The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a significant shift in the online shopping behaviour of consumers. As more and more of them get well-acquainted with the digital environment, E-commerce businesses are trying to develop fresher strategies to attract, engage, and retain their target audience and give them an immersive online shopping experience. Businesses must adopt these new methods because the said change is expected to last years as the economy continues to recover from the pandemic after-effects.

To give you a headstart, here are five E-commerce tactics for 2021 that you must make use of to ensure quicker checkout rates and drive those big sales numbers.

Retain before acquiring

Having a well-defined customer retention strategy in place holds vital importance for E-commerce businesses. Due to excessive digitalisation throughout the pandemic, the E-commerce sector is getting a lot of new customers. Since consumers are becoming more mobile-friendly, it would be smart to run SMS marketing campaigns. As per a survey, less than 15% of businesses use this method, which is why using this method might give your business an edge over the competition. 

Efforts should be put into introducing a greater variety of customer loyalty and reward programs as this pushes customers to make a higher number of purchases to avail premium benefits and discounts. Further, including a dashboard for customers irrespective of whether they are members of your E-commerce website or not will enable them to track their purchases and give them an incentive to return for repeat purchases. 

Illustrate to demonstrate

Visuals have always been big on grabbing attention, be it through an image, a GIF, or a video. This aspect should be taken full advantage of as it will help generate website traffic and get more leads in the process. Consumers love visual demonstrations as it provides a holistic view of the product or service being offered. UGC or user-generated content should be used more aggressively to increase promotions and boost sales, improving both the brand and the customer journey.

Videos end up having higher ranks on Google, which is why they must be a go-to for marketing a product or a service. Sponsorships gather a higher number of views as well. Businesses should try and tell their brand stories via customer testimonials as their first-hand experience makes the brand sound reliable and trustworthy.

Go all out on holidays

Holiday sales usually garner a lot of success as consumers tend to make more purchases on these days since they can make the time to indulge properly in shopping. This opportunity should definitely be used in the online space to convert these shoppers into loyal customers. Businesses should personalise their websites as much as possible and give lucrative and customised offers on every landing page to drive impulse marketing. 

A separate category should be included for holiday sales, and the website navigation should be made smoother, especially during this time, to ensure that the customers do not get stuck on any page. Focusing on bundling and complementary offers on holidays will make the customers feel like they are getting value for their money which will further help make profits.

FOMO your way into sales

FOMOing is an excellent tactic that businesses can use to ensure faster checkouts and make the consumers feel like they have gotten a fantastic deal. This helps in brand development and also pulls in the crowd by the minute. Businesses can try a few interesting tactics here. They should apply time limits on offers to create a sense of urgency so that the consumers act on it before the offer runs out. 

Missed offers and opportunities should be mentioned at regular intervals during the customer visits to ensure revisits, and this process will also help with cross-sales.  Showing real-time purchases of other customers will help your customers move past their dilemma of buying or not buying a product. This will make the customers trust your brand more and will help in increasing business revenue.

Work up on sales promotion

For customers, discounts, deals, and coupons play a crucial role in their shopping - online or otherwise. Data reveals that around 92% of customers eagerly look forward to promotional deals, and these offers act as critical drivers for bulk purchases. Businesses should try and include customised discount offers in exit-intent pop-ups as this will ensure that consumers do not exit the website. These pop-ups will keep them engaged and also help with sales.

Related Article : In the Cart: The New World of E-Commerce Marketing

To promote healthy sales and maintain SKUs, product-based discounts should be offered at regular intervals. This can be done on the basis of the requirement - whether there is a declining need for a product or the promotion of a new one. Further, value-added discounts like free shipping or an extra gift with the purchase should be given. This comes across as a token of appreciation on the brand’s behalf and helps create a good brand perception.

Changes in the E-commerce market and consumer behaviour are here to stay due to the sheer convenience of getting reasonable offers from the comfort of one’s home. Consumers have begun to understand the advantages of E-commerce, which is why brands should start prioritising their digital experiences. It will ensure that their offerings are the best in the market.

Related Article. : E-commerce Must-Do’s Post Pandemic

The Ecommerce industry is ever-changing, and every year brings in several new trends with itself. However, last year has considerably accelerated the digital transformation process, accompanied by significant online consumer behaviour changes. In the time ahead, we can only expect consumers to engage more and more in online shopping. Hence, businesses must realise that their pre-pandemic E-commerce strategies will not suffice to tackle this new change.

In order to adapt to the new reality, brands will need to develop new online capabilities to win the digital shelf and ensure a positive customer experience, including fulfilment, avoiding out-of-stocks and delivery delays, managing digital advertising, etc. Here are five do's that you can action to grow your E-commerce business and emerge as market leaders.

Revamp Supply chain processes

Supply chains face many challenges like return items, unpredictable demand, small orders, etc. To meet consumers’ rising expectations within a proper time-period, businesses should redefine their supply chain networks to optimise them into lesser, but larger operations. Demand forecasting will find critical use here. A higher number of third-party logistics providers should be brought into the picture to ensure minimum cost and maximum utilisation of stock when it comes to transportation, last-mile delivery, inventory management, and so on. Storage warehouses should be reorganised for optimal product placements, and high-grade analytics should be adopted for greater flexibility and productive online behaviour of the consumers. Alternative solutions like ‘click-and-collect’ can be considered so that consumers have higher autonomy in choosing their way of product-delivery. Constant communication and coordination should be ensured as this will help in making the whole process economically profitable.

Shift retail shelves online

Due to social distancing and home-isolation during the pandemic, consumers could not visit stores physically to buy products, which is why they had to resort to online methods for every requirement of theirs. The online purchase of food and beverages during the time shot up by a whopping 285% and grocery as a category spiked like anything in e-commerce. With this upward trend, businesses should include more categories of products on their online websites, such as - a full assortment of grocery items, long-term shelf-stable products, basic hygiene and medical-scale items, etc.  They should also put a spotlight on their ‘feature’ items and deals to attract a higher number of consumers. Apart from this, the regular brick and mortar stores should have tailored purchase options to address the meteoric rise in online demand.

Ameliorate visibility on social media

Data suggests that one in four purchases are being made via social media platforms, and about 17% of consumers prefer social apps for shopping. The reign of influencers was quite a rage during the pandemic as well, which automatically makes influencer marketing an important strategy. Businesses should collaborate with social media influencers, and focus on having a strong presence across every possible social media platform to create brand awareness, have a greater reach and boost sales figures. As per a survey, 74% of consumers visit social media pages before going ahead with a purchase decision, and 82% of consumers say they get information about products or brands mostly through social media marketing. Since social media engages consumers effortlessly, businesses should ensure their visibility in that space.

Adopt immersive and connected ads

There will be tough competitions between brands when it comes to digital advertising. Everything will depend on how one’s approach is better than the other and how widespread these approaches are.  Businesses should take advantage of listing their products on Google shopping for free as it will help them directly redirect consumers to their websites. Strong emphasis should be put on email reminders, subscriptions, coupons, etc. Businesses should also diversify their advertising channels to reach potential consumers in every corner of the world. They should further make more use of 3D and CGI in their advertisements to increase click-through rates (CTR) and drive website traffic. 

Improve digital payment trends

Research data tells us that consumers make around 10-30% of purchases on an average in the online domain. Though the digital payment trend was being led by the millennials and the Gen Z, the pandemic cornered other consumers into adopting these digital techniques. It is anticipated that shoppers aged 45 and above will switch to online purchasing trends, thereby creating a brand new segment of e-commerce users. To make this switch even more convenient, businesses should try and incorporate more online payment methods like NFC (Near Field Communication) and EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) for contactless payments. They should also tap into ‘Buy now, pay later’ apps as these methods are set to gain more prominence in the coming years. LazyPay and Simpl are some excellent examples. Other options like BOPIS (Buy online Pick-up in-store) should also be considered.

Needless to say, the above-mentioned strategies will surely help businesses to go that extra mile and deliver better and wholesome experiences to their consumers. Implementing them will ensure that your methods are streamlined and structured, and as long as you are up to speed with the consumers’ changing requirements, you will definitely have a long-lasting impact on them.

Related Article : In the Cart: The New World of E-Commerce Marketing

AR will drive check-out rates

AI will improve B2C conversions

Voice-search will boost SERPs

Personalisation to reorient PPC rates

Omnichannel Shopping will increase gateways

Grow with New-Age Intelligence

Dive into Augmented Reality

Optimise with Position ‘Zero’

Amplify with video marketing

Connect via Micro-Moments

Growing necessity of Omnichannel platforms

Increasing popularity of Programmatic TV

OTT will be in-trend

Virtual Events will become more frequent

Interactive Content will be the new normal

Increase in authenticity of ‘no-edit edits’

Higher worth of value-driven content

Growth and Expansion of partnerships

Seamless integration of platforms for shareability

An upsurge in micro and nano influencers

The rise of Virtual Influencers

The upcoming era of blockchain marketing

Instagram lite to take over regional marketing

The makeover of branded content ads

Multi-touch attribution model with data

AI will induce hyper personalisation

Online shoppers will adopt voice-based search

Interactive ads will take over static ads

AR & VR will have new Avatars

Employees as the brand’s spokesperson

The Coronavirus pandemic has furthered digital marketing by a considerable margin in the past few months. Not like it wasn’t popular before, but now, it is possibly one of the go-to methods that people are using to get their brands across to people. The new normal has definitely changed the way businesses function, and with employees working remotely, everybody is putting in constant efforts to adopt new ways and techniques, so that their organisations function as smoothly as they would, prior to the pandemic. Since work from home is expected to be a key takeaway from the year 2020, businesses are gearing up to target, engage, and retain their customers apart from also generating new leads - all this in the light of the fact that almost everybody has had to do away with the traditional methods of marketing. Even digital marketing for that matter has changed and continues to evolve. People today are buying all sorts of things online - medicines, clothes, sanitisers, food, etc. With the changing consumer behaviour, digital marketing is also changing to adapt. Therefore, to continue making those bucks, here are some interesting digital marketing trends that will take over in the year, 2021:

Power of voice-search

Using the voice-search based method, people can talk to their devices, ask questions, seek information, and do a variety of other things that does not require the traditional text-based or typing-based search. Google, Alexa, and Siri are famous and common examples of voice assistants that people know of today. They are rather fascinating and convenient to use as well.  Conversational interfaces are expected to take over and this might make CaaP (Conversations as a Platform) an actual thing. NLP or Natural processing Language will start trending soon, owing to its intuitiveness and personal touch. Further, it is quicker, and it replaces typing and keyboards.

Learn more - How Voice Search Will Change The Future Of SEO

Tell a story with a video

The attention span of people in general has become quite small. They want content that holds their chin in place but also does not drag on for too long. Videos are a good way to achieve both. They are very commonly used  for marketing and advertising purposes as well, but the main challenge is to make it full of content and information, yet condense it. Due to the pandemic, the trend that has set in is that, videos and ads have left the television space, and are moving on to computers, tablets, smartphones, Youtube, Social media handles, etc. - so we can expect to see a lot more of virtual reality, animation, live videos, 360-degree videos, and so on, in 2021.  As the world advances, people are becoming more and more tech-savvy, and they are on some device or the other, trying to catch up. These new methods will keep them further hooked.

Checkout 15 Smart Ways to Promote Your YouTube Videos

Influencer Marketing Revamped

The switch from offline to online will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. Though brands and businesses continue to find and apply new digital marketing strategies, adapt to new trends, and get their message across, loud and clear, they still want to organically connect to their audience. This is possible through influencer marketing, and brands will start giving that importance to this concept and use the influencer community to get their products  and brand message across to the unreachable segments. A healthy relationship between brand marketing, product marketing, and influencer marketing is expected to take over.

People believe more when they see and hear someone speak - visual and vocal reassurance is very personal and impactful, therefore, much more engaging.

Pocket your local audience with SEO

Increasing the search visibility for local businesses is definitely the in-thing these days, and it will start booming in no time. Hypertargeting allows for bringing in customers from communities or areas that are geographically restricted. By ranking higher on local searches, visibility is improved, plus credibility also increases. People are always looking for quick fixes. If something is not available at the nearest store, it is preferable to walk down to the next nearest. Hypertargeting allows people to do exactly that. It is time-saving from the customer’s perspective, and from the business’s perspective, it is beneficial because the online presence fetches them the required attention and audience.

Growth of in-game advertising

With people staying in, e-watching of sports has become even more common, and consequently, this has led to a spike in in-game advertising. Apparently, Gen Z indulges in a lot of esports, and because of the lockdown, others too are doing the same. The lockdown has contributed heavily to a rise in smartphone gaming. Mobile gamers ( around 57 percent) are okay with in-game advertising as long as they are allowed to play the games free of cost. Television is going down and online streaming is becoming more popular than ever. This exponential increase in the number of viewers has led to a healthy bond between gaming and advertising, and this is allowing brands to interact with the audience successfully.

It is interesting to note that all these trends have been fairly around for sometime now, dilly-dallying between becoming ‘generally known’ or ‘popularly used.’ The pandemic has helped with that super-nudge, thereby making these more popular than before, and also putting them on the path to becoming extremely popular. Had this been a choice, maybe the growth would have been a little slower; but with social distancing and lockdown, digitalisation is the need of the hour. Everything is happening online and therefore, people must know how to navigate through this world of digitalisation. The sooner, the better.

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Content creation and content sharing are widespread today. Everybody likes making their feed attractive and despite so many applications that are already present in the market, people are constantly looking for newer methods and ways to make their feed stand out in comparison to others. To keep up with these requirements several platforms have come into play to be able to reach out to specific audiences. These apps and platforms have also incorporated certain "desi" factors like Shayari, film dialogues, quotes, music, regional music, etc. Furthermore, the most essential point that has struck a chord with the people of India and certain brands is the use of regional languages. Accessibility is there, but reaching out becomes much more comfortable when one can understand what is being said and done. Below are five Indian apps that have carved out a position for themselves in the market:

ShareChat

Founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, ShareChat is a popular social media platform with around fifteen languages and over a hundred and sixty million users on a monthly basis. It was developed by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. This is a language first app that was launched initially for the purpose of content creation only, but with regular updates like private messaging, talking in one's own dialect, tagging, and Shake-N-chat, it now has many additional features catering to the requirements of the people. It has helped brands to tap into language-based advertising, and over the past couple of months, it has worked with over 25 brands like Facebook, Coca-Cola, Airtel, Pepsi, etc.

This app has more than 100 million downloads and over two million reviews on play store, apart from having an audience in more than 800 cities across the country. Its value stands at 600 million dollars. A person spends 23 minutes on this app on average.

Chingari

Founded by Sumit Ghosh, Biswatma Nayak, and Deepak Salvi, this application is an Indian video sharing service wherein people interact by sharing videos in more than 14 regional dialects. Based on how much traction a post receives, how viral it becomes, and the number of points scored, the content creators receive payments. ALTBalaji also came into a partnership with this firm to help this app gain the much needed outreach and attention. This app has also been rated as one of the best apps in Google Play Store, in 2020. It also supports the 'Make in India' program.

Chingari has literally lit a fire across the nation. It has more than 10 million downloads and over 201 thousand reviews on the play store. The likes and clicks on this platform shot up by 400 percent and 500 percent respectively within just a week's time.

Roposo

This app is owned by Glance Digital Experience Pvt. Ltd. It was released six years ago and primarily catered to a crowd between the ages of 15-35. People on this platform can share videos and pictures related to food, comedy, themselves, fashion, travel, and so on. Options are endless. One smart move by Roposo was to divide the entertainment section into categories wherein the users could pick and choose the kind of content they wanted to engage in. There is an array of filters to choose from for pictures, plus several options for videos like time-lapse, slow-mo, and so on. Roposo maintained a 'TV for the people' concept for users to switch through channels easily.

As of now, it has over 100 million downloads, one million reviews, and a user base of over 22 million people. Daily uploads happen at the rate of 2.5 lakhs, and video views cross 160 million on a regular basis. 

MX Takatak

MX takatak is a short video community app that has garnered much attention from the Indians and has resulted in a massive video community. This app too comes with the option of choosing a language (it has about 10 languages). It has more than 10 million active users daily, and almost every Indian spends at least 20 minutes on an average using this app. Videos have options ranging from dubbing, to comedy, to gaming, sports, food, memes, and much more. People love this app because it smartly caters to everyone's requirements - influencers, infrequent users, daily users, and so on. Further, this app includes options like Beauty Cam, Video Editor, Photo Editor, and Music Library.

This app has more than 50 million downloads and over 280 thousand reviews, around 600 influencers and well-known content creators, and more than 45 million active monthly users. It sure is a big hit in India.

Mitron

This is another Indian app, and this platform allows users to connect with each other and share content to showcase their talents and become the next 'Desh ka star.' This again is a social video community app that gives options of lip-syncing videos, dubbing videos, sing-alongs, funny dialogues, etc. It has 11 languages to choose from for the sake of convenience and has around 24 million hourly video views.

Apart from having a seed funding of Rs 20 million, it has more than 10 million downloads and 389 thousand reviews on play store. To date, the app has been downloaded more than 17 million times.

Many people around the world are developing apps for content creators and bringing in new ideas onto the plate to stay ahead of the competition. Creativity and imagination have no boundaries, and neither should the platforms that get to display them. Furthermore, these platforms can be used effectively by brands to reach out to their target audiences and run successful campaigns. That way, the methods will not remain restricted to just videos or content sharing but much more. High engagement will only ensure a bigger base and consequent success!

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