Four Trends to Consider for Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Retail and ecommerce businesses share the same objectives: to generate more traffic that turns into greater sales. To accomplish this, marketing teams spend their time developing campaigns, devising new promotions and offers, and testing new products and landing pages. At the same time, these teams face the challenge of new and fiercer competitors and a confusing landscape in which new messaging channels make it increasingly difficult to find and communicate with your target consumers. Even more, it is up to marketers to figure out how to accomplish these lofty goals within budget while maximizing ROI.

To avoid falling behind, marketers need to understand and determine how to best leverage newer technologies that can help them to deliver an effective ecommerce marketing strategy. Determining which changes and technologies to adopt will give you the best chance of fulfilling the evolving needs of your target consumers.

To that end, there are several trends to be aware of as your develop an overall ecommerce marketing strategy that will help you deliver better customer experiences and increased revenues.

Review Marketing

Good reviews will have a positive impact on your brand’s reputation and in many cases serve as the determining factor in gaining new customers. Customers are far more inclined to move forward with a purchase after they have received a recommendation from a friend or family member. Even seeing positive reviews from people they don’t know can make the difference. In fact, a recent study found that 88% of people trust online reviews from people they don’t know as much as they would from a personal contact.

User-Generated Content

Just like review marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is all about the consumers and serves as a great way for them to feel engaged with your brand. Social media provides the opportunity for everyone to generate and share interesting content. The value in user-generated content is that it comes directly from your customers and studies show that it can be up to 20% more influential than other types of content. Millennials, in particular, tend to generate and rely on user-generated content when engaging with their brands.

Enhanced Mobile Experience

Another important tend to be aware of is the introduction of enhanced mobile experiences for ecommerce customers. Companies that are not investing in developing an elevated mobile consumer experience run the risk of losing out to competitors who understand that, while the majority of actual purchases are still made from non-mobile devices, consumers today are leveraging mobile technologies for conducting research that will ultimately lead to a purchasing decision.

Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Chatbots are software programs developed to manage online customer interactions through a chat interface. While chatbots weren’t initially designed for use on ecommerce sites, there are several reasons why so many brands are buying into the technology:

Persistent Availability

Chatbots are available on a 24/7 basis, which is ideal for today’s consumers who increasingly want to engage with ecommerce websites after business hours.

Immediate Access

Chatbots require no queues or waiting times to engage with ecommerce consumers. And unlike humans, chatbots can manage multiple interactions simultaneously to guide people to the products, services, and answers they need.

Data Collection

The information from each chatbot interaction is automatically collected for aggregation and analysis in order to create an increasingly enhanced customer experience.

Decreased Costs

While chatbots are not meant to replace 100% of your sales agents, they are usually programmed to handle the vast majority of customer requests and inquiries that are frequent and predictable. This frees up your human agents to handle more complex sales and marketing projects that will provide longer-term benefits to your brand.

Contact us to discuss chatbots as part of your ecommercemarketing strategy.