Lancaster agency introduces new ecommerce event to the North

The first ever eCommCon was held last week, seeing ecommerce professionals from across the north flocking to the beautiful city of Lancaster to hear from a line up of top industry experts.

eCommCon was a first for Lancaster based Magento experts Nublue, who hosted the event, bringing together a number of their industry partners delivering talks and panel debates on the topic of increasing online conversions.

Taking place in the unique rooms at The Storey Institute, Lancaster, eCommCon saw names from Dotmailer, Nosto, Feefo, Brightpearl, Temando and more players in the ecommerce sphere, with a fascinating keynote speech from Neil McKay – CEO of Endless Gain, a Manchester based conversion optimisation agency.

A number of underlining themes were shared by the speakers and panellists on the day: namely urging online retailers to go back to basics, ensuring the essentials of the customer journey are in place first.

Skip Fidura of Dotmailer urged the audience to “focus on the fundamentals”, whilst Melanie McKay, Consultant and Head of Ecommerce and Digital for leading trail running brand inov-8 emphasised the need to work on projects in manageable chunks, again aiming to “get the fundamentals right first”.

Utilising the unique abilities of online retail to offer customers a personalised, unique and relevant experience also featured across several of the talks.

Nosto’s Rory Gilmore explained that today’s customers “expect relevance” in their online experiences with a brand, whilst Skip Fidura highlighted the unique potential that online stores offer over bricks and mortar stores to be able to facilitate a completely personalised experience.

A strong focus for the day was on boosting the number of repeat customers and working on customer retention. Fjolla Bakalli of Loyalty Lion expressed the need to “make loyalty programs part of your retention strategy”, looking at frequency of purchase and Average Order Value as measures of loyalty.

Nosto and Dotmailer combined forces to present ideas on how personalised communications can encourage repeat customers. Michael Ashworth, managing director of Nublue, the team behind eCommCon, expressed his delight at the turnout: “I’m immensely proud of the team here, and it was great to see so many ecommerce retailers attending and getting involved. There was a real buzz amongst the audience, and some powerful insights from our expert partners.”