Webinar preview: trends to help brand stand out in the crowd

Now that the exuberance of the successful holiday season has worn off, for many merchants the reality of 2013 is setting in – and while they have every reason to be optimistic, they also face a fundamental challenge: how to stand out in the crowd.

The online marketplace is increasingly polarized, as the top mega-brands attract the lion’s share of revenues on one end of the spectrum even as the field of small- and mid-sized merchants becomes ever more crowded. While overall U.S. eCommerce sales grew an average of 14% annually from 2007 to 2011, per year for the same time period, according to industry researcher Forrester.  And nearly 78% of the total 2011 revenues reported by Internet Retailer’s Top 500 merchants was generated by the 50 biggest names on the list. With over two million online retailers in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, merchants must differentiate themselves in order to survive, let alone succeed.

The challenge of creating uniquely irresistible appeal will be at the heart of tomorrow’s webinar examining 2013 trends, which will explore three key themes merchants can adapt to their individual businesses to present a relevant combination of products, offers and services across screens and in new formats. Among the topics MarketLive founder Ken Burke will discuss:

Multi-screen shopping becomes the norm. As merchants have deployed mobile offerings, they’ve largely focused on browsing and researching – activities that support eventual offline or computer-based purchases.  After all, , compared with the 96% who’ve researched products and gone on to make purchases offline or on a larger screen, according to research from Google and Ipsos. But the imperative is growing to focus on driving sales directly from mobile offerings. One key reason: the growing audience of than smartphone shoppers, in part due to the larger screen size that makes it easier to view products and complete checkout forms. But even on smartphones, merchants have an opportunity to better drive mobile revenues, whether by smoothing the path to purchase or tightening the mobile/offline connection so that they can better attribute eventual sales to mobile influence.

The end of the product page as we know it. Rather than seeking out static product information sequestered within a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, increasingly consumers can shop from a variety of online settings that are seamlessly permeated with opportunities to browse and buy. This revolution in content and product presentation is an outgrowth of advances in mobile technology that allow device users to search and identify non-textual content – from visual search tools such as Google Goggles, which delivers search results based on images rather than keywords, to Shazam, an app that can identify songs based on an audio snippet.  QR codes that connect consumers to content via scannable codes are also part of the trend; their usage has grown exponentially, with fully one in five U.S. smartphone users scanning a QR code in April of 2012, according to data from comScore. Shoppable videos and artful product-and-text layouts appeal to the same sensibility of being able to “point, know and buy”.

Personalization moves to the next level. Merchants have been making increasingly earnest efforts at personalization, and for good reason: the rewards for tailoring products, content and service are potentially significant. More than one in three consumers say they buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience and 34% say they buy more from retailers who send product recommendations based on past buying and browsing behavior, according to research from personalization firm MyBuys and The E-Tailing Group.  With an ever-expanding array of information available about individual behaviors, and a growing expectation on the part of consumers that products will be relevant to their specific situation, the bar is being raised on personalization. Merchants should now explore ways to incorporate location-based data from mobile devices and personal details gleaned from social networks as way to add further context to the shopping experience. But personalization in 2013 is also about drawing on shoppers’ explicit input and providing individualized services that make every transaction unique.

Sign up now for the webinar to explore these trends in further depth, complete with examples and more data. We look forward to the conversation!