Drive new revenue from your social advertising spend to boost ROAS

Shopping at the edge is when a customer starts a shopping journey away from the brand site. Today, it’s the source of most new customer traffic to ecommerce sites. Promoting a brand on Social media is one example, as is Google shopping, or advertising on ad networks or retail media networks (such as Amazon, Walmart, Target etc.). Equally any interaction with a customer on another channel, including messaging and email marketing is also starting a potential shopping journey away from the brand site.

The problem is not the engagement with customers at the edge, rather what happens when they click. Clicking through to the brand site involves crossing channels – and experiences frequently break when crossing channels.

Clicking through from a social media ad to a brand site, a visitor will be frequently directed to the Product Detail Page or Category Page. This can be a jarring experience – going from the engaging and aspirational experience of social to a product page with a very transactional ‘Add to cart’ call to action, is a hard landing and frequently results in a page bounce. In fact, visitors from the edge landing on Product Detail Pages have a bounce rate 72% higher and half the conversion rate of traffic lancing on any other page on the site.

The Product Detail Page was designed for a different journey where traffic arrives on the homepage, clicks through different categories, selects a specific product and is then presented with all the information necessary to decide to buy. Traffic from the edge follows a very different journey, with widely different levels of intent, contexts, familiarity with the brand, and different interests. For example, a brand might show an aspirational image of a model sitting on a beach chair wearing a white T-shirt, denim jacket and khaki shorts. The brand wants to sell the white T-shirt, but the customer might be interested in the jacket, shorts, beach chair, T-shirt or be thinking about their next summer holiday and be interested in all beach clothing.

Edge storefronts provide a frictionless shopping experience by blending the content from the edge with back end ecommerce services to make it fully shoppable.Edge storefronts extend existing ecommerce platforms, pushing shopping out to the edge, where customers are spending their time. Seamless integrations into both the channel and the back-end ecommerce services enable marketers to quickly compose highly engaging shopping experiences.

Edge Storefronts provide a great shopping experience for customers starting their journeys away from the brand site. In short, they make any content shoppable. Anywhere.

Customers are able to continue the story started on the edge, which enables brands to achieve three key things:

1. Drive new revenue streams from the edge
2. Provide customers with highly engaging experiences at the edge (when otherwise they would bounce off the brand site)
3. Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost by up to 20%

An Edge Storefront, is as the name implies, a complete storefront made up of multiple pages that blend content from the channel and make it completely shoppable. An edge storefront could be thought of as a channel or promotion specific microsite that is assembled in a few minutes, designed to get customers from initial interest to the point of purchase.

For traffic not yet ready to convert, a landing page can be a ‘dead end’ where there is only one potential path forward – add to cart and buy. Recognising that traffic from the edge has many different levels of intent, SimplicityDX drives engagement and exploration so the visitor can find easily what she is looking for.

An Edge Storefront typically has a home page, category and product pages which integrate directly into ecommerce back end services and the channel’s content. Each page blends content from both, creating a familiar but fully shoppable environment for traffic from the channel. These pages are different from typical ecommerce pages because the content is:

1. tailored to the needs of the channel;
2. highly dynamic, changing by the minute with new channel content, brand promotions and as channel content becomes hot or not.