Eben Sermon, Director Relationship Marketing and Loyalty (EU) at eBay, participated in a riveting interview with Loyalty 360 CEO Mark Johnson. Sermon discussed several topics, including customer-centricity, the importance of engagement and use of new channels.
Customer-centric Focus at eBay
Sermon: It’s a very customer-centric culture at eBay, with a clear expectation that every employee should work hard to be the customer and to build experiences our customers love. This is on the back of every pass of every employee in the company and that is what we are measured against. In marketing we invest heavily in research and customer contact programs. We’re strong on innovation and testing new boundaries with customers so understanding what resonates is really important. There is a strong push to make customer-centricity a core part of our culture.
Challenge of Staying on top of New Technologies
Sermon: It’s pretty challenging. We have teams that monitor the strategic landscape and look at the emerging players in loyalty, for example. In this area alone the speed of change is just stunning. Established companies are desperately trying to innovate and startups are doing things on the edge that provide good experiences. You have to keep on top of it.
You’ve got to test a lot. We have probably embarked on some 30-40 new partnerships in marketing this year alone, involving crowd-sourcing, social and mobile targeting, gamification tests, and personalization. My main advice for brands is pick the area where you want to differentiate and then devote a decent part of your marketing resources against testing new channels and partnerships that take you toward that. For us, it’s been about creating shopping experiences that are highly personalized and that put the customer in control anytime, anywhere. One of my favorites was us partnering with Dressipi, which is a London startup – this company allows female users to shop for fashion for their body shape and brand preferences. This is the sort of testing that I think matters.
Content?
Sermon: Like many brands, we have been working to find the balance between traditional broadcast communications and new forms of content – primarily through social channels. We have put a lot of effort into social over the last year and have had to learn as we go. We have done a lot of targeted paid testing but also really tested hard on how to show our inventory in a way that is on brand, provides some shopping inspiration, but is still entertaining. Mostly we get that right, but it is tough. We use an editorial review panel now to get a mix of views from across the business before we post.
A few weeks ago we created a feed that pushes all likes, shares, tweets, and comments around the offices in Europe. It shows on a big TV in our kitchen. If we get our postings wrong…there is nowhere to hide…I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea?!?…J
Tracking is a tough task. For example, if someone clicked on a Facebook banner on mobile, and then clicked on a piece of onsite content and then came back later in the evening and bought something via the app that was related to the original item … this is one of the core challenges for today’s CMO. We have spent hours and hours on tracking questions. The challenge we find is trying to attribute across that single purchase so we can attribute that interaction/touch point to the purchase or to the interaction as a whole.
Goals in Social
Sermon: We want to measure the brand impact of social investments on metrics like consideration to ensure we are producing great editorial content. However we also want to get to tighter mechanisms proving ROI of those activities. I end up being pushed in both directions. It’s super important to have your hand on the tiller of day-to-day operating statistics regarding whether consumers are engaging with you more than with competitors, but also knowing whether to push more spend through these channels than more established channels.
Launch of Feed
Sermon: With the launch of Feed, it gives a highly personalized shopping experience. It is a mix of our suggestions (led by data) but your direction. It is really engaging as a shopping experience. The description I like is about us ‘combining the science of search with the inspiration of browse’. That is what shopping should be – great for when you have only 3 minutes at the bus stop and just as good when you are on the sofa in the evening relaxing.
The great thing was the announcement a few weeks back that we will be building on this experience by introducing the ability to ‘follow’ interests, people, places, collections. It is about shopping the way that you want it and puts the customer in control. This is one of our most exciting things right now.
Multichannel
Mobile has been a very big theme for eBay with a very large proportion of Internet sessions now mobile driven. The U.K. leads the way on that metric. I was surprised to learn that last year in the U.K. only there were some 73,000 new retail apps released. This is a tough area for brands looking to get cut-through. There has been a lot of investment in our mobile experiences to make them engaging and the figures are impressive. I think we are at some 160m downloads now globally. But I have most liked the efforts to allow personalization and customer control – like the ability to have your car in your garage to easily find the right parts or to be able to search in our fashion app from a photo of a swatch of cloth or color.
As marketers, we strongly encourage to think mobile first – optimized emails, targeting tests, partnerships with operators. Success in mobile almost feels like one of the most important factors in driving loyalty for many brands.
Communication Critical
Sermon: The way you communicate is critical. The key thing is living up to the promise that you make. If you are going to make a promise of customer control and personalization then you have to live up to it as people land on your site or hit your apps. You have to live up to delivering a level of personalization that is compelling and intuitive and that will drive more engagement.
Brands not delivering on that … I can see people unplugging from those experiences and stopping engaging. That is certainly true when people are sharing their data in the expectation of a more enriching and personal experience. We look very closely at our operating metrics on visits, session time, 90-day activity and increasingly at that by device. Every experience is tested incredibly deeply pre-rollout. Then we do a lot of research with users in quantity and quality to check that our communications in all channels – whether it pertains to marketing, merchandising, or social – is enriching the overall experience.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty 360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.