Want to amp up your blogging results? Examine Orbit Media's blogging research to understand how blogging has evolved. Includes 40 actionable blogging tips.
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Digital commerce is playing a pivotal role in customer experience strategies. The world’s leading research firm, Gartner, recognized that digital commerce is a key way to acquire customers, develop relationships, drive revenue and reduce costs.1
Digital commerce initiatives affect both operations and customer experience management. They provide more ways to sell products, interact with customers, and differentiate from the competition. In their recent report, Gartner analyzed several emerging digital commerce technologies. We looked at the top five for delivering great customer experiences, including personalization.
Application programming interface (API) based solutions have gained more popularity with businesses that recognize digital experiences are a key differentiator in their customer relationship strategies.
Commerce has gone beyond the storefront with the emergence of new touchpoints and technologies. Customers today engage with companies through social media, wearables, smart home devices and their connected vehicles. They expect their in-store experiences are simply an extension of all of their other experiences.
API-based commerce facilitates consistency across all of these experiences. By decoupling the presentation layer from the business logic, businesses are more agile and flexible to support multiple digital and physical channels, and contextualize content that makes sense to the customer.
For businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition by quickly innovating and experimenting new customer experiences, API-based digital commerce is the appropriate choice. (Read our article on The State of APIs to see what a difference that makes.)
The augmented reality game, Pokemon, has been downloaded over 100 million times and has more than 20 million active users. However, augmented reality and virtual reality have uses far beyond the gaming industry. Both can increase sales and conversion by enhancing the shopping experience.
IKEA publishes augmented reality catalogues. Converse has a mobile app that lets you try every shoe just by pointing your phone at your leg. Sephora is working on an augmented reality platform that uses face recognition so users can try on different looks – then add the recommended products into a cart. The three-dimensional technology is particularly useful in travel, real estate, engineering and esthetic medicine. Customers can simulate and visualize the results of the product they are searching for and create an immersive experience.
AR and VR are still in the early stages of adoption. There are still some technological issues that need to be addressed to enable maturity and utilization. Businesses should look at how AR and VR might fit into their overall business strategy, and articulate how to leverage them to improve business results. A good way to determine whether an experiment is working is to use A/B testing to measure sales impact.
Conversational commerce is where messaging applications and shopping intersect. Customers can reach out to company reps or a chatbot through messaging apps, chat apps or voice technology to make inquiries or get recommendations. It uses technologies consumers already use like WeChat stores, Facebook Messenger, and Amazon Echo (Alexa) to discover and purchase goods and services.
It boils down to customer engagement across the entire customer journey. Be where your customers are, and be there at the right moment. Conversational commerce allows customers to engage using their method of choice, taking channel transparency to a whole new level.
Eventually, natural-language interactions will become the norm in terms of how people expect to interact with companies. But there’s a caveat. The challenge is that conversational commerce is also in its infancy. Tech firms of all sizes are working to simulate human to computer conversations, but there are limitations in terms of customer context. It works for simpler actions like product recommendations, rebuys, and other linear conversations. Complex issues like customer complaints may still be best handled by a human being.
“Thing commerce” has morphed from the smartphone to the smart home. Now it’s the smart home filled with objects programmed to make repeat purchases based on pre-set rules, preferences and context. Amazon offers the Dash Replenishment Service, which sets up appliances to reorder when supplies run low. More companies (and people) will start talking to embedded digital assistants in refrigerators and other appliances or to assistants like Alexa who can shop on their behalf. IHS forecasts that the IoT market will reach 30.7 billion devices in 2020 and 75.4 billion in 2025.
Companies driving innovation are getting ahead of the competition and seeing the benefits of early adoption. The question for every business: How should we prepare to take advantage of “thing commerce”? Actions might include embedding sensors or touchpoints in existing products, and integrating analytics to capture data. Identify short-term actions, future capabilities, ongoing operations and maintenance. It’s critical to map out the business case for any IoT play.
“Thing commerce” enables frictionless commerce experiences, resulting in increased revenue and a much better customer experience. In addition, the data that IoT devices gather exponentially improves customer insight and can fuel personalization.
A DXP is your technology toolkit for creating digital experiences for your audience. It can mean one product or an entire suite of products and technologies from other vendors.
A DXP provides customers with a consistent brand experience in spite of organizational silos and legacy technology challenges. It enables a business to provide and improve customer experiences across diverse digital experiences and audiences.
A good DXP should be agile, flexible and easy to extend. Usually, the DXP platform combines technologies and systems to support specific business needs. It provides the foundation for all digital experiences, as new devices and channels are “plugged into” newly defined experiences.
Some questions to ask when assessing DXPs include: “What can we do now? and what can we do in future? What challenges will we face when upgrading the solution?” Consider time to market, deployment costs, and if customizations will be required to integrate well with other components. Considering the pace of digital commerce, the worst thing you can buy is a DXP dinosaur: slow, difficult to alter, and vulnerable to tech change.
To evaluate any DXP, take inventory of your existing DXP across different channels and devices. Walk through different customer experience scenarios. Find synergies and overlaps between vendors. Set business goals and identify what you need in a new DXP to make them happen.
How are you taking advantage of emerging digital commerce technologies to deliver amazing customer experiences? As Gartner reported, you need an API-based commerce solution engineered for today and the future. Learn more about Elastic Path Commerce, an API-based, flexible, extensible ecommerce platform.
1 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2017
The post Hype in Digital Commerce: 5 Rising Technologies to Watch appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
Maximize your B2B content marketing distribution reach with this B2B Content Marketing Research analysis and 30 tactics with examples.
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We are entering the age of connected car commerce. Buckle your seatbelts.
Gartner predicts that by 2020, 80% of vehicles (roughly 250 million cars) will be connected to the Internet of Things.
These hypermobile devices will come complete with hardware, operating systems and app-driven utilities that can support a variety of payments on the go.
“The industry crossed a critical threshold in the first quarter of 2016, with the quiet but dramatic announcement of a statistic that few noted at the time,” reports Tech Crunch. “The net adds of connected cars (32%) rose above the net adds of smartphones (31%).” Industry experts see that the mobile market has hit saturation. Connected cars offer a new growth engine – pun intended.
Big car manufacturers like Ford, Honda, General Motors, Jaguar, Toyota and Tesla are already experimenting with connected commerce capabilities.
GM’s At Your Service connects OnStar subscribers with partnered retailers, hospitality and service providers, when and where they need them. For example, requesting directions to a point of interest can trigger personalized recommendations, offers and discounts from businesses like Dunkin Donuts for a re-fuel, Audiobooks.com to take the edge of the long drive or gridlock, Priceline for last-minute hotel bookings, and Parkopedia to find the closest (and cheapest) open spaces.
Jaguar’s XE and XF models support in-car payments in partnership with Shell stations, with plans to support e-wallets Apple Pay and Android Pay. Ford’s Fordpass mobile payment app has partnered with Chicago’s ParkWhiz to reserve and pay for parking spots in advance. Luxe and Tesla have teamed up to offer New Yorkers valet parking, charging and add-on services like car wash, overnight parking, and drive-home service – all booked through a mobile app.
You never have to let go of the steering wheel. Visa and Accenture are working on a proof of concept that supports contactless payments that don’t need interaction with a touchscreen. Using IVR (interactive voice response), sensors and beacons, drivers can search for nearby amenities, reserve and pre-pay for services, and place and pay for orders – all while keeping your hands on the wheel and your credit cards in your wallets. As with the Uber app, pilot merchants like Pizza Hut can receive alerts when you’re about to arrive. Your pizza will be ready at the window, hot and fresh.
Cars have unique opportunities for commerce capabilities, reports Tech Crunch.
• Bigger interactive surface. Nearly every surface in the car can become interactive: the instrumentational panel, backseat or rider-side infotainment screens. Even car windows can become augmented reality screens.
• Portable data centers with powerful computing capacity. Pokemen Go’s extensive use of augmented reality and GPS sucked the life out of your phone battery but could run without any problem on a car.
• Consumer habits. Car owners are already used to monthly expenses like fuel and maintenance, so paying an additional connectivity fee won’t be a difficult sell.
Car ecommerce is still in its early years. Who is leading the race? A KPMG survey of 200 automotive executives saw BMW as the early champion, followed by Daimler, General Motors, Toyota and Tesla. Tech companies like AT&T, Microsoft, Google and Apple are also investing heavily in this new technology. Nobody wants to be left behind in the dust.
How else will the Internet of Things change ecommerce? Download our ebook, The Future of Commerce to get the full report.
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To pull your audience into your content and build a memorable brand use this brand storytelling definition and 30 story lines to enhance your brand.
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Want to maximize your content reach? B2B content marketing distribution case study shows success steps (works for B2C) & 5 tactics to improve distribution.
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The world of work is changing and we’re shifting toward an ever more self-reliant, entrepreneurial, economy. That can be a liberating force, and many professionals dream of becoming independent, whether by starting their own businesses, becoming consultants or developing a sideline.
But how do you actually make money doing what you love? You may have incredible talent and novel ideas, but figuring out how to get started, building your reputation, developing multiple revenue streams, and bringing in a steady flow of new clients can be a daunting prospect.
Dorie Clark, a successful entrepreneur and author, has done it all. And in Entrepreneurial You she provides a blueprints for professional independence – a hands-on guide to building a portfolio of traditional and online revenue streams so that you can liberate yourself.
The post Entrepreneurial You – Book Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Want to maximize your content reach? B2B content marketing distribution case study shows success steps (works for B2C) & 5 tactics to improve distribution.
The post How To Improve Your Winning B2B Content Marketing Distribution [Case Study] appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
The world of work is changing and we’re shifting toward an ever more self-reliant, entrepreneurial, economy. That can be a liberating force, and many professionals dream of becoming independent, whether by starting their own businesses, becoming consultants or developing a sideline.
But how do you actually make money doing what you love? You may have incredible talent and novel ideas, but figuring out how to get started, building your reputation, developing multiple revenue streams, and bringing in a steady flow of new clients can be a daunting prospect.
Dorie Clark, a successful entrepreneur and author, has done it all. And in Entrepreneurial You she provides a blueprints for professional independence – a hands-on guide to building a portfolio of traditional and online revenue streams so that you can liberate yourself.
The post Entrepreneurial You – Book Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Today’s post originally ran on TotalRetail and has been updated.
The consumer Internet of Things (cIoT) is here. But what exactly is it? It’s hard to believe, but a world in which purchasing will become seamless from thousands of new touchpoints is just around the corner. We’re seeing the thin end of the wedge with FitBit, Apple Watch, Amazon Alexa, Nest and Google Home. In addition to the general trend toward digital commerce in customer behavior, the cIoT will redefine the future of commerce. New technologies are changing the way customers are buying, as well as what they’re expecting from brands. Consumers expect a seamless and consistent buying experience. To develop a coherent, commerce-enabled cIoT strategy, marketers should gain a basic understanding of some of the technologies driving this transformation. Here’s a primer.
First, let’s define what we mean by the cIoT. Basically, it’s a bundle of technologies that allows companies to improve customer experiences by embedding “intelligence” into internet-connected devices. Both Qualcomm and Intel are now building chips for the IoT space to capitalize on its growth potential.
These intelligent things can provide feedback (you have taken 10,534 steps!), create offers (do you need new running shoes?) and self-adjust to make in-context sales offers (Would you like 30 percent off socks to go with those new shoes?).
By commerce-enabling smart things, marketers can be more creative in how they commercially engage customers, providing a contextual experience in which customers receive offers in the moment when they’re most likely to buy.
Apple and Samsung have entered the wearables and smart home markets to expand their mobile ecosystem reach. Cisco estimates the number of connected devices worldwide will rise from 15 billion today to 50 billion by 2020.
With driverless cars around the corner, it’s not surprising that vehicle manufacturers are embedding commerce capabilities into their on-board consoles.
Couldn’t afford the top model? No problem. We can upgrade your engine control software to give you supercar speed for a day. Buy it online right in the car. The software downloads and self-installs to supercharge the family car. Roll down the windows!
With all these new touchpoints, it’s important to ensure customer experience consistency and continuity. Why, for example, customers ask, “Don’t I get the same offers and discounts across all channels? If I buy something through your app it costs 10 percent less than if I buy it on the website.” Or “Why is that item I just purchased on your app being offered to me now through the website?”
By focusing on individual touchpoints rather than the end-to-end customer journey, organizations can inadvertently create inconsistent experiences. In their underlying IT environment, they’ve siloed disparate systems that can’t provide a unified view of the customer, limiting marketers to provide a great customer experience.
And that’s with only a handful of touchpoints.
The cIoT is going to make a “unified customer experience” even more difficult.
What a customer can do using various touchpoints is obviously going to be different. However, all touchpoints must present the same brand personality and they all need to “know” the customer in the same way. That means somewhere in the background a system of record has to collect and consolidate customer purchase and intent data — no matter which touchpoint a sale has come through — then bring back a unified view of the customer to all touchpoints. This is important for two reasons. One, it increases customer loyalty because customers get the same experience in any engagement with the brand. Two, it increases revenue because customers buy more when they’re exposed to offers relevant to them.
Machine learning sounds very Sci-Fi, but what it really means is that with all these “smart” new customer touchpoints, companies can accumulate more data regarding individuals than ever before. Predictive software searches through huge datasets to detect buying patterns and correlations between customer type and purchases. This is how the machine “learns.” It’s a big step beyond “people who looked at this item also looked at these items.”
Eventually, customers’ actual buying patterns and a personalization engine will help marketers and merchandisers to auto-create special offers, dynamic pricing and custom bundles based on past purchase behavior. Taking this one step further, the personalization engine will access customer data in real time to hypertailor offers right at the moment of purchase. Everything the system knows can fuel the engine and promotions are dynamically constructed.
The cIoT promises to increase your number of customer touchpoints exponentially. Great, right? Yes, but to handle the resulting new transactions, you’ll need more computing power. Say, for example, you have 6 million orders on super peak days like Black Friday. Your platform has to be able to handle that load. But that’s only one day in the year. Systems built to handle peaks end up costing a lot because they’re essentially overbuilt.
Public clouds like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud can right-size computing infrastructure to handle those Black Friday peaks. Because cloud infrastructure can shrink and grow dynamically with load, it’s referred to as “elastic.” Elastic computing also ensures performance and availability benefits. A 2015 study by IDC for Amazon revealed that organizations of all sizes are realizing “64.3 percent lower total cost of ownership, $1.5M in benefits per application, and a five-year ROI of 560 percent.” And with elastic computing you get the added benefit of only paying for what you use.
No, we don’t mean appetizers. API stands for application programming interface. It’s a toolset and protocols that software developers use to get one program to talk to another. If you want to innovate with new business models and commercially engage with customers through new “things,” then that “thing” is a new commerce-enabled channel. The question becomes how does your e-commerce platform rapidly adapt to new customer touchpoints? Moreover, how would you orchestrate offers and campaigns across them? Sounds like a problem that an API-based strategy might solve.
APIs allow companies to easily connect new technologies together to make customer experiences more exciting, easier or fun — like Disney’s MagicBand. In the MagicBand case, there are many different solutions underlying a visitor’s experience, including sensors throughout the park, a commerce platform, a personalization engine, a customer experience system, a customer relationship management system and others. All these systems must work together behind the scenes, and the commerce platform acts like the conductor, orchestrating their interactions and surfacing the business information to the MagicBand via the API.
That’s only two years away. Most software-as-a-service or monolithic commerce systems just won’t be able to handle adding new touchpoints at the pace your business needs to stay ahead of the competition. Look for an API-based platform that can work with any new customer-facing technologies — the ones that already exist and even those still to come.
For marketers looking to capitalize on the cIoT, it’s important to realize that there won’t be a single, all-in-one solution that can support the commercialization of the technology. To create consistently superb customer experiences, you need the best of all worlds, and you need them working together. The technologies running in the background that underpin omnichannel commerce will shape the experiences that you can create. The more flexible the technologies you choose, the better off you’ll be.
Struggling to understand how new technologies will drive a coherent, commerce-enabled cIoT strategy? Contact us to find out how our agile, API-first commerce platform can help drive digital transformation.
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