Ensure that each element of your content marketing strategy works together to avoid the 10 plagues of content marketing. This Passover inspired post provides an actionable content marketing checklist of the 10 content marketing plagues and how make your content succeed.
The post The 10 Content Marketing Plagues: How To Get On Track To Succeed appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Customers don’t just use messaging apps, they prefer them. The point of conversational commerce is convenience. It allows people to conduct business on their platform of choice when and where they want.
However, many brands are ignoring the channels that people most often use. Facebook Messenger has 900 million active users and 50 million businesses, and processes 60 billion messages a day. That’s three times the global volume of SMS. Its Chinese counterpart, WeChat, has nearly 700 million users. Add Kik, Line, Twitter Direct Message and you are looking at over 1.4 billion chat users – roughly 1 in 7 people on the planet.
An OpenMarket survey found that people would rather communicate with brands through text message rather than email, phone or social media. “I don’t know anyone who likes calling a business. And no one wants to have to install a new app for every business or service that they interact with,” says Mark Zuckerberg. “We think you should be able to message a business, in the same way you would message a friend.”
“When responsiveness meets discoverability, users get the best of conversation and the internet together,” said Derry Finkeldey, research director at Gartner. “In many cases, this combination will remove the need for dedicated apps, as most interactions will go through a bot that allows the users to ’chat‘ their requests, as if they’re talking to their friends, thus removing any user interface friction.”
Done well, message apps can go beyond answering the occasional Facebook query. Conversational commerce – a term coined by Chris Medina, former Uber experience developer – harvests its potential to accompany customers throughout their buying cycle. Not to be viewed as separate, conversational commerce must work in concert with existing physical and digital touchpoints along a unique customer journey.
Imagine this. A customer types, “I need running shoes, color red.” A chatbot and/or human provides recommendations, which are further fine tuned through the conversation. When she’s ready, she clicks to purchase and receives an order confirmation and shipping notification. At any point she can return to that thread to follow up on the delivery status.
Facebook, Slack, Telegram and Kik have released or announced plans of developing bots that can answer customer queries, resolve customer issues or curate reviews based on what a customer is looking for.
Gartner predicts that by 2019, mobile messaging apps will receive more requests for customer support than call centers and social media.
In their Conversational Commerce 2017 report, Business Insider reports that “For merchants, these offerings are valuable because sales increase as customers communicate with and shop from their brand on more channels.” Conversational commerce allows businesses to access a larger user base, and improve retention rates through improved customer service. Chatbots can automate customer service messages and send shipping and delivery notifications and may resolve issues interacting with customers in real-time.
eBay’s RJ Pittman, says in an interview with Forbes, “We need to develop a relationship with each customer, a personalized experience that will strengthen the more a user interacts with the bot; this requires deep learning, in addition to natural language understanding. We’re seeing growth here, but it’s still early innings.”
According to Business Insider, the missing cog is payments functionality. While customers can browse within a chat app, forcing them to go to another app or a website just to pay lowers conversion rates. But companies are overcoming these limitations with commerce systems that can extend into conversational platforms.
For example, Subway and MasterCard partnered to let customers pre-order and pay for Subway sandwiches using Facebook Messenger. A bot allows customers to choose nearby Subway locations and customize their sub. The bot provides caloric information and quick, easy-to-use response buttons to help people select sandwich ingredients. When customers place their order, they can choose to use Facebook’s payment system or Masterpass, a digital payment service from MasterCard, without leaving Messenger.
At T-Mobile, customers can interact with agents through native SMS text or Facebook Messenger and they can also buy new services through any of these interactions.
As with any technology, rapid advancements are inevitable. Brands require the ability to experiment faster to be able to beat the competition. Commerce platforms need to be flexible to work with third-party chatbot platforms, and any other new technology.
To find out more about flexible and future-proof commerce platforms that can facilitate conversational commerce, visit elasticpath.com
The post Prepare for Conversational Commerce appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
Are you a one person business or department trying to keep your content marketing going? Use solopreneur content curation to streamline your content creation process. You have the choice of 3 key curation formats to supply your audience with useful information. Examples included.
The post The Definitive Solopreneur Content Curation Guide appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Heidi Cohen Interviews CoSchedule's Garrett Moon on his new book, 10x Marketing Formula.
Moon's book is about finding the strategic shortcuts to get you to results fast. It s about short-circuiting the path to jaw-dropping growth. You have to find your own way and The 10x Marketing Formula is that path.
The post 10x Marketing Formula – Book Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Need to build trust for your brand or business? Start by understanding the current state of trust according to Edelman. Then build content marketing trust with these 3 tactics.
The post How To Build Content Marketing Trust: 3 Tactics [Research] appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Do you believe the blogging blarney you hear? Not sure how to improve your blog to compete in a content saturated market? We smash 17 pieces of blogging blarney and show you how to fix them to achieve blogging success.
The post How To Avoid Blogging Blarney: 17 Ways To Change Your Blog appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Worried that content saturation (aka: Content Shock) will hurt your content marketing results? Included are 3 reasons content saturation hurts your content marketing with charts and 3 tactics to succeed at content marketing despite content saturation.
The post Content Saturation: How Your Content Marketing Can Succeed [Research] appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Sick of staring praying for creative, content marketing or writing inspiration? Use the 5 Step BRAVO Method for consistent content idea generation that yields quality results. Includes background research, super easy 5 step process and tips.
The post Content Idea Generation: Super Easy 5 Step BRAVO Method appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Want to create a sense of community for your business? Learn how to build a conference into a community based on Social Media Marketing World's case study. Includes a strategy and actionable tips with examples.
The post How To Build Your Conference Into A Community: Case Study appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
A guest blog post by Will Brown, Emerging Commerce Offerings, Accenture Interactive
Today, we’re in Austin Texas at the South by Southwest show. SXSW serves up a little bit of everything, offering a unique opportunity to explore the worlds of interactive, gaming, film, music, and comedy in an immersive festival of events, conferences, and showcases.
Accenture Interactive and Elastic Path have teamed up to demonstrate how commerce is becoming more immersive, embedded, and highly contextual, creating uniquely differentiated experiences, not unlike the SXSW festival. See for yourself how this works at the Accenture Interactive Innovation Cantina @Micheladas, where we’ll be showcasing our Adaptive Commerce Ecosystem, which embraces digital disruption. Meet with industry experts for some provocative points of view and entertaining conversations about commerce trends.
At the cantina, we transport you to a ski resort. Imagine you’re on vacation there. When you arrive, you skip check-in because the resort already knows you’re there. Your phone becomes your room key. Your smart TV alerts you to snow conditions and recommends gear you might need – that’s in-stock at the ski shop and can be instantly purchased and delivered.
Welcome to the world of adaptive commerce experiences. In this world, we expect tech to anticipate our needs (sometimes before we do!) and deliver convenience through intuitive, deeply personalized experiences. Adaptive commerce joins your digital and physical worlds seamlessly, to create frictionless engagements, that “foresee” your next actions and anticipate your needs. Avoid the long waits, manage your schedule and coordinate with your group. All of this is possible with the latest digital capabilities.
In the past, we loosely defined ecommerce as selling goods via an online store, moving customers through traditional conversion funnels, typically focused on physical products. Classic ecommerce platforms were designed and built to optimize the conversion funnel, drive traffic to an online store, and measure its effectiveness. As ecommerce evolved into omnichannel, companies engaged customers through stand-alone channels, whether online, on a call, or in-store and none of these channels worked together.
Improvements in sharing customer information, inventory, order history are improving the personalized relationship between brands and their buyers. Personalization typically equates to segmentation, categorizing a customer’s buying pattern, profile, and behaviors. Engagements are responsive, covering the traditional three panes of glass (desktop, tablet, mobile), and now we’re seeing expansion into social and voice assistants.
Today’s digitally engaged buyers have high expectations. They are influenced by direct competitors, experiential competitors, and perceptual influencers all demanding new ways to experience and engage with a brand. eCommerce platforms struggle to meet these evolving demands, address these new experience expectations and fulfill the capabilities necessary in a modern digital commerce system.
Digital disruption is becoming the new normal. To better understand what’s at stake with this disruption, you don’t have to look further than the Fortune 500 where 30% of those that were listed in 2010 list are no longer on the list in 2017 – just seven years later! This disruption, coupled with the digitization of everything has led brands to rethink their technology approach, shifting towards lighter weight, fit-for-digital, decoupled solutions that can adapt to emerging customer needs.
Experience is the new battleground. It’s the summation of every interaction, how we engage, sell, service and reward customers. It’s technology-enabled, able to flex and scale, and built on lightweight de-coupled architectures that respond dynamically to evolving needs. Experiences are data-driven, machine-learned and responsive across a plethora of new engagement methods. Customers experience contextually relevant pricing, promotions, and products that understand who they are, where they are, what they’re doing and anticipate their needs.
For example, a rideshare and coffee house might partner to increase your mutual loyalty. You select the rideshare because of its affiliation with your favorite coffee retailer. The coffee shop sends you promotional offers using micro-applications in your rideshare app. You pre-order and pick up your beverage based on the rideshare destination and the drink is queued to be ready based on your anticipated arrival.
Adaptive commerce experiences unlock trapped value by allowing customer experience designers to identify fit-for-digital partners, combine them with cutting-edge capabilities and publicly available contextual information, to create new and better offerings. Corporate boundaries suddenly can shift and push outward allowing brands to avert lapsing behaviors, create new wallet moments, optimize conversions, improve resiliency, scalability, and reliability. The possibilities are limited only by the ability to conceive these new kinds of customer interaction and the network of partnerships that make sense for your customers.
See how adaptive commerce can empower your digital business transformation to address disruption at the Innovation Cantina @Micheladas. Accenture Interactive SXSW
Presented by Will Brown, Sal Visca, Julian Lambert, and Victoria Wind.
The post Experience Adaptive Commerce at South by Southwest appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
Dynamic pricing or flexible pricing isn’t new.
Before the 19th century, customers haggled for discounts, and loyal patrons were often given a “friendly price.” Mass marketing introduced a little more science by using demographic research, and more recently big data and analytics, but lost the shopkeeper’s ability to directly negotiate with a customer. Prices now are mostly set according to market segment and supply-demand, not based on firsthand buyer knowledge.
Dynamic pricing today is human-driven, assisted by big data and analytics. Airlines change their pricing based on peak times. Uber charges more for high-traffic hours, during driver shortages or for traveling in certain neighborhoods.
Dynamic pricing can also be applied based on customer segments. People in segment A get pricing X. People in segment C get pricing Y. Pricing managers can control this kind of supply and demand / yield management pricing with rules in an ecommerce solution.
However, marketing has gone through a revolutionary shift to personalization. Customers are interacting with brands in new ways, on more platforms. They want the company to know who they are, no matter what method they are using, and expect consistently personalized service. The new commerce challenge is that companies must now attempt to sell to (and price for) a market segment of one.
That is where dynamic pricing engines using artificial intelligence come in.
Dynamic pricing engines use machine learning technology to accurately personalize pricing in ways that were previously impossible. What’s becoming possible through machine learning is the ability to pinpoint the price individual customers are willing to pay and at the same time optimize for revenue. To achieve this, many pieces of data need to come together.
1. All about the customer
A dynamic pricing engine uses machine learning algorithms to read a customer like a seasoned merchant. It looks at real-time behavior: how many times have they looked at the item, where the pointer is positioned on the page, the products they’ve compared. It calculates their price threshold from how much they’ve spent before and the kind of discounts they’ve applied. It will recognize whether it’s a first visit or someone who’s used or even purchased from other touchpoints. These systems also take into account similar customers to assess intent.
2. Pricing in context
Today, pricing is based on segmentation and mapping customers to a persona. Contextual pricing will take personalization to the next level, where recommendations will be just about you and for you, since companies can piece together purchase intent from an individual’s behaviors. This means they can offer differential pricing or progressive discounting that might encourage purchase if a customer is on social media versus if they are using a laptop to explore flights through Expedia.
Prices can be adjusted according to selling context or other conditions. Anonymous buyers that responded to a Facebook post may get a different price from loyal app subscribers who have bought two or more times before. It is also possible to offer contextual pricing within an experience, which often occurs when upselling, bundling, or cross-selling. For example, educational organizations could offer students taking online courses the ability to order supplemental materials from within the course environment. The system presents the offer when a student attains a poor or non-passing grade on a test or assignment.
3. Competitive intelligence
Pricing intelligence software not only evaluates customer behavior and internal supply and demand, but can monitor billions of product prices on other sites and analyze market shifts. Walmart uses this technology to change prices 10,000 times a month, based on competition, traffic, time of year, and inventory. The free WiFi in its store also allows them to track how many smartphone users are in the store and monitor the type of price apps that are being used for comparison shopping.
According to Accenture research, while 86% of business leaders agree on the importance of a differentiated customer experience, only 23% achieve strong returns. One pivotal factor is price, which should be as fluid as the experience itself.
The new price equation should include expectation + history + behavior + channel + context. Fixed prices don’t reflect value, or create opportunities to reward customers or respond to their purchase cues. Dynamic pricing engines are optimized to give customers what they want at a price that they accept–and that maximizes revenues. Machine learning continuously improves the model over time, given increased information about a customer’s behavior as they interact with the brand.
It’s a way to build relationships – and revenue.
The Accenture survey found that 60% of customers were willing to pay more for quality, experience and product options. They are also more likely to return for repeat purchases. In this way, dynamic pricing engines facilitate not just a single sale, but a lifetime of customer value.
Is your commerce system capable of leveraging dynamic pricing? Learn more about cutting edge commerce technologies at elasticpath.com
The post Dynamic Pricing and the New Formula for Profit appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
Need blog post ideas you can steal to fill your editorial calendar? Conference blog post content offers you 20 options. Includes tips & examples to help you.
The post Conference Blog Post Content: 20 Types You Can Steal appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
