Tag: Ecommerce

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – E-commerce technology company iPrice has announced the launch of iPrice.au, providing Australian consumers with the same proprietary online shopping experience it’s been offering Asian shoppers for the past 8 years.

With the launch of iPrice.au, iPrice stands apart in the Australian market with its unique ability to compare and curate offers at the same scale it employs in Southeast Asia, a region where it continues to help over 130 million shoppers each year to save money online.

The new iprice.au website builds on past successes with a blended approach, adding human curation on top of its proven technology platform. With large teams of category experts constantly reviewing the catalogue, they are able to quickly intervene where offers might be too-good-to-be-true. This method ensures that Price users see the best offers available at the time of their search.

The Australian launch of iPrice.au marks the first significant expansion beyond Southeast Asia, setting the stage for future growth in the region, responding to a growing demand to streamline the online shopping experience for Australian consumers by offering a more effective way to save money.

Talking about the expansion, Karl Loo, SVP of business development & internationalisation at iPrice, said, “As inflationary pressures make shoppers more cautious about spending, we are pleased to provide the convenience of Southeast Asia’s largest price comparison platform to Australia, to help Australians get more bang for their buck when shopping online.”

Meanwhile, Heinrich Wendel, co-founder and CEO of iPrice, commented, “Our mission has always been to help consumers save money, it’s great to see how our technology developed for hundreds of millions of consumers in SEA has the potential to carry forward to new markets like Australia.”

Malaysia – Bank Simpanan Nasional (BSN) has announced their partnership with Visa to kick-start a collaboration focusing on enabling e-commerce for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Through this strategic partnership, BSN and Visa have committed to nurturing micro-SMEs in a digital commerce training program called ‘Accelerate My Business’ (AMB). The training intends to drive the adoption of digital disbursement solutions, which will provide micro-SMEs with better financial literacy to explore more significant financing to boost their businesses.

According to BSN, the AMB training program will be divided into two module workshops aimed at digitizing the knowledge of 750 selected BSN micro-SMEs and empowering them for the next phase of their business journey.

This comprehensive initiative will run from August 2023 until March 2024, incorporating a total of 27 sessions conducted across 13 different locations nationwide, encompassing both the Sabah and Sarawak regions.

During these workshops, micro-SMEs will be equipped with essential entrepreneurial skills, covering diverse areas such as business management, financial literacy, operational efficiency, and digitalization strategies. Additionally, the AMB learning platform will play a crucial role in providing practical guidance to the participants by offering various resources. This includes interactive activities, worksheets, self-assessment tools, glossaries, and supplementary materials to support them throughout their entrepreneurial journey.

The program will also be categorised based on the entrepreneurial expertise of the participants—beginner and seasoned stages—to ensure that their diverse needs will be catered to.

Jay Khairil, chief executive of BSN, stated that by staying true to their vision of ‘No Malaysian Left Behind,’ BSN remains mindful of the community’s needs by diversifying our product and service offerings tailored to various segments.

“We have also integrated financial education resources and programs within our services to ensure our customers can access vital financial insights and practical advice. Hence, the strategic partnership with Visa is timely and coincides with our aim to drive digital transformation among micro-SMEs for enhanced operational efficiency and competitive advantage in today’s dynamic business landscape,” he added.

Meanwhile, Ng Kong Boon, country manager for Malaysia at Visa, shared that Visa sees micro and small businesses as the backbone of the Malaysian economy.

He further emphasised the importance of the partnership, saying that “we are pleased to partner with BSN as we share a common goal in empowering these enterprises with resources and tools to uplift their businesses and livelihoods, ultimately creating a ripple effect throughout their communities. By continuing to build on this foundation with greater financial and business knowledge, we can help them find new growth and thrive.”

Singapore – Fintech and e-commerce ecosystem Society Pass, has announced a strategic payments partnership with Singaporean global full-suite payments platform 2C2P to enhance the e-commerce experience in SEA. 

Through this partnership, Society Pass’s loyalty application would be able to offer 2C2P’s selection of alternative payment options to customers based in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Rokas Sidlauskas, chief marketing officer of Society Pass, shared their excitement to announce the partnership with 2C2P as it enables them to offer more flexible and convenient methods to pay for goods and services within their ecosystem. 

“By integrating leading Southeast Asia digital e-wallets such as AliPay, Touch n’ Go, Momo or GCash just to name a few into our ecosystem, Society Pass enables millions of customers to access our platforms, ranging from travel, to e-commerce, to telecoms, and to digital advertising. This is especially important considering that we operate in Southeast Asian markets, where unfortunately, over 75% of people are unbanked and do not possess debit or credit cards,” he added. 

Meanwhile, Rachelle Alexis Lim, executive director of 2C2P, said, “As we embark on this strategic partnership with Society Pass, we look forward to enhancing the payments experience of SOPA’s consumers across SEA. This collaboration with SoPa aligns perfectly with our mission to drive e-commerce growth in the region and globally, revolutionising how people transact and unlocking the potential of the digital economy for all.”

Singapore – Global e-commerce platform Amazon has launched European Expansion Accelerator (EEA) that allow active sellers to expand their business to nine EU stores through easier listing of products in all EU and UK stores whilst giving customers access to millions of products.

Through EEA, Amazon selling partners can access one page in seller central, discover the stores they are not yet selling in, and click to expand. Seller’s account registration, set-up, translations, listing, shipping setup, product eligibility checks and catalogue customisations will be executed within three business days. 

Moreover, EEA helps the sellers to reduce their time in navigating several different tools whilst running in multiple European stores. They can expand one store at a time or across all nine EU and UK stores at once. 

In addition, the new system will help in expansion of products through store-specific recommendations. It uses the selling partner’s preferences from their main store, replicating the same information across different stores.

For customers, they will be benefiting from the new products with attractive prices and faster delivery options.

Xavier Flamand, vice president of seller services at Europe, said that this new offer serves as their solution for their selling partners to grow and offer new products to Amazon customers in multiple stores.

“We’re pleased to be able to now offer this two-click step to sellers in Europe so that they can expand their businesses with Amazon,” Flamand added.

European Expansion Accelerator is free and available for all professional selling partners who already sell in at least one of Amazon Europe stores located in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium and the UK.

Manila, Philippines – ShopBack Philippines has recently concluded its first-ever Users’ Choice Awards event last 30 March at Fairmont Makati. The physical gathering was the culminating event of the rewards platform’s voting exercise which lasted for the whole month of March where users got to vote for their most favourite brands on the platform. 

In the in-person event, more than 100 merchant partners and media attended the night filled with fruitful discussions and celebrations. Awards granted included the Trendsetters’ Choice, Smart Shoppers’ Choice, Foodies’ Choice, and Mommie’s Choice, amongst many others.

 Prashant Kala, the GM of ShopBack Ads APAC and acting country manager for the PH market.

More than 200,000 votes were garnered during the campaign period and winners were determined based on the number of votes received, the number of users who visited the merchant online via the ShopBack app, and the number of bookmarks via the Watchlist feature.

Here were the full list of winners: 

  • Smart Shoppers’ Choice (Marketplaces category): Lazada
  • Trendsetters’ Choice (Fashion category): Zalora
  • Foodies’ Choice (Food and Grocery category): Foodpanda 
  • Mommie’s Choice (Mom and Baby category): Edamama 
  • Revenge Travelers’s Choice (Travel category): Agoda 
  • Glow Getters’ Choice (Health and Beauty category): Shopee
  • Fitness Junkies’ Choice (Sports and Fitness category): Nike
  • Tech Savvy’s Choice (Tech category): Samsung
  • Supefans’ Choice (Brand loyalists category): Adidas 
  • Top New Merchant: SHEIN
  • Brand Trailblazer Special Award: Lazada
  • Local Groundbreaker Special Award: Edamama and Metromart 

ShopBack opened the in-person event with a look back at 2022. Timothy Tuason, commercial director for ShopBack Philippines, emphasised the high conversion data in the platform which pushed for tangible business results for its merchant partners. 

The brand also teased what’s to come this 2023 and the highlights included were optimisations on its newly launched search ads and livestream features, an upcoming podcast series, and its 8th birthday celebration this June. 

Nishant D’Souza, Edamama Co-Founder, then provided a keynote presentation on the topic of how to make a flourishing Filipino start-up, sharing Edamama’s journey to becoming one of the top shopping apps in the country. 

ShopBack also invited other merchant partners for a fireside chat to talk about the synergy of growth and profitability. The discussions touched on the need to constantly adjust strategies in the ever-changing macro environment. The speaker line-up included:

  • Ricardo Ortuoste – Head of User Growth, Lazada Philippines
  • Amer Bakshi – Head of Strategic Partnerships, Foodpanda Philippines
  • Cris Tan – Marketing Director, Zalora Philippines
  • Nathalie Salcedo – Growth Lead, Metromart Philippines

“We are happy to spend this night with our esteemed partners as a way to show our gratitude for a great 2022. More exciting things are coming ahead this 2023 and looking forward to strengthening our partnerships with all of you,” Tuason shared. 

Last 17 March, ShopBack Philippines also launched yet another media gathering to mark the start of the summer season. In partnership with Zalora, the platform kicked off the season with ‘Summer Playground’, a lifestyle event that gathered KOLs and media as well as the platform’s key partners.

Manila, Philippines – ShopBack, the shopping, rewards, and payments platform in APAC, is launching its first-ever Users’ Choice Awards, which will inaugurally be focused on the Philippines. The platform is handing the power to users to determine the top-performing brands on the platform. 

As of current, ShopBack boasts over 600 partnerships with some of the most trusted retailers in the Philippines across industries ranging from travel and fashion to tech and marketplaces. According to the platform, the year 2022 saw the onboarding of several exciting new partnerships, with more than 50 brands, including collaborations with notable fashion retailers like SHEIN and Puma, onboarded on the platform. 

For its inaugural Users’ Choice Awards, to be launched in the Philippines; there will be a total of 9 awards up for grabs for the flagship categories.

The recognitions, namely, are the ‘Smart Shoppers’ Choice’ for the Marketplaces category, the ‘Glow Getters’ Choice’ for the Health and Beauty category, the ‘Fitness Junkies’ Choice’ for the Sports category, the ‘Trendsetters’ Choice’ for the Fashion category, the ‘Foodies’ Choice’ for the Food and Grocery category, the ‘Tech Savvy’s Choice’ for the Tech and Gaming category, and the ‘Mommies’ Choice’ for brands that cater to mom and baby essentials. 

True to the current times we have now, the roster includes an award for the top travel brands, aptly called, the ‘Revenge Travelers’ Choice’. In addition, serving as a bit of an icebreaker to the category-inclined awards is the ‘Superfans’ Choice’, which will be contested amongst brands with the highest brand loyalists. 

During the night of the awards itself, aside from the aforementioned, special awards will be given such as the ‘Top Growing Brand’ and ‘Top New Brand’, amongst others. 

The voting period, which has commenced last 10 March, will allow users to vote for their favourite brands per category on ShopBack until 27 March. This leads to the official awards night on 30 March which will be held at Fairmont Makati.

To vote, users will need to utilise ShopBack’s ‘challenges’ feature, where one can earn bonus cashback based on one’s purchases or certain actions on the app. For the Users’ Choice Awards, users can look forward to getting up to P100 from the challenges.

Brand winners would be determined based on the number of votes received (50%), the number of users who visit the merchant online via the ShopBack app (25%), and the number of users who added the merchant to their watchlist (25%). 

“This is also our way to show our gratitude and appreciation to all our merchant partners for the trust and collaborative partnership that we’ve had in the past few years,” commented Prashant Kala, the GM of ShopBack Ads APAC and acting country manager for the PH market.

Last November, ShopBack launched its livestream feature on the ShopBack app in time for 11.11. At present, the platform revealed that it is also currently in the midst of testing other solutions, such as search advertising and segmented audience optimisations.

“It takes less than 2 days for users to convert to purchase on ShopBack. This gives us a huge opportunity in terms of experimenting on new features for users and providing solutions for partners,” said Kala.

He added, “2023 has just begun, but we are already seeing it as a very promising year. Definitely, more exciting things to come from ShopBack.”

In H2 of 2022, ShopBack announced that it has raised fresh funding of US$80m which will go into further building and growing the platform in APAC. A few months following, the platform unveiled its expansion to Hong Kong, which saw the onboarding of over 250 local to global merchants. 

In the past year, growth through acquisition has become more expensive as Cost per acquisition (CPA) increased across most channels, attribution became opaque, and cookies became less reliable. Furthermore, in the past 6 months, the financial outlook has drastically changed, and with an increase in the cost of capital, it has become less prudent for companies with limited runway to spend large sums on acquisition. 

Additionally, as Cost of goods sold is increasing and customers are not ready to absorb additional price increases due to the higher overall inflation, there is additional pressure for lean operations and reduced spending. Acquisition investment as high as 10% of total revenue has now become a challenge to maintain due to lower overall revenue and even smaller margins; hence, the focus of e-commerce operators and investors has shifted from the growth rate to operational efficiency, bringing about a big change in direction from the last few years. 

Focusing on retention and keeping your existing base engaged

Over the last 3 years, e-commerce saw an outpaced growth rate during COVID that is now becoming more stable. The question we are all trying to answer is whether it pulled the growth forward by a few years or actually changed customer behaviour. I would argue, like most things, it’s probably a bit of both, but companies who assumed that the growth rate will be maintained will face a challenge as they may have over-leveraged for growth that is now going to take a few more years to materialise. 

Most companies have to make a hard choice, whether to raise prices to maintain profitability or reduce margins to keep their base growing! I think the third less obvious option is to focus on retention and increase the profit per customer. By focusing on creating a relational e-commerce experience that delivers value to what customers deem as necessity and accepting that customers will cut their overall spending, companies can ensure that they don’t lose their existing customers and can, therefore, increase overall revenue by increasing the Share of Wallet (SOW) of existing customers. 

Brands in e-commerce that look to unlock this path will likely invest in owned channels that would keep their existing base engaged, developing automated programs to lead customers through the lifecycle from onboarding and growth to rescue to advocacy. Meanwhile, many companies use their CRM strategy as the only part of the business to engage existing customers, however, most CRM systems are not able to go beyond the basic e-commerce tools of engagement such as abandon browse and repurchase and reactivation type campaigns, unless paired with a comprehensive source of customer data. 

Leveraging data to boost brands’ customer experience

To create effective engagement, brands in e-commerce must bring together all the sources of data to create a contextual understanding of their customer’s needs and habits. Brands are able to collect zero-party data as customers engage with the site and triangulate their profile info, purchase habits, on-site browsing behaviour as well as the customer segment definitions to create a comprehensive view of their current customers and predict potential behaviours of future customers.

Brands can also use this data to identify which portion of the customer SOW is necessary and will likely continue and, on the other hand, which the customers will decide to curb spending on. This will allow them to optimise inventory, pricing, and promotions decisions for a financial downturn. For instance, one company may use points and special offers to discount categories that customers may be hesitant to spend, and on the other hand, drive orders of the essential categories to maintain profitable operations. 

Additionally, without a doubt, the best way to improve the retention of existing customers is to provide an excellent customer experience. The next few years will set a new standard for what customers expect from e-commerce platforms in terms of customer service, delivery speed and refund/return policies. To protect their market share, said platforms will compete to stay ahead of the customer’s expectations and their competitor’s capabilities. 

Hitting the home run in relational e-commerce experience

Brand recognition will also play a big part as advertising budgets shrink. The best brands will focus on customer experience and brand values rather than splashy advertising. This approach helps them to stay top of mind, bringing existing customers back to the site and focusing the smaller acquisition budget on truly new customers who are highly aligned to the near-future growth strategy of the company, and likely in categories that are less recession-affected. 

Finally, to fully leverage site traffic, e-commerce players must focus on increasing the conversion rate by reducing friction in the buying journey and focusing on increasing the basket size of customers. 

It is worth noting pricing competitiveness is still quite important as we go through a financial downturn but has historically been a smaller contributor to longevity over the brand and customer experience. Many successful brands in e-commerce will use loss leaders to harness demand and drive retention and lifetime value. 

The most successful brands provide exceptional relational e-commerce experience rather than a transactional one by knowing their existing customers better and aligning their strategy to where the customer expectations are going. 

In 2023, brands ought to focus their strategy to balance Customer lifetime value and Cost per acquisition to ensure sustainable growth without the need for constant injection of acquisitions cost. To navigate this complex plan, they must bring together teams from multiple disciplines to allow coordination of data modelling, customer engagement, and customer experience to best engage and grow the SOW of existing customers. 

This article is written by Negar Mokhtarnia, Director of Product at Pet Circle.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023. What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series. 

Over the past five years, the number of buy now, pay later (BNPL) businesses and options has skyrocketed. The boom began when the world’s largest online retailers integrated these options into their e-commerce experiences, and the concept quickly went mainstream across the retail landscape. More recently, amidst the pandemic and rapid shift to online spending, we saw the first BNPL players turn to the BNPL and partner marketing channel as a new revenue stream. Since then, the channel has become an exceptionally important part of the BNPL industry’s growth strategy. 

That said, the e-commerce and fintech landscape are both undergoing rapid transformations, making this a particularly crucial time for partner marketers and BNPL players in terms of laying the groundwork for a sustainable future together. Let’s take a closer look at this growing opportunity, as well as the areas where both sides need to focus their efforts to ensure responsible growth. 

Why All Eyes Are on BNPL 

The BNPL opportunity, while not a new concept, has been redefined for a digital world and has taken on significant weight in recent years. Retailers have flocked to these providers, with major players like Klarna now serving hundreds of thousands of global retailers, including names like Amazon and Macy’s. 

In terms of the money that flows through these systems, Juniper Research predicts that money spent through the BNPL market will nearly quadruple between 2021 and 2026, to eventually account for more than 24 per cent of global e-commerce transactions (compared to 9 per cent in 2021). At the same time, these services will widen their generational appeal. According to eMarketer, 80 per cent of BNPL customers in 2018 were millennials or Gen Zers 14 and over. That figure dropped to 73 per cent last year, as older generations began to embrace these newer payment options. However, millennials and Gen Z are expected to remain the predominant BNPL customers in the near future. 

While BNPL is seeing global growth, Australia has become the world’s hotbed of BNPL activity. The BNPL boom in Australia has attracted more than 30 players in recent years, the largest being names like Afterpay, Zip and Humm Group. Zip in particular has more than 2 million customers across Australia and New Zealand, and the company credits the BNPL trend as being a major contributor to the wave of Australians who have ditched their credit cards in recent years. The rise of Apple Pay is a consumer trend worth monitoring, as well.

How the BNPL-Affiliate Relationship Can Thrive

To thrive, BNPL and affiliate relationships need to acknowledge the unique challenges and opportunities of each other’s respective businesses and ensure their contributions to the relationships are mutually beneficial. Particularly as consumer watchdog groups increase their scrutiny of BNPL programs and their lending practices, it will behoove both sides to demonstrate responsible practices by structuring these programs for success upfront. 

From the BNPL provider’s perspective, there are three elements to consider when it comes to being successful in the partner and affiliate space: 

  • Audience size and scale
  • Marketing themselves as a media business 
  • Optimising their customer platform with the right advertising opportunities

Afterpay has the biggest audience in the Australian BNPL market. Other BNPL competitors, who may not have the same audience size, were quicker to invest in optimising their customer platform to drive more customers through their shopping and rewards platform. However, Afterpay is further investing and launching an enhanced shopping portal which they are now monetising for their merchants.

Different BNPL providers are targeting different demographics as they are seeing certain shifts ultimately leading to increased audience size, unlocking broader reach across the population that has higher spending power.

No doubt, the BNPL opportunity is big—and getting bigger every day. From the merchant standpoint, capitalising on this shift and giving customers more flexibility in payment options just makes sense. From an affiliate marketing perspective, we can leverage this shift to help drive the right advertising to the right audience using the data produced through buyer spending behaviour.

To continue to leverage the growth in the market the industry needs to continue to monitor the consumer buyer patterns for sustainable growth.

This article is written by Kelly Guerin, APAC director of partnerships at Partnerize.

Singapore – ShopBack is returning with ShopFest 2022, the shopping festival it dubs its ‘largest’, having it slated for a 4-month run. September marks the countdown to the year-end holiday season and ShopBack’s festival comprises the biggest sales events – 9.9, 10.10, 11.11, Black Friday-Cyber Monday (BFCM) and 12.12.

ShopFest 2022 is a global initiative across all of ShopBack’s 10 markets and is actually now in its 5th year running. The massive shopping event seeks to achieve the same – continue driving sales for businesses across the island in the year-end shopping season.

As ShopFest launches this year, it will be the first time users will be able to run their shopping experience in the presence of two new ShopBack features launched earlier this year – ShopBack Pay and ShopBack PayLater. In line with ShopBack’s new brand tagline – ‘For The Wins’ – this year’s ShopFest is themed around the concept of ‘Like a VVIP’, which promises ‘to go above and beyond’ to deliver the best deals to ShopBack’s users.

“Our goal is for shoppers to feel a sense of personal victory every time they shop with us. With ShopFest 2022, we are going above and beyond to serve our fellow shoppers – our VIPs – with the best experiences and deals. At the same time, we want to encourage users to explore and experience the benefits of our recently launched ShopBack Pay and PayLater features, for a complete and integrated shopping journey,” says Fern Nannaphat, country manager of ShopBack Singapore.

According to ShopBack, last year’s ShopFest saw a 7x increase in merchants’ e-commerce sales on mega shopping days. This year, ShopBack is expecting to surpass its previous year’s performance with an average of 11x increase in sales generated for merchant partners during each of the 5 mega sale days.

Nannaphat also shares, “Looking back at ShopFest last year, the top performing shopping categories other than general marketplaces were in beauty, fashion (especially athleisure & cross border merchants) and health supplements such as vitamins and protein. However, we believe this year’s rendition will be vastly different. With the prevalence of ‘revenge travel’, the trend is likely to change with travel expenditure expected to top the charts, followed by the fashion category through athleisure brands like lululemon, Nike and Uniqlo as some of the fastest growing e-commerce brands since the start of the year.”

To kick-start the festival, this coming 9.9 mega sale day, ShopBack users may shop to get 10 extra chances to win S$100,000 worth of Tesla shares. The top spending VVIPs will also win up to S$50,000 worth of exclusive experiences at each mega sales day. This includes experiences such as a pair of F1 Singapore Grand Prix Padang grandstand Tickets worth S$1,200, a luxury yacht experience for eight worth S$1,200, and a pair of 2-Day VVIP pass to ZoukOut worth S$1,100. 

In addition, top five VVIPs will be selected to participate in ShopBack’s first-ever game show, The VVIP Circle, where they will stand a chance to win up to S$2,000 in cash. The show will be aired on the ShopBack app one day before each mega event on – 9 October, 10 November, 24 November, and 11 December, from 8 pm to 9 pm. 

The online world is here to stay and our time online will continue to grow. From shopping for necessities to staying connected with loved ones, how we shop, communicate, learn and make decisions has been irreversibly changed by the internet. Bain & Co found that since the pandemic began, Southeast Asia has added 60 million new digital consumers, of which 20 million joined in the first half of 2021. 

With the increase in digital consumption, we are seeing an increase in digital accessibility issues. In the Asia Pacific, over 650 million people live with a disability and this number is likely to increase as a result of the region’s ageing population. This means that one in six people in the region has some type of impairment that affects their ability to consume digital content. 

Addressing the gap 

It is expected that an increasing number of people with disabilities will require more accessible environments and services to remain mobile and engaged in society. 

However, digital inclusion remains under-addressed. Much of the internet remains inaccessible, despite existing policies to make websites more accessible. A report by Contentsquare shares some troubling numbers – 70% of digital content is not accessible, two-thirds of e-commerce sites are not accessible, and 70% of public services are not accessible.

Without ensuring digital accessibility for all, we are limiting a large group of people from accessing even the most basic services and information on the internet. There is a need to enhance the spotlight on digital accessibility, and brands catering to the audience of this highly diverse region must take action now to offer inclusive online experiences to secure a digital future for all. 

Digital accessibility is good for business

The argument for digital accessibility extends way beyond the moral obligation of building websites for all; it has huge financial and commercial implications too. Accessibility is not only good for ensuring equal access to everyone on an ethical level, but it’s also good for business. 

As the numbers tell us, the potential audience is huge and having the website inaccessible to this group is a missed opportunity. 

Ben Pintos-Oliver, general manager of digital systems at Telstra, spoke about this at a recent industry event for CX by Contentsquare. 

Ben shared that within Telstra, Australia’s largest mobile network, 50% of their base is over 55 years old.

“We know there’s a large portion of that population (around 50%) that [may have] a disability. We also know that we have an ageing population in Australia and that a 20% increase in over 65s will happen by 2030,” Ben said. 

Accessibility is not just important for disabled people – it benefits a wider audience, from people using smartphones to Asia’s ageing population to those situated in areas with low Internet connectivity. Human-centred and accessible design naturally comes with fewer points of friction and frustration.

A brand that demonstrates a commitment to accessibility for all can enjoy a strengthened brand presence and an increase in positive sentiment and word-of-mouth recommendations. And with those come significant improvements in customer experience and loyalty.

Make digital inclusion a key organisation-wide priority

Adoption of accessibility across the organisation is critical to its success, starting from leadership support. Accessibility as a mandate can’t be limited to developers and UX teams.

According to Telstra’s Ben, accessibility uptake is a joint effort and needs to cut across different functions across the organisation to be truly successful.

“From HR to corporate relations, to your digital team; more voices create more noise so make sure you get people from across the company on board as soon as you can. Seeking out people company-wide who support your initiative will help ensure a smoother buy-in from C-level too,” shared Ben.

The accessibility agenda needs to be woven into as many elements of the business as possible. For Ben, it is important for the team to align accessibility with ethical, brand and product agendas that are already on people’s roadmaps. 

“There needs to be a collective and conscious effort to support promoting accessibility for everyone, from your company values to your commitment to doing business responsibly,” said Ben.

Building a more inclusive web together: digital a11y by design

Building a more inclusive web to make a real difference in the lives of billions is a mammoth undertaking, and the more brands who commit to accessibility, the better. 

Brands need to ensure accessibility is embedded into their digital experience from the start, and not bolted on as an afterthought. Building a great website first and then reversing to make it accessible afterwards is a sure-fire recipe for a poor experience for your users. 

Brands like Telstra who prioritise accessibility from the very start will begin to cultivate an organisation-wide accessible-first mindset and contribute towards a better, kinder, and more inclusive digital environment.

This article is written by Albert Nel, senior vice president for Asia Pacific & Japan at Contentsquare.