0:16 Hi, everyone. My name is Stephanie Novak and I'm a value engineer. Here is our voice. I know you're probably thinking, what's a value engineer? 0:25 But my role is to quantify the impact of the value that our customers are receiving or can receive from the Bazaarvoice platform. So in that vein, I'm super excited to speak with you today about the value of omnichannel shopping and share some fantastic insights into the omnichannel shopper journey. 0:41 So let's dive in. First off, who's heard about the robo economy before robo or research online by offline is a trend in the buyer journey where customers seek online content to qualify their buying decision before they decide to purchase in-store. 0:58 And it's a consistent trend both before and after the pandemic. Now, with around half of shoppers turning to online research to bring them to checkout, so who wants to influence half of in-store shoppers to purchase their product? 1:11 This webinar will explore this robo economy and other shifting behaviors of today's omnichannel shopper. Today, I'm going to share insights from three sources of first party data. 1:23 Firstly, a consumer survey of over 6,000 consumers worldwide, with roughly half of the respondents claiming to prefer to shop in store and roughly half online. 1:33 Second, we conducted a survey of global brands and retailers with roughly 8% of the respondents coming from the retailer community. And my last source is a Bazaarvoice network data. 1:43 A Bazaarvoice have studied robo across industries for several years, for 72 product categories. With all this research, we've worked to quantify the impact of content on the omnichannel shopper journey. 1:57 So today's agenda. First off, I'm going to go into some purchase behavior information, then research behavior, brand and retailer value optimization, robo economy. 2:08 And then last but not least, some recommendations to leave you all with today. All right. Let me briefly set the stage for us in terms of why our voice is well positioned to support content related for omnichannel initiatives and speak on it. 2:22 This is a growth strategy as a subject matter expert today because our voice is the user generated content partner that gives your content direct access to the largest network of retailers and shoppers. 2:33 And by partnering with more than 12,000 brands and retailers, we average 1.3 billion shoppers monthly and have gained an intimate understanding of what works and what doesn't when it comes to leveraging user generated content across all marketing channels, online, in search, in social and in store. 2:54 As our voice helps brands and retailers collect and display all forms of user generated content on their e-commerce sites, social and in-store displays. 3:03 Our solutions and services include ratings and reviews, questions and answers, sampling, visual and social content, syndication insights and social commerce just to name a few. 3:16 So let's dig into this research and start with purchase behavior. We asked shoppers what mode of shopping they felt happiest an online, in-store or hybrid of both. 3:28 Nothing proves omnichannel more than these numbers, guys. 2/3 of respondents prefer a hybrid shopping mode. And at a macro level, what we're witnessing is the new norm. 3:37 How people prefer to shop post-pandemic. And this differs by age group with younger generations buying more online, particularly in millennials. 3:48 And this differs by country with German shoppers preferring a three course hybrid shopping mode versus other countries like the United States and Canada who see a larger in-store shopper piece. 4:00 And this differs most dramatically by industry category. Here are just a few industries from our data set, but you can see that electronics differs dramatically from food and beverage as an example. 4:12 From the majority of online shoppers. Retailers provide the main purchase channel with one in five purchasing via social media. It indicates that this is already a key channel in the purchase journey with Facebook shops and Instagram being the key channels used. 4:29 So Facebook and Instagram garner similar levels of interest from online shoppers, emphasizing the importance of seamless discovery, research and purchase opportunities across varying platforms. 4:41 Take a second to look at how your industry shopping behavior on social media platforms may differ from other industries. For example, health and beauty sees the highest usage via influencers Instagram stories, while home and garden sees the highest usage through Facebook shops. 4:57 So we asked shoppers what drives them to shop this way, either online or in-store. The top reasons shoppers prefer to buy online are access to home delivery, direct products, searching for better deals and ease and convenience. 5:12 Are those key drivers to shopping online? There's not much difference between those top four in terms of respondents response rate Among those who typically buy online 2 and 5 do actually purchase in-store, but they conduct research online before doing so. 5:28 Assessing the quality of the products and instant ownership are key drivers for online shoppers purchasing in store. For example, I'm a huge online shopper. 5:36 I even get my groceries online. But when I purchase something like a new iPhone, I go in store for instant ownership and to try the product myself. So when we look at an industry level, home delivery is an obvious advantage for bulky purchases like home and garden pet supplies and food, while direct searching and better deals are key when shoppers have a clear idea of what they need, like for vehicles and parts or electronics and ease, ease and convenience comes to the forefront for apparel, food and toys and games. 6:09 So we asked our in-store shoppers why they prefer to shop in store. The ability to assess the quality of the product before purchasing and experience are the key drivers for in-store shopping. 6:21 We also asked why they don't shop online. The inability to determine a product's quality is the biggest factor that causes in-store shoppers to hesitate purchasing online. 6:31 Interestingly, three points highlighted in yellow here are related to delivery and returns. So for online shoppers, the convenience of delivery is a positive driver. 6:40 And for in-store shoppers, the cost and complexity of delivery is a negative driver. Today we see that a third of in-store shoppers claim to use their phone in store to make a purchase online, mainly to get a better deal. 6:56 So now that we've discussed purchase behavior, let's go into the consumer research behaviors today. In this section, we look at what type of information shoppers use to inform their shopping journey. 7:07 So we all know that research is key in the omnichannel shopper journey. It's important to shoppers who prefer to shop online and shoppers who prefer to shop in store. 7:15 We found that 79% of online shoppers and 59% of in-store shoppers are conducting research online before making a purchase. 7:24 It's a huge opportunity, right? So digging in a little deeper, we found that for both online and in-store shoppers, a significant amount of research is happening online, in store and through word of mouth. 7:37 In other words, it's important to have all of your bases covered. However, online research is the highest source of research, regardless of shopping channel, whether that's in-store or online. 7:48 So we wanted to understand if there was any variance for this research need by industry. Conducting research online plays a significant role across all categories. 7:59 By plotting the percentage by industry through research for both online shoppers and in-store shoppers, we start to see some trends emerging. 8:08 We create a research scale of low research. Those who research under 25% moderate those who research 25% to 50% higher research 50 to 75%, and very high research at 75% to 100% With almost all industries coming out in the high or very high research behavior categories. 8:29 So just for fun, we took a look back at previous Bazaarvoice study from 2017 to see how this research online biathlon trend has changed in the past five years. 8:39 We plotted just a few example industries here, but what we found was a staggering change in behavior for food and beverage, for apparel, for health and beauty, and for electronics. 8:51 The rate of increase of online research for both in-store and online purchases is dramatic, and we only see this trend rising. 9:01 So what content do people need to research effectively? It's quite telling that the top five things on this slide to the left are either price comparison at 60% or user generated content at 47 to 26% individually. 9:14 So if you want to sell your product based on anything but price, you need. UGC scholars value all types of UGC content from social and visual to Q&A for reviews. 9:27 In fact, seven of the top 11 types of research content most sought after by smart shoppers is UGC, highlighting the key role that UGC plays in the omnichannel buyer journey. 9:39 So when we ask online shoppers where they conduct their research, they primarily said through a web browser searches or brand specific websites. 9:47 And of those who use social media, Facebook and Instagram are the predominant platforms used. We asked in-store shoppers the same question, and we found that they also conduct research through a web browser searches predominantly. 10:04 Today we see that 2 and every three in store shoppers plan to use their phone in-store for research purchases, mainly to determine the best deal available and to check reviews. 10:15 And this behavior seems to increase fractionally over the past five years, from 60% in 2017 to 63% in 2022. 10:25 So where does providing an omnichannel shopping experience fall, among other business strategies? We asked over 400 brands and retailers around the world to find out. 10:36 There's no denying that brands and retailers feel an omnichannel retail experience is crucial. Businesses have high expectations for omnichannel to deliver brand awareness revenue and to acquire new audiences. 10:50 When asked what challenges they were facing, respondents cited an inability to scale as a key issue poor coordination amongst different platforms, each channel being expensive and difficult to coordinate across so many retailers leading to. 11:04 And I'll call out a few here high costs, lack of resources and brand consistency issues. So I'm going to pause here to tell a quick story about a brand called Primal kitchen who came to bazaar voice to solve their issue of scaling all forms of UGC to drive omnichannel success. 11:20 Primal kitchen initially started working with bazaar voice because the team understood the importance of featuring user generated content. The brand was accumulating continuous reviews on its websites, some other websites, but it needed a way to syndicate them to retail partners like Target and walmart.com. 11:38 After implementing the tsar force platform, primal kitchen saw an immediate increase in reviews on retail partner sites and a massive boost in search volume for its products. 11:48 Going from a few thousand reviews to over 100,000 reviews across multiple retailers, which was a 130x increase on their review volume. 11:57 But that was just the start. Primal kitchen also needed a way to get to first time customers who may not be familiar with its unique products and get them to convert. 12:07 The company knew that written reviews would help with that, but it also wanted to use bizarre voices, unique solutions to create visual UGC and in turn create more authenticity. 12:17 Looking specifically at target.com, the brand is syndicating hundreds of visuals that are approved by target for its product pages, and the company has seen significant business growth from this effort. 12:27 In fact, in Q4 of last year, they saw 131% increase in conversion at target.com alone. Because we know UGC is key to the customer research process before buying both online and in-store, primal kitchen is now able to be front and center on key retailer sites, where customer customers are conducting research and looking specifically for UGC. 12:49 Additionally, in terms of scale, what if you're just looking to increase the speed at which you collect and display ugc? Another quick example is that for a large pet supplies retailer, by implementing a sampling program with bazaar voice, they were able to decrease the time it took to go from 1 to 10 reviews by 75 days for products within the sampling program. 13:12 We also saw that the quality of UGC from the sampling program improved with products sampled going from less than 4.5 stars to over $4.5 star rating, as well as increase the number of reviews that contained images which we all know are an important factor in consumers propensity to convert. 13:32 So there's no denying that brands and retailers feel omnichannel retail experience is crucial how they're currently researching or planning for this strategy. 13:40 While 42% are actively executing it or already have it as an established strategy, and 10% consider it to be the number one business priority. 13:51 So where do our brands and retailers investing in omnichannel brands spend over a quarter of their total marketing spend on their own website, followed by advertising? 14:00 And this is very similar with for retail with web browser coming in third at 25% Increasing traffic to online stores came out as the primary driver for selling on social strategies. 14:13 Multichannel uses came across as part of the omnichannel strategies as well, indicating that social content is of great importance to the omnichannel journey. 14:24 So 78% of brands know that shoppers research in-store and look for ways to help in-store shoppers research with QR codes, in-store displays and and arming shop assistants with tablets. 14:38 Which brings us full circle back to Robbo. So let's take a quick look at how you can calculate the impact research has on your in-store sales. 14:47 Brands and retailers know that online consumer content drives online sales. But how are offline sales influenced by online content? 14:55 to answer this question, we devised the robo multiplier, which quantifies how much in-store revenue shopper content like reviews, Q&A and social influences for every dollar it influences an online sales. 15:10 So for example, the average robo multiplier for brands and the Bazaarvoice network is 3.91. This means that for every dollar of revenue influenced online user generated content influences $3.91 in-store on average. 15:25 So to put Bazaarvoice is extensive product category and subcategory data to work for you and understand the robo multiplier for your specific business, please reach out to bazaar voice. 15:38 We'll help you figure out how to best close the gap between your online and in-store experiences. If you want to look more deeply at your own personal robo scores, I recommend talking to one of the Bazaarvoice teams who can set up an Roi workshop session with you, or even check out our Roi calculator online, which calculates your robo multiplier and much more. 16:01 And before I jump into my recommendations, I want to leave you with today. I just wanted to give a quick plug to an upcoming webinar, which I think is going to be very valuable to anyone trying to make a business case for bazaar voice, especially in a time when there's a huge focus on inflation pressures and recession proofing businesses. 16:19 And these webinars for brands and retailers on the 17th for brands and on the 18th for retailers, we have guest speakers and Forrester analysts in the omnichannel and retail and marketing space. 16:32 You can find this on the webinar section of our website. If you're interested in learning more about how we can help your business succeed, please go ahead and register now. 16:41 OK last but not least, I'm going to leave you guys with a few recommendations and a quick summary. The biggest lesson of rogo is that the line between online and in-store continues to blur and become increasingly complex as new social channels arise. 16:56 But what are the four key takeaways I'd like to leave you with today? First, we'd love to work with you on your specific robo multiplier. Please reach out to us. 17:05 Second, social proof, this amazing concept that performs in-store and an online shopping Q&A. Ratings and reviews. 17:14 Social and visual imagery. Each one of these is critical to you. Ensuring that you have the right content mix is critical. 17:22 There are speeds of value. It's clear from the research that we did that brands and retailers think that omnichannel is a clear strategy, but it's also clear that they're struggling to scale. 17:32 So it's critical that you're working with bazaar voice to collect fresh content and that content is being moderated, is authentic and being published across all consumer touchpoints. 17:42 And last but not least, in store, 25% of people say in-store is still a core part of their purchasing journey. You saw all the different ways retailers are using UGC in store. 17:54 You can work with a partner like bazaar voice to ensure your shoppers are finding the right information while they're in the aisle at the end of the day. To capitalize on omnichannel, you need a partner who will help you scale these opportunities at speed. 18:07 So user generated content from seven of the top 11 types of research content most sought after by shoppers, highlighting the key role that UGC plays in the omnichannel buyer journey. 18:18 Ensure your shoppers have the right content mix to inspire confident purchases. In-store research is happening. Make it easy. 18:27 So thank you guys so much for joining the presentation today. Now I'm going to be joined by my colleague bobak, who is a Bazaarvoice solutions consulting team lead. 18:36 To take any questions you all might have.
