By Glenn Conradt, VP, Global Marketing and North America, CoreMedia
The explosive popularity of social media and connected mobile devices is moving more and more of the traditional buying cycle to the online world — from discovery to final purchase and beyond. Online customers are more informed and less dependent on brands than ever before. As a result, retailers and their marketing teams are facing significant challenges — and it’s the customer experience that is suffering the most.
There’s no doubt that a compelling and consistent customer experience is a competitive advantage. In fact, in an era when shoppers can almost always find a lower price somewhere online, the customer experience may be one of the last and most effective ways to differentiate a brand. Unfortunately, most companies are ill prepared organizationally and technically to enable the optimization of experiences and ensure brand consistency to improve relevance, revenue and profits.
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Different Cultures, Different Tools
Part of the problem is cultural. Digital marketing and e-Commerce teams have traditionally worked in separate worlds with different content, processes and goals. Marketers are focused on creating higher long-term customer value with the brand while e-Commerce teams have laser vision on product sell-through and revenues.
This problem is compounded by a similar disconnect at the technology level. Marketing teams typically rely on web content management and marketing automation tools to reach customers, while commerce teams depend upon their e-Commerce platform. These tools are rarely effectively integrated.
The result is the dreaded “two-site syndrome.” Branded content on marketing sites looks amazing — but offers few product details or purchase opportunities. Meanwhile, web stores are highly efficient at processing transactions but are often about as inspiring as a plumbing supply catalog. Unfortunately, the separation between the two can be so abrupt that customers end up confused and not at all pleased with the resulting friction.
Removing The Friction
What’s needed is a way to create and manage digital customer experiences that seamlessly blend marketing content with transactional capabilities and deliver them across any channels or devices to build engagement that directly contributes to revenue generation.
Customer expectations are challenging marketers and e-Commerce teams to transform the experiences they offer, but technology is often the culprit compounding the complexity of the problem.
To transform customer experiences, companies need to think differently about how they approach technology. The use of dynamic content based on the context of the customer will need to be addressed to provide the personalization needed for smoothing channel progression and eliminating the confusion and friction that cause abandoned carts.
Aligning and integrating Web Content Management (WCM) and e-Commerce platforms and teams will help eliminate the friction to deliver on customer expectations, achieving their goals in concert.
The Need For Incremental Innovation
If only it were as simple as optimizing the technology that is already in place. Unfortunately, these systems were not originally designed to work together and they are often provide redundant, overlapping functionality — making integration difficult. To make things more difficult, most companies have made significant investments in these separate systems and can’t afford to simply rip and replace them.
Shifting approaches — from fragmented to frictionless — is not something that can happen overnight. Retailers and their marketing teams need to manage their level of risk by taking an evolutionary and predictable approach that lays a sustainable foundation for future growth. Companies need to follow a “grow-as-you-go” approach that starts with making enhancements to their existing web properties — while simultaneously building a foundation for a true hybrid platform that can deliver blended brand experiences across all of a companies web properties. Retailers should seek out technology vendors and implementation partners who can support this incremental approach.
Glenn Conradt leads CoreMedia’s global marketing efforts and manages the company’s North American operations. He has 20 years of experience in North America, Europe and Africa in enterprise, business intelligence and portal technologies. Prior to CoreMedia, Conradt was Vice President, Marketing at Tiburon, Inc., where he led the repositioning and re-branding of the company. Conradt also held executive management positions at Microsoft, Computer Associates, Sterling Software, Systemfabrik and Gentia Software.
