Newsletter #38 - 3 e-commerce trends to stand out this quarter

Newsletter #38 - 3 e-commerce trends to stand out this quarter

Julie Cauville

Julie Cauville

October 11, 2024

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Hello!

What a week! The D2C Academy has just celebrated its second anniversary and surpassed 10,000 subscribers!

Whether it's your first time reading (welcome 👋🏻) or you've been with us from the start, thank you for being a part of this adventure 💙

I've been focusing on preparing the next newsletter with Paco from the Meta Ads agency Adsteroid.

I’ve discovered some incredible formats and strategies, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Launch date: Thursday, 27 June 💌

In the meantime, I’ve done a bit of research and I'm sharing 3 e-commerce trends that stood out to me this quarter to inspire and help you stand out ✨

🛸 Dive into Immersive E-commerce

Already seen on the Drake Related website late last year, Walmart is now adopting this trend to target Gen Z and Gen Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024 🙃).

With Walmart Realm, the American brand offers its customers three immersive shopping experiences inspired by Pinterest Predicts trends:

  • 🪼 "So Jelly," an underwater immersion with aquatic creatures.
  • 👩🏻‍🚀 "Go Chromatique," a metallic and futuristic space journey.
  • 🏜️ "Y'allternative," a mix between the western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Coppola’s Dracula.

The site was developed by Emperia, also behind L'Occitane Greenhouse, who believe the key to success is "to offer customers something they've never seen before."

A successful bet, as it’s visually stunning: shopping experience, user-generated content, gamification, loyalty programs... Everything is there, or almost, to keep us connected and encourage us to place orders.

Moreover, according to Shopify, e-commerce sites with 3D content can increase their conversions by an average of 94%.

If this trend interests you, be careful not to overdo it, as it might slow down your site (and frustrate your users) or miss a more traditional audience.

A glimpse into the worlds of "So Jelly" and "Y'allternative" 🤠

📱 Before completely overhauling your e-commerce...

...try a marketing campaign in immersive reality! This format is used by Taylor Swift and Les Secrets de Loly to promote their travel kits 🧳

The agency Poplar.Studio offers this type of campaign among others.

🙂 Add Emojis to Your Visuals to Boost Your Ads’ ROAS

That’s what the Meta team from the marketing agency Pilothouse claims.

This hack worked well for CPAP.com, a medical device brand (essential but not exactly sexy, you might say).

By adding airplane emojis to their ad for a travel respiratory assistant, the brand increased its ROAS per click by 48%.

The Recipe for the Creative:

  • 📸 A well-centred product photo,
  • ✏️ The offer displayed in bold to capture users' attention,
  • ✈️ A flurry of airplane emojis to add a playful touch and direct towards the product’s use. So simple it seems almost obvious (and much cheaper than an immersive campaign).

If you want to try it, the Pilothouse team recommends starting with 3-4 versions with the same product and title, but with different emojis.

Once you’ve identified the winning version, you can test with new titles or apply the method to other products.

It’s clear that it’s instantly more cheerful!

✈️ Leveraging Emotional Experiences to Boost Your Sales

Although not planned at all, we remain within the travel theme.

As we discussed a few months ago, 62% of consumers expect brands to commit to causes they care about 💙

This vision of experience is at the heart of BARK’s strategy, a brand of food and products for dogs 🐶

A prime example, the brand enlisted Girl Scouts to sell their Bark Boxes door-to-door (you know, the kids who sell 🍪 and collect badges like Russell in Up).

A channel based on experience that reportedly brought the brand over $20M in revenue this year.

To go even higher, the brand recently launched BARK Air, the first airline designed for dogs' comfort before their owners.

Price of the journey: $8,500.

An amount that didn’t deter owners as within a few days, the brand had sold over $1M in tickets (even before the first flight took off) and received over 15,000 destination requests.

In terms of marketing, BARK Air’s Instagram account accumulated over 120k followers in a few months and the brand announced having gathered over 4 billion impressions.

Aww 🐾

👀 Little hack to keep an eye on the most inspiring brands

I use the investor platform
Seeking Alpha to track the performance and strategies of brands like Bark or Warby Parker.

To go further...

The D2C Academy is also a Blog 📰

Twice a week, Cathy shares the success stories of the most beautiful brands and their strategies to develop your e-commerce 🛍️

Here are our 3 most popular articles this month ⤵️

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter!

See you on 27 June for the special edition with Adsteroid to discover 3 exclusive ad formats to test and boost your ROAS ☄️

See you soon,

Julie

E-commerce Expert @ Bigblue