Which ecommerce marketing trends have you been considering this year? As we get settled into 2018, many e-tailers are starting to look at ways to ramp up their results. If you have been trying to increase your conversion rates, you may be tempted to try one of the many trends that seem to come and go each year.
Ecommerce Marketing Trends to Watch This Year
Although some trends can be very useful for your results, other less effective ecommerce trends can end up doing more harm than good.
To help you get on track, we have put together a list of the ecommerce trends shaping 2018, including the good, the bad and the ugly.
Love them or leave them, the following ecommerce marketing trends have all had their moment in the first part of the year.
The good…
Cross channel marketing and other integrated strategies are definitely one of the best trends to focus on this year if you want to see holistic, steady results. With the constant changes in algorithm across social media channels and search engines, an integrated approach is the most effective way to ensure that all your eggs are not in one proverbial basket. To make this work, aim to integrate the channels that drive the strongest conversion month to month. This will help you cut through the clutter without wasting time on underperforming channels.
The bad…
Engagement baiting is a social media trend that is not going away, regardless of Facebook’s new measures to clean up news feeds. The danger with this sort of approach is that it does not promote genuine engagement. Instead, it increases the risk of meaningless likes, comments or shared to audiences that are not in your target market. True engagement should always be driven by conversion. There is a huge leap between posts that get plenty of likes, shares and comments and those that result in actual clicks or purchases.
The ugly…
As much as marketing automation and CRM have helped simplify ecommerce marketing, over-automating is never a good idea. One of the worst ways to lose followers is heavily automated messages that are not targeted, personalised or adapted to suit the channel. Generic email blasts, mass mobile blasts, cookie-cutter social media posts shared across all channels and other template-style content has no place in 2018.
Ultimately, what is far more useful than blindly following ecommerce marketing trends is to develop a strategy that is just right for you and your needs.