What Can E-commerce Learn from 2020 Market Research Trends?

Through diversification and increased sophistication of the small businesses, the marketplace is booming in the area of e-commerce. In 2020 the revival of e-commerce is happening all around us.

Cutting edge digitally innate brands are trailing out voice commerce, partnering up with renewed companies, and experimenting with augmented reality – enabled online-to-offline experiences. E-commerce is constantly looking for trends in other industries, but staying at the forefront of their own sector is also imperative. With e-commerce continuing to expand, and data-driven decision-making taking on more prestige in every industry, there is still a lot to digest for progressive-thinking marketers.

To that end, e-commerce businesses need to use their experience working as service providers with support from market research firms and apply big trends that are impacting the industry today.

A New Era of Storytelling 

Storytelling has quickly become the marketer’s weapon of choice over the last few years. And it comes as no surprise why – humans love stories.

From the moment we are born, society provides us with stories of old, new and the future. It has inspired, given us proper confidence and helped us to learn. As for our buying preferences, when it comes to making a purchase, a good story makes the difference between us falling for those products or ignoring it altogether.

In 2020, big data is increasingly taking the back-sets to the contextualizing data as actual insights. Over the last years, the influx of data generated by digitization has overwhelmed decision-making, teaching e-commerce businesses that better structures are necessary to put that data to proper use.

In short, successful marketers are relying on data storytelling to contextualize those data points. And it works. Storytelling not only creates a narrative around your company and the goods it sells, but it helps you create a brand that sells.  

The story helps you frame your offerings, the reason why you create them and the mission behind your company.

Products videos are much preferred to product description 

Storytelling isn’t only about texts. You can story-tell your brand and the products it sells via descriptive video contents. And, video plays an important role in the future of e-commerce as it shows that 60% of online shoppers favour product videos rather than reading product descriptions. Research also shows that 64% of online shoppers purchase something after watching a product video.  

More Social Listening 

Social listening helps with everything related to e-commerce and social media. From customer service, lead generation, customer insights and influencer marketing, social listening is primarily centred on gathering every mention of predefined keywords or even cause.

For this reason, relying on professional marketing research agencies is imperative and beneficial for B2B agencies – to gather data from every possible online source available and social platform related to them. Social listening is so versatile today that by simply monitoring your brand, industry news and competitors can boost your e-commerce in different ways.

Sustainable e-commerce goes mainstream

In 2020 consumers are looking for brands who lead with their values, not only their needs. However, aligning a brand with social cause is no longer enough for today’s generations.

Customers increasingly want brands to act as global citizens by using only sustainable practices, reduced waste packaging and eco-friendly supply chains. Consumers demand to know a product’s whole lifecycle, as well as the ethical sourcing of sustainable components and commodities.

Intercept Survey 

Quick polls have long been carried out everywhere from shipping hubs and cinemas to cafes and pubs and restaurants.

Yet, while they’ve been around us for some time, we can see them shifting to social platforms more and more in the coming decade. In 2020, real-time SMS data gathering and social media tools are expected to grow as more people spend their time online- whether scrolling through Facebook feeds or watching YouTube videos. Polling does remain one of the most powerful tools that brands can incorporate into a social strategy.

For instance, soliciting opinions in real-time can help brands better understand the community and the types of things they enjoy. It provides a deeper insight into their customers and readers, and it can also improve the progress of marketing, advertising campaigns and traffic.

AI-assisted Data Collection

The ability to augment and automate the data-heavy strategy seen in the e-commerce industry made the machine learning-based AI models a perfect tool. AI-assisted data collection allows brands to dig deeper and search for more valuable details, but also supports them by controlling the data flow in the real-time.

Particularly, online retailers can find artificial intelligence in e-commerce useful in predicting user behaviour. So, although everyone is different and acts upon motivations when it comes to statistics, we’re all alike. For instance, a group that’s large enough to considerably represent target customers enables businesses to effectively predict customer behaviour. Basically, that’s the exact same trick that works in opinion polls during elections- but quicker and done in real-time.

Predictions work hand in hand with recommendations engines, supporting multiple ways to improve conversion rates and augment the overall business performance.

Increasing Use of Industry Partners 

The expansion of data collection methods such as social listening and AI-powered surveys, and increased focus on how data is analyzed, shows there are multiple levels that marketers can benefit from developing strategic partnerships.

One of the biggest impediments in analyzing qualitative data from market research is the approach of its collection. Collected data from focus groups, one-on-one interviews and other qualitative approaches are generally in the form of audio files. However, when handling large volumes of audio, parsing this whole data for useful insights can be difficult. Transcription services are one example of valuable partnerships that allow marketers to improve the quality of the outcome and internal efficiency.

It can be said that e-commerce is here to stay. That’s how the future of convenience will look like. Giving customers a good shopping experience will benefit brands tremendously as e-commerce is on the rise. And the future is already here making e-commerce easier, seamless, more convenient and powerful.