Reaching Content Nirvana: The Shoppable Experience
When commerce, creative, and context come together, it creates something incredibly powerful: the Shoppable Experience (or as we affectionately call it, content nirvana). It’s a digital experience that pulls the consumer in and delivers an engaging emotional journey, minimizing the path to purchase in the process.
Let’s break it down into three elements.
3 Key Elements of a Shoppable Experience
- Commerce: At its most basic level, it can be found in the product detail page. It’s all about the buy, with sterile imagery. The focus is solely on the product, with little visual inspiration to guide the consumer.
- Creative: Designed to elicit an emotional response from the viewer, creative is almost always from the brand perspective. It’s beautiful, professionally-produced content that effectively pulls the consumer in.
- Context: This positions the experience from the user’s point of view, using consumer-generated content or a cohesive link that a consumer can easily relate to.
Why Care About Shoppable Experiences?
Typically, retailers will have one or two of these features, but fall short of the trifecta. When all three are combined, it offers more value to the consumer and puts them in control. The consumer’s path to purchase is simplified and shortened, and they remain in the emotional experience throughout their buying process. Merging them is when retailers, and their consumers, reach content nirvana.
Shoppable Experiences seamlessly blend creative, context, and commerce without disruption, allowing consumers to experience beautiful, interactive imagery and make an immediate purchase. They’re kept in a positive emotional state, and therefore never feel directly “sold to.” And most importantly, the path to purchase is shortened significantly, increasing conversions. Instead of being bounced back and forth between curated landing pages and product pages, the purchase can be made within the shoppable experience. Consumers are guided to buy naturally, without ever leaving the experience.
L2 Digital’s Content & Commerce report (Oct 2014) said it best: “This ability to weave together content and commerce may be what separates retail winners from losers.”
To learn more about shoppable experiences, and how brands like Nautica optimize them to increase conversions and customer engagement, check out our webinar: How Nautica Generates Fresh, Shoppable Content.