Paul Stephen: 0:00
Good afternoon everybody. Sorry, we’re a minute or two late there. We had a bit of an issue with some technical issues, but we’re there and now we are good and ready to go, so I will jump straight in as we’re running. Hello and welcome to episode four of season two of Shoppernomics, our ecommerce podcast. My name is Paul Stephen and I’m your host today, and today’s episode is called Embrace the Data, and your Customer will love you for it. Joining me today is Mark Hammond, currently head of e-commerce at Heals. Welcome, Mark, it’s great to have you. You’ve had some pretty interesting roles across your career, so there’s loads to talk about here, but I just love it if you could just first introduce yourself and a little bit about your e-commerce journey.

Mark Hammond: 0:47
Hi, yeah, thanks, Paul, and yeah, thanks for havi ng me. So yeah, my name is Hammond, head of e-commerce at Heals. For those who don’t know the brand, we’ve been around 214 years now, so initially we were the first, the first importer of French feather mattresses into the UK, but for most of our history we’ve been designing and innovating contemporary furniture and homewares, as well as selling some of the the best designers across the UK and elsewhere in Europe. So we now have seven stores across the UK, up from Newcastle, down to Canterbury, but our kind of, our big showroom and our pride is on Tottenham Court Road in London, where it has pretty much been there for all of its history.

Mark Hammond: 1:26
So, yeah, we’re about 50-50, online and offline now obviously that’s that’s been growing in recent years.

Mark Hammond: 1:32
But myself, I think, hence the I guess the subject of this talk my background is a database developer and analyst.

Mark Hammond: 1:38
I, I guess, stumbled into e-commerce I don’t even know what it’s called and it wasn’t called e-commerce probably 20 years ago and just managing massive ppc data sets of millions of keywords and product data fates of hundreds of thousands of products, and it was. I guess it became quite apparent quite early that the whole kind of all of e-commerce and all of the kind of customer journeys was built off the back of data and the knowledge and I quite quickly kind of found myself an e-commerce manager role and really that’s kind of where I’ve been for the rest of my career, everything from customer acquisition, website optimization through to retention, I guess, while while my big love is retail and you know what I am now I’m very, very happy I have, as Paul said, kind of had a varying career from building a pet friendly travel agent to delivering DTC propositions for publishers and at one point I was ahead of digital for what is now the, the UK’s biggest pub company. Like I say, yeah, back home in retail and happy way on fantastic yeah lots to dive in.

Paul Stephen: 2:42
But before we do so, though, this is an interactive event, so for the listeners out there, if you want to get involved, you can in this conversation, you can sort of ask to speak in the panel there in in LinkedIn, and we’ll try and kind of get those questions at the end, and either can I can ask them for you, we can invite you on to the, the virtual stage for you to ask them directly. Be like good old radio, so, and don’t forget, you can emoji and and react to things along the way as well. So that’s all good. Um, so my, I’m going to start with this one. Really, you were once described by a colleague as pretty creative for a data guy, so I love that. But what do you? What do you think was behind that compliment?

Mark Hammond: 3:27
and yeah, it was a compliment, I think you could read it either way, but I didn’t assume to see her as well, who recently joined. I think historically she’d seen data guys, as those you know, in darkened rooms huddled over computer, which was arguably me at the beginning of my career, and was quite surprised. I was, you know, actively involved in marketing decisions and campaign creation and you really, I guess, driving a lot of our acquisition strategy and our creative direction as well as being the guy who was kind of analyzing how it was working.

Mark Hammond: 3:57
So, yeah, no, definitely a compliment. And you know we’re still friends now, so can’t be too bad.

Paul Stephen: 4:02
So is there anything that you you would describe as being to warrant you being particularly creative? Like so you’re? You’re not just a guy in a darkened room. Why? Why creative, do you think?

Mark Hammond: 4:14
I think it’s more from a certainly wouldn’t want me designing a website, not that kind of creative. I think it’s more from a, from a campaign creation and really thinking about what will resonate with the customer and, you know, understanding trends and seasonality, and just having a little bit of creative and going against the norm with some of the ideas that we came up with.

Paul Stephen: 4:34
Yeah, I mean, we call this session embrace the data, and your customer will love, love you for it. For you, though, what is data? Let’s just sort of pick that apart a bit really, what would you mean?

Mark Hammond: 4:46
It’s big question, but yeah, everything, anything, I think you know we literally bucketed into four areas of customer data. Try and know everything and anything we can about the customer. Product data how can we ensure it is as rich and as descriptive as possible? Sales data how deep can we get in the analysis and granular with the level of what we understand the sale, and then all the stuff that doesn’t convert.

Paul Stephen: 5:21
Um, and so, in terms of sort of customer data, uh, are you, uh, you know there won’t be anybody on here, I wouldn’t imagine who would not use Google Analytics, but what sort of things are you, uh, talking that? I suppose that’s more the last batch rather than the customer data particularly. But so what sort of data are you would you consider collecting?

Mark Hammond: 5:45
We obviously get sales data and you know, one of the challenges of business where 50 percent of our revenue is in store is a gap in knowledge of the customers. So we have recently I’d say about a year ago installed digital receipts. So now for a increasingly large percentage of our install customers we are getting at least their email address. We can kind of understand, you know a bit more around purchase patterns, but then for a large chunk of them they’re also signing up for for our marketing emails and promotions. So again, you know we can reach out and get back to them. So there’s the real, I guess more quantitative side of it. But we are doing, and continue to do, a lot of surveys just to understand a bit more about how our customers are feeling, a lot more kind of, I guess, from the qualitative side, understand where their pain points are, where their challenges are.

Mark Hammond: 6:34
We do digital surveys. You know we go out and speak to customers in the store and just try and understand them. There’s a. It’s a really interesting way and loyalty is not something we may cover today but something we’re certainly thinking about. My, my boss, walked early in his career into Heals and started chatting to this customer and she was you know I love heels, I’m your best customer, I’m a real loyal customer, I love you. And and he asked you know when was the last time you bought? And she said like seven years ago. So actually from a data perspective she probably dropped out of an engagement pot, but I guess that’s I guess part of the parcel of having a high-end, high ticket items that were not that readily bought, because this lady would have come back to heels the minute she wanted to buy a piece of furniture. She’s just hadn’t wanted to for seven years.

Paul Stephen: 7:17
Yeah, I mean I suppose that was asking the question because I’m conscious you, like you say you’re 50%, your sales are on in person and I’m there. It’s a sort of a product that definitely someone probably wants to look at, see, feel, sit on, all those sorts of things. So you know, collecting data in a pure play, come into the environment, is kind of fairly straightforward and well trodden path. But things like your store and maybe in your previous roles even sort of a pub environment, how do you go about sort of encouraging people to share that data?

Mark Hammond: 7:54
Well, pubs was. It was an interest. We had a thousand pubs, bars and clubs across the UK everything from like an old man pub in the country to some of some big clubs down in London and the biggest opportunity was Wi-Fi data. So particularly a lot of our venues had a younger audience. We had a 40-odd student pubs. We had some night clubs and really kind of catered to the 2021 year olds and obviously data is still a challenge.

Mark Hammond: 8:19
So getting people to sign up to Wi-Fi, giving a free drink as an incentive to that Wi-Fi or a discount off your kind of next meal purchase, captured a significant amount of data and you know it’s very rare. It’s really challenging from an e-commerce perspective in a lot of hospitality because when people come to the website they’re essentially just looking if you’re open and you know your address and increasingly they just go to Google to do that. So actually a lot of customers will never see your website when they come into the pub. So is the Wi-Fi was the biggest driver. And how could we have competitions, incentives, quiz nights, anything that got people to engage digitally while in the venue and then use that data to further kind of, I guess, enrich what we know about them and communicate accordingly?

Paul Stephen: 9:05
And how have you tackled that in the premium retail environment? Has that so sort of different challenge?

Mark Hammond: 9:13
It’s a. I don’t think we’ve come close to cracking it. I think we’re. We’re looking more and you know we chat this time. In six months time we should have a lot more engaging technology on the website for people to visualize their products. See in 3D, start to think about how a more augmented reality fits into the furniture world so you can actually see what size it is, what it looks. But then we want to enable our store staff to have these on tablets so they can talk customers through it. We can quite easily change all the colors on the sofa with a blink of an eye through this technology and then send this to them back at their home email address and part of that will obviously capturing their details so we can follow up and kind of bring them into our world.

Paul Stephen: 9:59
And, and are you finding a very different audience across those two different capture points?

Mark Hammond: 10:10
We are. We are. I think about 60% of all our purchases will have touched both in-store and online. I think there’s a real differentiation between categories. A lot of our store purchases are gifting, and people might not have come online because they just want to go to Heels to buy a gift, particularly around the run into Christmas. But actually, when it’s sofas and chairs and a good friend of mine didn’t know, I worked at Heels was our, I guess, our ideal customer, our classic customer that he went into Google shopping, was looking for a certain type of sofa, saw Heels, went on the website, thought that was nice, came out of where we live in Buckinghamshire, all the way into London, saw the sofa, loved it, went all the way back to Buckinghamshire and then bought online.

Mark Hammond: 10:53
You know, then, is countless different journeys like that. It’s not impossible to really quantify, but we know that it happens and we’re trying to understand more and more about that. That sofa journey would not have happened to someone buying a candlestick. It’s just a very, very different kind of experience. Again, it is one of our challenges to really think not holistically in terms of customer behaviour, but how it works at different categories and different subcategories.

Paul Stephen: 11:20
So you’re collecting all this data and you sort of now better understand your customer and what they’re looking at and what they’re doing at the moment. So, in terms of turning them into someone who loves you or loves the brand or whatever, what do you do it? How do you make them love you?

Mark Hammond: 11:41
Well, we tried to make them like us first. But yes, I think it’s one thing understanding what your customers are after, but a big part of why we try and do a lot of this talking and a lot of the survey is the questions you won’t get from just capturing data is what are their biggest challenges? Why are they buying these things? But, more importantly, what blockers are we putting in place? Do we not have the right stock in the shops? Is our checkout on the website not sufficient? Can they not find products? So we really try and understand, you know. A good example recently is we had a kind of a refocus on our mattresses, as I mentioned earlier, what Heels was founded on and we really thought you know, we should be doing this better, both in-store and online. So you started thinking about you’ve got the terminology we use. So from a buyer’s perspective, it’s tension. Mattresses have come in different tension. These things for customer means nothing. They want a firm mattress or they want a soft mattress, in fact, when they come into store. So our store staff are also a great source of knowledge. They speak to customers day in, day out. Customer service again from the other side, they hear the less positive side sometimes, so really tapping into their knowledge. But we realize the first thing a customer wants is a soft mattress or a hard mattress. That’s it. Whereas on the website we were talking about price, brand, color, like we did on other pages, there’s actually no one thinks about the color when they buy mattress. I mean, some people do, but we’re pretty much white or green.

Mark Hammond: 13:06
So really building that customer journey to align firmness first, really understanding there was some concerns around hey, what type of mattress do I buy? There’s all these different types of hyperallergenics there’s Feather, there’s Corp, and really then you know how do I make my mattress last longer? Because these are not cheap purchases but they’re also ones you want to last a long time. So we have a buying guide in terms of different types of mattress. We all have also have a mattress care guide to have to look afterwards.

Mark Hammond: 13:38
And you know, whereas in lots of previous roles we’ve built blog content as much for SEO rather than the customer, for this, we know people who engage with these buying guys and these care guides then go on to buy the product. We also know that you know they’re much less likely to return the product. So therefore, you know, love us a bit more because they are getting the right product they want and they know how to care with it. So I think we’re still quite early in this re-change of the journey and a lot of this terminology and thinking is mirrored in store. But you know, particularly online. In the last six months we’ve seen a really big uplift in online mattress sales and you know we put a lot of this down to the changes we made based on all that custom knowledge.

Paul Stephen: 14:21
So in terms of it helps you develop the products I don’t know refinement of those products, but has it also sort of changed the things that heals sales as well? Other things.

Mark Hammond: 14:35
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a real. You know we’re very closely with the buying team, so we know so good example one of our top zero searches is curtains. A because heels used to sell curtains, but B, we think, because we sell everything but curtains and it was just it was logistically and operationally impossible to sell curtains, all the different styles and, I guess, the ad hoc nature to them. But aside from the kind of obvious gaps we see within our search data, within Google Trends, using our SEO agency, you know new styles, new colors, new materials, things. That it’s a really bad example. But maybe you know blue was on trend last year, but we can see quite quickly through search data that you know Navy is the latest trend and year on year growth is coming, possibly ahead of the time the buying seeds. So how can we then, you know, filter all of this knowledge we see from the data into our buying team and help support them in, you know, developing the range?

Paul Stephen: 15:39
And so so maybe talk about how. How do you use data to I don’t know improve conversion and retention of clients?

Mark Hammond: 15:49
For conversion perspective. I think one of one of the challenges is you know a lot of people and I was guilty of that earlier in my career you know we just focus on that kind of website conversion as a metric, but it’s it’s got limited value. We know mobile converts less than desktop and for us, mobile is a percentage I think it’s got like 54 to 58% just in 12 months and this will keep growing. So actually your overall website revenue could be going down, but both mobile and desktop could be going up. So what we do is a we split down my marketing channels because we know our different channels perform very, very differently, but really focus on you know what’s the conversion between our product listing pages and our product pages. How are those pages performing? We then look at the ad to basket rate on a product page, but we look at it at a product level. So what’s the ad to basket rate on these products now versus 12 months ago?

Mark Hammond: 16:42
And we’re always looking at the top and the bottom 50 for these two metrics and then obviously thinking about all the steps and basket to check out, comparing mobile versus desktop, and then you will, in the nature of seasonality, the top 50 now will be very different to the top 50 in a month’s time, and you always, every single month. It’s the first thing we do. You know, what would we be expecting to see this time last year and what are we expecting on? What are we seeing now and really identifying? You know, there’s some products doing really well what is that, you know? And certainly the ones that are performing really badly. Is it the fact that the image is just not very good? Is it? You know, it could be just a price? Is that it could be something as simple as that? Or it could be something that my team can, you know, really focus on and tweak and make those product pages sing a little more?

Paul Stephen: 17:26
I think it was interesting. You dwelled on there the sort of mobile usage and stats around that are changing over time. I wonder, with a brand like Hills, which is sort of quite premium, I’m jumping to the conclusion that you’ll have sort of fairly well off younger audience, but you might have a slightly older audience as well because of, because of you know, it’s the sort of the furniture you buy when you can afford to, so to speak.

Mark Hammond: 17:56
My previous role at Louis James was a much. I guess lower price point and mobile was something up to 80%?

Paul Stephen: 18:03
Yeah, so that’s why it was interesting. Are you seeing that it’s actually, if you like, the older audience being more open to using mobile as time progresses?

Mark Hammond: 18:14
I think take my parents, for example, they’re kind of forced into it. So I think there is that, but the conversion rates are still, you know, double on desktop that they are on mobile. So we still, you know, have to focus on I don’t like to turn mobile first because it’s almost forgetting what your best converting channel is. It’s very much is mobile and desktop together, but you know, separately and together. You want that holistic look and feel, you want as holistic an experience as possible, but from a technical perspective and architecture perspective sometimes it’s just not possible. Sometimes you do need to style them differently to make sure they work both as well on both. And that’s something that goes across the website and you know what we’re looking to as we speak is around our emails as well, because obviously email traffic on mobile is even more than it is on desktop just the nature of how people read these communications.

Paul Stephen: 19:03
I mean, you mentioned there that the most customer relationships don’t sort of start on you know you don’t start with a sale on the first interaction with you. So you know, I mean you and I talked about how you know to have useful data you need to proactively find ways of collecting it and sort of doing that over a period of time and building that relationship. How have you, how are you doing that at maybe Hills now or maybe in maybe some of the other previous businesses where you’ve been?

Mark Hammond: 19:32
I think Pets Pyjamas are a really good example. I think if anyone hasn’t worked in the pet business, they should. It’s a wonderful place with customers that are equally, equally crazy and equally loyal. I think it’s from a data perspective. We we had a vision. It sounds like a 90s word, but we had a vision of creating a portal for all pet lovers. We built a pet friendly travel agent. We had a marketplace, which is you know why I joined. We also built social network for pets, the social pet work as it was called, and then we had loyalty points that were driven off the back of everything and every single touch point allowed us to collect data on the usage but also gave points to the customers. So if we go to the social pet work, you had to create a pet profile and you got I remember the numbers now. It was something like 100 points if you create a profile. We gave you 200 points if you told us what breed your dog was, and then another 200 if you attached a photo to it.

Mark Hammond: 20:28
We know, without doubt, that people are not dog owners unless you’re a mongrel. They’re generally breed owners. You’ve got Labrador owners. They are Bernie’s Mountain Dog owners and they associate with that breed intrinsically and some of the biggest successes we had A with our CRM campaigns is just really, you go okay, we’ve got 5,000 Labrador owners, let’s just send them a Labrador specific email. You know, I think it was called Love your Labrador was the subject line. It was the best open mate we had and the pictures in there had Labrador’s. Obviously we had UGC of other Labrador’s from the pet work and it was a real kind of hugely successful thing.

Mark Hammond: 21:08
And then on the flip side, we re-architected the whole product catalog around breeds. So we signed every single product to one of six different dog sizes and every single breed again to one of these six different dog sizes and it allowed us to create hundreds and thousands of pages targeted to breeds. So I think at the time we were the only page on the whole internet. That was the Bernie’s Mountain Dog ID tag page and you know there’d be other examples of that. It was really niche, but I remember, looking at an SEO report, we’d had three sessions in six months, for I think it was the Tibetan Terrier Dogbed page, which is nothing but one of those people bought 300-pound dog bed because they saw this page geared towards their dog. The beds were the right size. They had pictures of Tibetan Terriers on it. It just really engaged with them.

Mark Hammond: 21:56
You know, on the assumption that that product was right and felt good, that that’s the customer loving. You know they’ve got a website that’s just to create the collection, just for my dog. You know why would I not come back to them and check out their dog bowls for Tibetan Terriers? And I think that was a real big drive of the success of the business. But also, in how we could capture data was around not thinking about animal type and not even thinking about the customers. It was really thinking about the dog, the dog breed. And again, we’d catch the birthdays of the dogs and we would send an email to the owner from the pet two weeks before the birthday. You know, buying me this, buying me that, here’s my wishlist kind of thing and it sounds cheesy and silly to non-dog owners but my God did they love that. And yeah, another really successful con that we used to send out.

Paul Stephen: 22:40
And Pets Pajamas is sort of an interesting business because it, as you say, was e-commerce but was also a travel business. Did that? Did it start one way and develop into the other, or was it always this sort of and was that a data-driven thing, I should say?

Mark Hammond: 22:56
I think it was. That’s what. I think that the plan initially was to do a bit of everything. So we were even looking at services, part of the business. So I joined when it was only, I think, 11 months old and was there for the next kind of five years. So we sort of grew almost from a bunch of ideas. I mean, an entrepreneurial founder who had previously successful businesses and Karen had the idea of actually having everything from the travel agent to the marketplace, to a let’s find every dog walk, a dog breeder, dog sitter and create this services area. So actually if you’ve got a dog look at, we wouldn’t need to go anywhere else because you’d have every single thing covered.

Mark Hammond: 23:31
I think the products was naturally a lot easier and that’s the point where I joined to kind of really launch that. Travel was a little bit trickier. There we had a lot of biz dev and relationship building, but once we reached a bit of critical mass of that it started to roll. It was the services was a little bit more challenging. They’re very those are very independent businesses, very local businesses who weren’t that digitally savvy Often I we don’t you speak to me don’t want any more business. I’m fine.

Mark Hammond: 24:03
I do the dog walking just to fit around my normal life. I don’t really need any more business. So there’s a real pushback on trying to actually give people more work. So I think that for the travel group so successful, both from it there’s no one really doing it that well but, again from an organic perspective, we started building the website around suitable for big dogs, suitable for large dogs, suitable for two dogs, and different types of holiday, different types of adventure, based on the type of animal you have.

Paul Stephen: 24:34
Oh, good stuff In terms of sort of being a data driven business and wanting to sort of have a strategy that’s really focused around data. Have you, would you say you’ve had to, as you’ve come into this business, really change the way the businesses worked? Have you had to sort of, if you like, reimagine the way the back office is really thinking about data?

Mark Hammond: 25:00
I think, yes, I think to a certain perspective. So we actually a lot more now I think about it. So we built a person I hate the word single customer view so I won’t use it because I don’t think it really exists but a customer data platform. We’re increasingly adding more data to it. So, from sales data, we now have our digital receipts. We know what people are doing, engaging with the emails and using that, but ultimately we want to incorporate all our customer service data, our review data. We’re starting collecting UGC and really building this all up from a customer perspective to understand a lot more about them and communicate accordingly. So I think there’s a real yeah, there’s a real opportunity for a business that’s embracing digital. So our CEO would did, and it’s one of the reasons I was keen to join, describe Heels as an e-commerce business with stores which, for a 210-year-old growing business is quite a claim and it’s and he stands by, you know investing in technology, investing in digital.

Mark Hammond: 26:03
When I started, my first hire was a junior data analyst, which was a new role to the business, and she’s come straight out of uni and really on a day-by-day basis making, you know, analysis and insights. So it’s just changing the way we think about a number of things, but it’s a mindset that, unfortunately, is a working business that’s. You know it’s not a natural fit, but very, very eager to learn.

Paul Stephen: 26:27
So, yeah, I think the answer is yes. Then here’s a data. Yeah, you know, employing a data analyst certainly sounds like a change to a 200-year-old business, and I can’t do anything like this without not talking about AI. So have you, are you getting into using AI in terms of, or how are you using AI with your data?

Mark Hammond: 26:55
I think from a data perspective, not yet. I think we’re still at a position where we know what we need to capture. In fact, we have a lot of it. It’s just understanding how we can integrate it and pull it together and just understand a lot more about what we have. I guess there’s parts that I’m interested in is around.

Mark Hammond: 27:13
I’ve got every mountain of dog telling where I should be right content, but I know from recent Google updates that they seem to be finally coming down on the people that got away with it. But what we’re thinking about is how we have, say, we’ve got 3,000 SKUs. Each one’s got 10 images for EasyMask. We’ve got 30,000 images across the website. How do we use AI to name those images relative to the products? How do we get some alt text on those images which is based on the product description?

Mark Hammond: 27:43
So A just allows us to get them integrated on the website quickly, but it should have some SEO boosts within Google images. It’d be really beneficial from an accessibility perspective. So customers who are short-sighted and rely on these readers we can much better describe what we’re putting in front of them rather than skew one, two, three, four, fivejpeg. So I think there’s some real opportunities there, which are not necessarily the ones everyone’s talking about. I think we’re still a little bit more crappy when it comes to how we’re using the data, but yeah, I’d love to be here in 12 months time talking about our AI plans for data.

Paul Stephen: 28:21
Oh well, we might take you up on that. That sounds like we’re going to see how you’ve used AI over the next 12 months. I mean in terms of data marketers and e-commerce. People often focus on, obviously, the acquisition and conversion, but in terms of the long-term customer lifetime value and the overall ROI of the work that you do what are the other? Things you would say are the benefit of really loving your data.

Mark Hammond: 28:54
Our single biggest focus right now is reducing the time taken from first to second purchase and, I guess, increasing the number of people who do buy a second product. From every business I’ve been into, once customers bought two, maybe three items. You’ve got a loyal customer. They’re there. They’re obviously coming back for more. They’re engaged with the brand, they understand a lot more about it. It’s that drop-off between first and second. Why are they going somewhere else?

Mark Hammond: 29:21
What can we do to understand the purchase pattern between the first product they bought and the second one they’re likely to buy, understand the average time it would normally take and just really think about honing our communications to understand what they’re likely to buy and really reduce the time they would normally take. See if an average three-no-people who buy beds are likely to buy bedside tables. We know people buy lights. They’re actually likely to buy lights again. So it’s really as soon as they’re bought and how we talk to them. It’s just trying to communicate what we think they should buy next, because we know you well for doing it in a subtle and then a on- brand way.

Paul Stephen: 30:08
Wow, I’ll give a quick reminder to anybody. If you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the chat or raise your hand or whatever. From my point of view, I think every business has built on three pillars of people processing tools. It might be nice to pick that apart and focus on each of those. So start with the people bed first. What are the top skills you would advise someone to go and learn right now? If they don’t know it now, they should absolutely be all over this.

Mark Hammond: 30:44
The first one’s obvious, given the last half an hour we’re talking. It is analytics. I think, as someone who’s interviewed many, many people anyone who comes into business, however junior or senior you can tell that they’ve understood their thoughts about it, even if it’s a small element of inquisitiveness to how their area of the website work, or if they work on merchandising and product selection, really wanting to know what customers are clicking on, where they’re going, how this fits in the overall customer journey. Because it’s not always people get out of Excel and it’s a job that I did first into e-commerce, so I can say it’s quite a grungy job. At times you just buried in Excel, just looking, looking, looking at product data. But the people take a step back and understand why we’re enriching our product data, how it’s affecting the website and then what ultimately that is doing to the customer journey. I think it’s a really it’s not obviously a useful skill to have.

Mark Hammond: 31:41
And then one little bit what I encourage my new starters to do is just sign up to competitors’ newsletters, spend some time on their websites. We don’t want to. We are an innovator, we are a leader. But, however, there are, particularly in category, specialists. So go back to the mattress example from earlier. There are people who just sell mattresses there’s some very big names that jumped up in the last four or five years who must have spent significant volumes on A-B testing and analysis and customer. If they are all leading with a specific message first, there’s a good reason for that. If they’re building their category pages or their product pages in a consistently familiar architecture, again there’s got to be a reason for that. So we don’t want to completely mirror them, but there’s a lot to be said in kind of understanding what’s happening, and people have been doing it a lot longer than you.

Paul Stephen: 32:37
Okay, so the next one of those is process. So that’s kind of like what are your rules? What are your? What are the key KPIs, maybe, that you employ to keep your own discipline? What are the sort of things you track every week or so that you can prioritize and make sure that you’re not letting your guard down in a particular area? What are your golden KPIs?

Mark Hammond: 33:01
So I heard a new trade manager she must be nearly 18 months now and one thing she brought with her was Mondaycom, which I’ve not really used before. So it’s essentially it’s a project management tool, but it allows all of our creative to store their assets in there, all campaigns to be set up and planning. It gives everybody you know, including myself little nags when they need to come and sign stuff off. Everything’s done to a timeline and it’s for some of the team who are not necessarily very technical, it took a bit of handholding and a bit of warming, but now it’s just, it’s just bread and butter. You come in and see what the Monday queue is and you’ve almost got a lot of your work kind of lined up from the marketing and creative people which ultimately feed into a lot of what we’re doing online. It’s just being an absolute gold dust. And then I think, yeah, on top of that there’s from KPI. We have all the usual ones you’d expect.

Mark Hammond: 33:56
Something I I just try and get my team to do on a monthly basis is just to look at the quick wins on the websites. Is there any 404s? So are we got any pages that just customers are trying to find? And not there and it’s. You know it’s a quick win, we can fix this easily. It’s a really poor customer experience and also it’s harming our SEO. So I think that’s something we can look at and then going for our search logs, you know, as an venture.

Mark Hammond: 34:21
We get tens of thousands of searches a month and in there there are searches that are just no one’s ticking on. The searches are producing zero products and some of them will be the curtains that we’ll never sell curtains. So we have to think about how we can communicate that fact. But there will be synonyms customers can’t spell. So PetsPajamas, I think we had 10 different spellings for Chihuahua. I now know how to spell Chihuahua, but the longer people don’t and there was every month he’d go in, he’d go. My God, they’ve spelled it a different way, but the customers would get a zero search result page because the website didn’t know. But by going in there every month and looking at what’s not working, the next person who spells it that crazy way would get to the Chihuahua page.

Paul Stephen: 35:01
I mean, obviously it’s classic to sort of measure the amount of people that are visiting the website category view pages, product views and things like that. But are there any that you think of the things that the lights you would have on your dashboard that if they’re going red then we’ve got a problem? You’ve mentioned one already this idea that it’s not always the even some of the good journeys that are. I always want to know what are the best journeys that are happening so we can do more of it, and what are maybe, like you say, the dead ends or the bad journeys that we can kill. And it’s the two extremes that probably require the most focus, because you can make quite a big impact by sometimes quite a small thing if you know where they are.

Mark Hammond: 35:44
Yeah, I think that the two biggest metrics that Lucy and my team looked at every Monday is product page views and product add to baskets product level year on year. That’s the one thing. If we’ve got the same amount of views of a key range that we had 12 months ago, but half as many people are adding to basket, we’ve got an issue. If we add to basket rates the same, we’ve got half as many people looking at it. Maybe we need to look a bit more higher up the funnel and see if there’s any difference is happening to our marketing strategies. And then a similar thing to our category pages. So we have a very like everyone, a very tight marketing calendar. We know any given month what category we’re expecting to be doing well and it will be very, very similar to the 12 months before and we can try and understand why less people are looking at those pages or, if they are, why they’re not converting as much. I think that’s there’s two key metrics to look at. It would be that.

Paul Stephen: 36:39
That’s a weekly thing for you as well. Absolutely yeah, so yeah. And then the last one was in terms of tools. You’ve mentioned Mondaycom for organizing your content and your campaigns, et cetera. Have you got any other sort of like your favorite sort of tools, be it for analyzing data hosting platforms? What other sort of platforms do you love? And maybe, what are your channels that you know you’re excited about?

Mark Hammond: 37:09
It’s boring, but I love Excel. I mean, it doesn’t matter what plan and then one of my agencies sure remain nameless keeps sending me bloody PDFs every month and I’m just giving me an Excel file because I’m just going to copy it in Excel. I think it’s underused from sorting, looking stuff up, joining data, even the stuff as you’ve got, the conditional highlights to look at, read down to green. It’s just a wonderful way of visualizing stuff and it drives most of the decision making in our business. But I think, away from Excel, it’s interesting. Tools are very, very specific to the business and they’re required. One thing that we’ve launched just before Christmas is Advanced Commerce to do our search and merchandising, and there’s a lot of stuff we can do with merchandising our products. It’s a whole new podcast on there that we’re scratching the surface with, but it’s really producing valuable to our team to be able to algorithmically promote stuff at the right level but also give them to control and understanding what’s working and what’s not working well.

Paul Stephen: 38:20
Yeah, I mean, some people call it productizing, some people with merchandising. I don’t have any thousand products or whatever you’ve got. It’s something in a real retail environment. It’s very easy to see and you’ll bring things to the front and you can see them as people walk in the door. It’s a finely crafted science that we’ve kind of learned retail environment design, if you like. I think it’s something online is still not that mature.

Mark Hammond: 38:49
Yeah, and everyone has an opinion. It’s a challenge to, yeah, again use the days that we see online. That may or may not be the same as in store, but we know matches have always been better installed online by the nature of what they were, but it wasn’t that long ago. People say you can’t sell sofas online, but every single week now our biggest individual product sale is always a sofa, many sofas so it’s a customer’s mindset are changing. Doesn’t mean they haven’t been able to see them, but they’re increasingly happy to buy online.

Mark Hammond: 39:21
From a channel perspective, yeah, what we’re we are, like many have been heavily reliant on Google, but what we’re seeing the last kind of I guess, 12 months improvements is across some of the social channels, so particularly Instagram and actually Pinterest, we’re seeing a lot more engagement and a lot more. You know the big challenges. From an in-platform metrics perspective, you know they’re taking over the world, but from a Google analytics perspective, they’re doing absolutely zero and we know the truth is somewhere in between. So, while we know they are getting better, the big challenge for my data analysis is really trying to understand that. Relative attribution is also really trying to understand.

Mark Hammond: 40:02
You know what is quite a long buying cycle for some products but obviously a lot less for some and just trying to you know, I don’t want to be building an attribution model, because I’m not sure that there is one that fits for everybody, but it’s just trying to understand a little bit more.

Mark Hammond: 40:18
It might be as simple as just segmenting everything from top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel to something in the middle, to at least kind of evaluate these different channels, but from a kind of I guess, a year on year improvement is Pinterest is the one that’s is getting us quite excited and also thinking about how, you know, we can use technology on the platform to create moveboards instead of a wish list where people take a button and it goes somewhere and never use. How can we actually have almost a moveboard that people can put these products on a board, move them around, put them together, put colors that match or don’t match and then share it with their friends? It’s something, you know, we’re hoping to have in place come Christmas. It’s something we’re certainly looking into.

Paul Stephen: 40:57
I mean it’s interesting you talk about not many people talk about Pinterest as a as a as a channel, even though it’s a platform that’s been around for a long, long time. I’m trying to think how old it is actually feels I don’t know a good 10, 12 years.

Mark Hammond: 41:12
I don’t know. Yeah, it will never outperform Google. No, it’s about saying, but from a top of the funnel and a creative perspective, it’s something we’re definitely looking at, yeah.

Paul Stephen: 41:26
I mean, interior design is probably what I’d think of Pinterest as being the thing that people, do you know, put on their pinboards of their ideas for indoors, outdoors or whatever in the home. So do you do you think that then Pinterest is having a bit more of a research, and it’s always just your, you know. You you’re learning how to embrace what’s been there all the time.

Mark Hammond: 41:48
Very interesting question. I think it’s definitely the latter. It’s certainly working more for us and it’s yeah. It would be interesting to hear from others if they’re seeing similar or if the overall metrics are going in the right direction. But both anecdotally and you know within what we’re seeing, it certainly seems to be, you know, getting the right people on there.

Paul Stephen: 42:08
So we’re kind of coming close to the end of the time now. So I’m going to ask you one more and then open it up. So we’d love to hear about all the good and the bad on this show. So I’ll be interested to know if you’ve got any advice or stories war stories or otherwise which you would. You know, there’s things you’ve done that you might do differently in the future maybe.

Mark Hammond: 42:32
Good question, I think, if I go about and look at all my career, and one thing I’d like to think I’ve hopefully got better as I’ve got older it’s just listening. You know, when you’re going into new business you want, you’re so excited, you’ve hired you for a reason, you’ve got all these skills, you just want to prove a point, but actually you know there’s a good argument just don’t do anything for a month, just spend time with the key stakeholders. You just never know where advice is, where help is. If you’re too busy just trying to change the world, you might be not doing the right thing, but you might be missing a drink. And I go back to one of my previous roles.

Mark Hammond: 43:09
There was an IT director who was an elderly man.

Mark Hammond: 43:13
He’s retired now and everyone just knew he was a no man, just said no, no, no no to everything and didn’t get digital.

Mark Hammond: 43:20
And you know, I unfortunately just took everyone’s advice and didn’t spend that much time with him. But before I left the company we were having, you know, quarterly lunches because actually he knew every single nuance of the business, he knew everybody, he knew how all the technology lined up and the reasonings are no, no, no man is because he reported into the CFO and he had very, very tight budgets, but he would be thinking two, three years ahead. So actually he would more than happy to have a conversation as to what would come down the line and how this digital e-commerce technology could fit into the wider business processes. And as him and his boss, the CFO, were chatting plans, he was the right man to have the ear of. But it took me a good year to understand that you know that’s the right person to have. So I think, yeah, just don’t go in all guns blazing and just find out the right people to speak to. I think it’s not necessarily digital tip, but I think it’s something for any business, I guess.

Paul Stephen: 44:14
So I know Heels because I’m 53. So I’ve always known Heels as a kind of quality, well-designed, aspirational brand. But I was one of my millennial friends the other day if she knew them and she just bought a house and she was right in that situation where she would buy quality furniture and she didn’t know them. So I’m kind of curious You’ve talked about Pinterest and Instagram, but have you looked at TikTok or any of the other social platforms?

Mark Hammond: 44:42
I think we I’d say we have dabbled in it and the challenge of that is, you know it’s a small team and dabbling is not sufficient. I know from people have done it very, very well. It is about consistency, it’s about testing, it’s about learning and you know, I’d love to say you know we’d have some resource and some time to do that over a period and try and make it work. But yeah, unfortunately not. But it is an interesting point about brand visibility and we know you speak to anybody around London of certain demographic. They know Heels Even Brighton, where we haven’t had to store for two years, it still resonates.

Mark Hammond: 45:19
But you know, I’m from Norwich and very few people have heard of Heels because it’s just not a local business. And as our marketing is, you know we’re still just a UK-based business but our marketing is national. It is a lot we need to think about more up the funnel, more brand awareness. We did a bit around kind of YouTube brand videos and reaching out in the run up to Christmas. It’s. The longevity of the success of them is yet to be proven, but I think we need to think a lot more about that. For, you know, for people like your friend, you know we want people who are thinking of two-seater sofas and not typing it into Google to have Heels front of mind, and I think that’s a real opportunity for us.

Paul Stephen: 46:01
Yeah, it’s about the aspiration right. It’s the desire, the desire to own such an object.

Mark Hammond: 46:06
As som eone who now fortunately has a couple of Heels pieces. They are beautiful. They are, y ou know there’s a demographic that have have that’s not necessarily the old, rich people living in the country, but the more kind of younger, urban who are doing well but want piece, not, you know, I’m not greenwashing, saying sustainable, but you know they look at buying products that are going to last a lifetime or 30 years, rather than stuff you know that’s going to last five and need to replace it and I think we are one of those brands that you know people who know us know that products are going to last, hopefully, a lot of time and they trust that.

Paul Stephen: 46:42
That’s great. There’s certainly a sustainability angle there. I’m conscious of the time now we’re been going a good 50 minutes, so I’m not seeing any more questions in our feed. I’m sorry about that, but it’s been a fantastic time. Well, I’ve learned a hell of a lot, I think. Hopefully, those that listened have done so too, so I can only say thank you for that Mark. Thank you for everyone who tuned in as well. I’d like to remind everybody as well while, I’ve still got you that we have another one of these wonderful Shoppernomics events. This time it will be on a Wednesday, on the 3rd of April. We have a lovely lady, Anu. She’s an e-commerce product lead at Whitbread, so please tune in for that, and also all of our Shoponomics. Recordings are available on podcast Apple podcast, spotify podcast any of your favorite Spotify, sorry, your favorite podcast channels.

Paul Stephen: 47:44
So, yeah, all I can say now then is thank you, mark. That’s been amazing. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Mark Hammond: 47:51
No, it’s brilliant. Thank you very much for having me.

Paul Stephen: 47:53
Thanks a lot.