Can you believe we’re almost halfway through 2022 already? It feels like just yesterday, we were celebrating New Year’s six feet apart from each other. Yet here we are, heading into the busy summer shopping season full steam ahead.

And as Q2 draws to a close, have you evaluated the state of your eCommerce marketing thus far? What letter grade would you give your business? If you’re rocking an A+, you can probably skip this article. But if your eCommerce marketing is in dire need of an upgrade for the latter half of this year, we’ll help you cram for your midterms; ie. increasing your online sales and ROI.

Due to recent world events that were the cause of a dull New Year’s party, modern ecommerce is skewing more in the vein of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C). Online shopping has become integral to nearly every retail business, and the major advantages of D2C are what today’s shoppers are looking for:

• Lower prices
• Better quality control
• Faster delivery
• Personalized customer service
• Shared values
• Brand awareness

And your eCommerce marketing has to evolve to tout these qualities, even if you’re technically B2C, because these conveniences and qualities are what your customers increasingly want. They no longer want to engage with faceless corporations and would rather spend their dollars with intimate, nearly boutique brands that they know and trust.

So in what ways is your eCommerce marketing failing?

By now, the Google and Apple cookie-pocalypse has shown marketers how much harder it is to track your customers’ online activities without good 3rd party data. Harvard Business Review showed that audience segments that marketers can buy from brokers are wildly inaccurate, and as we head to a more privacy-focused landscape online, tracking what your customers are interested in is becoming a challenging task.

This is why it’s crucially important to gather your own, 1st party data directly from your audience. Your Retail CRM platform should be robust enough to track their activities on your website, as well as log the actions they take in-store. Along with email or SMS surveys, questionnaires, and focus group studies; the brands that can know their customers most intimately today will have the competitive edge over their competitors still relying on Facebook audience segmentation.

Endear users already know that the more activity your team can spur directly on your ecommerce site, the more data you can gather. Instead of sending online traffic to social media sites, brands can leverage Shoppable Stories that are curated visual catalogs that keep your customers, and their data, right on your website.

Which reminds us…

Like it or not, we’re living in the Tik Tok era of short, lo-fi videos (though we’re old enough to know it really started with Vine). Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have all embraced very short video content on their platforms; and if you spend any time at all browsing from a smartphone, you’ll inevitably run into a 30-second video ad that looks exactly like a Tik Tok some teen shot in their bedroom.

Your eCommerce marketing strategy isn’t optimizing the impact your brand can have unless you’re embracing these types of videos. Research from wyzowl shows that not only do 88% of people say they’ve been convinced to purchase a product or service by watching a brand’s video, but also that 88% of people would like to see more videos from brands.

Endear’s Shoppable Stories was created with this in mind, as a simple and straightforward way for retail brands to showcase their products in the bite-sized visual packages that modern “window shoppers” enjoy. But even if you’d rather use a social media platform, make sure that there is a clear call-to-action that brings them back to your eCommerce site.

The good part of short, lo-fi videos is that your brand can A/B test many of them since they are relatively low-cost to produce, iterate, and release new ones quickly. And with just 15 to 30 seconds, it’s incredibly important to show your customer the types of products they really want to see.

Oh, you’re not doing that?

Ecommerce marketing in 2022 will live and die by the level of personalization your team can muster, and you’re most likely not offering enough personalized experiences. As Twilio reported, while 85% of businesses believed they were offering personalized experiences, only 60% of consumers agreed.

So what type of personalization does your customer expect? According to MoEngage’s report (via martech), the main preference they had was for their previous purchases to inform their personalization; ie. product recommendations.

There’s no better sense that a brand truly knows who you are than when a product they recommend is precisely what you’ve wanted… even if you had no idea that you wanted it. By mining the data in your CRM, your team should be able to show each customer personalized product recommendations that resonate with them.

You can even connect apps to your ecommerce store and CRM that utilize artificial intelligence to recommend the right products to online shoppers. Of course for these apps to be effective, your CRM data has to be as thorough as possible. Endear puts a heavy emphasis on tracking and leveraging your customer data to get to this level of personalization, making it easy to have a true back-and-forth conversation to further cater to their shopping needs.

Which finally brings us to the most important and comprehensive ecommerce marketing philosophy…

Clienteling encompasses all the previous tactics, but it really is more of a philosophy for your brand. The best marketing is providing a personalized experience, whether the customer is in-store or online. It’s an omnichannel retail approach to marketing where your brand’s email & SMS marketing aligns with your social media messaging, your online presence, in-store experience, and post-purchase follow-up.

Virtual clienteling refers to the online portion of the experience, with 1-to-1 conversations at the forefront of the modern web experience.

Brands that use Endear have seen a 111% increase in order frequency from their customers, attributed in large part to the communication methods available through the CRM. From email to text to set up virtual 1-on-1 virtual appointments, communication that is personal and knowledgeable of their preferences and shopping history has turned out to be the most effective marketing tool for online selling.

And if you’re thinking that clienteling is only good for marketing to existing clients, you’re not factoring that happy customers tell their friends. Gladly found that not only will 84% of consumers “go out of their way to spend more money with brands that deliver personalized customer service experiences,” but also that “77% recommend a brand to friends and family” if they provide that sort of experience.

Does your eCommerce marketing focus on today’s clienteling experience? Endear’s CRM can help. Click here for a free demo today.