The Key Learnings from Savant London 2025
Savant London wrapped up last week with lots of insightful keynotes, productive meetings, and some seriously spicy turmeric shots. In case you missed the event or didn’t hear all the talks you planned to, we’ve done the decent thing and recapped all the key takeaways here.
Read on to find out why…
1. Personalisation is important – but it isn’t always what you think
2. Customer expectations for privacy differ depending on the market – here’s how to get it right
3. It’s crucial to make sure your business is on the same page
4. Generative AI is the future, and it’s happening now
5. Unlocking your customers’ lifetime value can lead to huge wins
What is Savant London?
Savant London is a calendar must for anyone working in eCommerce. 2025’s event brought together over 250 senior leaders in eCommerce, marketing, digital, and customer experience from the UK's most dynamic brands, retailers, and manufacturers.
Personalisation is important – but it isn’t always what you think
Personalisation doesn’t just mean tailored recommendations for repeat or first-time customers. Instead, try going back to basics and start with crafting your brand’s narrative and content strategy. Think about what will resonate with your customers at different stages of their buyer journey, and make content that you know they’ll want to consume. This is a key aspect of personalisation that will really help your brand stand out.
For instance, sharing your brand’s or founder’s story is a great touchpoint for customers at the Top and Middle of Funnel, in the “awareness” or “consideration” stages of the buyer journey. A key cornerstone of Look Fabulous Forever’s personalisation strategy is posting make-up tips and tutorials on YouTube for their older audience of post-menopausal women, whose needs differ from the younger demographic that most cosmetic products market to. This empathetic personalisation strategy shows customers that they’re truly understood, nurturing brand loyalty by predicting the emotions around, questions about, and situations in which customers will actually use the brand’s products.
Customer expectations for privacy differ depending on the market – here’s how to get it right
While privacy legislation varies by region, beyond that, it’s also important to pay attention to customer expectations in order to avoid alienating potential shoppers. Whilst in the US, a customer might receive 4 emails a week without batting an eyelid, sending 1 email per week in the EU could risk an onslaught of unsubscribes. And when it comes to emerging markets like Brazil, prevailing attitudes there are ahead of the curve when it comes to data privacy. Creating a thoughtful communications strategy that tailors to customer expectations by region is a must in order to build a strong relationship of trust with potential buyers and ensure the right message hits at the right time.
It’s crucial to make sure your business is integrated
Do Marketing and Sales use the same words to describe your products, campaigns and metrics? Does Operations use the same vocabulary as your call centres? It’s best practice to develop a simple, easy-to-understand internal language that keeps your whole company on the same page. Developing a centralised dashboard that is easily understood by each user will do wonders to reduce internal friction, ensuring a better handover and a more holistic understanding of your customers. Push for simplicity at the heart of your organisation – and at the end of the day, take everything back to the same question: “Does this action help my customer?”
Generative AI is the future, and it’s happening now
Ocula CEO Thomas McKenna (right) presenting with Hornby’s Head of Ecommerce, Michael Manton
GenAI was the word on everyone’s lips at Savant 2025, with huge praise for its cost-saving potential. Claire Hennah, Non Executive Director at Karo Healthcare, summed it up in a line: “With Generative AI, we can create much more than we have ever been able to, and at a cheaper cost.” Similarly, Hornby’s Head of Ecommerce, Michael Manton, uses Ocula’s AI copywriter to free up bandwidth for his team, creating valuable time to focus on all other aspects of improving CX. Not only does Hornby use Ocula’s AI to generate huge volumes of content across multiple brands and 1,000s of SKUs, the tool also functions across multiple markets and languages, surfacing key insights about content performance via its clear prioritatisation dashboard.
Unlocking your customers’ lifetime value can lead to huge wins
Customer lifespan measures the time between a customer's first and last purchase, and typically sits around 1-3 years. For Virgin Experience Days, however, customer life span is significantly longer, with a key segment of customers purchasing from the gift company on a 5 year cycle. Virgin cited their innovative product and CX as the main reason for this impressive lifetime value, but also highlighted that they ran dedicated brand and awareness campaigns to continually bring back long-term customers. When a customer shares negative feedback, rather than labelling their churn as inevitable, Virgin aims to tackle such friction points head on and recapture these customers with the right message at the right time. AI automations have been particularly helpful for creating this personalised comms strategy.
Like always, Savant 2025 was a fantastic opportunity to meet with leaders from across the retail landscape and explore the future of eCommerce. If you missed the chance to catch up and learn how Ocula’s AI copywriter and SEO expert can save your eCommerce business 1,000s of hours in time, book an intro call with our CEO here.
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