Budgetary & Business Shift In eCommerce Spend For Multi-Channel Retailers
Multi-channel retailers (as well as branded manufacturers) are now spending a higher percentage of their overall marketing budgets on their online effort. As more and more stores closed in 2009, eCommerce sales grew. Multi-Channel Retailers are also under a lot of pressure to close the gap between themselves and pure play retailers as it pertains to the online experience. What does that mean? Brick and mortar multi-channel retailers will be investing in a lot of technology in 2010 (From entire platforms to upgrades in areas such as search, merchandising and back end systems).
Further to that, there are business implications of eCommerce growth: Multi-Channel retailers are finally realizing that internet is central to running their “offline” business – customer acquisition, customer product research, planning shopping lists, comparison price shopping, etc. So the internet is becoming the front end to the entire store. This is causing retailers to rethink their organizational structure and resource allocation.
Optimizing The Core Marketing Fundamentals Of Your Online Business
eTailers have been focused on too many things, for way too long. The economic downturn of 2008/9 caused retailers to scale back on their spend and do more with less. Now retailers are trying to focus on getting the marketing fundamentals right, once and for all. Search, Email, Checkout, Navigation, Data/CRM and Product Imagery are a few areas that fall within the area of “fundamentals”.
Improving The End-To-End Customer Experience
Smart online retailers understand that there are large parts of the customer experience that have nothing to do with the website. How in stock you are, how quickly you ship, and how good your customer service is can break you or set you apart. There aren’t many retailers out there surviving who have bad service. This is an area where branded manufacturers are at a particular disadvantage. Zappos – They are a perfect example of how you can compete on something rather than price.
Increasing The Relevance Of Their Messaging
This bleeds across CRM, data integration and personalized recommendation engines. Recommendation engines are helping spike sales for retailers and offer short-term ROI. Retailers are seeing a huge value in communicating with their customers in a “relevant” way – increasing conversion rates and AOV (average order value). Personalized emails are generating far more in terms of click-through and purchase. But remember, you can’t be relevant across all touch-points unless you have a single view of the customer – most retailers aren’t there yet and the economic downturn exposed this.
Social Media For Customer Engagement & Monetization
During the downturn, retailers looked to community building and social networking sites to drive their content (user-generated), improve their customer service (by listing to the voice of the customer and gathering feedback), and to increase web traffic. Now that most retailers have made some efforts to build a community (even if just on Facebook or Twitter), they are trying to find ways to monetize the traffic that they now generate through social media. It’s all about the soft sell and being practical.
Mobile Commerce – Revenue Generator?
Mobile has finally come of age. 2010 is a big year for retailers to be “developing” their mobile strategy. Meaning – most retailers are still trying to sort out exactly how they plan to approach mobile. Do they need a full mobile site? Just a iPhone App? Retailers are trying to figure out the best mobile strategy for their business with the hopes of exploiting this channel more fully by the end of 2010. Also, mobile solutions are finally becoming cost effective, so most retailers will be spending in this area within the next 12 months.