Happy Friday the 13th! In honor of the classic horror film, we’ve got some scary-good content to share with you this week. This Ecommerce marketing round-up features articles from BigCommerce, GetElastic, and SEMrush. We’ve also included an infographic we recently published, which came to us from the good folks over at Sprout Social. Enjoy it while you can…Muahahahaha!
The Most Successful Retailers are Increasingly Omnichannel; Here’s What That Means and Why it Matters
By Tracey Wallace – Today, shoppers have an unprecedented numbers of options when it comes to researching and ultimately purchasing products. With multiple touchpoints across an increasing number of devices, the most successful Ecommerce marketers and online retailers will be those who embrace an omnichannel approach to their sales strategy. As Tracey Wallace discusses in her article, “Omnichannel simply means that your brand is capable of selling absolutely anywhere the consumer is willing to buy. In an omnichannel world, there is no such thing as ecommerce or mobile commerce or social commerce.”
Wallace goes on to mention that online stores looking to take a more omnichannel approach will do well to optimize their site for search engines, and embrace (rather than shun) marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. Wallace then sums up her call for an omnichannel approach nicely: “Customers are increasingly blurring the lines between commerce points of sale, whether that be offline, on your website or via a marketplace. If your products don’t appear when and where a customer searches for them, you won’t be closing any sales.”
Tips for Increasing Sales on Black Friday
By Get Elastic – Forrester Research predicts that online sales will top $95 million this holiday season, with a large chunk of that spend coming during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In a recent Twitter chat between Get Elastic and Optimizely, several important questions were addressed regarding Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and how online retailer can best implement Ecommerce marketing and sales tactics to take advantage of the shopping surge.
Some of the questions discussed were:
- What are the most impactful marketing tactics to drive Black Friday sales?
- What is the biggest mistake you see online retailers making during holiday time?
- What’s the number one thing retailers can do to improve their site today?
- How do you keep sales momentum going after Cyber Monday?
These are some important questions, and definitely make the article worth a read.
Client Aquisition for Ecommerce in 2015 – What’s Changed?
By Herbert Knibiehly – Any Ecommerce marketing professional will tell you that staying ahead of the technology curve – as well as your competition – is challenging work. Twenga‘s VP of Marketing, Herbert Knibiehly, knows about these challenges all too well. His article this week on SEMrush discusses these challenges, and how the increasing complexity of Ecommerce marketing in 2015 is a causing a “scissor effect” where acquisition costs increase and margins to decrease.
Knibiehly goes on to discuss how automated, real-time tools and platforms will be extremely important for marketers to leverage in order to see success in 2016. Three specific areas that Knibiehly identified as marketing focal points heading into next year are:
- Audience Segmentation
- Product-level Information
- Real-time Bidding
Check out Knibiehly’s full article on SEMrush’s blog to get his take on each point outlined above.
Ecommerce Retailer Responsiveness During the Holidays [INFOGRAPHIC]
By Zac Heisey – Our friends at Sprout Social were kind enough to send us a really cool infographic this week that we shared on our blog. It covers the response rates (or lack thereof) of Ecommerce retailers to social media inquiries from customers. Citing data from their Q4 2015 Sprout Social Index, the infographic mentions how 5 in 6 messages sent to retailers via social media don’t get a prompt response. When consumers do get a response from retailers, the average wait time is a whopping 12 hours.
Obviously, there are some huge opportunities for improvement here when it comes to customer engagement and retailer initiative on the social media front. Considering that retailers are projected to receive an average of 1,500 inbound message from consumers this holiday season, getting a solid social media engagement and customer response plan in place seems like a good idea.