About the future of ecommerce, contentmarketing strategy and personalisation by force

It is september, and I do not know why, but in september there is alway's lot's of interesting ecommerce news. I do like to share a few interesting articles with you today.
Take for example Ryanair. Ryanair is going to introduce "personalisation by force". You do not have a choice but to get personalised offers and information, Read more about it here and here.  I think a really good move. Make loyalty easy. It always annoys me if I fly with an airline and I can only benefit from their loyalty programme if I sign up. Why not just match my email adress, and see my booking history. For example I flew many times with Cathay Pacific, but I never took the effort to sign up for their loyalty programme, same goes for KLM. But they do have my fly history and flight pattern, so they can personalise offers! However they do not do so  leaving me chosing often other airlines. Curious how this works out countries where privacy is an important issue in online marketing, countries like Germany for example.

Then there is the growing importance of call centres in e-commerce and marketing. Every call is becoming a data collector! Interesting. By using data acquired by call centre agents, the website experience, or more broad the digital touchpoints experience can be improved. This aspect of ecommerce is often forgotten, but call centres already were of great importance for ecommerce but their importance is only growing!

Econsultancy, from the UK released a nice infographic about contentmarketing. Often companies think that contentmarketing is just writing an article or publishing a generic video. But that is not the case. Contentmarketing requires a true strategy. This infographic (on click for large) describes various types of contentmarketing.

As you see there is a lot to take into consideration and now imagine these content types in an international environment.

Meanwhile others (and I think there is truth in it) say that generic content is no longer king. But write content (and give tooling), so others can write content for you and about you. Of course it depends in which industry you are at, but when thinking out of the box , there are always some idea's to think try.

Another interesting opinion about the future of ecommerce, I found at this website. This guy, Brent Bellm, signalises a trend: Seemless buying, buying via social platforms, or any platform where there is interaction between friends or consumers. 

The trend he sees is that we move away from ecommerce platforms (bring the store to me), and even that we might move away from marketplaces as Amazon. 

Interesting, as how will digital branding look like, when there are far less ecommerce websites? Customer Experience will be even more important as it is far easier for consumers to share idea's or products (maybe even for a commission), at the same time digital experiences related to the products you sell, or digital problem solving tools, will help in creating your brand.

At this moment, by the way, marketplaces are still growing strong. 92% of users use online marketplaces in a lot of parts of the world.

However we also know from China, that seemless buying in chat applications like wechat is very popular and easy to do. It is also very easy for companies to integrate their shops and services in wechat.

A very interesting trend to follow closely the next few months.