Top E-Commerce Trends That Will Continue to Grow In 2018 – Part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of our series! We’ve got more useful information for you yet again on upcoming e-commerce trends that are here to stay. Plan your e-commerce strategy with a focus on these key trends to keep ahead of the e-commerce game in 2018:

Smart Consumers Are Already Doing Smart Searches – Before Anything Else

Shoppers nowadays do not go out shopping without equipping themselves with the required information. Coupled with the rise of the use of mobile phones, they do their research anytime and anywhere, including while they are shopping in the brick and mortar store. This online research holds great impact – whatever information they gather about you will influence their decision if they will buy from you or not. So one important thing to take care of is to ensure you are easily searchable online: Besides optimising your store website, you need to also have a sizeable social media presence and be active enough to gain attention of your audience in those channels. One way to do this is to leverage on your networks and let them spread the word about you.

Consumers Will Communicate More With Chatbots

2018 will see an even more widespread use of chatbots such as Facebook Messenger and Alexa, which are able to undertake various functions that enhance customer experience. Use them to send customers personalized marketing content, such as product recommendations to help them make the best purchase decisions, or answer whatever questions that your customers may have. With chatbots, you can offer around-the-clock customer support that is personalised, branded and engaging, track customer’s behaviour to collect valuable data, and ultimately attain seamless brand continuity.
Without any additional spending, chatbots can be a great way to elevate online shopping experience for your consumers.

Spend on Social Media Marketing Will Increase

With social media being the common space for the business to connect with a wide base of potential and existing customers, it is no wonder 66% of marketers are increasing spend on social media marketing and advertising on social media platforms through the next year to keep their audiences happily engaged, as well as their brand on top of minds.

Going in for a closer look, Instagram is set to become an even more valuable marketing channel than Facebook, with approximately 800 million people using the platform each month. It is more popular especially with younger generation like millennials and seeing better engagement than other social platforms. On the contrary, Twitter continues to remain quiet in its struggle to grow users and this is set to continue in 2018 if the platform does not take any significant action.

Email Marketing a Key Marketing Channel for Many Brands

The coming year will see greater usage of AI and machine learning in email marketing to produce deeply personalised and interactive as well as automated emails. 2018 will also see the rise of plain-text emails as opposed to HTML ones. Trigger emails will also increasingly be used to continuously engage users for an array of events like cart abandonment and price notifications, with trigger-based marketing campaigns so effective as to be able to generate as much as 4 times more revenue, according to Forrester Research.

AI Continues to Expand Its Influence

The use of Artificial Intelligence will get even more proliferant comes 2018. AI is everywhere and making our life extremely easy. On e-commerce platforms, AI plays crucial roles: For instances, AI is already making waves on the front of personalisation where its predictive nature allows us to serve the most relevant and effective advertising to the right visitors and at the right time. It is also able to help in the field of inventory management where real time and future inventory needs can be accurately predicted.

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