Your 2021 Ecommerce Acceleration Plan

This week, I came across an article from McKinsey that highlighted 3 characteristics top-performing companies share in successfully accelerating their ecommerce growth:

1. They foster a test-and-learn culture
2. They have a strong operations infrastructure that can quickly react to change
3. They’re committed to customer-centricity. 

As you reflect back on the year that has (almost) passed, there is no better time to ensure your ecommerce is set up for success to serve both you and your customers.  2020 was a watershed year for ecommerce and we are excited for what’s coming in 2021. 

As the partner of choice for thousands of enterprise brands and retailers in more than 100 countries around the world, Vantage helps retailers and brands scale up their ecommerce sales quickly and effectively through data-driven ecommerce advertising. Driving growth: artificial intelligence, machine-learning technology, predictive analytics, and intelligent marketing performance at scale. 

As I read through the McKinsey report, there were four key insights that stood out to me. 

1. Top performing companies test ideas, measure results, and execute changes to products, services, and ways of working much more effectively than their industry peers. 
2. Truly digital players have ecommerce and digital sales fully integrated into the rest of the value chain. This comes from a commitment to unearthing good data and actually using it so that they are able to spot opportunities quickly and adapt. 
3. Successful digital innovators treat customer satisfaction as the primary business goal and invest heavily in analyzing and mitigating customer friction points. They use data and analytics to sync their ecommerce experience with all of their other customer-facing channels to enable customers to seamlessly shift between them. 
4. Every good company wants to walk in their customers’ shoes. However, they often end up experiencing employees’ perspectives, rather than that of their customers. 

At Vantage, our biggest skill is turning insights into action. So here are some ideas on how to effectively navigate the changing ecommerce environment through a period of both incredible disruption and opportunity. 

• Unlock more ecommerce capabilities by implementing technologies to streamline work that humans just can’t do effectively: Consumer preferences can change in the blink of an eye, and human abilities to manually analyze and churn out insights aren’t cutting it anymore. This is where technologies like AI come in to fulfill the need to analyze how customers shop so we can spend less time analyzing and more time strategizing. 

• Define an optimal user experience for your best customer segments: Who are your best customers online? Don’t be one of those companies that simply replicate the store experience with a website. Ecommerce needs to complement the in-store experience, with touchpoints and a design that allows you to better target your ideal customers, and can also simplify your operations. 
• Design your supply chain to be able to deliver against your curated customer segments: Do you understand how your best customers are shopping and how that impacts your product supply? The speed at which online shopping happens with rapidly changing consumer demand and preferences, small order sizes, and returns, all need to be understood well to forecast demand and ensure your back-end can effectively meet your customer’s shopping needs.

Let Vantage handle it for you

Vantage delivers fully scalable best-in-class ecommerce advertising, promotion and insight solutions to enterprise retailers and brands. Through our powerful machine learning and AI tech, we’re able to provide highly-targeted automated capabilities at scale, taking your shopper intent and retail data to help you understand your customers. We easily integrate with all retail platforms to help you increase your sales, provide vital customer insights, and deliver personalized shopping experiences proven to generate revenue and loyalty. 

Vantage helps you uncover deep insights into what your best customers look like, and the products they interact with the most, as well as the marketing content that actually draws them in online. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of insights you can get. With full-funnel campaign planning at your fingertips, Vantage helps you launch data-driven strategies designed around your audiences’ actual shopping behaviour. And with an average of 13.8X return on ad spend, our numbers don’t lie. 

Stop putting out fires when your demand gets too hot to keep up with and learn how Vantage can help you accelerate your ecommerce goals.

— Let’s connect!

Aran Hamilton, Founder & CEO, Vantage