Last updated: Survive in the digital age: Embrace disruptive commerce strategies

Survive in the digital age: Embrace disruptive commerce strategies

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Progressive companies tend to focus their corporate strategy around customer centricity. The question is, how do companies create commerce strategies to foster this centricity and provide value to customers, while also keeping revenue on track?

Commerce strategies: In it to win it

Companies that are in the business of creating and selling digital content, assets and services are best positioned to take advantage of today’s transformative digital landscape.

New technologies and attitudes allow direct connections with consumers (D2C) on many levels, including:

  • Rewards
  • Personalized experiences
  • Engagement with relevant interests like movies and live events
  • Simultaneously motivating customers to return again and again
  • Facilitating the collection of usage data and the prediction of future behavior

Companies need to embrace disruptive, cross-platform engagement techniques if they are to survive in the new digital economy.

Today’s customer is complex and omnichannel. They engage with brands and service providers on their terms across multiple devices, when and however it suits them.

Companies need to understand the context customers are in at any given moment. Geo-location on your website is a good start – even better would to identify a customer and actually recognize who they are and offer a personalized experience based on the implicit and explicit data you have on them. For this you need the vision and subsequent systems to truly get a 360 on your customer, which pays multi-fold dividends in the long run.

Digital commerce requires engagement across all the channels customers are using

Digital companies are now able to deliver to their customers an electronic and proactive embrace, constantly offering them things they care about, including convenient, contextual, and relevant experiences that are not invasive. This helps elevate loyalty and customer lifetime value while monetizing customer activity across all available channels.

Historically, many service providers have focused on content reach. But they overlooked improving the monetization of that reach by offering buying options with flexible subscriptions, metered paywalls, usage- and frequency-based entitlements, and dynamic bundling – combining digital and physical purchases – all with the convenience of self service.

The digital age mandates using disruptive monetization strategies across all channels, in real time – or face certain decline. The essence of this transition is a move towards seamless-ness, regardless of media format.

The seamless model is best illustrated in online gaming, where gamers can instantly purchase another level, weapon, scenario, or skill. This supersedes the previous method, where a player had to purchase a new box or disk from a store, bring it home, and install it. The current scenario shifts from the box to the cloud streaming, from a one-time purchase to usage-based subscription payments, and from the user’s device to cloud storage.

Media and service companies are currently experimenting with a range of interactive commerce strategies and monetization techniques including:

  • Digital subscriptions
  • Free trials
  • Add on downloadable content
  • Partner related downloads
  • VIP treatment and regular-visit incentives

Each media sector must deal with the monetization challenge in its own way, but some commonalities remain, especially the “audience of one” concept, which represents a significant culture shift from any broadcaster’s origins as a distributor of information and data to a collective audience.

Customers see themselves as individuals who choose their own apps and social media connections to interact with the world. Sector-specific media companies should not limit themselves to observing competitors within their own industry vertical, but take note of and leverage best practices from other sectors. The success of online games like League of Legends resonates loudly – letting players in for free and monetizing with micro-transaction resulting close to $1 billion in revenue in 2014.

Aligning monetization strategies with changing customer consumption preferences is a win win for customers and companies – convenience and lifestyle alignment for customers and continuous monetization with predicable recurring revenue for companies.

E-commerce everywhere.
Fast. Personalized. Shoppable.
It starts HERE.

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