According to a report from IBEF, the digital commerce market in India is expected to be worth $325 Billion in 2030 from the current size of $102 Billion in 2023. No wonder then, every company In India is looking to have a digital footprint to stay relevant in business. This maybe in the form of having an end to end buy journey where customers can place orders, be a discovery platform which showcases all of the companies’ different products, or a customer care platform which will help in resolving customer issues and grievances. We have seen traditional offline only companies branching out into online, investing in building their digital platforms to open a new channel for their goods and services along with digital first companies who have positioned themselves as an online only business.
But both these different sets of businesses are facing similar issues – to make the customer buy high ticket size products online. Customers typically want to touch and feel or inspect such products before making a purchase. This results in customers using the platform more for browsing and comparing the multiple products and making the purchase offline. This makes it difficult to generate consistently high contribution margins which are required to offset the higher fixed costs that are associated with setting up and maintaining the digital platform. These costs come in the form of marketing spends for customer acquisition, offers and cashbacks to entice the customer to make the purchase, purchasing of products or softwares to create the platform, investing in a tech team to manage the platform, COE, Category and Campaign teams to drive business etc. This is putting CMOs under tremendous pressure to justify their spends on technology and marketing in adding value to the overall business.
As a result, companies are trying to find out how customers are using and perceiving their platform. This has led them to invest in tools and technologies which help them track each and every aspect of customer behaviour on the platform. The most popular of them are web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics which help analyze and monitor customer behaviour on the platform. These tools track each customer with a unique ID, called visitor ID (Adobe Analytics) or client ID (Google Analytics) which is a unique value stamped for each device browser combination used by the customer. Once the customer logs in, this mapping can be stored in the database. So next time even if the customer logs out or is not logged in visits the platform, the marketing team will still be able to identify them using this visitor or client ID. This will allow them to identify customers who have visited the platform, browsed the products but made the purchase in an offline store. Apart from this backend stitching, companies are looking to nudge customers to login on the platform. This helps them in identifying the customers, showing personalized offers and retargeting them if they drop off in the journey. An attribution model can be created in which the digital platform can be credited for the purchase of the product in an offline store, if the customer has browsed the product on the platform in a specified time duration before the purchase was completed. This duration can be modified based on the nature of the goods being sold.
This attribution will help the Marketing team understand the ratio between how many customers are browsing the product online and purchasing it offline with the number of customers making the purchase online. If this ratio is significantly high, then resources can be prioritized into developing capabilities which aid the customer in discovering all the products which the company offers. They can also focus on showing the nearest stores which have the product from the customer’s address or PIN Code, thereby improving the chances of the customer visiting the offline store and making the purchase. The data can also be shared with the call centre team or the nearby dealer who can call and assist the customer with their purchase.
These measures will help the business in identifying the value which the digital platforms are generating for the overall business. This will also help in making strategic decisions to utilize the capabilities of the digital platform.
