Staying on top of e-commerce trends

Undeniably, catering personalized experiences to your prospective customers can make all the difference when it comes to winning the e-commerce game. According to Gartner, e-commerce businesses that implement personalization will be able to achieve 15% profit boost by 2020. This is a pretty good reason why understanding the user intent should be on top of your e-commerce marketing strategy. Start by building a buyer persona and segmenting the customers. Take a targeted approach to ensure personalized messaging and shopping experiences for your buyers.

Another e-commerce trend that you cannot ignore is building an omnichannel presence. Online buyers are accustomed to using multiple channels to do their shopping, which means that you must absolutely be present across the entirety of these channels. Whether they choose to shop via a website, mobile, or social media, you must be there otherwise you may end up losing on customers. Besides establishing a presence across diverse channels, you must also ensure consistency in design and messaging so that buyers recognize your brand everywhere they see it.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are the two technologies that are emerging strong in this landscape. These technologies were primarily adopted to drive buying decisions because the biggest challenge is that shoppers cannot see and experience the products. With AR and VR, however, they can get a 3D view of the products, be it clothing, accessories, or furniture. If you want to empower your e-commerce store with the most amazing virtual experiences that are as good as real, embracing these technologies do not remain a choice.

As the online usage has witnessed a paradigm shift from desktop computers to mobile devices, m-commerce emerges as another dominating e-commerce trend. Of course, you would not want to miss on this segment of customers because these make a major proportion of your target audience. The best way to do so is by prioritizing responsiveness for your online store so that it renders seamlessly across mobile devices. Also, investment in m-commerce mobile apps is a smart move that all online sellers should definitely make sooner rather than later.

Whether you sell in-store or online, customer support is imperative to success. Unless you have a good customer support system in place, you cannot expect the shoppers to be happy and come back for repeat shopping. Chatbots or virtual assistants are fast becoming an ideal choice for e-commerce businesses that want to excel on the customer support front. Even though they are just software applications, they are still capable of providing a conversational interface to the buyers, while resolving their concerns and streamlining their journey. The best part about chat bots is that they are a one-time investment for your store but make a smart alternative to human customer support.

Another major trend that no e-commerce business can ignore today is that of voice searches. It is estimated that 50% of the entire online searches will be done by voice search in 2020. Why would the shopper want to type keywords and search queries when they can do it by simply speaking them up. Therefore, the best advice for e-commerce sellers is to make your website optimized for voice searches. This is primarily done by having conversational keywords in the content because customers who search via voice are more likely to speak in sentences, questions, or phrases as compared to conventional keywords.

Like voice search, visual search is another key trend that you must embrace for driving growth for your e-commerce business. This is because searching for visuals is much easier than textual searches, particularly when you are selling fashion, home decor, real estate, or electronics. It enables consumers to save time as all they need to do is just share an image and search the corresponding products. On the other hand, you can get the advantage of closing the sale faster and boosting your sales via up selling.

In the coming years, online buyers will expect secure and multiple payment options on e-commerce websites. Not having enough of them can be a barrier to conversions and often translate into cart abandonment. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website offers a wide range of popular payment methods and each of them assures secure transactions. From PayPal to cryptocurrency, credit cards, and digital wallets, you need to empower your e-commerce store with all kinds of payment options if you want to get ahead.

Social selling is another key trend that you must stick to because it can increase your chances of fetching higher revenues and sales manifold. Since a majority of online shoppers visit social media, they would prefer to shop from these platforms rather than access your website. The best measure to boost your sales and get closer to your targets is by making it easier for the customers to buy via social media because the sales journey is much shorter across these platforms. Pinterest and Instagram, for example, have shoppable posts which you can leverage for boosting your sales. Alternatively, you can simply add buy buttons to the social media posts for attracting sales.

Selling in e-commerce is all about winning the trust of the buyers because they cannot experience your products physically nor interact with you in person. User-generated content can go a long way in consolidating the user trust and engage the customers as well. Essentially, user-generated content is shared by your customers in the form of their testimonials, reviews, and product stories. Having such pieces on your store gives your credibility a kick because customers trust real people more than they trust brands.

From the selling perspective, you need to go over and above the regular tactics to leave your competitors behind. Think in terms of upselling and cross-selling the products to increase your average order value and boost the sales figures as well. When the buyers get to see additional option while buying products, chances are that they will pick them up as well. Marketers, therefore, need to leverage these strategies if they want to push the average order values and boost the overall sales for the business.

From the marketing perspective, going contextual is another trend that you cannot ignore. Also known as programmatic advertising, contextual makes use of data sets to identify the target audience. Further, the ads are displayed to the audience on the basis of consumption. They are re-targeted after a specific time period to generate higher ROI. Simply speaking, it is all about reaching the right audience with the right ad at the right moment.

E-commerce requires a great deal of hard work in terms of staying connected with the potential buyers, considering the daunting competition out there. Marketing automation has now become the new trend because it empowers the business to send across tailored emails to the customers without any hassles. It also becomes possible to display the new products and promotions on the basis of the shopping history of the visitors. Retargeting customers for necessary product sales also becomes easier.

The toughest part of selling via e-commerce is engaging with your customers. Customer Relationship Management plays a key role in this aspect. You need to gather the customer information to develop a satisfying CRM. From order information to additional data, the last time you connected with them via an email, every single piece of information matters. E-commerce sellers can pull out such information from the CRM and use it to deliver better user experiences in many ways. For instance, they can use it in loyalty programs, referral programs, on-site chats, emails, Facebook messenger, SMS, customer groups, and more.

Another trend that you must absolutely embrace is to think novel with your marketing tactics. Stop using only the conventional paid advertising and organic approach, rather make campaigns more targeted with ideas such as Google and Facebook remarketing. These tactics serve immense benefits as they make your ads visible only to the customers who are most likely to convert. People who have visited your website or explored your products are identified and followed around on the web with these campaigns. Showing your ads to relevant people at relevant places and relevant times gets your sales going up!