E-commerce extinctions: 3 things your marketing strategy should say goodbye to

The evolution of ecommerce has redefined the retail landscape, shifting it from a series of seasonal trends to a dominant force shaping the future of shopping. The numbers speak volumes. Revenue in the European ecommerce market has been forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by a total of 344.7 billion U.S. dollars (+54.48 percent).

After the seventh consecutive increasing year, the indicator is estimated to reach 977.36 billion dollars and therefore a new peak in 2029. As part of this boom, UK online sales alone are projected to account for 38.1% of all retail sales by 2025, totalling an estimated £152 billion.

As retail peak season approaches, spanning the end of October to December, marketers must be fine-tuning plans to capitalise on the ‘golden quarter’, as they brace themselves for the usual surge in consumer demand. For e-tailers, the challenge lies not just in managing this rush, but in leveraging it to drive growth. With so many different marketing strategies and tactics available, knowing which investments will truly propel your business forward is daunting.

While the right approach depends on your unique business model, products and industry, one thing is clear: some ecommerce habits are no longer effective. Recognising what not to do could be the first step toward refining your strategy and maximising results.

By avoiding outdated tactics, your business can better engage customers and maintain a strong growth trajectory during the crucial peak season. On top of this, your marketing teams can spend their time focusing on other tasks that provide value.

Making the most of your data 

Creating campaigns through guesswork and predicting what consumers will relate to is not only less effective but a drain on time and resources. Deep customer insights are crucial for creating personalised campaigns and powering brand growth. They eliminate guesswork and instead give marketers a true understanding into their customer preferences.

However, there’s data and then there’s detailed, granular data. Marketers need to stop relying on simple customer segmentations and expecting them to drive significant results. Instead, they should spend time using and analysing their data, such as behavioural and transactional proof points, to understand their customers in a more detailed and personalised way, on both a group and individual level.

The latest marketing technology can automatically gather data and generate insights on customers and how they interact across various channels. This data allows brands to monitor their activity and see what products interest them, what campaigns they respond to, and how they like to receive communication. This includes using tools such as surveys and contact preference forms to gather personal zero-party data transparently and ethically. Equally, integrating this with other engagement data helps to build a more complete customer profile – resulting in the ability to better segment and boost understanding of relevant messaging.

So, instead of guessing what communication their customers like, marketers can tailor it to their individual needs, expectations and preferences – and this is what will increase conversion rates.

The elimination of complicated martech stacks

There are more than 14,000 martech solutions on the market. With so much choice, businesses can integrate too many different products and become overstacked, paying for extra features they don’t use and creating inefficiencies in their teams. Marketers need to conduct a detailed and honest review of their martech stacks to understand what each product is capable of and determine the necessary products they need. By assessing their stacks and reducing their complexity, they can start to understand what exactly is needed to drive growth and streamline their processes.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to adopt a customer engagement platform. It can integrate with other business and marketing solutions and help marketers to store and leverage all relevant customer and marketing data in one location. This empowers marketers to maintain critical applications but create a more streamlined and agile approach for managing and processing their data.

The extinction of siloed customer experiences

The use of different technology can often create siloed customer experiences. Customers interact with brands through a whole variety of channels, whether that’s on a website, through their email or on their mobile device. Failure to connect these experiences can lead to a lack of brand continuity and impact the effectiveness of marketing communication efforts. In such a modern ecommerce landscape, brands need to find ways of efficiently creating connected customer experiences across all the channels they use.

Boosting cross-channel effectiveness via email, mobile, web and push notifications allows marketers to deliver seamless omnichannel communication, consistently communicating with customers wherever and however they prefer. By using a customer engagement platform that integrates with these channels, marketers have the opportunity to gain real-time insights into customer activity, see what channels they prefer, and then adapt campaigns accordingly. This includes driving live interactions with real-time offers, whether that’s a WhatsApp message or a mobile notification when they’re using the brand’s app.

By orchestrating customer experiences across the channels they use, marketers can also become more targeted in their approach.

Time to make these habits extinct

As ecommerce sales surge and we enter the golden quarter, marketers face a crucial moment to capitalise on increased demand and drive their growth.

The range of marketing strategies and tactics available makes it a challenging process to know what investments to focus on. However, the days of guessing about your customers and what and how to communicate with them need to be eliminated. Instead, marketers should be refining and optimising their marketing technology investments using the latest customer engagement platforms to provide deep customer insights and implement them to drive more effective campaigns across their multi-channel experiences.

By making these three eccomerce habits extinct, marketers can elevate their brands, and achieve their goals.

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