You might be surprised to know that online shopping, known to us now as e-commerce, first emerged at the tail end of the 1970s when inventor Michael Aldrich produced the first known electronic transaction system—a connection between an everyday television and a processing computer. Aldrich went on to develop more sophisticated tools for electronic transactions throughout the 1980s, which began to be adopted by large companies in the United Kingdom. Then in 1991, when Tim Berners Lee made his brainchild, the World Wide Web, available for public and commercial use, the electronic shopping systems that are ubiquitous today—including the shopping cart—began to take shape. IBM, e-Bay, and Amazon were some of the earliest to adopt and turn the technology into their core way of doing business. In the 25 years since then, the basic visual nature of the online shopping experience hasn’t changed much. But with mobile shopping firmly on scene and here to stay, digital storefronts and shopping carts seem to be undergoing a makeover. Here’s what some experts think you can expect to see for e-commerce in 2016: Increasingly standardized layouts This has been a trend in web design in general over the last couple of years, as developers and marketing departments are finding that standardizing their web sites translates into longer visit times and higher conversions. Users like to be comfortable and feel like they’re in familiar territory when they’re shopping. Get too out-of-the-box with your searches, CTAs, shopping carts, or other components of your pipeline and you create friction that can result in a dropped sale. That epiphany has led to standardizing of everything from menu delivery, button placement and design, and overall layouts— saving unique and creative ideas for the marketing campaign. Card-style product views You may have seen these popping up on retail web sites in recent months. Products are displayed in a self-contained, bite-sized card (also called tiles) that contains an image, a short description, the price, and, usually, links to share it on social media. Think: Pinterest. This presentation allows sellers to provide users with an at-a-glance view of the product that’s easy to compare with similar products in a way that’s visually rich but not overwhelming. Examples: https://www.behance.net https://canopy.co Flat, minimal, and vibrant Gone are the days of stylized, three-dimensional, deeply-shadowed objects layered throughout a single web page. We’ve been moving toward flatter design for many years, but the last two have seen a proliferation of these ultra-flat, minimal, image-driven e-commerce website designs. To offset that minimalism, designers are turning to bolder, chunkier typography and exceptional colorful (and sometimes unusual) tones.
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We understand. When your web developer revealed your new website in 2004, it was love at first site. Your employees were excited, your clients were excited, business boomed, and you still look at it with affection every time you pull it up in the morning. It’s a beautiful but is also a slow website. Unfortunately, if it takes more than three seconds to fully load, and many websites with outmoded technology or development standards even just a few years old do, it’s costing you money. Consumers have become conditioned to hyper-fast load times, and are increasingly unwilling to wait more than a few seconds for websites that don’t provide them—an allowance that would have seemed ridiculous ten years ago. But today, 40% of web users say they’ll abandon a website if loading takes more than three seconds. Even more startling: Studies show that a delay of just one second on an e-commerce web site can reduce sales conversion rates by up to 7%. If your web site earns $25,000 per day, that’s a loss of $625,000 every year. Kissmetrics has a rundown of surprising stats on how un-optimized web page load time can effect your business. And isn’t just consumers giving your slow website the snub. Google, in service to demanding consumers, penalizes slow web sites in search rankings. Google’s model revolves around providing useful and easily-accessible information for its users. A slow-loading web site isn’t easily-accessible, and as such, isn’t considered useful. That means all the hard work you’ve put into boosting your SEO rankings could be deeply undermined by even a few seconds of delayed load time. A comprehensive web site with load times that meet modern standards should be at the top of your Internet marketing checklist. You can check your website’s page load times at Pingdom. Not cutting it at the three-second mark? Try these three adjustments to help bring those wait times down and get more visitors to stick around: 1. Optimize your images and videos. These are often the biggest culprit in older web sites. Most photo- and video-editing software has a “save for web," "quick export" or similar options that helps keep file size down. 2. Keep your script and CSS files compressed into a single file. If your Javascript is spread across several files that have to load every time a visitor refreshes your page, or clicks on another page in your website, your load times can plummet while the browser renders all of them. 3. Make smart use of caching. Caching allows the browser to keep certain elements of your website pre-loaded, so that when a visitor loads your page multiple times over a given timeframe, it doesn’t have the render the whole page from scratch each time. If after implementing those changes, your website is still loading too slowly, it’s time for a major tune-up.
Short of Apple and American politics, I can’t think of an industry more consistently skilled at building and riling up a fierce, loyal fan base than sports. Games are exciting by nature, but great sports marketers are experts at capitalizing on that foundation. They know how to make full use of tools like brand strategy, social media, and email and internet marketing, even internal marketing, to make everything about their game, their players, their ticket sales. But those sales boosting strategies aren’t unique to sports, and any business willing to invest in the value of enthusiasm can steal them to power their own home field advantage.
This is something that sports marketers do really well, and it’s an easy play for any business to add to their repertoire. There are many great ways in which the sports industry markets that any business can put towards their list of sales boosting strategies. We all know that social media is about engagement, and that engagement usually means broadcasting and interacting. But how carefully are you listening on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social media outlets for positive mentions by existing and potential customers? What do you do when you find them? You amplify them. Like them, but don’t just like them. Respond, but don’t only respond. Retweet, reblog, link to those mentions in your marketing emails, share them through all relevant channels. Enthusiasm is most infectious when it’s observed in an un-coerced third party (just like endorsements—and enthusiasm is a form of endorsement). Sports teams amp up fan excitement by compounding the energy of excited, individual fans, and you can do the same thing for your product or service by letting your potential customers be voyeurs to the happiness of your existing customers. Be sure to listen for other customer and market segment conversations about things relevant to your business, too, and be a conduit for those. Sharing excitement about upcoming events, new technology, and other things your customers are interested in can align you with the shared philosophies and positive feelings that are precursor to buying.
We know what happens in the football huddle: The quarterback pulls the team together mid-game to strategize the next play, congratulate or motivate players, commiserate on a sagging score, or in general to get player buy-in back at peak levels. In other words, it’s a kind of internal marketing. Whatever it is that happens here during any given game, you can be sure the quarterback feels it’s critical to winning that particular game. Not the game they planned for, hoped for, or even expected statistically—the game that’s currently in progress, with all of its unexpected turns. Keep your sales boosting strategies and marketing plans bold and robust but flexible. This way they can be quickly adapted to unexpected changes like economic downturns, new technologies or outlets, poor product reception, social media backlash, or any of the number of fumbles, blocks, and interceptions that can plague a campaign. Internet and email marketing are especially good channels for marketing flexibility. Social media, too. Campaign messages can be quickly adapted to reflect changing information, corrected for mistakes or oversights, take advantage of new developments, or work around a mea culpa situation gracefully.
Have you ever been invited to a luxury box seat for a high-profile sporting event? If so, you know how much that changes the experience of watching a game. That game is, technically speaking, the same game for everyone in the stadium. The lineup is the same, the announcers are the same, the plays are the same, no matter where you’re watching from. But I assure you the game doesn’t feel the same from up there behind those big windows, wine and cheese in hand, as it does in the crowded, sometimes too-hot or too-cold and almost always stiff-seated stands below. The VIP treatment changes—and almost always enhances—the customer experience. Sales boosting strategies that add to a customer's value and experience will increase sales simply due their satisfaction. Levels of purchase have become more commonplace since the advent of web apps and services, and this can work for just about anything—but keep it simple, and make it meaningful. You can shift up or down with this. If your service is basic, what expansions, add-ons, or concierge-like perks can you offer at a higher price point to add value, and boost the customer’s experience (and opinion of your brand)? Even something as simple as extended support hours can boost your customers’ sense of their value to you. If your product is already complex and/or high-dollar, can you provide a pared-down version to offset the image and value of the original? This can also make your brand more accessible to a larger market, but be careful and talk to a brand strategist on this—some brands can be damaged by offering more basic and affordable options (think of a $22,000 MSRP on a Rolls Royce).
Team marketing is a big component of sports marketing, but I’d argue that player marketing is the key to the emotional resonance that gives sports its true power. Players are storied, and as humans we’re helplessly attracted to stories—particularly ancient story archetypes like the hero’s journey, rags-to-riches stories, David and Goliath. Embedded deep down in our DNA is the universal need for something to root for, and it’s why sports and games elicit the responses they do. It’s why a single sports team can affect everything from a fan’s wardrobe (black and orange, anyone?) to their emotional behavior (shouting red-faced at the screen, or the field), to their willingness in some cases to paint themselves and go out into public with large foam appendages attached to their bodies. Burt Shavitz, the now legendary figurehead of Burt’s Bees personal care products, is a favorite go-to example of the power of storytelling in a brand. The quality of his products is top-notch, but it’s his unlikely story—north country recluse living off the land and raising bees stumbles on myriad uses for beeswax—that populates the brand with its infectious personality and wins it fans (and hundreds of millions in revenue) worldwide. If you can capture the fertile seeds of story that served as the seeds for your company’s products and services, or that underlie the company itself or the people in it, marketing magic can happen. Just be sure the story is congruous with the company’s brand image, and is told consistently across all messaging.
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