The year 2020 will be remembered as a pivotal shift – to life online.
I’ve felt it – trying to get my son into his school’s online class while the toast is burning and I’m trying to run a marketing strategy session on Zoom.
“You’re on mute, Jeff!”
We’re working online, communicating online, and – more than ever – shopping online.
Amid this struggle, it’s our job as ecommerce marketers to make that last process – shopping online – as painless as possible.
Even… enjoyable?
That’s a big ask, but one thing is for sure. The closer we get to understanding exactly what the customer wants right now makes them happy.
Really happy.
“I’ll become your lifelong customer” happy.
And I’m about to share that the ecommerce site that gets this right will dominate your category for years to come.
Make sure that’s you.
Unprecedented Growth = Unprecedented Expectations
What an incredible responsibility (and opportunity) we have. Ecommerce is growing 5x faster than projected this year, a blistering 77%.
And the profile of who is buying from your website has changed, too, offering an opportunity to win market share from competitors. Now, these shoppers are more likely to be:
- Newcomers to your category: 74% of shoppers are buying items they “usually would not buy online.”
- Older: of the 7.4 million people who will go through their first online checkout ever this year (U.S. alone!), 75% are baby boomer-aged or above.
- Unusually willing to be won over: 80% said they would “be more likely to return to an online shop repeatedly if they customized every shopping experience to my personal needs.”
These new shoppers are looking more for necessities than for discretionary spending. Their top complaint with shopping experience is “items out of stock” (76%), and second biggest complaint is “difficulty finding the item I need” (43%)
In other words, they are mostly tech-unsavvy online shopper newbies expect a shopping experience that is fast, uncomplicated, and above all relevant to their immediate needs.
And they’ll dedicate their dollars to the first shop they find that does that for them.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher. Get personalization right on their first visit today, and you’ll lead your company into decades of growth. Don’t, and it will be your competitors you read about in 20 years when you look back at this historic year of ecommerce adoption.
First in Personalization = Dominate the Category
Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world because he got personalization in ecommerce earlier – and better – than anyone else. In 1998:
“In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge of the customer to accelerate their discovery process.
If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well.”
In the last 22 years, most ecommerce companies have gotten pretty good at personalization when they have lots of data about the shopper.
But as I’ll share below, the one thing 78% of ecommerce stores are not getting right yet is “first-touch personalization” – a new, technically challenging but possible offering that will make or break the winner of every category in 2020 and beyond.
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