By Brian Rigney, CEO, Zmags
With a fresh year upon us, I want to share the four biggest technology trends every retailer should be paying attention to in 2016.
Personalization Gets Real
On-site personalization is poised to gain significant traction in 2016. In fact, 94% of marketers and 90% of agencies agree that “personalization of the web experience is critical to current and future success.” And yet three quarters of marketers reported being unsure of how to do it.
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Two evolving factors are making on-site personalization more realistic. First, many brands have invested in building comprehensive data collections and are putting big data to work. Second, the latest content management technologies have built-in capabilities that are making it easier and faster to deliver highly personal experiences, such as a shopping assistant, “find your own style” guide, and recommendations based on personal interests and activity.
Looking ahead, personalization may indeed completely transform how we think about digital commerce altogether. Some are even suggesting that we may see an evolution of B2C into B2One — a scaled, efficient approach to delivery of exceptional one-to-one consumer experiences. By increasingly working to make better use of available data, companies can make life easier, better and more tailored to each consumer’s preferences.
Shoppable Content Mainstreams
Retailers have been using beautiful imagery to showcase product and inspire consumers for years, but something is changing — now that imagery can offer a more direct path to purchase. Shoppable content — such as “lookbooks” — combine rich media with one or more links to individual products that a consumer can click to instantly add items to their cart. Like that hat in the picture? Click, choose a color, add to cart. Wow, this hat looks great with that scarf — click, add one or both items to cart. Adding engaging, shoppable elements to rich media shortens the path to purchase and keeps a consumer’s attention longer.
A recent article, Making Digital Content Shoppable, recognizes that “shoppable content can motivate browsers to make a purchase, and curated content on product pages can boost the value of transactions.” Take Neiman Marcus, which creates more than 150 digital lookbooks annually to showcase its designer collections. By connecting each image with their e-Commerce platform, they are making it truly easy to shop the look.
The technology for shoppable content is finally accessible to marketers without the dependency on agencies and IT, making it quick to share new ideas and capture sales in the age of limited attention spans.
Beyond Mobile
2015 was undoubtedly the Year of Mobile, and 2016 will be about providing new, innovative and shoppable mobile experiences to their customers. For example, let’s look at micro-moments, those times when consumers check their phones multiple times per hour to stay current on social media and email, look up prices and reviews while shopping, or get recommendations on what to do in their vicinity.
Many retailers will be re-architecting the customer journey to capitalize on micro-moments in order to capture a customer inspired to make a purchase. As beacon technology continues to emerge this year, location-based marketing will help to deliver immediate relevancy to customers. This could be through mobile proximity-based alerts to a major sale or a welcome offer delivered when someone is near their store or a competitor’s store.
2016 also will be about looking beyond the smartphone to other emerging digital platforms, such as wearables and smart watches. Mobile payments expanded beyond the smartphone last summer when American Express announced the ability to make purchases using a wearable fitness tracker. Like smartphones, these devices also offer interesting possibilities to augment in-store experiences. Mobile gamification is also on the rise with some companies like Taco Bell now rewarding customers for repeat ordering and engaging on social media.
Marketing Technology Platforms On The Rise
As I’ve written before, the traditional development and release process for creating and storyboarding a Web experience, then coding it, iterating on that, scheduling a release and then deploying the release is broken — and in 2016, we will see significant efforts by CMOs and CIO/CTOs to upend that process and better position their organizations to deliver richer, more engaging content across all devices — more frequently and at a lower cost.
Why? The answer is simple: More content created and published more frequently creates a reason for consumers to return and engage more often, across multiple devices and at higher engagement levels than before. This leads to more conversions and drives higher revenue.
Leading e-Commerce platforms and content management systems are simply not up to providing complete solutions to this problem, but there are newer and better technologies available now that enable marketers and e-Commerce teams to easily create rich, engaging and immersive experiences that are shoppable — and then to quickly deploy those experiences to a web site. This can be done without coding and in minutes.
Until the content ideation-to-development-to-deployment path is condensed to hours or minutes, the opportunity for enhanced gains from integrated personalization, shoppable content and re-architected customer journeys on mobile devices will be constrained by a lengthy, outdated and expensive process. The best CMOs and CIO/CTOs recognize a broken process and will be moving quickly to put their companies ahead of the curve.
Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags, has over twenty years’ experience leading high performing, entrepreneurial teams in launching new businesses and bringing innovative new products to market. Follow Zmags on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
