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Recap of Shop.org 2015

October 9, 2015 — by MediaMath    

This post originally appeared on the Adroit Digital blog

It was another great year at Shop.org as thousands took to the City of Brotherly Love to soak up the facts, figures, trends, insights and new technologies that are influencing retail advertising. The biggest retail show of the year didn’t disappoint—in swag or in content. In addition to a great BIG !deas Session on driving the right marketing outcomes moderated by our President Jacob Ross and including iProspect and Blue Moon Digital, we liked that many sessions had actionable takeaways for retail marketers. Here are a few themes we picked up from the National Retail Federation’s signature event.

Get married to your customers

Is it love at first site? A big theme at the show this year was about cultivating not just customer loyalty but customer lifetime value. As Sandi Michels, AVP CRM & Ecommerce of Dress Barn, put it during the session The Power of Customer Lifetime Value, “We tend to count customers and not take into account the future value of the segment.” Especially in Q4, many retail marketers are trying to drive as many customers to their sites and stores as possible. Customer lifetime value is not about numbers. Rather, it enables brands to assess the overall health of the customer database, not just how many are on file. In another session, a speaker mentioned that 80 percent of future profits come from 20 percent of existing customers. Take better stock of who your most valuable customers are and focus your efforts there.

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Mobile gone micro This year, $970 billion in sales will be influenced by mobile, representing 2x of all ecommerce sales. But the experience consumers are having on mobile is not fluid. Rather, 59 percent of time spent on mobile is split into hundreds of micro-sessions lasting an average 70.8 seconds. As an individual retailer or advertiser, you are only going to capture a fragment of your target customers’ time. So make the content count. Create relevant, digestible advertising that makes a quick impression to get the conversion. Key quote:  

Gifting is ginormous

In the session 10+ Things You Can Do to Make More Money Next Week – Holiday 2015 Edition, CEO of Loop Commerce Roy Erez of said gifting is a $200 billion market in which people buy more than 20 gifts a year. But most gifts are not bought during the December holidays. Birthdays are actually the most popular occasion for gift-giving. Millennials are the most likely of any consumer age group to give gifts “just because,” and many consumers, regardless of age or gender, like to buy others what they buy themselves. What does this mean for retailers? Erez thinks they must make gift buying as simple as possible by taking out the guesswork and offering fewer product attributes. Also, 45 percent of e-gift recipients will virtually return a product, so rethink your return policies.

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We hope you can use these insights to shape a strong Q4 advertising strategy. See you next year in Dallas!