Ecommerc's future is going to be a symphony of feeds. Use SellWare.com to help manage the sell anytime, anywhere future that is coming fast.
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.
There's some great data out there on marketing channel ROI. This infographic pulls together industry studies and surveys on how marketing channels compare.
Marty Note
Somewhat disingenuous to separate channels like this. Everything is everything now and that means results in one channel are influencd in many ways by other channels. That is an important caveat for the "all or nothing" crowd who may read these results thinking they can reduce or eliminate commitment to social or PPC.
Yeah we wouldn't do that. Your site is MODELED and substantial changes to any part of your current model could take down all the dominoes. That doesn't mean this knowledge isn't important though your results may be different. Knowing what channel is contributing profit and what channel is contributing traffic allows you to invest in the blend. Remember it is the blend that wins so don't go cutting off your nose to spite your website.
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 :).
Marty Note
Solid tips here with a few caveats:
* #3 printing is a nice to have now not a must have. Printing just isn't as important, but, for some, a printed piece is easier to share.
* Reviews are now more important in their absence. Having hundreds of reviews is great as it shows the size and value of the tribe formed around a given product. A Customer's voice is always a tad different sounding too, so be sure to curate content FROM reviews.
* High res images is a good idea, but don't slow the delivery of your page down. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help server your images and videos fast no matter who is looking at your content or from where.
* Product comparisons are great especially if they are social.
* Shipping = we would amend shipping to make sure your FREE Shipping triggers are easy to find / be aware of and set to maximize conversions.
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
This holiday selling season (2014) will happen as close to real time as any thanks to the social / mobile web. Listening and curating are going to be important, but so is tapping the nostalgia and spirit of the season in creative and collaborative ways.
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.
Creating a distributed content network with widgets is a vast blue ocean of low cost, high reward Internet marketing today. Won't be that way for long.
Marty Note - Rethinking Ecommerce & CrowdFunde
I love it when we find supporting data for CrowdFunde our content marketing meets crowdfunding and social media startup. Here is Don Bradford from eBay making our point for us:
Problem: People are likelier to purchase something if their friends weigh in--but that's not easy to do on massive e-commerce sites.
Solution: EBay's new browser plug-in, Help Me Shop, lets users shop anywhere on the web and drag items into a separate window. Through Facebook, the user invites friends to give advice on the items they like best.
"As we spoke with our customers and really started analyzing their activity, we discovered that what they were doing was shopping in a social product life cycle:
Things start out around inspiration and research--something that a friend shared with them, or something that an influencer had shared with them, whether it was on Twitter, Polyvore, Pinterest, or Svpply.
They continue to connect with friends all the way to the point of purchase. And after the purchase, they can be a resource for other people shopping for the product. What makes Help Me Shop really powerful is that it goes beyond eBay's inventory. It's really about a social shopping experience that goes wherever I am and allows me to engage my friends in the shopping experience whenever I think it's useful."
Emphasis mine
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Our goals for http://www.crowdfunde.com is to make it easier for friends to weigh in (helps shoppers and retailers) and to own the social conversation. Own the conversation, own the traffic.
At AddShoppers we have been busy number crunching. “Why?” We wanted to help eCommerce store owners and social experts understand a monetary value for soc
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Wow, helpful stats for pitching the "new ecom" to the c-level here.
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.
Step by step, detailed case studies on getting traffic from Neil Patel, Jeff Bullas, Jon Morrow and many more.
Martin (Marty) Smith:
Traffic's Drug
Here is the thing about TRAFFIC. A lot of peple will tell you nonconvertig traffic hurts more than it helps. I'm not so judgementa and it depends on how we GOT the traffic and how expensive it was.
Traffic, by itelf, is a metric of nothing.
Traffic plus conversion (money) plus source, plus content = cool let's do it again realizations. Each of these experts have great ideas, ideas where I like some more than others. Will try to remember to circle back around and pick my favorite 10 GET TRAFFIC IDEAS and why I like them over others.
Marty
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."
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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
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