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Omnichannel customer lifecycle

E-commerce marketing trends

Interested in the latest retail cart abandonment and recovery trends to grow your business in 2021?

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Personalized marketing, as we know from our experiences as brand-lovers and as marketers, is the make or break of any e-commerce marketing strategy in a competitive environment

Personalized marketing is all about offering improved user experience (UX) by serving relevant content, or targeting key messages in the funnel, based on your customer’s e-commerce activities and behaviour. Personalized marketing unlocks tactics for retailers to form personal relationships with their customers during their online experience (CX), to nurture leads and drive more sales from digital marketing. During a global 2022 survey of consumers who purchased something online in the past six months, 62% stated that a brand would lose their loyalty if it delivered a non-personalized experience. This is no secret to marketers who have watched a growing trend of personalization customer expectations and e-commerce investment to match. In fact, the chart below shows current customer experience personalization and…

What do the latest retail marketing trends mean for your e-commerce marketing strategy?

The biggest takeaway from our 2021 retail e-commerce marketing trends is that, with increasingly complex customer journeys in 2021, retailers need an e-commerce marketing strategy that integrates customer experiences. Customer lifecycle marketing is more necessary than ever, as consumers increasingly use multiple channels along their path to purchase. Therefore, to ensure you build a strong e-commerce marketing strategy to both reach and convert your customers, you need to consider the whole customer journey. We have marketing training and tools to refresh your omnichannel approach to e-commerce marketing strategy. Our popular RACE Framework structures your strategy across the customer journey process of plan, reach, act, convert, and engage. You can find out more about these resources and how to apply them to your e-commerce marketing strategy throughout this article. The…

Chart of the Week: More than three in five consumers say that retail innovations or solutions have made shopping experiences easier, with online shoppers seeing the biggest benefits

More customers now expect a seamless, personalized shopping experience. Whether they are buying in person or online, people want a quick and easy experience, something that is being made more possible with retail technologies. In fact, more than three out of five consumers say that technologies used in retail and retail innovations have led to an improved shopping experience, according to the latest research from the National Retail Federation (NRF). When it comes to shopping online, 80% of customers say the same compared to 66% shopping in-store. Despite the fact that there is an increased focus on mobile shopping experiences, only 63% said that shopping technologies and innovations improved…

How you can use push notifications to increase your online conversions

You already know about email, social media, affiliate marketing, SMS, ads (Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing). All these channels have their own piece of the marketing promotion pie, where you can deploy different kind of campaigns to reach and engage users. Online businesses use all or a part of these channels to attract visitors to their website, as well as engage with the ones who have already visited it. But there’s a new one that looks very promising for both businesses and users: push notifications. Push notifications have a short history in the world, coming from mobile apps, where IOS and Android used them as the default way by which mobile apps communicate with their users. The advantage of delivering the message in real…

How is cart abandonment and remarketing changing in 2017?

The global cart abandonment rate for Q1 2017 was 75.6%, down 1.2% from the previous quarter, which included the Christmas shopping season. 

This data is taken from more than 500 ecommerce sites and tracks abandonment rates across six key sectors. 

There is plenty of variance between the sectors studied, and it's interesting to see why. For example, while fashion site experience lower than average abandonment rates, at 68.3%, abandonment in the finance sector is much higher, at 83.6%. Travel sites also experience high abandonment rates, at 81.7%. 

Broadly speaking, the more complex the on-site experience and purchase process, the higher the abandonment rates. So, a fashion retailer with a simple checkout and relatively low-cost items will experience fewer drop outs than a travel site with more expensive products and longer forms to complete. 

We know…

Follow these 10 strategies to reduce cart abandonment and 1 strategy to recover lost sales post cart abandonment

Your customers add items to their carts, they may even start the checkout process, but then they leave the site and abandon the items. Sounds familiar? This is the cart abandonment phenomenon. Cart abandonment is a common phenomenon in e-commerce, with an average cart abandonment rate of 68.63% for 2016 (see chart below). Online shopping cart abandonment rate worldwide from 2006 to 2017, Statista. There are many reasons for customers to abandon their carts. Some of the most common reasons can be seen in the chart below. Primary Reasons for Cart Abandonment in the U.S. in Q4 2016, Statista

So why is cart abandonment a major issue for ecommerce sites?

Think of the amount of resources that…

Two-thirds of carts are abandoned. Here's how to win those customers back.

When a consumer reaches the final stages of making a purchase but decides to abandon their shopping cart, it’s clear there is some level of objection. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the largest obstacles for ecommerce retailers to overcome and the extent of the problem is shocking. On average, 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned (Shopify) meaning businesses who are failing to proactively engage with these potential customers are missing out on a huge opportunity to recover lost interest to generate conversions and, ultimately,  sales. It’s easy to assume the majority of cart abandonments happen because consumers are undecided over a purchase, when actually there are numerous underlying reasons that are directly linked to your business’ sales process - ’not being ready for purchase’ only takes third place according to  Business Insider’s top eight reasons for shopping…

Use these cart recovery tools to nudge your customers into converting

Cart recovery tools use email and on-site notifications to drive users back into a site (usually the checkout pages) with the aim of driving incremental transactions by reminding customers of the products or services they abandoned. With initial customer acquisition becoming increasingly expensive, brands have focused their efforts in trying to re-engage and convert those users they’ve already spent money acquiring and/or who have already expressed some level of interest in a product or service. Cart abandonment is the use of remarketing at the closest point to conversion i.e. once a user has added something to their cart but fails to check out. Cart abandonment tools can therefore be an extremely cost effective way of increasing sales, and usually generate great returns on investment. If you are considering investing in a cart recovery tool for your website, here are some of…

Most companies are doing nothing to re-activate abandoned carts

A 12-month survey for 2016 conducted by ecommerce recovery specialists Optilead has identified that 81% of online abandonment is totally ignored. This means that in the tests, valued at £2.1m, a staggering £1.7m of abandoned transactions were not followed up. Over the past few years, online sales have increased in the UK in excess of 10% per year – with this continued increase comes higher competition and the increased need to maximise each opportunity. Despite this, recent reports suggest $4 trillion worldwide would be lost to abandonment alone during 2016. Optilead surveyed 946 websites in the UK to identify how they react - and determine whether they engage with customers or leave them to become part of the global abandonment issue. The average abandonment rate across all sectors is 76%. But it's not just the abandonment rate that's of concern – it's the low…

New research reveals the top tactics ecommerce businesses can use to convert the 68% of people who abandon their shopping carts

In 2016, global ecommerce sales within retail grew to $1.915 trillion, a figure excluding sales for travel, events, and restaurants. What is more, ecommerce is projected to grow to over $4 trillion by 2020. This type of growth isn’t occurring anywhere else in retail (an industry which hovers around 6% growth year to year as a whole), so it’s clear that ecommerce revenue will increasingly become a dominant force in retail. Yet as retail adapts to the digital world, the ecommerce system has evolved into something imperfect. Simply googling ecommerce business problems reveals a troubling statistic: the majority of shoppers abandon their shopping cart before finalizing a purchase. In fact, according to Baymard Institute, 68.81% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and this figure is based on the…