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What is on-page SEO

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 17^th October 2017

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. For those new to on-page SEO, highly recommend reading Rand Fishkin’s A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO. On-page SEO has changed over the years, so it’s important to keep up with the latest practices. Below are the latest post about on-page SEO from the Moz Blog, and we chosen our favorite resources to help you along your journey.

Check out the link Given on On Page SEO

https://moz.com/blog/on-page-topic-seo

Tags on page optimization, on page search engine optimization, on page seo, SEO

The best thing is to check out Shopify’s marketing guide called 50 Ways to Make Your First Sale – it is full of tips and marketing ideas to Boost your store.

Apart from that i would recommend

Build Content Strategy based on your Customer Persona (Target Audience)
SEO and Social Media always gives long term return and its worth investing if its targeted very well
Some of the Marketing Apps you can use form Shopify App store for example Loyalty, Reward , Instagram follower app etc
Even you check with Kit, lot merchant uses very well you can check out their videos and functionalities. Kit can now create Dynamic Product Ads that retarget shoppers on Facebook who left your site without purchasing. You can find a step-by-step guide here on how to use Kit’s retargeting features and I would definitely recommend setting this up for increasing your sales.

How to Boost Ecommerce Sales on shopify

Ecommerce Shopify

Post author By binadmin
Post date 14^th October 2017

Tags Ecommerce, Ecommerce Business, Shopify, Shopify Development

Knowing where to start can be the toughest part when creating a digital marketing plan or a wider-scope marketing plan for the first time. By using PR Smiths’ SOSTAC® model you will have a clear structure that makes it quicker and easier to create the plan

So This is how it gets structured (SOSTAC)

1. Situation Analysis
2. Objectives
3. Strategy
4. Tactics
5. Actions
6. Control

Now once you structured your Digital Marketing Plan you also need to Plan Framework for Digital Marketing Practices which is critical to develop customized, agile, and strategic approach to your business’ unique needs. We can call it RACE.

REACH
ACT
COVERT
ENGAGE

SOSTAC Model of Marketing planning

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 11^th October 2017

Tags digital marketing, marketing, Marketing Planning, sostac

Automation and its impact of Digital Marketing Job

I would like to drive home a few points for your

Its is now too late to be even worried about this

Automation, especially in Digital Marketing, has been around for longer than you think. I think since its inception, we digital marketers are trying to automate things as much as we can so that we can focus on bigger things and not waste our time doing menial jobs. There are tons of bots out there that automate pretty much everything.

I can easily say that the guys who were into DM back in the day are pioneers in terms of online automation.

But i think there is hope.

Your biggest asset is your randomness

Mainly a large part of the digital marketing workflow revolves around creativity and evoking emotions through human connections.

At the end of the day artificial intelligence is, after all, artificial.

I am pretty confident that a robot will not be able to write the way I have written this, let alone an amazing copy for your FB Ad.

Of course, it might be able to automate it and churn out multiple “templates” by analyzing copies across the web. But then again, this can turn out to be counter-productive for the bot cause then it is levelling the playing field again since pretty much every copy out there will pretty much have the same essence to it.

This brings me to my third point.

”Handmade” sells

You probably know, Bentley still stitches their upholstery with their hands.

It always been perceived value of something that is hand made is far more than for something that is automated. So Special Automation o DM will not leave that kind of personal impact in comparison with human touch

The biggest advantage you have as a human is that you are inconsistent, sporadic and random. And this is what makes you unique and stand apart.

Career in Digital ? More then a job its a SKILL.

Once you have this skill, you can apply it whenever and wherever and make a living off it.

You can be a Youtube, Influencer, consultant, Copywriter, Visualizer, Strategist…. The possibilities are endless.

Just to make you more feel more better, a recent study conducted by McKinsey, only 13% of your job can be done by a robot and a marketing job is 85% safer than other jobs.

Main thing is Continuously invest in ourselves and always be innovating.

The way I see automation/AI in Digital Marketing, is that it is creative destruction. It is making way for something bigger. New jobs will and are created for which new skills are required.

I still remember my school teachers telling me that computers will take away all your jobs and it will be very difficult to get ourselves a job. And what has happened?

Computers are Internet has helped humanity take a leap into the future. I have a feeling the same will happen with Automation/AI.

Automation and its impact of Digital Marketing Job

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 9^th October 2017

Tags Automation, digital marketing, Jobs, Marketing Automation

Tools we love & use to monitor our SEO progress

23rd September

There are many tools which can be used SEO Campaign but as of now use below tools

SEO MOZ

If you’re looking for a truly all-in-one solution, Moz Pro is a good option. It includes robust analytics that help you keep track of all things search, social media, and content. It also has research tools that allow you to analyze your competitors through link profiles, brand mentions, and more. Finally, Moz Pro provides insights for how to better optimize your site. It’s on the pricey side but all in all, a well put together collection of tools

Wordracker

Do you need to figure out what keywords would be the best to optimize for on your latest website? Then Word-tracker is a tool you need to know about. It helps you pinpoint the best performing keywords in your niche within minutes after starting a basic search. Often, it helps you find keywords that are doing well without a ton of competition. And as any SEO knows, that’s the most coveted thing you can come across

Google Analytics

Where would any of us be without Google Analytics? Seriously, this free tool is something we come back to time and time again to track website traffic, mobile app data, conversions and more, all within one convenient dashboard. And now with mobile versions available for iOS and Android, it’s a tool you can take with you anywhere to impress any client

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a really nice link building tool that makes it pretty straightforward to automate the process of researching link prospects so you can spend more of your time reaching out to them and building relationships. It also comes equipped with PR and social media tools for better managing relationships with industry influencers on social. It keeps your contacts organized and readily accessible at all times, too.

Tools we love & use to monitor our SEO progress

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 7^th October 2017

Tags digital marketing, Digital Strategy, marketing, SEO

Simple and effective workflow for building and maintaining Shopify themes

Today one of our team member (Ms Runali Patil, Shopify Developer Expert) shared a link on Shopify Theme Development Workflow. We found it very useful for anyone who want to develop theme on Shopify Platform.

Shopify Theme Development is little bit different then developing themes on WordPress. Shopify you do not run a local server instance or database because you don’t have to worry as, Shopify made a choice to reduce complexity by hosting and guaranteeing the quality of the data model. So, you don’t have to worry about ever updating your server. And Instead of that, you work locally and use a syncing utility to push your changes to the server instantly, where you can view them. If you are comfortable with the command-line, I highly recommend the shopify theme gem.

A typical workflow for a single feature branch:

1. Pull from master and checkout a new branch

1. Log into Shopify store admin

1. Duplicate the published theme

1. Rename the duplicated theme to the name of your branch

1. Click “Customize Theme” of your new branch theme

1. Note the theme ID in the URL (example: /admin/themes/9542224/settings)

1. Edit the theme_id in config.yml to point to your branched theme

1. theme watch and do your work

1. Preview your work by navigating to that theme in Shopify admin and clicking preview

1. Pull Request

1. Rebase onto master, push to master repo

1. Delete your branch (local and server)

1. Delete your branched theme in Shopify Admin

You can also check this Video on Shopify Theme Development Workflow

This workflow makes use of the command line. It is not anything too intensive, but being comfortable with common commands will help. Firstly, You need to install Theme kit, it is cross platform command line tool for Shopify Theme Development.

Other then that you also check out couple of more resource on related to Shopify Theme Development, Which give you an insights from the Basic

https://robots.thoughtbot.com/shopify-theme-development

https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization

if you have any feedback or queries reach out us on

If you are looking for any Shopify Theme Development reach out to us on shopify.binaryic.com

Simple and effective workflow for building and maintaining Shopify themes

Ecommerce Shopify

Post author By binadmin
Post date 6^th October 2017

Tags github, Shopify, Shopify Development, Shopify Theme Development, Shopify Workflow, Shopiy Experts

Ecommerce markets across the globe are buzzing with a lot of profitable returns and finding out new innovations to overcome the hurdles. Online retail is growing amazingly and hence the predictions are up that it will further keep growing at the rate of 8 -12 percent every year. The estimated sale to reach by the end of the year is expected to be between $427 and $443 billion as per the reports by National Retail Federation. Online retailing has taken a new high by focusing on efficient automation, seamless branding and giving excellent customer service. Let us discuss few of the strategies that one can keep in mind to make the best of the booming ecommerce business globally:

Brand Building

Marketers follow varied procedures and take steps to improve the reputation of their companies. Brand building is one of the most crucial parts to build customer loyalty. Whatever call to action plans they are contemplating to take, customer communications is the key and every marketer should include it in their strategy model. Building brand awareness and hence getting recognition are important pre-requisites for any brand growth; it also helps in gaining new customers and gets conversions for existing customers.

Automation

Automation is a must in today’s hi-technology world since with Ecommerce order fulfillment is an important priority hence to keep up pace, one has to have processes automated for example having automated shipping software, order management and shipping. This will reduce many work hours and reduce labor costs too. Repetitive tasks are completed before time since automation makes it faster and quicker. Many organizations are already using marketing automation strategies that will help them deliver and process faster. Savvy retailers are already using automated software systems in their business and are truly getting much benefit from the same.

Customer Service

Ecommerce means online business; brands will readily loose the charm if they do not stay up to the expectations of their consumers. A Great customer experience helps the users to stay loyal to the brand and also helps in building trust and healthy business relationships. Online retailers need to state clearly their returns policy and any other bigger policy that is related to the product. This makes it easier for consumer to reach out to brands and have smoother interactions post the sales cycle.

Online retail shopping is going to grow in the coming decade; hence it is of prime importance for brands to make themselves reachable to the people without any disturbances. Consumers get comfortable if the policies are transparent; they go for repeat purchases if there are customer-friendly returns policies and processes.

How to take advantage of the booming Ecommerce markets across the globe

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 22^nd September 2017

Tags brand building, Brand loyalty, Ecommerce Business, Ecommerce retail, Online Retail, Online retail shopping

4 ways on How to Optimize YouTube for Ecommerce Marketing and Business growth

Over the last one decade, there has been a steady increase in the amount of Video content that is shared online. May it be Facebook or YouTube? YouTube is today the most used video sharing service and it has incredibly changed the way people ever looked at things. People love watching videos rather than someone going through boring paragraphs one after the other. Videos are the easiest medium for marketing today and its every marketer’s favorite online tool. Although videos are growing on every network and success rates are also too high, it is worth noting, marketing videos are not an easy wavy tasks, as it may seem. It takes a lot of effort, determination and understanding what customers expect from the brand. Start Video Marketing for your Business today by following proper optimization methods.

The broadband Internet usage has grown stupendously and it is now widely accessible across the world. The growth of video content is inevitable and still growing at rapid speed. Major Internet users today rely on videos as a means to understand things that wouldn’t otherwise have been understood by them. Here are some of the top methods that help to optimize YouTube Videos online and helps to boost your marketing efforts:

Relevant Content: Every word the company markets relays some message from the brand to the final consumer. So content is an important source where customer gains attention towards the brand. Forming video content is highly challenging, as it requires right use of words, picture objects that give the right message to the audience. If the video is very appealing for the users, they will start instantly sharing the video online. Social proof is a powerful tool that helps other users to rely on the brand because people rely more on others reviews before buying the product.

Technicalities: There are lots of things involved to help reach your content to the final consumers. First of all, you need to start with basics on how to start a YouTube channel and understand technical aspects of it. First thing to start is to have a channel name; it should be self-explanatory, catchy, and easy to remember. Users should be able to find your channel easily for rapid publicity you should put links on your website and any prominent place you feel will catch users attention.

Optimization: Along with putting excellent content, it is highly important to optimize it so that the users can easily find it. For this you need to make use of keywords and title words that people find on the web. Do not make it too much to irritate the users for the same.

Collaboration with the Industry – For a brand to raise itself up to already where the industry leaders are, there needs to be come kind of collaboration. Industry influencers are good people to start with, once you collaborate with them with smallest of means; it makes a lot of difference to your business beginnings.

YouTube is an important marketing tool for your business. The research states that video content are shared more as compared to textual content. Internet traffic is thriving on video content as the most looked after medium online and is further slated to increase more.

4 ways on How to Optimize YouTube for Ecommerce Marketing and Business growth

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 21^st September 2017

Tags Important Marketing Tools, Relevant Content, Video Content, Video Optimization, YouTube Optimization

Improving SEO by Detecting and Correcting Duplicate Content Pages

The main concern that any web retailer ever faces is the fear of Duplicate Content. For raising organic traffic to any website, Duplicate content is one of the biggest enemies since Google rankings are based purely on Original Content created. Many sites copy content from other sites that is no good for their online business growth as they can penalized and also taken off the rankings for indefinite period. If you are looking forward to remove duplicate content from your website than you should do quickly since it requires few technical changes. In a matter of few weeks, you can see your website is fairing better and has got improved rankings. Removing duplicate content is not just about removing penalties but helps for building the links. Links are a valuable resource for better SEO performance.

The given below is an example of Diluted Links because of Duplicate Content. The same content when searched by several URLs dilutes the online reputation. The image shows three different pages of the same product. When searched by users, search engines scans through each page checking the popularity of the pages and how often the users have visited it. They consider overall quality and quantity from third party sites as the kind of endorsements. Search engines use the links to prioritize how far they search, what is the ranking, what is indexation, how much they rank and how higher they rank.

Source: Google

The main page reputation is hampered because the other pages receive some reputation online because they are having the same content. They may even have same set of keywords that are searched. By consolidation of the duplicates, we increase links to main page and hence boost the reputation.

Now, the main question is HOW does one Detect Duplicate Content. This is a very simple step by which you will know whether your site reputation is hampered or not. To determine, type in Google – yoursitename.com and you will see the list of sites listed having duplicate content.

To determine if your site has duplicate content, type in Google site:yoursitename.com, and check how many pages are listed. Usually the products on your site make up the pages that are listed on search engines and if it shows bulk pages with given keywords it shows that it has duplicate content. XML sitemaps are comprehensive hence Google search console could be used to compare number of pages indexed in XML sitemaps as opposed to the number of total indexed pages in your Index status.

Blocking duplicate pages by making use of robots.txt, the duplicate pages are still able to accumulate links and it doesn’t hamper their page reputation. It’s basically an outdated technique that does not consolidate reputation of duplicate links in canonical pages.

RewriteEngine On – it will help enable Rewrite capacities

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on – the command helps to make sure the connection is not already HTTPS

RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://www.webstore.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is done to check the connection whether it is already HTTPS or not.

The rule is applied to address rare IP duplication where site is available through the IP address.

RewriteEngine On – helps to rewrite the capabilities

%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f – This command makes sure that slashes are not added to the files. i.e., /index.html/ would be incorrect.

This rules helps to add missing trail slashes. The given below helps to remove them:

This is perhaps one of the most common duplicate file cases, it is the director index file. We have to remove the directories index.php and .NET systems to avoid the duplication.

In the above example, one can note that the product IDs are same for both the URLs. The canonical version and the other one is the duplicate. Because of this, one can use single rule to map all product pages. The product IDs are not same and new URLs don’t use same IDs, you will require one-to-one mappings. The available tools online helps to map and rewrite the products.

Improving SEO by Detecting and Correcting Duplicate Content Pages

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 19^th September 2017

Tags Blocking Duplicate Page, Correcting Duplicate content pages, Duplicate content pages, Google rankings

Understanding HTTP Codes for your Ecommerce Business

HTTP codes are important elements that inform browser the address to target a webpage or a resource. When the user clicks a link, it is asking the web server for the page that it is linked to. The resulting display with the status code of 200 means that the page was found successfully. There are several HTTP status codes that are used for different files used. They are used on webpage image, CSS Stylesheet, Javascript, web pages, etc.

The above is an example of the home page of Practical Ecommerce that shows 200 as the status code that returned 83 times. The common status codes are of significance to all web developers. All of them may be not looking for the same but to recognize an error page 500 instead of redirect 301 is a talent, developer should know. This is typically useful also for the non-developers to be aware of their status codes. Codes are basically the language through which the whole web works so it is highly important to be fluent to be able to understand the store functions. It is also important if the store use or consumes or interacts with an API. HTTP status codes are the switchboards for an API.

HTTP Status Codes

Status Code groups and the Codes within the group are important for an Ecommerce site.

Items in progress – 100 Group

Successful responses – 200 Group

Redirect – 300 Group

Browser errors – 400 Group

Server errors – 500 Group

The above group helps to identify the general status codes even without knowing the exact code. 403 errors would let know that it was an URL related and a 511 would be related to the server.

100 Group – These are rarely used outside the data streaming so kindly ignore 100 group status codes.

200 Group – it is common generic 200 OK responses, which means 200 OK is fully accepted and successfully implemented with no problems.

201 Created (API) means something was created.

204 No Content (API) helps the server to process request but nothing to show.

300 Group – consists of two common redirect responses of 301 and 302.

301 Moved permanently, it means, the browser should use different URL it actually includes a new URL. When the browser gets the code, it opens new redirected URL from the server.

304 Found is a temporary redirect, its function is same as 301. 304 Not modified states that the browser has latest version of URL and it should be using that version. This often commonly happen with caching to speed up repeat views of the page or a file.

400 Group – These are the Client Errors, it includes half of the error codes, 400 group error represents to the client or a browser.

400 Bad Request shows it is a generic error when the browser requested wrong information; there are also specific error codes.

401 Unauthorized (API), it happens when the browser isn’t authorized to use the page. It helps protect private information.

403 Forbidden (API), it is similar to 401 Unauthorized error. The only difference here is 403 error is logged in correctly but lacks permission for access to something.

404 Not Found means the server cannot find any URL.

405 Method Not Allowed (API) – It is a common error with API Development, it usually occurs when HTTP is incorrectly used such as the form trying to send the data to a URL.

429 Too Many Requests (API) – Some APIs limit other APIs in the way it can be used. When it is used too quickly, the error is returned to let know that you have reach the limit.

500 Group is meant for the Server Errors. There are not many of these and they are not generic and 500 Error is common.

500 Internal Server Error shows that there is generic error if something is wrong on the server.

502 Bad Gateway (API), server communicates with other servers if they do not get any response than the code is sent to the browser.

503 Service Unavailable, it is when the server gets overloaded and fails. It will show this message; it means one should try later.

504 Gateway Timeout (API) it is very similar to 502 Bad Gateway, the error is more specific and deals with other server that is not responding at all.

Understanding HTTP Codes for your Ecommerce Business

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 18^th September 2017

Tags HTTP status codes

PHP is one of the most popular web development programming languages that is practically used everywhere. PHP has now its presence on major platforms that includes open source projects like WordPress and Drupal. Given below are few of the PHP coding insights that will help you get started:

Make use of PHP Core functions

Before you start coding, making your own program, you already have a fair idea of what to program and how to program. But, we suggest you take up a PHP function or class. There are many resources available online solely dedicated to PHP learners. Check PHP manual before you start making your own functions. To remove the white space at the beginning and at the end of the string, you do not require a separate function. You can simply trim the function. You can make use of XML Parser function for RSS feeds.

Make a configuration file

Create one master file that has all database connection settings and use it for your PHP scripts. If you need to make any changes later on, you can do the changes with one single file instead of several files. It is also very useful when you need to use other constants and functions throughout multiple scripts.

language

Sanitize your Data

Understand what SQL Injections are and then think of the common problems that may occur if you do not sanitize your data. Firstly, learn about the ways through which your app data can be compromised. You can read online examples of SQL injection attacks and learn how you can avoid possible attacks

There is one magical PHP function that can lead you completely out of all problems. The code mysql_real_escape_string will take regular string of all data types with the help of PHP variable guide and sanitize the data for you. The function “htmlspecialchars” that convert reserved HTML characters like

Leave Error reporting Turned On in Development stage

While building your application, turn on display errors to check for any run-time errors that will help to quickly identify the root of the errors. You need to have access to override directives of the file, set them on top of PHP scripts, use ini set () function to set display_errors to 1.

Reporting error is quite simple, once you start detecting errors you can fix them faster. PHP often keeps giving warning messages that you may take it lightly. These errors signal towards memory-related issue that can be rectified. When you are done with error reporting and display errors, you can turn the function off.

Avoid Over-commenting on the Code

Documentation of the code in your scripts is a good practice but it may not be necessary to comment on every single line. Comment on the complicated parts of source code you can revisit so you can quickly remember what is going on.

code

Keep your favorite Code Snippets ready

Most times you will be coding similar things throughout your PHP development career. Keep Code snippets ready with you so that you can save your time programming same stuff. There are apps available that can help to keep and sync the code snippet; you will always have snippets available. Some apps that help you to save your Code Snippets are Snippet, snippely, Snipplr and Code Collector.

Exposes

Many integrated development environments such as Eclipse store code Templates and Dreamweaver have built-in features for storing code snippets. A well-organized directory with the name snippets consists of text files and PHP scripts; these can possibly be synced in the cloud using an app called Dropbox. This especially helps if you are using multiple computers.

Use Good Source Editor

Editor is the place where you are going to spend much of your time, so use something that will help you save your time. Highlight the syntax files and look out for software feature. Other points beneficial here are code hinting, built-in debugging tools and code navigations. These features help to save a lot of time.

PHP

Get familiar with source code editor features, read the documentation and read the tutorials online, invest a little time in this area that can help to streamline your coding workflow.

Make use of MySQL Administration Tool

Use graphical user interface like phpMyAdmin that will help to speed up database development and administration.

Demo Server

It is one of the most wonderful open source database viewers, it allows for viewing of your MySQL databases in a graphical manner. With this, you do not have to waste the time doing things through command line. You can build database, export the database in SQL files, and run it.

Using PHP Framework

While using PHP, you will learn a lot many things than you expected, and doing web application development is no joke. You will have to do a lot of reading to learn how the API framework works. Once you start using it, you will get to see amazing productivity and efficiency. PHP Framework helps to do better web development patterns that you may not need it right now.

PHP Framework helps when you are working with someone and you have to set up a standardized platform for building web applications.

CakePHP

Connect with other Developers

Join an Online PHP community that will help you to learn more things by interacting with others. By connecting with other PHP developers, you will be at a better position to learn PHP. Any basic level learner can become a master by learning basic things first. PHP is very popular programming language, it’s an open source so any one having Internet access have access to PHP codes that are available to them. PHP can be embedded into HTML to see varying outputs.

While you are Coding PHP, you may encounter many problems, the solutions are easily available on the Internet to fix the bugs. Do not get frustrated if something doesn’t work out the way you targeted. Go through different learning material online, take help from experts, discuss with other PHP people online and start coding.

PHP tips to help you get started

E-commerce Website Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 16^th September 2017

Tags PHP development, PHP programming, Programming languages, Web application development

Natural Language Processing: Right path towards E-Commerce Conversions

Today, Ecommerce is growing at faster pace than ever thought of. Marketers are ever so wandering to tune into what is latest and introduce them into the world to selling. Smarter tools like Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, IoT are there to furnish everything automated and quicker than what Humans can do. Natural language processing commonly known by the term NLP is a component of AI that helps computer programs to understand human speech and then function accordingly.

Bigger commercial portals are already on the brink of utilizing NLP on their websites and apps. NLP is a meaning based search that allows shoppers to search products in their own language and getting relevant results. Given below are the best means to apply NLP in Ecommerce.

Tips to apply NLP in Ecommerce:

Product Description

Awareness of the product means looking at the actual term and identify with the primary item and the descriptions that have secondary importance. NLP recognize the words in the primary data. When an item is searched, it checks for perfect name and doesn’t take into account the terms that do not match even if it means item having more adjectives.

After the primary product is recognized, NLP applies machine learning to understand the description that is important elements to seek individual items.

Linguistic Nuances

NLP in ecommerce site – searches and recognizes similar terms based on the choices of an individual. Shoppers may be searching for one item with different terms. NLP should have the capability to identify that these are one item only that give same results regardless of the terms used.

NLP is a powerful tool that should also help identify the synonyms; it should even let go off the dissimilarity in the spellings. Consumers are really annoyed when they do not get the item they are looking by putting a search term especially when they know that the item is present in their list. Most commerce site cannot really afford to miss out on potential conversions. Hence, NLP should be geared up to correctly predict what the user might be looking for.

NLP Personalization

Most organizations today are combining NLP with personalization approach and this is proving to get bigger benefits. Customer expect customization at every step of their shopping journey, they had prefer a physical store than virtual since they get personalized attention. Online searches also offer the same benefit but nothing befits the satisfaction of touching and feeling the product and then buying it.

Brands prepare customization based on the user preferences that are previously seen in their shopping. The main aim here is to give great shopping experience to the users.

Natural Language Processing: Right path towards E-Commerce Conversions

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 15^th September 2017

Tags Conversions, Customization, Ecommerce, Ecommerce conversions, Natural language processing, NLP, Personalization, User conversions

How Facebook Chatbots are changing E-commerce?

E-Commerce has grown stupendously over the last one decade and the idea of Live Chats has been used for quite sometime now. Although, it has not been prominently used. But with developments happening, Live Chats are soon going to be the norm, its Chatbots that will act like Humans talking to Humans!

Chatbots will completely change the face of Ecommerce; consumers will now be getting answers for their queries online through live chats. Chatbots will answer all customer queries that are related to brand or a product or a service. Customers appreciate this new approach and according to the recent reports by eMarketer Survey reveals that 63% of customers are likely to return to the site having live chat feature.

Live Chats services are often offered by brands on their E-Commerce platforms, it consists of most advanced features including survey forms, queuing up, transcripts, analytics and reports. These are mainly useful to handle customer queries and concerns about the products. Chatbots are bringing in a new revolution of a kind that brings entire Ecommerce to one subject topic of “Live chats”. It not only helps create social awareness but also helps to build brand loyalty too mainly because customers can directly interact with the brand without waiting for emails to be answered or calling the company.

Conversational E-Commerce is in!

Messaging apps are now being targeted for use in Business. Facebook messenger has taken the first official step; it is one of the most viable channels for business interactions that help to connect to customers. Billions of people are using Facebook and messenger service as a means to connect with each other. Facebook made available its messenger platform for developers so that developers can embed it on their sites or apps.

Talking of Messenger Apps, it has long been used since 2015 when Uber tapped Facebook Messenger on its app that allowed customers to book their ride through the chat window. It was then first coined as “Conversational Commerce”.

Improved Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is one of the latest developments in Digital commerce where lots of things are happening at one time. AI has reached the level, where things are meant to be worked without the use of Human brain. The bigger tech players have already started investing in machine learning and natural language processing to be part of the big boom in the making. Artificial Intelligence bought a Digital revolution marking a new beginning.

Chatbots are learning a lot of things that seem very natural in a learning process; they are learning human interactions and trying to accommodate the future interactions too.

Chatbots can help in multiple ways to facilitate the buying journey of a consumer, they are programmed to help create awareness, solve queries, educate the potential customer and influence them in making a buying decision. Chatbots are programmed to handle after-sale activities or providing any further service the customer is looking for.

Facebook have continually supported Business Ecommerce through varied means, its recent plan of launching Whatsapp for Business truly marks the beginning of a new revolution where Business will solely be conducted through live chats whether they are Chatbots or consumers chatting online. The recent developments truly reveal Facebook Messenger will encourage sale of Physical products in the era where more and more businesses are getting online.

How Facebook Chatbots are changing E-commerce?

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 14^th September 2017

Tags Artificial Intelligence, Business Messenger, Chatbots, Ecommerce, Facebook Messenger

We are very much aware of how Shopify works and how it can get tremendous benefits to your Ecommerce store. However, it is important to note how to start using SLATE and how to get maximum benefits from the same. SLATE is a front-end framework that helps to build Shopify themes. There are usually a number of theme options and with modern tools and the command line the tasks become simpler and better. This helps in faster developmental processes especially for theme developers. Lets start beginning with the basic steps for using SLATE platform and understand the features of Slate:

Installation of Node.js and Slate

To start using Slate, the first step is to install Node.js and npm installed on the computer. As we know Slate is an npm package, it does require its parent file. You can check if the version is up and running-by-running the “node” function on the computer. Usually, Slate runs on v.4 or higher versions if you have low version than you may want to install the latest Node version.

Installing Slate

For installation of the Slate, you will need to run the given below command from any directory by using the command line or running a terminal app on the computer:

npm install -g @shopify/slate

In the above, -g shows that you are running Slate globally on the machine and it indicates that it is working in any directory. Troubleshoot by checking Node.js, if you face any issues while running.

Creating a New Theme

The next step you need is creating a scaffold theme by using Slate. You can run the below command from the directory:

slate theme [theme-name]

Do not include any spaces in your theme name the first name in the theme directory will be your new theme directory name. The final command should look something like below.

slate theme my-custom-theme

Uploading the Theme

Run a command from inside the local theme directory, navigate in your theme directory and type the below command line:

cd [theme-name]

cd command stands for “change directory” and it takes you inside of the directory path that will specify after it. Inside the directory you can run following command:

slate zip

The above command will help compress a directory in a zip file for easy handling of the manual that is uploaded to client’s store. After running, you can see the upload having a zipped theme.

Shopify admin can follow this process by going to theOnline store > Themes > Upload theme > Upload the new Zip file > Publish the theme once it is uploaded on your store.

Connecting Store to local

After uploading Shopify theme made with Slate, you are now able to connect the local version that has been uploaded.

Rename the file as config-sample.yml

Here, you can add your store information and also you can add private information.

Password – For getting the password, you will need to set up API key for adding config.yml that helps to create connection between the client store and local theme store. One can create a private app. Go to Shopify Admin, click on apps and click on View private apps. Click on Generate API for creating a private app.

Theme_id – It is the unique id used in the theme to write for deploying to the store.

Let us start discussing the things that are of utter importance while working with SLATE:

Slate start – Slate is a front-end framework hence it is highly important to know its commands before you fully start using it. The command “slate start” runs slate build, slate deploy and slate watch features that help to develop faster. The command runs all the three commands so if you have made changes to client’s store and you haven’t made those changes locally then the local version may potentially wipe out those settings. Consider that the files have changed on your client’s store and they do not exist in local version of the theme.

Style Sheets – while you are importing style sheets it is to be noted that import statements that are found in Slates theme.scss are not Sass import statements. The imports build your stylesheet while running slate commands; they do require a build script to make a proper compilation. For adding additional Sass files, start to create new files in appropriate directory in the styles folder, add a new import line for newly created files having a correct. You can then run slate watch and see the changes that are reflected.

How to start with SLATE in simple steps

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 13^th September 2017

Tags Node.js, PHP Learning, Sass, Slate start, Style sheets

PHP is a wonderful programming language and as you dig deeper into its different aspects, you find more interesting things in store for you. For newcomers, who are looking to get into programming world may wonder in amazement as to why one should learn PHP, what are its benefits and how it helps them. Let us start right from the basics and get a deeper grip into the world of PHP.

PHP stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, it is the most common server side language that is used in programming today. It is an open source platform hence it is widely popular, any person can access it through the power of Internet. It is a free access tool to everything PHP online. The reasons and justification for using PHP go far beyond the reasoning fact that it is the language any programmer uses to not only develop their programming skills but using a free implementation. This language can be embedded in HTML. Learning is learner’s passion hence it is highly important to know where to start and how to start.

To start with PHP, one obviously needs PHP installed on their computers where they can write the code. Visual Studio Code is good platform to start with, download and install the program and save it like the way we usually save a notepad document. The extension for PHP file would be .php. Go to Open with > Select Studio Code > Open a Blank template for using. PHP coding always use PHP tags so do not forget them.

The starting of the tag looks like ‘<?php’ (<? This is outdated and hence it may create some problems. To run PHP program, one requires software where they can run it. Most people use Xampp, once you download it, there are some modifications that can be done to make it run smoothly. If no changes are made, Xampp will be saved in C:\ drive of your computer. When you open the file, it will open up many options but save all of your files in ‘htdocs’ folder. When you click on the Run option, you will see two numbers under the ports that appear, the numbers that you can see are 443 plus a second one. We would be considering second number that is displayed. Now open a web browser and type localhost: 801/hello-world.php. You would write the second number where I have put 801. Once you hit the enter button, you will be taken to a white blank page. The next step is to confirm whether the browser that we are currently using is programmed to read PHP tags or not. For this, you will have to open hello-world.php file and in between PHP tags, you have to write “Hello”. To check this on the browser, go to the browser and reload the page.

Finally, now that we have installed PHP, and the way to write its code, we have to start learning how to actually use PHP. There are a number of online resources and books available online, some resources are freely available. There is a lot of information available online to learn so many things, search with keywords like PHP programming, PHP free online resources, mySQL Web development, etc. some programs and books will be quite lengthier than you think, but do not get nervous. Lengthier the pages, the deeper understanding of the programming and the processes they have used. There are ample of books available that will give you good amount of information to learn PHP section wise.

PHP is a smart language, once you dig deeper into it, you shall see how tremendously useful this language is. Sometimes, you may be utterly frustrated if codes do not work what you programmed them for. But, do not give up, scan through online courses, mark different solutions that you get to fix your problem and try again.

Tips and sources to start learning PHP

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 13^th September 2017

Tags PHP, PHP programming, PHP programming language, Programming Language

The Rise of the Digital Experience Platform

Most consumers today are digitally inclined getting served exactly what they are looking for. There is emergency of multiple digital touchpoints allows consumers to check the product on one device, and buy it from the other and still give reviews on another. Brands are giving umpteenth liberty to consumers to reach out to them however and wherever they want. The interactions are usually experienced through the texting mode, phone apps, social media that leads to business growth and profitability. Companies are optimizing consumer digital experiences to enhance brand reputation in the longer run.

Industrial analysts are able to see resurgence of projects and investments with flexible technologies reliably demonstrating abilities that helps to generate sales, improve loyalty, save money and solve customer service problems. The most wanted out of them all are the integrated digital experience strategies.

Most often than not companies make the mistake of overinvestments in features and underinvesting in integration. The new channels coming up with architectural strategy will continuously keep testing. The new touch points have regular problems because they are hard-wired. Custom integrations make the accommodation a little difficult with new channels.

Flexible Integration strategy and execution plan serves as cornerstones for digital experience platforms. Integration is not the term that is usually used by marketing or digital experience leaders. The stakeholders are anyway aware of the pain points preventing teams from working across the aisle. Architectural strategies are the key selection factors while choosing the technology components for your Digital experience platforms.

Important Integration questions one should usually ask are: are the systems that I am using for CMS modular? Can I extend legacy systems by using reusable services and APIs? Is the solution truly best of breed? Could there be deployment alongside existing systems? A flexible integration strategy is need by any medium of organization. Without such integrated strategy approach it is either going to be left hanging or be completely implemented.

The Rise of the Digital Experience Platform

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 11^th September 2017

Tags Digital experience platforms, Digital platforms, Flexible integration strategy

Grow your Search traffic by adding JSON-LD

If there is one objective that every Ecommerce has in common is the search for Organic traffic on their websites. Although, there are many limiting factors with search engines, the choices to get Organic Traffic are vast. Search engines often face the problem of analyzing huge quantities of HTML data that is complex and non-standardized. Search engines extract data and present it to the users for the queries they ask in the search box. They do it with the help of Structured data, one may wonder how structured data helps for search engines to recognize and analyze the query.

Structured data is the information about a web page that helps search engines to understand the contents of the page. Search engines do not have to parse entire HTML document, they can analyze the page through structured data. Let us understand the Role of JSON-LD in getting Organic search traffic:

What is JSON-LD?

Google highly recommends making use of structured data in all of the sites and JSON-LD is one format of the structured data. The biggest benefit of using JSON-LD amongst other type of structured data is that it doesn’t have to be interspaced within HTML coding. As compared to this, other formats require you to change HTML, add the elements and attributes to show where each part is located in the page. Sometimes it is difficult to detect any errors due to which it may affect the search results. With JSON-LD, the code is embedded in HTML that acts as a block to JSON data. This doesn’t affect how HTML looks and is invisible to regular users.

How to Add JSON-LD

JSON is a popular data format and JSON-LD is based on it that many developers create or update it. Developers’ find using JSON-LD easy if they have already worked with other structured data formats like microformats or RDFs. Other benefits of using JSON-LD is, that it works with stores having dynamic backend that helps to create web pages. JSON-LD is the data that is separated from the actual page. The stores using dynamic data are able to easily create a template for JSON-LD; they can then re-use it across all product pages.

A person not having technical background is easily able to check the details of the product page details like the name, description, brand, image, url, sku, condition, etc. Other things that can be checked about the offer are price, condition, currency, availability, etc.

Easy Updating

All the data combined together help the search engines understand the product for sale. Some data are duplicated in both the product and offer section. JSON-LD format allows listing the details of the product page. Try to give as much data as possible to the search engines when you set-up JSON-LD, they can use it for search results.

Include Core Data

Core product data is highly important to include in your product JSON-LD. Product element terms like name, description, itemcondition, availability, price, pricecurrency, aggregaterating, offers, etc are used to provide for organic listings. Adding JSON-LD helps search engines to parse the products and offers available on your online store. They greatly help to increase organic search traffic.

Grow your Search traffic by adding JSON-LD

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 9^th September 2017

Tags JSON-LD, Organic listing, Organic traffic, Search listings

How to prepare yourself for Google’s Mobile-First Index

Time and again Google have been coming out with different SEO updates, Algorithm updates and mobile updates. With the type of announcements that Google is coming every time, it is pretty much clear that they are in much favor of Mobile websites. Google’s Mobilegeddon update has brands initiating to make responsive websites. Responsive websites are the need of an hour with much of users shopping and browsing online through their mobile devices.

So now let us understand what is Mobile-first Index and why is it important:

Technically Google’s current index is the one in which people continue to keep getting results from. Desktop content is indexed and is used for showing listings to mobile and desktop users. For Mobile, a special mobile friendly ranking system is used that helps to boost content for Google’s mobile listings. A study by Stone temple consulting shows that 55% of traffic comes from a mobile device and it will continue to keep growing year after year.

As more and more users are transitioning from desktop to mobile use, it makes sense for the brands to come out with mobile friendly pages.

Google Indexing

Initially, Google indexed the site based on Desktop experiences

With the new update, Google will index and rank your website based on the content of your mobile experience. The image given below shows desktop and mobile experience for same pages and the way content is displayed on both the pages:

The above states that both versions show same content so when Mobile-first index kicks in, it wouldn’t make any impact to the site’s page. Google will see similar thing as the site is built up on responsive web design.

Similarly, the above image shows the site having negative impact because Google will use mobile experience on the right for indexing purposes.

Tips to help you prepare for Mobile-First Index

Learning and implementing about Mobile-First Index requires a detailed analysis and studies, here are the steps that help you get through update when it releases:

Google’s Webmaster Blog Post

Google has always been open about the changes that it wants to bring and encouraged people to learn from the blogs and news. Webmaster’s blog post is a good starting point to plan your activities when the update kicks in. However, there are two important points to note here: If you are already having a responsive website where primary content is similar to content seen on the desktop than you do not have to change anything. If the site shows different content on desktop and mobile, then it means that primary content needs to be changed and it requires some changes to your site.

Responsive Website design

Responsive websites are the ones which are mobile friendly; their primary content is similar to what content is seen on the desktop version. If your website already shows same content on desktop as well as mobile than you do not need to make any changes.

If your website is not responsive than there might be indexing issues and Google will not give good ranking to your site. In such cases, you can put primary content on your mobile site as Google will check primary source of content first.

Hidden Content in Tabs and Accordion menus

Google has always been very clear about its update; they do not like to hide their content. According to their past update, they had strictly stated that the hidden content in tabs or accordions will not be considered for ranking purposes. But with Mobile-first index update, they plan to take it loose; it rightly derives from the following statement by John Mueller:

“So the mobile-first indexing will index the mobile version of the page. And on the mobile version of the page it can be that you have these kind of tabs and folders and things like that, which we will still treat as normal content on the page even. Even if it is hidden on the initial view.”

This is advantageous from the design and UX standpoint of view; it will also help organize large pieces of content.

Mobile friendly website design are the future, so it is greatly recommended to make a responsive website design that will help millennials easily browse through webpage across any possible devices you can merely think of

How to prepare yourself for Google’s Mobile-First Index

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 8^th September 2017

Tags Mobile Designs, Mobile First Index, Mobile Responsiveness, Responsive Websites, User-friendly

How customers prefer to shop; online vs In-Store

E-Commerce has led to many uprisings and has taken e-retailing to newer heights. Although there has been a major shift from retail buying habits to online buying, larger US consumers still rely on buying from physical stores. According to the reports by eMarketer, an estimated over $5 trillion disposable income of US population is said to be spent on physical store buys by 2020.

Over 85% of those surveyed said that they like to touch and feel the product before they buy; hence they buy it from the stores. It helps them make a purchase decision. A research stated that one-third that is 36% respondents do not like to wait for items to be shipped and 30% like to get advice on product features, services and products they should buy. 90% of consumers stated they would buy items if they receive knowledge based advice from representatives regarding the product.

With millennial generation, we know that shopping online is the norm; the new buying habits are somewhat very similar to earlier generation buying offline. The adult populations of United States heavily rely on physical buying from the stores, states the research done by Walker Sands Communications. The survey was done in March 2017 on 1,662 consumers above 18 years of age. 54% of respondents stated that they would prefer buying from physical stores where as 33% would prefer buying from online shop on computers, 12% prefer mobile device and 1% prefer using voice-controlled devices.

Youngest consumers in the age group of 18-25 and the oldest in the age group 61+ preferred buying in-store compared to online buying.

83% respondents stated they bought product from physical store last year, 69% purchased online and got it delivered through regular shipping and 41% purchased online and picked up from the store.

80% of consumers stated that they would opt for shop online on the website or an app if they are offered free shipping.

Conclusion

Retailers providing high value interactions will give satisfying experiences to customers. Retailers should understand customers’ needs and wants if they want to survive in highly competitive business markets. They should use modern technology to empower their store representatives.

How customers prefer to shop; online vs In-Store

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 7^th September 2017

Tags Ecommerce, Ecommerce Stores, In-Store, Offline Store, online store, Retailers

Beyond Amazon and Alibaba: what’s next for E-Commerce

Ecommerce businesses have rolled out in whatever fields, we can merely think of. The biggest consumers of Ecommerce goods are the US and Chinese markets. Although the switch from physical stores to online retail has been tremendous, the shift is for good and according to reports there are still unexplored places and diversions. The technological advancements have led to many new insights which industrial experts are yet to be aware of. With the popularity of Ecommerce giants like Amazon and Alibaba, the world is assuming that the game is over. In fact, these giants are evolving day after day commoditizing product categories at different stage of advancements.

Amazon has taken a swift approach by first targeting the books, then houseware, electronics, clothing, grocery and so on. Where as, Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao platforms have been capable of capturing market shares and have popular imagination with millions of SKUs creating a global store. The growth is tremendous when one compares from where it started and up to where has it reached today. With every evolution, people thought that it is the end but it never was. The emerging trends are never ending and if you closely look at Greenfield territory, you will find there are billion dollar start-up companies thriving simply on opportunities created. One can understand these emerging trends through redefining of what we call “mass market”. Today, we see buyers and sellers are equally constrained for selling their goods in every vertical possible at lowest price point being an “all available store” selling “all at lowest prices”.

Many bigger E-Commerce brands have constructively made use of resources available to provide improved customer experiences. These brands and vertical market places are using personalization and community help for curating experiences for prevalence in the US and Chinese markets.

Let us get a brief idea on how these giants have a purpose and how they are still going strong. Amazon and Taobao are gigantic warehouses that heavily rely on purpose based shopping. People visit their sites; find the product they are looking for, order it, find the delivery the next but overall experience are cluttered especially for people who are disoriented. In comparison to this, E-Brands and vertical marketplaces are not going to compete with similar warehouse searches. They are rather focusing on the discovery and curating of products in specific categories that a customer want to use it for occasional purchase. More of mobile shopping has evolved and people are having enjoyable experiences with the brands. The apps are targeted for shoppers who feel they need access to each and every product right now. They offer curated experiences to consumers of the brand to help them discover affordable products to build a good shopping experience for smartphone users.

Creating a Social Flow

People love Amazon and Taobao for the user experiences they get by browsing these Ecommerce store. Customers treat these stores as tools where they can shop online and not as an “Identities”. E-Commerce brands such as AirBnB, Houzz, Xiaohongshu and Pinterest offer expert social profile for brands and also help to develop followers. These Ecommerce giants have built upon a platform, where people look up to for information and buying products.

Different E-Commerce brands build value infused branding depending on the type of products they are dealing in. There are diverse industries that follow different tactics for consumers to follow them either on social platforms or through mobile apps. The consumers do not necessarily log on to Amazon or Alibaba for buying brand items. On the flip side of it, bigger outlets like Walmart are finding it difficult by the changing customer buying habits.

So, what’s up next!

Is Walmart looking to battle bigger Ecommerce giants like Amazon or the likes?

There are several advantages for small enterprises or startups to follow new plans and strategies and take learnings from already established Ecommerce stores. With Alibaba and Amazon in comparison, there is still unexploited vast amount of growth that needs to be realized for Ecommerce markets.

Undoubtedly, Amazon and Alibaba take up much of market share in the US and China that only amounts to 8% and 16% of the total $9 trillion retail markets. There are again larger developments uncovered that could lead to tremendous increase in business. The new markets are open or rather unexploited till date; there is good scope for E-Commerce expansion and appeal to next-Gen millennial consumers. The communication channels and models are improving thus opening up more channels for buying and selling. E-Commerce markets are growing and evolving over time, even start-ups are making full utilization of the resources available that helps them to curate, personalize and optimize the experiences.

Ideally, E-Commerce market segmentation seems like a traditional retail business but it’s altogether a new approach. With the use of AR/VR Technology, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, etc in place there are bigger solutions available. A new twist and approach is in place to encourage larger and bigger dollars pumping into E-commerce industry.

Beyond Amazon and Alibaba: what’s next for E-Commerce

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 6^th September 2017

Tags Alibaba, Amazon, E-Commerce Markets, E-Commerce segmentation, Social platforms

11 Cost Effective growth hacking for Ecommerce

Ecommerce is everywhere and so does its competitiveness! Retailers and marketers are submerged in a pool where there are so many tactics to be followed. Organizations should look forward to solutions that best suits their business needs and explore the growth hacks that they can implement in their business to get more sales. Given below are creatively churned out best hacking ideas that you can use in your Ecommerce business:

1. The use of ad extensions

Ad extensions are the best possible ways through which you can target your ads especially on Google and Bing. These types of ads help to provide uniqueness to viewers compared to other ads that only show Headline and the URL. Ad extensions help to give more robust and interactive ads as given below:

The different elements that you can add to your ads to make it look more attractive and help consumer easily get through to convert are sitelink extensions, call extensions, location extensions, review extensions and callout extensions.

1. Prepare Creative content and create market buzz through giveaways

Content Marketing takes the lead when it comes to create customer engagement, it helps to increase good number of subscribers and boost the sales. Giveaways are a great way to create awareness about the brand and generate website traffic.

Choose something that will grab users’ attention, there can be a variety of items that the brand can give to its potential customers like sample products, offer coupons, introductory products, reward based incentives, etc.

1. Create a sense of Urgency through FOMO

Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO) drives a good amount of traffic by creating user engagement and social activities on platforms. A study revealed that 56% of consumers are afraid to miss out on important announcements if they are not active on social networks.

Marketers can leverage the FOMO by creating good offers, highlighting the contests with the limited time promotions that mark a sense of urgency in audiences.

1. Build your own Life time value (LTV)

The important learning lessons and essential for business growth is to retain your customers. Use your instincts and give excellent customer service. It is much costlier to acquire a new customer as compared to an existing customer. Harvard Business school study states that a 5% bump in customer retention increases your profits by 95%.

A good customer service program creates loyal relationships, interact with your customers and find what is that they are looking for.

1. Use of Influencer Marketing

Every industry certainly has influencers that are followed by masses; look out for the influencers belonging to your industry and check if they are promoting similar products. Influencer marketing has been tremendously successful in apparel and retail industries. Social influencer marketing is strong marketing and is induced by word of mouth marketing method. It can drive tremendous visibility to your website and create traffic. Below chart shows how brands work with influencers to connect with customers.

Influencer marketing is one of the smarter moves by brands, it encourages trust and engagement because influencers belong to your industry and have higher probability to drive traffic.

For searching the right influencers, select the influencers, who belong to your industry, build a personal connection with them. Send our samples, talk to them if they are ready to promote your product.

1. Simplify the checkout process

Cart abandonment is ever so common! Why? The reason being most customers gets frustrated with checkout process and leaves their carts. This is the bigger problem faced by Ecommerce industries today, optimizing the checkout process is a big challenge. The study shows, 68% carts are abandoned having an estimated value of $4.9 trillion on a global level.

Easy navigation helps the users to browse and navigate through the website easily and effortlessly. Reduce the elements on the page to give clarity to the browsers of the page especially the checkout process. The common friction causing reasons for cart abandonment are shipping costs, pricing, separate logging accounts, complicated checkout process, etc.

1. Psychological pricing

Most times when consumers buy anything it is the brands who have sold out to them through the means of tiered pricing. SaaS platforms use this method most times that is highly beneficial. Listing too many expensive and non-expensive items does it, there by making customers choose item exactly that brands want you to select. It is psychological pricing.

A MIT study and University of Chicago tested similar tactic with women’s clothing found that most consumers select the products in the middle price point.

1. Build social sharing offline

Social shares are the fastest means to help you do word of mouth marketing, make the maximum use of this opportunity. As soon as the customers open their new purchases, prompt them to share their new buys online with hashtags and share their experiences on the brand page with relevant hashtags by incentivizing them.

Incentivize your audiences with a number of options like promotion codes, discount, using custom hashtags, etc. this will help to create User generated content that helps to do brand promotion.

1. Referral programs

This is another great way to create branding at its best. A study from Texas Tech University found that 83% of customers are willing to refer friends and family to brand if they have positive experience with the brand. In reality, only 29% makes a referral. Customers would not share by themselves; the idea of this campaign is to ask for a Referral and to so wisely. According to University of Chicago studies, non-cash incentives are more effective as compared to cash incentives by 24%.

1. Retargeting strategies

Retargeting is an essential part of any marketing program; the research by AdRoll stated that 2% of customers actually convert in their first visit. The experience of a customer on its purchase journey is the implication how further it is going to be. Consumers buy their purchase across different devices. They select from one device and purchase from the other.

Retargeting helps to gain your customers back by 27% of lost prospects and gain 70% back with help of retargeting for customers who were shown relevant ads.

1. Segmented Email campaigns

Email Marketing is one of the main channels to boost your Ecommerce growth. 77% consumers rely on email communications for doing permission-based communications as compared to any other mediums. Over 80% of retail professionals feel that email marketing is the biggest driving factors for customer retention. Drip campaigns can be designed on the basis of customer triggers.

Always follow 80/20 rules for content sent to your subscribers and be cautious about the number of emails that you are sending out to your customers.

Most of the businesses today heavily rely on acquiring new customers to boost their business growth. But retention is also one far-sighted element to continue the profits of your business. There are several ways to hack your business growth by engaging your customers more.

11 Cost Effective growth hacking for Ecommerce

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 5^th September 2017

Tags Business Growth, Customer Engagement, Growth Hacking, Influencer Marketing, Retargeted Marketing

Introducing an inter-organisational business incubation event focused on enhancing our team’s entrepreneurial spirit’s and ambitions.
Binary Entrepreneur League is designed in such a way that its character targets to give a new lease to Binarians thought patterns, help in developing their creative thinking element and get their innermost entrepreneur desires up and running.
Here are our 5 final teams:

1. Dresskart

Introduction: Every color says your mood and reflects your personality,Dresskart provides all the shades and patterns for enhancing your beauty.Vision: Our vision to be the No. 1 retailer for dress materials in India
Our Mission: To expand our business both offline and online and have a powerful presence on both fronts.
Our Value: Integrity, Respect and Passion for excellence, working together.

2.Happy Feet

Happy Feet brings to you a wide range of ladies footwear ranging from trendy Chappals to cool Sandals.
If you are looking for happiness for your feet as well as to your wallet, this is where your hunt ends!!!
Vision: To bring happiness to ladies who wish to buy comfortable and trendy footwear at economical prices.
Mission: To help ladies who wish to buy comfortable and trendy footwear at economical prices find their fitting pairs of Chappals & Sandals

3. Fashion Hub & Crafts

Fashion Hub & Crafts is our Fashion idea of giving our esteemed customers the best in terms of Design, Style and Quality.
We keenly look forward tying up with prominent designer houses to add value to our on-going business.
Vision:To bring exclusive designer pieces that are one of a kind having best quality at its core.
Mission: to churn out the best design pieces directly from manufacturers and bring it to final consumers at very affordable rates.

4. Masala Makers:

Mission: We ensure to deliver high quality premium spices with the right mix of health and taste
Vision: To make Spices and Mix “Taste Like Never Before”

5. Classy Desis

Classy Desis, is a fashion brand that brings to you, meticulously chosen contemporary as well as traditional jewelry.
Vision: We envision ourselves as people’s choice of the go to brand, when it comes to artificial jewelry.
Mission: The mission of Classy Desis is to have something in store for ever

BINARY ENTREPRENEUR LEAGUE

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 2^nd September 2017

Tags marketing

Effective Email Marketing tips for Ecommerce

If you are running an Ecommerce business, we sure know that you are looking for varied strategies that will help boost your business growth. Email Marketing is one component of your Ecommerce strategy that helps to get good number of conversions. Ideally, there are several options that help to grow your Ecommerce business online by the means of social media, Content Marketing, SEO and others. Email Marketing is one of the best means when it comes to creating customer engagement and build brand loyalty. According to a recent study, 33% of consumers have reported that emails are main motivators to shopping online. Given below are few of the Email Marketing tips that can give good effective results:

1. Offering Subscription incentive and welcome series emails

A smart marketer will absolutely know the importance of email lists. You can offer your subscribers some incentive by giving them offer coupons, discounts on the products they buy for subscribing in your email lists. After they subscribe to your list, it is now time to send them your first welcome email, followed by a series of emails. With the first email, the primary objective is to form a brand impression. The second email can be sent to build a brand identity and the third email should be targeted towards getting conversions.

1. Make your subject line attractive by including FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Subject line is the most important since it’s the first thing a viewer sees after signing in, in their email accounts. You can grab user’s attention by creating curiosity in subject line. The use of FOMO that is Fear of Missing Out makes use of the phrases like “don’t miss out”, “last chance to grab” creates a sense of urgency amongst the users.

1. Engagement and Personalization in your emails

Make your email engaging by creating stories, after all people love reading stories. Your email should be entertaining and should sound natural when readers are reading them. Customize your email to suit the requirements of your users, simply making use of first name encourages a deeper connection and helps subscribers to have trust on the brand.

1. Ask customers feedback and give them something valuable

Your customers are special to you, give them something valuable by sending vouchers and discount off. The study states that almost 34% redeem the vouchers sent to them. Ask customers their valuable feedback, what they are looking for and if, is there anything missing and how would they want brand to serve them better.

1. Strong Call-to-Action plan

Be very precise and straight in your message, include actionable CTA that stands out and create a sense of urgency in your message. Use words like “Today”, “now”, “Free”, etc that will motivate them enough to take some action.

1. Wake-up inactive subscribers

Your email lists may look pretty much longer but there may be inactive subscribers too, to get them back send them personalized email that will reactivate communication. As Neil patel suggests in his infographic, “sending emails to people who are opening them and the people who are not opening, put them in re-engagement campaign to make them active”.

1. Personal email for Cart Abandonment

People often leave their online shopping carts that they had picked items and placed it in their carts, brands need to play with strategies to gain the customer back and push them into finishing the purchase. A cart abandonment email can surely help to recover the lost sales. The brands may include discounted coupon on the product they had selected or offer a coupon that they can utilize if they complete the purchase.

1. Integration of Social media channels in your email campaigns

Social media is very wide and infinite; use this benefit to pump up your email marketing campaign. Include social media links in your emails where the users can directly get onto your landing page or whatever product pages you want to direct them to.

1. Subscription options

People get more frustrated with the amount of emails they keep getting from brands, you can use a smarter side to this by giving your customers chance to make their own selection. this will not only reduce unsubscribe rate but also your customers will appreciate you. Include in your emails, a preference center where users have control over email frequency, update information, change the content and even unsubscribe.

Effective Email Marketing tips for Ecommerce

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 2^nd September 2017

Tags Cart Abandonment, Communication, Conversion Rate, Email Communication, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Tips

Facebook Messenger for Ecommerce to sell more Physical Products

We already know how selling online is critical to brands objective of using social platforms for selling. Today, consumers are looking much more than traditionally what it used to be. They need someone to resolve their confusions, solve their queries and address their unique needs. Hence, one may wonder how you do that. It is in fact, part of a learning process for brands and people are using and finding varied mediums to buy and interact with the brands. The recent research suggests that 32% of online people showing interest in mobile ad get converted on a desktop and over 60% of consumers shop from one device and continues on other. The data is quite fulfilling to pay deeper attention to what is missing here; consumers today are using different devices for different things and purposes. The best way to bridge the gap here is by the means of Facebook Messenger Marketing and the results are astonishing!

Facebook Messenger is simply great for your Ecommerce marketing since it allows one-on-one interaction with the prospects. The users can converse with the brands the way they want and are comfortable in. Facebook is a powerhouse that can help to convert the prospects into actual customers. Facebook messaging has taken Ecommerce to bigger heights by making available brands wherever and whenever the customer desired. The huge popularity of messaging apps have created demand for Chatbots that converse intelligently with the users and give answers for general questions asked. Chatbots are going to be hugely popular in the near future providing greater relief for organizations to do automated work of chatting and resolving queries of the customers. Given below are three tactics that will help to sell more physical products on Facebook messenger:

1. Retargeting through BOFU (Bottom of your funnel)

Bottom of your funnel are the audiences that are close to purchasing your product, it includes the people who have visited your website, the people who have chosen a product and put it in the cart and the people who have checked out your product. These are good enough reasons to realign marketing strategy and give your prospects the offer to come back and buy the product. You can retarget the people to buy by offering them coupon code that they can use for buying or redeeming the discount.

Given below are simple steps to get more BOFU sales using Facebook Messenger:

Setting up your Facebook Campaign

Create a new Ad campaign within Facebook Ads page and set objective to “Traffic”

In the Ad set window, edit the placements excluding all except Facebook feeds.

Set the traffic destination to Website or Messenger.

The target should be on people who have already visited your website and excluding who made the purchase.

Next step is to Optimize your Ad delivery for Link Clicks and not Conversions

With this new Campaign and Ad set, it should be configured correctly to create the Ad. You have the choice to select any type of Ad, just make note to select “Messenger Text” under “Destination” given below:

Write a message that explains your users that they get a Coupon when they reply to your message with the word “Coupon”. Given below is how your finished Ad looks like:

When the user sends the message, they will receive pre-written message given below:

If you follow the above processes, you are almost half- done.

Setting up the Chatbot

For setting up the Chatbot, you will have to log into your ManyChat account and click on Automation option given on the left side.

Add “Coupon” as the new keyword

Also change the targeting message to “Message contains” as keyword, it should look like the image given below:

Also, you can add common misspellings that the user may have typo. You can write automated message that includes coupon code and link to the shop.

Your automation step is complete here. As the user types the word “Coupon” in response to automatic Facebook message, they get automated response with the coupon code:

The campaign is powerful enough to track people who have abandoned your shopping cart, it sends coupon code with the link to your product to complete the purchase. Facebook messenger campaigns are running high and dry with good click through rates.

By this stage, you may already be seeing a high ROI Facebook messenger remarketing campaigns

Adjusting Timeline to Maximise Revenue

The common questions marketers come across is, that the brand may miss out on revenues if they keep offering coupon to all and in any case consumers are going to buy the product. For this, there is an easy way out,brands can adjust their timelines to target only those people who abandon their carts more than three days ago.

You can check what works best for your brand and for your customer to get you maximum benefits with overall good results.

The above is smarter way to optimize your bottom funnel.

1. Automated Onboarding Message

The main focus in this is to focus on how you can use Facebook Messenger Chatbot to increase the engagement with brand new visitors. Customers are looking for information online so when they ask some query they are looking for a human touch response but that would not always be possible. Hence, onboarding messages are used that will shoot when the user asks common questions. The Onboarding messages are used to answer common questions like FAQs, Provide information, Help people find information they are looking for, Brand engagement. Given below is a good example of an automated Chatbot message:

Let your prospects know that their message has been received and they will be answered shortly, you can send them useful links based on their queries.

To setup this inside – ManyChat, click on “Automation” and “Main menu”

Finally, you will be able to check which buttons are getting most clicks.

The information can be used to make your options useful by identifying what your visitors are looking and creating.

1. Shopping Platform Integrations

Facebook Messenger is one of the most basic shopping platform integration used for order confirmation. It is available on Shopify platforms. The below image shows how it exactly looks like:

The best thing about this type of order confirmation is that it triggers a good response from your customers by keeping them engaged with your brand.

You can also send money through the use of Facebook messenger by sending peer to peer payments. Facebook is working on process where users can store their credit card information for quick payments. This will help the users to see the ads on feed and with one click; they will be able to make that purchase.

Facebook messenger for Ecommerce is at a very early adoption stage and not much of your competitors may be using it. As it gets more popular, you are more likely to see lower response rates but as far as your brand conversation goes you can see good click through rates. These metrics are sure to fall down once people starts getting too many of messages just like it did for emails.

Facebook Messenger for Ecommerce to sell more Physical Products

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 1^st September 2017

Tags Automation, BOFU, Click Through Rates, Conversions, Facebook for Ecommerce

How brands can maximize sales by using Amazon 1P Multichannel Marketing

Amazon is one of the largest Ecommerce portals with over 100,000 sellers and hence faces immense competition within the dealers. Amazon provides multiple options for vendors to showcase their products and hence exclusive vendors get an access to their marketing tools to build their online presence. But, like every great thing takes time, to get verified conversion it takes time to build audiences over running campaigns. Let us step down to few of the marketing basics, as it’s commonly known as first party (1P) marketing.

Being a 1P vendor can get you many, many real benefits – it increases consumer confidence since shoppers will see the products as being sold by Amazon. This will enhance the product reliability and it is seal of approval that no third party gives. The vendors get to use more marketing tools on Amazon retail as compared to third party platforms. Vendors will be able to use 1P marketing only by invitation from Amazon, only after that they will be able to access Vendor Central portal.

Marketing Services

Amazon Marketing services (AMS) provide PPC ad solutions to its vendors that help them to reach new customers and drive their sales. This advertising service is for suppliers on Vendor Central and Vendor Express. Vendors can use headline ads and product display ads along with sponsored products that are offered to 3P sellers.

Sponsored Products

These ads are the PPC keyword based program that gives 1P vendors opportunity for more promotions. The ads appear on product pages and below the search results. Sponsored products are the best places on Amazon to increase your product exposure. Sponsored ads will land your ad on the first page when the users are searching for your product category. The ads are only displayed only for items where the vendors own the buy box.

Headline Search Ads

Headline search ads are the targeted Cost per click (CPC) ads that appear at the top of first page of search results on desktop and mobile pages. These ads give more visibility to brands and chance to interact with customers right from the start of purchase process.

Product Display Ads

These CPC Ads appear only on related product pages, these ads are not targeted by keywords. The ads are useful if your target audience’s interests are very specific to product that the brands sell.

Following are the key AMS Campaign strategies you can use:

Match your keywords with Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASIN), combine your brand name with high level product category items.
Manually add the keywords and prepare a good keyword list adding relevant misspellings. Aggressive bidding will help to capture relevant traffic to your ads.
Reach out to new customers and promote high-level product categories, make use of product display and headline searches.
Review your performance by reporting metrics; analyze ASINs, check for relevant and matching keywords.

Advertising Options for 1P Merchants

1P merchants can benefit by using promotional programs and other marketing tools made available by Amazon. The promotional programs include subscription service, Deal of the day, Lightening deals. There are thousands of vendors that are working with Amazon so brands should note the fact that their brand may not have guaranteed access.

Amazon Vine helps to send your product to top reviewers before it is put on sale. As consumers trust UGC more than ads, it can help to boost your sales.

A+ Content Pages helps to form a bulleted list of your product, brand can use logo, embedded video and other interactive feature for consumers to look at product and connect better. Amazon reports states that A+ helps to increase the sale on an average by 3 to 10% where brands can provide information and users are better able to connect through the use of improved SEO and content.

How brands can maximize sales by using Amazon 1P Multichannel Marketing

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 31^st August 2017

Tags Advertising, Amazon 1P, Product Display Ads, Search display ads, Sponsored ads

How Apparel retailers embrace new strategies, counting beyond just conversions

Apparel markets have seen a major shift in last one decade or so. The reason is rapid commercialization; retailers are growing beyond just four walls and leveraging the idea of online business reaching more audiences online. The advertising structure has completely changed keeping in mind the purchase intent and advertising methods. Newer marketing tools and technological developments have led to more competitive markets globally showing a good revolution across buying and selling industries.

Google often changes its search result type keeping in mind the user intent; this helps users to make searches in specific verticals. Search engine results page or SERP as is commonly known display videos or related articles based on users’ intent. Accordingly, apparel retailers need to optimize content based on SERP display of targeted keywords. Today, advertising and marketing go beyond the measure of simply looking at conversions. Apparel brands are looking forward to set goals and measure success in the way they interact and engage their customers. It has become highly important for brands to take into account newer marketing methods, ideas and measurements. Apparel industry as a whole has seen bigger competitive landscape with shifting search trends. The massive change have led to more online conversions by including latest digital methods and devices, it tremendously helps to improve on User Engagement that goes beyond simple purchasing power.

Significance of Brand voice

Brands must purportedly engage its audience by providing them with personalized content. This helps brands to understand their users and create a content strategy that well aligns with SEO and social media goals.

Brands relevant tone and message should align with their organizational objectives and they should use key insights from audience data and purchase data to appeal to people. Seasonal announcements help to engage with audience by offering them relevant product offers. Take the case of Nordstrom, the company crafts content around important events and seasons. Their content often revolves around events like wedding seasons, prom, swimwear, seasonal work attire, etc. the below example shows how Nordstrom formats its content putting user intent in mind. While searching for “wedding guest” query, Google knows the user intent hence it can derive that the user is basically looking to wear something for a wedding.

Nordstrom have remarkably engaged its audience with creative marketing strategy. Nordstrom is equally leading on Facebook pages for discussions that are relevant to new wedding looks and work attire. The brand have clear objectives that are simple and sleek through images, post the copies and links that provide better engagement and visibility amongst the users. Through this type of marketing it will lead to better engagement through word of mouth and increasing the conversions.

The main marketing key lies in knowing what customer wants to interact with, hence content message should be written keeping the purchase intent in mind along with marketing strategy. Another very good example of an online male apparel brand is Chubbies. It’s a niche brand selling men trunk and shorts, they have created a distinct and very clear marketing message across all digital channels as a unified brand image.

Finding your Influence

Influencer marketing is one of the most upcoming forms of marketing because today people trust “people” more than any brand advertisements. Influencer marketing campaign helps to expose your brand to newer audiences that will be more excited about your product brand. For example, take the case of BlackMilk Clothing; the influencer often shares her favorite items on social circles and answer user questions that help to spread the brand awareness.

Inluencer marketing does not only relate to social media, it also takes into account other activities and platforms that influencers use. Many influencers run their blogs that has massive following hence when an influencer belonging to your industry or product niche feature your product in their blog, it can have direct impact on the visibility of your brand in SERPs. Brands must consistenly try to shift their communication to potential customers to push through all mediums, for web properties belonging to them or that of influencers. The culmination of different media can help bring a bigger outcome and help brand work towards a specific goal like increasing the engagement and expand the reach and visibility.

Product Listing Ads

Today brands are going beyond what was just ordinary, along with Facebook ads and traditional search ads they are recognizing the power of Shopping Ads. These are basically Product Listing Ads (PLAs), appearing on the top of Google mobile search results having visual impact. The ads shows to user a photo of product complimenting with color, size, store name, price, etc. more details can be added through ad extensions.

Benefits of using Shopping Ads

Shopping Ads can provide long lasting benefits for your business profile, it helps:

To promote inventory and enhance in-store traffic
To Nurturing the leads who are looking to buy the product

It is highly important for brands especially apparel brands to evolve themselves out of traditional strategies and market their efforts towards latest digital tactics. Different marketing efforts like content strategies, influencer marketing, facebook ads, shopping ads and other types of ads help to stay on par with competition.

How Apparel retailers embrace new strategies, counting beyond just conversions

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 30^th August 2017

Tags Apparel Retailers, Facebook Ads, Influencer Marketing, Shopping Ads

Why Web developer’s Project Completion estimate is important?

Web Development is a huge arena that requires a lot of patience, hard work and determination. The sheer challenge here is the completion of web development project delivery on time. Many a times, it so happens that there are several revisions to developer’s project analysis while several times the project time is underestimated or over estimated. It is highly important to take note of each and every step of web development that shall give proper estimation of costs and the time.

Every successful step in web development designing is a step forward towards achieving a milestone. Developers are themselves keen eyed when it comes to using finest of their developing abilities. Hence, every time they design they will find a new design feature that could make it better and sometimes changes from clientele are unavoidable. So developers ideally gives project estimation based on the processes they follow. Most times developers make use of existing codes because that has been previously used.

Given below is the lowdown on the entire project estimation and why is it important:

Developing Buttons

Buttons are probably the best known feature of any website. So, let us assume that client needs a reordering button. So a reorder button is created in the ecommerce store, this button will help customers to reorder a product based on previous purchases.

New button – Designing a new button is a visible task that would go on a product listing page. Existing add-to-cart button can be added provided some changes are made that are distinctive. Move the button outside the cart’s HTML form in its own form so it does not look different.

Button for repeat customers – This button is being specially designed for logged in customers only they are basically returning customers. Ecommerce systems hence have a code that helps to detect if someone has logged in already.

Actual customers – These are the customers who have bought the product from the brand hence only they will be able to view the button. It requires some answers to be fulfilled by the database. The performance of the queries is taken into consideration since load time is important; hence the time for development needs to be added for actual calculation of performances.

Connecting buttons to the actual server – The buttons are only visible to actual buyers; it needs to connect it to actual server so a pure action is undertaken when clicked. The first task is to wrap the button in an HTML form and embed the product ID in the hidden fields so the server knows of the product customer is looking for. A URL end point need to be created that will help to add the route and controller that will hold the server logic. With all these three elements, the button is connected to the server.

Check product details in previous transactions – The product details can be checked in the backend system along with the actual goal of the button. The product ID is derived from customer’s orders. For doing it, the database access is required to find the product; embedding the ID helps the server to know the product that customer is viewing. We can use same queries with some tweaks to find more on product line. After having the line item, it could be copied to the cart with other options or sizes the customer ordered.

Redirecting the users and testing – After the product has been added to the cart, the customer is redirected to cart page for the checkout. Testing is important across the whole development to check for its functionality.

Take it live – The final step after development is to get the Code live with all its functioning up and running. It is usually an easy step except for it’s a very large project. Sometimes the scheduling takes some days, weeks or months for unexpected delays may creep in.

Most times developers fail to make correct estimates without considering the above points. The reason could be miscalculations or sometimes over estimation and the feature is marked as “done” even when it is still remaining. A simple reordering button as it may seem, but it consists of a long list of complexities and time that goes into making is prolonged. One change in button consists of several steps and modifications; it requires graphic design, front-end logic, HTML forms, backend changes, database queries and so on. Hence most software features take time in building the outcome, it’s easier said than done many things go beneath the roof before showing the outer shine.

A skilled and experienced developer follows the process and provides estimates including all time-bound things that are to be implemented, designed and developed. Along with a good programming and the way each step is being followed, there are assumptions and questions that everybody feels about. Some things are really doubtful while rearranging things; the order of priorities or the options may change. Every single change will bring a different estimate time and cost calculations.

To summarize it, let us make it very short and simpler. The actual estimated total time is difficult to analyze, the web development is quite a complex process that requires many teams working under the same project. Hence, it is the responsibilities of the merchant as well as the project team to estimate time, cost, and seek any clarifications if needed to get a realistic picture and accurate estimates.

Why Web developer’s Project Completion estimate is important?

Shopify

Post author By binadmin
Post date 29^th August 2017

Tags Good Developer, Project Estimatation, Project Estimate, Web Development Project

How to get results from Instagram Influencer Marketing

Ecommerce markets are in all likelihood spinning the game with thousands of online tools and platforms available to grow your business. It has made it super easy for brands to influence their customers by making use of social platforms. Instagram Influencer Marketing has come out to be great reliever of sorts helping smaller and bigger businesses to showcase their brands and make them popular. Instagram marketing has exponentially grown in a very short time span that gives many advantages; you not only grow your followers but leverage your brand identity.

Kissmetrics report states that over 70% of Instagram users look up on varied brands on the platform and looking forward to consume the content. Instagram is an effective tool for your ecommerce business with over 300 million monthly users. Every marketer has a dream to show their product to its customers in the most prominent manner. The trick is to display your product strongly in front of customers but not overly trying it. Hence, Instagram Influencer marketing is best regarded when it comes to show your brand. You can make use of Instagram in two methods; one is by building your own following and second is by Influencer Marketing.

Building your own Instagram Audience

Online tools like Webstagram or Iconosquare helps to build Organic following on Instagram, through these tools one can select relevant hashtags and reach out to right people interested in your industry. Webstagram is a wonder tool that provides excellent way to search for popular hashtags. Webstagram search helps to search for key information that is relevant to Instagram marketing strategy. However, it is highly important to know how to do posting on the right day to get optimum benefits. Iconosquare is another most awesome tools online that tell you exact times where most engagement happens.

The tools help to make your brands popular by indulging in marketing at perfect times. The above image shows sample data from Iconosquare. Shopify study indicates that the dark circles are the ones which you usually post and light grey are the ones which get most engagement. The ideal time for posting is represented by large light grey circles.

Siphoning the followers – although there are several means that you can directly touch base to attract your customers, the easiest ways are the ones that do not require any efforts. Like in the case of this marketing strategy that is to siphon the followers from competition. You already have correct knowledge and audiences that are following your competitor’s account, you know which products they are interested in, how they are selling it. Once you start siphoning, you know you have at least some targeted audience. One can easily do this, by “following” competitors account and then engage with them by following them, liking their pictures, commenting on their photos. A shopify’s test run showed that by following an account you at least get 14% follow backs, 22% followbacks and likes and over 34% of comments, likes and followbacks. It can look pretty much tough at first but once when you are into it, you get the solid data with you to implement your strategy right.

First let us understand the concept of Instagram Influencer and Influencer Marketing!

Instagram is all about reaching your audiences; brands are marketing their products with the objective of getting many followers and get some proportion of those followers into conversions. That is where the role of Influencer marketing kicks in. Influencers on Instagram could be any person having a celebrity status or a person having a huge following. These are the people who are influencers they have great following up of people and people might just be interested in your brand. You can turn your small new business having minimum following to a larger following in a matter of just few days through the power of Influencer Marketing. You just have to search for influencer in your niche, contact them and agree on terms through which they will market your product or brand.

Companies like Boxed water uses Instagram Influencer Marketing for their campaign The ReTree Project, it was a simple campaign in which users had to post a photo with hashtag #retree. For each of this post, the company used to plant two trees. Social media examiner report states that in a time of just one month, they have generated more than 2,600 posts having #retree hashtag. Visually appealing products have larger influencing factor when it comes to Instagram influencer marketing, it could be a great booster to get larger following in a short span of time.

Now, the most important question is How to convince the Influencers on Instagram to market your products?

Influencers are basically the people having larger reach, hence any brand would want to get accustomed to them providing they are somewhere related to your industry or the product or services relating to yours. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out may find this as little intimidating. Its very difficult to get started at first because first brand has to figure out what kind of influencers they need, searching the right influencer, how to reach out to them, how to impress them with your product or brand, how it will affect the sales, so on and so forth. Its not a rocket science, but with slow and gradual steps, it all can be achieved. Given below are few of the steps that help you get started:

Building Influencer Marketing audience on Instagram

Finding the right Influencer

The foremost step to start marketing on Instagram is to find the influencer that belongs to your industry or product line. Influencers from your industry have higher chances to fetch more following because people of similar interest are already their followers. Targeting specific customer from your industry cuts down your work by half. Free online analytics tool are really helpful to find relevant keywords on Instagram that will help you with Instagram marketing strategy. You can select from a bunch of hashtags and keywords where you think audiences may be interested in. Finding the right influencer with all the research work is worth your time otherwise it may get expensive for losing your money as well as time.

Negotiating with Influencer

You can get good success in your Instagram marketing strategy once you have right influencer. People are more likely to follow the product or brand, which they see Influencer promoting on their feeds regularly. Hence it is of vital importance to check if your product aligns with what your influencer have been regularly promoting on their page. You can form a partnership with the Influencer by first introducing yourself and the brand and the product that you like to market. Influencers usually are monetarily working; hence you can provide product samples also talk about money they will work for. You can find their contact details and information on their page.

Contact them and giving your influencers a brief idea about your product and what you want them to market will set their intentions on it. Creating a Mood Board for your product brand will help them getting connected and feel your brand.

Mood Boards are nothing but a collection of images that gives some sense of the product to the on-lookers. The above is a sample of Mood Board created by Neil Waller for promoting his business brand – Shore Projects. It gives influencer good sense of conveying brand’s message to its audiences that makes your marketing all the more successful. Remember, that no influencer will work for free so it is best to talk out deals with them and have all things sorted on paper. Agree on terms together and give them some samples that they can try and be sure of.

Measuring the output

Campaigns with good framework always give better results hence It is also important to measure the results. You would know what works and what doesn’t work. Online tools like Bitly helps to keep multiple trackable links for every influencer you want to target. You can ask influencers to post your business link on their bio page, that way you would know how many visitors are coming from their page.

Instagram Marketing has been of great help for Ecommerce merchants; visually appealing products have greater outreach. Organic following in Instagram is an achievement one should draw in Instagram marketing strategy plan. It is a great platform for building brand and growing Ecommerce business.

How to get results from Instagram Influencer Marketing

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 25^th August 2017

Tags Influencer Marketing, Instagram marketing

4 Effective Customer Engagement strategies

Customer Engagement becomes of significant importance to create selling opportunities. Marketing is simply a way of connecting to consumers; however, more relevance goes into building that relation with consumers that is long standing. Sometimes, customers are not really happy with the manner in which brands interact with them. Brands make biggest mistake by annoying their customers beyond the limit, customers often complain of bombarding emails, following them on every social networks and text messages, etc. given below are top strategies to create Customer Engagement in a most fruitful manner:

Precise time EngagementCustomer Engagement is undoubtedly a powerful means to build relation with them but it is even more important how you build upon that relation. Some contents are ever so green so they are readily invited by users and some content only matters if there is some specific event attached to it.
It is highly important to understand the behavior of the consumer, if the content is sent on time and doesn’t resolve a customer issue it’s not going to make any sense. Similarly, a seasonal content not sent on right moment, would not make any sense to consumer reading at much later time. Triggered email marketing helps to understand behaviors of consumers and send time bound and relevant content to your audience.
Customer PrioritizationCustomers are the market king and one of the most important assets for any organization. So they should be held on top priority, it becomes especially important for engaging your customers. A customer-centric company would do anything possible to gain customer trust and loyalty.Most organizations today have general customer handling departments that help to analyze behavioral data, email activity, website logins, customer habits, priorities, etc. Certain myths surrounding customer needs are well portrayed in the chart below:

Data collected with a customer visiting your website gives a lot of information about customer choices. If they like a specific ornament, brands can send relative image of the same ornament with discounted offer. This is definitely going to bring a lot of value to your brand.
Conveying messages differently and not overloadingImagine the feeling one gets with same throbbing email every time, a customer makes a purchase or getting similar response to a query. This can get really frightening as your customer may find it annoying. As Susanna Tarrant, Digital Marketing Coordinator for Marketing Copilot rightly puts up, “Rather than trying to close the deal too early, you should create content filled with information for your audience. A useful content marketing strategy changes the conversation. It makes it about your customer and not about you or the sale.”Educating your consumer is of high value; too much of text content may send negative signal and push away users from the website. Visitors on your website are looking for critical information hence it is best regarded to give them a clutter-free layout with easy browsing options.

If the brands have a very important message to be conveyed, it is important to give instant value to the users. The above image clearly gives customer a solution for specific problem. Customers get engaged when we highlight important points they may want to use.
Avoiding Awkward situations
A great customer relationship is formed when all hurdles are bypassed so brands should particularly be very alert when it comes to maintaining transparent relations and dealings. Customers become loyal when they find value in the brand. Customers do like surprises but that would be in the form of rewards and not hidden fees and expenses. So brands should not do something that will create barrier to upholding a good relationship.

Customers should be aware of all billing details before the checkout happens, there should be no unpleasant surprises waiting for them. To improve customer experience, the best idea is to follow good marketing habits. Customer Engagement will grow with creating brand value and awareness through genuine and transparent dealings.

4 Effective Customer Engagement strategies

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 24^th August 2017

Email success is of great importance when it comes to attaining Marketing successes. Once, we have a basic understanding of marketing metrics, understanding email marketing is not of a very big issue. There are different variations to it some are used for ad campaigns or on-site performance metrics. Given below are few of the guidelines to optimize your email campaigns and newsletter program:

Email list growth – The email list sizes are of prime importance since it highly advocates what would be the percentage of open rates. If your email size is large, you would see more users who may open your emails but then there are other groups of people who are less passionate about your brand. In similar case, when you have smaller email list, people are very passionate about your brand hence you may see a higher open rates and click through rates. This gives higher user engagements rates. So, you can determine the success and failure of your email marketing campaign through the list size and the type of the users placed on the list.
Delivery Rates – Email Deliverability rate is the number of the emails that were actually delivered to the recipients, this list may also include emails that ended up in spam or junk folders. The total email delivered and bounce backs will tell you the number of bad addresses you have had in your list. Email lists that are prepared in-house giving low deliverable rate may mean there is improper data fed in the system and need some immediate attention.
Open Rate – Email Open rates signifies the total success rate of your email success metrics, this needs a proper monitoring to help you optimize your email campaign. Open rates of Emails are nothing but the percentage of people who received and opened your email. This is the very step for achieving email marketing campaign success. It is very critical information that determines further evaluation and steps to improve on marketing campaigns.
Click-Through rates – These are the actual clicks from emails to websites or landing pages. The basic motive for brands to arrange for any clicks on emails are to get conversions and monetize the transaction. The clicks through rates are representation that people open the email and clicked the links.
Conversion Rate – Conversion rate is an important metric determining overall email marketing success rate. This shows how much revenue is generated from total number of clicks and how many registered on your website. General email marketing platforms like Comm100 tracks the deliverability rate, open rate and click through rates, conversion tracking however need to accommodate through internal settings.

Email Marketing successes are determined by the above key metrics that delivers important analysis in forming further marketing strategies. Each of the these key metrics help to form a standard representation about how the email campaigns are performing.

Guide to Email Marketing Metrics

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 23^rd August 2017

Tags Click Through Rates, Conversion Rates, Email Marketing, Marketing Metrics, Open Rates

Top key strategies to help you gain back the traffic on your site

Getting traffic on the websites is one of the key elements to get customers buying products from you. There are remarkable ways through which you can attract your customers by knowing the right time and place to market your business. Mobile optimization is one of the top priorities because more and more people are shopping on-the-go so brands should be making super easy for them to get on their webpage and have a hurdle-free shopping experience. Let us take a look at some of the key strategies that will help to gain traffic on your webpage.

Optimized Mobile Strategy – Physical stores have geographic limitations, this can be overcome by the means of Geotargetting. Geotargetting helps to boost the food traffic on webpages through shopping and making use of search campaigns. The bid modifiers help to target relevant ads while shoppers are closer to store.A survey by Deloitte showed 49% of mobile traffic. Google’s free tool allows anyone to check on the site speed and provide recommendations on different ways that can help optimize the mobile site.Cart abandonment is a common issue; brands should provide frictionless buying experiences to their customers. Customers are looking for similar experiences the way they find it on using desktops. Checkout options must be optimized that ensures to keep up with the sale.
Maximizing Returns on Investments – The past data can be useful in predicting the top performers; it also helps to analyze previous year’s output. The past data helps to make informed decisions on products.Remarketing strategies are highly sustainable with proper approach; you can make a list of audiences that bought products and then increasing the bids on those audiences. It will help to derive a conversion.
Promotional Strategy – Promotions are part and parcel of any business, competitive pricing helps shoppers who are looking for good deals. Promotion price can also be offered for special festivity and occasions.Some consumers are also looking for Free Shipping; it’s a great way to attract customers. A study by Deloitte says that 63% consumers shop from online retailers offering free shipping.
Social Media Strategy – Social media strategies form the base of online purchase, research shows 27% consumers make use of social media platforms to make online buying decisions. Customers vouch for colorful images; they attract more attention and help to stand out from the competition.

Marketers make use of audience strategy, custom audiences on Facebook helps to target your customer base. Brand can expand their reach by using Lookalike audiences on Facebook for targeting the consumers which are very similar to demographics.

Top key strategies to help you gain back the traffic on your site

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 21^st August 2017

Tags Mobile Strategy, Returns On Investment, Social Media Strategy

Points that Ecommerce Developers secretly confess

Prime importance is given to Ecommerce developers and actually they really are worth it. Every piece of art, we mean coding that they do is important hence we do value their skills. But, talking to few of them recently I stumbled upon a rock bottom secret. Not every developer is happy with their coding, sometimes they expect to code something and it showed something better and sometimes vice-versa kind of stories. Usually developers have standard processes and they follow techniques that help them do their jobs well. There are some whimsical ways too that they work in, some like quite places while some can code while they are in a musical. The ultimate aim is to get working what is needed.

Perfection! A possibility?

Perfection is just a word per se, we may believe but it really is. I must state that developers are pretty much-obsessed people. The very character of them nudging and queuing every portion of their program shows how important coding to them is. It often happens that developer may develop some piece and it is not at all similar to what the client suggested. This is a very frequent phenomenon. Somehow, it becomes difficult to do software building that is needed by some other person. The causes are sometimes unknown, but two common reasons are communication gap and not having resources.

The gaps occur when there is not enough information available or the data is not supportive, it is flawed in nature. Lack of resources is another forefront reasons, we may have much of time, money and people but some things are just lagging. The time is of course limited and some features simply do not work. Hence, developers often feel that perfection is impossible.

Time Constraints

This is the most common reason for all of us and coincidently with the developers too. No matter how much time we have it on hand; there is always a time scarcity, a resource that is so valuable. As one gets closer to the deadline, a particular feature is rushed upon, the development portion becomes difficult, and budget is uncontrollable, sudden bugs come up, change in feature request by client often leads to elongated gaps.

There are several of these scenarios that may let one think that there is severe lack of time. Every scene has different issues and hence it all can be solved in different ways. It is always a good idea to showcase and tell clients the feature that would go good with the said request.

Surprising Code acceptance

Sometimes, the reasonable happens with the unreasonable. And this is so common with developers. Often we encounter our own flaws and we know somewhere within what will work and what would not work and still it worked. This can show a very good surprise for the developer but can equally lead to negative impact too.

This phase often comes with reporting the bug. The client may report a bug that is fixed by someone and so developer would never know what was the actual program and treats it as a bad bug report. So best idea here is to do the testing for some extra time and clarify what is the problem and where is the problem. There are no successful systems that haven’t had any bugs; the most successful company processes may have bugs. So it is perfectly normal to have bugs.

Points that Ecommerce Developers secretly confess

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 19^th August 2017

Tags Developer Confessions, Ecommerce Developers

Points to ponder if your Conversion rates are falling!

Ecommerce businesses are all about market credibility and marketers well know that no one is going to hit the pod in the midst at least for some months. But, if the markets are targeted properly the response could be overwhelming and sometimes even with bigger instincts the results can be underwhelming. Most times the buying decisions are held subconsciously in the mind, so brands should take care of those things in mind. UX is the first and foremost thing a brand should pay strong attention to for its impacts your business sales tremendously. Stated below are few of the pointers to look for:

Deficient Visual layout – Having a good site layout is one of the most important necessities for the site to look appealing to people. Visual colors help attract attention and elements like color, positioning of the products, shapes, sizes and more. The landing pages can be organized to give a strong impression to users of the website. Given below is an example of MailChimp’s Homepage:

The above image clearly represent, where the user attention might go to. Some color options help customers to easily know what the site page is all about. The landing page goals are directed towards brands goals hence the actions can be taken accordingly. Following is one of the landing pages of the brand:

The below image grabs attention of the users where the brands want to highlight their selling proposition:

The above image clearly depicts where the highest engagement may attract the attention. The only demerit of this page is there are no actionable buttons where the users could click and get conversions. There are different online tools that help to identify and scan the visitor’s patterns. The landing pages should be designed keeping in mind the objectives of the landing page
Undecided Value proposition – Brands should know there is no immediate selling, the brands USP is created to entice buyers into buying the products. Customers are looking to buy goods that are unique, hence idea for brands is to demonstrate their products with its usefulness and how it can be better opposed to other brands. A value proposition for the brands means to identify the need of the product, presenting the solution, showing the difference, providing the proof, etc.

The homepage is dedicated to express the brands value proposition, the industry is dedicated to show common issue that brands and customers usually face.

Industrial case-studies conducted by Invesp states how a well-craft value proposition can help to increase conversion rates by almost 90 percent. Ecommerce has a huge market and greater competition.
Below average checkout process – Checkouts are the most important milestones when it comes to selling. This is the stage where customer finally buys your items and checks out. The abandonment rates are pretty high standing at an average 76.8 percent last year. The reasons behind abandoning the cart could be many:

The ultimate goal is to make the checkout process for customers as easy as possible and eradicate loopholes. The longer the checkout process, the longer the chances for customers to reconsider the buying and abandon the cart. Sometimes even one click options may not be viable for all Ecommerce platforms. The customers also have the option to checkout as a guest, signing in some portals may give a lot of unwanted emails and hence customers resist the sign in. Look below the example of Asos:

It clearly defines the total cost of items and provides costing for shipping too so the buyers would know clearly the total expenditure costs.

The above image shows an organized way of dealing with customers. The indications are clear cut and hence there is every chance of a conversion. The carts are created for checkouts and they are ultimately going to lead to a sale. Hence it is highly important to maintain them well and give good checkout process. A Shopify website offers good customizable options that ensure good functionality.
Outdated website theme– The millennials are looking for what is latest, hence new upcoming website designs attract more attention.

The website that has old type of look can easily be concluded as an old business owner who is no more in business. Customers should find your site that is valuable in terms of providing information because they like credibility. Choosing a web design require a good market research and also the finest UX that you can provide. It gives your competitors the impression that you are competitive. Some sites simply use powerful images while some are heavily filled with content depending on the industries that they cater to, given below is Vera Wang’s homepage:

The captivating unique video on the site gives impression to user more than anything. If the site is outdated than nothing can make do the gap what your customer feels about the brand. Jeffrey Eisenberg, CEO of BuyerLegends.com, puts it as sites should focus on “persuasion” instead of “conversion”. He further noted “The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in conventional thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.”

Designing a perfect website is magical science that helps to cater to perfect balance of all the elements. It takes into account user prospects of the webpage and also helps to get healthy conversion rates.

Points to ponder if your Conversion rates are falling!

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 18^th August 2017

Tags Conversion Rates, Ecommerce Marketing, Value Proposition

Social Planning Essentials – Strategies that give remarkable results

Social media strategies and plan helps to achieve organizational objectives through the means of getting a steady workflow. Given below are some of the strategies and plans that businesses can follow to get optimum output from all the marketing efforts:

Building Strategies – Business plans are often actionable plans that help to achieve organizational over all goals. Strategy defines the very aim of social media presence and they define the parameters of what it will deliver and how it will deliver. Strategies are plans that showcase how the objectives will be met with and that includes the channels, budgets and resources to achieve it. A strategy should consist of a concise and short summary of the things that it aims to achieve.
Strategies help to define goals and objectives that show where you stand in your social arrangements and where should your business be going. Goals are the main criteria that help to achieve your objectives that ensure each goal has measurable criteria for evaluating progress.

One can decide for themselves, high level goals for social media plan that is to complete social media audit and implement the actions. Creating and maintaining social calendar. Work within measurable framework; demonstrate the impact and ROI of social media. The business challenges need to overcome for social channels and strategic activities helps to enable this.

Refer the given below format:

The frames help to reach out to social networks, you have to check your core audience and also identify new customer types that you want to attract based on products and services. The three types of social followers are loyal, existing and potential customers. The strategy should be flexible that responds to changing market conditions. Including guidelines in social media strategy helps to execute processes tactfully, this provides for a set of rules for businesses that they have to adhere to.
Creating Social Media plans – These are basically nothing but summary of the activities that are implemented to support the plan. The social media audit consists of the summary of social media integration, Facebook profile, twitter profile, reviewing suitable platforms like Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Social media content calendar is created having stand-alone thematic moments having full integration with wide marketing plans.
Channel activities are an integral part of any social strategies; you have to make sure to include all tactical elements that are related to people or processes. One can make use of Twitter handle as a customer service channel and an interaction channel. Twitter accounts are extremely helpful so that brands are easily available to consumers. It will be beneficial for developing brand awareness. Twitter helps you to do followers, include cross-references to email databases; even following key influencers helps in broadcasting your brand.

Integrated marketing helps in aligning with other marketing channels so people understand bigger picture. Email marketing explains how to use social networks, using apps, using widgets, using social engagement data to inform email teams, etc. This can work both ways so you can define how other marketing channels can support with the help of a social network.

Social activities must consist of time lines so the progress is tracked steadily. Timelines are very important and critical when it comes to fulfilling the objectives of the organization. Activities need to have timelines so goals are not drifted, recurring activities can be handled in organized by setting the frequency and targets for the week.

Measuring your social performance by the way of KPIs helps to keep track on all social networks for easy measuring. You have to also check if web analytics tools are configured in a correct manner that helps to capture relevant data.

With social activities and plans, one can actually know the social performance and take necessary measurable steps that help to isolate specific elements of the activities. You can re-write social goals to meet social expectations by means of ecommerce goals and conversion data to check which one add the most value.

Social Planning Essentials – Strategies that give remarkable results

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 17^th August 2017

Tags Ecommerce Goals, Marketing Goals, Social Activities, Social Networks, Social Planning, Social Plans, Social Strategies

Longstanding Business strategies to boost Online Business Growth

The conventional methods of business are long gone, welcome to the world of digital tech where opportunities are numerous and the growth is stupendous. People usually feel loyal about companies that cater to individual needs. Digital marketing has a great influencing factor on Ecommerce growth of the organization, this allows for customer trust and stand out from the market competition. It might take years to develop brand name and identify individual components, this helps to build up successful e-commerce business model. The success strategies help to differentiate your company and helps achieve long term business success a reality.

Integrating the Data

Good data is one of the key components to personalization; it helps build consumer trust and loyalty. Data is available in huge quantities but not all companies know how to take full advantage of the information that is available to them.

Aldo Group found itself failing to utilize its data to the maximum potential that it can. It started with a 2-part Ecommerce approach to rectify their situation. The first approach was to adopt a new front-end solution that will help improve data personalization and later investing integration software to merge the power of more than 100 existing apps, databases and services. The final results were outstanding. What it did was blending its legacy systems with new customer-centric data solutions. The brand had this as one of the most successful holiday shopping season since the time Ecommerce debut started.

Companies collect much data today through the means of marketing efforts so it is their responsibility to make every interaction with the company and customer as intuitive as possible. Optimization of data is one of the vital aspects of an Ecommerce business hence website should have every element as dynamic as possible so that it ensures that customers receive tailored business experience catering to needs of individuals.

Expedia, Travel Company, recognizes its customers travel decisions hence they have created their data as smart as possible. This means using strategies to make customer engaged through different social platforms and reaching customers across all devices. This will also help recognizing patterns that provide advertisements and suggestions that are relevant to every customer. A system can be created where customers get reward points for signing up but at the same time they gather a lot of data that helps to meet their requirements. It is one of the best ideas for customer loyalty.

Going Straight to the Customers

Most brands do bigger mistake of waiting for their customers but the secret to gain customer engagement is by going to your customers. Find the ways where you can reach your customers. The best thing a brand can do is to make their products and their awareness highly reachable to customers. For brands it is easy to sell something to people if they are in your store already. Many bigger retails like Starbuck and Target now make use of Beacon Technology that helps them to collect personal data and boost the revenue from customers. Beacon technology works when a person is at close proximity to the location, the brands then sends mobile alerts to people on sales or any discounts at the store.

Beacons can be used by companies not limited to just Ecommerce; brands can use social media for encouraging their customers to make purchases online. The newer advancements have led even more companies to go beyond social platforms and make use of the sites as a selling point directly. Facebook itself marks sales of over 60% worldwide, almost 90% of Pinterest users purchase online in the past six months.

Enhance Customer’s Online Presence

Digital era has arrived and customers are frantically looking for newer experiences and if they like those experiences than they get engaged to the brand. Brands need to just make easier for users to browse through websites so they know what your brand is about, what you sell and provide. Let us look over at some of the methods through which you can achieve this:

Simple Website navigation – An easy layout of the website makes it easier for users to understand your website and its structure. A quality search feature and good indexing of products help to display your products and it has higher success rate.
Personalization – Personalization is the key elements when it comes to buying and enticing customers with new products. New items and bestseller sections on web makes easy for customers to know about your brand. You can also add sections to recently viewed items so customers know that you are aware about your preferences.
Optimizing Cart functionality and making the site mobile-friendly – Shopping cart is an important buying stage hence attention should be placed that customers don’t leave your shopping cart. Arrange good functional features so that they are easily able to navigate through your website. Mobile commerce is growing at a stunning place; it makes up for 30 percent of entire Ecommerce market in the US. These numbers will rise steadily over coming years. Customers would not wait for long for your webpages to load hence optimization is important.
Prioritizing on Security – Brands must ensure that their site is safe and secured; they can make use of strong SSL authentication and run regular PCI tests. A breach in data can lead to massive damages to organizations; hence it is best to let customers know that their data is safe and secured.

Customer’s viewpoints

Customers are the best people to know what they want; you can improve their experiences by providing them best services. You can ask for their feedback and ask them what and how they feel about your website, products and its services. Follow up emails, surveys, customer services, social media provide better opportunities to learn new ways and improve the brands digital marketing approach. Brands can outperform by using good tools and leverage the data to boost brand presence.

Longstanding Business strategies to boost Online Business Growth

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 16^th August 2017

Tags Business Strategies, Online Business Growth

Get Google Analytics answers in plain English

Technological changes have made stupendous discovery of new processes and styles that have led to enormous changes in the way we ever interpreted things. Google analytics will let users’ lead easy interpretation with its marvelous discovery of giving data in plain English. Natural language processing and Machine learning technology are the next big things that are going to be integrated in its popular analytics platform. Google have stated the technology that they use hugely comes from Android and Search hence analytics users do better understanding and act accordingly on analytics data.

Google, after thorough preview with analysts it indicated that they spend half of their time in answering basic analytics questions for other people in organization. This makes it possible for analysts and business users to make use of simple English to provide analytics data. They shall be able to get information in theoretical form faster; it gives groups the power to focus on high value aspects of their roles. The ultimate goal of the Google is to get answers about key business metrics as simple as asking questions in plain English.

The latest functionality from Google named as Analytics Intelligence is a powerful tool that helps to answer numerous questions. They shall answer questions that are related to basic metrics like referrals and traffic, trends and performance. The users can put date ranges to get the data specifically that they are looking for, that shall also include percentages.

Google Analytics Intelligence helps give precise information about varied user groups. Retailers can ask any questions relating to their trade in any countries and advertisers can ask questions relating to paid search keywords that give better conversion rates.

Analytics Intelligence is quite intelligent and promises to offer impressive results; it has its set of limitations. The only drawback is that, it cannot tell users which questions to ask. Analytics Intelligence will undoubtedly help a lot of Analytical users not having in-depth knowledge of services to answer questions of their own. It’s a powerful and simple to use service but it often requires good knowledge and experience that most of the companies do not possess. Many people do not realize its utility and hence they are not able to make maximum use of the free service that is available. Analytics Intelligence cannot totally address the issue; they would not be able to tell users which questions they should be asking.

Companies today are already facing a lot of challenges and interpreting data becomes even more difficult with lack of expertise and tools to use. Data is available in huge numbers and tools make the task even simpler for analyzing it. But Data is of no use, if users don’t use the right metrics and ask the right questions. A user can ask Analytics Intelligence questions like, “What channels gave best conversions in the month of July”. The answer may or may not be of real value to the business. Analytics Intelligence does not know what the questions are.

However, good functionality the Analytics Intelligence tool may provide, the users should know that it shouldn’t lead to over-production of reports and charts that might not be of any use for business.

Get Google Analytics answers in plain English

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 14^th August 2017

Tags Analytics Intelligence, Google Analytics

How to create social media content strategy and plan

Social Media is whole and soul of any business marketing strategy, it may not essentially guarantee a big bang success but it gets you closer to your goals and business objectives. Smart content marketers exactly know how to develop business ideas and what works best for their business and how social networks can be effectively used in making the sales and engaging the customers. Social alignment is highly important when it comes to maintaining consistent style of communication with customers.

Get your content right first

Social Media networks are heavily used by people for connecting with family and friends and moreover it takes a leap ahead by helping business to involve and engage their customers. Customers are looking for relevant content online, so blasting too much content is not a right technique towards attaining one’s business goals. Brands need to take time to learn the facts about their customers, what they like to watch and read and the channels that are most useful to them.

Communication and Content plan are important

Customers love when there is clear communication from the brands; the content that is shared should be totally aligned with the business goals. It is not specific to any social channels but the way communication is led across different channels. There are several ways through which social content could be made available to the users. Before you start posting the content, you may ask yourself some questions like –

What are you looking for in social media and how it aligns to your core business goals?
What is your story and how relevant it is for social audience
Customer profile and type of content that they will respond to
Current state of market and how competitors perform socially
Who needs to involve in content production and marketing
Measuring social content success, optimizing and improving

When you answer the above questions, you get a clear idea about what your audiences are looking for in your content. The plan provides for simpler guidelines that help to focus social marketers on what they are basically looking for in content marketing.

“Without a useable comms and content plan it is much harder to gain traction with your audiences. You may achieve siloed spikes in activity through individual campaigns but it is much harder to build momentum around brand awareness and engagement. By having a content plan in place that clearly answers the Why, What, Who and How, you will be able to be more adaptable and reactive with your content.” – Sejal Parekh, Brand and Creative Strategist.

Analyzing Competitor’s Social accounts

The markets are overly flooded with lot of competition and competitors, the new comers are still buzzing for opportunities. With the highly saturated markets, it makes sense to go with the flow. By this, we mean looking for contents that your competitors are creating and how they are attracting customers. A close looks up in their social accounts, studying the things that they are sharing or following or offering, shall give you a quick content gaps.

You would know –

The contents that they aren’t sharing
The topics that are poorly covered and you have the possibility to create a niche market

Original is the key to grab markets

Creating original and creative content helps to reach people’s heart and furthermost, the genuineness. These are the key components if you want to rule the market game. People are ambitious and hence inspiring things attract them. There are several media engagement programs that can be used to drive social engagement. Businesses can announce free events, live tweeting of events, famous personality speak, write-ups about events, interviews, etc. and if you see the after effects, the results are astounding. One may see increased event attendance, increase in the number of followers, increase in social engagement and more.

Social Media Content Calendar helps!

Your social media strategy does not have to be extravagant, keep it simpler for your customers to understand what you are sharing with them. A consistent strategic plan goes a long way in building engagement and loyalty. Work out on a quarterly plan and build your content on ideas aligning to previous content that is shared with your customers.

Planning a content that levels itself to high level content stories is a good idea since there is clear link in the overall content of the strategy. Hence, every time you plan content, it needs to contain a key story. Do not give irrelevant content with the customers for the heck of it.

Optimization a must!

Businesses should not restrict to the content that is just shared on social, there are numerous things by which they can create infinite content that can be unconditionally used for audience engagements. Customer executives spend a lot of time talking to users; they collect vast data in terms of user preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Attractive posts on social accounts attract attention that can be linked to a more detailed landing page on your website.

Hooks are a major attraction

Content format plans should be rich in quality, creating regular posts helps people to come back to the brand. The below example shows the Twitter account of @Craft posts from its Flickr updates.

Hashtags are good means to get your brand popular, by tagging people or brand; it is more likely to be noticed since they are monitored. It further helps to build engaging communication. Social conversation threads can be created by the use of hashtags.

Expansion of Content Reach

Brands are always vouching to reach highest audiences so that maximum benefits can be attained by the way of campaigns. The social reaches can be enhanced by way of users sharing the brand content on their networks. How is that possible? Let us look down on few of the basic techniques to achieve this:

- Creating a lack of resource – It is not actually creating a lack, but for bigger promotions, it requires bigger marketing. So publicizing your product or event launch in advance helps to drive social activity and get people talking about it. The below example shows how Brighton SEO in UK grew the event into one of the leading European SEO event and tickets went selling too sooner.

- Offering Unique ideas – People look for content and ideas that are very unique in nature, and if they do not get to see uncommon idea other than yours then surely they are up running for you. It increases the chances of brand awareness and attention grabbing material helps to boost the engagement.

The above is good idea placed by Oreo, the brand created several spoofing videos for Halloween that are funny and liked by all hence people share it.

Amplifying the reach – Brands can amplify their reach by encouraging users to engage with their brands. The followers should be those people who are actually listening to and not just listed as followers. The actual followers who are interested will listen to brand and check for any posting updates and share it eventually.

Test and Evaluate

This is one of the most crucial stages for knowing what social media content is working for your campaign. The simplest way is finding through engagement metrics like the total number of likes on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, etc.

For getting optimum benefits from running the campaign, one must do the following:

Campaign tracking to be put in all posted links.
Using social reports for monitoring social sessions and conversions, the referral reports can be used for comparing social domains to create referral traffic.
Using landing page reports and applying social segments to check social impact on web pages.

The Top Preferred Social Media Marketing Tools are basically a set of toolkit that helps to coordinate and automate social content marketing. The social tool helps the content to reach audiences more efficiently.

How to create social media content strategy and plan

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 10^th August 2017

Tags Content Marketing, Social Media Campaigns, Social Media Content Marketing, Social Media Content Plan, Social Media Tools

Proper use of Adwords makes a great difference in getting best ROI from PPC. Keywords are the main resources that trigger the ads, the keywords tool help to find the trending keywords that are being used by the users. So when a particular user searches for keywords, it triggers the ad. Hence building and maintaining correct keywords is important. Keywords are organized in ad groups where one can assign these ad creatives to ad groups. These creatives or texts appear when they are triggered. The keyword research tools help to find which keywords are important that will give best returns, the research helps to form a keyword lists that are searched by consumers with the use of words or phrases.

Importance of Keyword Research

Keywords are highly important when it comes to AdWords campaigns; it helps you get tremendous visibility through the searches that are made online. A robust keyword list will help you get started and with the quality keyword list, it will perfectly determine the frequency at which your ads appear. It is highly important to review your keyword lists on a regular basis even if you have recently run any Adwords campaigns.

Research Tools and Techniques you can use for Keyword Research

There are vast numbers of tools that help you figure out keywords for running your campaigns but primarily it’s a best idea to go with a Google tool:

Google Keyword planner

The Keyword planner tool from Google helps to build Search network campaigns. Through the use of keyword tool, one can get historical statistics, get ad group ideas and see a host of keywords that describes how a particular keyword might perform. AdWords tool is a free tool; it helps to choose competitive bids and budgets that can be used for campaigns. It provides reliable data based on popular keywords from Google.

On-Site Search

Google Analytics is one of the best known resources for searching data, the search queries report provides good insights that helps to start your keyword research process. Your own website search box shall reflect the known terms your browsers use to find the products and services.

Search terms reports

Best Practices one can use for Keyword Research

A QUALITY Keyword helps build up a healthy set of keywords, those are strong keywords that helps to have precedence over generic keywords that have high search volumes.
Setting a BUDGET is an important element when it comes to making a keyword research. The search volume and CPCs are important to finalize the keywords to be sure of using all the chosen keywords.
The COMPETITIVE review tool are useful in knowing the activities and analyzing how fair the rivals are doing and how they are bidding on keywords.

Procuring the Right Match Types

The keyword matching options helps to make your own choices, like you can choose who gets to see your ads. It helps to find the keywords that are searched by similar users on search engines. With the help of Adwords, it lets you chose five main match types:

Exact Match

Setting the keywords to exact match shows users, search queries for keywords that are matching perfectly. The user may see your ad appear, if he searches for the keyword that is a very close variant to exact match keywords.

Phrase Match

The Phrase Match triggers Ads when users search query matches the keyword exactly or if it is very close variant. The search will also trigger the ad if the search query has other words included before or after the keywords.

Broad Match

Broad Match keywords are the keywords that show ads for wide range of queries that are broadly related to keywords themselves. The users shall be able to see broad match keywords if the search keywords are synonyms, if the searches are made in a different order, if the searches are a long tailed queries relating to subject matter, or the use of incorrect spellings.

Broad Match Modifier

These are the searches that are made between the broad and phrase match, it offers greater level of targeting control as compared to a broad match since it doesn’t display ads when the users search for synonyms. It will also show the ads when users search for words in different order.

Negative Match

This match is created to define the queries that would stop triggering the ads. These are used for offensive keywords and sometimes there may be some obvious words that are pertinent to your industry. At later stages, this list of keywords can be drawn out at campaign level but you need to be having good understanding of the keywords that convert and the ones that don’t.

Optimizing the right match type

It is highly important to audit and optimize the match regularly, since if keyword targeting is not controlled, it may get out of budget. The clicks from irrelevant and non-targeted search queries would not get converted and it may cost money. The exact match type offers maximum control over targeting, it is followed by phrase, broad match and modified match.

Broad matches are low value hence should be avoided as they appear for irrelevant queries. Ideally, your account has the keywords that are set to exact matches with different variations. It allows for maximum level of control on targeting and budgets. But that is all possible in an ideal situation, but in reality we have to make use of phrase matches and modified broad matches that help us to reach customers without spending too much time optimizing on campaigns.

Must have’s and Not for Brand Keywords

Brand searches are highly important since they ensure Brand Protection. Earlier, there was restriction by Google to bid on competitor’s brand names but those restrictions are no more. Businesses can now bid on competitor’s branded terms but one cannot include them in the ad text if they have trademark. Brands should know that no search query is safe so even if customers are searching for your business they may end up on your rival company’s ads. So it is worthy to bid on your brand name as a keyword, depending on the business names or brand name a company carries. The bigger brands invest on bidding since they want to see their name on top position in Google search, for some it could be sheer waste of money resources.

The markets are really competitive hence big retailers are aggressively vouching to make their position in the marketplace. The retailers who are bidding must ensure that they set their bids high enough ensuring that the customers straight away visit their sites. The main objective must be to stand on #1 position to get organic clicks.

Steps to ensure right matches

Consider Match types – Brand names play an integral part for keyword searches. If the brand name is unique, it may be recognized by people since they know the brand and the products and services it caters to. If the brand name is too common, the ads may appear along with other irrelevant searches that go common with your brand name.
Brand Targets – Brand keywords are always a profitable venture since people who are searching your brand names have already made up their mind to purchase the product. You can set targets based on brand names or non-brand keywords.
Brand Reputation – The brand reputation is the most important elements while considering PPC for brand keywords. So, while thinking of keywords to bid on, one must consider and think of the queries that they do not want to be associated with the brand. Unwanted keywords do not get any brand traffic or conversions.

Maintaining and building effective keyword list is an on-going process for which brands have to stay awake. If you want your brand to run successfully then setting the right expectations and research is needed to form strong pillar.

Top tips to build Quality Keyword List and getting the Right Match type

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 9^th August 2017

Tags Brand Reputation, Google Keyword, Keyword Planner Tool, Match Types

Brand Personality plays a vital role in influencing customer’s decision to purchase the products online. Social media has entered every vein where marketing strategies move and they are increasingly visible. With the competition ever so expanding, it is highly important to create a positive brand personality online; consumers are spending 30% of their time on social media. Firstly, brands need to ask the questions where to raise the brand awareness and how to resolve customer service issues. Given below are few of the reasons why to use social media marketing:

To raise the brand awareness and company’s reputation
Resolving customer service issues
Improving organic search ranking and driving traffic to the site
Engaging with customers and feedback

Consumers are looking for honesty in dealings and brands are upfront trying to give out the best especially with the growing competition. The study by Sprout Social (Q2 2017) says that customers prefer an authentic and honest brand personality that is to 86% on political or sneaky comments.

72% of the surveyed people stated that they are more likely to make a purchase from the brand if they like social media content. Consumers are openly looking forward for the brands that are friendly and give them some kind of engagement. It helps built customer morale and helps increase the brand reputation and influence the purchase decisions. Brands need to be friendly and approachable to have more followers. They should not try stopping much resistance and political correctness. It is only going to put off from people buying the product online.

Branding Behavior

Branding behavior are important elements when it comes to social playing cards. Consumers are looking for honesty and friendliness of the brands on social media. Brands can show customers video and engaging clip that will help them to look forward to brands products. Almost 80% of the surveyed people stated that they prefer brands that respond to their queries and engage them in jovial conversations rather than having competitive tonality. Brands are strongly advised to stay off from political commentary, they are domicile in nature and your product would be lying at one side of the room. Hence, best idea to make your product stand out and you making yourself as a brand ambassador by being unique.

How the research helps?

Customers are very smart people; they can easily trace the fine line between what is cool and what sounds annoying to them. Out of the survey, 51% of Internet users said that would instantly unfollow a brand, if the brand sounds irritating to them and only a 26% will ignore it.

Brands have to figure out what image they should cultivate in front of the customers so that the brand should not unfollow them. Social Media Marketing is an important marketing plan to your customers as much as it is to you as a brand.

Brand Personality influences Consumer Purchase Decisions

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 7^th August 2017

Tags Brand Personality, Purchase Decisions, Social Marketing, Social Media marketing

Top Skills required for B2B Tech Marketers

People management is one of the most important skills required by B2B marketers. The ability to have a good communication is another prominent and an important skill in the field states recent research from Spiceworks. The research data was done with a survey of 359 B2B technology industry marketers living in North America and Europe. The researchers categorized respondents in to three generations: Millennials that are born between 1981 and 1997, Generation X that are born from 1965 to 1980 and Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964. Around 82% of respondents state that soft skills are extremely important for B2B tech marketers. Other skills like writing ranks the second standing at 80%, content marketing skills stands at 78%, digital media skills stand at 77%, data analysis skills stand at 77% and email marketing skills stand at 65%.

B2B Technology marketers state that they have advanced writing and soft skills. Over 46% of B2B technology marketers state that their content marketing skills are advanced and 38% say their digital media skills are advanced. The marketers feel that it is very important to stay on the top of the writing game. This is the main reason why Marketing Writing Bootcamp consists of 13 classes that are tailor-made for the one who tasks with.

The research states that millennials are less confident as compared to older generations when it comes to their writing and softskills. The millennials are more confident when it comes to social media skills. Most respondents are looking to change the jobs in the next one year. The research study states that the main hope for the job switch is with the hope to advance their marketing skills.

The research was based on the report from data that surveyed 359 B2B technology industry marketers who live in North America and Europe.

Top Skills required for B2B Tech Marketers

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 7^th August 2017

Tags B2B Tech Marketers, Digital Media Skills, Marketers, Marketing Skills

Social Media planning

For organizations it has become highly important to follow a specific strategy that will help them achieve their company goals. Strategies are nothing but a set of defined rules and methods that organizations will follow at a given point of time to achieve strategic goals. Social media strategy regulates the use of methods supporting platforms and tools. Social strategies play an important role in engaging your audience to your business. Some businesses do not make use of planning but important is to know that strategies will help them to stand out even if they are not actively involved, because their competitors are. Let us discuss few of the key points to consider Why Social Media Strategy is a useful for your Business

Social Media is vast and growing

Social Media is stealthily growing quicker than we think. The key factors driving the social web according to Global Web Index study are the use of Mobiles and Older User Adoption. The mobile internet usage increased to 818.4m that is by almost 60.3% between 2012 and 2014. The people in the age group of 55-64 years age group are adopting Twitter at fastest demographic rate of 79% since 2012. As compared to this, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ stands at 45-54 years of age. Overall globally there has been an improved mobile connectivity; people are using mobiles “on-the-go”. People are using social networks like never before, they are getting online, sharing the watching the videos. The Ruder Finn social media usage research in the US shows why people go online and why social outings are the driving elements.

A targeted social media strategy helps to focus on using relevant platforms to connect with new and existing customers.

Social Media influences Buying Decisions

The Social media trends keeps changing, right now the focus is on commerce and personalization. Earlier it was audience building and engagement. The platforms increasingly lured marketers with improved APIs and smart targeting. It included the ability for uploading email lists for running personal remarketing campaigns. With the use of Facebook API marketers’ helps to manage audience data for custom audience targeting, creating the campaigns and ads, building custom dashboards and run analytics. The Crowdtap research shows 64% of 3,000 people surveyed make use of social for shopping purposes, it is driven by retailers to target consumers with personal offers and deals on social networks.

Almost 46% of social media users are using social platforms while they are thinking of making a purchase. 40% of users are deciding of buying while already making use of social media platforms, this also includes reviews and recommendations. The recommendations from peers are influencing factors when it comes to holiday purchases. Each social network plays a vital role in the purchase cycle. Some social networks works better with visual products where people find inspiration. Facebook is better for businesses for sharing content and finding promotions.

Strategy Absence gives Competitors the benefit

Every organization today is following some kind of strategies that aligns with their business goals. Marketers prepare a strategy that has a framework through which they can plan, prioritize, execute, measure and optimize. A proper framework will give better results because the activity has been designed and has a direction.

The absence of proper social strategy will not give a clear idea if the campaigns are successful or not. Simply posting social content would not always show results, the efforts that are being put up should have some direction and some objective in mind.
A non-structured approach will lead to gap in communication and measurement. The marketing team would not know what to post, when to post, how, to whom and why to post. The savvy competitors’ works smarter by engaging customers having clear objectives, goals and targets to perform better and give better measuring tools.

Active Customers on Social Media

The new technologies have emerged as a manifestation of all social tools that work with integrations to give finest benefits to the users of the technology. People can access, use and share the information based on their choices. Many people simply make use of Social platforms like Facebook to read content rather actually reading any blogs. It doesn’t amount to a total number of audience, although a subset, some customers may want an information from a social network. Twitter is highly known amongst brand for providing customer service, it acts as a good backbone for brands looking to solve customer enquiries and act as a problem resolution channel.

Strategy is required by brands to connect with its customers through strategic thinking. The social strategy needs proper aligning with other communication channels to define its role and understand.

Social Networks have Key Influencers

Influencers can turn tables in a matter of just few minutes, hours or days, so never underestimate the power of peers. It is a known fact that over years, retailers have seen increase in conversion rates by the power of peer influence. The feedbacks from other customers are seen as worth. Endorsements from experts help to increase brand credibility. The high-end tech markets have led to more people relying on opinions from experts in the field or celebrity or a famous person’s endorsements.

It is highly important for brands to be part of influencer’s world, if you don’t; you have the bigger risk of losing out on market share that has more aware competitors that are creative and innovative with their campaigns.

Social networks can Make or Break a Brand

Social networks help brands to deliver an experience to users, they are good valuable resource to uphold a particular reputation hence reputations are enhanced or destroyed on social networks. Social platforms give voice to the users to have their voice heard on the networks. They are transparent and portable and are readily available to users. The below example shows Aldi social team; launched a genuine marketing campaign which attracted a lot of negative tweets and trolls.

Many companies have faced social media backlash and they literally struggle to cope with negative comments and feedbacks. Some companies having social media strategy with crisis response have failed at giving handling such backlash and bring back the same reputation to the brands. The damage is irreparable so it is best advised to have a social media strategy that helps to take effective steps towards maintaining online and offline reputation.

Why you need a Social Media Strategy

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 5^th August 2017

Tags Social Media Planning, Social Media Strategy, Social Planning

3 most important things to know about Email Marketing and AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most important topics when it comes to technological developments. AI may seem like just another tech waiting to get implemented although there are some hidden aspects to it. Many organizations have already implemented AI into their working systems and getting good results from it. The buzz surrounding the AIs gives you a glimpse of how huge technological changes are going to impact businesses globally. Let us discuss some internal aspects to the AI tech that people so profoundly know it but do not speak openly:

1. Marketers are not really ready for AI Step ahead yet!

Artificial Intelligence thoroughly relies on customer data across all devices and channels to understand the user behavior. The user data has the ability to determine what millions of potential customers want even before them knowing it themselves. These insights are merely helpful to get integrated data. A lot of data is available with marketers today but most of these data are unorganized and lags segmentations. The very first step to move towards getting ready for AI is to organize and integrate the data. For that, you require a clean current data that encompasses the information that is gathered at customer touchpoints. Centralizing customer data is another big step to organize big data; the data can be segmented through different departments, vendors and systems. The organized processes will help to set you apart from your competitors and helps you take advantage of AI’s potential.

Marketers need a better foundation that helps to evaluate what AI applications are used for and when is the best time to use them.

1. AI powered Email Marketing won’t show big leaps

AI has created a lot of buzz amongst marketers and it feels that AI has literally given the solution for every problem. Email Marketing is the best option preferred across different channels and age groups by 2:1 ratio. According to DMA’s 2016 Consumer Email Tracker, 80% of consumers state that less than half of the emails they receive are relevant or interesting.

For starting Personalization in Email Marketing following are the steps –

1. - Check how often the customers want to be emailed and if they would like be contacted for any specific products or events
  - Creating customer segments that helps to deliver personal touch
  - Sending Welcome Emails, Thank You and Birthday Emails
  - Emailing your customers when they abandon their shopping carts
  - Reminding them about events, offers and sales

The above things are easy to set up and with regular process; it helps to improve the performance. Make use of automated email tools, the AI idea cannot be achieved with one big step but by taking small baby steps.

1. Businesses already have AI type Email Marketing Capability

Talking of AI, it’s a simple fact that they are already being used today in Email Marketing. Emails uses send time optimization that uses analytics to check on engagement history that predicts the best time to send emails to individuals. Optimizing your send time becomes pretty simpler with automated campaigns and it starts as soon as you hit the “send” button. The recipients receive emails at specific time of the day that works best for the brands.

Artificial Intelligence use email tools that make use of language algorithms to create strong subject lines, calls to action and body copy. The Analytics information evaluates hundreds of sentiments, emotions and phrases, AI predict the language that will best increase engagement and reflect the brand voice.

AI will be beneficial for fast track sales by giving customized messages to people who are aware and ready to buy. The businesses will be able to aggregate insights across multiple data sources that helps identify potential customers based on purchases they have made from other companies. The best means for using AIs are to prepare your data, perfect the basics and make use of the best tools available. Moreover, you will find that AI provides same strategies that marketers have always used.

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3 most important things to know about Email Marketing and AI

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 4^th August 2017

Tags AI, Artificial Intelligence, Email Marketing, Emails, marketing, Marketing Emails

Google’s AMP have revolutionized the way e-pages were ever loaded, it uses simple algorithm like that of HTML coding but an AMP HTML version. The Javascript in the coding, don’t let outside elements disturb the loading of original content of the web page. It is designed to give users top loading speed like that of instant bulb lighting. There are many benefits to AMP pages that simply follow its own set of rules and no amount of outside coding disturbs its load time.

AMPs are the next big boom after the SEO on-set. Google Accelerated Mobile pages are set to break down all hurdles for loading web pages. AMPs are targeted to avoid the loss of customers when they leave the site after long minutes of waiting for the pages to load. Mobilegeddon update from Google created much buzz declaring that the search engines will count mobile friendly pages in its searches. With the latest, Google’s AMP – it has a new standard for HTML programmers to in-built AMP HTML pages for higher web performances. So, let’s start with the basics first, what is AMP, how does one get started with it and how is it astoundingly beneficial for ecommerce brands and marketers to market their pages.

Google AMP: Explained

Google AMP is an Open Source Project designed to help web publishers create mobile-optimized pages. The pages can be loaded instantly on all the devices, Google states that web pages need to run rich content like animations, video and graphics that work with smart ads that load in an instant. Google’s blog post stated, “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”

Google’s goal is to provide best possible mobile experience. Michael Bertini, search marketing expert at iQuanti says, “Google wants to get information to the end user as fast as possible”, “Google doesn’t want the user to have to wait to read or see something.” According to SearchEngineLand.com, Google’s AMP Product Manager Rudy Galfi said that median load time for AMP coded content is 0.7 seconds. The median load time for non-AMP pages stands at 22 seconds, he noted, it takes this time or makes you leave the site. AMP was officially integrated by Google on February 23, 2016 for mobile search results.

Google AMP: How it works

The latest AMP HTML framework comes as a big support system to already existing web technologies; it helps owners to crease light-weight webpages, according to Google. “AMP-HTML is simply HTML5 with a set of specifications (requirements and restrictions),” Google’s Galfi told SearchEngineLand.com. “The optimization is powered by JavaScript, styling can be customized via CSS3, and pages are cached.”

Caching is core to AMP, Galfi said. From SearchEngineLand.com:

“[Galfi] explained that Google AMP cache functions in a similar manner as a content delivery network (CDN), that it is free for anyone to use and that it works on ‘stale-while-revalidate’ model. This model helps make sure the content is always up to date in the cache. The process by which it works is quite simple: When a request is made, the client receives the cached version while the document is requested again from its original server to be updated in the cache.”

AMPs are “completely separate from a typical mobile site,” says Jim Robinson, founder and CEO of ClickSeed, a digital marketing and SEO agency. “Assuming your site has a desktop version, a mobile version and an AMP version, the desktop version will be the canonical (preferred version), and the mobile and AMP versions will each be annotated separately as alternates.” Site publishers can serve their own ads through AMP, “although there are restrictions on sizes and placements,” Robinson says. “Most major publishers serve ads through DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) or OpenX, both of which are compatible with AMP.”

Google AMP: Types of Sites that can use AMP

Ordinarily, AMP is targeted on news stories from online publishers, the content that Google search users see as AMP pages in to mobile search results. AMP is also beneficial for Ecommerce organizations that use AMP results carousel and other components are well-suited too. Take for instance; eBay announced that its AMP mobile shopping experience was live. Overall, 8 million AMP based “browse nodes” are in production. Robinson added that the ability to develop AMP based product pages are most likely to create bigger commercial incentive for websites adopting to the standards.
Trevor Paulsen, product manager with Adobe Analytics states that “AMP is an incredibly important part of a balanced marketing strategy for publishers today, given the project’s close ties with search engine results and advertising impression rates,” he said further that “Adoption has been strong, given the battle for mobile ad dollars and the fact that Google prioritizes AMPs in search results. That being said, Google is interested in keeping people within their ad network, so it will be interesting to see whether ads are more successful on the mobile web or in apps.”

“As with any evolutionary change in the search engines, people need to pay attention to AMP and adjust,” adds Thomas Petty, president and digital marketing trainer with Bay Area Search Engine Academy. “Over time, it will become an influencing factor. Just as Google has been recommending mobile-responsive websites, this is another step in that direction.”

Google AMP: Why was AMP CREATED?

Usually, web surfers need rapid search results, according to Eric Enge, CEO of Digital Marketing Agency, Stone Temple Consulting. It means Google wants to give its users speed to because there is huge competition in today’s world, if they are able to give superior speed to their users for the content being searched, they will win the market share, Enge added. Google also wants its users to stay tuned on mobile pages, Google has over 5 out of the 9 most installed mobile apps even then its market share is less certain there.

Google AMP: Types of Sites that can use AMP

As Richard Gingras, Senior director of news and social products at Google rightly states that AMP won’t directly show you a massive search ranking while talking to AdAge.com. There should be enough of Search engine ranking signals that need to meet satisfying criteria. He further stated that “Speed” matters the most when it comes to search engine ranking. According to Gingras, “If we had two articles that from a signaling perspective scored the same in all other characteristics but for speed, then yes, we will give an emphasis to the one with speed because that is what users find compelling.”

AMP has the power to influence where Google places its search results, Petty says. AMP pages get more clicks and less bounces because they are quicker to load. If Google feels that the page is of high value to users, then it gets higher placement in search results. Google keeps changing its rules to give the best results in terms of searches made. If your website takes too much time to load pages, it may lose out on lots of business. Mobiles have come to be an important aspect in everyone’s lives; most people are using Google to find anything and everything on earth. AMP acts an essential tool that would ensure better rankings and find ability on the web, says Oleg Moskalensky, President of Productive Computer systems, the company that develops IT solutions for smaller businesses. He says, Google shall punish slow loading web content in their rankings, “So even if you do everything you can to improve SEO, without AMP, you’d be potentially spinning your wheels.”

Google AMP: Potential Pitfalls

AMP is a new technology placed by Google and hence it is going to take some time before it becomes too common and people start using it. “It’s harder to implement at first, but tools, plug-ins and add-ons evolve to make it almost automatic,” he says. “Think of where SEO was a few years ago. Manually hand-coding Meta tags and other elements was the norm. Now SEO plug-ins prompt users with exactly what they should do to improve ranking, without having to know SEO.” And an AMP WordPress plug-in “does a pretty good job, and it will evolve over time” to make it simpler for everyone, Petty says.

AMP does not really have any pitfalls but understanding its limitations of the AMP is the right word. Enge states that AMPs work faster because it has restrictions on the amount of the code that you can apply on your pages. Take for example, an AMP supplied JavaScript library is very limited to what it can do. He further states that one cannot implement forms till the time they use iframes.

One hazard with AMP is when users share links to AMP content through a Google search, the links point to Google.com URL rather than taking it content developers site – this was pointed out by Wired.com. It could significantly give negative impact content developers site traffic, states Mike

Kisseberth, Chief Revenue Officer of Digital Content and services firm at Purch stated.

Paulsen says, AMP “creates a potential challenge on the analytics side, as it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure where a publisher’s content will be loaded from, as well as complications with visitor identification due to tight cookie restrictions”.

Google AMP: Role of IT in AMP

AMP Initiatives involves HTML code and Programming where IT department should be involved according to Moskalensky. “IT needs to work with others for content creation and planning, but the actual implementation and maintenance would need to be done by IT either within the company or by a freelance company hired to do the job.” According to Robinson, IT “will likely play a big role in adopting the AMP standard because there are some behind-the-scenes prerequisites they’ll need to help with,” he further says “For example, depending on the chosen configuration, a server admin may need to set up additional sub-domains or install secure certificates. There will likely be some coordination with any CDN vendor. Most of the work can be handled by developers from there, but there’s definitely a bit of technical work involved.”

Google AMP: Is this the Mobile future?

AMPs are yet to grip the whole mobile market. Robinson says, “AMP potentially has big implications for the mobile web, but it all depends on whether it becomes widely adopted as a standard”. He further stated that, “Not everything Google pushes for gains traction. Google pushed for adoption of Authorship markup, for example, which required publishers to implement code changes and encourage their writers to set up and connect Google+ accounts. But Authorship markup is now irrelevant and some publishers feel like they were sent on a wild goose chase.” He said AMP “may stand a better chance at becoming a widely adopted standard since it’s less proprietary than alternatives, like Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News. As a result, publishers may be more willing to develop AMPs. That combined with the resources Google has put into promoting AMP as a new mobile standard mean it should be given a serious look.”

Top things to know about Google AMP

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 3^rd August 2017

Tags AMP HTML, AMP Pages, Google AMP, HTML Pages, Optimization of Pages, Web Pages

Social Media Planning and Aligning with other Channels

Social Media Marketing plays an essential role in the implementation for varied marketing strategies. Brands today are coming forward to accepting newer planning and implement strategies alongside aligning with other channels. Marketing Calendar forms as a rock solid pillar for the success of the strategies in business.

Role of a Marketing Calendar

The organizations today are resorting to following a specific plan to outline their business processes. Hence, a Marketing Calendar comes handy to follow the guidelines set and expectations to reform with brand objectives. A Marketing calendar is a plan that outlines the key campaigns for the year; they follow a monthly cycle rule. The content calendar helps in defining big campaigns, promotions, key messages, CTAs and different channels that it shall deliver in. Social Media helps to align with the calendar and it is executed across different channels simultaneously. The core message is to promote with a slight different execution in every channel. The marketing calendar is flexible that allows to change the marketing plan and the team.

Custom Marketing Messaging for Social Media

The Marketing calendar offers a campaign level plan. Given below are some of the examples:

Product Campaigns:

The new product launches offer product imagery that helps to create new boards on Pinterest, Instagram Photos, etc.
Make use of Visual posts on Twitter then only text.
Using Animation to bring products to life Example: gif images, short videos.

Events:

Engaging photos with the use of photography for visual networks like Instagram.
Adding new events to Facebook and geo-tag locations.
Announcing the events on Twitter having the link to the “About” landing page
Using the events or campaign hashtags in different posts.

Brief the social team for handling the campaign activities

The campaigns are created with the sole purpose of Marketing. An offline ad is shared by the user on social networks that generates interactions with other users. The Social teams should be aware of what is happening, when, where and why. It has to plan to take advantage of the campaign in the social space and ensure the monitoring of social channels and brand mentions.

Social Organic Marketing

Social Marketing is done to get best results on Search Engine Ranking Algorithms. The brand should look out for ways where they can merge the key content with landing page URLs; it can be shared socially to maximum the reach. It includes activities like promoting new landing pages through social networks or posting the links to latest content like videos and blogs.

The social teams can make use of social research tools like Buzzsumo that helps to find the content and the keyword that is most popular. The brands can use this insight to work out the style of content that would be useful to the social audiences. The Social and SEO teams can work together to analyze the content trends and share information to inform the plans.

Understand the difference between the Paid Social and Paid Search

Paid Social and Paid Search requires a lot of honest efforts in researching to get targets to your audience effectively. It requires targeted ad copy and a structure to run the campaigns so right ads reaches to the right people. Paid Social is a form of push marketing that requires segment and structure for the activity so that best optimization can be made on ROI by using the data that is generated. The paid social planning is effective in blending the right resource. Paid Social is an intensive tool that helps to manage the high standards as compared to the Paid Search.

Social Media ad tools offers various targeting and goal options hence it’s important to get the right grip with the platforms that you can start before planning.

Paid Social and Paid Search informing each other

These two are different techniques but they should be well integrated. The money spent on optimizing paid search creative and landing pages can be used for informed paid search campaigns. The keyword data should be full of useful insights. You can apply your keyword learning to the social scene and use those keywords for driving social keyword research. You can also make use of the CRM data that helps with social targeting by creating look alike used on existing customer profiles.

It is highly important for both teams to coordinate well with each other, it’s important to share the data, plans and insights.

Use the Social Networks for Event Marketing

Given below are some of the methods to maximize social reach during and after the event. It has helped good number of organizations create social media marketing plans and events. The simple activity can help drive good increase in social engagement

Remind people of #hashtags during the event and help them to post live by making use of those hashtags.
Include the live tweeter that shares your key content like quotes and pictures from your event.
The thread can be made for every event and it can be shared even when the event is fresh in the minds of people.
Publish a blog write-up and videos sharing key insights and share it on social channels after some days of the event. For videos, tweet each speaker the link that will encourage them to share.
Contact Social influencers, share your event content with them and ask them to share. Parallel, you can also create event photos for creating a Facebook album.

Social Media helps to extend life of an event, the content created can be used to share and maximize the benefits by reaching more audiences.

Adding Social Data to CRM Contacts

Tools like Full Contact is a useful tool that helps to upload customer email addresses and add social data when needed. It can also directly imbibe Twitter handles. The audience can be fragmented to differentiate the high-value customers and also deliver personalized communication. You can do it through email and it is highly important to have alignment of CRM and Social Data, it helps to enable more personal style of communication. Remarketing tools like Facebook are used for Paid Social, it helps to enrich CRM database with customers’ social handles.

Social Media Planning and Aligning with other Channels

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 2^nd August 2017

Tags CRM, Organic Marketing, Social Data, Social Media Planning

Marketing is of prime importance when it comes to selling your products online and social media tools come handy to make your work easier. Conventionally, there has been lot of ifs and buts for marketing field but at the end of the day what counts are the efforts that you put in marketing activity of the brand. Manual settings for marketing are long gone; today brands are much more keener and being much friendlier by knowing their customers and making them happily satisfied with the products or services.

The social media management tools are crafted in a manner to automate the marketing processes to reach maximum audiences. Social Media management means choosing the right strategy and the right approach in reaching the brand goals. Marketing requires a lot of time and efforts so it is not always easy for marketers to shoot emails or schedule the meetings or put up social posts. This work gets done through platform management tools that make your task easier. The tools help you with options to publish as and when required. Marketers can save a lot of time and efforts with the marketing tools. Given below are some of the tools that help making your processes easier:

Social Media Management tools

FLOW

Flow is a market tool by Driftrock useful for audience targeting. The key functions of these tools are Lifecycle social advertising. It can easily be integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Dotmailer, Intercom, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Webhooks, Salesforce Pardot, and Custom CRMs. Flow helps to gather customer data that helps to retarget the existing customers. The tool helps to find new customers having same elements as the current customer base.

SOCIAL BAKERS

Social Bakers is a social media analytical platform that helps integrating just any social media app, the key function of this tool is scheduling the social posts. The app helps to analyze the performance across different platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. they offer customizable dashboards and flexibility user rights management that allows for internal and agencies to collaborate.

AGORAPULSE

Agorapulse is used for scheduling social posts; it is integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus. It’s a social media management suite of tools that helps to manage the social media messages. The inbox feature in the tools helps to see the items remaining and who is working on each of these items. It also helps in providing comprehensive reports.

Through the use of Agorapulse, you can tie all your social accounts into one, it helps to schedule, publish the posts and tracking all your social activity.

SPROUTSOCIAL

The key function of Sproutsocial helps for scheduling social posts and also helps in audience retargeting. It can be integrated with popular social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Sproutsocial is a social media management platform that includes a smart inbox, advanced scheduling, social CRM, analytics and reports and team collaboration tools. It is one of the best options for smaller businesses. The best feature of this tool is the “listen” option; it listens to popular terms and Hashtags on different social networks to help you stay on the top of trends.

POSTPLANNER

The main function of Postplanner is to schedule curated content plus Industry news. It can be easily integrated with Twitter, Facebook Blog (RSS Feed) and Pinterest. The tool makes use of custom algorithms that helps to review past performance on the feeds that are available through different social integrations. The tool also helps for re-sharing the popular content on social platforms.

BUFFER

The main function of Buffer is to schedule the social posts, it can be integrated with common platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and Blogs for RSS feeds.

Buffer is usually used to drive traffic and to increase the fan engagement and also save the time monitoring social media. The tool helps to reach out to your audiences at the right time, you can schedule your content and increase the reach of your audience. The tools are made to sync with a number of social platforms.

HOOTESUITE

Hootsuite is useful for scheduling social posts, and is one of the powerful tools that integrate with 35 popular social networks. It helps to gather the data into a single dashboard where the tools can be found to help manage several social profiles and schedule the most effective social content. The other impressive feature it offers is the robust message approval and permissions. It gives the capability to help protect the brand and reputation while increasing other profile protections. This tool helps to guard against hackers and other threats.

COSCHEDULE

CoSchedule helps in managing the content and scheduling your social posts. It works integrated with different tools like WordPress, Google analytics, Bitly, Google Drive, Evernote Google Calender, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages and groups), Instagram and Google+ pages.

CoSchedule is used for managing WordPress posts and helps promote the online content. It gives the ability to drag and drop social messages on different days and it also allows the platform to pick the right times.

Influencer Research Tools

Influencer marketing is making wonders to brands because it allows publicizing your business with huge exposure. The best to identify influencers in your industry is to take that opportunity and reach out to create relationships. The platforms make it easier.

TAPINFLUENCE

TapInfluence is used for managing the content and expanding the influencer outreach. It can easily be integrated with Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. TapInfluence is an opt-in marketplace of content creators and influencers having 8 years of real life program data. It helps to discover perfect influencer for your business. It helps to build a marketing program for delivering fresh content. The tool helps to offer greater analytics having multi-channel tracking on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

TRAACKER

Traacker is a platform for Influencer Relationship Management (IRM); it is a system for managing, scaling and expanding the global influencer marketing. It features team collaboration features and conversation tracking. It is an all-in-one tool that helps to expand the business network; it helps you land the best influencer for your brand. It is a great place to get information on Influencer marketing; the system has a lot of solid content.

BUZZSUMO

The main function of this tool is Content Ideation, its an influencer outreach. It consists of integrations like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pocket, Buffer and different standard APIs. The tool helps to identify trending news and content, getting content insights and website analyses, it also helps to identify influencers. Big brands using the tool are Expedia, Yahoo, Capital One, IBM, Ogilvy and Vimeo.

Social Sweepstakes/Contest Tools

WISHPOND

Wishpond is a Social media content management tool; it includes 10 Facebook contest apps that make it easy to create engaging competitions. The competitions like sweepstakes, Instagram Hashtag contests, essay contest, photo contents can all be covered under Wishpond. Wishpond is a tool that helps to integrate easily with other many CRM solutions, webinar apps, email marketing apps, survey apps, team chat apps and more.

SHORTSTACK

Shortstack is a Social media contest management tool; it integrates platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It helps to collect the leads, boosts contest engagement and helps to drive the sales from the landing pages, forms and contests. Shortstack integrates into a number of platforms like YouTube, AWeber, MailChimp, Constant Contact and Google Maps.

WOOBOX

Woobox is a social media contest management tools that is integrated with Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It’s a very powerful tool; you can custom design the coupons, photos, instant wins, videos, hashtag contests and more. If you know which campaign works best for your audience than you can manage this tool very easily.

Social Image Apps and Tools

CANVA

Canva is a standalone tool with social friendly image creation; it’s a free tool that can be used on a daily basis. It is one of the best tools for creating social friendly images in friendly sizes. There are lots of upsells that are available in the app, you can upload your image.

PROMO

Promo is a light social friendly video creation tools, it’s a standalone tool and is one of the best places to get started. By making use of this tool, you can promote your sales by making a product teaser; you get a high quality video content that is searchable within the platform. You can edit the copy and also add the music.

LANDSCAPE BY SPROUT SOCIAL

Sprout Social is a light automatic image resizing tool that is used for social; it’s a standalone tool and is available for free. The tool has a plenty of options on offer that will make your tasks simpler and easier. The reports you get from the tool should be properly reviewed and accordingly you can take actions.

Top preferred Social Media marketing Tools

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 1^st August 2017

Tags Marketing Tools, Social Apps, Social media, Social Media Marketing Tools

Check what channels consumers’ research before buying online

Consumers today are much adapted to using latest tools available online to find the best product they may be looking for. Millennial’s between the age of 18 and 34 year olds are amongst the bigger range of crowd purchasing the products online, the next is Gen X and Baby boomers.

Consumers are tech savvy today exploring every dimension before making any purchases. Before buying any products, you have a good deal of information that will help you make buying decisions.

The research by Salesforce surveyed over 4,000 consumers across different countries – UK, USA and Canada. The results found that respondent spent their times online before making any purchases online. They used different channels before making a purchase decision.

The findings showed there is mega difference amongst the behavior of millennial’s, Gen-X and Baby Bloomers. Millennials were not in favor of a particular channel after the use of websites. Gen-X had similar opinion as millennials except that they relied less in the use of phones. The studies show that the age group up to 54 years has become highly adaptable to the use of latest technology. Baby Boomers switched less channels while doing their research, they usually used emails and websites before making a purchase.

The research showed how it is important for a fully integrated multichannel marketing strategy for getting success.

Source: Salesforce Connected Shoppers Report

Data Sample: Individual data breakouts across three global markets (Canada, U.K. and U.S.) based on responses from 4,000 adults.

Recommended Resource: Integrated Marketing 2020

Check what channels consumers’ research before buying online

Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 1^st August 2017

Tags Buying, Channels, Consumers, Marketing Strategy, Social Channels

Track your Customer Purchases to drive more sales

Customer focus is one of the most important priorities today especially with so much of competence and brands overpowering each other to vouch for customer attention. Most retailers today are highly bent towards gaining new customers but what they forget in the hindsight is to take care of their already existing customers and in the bargain they even loose out on new as well as old customers. It is highly important for retailers to go through the past history of their customers in order to understand them better. The data generated from the past sales can help form a strategy that will help to increase the revenue. There are several methods through which one can analyze customer data, let us understand them:

Customer Order history

These are the list of orders, a customer has ordered in the past, it includes items they have purchased and constantly purchased. The history will also show, the amount they have spent on each of their purchases. It also consists of information when they bought the items. Suppose, some items were bought frequently over some festivals or holidays so it gives the data.
The point of sale system, is a robust POS system that allows browsing different data points, it includes take from customer to individual products.

Take Insights from previous purchases

Order histories are meant for the record for customers as well as brands. The brands can easily make use of the data available; let us look at some trends:

Dates – the data denotes the specific time of the month, the particular item was purchased. This data will help brands to formulate selling strategy offering same goods to customers online or through email with discount options or other benefits.
Products – the brands get an idea of how these products are performing with consistent purchase happening. They get information, if customers constantly buy some items together always.
Customers – With this data, brands know if customers are buying certain items at one particular time. They come to know repeated buyers and hence they will formulate the strategies accordingly to formulate the customer into buying process.
Upselling – If the customers are well known to your brands and are accustomed to, then they will frequently buy items from you. Brands need to upsell hence make opportunities for buyers to buy from them. For this, brands can filter the product history, identifying the customers who bought the dress, giving a follow up marketing email feature will help to entice them into buying.
Personal Messages – since the brands know, what the customer bought and what their order history looks like, they can now tailor personal messages to brands.
Promotions – the customer demographic data is useful for targeting the audiences on paid social advertisements and the other promotions.

Improving the Customer Experience

Order history customer data, helps the brands to improve the customer experiences. If the customer is making continuous purchases and suddenly stops, it is time for brands to have a look over it and give customer the precious momentum to get back to the brand. Enhancing their experience with the brand can do this, the motto here is to keep your customers satisfied and give them good value for money. Given below are some of the things the brands can follow:

Sending personal email messages, this includes including a coupon code.
Offering free samples or small gift as an appreciation for purchases made.
Giving customers exclusive discounts and special deals, for this they will feel valued and may buy something extra.

Order Histories make better decisions

Customers are always focused into buying but they are always looking for the best customer experience from brands. Order histories are one such tools that helps the brands to form a blue print about the customers and make high decisions about making sales. This includes several things like keeping the inventory accurate; maintain the stores shelves well, in short giving the customers every chance to be happy. Brands should completely discontinue keeping the products that has no sales, sometimes look over at them may be a big turn off because of the bad experience a customer might have had.

Make the most of Customer Data

Customer data is a precious gem that the brands posses hence make good use of them. The order histories are good starting points and help track customers, which, what, why and how they are doing a particular purchase.

Track your Customer Purchases to drive more sales

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 31^st July 2017

Tags Customer Data, Customer Experience, Drive More Sales

Traditionally, brands hardly paid attention to giving customers visual credit to make their purchases. But, today the scenario has entirely changed; photos have become an integral part for converting your potentialities into realities. May it be brands, clothing, marketing plans, selling, purchase or whatever? Photos and images entirely drive sales and this is the reason why social media platforms have become a greater marketing tool for brands. Brands are putting up their visual ads; videos on social networks and customers are increasingly viewing and sharing the visual content. Bigger domains, make use of visuals to display their products, customers can choose their color, pattern, fabrics on models online and buy their products. The important element for brands today is to vouch for customer attention that comes a hardy way due to increasing competitions. Lets check some of the ways through which brands can unknowingly spoil their product image and avoid conversions:

Stock Photographs

Some cases, the stock photos do well but not always as customers have already explored many places before landing up on your page. The pictures actually do very little to promote your brand. The photos need to be effective to attract a buyer’s attention. Different people foresee a different image and hence a different thinking. Limiting the stock photos will help represent your brand in a better way.

The above image was almost found on 1500 websites, shoppers see every detail when it comes buying and hence small images don’t always magically work. Customers are always looking for clearer view and genuineness in the product-detailing page. Brands should be aware that customers would view the zoomed image for better viewing hence such options is to be kept. If you feel, that particular image doesn’t necessarily go with the context of the page, than you can add caption on the image for good understanding by the customers.

Coolibar have always used images that go well with their product line. Brands should avoid photos that are blurred or are not properly cropped. Sometimes there are photoshop failures, like blurry image or some elements may be cut-off from the main image or removal of some important things, product images are not properly used, etc.

The above image shows how the leg of the model was cut off in the editing process. The source is Huffington post. For any image where the brands are trying to demonstrate, it is best idea to make use of real photos. They can even go for candid photography that will help represent the brand idea and image. Sometimes, stock photography is overused and it raises many a questions about the product and brand services.

The image shows a representative, but so many times this image has been used that represents a call center. But ideally, would it be possible for a person to work for so many call centers at a time. It is best idea for brands to take reviews from several people before finalizing the product photos.

The best photographs for representing any brand or for marketing purposes is to avoid artificial stuff. Like over staged photos of people, the people who are not acting in the image should be avoided. The body language and the pose of the models are highly important in showcasing the brand image. If people see that models are uncomfortable wearing some clothing for a clothing brand, they will avoid buying the product.

Sometimes, the crowd photography is used by brands to convey the message of happy customers. But these photographs do not always convey that message. A stock photography should anyway be avoided and with crowd in side it might send an unrealistic message.

A testimonial page should best consist of a customer posing with the product for better understanding for other potential customers. Some customers would be glad to pose with the product and your reviewers will enjoy watching the pleasure the customer is having in using your product.

Stock photos are not counted as authentic because it describes unrealistic expectations from a brand. Actually speaking, masses do not use the same product so isn’t it a bad idea to represent a crowd in your brand image? Personalization everywhere is the key. So even it takes a good share of pie in photography image too.

Original photos are always the best regarded, so replicating from duplicate photographs is nearly a bad idea. Copying other brands image may lead to copyright issues and if the brands copy it could be possible that the image was a big mess and gave bad results so even the brands copying will have the same bad luck. So being original is the best way to turn potential audiences into real ones and set real par expectations by the customers and give them the trust for buying your product.

Get to know how Photos can harm your Ecommerce Conversions

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 31^st July 2017

Tags Brand Photography, Buying, Conversions, Product Image, Product Photography, Purchase Conversions

Quick guide to Competitor Analysis for your Social Media Strategy

Social media strategies are used by organizations today to plan a strategic plan that will help them to improve on their products and boost the sales. However, much is important, to stay on par with the competition. If you are really looking forward, you must see what your competitors are doing, that will give you a glimpse and help you identify strategic opportunities. Given below are different types of competitor’s analysis that will help you out with social media strategy:

Glimpse on competitor’s activities – When you look at what your competitor is doing, you might get a clear view scope of the social activities they are performing. You can only do this by checking on their profiles, the campaigns they are doing, comments, content on their accounts, etc.You can get wider information once you act like their customer and start posing them with questions and see how often they are responding. If the replies are same for all, it means the replies are set to automatic.The below screenshot shows a Twitter feed of 3 leading US apparel retailers, it shows visual similarities on their profiles. The first two shows a high visual content while the last is more on textual updates on their timeline.

It may look worthy for some while not for others. The objective is to get as much engagement as possible. The brands that are constantly engaging with clients have higher visitors. The following questions will give previews about what brands can foresee through their findings:
- Core channels that organizations are focusing on.
- How are competitors using the channels to meet their goals to meet the sales, engagement and customer services
- Frequency of the updates
- Personal and automated updates
- What content is used and how
- What tailored content is each channel preparing.
Assessing their social role in providing customer service – Social media plays a vital role today in aligning your brand with what customers want. Using social media is a good means to reach out to your customers. The brand BT has dedicated its Twitter account to provide customer care than marketing. The companies seek better understanding of their customers by gathering the tweets and use them to improve their services. The Harvard Business review suggests that 46% tweets had no response in Feb 2014 as compared to 38% in Feb 2015.
There are several things you can see after studying your competitors profile details. You can check if they are responding well to the complaints made, the tone and response style they are using, etc. if the competitors are poor in responding to customers than you know what their weakness is and quickly take this advantage and give customers what they are looking for. Ask yourself this question and you will have an answer:
- Check if competitors provide separate customer service other than marketing
- Do they provide personalization with the initials of people posting
- Do they respond to negative comments
- Do they provide constructive help to customer queries
Assessing competitor’s strengths and weaknesses – You cannot have it all so the best potion is to rely on a structured approach than comparing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You should be looking for following things:
- What is the good thing that everyone else is doing
- What are customers responding to
Identifying what customers like to respond to – A smart marketer would exactly know the difference between being socially active and being active and engaged with the audiences. The success for a brand is correct when it has engaged with its audience. You can go through your competitor’s profiles and find some information to see which of the updates are most followed and liked by their followers:
- Check which of the posts have most tweets, retweet or replies on Twitter
- What posts on Facebook has most likes and comments
- What content formats gets the best engagements
- What content style does get attention from the people
After a thorough study, you will know what works good or bad in a social media content plan. Whatever your audiences love, you should be doing that. Make use of the content that you collect online to find most likes, tweets, any particular post that became too popular suddenly, etc. given below is a quick analyze to visualize the opportunities.
- Big Win – in this case, the competitors are not active but engagement is high
- Loss Leader – the engagement is high along with competitor’s activity. You need to compete, it shall take more resource effort with lower ROI
- Space filler – the customer activity is low and competitors are not doing much either. Your brand can be a market leader by engaging smaller audiences.
- Low value – there is high competitor activity with low customer interest.
Use the knowledge to make your own strategy – Read the above sentence very well, by that it doesn’t mean you replicate what your competitors are doing. If all brands are doing the same, what incentive does the audience have for following one particular brand? After studying their social activities, you need to learn your own lessons, think of the good things they are at. Your only objective is to add up value.
Customers can react strongly to campaigns they don’t feel linked with or the brand matching their vision. The below example shows Fraser’s #Emojinal campaign, that divided customer opinion and attracted a lot of negative feedback. It wasn’t a bad campaign but it looked quite different than its core styling.

You can get very good insights from competitor’s examples, the competitor analysis will help you shape your strategy. Do not copy anything! But you can surely take some elements from their successful campaigns and apply it on your marketing activity to make sure that those elements perfectly align with your goals and vision.

Quick guide to Competitor Analysis for your Social Media Strategy

Ecommerce

Post author By binadmin
Post date 26^th July 2017

Tags Competitor analysis, Customer strategy, Ecommerce, Markets

Top 3 ideas to repurpose User-Generated Content in Social Media Strategy

User engagement has become extremely important when it comes to keeping brand loyalty and increasing the followers. But that doesn’t happen overnight, you already know that your brand doing well. Now, the next step is to imbibe the policy of good-will content that is created by your loyal audience and that can be technically termed as User-Generated Content. User-Generated content or UGC can simply be coined as a content that is posted by a customer in the form of an image or video about your brand. You effectively seek permissions and use that content in your marketing strategy to further bring accolades to your brand and this time with loyal users.

There are several things that are gets attached with repurposing the UGC. It’s a no fixer that how you are going to use the content. Any photos, snap, tweet or video that is shared about the brand is a UGC and it works automatically with happy customers and bring loyalty to the business. So what’s the notion that helps marketing teams to repurpose UGC?

Sneak Peak on why use Repurpose UGC?

UGC is undoubtedly ted good news for the brands as well as for marketing purposes. It helps to bring in more sales and build customers relations. The audiences can see the experiences and how other customers feel. It is more than convincing for a person to see a product is willingly appreciated by the other user than the brand publishing it. A recent survey, states that 76 percent of users trust UGC than the ads by the brand itself. Almost 84% trust online reviews put up by buyers similar to personal recommendations. As we earlier said, how brand engagement is important from a sales perspective – 97% of people purchase with the brand they interact with and it boosts conversions by a whopping 78% percent.

Now, the next question that confuses your mind is whether to use the UGC content, is it really legal?

UGC is nothing sort of a lethal bomb, UGCs are a content that is generated by the users and using Hashtags itself means that they are implying to use that content for the purpose of marketing or viewership or whatever. Social works rely on the data that is copyrighted and original so the sole rights are with the creator of the original content even if your brand Hashtag is being used.

If you go a legal way, there are lot of implications that are attached to it and questions that are innumerate like – do you require permissions from original poster? Do you require permissions of the person in the image? Can you repost it? Do you send some sort of agreement asking for posting? Etc. Let us take an example of Airbnb. They reach out to users on Instagram who use their tags or posts, asking their permissions to post content in their own feeds. The brand leaves a comment for users to click on the link where they can read terms of use for UGC. Users can reply with #airbnbphoto for confirming and also provide the link to Airbnb for featured image.

Every social network comes with its terms and conditions so assume that all content is copyrighted so the best option is to seek permissions from the original content creators. The users should know that it is the brand that is walking up to them, and there is no doubt about any sort of intentions. Do not jeopardize with the brand reputation by holding it loose, there should be no contradictions to the brand using UGC seeking permissions.

So, finally how can you Generate UGC?

For making optimum use of UGC, your brand should exactly know the system how, when and why you are going to use UGC. The first and foremost is the basic is to create a brand Hashtag so that you can use to repost it into your own feeds. Customers are willingly sharing your brand Hashtag and when you ask for permissions to repost them it is their chance to stand in the limelight hence almost 65% will grant permission to use the content within 24 hours.

Brand can also use UGC by holding contests or sweepstakes that challenge the people to use the brand Hashtag in a photo or any posts to gain entry in to the prize draw. Take for example; Japanese retailer MUJI encouraged their followers on social media to post its photos of artwork with MUJI pens. The brand campaign saw a good 2,500 people entering the contest with the Hashtag #mujipenart. This greatly increased its social out-reach and it created an entirely UGC based campaign that drove many people to it in return for awards and prizes.

The buzz created by your audiences far outweighs the total marketing costs and in bargain you may win a lot of customer loyalty. UGC generates customer engagement and the brands will possess images and comment mentioning them that further goes on to speak how good the brand is or how better the experience was. The UGC campaigns may fall short of your marketing needs sometimes; in that case brands can always rely on influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is a sure shot way of bringing attention to your brand with a popular personality or a celebrity having millions of followers promoting your brand. Instagram influencers help to create content on behalf of your brand, this allows your brand to gain credibility and engage with your customers. So that is all about creating your brand market buzz, influencers will keep doing their targeted work, now let’s check how you can succeed with UGC? How you can repurpose the UGC created?

Steps to Repurposing User-Generated content

The big data that is available on web is truly humungous and to make a good use of it is an art that only few social media companies utilize. It’s no big deal, it’s actually a standard norm but to stand out of the crowd you need to do things differently.

Publishing UGC with the product
As a brand you already have multiple things and material that you are using for marketing purposes. the example of Sonos is truly inspiring, they have embedded Instagram UGC as a part of the buying process on its website. The Sonos product page shows the product alongside customers with the product to show how they are using the product and how they like the brand. The images inspire new customers to look over it and visualize their lives with the pictures depicted and hence buy the product.

UGC inside emails and promotion materialsHere we take an example of the brand Chubbies where you receive newsletters with UGC content. The brand doesn’t necessarily promote their products but simply use real photos with happy customers that show users how authentic the brand and the product is.The brand simply influences users by promoting products with customer satisfied faces. Chubbies collects its data from customers by asking its customers to share their experiences with Chubbies on social media. The brand has inspired a total of 331, 000 people to follow them on Instagram and 1.6 million on Facebook.
Have your brand’s Hashtag
Hashtags are the future and prominent methods to promote your business. Have a unique Hashtag for your business that differentiates itself from others. It could be your company name, or using your own tagline, you can also make use of products in your marketing campaigns for Hashtags. Take an example of Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke campaign that results in a 2 percent increase in sales.There can a Hashtag that doesn’t at all talk about our brand name but reflects everything about your brand. Make use of user sentences that will inspire the likes of people in that product segmented group.

p style=”text-align: justify;”>Hashtags give an identity to the brand and helps start a conversation with whoever is familiar or not familiar with thebrand. You can build or tablish the brand loyalty amongst the customers.

Marketing Automation Strategies to implement for your Business today

Ecommerce Technology

Post author By binadmin
Post date 24^th July 2017

Tags automation strategies, business strategy, Marketing Automation, Strategies

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