Breakfast for Leaders Event 2021 – Digital Personalization and Marketing
Just as you’ve come to expect, our Breakfast for Leaders event for 2021 was a huge success and a great morning for all who attended. This exclusive knowledge share session, co-hosted by Tetrad IT and Salesforce, was an opportunity to hear the latest updates, insights, and industry trends within the ecommerce space with a very special guest, Theo Baloyi, founder and CEO of Bathu Shoes.
It’s the 21st century. Digital transformation is a hot topic for the year and a strategic focus for many organisations for years to come. So, what does such a transformation entail and where on earth do you begin? We’re here to help and our Breakfast for Leaders event covered just that.
Our speakers delved into the topics of value, innovation and how to improve efficiency, whilst keeping customers unique journeys in mind.
This is our 2nd blog post giving a rundown of the event along with key takeouts. Let’s tackle personalisation and what that means in the ecommerce world…
Businesses can advance during times of uncertainty with digital personalization techniques.
With the many inspiring stories of self-sacrifice, it is natural to contemplate your place in the crisis and to search for greater meaning in your work. Many brands have struggled with this, having to make tough choices each day because of COVID-19. These business decisions would have been unfathomable just a couple of months ago.
It’s clear that for companies across all industries, these challenging times are even more complicated by unpredictability. Each day of the pandemic brings dramatic changes in customer sentiment and behaviour, supply chain accessibility, staff retention plans, business response strategies, and future forecasts. Industry reports and predictions from two weeks ago are already stale.
In our temporary isolation, all types of companies, especially retail, are focusing their business plans on immediacy and fluidity, and moving nearly all of their consumer connections online. Organizations are consciously and aggressively changing how they work to engage an anxious population while operating in a business environment that requires planning on a near-daily basis. Amid all this whiplash, companies must stay abreast of change and rapidly adapt to stay relevant.
(Extract from: Salesforce.com)
Our special event speaker, Theo Baloyi, Bantu Shoes Founder and CEO, elaborated further and shared his experience on how Covid affected his ecommerce strategy:
‘I was initially pushing around selling a brand that really resonates and was not really focused on ecommerce. I had an online store, but not necessarily a solid optimized omnichannel. So when Covid came and lockdown was announced with the first six weeks being retail shutdown, I had to go online. This gave me the opportunity to press my reset button and think about how I actually optimize my omnichannel.
Now I’m at home. I really need to get my data and insights and know what my online is telling me about the consumer at home because of Covid. What is it that they do? I managed to integrate all of that and made sure that my omnichannel is well integrated and optimized. And ever since I’ve done that my online store has been number one over the last couple of months. That is because of the insights that I’ve gotten from online and understanding the consumer. Communicating with them through socials and different means of channels have managed to retain the consumer and get them to experience the brand.
We even introduced two new cool things, like click and collect. So you can buy your Bathu shoes online for your cousin in Cape Town, and they can go to a catalogue store and collect it and vice versa.’
Doesn’t reading this make you want to go buy Bathu shoes, run around in your Bathu shoes, screaming ‘ecommerce, ecommerce, ecommerce’. All jokes aside, it really is exciting how ecommerce can transform a business’s revenue and change its sales trajectory.
Our founder and CEO, Vusi Mthethwa, shared his own experience and insights on it as well:
‘Personalization is such an important topic and we look at different trends worldwide. Think of Amazon Prime wardrobe, they’ve now come to a stage where for their Prime customers they have personal stylists that can pick out clothes that are relevant to them. And that’s the level of customization that some companies have gone through. There are shops now where if you walk past and you’ve got an app, personalized specials are then messaged directly to you. So even though you weren’t planning on going into the shop, you end up getting the specials.
There’s a lot of trends that we find when it comes to personalization. But to the point, I think being agile and being able to learn fast, implement fast, fail fast if you have to fail, but also grow is important. I think that’s the key, especially in the climate that we are living in. If you’re going to wait and look for something that’s going to take you two or three years to implement and get going with what you know, you’re really on the back foot. There are people that are launching in a couple of months. There are Salesforce Commerce Solutions out there that can help you springboard your businesses. The businesses that are doing well and clients of ours that have been successful are those that are agile are able to adapt quickly and fast.’
We have only hit the tip of the iceberg here. As the event continued, our special guest speakers elaborated on commerce analytics and order management. We will share that with you in a third blog post coming soon and keep a lookout for related white papers sharing additional information.
Here is a white paper delving into Salesforce and ecommerce personalized marketing:
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For those who couldn’t attend the event and are keen to attend our next event, give our social media pages a follow and keep a lookout for our next event. We look forward to having you there!
