You have an e-commerce site that serves a variety of vertical markets, perhaps diverse geographies, but more critically – a wide array of customers. You may have spent tens of thousands of dollars to ensure your site provides a positive user experience…yet you can’t seem to really reach or engage your potential customers.
The traditional website has generally been one of two things: transactional or informational. The advantage to those who launch informational sites is the fact that they don’t normally have to worry about shopping carts, inventory, integrations to third party systems, and the nuances associated with ensuring that a main revenue channel is up and running perfectly.
Taking it a step further, many informational sites have the content management tools to be dynamic, relevant, and timely. Marketing teams can update content, offers, ads, and more without the intervention of programmers! They can even personalize content based on a visitor’s geography, pages visited, and actions performed on the site. This creates a very powerful advantage for marketers to truly reach and engage their audience…the two things you are yearning for!
A common cry from those with transactional sites has therefore been, “But I want commerce AND content management!” Until recently, striving for relevance was limited to such tactics as featuring product subsets in microsites, cross-sell and up-sell (others who bought this also bought that), and utilizing customer logins to deliver specific landing pages.
Now the good news: the best of both worlds IS here. It exists. It’s amazing! Imagine your customer landing on your retail clothing website. Since its winter and they have an IP address originating in the Northeast, you feature your heavier parkas and gloves. They navigate to the Men’s category page where they click on a video of your best-selling line of ski jackets in action. In the background, with each step the visitor takes, your CMS (Content Management System) is giving them a score, assessing and understanding their intent. The next page they browse is Men’s Jackets, where they notice a featured article from a professional skier touting the benefits of your best-selling jacket. They also see four of your best ski jackets highlighted. You get the idea. Now think of how this scenario would apply to a Woman browsing the site from Texas looking for a pair of yoga pants. In each case, you have guided an entirely unique individual to not only provide a positive experience, but truly help them find what they need. With the power of ecommerce, they can see the price, availability, perhaps even configure a custom order before quickly, and easily checking out.
