The world of ecommerce is in a constant state of evolution and flux. From escalating customer expectations to optimized internal operations, new systems for ensuring ecommerce revenue growth are regularly proposed. How can your Major Appliance sector business ensure you’re accessing and adopting the best business processes, and seeing the best return on investment in these instances?
To be successful going forward, businesses will have to adjust internal processes to support the new trend toward digitalization. The white goods ecommerce industry is no exception. Having the internal structures to support a productive omnichannel experience is increasingly essential, and AI, digital transformation, and enhanced customer support provide the foundation for all future online revenue growth.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the business processes that can help accelerate ecommerce sales growth, through increased efficiencies and data-driven strategy.
Read on for our six top recommendations when it comes to increasing your white goods ecommerce revenue…
1. Digitally transform your Product Information Management
It’s a clichéd phrase, but one that exists for a reason – retail is detail. Customers are looking for specifics, and without the information they need, conversion simply won’t occur. This effect is amplified when we’re looking at online sales. No product to hold, view, test or assess? Without the reassurance of detailed product descriptions, digital assets, and supporting social proof, consumers simply won’t take the leap of faith. This effect is compounded even further in the case of expensive, attribute-heavy items like refrigerators and washing machines…
With the rise of omnichannel, and as retailers have come to appreciate the value and importance of product information, we’ve seen a marked increase in the adoption of dedicated PIM (product information management) systems. By leveraging a digital platform tailored to the specific storage, organization, and distribution of accurate product information, retailers can ensure they’re making optimal use of the data they own, and by extension, see optimal conversion rates from the PDPs they populate.
By digitally transforming their PIM with a platform that enables the automation of many time-consuming, manual tasks, retailers can manipulate and edit information across any sales channel, ensuring better accuracy, higher performance, and improved customer experience. PDPs that lack detail underperform – while those with incorrect or outdated information may lead to costly returns and damaging negative reviews.
When assessing internal processes that stand to boost revenues and deliver dependable ROI, PIM is a sound investment. By integrating a dedicated PIM platform, retailers can:
- Increase conversion rates for PDPs
- Identify and improve underperforming PDPs
- Improve team efficiency and collaboration
- Achieve a more consistent omnichannel experience
- Reduce the burden on customer service teams
- Minimize the expense and product wastage associated with returns
2. Centralize and standardize your digital assets
Hand in hand with product information, digital assets represent another critical component when it comes to ensuring optimized ecommerce revenue growth. For omnichannel retailers, and even in the case of Major Appliances (where the majority of final sales will be made in-store,) a consistent and comprehensive approach to digital asset management is critical. With so much product exploration, comparison, and consideration taking place online ahead of a sale being made, ensuring your customers have access to accurate, high-quality images, videos, manuals, guides, and more all contribute to healthy conversions.
Just as PIM has evolved to run more effectively over dedicated digital platforms, DAM (digital asset management) has also evolved to meet the demands of omnichannel and the modern consumer. In addition to improving the process of distributing and storing digital assets, a dependable DAM platform also helps to ensure better brand control – keeping assets aligned to brand standards and presentation guidelines.
As more sales channels emerge, brand control will become an increasingly important consideration for those looking to attain the best results and revenues. By working with a DAM platform such as ECP, businesses can benefit from dual syndication – a feature that allows digital assets to be imported directly from brand catalogs, ensuring that all assets are representative of the latest product variants or editions.
As with PIM, DAM is an area that stands to provide solid returns on investment. By leveraging a digital DAM platform, retailers can:
- Boost conversion with more appealing and informative PDPs
- Maintain brand control and consistency across multiple sales channels
- Increase team efficiency and collaboration
- Avoid the damaging impact of content degradation
3. Optimize Team Efficiency with AI, Automation, and Enhanced Collaboration.
When it comes to the opportunities offered by AI and automation, the spotlight within ecommerce frequently falls upon customer-facing solutions and software. While the advantages offered here are considerable, there’s just as much to be gained within the realm of back-office processes. By ensuring your business is benefiting from the latest developments in this area, you can optimize operation aspects and see the best returns on your team’s productivity.
Identifying the bottlenecks and laborious manual processes within workflows is the first step toward improved ecommerce revenues. For the Major Appliance sector, which deals with a lot of product onboarding, finding an automated solution to this time-consuming process carries many advantages. As well as freeing up your team’s time, an automated product onboarding process can also lead to a reduction in mistakes and corrections, thanks to a reduction in the chance of human error.
Similarly, AI-informed workflow management can help to ensure that your team’s time is put to the most efficient use. In addition to providing better whole-team transparency, and easing collaborative, multi-channel product management, ECP’s platform allocates every member of your team a unique user profile, enabling clearer individual objectives and intelligent “next best action” recommendations, to help ensure optimal use of everyone’s time and the best outcomes as a result.
In the same vein, automated content scoring is another valuable tool that can greatly reduce the need for manual investigation and monitoring. ECP works to continuously and automatically assess and score PDPs, across unlimited channels, to discover which may be falling below the threshold for content quality, allowing your team to focus their efforts on improving them for more conversion uplift.
When looking to improve ecommerce revenue, it makes sense to optimize the efficiency of the team that you rely on to bring all the moving parts of your online retail operation together. By giving them the tools and systems, they need to support an efficient and collaborative working environment, you empower them to chase and achieve the very best results.
4. Perfecting the omnichannel experience so customers feel fully supported
Omnichannel is the modern default when it comes to sales success. This is especially true for sectors such as Major Appliances, which see customers undertake a lot of product research and comparison across a wide range of channels before committing to a purchase. The modern consumer increasingly expects seamless and personalized omnichannel interactions, which deliver a familiar, functional, and consistent experience. By doubling down on omnichannel strategy and functionality, retailers can ensure that they are optimizing their chances of success, no matter where, when, or how a shopper interacts with their brand or products.
Omnichannel consistency impacts all aspects of customer experience – from product discovery and exploration to customer experience. By paying attention to the way that customers experience your offering – be that in the form of PDPs or interactions with support staff – you can ensure that your audience feels supported, and confident and maintains their motivation to purchase.
Data is key to success here – more specifically, access to and mobility of data. To deliver a personalized experience, consumers need to recognize as individuals at every touchpoint. This is especially true in the case of support – be this pre- or post-purchase. An omnichannel, personalized approach to customer support is the modern gold standard – and especially important for the Major Appliances sector – where longer purchase consideration phases and a higher cadence of post-purchase support (in the form of installation, repair, and spare part supply) are common.
As sales channels continue to evolve and expand, businesses are increasingly investing in ensuring the same consistent marketing and support experiences. 47% of ecommerce decision-makers in Europe and North America believed omnichannel strategies to be very important in 2021 and we can reasonably expect this figure to continue to rise. Within Major Appliances, the need to adhere to rising standards and expectations will be common within the sector – helping to create friction-free and seamless pathways to conversion.
5. Excel in digital customer experience. It starts with the underlying technology.
The method of delivery for customer support is just as important as its omnichannel nature. However, and wherever they choose to reach out, the modern consumer increasingly expects support to be available 24/7. While this level of support may not be possible around the clock, especially in the case of cross-border sales, automated processes such as intelligent chatbots are increasingly helping to bridge the gap between expectation and provision of instant answers and assistance. As standards within this technical field continue to rise, customers can access information in an intuitive and increasingly “human” environment, getting the updates they need in a manner that is both economical and scalable for the business involved.
Once again, the pandemic changes the playing field in terms of customer support trends, and today, consumers highly prize a fully digital customer support experience as their favored method of outreach to a brand or retailer. This trend can be observed across all demographics but is particularly evident within the millennial market segment. 89% of millennials surveyed expecting brands to use technology to shape their customer experience, and as this age bracket grows into homeownership, this trend can be expected to align closely the future of the Major Appliance sector.
What does this mean for brands and retailers? Now is the time to double down on a polished, well-considered digital support structure and strategy. Best-in-class service here will prove a valuable point of differentiation from close competitors and can help to ensure ongoing customer loyalty from a younger generation of consumers who are new to the market.
By taking an omnichannel approach here, businesses can triage questions coming in from a wide range of platforms. As a result, and in the case of attribute-rich lines sold within the Major Appliance sector, agents must have instant access to the product information that they need to answer queries quickly, accurately, and professionally, without needing to pass customers on to different departments. Again, this is an area in which a dedicated PIM system pays real dividends.
6. Personalize the interaction by collecting the right data.
71% of consumers report feeling frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, making this element of marketing and customer experience an increasingly critical consideration. Once again, millennials are leading the way when it comes to this preference, denoting a trend that is here to stay for the Major Appliance sector.
Personalized calls to action convert at a rate 202% times higher than their generic counterparts. To see success here and get the needle moving when it comes to white goods ecommerce sales, brands and retailers alike should be personalizing offers, experiences, communications, and recommendations.
AI technology is getting more advanced at encompassing emotions (for example, within sales or support calls) into the algorithms delivering these experiences, but to get the best results, brands need a solid base of customer data and analytics technology, held within and leveraged from a dependable CDP (customer data platform.)
While a dedicated and thorough approach to personalized interactions does mean an investment when it comes to both the acquisition and architecture of customer data, those who use personalization as a strategy has been able to drive 5 to 15% increases in revenue and 10 to 30% increases in marketing-spend efficiency — mainly by leveraging product recommendations and triggered communications.
Ready to increase white goods ecommerce sales?
The ecommerce playing field has changed dramatically in recent years — consumer experience expectations have risen in line with advancements in the technology designed to deliver them. Today, competing in the white goods market and reaching greater revenue goals will require businesses to look at their internal readiness.
Perhaps above all else, this means having the technology required to provide more enhanced and consistent digital experiences to customers across multiple channels. Individually targeted marketing driven by market research will require the support of an internal process that supports the accurate collection, centralization, and distribution of that essential data.
The future is bright for ecommerce sales in the Major Appliances sector. The supporting role that digital channels will play in offline sales will continue to grow in its significance, while final sales made online will also continue to climb, especially as younger, digitally native consumers enter the market. As new tech advances, businesses have a real opportunity to allow for more coverage of consumer sales points, leading to more opportunities to complete a sale and win those all-important digital conversions.
