E-commerce trends: What is most important for an online store? Part 2

We continue to talk about the challenges and challenges faced by representatives of the e-commerce industry. In the past topic, we discussed the importance of process automation and the availability of well-implemented product recommendations. Today we will talk about not less important things that can play a decisive role for the success of an online store: content and email marketing.

Content Management

E-commerce is evolving and, over time, more and more people prefer to shop online. And if there is a demand, then the supply grows, and more and more goods are sold through the Internet. Today, a large online store - there are thousands of different items of goods, each of which must have a card with a photo, description and other data that will help the visitor to make a purchase decision.

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Content is very important for several reasons: firstly, it is “fuel” that can be used to attract clients in social media and by means of mailings, besides, high-quality content on the site has a good effect on the site’s position in search engines.



But content is difficult no matter how you look. In order to create it you need to try. The cost of the content of online stores is constantly growing. In order to create one commodity item it takes several minutes, and if there are at least several hundred such items, you will have to hire a dedicated content manager to do this work. If he has to start every product from scratch and then drive in all the necessary data, then the speed of work of even the most responsible employee will not be very high.







To optimize the process of creating and modifying content, special content management systems are increasingly being used, which allow to automate the process of creating and uploading such content to the site.



As a rule, these systems work like this - first, the administrator sets the initial settings, then the access is obtained by content managers, who form commodity items using predefined templates. As a rule, such systems (for example, Agora Content ) are able to find errors in the descriptions, which allows to get rid of most of them even at the stage before uploading to the site. After the formation of goods, according to the rules created by the administrator, the content is uploaded to the site - you can choose which product and which category to place. As a result, time and total expenses for creating one product item are significantly reduced.

Mailing Lists

Despite the fact that many people are skeptical of email newsletters, the experience of many ecommerce brands suggests that emails are still one of the most important factors for the success or failure of an online store. According to various studies :

• 80% of people in addition to letters from friends receive marketing messages every day.
• 70% of people use coupons and discounts, which are learned from the mailings.
• 60% of people think that letters with offers and discounts are the main reason why you should subscribe to any newsletters.

In other words, if you do e-commerce and don’t pay attention to email marketing, then you lose money.



In addition, e-mail can provide a wider coverage than the same social networks. If the online store page has tens of thousands of subscribers on Facebook, it still doesn’t say anything, because the social network changes the algorithms, lowering its organic reach, encouraging brands to buy advertising. Now posts from the company’s page are seen on average by about 16% of subscribers. On Twitter, where messages "live" for a few minutes, there is no certainty that someone will see your tweets at all (by the way, this is why Guy Kawasaki always repeats any tweet several times - to reach the maximum audience).



Last year, the Custora survey was published, during which data on 72 million customers who made purchases in 86 different online stores were analyzed. The researchers found that over the past 4 years, the number of customers received by online stores via e-mail has increased 4 times, which is not compared with the indicators of social networks.







There is a huge amount of funds in the world for creating and sending email newsletters: there is the famous Mailchimp, HubSpot releases its software and a well-known company, with which you can not only collect email addresses into mailing lists, but also intelligently segment potential customers according to various criteria. The use of such systems also makes it possible to use the capabilities provided by e-mail more efficiently.



Well, that's all for today! In the following topics we will talk in more detail about such important aspects of e-commerce as design / usability, analytics, preparation for seasonal sales peaks and much more. Thanks for attention!