E-Commerce Trends to Watch in 2016
Who has time to keep up with trends when managing your online store is more than a full time job? Not all trends are worthy of your attention, but these Ecommerce trends of 2016 certainly are.
E-commerce is slowly but surely taking the place of brick-and-mortar retailers. It’s estimated that 40% of all global Internet users have purchased at least one product from an e-commerce website. E-commerce allows consumers to shop from the comfort of their own home, often with lower prices thanks to the minimal overhead. But if you own or otherwise manage an e-commerce store, you should familiarize yourself with the following trends, because they will directly affect your sales and subsequent level of success.
Instagram Marketing
Facebook isn’t the social media network that’s useful for promoting an e-commerce store. On the contrary, Instagram is particularly effective because of its focus on photos and videos. Integrated apps allow users to visit an e-commerce site’s product page directly from the product photo via Instagram. So, if you’re looking to capture more sales, make Instagram a part of your social marketing strategy.
Images: Bigger is Better
You may have noticed that more websites have been using big bold images to make a statement rather than overly cluttered pages loaded with content. I love this trend towards visual impact and pushing clutter to secondary pages ultimately resulting in a simpler navigational path.
Omni-Channel Marketing
Image from: A LatAm Perspective: The Road to Omnichannel Marketing
We’ve talked about this before on our blog, but it’s worth mentioning again that omni-channel marketing is taking over the e-commerce landscape. As the name suggests, omni-channel embraces a layered approach in which multiple platforms are used to promote an e-commerce website and its respective products. Common marketing channels used in omni-channel include pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), social media, content marketing and email.
Dynamic Views
Another trend that you can expect to see more of in the e-commerce industry is dynamically viewed pages. Traditional static pages feature, well, static products that remain until the site admin manually changes them. Using JavaScript or Ajax, however, e-commerce site admins can change their pages’ products dynamically.
Location-Based Ad Targeting
More and more e-commerce stores are shifting their marketing strategy towards location-based ads. If your store only sells and ships products to residents in the U.S., for instance, it really doesn’t make sense to buy ad space for global user. In 2014, advertisers spent roughly $4.3 billion in location-targeted mobile ads. This number is expected to grow to a whopping $18.2 billion by 2019.
Decision Making Based on Real Time Analytics
Real time analytics is allowing ecommerce store owners to make marketing decisions much more quickly when it comes to landing pages and audience targeting. For Ecommerce this is hugely important for improving conversions as well as improving ad spend. Think about how the ability to monitor the impact of content changes on your website or whether a specific promotion is driving traffic or conversions and even the effect a social post has on your site… this could be the game changer you’ve been looking for.
