Jordan Brannon is the President of Coalition Technologies, a company that provides SEO services in digital marketing, design, web development, and PPC advertising. Jordan’s expertise in digital strategies has shaped his career for more than a decade, where he focused on developing solutions that allow for more qualified leads, better traffic conversion, and SEO optimization.
Shopify is pivoting to compete with prominent online marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. This summer, the platform has released many new offerings, including AI products with an emphasis on entrepreneurs and small businesses. With so many retail options and capabilities on the market, how can you determine if Shopify is right for your business?
As Shopify gains dominance in the market, the platform has positioned itself as a leading choice for brands by solving their most pressing challenges. Yet with this authority, Shopify can market to any audience, forcing brands to share their customers. For some companies, this is a viable growth opportunity, but others struggle to demonstrate value. With deep insight into eCommerce marketplace performance, Jordan Brannon recommends viewing Shopify as a separate strategy from your website storefront to acquire diverse audiences. Digitally native brands with engaging content and strong marketing campaigns benefit significantly from this platform.
In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, President of Coalition Technologies Jordan Brannon returns to speak with Aaron Conant about Shopify’s growth. Jordan shares advice for transitioning to alternative platforms, unique use cases for AI, and Shopify’s plans to expand its offerings.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
As eCommerce becomes increasingly centralized to meet evolving consumer demands, many businesses are reconsidering the functionality of their monolithic or single-use customer experience platforms. To create a more seamless customer journey, headless and composable commerce options are more flexible integrated concepts that separate the front-end presentation platform from the back-end software to develop a customer-focused, best-in-class tech stack.
Yet some companies are influenced by this solution’s growing popularity and lack consideration for its features, which can give the customer an inconsistent and confusing experience. So what should you know when contemplating headless or composable commerce for your business, and how can you implement one of those approaches seamlessly into your eCommerce system?
To stay in step with competing modern brands, businesses utilize headless and composable commerce to enhance the customer experience. For instance, when employing a subscription program, you can delegate portions of your checkout model to third parties to provide the customer with personalized shopping options. These approaches enable them to improve content management and marketing strategies and boost website speeds.
However, adopting a headless or composable commerce approach is a significant investment that requires careful assessment. You’ll want to consider the alternatives.
Headless and composable commerce approaches may appear attractive initially, but it’s critical to evaluate your current monolithic architecture before moving forward and fully implementing them into your business model. Sometimes, your current system can be optimized to perform functions similar to a headless solution, thereby increasing your conversion rates and average order value in the same manner. In this case, your monolithic program holds greater value and ROI since you wouldn’t have to pivot your entire organization to accommodate a new system.
In a trend-driven digital landscape, headless and composable commerce are marketed as all-or-nothing, comprehensive solutions. Yet, a complete system leads to additional complications as businesses try to address knowledge gaps, liabilities, and risks. Executing a complete transition from a monolithic to a headless architecture requires onboarding, staffing, and training, leading to increased maintenance and costs.
How can you develop an approach that’s right for your company?
Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, says that you can take a fragmented approach to composable and headless commerce: “the big key thing is to be thinking about what aspects of a composable or headless solution are going to benefit you; which ones are going to provide value and which ones won’t?” Decoupling your front end from your back end and going headless with your current system will increase flexibility, speed, and control. Composable commerce goes further and is most valuable when implemented with high-volume data hubs, such as warehousing, fulfillment, shopping carts, and CRM software. Adopting a composable architecture enhances responsiveness to market changes by leveraging many powerful technologies.
When you analyze each option, determine which one benefits you most — headless or composable — and create a solid plan for effective implementation. Before selecting an appropriate solution, Jordan recommends simulating the onboarding process to prepare for and mitigate possible complications.
If you’ve decided that composable and headless commerce is an appropriate fit for your business, it’s essential to become familiar with each component. Software platforms integrated with a composable system offer multiple PBCs (packaged business capabilities) that you can extract and curate for a particular business function. For example, they can be employed to personalize content for target audiences without detaching your eCommerce back-end system.
If you’re looking to maximize customer lifetime value, PBCs can also optimize the shopping, post-purchase order, and post-purchase checkout experiences through a CRM solution. These capabilities can also accommodate your monolithic platform.
Whether choosing to maintain your current architecture or adopting a headless or composable approach, it’s essential to modify new systems to support your business endeavors rather than transitioning to a more complex environment.
The weeks leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a make-or-break time for brands. Many are on a mission to turn carts into purchases and prospects into customers. With pressure looming over the biggest sale of the year, what can brands do to ensure they’re on track for success?
Even if you’re falling short of your projected goals, there’s one strategy that can help you get back on course: audience segmentation. In this marketing approach, brands break customer lists down into subgroups, leading to more tailored messaging and greater audience engagement.
Audience segmentation offers opportunities for brands to accelerate success quickly; however, there’s also room for mistakes — which can be costly if you don’t know how to work around them.
One of the largest mistakes brands make — especially with email campaigns — is falling into a habit. Some brands get comfortable with their metrics and stick to their routine because it gives them satisfactory results. With email, there’s a fairly high success rate for less effort compared to other sizable campaigns, and brands don’t realize that the ceiling could be much higher. When you optimize email campaigns, you can see improved results that could push your brand from satisfactory to outstanding.
Another mistake comes in the setup of email and SMS campaigns. Many brands take a “batch-and-blast” approach, meaning they send messages to their entire customer list. When you batch and blast, it diminishes the value of future messages you send to individual recipients. Additionally, sending batch and blast campaigns could cause messages to be flagged as spam — which is costly before the holiday season.
To avoid these major marketing mistakes, brands can utilize audience segmentation. By breaking down customers into smaller groups and identifying their needs, you can better target your messaging and create more engaging content for them.
Many fashion and apparel brands segment by locale to target specific customers. For example, consumers residing in areas with traditionally cold or wet weather during the holidays can be segmented and targeted with apparel for this type of weather.
During this time of year, holiday shopper segmentations are crucial. Some shoppers are only active in the market during the holiday season, namely Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so you want specific messaging to point them toward your brand.
A subset of the holiday shopper category is the discount shopper. Some luxury and premium brands aren’t big on the discount and sales category; however, even if it's not a big portion of what you do, having a discount shopper segment is helpful. Why? Because it allows you to promote and sell inventory at a discount without it becoming a big part of how your brand is perceived.
Another segment is the churn risk audience. This group consists of customers who bought a product from you once but are unlikely to buy that product from you again. When you’re not on the top of their search list, the churn risk segment can be helpful to develop specific content strategies and get them to reconnect, keeping you top of mind in the most meaningful way.
When you know your top segmentation categories, how do you place the right people into the right categories and take action?
One helpful tip is to look at consumer behavior and product interest. Who’s engaging but not purchasing? Which consumers are buying which products the most?
“Most of us have that purchase history,” Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, explains. “We have the ability to go back into our orders and essentially see what people have bought, and we can then customize and target our emails and automations based on user interest in specific product types and certain brands.”
However, Jordan warns brands to be cautious about SMS. During the holiday season especially, it’s best to send fewer SMS campaigns. Despite this, when you carry segmentation data over to these campaigns, they’ll become much more effective — even if you’re sending fewer campaigns.
Consumers are much more open to multiple email campaigns, especially when they’re targeted correctly. When you customize and target emails based on purchase history and data, consumers will be much more willing to open and engage with the messages because they’re catered to specific consumer needs.
The term “headless commerce” is gaining traction as people begin to see value in its maturity. The overriding advantages of headless commerce are apparent in a multi-storefront experience where you can blend a group of best-in-breed eCommerce, content management, and marketing technologies in a powerful way.
But there’s a big question many companies are asking: “Is headless commerce right for me?”
![](https://bwgstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/card-keyboard.jpg")
Let’s start with the basics. As an eCommerce brand, most of your consumers interact with a presentation layer, while the administration and what happens from a business perspective occur primarily in somewhat of a back-end management tool.
So, you have two things happening. On the one hand, customer service teams, fulfillment teams, warehouses, accounting, finance, and IT are all working with the back end. On the other hand, the customer is engaging with that front end presentation layer.
With headless commerce, you can separate the front end from the back end of your application. The idea is that you can remove the head from the rest of the body, and the body continues to operate.
There are three significant limiting factors that headless commerce can address. One factor is on the presentation layer and customer experience side. Another is in that back end and management layer. And the third factor is that it helps address limitations inside the organization itself. Essentially, you can use headless commerce as a way to patch over problems you have inside the company.
Traditionally, eCommerce teams carry the primary responsibility for eCommerce growth. However, they often don’t have the authority to manage the eCommerce toolset. They're beholden to an IT team, AI engineering group, customer service teams, operations teams, and maybe even legal and finance teams, limiting their ability to move and pivot quickly.
Headless commerce allows the eCommerce team to work more independently and quickly to achieve its goals without being concerned with all those traditional organizational workflows and approvals that can be restrictive.
Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, says, “Headless increases your marketing outcomes. It can be organizational, and it can help free you from some of the bureaucracy traps that maybe you're stuck in with a larger organization… it can be more flexible and dynamic, it can be faster to stand up, [and] it can be more responsive [to] customer needs.”
Headless commerce can help eCommerce teams address changes in the market — such as iOS updates, TikTok, and short-form video content — and take advantage of emerging opportunities as they arise.
To illustrate, a small pest control equipment company saw a significant increase in demand for online purchases during the pandemic, specifically around beekeeping equipment. They stood up a headless commerce experience specific to these products and saw a 3X increase in ROI. Because they were able to set up subsites and optimize for the consumer, their product sales increased. As an added benefit, the headless approach is also less expensive since their main B2B site is already connected to their accounting software, warehouse, ERP, and CRM.
There’s a wide range of headless commerce implementations. Brands are employing headless for apps, emails, games, and more. Rising projects also include headless commerce as it relates to the metaverse, augmented reality experiences, and 3D rendered products. Beyond content management, headless is also being used in multi-storefront initiatives to differentiate the customer experience and optimize the customer journey.
Coalition Technologies’ clients are using headless to generate content marketing, new experiences, and new interactivity. Comparing two clients based on Shopify and big commerce, Jordan says, “Both are leveraging headless as a way of… selling experiences that are different [from the] typical ‘buy a single product.’ Both use recipe-type content for top-of-funnel traffic generation… they wanted their content marketing teams to have more freedom to be able to publish that and do that easily.” Whatever the use case, headless commerce unlocks greater flexibility and unique content for your industry.
Jordan Brannon is the Co-founder and President of Coalition Technologies, a top-ranked SEO and digital marketing firm. With 20 years of experience working in eCommerce, he helps D2C and B2B brands succeed in the eCommerce and digital marketing space. Jordan and his team at Coalition have helped propel over 1,000 businesses forward across various industries. Jordan has a bachelor's degree in political science, human rights, environmental sciences, and computer science from the University of Washington.
Are you thinking about migrating from one platform to another, but you’re now sure how? Is it possible to transition websites without derailing your consumers?
Jordan Brannon proposes that if you’re an established eCommerce brand, you have to have a clear thought process before you begin. What steps do you need to take to revolutionize your brand’s online presence? There isn’t a simple solution for every business, but Jordan recommends starting with small visual changes: font, images, and colors. Then you can begin to route your emails, establish certifications and authentications, and manage your data flow warehouse into an ERP. If you want a competitive advantage, providing a unique and faster experience can be the solution. If you’re looking at the next step forward for your brand, this is an episode you do not want to miss.
In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant sits down with Jordan Brannon, Co-founder and President of Coalition Technologies, to discuss the advantages and challenges of migrating from one platform to another. Jordan talks about how to redesign your aesthetics without confusing your consumers, the purpose and superiority of headless commerce, and streamlining management software.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting edge and provide our clients with best -in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, start-up to Fortune -100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights & actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
