VR Inside The Dali Store
Watching Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ brilliant retelling of the Salvador Dali experience via virtual reality (VR) should have every e-commerce team reading this email sitting up, paying more attention and wondering what is it for them to start thinking about vr, experiences and the future of a new kind of online commerce.
30 Ecom Strategies & Tactics To Master
No wonder most ecommerce teams feel overwhelmed. Off the top of our heads we came up with 30 complex "mini-systems" that must be mastered to create greatness in online commerce.
Gone are the days when a little of this and that could win the day in online retail. Today all 30 of these tactics and strategies dance together requiring sophisticated understanding of individual trends, tools and ideas to win.
Things change too fast to really KNOW anything. Instead teams must surf waves, learn and fail fast and then wax up their boards for another wild ride.
Did we miss any BIG IDEAS your ecommerce team is managing. Soon we will support this infographic with a http://www.Curagami.com post to further explain each strategy and tactic. In the meantime let us know what we missed in comments or email martin(at)Curagami.com.
Thanks and remember DEEP SLOW BREATHES and if you aren't having FUN your visitors will know. They will feel it.
April Showers - Beware The Responsive Rabble
Responsive is so much more than most realize. Sure you can get a template to LOOK okay, but without redefining your site's functionality, design and information architecture you are "responsive" in name only. Problem is MOBILE FIRST = PAIN for many.
Pain comes in two forms one usually under marketing's control and one not. Understanding the FLATTENING of websites in a post-mobile era means doing less BETTER. Since much of IA can be done within Magento's categories or a CMS's tune engine marketing usually has the means of production.
Not so much when it comes to functionality shifts. Redesigning a cart to be "mobile first", for one PAINFUL example I'm glad I'm no longer an Ecom Director to have to manage, is out of marketing's hands after wireframes go to the coders.
The REAL challenge is some SEO sensitive champion needs to be watching over your site's RESPONSIVE metamorphosis or PAIN will be a vast understatement. SEO changes inside the code can create spider-traps and other problems.
Programmers take efficient straight lines. Problem is some of those efficient lines can KILL your website. Promise to create more content about how to protect what you have and get some more even after a responsive re-design soon.
WaNeLo.com
WaNeLo.com understands something you don't. They understand there is NO WAY to compete head-to-head with Amazon. Better to shift to a "blue ocean" by creating a highly social, mobile and gamified environment.
As a "mashup artist" WaNeLo.com can create pages that cost pennies, pages that may generate dollars. Are there bumps with this "new age" affiliate marketing? Of course, but, as the pagespread chart illustrates, you don't beat the giant YOU CO-OPT him :).
Never been more important to know your website's long tail than in ou social / mobile / connected time as Amazon proves and WaNeLo illustrates.
Ecommerce Is A Mobile & Social Game
The more I do this, web marketing, the more game-like everything feels. Mobile and social are acting like huge pythons squeezing content into a game. Content shock is the other trend impacting your content marketing.
In 2003 your content could be factual and visually boring and it would work. Not so much anymore. Today you must think of your content like pieces on a chess board. How can you achieve your goals by developing relationships between your content, your customers and advocates?
Mobile and social make ecommerce a game too as WaNeLo.com demonstrates. WaNeLo.com is a "clean slate" built to mashup massive amounts of content that already exists, make creating "YOUR WaNeLo.com Store" fun (you swipe through content) and collect a nice fee for being the first retailer to get the many changes to online commerce brought to you by a smart phone near you (and most of the time people are within 10' of their smart phones at all times).
We began the conversation about how to make an online store a game a few weeks ago on G+ (https://plus.google.com/+MartinWSmith/posts/RdjAjWoJTHw ).
This @HaikuDeck shares how to make content more game-like. Here are a few easy ways merchants can begin to create gamification:
* Create an Ambassadors Program to identify your 1% Contributors and 9% Supporters.
* Provide a public profile for Ambassadors (if they choose) with a good URL (cool.com/ambassadors/marty for example).
* Curate great Ambassador content first to OTHER Ambassadors and next, and this should be a smaller set, to the public via your site. * Begin to track key Ambassador functionality such as social shares, links and likes.
* Create feedback loops for Ambassador actions (200 Likes, 100 links and 3,000 social shares to date or yesterday or last week). * Steal LinkedIn's famous, "Your profile is 80% complete" Call-To-Action (CTA).
Might seem strange to talk about adding gamification to ecommerce NOW when the holiday tsunami is only days away, but most ecommerce teams have their plans made up. While social media means any plan must respond to what is happening now, most ecommerce teams are working a quarter ahead.
Successful gamification isn't easy, but rewards are huge. Instead of invading Russia in the winter we suggest merchants begin building foundation by creating an Ambassador Program. Ambassadors, those fans, friends and supporters willing to help, become critical when you want to turn gamfication ON (and you will).
Revolution Has Begun, Now Join & Contribute
Are you as frustrated, bored and wanting more from ecommerce as we are? "We" is five marketing, merchants and Magento programmers who know TOGETHER we change the way we communicate, share and sell things to one another.
Learn More
http://bit.ly/ecom_revolution_google
Can You Say Minority Report?
Beacons are taking the world of mobile by storm. They are low-powered radio transmitters that can send signals to smartphones that enter their immediate vicinity, via Bluetooth Low Energy technology.
In the months and years to come, we’ll see beaconing applied in all kinds of valuable ways.For marketers in particular, beacons are important because they allow more precise targeting of customers in a locale.
A customer approaching a jewelry counter in a department store, for example, can receive a message from a battery-powered beacon installed there, offering information or a promotion that relates specifically to merchandise displayed there.
In a different department of the same store, another beacon transmits a different message. Before beacons, marketers could use geofencing technology, so that a message, advertisement, or coupon could be sent to consumers when they were within a certain range of a geofenced area, such as within a one-block radius of a store.
However, that technology typically relies on GPS tracking, which only works well outside the store. With beaconing, marketers can lead and direct customers to specific areas and products within a store or mall....
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Inevitable the brick and mortar world will become more web-like. The other major take away is a consistent theme now - the closer we get to near real time the better we interact with the evolving mobile / social world.
Zazzle, Cafe Press, Etsy and Sara Harvey show how ecommerce's social future is about collaboration, empowering and sharing. Does your store do that?
By mashing eBay's Pitman with Motif's Walia we see the functional, social and mobile future of online retailing, ecommerce and mobile / social shopping.
New Ecommerce Marty (@scenttrail) Note
I love this post sharing tips from a handful of ecommerce experts. I might fall into that category too after a 7 year tenure during which teams I managed made over $30M in online sales.
Our AOV (Average Order Value) was never more than $62 so hundreds of thousand of transaction. When I was hired the site's sales were below a million. When I left annual sales were over $6M.
Those times weren't EASY either, but they are were in comparison to now. Now ecommerce is complicated by:
* Increased competition.
* Muddled channel marketing ROI strategies.
* Social Media.
* Mobile.
* New SEO.
Add all of those new pressures together, all discussed multiple times in the linked post, and the inescapable conclusion is "easy" is OVER in ecommerce.
Cart Abandonment - An Easy Way To Recover A Million Bucks
Great tips here on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment including:
* Reason #1: Lengthy registration forms
* Reason #2: Single channel experiences
* Reason #3: Sheer timing
That last one can be a real killer. People want to know their costs so they test the cart. Finding ways to add information about shipping upstream can reduce cart abandonment.
In this article, we’ll walk through all of the vital steps when planning a highly converting mobile e-commerce website. The most important questions you need to ask are...
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Love the "ditch digging" specifics of this post. Mobile conversion seems mystery wrapped in enigma to me, so this post is beyond helpful.
Marketing driven commerce is about engaging your customers whenever and wherever they are. Get started in creating new marketing strategies and optimizing current ones with guidance from these white p
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Excellent ecommerce white paper from Bronto my favorite email marketing tool. Trends include:
* Mobile Pushes desktop to the side.
* Content is KING but focus is Queen.
* Retargeting works but know when to stop. * Value comes from relevance.
* Beware of ISPs & online services bearing gifts. * Automation is your friend, but don't forget PEOPLE.
Excellent report especially on mobile and how mobile is changing everything.
Marty (@ScentTrail) Note
As a former Director of Ecommerce I know what trends will be a "must respond" while others are "nice to haves" if time allows. Here is my rating for the 5 Ecommerce Trends outlined by FourthSource:
Wearable Tech - Nice To Have
Sure I would blog about wearable tech and I would make sure whatever I was doing had a large PHONE and PAD component, but turning the battle ship to face the wind on "wearable tech" feels way to premature. Give it a year to let the gems emerge and then MAYBE wearable tech becomes a "must have".
Automation - Must Have
Yeah automation of front and back end processes is critical to ecommerce health. The "ship the same day" banner being thrown down by ebay and Amazon means some merchants may need to look HARD at their 80/20 rule (80% of most websites volume comes from 20% of their products) and create faster delivery options for the 20% especially to their VIPs.
The other "automation" trend I see in 2014 but not mentioned here is front end dyanmic presentation based on predictive modeling. We can't keep batching and blasting the same content to every one. Use of personas and segments combined with dynamic zones, zones you fill based on what you know about the visitor either from their "new" or "returning' status, a cookie you previously planted or their behavior. Websites must act more like email with relevant information getting to the right group faster.
Tablets and Mobile - Must Have
The discussion of tablets and mobile misses the mark a tad for me. Biggest issue is how we ARCHITECT information now. Content needs to become a series of highly visual "rich snippets" held together by a flexible map of tags, interconnection, glue and chewing gum (lol). Mobile is a revolution not a thing, so think Mobile First in 2014.
Oliver Jäger's rap at the end is essential:
"In a day and age where information and connectivity have become an indispensable part of a modern lifestyle, it’s not just bricks-and-mortar retailers that need a new strategy. Online retailers are increasingly also having to adapt to the new multichannel, information-rich reality.
What this means is that in 2014 we’ll continue to see more and more retailers moving into the content space. Modern consumers are much more demanding and sophisticated, expecting their shopping experience to be a holistic and comprehensive one. "
Right on Oliver!
Is E-commerce Stuck In The Mud? After our first Holiday Ecommies Review of 30+ top online retailers (@Ecommies is a new ecommerce ratings, review and award site coming soon). It’s clear e-retailers are stuck in the mud.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Fun writing this post for @ janlgordon new Editors of Chaos http://www.curatti.com. Conclusion after our first Ecommie Awards for Holiday 2013 is YES e-commerce is stuck in mud of its own making.
Online retailers seem stuck fighting battles that are all but over such as the adoption of free shipping out and back, deal-of-the-day and Buy More, Save More. The ocean runs red as competitors face off with each other with little regard to the unique characteristics of selling online.
There were bright spots in the more than 30 top e-retailers reviewed including REI.com and Williams-Sonoma, but even well established brands such as L. L. Bean seem to struggle this holiday selling season.
Not hard to see WHY ecom is in a rut. Mobile is changing everything though few seem to realize the magnititude or sweep of the change. In addition to the Ecommies Report card we created a Social Media Analysis showing most e-retailers follow less than 1% of their followers.
Clearly the conversational nature of the new web is as perplexing to retailers as mobile. The combination of these two big misses, mobile and social, made holiday 2013 lackluster and stuck in the mud. This Curatti.com post shares ideas for how to fix not least of which would be embracing social media marketing and joining a mobile marketing revolution that has little to do with phones.
There is a case to be made that soon; online experiences will be replaced entirely by mobile experiences. Utilizing Artificial Intelligence can grow mobile commerce through discovery and personalization.
Marty Note
This is an important post since it points out how ecommerce is ahead and behind the game:
"...we have concepts but no real, new, immersive experience in our present online shops."
We learn the same hard lesson over and over. Taking ecommerce websites and putting them on to mobile devices is like taking the motor out of a roller coaster. You can push the cars, but the thrill is gone.
"So, what does it take to really change shopping? One key is to bring the best of the offline world to the online world, and this can be summed up in the seamless way we "discover" in physical environments and the way we "learn" about new products."
"Virtual assistants are, in effect, highly intelligent recommendation systems. These recommendations systems for the future will drive sales by gathering knowledge from the organization, information and data to create intelligent solutions that differentiate businesses."
"Two other transformative ways Artificial Intelligence can grow mobile commerce are bringing the long tail to life through discovery and personalization."
###
I like recommendation engines too, but think the mobile engine that emerges is going to be more social and communal than this article projects. Regardless this is an important post with solid ideas on what the "new ecommerce: will look, feel and act like on our phones and pads.
More "Mobile First" thoughts on GPlus:
https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/LQFqeEowKPT
Email marketing has been used for years to keep in contact and maintain relationships with customers. Lately, with the increasing use of smartphones, we’ve seen the effectiveness continue to rise.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Since email is typically the most profitable channel for most multi-channel retailers staying abreast of how mobile is changing email marketing is critical. The rise of triggered emails als heralds the rise of web 3.0's contingent what if statements filling dynamic zones on web pages with relevant content. Ecom merchants should watch email marketing trends closely.
Mobile Commerce Daily today - EBay, Zappos get first-mover advantage with iOS 7 app updates; Blimpie engages millenials with in-app offers in new mobile game; U.S. Bank integrates with Western Union to simplify mobile money transfers.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
What are implications of new iOS7? Ebay and Zappos think Apple's iOS7 will be a game changer as they crunch to launch new apps at Apple launch.
Whether you're building an iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Facebook or cross-platform app, this superb selection of tutorials will help you on your way...
Martin (Marty) Smith:
The Appification of Ecommerce
About a year ago I purchased a new MacBook Air. Seeing how my new laptop related to the world much like an iPad with apps and an app store was a revelation. Apps will rule the world.
This trend is why we are all app builders now and these tutorials are a must view. The trend toward apps is more than you think. A few days ago I shared a Haiku Deck about the future of web design 3.0 (http://sco.lt/7r6zkf).
I missed the appification of everything. Apps, the widget-like shrinking of code to Lego blocks, form the core of mobile programming. Since mobile is taking over the smart move is to "appify" everything.
This means thinking of websites as interconnected blocks responding to each other and our visitors in real time (as described in the deck). Best demonstration or analogy for this fluid app future is MIT's David Merrill explaining Siftable at TED http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html .
The way Siftables related to one another (they are aware other Siftables are present and have a desire to connect if code expressed as a toy can have desires) and link in order to create a sum is greater than the whole universe is a great way to think about the New Ecommerce.
The new ecom is location agnostic (capable of converting anywhere at anytime and with the merest snippet of Siftable-like code), socially self aware (capable of pulling friends and their influencers into the equation) and appified (small Lego-like blocks snapped together to meet specific needs).
Sometimes we will snap in the predictive analytics block sometimes we might now. Other times we will want the social share block other times not. Design, in this Siftables-like future, becomes a series of WHAT IF conditions and testing, always testing.
Going to be fun and why it is a GOOD idea to become an app builder.
How Mobile Shopping Will Improve in the Future http://t.co/IhWyTnB7 #Mobile #Mcommerce #Ecommerce
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Some improvements will come from how we as ecommerce merchants structure our presentation, data and offers. Other improvements in "mcommerce" are going to come from technology. This article from Mobile Commerce Daily covers both of these trends with ways mobile shopping bets better in 2013.
Mobile Devices Are Future of E-commerce: Gilt CEO on CNBC.comThe Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales rose 0.3% in November after falling 0.3% in October.
Detailed Infographic covering the latest M-commerce statistics and Trends.
Marty Note
Sitting with some smart Internet marketing friends at Raleigh's Internet Summit I learned that the $100M website they manage now has 16% of sales coming from mobile phones and tablets. Wow, that is math even I can do without Excel. $16M in "Mobile Commerce" means the mobile tsunami is HERE. This infographic predicting $31B in US sales by 2015 and other helpful tidbits just underscore that e-commerce is now m-commerce.
Other thing I keep reminding myself is MOBILE is way more than the phone. Mobile is about design, data structure and how you tell a story in a much smaller device. The other trend we are seeing that is critical is the phone is mobile devices are curating people's lives. If you don't look good and tell a attention-grabbing story in mobile you never earn the right to play on my laptop or desktop. Mobile is the gatekeeper, so EVEN if your mobile traffic stats stay low the influence of mobile devices is being felt.
Digital marketing isn't a fad - it's the future. And although it may be a notoriously difficult task to project the future; the most telling variable is what's happening in the present. Look around you and you'll notice that the world is connected, communicating and constantly clicking. There's no reason to believe that the demographic cohort that will follow Generation Y, will be any different. In fact, the next generation will be the first that cannot conceive a world that isn't defined and enabled by the Internet, mobile devices and online social networking. Still not convinced? The following Infographic by ROI Media - http://bit.ly/JOOy40 - presents an overview of the digital landscape, and the changes pointing towards the need for social media marketing in commerce. Download / Embed Here: http://bit.ly/JOOOA7 ;
|
Scoop it Creator
Martin (Marty) Smith
FOLLOW US
|
