3 Important Ecommerce Customer Experience Trends You Must Follow In 2019
It’s hard to believe we are already a quarter of the way through 2019 but this means we already have some great insight on what eCommerce trends are performing well in 2019 and reasons why you should be following them. What 2019 has taught me so far is the only way to maintain direct and close connections with customers is by:
- Having original content is crucial for growth and success.
- Having a conversion optimization strategy that does not undercut brand value is extremely important.
- Conversation commerce through Chat, Messenger and SMS is the way of the future.
Each of these topics could be articles on their own but I will summarize each one into some main points to help you grow and scale your business in 2019.
1) Commerce+ Content
Brands can now scale profitably by serving smaller niches comparatively to much larger competitors who serve a larger set of people (think of a store that sells TVs, computers, video games and headphones compared to a brand that just sells headphones). Being able to serve small niches is the big advantage of selling directly to the consumer which can now be easily done by having a strong online presence. It’s no secret that content has the power to sell but knowing how to utilize the full potential of content is extremely important if you want to grow your brand. A big mistake a lot of merchants make is they try and use content in a direct way to sell to their customers, if you are doing this STOP, because I can guarantee that you are not utilizing the full potential of your content. The power of content comes from exciting and energizing your audience eliciting emotions from them through a consistent well told story.
Hopefully I’ve now made it clear to not just post meaningless content to try and sell, but you are probably asking yourself well how do I create the right kind of content that turns my audience into buyers? It may be easier said than done but you want to think of ways to create stories about people not your products, and direct these stories at your audience, or make them about your audience or even have your content created by your audience (user generated content is very important). By selling the story of your brand and coming up with clever ways to include your audience you will find your content will become much more engaging and this will turn your audience into buyers naturally instead of forcing sale driven content at your audience that they can’t relate with or engage with.
There are tons of ways you can make this type of content, whether it’s through your blog or a YouTube/Instagram channel, you can even achieve this through traditional marketing techniques like radio ads. Just make sure before you dive into trying out these methods that you have a planned-out strategy, don’t wing it and hope something works because 90% of the time it won’t. Think of ways to tell your brands message through different platforms and how you can use each platform in different ways. Also make sure to have your content planned out and measure the actual results driven by this content. A huge mistake by many companies is they make all this content and then don’t even take the time to report on how well its performing.
2) Conversions that don’t sacrifice your brand value
In order to grow your business, you always want to be thinking of new strategies that will increase your conversions, but you need to be careful that you aren’t sacrificing brand value when coming up with new strategies. You want to make sure that as you increase your conversions you still maintain brand equity (brand equity is the value of a brand determined by consumer perception and experiences with the brand: awareness, recognition, trial, preference and product loyalty). So how do you achieve higher conversions without sacrificing brand value?
Studies indicated 62% of consumers want their brand to take a stand on relevant cultural issues and 52% of consumers say both their initial purchase and their loyalty heavily depend on a company’s commitment to something bigger than just products and services. Statistics show brands with a high sense of purpose have a valuation increase of 175% compared to brands with a low sense of purpose whose valuation sits at 70%. In late 2018 many large brands (and leaders in the ecom world) offered no holiday discounts, very limited discounts or charity-based incentives, why? Because just giving out discounts all the time can hurt and lower brand value.
In the past few years using discounts have been a proven method used repeatedly by many brands to help improve conversions, if done correctly this method still works really well but if done poorly this can really hurt your brand’s value. So, does this mean discounting is a thing of the past? Absolutely not, it just means you must come up with better strategies to implement discounts without sacrificing brand value. A great example of this is using a tiered discount strategy, this strategy lots of time combines free gifts and discounts for hitting target-based goals. For example, “add $100 of products to your cart and get X-gift + free shipping” and then your next tier could be “add $200 of products to your cart and get X-gift + Y-gift + free shipping”. To tie this all together you will want to make sure you have a great strategy in place for how your customers can add everything to their cart and get the free gifts in the least number of steps and you want to make it clear and easy to see how close they are to hitting the goal of the tiered discount.
3) Conversational Commerce
Email marketing is still the dominant choice for pre-purchase marketing and people still are looking for transactional and post purchase emails in their inbox. A new form of conversational commerce has recently become very popular and has been showing some great results. Conversational commerce refers to onsite chat, direct messaging through chat, Facebook Messenger chat or SMS. If you aren’t already using one of these chat methods or haven’t started to think how you might be able to implement these chat methods on your store you aren’t preparing yourself for the future. The best way you can utilize these messenger features is through your sites support, as I’m sure you know as your store grows customer support efficiency usually decreases which can have negative outcomes on your store’s growth. Not only can these messenger features help keep your customer support efficiency up, but you can have personal engaging conversations with your customers who reach out to you and provide them with content, knowledge and expertise to help them complete their purchase and provide a great experience.
If you have any questions about anything I have mentioned or would like to talk about a strategy plan for your eCommerce store in 2019 please leave a comment below or feel free to email me at brent@onlygrowth.com or check out our website https://onlygrowth.com for more growth tips.
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