Leader Spotlight: The evolution of customer expectations, with Erica Randerson

Erica Randerson is an entrepreneurial, data-driven ecommerce leader with a career marked by driving growth and transformation in the digital landscape. As Vice President of Ecommerce at Edible, she orchestrates all facets of digital strategy.

Prior to Edible, Erica served as Vice President of Ecommerce at Divi, a beauty startup recognized as Ulta Beauty’s 2023 Emerging Brand of the Year, where she led marketing, technology, and creative. Earlier in her career at Look Listen, a leading full-service digital agency, Erica honed her leadership skills at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and creative endeavors. Her strategic insights and innovative approach have consistently delivered profitable results.

In our conversation, Erica talks about how Edible Brands has evolved things like pricing, delivery, and customization options to meet changing customer expectations around ecommerce. She discusses how companies like Walmart and Amazon have set the standard for delivery, and how her team aims to meet and exceed these standards for their customers. Erica also shares current trends in online shopping, such as the desire for last-minute and one-hour delivery.

Evolving Edible Brand’s offerings

Could you begin by sharing a bit about the background of Edible Brands?

Edible Brands is best known for our iconic 25-year-old brand, Edible, formerly known as Edible Arrangements. We are in the gifting space, but we also offer options for customers looking to indulge and treat themselves. For example, we now offer cupcakes, cakes, cheesecakes, brownies, cookies, and even flowers that are perfect for that treat-yourself moment.

I love telling people that I work at Edible because they often wonder what I do in ecommerce for a brand known for its physical products. Edible.com is our ecommerce engine that engages with customers digitally and acquires orders for our franchise system to fulfill. One thing that I love about our franchise system is that we’re digitally forward, and eager to provide a wow-worthy customer experience from the first-click to last-mile. We have a customer-forward ecosystem with excellent digital experiences, product quality, and delivery in partnership with our stores.

Based on your experience, how have customers responded to dynamic pricing combined with various delivery options?

Customers have responded by showing us that the bottom line is that they want options. Brands that do not offer their customers multiple ways to shop and receive the product, including options to customize how fast they get their product, are missing out on an opportunity for incremental revenue.

Edible.com is truly the one-stop shop for all things gifting. Most of our online customers are coming to us for that last-minute, last-mile gifting moment. As a result, we have to balance immediate delivery options with delivery options for customers who do have some flexibility in when they need their product. For example, next-day delivery could be OK for some, but not for customers who really need that gift to arrive ASAP.

When customers need to send a gift ASAP, they typically have no problem paying a premium for delivery. As an ecommerce industry, we’ve been helped by powerhouses like Amazon, Target, and Walmart who have conditioned customers to understand that a 5–7 day delivery window may be free, but getting delivery faster will probably cost a little extra. We’ve uncovered similar customer expectations and sentiments within our data.

The evolution of Edible’s options and pricing

What consumer trends are you currently observing regarding the preference for faster delivery versus cost savings?

Recent research shows that value is still at the forefront. So, we always have to take into account the macroeconomic landscape. But alongside that, delivery innovations have driven customers’ expectations — the baseline for “fast” is now much faster than it was five years ago. From a cost standpoint, ecommerce retailers have to determine their own baseline for “free” and how their customers can unlock that.

Not only are customers eager to get products faster, but they also like having options. As a retailer, you may not be able to offer as fast as a one-hour delivery like Edible, but would it be possible to offer next-day delivery or even same-day delivery alongside your more standard options? Providing more options enables the customer to customize their delivery experience. When you pair this customized experience with a strong education through on-site UI/UX, you create a winning experience.

What’s your approach to aligning dynamic pricing strategies with options that enhance customer satisfaction without compromising profitability?

The power of dynamic delivery options and pricing really lies within how you combine the two while keeping your customer front of mind. If you’re a brand that’s not already playing with dynamic delivery offerings and pricing, you’re likely leaving incremental revenue on the table. We’ve done a lot of testing at Edible to understand our customer experiences and how users engage with our delivery options and pricing. This testing has helped us find the right combinations of delivery options and pricing that create a win for the customer and for us.

We’re also constantly keeping an eye not only on our competitors but also on other brands where our customers’ wallet share is going. Our team does a good job of keeping a pulse on how other ecommerce players set customer expectations regarding options and pricing, and finding ways to test similar strategies on the Edible.com experience.

An ever-changing ecommerce landscape

What are your thoughts on balancing immediate profit versus long-term growth?

It’s certainly a balancing act. Being rooted in strategic initiatives and having a strategic initiative roadmap as an organization — at a brand level — is helpful in those moments. As marketers and ecommerce leaders, we face those short-term and long-term trade-off decisions daily. How do we prioritize our team’s time and maximize the dollars we have to invest? Having alignment on strategic initiatives at all levels in the organization can make tough decisions much easier.

For most businesses, real-time macroeconomic factors will also impact those decisions. I’m proud of our team at Edible for being rooted in our strategic initiatives. At the same time, they’re willing to get scrappy to actualize ideas when immediate profit opportunities present themselves or when real-time factors change the shape of the landscape that we’re playing in.

At the end of the day, if we’re putting customer’s needs and expectations first, and crafting digital experiences that meet those, we’re likely to find a win.

Speaking of meeting the customer’s needs, what’s your process for collecting customer feedback to understand what they’re looking for?

We’re deeply rooted in data and try to make all our customer experience decisions from a data-driven place. For example, we’ve recently been testing day-parting with some of our delivery pricing. We analyze real-time data to understand the impact on conversion rate, whether positive or negative, versus the impact on revenue and other KPIs. Brands that find opportunities to evolve their offerings, whether related to pricing, delivery options, product offerings, or something else altogether, have something in common — they aren’t afraid of testing, and sometimes being met with a little failure.

It’s important that we recognize that the ecommerce landscape is constantly evolving, as is the customer expectation of their ecommerce shopping experience. We also have to recognize that we may not get it right the first time, and that’s OK.

For Edible, specifically, we use a heat mapping and session recording tool alongside other data insight platforms. Whenever we see an anomaly or trend, we dig in to understand what the customer is experiencing. How are they engaging? Are they engaging in the way we expected, or is there a new way of interacting with the site experience that we may not have anticipated? That’s where we find unexpected CRO wins to tap into.

Do you have an example of something unexpected that came from quantitative or qualitative data?

Yes, it’s always fun when data surprises you and unveils a new opportunity. As a gifting company, we typically want the recipient to know who their gift is coming from unless the sender wants to remain anonymous. Throughout our checkout experience, we offer the customer both a complimentary card option and an upgraded card option that they can personalize with their message and photo.

For several months, we were getting feedback from our stores that customers were calling in because they forgot to add a card to their online order. They would call and ask our store team members, “What do I write as a message to my wife? It’s her birthday.” This was interesting feedback from our store system of managers and franchisees. They were taking their time to help customers, which we so appreciate, but it takes us back to the question of what is missing in the digital user experience that’s causing the customer to miss our card offerings.

We ended up partnering with our technology and UI/UX teams to rework the positioning of our two card options. With that, we introduced an AI component to the experience. Now, as customers get to the more prominent card options, we also offer messaging options for them based on the occasion they’re celebrating powered by AI. We can now produce a card message on the customer’s behalf if they’d like to choose that option — empowering them to write the perfect message for their wife’s birthday.

We rolled that feature out a few months ago, and it had over 3,000 interactions in the initial rollout period alone. It’s incredible how qualitative feedback loops with customers can uncover unexpected CRO wins. I’m unsure if we would have discovered that if we had simply looked at quantitative data alone.

Offering more to customers based on trends

Have you experienced a time you can share when combining dynamic pricing and enhanced delivery options led to a significant win?

At Edible we have long offered next-day and same-day delivery. Same-day delivery has been a differentiating factor for us in the gifting space and typically see more same-day delivery orders than any other type.

As consumers, we can probably all relate to this same-day trend. For example, sometimes, I’ll be sitting at home scrolling Amazon, filling my cart, and I’ll turn to my husband and say, “OK, we need to spend three more dollars because I want to unlock the 10 p.m. delivery tonight. What else can we buy?” It’s funny how these ecommerce experiences can train us to be eager to find more ways to spend.

With innovations like Amazon’s near-immediate deliveries and the insurgence of same-day delivery giants like DoorDash and Uber Eats, we knew there was more we could offer our customers. So, we launched our one-hour menu late last year. That was a significant enhancement to our delivery offering. We kept it simple — it’s not our entire Edible product catalog. Our operations and innovation teams worked tirelessly to ensure we had products we could quickly make at our franchises to fulfill within a customer’s one-hour window.

Within the first months of launching, the incremental fee for one-hour delivery alone drove a nine-figure revenue impact. This was a massive win for our system. We’re now iterating on that menu and adding more products — it has been a game-changer.

Are there particular times or seasons when those last-minute delivery features are utilized more than others?

We’ve seen these delivery features used more frequently as the window of time to give gifts gets shorter and shorter — say, a few days before key gifting holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, the winter holiday season, etc.

This is when the delivery conversation should come to the forefront for brands. It’s about paying attention to existing customer expectations and capitalizing on those last-minute shopping habits we’ve all developed as consumers.

Are customers also moving toward a subscription-type model, especially for anniversaries or birthdays that occur on the same day every year?

Yes! We’ve definitely seen this trend in the ecommerce industry over the recent years. I’m excited to share that Edible Brands just launched freshfruit.com — our leap into fresh produce subscriptions powered by Edible. We offer a beautiful produce box filled with the freshest, seasonal produce and delivered by hand weekly or monthly. It’s quickly becoming a favorite Edible gift or self-treat.

When we talk about subscriptions, our focus has remained on the customer — offering the best products, flexible subscription plans with no-string cancellations, and the ability for the customer to make modifications to their order in the palm of their hand. We’re really proud of what we’ve built with freshfruit.com and offer this subscription brand to our customers.

Setting customer’s ecommerce expectations

What do you anticipate in terms of the evolution of customer expectations regarding pricing and delivery? Will consumers continue to want things faster?

Yes, 100 percent. Brands that will continue to win are the ones that will pay attention to customer expectations and flex their experiences accordingly.

It will be important to continue to set expectations through your ecommerce shopping journey about what “free” means for your brand. I also expect that as expectations for faster delivery options increase, the appetite to pay a premium will slightly decline. Players like Amazon will likely be able to accommodate this and still be financially OK, whereas smaller brands may not. That’s part of why awareness of what you offer from a delivery standpoint, why it’s best suited for your customer, and your seamless delivery experience will become even more important than it is today.