For a successful e-commerce marketing results, it is highly important to have a good marketing strategy and you need to start planning for it now. As Ecommerce continues to grow at rapid speed, the markets are ramping up with faster ecommerce growth than initially targeted. It will eventually lead to more dissatisfaction amongst customers, losing out on leads and non-satisfactory UX. To avoid this trauma, it’s highly important to stay in tune with the fierce market competition. The mega global trends have huge implications and are not going to be grounded too soon. The marketers will have to integrate latest trends in their planning with a focused approach taking into consideration analytics and great optimization techniques in an effective manner.
Given below are few of the greatest trends that can be included in your marketing campaign for fastest results:
Trend 1
Asia specific eCommerce progression
Primarily, US were the only one that was driving eCommerce market growth, now it has become a global phenomenon. US, is still the most significant partner driving the business growth globally. The chart shows how US eCommerce annual growth has continuously seen explosion in the past 15 years. The growth rate is still very strong and isn’t too far from the market saturation so the sales are just beginning to plateau. This is in absolute contrast with Asian markets where eCommerce markets will see astounding growth. The below chart shows China driving overall growth including that accounts for over all global eCommerce sales. The sales are expected to double from present day till the year 2019 that will add $1 trillion of additional sales in the next three years.
The Keynote:
Asia’s ecommerce growth has great potential, however to take advantage of Ecommerce boom they will need to go International with their ecommerce. The best part of ecommerce business is that you don’t have to have any physical stores and with easier inter-country business relations it has become easier to enter new countries.
Trend 2
Rise in Mobile users but are they really contributing to eCommerce growth
There has been a massive shift in the mobile use in the last five years and it continues to show increasing trend towards mobile web traffic. But it is surprising to know that a big chunk of customers aren’t really happy with mobile shopping. Wolfgang digital analyses state this fact with 80 million website sessions and online revenue worth €230 million. Out of a total 59% of all sessions by device, there was only 38% revenue through the mobile browsers. Desktops have higher conversion rates while mobiles are basically used for research purposes. The difference came in larger quantity with high cost purchases like holidays that made up to 41% of traffic on desktop and dominated sales bought 67% in revenues.
So basically, it can be summarized that mobile users cannot be ignored. They make their major buying, researching decisions on smartphones they than actually log on to desktop for making the purchase. Wolfgang’s study found a strong correlation between high percentages of mobile and overall website conversion rates.
The Keynote:
On average households have 7.4 internet connected devices, so a user is a Planning-for-digital-marketing-most-effective-550×444.pngmobile user at particular moment and the desktop user the next. An excellent mobile UX may help mobile users convert without switching to desktop. The main focus should be to provide seamless user experience in all buying decisions a customer makes.
The key strategy that can be used here is to send an email of all items that the user browsed on the mobile there by giving the user best possible getaway to convert.
Trend 3
Growing Ecommerce competence
Every year brings new challenges and innovations. The startups are entering the markets and bigger retail outlets are turning to ecommerce markets to rake in online sales boom. The Martech 2016 by Scott Brinker clearly shows a big explosion in mar-tech tools.
The growing competition will pose a serious threat for ecommerce marketers in the year 2017. Mark Schaefer point out that the real problem would be for anyone who is using content marketing that includes big amount of eCommerce companies.
The Keynote:
The trends show historical win for ecommerce marketer although competition and content shock are undoubtedly a serious threat. Marketers will have to come up with the best exclusive content to stand out in the year 2017 and if they cannot manage that, moving to other focused marketing approaches may be the best bet.
For successful eCommerce marketing with a dominating content shock world, marketer will have to employ innovative model. The 70:20:10 model will help shape content marketing strategy with 70% of time focused on effectiveness, 20% on innovating new content and 10% time on risk project that could potentially be a major payoff.
Trend 4
Subscription based Business Models
SaaS based business models are pioneers in the subscription based model and have been highly effective to businesses and consumers. It offers greater flexibility to consumers and the recurring revenues are a win-win situation for both the parties. This has amazingly led to its massive growth in the past ten years and would continue as we proceed for 2020.
The subscription based models need not be limited to software. The last few years have seen ecommerce businesses providing physical product on subscription than paying for a single fee during the purchase. The pretty good example of this is, the dollar shave club which was founded in the year 2011, today it is worth $615 million.
There should a strong focus on retention with constant efforts and investments in improving the product. It could be very tempting at first to focus on getting more conversions, but if you neglect them, customers will go elsewhere. Industries are already ripe for disruptions from successful e-commerce sites and looking for economy wide trends and this is set to continue further.
The Keynote:
It is best to sell your product through a subscription model. The millennial’s high disposable incomes would mean more cash for subscription but lower wealth would mean there is never a chance for big one-off purchase option. So there is never going to be a better time to sell your product through a subscription based model.
Trend 5
Growth of Artificial Intelligence
It’s pretty much a new trend so it is hard to make any predictions. The availability of more consumer data has increased the ability to target the customers but that doesn’t mean increase in effectiveness. Marketers can get caught up sometimes with big market speaks and buzzwords but fail to see what a consumer sees. What “big-data” actually means to customers is getting served the ads of products that they have already bought. Cracking the targeting is a big challenge and that is where the role of Artificial Intelligence comes in. The funding cost for AI has seemingly increased over the past three years. The year 2017 will most serve the best AI resources that combine genuine intelligence with data. The analytics and tracking software will get smarter, this will help target the ads and help in personalization strategy.
Trend 6
Chatbots
Chatbots have bought a huge change in the way customer ever communicated with brands. The important trends like big data, VR, AI and IoT have already been around for some time now. Chatbots have been around since before 2016 and it has grown huge in popularity.
Chatbots help to automate repetitive tasks over the Internet. It also includes different applications. The latest bots are built to help marketer, they act like a human helper without actually hiring a human.
The Keynote –
Chatbots are emerging technological tools so do not invest in it only because it’s the latest. Do your own market research and know what is really needed. It has a huge potential for growth, it will soon become a norm before experimental phase passes away. E-Commerce businesses will soon start utilizing Chatbots as the best means to provide to a customer on its Journey.
Trend 7
Shoppable Personalized Video
Shoppable videos are not really new things, it was launched by YouTube way back in the late 2015 but it didn’t take off really well the way it should have been. The simple little pop up cards in a video is an old jargon that any video creators could do. The prediction for future is one of the providers or YouTube will merge the tech and create programme based general personalized videos. There has been a great surge in creating Shoppable and personalized videos that shows a massive change in the manner in which eCommerce marketers are selling through videos.
The Keynote –
The merged tech will offer superior outcomes to eCommerce marketers. Placing the products in the video based on customers’ preference through programming will offer advertisers the outcome they never expected before.
Conclusion
Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing fields and it’s necessary to keep up with the latest trends. Consumers can effortlessly switch from one brand to the other hence it is very important to provide great customer experience and use a great pricing strategy.
