Industry Experts & Pubs Weigh in on Key Learnings from eTail West 2012

It’s officially been one week since coming back from a jam-packed eTail week, where retailers and solution providers alike were abuzz with conversation about where the world of multichannel retail is going. From email marketing to PPC optimization to customer experience to mobile strategies, there was no lack of stimulating discussion throughout the whole eTail West 2012 event.

conference session

We posted a few summaries of key sessions while there (David’s Bridal, Stifel Nicolaus, CoffeeforLess.com), and have a few more coming your way. But for now we want to share some of the best roundups from others who have been kind enough to put their learnings into succinct articles (doing our job for us? Yes, please! Just kidding…) that highlight some of the best points from the various sessions throughout the four-day event. Here we go – and for everyone on here who has written these – thank you!

Mobile Commerce Daily: One of the best industry resources for news about mobile commerce, Mobile Commerce Daily summed up the key learnings about mobile which its staff of writers learned while at the event. The article pointed out some of the best tips learned at the event, including, but not limited to the following:

• Understand your mobile customer’s journey and intention
• Create a consistent, relevant and targeted cross-buying experience to fully engage the customer
• Design for the five-minute experience
• Tailor the user experience to the device being used, in other words, handset optimization
• Mirrored online interface to provide a consistency for your consumer
• Implement advanced share tools such as Facebook/Google + comment box, tweet and moShare to allow the customer to evangelize your brand
• Hyper-personalize each shopper’s experience

Read the full article here.

Mogreet: Mobile CRM platform provider and mobile marketing specialist, Mogreet, wrote a five part series detailing all the learnings from eTail West. Very thorough and informative! Parts one through four are posted on the company’s blog, and part five is on the way. The topics are as follows:
1. Are you mobile ready? – Massive impact mobile will have on retail in the next 3 years.
2. Optimize your website for mobile, yesterday! – Mobile landing pages
3. Diversify the campaign – Multichannel integration
4. Think before you leap – Social media: strategies before tactics
5. Every customer is unique – Personalize customer experiences through optimized content

Read the articles here.

PitneyBowes: The leader in postage meters and machines wrote a wrap up of the event, highlighting keys to success such as “focus” and “restraint,” and discussing challenges in going global with ecommerce operations. The article states the key takeaways from the event as follows:
– International ecommerce is moving up the strategic queue, but more evangelizing and senior executive level support is necessary.
– Leaders are starting to focus more on innovative digital marketing solutions that can help them increase international demand.
– International shipping costs are artificially high in part because U.S. ecommerce companies simply hand off international orders to their domestic U.S. shipping partners. Much can be done to fix this. Do so ASAP!
– Really understand your company’s core competency and focus your resources on expanding that core competency internationally if you want to go global successfully.
– Make sure that local in-country support teams understand how strategic ecommerce is to the future of your brand.
– International ecommerce initiatives require both an internal executive in charge and other champions within the senior management rank.
– Don’t overlook the impact of international returns on the international online shopping experience.

Read the full article here.