Testing and Learning in E-Commerce – JOHN VEICHMANIS | DMR #208

Today I'm joined by a man who has held senior online business roles for the past 20 years. He’s been a senior manager at Dell and Apple, a Director at Skype and a Vice President at Expedia. He’s currently Senior Vice President of Online Marketing for Farfetch - welcome to DMR, John Veichmanis.





On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss testing and learning in e-commerce, with topics including:

How would you define testing and learning in relation to e-commerce?
Is it necessary for every e-commerce business to be testing and learning or does this only apply to larger businesses?
What are some of the more important areas to be testing?
How do you structure a test and learn effectively so that you can have confidence in the winning result?
How do you define the difference between a winner and not quite a winner?
If you do find a winner, does that mean that you should implement that change thought-out your business?
How do you decide on what to test? Can you give me an example of a really well structured test?
What would be an example of a bad test?
Is there a danger that running experiments could be taking our time away from what may be seen as more productive work?
Are there some things that just can’t be tested and we have to rely more on our gut instinct?

[Tweet ""Data is our real currency" says @johnveichmanis from @farfetch #ModernMarketing"]
Software I couldn't live without
What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success?
BlueKai from Oracle [Data management platform]
What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future?
Optimizely [A/B testing tool]
My number 1 takeaway
What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses?
Data is our real currency. Any marketer typically has a pound or dollar-based budget. I often think about how we get the best return for that spend. Ultimately I think that we should change that dialogue and look at the data assets that we have and make sure that we're getting the best return on those assets, and we're using them effectively. Both in terms of measurement, but also enhancing that user experience and that to me is the real focus. The brief to my team in terms of what are we doing to make sure that we really enhance and get to that one-to-one level - not only in email, across any communication actually. I think that it's a long, winding road ahead. We'll make many mistakes, we'll learn many things form testing hopefully - but that is the most important and interesting space I think.