Modern commerce is channel-agnostic: you need to take a customer-first approach to be able to excel at effective customer engagement, conversions, and higher lifetime value.
Know Your Customers
Today, brands are expected to understand their customers in impactful ways, continuously leveraging both qualitative and quantitative-driven user personas. For instance, in the clothing industry, brands should know customers' size and style preferences to recommend clothes that will fit them well. You can imagine how this can apply to your business and the products you sell.
Customer data platforms, such as Adobe Real-time CDP, are crucial for identifying customer interactions across brands and accurately attributing revenue. Important data and metrics need to ultimately align with business goals and be shared across cross-functional teams to enhance everyone's understanding of data, marketing spend, and actions. Coordinated data mining across brands is essential. It's important to focus on measuring metrics where you are willing to take substantive action to address the findings. Finally, kKnowing that we're moving to a largely cookie-less future, zero and first-party data are the norm going forward in terms of driving marketing efforts.
Making Purchasing Easy
The bar is extraordinarily high these days. Audiences engage with brands in a variety of ways, from casual or passive interactions to intentional discovery with specific goals in mind that are largely agnostic to how you think about "channels." To cater to these diverse behaviors, it's essential to create an experience that meets users in each moment. This involves maintaining a consistent brand presence across multiple platforms and devices, as well as ensuring that users can easily engage with your brand—whether they are browsing social media, conducting research, or ready to make a purchase.
Facilitating seamless transitions between channels and devices is also crucial, so users don't lose their place in the customer journey. Implementing features like "save for later" or wish lists can enable a smooth transition from casual browsing to intentional shopping. Again, customers don’t care about channels, so it's important to explore cross-channel bundling to enhance their experience.
Deliver Great UX
This is the other side of the coin in terms of the brand experience. To preserve a unique identity and provide a user-friendly, conversion-driven shopping experience, it is essential to engage customers on a deeper level by tapping into their emotions and aspirations. This can be achieved by adapting messaging and interactions to suit different stages of the customer journey, offering educational or inspirational content, such as direct transaction-enabled on-site live chat. Additionally, designing for product discovery through various facets or consumer mindsets, and leveraging third-party sources like Baymard Institute, can enhance the experience with data. Finally, leaning into bespoke copywriting that truly embodies the brand while also performing well in line with best practices in ecommerce strategy is crucial.
Tie it All Together
The customer journey doesn’t end at the purchase. You need to adopt an operating model and way of working that aligns with continuous innovation and adaptation. Leverage real-time data signals to deliver a personalized experience, across content, product mix, and offers, reflective of multifaceted buyer journeys. Meet high consumer expectations for fast and inexpensive fulfillment and consider universal product merchandising wherever possible to make it easy for consumers, regardless of business complexity.
Finally, DTC ecommerce isn't just about the transaction. Engage directly with customers through social media and other platforms that emphasizes the fundamentals of customer service.
