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Enhance Your Global Business with an Updated Commerce Strategy
Aug 10, 2017 • 2 Minute Read • Jeff Pratt, Commerce Practice Director
I'm very excited to have co-presented, with Joe Crum IEWC's CIO/CMO, on last week's Sitecore Global Summit webinar series. The webinar, “Enhancing a Global Business with an Updated Commerce Strategy”, offered some straight forward and openly candid advice and steps that any company should be aware of if it is considering expanding digital capabilities in a meaningful way.
IEWC's Global Digital Initiative, the Project Nile, is well into Phase 2 implementation of their 3 Year Roadmap and this mid-stream reflection point provides directional insight from a solid and mature business as they get serious about gaining a leadership role in the digital arena.
The webinar was structured against ‘3 Steps to Global Digital Commerce Strategy’ which we defined as:
- Foundational: ‘Educate & Inform’: Joe Crum leads the discussion as to how he and his team went about educating and aligning a common understanding within IEWC's senior management and board-level leadership. To paraphrase him, “There will soon be two kinds of companies, those who have a solid digital capability and experience for their customers and those who won't be around for much longer.”
- Strategy Development: As Commerce Experience Practice Director at Verndale, I was the lead strategist with IEWC as we quantified, validated, and grounded our approach to Strategy Development during a ‘Pre-Strategy Discovery & Planning’ phase. With that clarity to inform the structure and approach, we then engaged a more broad representation of the IEWC organization as we stepped through workshops, interviews and deep-dive sessions to capture, analyze and prioritize all the exciting opportunities for IEWC to consider moving forward. I outlined a high-level view of this approach and some specific tactics in the webinar and in the deck that is also available.
- Implementation: With the proper foundational support of the organization and a comprehensive Digital Vision & Strategy documented and agreed upon, the final leg of the journey involved prioritization and breaking that vision into discreet segments that could be supported and built out. The resulting 3-year roadmap highlights the evolution of IEWC's Digital capabilities, the relationship of their core US market to a Global Expansion plan, and how various decisions were made and are being managed moving forward.
Lastly, it was great to hear from Joe about some of the early performance metrics for their Phase 1 site that was launched just a few months ago. Several of the key scenarios that we had identified during our Strategy Development phase were directly aligned to these KPIs... and we are all happy to report significant business impact during these initial months. To highlight a few, IEWC Web stats are up:
Unique Visitors: +23%
Web Visits: +26%
Page Views: + 13%
Conversions: +126%
Our last slides contain two ‘Digital Strategy Check Lists’ that viewers can use to validate their own approach to generating an updated Global Digital Commerce Strategy or use to inform the partner selection process if you decide to seek outside assistance in pulling this together.
We certainly appreciate the recognition by Sitecore for Verndale's role within the community and our capabilities in the Digital Strategy space. We also very much appreciate the time and effort put into this webinar by Joe Crum and his team at IEWC. It means a lot to all of us here at Verndale, to have a client who is as committed and dedicated to realizing their business vision and growth as IEWC and it means a lot that they have been willing to step forward and openly share this part of their journey with the larger Sitecore Community. Dive into the recording, here!