With the drastic expansion of e-commerce, brick and mortar businesses have taken an obvious shift towards online retail. The increase in e-commerce shopping has transformed the way marketers must strategize.

E-Commerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically. E-Commerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract visitors and facilitate purchases online.

 

E-Commerce is Becoming the Mainstream 

E-commerce has made the shopping experience instantly available to consumers. Studies have found that Millennials today make over 54% of their purchases online. Another recent study found that in the United States alone, over 17 million online transactions occurred on Amazon within just two days during the annual Prime Day event. In China, Singles Day shopping in 2018 shattered the previous year’s record, making $30.8 billion in one day, which is a 27% increase year over year.

As e-commerce continuously grows, it’s important that businesses utilize online shopping as part of their business strategy. With the switch to online shopping, businesses have the ability to track and measure the digital footprint left by consumers.   Collecting and examining this data helps marketers to determine the best future strategies. 

 

The Entire Customer Experience is What Matters

When it comes to tracking online shopping trends, marketers can get hung up on individual metrics such as shopping cart abandonment or bounce rates. While it is important to track individual metrics in order to increase numbers, potential customers can drop out of the buying process at any point in time. It is crucial for marketing professionals to study the entire part of the customer transaction in order to pinpoint what areas of the website may need improvement. Examining the conversion rate of each individual point of a customer’s online interaction will help marketers locate metrics for the customer’s entire experience. 

In order to analyze the impact on conversion rates, it is important to initiate tactics like A/B tests and quality assurance. This will help marketers to discover at what point in the buying process are they losing the interest of the consumer. Gathering feedback from the customer will also help with determining possible adjustments to the online shopping experience. A great example of collecting this information is by using online surveys to ask consumers why they did not want to proceed with the purchasing process. 

Nathalie Torres, the data director of Inamoto & Co, explains that “decades ago, brands were judged on product alone. Today, brands are being judged by the entire customer experience—and it takes smart design thinking to get this right.”