Welcome to our newest feature, The Inner Circle Confab, where we’ll feature a question of the week along with the answers of a select group of women retail leaders. This week’s confab question: “Quarter two is upon us. What’s you biggest goal for the quarter?” What follows is select answers from retail executives.

Joan Abrams
Director, E-Commerce
Ross-Simons
“In the second quarter, our major holiday selling seasons have passed, so we’re focused on improving the user experience on our websites before the next big selling seasons. We’re soliciting customer feedback via online user testing, surveys and mystery shopping. We want to know if we’re meeting customer expectations and what we can do to improve the Ross-Simons’ shopping experience. In addition, since Ross-Simons’ customers are spending more time on their mobile and tablet devices, we’re focused on optimizing the jewelry shopping experience on these devices.”

MaryAnn Bekkedahl
Co-Founder, President
Keep
“Here at Keep, we’ve built an amazing customer retention business through the combination of fantastic merchandise and outstanding customer service. In the second quarter, my priority is to continue driving our already high Net Promoter Score of 77 upwards, and growing our repeat shopper sales from 60 percent to 70 percent, while growing overall sales and, of course, welcoming first-time purchasers.” In addition, MaryAnn says Keep’s Apple Watch app will go live in conjunction with the watch in-store date, so she’s “eager to see Apple Watch adoption by women, and the Keep audience in particular.”

Amy Madonia
Executive Director, Digital
Temptu
“My biggest goal for the quarter is increasing conversion. We’ve had significant traffic growth, so leveraging that growth with just a 5 percent to 10 percent conversion gain will lead to significant sales increases.” Amy says Temptu has a three-pronged optimization strategy for driving conversion in the second quarter, which includes the following:

  • On-site content: This includes optimizing on-site search, homepage content, personalization, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
  • Mobile: Our smartphone conversion [rate] is the lowest conversion we have, which isn’t uncommon, Amy notes. Using heat maps and understanding top paths to purchase on mobile will be important to improving smartphone conversion, she adds.
  • Quality traffic: Increasing traffic to our site from email and affiliate channels, which are typically high-converting channels, through email segmentation and affiliate activation strategies.

Tran Tieu
Director, Omnichannel Strategy and Innovation
Brighton Collectibles
“For the second quarter, the biggest goal for Brighton is reshaping what personalization means to the brand and how we can help our customer regardless of where she is in her purchase life cycle via channel.”