eCommerce has completely transformed how we buy and the way businesses operate. But that’s old news. For savvy brands and e-commerce operators, the natural question is: “What’s next?”
Today, we’re getting to dive into what we expect is that the next big thing: experience-driven eCommerce. We’re getting to check out what it’s , why you ought to care, and a couple of belongings you can do to urge start.
What is Experience-Driven Commerce?
Experience-driven commerce isn’t a completely new idea. Part omnichannel marketing, part digital transformation, part marketing automation, and part back-end integration, it’s really just a subsequent level of commerce for B2C brands. to know and it means though, it’s best to see where we came from.
First, we had brick and mortar stores. Great. Then we had franchises, who sought to make one experience across multiple locations (think nutriment chains).
Then, we eventually got eCommerce. Now, brands had essentially two stores and two brands: one for offline, and one for online (you can see this within the split in marketing teams between traditional marketers and new-fangled “digital marketers” within the 90s / 2000s).
Then came omnichannel, as brands realized that equivalent people shopping in-store were also shopping online, and we’re trying to find a unified, personalized brand experience.
And finally, we get to experience-driven commerce, where that omnichannel experience is accelerated even further. With the proliferation of channels, it became clear that the simplest way for brands to win is to supply relevant experiences, to the proper person, within the right place, at the proper time.
That’s the kernel of experience-driven commerce: using personalization, savvy technology, and automation to bring your brand to your customers at precisely the right moment, with precisely the right message for that moment. This mix of the instant , the message, and therefore the channel creates the experience, and therefore the goal of experience-driven commerce is to make experiences that help brands win.
Why care about experience-driven commerce?
Because your margins are thin and who cares are brands who will win. It’s that straightforward .
Take, as an example , a recent Episever study that found that 92% of shoppers abandoned their online purchases. They put the products within the cart then wandered out of the shop . When was the last time you were at the grocery and located a cart, piled high with produce and spread , with the cart owner walking out, saying “You know, I assume not.” Never. you’ve never seen that. And yet we accept that as a reality in eCommerce. At an equivalent time, you don’t need to look far to ascertain the growing importance of eCommerce. Here’s one such startling graph from BigCommerce:
You don’t need to be a mathematician to figure out that if consumers are spending more of their income online, they’re probably spending less of it in-store.
The final piece to the present is that eCommerce marketplaces are increasingly dominated by a couple of , huge companies, the foremost significant of those being Amazon. which presents a replacement challenge for brands:
- There’s huge competition for web traffic by behemoths who pay for it.
- It’s unlikely that individual brands can compete at a purely transactional experience level (e.g. Amazon is better than anyone at processing payments and getting goods out the door).
- Amazon can enter a product category at any time and dominate it, either through their aforementioned transactional experience or through price domination (via enormous economies of scale).
In short, brands are being squeezed offline to travel online, and dominated online during a head to go comparison of their product and transactional capabilities.
That leaves just one competitive advantage: experience-driven commerce. Only a brand can understand its audience, its product, and its marketplace tolerably to deliver an experience, across every channel, in real-time. this suggests doing all the quality advertising and marketing activities, but also:
- Marketing through Instagram and leveraging influencers
- Creating unique experiences that drive traffic to stores
- Geo-located store messages to drive street traffic in
- Sensor-based, time-sensitive promotions that deliver personalized incentives to drive purchases via a smartphone app.
How to continue
If that example above scared you, don’t worry. Three years ago, it scared Foot Locker too. Now, however, they’re top of their game when it involves experience-driven commerce.
They began a digital transformation project, uniting teams, breaking technological and organizational silos, shifting to agile methodologies, and building key brand partnerships for his or her audience . This culminated in an augmented reality scavenger hunt around LA, where digital clues led users to popup stores. Complete the hunt, and you get the prospect to pre-buy a particularly exclusive pair of sneakers.
This sort of campaign — from the partnership with Nike to the AR, geo-located clues, to the physical popup stores — was only possible due to Foot Locker’s mission of experience-driven commerce.
Over to You
Not most are Foot Locker (yet!) So what are you able to do today? Here are 3 things to urge the experience of ball rolling.
Build an experienced council. You’re going to need buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and therefore the best way to catch on is to urge the leaders of each department on an experienced council. Meet once a month to debate where you’re , where you would like to be, and the way you’re getting to get there. We recommend including IT, marketing, customer experience / UX, product, stores / retail teams, and inventory.
Move incrementally. Rome wasn’t inbuilt each day , and AR-driven campaigns with geo-targeted tie-ins didn’t happen overnight. Work gradually to both show the worth of experience-driven commerce, and also, so you don’t lose momentum and your mind. specialise in incremental changes to deliver meaningful results over the future .
Hire an expert. The most important problem we see again and again is knowing where to start out . Get someone in who’s been there before and that they can’t only help shape your map but also assist you prioritize where you would like to travel .
