28 E-Commerce and Marketing Predictions To Watch In 2018

2017 was the year where the marketer's role in retail changed drastically and retail businesses (both pure-play and omni-channel retailers) had to come to terms with a new playing field that required them to disrupt their own strategy at every turn. Amongst a very long list, this included understanding the next generation of customers, learning how AI can help them in their role, maximising sales during Black Friday and key shopping days, preparing for GDPR (in Europe), building personalisation into the core customer experience, implementing new solution providers to the marketing stack and experimenting with new technologies and tactics to see what works.

Senior executives and C-suites from leading retail and marketing technology companies share their views here on what they predict 2018 holds for retail and marketing:

1. New Roles “Brands that are leveraging data science today are largely forced to do the heavy lifting themselves. That will change in 2018 - we’ll have tools that won’t just manage analysis; they’ll also prescriptively recommend and execute the best course of action based on a marketer’s desired outcome. Not only will the technology actually deliver on those promises, it will also be broadly accessible to all growth-oriented ecommerce brands. All of this will culminate in the marketing function shifting away from monotonous administrative tasks. Roles that are nearly entirely dedicated to operating software, for example, will start to be phased out - both in house and across the broader services industry. Marketers will be forced into - or more accurately, will finally be able to experience - roles that are increasingly strategic, creative, and above everything else: customer experience oriented.” - Agata Celmerowski, VP of Marketing, Klaviyo.
2. Email, SMS and Push Notifications “Multichannel marketing - targeting consumers at each stage of their path to purchase through email, SMS, push notifications and more will cease to be an afterthought and instead become a baseline necessity for successful marketing in 2018.” – Joshua Neckes, Co-Founder, Simon Data.
3. Visual Search “The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and particularly visual recognition will continue momentum in opening up new and exciting sales opportunities for retailers. For example visual search for products will grow particularly via mobile and the monetisation of eCommerce imagery via automated product tagging will bring new revenue streams in 2018.” - Alex Vaidya, CEO & Co-Founder, StoryStream.
4. Multi-Format Video “Broadcast TV and digital will roll into a single, more aligned cross-screen video campaign strategy. Instead of television functioning independently of data-driven digital approaches, marketers will begin to integrate the big screen into more commonplace addressable tactics (desktop, mobile, social, native) to deliver relevant advertising experiences at the household level. I expect advanced marketers to test this in the first part of the year and for this to become more prevalent by the end of 2018.” - Jon Setty, Managing Director UK, Eyeview.
5. Multi-Channel Personalisation “Personalisation will emerge as a must-have capability in retail brands to retain customers. Retailers will prefer to work with vendors with complete customer engagement and activation stack rather than with multiple point solution vendors to increase ROI, improve operational efficiency and to better customer experience.” - Anoop Vasisht, GM EMEA, Dynamic Yield.
6. AI for Customer Insights “Utilising new AI technologies on mobile devices, passive data collection methods that increase user understanding; demographics, behaviour, interests and intent will drive personalisation at scale and increase relevancy and engagement.” - Henry White, VP Strategy at Pixoneye.
7. Location Intelligence “In 2018, brands will place greater emphasis on location intelligence. By analysing historical location data and detailed behavioural patterns, brands will gain comprehensive insights into consumer preferences and habits which can be used for hyper-targeted campaigns.” - Gil Larsen, VP Americas, Blis.
8. Email “The majority of email revenue will come from automated email programmes using different kinds of triggers such as price drop triggers, behavioural website and lifestyle triggers, abandoned product triggers and more.” -  Jared Blank, Senior Vice President, Data Analysis and Insights, Bluecore.
9. Ad Spend “Facebook (including Instagram) and Google will continue to drive the vast majority of ad spend for commerce, while popular platforms like Snapchat and Twitter that haven’t cracked the code on direct-to-consumer selling will refocus their efforts on branding and cultivating community.” Tomer Tagrin, Co-founder and CEO, Yotpo.
10. Social Advertising “2018 is the year that social advertising grows up: more platforms will enter the market and formats like voice search will transform social ads.” R.J. Talyor, CEO, Quantifi.
11. Mobile Marketing "The retailers and e-commerce companies that will see the biggest growth in 2018 will be those that are able to truly own their digital customer relationships. As the capabilities of mobile devices evolve and become more powerful, smart marketers will look to offer amazing new personalised experiences to customers and mobile users, while capitalising on the data these interactions produce. With more marketing budgets continuing to shift to mobile, businesses that master their ability to measure and act on their mobile data will have the ultimate competitive advantage." - Ran Avrahamy, VP Global Marketing, AppsFlyer.
12. Mobile Wallets “Mobile wallets are known for making payments a breeze, but more brands will leverage wallets for non-payment activities, like coupon redemption and ticket scanning, all to bolster brand loyalty and customer retention. Tools like these market your brand proactively – you can reach the consumer directly, rather than them having to hunt through their phone to find your app.” Jack Philbin, Co-Founder & CEO, Vibes.
13. Lets’ chat? “In 2017 companies were more focused on the information that chatbots provide to customers rather than their conversational skills. However, this year businesses will look at ‘the tone of voice’ to use chatbots not only in sales but also to deepen relations with customers and support the company’s communication strategy.” Szymon Klimczak, CMO, LiveChat.
14. Conversational assistants “Whether via messaging platforms, smart speakers or email, marketers will be able to leverage new tools to have ongoing conversations with their customers. Brands who successfully deliver hyper-personalised content and product recommendations via these channels will build stronger relationships with consumers across the home, in-store and mobile.” - Andy Maury, CEO and co-founder, Automat.
15. Digital Content "Channels like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are magnifying an age-old problem: the content crunch. It has become extremely challenging for brands to drive interesting, engaging content across all the channels modern consumers have adopted. Rather than out-sourcing content creation, brands will increasingly look to bring content – of all types – in house in 2018.” - Brad Rencher, EVP & GM, Digital Marketing, Adobe.

Read the rest of the article here on Forbes.