We’ve all got a short-attention-span – around 8 seconds to be exact. In a heavy-tech-oriented world, consumers are constantly spammed by marketing, media, and content. Now it’s becoming harder for businesses to capture their attention and keep it long enough to convert.
Your omnichannel strategy helps you appear where your shoppers are and they’re probably noticing you hanging there. But you might be losing their attention because you’re using irrelevant content at the wrong time.
To help, we’ve summarized key points from Increasingly’s webinar with Mapp, Space48, Metapic, and Wavemaker to help optimize sales, with some extra insights!
What customers expect from brands
What the customer journey looks like now
How effective are offsite channels for short-span-attention shoppers
Why onsite optimizations are better to keep shopper attention
100+ free tactics to improve your marketing
The power of tech gives us more control to browse, consume and purchase in our time-constricted lives. We’ve got Netflix to skip the ads, Ubereats to secretly overindulge, and apps to browse or shop from our own phones. Customer expectations are now at an all-time high, as they crave even more speed, convenience, and an attentive experience with your brand.
Shoppers believe we’re in the post-pandemic phase and that businesses had enough time to work out the kinks to make impossibilities, possible. But this pressures your business to innovate how it appears, interacts, and communicates with customers across multiple channels to get their attention. Without the right MarTech and customer insights, it limits your adaptability to customer unpredictability.
E-commerce is booming, as sales reached $4.9 trillion globally in 2021 and are predicted to grow around 50% by 2025. Shoppers are becoming familiar with online shopping, and it’s growing as they shop what they want, where they want, and how they want. Rather than trying to herd customers along the customer journey, brands are investing in appearing at all relevant touchpoints with relevant content, as the lifecycle becomes more complex, and customers control how they navigate.
The customer journey still has the typical stages of browsing, awareness, interest, purchase, retention, and advocacy. But it’s become non-linear.
Shoppers are given more options, tech, and channels to navigate around an omnichannel spiderweb to research and compare, hiking up the bounce rate, drop-offs, and basket abandonment. They’re on and off a range of devices (mobile, PC, tablet, TV, voice assistants) within a range of online & offline, onsite & offsite channels (CSEs, marketplaces, socials, website, emails, SMS, apps, in-store).
Google calls these complex and non-linear paths a zig-zag customer journey in the example below of a customer purchasing a PC.
This only scratches the surface. Customers are unique, which is why learning about them and becoming insight-led is essential. Using a customer journey map is a great start to nail down the channels that your target consumers are using, how they behave, and why. But you need to dig deeper using customer intelligence to get a 360-degree-customer view. A customer data platform (CDP) is essential here to help you connect your data and get valuable insights to optimize your marketing strategies.
For the browsing, awareness, and interest stages, offsite channels are key in customer acquisition and building brand awareness. Customers will often interact with your brand through offsite content (e.g. ads and product recommendations), but you need strong and relevant content to get the shopper’s attention and potentially re-engage users. Here’s a sum-up of typical avenues marketers are using.
Brands heavily invest in Product Listings Ads in competitive CSEs such as Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, and more. At this stage, customers are looking for a particular product. The aim is to get your products surfacing in relevant product searches, usually in the generic, specific, long tail, and descriptive searches. By clicking on your ad, it takes shoppers to your product landing pages.
TIP: To get an effective ROAS, optimizing your product data feed is essential. Your product titles, categories, and images are what the shopper first sees, so you need correct, complete, accurate, and up-to-date data powering your ads. Experimenting with your product titles, categories, and images helps optimize relevancy that helps capture your target shopper’s attention.
A trend over the next few years. More consumers look for entertainment in brands and influencers when browsing for inspiration. Instagram Shopping boomed during the pandemic and continues to ramp up, as consumers have the time and privacy to browse. Now longer forms of content are being invested in, such as partnering in live shopping streams with influencers.
But as platforms like TikTok are becoming hotspots, brands are investing here to capitalize on this trend through short bursts of high-quality content influencer partnerships. It’s great for brand awareness, product discovery, and acquisition.
Facebook Dynamic Ads are superb for your dynamic personalization and retargeting strategy. When trying to reach new audiences, personalized ads are delivered based on the shopper’s own behaviors after showing interest in similar products. But for warm audiences who’ve previously visited your website or app, you can use Dynamic Ads to cross-sell and upsell products based on previous purchases. This helps bring customers back onto the customer journey.
Other offsite channels such as affiliate and paid advertising are also effective to get discovered by shoppers. But this flags an issue: your marketing is heavily in the hands of third-party channels. This means less control and higher costs, which doesn’t promise an effective ROAS. To really capture and maintain the short-attention-span of shoppers, you need to know them using customer intelligence to get them on-site and personalize their experience.
Offsite channels kickstart the customer journey, but the end goal is to get your customer onsite. This helps you learn more about them to optimize their experience with your brand across a range of devices and channels to create an integrated cross-channel experience.
Looking for that extra attentive experience, orchestrating an attentive 1:1 personalized experience at every customer touchpoint consistently helps you grow more than just sales. It grows customer retention, brand awareness & advocacy, and customer loyalty. But the first step is getting to know your customers to give them what they’re looking for.
It’s difficult when trying to work with limited solutions that you’ve outgrown or platforms made with data experts (who are rare to come by) in mind. Reviewing your platforms regularly ensures it helps you achieve your goals with valuable insights and support while being quick to adapt to the changing customer trends and expectations.
With GDPR and data regulation being a hot topic for businesses, real-time first-party data and zero-party data are becoming key due to their accuracy and availability.
Using a CDP that has analytics at its core (you can call it a Google Analytics alternative) helps you to centralize your different types of data to become data-driven: direct customer surveys (zero-party data), indirect customer tracking (first-party data), and supplementing your own customer information (with third-party data). So once a customer interacts with your brand, the more customer data you collect, the more you enrich their profiles.
By using platforms like Mapp Marketing Cloud, you can plug in real-time data to generate accurate customer segments, priorities, and learnings that become key insights in powering a hyper-personalized experience at scale. In short, it enables actionable insights.
With data at your fingertips, you can build unified customer profiles, to get a 360-degree view of your customers and their behaviors. Here’s where you can draw insights into your customer’s current needs, behaviors, pain points, psychographic and demographic data.
For instance, understanding what offsite channels your shoppers came from, what products they look at, where they’re abandoning their baskets, and how often they keep returning.
By centralizing your customer data and building up your knowledge about your customers, you can optimize per channel to streamline their shopping process across each stage with speed and convenience.
And by drawing insights, you’re able to understand their entry source & channel and optimize their experience with your landing page and product recommendations.
For example, mobiles are popular devices, and you may learn that it’s your customer’s go-to device when shopping. But often brands have format and speed issues, which may be causing drop-offs. By rendering devices for mobiles first, it can help you optimize the experience by offering dark mode, increasing speed, and even optimizing content formatting for visually impaired consumers (8% of the population are colorblind, so it’s important not to overlook this).
Getting actionable insights helps to better target messaging and understand where to use each channel at each different stage in the customer life cycle.
Personalizing your website banners and blocks of content based on your customer’s previous interaction and contextual profile data is a start. But it’s also about knowing where and when to use the right content. For example, automation is great, but a generic pop-up with “10% off your first purchase” can alienate your existing customers.
To keep them coming back and converting, treat them with respect and loyalty by changing your messaging to show them recommendations that will drive them to repeat purchase. This captures their attention, increases AOV, and drives conversions.
Integrating your channels helps develop the omnichannel spiderweb that supports your customer’s zigzag journey. Creating a cross-channel experience enables a consistent and seamless experience at every touchpoint, that makes your brand memorable.
Using an insight-led customer experience platform like Mapp Marketing Cloud enables you to use automation that helps you trigger cross-channel campaigns with the right content at the right time. This is done by easily designing, testing, and optimizing content using our whiteboard automation for event-based campaigns such as abandoned carts, category triggers, loyalty programs, product stock alerts, and more to drive customer engagement.
Building and centralizing customer data is just the start to keeping up with customers and earning their attention. To really be remembered, you need to use your data in a way that helps you predict customer behavior to implement campaigns that help you grow relationships by preventing churn and driving customer nurturing.
Our smart technology takes your customer’s transaction data, browsing behavior, contact history, loyalty status, and more to analyze, score, and visualize customer insights. It enhances these insights with AI to predict the customer’s probability to convert or churn, as well as their expected next order value to tailor your messaging.
Despite the short-attention-span, customers have a memory that sticks when it comes to online shopping. It’s a trust thing: one bad experience with your brand can put you in the bad books and damage your reputation via word-of-mouth or review websites. To help you create a personalized cross-channel experience that captivates customer attention and maintains it to grow sales and customer loyalty, have a look at our interactive 100+ free marketing tactics.
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