Indi, the digital word of mouth engagement and monetization platform, has been selected by Jakarta-based online marketplace Tokopedia to enhance customer engagement and user experience.

Considering that digitization was still smiled at a few years ago, two-thirds of retailers look at it today as an opportunity to thrive, aware of the fact that shop systems will be much more than just additional distribution channels in the future. The boundaries between online, offline and mobile will continue to merge and the distribution channels no longer coexist but used in combination the way consumers want them to. Hence, the cross-channel shopping experience is at the top of every merchant’s list when it comes to customer expectations.

As many reports reveal, the festive e-commerce market in Southeast Asia is worth billions of dollars, rewarding those brands willing to digitally reinvent themselves constantly and matching consumer demands and expectations steadily. Or as Meltwater describes it in one of their recent reports, “the common thread between the winning brands – whether that is Lazada, Amazon or Shopee – lies in their understanding of consumers and willingness to provide the best experience through price, value, quality and service.”

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) generally creates real competitive advantages and enables the development of new markets, besides leading to more customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty and maximized profits.

2019 will be the break through year of what has been predicted for years but hasn’t yet materialized to any significant extent: big brands, advertising agencies, retailers, and leading media will disappear into insignificance, creating space for new things and better solutions besides new social- and value systems. The trend towards something new and the challenges in digital marketing will simply increase even more: it continues to be all about personalization, voice and the increasing dominance of Instagram; Amazon will go head to head with Google and Facebook in online advertising market share; and collaboration within agencies and agile brand management will keep on being important.

We just started to imagine what artificial intelligence (AI) can do to transform the experience for both marketers and consumers with its impressive versatility. Adobe just released its online shopping predictions for the 2018 holiday season, Retail Unwrapped, making use of its artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, to identify retail insights from trillions of data points that flow through Adobe Analytics and Magento Commerce Cloud, part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

In their insightful report Break Through the Hype: Uncover the Reality of AI, Oracle and Bronto point out that a growing number of commerce marketing software providers claim their systems use AI, explaining in a nutshell what this means:

Leading global IT and business solutions provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced findings from its global study titled, Winning in a Business 4.0™ World, which benchmarks large companies in their Business 4.0 growth and transformation journeys by mapping their adoption of four critical business behaviours: driving mass personalisation, creating exponential value, leveraging ecosystems, and embracing risk.

Customer experience (CX) is expected to overtake price as a key product differentiator by 2020. However, businesses are already urged today to keep pace with customer experience innovation that can help gaining insight, scale and connect customer journey touch points, from the tested online experience to the monitored customer service experience, since CX has been growing exponentially over the past years.

Mobile channels have become more compelling to the perpetrators of ad fraud, since mobile accounts for an increasing proportion of digital ad spend. But, while there are many strategies and solutions available to mitigate the impacts of ad fraud, separating the capabilities from the spin can be difficult, which is why TrafficGuard provides some thoughts and predictions on ad fraud prevention:

In the classical marketing model, marketing is deemed to a funnel: at the beginning of the process (in the "awareness" stage) there are many branches competing for the attention of the customer, and this number is reduced through the different purchasing stages. Marketing is an action of "pushing" the brand through few touch points (for example through TV ads).

A recent study by elaboratum, a German expert consultancy firm for digital business and cross-channel strategies, shows that optimizing your website for emotional and intuitive decision-making factors can significantly improve your conversion rate.

The terms influencer marketing and influencer relations, as well as their opportunities for corporate communication, have been discussed for around ten years now. Essentially, it is about how opinion building works for stakeholders, especially customers or other reference groups, and what levels beyond journalism or advertising are involved.

Customers nowadays expect more from their online store than just standard suggestions on the latest bestsellers or the cheapest items. Whoever wants to increase sales in e-commerce must meet the expectations and tastes of the customers - ideally fulfilling their wishes before they could even express them. However, this only works if the recommendations include comprehensive information such as the previous buying behavior and previous search queries, and thus become relevant for the customer. Pseudo-personalized emails, incoherent advertising, and randomly chosen "You might like it" links are more harmful than doing any good. If the personalized recommendation is successful, online retailers can improve customer satisfaction, achieve a higher conversion rate, and increase sales.