Over the past 20 years, we’ve witnessed eCommerce evolve from simply a necessary online presence to a place that demands stunning creativity and competition; a beautiful tapestry of unique brand identity laced with bold statements and endless pop-up offers.
The window of opportunity for online brands is small and today’s customers are influenced by micro-moments. Increased revenue is the end goal and relevant digital experiences are your secret to success.
Why are NEW digital experiences so important for customer growth?
The next generation has ONLY lived in a smartphone/digital-first world. It’s impossible to ignore the importance of digital experience, especially in a post-pandemic world. Brands that refuse to dedicate time to building new experiences will be the ones left behind.
According to ClickZ, shoppers who use three or more channels to interact with brands have a purchasing frequency rate 250 percent higher than single-channel users.
Leading brands are broadening the digital experience outside of their eCommerce site, with in store digital experiences, product driven mini-apps, and VR.
To stay ahead, your digital experiences must create unique engagement tailored to your audience. You need to tap into your treasure trove of existing customer data and build experiences that utilize not just product and content, but also context.
Check out this great blog from entrepreneur.com Why a Personal Customer Experience Is Critical to Your Business Success.
What new digital experiences can be created beyond the e-commerce store?
Instore screens
Studies show that 70% of the human brain is used for sight — and customer experience technology such as smart retail digital signage elevates the way brands engage consumers, drive sales and impact brand value.
Digital marketing solutions open the opportunity for retail stores to level the playing field with eCommerce — fighting for greater market share by bringing elements of online shopping into the store — while offering a memorable, personalized shopping experience. Read more from Scala.
Virtual shop tours and product try-ons
Emerging virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are allowing people to interact with products and places where products are produced, even from very distant areas, overcoming the logistic boundary and offering impressive remote experiences.
Here are some of my personal favorites:
- Valentino created Garavani's Virtual Museum
- Estée Lauder’s virtual make-up try
- Burberry’s employed AR tools to enable customers to picture Burberry products in their own environment
Apps developed specifically to support instore staff
Cartier wanted to unlock sales capacity and create a mobile-first experience for employees to improve the experience of customers. The solution was a mobile app designed specifically for sales associates, enabling them to serve customers anywhere in the store (or remote!), with instant access to the assortment of Cartier's unique creations and stock information. With this information at their fingertips, sales associates are better equipped and able to focus more on improving the experience for customers. Read more
The metaverse
The metaverse is already showing promise beyond its gaming roots to offer people and brands a new place to interact, consume and earn. Finding success here will rely on brands’ understanding of their customers in this new world.
How can you prepare for faster digital innovation and deliver more digital experiences?
The answer can be broken down into two steps:
- Find a better way to unify your data and make it more accessible to your digital teams.
- Reduce time and money spent on lengthy integrations. Time to market must be reduced to leverage these customer opportunities.
… Finally, here’s the solution
To strengthen customer experience, you need build new digital experiences. To build new digital experience your digital teams need easier access to the data and less reliance on lengthy integration projects.
An Experience Data Platform serves as a data layer that sits on top of your Enterprise data systems and closes that gap - completely removing the need to build many point-to-point integrations for each new front-end.
With an Experience Data Platform, your digital teams have all data at their fingertips so they can start to be creative with it without being held back, and they can re-use data across multiple channels outside of the eCommerce, including more apps, and in-store screens.
You can now say YES to creating epic digital experiences because unifying your data and delivering relevant content to your front end is made possible with the Occtoo Experience Data Platform.
How an Experience Data Platform complements your eCommerce
An incredible example of an organization that is maximizing the digitization of its brand, is luxury world leader Cartier. See how Cartier is leveraging Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform to roll out new innovative digital experiences.
