8 eCommerce trends to watch out for in 2023
2022 was a year of astronomical growth for the eCommerce industry, and 2023 is already looking to be another record-breaking year.
If you want your Shopify brand to come out on top in 2023, there are 8 eCommerce trends you should pay close attention to.
1. Personalization will remain a top priority
Personalization is no longer an option for D2C eCommerce brands, it's a necessity. Don't believe us? 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant and unique to them.
Adding personalization to the buying experience and post-purchase journey may be easier than you think. Here are a few ways your Shopify brand can customize buyer experience to encourage repeat purchases:
Understand your audience: Personalization requires deep knowledge of your customers and, better yet, where your customers are coming from. Whether they come from social media, advertisements, or a Google search, that will impact how you can personalize their experience.
Branded order tracking pages: There's no better time to connect with your customers than when they're waiting on their package to arrive.
SMS communications: Did your customer abandon their cart? Use SMS to remind them of the cart waiting for them, and offer a special to help them pull the trigger.
Post-purchase emails: Despite the rising success rates of SMS advertising, email is still going strong.
Targeted ads: You can target specific ads based on gender, interests, and age group or you can serve ads to people based on social media pages and posts that they've liked.
2. Social commerce will continue to rise
The secret to any successful D2C model is knowing where your customers are and selling to them right then and there. Shopify brands have mainly relied on their website and email marketing, but there's a new medium to consider: social media.
Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have implemented ‘online stores' that allow users to make purchases without leaving their app.
This concept of social commerce has gained popularity over the last 5 years. 38% of US shoppers make monthly purchases directly through social media platforms and 71.2% of TikTok users have shopped and purchased when they stumbled across an item in their feed or stories.
Social commerce is an excellent strategy for Shopify brands that utilize influencer marketing and user-generated content for their marketing campaigns. And by allowing customers to purchase directly from the social media platform, instead of going to your website, you're making the purchasing process that much easier.
3. Omnichannel presence will be essential
Your brand's website is just one part of the shopping journey, there is also your social media, influencers, emails, advertisements, in-store experiences, and more.
Each area is important to consumers, so much so that 75% of buyers use multiple channels before purchasing. They're comparing prices, quality, and the overall experience between your brand and your competitors.
To ensure that your brand has a successful omnichannel presence that converts, you should focus on 2 things: cohesive branding and personalization.
We've already talked about the importance of personalization, so we'll skip over that (attention spans and whatnot), but a cohesive branding experience is crucial. Your website, email communications, order tracking pages, in-store experiences, and social media channels should all have a similar style and feel. So if your customers go from one channel to another, there shouldn't be much of a difference.
4. Sustainability will take over
Sustainability has slowly grown in popularity since 2020. Now more than ever, customers are looking for ways to decrease their carbon footprint. So much so that 86% of consumers are willing to delay deliveries if it's more sustainable.
How can brands be both sustainable and profitable? Here are a few ideas:
Carbon-neutral shipping
Shipping in bulk
Recycled packing and materials
Paperless invoicing
Reuse packaging for returns
Reduce returns by providing clear information about your products (detailed descriptions, real customer reviews, etc.).
With such a growing interest in sustainability, greenwashing has unfortunately become more common. This is when a company promotes and markets being environmentally conscious, even though there are no clear sustainability efforts. For example, filling an office with plants, waterfalls, and natural lighting doesn't necessarily mean that it's eco-friendly.
But what if sustainability is a major part of your eCommerce brand? Tell the world! Your website and social media platforms are some of the most effective ways to show your customers how your brand is practicing sustainability, and perhaps how they can join in too.
5. Mobile commerce will grow in popularity
For most of us, our phones are never further than an arm's reach away. We use our phones for everything—shopping, connecting, research, you name it—and more people are browsing and shopping through their mobile devices than ever before. Mobile commerce is so popular that 72.9% of eCommerce is on mobile.
To improve the mobile commerce experience, Shopify brands should focus on 2 things:
Mobile navigation: Your brand's website should be as easy to navigate on a phone as it is on a desktop. Make sure that your navigation text is easy to read both in font choice and background color.
Mobile load time: If your website takes too long to load, your customers will look to shop elsewhere. Your page load time should be between 0-2 seconds.
6. Don't forget about SMS
With mobile commerce gaining more popularity, SMS marketing and advertising will continue to dominate. In 2022, 70% of consumers subscribed to SMS marketing, which is a 12% increase from the previous year. Needless to say, SMS isn't going anywhere!
Take a close look at your tech stack and integrate where possible. Malomo has SMS integrations with leading Shopify apps like Attentive, Klaviyo, and Postscript to streamline customer communication.
7. Video marketing will be critical
Adding videos to your website, social media channels, and email mediums will help increase engagement with your customers.
Video marketing is great for eCommerce brands because the sky's the limit! Interested in promoting a new product? Make a video. Need some educational content for your customers? Create a video how-to series. Want to showcase how much fun your internal team is? You guessed it, make a video.
Aside from being engaging, consumers want to fully understand the ins and outs of a product before pressing the ‘buy now' button, and the best way to do that is through video. By providing reviews and interactive content about a product, your customers are more likely to purchase and less likely to request a return.
8. Post-purchase marketing will remain crucial
With the biggest consumer buying trends being personalization and social commerce, post-purchase marketing and branded order tracking should be top priority. The highest converting post-purchase mediums are branded order tracking pages and transactional shipping emails/SMS.
Branded order tracking pages are so effective because customers check tracking information an average of 4.6 times per order. That means your brand has almost 5 additional opportunities to connect with a customer, so you want to make it count! Branded order tracking pages with Malomo can be completely customized to your brand, so you can include:
Your brand's colors and fonts
Unique messaging
Upsell opportunities
Social media newsfeed
Educational videos and content
Transactional shipping emails help your brand go from reactive to proactive by notifying customers when shipping delays or exceptions occur. No one wants to be left in the dark, especially your customers.
Start 2023 on the right foot by giving your customers a premium post-purchase experience. Malomo's platform reduces customer support tickets, automates branded shipping notifications, generates additional revenue, and more! Book a demo to learn more.
