The future of optimisation: getting personal

In this article we’ll share with you some of the top tactics that will help you stay ahead of the pack when it comes to visitors, conversions and sales. 

By Suzie Larcombe

The key for the future of optimisation is getting even closer to your site visitors by getting even more personal with them.  Here’s what you need to be thinking about:

1.    Getting the most from every visitor.
2.    The development of a re-marketing strategy.
3.    Letting the consumer choose their platform.
4.    Embracing mobile commerce.
5.    Growth.
6.    Constantly developing your product displays.

Squeezing the max from every visitor

Getting a visitor to your site is tough.  Ask any start-up and they’ll tell you just how tough.  That’s why, once you have a steady flow of visitors you need to do all you can to get the most you can from each and every one. This is the future of ecommerce optimisation and works in several ways.

For example, you can make sure you convert doubters by introducing a human element to your (largely) hands-off sales process; you can personalise the whole buyer experience to convince the customer that he (or she) is King; or you can reward people for their loyalty in an attempt to make your long-term return on investment even greater.

The technology you need to achieve each of these goals is still in its relative infancy, but already allows you to really get to know your customer and means you can start to target them with offers that’ll have them thinking your psychic.

Add to that, making your whole online experience feel more offline and touchy-feely, by adding effective and hassle-free human elements are being tipped as one of the major steps forward in the ecommerce optimisation revolution to get the max from every visitor.

Using re-marketing in conjunction with traditional marketing

Re-marketing is all about using information you’ve gathered about your site visitors to target them with ads as they browse the web away from your site.

This type of marketing is a much warmer way of staying close to those people who visited your site but didn’t buy (yet).  Re-marketing helps keep your name at the forefront of your potential buyers’ minds while they are contemplating a purchase.

By combining re-marketing with traditional online marketing, you can already achieve an impressive return on investment, but this style of marketing is again still in its infancy.

Expect it to grow significantly and appeal to a broader ecommerce market in the near future, so make it a priority to get familiar with it.

Streamlining your buyer experience

There’s no getting away from the fact that buyers are moving more and more towards using their mobile phones to do pretty much everything for them.

Everything from running their social media accounts to making purchases is going mobile.  As this technology develops, buyers will be expecting to see the same quality and attention to detail on their mobile phone as they see on the high street when they interact with their favourite brands.

This expectation poses it’s own challenges and already ecommerce sellers are battling with the decision between an app, a mobile website or a fully responsive site as the way to go.

There’s no getting away from the fact that each of these options have their pros and cons, but if you’re serious about growing your ecommerce reach and increasing sales, you need to be making the right decisions, right now.

Going mobile

As we’ve said, going mobile soon won’t be an option; it’ll be an essential part of your future ecommerce success.

Deciding which way to go in the short term will depend on the size of your business; your budget and your goals, but long term, the future is definitely a seamless, fully responsive site that works across giant televisions and hand-held devices equally efficiently and effectively to engage with and convert buyers.

Expect the developments on this front to be fast and furious over the next few months and years and make a point of staying up to date.

In the future, think big

Big players are predicted to become the main feature of ecommerce in the future.  Reaching out to the broadest market possible is the key to gaining market share and achieving the economies of scale needed to really maximise profitability.

But with this come the logistical issues of stock control and order processing as well as the development of a slick returns procedure.

These, as well as reaching out are going to be a challenge for some of the smaller ecommerce players and investing now in back-end technology and systems is a must to stay ahead of the game down the line.

An evolving product display

As time moves on, you should expect product displays to become more and more intuitive and interactive, with a shift from static photos to videos where the site visitor is much more implied in the demonstration of the product.

Once again this will pose its challenges to smaller players, so look to the future right now and start to plan how you’ll achieve these images.