With Black Friday and online sales from the 10th annual Cyber Monday just behind us, there’s no denying that online retail environments are an important part of the customer journey. Marketers have to find a way to transfer their experience with traditional retail to this tech-driven, fast-paced environment to optimize the sales experience.
Mini Kalivianakis, Director of Client Solutions at SKIM, has shared best practices for brands looking to optimize the on- and offline shopping experience in the latest Quirk’s newsletter.
Best practices for brands adapting to the omnichannel consumer decision journey
“Marketers working in traditional retail have decades of proven insight to fall back on. But today, sales are increasingly migrating to online retail environments that are less mature and are more technically-driven and these environments are seldom designed to effectively lead the customer through the purchase decision journey in a satisfying way. Knowing that time is extremely limited in the real world of e-commerce, the sales process offers very little room for error. It must be short, sweet and effectively optimized for the digital shelf. But what does an optimized online environment look like?
The newness of the online shopping world means that marketers and researchers have little in the way of established best practices to fall back on. In order to understand and optimize for online consumer decision behavior, our team performed an analysis of choice behavior in online sales channels using virtual online shopping environments that mimic Web sites and mobile apps such Amazon.com and the Amazon mobile app.
Simulations allow marketing researchers to test attributes such as product ranking, rating scores, imagery, product description and price. The results of this study revealed valuable techniques for optimizing e-tail environments, thereby making the online shopping experience most effective for shoppers and brands. Best practices that were found include boosting search positioning (particularly for mobile); understanding how sorting and online reviews can alter the competitive environment; and optimizing visuals and claims for the virtual shelf…”