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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
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Experiential Commerce
Blending Marketing and e-Commerce
to Engage and Convert Demanding Consumers
Unifying the customer experience across .com and online store sites will help marketers and e-Commerce
teams transform mundane, uninspiring transactions into compelling commerce experiences. This guide
will help you set the vision and identify what needs to be done to get there. You’ll learn:
JJHow to set the vision for unifying the customer experience
JJWhy experiential commerce is reliant on product-aligned storytelling
JJHow to create cross-channel consistency that accelerates conversions
JJThree goals for transformation as you take an iterative approach to experiential commerce
BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AS A KEY DIFFERENTIATOR
Digital marketing and e-Commerce teams have traditionally worked on separate
missions. Marketers have been focused on creating higher engagement with the brand,
while e-Commerce teams have had laser vision on product sell-through and revenues.
Unfortunately, the variation in experiences can be so abrupt that customers end up
confused and not at all pleased with the friction.
Inconsistencies that can result from “two-site syndrome” that manifests a bit like Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde between the .com experience and the shopping experience are usually due
to context vs. function. Consider the glossy magazine-type experience that marketers
produce to romance customers as compared to the functional, dry, and inflexible catalog
customers encounter when they decide to buy.
Shoppers want to do more than simply transact. They want to be able to interact with the
brand, explore different product categories, converse with their peers, get tips on how
to use a product, and see a product in context. The actual purchase and fulfillment of a
product is really just one part of a much broader customer journey that many people are
beginning to call “experiential commerce.”
And according to Martin Ryan of Javelin Group “Retailers understand that online
customer experience has to evolve beyond simple product browse and shopping cart
functions. The most valuable customer is inspired by, reassured by, and emotionally
attached to a retail brand.”
Managing the effort to unify the customers’ shopping and brand experiences requires a
concerted effort from marketing and e-Commerce teams. Siloed teams and missions need
to be aligned, but so do the technologies that often compound the problem.
Technology should be seen as the enabler to smoothing channel progression and eliminating the confusion and friction. Collaboration and workflow tools that expand visibility to
teams will need to work effectively together — and the teams that use them — rather than
in silos.
The Need for a Unified, Compelling Destination
There’s no doubt that a compelling and unified customer experience is a competitive
advantage. In fact, the customer experience may be one of the last and most appealing
ways to differentiate a brand in the marketplace.
The smart integration and use of the two primary technologies supporting each team —
Web Content Management (WCM) and e-Commerce platforms — are critical to eliminating the friction to allow both marketers and e-Commerce teams to achieve their goals in
concert. Unified experiences will result in a contextually relevant and compelling experience for your customers.
Transforming transactional into experiential commerce will support customers throughout
the discover, explore, buy and engage stages of their journey, resulting in increases in
engagement, revenue and loyalty.
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The Vision and Value for Unifying the Customer
Experience
As e-Commerce and marketing professionals work to unify fragmented customer
experiences by incorporating personalized brand stories with transactional e-Commerce —
creating experiential commerce appreciated by customers — the WCM and e-Commerce
platforms in use must help, not hinder, their efforts. It should not go unnoticed that unifying
the customers’ experience begins with unifying the marketing and e-Commerce teams.
Setting the Vision
Making the move from transactional to experiential commerce requires companies to
rethink the decades-old models for how they go to market. Recognizing that the product
or service is not the primary vehicle for value is the first step in shifting away from a purely
transactional focus.
As you work to unify customer experiences, a few questions to ask include:
JJHow can you create synergies across product lines to provide higher consistency and
make the customers’ experience simpler and more gratifying?
JJWhat would it look like to evaluate the cross-channel experience as a “whole” in its
contribution to revenues, rather than the parts that comprise it? Would this contribute
to higher cooperation on behalf of the customer?
JJHow can operational efficiency based on what matters to the customer also contribute
to sales and margins?
JJHow will visual elements and relevant content create better experiences that can prove
contribution to increased sales, repurchases and customer loyalty?
Driving higher traffic, alone, isn’t going to solve the customer experience dilemma. The
vision for customer shopping experiences must be connected to specific and practical
customer-facing business objectives that can align marketing and e-Commerce teams. The
vision you create will help your company to achieve the differentiation that counts in the
eyes of your customers.
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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
The Payoff Is in Transforming the Experience, Not Improving
the Transaction
Trying to improve a customer experience built on a transactional construct will not provide
the differentiation that enables you to establish clear competitive advantage. Transforming
the experience is the better choice. Visual engagement, immersive content, and an
incremental approach to innovation are three components that will help you do so.
Visual Engagement
The first component to consider during transformation is the importance of visual
engagement. In fact, 92.6 percent of people said that the visuals are one of the top
influential factor affecting a purchase decision.1 They also assess products within 90
seconds of viewing them, making an initial judgment about whether or not to purchase.
A standard catalog that doesn’t offer contextual relevance will not meet this requirement.
The visuals must clearly represent the quality and value of the product and set the
appropriate expectations. Twenty-five percent of returns happen because the product was
not what the customer was expecting.
Design elements, such as slide shows, carousel views, tabs and more presented via a
responsive Web design that adapts to screen size and browser on any device are becoming
table stakes for earning the shopping customer’s attention.
Immersive Content
It’s also interesting to note that 42 percent of consumers are identified as “vague”
consumers. This category represents customers who need more information in order to
decide to buy. Consider the benefits of video as part of the experiential shopping process.
Fifty-seven percent of people say they’re more confident when they see a video prior to
purchase and are less likely to return the item. They also stay on your site longer, return
more often and buy more.
The traditional product catalog, focused on transactions, doesn’t allow for the sharing of
brand and product stories that are personalized and based on the context of the customer.
Flat and static transactions will result in higher cart abandonment, whereas dynamic and
interactive digital experiences will produce more profitable engagement due to higher
conversions. It also doesn’t hurt that increasing amounts of relevant content improve search
engine rankings and result in earned media traffic.
Incremental Innovation
According to Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director of the Customer
Experience practice at Forrester, “…roughly half of the attendees at Forrester’s three
customer experience forums in 2013 said that their organizations are in the first phase
of the path to CX maturity (repair). Their priority is — and for the immediate future will
remain — finding and fixing broken experiences.”2
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As you work your way through fixing broken experiences, it’s important to be proactive
about acquiring the capabilities that enable you to transform them. The combination of
WCM solutions and e-Commerce platforms that are integrated to provide contextual,
rich media experiences your customers care about will help you make the transition. A
recent survey of eBusiness and channel strategy professionals, conducted by Forrester,
indicated that an investment in those two technology platforms trumps all other technology
investment priorities.
An approach inclusive of these three components will help to bring the vision for a unified
customer experience to life, while also delivering the value related to your company’s
business objectives by weaving products into the stories you share.
Experiential Commerce Is Reliant on Product-Aligned
Storytelling
Some shoppers know exactly what they want — others don’t. Some are driven primarily by
price and availability, whereas others have an emotional attachment to a particular brand
that is best addressed through storytelling. Experiential commerce enables marketers
and e-Commerce teams to supersede the common transaction to create the uncommon
experience that customers deserve.
Stories can be constructed around virtually any product or collection of
products. When products are combined together with rich media as part of
a real-life user story, they do a much better job of addressing the practical
and emotional needs of the shopper.
These stories can include additional lifestyle content and show the product
in use in a variety of real-world contexts, including seasonal, current topics
and trends that inspire and engage shoppers on a far deeper level compared
to scrolling through a long list of unrelated products.
Imagine what becomes possible when content and commerce are brought
together seamlessly to engage your customers. A static product catalog
template that presents standard product specifications, pricing and
shopping cart functionality no longer convinces today’s customer to buy. In a digital world
where they can’t “touch and feel” the product, your site must enable them to visualize its
application to their lifestyle or situation.
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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
Product Stories Motivate Customers
With the ability to present customers with immersive and inspiring content, such as a video
showing them how to use it and why features are valuable, you can create an “anchor”
against which all other options must compete. By immersing them in the product with a
story, you allow them the space to create the vision for how the product may impact their
reality.
This concept is related to neuroscience. According to Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist from
Princeton University, a story is the primary way to activate parts in the brain so that a
listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.3 His research also showed
that images must be connected to narrative if they are to have any value.
Therefore, we now have science to prove that storytelling is the most effective way
to create empathy that motivates the interpretation, anticipation and behavior of the
listener (shopper). With the ability to embed product stories seamlessly with product
and cart information, you’ll be able to deliver on the goals of both marketing and
e-Commerce teams: engagement and conversions.
Let’s not forget that storytelling is also a social experience. To enhance your product
stories and help them spread, including social capabilities such as ratings, comments,
discussions and rich media uploads can also motivate buying. By allowing customers to
share their stories about your products, you also help new customers see the value of
the product through various contextual interpretations.
With powerful moderation tools, marketers and channel groups can manage the
conversations, maintain the brand and curate the best stories to help your customers
visualize the role that your products can play in their lives. The integration of WCM and
e-Commerce platforms allows your company to develop experiential commerce by sharing
compelling stories creating cross-channel consistency to help customers become loyal
advocates that bring new business through positive reviews and referrals.
Create Omni-Channel Consistency for Every
Touchpoint
Assuming that your customers know just what to buy can be a missed opportunity that
transactional commerce isn’t equipped to address. Experiential commerce attempts to
understand the shopper throughout their journey and develop an emotional connection
that delights, inspires and informs. This is achieved through immersive, contextual and
rich media content that unravels the story that connects your brand with consumers.
Online shopping experiences are now multi-touch, omni-channel journeys that require
context and consistency to motivate conversions. The experience must prevail over the
transaction. To attract and inspire buying intent, the experience with your online store
must be flexible, fluid and visual.
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According to research by the Custom Content Council, 90 percent of consumers find custom
content useful.4 But, for 61 percent of them, they actually feel better about a company
that delivers custom content and are more likely to buy from them. It’s important to realize
that your customers’ browsing and buying habits have changed. They are more likely to
buy from brands they follow on social media as well as to recommend those brands to their
networks.5 A fragmented experience won’t bring this advantage.
The challenge this creates for marketers and e-Commerce teams is in how to effectively
manage both owned and “leased” Web properties. From the promise made in posts on
social media channels that pull consumers back to your online store, to the stories you share
about your brand and products when they arrive, the experience must be fluid, consistent
and transparent.
Blended Content Delivers
Content and commerce must be brought together and blended to share a story that engages
customers with an experience that motivates conversions. Based on what you know about
your customers, the content you serve them must be as closely related to their context
as possible. Whether based on a user profile, past purchases or social media activity, the
depth of personalization will be a determining factor driving the quality of the customer
experience.
Product detail pages must go beyond the product features and functions to include
rich media, social media — such as reviews and ratings — instructional videos, support
information, and links to related products. By sharing product-aligned stories, your
online store will be better equipped to secure conversions, generate up and cross-sell
opportunities or enhance the post-purchasing process.
Blended, content-rich shopping experiences result in higher sales per transaction,
greater loyalty and more vocal advocacy that spreads the word. People follow brands
with interesting content. They share experiences that delight them with their social
connections. And this word of mouth fuels up to 50 percent of buying decisions.
Powerful Design Environments Provide the Flexibility
Given the real-time nature of customer experiences, marketing and e-Commerce teams
need to be able to serve up stellar visual content without waiting in the IT or design agency
queue. Visually appealing free-form layout options and a comprehensive catalogue of
design elements should be available to help facilitate creative and execution. A platform
that separates content from layout and presentation layers means contextually rich stories
can be shared along with product and pricing information to maximize the impact and
effectiveness of the customer experience — with no IT involvement needed.
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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
Responsiveness Is Required
These capabilities combined with built-in responsive Web design technologies allow for the
creation of modern, experiential commerce on any device or screen size. Tagging and asset
management capabilities enable the system to detect the consumer’s device in use and
deliver relevant, device-specific experience.
With this level of flexible design and blended content and commerce, marketing and
e-Commerce teams will have the speed and predictability that are essential to meeting
customer experience expectations at the time of need — regardless of the channel and
device in use.
Set Three Goals and Take an Iterative Approach
Making the transition from transactional to experiential commerce can be a challenge.
Taking an iterative approach is one way to ensure that the project is successful. Considering
that McKinsey & Company finds that, “on average, large IT projects run 45 percent over
budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted,”
an iterative approach affords a higher probability of success.6
Being aware of the risk will help you make smarter choices when taking the initiative to
remove the friction from the customer experience. When making the transition, there are
three goals that will help you to chart your path to transformation; brand consistency,
unified experiences, and revenue growth.
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Brand Consistency
Keeping track of a global brand across a myriad of communication channels is key to
maintaining its strength, which translates into customer affinity and ultimately sales.
However, research from Meaningful Brands® has found that the relationship between
people and brands is broken.7 In fact, research that included 700 brands and over
134,000 consumers in 23 countries found that:
“Most people worldwide would not care if more than 73% of brands
disappeared tomorrow.”
This finding has frightening implications. But marketers and e-Commerce teams can
rise to the occasion by sharing product-aligned stories that address the context of
customers and provide compelling experiences, rather than confusion. By choosing
effective and efficient two-way integration between WCM and e-Commerce platforms,
fluid, visually inspiring and immersive interactions become the norm — rather than
the exception.
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2 Unified Experiences
Customers have a variety of experiences with your brand, including your online store,
brand .com site, social media, mobile and customer service. When these interactions
are managed in operational silos, experiences become fragmented and confusing for
the customer. By their very nature, transactional commerce is focused inside-out,
based on what the company considers important, such as process improvements,
pricing optimization, order fulfillment, calls to action, and more.
The importance of making the shift to experiential commerce is summed up nicely by
Peter Sheldon and Stephen Powers of Forrester Research:
“It is no longer enough to enable an online catalog and transactional
e-Commerce: Today’s marketers want to tell brand and product stories
through the deep personalization and contextualization of content and
interactive digital experiences.”8
This is also what your customers want.
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Revenue Growth
Improved search engine optimization made possible through blended content will
bring higher traffic from earned media at higher levels of engagement. Greater brand
awareness and consistency will result in higher conversion rates and revenue that
leads to improved customer loyalty.
Meaningful Brands finds proof that brands that deliver immersive experiences that
customers want have higher financial performance:
“In addition to outperforming their competitors in traditional brand
measures, the top 20% of brands also dramatically outperform financial
leaders across a spectrum of industries… These are financial advantages
that are durable, sustainable and disruptive.”9
Cross-channel consistency creates higher, more sustainable levels of engagement
at every touchpoint. Armed with the engagement tools that allow marketers and
e-Commerce teams to continuously edit and refine the digital customer experience
without depending on IT, opportunities for experience-driven conversions can be
seized in the moment, not queued up with IT for implementation after the fact.
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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS GUIDE: MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE
CoreMedia LiveContext 2.0
If your company would like to overcome the challenges of moving from transactional
to experiential commerce with an incremental approach aligned with the three goals
above, the solution is available to unify experiences that build brand equity and revenue.
Effective brand management, collaborative teamwork and a digital experience hub provide
the ecosystem of tools you need for a successful transformation.
CoreMedia has engineered its experiential commerce solution — CoreMedia LiveContext —
to effectively address a broad range of digital content and asset management scenarios for
IBM® WebSphere® Commerce and In-house e-Commerce platforms.
Each system is utilized for its strengths. The e-Commerce platform provides a powerful
customer interaction platform for cross-channel commerce. And CoreMedia is the expert at
delivering engaging, contextual customer experiences across all touchpoints.
Working together, these platforms provide a rich experience-driven e-Commerce solution
to drive brand building and enrich the product catalog, with tools that ensure maximum
flexibility of design and layout. You’ll also enjoy minimal risk with our Express Deployment
Solution that provides a fixed-price, fixed-scope deployment offering to ensure successful
implementation within a reasonable timeframe.
To learn more more, visit www.coremedia.com/livecontext.
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About CoreMedia
CoreMedia is a leading digital experience (DX) company that has been powering the online
strategy of organizations across varied industries for more than 19 years. We partner with
our customers to connect them with their audiences wherever they are by seamlessly
integrating digital, e-Commerce and social media assets, accelerating time to market and
increasing the productivity of business users. Our solutions also help transform e-Commerce
stores by infusing visually compelling and immersive content into the online customer
experience, resulting in increased engagement, sales, and loyalty.
Established in 1996, CoreMedia is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with offices in
San Francisco, Washington DC, London and Singapore. CoreMedia’s clients include global
brands, such as Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), BILD, CLAAS, Continental,
Deutsche Telekom, Henkel, Internet Broadcasting, Office Depot and Telefónica Germany.
1 Research study conducted by the Seoul International Color Expo, 2004.
2 http://blogs.forrester.com/harley_manning/14-01-31-customer_experience_predictions_for_2014
3 http://fitafterfifty.com/brain-activity-a-solution-to-the-obesity-epidemic-pt-2/
4 http://www.customcontentcouncil.com/news/content-marketing-–-powerful-local-businesses
5 http://www.contentplus.co.uk/marketing-resources/infographics/anatomy-of-content-marketing/
6http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering_large-scale_it_projects_on_time_on_
budget_and_on_value
7 http://www.havasmedia.com/meaningful-brands
8Peter Sheldon and Stephen Powers. “Content and Commerce: The Odd Couple or The Power Couple.”
November 2013. Forrester Research, Inc.
9 http://www.havasmedia.com/meaningful-brands
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