Overview
As the COVID lockdowns prompted a heightened reliance on online shopping experiences, our company seized the opportunity to accelerate its longstanding ambition for Ecommerce excellence. As the company was restructuring IT across the business unit, they had simultaneously entrusted me with spearheading a dedicated Ecommerce team to prioritize Ecommerce initiatives. Over two years of collaborative efforts between our five-person Ecommerce unit and IT, what strides did we make?
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Challenge
Within the organization, the Ecommerce platform faced hurdles in garnering internal support due to various teams treating it as a side project. Additionally, the marketing team was preoccupied with maintaining legacy websites with Ecommerce functionalities. The overarching objective was to align with a unified brand strategy, necessitating the consolidation of disparate platforms into a singular website and Ecommerce system. The goal was to shift the Ecommerce focus from IT-driven to business-led, facilitating its evolution into a potent digital commercial channel capable of generating incremental revenue and expediting new customer acquisition.
Approach
Alignment with Senior Leadership: Collaborated closely with senior leaders to define the desired outcome and establish clear benchmarks for success.
Ground-Level Insight Gathering: Engaged with frontline teams to assess the current state of affairs and identify existing gaps and challenges involving the ecommerce platform.
Stakeholder Workshops: Facilitated interactive workshops involving diverse stakeholders to gain comprehensive insights into the intricacies of ecommerce operations and to collectively brainstorm strategies for its evolution.
Solution
To establish a self-sustaining ecommerce team, we prioritized a holistic approach encompassing:
UX: Crafting seamless digital experiences and functionalities to enhance platform usability and engagement.
Growth Marketing: Strategizing customer adoption and onboarding techniques to drive traffic and boost platform visibility.
Merchandising: Optimizing the path to purchase by ensuring products are presented effectively and customers can easily find what they need.
Analytics: Implementing a robust reporting system with daily, weekly, and monthly analyses to monitor performance, identify trends, and assess KPIs. Leveraging this data allows for informed decision-making, continuous improvement prioritization, conversion optimization, and campaign refinement.
Governance: In addition to establishing the ecommerce team, we also partnered with commercial IT in establishing governance and process that we reviewed regularly to ensure that our cross-functional team is running smoothly.
Outcome
Expanded Customer Base: Doubled the number of long-tail customers and tripled new customer adoption, indicative of an enhanced market presence and the development of a robust lead pipeline for the direct sales team to cultivate into larger accounts.
Operational Efficiency: Achieved a 30% increase in transactions, streamlining operations and allowing customer service to allocate more time to handling complex orders, while routine orders were efficiently processed through the Ecommerce platform.
Merchandising Success: Implemented a variety of Merchandising programs aimed at enhancing Product Detail Pages (PDPs), resulting in a notable increase in revenue and items ordered. Detailed results will be elaborated in a separate article, highlighting the effectiveness of optimizing PDPs for conversion.
Lessons Learned
Establishing a team for roles that were previously non-existent within the organization, particularly in a function not fully understood by the broader team, underscored the critical importance of internal communications. Repeating key messages across various formats and forums proved instrumental in embedding the desired narrative and to help the organization better understand our purpose and performance. Plus, relying on analytics to support our decisions was crucial. Numbers and insights often had more impact than just words alone.