Are Your Consumers Ghosting You?

What Happened: It’s undeniable that consumers are presented with seemingly unlimited choices, and consumers tend to explore those choices. ?A study by Bluecore showed that “74% of a retailer’s customers are one-and-done,” and this one-and-done behavior isn’t vertical specific. Bluecore dubs these one-and-donners “fickle shoppers,” having purchased only once then ghosting your brand. ?While we agree consumers have a habit of ghosting us, we don’t quite believe they’re “fickle.” It’s likely they’re testing and trying and exploring and your brand may not have made the cut (valuable insight.) They could also be under economic stress limiting their purchase behavior. The point is, using the “fickle” label negates the most valuable insights you have to buyer growth: consumer perceptions, needs, and circumstances. ?

Fickle ghosters aside, that initial purchase is the best indicator for fostering a repeat customer. The study also found that “once a customer buys twice, the likelihood they buy a third time goes up 95%.” This may seem like a no brainer, but how do you get past the one-and-done epidemic to fostering a relationship with life-time consumers? Data.

Data has always been the backbone of strong strategies and one could argue that retail relies more heavily on real time consumer data to power B2C business models. With the user shopping journey, though it’s always been fractured to some degree, being fractured across numerous channels, mediums, marketplaces, and device types, understanding brand engagement across this landscape of touchpoints is critical; but can seem like a pie-in-sky versus a reality.

As consumers get more concerned about privacy, see the story above from the “All Industry” section for further details, brands will need to be even more careful about consumer perceptions when diving headfirst into first party data. ?As is ever the case, this lack of trust and concern for privacy from consumers is in stark contradiction to their main wants and needs from their retailers. eMarketers latest GenAI and the purchase journey report reported the 4th most prominent want from consumers for “innovations online vs. in physical stores” was seamless onmichannel experiences.

Seamless omnichannel experiences, as well as increased personalized services (#3 on the list^) and personalized product recommendations (#4 on the list^), only exist in a world where we truly understand the user. To understand the user, we need the data. Therein lies the rub. Said rub will only get stronger with the loss of third-party cookies as users are inundated with requests for information directly from every brand they interact with.

BUT, we know that the journey is fractured. We know that channels can’t be siloed. We know that just like in the physical world, our digital presence must be a cohesive unit. How do we know? Because data. Channel lead marketing strategies see only a 22% retention rate, while customer movement lead strategies see a 59% retention rate.

Speaking of fractured journeys: In-store is the most popular way to discover clothing brands and products, but while discovery happens in-store, users research products on-line. Though that statement on its own may be true [the most popular way to discover new clothing brands/products purchased is in-store with 38.5% of US clothes buyers], the next three main drivers of clothes discovery vastly outweigh that single instore percentage: Brand website or app is 33.6%, Retailer website or app is 30%, and social media is 28.2%. In a silo users enjoy browsing the aisles and have experienced a return to physical shopping, by and large users are getting most product exposure and discovery from the device that’s always in their hands.

Physical retail aside, we know that users are starting their journey either on a marketplace or a search engine, but it looks like they’re ending it their too.? Amazon accounted for 40% of ecommerce sales, 80% of marketplace sales, and 4% of retail sales in 2023. Disregarding the minor grocery faux pas, ?Amazon is the brand to beat.

As the Googs shifts to try and battle it out, meaning the influx of marketplace-esque SERPs, they are finally dropping us marketers a bone with adding the ability to connect merchant center to Google Analytics 4. TBD on how well this new feature will work, but I know we are excited to dig into the data.

Impact on Search: With the explosion of social commerce, influencer brand deals, and retail media networks, this isn’t surprising at all. Users are inundated with product recommendations both shoppable and inspirational and most of the time, those are on a mobile device. While we’ve reported on the SERP composition changing to prioritize the PDP and mimic a PLP or a marketplace, we haven’t discussed the flipside to that. This marketplace-first UX is mostly seen on desktop; though, product features are seen on mobile, the mobile SERP experience is structured to facilitate the upper funnel learn and consider needs of users. This includes the integration of features that give social channels, like TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit, greater visibility in SERPs that lean more transactional on desktop.

Our search reporting data shows that product focused listings take up 20% less space of page 1 (in an infinite scroll world, we delineate this with a size variable) SERPs on mobile than they do on desktop. Furthermore, product searches on mobile produce more social narrative SERP features, like discussions and forums and short videos. Short videos are only seen on mobile SERPs, this feature is nearly the only place we see TikTok breaking into SERPs. Reddit is basically the only owner of discussions and forums with 2/3rds of the space dedicated to the platform. Product panels on mobile dominate the main SERP feed vs being segmented to the right which could largely be ignored.

If all the data is pointing to users discovering and evaluating products online, it’s highly likely that the majority of that research resides in the mobile environment. An environment that may very well push your users down a path that presences them with another set of options, similar to a SERP, that you may not have thought about nor have presence in. Again, it’s all in the data, so what does your channel presence data say about you?

The biggest threat here is most of the time in the retail space, when a user starts down the social path, likely being redirected to an in app experience, you’re hard pressed to see them jump out of it. Once the user is off the engine and into the app, did they land on your brand or brand sponsored content? More over, with the nature of shoppable social media (peep YouTube’s new shoppable features), are they then going to convert from that platform?

So what does this mean for you? It means that even though we’ve been push down the “mobile first” index, that doesn’t mean your site wouldn’t benefit from a device type review for various user engagement factors. This also means that your Search teams and your Social teams should likely be communicating and coordinating on strategy more than they currently are.