How Digital Retailers Can Maximize Conversion and Brand Loyalty

The digital retail landscape is constantly changing. As we head into the second half of 2022, both supply chain problems and elevated inflation are still causing some uncertainty for shoppers. The good news is that according to economists and the National Retail Federation, retail sales will still overall show an increase from last year, with digital commerce playing a vital role in that growth.  

Retailers and ecommerce alike can shift their strategies to one that is more agile and flexible. This provides a huge opportunity for retailers, specifically digital retailers, to differentiate themselves by selling the best products and providing the best experience. If your customer knows your site always delivers what they are looking for, even if the product is slightly different than their original search, they will come back to your site repeatedly, strengthening the loyalty and conversion bond. 

Delays and disruptions are the new normal! Now is the time to focus on what you can supply your customers instead of constantly chasing demand (and perhaps running into some fulfillment operation struggles.)  

Out of stock items are really impacting retailers’ conversion and loyalty and will continue to do so as shoppers become less tolerant of a lack of inventory and bad experiences. A report from Forrester predicts that “brands will lose 50% of sales on backordered items unless they compensate with a proactive customer experience.” Customer engagement needs to be a top focus for brands looking to mitigate problems flowing from supply chain obstacles.  

The key is for brands to be able to quickly pivot and adapt to the ever-changing retail environment and consumer behavior. There are two parts to think about here:  

1. What can you invest in? and how can you adjust pivot your strategy?
2. What are some ideas you can try out today? and how can you test and adjust based on those results? 

Introducing Creator Connect: a powerful solution you can invest in and quickly implement to make changes on the fly this season! 

Creator Connect is your personalized solution to tackle common digital retail challenges. Connect empowers your brand to adapt quickly to the never-ending changes in consumer behavior and inventory management. Connect amplifies the power of Creator by optimizing your customer journey and inventory.  

• Differentiate your brand experience. 
• Allow for Real time product updates. 
• Test and iterate more easily. 
• Realize stronger brand loyalty and sales 

Connect allows you to build connected and intelligent experiences so your shoppers always get the most relevant content. There are many ways to drive a more customer-centric experience, no matter your stock level. Examples include displaying a low stock or out of stock badge on your PDPs and landing pages, hiding certain out of stock products all together, proposing alternative or similar products and more! We’ve seen our customers get creative by shifting strategies to cross-selling and promoting alternative products directly on their PDP’s - serving searching customers and driving overall Ecommerce revenue.   

All of these ideas are considered personalization. A different type of personalization than the one we naturally think of because these are product based instead of customer based, but in the end your customers will get a personalized experience based on what product they are looking at –– we know that is meaningful for many reasons. According to Marketwired: 

• 71% of shoppers on average express some level of frustration when their experience is impersonal 
• 49% of shoppers made impulse purchases after receiving a personalized recommendation
• 44% will become repeat buyers after personalized experiences 

Creating a valuable overall customer experience is key to building trust amongst your target audience — which is necessary to keep them engaged as time goes on. Connect allows you to incorporate live product information into your digital experiences. This includes but is not limited to live inventory, pricing, product details and naming.  

You can maintain a positive customer experience if something goes out of stock suddenly, by selecting to automatically hide these out-of-stock products and replace them with back-ups of your choosing. In addition, you can preserve customer expectations with the option to hide or display out-of-stock badges on products depending on inventory levels.  

How does Creator Connect make this happen?  We have built an API layer that is able to pull data from your e-commerce systems. Your systems are represented in the bottom piece of this graphic. We have been focused on core ecommerce capabilities like product information and inventory but in the future, you can imagine how this can expand to your entire martech stack very quickly. 

Connect  allows you to take advantage of this live data for your actual content and customer experience- free of templates and without the need for custom coding. From that, the ideas you see at the top of what you can do with it are the ones we have had and that some early customers have given us, but the options are really limitless. 

Want to learn more? Take a tour of the Creator Platform and then schedule a demo with us and we will walk you through all the ways you can implement these powerful tools today.