Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Daniel Brzezinski, COO of GetResponse.
Online shopping is at an all-time high. Last year, shoppers made just over half of their purchases online, continuing a steady growth from 48% in 2015 and 47% in 2014. In this evolving marketing landscape, e-commerce marketers are constantly looking for new areas to focus on that could boost sales. The only way to succeed in such a competitive field is to get creative with ways to separate your company from the rest.
How can e-commerce marketers improve business? Here are three ideas:
Customer loyalty and upselling
One major e-commerce challenge in 2017 has been developing ways to increase revenue and long-term customer value. The key to achieving projected growth in this area is applying advanced customer loyalty programs. According to Facebook's latest research on customer loyalty, 77% of people said they come back to one company and buy multiple times. But out of these, only 37% are considered brand loyalists. Forty percent of respondents said they will come back to the same company, while they don't consider themselves loyal to any business.
Brands will have to figure out ways to drive customer loyalty and incorporate emotion into their marketing, instead of battling with competitors over offering the lowest prices. This is where marketing automation and progressive profiling will be most useful: Gaining the knowledge and getting close to customers by learning more about them, as you would with any other relationship. Armed with that knowledge, e-commerce businesses will get more chances to build loyalty programs and target their clients with the right upselling methods.
Machine learning in PPC
E-commerce businesses use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to get ahead of the competition — it's a requirement in today's competitive online business landscape. And for good reason. According to PowerTraffic, businesses using Google AdWords make $3 in revenue for every $1.60 spent.
Companies will have to use more advanced machine learning tools and apply the knowledge they gain from them to highly-targeted PPC campaigns. Whether it's the use of scripts, automated bidding or auto-suggested audiences and keywords, advanced algorithms are there. All e-commerce businesses now have a unique opportunity to get better results while spending less time on campaign setup. And thanks to this automated pre-setup, online businesses now have more time to analyze data and predict trends in their sales patterns.
Local search and geolocation
Another huge opportunity for e-commerce in 2017 is local search and geolocation. According to Business Insider, Google expects to hit $5 billion in revenue from local search by 2020, putting more weight on local services and geolocation than ever before. This is the direction where e-commerce should be heading this year, too. Based on close monitoring of web traffic and search terms, online business owners get enormous amounts of data about their customers' needs and interests, depending on their location and current circumstance.
We're all familiar with seasonal email campaigns sent by online stores. But what if we took that a step further and targeted customers even more by monitoring geolocation and local search? For example, if someone visits an online clothing store in an area where it rains often, umbrellas and rain boots should be at the forefront. In warm, sunny locations, e-commerce marketers should upsell sundresses, sandals and sunglasses to online shoppers. While this concept isn't explored by many services yet, whoever truly succeeds at it first will likely see a huge market share.
As competition continues to get more and more fierce among e-commerce marketers, new opportunities will continue to arise. If they want to stay relevant, they'll have to take advantage of any new strategies and developments.
