Should you be using omnichannel marketing to boost customer experience?

It has now become vital for brands to inject their unique voice in every communications channel that they make use of, be consistent with pricing policies and promotional offers to avoid any confusions for potential buyers. More and more brands are wanting to move towards an omnichannel experience, integrating the offline with the online. As Christina Dam, Product Marketing Lead of Square suggests, “A great omnichannel experience feels familiar to the customer, regardless of the channel.” Hubspot defines the omnichannel experience as, “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels, while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.” A 2017 ecommerce survey of 1,164 U.S. small and medium retail business owners, conducted by Square and Mercury Analytics, found that: 56% have a physical store 21% have a pop-up store, or pop-up at events 34% sell…

Part 1 of 2: How ecommerce can win with Amazon

Amazon is by far one of the biggest and well-known brands in the world and one of the top five largest companies in the world by market capitalization. The business has grown exponentially over the last 10 years and the pace is continuing at a rate of knots: Source: US Stock Market  Amazon has been a growing and dominant force of nature in the world of retailing since its origins in 1994, threatening existing players such as Walmart and Toys R Us, whilst disrupting entire market dynamics and customers expectations of what is expected in terms of quality, service and delivery. *For a detailed run-through of Amazon’s history, business model and strategy check out Dave Chaffey’s in-depth case study analysis. [si_guide_block id="79186" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 ecommerce mistakes" description="Explore the…

Chart of the Day:A comparison benchmark of add-to-basket rates with conversion rates?

Do you call it add-to-cart or add-to-basket? It depends where you are based - cart is most common in the United States, basket is more common in the UK and Australia. Regardless of what you call it, adding an item to the cart is an important micro-conversion step to measure and benchmark for retailers. While it is common to compare conversion rates, naturally this measures the efficiency of the overall process including both category or product views, basket adds and checkout. Add-to-basket rates give additional information about how appealing individual products are based on description and visuals on the product page. It shows intent to purchase by interactions with the site (Act in the Smart Insights RACE Planning conversion funnel). Google has several definitions in its Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and they neatly avoid the use of basket or cart. These measures include: …

When you operate an ecommerce store; you’re either losing or making money. Sales are either up or down. Whatever your situation, you can always increase your store’s conversions to stop the bleeding or make even more money

One of the most accurate methods to help you do this is by digging deeply into your store’s analytics. Analytics can help you find out what on your web pages isn’t working, or can still be improved further. Unfortunately, the stats on how ecommerce stores use their analytics is rather dismal. 80% of online stores don’t use Google Analytics properly, which breaks down to: Just half of all ecommerce stores even bother tracking their main conversion points 67% of stores haven’t integrated social-media tracking with their analytics …

How online coupon and comparison site Dealhack have re-established themselves

Dealhack launched back in 2005 and proved popular with users in creative careers.

How have Dealhack marketed themselves?

Through market research and competitor analysis, the company positions itself as the gap between coupon and comparison shopping sites that have thousands of entries and insider blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo. The discount company serves both as a shopping guide and a source for special deals, thus shortening the customer lifecycle as they are able to research and buy on the same site. Dealhack also has regular weekly features that its users enjoy, like Top 10 CDs, Top 5 DVD Sales and Rentals, Top 10 In-Demand Book Titles, and highlighted "Dealhack Favorites."

What Dealhack do?

Today’s shoppers look for value for money when purchasing products as retailers struggle due to brand loyalty and increased competition. Coupon sites have helped to decrease the gap between online retailers and consumers.…

Chart of the Day: New research shows the dynamics of digital marketplaces

When creating a digital marketing strategy, it's important to use the analysis time to accurately understand the dynamics of your digital marketplace. In my articles and visuals on digital marketplace analysis, I show how a methodology for summarising the online marketplace from a customer perspective through creating a marketplace map. The example map from ZenithOptimedia in that article shows a practical tool to summarise opportunities to interact and influence with consumers through their customer journey.

How important are brand Ecommerce stores?

One of the significant business model developments facilitated by the Internet is that brands can now sell direct to customers (sometimes know as a the direct-to-consumer D2C business model) either through their own site, e.g. the Nike.com Ecommerce store, or through marketplace stores on Amazon or eBay. This new insight compares the relative popularity of these marketplace options for consumers and…

Chart of the Day: A gradual transition from desktop-first to mobile-first for EU5 ecommerce?

comScore has recently released their EU5 report - detailing the ecommerce trends and benchmarks in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Mobile reach vs. Desktop reach for selected products

In the first group we see that consumers are more likely to access retail sites across all product categories through a mobile device. In the second group, consumers are more likely to do so through a desktop device. *"European countries divide in two groups: the mobilefirst group (by reach), which includes the UK and Spain, and the desktop-first (by reach) group which includes France and Germany. (Italy sits in the middle.)"

Top three retail sites, by % reach

Amazon is still dominating all ecommerce markets in the UE5. Amazon's reach is 41% in Spain,…

Chart of the day: the more senior someone is in a business, the more they believe that they offer a good customer experience (CX).

The Customer Experience industry report 2018 by uisertesting.com has found that executive level professionals and those who work in CX management think they have a good CX, whilst UXers, product manager, and researchers believe their CX is less good. Executives may be far too confident about their CX which leads the report and me to suggest that the more senior managers could be less aware of the real CX in their business. Respondents also reported that good CX is critical to their businesses success, CX is recognized as being incredibly important to the success of a business. User research is also recognized as helping business growth. The majority also want more user testing…

Customer engagement in ecommerce is paramount to success and must be a constant priority for your company

If your company isn’t hitting its sales targets, there could be a number of reasons responsible for these shortcomings. However, all too often, companies aren’t profiting as much as they should because they’re not engaging customers as much as they should. This is an especially prevalent problem in ecommerce. Without any face-to-face opportunities, far too many companies are dropping the ball when it comes to customer engagement. Sound familiar?

Why Customer Engagement Is Essential to Ecommerce

It should come as no surprise that people like individual attention. Alternatively, no one wants to feel like they’re just a number. We’ll spend our money on something we want, but most of us will also pay more if better service comes with it. This isn’t a small distinction, either. You ignore it at your company’s risk. 86% of consumers will spend more…

Chart of the Day: Consumer Interest in Using Voice Assistants and Voice Search

Originating from the smartphone trend of voice search, where Apple and Google introduced voice assistants on their smartphone operating systems, we now have voice interactions through the likes of Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa/Echo. This seems to be a growing trend across all the main digital platform providers and these voice assistants are predominately used for search queries.

Google highlighted that more than 20% of mobile queries are voice-based and this will only grow by 2020. 40% of millennials have already started making search queries through a voice assistant, prior to making a purchase. In fact, a research report from BI Intelligence shows that the younger you are, the more likely you are to switch to and prefer voice-activated search as opposed to traditional search engines. 

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