Carnival and their Guest Experience Digital Transformation

The Future of Retail Lies with those who Personalize Brick-and-Mortar

Getting the most out of Retail’s Big Show

This Holiday Season, Give Your Customers a 360-Degree Marketing Strategy

The holidays are upon us. If you’re like millions of others shopping for the perfect gifts for your  family and friends, you know the drill. Maybe you finally find the new kitchen gadget for the culinary-inclined cousin you drew in the gift exchange. It’s ordered and on its way — you’re done!  

Now cue the endless targeted ads and emails about pasta-makers headed your way. 

Never mind you can’t cook to save your life and you’d never shop for that product outside of the holiday season. Never mind that you’ve already BOUGHT the product and don’t need to see ads about it for the next month. You can guarantee these ads will be following you around for a while.  

This common scenario is of course annoying for consumers, but it highlights an even bigger problem for brands: Despite advancements in digital marketing strategies, brands still don’t have a single view of the customer. As a result, customers still see ads for products they already own and interact with sales staff who have no clue who they are. Without this single view, you’ll never be able to create a cohesive, personal commerce experience. 

Holiday shopping reveals a fundamental mistake
Let’s walk through that kitchen gadget example from a brand perspective. The shopper buying a KitchenAid or Cuisinart as a gift would be flagged as a new customer interested in culinary products, despite being unlikely to purchase again. The brand wastes ad dollars trying to target this new customer, without realizing she’s only buying a gift. Further, the brand is missing that the cousin she’s buying the gift for is actually one of their loyal customers, who frequently buys kitchen products.  

This problem is heightened during the gift-giving season, but it highlights a critical year-round issue for brands that’s tricky to solve for. With customers buying products in stores, online, and even through new channels like pop-up stores, how can you gain a single view of all of your customers’ shopping behavior?  

Marketing silos obscure critical insights
For too many brands, key customer insights are siloed across disparate departments. The email marketing arm might know one thing while the commerce team knows another. And they likely have no idea what’s occurring offline. It’s crucial to know if, for example, a customer researched a product online before making the purchase, but only after seeing it in store. Too often, the marketing team has no clue that the in-store experience was what inspired the final conversion.  

An effective, future-proof marketing strategy relies on a brand’s ability to integrate online and offline data to create a 360-degree view of a customer. Yet almost half of businesses still fail to implement the single customer view. These businesses can’t compete with brands who not only better understand their customer journey, but leverage insights to create unique commerce experiences.  

With a single view, brands can create more personalized experiences
For example, brands with a single view of their customer easily abandon traditional rules-based personalization in favor of less limiting machine learning-based strategies. Using AI tools informed by every customer touchpoint with your brand — be it in the mobile app, on the website or in the store — you can more accurately tailor marketing messages to each individual customer to nudge them along the purchase process. That way, you eliminate the clumsy tactics (like advertising products already purchased or bought as gifts) that cause customers to roll their eyes.  

Let’s face it — they should be rolling their eyes. Your customer doesn’t look at your brand as a multichannel experience, and you can’t treat it that way anymore. No more redundant or poorly aimed marketing messages informed by off-the-mark insights. In the new year, prioritize your customer by adopting a single view of their journey and strategizing accordingly.

The post This Holiday Season, Give Your Customers a 360-Degree Marketing Strategy   appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

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SEO Professionals: Why You Should Guarantee SEO Results

Dear SEO professionals: Clients don't simply want our SEO recommendations... they want guaranteed results. Why should you offer SEO guarantees? When should you offer SEO guarantees? And what kind of SEO guarantees should you offer? Read on to find out. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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Local Business Reviews on Google: Ranking and Rating Trends

Business that rank among the top 3 in Google's local search results tend to have more reviews and a slightly higher average star rating than businesses that rank in the fourth through tenth positions, according to recent research from BrightLocal. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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Consuming Hypermedia APIs vs The Other Guys

API consumption has come a long way in the last few years. The industry has seen traditional commerce APIs revolve around catalog navigation, search, product information, checkout, etc. However, the industry is constantly changing and growing for the better. With the movement toward hypermedia REST level 3 APIs the ecommerce industry has once again adopted a modern trend in API layers and sparked the progression to these new technologies.

For readers who have only consumed REST level 3 APIs, it is worth noting that a lot of ecommerce vendors still have not adopted hypermedia APIs into practice and are working on legacy Level 1/2 API layers.

API consumption can be broken down into three segments:

• Readability
• Invocation
• Operation

Readability

APIs need to be readable for developers – allowing them to understand the actions they’re performing in anticipation of the next possible requests they can make. When these APIs are presented strictly through some documentation, how is flow and adoption maintained by external developers? If they’re reading through documentation, it will have to document all the possible flows that a developer may hit and hope that enough documentation was provided to cover all the edge cases. Swagger specifications can only get developers so far with technical API documentation, as the various options/parameters must still be relayed in some sort of manner, so they can be understood and then memorized by developers for later consumption.

Consider the alternatives of a REST Level 3 API. The API layer itself begins at the top-most root layer, of which returns all the possible services that can be subsequently invoked. The principal of hypermedia APIs is that developers don’t need to memorize what they’re attempting to use, only that they want to perform a particular action that is part of a pre-defined flow.

Memorization of lengthy documentation becomes a thing of the past and it becomes clear that a Level 3 API is much more readable and easier to consume simply by invoking the various levels returned such that documentation required by developers can be very minimal.

Invocation

Here’s an example of the common flow for checkout (for sake of the example, ignore the credential tokens passed in headers):

Add product to cart
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart
Body: {“x_inventoryValidation”:”true”,”orderId”:”.”,”orderItem”:[{“quantity”:”1″,”productId”:””}],”x_calculateOrder”:”1″}
Create billing/shipping address & info
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//person/@self/contact
Body:{“country”:”Canada”,”state”:”Ontario”,”addressLine”:[“123 Street St”,””],”nickName”:””,”email1″:”test@test.com”,”firstName”:”Shaun”,”lastName”:”Mahar”,”zipCode”:”M4B1b7″,”city”:”Toronto”,”phone1″:”123-123-123″,”addressType”:”ShippingAndBilling”}
Set shipping address & info for order
PUT
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/shipping_info
Body: {“x_calculationUsage”:”-1,-2,-3,-4,-5,-6,-7″,”orderId”:”.”,”addressId”:””,”x_calculateOrder”:”1″,”x_allocate”:”***”,”x_backorder”:”***”,”x_remerge”:”***”,”x_check”:”*n”}
Set payment method & amount
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/payment_instruction
Body: {“orderId”:””,”piAmount”:””,”billing_address_id”:””,”payMethodId”:”COD”}
Prepare cart for Checkout
PUT
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/precheckout
Body: {“orderId”:”.”}
Submit order
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/checkout
{“orderId”:”.”}

Memorizing the possible arbitrary parameters and invocation URLs of the above requests can be quite difficult. A front-end consumer of these APIs may be completely unaware of what order these calls must be invoked in, and which parameters are mandatory — unless they’re thoroughly documented. Consider `x_calculateOrder` and `x_calculationUsage` as examples of these arbitrary parameters. Order calculation in this particular API is used to calculate the total charges for the order, and will only be invoked if `x_calculateOrder` is set to ‘1’. Rather than using a boolean, or checking whether or not the parameter is even passed, the API uses a string representation of 0/1 – hence passing 0 will not invoke a re-calculation whereas a 1 will, and a null value will fail the request altogether. Imagine how confusing this may be to understand and adopt from a front-end perspective. Now consider `x_calculationUsage`, which is a comma-delimited string of the calculation code representation for the type of calculation to be performed on the order (tax, shipping, order, etc). Rather than accepting an array of these values in with meaningful codes, the API requires a formatted string representation of the parameter with numeric values that correspond to identifiers only provided within documentation. A better option to this process would be to have optional body parameters for each independent calculation usage code, and meaningful identifiers that correspond to the calculation usage requested. Having these mandatory parameters without defaults and true type representations can cause further confusion during adoption of these services.

Now assuming the front-end figures out the order and makes these calls in the sequence required, there’s still the matter of consuming the responses of these APIs and passing in the required information back to the next subsequent call to be made. In the Level1/2 behavior, this process becomes a burden for the consumer as any data pertaining to the context of the order/user must be managed by the client rather than the server at a point and time basis.

Taking a closer look at the step “Create billing/shipping address & info”, added address information returns an ID in the response corresponding to the address ID. The developer (as the client) has to pass that address ID into “Set shipping address & info for order”, despite just creating the address as part of the order. Any requirements/failures in requests to these APIs are only indicative to the client through response codes/messages, which only helps after the fact of the request actually being made and not prior. An accumulation of these small processes take time away from front-end development that could be spent elsewhere, but rather it’s spent on tasks to simply understand an API structure and then ensure the invocation is formed correctly.

Contrasted to a Level 3 API, the entire checkout process becomes chained together in a structured flow that a front-end can consume simply by invoking the top-level requests required, then following the chain of responses to achieve the purpose intended by the client flow. Particularly to entering address information, we receive advisor messages to advise client developers, indicating that certain information is required for the checkout process.

Figure. 1

These messages can be consumed by the client when consuming the checkout flow to display some appropriate feedback from the API layer for a front-end to understand why a subsequent request may fail. An example following below, as an advisor message is presented directly within the purchase form to indicate the submit action for an order is blocked due to required payment information missing from the order. This in turn lets the front-end know an action must be performed before the request may even be processed and avoids the client having to submit a request simply for the sake of acting on a response code, which would be the traditional method in a Level 1/2 API structure.

Figure. 2

Guiding a front-end through API consumption helps for faster adoption and encourages less error-prone design through guessing outcomes of an API based on the actions a front-end may perform.

Consider the next step, to add and select an address as part of the checkout flow. Compared to what is seen in the Level1/2 API structure, the possible options available in a Level 3 response is to create an address through an address submission form. It is clear from the following example how the API tells exactly what parameters it needs and what the subsequent actions/steps to perform are after completing the necessary step.

Figure. 3

Then, the URL to invoke to select a particular address. Once again, this eliminates the guess work required by the client to process this flow in a structured and expected manner.

Figure. 4

Operation

A REST API’s goal is to be able to perform actions without having any dependency on the client invoking it. If the client must compensate for features which the service cannot perform, then the service itself may be lacking a certain feature to begin with. Think for example the ability to iterate through and display multiple products within an ecommerce API, or even retrieving the current cart and proceeding through a checkout flow. Both of these flows appear to be fairly straight-forward, however differences between API structure can affect the front-end’s consumption of the services.

Reflecting on the following examples:

Set payment method & amount
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/payment_instruction
Body: {“orderId”:””,”piAmount”:””,”billing_address_id”:””,”payMethodId”:”COD”}
Prepare cart for Checkout
PUT
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/precheckout
Body: {“orderId”:”.”}
Submit order
POST
https:///wcs/resources/store//cart/@self/checkout
{“orderId”:”.”}

It’s clear that in this phase of the checkout flow, a user is setting a payment method for an order, preparing their cart for checkout (by means of validating inventory availability), then submitting their order. Notice that the order ID is required to be passed for every step within this process. In addition to this putting burden on the front-end to manage the current order identifier and propagate it to all subsequent requests in the checkout, it also would not make sense to require it in the design of a single-cart checkout flow. This is where the API’s capability to maintain user context will greatly improve the structure of this service. Additionally, either of these flows were to return an HTTP status code other than a 200OK, hence the step has failed and the step was not completed. This level of assumption is exactly what the front-end must make in this Level 1/2 REST API behavior.

However, in a REST Level 3 API design, the API would be able to understand the current shopper’s context and maintain the order information for the shopper as they proceed through a checkout flow. Looking at the full order response of our Level 3 API from Figure 5 below, we can see the entire response already contains these pre-constructed URLs which a client may invoke in order to retrieve or persist additional information pertaining to a certain order. These URLs already associate the context of the current shopper’s order with the shopper token that will be passed into the API requesting this information.

Figure. 5

These common scenarios of the API handling the association between an order identifier and shopper token spark the question of “why would it be done any other way”?. Well the fact of the matter is that following a hypermedia API design enables back-end services to maintain the user context in a solution where the client does not have to retain this information for themselves, but solely rely on consuming the flow presented by the service itself for the current user.

The examples above illustrated shifting the developer mindset to a modern Level 3 API. These are strong influences ensuring services are adoptable by developers in a timely fashion, with no dependency on the front-end’s capabilities.

 

The post Consuming Hypermedia APIs vs The Other Guys appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

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Doing more with less: How Sam’s Club scaled up conversion by embracing data

Originally published on BloomReach

Samsclub.com senior manager of site merchandising, Robelle Mancilla shared how her small ecommerce team embraced data to scale conversion just in time for the holiday season.

Like many teams today, the site merchandising team at Samsclub.com were expected to do more with less. What typically takes a team of 20 to perform, Mancilla’s team of five were tasked with managing everything from the homepage to the category pages – with delivery expectations to remain the same, growth plans to continue, and the demand for quality just as high. These five rock star merchandisers had to step up to the plate. And that they did.

With the holidays fast approaching, Mancilla acknowledges how this new challenge was daunting, but she knew the power of her team and reacted with determination.

In the BloomReach article, she explains how her team tackled these new expectations and made their approach to merchandising more effective in the process. She also shared valuable key learnings picked up during this time that can be valuable to everyone in the merchandising space, lean team or not.

Starting with the data

In order to be more effective with lean resources, the team’s first order of business was to analyze the trends around holiday shopping.

From here, they noticed the influence marketing campaigns had on their website traffic. Mancilla notes, “The main thing we saw was our traffic spiking when there was marketing, which is great because that means the marketing works.”

However, solely relying on marketing was not a sustainable ecommerce strategy for Samsclub.com. The bursts of customer acquisitions these campaigns brought in were great but, in parallel, the team set about building a powerful brand that would drive traffic to the site continuously and regularly.

Building a powerful brand

To create this brand the team narrowed their focus to a select number of themes rather than trying to transform their entire offering. Mancilla shared that, “One of our goals is how do we highlight and showcase that Samsclub.com is the one stop shop destination for everything people need for the holiday.”

The team then reflected on how this intention could be demonstrated through their online experience and Mancilla concluded, “for us, it’s about the merchandise, it’s about the gifting, and it allows us to showcase the breadth of our assortment.”

From the customer point of view, they wanted to create more personalization with a “story of connection for our customers that we are the one destination for all their holiday entertaining needs.”

Optimizing the customer journey

After deciding their direction from a brand angle, Mancilla’s team started to adjust their digital experience with their brand story always at the forefront.

They examined the data and noted the high traffic web pages – from the homepage to category pages – to look for opportunities to highlight these brand themes. The merchandisers altered their site to tell visitors (through product suggestions, CTA buttons, and inspiring content) the story of Samsclub.com and in the end “we reduced a lot of friction points,” says Mancilla. The team made sure this narrative carried over to every device, ensuring cohesion across their mobile, app and desktop sites to guarantee a seamless experience.

The results

Taking this granular approach to the customer journey (with a lot of testing and iterating along the way) proved effective. Mancilla shared her metrics with us, reporting “At the end of the holiday, we’ve seen a good increase in our visits for those specific categories. It was up by 300% and we also increased conversion by around 14%.”

Mancilla credits the team’s success with “focusing on what the key elements of the business and the brand were, our stories were a lot more engaging and robust. They were focused on the key things that mattered the most for us.”

Key Takeaways:

1) Scale back and look at the big picture

When trying to do more with less, it’s important to shift your focus to the areas that really matter.

Once you realign and focus mainly on what the company stands for, it’s time to make some cuts in your everyday tasks and question, “Do the things that we’re doing still matter? Do they still align with the business in general?” Without strongly uniting over core areas that tie in and are supported by the whole business, it’s impossible for a small team to make their mark.

2) Leverage data

Mancilla and team took two approaches when it came to analyzing their data. First, they looked at it from the perspective of the customer’s shopping experience.  Leveraging insights from past sales, they asked the broad question of, “How do customers shop our experiences and how do you optimize those experiences?”

Second, the team looked at the problem internally. From an operational standpoint they questioned, “How does a group of five people manage the same demand and workload the 19 people have done before?” Leading them to the conclusion that it would be impossible. To overcome this hurdle, they took an effective approach and understood “It was a matter of looking at the 20 percent that’s really going to drive 80 percent of the business.”

3) Over-communicate

To ensure that everyone in the organization could follow and understand the ecommerce team’s efforts, they set about improving communication and ultimately creating transparency on all levels of the company.

One example was to use an Excel sheet that records all of the changes that occur on the website. This included homepage updates and all the different category updates. The sheet was shared across the organization, with VPs, executives and the people ecommerce worked with on a daily basis like operations, project management, engineering and supply chain.

The company-wide document also built up the team’s and the whole organization’s confidence, acting as “a security blanket for a lot of people to know that they have access to what the site merchandising team is doing and they’re confident that our actions can drive revenue and growth for the company.”

Next Steps

From these lessons, the Samsclub.com team is planning to use the same strategy and improve on it. This holiday season, Mancilla’s (slightly enlarged) team will follow the same way of thinking, but further optimize and personalize the experience for their customers.

She also added that this time around, the team is looking into the possibilities of site search and how this tool can contribute to the buying journey and help to build out their brand story.

The post Doing more with less: How Sam’s Club scaled up conversion by embracing data appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

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The Top 3 Mistakes Companies Make in Implementing B2B Ecommerce

B2B ecommerce has exploded to become a major force in the US Economy, and an exciting new selling channel in many traditional industries.  Forrester Research reports that the B2B ecommerce market totaled $889 billion in 2017.  By 2020, that number is projected to eclipse $1.2 trillion.  B2B ecommerce has quietly grown to surpass the size of the more visible B2C ecommerce marketplace, today accounting for 2.5 the volume of B2C online purchases.  While surprising to many people, the fact is that selling fasteners, medical equipment, electrical components, and other business-specific products online dwarfs the volume of shoes, make-up, and music to consumers via the Internet.

Recognizing this volume, more and more manufacturers and distributors in traditional industries are launching B2B ecommerce efforts.  Unfortunately, many companies don’t do their due diligence ahead of launching an ecommerce initiative.  This results in less than optimal ecommerce platform deployments, ineffectively structured organizations, and missed opportunities – which all create inefficiencies and stifle growth.

By understanding these common mistakes, you can avoid the common pitfalls associated with implementing B2B ecommerce.  With this in mind, let’s look at three of the most common mistakes companies make when implementing B2B ecommerce—and what you can do to avoid them.

Mistake #1: Failing to Define Your Requirements in Detail

All too often, I see companies fail to put in the time required to create a thorough set of requirements for their ecommerce system, grounded in a solid understanding of business objectives. In doing so, these firms drastically increase the likelihood they will choose the wrong platform —which prevents them from being able to take full advantage of their ecommerce opportunity.

Taking the plunge into ecommerce for the first time is an extremely time-consuming process. The last thing you want to do is have to replatform shortly after launching because you made the wrong choice to begin with.

Because so much is at stake, it is imperative that you choose the right platform the first time—one you can live with for five to ten years, or even longer. The only way you can ensure this is done correctly is by extensively documenting your requirements up front.  Be sure to include information about features, workflows, pricing, contract support, flexibility, integrations, and more.

Your company is not likely an expert in ecommerce, so choosing the right platform from the start can be a tricky and taxing process. Because of that, many companies outsource these responsibilities to companies that are experts in the space.  Yes, this requires additional upfront investment and time, but the ROI and risk reduction make it worthwhile.

Mistake #2: Underestimating the Importance of the User Experience

I have observed that B2B companies tend to have a nasty habit of putting up ecommerce storefronts that are difficult-to-use, bolt-ons to their existing ERP (Enteprise Resource Planning) systems, and simply expecting orders  to come flowing in. When they don’t, they either blame their customers or figure that ecommerce won’t work for them.

They’re wrong on both counts.

When implementing an ecommerce system, it’s critical to focus on the user experience (UX). Today’s B2B buyer expects the digital user experience to make their jobs’ easier, and reflect consumer-like online shopping experiences.  If the UX is poorly executed and the resulting web site is difficult to use, how can you expect customers to actually use it?

Keep in mind that business buyers’ expectations are set by their personal experiences in buying from the most advanced ecommerce sites in the world. Retailers like Amazon continue to set the bar extremely high for online retailers—which includes your company, whether you like it or not.  While B2B web sites must accommodate B2B buying workflows and nuances such as customer-specific pricing, custom catalogs, and payment on credit terms, the foundational elements of a B2C web site are also critical to incorporate. If your site search, navigation, product details, listing pages, shopping cart, and checkout aren’t optimized to meet the standards of modern online buyers, your ecommerce site will not be effective.

Invest heavily in building a desirable UX, and customers will keep coming back.

Mistake #3: Neglecting to Involve Your Sales Team

Your sales team is nervous. They hear the word “ecommerce” and they think competition and lost commissions.

Fear isn’t warranted in the vast majority of cases.  However, many B2B ecommerce replatforming efforts are launched without input from the sales team—at least when  it comes to planning and implementation. As a result, a large amount of value is left on the table, and sales teams will fight against adoption of ecommerce among your customer base once you have launched your site.

In reality, ecommerce is a force multiplier for the sales team by allowing associates to spend more time on strategic issues with key accounts.  An effective ecommerce web site eliminates time spent on low value, routine tasks such as entering orders or answering order status questions. And, if sales team members are commissioned for sales made to their accounts via ecommerce, economic incentives are aligned as well.

Don’t keep your ecommerce replatforming initiative isolated to a few top executives or driven solely by the marketing team. Instead, use your sales team strategically.  Real value unlocks are available when selling channels are in sync, and getting the sales team involved early in defining your requirements and setting objectives will enhance your return when you launch.

Benefits of Successful Replatforming

The B2B ecommerce market is growing bigger every day. Frost and Sullivan projects that 27% of all B2B transactions will be conducted online by 2020.  Think about what this type of sales penetration could mean for your business.  Not only are sales transacted via ecommerce more efficient to process, but they often occur at higher gross margins.  Online sales also frequently represent incremental revenue – either via increased share of wallet from your existing customers or from new customers.

Capturing these results for your company requires significant investment of internal and external resources. However, real return on investment exists for companies that diligently plan for and execute on this opportunity. Do it right, and you’ll be eating your piece of the pie in the near future.

The post The Top 3 Mistakes Companies Make in Implementing B2B Ecommerce appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

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Five Buzzworthy SEO Trends for 2019

You knew this article was coming: the hottest SEO trends for the year ahead. Some of these trends you've already seen this year, and some are new, but we can definitely expect to see more of all of them in 2019. Check them out to prepare your SEO efforts for ... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

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The future of retail continues with Nike

Easy Guide To Solopreneur Pricing: How To Set Rates That Will Make You Happy

Wonder how to price your services as a solopreneur, consultant or freelancer? Use this easy guide to solopreneur pricing. It outlines (with examples) 5 types of pricing to help you.

The post Easy Guide To Solopreneur Pricing: How To Set Rates That Will Make You Happy appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

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How Negative Feedback Can Improve Customer Retention