In the last four years, the retail environment has shifted to the point where a more expansive conversation is needed about ‘commerce’ rather than ‘shopping’.
I recently attended a talk by Jamie Peate, Global Head of Retail Strategy at McCann Worldgroup, on the key trends in retail today. Whether you’re a marketer operating in the retail sector or somewhere completely different, many of the points highlighted cuts across industries and provides a unique insight into human behaviour.
Back in 2015, McCann launched the Truth About Shopping, a longitudinal research project to study the dynamics in retail across 26 markets. Four years on, the team revisited the research and noticed that in this short time the retail environment has shifted to the point where a more expansive conversation is needed about ‘commerce’ rather than ‘shopping’.
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Today, customers are thinking about everything from…
Keeping new customers satisfied is compulsory if you are to have any chance of turning them into regular customers
As an e-commerce business owner, you probably understand the important role that "trust" plays in converting first-time visitors into paying customers.
This set of visitors would never complete the checkout process if they find anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or doubt the credibility of your service.
So, keeping them satisfied is compulsory if you are to have any chance of turning them into regular customers.
Here are some other benefits you will gain by satisfying new customers:
New referral opportunities — First-time customers are usually more enthusiastic about sharing your e-commerce website with their friends especially when they love the experience.
New reviews — While your old customers may be tired of…
No holiday shopping season is the same, but this year’s trends can help you prepare next year’s tactics
Despite being a US tradition, “Black Friday” kicks off the official holiday shopping season for buyers around the globe. But marketers know the promotional season starts much sooner, and what happened this year can be helpful in planning next year’s strategies.
Thanks to Thanksgiving’s late date this year, 2019 has six fewer shopping days than 2018 and three fewer than 2020. November 29th is the last possible date for Black Friday to fall, giving marketers six extra days to promote Cyber Week and pre-BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday) deals.
The Cyber Week peak
‘Tis the season for retail email - 68% of consumers say they pay more attention to email during the holidays.
While early November promotions have trended in the past several years as marketers compete more and more aggressively for inbox attention,…
Getting website personalization right is hard and I bet you are sick of being told otherwise
I don’t blame marketers for trying to tell you differently of course. It’s immensely frustrating for them too – knowing just how valuable personalization can be and knowing that it will, in time, become a necessity, rather than luxury, for all brands to offer a personal experience to their customers.
Still, industry folk are frequently told we should be getting on board with web personalization and the many different approaches to execution that have been proposed over the last few years. But (and it’s a big but), rarely does anyone address the fact that most businesses have one or more fundamental and significant blockers in place preventing personalization success (more on this later).
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It's akin to asking a member of the public to take part in the World Championship triple jump competition and preparing them by showing…
Product pages do more than just represent the product, they help build a relationship with the customer, giving them every reason to open their wallets and make a purchase
For many webmasters, creating a winning e-commerce product page may not seem as sophisticated as to write an entire article about. After all, all product pages have the same purpose and many other crucial aspects come to play in converting the customer.
However, in today’s e-commerce landscape, simply uploading a product, adding some details and then laying back waiting for sales to happen is overly superficial. The dawn of smarter algorithms, more inquisitive online shoppers, and rising competition between brands has given webmasters a lot to think about. Product pages now do more than just representing the product, they help build a relationship with the customer, giving customers every reason to open their wallets and purchase the product.
Therefore, the task is not simple,…
Many businesses, despite spending a huge amount on driving new traffic to their websites are still experiencing poor conversion rates and lack of insight into their visitors requirements
The growth in consumer demand for real-time personalization is at an all-time high. It’s a fact, customers are not only becoming more connected they are also becoming more informed, demanding and unpredictable.
Given the wide range of options consumers have online, retailers are finding that the key to converting their visitors into loyal long-term customers is real-time AI-driven e-commerce personalization.
Through the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, intelligent e-commerce personalization platforms are able to analyze customers’ behavior, learning their habits and enabling retailers to deliver automated, personalized recommenders within search results, promotional and personalized banners and on-page recommendations in real-time.
Why should e-commerce personalization be the main agenda point?
Provides each customer with a relevant…
Take a look at five social commerce trends for 2020 that could help improve your social commerce strategy for the year ahead
Social media continues to offer opportunities for brands to connect with consumers in new and interesting ways, across a wide variety of platforms.
The number of people online, on mobile and on social has increased year-on-year. According to the Global Digital Report 2019:
The number of internet users worldwide in 2019 is 4.4 billion, up 9.1% year-on-year.
The number of social media users worldwide in 2019 is 3.5 billion, up 9% year-on-year.
The number of mobile phone users in 2019 is 5.1 billion, up 2% year-on-year.
It’s also worth noting that whilst the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) still dominate, there has been a rise in alternative platforms. As …
Social engineering is the use of manipulative tactics by fraudsters to convince individuals or organizations to voluntarily give up valuable private information
Modern businesses must contend with a range of cybersecurity threats, from DDoS attacks and hacking attempts to viruses and ransomware. However, according to findings published in the 2019 Trustwave Global Security Report, social engineering is now by far the dominant method for cybercriminals looking to access your data.
Indeed, the report found that 46% of all breaches in corporate settings can be attributed to successful social engineering attacks, and this rises to 60% in cloud and point-of-sale environments. As a result, learning to prevent social engineering attacks needs to be a top priority for all businesses and individuals.
[caption id="attachment_146502" align="aligncenter" width="939"] [Image Source][/caption]Put simply, social engineering is the use of manipulative tactics…
Even in a world where business reviews no longer contribute to aggregate star ratings in SERPs, there are plenty of reasons to include them on your website.
In mid-September, Google made a significant change to the way it displays business websites in SERPs. Prior to the update, first and third-party reviews on a business website could have structured markup applied to them that would result in the average review rating appearing alongside the web page in Google SERPs, like so:
Since Google’s update, which …
To sell products online, your e-commerce website content needs to be persuasive. Here are three metrics to measure whether it is.
We all want to be persuasive, don’t we? To influence others, to get stuff done. Most of us readily use all the tactics in our toolkit: smiling, quickly building rapport, and, over time, earning all-important trust. Then we leverage this ‘relationship equity’ to get what we want (or not).
In the e-commerce selling realm, persuasiveness — not just content — is king. To crown our site a UX king we need to a) first track how persuasive our site is, and then b) employ new tactics that we hope will increase, or lift, this persuasiveness.
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