4 Strategies To Boost Customer Loyalty Within the Visual Economy
Learn a few strategies from Saranya Babu to boost customer loyalty as new shopping behaviors and interactive shopping experiences pressurize brands.
New shopping behaviors and the advent of interactive shopping experiences are putting pressure on brands to keep customers happy and loyal. Brands should ensure their ecommerce strategy can handle the scale and complexity of personalized and next-gen visual experiences. Saranya Babu, chief marketing officer, Cloudinary, discusses a few ways to attract customers and boost loyalty in today’s visual economy.
Consumers are switching brands more than ever before. In fact, McKinsey found that an unprecedented 36% of consumers surveyed have tried a new product brand in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities, and 73% are incorporating those new brands into buying routines.
These new shopping behaviors are putting new pressures on brands to keep customers happy, engaged, and loyal. At the same time, interactive experiences, such as live shoppable videos, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR), are rapidly entering the equation that determines shopper engagement and, thus, ecommerce success. In fact, Snap Inc. found that more than 100 million consumers are already shopping with AR in some capacity, and 76% of surveyed consumers want to use it as a “tool” in their everyday lives. Even more impressive, they expect “almost all smartphone users will be frequent AR users” by 2025.
In combination, this means that brands that wish to create new converts must move quickly to ensure their ecommerce strategy can handle the scale and complexity of personalized and next-gen visual experiences. Doing so protects the brand from losing the hard-earned loyalty of its existing customers and opens up new opportunities to attract new customers.
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Personalize Content To Meet Customers’ Expectations
The thing is, shoppers are not just looking for a product gallery with plenty of high-quality images anymore. That part is just a requirement now. At this point, brands must offer personalized content to earn their business. To prove the point, McKinsey has found that personalization drives better business performance and meets customer expectations at a much higher rate:
- Nearly 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions
- Within that group, 76% of consumers get frustrated when they do not get a personalized experience.
One way to deliver on this expectation is to create personalized, customized images that convert passive viewers to engaged customers. Personalized images allow brands to tailor images shown to a particular individual based on data and users’ behaviors. Nowadays, this can be done programmatically. With simple, no-code solutions, brands can transform content to fit new requirements by resizing, cropping, overlaying text and other images, adding borders and several other adjustments. For example, by simply adding parameters to an image URL, brands can build a new, customized image on the fly without involving designers and at scale. Whether images or videos, personalizing visual stories allows brands to deliver content tailored specifically for various visitor personas, grow sales and ROI, and create life-long customers.
Make Videos Shoppable
Video is on the rise and is slowly becoming one of the most commonly used formats. In fact, research from Hubspot found that 86% of marketers consider video a key investment for lead generation.
As brands start to invest more in video marketing, there has been a big move in the ecommerce space towards shoppable videos. Shoppable videos allow the viewer to engage with the video content live. As the video plays, the viewer has the option to click and buy items ‘in the moment.’ This concept offers a smoother path to purchase. Instead of a potential customer having to click through multiple links, marketers can bridge the gap between entertainment and commerce and provide a more engaging experience.
Brands can even take it one step further by partnering with influencers or affiliates to promote products. This approach can help brands reach a bigger audience while building brand awareness.
Drive Repeat Business With AR
Another use case that is growing in popularity is augmented reality (AR). With more online shopping than ever before, ecommerce companies are tapping into AR to provide users with the familiarity of an in-store experience online. AR can uplevel a brand’s personalization offering and provide users with an opportunity to imagine products in a real-life setting. For example, users can see what furniture could look like in their home or visualize how an outfit may look before they purchase.
These immersive experiences can help the user imagine products in real life, giving them an opportunity to connect on a deeper level with the brand.
In fact, according to Shopify, interactions with products having AR content showed a 94% higher conversion rate than products without access to AR previews. It can also drive higher conversion rates and is proven to drive loyalty: the increased satisfaction AR provides results in 71% of consumers saying they would shop with the vendor again if they could use AR to vet future purchases.
AR technology provides an immersive experience that adds value to the shopping experience. It offers an interactive visual-media format and an effective promotional tool to boost connections with shoppers.
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Keep Up With Shoppers or Get Left Behind
These highly engaging and immersive technologies are quickly becoming fundamental pieces of a complete storytelling and merchandising approach. To create the online shopping experiences customers crave, every retailer needs to consider how they fit into their broader consumer engagement strategy.
With so much competition online today, brands must consider how they can take personalization to the next level. It is no longer enough to simply recommend a product based on previous interests. Instead, users are starting to expect a more advanced digital experience, one where they can visualize the product in their home or perhaps purchase an item through an immersive experience.
Marketers who can connect these dots and implement these strategies successfully will not only see an increase in users but will also see a major boost in customer loyalty.
What strategies have you implemented to boost customer loyalty in today’s world of interactive experiences? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Image Source: Shutterstock
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