Today’s marketplace is filled with demanding consumers who hold high expectations when it comes to brand experiences, making it critical for companies to not only have the right strategy in place, but also the expertise and capacity of resources to deliver these relevant and personalized experiences.

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Crucial Play Of Digital Commerce In Your
Business
Today’s marketplace is filled with demanding consumers who hold
high expectations when it comes to brand experiences, making it
critical for companies to not only have the right strategy in place,
but also the expertise and capacity of resources to deliver these
relevant and personalized experiences.
According to Gartner’s 2016-2017 CMO Spend Survey, marketing
leaders spend more on marketing technology than they do on

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paid media while 54% of marketing organizations have ultimate
responsibility for digital commerce.
Need for Digital Commerce Objectives
Retail and brand marketers know promotions are a race to the
bottom. Promotions can bring a quick boost to online conversion
and digital commerce revenue. But like most every other bad
habit, promotions eventually catch up to you in one of four ways:
· Unsustainable top line growth
· Deteriorating profit margin
· Erosion of brand equity
· Declining customer lifetime value
Solutions
· Foremost, set the right goals. Digital commerce revenue
objectives need to pair with margin goals and thresholds. Both
sets of metrics should be proactively tracked and monitored.

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Equal focus on top and bottom line performance will highlight the
real impact of promotions.
· Marketers need to use customer data and analytics to
forecast sales impact, prepare executives for short term effects of
fewer promotions and illustrate the long term pay off in higher
margin and customer lifetime value.
· Put marketing resources behind personalization to learn
what is most important to your customers. Personalization won’t
deliver overnight results. It will help you achieve incremental
improvement in conversion metrics by putting the right
campaigns, content and products in front of shoppers at the right
time and in the right channel and context based on their
behavior.
Dividing Digital Commerce Responsibilities
Marketing leaders with digital commerce responsibilities fall into
two categories: those who own the digital commerce function,

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and those who support digital commerce by using marketing to
achieve digital commerce goals.
· Marketers who own digital commerce demonstrate revenue
results, and have authority over capital expenditures and
resource management. They build and advance the digital go-to-
market strategy and gather and analyze customer data to better
understand buyer expectations and inform strategy and
execution.
· Marketers who support digital commerce must align
marketing plans, resources, channels, tactics and content to
deliver against digital commerce objectives. They must use
business andfinancial acumen and data-driven insight to influence
digital commerce strategy and shape commerce goals, which are
often set by brand or business unit leaders. To achieve those
objectives marketers must work closely with those leaders and
other internal functions like sales and IT.

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Why digital commerce matters in a considered purchase
process?
While the process for making a considered purchase varies by
industry and company, buyers can use digital technology to
educate themselves, plan and prepare for the buying process. For
buyers, being better educated can expedite the sales process and
mitigate the risk of making an uninformed or emotional decision.
For sellers, digital commerce and digital customer engagement
can shorten the sales cycle and improve the ability to orchestrate
and track customer behavior and measure the impact of different
marketing and sales tactics on lead to sales conversion. But
digital channels also lower switching costs, making it easier for a
prospect to shift between competitors than in traditional sales
channels.
Build three core competencies to enable digital commerce
for considered purchases

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· A customer-led buying process: Use digital to enable self-
service for customers. Encourage sales to respect customer
preferences.
· A digital product catalog and rich product content:Use
content marketing to enrich commerce. A rich content and
immersive experience, high quality images or detailed product
information and if possible, a 360 degree video makes an
appealing catalogue.
· A common system for tracking buyer interactions: Avoid
onslaught of emails, mobile messages and calls to customer. Use
CRM, marketing automation or campaign management tools to
orchestrate multichannel interactions.
Conclusion
Achieving results means understanding and anticipating your
customers’ wants, needs, behaviors and expectations. Digital
commerce strategies not only help to build a foundation for

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customer insights, but also to know the environmental and
competitive factors driving marketplace disruption.