The current business environment is increasingly competitive and complex. Marketers are under constant pressure to manage headcount and budget while enhancing customer loyalty and sustaining business growth.
And with the impact of technology on the consumers, their expectations are also getting higher. Buyers not only want the best deals but also a seamless buying experience. The impact of this consumer trend is felt by the marketers greatly in this competitive environment. Though it may be a challenge for the marketers, some see these challenges as opportunities to offer value across different touchpoints and keep the audience engaged. The online retail world has embraced digital commerce as an integral part of their business activities.
What is digital commerce?
Digital commerce is the act of selling and buying services and goods through various digital channels. It can also encompass the whole processes of product development, marketing, and servicing activity using a digital channel. Basically, it encompasses all touchpoints and processes that make a customer to do the final purchase. For an online retailer, it’s the power source that keeps all the activities function properly.
How does digital commerce work?
An effective tool for marketing, digital commerce includes the marketing activities that support transactions such as technologies, processes, and people to execute the offering of analytics, brand promotion, content development, pricing, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer experience, and so on through the purchasing journey.
Digital commerce strategies
Here are a few digital commerce strategies that can keep your audience interested and offer the best shopping experience.
• Personalised marketing messages
According to reports, around 70% of choose to respond only when the marketing message they receive is customised as per their needs. By offering personalised content, you can not only make better customer experience but also gain the trust of the customers. So, it’s important that you conduct proper research on your target audience. When you have proper information about your target audience, know the interest of the customers, learn the purchasing pattern, and other customer-related things, you can create better personalised content.
• Personalise the home page
Personalising the home page based on the customer’s last session on your website, what customers viewed or purchased or offering product suggestions based on real-time data such as time, or location can enhance the customer experience to a great extent.
• Keep up with the evolving competition
You should start mapping the customers’ journey if you’re not doing it currently. The chance of your competitors already integrating it to their digital commerce equation is extremely high. So, when you consider focussing on the moments of customer interaction that offers brand loyalty, you get to know why your customers want to recommend their experience with your brand to their family and friends.
• Augmented Reality (AR)
Offer a digital commerce experience that feels real to your customers. This is all possible with augmented reality, the technology that superimposes images onto one’s view of the world by stimulation of the senses. It establishes an emotional connection that makes a customer buy a specific product by triggering the need.
Including augmented reality into your digital marketing strategy reduces the requirement of physical inventory which in turn saves resources, money, and time. It’s an interesting way to boost brand value through a computer screen or phone.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence when integrated with digital commerce analyses users’ data such as interest, gender and age, and identifies different patterns of consumer behaviour to provide highly specific sales content to the customers. It has helped businesses to improve brand awareness and increase brand awareness.
• Customer analytics
It’s crucial to use analytics to understand the behaviour of the customer and make informed, data-driven decisions. Customer analytics helps businesses to make better marketing efforts and fine-tune the prospective customers’ demand. It also helps in optimising the strategies of social media marketing and assesses all the important points across each stage of customers’ journey for an improved ROI.
