Here are the 5 Top 2017 Marketing Trends and their 2018 marketing implications. Includes 2018 marketing tactics and charts to make your case.
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Facebook is must-have marketing media, both organic and paid. To understand the type of content that works best examine this Top 2017 Facebook Content.
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Chief Marketing Officers At Work contains 29 exclusive, in-depth interviews with chief marketing officers like Jeff Jones of Target and Seth Farbman of Spotify.
It's intended to help C-level executives to understand how marketing drives growth at both startup and enterprise levels, and how marketing has moved from art to science.
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A bad checkout experience can lead to an abandoned cart and a tarnished brand image. Surveys show that 70% of customers get irritated by slow or chatty cashiers, and 49% hate seeing closed lines at peak hours. Keep them waiting for 2.5 minutes, and they get annoyed. Keep them waiting for 5 minutes, and half will just leave the store – and likely never return. (Retail Customer Experience).
Retail companies have tried to manage this pain point with barcodes, RFIDs, and self-checkout counters. But why not eliminate the checkout altogether? Here are some ways leading companies are using checkout-less shopping to create a frictionless shopping experience.
“When checkout is working really well, it will feel like stealing,” says Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute. And no ecommerce technology comes closer does that better than checkout-less shopping.
Take Amazon Go’s “Just Walk Out” shopping experience.
You log into the app, enter a brick-and-mortar store, get what you want, and leave. What kind of sorcery is this? It’s the same artificial intelligence and machine vision found in self-driving cars. Sensor technology and video scans track your movement across the store. The data is synced with the handheld device, and when sensors (and face recognition) confirm you’ve left, the items are added up like in any other online shopping cart. You are charged based on your preset payment preference, whether that’s a credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay or bank account. This requires set-up on the part of customers, so they will likely only do that for stores they visit regularly.
As early as 2013, Walmart’s wholesale division, Sam’s Club already had a “Scan and Go” app that let customers scan product barcodes and then pay at a special fast lane. With the 2016 update, people can pay straight from their phone. Within seconds, they receive an e-receipt to show to the “greeter” at the store in order to exit.
Sam’s Club still has traditional cashiers, but the app is useful for skipping lines especially during peak hours. Between shopping trips, the app also notifies customers about promos and sales related to their preferences and/or previous purchases. The traditional cashiers allow customers not yet enabled for a checkout-less experience to still spend at Sam’s. As they see the convenience of checkout-less shopping, they may convert over, and cashiers can help with that conversion.
There may be no way to completely eliminate lines because there will always be people who won’t have the right app. These people will still need POS systems, but not necessarily a human cashier. And the corner grocer (unless it’s a 7-11) won’t have the $ required to set up the technology necessary to facilitate checkout-less shopping so there will be lines there too.
Pay for a meal without even opening your wallet. Apps from companies such as Chipotle, Taco Bell and Starbucks take your order and process the payment in cloud. Your food or drink is ready when you arrive at a dedicated pick up point, and the only thing you need to do is eat.
Google also launched its “Hands Free” payment in some restaurants in the California bay area. Customers can order, and just say “I’ll pay with Google.” Cashiers then verify your identity by asking for initials and viewing your picture. Some stores also have in-store cameras that snap a photo and verify your identity on the spot using facial recognition.
Checkout-less shopping doesn’t just change the way people pay for their items. The technology changes the customer experience and opens new marketing opportunities.
“Our current dominant payment technologies have separation between the shopping experience and the payment experience,” says Tom Davis, president and COO of CSCU and Payments Review. “Since these newer forms of checkout-less shopping can happen within merchant controlled environments, in-store experiences can be blended with online and mobile experiences. This not only has advantages for loyalty, but can provide valuable data for several other purposes including target marketing and reducing shopping cart abandonment.”
Video analytics can now monitor what you buy, and what you return to the shelf or leave in your basket. Sensors can analyze movements across the store: where you go first, which aisles you spent the most time in, what you looked at and left (and may be interested in getting during the next sale). This is similar to the insights gleaned from clickstreams—and a powerful way for retailers to create personalized, data-driven shopping experiences.
To find out more about cloud-based ecommerce technologies, visit elasticpath.com
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Want the latest on 2018 B2C Content Marketing Trends? Here's research and analysis you need to support your business plans.
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Are you overlooking the audio content marketing opportunity? Here's analysis of the audio content and podcast market with actionable tips.
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During Thanksgiving 2016, Black Friday and Cyber Monday hit record breaking ecommerce sales in the United States. Over 108 million shopped online. Total sales reached $9.36 billion, and mobile sales also broke the $3 billion mark. Online sales outpaced brick and mortar sales, as more people (notably the millennial demographic) chose to surf online for the best deals.1
Unfortunately, not all retailers were ready for the surge in traffic.
Macy’s, Old Navy, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Target and Newegg all experienced online technical issues. Websites lagged or crashed.2 Some customers couldn’t even log on. Others had a cart full of items that they couldn’t pay for, some even saw their items disappear and replaced by someone else’s selections. Many frustrated netizens took their complaints to social media, but for every person who bothered to tweet, dozens more simply took their money elsewhere.
According to the Forrester 2017 Holiday Outlook Report, online retail sales will increase this year by 12% and companies have worked hard over the past year to optimize every part of the shopping journey to win, serve, and retain customers during this often make-or-break shopping season.
Raw computing power has become commoditized to the point where there is little benefit in owning and running infrastructure to handle super high traffic on just a few days of the year. For companies that experience highly variable computing loads, the cost of maintaining on-premise servers just to cover those high load days, is senseless. Retailers are preparing for Black Friday surges in ecommerce system traffic with demand based computing clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provide unlimited dynamic scaling. Computer capacity is adjusted according to demand, protecting both customer experience and costs since companies don’t pay for servers sitting idle in low season.
Companies using clouds like AWS to run their critical commerce infrastructure are also buying the expertise of the world’s top technology infrastructure platform experts. They’ll ensure new technology innovations are implemented as they arise.
Not only are total sales going to increase, but lines between physical and digital experiences continue to blur, putting more pressure on underlying commerce systems. Even brick-and-mortar shoppers use their mobile to check reviews or compare prices. Many retailers also use mobile presence technologies in-store. These customer tracking systems can provide contextual information to a commerce system that can then offer discounts via SMS or an app as people browse. Some stores have cut down lines by giving staff mobile point of sale devices.
All these technologies depend on reliable and scalable bandwidth in store as well as a commerce system that can handle digital and physical store purchase surges. With a unified transactional layer for online and in-store purchases, shoppers experience consistent products, pricing and promotions regardless of sales channel. Combine this with the power of AWS and the entire commerce infrastructure can easily scale as demand skyrockets. Checkout line clogging up? Add more mobile checkouts help line bust. Don’t have the right item in store? Let customers purchase anyway and ship it directly to their house. The flexibility that a unified commerce layer provides customers allows your company to solve the bottleneck problems that might sour their experience with your brand.
As commerce becomes more and more connected throughout the customer journey whether digital or physical, all transactions will go through a central system. Commerce systems running on a platform that offers guaranteed dynamic scalability will ultimately win out because they will be able to keep up with the unpredictable peaks of the holiday rush.
2 Forbes, How Retailers Botched Black Friday And Cyber Monday
Your company’s commerce system doesn’t have to be vulnerable to a Black Friday, Cyber Monday meltdown or any peak shopping period. Learn more about Elastic Path Commerce for AWS.
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Earn reciprocity from your customers by using Thank You Content Marketing to build relationships and sales. Examines 5 Thank You Content Type and offers tips.
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What do many successful businesses and leaders have in common? They’re the first names that come to mind when people think about their particular industries. How do you achieve this level of trust that influences people to think of you in the right way at the right time?
In Top of Mind, John Hall show you how to develop habits and strategies that focus on engaging your audience, creating meaningful relationships, and delivering value consistently, day in and day out.
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How do you maximize your content marketing distribution? By understanding the 5 types of content consumption and their marketing implications. Includes research, charts, tactics and tips. [INFOGRAPHIC]
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According to Forbes, 7 out of 8 digital transformations fail. The problem is that companies aren’t actually transforming, instead they are only attempting to transform by wedging new mobile applications, engagement layers, or channels on old and brittle infrastructure. Frankly, this is not transformation, this is stagnation.
Here are some of the most common and expensive mistakes that send well-intentioned digital projects to their doom.
Successful projects aren’t built around shiny objects. They deliver true value to customers. Approach transformation from the customer’s point of view. What will truly fill a need, delight and support a customer along the buyer journey? Use both quantitative and qualitative methods to formulate and validate your hypothesis:
Failing to plan carries the opportunity cost of delayed or abandoned projects, which translates to lost customer sales while giving your competitors time to get ahead.
Define your project requirements, customer journeys and flows. Understand and anticipate necessary integrations. These details should be nailed down before you start to build to avoid mid-implementation changes and issues that can derail your effort.
Traditional, single-stack ecommerce solutions are coupled, meaning the front-end presentation layer and back-end infrastructure (the “stack”) are unified. This creates several technical issues and business limitations.
That’s why top brands are abandoning siloed, single-stacks for more flexible headless commerce solutions.
With headless commerce the business layer and the presentation layer are decoupled from each other.
There comes a point when you need to stop adding to legacy or homegrown systems – it becomes too restrictive, arduous and expensive – and for most organizations, that time is now.
Learn about digital transformation from customer experience leaders. Download Elastic Path’s free ebook to find out more about the future of ecommerce.
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Fill your editorial calendar with curated content. Create a content curation plan with 5 core types of content. Includes a year's worth of ideas & tips.
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Content amplification builds reach with into 3 tactic before mass distribution. Includes 30 content amplification tools with 5 actionable tips.
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