Top 7 E-commerce Experts and Their Strategies for Success in 2022

If you’re looking for some ideas about what to concentrate your efforts on, we’ve got you covered! E-commerce specialists shared with us, what are the trends in the e-commerce world that they are going to incorporate into their 2022 strategy. Get inspired with their amazing insights and start your journey to success!

Karl Lillrud

Karl Lillrud is known as one of the world’s TOP 30 Business Coaches 2022, TOP 30 E-commerce and Online Business Growth experts, proven success record of generating 300% increased conversion. In his opinion this year, business should concentrate on customers – building trust and long-term relationships and improving the dialog.

Get your clients to share their opinions with gamification

We have been talking about the data-driven approach, big data, and so much more but what really matters is what your customers think and feel about you.

Start this year by focusing on building trust, and increasing the conversation, not the monolog – get the customers to share their opinion and not just by complaining when things go wrong.

Make it gamified and incorporate the gamification model throughout the customer journey to prove the value for the customers’ opinion and sharing of their emotional state while interacting with your store and company.

Create long-term relationships with customers with subscription models

This year we will see a change in consumer behavior as retail will be forced to drive traffic back to stores in every way they can. The fight for the consumer will increase and consumers will feel it. Don’t be that company that tries everything to get the customer back, almost turning into desperation as you don’t want to lose your customer base!

Instead, start now by creating a long-term relationship with your customers built on trust and ease of use. The easiest way to get this started is through subscription models. Start offering as many products as possible as a product they can subscribe to. If they chose to subscribe you can easily count on the returning sales of that item and offer them a lower price to motivate them.

Also, you can order larger batches and negotiate the price with your supplier given that you now have returning orders at close to zero risk. Basically, you have created trust for consumers to set up auto purchases for the products they like to make it easier for them in the future by saving time and energy.

Sam Harper

Sam Harper is a Co-Founder & CMO of Hippy Feet — a sock company on a mission to help young people experiencing homelessness. So far, the company was able to provide transitional jobs to 150+ young people impacted by homelessness. Sam also believes that all the efforts should be put into retaining customers’ loyalty.

Focus on customer loyalty

In 2022, we’re going to see a significant shift towards e-commerce brands focusing on customer loyalty.

Increased demands for web privacy are also leading to increased customer acquisition costs for e-commerce brands. In order to grow sustainably, brands need to make sure they’re retaining the customers they do acquire and maximize the lifetime value of each customer.

Rachel Andrea Go

Rachel Andrea Go is an e-commerce expert. She was listed as one of the 50 Top E-commerce experts to watch in 2020. Rachel also underlines the importance of customer retentions and points out to the need of synchronizing data, since nowadays e-commerce requires more and more tools.

Customer acquisition costs are rising, making retention is more critical

With more competition than ever and rising acquisition costs, it’s more important than ever to retain your existing customers, boost your customer lifetime value, and invest in loyalty programs and communities that can keep shoppers coming back.

CLV (customer lifetime value) and retention rate are two metrics that merchants should pay as close attention to as acquisition (or even closer in some cases) since it can reveal gaps in your process and pinpoint areas of improvement for your buyer experience.

For example, if you have a short CLV, what strategies can you implement to boost it? Create a subscription plan, launch a loyalty program, offer rewards for returning customers, customize your post-purchase marketing campaigns based on past purchases, etc.

If you notice low retention continues after that, look into your product and buyer experience. Check your negative reviews – where is your brand letting people down? Is it a case of the type of product you have?

For example, people normally only need one fridge at a time, so don’t sweat it if your customer hasn’t come back for another in a while. Or is it your delivery? Did your items arrive damaged, or go to the wrong address? Did it take a longer time to deliver than expected, pushing them to your competitors? Were items not as promised? Did customers report items wearing out quickly? Retention rate has the power to reveal all.

E-commerce is becoming increasingly fragmented

There are an increasing number of tools for the modern e-commerce merchant, all specializing in something unique. A few years ago, merchants only needed a handful of tools to sell online (a website and a shopping cart, or a marketplace account).

Today, each function of selling has gotten more complex, broken out into more steps, and with more moving parts. If all of those parts don’t have a way to synchronize data, you end up over-selling, getting incorrect inventory counts, and not being able to fulfill orders.

I’ve seen this play out in both e-commerce software (ie. inventory management, warehouse management, websites, shopping carts, etc.) as well as logistics (marketplace fulfillment, 3PLs, in-fulfillment, the number of warehouses you need to use to stay competitive – not necessarily a bad thing if you can manage it well).

Jake Munday

Jake Munday is a Co-Founder & CEO at Custom Neon.  He was named Attaining Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 at the Geelong Business Awards. He started his company with 500$ investments and it grew into a $10 million global business within 4 years. Jake focuses on using technologies like voice search, VR, and metaverse to boost his e-commerce efforts.

Voice search and conversational shopping

With voice search global commerce sales predicted to tip $164B by 2025, the race to integrate technologies and simplify further the shopping experience is on!

Conversational shopping provides deeper interaction. 2022 will see chat apps and voice technologies becoming prolific.

We have already optimized our site for voice searches, making content more conversational and utilizing long tail keywords. Our tech team is also developing the software to trial voice commerce and face pay to streamline, simplify and synthesize the shopping experience.

Increased video marketing usage

Video Consumption grew 96% in 2020 and the popularity is still on an upward trajectory, with YouTube serving as a prime location for small businesses and startups to develop their brand identity and drive customers to their websites.

Today’s consumers are looking for more authenticity and personality in the companies they work with. Video marketing gives the opportunity to tell a story, introduce a product, showcase your services and really hook people in with interesting, humorous, informative, or vibrant content.

We have ramped up our own video marketing campaigns with a high-budget video focused around driving traffic and boosting brand awareness by showcasing our business to a wide number of audiences and demographics.

This broad approach has seen almost 235,396 views to our new videos and more than 30,668 clicks to our custom tool page, resulting in a click-through rate of almost 5.5% – something that we’ve extremely proud of, given that the average YouTube Ads CTR is 0.65%.

VR, AR, and the Metaverse

2022 will see a flurry of businesses experimenting with new technologies. Agility, foresight, funding, and technical ability are all essential ingredients of businesses looking to continue an upward trajectory.

Here at Custom Neon, the tech team has been exploring ways in which using the metaverse can benefit our customers. This innovative type of immersive purchasing experience, allows customers to see their customized designs and visualize how they will actually look in their own space. Using VR and AR technology provides a more interactive shopping experience that drives desire and promotes customer satisfaction.

The metaverse also provides the opportunity to businesses that don’t have a bricks and mortar store, such as Custom Neon, to create their own virtual ‘in-store’ experience for customers, one that is targeted to match their individual requirements and proclivities.

These types of experiences are slowly starting to appear online with Gucci’s Guilty Diner presenting the potential of virtual shopping. Whilst we are in the infancy stage of this type of purchasing experience, I think it’s important for business owners to keep an eye on the emerging opportunity.

Working in the e-commerce space, I am so excited by these new technologies that have the capacity to greatly improve the customer experience, whilst also allowing the retailer uninhibited global reach. The sky’s the limit!

Kevin Miller

Kevin Miller is a digital marketing expert, former Google employee, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He was recently named “Entrepreneur of the Year” in the 2021 American Business Awards. He focuses his insights on social media, video, and influencer marketing.

Understanding cookies replacements is crucial 

You should understand Single Sign-On (SSO) and other replacements for cookies so that your paid ad budget isn’t wasted. This is important because the full social media integration will become more widespread in paid ads, at a time when Facebook has been accused of allowing too much information about users over to advertisers.

If your campaign is not taking into account that cookie pooling doesn’t exist on social platforms, you may be missing out on potential customers.

Video & Influencers 

Video is another trend that won’t go away anytime soon. TikTok, Facebook Live, and Instagram Reels continue to grow. Instagram announced that it is moving more towards video content, and marketers should be prepared for that so that audiences remain engaged.

Brand advocates and influencers continue to be effective and affordable marketing strategies. Consumers trust their peers and are more likely to engage with a brand that a peer has recommended to them.

Chun-Kai Wang

Chun-Kai Wang is Co-Founder & CEO of a mobile gaming studio called Kooapps. Kooapps has made over 30 titles, which were downloaded over 200 million times. Prior to Kooapps, he was a software developer at Microsoft Research where he built large-scale web services. Chun-Kai concentrates on using technology to personalize user experience.

Personalize user-experience

In the upcoming years, e-commerce businesses will strive more towards hyper-personalized marketing. With omnichannel experience, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and smart website features are focused on making user experiences more personalized.

We have invested in the latest technologies to track user activity in real-time on our website, and based on this data, we customize and personalize their experience on our website.

E-commerce businesses will shift more towards faster distribution channels and new marketplaces. Not only does it help to improve the delivery quality of the business, but it also helps to target a broader audience base and increase sales.

Some marketplaces to invest in 2022 and the next years are Walmart and Amazon, as it offered an opportunity to small e-commerce businesses to reach out to more relevant customers.

Jason Sherman

Jason is the Founder and CEO of TapRm, an e-commerce solution for beer and hard seltzer brands. It’s the fastest-growing alcohol company, ranking 108 on the 2021 Inc 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America. Jason too concentrates on personalization. He recommends using programmatic advertising to boost digital marketing effects.

Engage customers with personalized search ad campaigns

Programmatic advertising will take the pain out of running search ad campaigns, enabling digital advertising to reach new heights.

Most marketers only target three or four options in their search campaigns. These targets may include keywords, interest, time of day, or location. But automated programmatic demand-side platforms (DSPs) integrate with customer data software and deploy hundreds of targeting signals.

As users see the ads, DSPs record information about them. Then a profile is built up over time based on what type of content the user consumes, where they click on advertisements, and how often they do so. These improved targeting capabilities enable digital marketers to run personalized search ad campaigns that engage consumers at each stage of the funnel.

Including e-commerce trends into the overall strategy is a clear way to success. It’s worth following experts on the topic who can give you valuable insights into what you should pay attention to. We hope that today’s article inspired you to include some of the mentioned trends in your strategy for 2022. If you need help with that, check our e-commerce SEO services!

Let us know what other trends you’re planning to jump on!