[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Online retail and e-commerce are booming. By 2019, e-commerce is expected to hit $480 billion in revenue. With 800,000 online stores to choose from, even big players like Amazon face fierce competition within the consumer market…
Turning Transactions Into Revenue, Relationships, and Advocates
Now a staple in the diet of cross-channel interactions, e-commerce and online retail has grown substantially, with estimates placing it at $480 billion by 2019. According to Forrester, nearly 70% of consumers purchase online regularly. Even with household names like Amazon.com, competition remains fierce and diversified to reach these consumers. Customers in the US now have more than 800,000 web stores from which to pick products.
But with this opportunity comes great challenges for online retail and commerce companies. With huge growth goals, they struggle to keep their costs low while growing revenue rapidly. More than 40% of retailers said that their marketing cost per order increased in the past year, and 46% said that their new customer acquisition costs increased. Part of the challenge rests in customers receiving messaging and advertising that isn’t targeted based on their interests, resulting in wasted advertising, bad product targeting and, ultimately, low (2.6%) conversion rates.
The underlying cause of these high costs and low conversion is sub-optimal alignment between marketing and commerce from a process, technology, and data perspective. Some technologies take up to 24 hours to share customer data. Without the right data, customers don’t receive the experience they need and move on to competitors. From a technology and process perspective, disparate applications are used to message to customers, with just 7% of marketers saying they’re equipped to do true cross-channel marketing (eConsultancy), compounding the problem for customers. In fact, according Accenture, nearly 80% of consumers receive a fragmented experience as they move across digital channels such as commerce.
What if we told you that commerce and marketing platforms no longer had to sit in their own silos? In this paper, we’ll examine what best-in-class companies are doing to deliver more consistent experiences that drive commerce revenue and more consistent customer experiences across marketing channels. Here are the five ways they are making a difference.
1. Use Commerce Data to Inform Top-of-Funnel Acquisition
Today’s online customers have all the information they need about your company at their fingertips. They can easily research your products and brand throughout the course of their day, wherever they are, and on multiple devices. How can you capitalize on the product research your customers perform to encourage purchases?
To start, you need a plan for capturing commerce data to inform your acquisition strategy. Data management and tracking capabilities can help your company obtain customer browsing data on your website and share it with your marketing platform. Using those insights, you can launch product education campaigns to help customers find the information they need based on the products they’re researching. As customers see your offerings and learn more about them, you can guide them to the point of purchase as they understand how the product solves their problem.
Key Tactics for Getting There: What types of data must you collect?
To engage with your customers on a 1:1 level you first need to know what
kind of data to use. A good rule of thumb is to start with these five main categories:
1. Product Preferences
2. Past Purchases
3. Activities
4. Behaviors
5. Communication Preferences
As marketers, it’s important to know what your customers like and want to see about your products (Product Preferences), which products they have already purchased (Past Purchases), how your customers are currently interacting with your brand (Activities), when and how your customers are engaging with your brand (Behaviors), and how your customers want you to engage with them (Communication Preferences). When we are able to tie in at least one customer attribute from each of these categories, the right message is being delivered at the right time, resulting in a highly informed and satisfied customer.
Use Case Example
Let’s say that our organization sells outdoor apparel and our customer, Chris, has been browsing our website to search for a new winter jacket. There are a lot of options we could recommend to Chris but the commerce data shows us that Chris is particularly interested in two specific brands based on his browsing activity. Using this data, we can send Chris an email campaign that highlights the benefits of each brand, helping with his research and bringing him closer to the point of purchase.
Key Ways to Measure It
• Site Traffic
• Page Views Per Visit
• Products Purchased
• Site Abandonment Rate
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
• Exit Pages
• Days and Visits to Purchase
2. Improve Targeting By Building a Comprehensive Profile for Commerce and Marketing
Customers can be underwhelmed by the typical life-cycle marketing campaigns used to retain or engage them for up-sell opportunities. How many times have you received an email that just said “Happy Birthday [insert name here]”?
The promise of personalization is vital and a promise that you should keep with your customers as 61% of customers feel more positive about a brand when marketing is personalized. If you treat your customers like individuals (not just another number in your database), and consistently recognize them and their preferences, the likelihood of them buying and remaining loyal to your brand improves. This starts by creating a more robust, unified profile between your commerce and marketing technologies. When commerce and marketing platforms are seamlessly integrated, you have a comprehensive view of your customer and are able to create highly-personalized, 1:1 content for each individual customer. Using commerce and marketing data together, you can engage your customers with the tailored experience they want, leading to deeper, more profitable, long-term relationships.
By using past purchase and profile data, marketers can deliver engaging 1:1 experiences to their customers.
Key Ways to Measure It
• Page Views Per Visit
• Product Relationship (products viewed consecutively)
• Site Traffic
• Time On Site
• Average Order Size
• Average Order Value (AOV)
3. Let Offline Behavior Fuel the Right Commerce Messaging
Just as you need to provide personalized and relevant content to your customers, you also need to provide unique cross-channel experiences for your customers to feel as though you are speaking with one voice. This is critical because customers are 72% more likely to purchase additional products if they receive a positive cross-channel experience. To deliver on this, commerce and marketing teams need to act as one to have a single voice coming from your brand in marketing and transaction messages.
When commerce and marketing teams are seamlessly integrated, they can share customer data that spans the entire customer life-cycle. The commerce platform needs to gather customer data from various interactions and share that data with the marketing team so they can speak to customers with your brand’s unified voice. This is important to your brand’s success because using the same voice throughout customer interactions can provide a sense of comfort for the customer leading to enhanced customer experiences and a lift in lifetime revenue.
When your marketing team sends tailored campaigns that use a consistent voice with data collected through your commerce platform and offline data sources, the customer life-cycle can be more rewarding for both your customers
and your brand.
Key Ways to Measure It
• Percent of Sales From Repeat Customers
• Average Time Spent Per Page
• Page Views Per Visit
• Conversion Rate
• Product Affinity (products purchased together)
• Product Relationship (products viewed consecutively
4. Improve Conversions with Cross-Channel Re-targeting
Customers are often browsing and shopping online only to be distracted by something happening near them. Frequently, the products that the customer was looking at are left and forgotten, resulting in a lost opportunity.
If you were to remind customers of the items they were considering, many customers would return and follow through with their purchase. When commerce and marketing platforms are in silos, it can take up to 24 hours for the marketing team to receive the abandonment data from the commerce platform. By that time, there is a good chance your customer visited a competitor to complete their purchase. When commerce and marketing platforms are seamlessly integrated, you can engage your customers in near real time. This provides a friendly, timely reminder through their preferred channels to reconsider your products before they look to a competitor. This collaboration enables you to drive more traffic to your site and build deeper relationships with your customers by using accurate, real-time data.
When commerce and marketing platforms are seamlessly integrated, you can engage your customers in near real time. This provides a friendly, timely reminder through their preferred channels to reconsider your products before they look to a competitor. This collaboration enables you to drive more traffic to your site and build deeper relationships with your customers by using accurate, real-time data.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]