Leading technology change in eCommerce- where should you place your bets?
As Debenhams becomes the latest to call in the administrators, last week retailers were once again reminded of the importance of staying relevant and meeting consumer’s ever increasing expectations. Technology isn’t just changing the way consumers shop- it’s opening up new channels and giving retailers new ways to interact with customers. But where do you focus?
Communities
Today’s shoppers are relationship-driven, favouring brands that bring value and meaning to their lives. Retailers and brands must look for new ways to differentiate by appealing to customers’ emotions and forging connections based on shared beliefs.
You may ask, what’s so good about emotional connections for retailers? To which there is a very simple answer — According to Forrester, 50% of every buying decision is driven by emotion, yet 89% of consumers feel no personal connection to the brands they buy. Cultivating brand loyalty is more important than ever- advocacy is worth more than advertising, and influencer marketing, while changing, isn’t going away. Generating a feeling of connection is where brands can gain an edge over marketplaces.
Personalisation
Get personalisation right and you can make huge gains. Gartner predicts a 15% profit boost by 2020 for those who successfully handle personalisation in eCommerce.
Personalisation might take the form of personalised search results on an eCommerce site, predictive “you might also like” recommendations, or a store associate studying a shopper’s past purchases before offering up new items to try on in-store. These insights can lead to marketing decisions, such as abandoned cart emails to entice shoppers back to the retailer, dynamic homepages to drive conversion, and associated product recommendations: “you might also like”.
Personalisation makes the consumer’s content relevant and tells shoppers: we’re listening. And in an environment where 64% of consumers say they don’t feel retailers truly know them, that level of listening is important.
How do you make personalisation relevant for a changing consumer in real time? Consumers change at an individual level, so what works for personalisation on one day may not work the next. It’s difficult to replicate that experience of being in-store, online- personalisation can take in external factors, such as weather and seasonality, but how do you capture mood?
Each time your customers visit your website they have a specific shopping goal in mind, a specific mission, which can be completely unrelated to what they had the last time they visited you, and therefore needs a unique approach. Personify Experience Platform focuses on consumer behaviour during every visit, understanding what they are looking for and enabling you to provide relevant recommendations for products that your customers will love and purchase. It’s AI makes smart decisions- if there is a laptop in the customer’s basket, they are unlikely to want two, so it will switch to complementary products- like wireless mice.
The other thing to consider is the vast amount of unknown traffic landing on eCommerce sites. While personalisation in the traditional sense works well, for the unknown customer IP addresses, it can fall flat. With latest estimations from that 95% of retail web traffic is unknown, (need source from client), it’s important to work in real time and use aggregated anonymised data to predict the humanity, the mission, behind each individual.
Customer Experience
With all the noise around blockchain, voice search, crypto currency and more, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Speaking to retailers in the market, the consensus is that it’s easy to feel inspired, but hard to put the inspiration into action. The most critical thing when innovating to stay relevant in retail is to bring it back to basics: focus on the customer experience.
Retailers can’t rely on product quality anymore when feeling competitive pressure from online marketplaces, product commoditization, and new business models.. They need to focus on the ease of navigation around the site and search, product descriptions, stock availability, and crucially, the checkout process. Make it as streamlined and efficient as possible for today’s busy consumer. Clunky payment systems and paid-for shipping are not going to cut it, as is ignoring the huge rise of mobile or delivering irrelevant content.
Once you’ve cracked most of the basics, then you can get more creative with the shifting trends in preference- the rise in ‘unboxing’ videos amongst Generation Z, testing new service channels, or ordering via voice. Use personalisation, seamless experience and communities to drive loyalty as your bedrock, and then ‘level up’ knowing the foundation is customer first.
