More than a third of all people in the world now shop online – a huge market. In fact, 70% of EU citizens aged 16-74 years bought or ordered goods or services online in 2023, and it’s a figure that continues to rise. On top of this, choice for consumers is also expanding, with 1.6 million new ecommerce websites launched in the first 10 months of 2024 alone. Ecommerce continues to grow, driving marketers to compete fiercely for customers while developing strategies to attract and retain them.
To maintain relevance in such a competitive landscape, ecommerce brands have to select platforms that will enable them to be agile and deliver the necessary, and expected, customer experiences. The journey from being an ‘emerging shop’ to a ‘major market player’ includes turning site visitors into customers, and then into loyal, returning customers, and ultimately brand advocates. This is achieved by delivering exceptional experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
For ecommerce brands, their evolution (as well as survival) hinges on their ability to acquire, convert, and engage customers – three essential goals to drive sustainable growth. By defining growth at each stage, brands can set achievable targets in line with their market, their capabilities, and their digital marketing maturity level.
However, which strategies should marketers prioritise to achieve these goals?
Optimise engagement across available channels
When companies are in their early ‘emerging shop’ phase, their marketing is often acting on limited customer data and utilising few channels, often email,social media and their website. Additionally, many tasks are still handled manually, with limited automation and little optimisation of channels. This will not support growth, and in order to scale they need to find ways to automate and orchestrate their customer experiences across channels. At this stage, a primary marketing focus should be on increasing their use of available customer data to increase engagement across their channels. This requires understanding what data is available, how to access it, and then having the ability to act on it to deliver the desired customer experiences.
The composition of a company’s marketing technology stack is a primary factor in how easy or difficult this may be. While it’s not uncommon for brands to start simple with an email marketing tool, as their needs increase, they often bring in other tools. This can result in multiple, disconnected tools that make it difficult to deliver well-choreographed cross channel messaging and accurately understand the impact of the marketing being undertaken.
This forces marketers to have to think strategically not only about their customer experiences, but how to deliver and measure them effectively, efficiently, and at scale. Before advancing too far in their marketing maturity, a company will need to consider moving from point solutions to a platform which can support and enable their growth. A customer engagement platform (CEP) can be the answer and a source of competitive advantage for ecommerce brands. They have the native ability to perform automated multi-channel messaging, easily integrate with other data sources and create unified customer profiles with Customer Data Platform (CDP) functionality, and apply AI to multiple marketing functions (e.g. content development, messaging automation, website experiences).
A significant advantage of such a platform is the analytics capabilities and data quality; so not only can you execute and optimise multi-channel personalised experiences, you have real time metrics, analytics, and insights to understand marketing performance. When brands can harness a combination of aligned tactics (e.g. website experiences, email, SMS, web push) to consistently engage customers across their channels in an orchestrated manner, they can maximise their customer acquisition, conversion, and engagement.
Capitalise on real time customer data
With marketers having growing volumes of customer data and increased analytical capabilities, they can better understand their customers and begin to develop long-term relationships with them. The challenge to nurturing this relationship is not just the access to the data, but having it in real time and being able to quickly derive actionable insights to deliver timely, interactive customer experiences.
This process involves personalising engagements using real-time data and automation to immediately engage customers and deliver ‘micro-moments’ to customers. Micro-moments are when customers engage on their device of choice, with an intention to act on a need – this could be to generally explore what’s available, learn more about a specific product, or have a desire to buy something. In these moments, marketers can use CEPs to deliver timely interactions with real-time offers including product recommendations and discounts. This type of engagement can capitalise on the intent and moment to encourage further exploration and trigger conversion.
Over time, the insights from these multi-channel experiences and resulting purchasing behaviours enable marketers, based on real time data, to evolve to a more advanced and increasingly personalised and targeted and interactive engagement approach. When this capability is achieved, marketers can deliver engaging and brand-building customer experiences that can significantly increase customer retention and loyalty.
It’s not about the transaction, build a relationship
Customer relationships are not about a conversion from a lead to a customer and the associated transaction. Realising the goal of long term customer value and advocacy doesn’t solely come from the engagements used to drive a sale; it’s about the overall customer experience and relationship with the brand. This may include a pre-conversion marketing approach to enable customers to become familiar with the brand, as well as post sale processes, such as providing quality customer service and recognition of a customer after their initial purchase with the brand.
Marketing plays a critical role in developing and maintaining these relationships.
Effective relationship-based engagement requires gathering more customer data that what marketing may have traditionally had available. For example, this could involve doing ‘progressive profiling’ and gathering zero party data to hear from customers directly and incrementally. To optimise the use of this customer data, brands need to ensure their marketers have analytics capabilities to provide actionable insights.
The graphic below is one way to show the customer lifecycle marketing, noting that the lifecycle is actually an ongoing process that repeats through multiple purchases and engagement touchpoints.
This ongoing process is a perfect use case for automation, which can play a significant role in relationship building by acting on real time data and insights. When marketers automate processes such as emails, SMS, and website experiences, not only do they maintain ongoing engagement with their audience throughout the lifecycle, but also free up their time to focus on value-adding and strategic activities.
From engagement to advocacy
As the customer lifecycle shows, there are many ongoing steps that require continual attention and refinement in order to optimise them to achieve your goals. As ecommerce brands scale and progress through their growth phases, having well-defined marketing strategies and the necessary technological capabilities to support each experience is essential for effectively unlocking sustainable growth in the competitive ecommerce landscape.
By leveraging real-time data with omnichannel experiences and enhancing automation capabilities using CEPs, marketers can gain deeper, more granular insights to personalise their campaigns effectively across the entire customer lifecycle. This not only streamlines processes but also allows for more strategic decision-making, enabling marketers to build stronger relationships throughout the customer journey. Ultimately, these insights help transform prospective customers into loyal advocates, fostering lasting engagement and driving sustainable growth for the brand.