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The retail industry is in the midst of a consumer-driven transformation unlike anything it

has ever seen. As consumers become more sophisticated and demanding, retailers are

scrambling to up their game when it comes to building digital experiences that will attract

and retain newly empowered customers.

Gartner says nearly 60 percent of retailers increased their technology spending in 2016. In “The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites, Q1 2017, the analyst firm reported that retailers and other businesses selling to consumers are hungry for technology solutions that pro-vide consistent engagement with consumers across all the channels and devices they use in their daily lives.

The most progressive among them are deploying tech-nology that alerts store clerks to a particular individual’s arrival at a store or that tell a consumer through his or her mobile device what products are available at the store they are in or near.

Leading retailers are investing in digital merchandising tools and personalization technology that ensure

that each and every consumer has the kind of fulfilling digital experience that builds long-term loyalty.

And why not? The market is growing at a dizzying pace. Business-to-consumer e-commerce in the United States and the European Union reached nearly $1 trillion in 2017, topping out at $904 billion or about €853 billion, figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and E-commerce Europe indicate.

And while the United States 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

CMSA Critical Solution for Today’s E-Commerce

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Experience is the name of the gameOf 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 a consumer is interacting with a website, mobile phone, tablet, social media or even a kiosk interface — every business today is in the digital content business. And content — and, more importantly how businesses are managing it — is a critical component in creating meaningful customer experiences.

E-commerce platforms have historically supported consumer transactions. They handle the mechanics of buying, managing catalog display, logistics, discounts, shipping, price management, payment and taxes.

For their part, Web Content Management systems have evolved into the solution, creating and managing the customer’s buying journey — from the earliest consideration stages to the days, weeks and months after the purchase when customers are dealing with warranties, support and questions about complementary products.

The content management system facilitates SEO, improvements in content targeting, multi-language capabilities, multichannel content optimization (mobile, social etc.) and the personalization for delivery of relevant experiences.

The bigger picture: content and commerce

At BloomReach, we’ve seen extraordinary growth in the marriage of e-commerce and web content manage-ment. One of the big challenges with e-commerce today is that many sites are a collection of store pages, rather than being a collection of buying journeys.

Instead of playing the role of shopping assistant, these sites traditionally have been little more than static catalogs or electronic brochures. That’s changing.

“You have a lot of different retailers, all globally, that are selling the same brand, so from a brand perspective they need to position themselves as the experts,” said Yanna Sigenlaub, of FitForCommerce, a digital commerce consultancy. “They might not be able to compete on price, so instead they have to compete on experience and providing the expertise to both engage consumers, but also inspire them and ultimately convert them.”

Combining e-commerce and content management into a single platform that builds a meaningful customer experience is important for all retailers, brands and manufacturers, whether they are selling directly to consumers or to other enterprises.

The true differentiation for tomorrow’s e-commerce is when you marry the best of both of these worlds — content and commerce — that is personalized for each consumer in the moment.

E-commerce enterprises asking for CMS today, are looking to produce a modern, dynamic customer journey for consumers, while gaining 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 for the content management platform to seamlessly work with the e-commerce (transactional) software, while maintaining visibility of the end-to-end customer journey: customer data, CRM engagement, purchase history, and beyond.

And, of course, they need the ability to quickly test their strategies to measure the impact of the changes they make so they know whether to change course or double down.

The need for DXP in commerceAs the digital transformation of our world continues apace, competition for consumers’ attention is rising just as quickly. Competition rages across mobile, social, traditional websites and beyond. Today’s e-commerce provider, then, must be faster, more flexible and more relevant than ever before.

Consumers today are conditioned by Google and other search engines to demand personalized and relevant results, both when searching on the wider web and when searching on individual websites.

While 30 percent of visitors to a website use site search, buyers are 90 percent more likely to use site search than browsers, according to Brigham Young University research. Despite the obvious importance of search, those using site search only find what they’re looking for half the time, the BYU study found.

Enterprises, therefore, need immediate and actionable insights into the way consumers are behaving and how products and content are performing on their digital sites. It’s no longer good enough to collect data and wait for teams of analysts to sift through it to see what it all means.

These are customer experience trends that no online enterprise can choose to ignore.

There are six trends that we see in top enterprises that are combining powerful e-commerce and content management solutions to create a unified content and commerce experience.

1. Driving traffic through SEO and creating trusted experiences

No doubt a key to success in the e-commerce world is to create a trusted and recognized brand that custom-ers will shop. Step one, then, is having the customer find the digital site. Next comes building the engagement and trust that will lead to an actual purchase.

In order to drive relevant traffic to a site, retailers must produce enough high-quality content to become a valuable and trusted source for consumers. Let’s break that notion down:

SEO: Of course all website owners are concerned about search engine optimization, but for e-commerce, SEO is critical. This is where a great web content man-agement system should provide functionality as part of a search-optimized content strategy. Traditional search engine optimization managers focused on technical aspects, such as meta tags, HTML and the like.

But with the evolution of search engines and the in-creasing influence of social media in purchase decisions, SEO has become more about improving the quality of your content and the experience you provide consumers. For example, digital retailers are now graded heavily on the quality of their mobile offerings, given that the bulk of site visits come from mobile devices.

Not only do sites need to be built to be friendly to human visitors, they need to be accommodating to search engines, which index content based on quality, relevance and general usefulness to digital users.

Sites that rely on natural language processing and web-wide search queries to continually learn and keep up with changes in vocabulary, seasons, trends and con-sumer habits are particularly well-suited to serve today’s demanding consumer.

Compelling, Trustworthy Content: Digital experiences must be more personal once you’ve actually attracted a customer to your site. As Jeroen Verberg, one of our co-founders, 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.”

For instance, consider Proven Winners, a plant and seed wholesaler with a direct-to-consumer arm. The company has partnered with backyard gardeners and YouTubers Laura and Aaron LeBoutillier to create how-to videos that at times are meant to spark an interesting in gar-dening and at other times lead directly to product links.

The magic, as Verberg writes, is serving the right piece of content to the right person, depending, for instance, on where they are in their buying process.

“This is the way that web engagement management that optimizes e-commerce will truly be successful,” he continued in the CMSWire piece. “It’s not only in help-ing 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 auto-matically optimize content in real-time.

“If visitors click on a link on any of your online store channels – a true web engagement management plat-form will use information obtained in real-timeto optimize what the visitor sees. Information from their social graph (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google), from their device (mobile or desktop), 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 delivers an automated set of experiences – and data insight to the managers to create different content.”

2. Workflow and sophisticated omni-channel content delivery

Certainly managing content isn’t a new requirement for e-commerce systems. In fact, many e-commerce software systems rival some content management systems in their ability to produce normalized content to different channels.

But the fact is that most e-commerce systems have not been built to handle multiple workflows for managing content channels.

Nor are they built to optimize digital consumer expe-riences. As Forrester’s “Content and Commerce: The

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Odd Couple or the Power Couple?” pointed out, there are historic reasons that content and commerce have been independently managed, but they don’t necessarily make sense in today’s world:

“This segregation creates friction in the customer life cycle, forcing customers to jump between sections of the website during the exploration and buy phases.”

This is where it becomes critical to combine the commerce platform with a powerful content management system to create a single digital experience platform that can drive these optimized, multi-channel experiences. Savvy e-commerce 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 e-commerce and content management.

In short, a Digital Experience Platform.

3. Optimizing conversions by creating an optimal customer journeyIn surveying 37 separate studies, the Baymard Institute found last year that on average nearly 70 percent of customers leave items in their digital shopping carts, rather than go through with a purchase.

Now, of course, some of these are buyers are using their carts as wish lists; or they may be holding out for discounts to come online. Either way, the e-commerce manager’s job is to get these shoppers to convert into buyers.

The key to reducing abandonment in shopping carts is to follow up on the abandonment. A properly timed email is a proven strategy, with eMarketer reporting that more than 20 percent of those who abandoned carts will convert if sent an email within an hour ofthe abandonment.

But increasingly – the ability to serve up personalized, direct and targeted content across any channel is the key to delivering that reminder successfully.

This is where an integrated content management solution can become a holistic solution for targeting this content. No question a robust digital experience platform should include the ability to deliver a truly relevant, personalized approach to content across any channel.

We’re talking about personalization informed by channel awareness, location, time and behavior that is 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 on — for instance, automatically sensing the type of mobile device.

The system’s awareness is based on two types of attributes:

1. Explicit: 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 could be based on the fact that the shopper still has items in his or her shopping cart. Or it could be based on the fact that he or she is shopping for a gift, or waiting for a discount, or for a particular answer to a poll question.

2. Implicit: These are pieces of data that the system can automatically derive from the visitor and use to create a more contextual experience.This data might include time of day or behavior on the site. (If they choose “recipes” and “cookware” products, for example, the site can serve content related to “cooking.”). Or, it can even be simple attributes such as what device the consumer is using or a geo-located lookup for language presentation.

The key is that the system assimilates all of this data and both reports on it – providing insight for the retailer into what patterns are being generated – as well as delivering for the consumer more relevant, personalized content based upon it.

4. Think about your content, not about pages

Digital commerce sites that have quite a few products and categories can truly benefit by making the products as quick and easy to find as possible. This is where an integrated, high-quality content management system can really enhance the customer experience.

Many retailers start out designing their site thinking they know the personas they want to serve – and believing that they can predict the specific paths to purchase each persona will take to conversion. This almost always results in a less-than-satisfying customer experience. These retailers are taking the page-oriented viewof e-commerce, instead of the content-as-a-service concept of today’s digital experience platform.

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E-commerce marketers will do better by relying on data to show them the natural patterns that develop as they roll out different web content – and then using that insight to develop different content strategies, while also relying on artificial intelligence to constantly improve their customers’ experiences.

For instance, instead of forcing users into an assumed hierarchy of content – smart marketers are using sophis-ticated content management systems, including faceted navigation, to have their content dynamically assume a hierarchy as the content is consumed. This way, each shopper determines his or her own journey – and there are innumerable ways that they can provide a customized journey to their desired end point.

5. Selling internationallyAs the world becomes a smaller place, e-commerce enterprises are finding that there are vast numbers of new customers waiting for them overseas. As we’ve said, 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 countries can truly help differentiate you from your competition.

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 content management system can handle delivery of content across any language – and that it makes 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. In order to provide a memorable customer experience, marketers need to ensure that they are using certain content management features. 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 – therefore your content management system shouldn’t be either.

• Content Management System Interface in Multiple Languages – A good content management system will be available in multiple languages and will be able to produce and manage those languages. Your localization managers might 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 United States the ability to view the website in another language – and then “remembering” that choice for subsequent visits.

6. Multi-channel touch points for commerce strategy

With mobile traffic to some e-commerce sites reaching 50 percent and with mobile spending increasing by 32 percent annually in the United States and by significant amounts globally, according to eMarketer, there is no denying that mobile commerce is a huge avenue for e-commerce marketers.

As eMarketer said in its 2016 Mobile Commerce Roundup: “Smartphones are continuing to make up an increasingly important e-commerce access device around the world, according to data from multi-channel retail solutions provider Monetate.”

Beyond mobile, social media is emerging as a key channel for e-commerce as social media providers experiment with new features and advertising formats to encourage e-commerce.

Establishing a centralized way to manage product offers, catalogs and all manner of personalized content across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram is essential for e-commerce stores.

Given the importance of mobile in social media consumption, mobile content marketing strategy is undoubtedly a part of your digital strategic planning. Before you get too far along in development, make sure that your current tools will actually allow you to deploy a mobile content management strategy.

Most content management system and e-commerce solution vendors today will claim they can deliver content to multiple channels. This, of course, includes mobile

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content delivery. But making sure that your content is separated from the presentation is critical.

And, making sure that you can easily add mobile channels to your strategy is also very important. In other words, the harder it is to set up a new mobile channel for your web content, the less likely you are to do it.

For example, BloomReach Experience 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.

Finally, savvy e-commerce businesses are deploying integrated content management systems 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.

The Bottom LineAs e-commerce providers become smarter and smarter, the competition becomes harder and harder. Once dependent on just simple web analytics and trial and error, today’s holistic content and e-commerce solutions provide marketers with real-time, predictive analytics about shopper behavior. This gives the savvy e-commerce provider the ability to optimize content and ultimately optimize sales.

All that means you need to be much more nimble and agile with content. Your choice of a tool to engage your customers and help them by your products is a critically important part of becoming a trusted provider for them. Not to mention, a critically important part of your ability to remain successful.

Selecting a good Content Management System for e-commerce requires balancing the needs of marketing, technology (IT), the executive team, content creators and – yes – even content consumers. Whether you’re looking to create more revenue, encourage more efficient shopping cart behavior, lower customer service costs or just create a more fluid method of managing content, understanding your process and selecting the tool that will help run that process is what’s important.

At BloomReach, 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, merchandisers, marketers and developers.

We know that customers expect to be able to engage with your company at every stage in their buying pro-cess, including after they make their purchase. And, by making that process easier and more relevant — for them and for you – we believe that a digital experience platform combining the power of content and commerce can help teams create digital miracles.

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Resources:

• The Gartner Blog Network 2016• U.S. Census Bureau 2017• E-commerce News 2016• Forrester “Content and Commerce: The Odd Couple or the Power Couple?” 2013• Baymard Institute’s “37 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics” 2017

• eMarketer’s “When Should Retailers Remind Shoppers of Abandoned Carts?” 2016• eMarketer’s “Mobile Commerce Roundup” 2016• TechCrunch’s “Commerce at Twitter is not Dead” 2016• Tamebay’s “Facebook Bolsters E-commerce Offering with Visual Enhancements” 2017• The Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Suites Q1 2017

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About BloomReach

BloomReach is a machine-learning, big-data technology company that delivers a more relevant digital experience using data from more than 75 million monthly unique consumers and the applications built on its Digital Experience Platform — the first open and intelligent DXP.

BloomReach’s core technology – the Web Relevance Engine (WRE) – algorithmically understands content and users, matching this understanding with demand and intent data from across the Web. BloomReach’s Commerce products adapt your content to make it personal and relevant for individual users, while its Compass surfaces actionable product performance and recommendations that maximize revenue.

In the area of content management, we are redefining the CMS space with the world’s most advanced content performance platform, designed to help businesses understand their visitors – whether they are known or anonymous – and deliver the content they value in any context and on any device.

BloomReach’s portfolio of customers include: Neiman Marcus, Sears Outlet, Staples, Williams-Sonoma, REI, Inc., FC Bayern München, Bell Aliant, Couchbase, the Dutch Foreign Office, Randstad, Veikkaus, the University of Maryland, Edeka, 1&1 Internet, Bugaboo and Weleda.

Launched in 2009, BloomReach is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices in Amsterdam, London, Boston, Dallas and Bangalore. BloomReach is backed by in-vestment firms Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, NEA, Salesforce Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. Visit BloomReach.com for more information.

For more information visit bloomreach.com