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Commerce experts today are laser-focused on implementing the best platforms and portals to facilitate online transactions safely and securely. Meanwhile, marketers concentrate on telling strong brand stories to increase sales and build customer loyalty. While both teams have similar goals when it comes to increasing a company’s business, their efforts are often siloed. They don’t realize the benefit of integrating efforts closely in order to create bottom-line business impact.
Like Seeing Double
Studies have shown that 60% of marketing and commerce teams operate in silos -- reporting to separate managers and using separate technology platforms to create customer experiences on a company’s website. While common across companies, this siloed strategy can lead to major issues. For example, brands whose marketing and commerce teams are not integrated suffer from something called “two-site syndrome” -- where the branded content portion of the website feels disconnected from the purchasing section. It’s almost as if they are two different sites altogether. And consumers notice.
Two-site syndrome disrupts the path to purchase and leads to lost conversion opportunities and lost revenue. Even worse, it creates a disjointed experience for site visitors -- which is hugely detrimental to creating and keeping loyal customers.
A recent study found that brands whose commerce and marketing teams operate independently feel less confident that their collaborative efforts will positively impact conversions. Those same brands also suffered a negative impact on product development metrics, with a 24 percent slower time to market. What’s more, companies with disparate marketing and commerce teams struggle to merge important streams of customer data into one unified platform. Disconnected data points collected on separate technology systems weaken customer profiles, making it harder to implement best-practice features like content personalization on your company’s website.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
A Marriage of Minds
But there is hope for companies who have, to this point, kept marketing and commerce in separate areas. To prevent a negative impact on product development and user experience metrics, companies should implement a unified platform for both the marketing and commerce integrations online. A unified platform ensures that both sides of the site operate in tandem -- and that consumers can seamlessly move from one section to the other.
As evidenced by Gartner’s recent ranking of Web Content Management platforms, brands have started to take notice and make actionable changes toward integrating the two teams in the year ahead. Within Gartner’s report, the platforms that provided greater overall value throughout the entire digital experience performed better than specialized tools focused solely on content management.
I believe 2015 will be the year of marketing-commerce integration. Brands will take serious steps to intertwine their marketing and commerce departments, find unified tools that fit the needs of both parties, and structure their organizations in a way that both of these departments report to a common executive.
Title image by Stephen D (Flickr) via a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license
