09.12.2009Getting under Next customers’ skins by Rob Smith
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
As some of you may know, we work with a number of retailers helping them with their ecommerce operations. One of those companies is Next where we operate one of their 3rd party websites that sells Made to Order products such as curtains, blinds and some furniture.
It’s now been going close to 2 years and so we have a nice wodge of data that we can analyse to see the trends that are appearing. The most interesting relationship we’re seeking to understand at the moment is that between sampling (getting free samples of curtain fabrics in the post) and purchase of an actual product.
We recently sent out an email to all those people that didn’t purchase but had ordered samples, it’s been pretty successful, generating a good number of orders and paying for itself many many times over. On analysing the data of those that purchased on the promotion, we found that there seemed to be a optimum time between samples bought and the purchase date. We’e now thinking of setting up a system to take advantage of this new found optimum date to remind people at that time.
We’re now looking to delve deeper into the sample to purchase relationship to see how we can:
- Convert more people to order from sampling
- Reduce the level (and therefore cost) of sampling without reducing orders
Which should result in some pretty huge return on investment.
I think some ecommerce websites can focus too much on their traffic sources, increasing traffic from X route and their conversion rate, and not always think about some of the other simple measures on their site such as registration, sampling (if you have it) and other metrics. Are you obsessed by traffic and not behaviour?
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