Bringing together stakeholders and fostering alignment is easier said than done. So while digital growth is often driven by leadership’s vision and strategic directives, many companies struggle to come together to define the vision or align on how to execute plans. This ultimately leads brands to a halt when it comes to innovation and growth.
This is where eCommerce consultants come in. A single individual or group of experts that supply first-hand knowledge with the ability to redefine possible, take you where you need to go, and ideally foster sustainable alignment. Watch this video as our CXO, Michael Braun and clients share how we take our years of experience and proven practice to empower their brands with the tools to have a successful digital commerce practice, creating a true competitive advantage and disrupting the market.
Consultants can take a look at obstacles that prevent change initiatives from materializing and help you overcome barriers in order to create a path forward. In essence, they can help your brand learn (or re-learn) how to continually innovate- getting into a rhythm of plan, change, grow.
What an eCommerce Consultant Might Do
Working to align leadership's vision with tactical execution is a highly collaborative and ongoing process. However, this process will allow you to recognize trends, identify market opportunities, define goals, execute tactics, measure progress, and continuously improve upon your strategy. eCommerce consultants can be brought in to facilitate all or some of this process and oftentimes work alongside brands to ensure future growth and innovation occurs.
Below are several popular areas eCommerce consultants are brought in to offer unbiased third-party expertise and guidance.
- Understanding Customer Personas
Many brands would answer that they have a precise idea of who their customer is. However, research has shown most brands only know part of the story meaning they are missing out on big opportunities.
If your user experience is focused on the customer journey and properly executed you can expect three main goals to be accomplished:
- Expect a return on your user experience investment
- Expect to intimately know your users and their behaviors
- Expect opportunities to innovate to surface based on interactions with your users
If you are seeing any of these as gap areas, it means it could be time to review your user personas, update user journeys, site maps, or the overall user experience. This is where the guidance of an external expert comes in and helps you understand your customers, identify gap areas, and create a user experience. An eCommerce consultant can refine your audience and optimize your customer journey.
- Improve Conversion Rates
Lots of people come to your online store, but still suffering from low conversion rates? In order to find the heart of the issue and work towards improvement, it might be time to bring on an outside party of experts. eCommerce consultants can be brought in to audit your online store performing tasks including usability evaluation, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and provide insights and recommendations based on their findings.
The issue could be on the back end or commonly something on the user experience (customer-side) that you're not seeing. Regardless, an eCommerce consultant will be able to identify the issue and provide actionable advice to get your business where it needs to be.
- Launch and Maintain Digital Marketing Campaigns
eCommerce consultants are oftentimes brought in to optimize campaigns that resonate with the target audience. Having the expertise of a third-party using business intelligence can help not only a single campaign, but the business as a whole to strategize and align marketing with business trends.
Consultants can help you launch and even run your digital marketing efforts. Services can range from auditing current SEO, Paid Marketing, or Social campaigns to conversion optimization where you are better able to understand how your site's visitor interactions feed directly into an effective internet marketing strategy, including developing sales funnels and follow-ups.
Learn More About Our eCommerce Consulting
The journey of digital transformation requires a clear vision of the experience you want to create for your customers, partners, and internal teams. Leverage our executive experience in building strategies and solutions for major companies like Walmart, Teleflora, Kohl’s, and Best Buy when you partner with Echidna.
“Their questions showed a real understanding of business fundamentals. More importantly, at least to me, is that they understood my business model, my vision for growth, my customer base, and the markets we reach.”
-Rob Jessup, Jessup Manufacturing CEO
At the core of all our eCommerce consulting is helping our clients keep their competitive edge and learn to pivot with ease with the ever-moving target of modern commerce. Our team is dedicated to serving our client companies in the planning, design, implementation, and continuous innovation of their modern and profitable online commerce business systems. Through our eCommerce consulting we allow you to establish a methodology to continually align and assess tactical efforts and improve results.
