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John Hall Senior Contributor;
I write about topics that will help companies grow and learn.Follow
Dec 13, 2022,08:00am EDT
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E-commerce has swept the shopping scene. According to Statistica, e-commerce accounted for nearly 20% of retail sales worldwide in 2021. Estimates indicate that by 2025, these online stores will account for almost a quarter of total retail sales worldwide.
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A significant factor in the growth of this online shopping modality was the COVID-19 pandemic. As individuals stayed home to avoid the virus, people turned their attention to online shopping. Census Bureau reported that ‘e-commerce sales increased by $244.2 billion or 43% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, rising from $571.2 billion in 2019 to $815.4 billion in 2020.’
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As the number of e-commerce stores has risen, the need to stand out against competitors has also increased. Considering that the e-commerce experience is virtual, digital marketing strategies are crucial to setting your brand apart from others. Implementing these three essential tactics is the best place to begin.
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1. Personalized Outreach Campaigns
In 2020, CEO and founder Danielle Hixenbaugh started Bloom Digital, a fully remote digital marketing agency, and saw the impact personalized SMS campaigns had on consumers.
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Hixenbaugh says, ‘Since COVID-19, I’ve noticed that significantly more customers are craving an emotional connection to a purchase. Many of these individuals are the ones who will show up on your SMS lists. This is because SMS is intimate. Your SMS list is made up of individuals who really want to hear from you and be informed about upcoming discounts or new products. Use this tool wisely, and speak to your audience as you would speak with a friend.’
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Email campaigns are another personal way to invest in clients, particularly for brands with a smaller marketing budget. While some customers may say they don’t want to be emailed, the data shows otherwise. According to Litmus, the e-commerce industry has the highest ROI for email marketing. For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive $45 in return.
2. Loyalty Programs
A recent survey by CommerceNext, in partnership with CommX, studied 118 digital marketing and e-commerce executives. Results revealed that a top priority of these executives is the creation of loyalty programs that will build more meaningful customer relationships. Over half of the participants indicated that they were planning to expand or launch loyalty programs in 2022.
For brands that want to increase their buyers’ loyalty, Zsuzsa Kecsmar suggests focusing on the emotional aspect of loyalty programs. Kecsmar is the CMO and Co-founder of Antavo, a loyalty technology provider that recently published its 2022 Global Customer Loyalty Report. This study used the survey responses of over 320 global corporate individuals, as well as data from more than 25 million member actions on Antava’s platform, to highlight the importance of emotional appeal in loyalty programs.
‘In an age where customers have access to a huge selection of web shops and retailers, a brand has to catch customers by the heart and not the wallet because discounts are now less effective than rewards that have an emotional component to them,’ says Kecsmar. ‘In our survey, only 20.7% of existing program owners classified their program as more emotional than rational, while 53.6% of companies in the process of launching or relaunching their program specified that their program would be more emotional than rational, signaling that in the future, much more loyalty programs will focus on generating emotional loyalty.’
Kecsmar adds, ‘It’s worth highlighting that emotional loyalty isn’t a zero-sum game. You can still have transactional elements, like coupons and collection in your loyalty program — just remember to add a couple of features and rewards that emphasize emotional attachment.’
3. Optimizing Content for SEO
No matter the size of your company or budget, SEO is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy that allows you to connect with your audience. A website optimized for SEO also serves as a valuable tool for creating brand awareness, boosting engagement, and can lead to additional media placements for your brand.
If you are wondering where to start when it comes to SEO, consider the content you already have. Among marketers, ‘content is king’ is a familiar phrase. Alex Valencia, President and Director of Business Development at We Do Web, even refers to content as the ‘backbone’ of an SEO strategy.
Keep your content quality, relevant, and fresh. These factors are critical because they can affect how Google’s algorithms will rank your webpage. The higher your ranking, the more prospective clients will see your valuable content, and the more they will relate to your brand.
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‘The quality of the content you create and where it surfaces online plays a large part in the success of your larger marketing strategy,’ says Valencia. ‘Each piece of content offers users an opportunity to know your brand, engage with your offer and, hopefully, convert into a paying client or customer. With this in mind, your content should be at the forefront of your marketing plan, not an afterthought. And, in short, a siloed approach ensures your content is on-topic and relevant to the audience you are aiming to reach.’
Implementing these three tactics can help boost your digital marketing efforts, and help you grow your e-commerce business. As traditional marketing shifts, consumers are valuing experiences above all else. Remember to personalize your campaigns, reward current customers with reward programs, and optimize your content for search engines. As customers become aware of your presence and value your customer-driven approach, you’ll see your efforts convert to sales.
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John HallFollow
John Hall is a top motivational speaker and the co-founder of Calendar, a… Read More
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Betting On Technology: How Governments Can Achieve Climate Equity
Beth McGrathBrand Contributor
DeloitteBRANDVOICE| Paid Program
Dec 1, 2022,09:34am EST
Climate change often has a disproportionate impact on communities least equipped to deal with its challenges. From the monsoon-induced floods in Pakistan to the drought in China’s Yangtze River Basin, the impact climate change has on the most vulnerable underscores that not only does action need to be swift—it also needs to be equitable.
At COP27, world leaders reached a significant milestone for climate justice and equity with an agreement to establish a fund to support developing nations already experiencing the impacts of extreme climate events to rebuild and strengthen their communities. As the fund’s committee starts to work on how the fund will take shape, who will contribute to it, and who will benefit – it is important they think first and foremost about how these contributions get to the affected citizens and communities that need it the most.
Supporting an equitable transition to climate-neutral economies—or climate equity—will be key to not only delivering on climate commitments but to ensuring no one is left behind. Governments can do this by drawing on recent advancements in data and technology to identify those most in need of relief and measure the impact of their policies.
Gearing up with data
One of the more disheartening facets of climate impact: economically and socially disadvantaged populations often live in areas most susceptible to extreme weather conditions and have few mobility options. In fact, climate change is expected to push up to 130 million people into poverty over the next 10 years.
But in recent years, as governments have begun to recognize how policies on everything from pollution to infrastructure impact these populations, public investments have started focusing not just on the level of benefit but on who benefits. This requires data. And thanks to the proliferation of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT), large amounts of data are now available to governments. The challenge, then, is to analyze it in ways that bring vulnerable communities to light. For example, mapping tools can help identify communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened when it comes to climate impact.
Although this use of data can help address the lack of climate equity, the status of communities is ever changing given the dynamic nature of climate change. That means that identifying disadvantaged communities will be an ongoing activity—and must draw on new technologies and data sources as they become available.
Engaging for impact
The only way to truly ensure climate equity is through strong engagement with underserved communities. This can improve the design and effectiveness of public programs and foster greater participation from the population. As a starting point, governments can audit their activities for opportunities to improve community engagement. Governments can also require climate change related programs and initiatives to incorporate community engagement in all development and implementation phases.
Simple actions such as making science and data more accessible and usable to underserved communities—who can then use it to build climate resilience—can also be a first step. Other actions include grant programs that can empower disadvantaged communities to develop their own greenhouse gas emission goals and decarbonization initiatives.
New technologies are also offering new ways for communities to provide input and share their concerns and expectations. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and web scraping (the use of bots to extract website content) can increase governments’ ability to collect and analyze data from communities. And social media and crowdsourcing can bring opinions and ideas directly to policymakers, allowing programs to be more participatory and inclusive from the start.
Measuring up
Measuring climate equity will be critical as governments try to find ways to reach disadvantaged communities with their climate action. But measuring this kind of impact can be difficult, as it can take place over extended periods of time and is more of a qualitative versus quantitative exercise.
There is now a wide range of technologies that can help measure the impacts of actions on specific communities, with governments having access to both short- and long-term metrics. But governments should also be open to using both quantitative and qualitative data to monitor progress and representing the lived experience of a community.
Tools such as web-scraping can provide informal data-capture. Sentiment and anecdotal information can be gathered using social media. Artificial intelligence in the form of chatbots can even text community members, surveying them on their reactions to climate change efforts. This is where enhanced engagement comes into play—and policymakers should remember that it’s important to measure what matters to the community.
Embedding action
Climate equity is still gaining traction among policymakers, but technology now provides the tools to help those disadvantaged communities impacted by climate change. Modeling tools can be used to understand how a particular program will play out, building useful, actionable information. And scenario planning can be used to understand how a particular program could potentially change a neighborhood before rolling it out.
Even with the range of technology and data now available, the key is for governments to take action. Only by making use of these tools to embed climate equity into all their climate change efforts will governments begin to ensure disadvantaged populations gain real relief.
To learn more about Deloitte’s Government & Public Services practice, visit our GPS pages on Deloitte.com.
Beth is the Global Sector Leader for the Defense, Security & Justice Sector… Read More
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