Social Selling and M-commerce

Social commerce is a fast-growing market. Around 70% of all online purchases are influenced by social media. 

So how can retail brands benefit most from social media’s impressive reach? Personalised marketing strategies based on customer personas, considering the sales funnel and other relevant touchpoints to create a seamless customer experience. 

Simply put, this means creating a frictionless experience for consumers – using online tools and solutions to streamline the digital purchasing process from start to finish.

This is where social selling interlinks with mobile selling. More and more customers are using mCommerce. Statistics reveal that retail sales from mCommerce in the UK are expected to surpass £100 bn by 2024.

Brands must embrace mobile solutions, allowing customers flexibility regarding the devices they use to browse and buy. Mobile is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a critical component of any eCommerce store.

Returns

It’s predicted return policies will ‘make or break’ retail loyalty. True, eCommerce returns have plateaued slightly; however, they continue to hit retailer profits hard and are a top contributing factor to poor customer experience.

Free returns used to be a means for retailers to gain a competitive edge. But more and more have had to scale back and, in many cases, remove this option completely. Without this ‘golden carrot,’ it’s crucial that brands take steps towards offering a seamless returns process to ensure retained customer loyalty and satisfaction.

The reverse last mile is the key area of focus for brands looking to reduce returns friction – critically improving visibility in an item’s return journey to the warehouse or store. The right technological solution can greatly aid this area, helping with tracking and communications.

Personalisation and First-Party Data

Customers have high expectations. One of these is a personalised experience. Visiting a digital storefront is just the start, engaging customers across their digital ecosystems. Now, forward-thinking eCommerce retailers are embracing an omnichannel approach, offering item recommendations to customers even when they navigate away from the main website or storefront. 

With tools like personalised emails, push notifications and text alerts; businesses can stay top-of-mind with customers and meet them ‘where they are’ – a tactic that can lead to re-engagement, increased conversion rates, and create a better customer experience.

First-party data is the secret sauce for true personalisation. Although marketing professionals bemoan the coming erasure of third-party cookies, the fact is that first-party data is much more valuable. It offers highly specific information about a customer, provided directly and willingly. This means you can offer your customers the products they want.

Headless Architecture and Composable Commerce

As the trends we’ve covered illustrate, consumers want a frictionless, fluent, digital shopping experience. The right technology can make all the difference in helping you achieve this, particularly headless architecture and composable commerce. 

Traditional ‘monolithic’ eCommerce platforms are very limited, making it hard for modern eCommerce brands to stay competitive and offer the kind of digital experience consumers expect. Headless architecture decouples the front end (the user interface) from the back end (the logic provided by an eCommerce solution), letting brands focus on boosting the customer experience without worrying about the impact even small changes to the interface could have on critical back-end systems.

Composable commerce takes this flexibility even further, offering an architecture where every individual element (or Packaged Business Capability) works independently and can be replaced or updated without impacting the wider system. Each PBC solves a specific business issue, or problem, and is connected through an API layer to parts of the system, letting brands combine ‘best-of-breed’ elements to design the perfect architecture for their needs.

Building Better Digital Businesses

Everything we do at Maverick Partners is about building your future business success. We develop digital products and experiences to engage users and drive business growth, helping you build your digital products so they fit perfectly with your business strategy and customer needs.