming a noisy place saturated with different brands and experiences.

However, in developing their web-based social commerce platform, there were three insurmountable key issues:

  1. Due to the way affiliate marketing operated online, there was a significant delay between being able to track a click and seeing whether the sale had been completed. This lack of real-time understanding of the customer’s behaviour created a real challenge when it came to understanding their journeys, conversion rates and re-engagement opportunities.
  2. The customers’ mobile journeys were becoming increasingly difficult to track, which left users less able to follow their orders. Poor tracking, coupled with slow loading times on mobile web, meant the churn rate increased due to the ecommerce experience being limited when compared to a native app.
  3. By focusing on a Millennial audience, who was rapidly changing its entire user behaviour, Grabble had to adopt a completely different approach to engage and retain it.

Ultimately, Grabble concluded that the web was a great place to publish, and, therefore, its approach to discovery through community curation was a viable concept. Users were satisfied clicking ‘buy’ on an affiliate site, which opened a new tab for the retailer’s domain where they actually purchased.

However, on mobile, this all changed. Users were willing only to consume content rather than participate in creating it, which meant that Grabble had to change its vision of how ‘discovery’ could be serviced to its audience. Users were also frustrated by being sent to mobile checkouts, so the end-to-end user experience involving purchase in app had to be thought out from scratch.

The background

Grabble had set up to solve the problem of fashion discovery and inspiration for its users. It had spent close to a year, and in the region of £300,000, developing a platform for web that would enable users to save their favourite products, sourced from other sites, and receive sale alerts.

Yet, in the time it took to fully optimise this experience, the question of how to best engage Millennials on web had completely disappeared, as their audience instead flocked to mobile for discovery. To compound this issue, Grabble had a month’s worth of funding remaining. Existing investors were unwilling to reinvest due to lack of traction with the web product and, without seeing evidence of the new mobile concept, new investors were scarce.

The solution

Grabble knew through insight that mobile was the opportunity to fully engage with their audience, and made the difficult decision to cease developing on web. This meant an existential shift of focus towards questioning what made for a ‘sticky’ mobile app and how to adapt their social commerce mission.

They noted the ‘mobile first’ user experience was the key, but, rather than ripping up the rule book, they analysed the popular apps – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Tinder, etc. – and determined that the strongest feature of these was doing one thing well.

Grabble’s web competitors had mostly shut down over the course of the year, which indicated they might be next. However, they could not pinpoint any particularly engaging mobile app that felt like it would be successful.

They instructed their designer and developer to build mock ups in HTML5 with the brief of creating a ‘Tinder for fashion’. They then took the concepts to a shared workspace, asking 50 people which they preferred. From observing engagement and responses, there was a clear winner. Research noted that simplicity was king on mobile and would create the ‘wow factor’ for their audience, providing the company a new, commercially viable focus.

The approach

The new remit was to create an iPhone app that, from an engagement perspective, utilised the ‘Tinder’ style user experience (UX) of swiping. Grabble had built the technology that enabled it to ‘scrape’ and, therefore, instantly add products from any other site back onto its platform, giving it an inordinate amount of flexibility when it came to merchandising the product or, rather, filling it with content.

Grabble knew its wider market was the coveted Millennial audience, but, faced with a funding timeline that put it under immense pressure, it decided to attack the younger end of this audience first. Students were the agreed focus and the ‘Tinder for Fashion’ concept was used to attract them.

Timing for relaunch

With four weeks to go before exhausting their funding, they informed their team honestly of the company’s position and that, rather than wind the four weeks down trying incremental marketing tests to attract users, they would go with one big bang to try to make an impact. With two weeks to go, they decided that ‘trending’ nationally was the only real, obvious way they could have the kind of impact required. They researched and then actioned the key tactics that would have the best chances of helping them gain traction.

Launch marketing

With one week to go, they launched their campaign through Twitter on a cold Sunday night after football and before X Factor had started – two golden rules discovered about making an impact on a Sunday on Twitter – the platform’s busiest period. Knowing that they would have the best initial impact with a university student market (given the ‘Tinder for’ aspect), they got in touch with hundreds of Twitter account owners and offered to pay them to tweet (between £10 and £50 for the tweet). To ensure maximum impact, Grabble planned for all the tweets to be published in the same 20-minute window when Twitter traffic was predicted to be heavy but the nationally popular tweets were less frequent (i.e. football).

To ensure a feel of authenticity, the one specific rule to the tweets was that they did not look like marketing and never mentioned ‘download Grabble’, which was the fastest way to turn off their target demographic and guarantee zero engagement.

Research showed that, to trend on Twitter, a hashtag or @ was unnecessary, and they launched a number of memes and tweets talking from the account owner’s tone of voice, whilst the topic focus was to say something mysterious about Grabble to provoke intrigue. An example was the page ‘Lord of the Rings Reactions’, which had hundreds of thousands of very engaged followers.

They tweeted a picture of Frodo at Mount Mordor holding the ring, which said, ‘That feeling when you finally find that ring on Grabble’. This was retweeted over 10,000 times in seconds, and was one of 200 accounts with similar success. Within 10 minutes, they were trending, and the engagement on Twitter was coming from the general public asking what Grabble was and engaging in a conversation about how everyone was suddenly talking about it.

During the course of an hour, they had seen tens of thousands of tweets come in, causing a huge surge in downloads, crashing their servers, much to their disappointment. However, by the time they got back up, the downloads were still coming in fast and, by Monday morning, they had surged to number 7 in the app store and were featured that week in ‘Best New Apps’ on the App Store.

The campaign had cost them £5,000 and had been a risk but, following its success, they were able to approach their investors again, who rapidly put money into the company. They swiftly raised £750,000 with a vision of building a mobile company, and began identifying the key hires to achieve that goal. Having previously run their tech from an outsourced team to save costs, they now looked to build an in-house team. Key roles such as CTO fashion director, head of growth (marketing), lead iOS developer, product manager and lead designer were brought into the team to drive value and build at speed.

The team decided on a three-pronged communication strategy; the founders’ (Daniel Murray and Joel Freeman) vision on mobile commerce, the fashion director’s (Cherry Collins, ex Net-A-Porter and Selfridges lead stylist) profile and taste/experience, and the brand’s mission to make shopping on mobile fast, fun, addictive and simple. They sought to use the key spokespeople to build the brand, putting themselves on the front line. They were rewarded with a high-profile investment round from leading angel investors, awards and continued product growth.

However, because mobile commerce is such a new area, there were not really any clear business models or approaches to replicate, and the team tried to execute a traditional ecommerce model focused on lifetime value, forcing consumers towards an industry leading mobile commerce checkout with an 18 per cent conversion rate.

It shortly became clear that this was an impossible focus for their strategy; winning in ecommerce requires driving margin and volume, which is counter-intuitive to how people were comfortable using mobile. Also, to flourish on mobile, the product must be ‘sticky’, meaning people need to come back regularly enough to not delete the app. If the team focused solely on commerce, they were unable to engage users to return regularly enough. These learnings saw Grabble shift its focus to content, which was a huge success and helped create one of the stickiest products in the market.

Results

Grabble has succeeded where many have failed. It has built a mobile commerce environment that is ‘sticky’ (users come back regularly) because it was agile and able to adapt to the market whilst learning on the go. With no prior experience of what the industry key metrics should be for benchmarking in its area – it approached venture capital firms (who see many similar companies) to get a sense of what was deemed ‘great’ in various known industries on mobile.

Typically, social apps would see 30 per cent monthly active users (MAU) and ecommerce apps would see around 5–10 per cent. Grabble assumed that being both content and commerce, it should aim for somewhere between these figures. At the time of publishing, the MAU is 26 per cent, which certainly contributes to their ability to engage users regularly and build traction and buzz around their product. One of the key ways they tested their proposition along the way was to use net promoter score (NPS) ratings. Whenever preparing to release a new feature or change strategy, Grabble made sure, in a control group of usually 15, that the NPS score was at least 7 to ensure success.

Critical success factors

There are three major factors that Grabble feels contributed to its success:

  1. They have operated in a highly agile way, testing concepts that they believed would cause an addictive consumer interaction for their product and therefore drive people back to it every week/month.
  2. They have been proactive in driving the product forward – moving quickly on new ideas and strategies and consistently developing an innovative, market-leading product.
  3. They have focused on consumer feedback and put customer service at the heart of their business. This has given them an open platform for understanding the voice of their end user, who is, ultimately, the person controlling the success of their execution.

Lessons learned

The key lesson learned after a year was to focus on the market not the product. In spending too long iterating and developing their product they had neglected their mission – to make discovery simple – and the product was ineffectively executed. As such, in year two, they were quick to conceive and test a hypothesis, measure the results and change it accordingly.

By doing so, they produced seven different iterations and ‘pivots’ of the Grabble mobile app in year two before settling on a content-focused mobile product that began to reap the rewards with cohort data, proving they had finally surfaced the winning formula.

The team also learned about hiring people; having hired successful people who had ‘done it all before’ at established companies, they realised these people were more fearful of change and set in their ways, which is an inappropriate way to think in a start-up. They opted, instead, to nurture up and coming talent, as these are the types of people who understand how to create change, not resist it.

They have been very passionate on their hiring strategy and follow a mantra to ‘hire fast, fire faster’ if people have not felt like the right fit for their long-term success. As Daniel Murray said on reflection, ‘The people with the best people win.’

Recommendations

  • Build technology that is scalable but with the understanding that platforms and operating systems change fast. This ensures you are not overly reliant and your business does not die as these develop. Essentially, there is no perfect solution. Instead, build the right tech at the right time that works, then move on to the next challenge rather than finding perfection everywhere. If the whole question changes, the technology you might have spent so much time on can make you obsolete.
  • To succeed in your market area, you need ruthless focus. Are you a consumer- or business-focused operation? If you are business-focused, aka B2B, you will need to solve problems for your retailers/partners that fit into their technical stack properly. If you are consumer-focused, you must ignore any friction with your partners and focus on optimising every part of the consumer journey effectively, and efficiently, fast. This is where many start-ups and companies fail – they try to solve too much at the same time. If you want to be a B2C – make sure you are learning, adapting, innovating and reinventing your product rapidly and regularly based on your learnings, and worry about the other bits later.
  • At a very high level, suggest a proposition/concept and rationalise why it makes business sense. Ideally, test the theory with a control group and then build it in a quick, efficient way by building a minimal viable product rather than a full-blown version. If you are wrong in your assumptions, you will find out by tracking the user data and behaviour – and do not be afraid to change tack.
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