eCommerce + WCMS = CXM. How Savvy Businesses Are
Transforming Their Business From Selling Products In An
Online Brochure To Assisting Customers Across A Buyer’s
Journey
Colofon
Author: Robert Rose
Get in touch with Hippo: info@onehippo.com North America: +1 877 414 47 76 (toll free) Europe: +31 20 522 44 66
CMS -A Critical Solution For
Today’s Ecommerce
almost 20% of companies will increase technology spending by at least 20%.
And this investment is justified. The market is growing fast. Sometime in 2013 global B2C eCommerce will surpass the 1 trillion euro mark. And while the US remains the world’s largest e-commerce market, the rest of the world is catching up quickly with even faster growth rates than those in the states.
Of course these trends coincide with the growth of customer engagement more broadly. Every business these days is faced with the challenge of multi-channel engagement. Whether it’s a Web site, mobile smartphone, tablet, social or even kiosk interfaces – today every business is in the digital content business. And content and, more importantly how businesses are managing it, is a critical component in creating impactful customer experiences.
eCommerce software solutions, historically, support the consumer’s transaction. They facilitate the mechanics of the buying experience. They handle catalog display, logistics, discounts, shipping, pricing management, payment, taxes etc.. Conversely, the Web content management solutions have evolved into creating and facilitating the customer’s buying journey to get them TO that transaction. The WCMS facilitates SEO, improvements in content targeting, multi-lingual capabilities, multichannel content optimization (mobile, social etc..) and the personalization for delivery of relevant experiences.
At Hippo, we’ve seen extraordinary growth in the marriage of eCommerce and Web Content Management. One of the primary challenges of today’s eCommerce sites are that many are treated as a collection of store “pages” rather than as a collection of potential buying journeys. Many eCommerce sites are just static catalogs or ebrochures not “shopping assistants”.
This marriage between the eCommerce and Content Management is especially important for those
such as B2B manufacturerers, pharma and cosmetics organizations. The primary objective of these sites is engaging the audience through value added content. eCommerce, whilst important, remains a secondary goal. We are not talking about the beautician around the corner, but a globally operating organizations often with multiple brands that have complex content requirements but straight-forward eCommerce needs.
The true differentiation for tomorrow’s eCommerce is when you marry the best of both of these worlds – and at Hippo we’ve come to closely partner with some of the largest eCommerce platforms in order to deliver truly optimized eCommerce experiences.
The eCommerce customers asking for CMS, are looking to produce a modern, dynamic engagement that gives them the ability to manage the overall digital experience. They want to be able to change content, layout and personalization rules without a programmer. The goal is to seamless merge the CMS and eCommerce software.
The Need for CXM In
Commerce
Even as consumers who were once cautious about purchasing something online, start to increase their spending – the competition for that buyer’s attention is rising just as quickly. Whether it’s competition across mobile, social or even traditional Website, today’s eCommerce provider must be faster, more flexible and more relevant than ever before.
Put simply – creating a multi-channel and relevant eCommerce strategy is now truly about creating a multichannel and relevant content and marketing strategy. It’s simple – in today’s world you can’t afford to ignore the customer experience trend.
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This white paper will outline the top 6 trends that we see in how smart Ecommerce solutions are starting to utilize smart content management solutions in order to optimize sales and drive customer retention and upsell.
1 Driving Traffic Through
SEO And Creating Trusted
Experiences
There’s no doubt that the challenge for most ecommerce stores is creating a trusted, recognized brand that people will shop in. The first problem is, of course, having the customer find the store – and then establishing trust so that they will actually purchase something.
Driving traffic – and specifically relevant traffic – has become increasingly important for online catalogs. And, further, once they have received a visitor – the online store must produce enough content to create a valuable and trusted source so that the shopper will feel comfortable. Let’s look at each:
• SEO. Of course all web site owners are concerned with SEO, but for ecommerce SEO is critical. This is where a great Web Content Management Solution should provide functionality as part of a search optimized content strategy. So much has been made of the technical aspects of SEO (meta tags, HTML, etc..). But with the recent changes in Google’s algorithms and the increasing importance of Social Media, SEO has become primarily about the practice of improving the quality and “shareability” of your content. Said more simply – Search Engine Optimization is two things: one, making your web site more friendly for Search Engines to find and index content. And two – producing quality content that encourages people to share and link to it on other highly ranked web sites - thereby improving your “importance” or relevance in search queries performed on search engines. We’d certainly encourage you to download our white paper: Best Practices For Search Optimisation On The Web
• Compelling, Trustworthy Content. Digital experiences must be more personal once you’ve actually attracted a customer to your site. As our CEO Jeroen Verberg wrote on CMSWire:
“The real shift of Web content and consumer expectations is not in delivering a solution that helps a client DELIVER a web experience — but rather one that helps their audiences CONSUME an experience of their own making.
”This is the way that Web Engagement Management that optimizes Ecommerce will truly be successful. It’s not only in helping build a more efficient way to manage content that might be personalized based on user’s PAST experience with the store – but a true integration of data to automatically optimized content in real-time.
If visitors click on a “link” on any of your online store channels – a true web engagement management platform will use information obtained in real-time to optimize what the visitor sees. Information from their social graph (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google) and from their device (e.g. mobile or desktop) and their location, their behavior and of course what the store KNOWS about that user will be used to make their experience more enriched and relevant. And, the system should learn, every day, and continually provide better results as it both provides an automated set of experiences – and data insight to the managers to create different content.
2 Workflow & More
Sophisticated MultiChannel
Content Management
Certainly managing content isn’t a new requirement for Ecommerce systems. In fact, many Ecommerce software systems rival some WCMS systems in their ability to produce normalized content to different channels.
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for managing content channels. Nor are they built to optimize digital consumer experiences. As the Forrester Wave report pointed out:
This is where adding a capable WCM that can drive these optimized, multi-channel experiences is critical. Savvy Ecommerce businesses are starting to think about content workflow, user management across different locations, link management, A/B testing and more flexible management of digital content experiences across every content channel. These requirements in turn require a much more integrated solution of both Ecommerce and WCM/CXM capabilities.
3 Optimizing Conversions by
creating an optimal Customer
Journey
There was a recent study that looked at 60 retailers during the holiday season. As it turns out almost 80% of customers leave items in their cart without ever purchasing them.i
Now, of course, some of these are buyers that are making “wish lists” or they may be holding out for discounts to come online. In either way – the ecommerce manager’s job is to optimize these shopping carts and get these shoppers to convert into buyers.
News reported – almost 85% of ecommerce providers fail to understand and follow up with items in the shopping cart.
The ecommerce manager may deal with this in various ways – and email is certainly one way. But increasingly – the ability to serve up personalized, direct and targeted content across ANY channel is the key to delivering that message successfully.
This is where a “CXM” Web content management solution can become a holistic solution for targeting this content. “Customer Experience Management” is the truly the next stage of delivering a truly relevant, personalized approach to content across ANY channel. This is both channel awareness, as well as location, time, behavioral and other personalization based on real-time analysis of the consumer of the content. The content (where applicable) can be dynamically changed to be optimal for the channel it’s being displayed within (e.g. automatically sensing the TYPE of mobile device).
It’s based on two different types of attributes:
1. Explicit Attributes: pieces of data that the visitor has explicitly provided and that the system can use to make the content more relevant in real-time. This may be (most obviously) that the shopper still has items in their shopping cart – but it could also be whether they are shopping for a gift, or waiting for a discount, or a particular answer to a poll question. 2. Implicit Attributes: these are pieces of data that the system can automatically derive from the visitor and use to create a more contextual experience. This might be time of day, or behavior on the site (if they choose “recipes” and “cookware” products for example the store can content related content to cooking”). Or, it can even be simple attributes such as what device they are using, or a geo-located lookup for language presentation.
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“the desire for greater control over the customer experiences – is a common reason why businesses are looking to migrate from homegrown solutions or their existing first - or second-generation commerce
solution.”Forrester Wave B2C
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The key is that the system assimilates all of this data and both reports on it – providing insight into what “patterns” are being generates – as well as delivering more relevant, personalized content based upon it.
4 Think about your content,
not about pages
Stores that have quite a few products and categories can truly benefit by making the products as easy – and as quickly - to find as possible.
This is truly where a capable WCMS that can deliver content in optimized ways can really enhance the Ecommerce experience.
Many stores start out designing their site thinking they know the personas they want to serve – and they assume they know how each of their personas will navigate their product catalog. This almost always ends up in a sub-optimal site experience for some. This is the page oriented view of Web sites – instead of the Content As A Service type of idea of today’s CXM oriented platforms. Ecommerce Marketers will do better by watching the natural patterns that start to develop as they roll out different web content platforms – and then use that insight to develop different content strategies. Instead of forcing users into an assumed hierarchy of content – smart marketers that are using sophisticated CMS systems use faceted navigation to have their content dynamically assume a hierarchy as the content is consumed. In this way – each shopper determines their own journey – and there are innumerable ways that they can provide a customized journey to an “end point”
5 Selling Internationally
As the world becomes a smaller place, ecommerce stores are finding that there are vast new customers waiting for them overseas. As stated before in the introduction, depending on which country you are selling in – another nearby country may be growing at a much faster rate. Getting a competitive advantage early in developing
But of course operating an international site brings its own set of challenges. We won’t go into the different laws, shipping and currency issues that you will want to explore – but from a content perspective, you should make sure that your WCMS can handle delivery of content across any language – and make it as easy as possible to set up a new international channel for your products.
Smart marketing organizations will deploy web content management technology that focuses on global brand management – with the ability to manage localized content at a “channel” level. Many Web content management vendors have moved to being focused on “web experience management”.But, marketers should look beyond this acronym and sets of features to ensure that specific content management features exist. Some of these include:
• Channeling Content – including the ability to simultaneously manage global catalogs (especially which products are available where) as separate channels – including the URL’s, workflow and other collaborative management features. Each channel should be able to be inclusive (managed as a portfolio of content and products) or exclusive (managed as a completely separate entity). Your global marketing strategy will rarely be homogenous – and so therefore your CMS Should not be either.
• CMS Interface in Multiple Languages – A good CMS will be available in multiple languages as well as produce and manage those languages. Your localization managers may be located in offices in the country of origin – and their experience should be in the language of choice.
• Personalization – As we discussed earlier in this paper, being able to automatically direct content by language and to target more relevant messages is important in being able to optimize the experience for users.
For example, giving the user in the US the ability to surf the website in another language – and then “remembering” that choice for subsequent visits.
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is facilitating a great process. And, that is also a critical factor. The opportunity for ecommerce marketers is to deploy a global marketing and local management process for managing digital experiences. But critical to that is having a technology that can grow and scale as marketer’s process does the same.6. Multi-Channel Touch
Points for Commerce
Strategy
As the Forrester Wave report pointed out one of the areas they expect to increase markedly in sophisticated Ecommerce systems are:
“Front-end capabilities such as multichannel/ multitouchpoint site management capabilities, mobile commerce, and in-store and call center solutions.” i Mobile commerce is becoming a huge new avenue for ecommerce marketers. As Forrester said in their recent report on Mobile Commerce:
“the rapid adoption of smartphones and mobile internet usage is changing the way consumers shop. Mobile is poised for exponential growth… Mobile retail and travel spending grew by 80% in 2011 and was expected to double by the end of 2012”.
And in terms of Social – while it is still nascent it too is growing in large ways. The new idea of “social commerce” which is a “subset of ecommerce that involves using social media to support social interaction” is growing very very quickly.
Establishing a centralized way to manage product offers, catalogs and all manner of personalized content across social networks like Facebook is essential for ecommerce stores.
Marketing strategy – make sure that you can actually deploy a Mobile Content Management strategy. Most of the WCMS and ecommerce solution vendors today will claim the ability to deliver content to multiple channels. This, of course, includes mobile content delivery. But making sure that your content is separated from the presentation is critical. And, additionally, making sure that you can easily ADD mobile channels to your strategy is also a very important part. In other words – if it’s extremely difficult to set up a new mobile channel for your Web content – you may not actually do it.
Finally, savvy Ecommerce businesses are deploying integrated WCM’s that can also MANAGE content via a mobile device. More and more – just like your audiences – you will begin to access the Web from your phone and from tablets. So, a solution that can help you manage content from that device will become increasingly important.
For example, Hippo empowers business users to create new channels without technical knowledge and manage layout and site structure, including roll out to multi-lingual, or specific device-centric channels, including responsive design and HTML5 capabilities.
The Bottom Line
Ecommerce providers are getting smarter and smarter, and so the competition is getting harder and harder. Once dependent on just simple Web analytics and trial and error, today’s holistic content and ecommerce solutions now provide marketers with real-time and sometimes predictive analytics about shopper behavior. This gives the savvy ecommerce provider the ability to optimize content and ultimately optimize sales.
And, as such, you need to be much more nimble and agile with content. Your choice of a tool to engage your customers and helping them to select your products is a hugely important part of becoming a trusted provider for them and ultimately in your ability to remain successful.
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Done correctly, selecting a good CMS for ecommerce is a balanced approach between marketing, technology (IT), the executive team, content creators and – yes – even content consumers. Whether your business goals are to create more revenue, more efficient shopping cart behavior, lower customer service costs – or just create a more fluid method of managing content – understanding your process first and then selecting the tool that will help you facilitate it, is what’s important.
At Hippo, we are constantly focused on not only how to create better experiences for audiences – but how to create better experiences for authors, editors, system administrators and developers as well. We know that customers now expect to be able to engage with your company at EVERY stage in their buying process. And, by making it easier and more relevant on both sides – we believe that a WCMS can enable teams to create digital
miracles.
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Recources:
• The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites Q3 2012
• Internet Retailer 2012 Global Ecommerce Sales
• Best Practices For Search Optimisation On The Web – Hippo Whitepaper
• Context Aware Content Management – The Most Important Pivot In CEM
• The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites Q3 2012
• Powerbiz Study On Shopping Cart Abandonment
• The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites Q3 2012
• Mobile Commerce Is Poised For Rapid Growth – Forrester Blogs
At Hippo, we believe, digital is here to make our lives a little bit better.
Hippo sets the standard for how organizations can bring real-time relevance to their audience and is the foundation for personalized communication across all channels: mobile, social and web. Our purpose is to facilitate innovation so our customers can create digital miracles. We serve our customers, by creating a platform that is fun to use, easy to implement and open for innovation. Hippo CMS is a powerful, enterprise-class foundation to deliver outstanding Customer Experiences based on Enterprise Agility and Innovation Power.
Hippo CMS is open source, 100% Java and convinces with its lean product architecture that is built for uptime, security and performance.
Our dedicated, Certified Partner Network delivers Hippo Awesomeness around the globe to our valued customers. Hippo is proud to serve organizations such as Disney, British Telecom, Dolce & Gabbana, Max Bahr, the Dutch Police, Thomson Reuters and Crédit Agricole.
Hippo is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Boston, USA.
Curious for more? Visit www.onehippo.com
