Following are my personal thoughts on what will be interesting and important in the world of digital marketing and ecommerce for 2013. As is traditional for my trends, there are around seventeen of them.
I haven’t spent too much time on giving extensive justification for any of these; they are based largely on the many conversations I have with industry influencers and practitioners.
Many are really just notes, or bullet points, but I’ve tried to give links to further information if you want to delve deeper. They are in no particular order though I’ve started with the more ‘strategic’ stuff.
As ever, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts, or feel free to post a link to your own trends or predictions.
They describe that we are at the “end of the digital beginning as companies reshape and retool for life in the new normal”.
With digital now at the core of business-as-usual, PWC believes that experimentation and execution are no longer sequential but will proceed in parallel:
The technology to deliver the enterprise with digital at its core is here now. The main challenges are around leading and marshalling the talent and innovative culture needed to make it a reality.
I entirely agree.
There are some significant implications for the phase we are now entering:
Restructures and ‘re-orgs’. A lot of companies are restructuring ‘digital’, in some cases dissolving it completely as a separate function. In some instances the good digital people stay, with wider roles and remits; in others their passion for pure digital, or frustration at the re-integration with the corporate mother ship, cause them to leave for a start-up or pureplay digital company.
M&A. A lot of consolidation has already happened. A lot more is to come. As digital has gone mainstream the big incumbent players are either going bust, painfully trying to transform, or, in most cases, buying digital assets. This is particularly true for agencies and consultancies but also true ‘client side’.
There aren’t many big purely digital agencies left now; in any case their competition is increasingly from the big consultancies (Accenture, PWC, Deloitte, Capgemini, KPMG etc.) as projects get bigger, more complicated, more strategic.
Business model evolution. Many ‘traditional’ business models remain under threat because of the rise of digital. Most notably publishing which is being further squeezed by their erstwhile advertising clients investing more in their own content marketing and their readers’ move to mobile devices which make advertising difficult to deliver effectively.
But digital businesses are running out of digital-only growth too and facing increasingly stiff global competition online. As digital matures it feels like digital alone will not always suffice; and being “medium sized” is not a good place to be.
Whilst we might be at the end of the digital beginning we are a long way from the beginning of the end of digital. In any case, before we reach that stage I believe the distinction between digital and non-digital will have become largely meaningless.
For those of us who have been in digital for more than fifteen years it is strangely almost a surprise that digital has finally ‘gone mainstream’.
I talk about this a lot because I feel it is probably the biggest challenge for most things digital. There are three notable things I’d draw out for 2013:
The size of digital teams has grown a lot
Forrester did a report called “Right-Size Your Interactive Marketing Organization” where they found that:
At the end of 2009, 60% of marketers surveyed had fewer than 10 people dedicated to digital.
By 2012 only 17% had teams this small.
45% boasted more than 25 dedicated digital marketers.
20% had 100 or more digital staff.
I now talk to Heads of Online (or whatever the most senior digital person is called) who manage digital teams of 1,000+. Likewise for agencies or consultancies. There is a huge need to feed these organisations with digital talent. The demand far outstrips supply.
The ‘big and boring’ companies are most desperate
Start-ups, and internet companies like Google, have been cleverly luring the best digital talent for years.
It seems only recently that bigger ‘traditional’ players have woken up to just what a problem they have in attracting and retaining digital talent right from graduate level to the more experienced staff.
Often they can’t compete on salary, despite deep pockets, because of pay inequality issues compared with other staff; they struggle to compete on the working environment (Wot no bean bags? No BYO device approach? No everything run as SaaS? No Agile throughout?); and they can’t offer meaningful equity.
Digital Marketers aren’t the most in demand
I’m afraid to say that whilst digital marketers and ecommerce professionals are still very much in demand, particularly in certain niches, those even more in demand typically have ‘product’, ‘data’, ‘engineering/developer/technical’ or ‘architect’ in their job titles.
Combine those words with ‘mobile, social, video, content strategy, platform’ and ‘manager, director, head of’ and the recruitment consultants are drooling.
We recently did an interview with Chris Ramsbottom, Sky’s Mobile Product Manager. Not only is that clearly a killer job title (see last bullet above) but his description of how Sky works sounds pitch perfect for the kind of approach I predict all large organisations will need to adopt if they want to attract and retain digital talent:
We work within an agile (scrum) framework, with a Mobile Product Manager responsible for one particular part of the business, such as News, Sports, or Movies. We then typically have a number of development teams working on different products on different platforms, but all the teams are co-located in London so there’s a lot of knowledge sharing that goes on between them.
The Product Managers will research, define and then drive the product strategy, working with user experience experts and designers within our Sky Creative department to help create wireframes, story cards and acceptance criteria.
Everything we propose is based on anticipated customer need, so we do a lot of user testing, usability studies and market research before and during development.
The development teams then have a solid basis to begin work from – we research, design, develop, device test and then launch to market – but scrum allows us to be flexible in the functionality we decide to prioritise, meaning we can respond much quicker to change in the external environment, which, working in mobile, is the only thing that can be guaranteed.”
Basically this is what we should all be focused on delivering, right?
Currently mobile is particularly weak for most companies (including Econsultancy…) so that’s getting a lot of focus. And integrating online and offline, whilst not a new topic, is still a big, and complex, journey for most companies.
We need to be delivering outstanding customer experience across all channels and touch points. They should be personalised intelligently, relevantly, responsively, in real time. The customer journey should be seamless across channels and each should play to its strengths.
We’re not short on buzz words, or marketing theories, or even best practice. Actually delivering it is much harder. For that you need the right people. See point 2.
For a long time the long tail has been part of digital lore. A recent Econsultancy article heretically suggested that perhaps the long tail of referral traffic is short.
I think there are few reasons that the ‘head end’ might be coming back into fashion in 2013:
Focusing on the biggest bang for your bucks
Given we all have limited resources, it seems that focusing on the long tail can sometimes be an awful lot of work for limited results. Or, at least, easily measurable or short term results.
So whilst we might want to engage with all those niche bloggers, or build links to tiny product categories we stock, do we actually have the resources to do this?
With so much fragmentation I think we’ll see increased effort on the few rather than dispersed effort on the many.
There is increasing evidence that we now have far too much choice and actually we crave less, but better and more relevant, information and services. We are starting to settle on particular sources as those we trust.
If this continues then there should emerge a smaller number of ‘winners’ leaving a swathe of insignificant players. This polarisation favours concentrating on the head end.
Ossification of consumer behaviour
We all talk about ‘the next Google’ or the ‘next Facebook’ sagely noting that these could spring from anywhere at any moment such is the world of digital change. But do we really believe this? I don’t.
I can’t believe Google is really worrying that much about some students in a garage eating their lunch. As Fred Wilson says in a recent article, I think we’re seeing consumer behaviour ‘settle’ much more, though it varies globally. It is now much harder than it was to become a global force quickly.
If this is true then again it makes more sense to focus resources on the existing ‘head end’ big players rather than expend lots of effort on many niche players who may never gain real traction.
With businesses looking for growth in stagnant economies their gaze turns to digital not just in their home markets, which are becoming more mature and saturated, but they see digital as the obvious route to international expansion and growth.
The big four of the internet: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. I don’t think Twitter, Pinterest or even Microsoft quite merit entry yet into the GAFA-rati.
For me there are four interesting broad themes here:
Resurgence of Google
At some points in 2012 (the leaked results, ‘disappointing’ G+ performance etc) it felt like we’d seen serious chinks in Google’s armour. But anyone writing off Google in favour of the likes of Pinterest, Twitter or even Facebook are, in my view, much misguided.
Android is soaring; YouTube is starting, finally, to seriously eat into the territory of traditional broadcasters; G+ is really starting to grow on me, and others; Google Communities, Google Pages… all starting to nibble at Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress etc.
Google also has the best ad platform for mobile; Google’s own marketing and creativity, in ad format innovation too, is impressive.
Amazon, the dark horse
Amazon is a global e/m-commerce steam train that has just powered through another massive Christmas sales success. And yet it is building a media business; and yet it has an awesome cloud services business; and yet it owns LOVEFiLM and IMDb.com and is taking ever more share of the consumer wallet.
Amazon gets less press coverage than the likes of Facebook or Twitter but it has a built a behemoth that it looks very hard to compete with given the scale and complexity of the e-commerce operations in particular.
Amazon as a broader platform for paying for, and getting delivered (physically or digitally), pretty much anything makes it a fascinating one to watch.
Will Apple set out to conquer TV?
Apple’s hardware no longer seems as sexy and distinctive as it once was with the likes of Samsung doing very well. Apple’s software, likewise, is looking less differentiated, particularly in the mobile space.
The Maps fiasco left a slightly sour taste in the consumer mouth and are you, like me, getting somewhat tired of constantly re-approving increasingly draconian T&Cs every time you use an Apple service or downloading huge software updates?
But Apple makes obscene amounts of money and has $100bn+ in cash. So what is it going to do with it? TV has to be the big prize. Not least because the current TV user experience is so broken that even a smattering of Apple user experience magic could transform it.
Rationalising your choice of platforms
There is growing evidence (see point 4) that consumers don’t want to manage and maintain presences across all the platforms and networks available. It’s just too much effort, too many logins to remember, too many profiles to try and reconcile etc. So perhaps most of us will settle on only a couple?
If I think about it I’d consolidate around Google (for apps, G+/identity/networking, blogging, search, content) and Amazon (for commerce, delivery) rather than, say, Facebook and Apple.
Over 2013 and beyond I imagine more people will start to settle on a preferred ecosystem. If so this will clearly have important ramifications not just for those businesses, but for us marketers.
This is really a sub-set of point 3. But as I point out in more depth in my article on “The 4Ps of Personalisation”, personalisation is very much back on the digital agenda.
I recently came across a concept I liked the sound of: “automagic”. We must aim to create digital services that are self-aware and personalised to the point that, for the customer, they just seem to magically know what they want and make things generally easier and more enjoyable.
If automagic is achieved then I don’t think customers will care too much about giving the personal data and permissions required to make it possible.
I’ve always been uneasy with the terms ‘content marketing’ or ‘content strategy’. Not because I think focusing on earned/owned media, rather than paid media, isn’t a sensible approach, but because it feels like we’re inventing a new term for something that should be blindingly obvious and shouldn’t need buzzword-ing.
Really ‘content marketing’ is again just a sub-set of point 3. It isn’t about ‘marketing’ content. It is about creating outstanding customer experiences which, inevitably, involve content in its many guises.
The rise of ‘content marketing’ has also been fuelled by the realisation that actually a lot of the success of, say, SEO or Social Media or Email Marketing or Most Forms of Marketing, isn’t about “doing more SEO” or “investing in social” but is about creating great content that people will want to read, link to, talk about and share.
This shouldn’t be the Damascene moment it appears to be for so many businesses.
This said, there are considerable implications of the increased investment in owned media. In particular, where ‘brands’ are investing in content instead of advertising. Firstly, these brands will have to try and find the talent and get used to working with editorial which most aren’t used to; secondly, this will further disrupt the publishing and media business models of old.
Within content marketing, there are three areas which interest me:
Content curation. In fact, content business and operational models generally. Assuming we’re going to be creating more content, the question is then how, and how much it will cost versus the ROI.
Content creation, curation, experience platforms and services. Related to above there is an interesting new set of platforms and services appearing that enable these new content models, often enhancing existing CMSs (Content Management Systems). We at Econsultancy, for example, use both Idio and Flockler to add more capabilities to our core CMS. There are a host of new decisioning engines, social curation platforms, content provisioning and production technologies and services emerging (e.g. Storystream, Smartology,iTrigga etc).
Content as data. Obviously all digital content is data. But the future of content is most interesting when that content becomes ‘smart’ through data: semantic, meta, or otherwise. This allows the content to be efficiently distributed, packaged, “sliced and diced”, to maximise its value.
Clearly the year of mobile was a few years ago. There is so much happening in mobile that it would need a full post of its own: mobile search, mobile ads, mobile payments, m-commerce, social/mobile etc.
So I’ve highlighted just two themes for 2013 which interest me:
Mobile, especially native apps, is less ‘ossified’
With reference to points 4 and 6, I think mobile is where there is still most to play for. People get excited about social, video, connected TV etc but it feels to me like mobile is where there are the biggest chances to be disruptive, to be small, but still have a good chance.
So whilst you are unlikely to have a *really* big app, and the costs of creating, maintaining and marketing it across multiple OSs are bigger than you might think, there are still opportunities to get real engagement and long term loyalty if you deliver a great app that serves a particular need.
M-commerce
For me this has to be the big focus for 2013. And it’s just about getting the basics right: mobile search marketing, a good mobile web experience, better integration of mobile into the multichannel experience, and better integration of mobile throughout the company (marketing, customer service etc).
Responsive design is great but isn’t always realistic as it is more difficult than most people think, therefore hard to find the talent, expensive etc.
Just having a stripped down mobile-specific site that does the basics well would be a good start for most (and, yes, Econsultancy is guilty of not having this). Not wishing to pick on B&Q but when I was out shopping this Christmas and wanted to find the opening times of my local B&Q store on my phone, to then go and buy something in store, I got the following:
Full marks for having a mobile site but it’s not much good when it is riddled with 404s. This reminds me of the early days of websites.
As with mobile, a huge topic. So a few areas I’d single out:
Talent (see point 2) – people who actually understand social and how to ‘execute’ – the biggest challenge. Also, how to do social media at enterprise scale is still a big challenge in terms of process and, to a lesser degree now, technology.
Personalisation. This is the topic of point 7. There is a lot of talk about ‘social CRM’ and how we can personalise based on social data points but still relatively few executing successfully on this (Amex, KLM, Photobox come to mind as brands who have). So 2013 should see more experimentation and results here.
Campaigns making better use of social. In the previous year or so there has been a great improvement in marketing and advertising campaigns that make powerful and effective use of social.
Owned versus earned social media. Or ‘onsite’ vs ‘offsite’ social as I tend to think of it i.e. social activity happening on properties you own, like comments on your blog, forums you run, reviews on your site etc, versus externally controlled properties like Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn.
I think this distinction is helpful since some companies mistakenly think they own their Facebook pages or friends. They don’t. Facebook do. In previous years the focus of activity and investment has been in offsite social, most notably Facebook.
In 2013 I think we’ll see a slight redress in the balance towards onsite social integration, including community management, underpinned, of course, by plenty of ‘content marketing’.
With increasing numbers of devices, at different resolutions, coupled with a desire for efficiency and streamlining of costs and content management, responsive design is understandably a focus for 2013.
However, given the proliferation of devices, it is increasingly difficult to deliver responsive design that isn’t actually somewhat of a compromise all round. As Stephen Pinches of the FT explains below I expect we’ll be designing not for specific ‘devices’ but for different screen sizes which have different use cases.
In an ideal world, responsive design shouldn’t be just about designs that scale for different devices, but about ensuring your customer experience is responsive to the customer journey and use cases across channels.
Web experiences will become increasingly influenced by mobile devices: the tablet-ization of websites evidenced through above-the-fold-swipe-y designs. Personalisation, video, social integration, chat, HTML5… richer experiences generally that are more complex to design for but which must appear simple, elegant and beautiful to customers.
In the War for Digital Talent I expect great interactive designers to soon out-trump even the engineers in scarcity value.
Great interactive designers will be close in nature to the great digital product managers: sensitive to both the customer experience and business needs and able to knit a compelling experience from APIs, content and data that may already be available and craft new digital services and products from them.
Native ads are those formats designed for a specific platform and which only exist on the platform: iAds, promoted tweets, Facebook ads, Adwords in Google search, Foursquare etc. This TechCrunch article on “Native ads in 2013” has a good round up, with examples.
In 2013 I’d expect to see continued experimentation here as media owners try to find the right balance between monetisation and the user experience.
In the first instance this focus on native advertising is not really about users, or marketers, but about the business models, or lack of, behind online publishing. It seems you have four choices as a publisher trying to make money out of advertising online:
Have native ads. This is great if you can make it work because you should be able to charge a premium AND the advertisers can’t get this form of advertising anywhere else AND the ad experience should be the best it can be for the users in your ecosystem, making it effective. But you need deep pockets to invest in creating and marketing the formats in the first place and you need huge scale to make it worth advertisers working with your bespoke format.
Don’t have native ads but have massive scale. You can still make money out of banners and the like but only if you have massive scale.
Don’t have native ads but own a valuable niche. You can still command very good CPM rates with standard ad formats but only if the audience you attract has genuine scarcity and value.
Be super lean on costs. If you run your site on next to nothing then it is possible to make a living with the smart use of network ads and affiliate networks e.g. as a blogger.
The problem is that most publishers aren’t in any of the categories above, certainly those that have historically relied on print and been focused on a single nationality.
Business model problems aside, the implication for digital marketing of native advertising is primarily yet more fragmentation, and yet more need for specialists that are hard to find. Key will be to prioritise those platforms that work best for your business and target market.
A lot of the focus for 2013 as regards analytics will be just doing what we’ve talked about a lot already (see next point). As ever, the major challenge here will be finding the right talent to do it.
Following are areas of interest for me which mostly relate to supporting earlier points:
Social data and analytics to power ‘social CRM’. See point 10. Lots of talk about social data and social CRM but less obvious successful action to date.
Web analytics and business intelligence converge. This has been happening, slowly, for years. It will continue to happen through 2013 as the back end and legacy systems of enterprises become more connected to the digital front ends and web analytics systems and processes.
Personalisation and the analytics relating to this. As per point 7.
Mobile analytics. Getting better at understanding and optimising mobile usage and behaviour.
‘Agile Browser-layer Content Delivery’ (“ABCD”). These are technologies which live in the DOM of the browser and allow marketers to change what users experience without going back to the server (likeMonetate). This is empowering from a marketer’s point of view; perhaps terrifyingly so for anyone in IT or web operations.
Forrester calls it ‘dynamic content delivery’. I think of it also like ‘goal hanging’ in football: whatever any other system has done you can nip in right at the end and claim the credit for achieving a desired goal
Attribution modelling fatigue. I’m as much a fan of attribution modelling as the next man. However, there is a point where the Return On Analysis Resource (“ROAR”) starts to flatten out i.e. there is only so much attribution modelling worth doing before you conclude a) most of this stuff is worth doing b) social media has a value c) so does email d) so does offline marketing etc.
Yes, you need to understand and optimise the mix, but I contend it still comes down to point 3: if you focus on the customer needs and the customer experience across your ecosystem then that effort will pay dividends even though you cannot hope to analyse every attribute.
These are all things we’ve talked about a lot in 2012 and which are good things to do. So in 2013 we should get busy actually doing them, or doing them better.
Back in my 2011 digital trends post I thought that connected TV would make more of an impact in 2012 than perhaps it did, despite the Olympics.
Most of the action around ‘internet TV’ in 2012 was not about the TV itself being connected to the internet but around “second screening”: mobile devices being used in conjunction with linear TV viewing to provide interactivity.
During 2013 I expect ‘social TV’ to gain traction primarily as TV producers and broadcasters become more aware of the commercial and viewer engagement opportunities and begin to commission and produce content that has interactivity and social ‘baked in’.
This is not new but it is becoming more mainstream.
However, the more important shift I expect to see over 2013 is increasing numbers of consumers actually internet-enabling their TVs, many of which have been internet-capable for years.
Many more consumers will have purchased new TVs over Christmas or in the New Year sales with Wi-Fi connectivity. They will connect these TVs primarily to get on demand services like BBC iPlayer and streaming services like LOVEFiLM and Netflix.
Then they’ll find themselves starting to watch cute kittens doing funny things on YouTube, but on their TVs. Then they’ll start watching more and more ‘TV’ off the internet but on their TVs.
If this happens it ushers in an era of huge potential disruption in the broadcast market. Not only does it threaten existing broadcasters and operators but even the likes of Sky should feel threatened. If a Google, Amazon or Apple went aggressively enough after content rights to premium content (sport, films etc) what could they achieve?
At the same time the TV manufacturers (e.g. Samsung and LG) own the interface to this content and thereby potentially displace EPGs (Electronic Programming Guides), like Sky’s, and create new revenue streams for themselves. It feels a bit like the ‘walled garden’ AOL days of the early internet.
“If I was down to my last dollar I would spend it on PR” is a famous Bill Gates quote. In digital marketing I would cut almost everything else before email or SEO despite them both being supposedly ‘dead’ according to many commentators.
There are some mildly interesting trends happening in both email and SEO, particularly SEO, but nothing that seems fundamentally different to what has gone before or which doesn’t relate to things I’ve already talked about but just applied to email or SEO e.g. social, content marketing, video, mobile.
Most of us still don’t do a good enough job of email or SEO so 2013 is still about better execution. This is not a technology challenge any more. It’s about people and process.
And finally… I predict a rise in popularity of very long blog posts.
Ashley Friedlein is CEO and Co-founder of Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter (4,600+ followers) or connect via LinkedIn (5,200+ connections) or Google+.
The e-commerce behemoth is coming, but that’s no longer news. Amazon is nearly 20 years old now, eBay just a year younger.
What is news? The behemoth is arming itself. New tactics, new friends and a hefty war chest mean that the old defenses insulating traditional retailers are no longer enough. Venture funds dished out $242 million to online retail startups in the last quarter alone, more than any other period since 2000. E-commerce, meanwhile, is now a $200 billion-plus industry in the U.S., set to ratchet up 15% a year as consumers realize there’s no reason to trek out to the local strip mall anymore.
In the retail arms race, e-commerce is winning. Here are five trends driving traditional retail towards the grave:
1.) Voluntary Conversion
The smart brick-and-mortar players recognize the inevitable rise of online shopping and are adapting to the new realities. Take Macy’s: The 154-year-old retail chain saw online sales rise 40% in 2011 while same-store sales grew just 5.3%. The company is transforming nearly 300 of its stores into distribution centers to speed up shipping for online consumers. Expected to do more than $2 billion in online sales this year, they’re even toying around with in-store online kiosks to help customers scan and compare prices.
Nordstrom, a whippersnapper compared to Macy’s at 111 years old, is taking an even more aggressive approach. With free shipping and free returns in its online store, the company has notched three straight quarters of 35% gains in online sales. Nordstrom is integrating its online and in-store strategies by introducing mobile point-of-sale systems–modified iPod touches–that eliminate lines while helping sales clerks sell customers out-of-stock items. According to Barron’s, the company plans to invest $1 billion (one third of its capital expenditures) into online efforts over the next five years.
While adapting their own infrastructure to serve online consumers, Nordstom is also keeping pace with innovation in the space via acquisitions and investments. Last year, the retailer spent $180 million on flash sales site HauteLook and led a $16.4 million investment in Bonobos, an online retailer of men’s clothes.
The online practices of veteran players validate e-commerce in the minds of older consumers while accelerating the industry’s growth. It also means they get to survive.
2.) A Losing Cost Structure
When you purchase an item at Bloomingdale’s, odds are that it’s been marked up at least three times. Once when it changed hands from the factory to the brand, again as it passed from the brand to Bloomingdale’s, and once more as it goes from Bloomingdale’s into your shopping bag. The result is a purchase price that’s some ungodly multiple of the item’s actual cost, usually between 2x and 5x.
Brands that operate exclusively online–Frank and Oak, Bonobos, orModCloth for example–eliminate that last markup by selling directly to consumers. By taking ownership of the design, curation and retail aspects of the business, these companies can keep hefty margins for themselves while still undercutting brick-and-mortar competitors on price. And because their stores are made out of bits instead of stone, they don’t face the costs of maintaining unwieldy networks of physical locations.
As for the legions of sales clerks that retailers pay? A single web developer probably replaces twenty of them.
3.) Free Delivery, Free Returns
Even if shipping costs don’t negate the price savings of online shopping, they’ve long acted as a source of friction. Asking consumers to factor in some uncertain, variable transaction cost is never a good way to do business, and asking them to pay for returns is even worse. The experience of returning an online purchase, paying two-way shipping costs and ending up with nothing–except $15 in the red–is enough to make anyone wary of online shopping.
Tony Hsieh and Zappos figured this out long ago and built a $1.2 billion business on the idea of free shipping and free returns. This policy is now de rigeur for serious, full-price e-commerce companies. (Flash sales is a different beast.) The reason is very simple. According to Amanda Bower, a business professor at Washington and Lee University, online shoppers given free returns increase their spend on the same site by 50 to 350 percent in later purchases. When they had to pay for return shipping? The value of their purchases decreased.
Free shipping and returns will be standard for e-commerce companies from now on. One less reason to schlep to the mall.
4.) Subscription Commerce
Call it the “set it and forget it” school of business. The bottom line: People are lazy and certain items just make sense to receive once a month. At the danger of touting a model that has already become a cliche (flash sales was a cliche until it proved itself), I should point out that only certain categories of products work for this model. (Battery Ventures partner Brian O’Malley wrote a fantastic post on this topic.) Razors, as you might imagine, make much more sense as a monthly delivery item than sweaters.
The foundation of the model is recurring revenue, where customers sign up to receive a monthly shipment for a set monthly fee. This is attractive to companies because it creates a steady, predictable revenue stream, not unlikeSaaS businesses. It’s attractive to consumers because the system is convenient and usually cost-efficient compared to alternatives. Dollar Shave Club, for example, ships men’s razors to customers once a month at a fraction of the cost of an in-store purchase. Men save money and a trip to the convenience store. And because DSC sources their razors directly from the manufacturer and sells them directly to the customer, they still enjoy comfortable margins.
I’m often asked about average ecommerce rates by site owners looking to boost their sales. It’s a year-round concern with this compilation showing that even for established brands during sale periods, the average add to basket conversion rate is around 12% during a visit with convert to order around half that at 5.6%.
If this sounds poor compared to the conversion rate a physical retail outlet would achieve, that’s a fair improvement on ten years ago when we used to speak of a “rule-of-thumb” for average Ecommerce conversion rates of around 2%. The improvement in averages since then suggests the value in conversion rate optimisation. That said, it’s inevitable that online conversion rates will be lower than offline with price transparency available through comparison sites and many still researching online and purchasing offline (the ROPO effect).
Reasons for shopping cart abandonment?
To encourage site owners to think about the factors that lead to checkout abandonment, inEmarketing Excellence we include this graphic to prompt site owners to think about all the factors that can affect conversion. This chart includes both shopping cart abandonment and branding and usability factors that affect the top of the funnel when site visitors are on the home page or browsing category and product pages.
Unfortunately, this chart doesn’t show the relative importance of different factors, so I liked this new infographic from Fifth Gear. Which has compiled different research into the reasons why consumers abandon checkout. The main concerns are clear from the pie charts on the bottom right which include:
Le « Consumer Barometer » est un projet mondial d’IAB Europe mené en collaboration avec TNS Infratest et Google afin de déterminer le rôle de l’Internet dans le comportement des consommateurs. Dans ce cadre, le Consumer Barometer montre le comportement d’achat et met en perspective la façon dont les consommateurs utilisent le web comme source d’information avant de prendre une décision d’achat. Où et comment les Belges achètent-ils aujourd’hui? Et quel est le rôle de l’Internet dans leurs achats? Google a effectué une analyse claire du comportement des consommateurs belges en ligne et hors ligne pour l’année 2012. Les données ont été obtenues grâce au « Consumer Barometer » Cet outil de recherche en ligne gratuit donne une vision d’ensemble du comportement des consommateurs dans 39 pays, classé en fonction de diverses catégories de produits. Il montre clairement la façon dont les consommateurs belges et étrangers utilisent le web pour trouver des informations sur des produits et pour faire des achats.
L’Internet a trouvé sa place en Belgique: 79 % de la population belge a aujourd’hui accès au web. L’Internet mobile ne cesse lui aussi de progresser: 22 % des Belges disposent d’un smartphone et l’utilisent pour chercher des produits en ligne. Avec l’aide du Consumer Barometer, IAB Europe, Google et TNS Infratest sont parvenus à montrer le rôle que joue l’Internet dans le comportement d’achat des consommateurs de 39 pays. Ainsi, il est désormais possible de comparer la quantité d’informations qu’un consommateur belge cherche en ligne sur une destination de vacances avant de la réserver hors ligne ou les recherches qu’il effectue en ligne avant de procéder à un achat en ligne. Cet aperçu clair des comportements de recherche et d’achat en ligne et hors ligne aide les entreprises à encore mieux répondre aux souhaits et aux attentes de leur public cible.
Comportement de recherche: en ligne ou bien rien ne vaut de voir?
Il ressort de l’étude qu’un quart (26 %) des consommateurs belges font des recherches en ligne avant d’acheter un produit. Simultanément, 26 % attachent de l’importance au fait de voir les produits de visu ou de demander des conseils en face à face à un expert. Nos voisins français et hollandais montrent toutefois une nette préférence pour les recherches en ligne. Les consommateurs hollandais sont en tête – 38 % n’effectuent que des recherches en ligne et seuls 19 % glanent des informations hors ligne. La différence est moins marquée en France – 34 % font des recherches en ligne, mais 21 % préfèrent effectuer des recherches hors ligne.
En ce qui concerne les produits qui font déjà l’objet de recherches en Belgique, les biens immobiliers, les billets, les hôtels, les vols, les logiciels et les caméscopes enregistrent de bons résultats.
Comportement d’achat: remplir un caddie virtuel ou trimballer un panier?
Chose commune à tous les pays étudiés: les produits qui sont recherchés en ligne sont aussi souvent achetés en ligne. Le consommateur belge suit cette tendance. Les produits précédemment cités – tels que les billets, les vols et les hôtels – sont bien plus souvent achetés en ligne que les produits cherchés hors ligne. Si nous analysons la part des ventes en ligne, la Belgique se démarque de la France et des Pays-Bas: alors qu’aux Pays-Bas, 37 % des consommateurs achètent un produit en ligne, ils ne sont que 28 % à passer à l’achat en ligne en France et 18 % en Belgique.
Julien Blanchez, Country Marketing Manager de Google Belgique, déclare: « Ces résultats permettent de mieux comprendre le consommateur belge. On considère parfois qu’il figure parmi les derniers à adopter une nouvelle tendance – mais en fait, le Belge est tout simplement plus prudent lorsqu’il s’agit de s’approprier de nouvelles habitudes et technologies. Le processus d’apprentissage est parcouru étape après étape. »
Les entrepreneurs belges feraient-ils donc mieux d’attendre encore un peu avant de mettre en œuvre leur stratégie numérique, jusqu’à ce que les comportements de recherche et d’achat soient mieux entrés dans les mœurs? Au contraire, assure Goedele Soetemans de Katchoo.be: « Nous vendons des bottes de pluie dernier cri et lorsque nous nous sommes lancés dans cette aventure, nous étions conscients que les achats en ligne étaient moins populaires en Belgique qu’ils l’étaient dans d’autres pays. Cependant, nous avons choisi de voir dans ce constat plus une opportunité de croissance qu’une menace. Nous avons donc tout misé sur un magasin et une stratégie en ligne. Nous sommes convaincus que si l’on vend un produit de qualité et que l’on fournit un bon service, les consommateurs vont rapidement comprendre les nombreux avantages des achats en ligne. Veillez à ce que les clients potentiels puissent trouver très facilement votre magasin en ligne et vos produits et offrez-leur le meilleur service possible. Les clients qui ont eu une expérience concluante ne manqueront pas de revenir. »
Le spécialiste du social media marketing Semply Social a publié une infographie sur l’usage de l’Internet mobile en France et particulièrement des médias sociaux sur mobile. Se basant sur diverses études (Ipsos, Médiamétrie, FEVAD, Emarketer, TNS Sofres, etc.), il analyse l’importance que peuvent avoir les médias sociaux mobiles sur l’usage du e-commerce.
Aujourd’hui, plus de 38% des français possèdent un smartphone et 83% d’entre eux se connectent à Internet depuis leur mobile. D’un autre côté, près de 3M de tablettes tactiles ont déjà été vendues en France en 2012.
Les études démontrent que les appareils mobiles poussent leurs propriétaires à utiliser les réseaux sociaux: l’application la plus utilisée sur iPhone est Facebook, 59% des utilisateurs de tablettes y consultent régulièrement les réseaux sociaux, et 50% du trafic généré sur Facebook et Twitter provient d’un téléphone portable ou d’une tablette. Semply Social prévoit même que près de 16M de Français utiliseront leur mobile pour se connecter aux réseaux sociaux, contre 7,5M en 2012.
Etant donné que de plus en plus d’acheteurs se fient aux avis des internautes et de leurs proches avant d’effectuer un achat, l’infographie révèle que 40% des mobinautes se rendent sur Internet en magasin, tandis que 14% utilisent les bornes interactives mises à disposition dans certains commerces.
En ce qui concerne l’acte d’achat:
34% des mobinautes et 60% des tablonautes ont déjà effectué au moins une transaction en ligne depuis leur appareil mobile.
40% des tablonautes et 22% des mobinautes ont l’habitude de préparer un achat depuis leur tablette tactile.
Cependant, les utilisateurs d’appareils mobiles ont tendance à les utiliser plutôt chez eux qu’à l’extérieur, et s’y rendent pour acheter des produit culturels, des applications, des services, des vêtements et des voyages.
Une dernière tendance se dégage de l’utilisation des réseaux sociaux sur mobile : c’est le « local »: 61% des utilisateurs de Facebook souhaitent y trouver des informations sur leur ville et quartier. Parmi eux:
Après avoir lancé les « cashtags » et les tweets promotionnels, la direction de Twitter répète qu’elle ne prévoit toujours pas d’introduction en bourse. Par contre, Dick Costolo, le p-dg du service de microblogging, laisse entendre qu’il pourrait se tourner prochainement vers le segment des billets en ligne.
Dick Costolo, le p-dg de Twitter n’entend toujours pas programmer l’entrée en bourse de son outil de micro-blogging. Le patron de la société avait déjà tenu, en juillet dernier, à enterrer toute rumeur concernant une prochaine introduction en bourse du service. Il avait alors également précisé qu’il n’irait pas non plus titiller les investisseurs en leur proposant d’acquérir des parts dans la société.
Toutefois, Costolo explique lors d’une interview accordée à CNBC qu’un relais de croissance pourrait être trouvé du côté de l’E-commerce. Il précise ainsi que « certains segments comme celui des billets en ligne sont particulièrement intéressants car il s’agit de stocks périssables. Nous sommes attentifs sur ce terrain-là et nous pensons aux différentes manières de faire afin que nous puissions participer à cet échange de valeurs. »
Pour l’instant, la publicité reste centrale pour le fonctionnement économique de Twitter grâce notamment aux « messages promotionnels ». Toutefois, la direction du groupe reste silencieuse quant aux revenus qu’elle génère par ce biais. Enfin, Twitter pourrait trouver un autre relais de croissance en multipliant les partenariats avec des services (Télévision, CRM…) afin de leur fournir des accès privilégiés à sa Timeline.
Toujours est-il que le patron de Twitter est resté discret quant à sa stratégie. Au sujet d’éventuels nouveaux modèles économiques, le dirigeant a seulement tenu à expliquer qu’il gardait en tête sa propre équation : « Notre entreprise ne va fonctionner que si nous mettons en avant le contenu de nos utilisateurs qu’ils veulent voir. Si nous maintenons cette ligne, ces derniers resteront satisfaits et notre business marchera… et nos investisseurs publicitaires seront gagnants ».
Les ventes en ligne BtoC ont atteint 690 milliards d’euros dans le monde en 2011, dominées par les Etats-Unis, le Royaume-Uni et le Japon.
Publié le 18 juin 2012, 11h59
Les ventes en ligne BtoC dans le monde dépasseront le millier de milliards d’euros en 2013 et le nombre total d’internaute atteindra 3,5 milliards, contre 2,2 milliards fin 2011, selon une étude de l’IMRG. D’après le lobby e-commerce britannique, l’e-commerce BtoC dans le monde s’est élevé à 690 milliards de dollars en 2011, en hausse de près de 20% sur un an.
Les Etats-Unis demeurent le premier marché e-commerce de la planète, suivi par le Royaume-Uni et le Japon. Dans ces trois pays, la croissance du secteur devrait se situer entre 10 et 15% par an sur les prochaines années. Sauf que la Chine devrait bientôt bousculer ce podium, puisque le secteur y a enregistré une croissance de 130% en 2011.
Selon l’IMRG, la France, l’Italie, l’Espagne, la Russie, la Turquie et la Pologne seront les marchés européens les plus en croissance dans les années qui viennent. L’Amérique latine, menée par le Brésil et le Mexique, ainsi que le Moyen-Orient, tiré par Israël et les Emirats Arabes Unis, devraient également afficher de fortes hausses de leurs ventes en ligne
Tablet shopping on the rise as frequency of use grows
Apps aren’t always the answer to engaging with consumers on mobile devices—especially when it comes to m-commerce. According to research from rich media company Zmags, very few Americans prefer to use mobile apps for shopping activities. Instead, consumers strongly prefer purchasing through web and mobile browsers.
When Zmags surveyed US consumers who owned a PC or laptop computer about their shopping methods, 87% said they preferred using websites and mobile sites, compared to 14% who most liked shopping from websites via smartphone and just 4% who preferred to shop using mobile or tablet apps.
Although smartphone and tablet owners display a preference for browser-based mobile purchases, a significant number of US retailers have created mobile apps that enable commerce activities. Survey data from mobile-shopping company AisleBuyer showed in December 2011 that 19% of US retailers had a mobile app to connects consumers to their ecommerce site.
Retail apps may be of greater value to smartphone users, for whom the browsing experience is more limited in nature. There’s also opportunity for tablet commerce apps to provide a more catalog-style approach, giving users more interactive features.
Meanwhile, the tablet commerce category as a whole is growing significantly. According to Zmags, during the 2011 holiday shopping season, 87% of tablet owners used their device for shopping. Not only do users report better buying experiences than with smartphones, but tablet owners are using their devices frequently for m-commerce. According to Zmags, half of tablet owners are using tablets for shopping on at least a weekly basis.
eMarketer projects that m-commerce sales will grow more than fourfold over the next few years, from $6.7 billion in 2011 to $31 billion in 2015. If consumers continue to prefer browsers over mobile apps for shopping, retailers should consider investing more in mobile-optimized ecommerce sites. Moreover, marketers should consider designing engaging, tablet-specific ecommerce experiences for tablet users.
963 milliards $. C’est ce que devrait peser le marché du e-commerce d’ici la fin 2012, selon les calculs du cabinet JP Morgan. Fort de ces prévisions, Rakuten, le géant japonais du e-commerce, qui détient notamment PriceMinister, dresse un état des lieux des 6 tendances majeures qui devraient marquer le secteur du commerce en ligne cette nouvelle année. Les détails.
1. Du M-commerce au T-commerce :
En 2012, le m-commerce devrait continuer de croître, accompagné par une forte émergence du t-commerce (commerce sur tablettes). En effet, selon Rakuten, les fonctionnalités avancées des tablettes devraient permettre de passer d’une expérience traditionnelle basée sur la recherche de bonnes affaires et la transaction, à une expérience de magasin virtuel, transformant internet en une expérience presque tactile.
2. Une convergence entre le cloud et le commerce traditionnel :
Rakuten s’attend à l’émergence d’un nouveau système qui récompenserait à la fois l’écosystème physique et l’écosystème virtuel.
3. Le pouvoir de recommandation des réseaux sociaux :
Les réseaux sociaux devraient faire partie intégrante de l’évolution du e-commerce en 2012. En effet, de nombreuses études pointent du doigt le pouvoir puissant des recommandations des amis sur les réseaux sociaux : aussi bien en terme d’intention d’achat qu’en apport de trafic.
4. Des communauté d’acheteurs sans frontière :
Selon Rakuten, 2012 verra fleurir les places de marché en ligne globales. Cela devrait permettre aux e-commerçants de s’ouvrir de nouvelles opportunités dans les marchés émergents tels que la Chine, l’Inde et le Brésil.
5. Des modèles de livraisons flexibles :
D’après le géant japonais, il est indispensable de prendre en compte les préférences d’achat spécifiques à chaque marché. En effet, pour certaines populations l’obstacle principal est le paiement en ligne, tandis que pour d’autres il s’agit des problèmes de livraison. Ainsi, Rakuten considère qu’en 2012, les modèles d’achat flexibles seront essentiels à la croissance.
6. Le shopping en ligne devient personnel :
En 2012 l’échange de données entre les vendeurs et les réseaux sociaux devrait générer de nouveaux modèles économiques, qui viendront enrichir la base de connaissance des vendeurs. L’enjeu consistera donc pour les revendeurs en ligne à identifier comment engager le consommateur via des campagnes opportunes et personnalisées en exploitant les données avec pertinence.
15/12/2011 Les membres de BeCommmerce, l’ association belge de l’ e-commerce, ont voté pour un renforcement de leur Conseil d’ Administration par la venue de Belgacom lors de l’ assemblée générale de ce 15 décembre chez bpost.
C’ est Dominique Leroy, Vice President Sales, Consumer Business Unit chez Belgacom qui va prendre cette fonction. Ex CEO d’Unilever Belgique, elle a rejoint Belgacom en octobre au sein du cadre supérieur de l’ opérateur. Bruxelloise de 47 ans, elle a accompli ses études à la Solvay Business School et a effectué toute sa carrière chez Unilever. Elle est aussi membre indépendant du conseil d’administration de Lotus Bakeries.
Dominique Leroy déclare: “En devenant membre de l’ association BeCommerce, Belgacom est convaincu de pouvoir contribuer à la promotion et la croissance de l’ eCommerce en Belgique. Belgacom est un joueur majeur de l’ eCommerce belge au travers de ses differents eshops Proximus.be, Belgacom.be et Skynet.be représentant plus de 2.1 millions de visiteurs uniques mensuels (Comscore 2011 Oct) et aussi via sa solution de paiement mobile Ping Ping. Nous sommes convaincu qu’ en rejoignant BeCommerce, nous pouvons booster la notoriété et la confiance des ventes en ligne en Belgique.”
Patricia Ceysens, Présidente de BeCommerce se réjouit également de cet engagement de Belgacom et remercie les membres de BeCommerce pour leur vote. “Après l’ arrivée de Delhaize en 2010 comme représentant du secteur de la distribution belge dans notre conseil d’ administration, BeCommerce continue sa stratégie d’ ouverture et de renforcement des différents secteurs de l’ eCommerce belge à la fois grands ou petits ».
L’ association BeCommerce représente plus de 200 membres et 30 partenaires business et est dotée d’ un Conseil d’ Administration composé des membres suivants:
Patricia Ceysens, Présidente du Conseil d’ Administration
Belgacom représenté par Dominique Leroy, VP Sales, Consumer Business Unit
Delhaize représenté par Louis Martin, eCommerce Director
3Suisses Belgique représenté par Laurent Vigneron, CEO
Neckermann.com représenté par Kurt Staelens, CEO
La Redoute Benelux représenté par Geneviève Vitré-Cahon, CEO
Bivolino.com représenté par Carine Moitier, COO & Co-Founder
John Farrell, YouTube's director of content partnerships for Latin America, spoke to eMarketer about the evolving market for online video in Mexico and YouTube’s business there.
US advertisers are taking full advantage of social media as a free channel through which to reach customers. Research shows that more advertisers use social platforms to create branded pages than to purchase ads. Those who do buy targeted ads are most interested in narrowing their message according to demographics.
As video advertising gets bigger, the participating industries are shifting somewhat. Research shows that the consumer goods category has surpassed entertainment for video ad impressions. Entertainment sites still hosted the most video ads, but gaming, sports and music all grew their share.
Big Data offers marketers a lot of promise—along with many headaches—as the quantity of data out there makes it hard to create actionable insights. Data management platforms (DMPs) are increasingly being used to manage and process the many different kinds of incoming data and put it to use.
US consumers are watching more streaming and online video content, and as they do, cable is losing viewers. And while more than one out of five consumers report cutting their cable subscription, over-the-top (OTT) content is only getting more popular.
Following are my personal thoughts on what will be interesting and important in the world of digital marketing and ecommerce for 2013. As is traditional for my trends, there are around seventeen of them.
Obviously digital maturity differs by country globally but there was a phrase used in PWC’s 
Given we all have limited resources, it seems that focusing on the long tail can sometimes be an awful lot of work for limited results. Or, at least, easily measurable or short term results.
During 2013 I expect 
12. JAN, 2012 
1. Du M-commerce au T-commerce :
