5 steps for your success in e-commerce
In order to best market your product, a positive experience for your customers is worth its weight in gold – but this is often subjective. However, the principles behind it are very similar and can be well controlled. In the following, we will introduce you to the important ones.
The crème de la crème of e-commerce marketing relies primarily on personalization and omnichannel tactics. A certain degree of personalization can often generate sales increases of six to ten percent. And: Omnichannel personalization increases engagement even more, so that your customers are more likely to interact with the content of your brand.
As the way we spend and consume continues to evolve, e-commerce marketing needs to focus on a longer distance rather than a quick sale.
Take the time to research and get to know your customers in order to create an effective customer journey map. Only then will you be able to identify important points for building relationships, to attract attention and, together with your customers, to create an experience that creates benefits and value. Your customers should always be the focus. Your customers go through four stages within the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, Decision (Buying) and Post-Purchase Reflection.
Remember that your customers today can become aware of you through several channels (omnichannel): Be it through social media, search engines, reviews, blogs or advertisements – you have to make yourself and your brand visible and formulate your message clearly. So before you create awareness, you should be clear about it. In the phase in which your customers have discovered you and are considering buying a product from you, the main focus is on brand awareness, quality, user-friendliness, design and good customer service – and thus convince interested parties . These aspects as well as a certain authenticity are required so that an initial interest arises with your customers.
Did you manage to get your product bought? Make sure that you don’t just let your customers go, but try to build a relationship within the customer journey – for example with an automatic welcome message or signing up for a newsletter. In the last phase (post-purchase reflection), the main thing is to build loyalty among your customers. For this, customer satisfaction and the identification of future needs and problems of your customers are particularly important. The customer journey must therefore be designed proactively and individually for the customer even after the purchase.
The main goal of any ecommerce business is to increase sales and revenue. The key to a good story, however, is seeing your brand, your products, and your customers for who they really are. Because your e-commerce business not only sells a product, but also the solutions you can offer and the real feeling your customers get from using your products. The way you tell your brand story will help you build a stronger and honest brand that stays true to its values, promotes creative and engaging content, while standing out from the competition.
Storytelling still plays an immensely important role. (Photo: Shutterstock / Jacob Lund)
Headless e-commerce eliminates content silos and concentrates all content in a single content hub, also known as a headless content management system. The headless architecture was developed with the growing popularity of the IoT in mind and prioritizes the simultaneous delivery of content on all platforms. The biggest benefit of headless commerce is the ability to create the content once and use it anywhere.
Another important aspect of headless commerce is the separation of the content management system (CMS) and the e-commerce platform: Traditional e-commerce solutions such as Woo-Commerce or Magento are based on a monolithic architecture and take over both the front end and the also the backend. But a growing number of e-commerce providers such as Big Commerce or Shopify also offer a headless option with access to the shop’s data via their API. This separation is often advisable because a CMS and an e-commerce platform pursue completely different goals, each of which requires its own specialty.
Storyblok goes one step further as a provider of a headless CMS by developing a content management system that is especially suitable for e-commerce topics. It gives your developers the flexibility they need to create reliable and fast websites, and at the same time gives content creators without programming knowledge the ability to edit content independently of the developers.
It’s not news that the right content is almost one of the most important things in ecommerce marketing. However, many companies still scramble with the right content strategy and fall back on uninspired copy-paste material. By first understanding the content lifecycle and implementing this in your central strategy, you can automate a significant part of the content creation tasks and reuse older content appropriately. The workload can be reduced so that you have more time for the creative, while the daily business can be done by an AI.
As an e-commerce CMS, Storyblok meets all key criteria for a successful customer experience. Modular content blocks allow you to customize your content to any desired level. In addition, Storyblok’s focus on speed results in drastically reduced loading times on your customers’ site. When it comes to personalization, Storyblok goes one step further and offers you completely free internationalization features. Storyblok is used by eCommerce brands such as Happy Socks, adidas and Decathlon.
Curious? Then just give Storyblok a try.
