On a Q4 2015 earnings call held on September 22nd, CEO Don Grimes had some exciting news. The luxury retailer, currently preparing to go public, sold $1.3 billion online in fiscal 2015, an increase of 13% year-over-year. Web sales accounted for 25.5% of the company’s 2015 sales of $5.095 billion, up from 23.9% a year earlier.

On the same day, Daniel Neukomm, the CEO of La Jolla Group—parent company to surf apparel retailer O’Neill Clothing Company—had his own exciting results to share in an interview with Internet Retailer. In the last two years, smartphone revenue has increased 111.15% and smartphone conversions increased 15.28%. This improvement is good because, according to Neukomm, about 50% of O’Neill’s traffic stems from smartphones.

But these two CEOs share far more than some exciting sales numbers and a little press coverage. Each man credits the same foundational web experience strategy for his success: Personalization.

What They Did

At Neiman Marcus, the focus was on the on-site customer experience. From a personalized editorial homepage that provides customers with relevant content in the homepage main image to personalized site search based on buying or browsing behavior, Neiman Marcus hoped to capture high-end fashion buyers by serving the brands they love in a variety of ways. They also launched the ability to customize and personalize merchandise on the website and added a variety of advanced search filters so people can customize their experience even further.

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It’s not too late to learn from 2014 and ensure a more successful 2015 holiday shopping season with site performance and availability measures.

Retailers that fared the best in 2014 are those that not only kept their sites running smoothly but also could make needed changes.  While this is counter to traditional approaches where websites are “locked down” for the holidays even months ahead of Cyber Monday, the survey highlights how the most successful firms are moving beyond this approach.

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Web accessibility is a concept that often makes headlines. Earlier this year, Harvard and MIT found themselves facing lawsuits for a lack of online captioning. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice intends to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking this June that will provide guidance on website accessibility for the private sector. The DOJ’s recent, increasingly aggressive pursuit of its enforcement agenda makes it clear that it views online accessibility as importantly as it does physical-world accessibility. Norway’s record-setting legislation for private sector online accessibility kicked in this year as well.

I live in Ontario, Canada — the first jurisdiction in the world to legally mandate web accessibility for government AND private business. Along with the U.S., similar legislation is marching forward in Australia, the EU, and elsewhere. This is a great win for social justice, not to mention the many other powerful arguments for making your sites inclusive (doing the right thing, leaving no one behind, broadening reach, fulfilling corporate social responsibility, etc).

But even if you are able to skirt the law and ignore all the visitors to your site that may be negatively impacted by a lack of accessibility standards, there is one visitor you can’t ignore: Google.

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5 years ago, Google declared that they would begin incorporating page speed into search rankings. Page speed–a metric often ignored by marketing teams–had been largely seen as a developer concern. But with Google declaring page speed a significant SEO ranking factor, many marketers began to take notice.

Whether you thought the Google announcement was a turning point or just one in a long line of shifts toward experience-driven marketing, it is hard to ignore the evidence that experience drives loyalty, improves purchase intent, and differentiates the brand. And no modern experience can succeed without optimized performance and efficient delivery.

A few data points should help bring things into focus:

• Conversion rates plunge once page load time rise above 1 second
• People will visit a website less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds
• Millennials now account for $1.3 trillion in annual consumer spending and 78% of them prefer experiences over things
• By the end of 2015, mobile’s share of e-commerce transactions will reach 33% in the U.S. and 40% globally

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We recently introduced our readers to the concept of Website Accessibility; a form of user experience development used to make sites and web stores more accessible to disabled visitors. Kanban has been working to bring our clients into compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards–currently used by organizations around the world and now enforced by the Department of Justice–will not only protect our clients from lawsuits, but will make their websites more accessible to the disabled, the elderly and people with drastically reduced internet speeds.

While it is possible to retrofit your website to conform to accessibility standards, companies planning for a redesign will see efficiency and economies from adding accessibility to the scope of work. For those of you who are interested in accessibility compliance but are not planning a redesign, start with an accessibility audit, mapping your user experience features and functions–and the CMS– directly to WCAG standards.

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