Crucial play of digital commerce in your business

Crucial Play Of Digital Commerce In Your Business

Today’s marketplace is filled with demanding consumers who hold

high expectations when it comes to brand experiences, making it

critical for companies to not only have the right strategy in place,

but also the expertise and capacity of resources to deliver these

relevant and personalized experiences.

According to Gartner’s 2016-2017 CMO Spend Survey, marketing

leaders spend more on marketing technology than they do on

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paid media while 54% of marketing organizations have ultimate

responsibility for digital commerce.

Need for Digital Commerce Objectives

Retail and brand marketers know promotions are a race to the

bottom. Promotions can bring a quick boost to online conversion

and digital commerce revenue. But like most every other bad

habit, promotions eventually catch up to you in one of four ways:

· Unsustainable top line growth

· Deteriorating profit margin

· Erosion of brand equity

· Declining customer lifetime value

Solutions

· Foremost, set the right goals. Digital commerce revenue

objectives need to pair with margin goals and thresholds. Both

sets of metrics should be proactively tracked and monitored.


Equal focus on top and bottom line performance will highlight the

real impact of promotions.

· Marketers need to use customer data and analytics to

forecast sales impact, prepare executives for short term effects of

fewer promotions and illustrate the long term pay off in higher

margin and customer lifetime value.

· Put marketing resources behind personalization to learn

what is most important to your customers. Personalization won’t

deliver overnight results. It will help you achieve incremental

improvement in conversion metrics by putting the right

campaigns, content and products in front of shoppers at the right

time and in the right channel and context based on their

behavior.

Dividing Digital Commerce Responsibilities

Marketing leaders with digital commerce responsibilities fall into

two categories: those who own the digital commerce function,


and those who support digital commerce by using marketing to

achieve digital commerce goals.

· Marketers who own digital commerce demonstrate revenue

results, and have authority over capital expenditures and

resource management. They build and advance the digital go-to-

market strategy and gather and analyze customer data to better

understand buyer expectations and inform strategy and

execution.

· Marketers who support digital commerce must align

marketing plans, resources, channels, tactics and content to

deliver against digital commerce objectives. They must use

business andfinancial acumen and data-driven insight to influence

digital commerce strategy and shape commerce goals, which are

often set by brand or business unit leaders. To achieve those

objectives marketers must work closely with those leaders and

other internal functions like sales and IT.


Why digital commerce matters in a considered purchase

process?

While the process for making a considered purchase varies by

industry and company, buyers can use digital technology to

educate themselves, plan and prepare for the buying process. For

buyers, being better educated can expedite the sales process and

mitigate the risk of making an uninformed or emotional decision.

For sellers, digital commerce and digital customer engagement

can shorten the sales cycle and improve the ability to orchestrate

and track customer behavior and measure the impact of different

marketing and sales tactics on lead to sales conversion. But

digital channels also lower switching costs, making it easier for a

prospect to shift between competitors than in traditional sales

channels.

Build three core competencies to enable digital commerce

for considered purchases


· A customer-led buying process: Use digital to enable self-

service for customers. Encourage sales to respect customer

preferences.

· A digital product catalog and rich product content:Use

content marketing to enrich commerce. A rich content and

immersive experience, high quality images or detailed product

information and if possible, a 360 degree video makes an

appealing catalogue.

· A common system for tracking buyer interactions: Avoid

onslaught of emails, mobile messages and calls to customer. Use

CRM, marketing automation or campaign management tools to

orchestrate multichannel interactions.

Conclusion

Achieving results means understanding and anticipating your

customers’ wants, needs, behaviors and expectations. Digital

commerce strategies not only help to build a foundation for


customer insights, but also to know the environmental and

competitive factors driving marketplace disruption.


Education

Crucial play of digital commerce in your business