With most online retail propositions now up to scratch in terms of customer delivery, what’s the best way and which is the best channel to differentiate your offer?

Channel

In the frantic run-up to Christmas online retailer Amazon announced that it could deliver some of its product range by late Christmas Eve if ordered early enough the same day.

It may have been pushing consumer brinkmanship to its furthest reaches - there was certainly no Plan B for present buyers if that didn’t pan out - but it was also a statement bristling with intent, as if to say: “If we can get it to you even if you don’t order until Christmas Eve then just imagine how safe you are ordering on December 20 or 21.”

Amazon’s self-confidence in its abilities to deliver drew a line under the widespread retail fulfilment debacle of three years ago but raises a new question - if consumers now trust online retailers to deliver, how as a retailer do you differentiate your online services offer and what is the most effective way to tell customers what you are doing?

“The Amazon delivery stance sent out a strong message,” says Google UK head of retail Paul Frantz. “Delivery, services and fulfilment are more and more important. We have seen Argos sales shoot up since it introduced click and collect, and John Lewis is starting to muscle in further on this area. The John Lewis Partnership has been very clever, moving people from one channel to another, increasing both average orders and loyalty.”

Andy Houstoun, head of marketing at ecommerce specialist Venda, which develops ecommerce sites for brands including TK Maxx and Laura Ashley, says: “The first challenge was for retailers to stop thinking about online as a satellite project. It was only recently that retailers started using their bags, receipts and stores to advertise their websites.”

He stresses that understanding the customer’s needs is key to discovering the right promotional strategy. “Now retailers need to think about promoting their multichannel offer in affiliate environments like Amazon Marketplace, and on Facebook, Bebo, Twitter - on the latter especially through communities,” he says.

A level of consistency

But there is still a way to go. While a customer satisfaction study of the UK’s top 40 online retail websites at the end of last year, by ForeSee, unveiled customer satisfaction scores up on last year, UK e-retail is still 10% lower than its US counterparts.

ForeSee chief executive Larry Freed says: “Additionally there is only one site out of 40 with a satisfaction score over 80: Amazon - essentially an US company with a strong UK presence.”

And before considering how to promote multichannel, retailers need to ensure they can operate consistently across their platforms. Carlo Rimini, managing director of ecommerce service provider Snow Valley, reflects that while many retailers may have the will, they do not always have the means to integrate their channels in the way they would like.

“For retailers with stores, the very least they need to do is differentiate themselves from pure players by leveraging their store network,” he says.

Once the basics have been established, Rimini says that how retailers choose to interact with their customers and promote their services is also open to debate. In this new mix he puts trust and credibility above promotion.

“Trust is increasingly important. Any site that can establish knowledge and expertise in its field, rather than just listing a lot of stuff, will demonstrate to customers that it is selling products it believes in,” he insists.

“There was certainly too much use of email before Christmas. I think customers get fatigued by it unless they receive something with added value. You have to look at a retailer like Asos, which has built strong loyalty through its Twitter community.”

Indeed, Asos has been at the cutting edge of how it relates to its consumers and recognised the different channels that may act as the entry point for consumers. An active Facebook community - where the online retailer appears, commendably, to have embraced the eclectic breadth of views that may be expressed under its umbrella - plus Twitter, other social media platforms and its lifestyle website all promote its offer. Importantly, many of those channels also allow its users to talk enthusiastically about Asos’s speed of delivery and returns policy.

Seb Villien, ecommerce manager at Kaleidoscope, part of the Freemans Grattan Holdings group, adds: “Online is now used as a marketing channel in its own right and is often the first point of contact a customer will have with the brand.”

Comet has been busy innovating and head of direct channels Ryan Thomas says that new channels have become an important a way of communicating differentiation. The consumer electricals retailer has also promoted its online offer through traditional methods. Emails are sent every week or two weeks, with some on, for example, upcoming technology rather than simply about deals.

“In the Christmas run-up we added a message at the end of our TV ads about the 30-minute click-and-collect service. That has worked really well and about 50% of our online transactions are for click and collect now.

We had a lot on Christmas Day afternoon, as people started spending their Christmas money and picked up in-store the next day. Obviously that’s an important message for us to get out as it differentiates us from, for example, pure players.”

Thomas says that the pre-Christmas period was one of experimentation. “We have what I believe is unique in the electricals sector - a live chat service, which works a bit like MSN. Customers can talk to agents about products and services online and we get about 1,000 chats per week, with a very high customer satisfaction rate,” he says.

Linked to that, in October Comet launched an “Ask and Answer” service enabling consumers to ask questions about products online and get answers either from Comet or other users. “It’s a forum, although heavily moderated, but we have some people who answer questions regularly,” says Thomas. “We expected perhaps 100 or 200 questions in our first week but got 1,200 and it still runs at about 400 to 600 a week.”

In November Comet launched its first mobile website version. “The dedicated version is much easier to use and over Christmas 4% of our click-and-collect traffic came from mobile users,” he says. “We are currently working on an iPhone application.”

At Christmas Comet experimented with Twitter and ran a “Tweet the Parcel” promotion. “Followers tweeted what they wanted for Christmas and when the ‘virtual music stopped’, whoever issued the last tweet won a prize. It’s still early days with Twitter but it was great fun and attracted perhaps a different type of user,” says Thomas.

More marketing and promotion of the fulfilment services that retailers can offer is inevitable with companies such as Amazon continuing to raise the bar in terms of what consumers can expect. And while traditional channels of communication such as TV advertising will play an important role in this, getting across the message using the many mediums created by the internet will become increasingly important too.

Co-ordinating channels

There are a number of key issues for retailers in co-ordinating their multichannel platforms before even considering the follow-up challenge of telling customers about it. For one thing, by definition, a potential customer may well arrive at the brand from a non-traditional source so determining how best to promote the offer moves away from traditional media.

Fadi Shuman, co-founder of digital agency Pod1 - which has created ecommerce sites for brands including Kurt Geiger, Reiss and Uniqlo - agrees that there is a legacy issue.

He believes that finance is often at the hub of why many retailers have yet to unite their infrastructure across all their touch-points and says this needs to be addressed before fine-tuning a campaign can be achieved.

“Too many retailers still think in terms of disparate business units - online, stores, catalogues - with separate accounting processes, structures and reporting lines,” he says. “Amalgamating these takes time and money. The big retailers are starting to invest in this and break down the silos, integrating their marketing and commercial teams across channels. Ultimately it’s about looking at customers as a whole, wherever and however they shop, not fighting over the transaction itself.”