As we all know 2020 was a crazy year for online shopping due to the pandemic. The pandemic has allowed a lot of people to consider selling and buying online. With all the lockdowns happening around the world, consumers where left with no other choice to satisfy their wants and needs through online shopping.
The pandemic has accelerated years worth of growth in the commerce space in just a couple of months and 2021 is going to be an even more unpredictable year compared to 2020. Through experience and knowledge we can build the following assumption of what we can expect to seen in eCommerce marketing throughout 2021.
Fierce Competition For The Market
Due to big retail brands and stores that had to adapt to selling online, we can expect to see that the overall CPA (cost per acquisition) is going to be higher than average compared to previous years. We are already seeing this at the end of Q4 in 2020 and this will continue to be the trend in 2021.
This is due to already existing stores and brands that had to start selling online since the start of the pandemic. These companies have established branding and followings that help accelerate their position in the online space normally dominated by SME’s.
A combination of higher budgets and bigger margins will allow these companies to start dominating the ad space such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. These companies are equipped with advanced customer service experience and the ability to provide a better service compared to your average eCommerce store.
Read More: How to Keep the Sales Momentum Going Through 2021
Overall Consumer Behaviour Change
If you have run any ads through the 2020 year, you will know that it had been difficult to control the volatility of the Facebook Ads Campaigns. Overall consumers have changed the way they shop online.
As a standard, eCommerce stores mainly focused on what you would consider as luxury goods items and eCommerce store have become custom to this consumer behaviour, and the Facebook Ads Algorithm as well.
For 2021 we can expect that consumers will adjust to purchase more essential goods and services from eCommerce stores such as groceries, health and home products. This leads back to the first trend as well.
This is mainly the reason why we will see more retail stores moving into the eCommerce and Facebook ads space. Consumer behaviour will change with this as well since they will be more inclined to purchase goods for the space they spend the most of their time, which will be their homes.
Read More: What Facebook Changes Do We Expect to See in 2021
A Focus On Customer Retention
As mentioned in the first trend, eCommerce stores will be focusing more on running Retention campaigns as customer acquisition costs sky rocketed through Q4 for 2020 and what we can expect to see for 2021.
The main focus for established online brands will be to retain their customers through exploring new channels and funding this through their retention efforts. This push towards retention will only be a band aid for a larger existing problem for 2021.
A good model we can see is eCommerce stores introducing loyalty points for coming back to the stores. This marketing strategy will mainly be seen implemented through other channels such as native advertising, email marketing etc.
Overall the new marketing trends in 2021 will be extremely different from what you see from data from pre Covid-19. We believe that the volatility of the Facebook Ads campaigns will settle down for the most part since the algorithm has had enough time to gather enough data.
Facebook Ads Media Buyers know how to read these changes and adjust their campaign strategies in order to stay as profitable as possible during volatility of campaign performance and it’s imperative to be able to do this for your eCommerce store as well.
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And that’s a wrap!
I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko
