Digital Strategy & E-Commerce – 28 key insights from FIRST

Apr 24, 2014 | Digital Strategy

FIRST Process Diagram v2-02

FIRST on Digital Strategy & E-Commerce

  1. Digital programme performance is slowly but surely being recognised as a key driver for corporate performance: 31% of CEOs now personally sponsor digital initiatives, up from 23% in 2012. And yet: “Only 36% say their companies have a top-line metric for monitoring their digital programs’ overall progress” (McKinsey). (Source: mckinsey.com)
  2. Another thought-provoking post from Avinash, as always: “CPC is a profoundly silly indication of your search strategy success. It causes companies to make silly decisions, which leads to poor results (both for the digital strategy and your career).” (Source: kaushik.net)
  3. A nice and succinct definition for omnichannel retailing: “Online, offline, it’s gotta be the same” – Angela Ahrendts, SVP of Retail, Apple (soon). (Source: econsultancy.com)
  4. Custora Pulse has launched. Benchmark your e-com performance against the aggregate and find out just how good your digital marketing really is (% orders by channel breakdown, eg SEO) – 70M consumers, 1B revenue data pool (US only). (Source: blog.custora.com)
  5. Nice move by Shopify to give bitcoin currency a go. Merchants can now apply to have this payment option enabled on the gateway. (Source: coindesk.com)
  6. Clearly, Google is serious about monetising product search. (Source: forbes.com)
  7. Note: The lifetime value of new customers acquired through Paid Search (SEM) and Display Advertising drops by about 13% over the Dec/Jan period, compared to the channel average for the same period (Custora). (Source: blog.custora.com)
  8. “Oh, hi there Amazon, we’re just practising our logistics/integration” – from Google, Costco, Target and friends. (Source: wired.com)
  9. The median load time for the top 2,000 retail sites is 7.25 seconds for a first-time visitor (March 2013) – 22% slower than last year (Infographic). (Source: getelastic.com)
  10. eBay knows that a key driver for the number of product listings is seller convenience. “Sell it Forward” is a brilliant initiative to achieve this goal, whilst also making a small difference in the world (San Fran only).(Source: venturebeat.com)
  11. Suburbean Brisbane retail at its finest..? – Aussie small shop charges $5 “just looking” fee: “If you are going to be asking bucket loads of questions, you are going to have to pay for the information…we are not a charity.” (Source: techcrunsh.com)
  12. From your roots in digital through to “experiential high touch retail” with one of the nation’s top stores. Seriously good work Michael & team. This will work well. (Source: retailbiz.com.au)
  13. With so much scope for integration, as a marketer it might be difficult to focus on the actual end-goal itself: A great customer experience (that drives profit). Nevertheless, here’s the latest rundown on the marketer’s software toolkit for 2014 across Internet services, infrastructure, “backbone platforms”, marketing middleware, marketing experiences software as well as marketing operations. (Source: chiefmartec.com)
  14. PrepPad: A scale that let’s you quantify your diet with actual data. Understand exactly what you’re going to eat via info from the iPad app (using data the PrepPad sends via Bluetooth) – before you eat it. Watch the video, very cool. (Source: gigaom.com)
  15. Google Maps as an analysis and commercial decision making tool? – Yep. We also like the idea of every user being thought of as a cartographer. (Source: thenextweb.com)
  16. Strategic planning: Fancy plans and little action? – Try using the levels of strategy approach, borrowed from the architectural design process. (Source: blogs.hbr.org)
  17. Gartner’s spin on the world: Every company will ultimately be a technology company and every business will ultimately become a digital leader. Agree? (Source: gartner.com)
  18. Nice write up of the interesting investments being made in some of the promotion, amplification and optimisation players operating in the content marketing ad ecosystem by Nick Gregg, CEO of StrategyEye. (Source: venturebeat.com)
  19. eMarketer is estimating Amazon’s 2013 global ad revenues after traffic acquisition costs (TAC) at over US$ 800M. Where’s the value? Post-transactional targeting data. (Source: emarketer.com)
  20. AmazonFresh is coming to LA and San Fran. Interesting to read Bezos mentioning “getting the right mix of economics and customer experience”. Given they’ve been testing for 5 years in Seattle it sounds like they are just about ready to scale it up proper. (Source: reuters.com)
  21. Shel Israel is correct when he says: “Advertisers [need to] understand and measure the loss of goodwill that occurs when they produce more noise than signal across all communications channels.” (Source: blog.hubspot.com)
  22. What exactly is digital transformation? It’s an overall change of process, change of organisational design and a commitment to employee education. (Source: econsultancy.com)
  23. Altimeter research report on the strategic use of content marketing: What scalable organisational models exist for addressing content needs across the enterprise, what are the models for governance and distribution? (Source: web-strategist.com)
  24. The three V’s of Big Data, forming the basis for competitive advantage: Volume, velocity and veracity (truthfulness). (Source: marketingmag.com.au)
  25. Tim Cook: Yes we do have a bit of cash. Key projects for using up some of that 137B include investing in R&D, supply chain and infrastructure (9B), saving it for possible acquisitions (“we’re disciplined and thoughtful”) and investing in retail (30 more stores in 2013). (Source: gigaom.com)
  26. The more subscription-based content deals Apple can close, the more attractive this product will become. (Source: bloomberg.com)
  27. And this why Apple needs to work out fairly quickly how to turn some of their spare cash into a greater competitive advantage. Google will be waiting to slap some (more) ads on whatever Apple comes up with. (Source: venturebeat.com)
  28. Device-optimised streaming video: Amazon continues to build out AWS, it’s obvious to see how this will play an important part in many existing businesses and ones not even launched yet. (Source: venturebeat.com)