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10 Future Trends of Ecommerce Customer Experience

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10 Future Trends of Ecommerce Customer Experience

Customer experience is probably one of the most crucial aspects to focus on for ecommerce companies.

According to the PWC customer experience report, 86% of online shoppers are even willing to pay more in return for a superior customer experience.

While it’s true that quality products have a notable impact on the success of your ecommerce company. In fact, quality products were considered “King” once upon a time in the ecommerce industry. But the king has long been dethroned.

Nowadays, online shoppers value customer experience and product quality equally. This simply means that product quality is no longer the only reason why online shoppers buy from particular brands. They now emphasize on the overall online shopping experience.

Put another way, providing a superior customer experience is now your golden ticket to succeed in the fast-moving ecommerce space.

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And in this article, we’ve shared the top 10 future ecommerce experience trends you need to consider adapting in your ecommerce company.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly clear up what ecommerce customer experience actually means.

What is Ecommerce Customer Experience?

Ecommerce customer experience basically refers to how your customers perceive all their interactions with your ecommerce brand. It covers all online experiences starting from the first time a customer hears about your ecommerce company to the post-purchase experience.

Though, there is no one way to create a winning customer experience for your ecommerce company. But one thing that’s clear as crystal is that it must be simple and satisfying for your customers. Otherwise, they’ll immediately get frustrated and begin the hunt for alternative options in the market.

To help you prevent that, we’ve shared 10 customer experience trends to implement in your ecommerce store.

Top 10 Future Ecommerce Customer Experience Trends

COVID-19 pandemic brought plenty of customer experience trends that have ultimately helped ecommerce companies over-achieve their goals.

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But in order to remain competitive, every ecommerce company must also be on the lookout for future ecommerce customer experience trends to adapt.

Here are the top 10 future trends you can consider.

1 – Customer Service

Customer service plays a crucial role in providing a positive customer experience in ecommerce stores.

According to Microsoft Customer Service Report, 72% of online shoppers expect the ecommerce support team to have an idea of who they are, what purchases they’ve made previously, and what kind of help they need.

The same report also revealed that 48% of online shoppers expect a response from the support team within 24 hours, while 18% of them expect a response within the first hour.

Furthermore, 56% of customers stop shopping from an ecommerce brand if the customer service experience is poor.

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The lesson here is, ecommerce companies must keep track of their customers and promptly respond to their queries/complaints with satisfying solutions.

2 – Payment Security

Believe it or not but payment security plays a major role in ecommerce customer experience strategy.

Plus, ecommerce companies also need to be vigilant about accepting payments online. Especially because of the volume of online payment frauds occurring these days.

According to a report, online fraudsters are predicted to siphon off $12 billion per year.

Another report by Finance Online also found that ecommerce companies deal with 206,000 web attacks on average every month.

Looking at these reports, one thing is clear — ensuring a secure payment transaction is a must to earn customers’ trust and develop a strong customer experience in ecommerce.

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3 – Faster Delivery

In the age of instant gratification, customers’ expectations for faster delivery is growing every passing day.

Ever since Amazon pivoted from 2-day shipping to next-day shipping and now same-day delivery, it has forced other ecommerce brands to follow Amazon’s footsteps.

According to a recent survey conducted by PWC, 88% of online shoppers are even willing to pay more for faster delivery options.

Because of this, over 51% of ecommerce brands worldwide have already started offering same-day delivery. And 65% of ecommerce companies plan to offer it in the next two years.

The point is, it is now absolutely critical to start offering faster delivery options to remain competitive in your ecommerce niche.

This is even more crucial if you’re selling products globally but unable to keep up with faster deliveries. In such cases, you should partner with a quick international courier service that guarantees timely delivery of all your international shipments.

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4 – Hyper-Personalized Upselling

When it comes to ecommerce, the potential of upselling cannot be overlooked. And by offering hyper-personalization along with custom-tailored deals, it becomes easier to win customers.

A McKinsey report recently found that ecommerce brands that go the extra mile to serve customers with a hyper-personalized shopping experience grow faster (in terms of revenue) than their competition.

By offering personalized incentives you can also boost upselling in your ecommerce store. You can create various forms of incentives such as point-based rewards, cashback offers, referral bonus programs, and so on.

If you’re planning to implement incentives of any form, make sure to integrate functionality that lets you create custom incentives with ease.

5 – Habit Loops

Humans are creatures of habit. In fact, habits have a massive impact on our everyday lives. That includes how we interact with other human beings, and how we interact with brands.

Therefore, creating habit loops in your ecommerce store can have a huge impact on the overall customer experience. A habit loop is a neurological loop that forms a habit in every one of us. It consists of a cue, routine, and reward.

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Smartphones are a prime example of habit loop formation. A new notification is a cue, checking the notification is routine, and seeing a new message from a friend or loved one is a reward.

To form a habit loop in your ecommerce store, you need to start by creating a hook for your products. Hooks trigger an action that leads to a reward for your potential customers.

While forming habit loops, make sure that they make your potential customers excited about your products and your ecommerce brand so that they continually reach out for more rewards.

6 – Self-Service

Nowadays, customer service channels are getting increasingly overwhelmed and the customers are also well-aware of this fact. This is why customers are now also becoming more resourceful and seek to fix their problems independently.

Ecommerce brands need to respect this and make it easier for customers to find solutions to their problems.

The best way to do this is by investing in a knowledge base and a dedicated FAQ page. Having a knowledge base and FAQ page can help your customers walk through the common problems and discover the best solutions possible.  

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7 – Social Commerce

Social commerce makes it easy for customers to connect with brands and shop for products they desire to purchase on their favorite social media platforms.

The shopping features on Facebook and Instagram allow users to buy products from their favorite brands in just a few clicks.

According to research, almost one in three Facebook users in the US are planning to make purchases through the platform in 2022.

Statista also revealed that social commerce sales are forecasted to triple by the year 2025.

So, if you haven’t already created your product catalog on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, you should do it right away!

8 – AI-Powered Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are ruling the ecommerce space these days. In fact, ecommerce brands are predicted to spend nearly $7.3 billion on AI by the end of 2022.

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So, if you haven’t invested in an AI-powered chatbot, you absolutely should.

The main reason AI-powered chatbots are on the rise is that online shoppers nowadays hate to wait for getting answers to their questions.

AI-powered chatbots can resolve this issue by answering your prospects’ questions in real-time. And in situations where your AI-powered chatbot cannot answer a customer’s question, it can automatically transfer it to one of your human representatives.

This way, your customer support team can focus only on complex queries, while your AI-powered chatbot handles the rest.

9 – Omnichannel Customer Experience

For many years, trends in the ecommerce space have been pushing towards creating an omnichannel customer experience.

For those who don’t know, omnichannel customer experience is about meeting your customers wherever they hang out the most online and selling your products on those platforms.

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Social commerce, for instance, is a prime example of the omnichannel customer experience.

Another crucial ecommerce channel is mobile commerce.

According to Statista, the total m-commerce sales in the US already surpassed $360 billion in 2021. And the same is forecasted to reach $710 billion by 2025.

Looking at these statistics, it goes without saying that your customers should be able to purchase your products on their smartphones & social media platforms just as easily as they can on your desktop website.

10 – Augmented Reality

When COVID-19 Pandemic restricted people from visiting brick-and-mortar stores to try on apparel items before purchasing, ecommerce brands started integrating Augmented Reality technology in their online stores.

The AR technology enabled customers to try on apparel through either webcam or by uploading their photos and allowed them to experience the product digitally.

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While the pandemic has begun to wane, customers continue to make apparel purchases online. AR has given them the possibility to shop apparels confidently on the internet and that trend is only going to grow in the near future.

Key Takeaway

If you’re an ecommerce brand looking for ways to not only maintain but also grow your market share in 2022 and beyond, you need to double down on improving customer experience in your ecommerce storefront.

Implementing the 10 future trends mentioned in the article will definitely help to elevate your overall ecommerce customer experience and increase your market share in the near future.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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