Ecommerce marketing is being disrupted and refined by fast-evolving technology. Keeping up with huge brands is becoming harder and harder as big players are setting the customers’ expectations and become buying destinations for more and more consumers.
Is there still a hope for smaller ecommerce brands that struggle to innovate?
The following three trends are in line with technology trends that are pushing the industry forward this year.
1. Advanced Personalization
Huge brands have been providing highly personalized experience for a few years now which impacted customers’ expectations in a big way. These days your customers expect to receive personalized experience whenever they are dealing with a brand.
Personalized experience comes in many ways:
- Personalized product recommendations based on each individual customer’s buying and viewing history
- Highly personalized email targeting specific events that have to do with each customer, e.g. their cart, their special offers, their (un)successful orders. Anything that is too generic can ruin your relationships with your customers
- Personalized calls-to-action whenever they return to your site
- Personal communication with the brand 24/7 (even if it’s a smart bot representing a brand)
Today’s customer expects an ability to personally connect with your brand and instantly hear back.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, brands are able to guess the consumer’s tastes and decide what they need to buy for them.
- Amazon uses machine learning to recommend items you may not even thought to buy but find yourself really willing to have.
- Thread uses AI-powered advanced personalization to serve better fashion recommendations for each customer. Their algorithm learns each customer’s style and suggests items that both fit their current style and broaden their outlook.
Smart dynamic personalization is everywhere and it’s something that may be expected from your site as well.
These days the majority of consumers expected brands to send them personalized offers based on their past purchasing decisions and they were willing to bargain their personal data in exchange for a personalized shopping experience. Infosys found that 59% of consumers thought that personalized experienced had a major impact on their shopping decisions.
Luckily their multiple solutions that are easy to integrate with your current ecommerce platform helping you personalize your customers’ experience.
- There are platforms helping you design a self-learning bot
- And of course, there are a variety of solutions for dynamic email personalization
2. Headless Commerce
Headless commerce architecture is the decoupling of the front-end (i.e. “the head” like a template or a theme) from the ecommerce platform, typically resulting in more flexibility in content management and delivery, as well as user experience.
With a headless platform, the front end is removed, leaving only the backend. Developers can then use APIs to deliver products, customer reviews, articles, etc. to any device.
In essence, headless commerce is how ecommerce solutions are preparing for various technology trends:
- Cross device shopping experience (people start shopping online and then complete purchases through voice, for example)
- Micro-moments (consumers are willing to get things done at this very moment, often while in the middle of the task)
- Internet Of Things (IoT)
In that future, all your inter-connected devices (your mobile phone, your smart assistants, your smart watch, and in the future even your fridge and your microwave) will talk to each other to distinguish what is missing and even make your purchases for you.
These days, you can see IoT integration with Amazon Dash Buttons that are able to send reminders to re-order your previously purchased items.
In the future, there will be kitchen appliances that can follow recipes, create shopping lists according to those recipes, and actually buy items from the lists independently.
With a headless platform, your ecommerce store will be optimized for that, as well as for any cross-device shopping experience you can imagine.
The good news is, there are already powerful ecommerce solutions allowing you to implement headless ecommerce allowing you to simultaneously run multiple stores across various front-end solutions – all from a single dashboard.
3. SERP Marketing
Digital marketers have had to deal with this dilemma for ages: Google is businesses’ most effective visibility channel as well as their biggest threat. The thing is, there’s no real alternative to Google traffic these days, and yet Google is becoming less and less willing to give that traffic away.
Google is turning into the destination building search result pages that answer any imaginable answers:
Organic rankings are becoming less important. You need to treat each target search result page as a whole coming up with solutions to ensure brand visibility in more search elements.
Building rich product pages is key to search visibility. You need product images, videos, rich markup, etc. to dominate your target SERPs.
To help you out, we have started building ultimate SERP marketing tools helping you dominate your target search result pages with text, image and video content. There are also smart semantic analysis tools allowing you to optimize for search intent and target the query in its context.
Conclusion
Advancing technology is bringing challenges to ecommerce businesses. Luckily, for any challenge there is already a solution allowing ecommerce site to adapt to fast-changing marketing landscape. The future is bright for those forward-thinking flexible business that are eager to innovate.
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of Viral Content Bee. Smarty has been into internet marketing for over a decade, she is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Smarty is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz
