Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
How To Reduce Non-Human Digital Traffic: 3 Ways That Will Make Your Marketing Succeed
Want to reduce Non-Human Digital Traffic? Use these 3 ways to improve your marketing results. Includes data and actionable tactics to combat non-human digital traffic.
The post How To Reduce Non-Human Digital Traffic: 3 Ways That Will Make Your Marketing Succeed appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
from
https://heidicohen.com/how-to-reduce-non-human-digital-traffic/
Monday, January 14, 2019
Why Consumers Click on Paid-Search Ads
from
https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2019/40388/why-consumers-click-on-paid-search-ads
Better customer experience means targeting people, not buyers
The success of industry disruptors such as Airbnb, Amazon and Tesla can be attributed to many factors, but these companies all have one thing in common — a focus on creating an exceptional customer experience, rather than just selling a product.
As a result, customer expectations as a whole are evolving. Today, consumers expect Amazon-like speed and service from any business, regardless of the space you play in. They want to be able to browse and buy anywhere, anytime, and on any device. On average, today’s consumer uses almost six touch points when buyingan item, with 50% regularly using more than four.
Meeting these expectations is a major challenge for enterprises. You need to be able to offer a meaningful engagement and seamless sales transaction at every touchpoint. Essentially, this means making it as simple as possible for customers to find what they need during every interaction, allowing them to purchase when and where they are ready.
Interact with customers on their terms
In this environment, having an online store is just the beginning. The growing use of conversational commerce highlights how more businesses are meeting customers inthe moment to create a better experience. For example, enterprises are increasingly relying on chatbots, AI and emerging technology to assist customer enquiriesand sales. Gartner predicts that by 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on chatbot creationthan traditional mobile app development. That’s not surprising, given that 75% of online customers expect a response within five minutes.
Social media is also a growing avenue for commerce interactions. Features such as Instagram Shopping, where businesses can tag up to five products in an image to display the product cost, product description, and link to buy the product, have made it even easier for customers to purchasewhile scrolling through their feed. The recent expansion to Instagram’s Stories feature for verified accounts further indicates the growing appetite for social selling.
Then there’s the increasing development of IoT and wearables, which is helping with everything from reordering office supplies to creating cashier-less checkouts at Amazon Go stores.
Personalize the shopping experience with artificial intelligence
However, it’s not enough to offer multichannel engagement—the experiences you offer on these channels need to resonate with customers to be effective.
Personalization is an increasingly important aspect of the customer experience. Consider how a customer engages with your brand today. It’s likely that they use a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or maybe voice-assisted technology such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. It may take some time to find a specific product in your catalog, and that might involve clicking through various tabs to complete research online. The customer may be turned off if it takes too long, or if there are an overwhelming number of options.
Enterprises can speed up the buying process and make it easier to buy in the moment by creating personalized experiences. Data from customer browsing, known preferences, purchase history and other touchpoints lets you gain a complete picture of your customer. You can then use that data to personalize the content shown on your website, app, social media, chatbot, orother touchpoint to create a more relevant, curated customer experience.
Data analysis and artificial intelligence make it easier to make sense of the mountains of customer data available. As the number of touchpoints increase, AI will become even more necessary to create individually tailored customer experiences.
The use of artificial intelligence could extend to your pricing structure. For example, a dynamic pricing engine that uses machine learning algorithms could examine customer behavior, product comparisons and purchase history to offer differentiated or competitive pricing based on an individual’s behavior. This kind of personalization can have real benefits to a company’s bottom line, with Gartner predicting that by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%.
Take an open systems approach
It’s one thing to invest in chatbots and launch Instagram Shopping, but bringing together the back-end systems to enable a truly holistic customer experience can be more complicated. You need to combine commerce, content, data analytics and machine learning. You need to integrate your content management and commerce systems with legacy billing and fulfillment systems. You need to consider SEO, third-party data and merchandising.
Taking an open and flexible approach is essential to merge commerce into personalized, multichannel customer experiences. By embracing data analytics and machine learning, you can better make sense of customer data to offer a level of personalization that was previously impossible. Only then can you create relevant digital experiences for individuals, enabling them to purchasein real time, regardless of touchpoint.
The post Better customer experience means targeting people, not buyers appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
from
https://www.getelastic.com/customer-experience-people-not-buyers
Monday, January 7, 2019
Convert your mobile browsers into buyers with these recommendations
Consumers, on average use five to six touchpoints before making a purchase – and for those multi-device shoppers their commerce journey starts and ends on smartphones. And not all journeys end with a conversion.
Based on data from comScore there are five reasons mobile shoppers don’t convert:
- 2% — security concerns
- 6% — unclear product details
- 6% — inability to open multiple browser tabs to compare
- 3% — difficulty navigating
- 6% — difficulty inputting information
How do retailers solve for these five challenges?
Security
Filling out transaction forms with addresses and credit card numbers often leave shoppers weary – over 60% of consumers won’t complete a purchase if the site is missing a trust logo. Therefore, in addition to the SSL certificate, retailers’ transaction forms should include well-known and trusted security logos clearly visible and close to transaction forms.
Product information
Retailers’ product pages should be more focused on the details that matter to the target buyer versus keyword priorities. Retailers need to provide as much detail as possible and have it read simple enough for anyone to fully understand. Product description pages need to include: product measurements, available colors, model or item numbers, photos and videos. The feature image of the product also serves as the first impression to the shopper, so making the investment in high-quality imagery is important. 
There should also be more than just one photo, including a gallery of images, as well as any potential 360-degree shots gives shoppers a full glimpse at what the product really looks like. Shotfarm reported that detailed descriptions rank higher in influencing a customer’s decision to purchase over reviews and price.
Since reviews are also valuable to converting shoppers, having them accessible on the product page can assist with conversion. Two Leaves does a great job of this, by having the product description, ingredients, how to brew and reviews all within the product page and right next to the “add to cart” button.
Product pages also offer the retailer an opportunity for up- and cross-selling as Amazon does so well with their “frequently bought together” feature.
Comparison
A step in the consumer journey that is often overlooked is the consumer’s desire to compare products; and it’s typically lumped in with search or navigation as an afterthought when mapping this out. However, comparison itself is crucial. According to the Nielson Norman group, “the first step to enabling comparison is providing consistent information for all comparable products or services. However, when that information is distributed across detail pages, the interaction cost and the cognitive load both increase: users are forced to remember information, take notes, flip between tabs, or open multiple browser windows.” And because of this, the comparison table should be leveraged as it “allows for quick and easy comparison between each offering’s features and characteristics.”
Keurig offers a straightforward comparison table and it is also visible right from the mobile navigation with product details and FAQs. Keurig also ensures the “live chat” feature is available front and center during this phase of the journey – providing added assurance that all mobile site visitors’ questions can be answered in a timely manner.
Navigation
Good mobile navigation is imperative in the customer journey – and it is not to mirror desktop. The more scrolling a mobile user has to do the more likely they are to bounce.
Common practice is to collapse the mobile menu within three horizontal bars aka the “hamburger” icon. Mobile navigation must be quick and intuitive, while informing visitors and providing shortcuts to the areas of the mobile site that matter most to them. L.L. Bean provides clear navigation within their mobile header by offering the hamburger, hyperlinked logo to bring users back to the home page, shopping bag and direct upfront search bar.
The hamburger icon opens up to reveal the organized navigation options. “Call us” and customer service are also clearly displayed and accessible for users. Retailers must prioritize navigation options while keeping it short and sweet and designed for touch.
Forms
Navigation shouldn’t mirror desktop, neither should the mobile checkout process with forms and fields. Mobile involves planning for the “thumb zone” and ensuring all the necessary functions needed via touch are within proximity of where a user’s thumb would be on the device.
The checkout and form completion phase of the customer’s journey is also not the time to try to up- or cross-sell. This phase needs to be as frictionless as possible or retailers run the risk of mobile cart abandonment.Checkout also needs to be a simple one-page form, no images and descriptive text. Staples is a great example of this and because of the simplicity of the page, mobile loading time won’t be an issue.
The post Convert your mobile browsers into buyers with these recommendations appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
from
https://www.getelastic.com/convert-your-mobile-browsers-into-buyers-with-these-recommendations
Thursday, January 3, 2019
How Your B2B Company Can Thrive in a B2C Search Space
from
https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2018/40354/how-your-b2b-company-can-thrive-in-a-b2c-search-space