Chart of the Day: Which personalization techniques are most popular?
There are now many website personalization services available (our listing identifies 28), but how popular are they? This new research is useful to businesses considering adopting website personalization since it explores how many businesses are using different types of personalization.
The benefits of personalization are compelling, regardless of the type of business. Once set up, it can automatically deliver an improved customer experience and increase conversion by recommending relevant products and customers to nudge visitors along the customer journey. Such recommendations services are well-known and widely deployed in ecommerce, especially retail, but there are options to use them in other sectors like travel and financial services. Our article identifies 4 categories including B2B, where personalization services can recommend the 'next-best content' to nurture prospects.
How Widely Adopted Are Different Personalization Techniques?
Across all companies surveyed, more companies are using personalization for email marketing (72%)…
Why these 10 ecommerce features are essential to your online marketing efforts
Choosing the best ecommerce platform for your needs is difficult. You've got dozens of choices, and it can be hard to tell the difference between the truth and the marketing hype.
When you factor in your shopping list of features to consider and the parameters specific to your situation that go into the decision, it's easy to get overwhelmed, which makes it even easier to make the wrong decision. And the stakes are high.
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Making the wrong decision can leave you spending way more than necessary to set up your online shop with all of the features you need,…
Chart of the Day: Marketers who offer electronics have the highest mean conversion rate at nearly 25%
Measuring and reporting conversion rates is vital for all ecommerce marketers. Benchmarking your conversion rate against others in the same industry can give you an indication of how you compare to your competitors. However, having a lower conversion rate does not mean your marketing has been unsuccessful, it shows that there's room for improvement.
Average ecommerce conversion rates are 1% – 2%. Even if you are doing everything right, you can still expect to win the sale around 2% of the time.
However, research by Marketing Sherpa shows that marketers who market electronics can see almost up to a 25% conversion rate, followed closely behind publishing and entertainment, and business services.
Improving customer journey effectiveness is important for any conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. To…
Chart of the Day: Multiple purchase history customers have higher add-to-cart and conversion rate than single purchase history customers.
This is really not that shocking - returning loyal customers (8.55%) have a higher a conversion rate because of their previous experience with the brand.
A new shopper to an ecommerce site will have questions they want answering first:
Is this product reliable?
Is this the cheapest price?
Can I find a similar product elsewhere with better reviews?
How much is P&P?
Among others, it is also possible that first-time customers to your site are more wary about buying your product without social proof, or persuasive copy.
Returning customers are returning because they like your product, would recommend it and are happy with the quality and customer service - more new shoppers need to be converted into returning customers.
Source: Monetate
Sample size: 2.5 million eccomerce…
Chart of the Day: Drivers and barriers for online purchase
When I first got involved in digital marketing in the mid-1990s, online shopping via e-commerce was in its infancy. It's hard to believe now, but many consumers were reluctant to buy online, so it was important for retailers to understand the drivers and barriers to online purchase. Then tactics, messaging and incentives could be developed to encourage online purchase.
Today, purchasing online is accepted by many, but if you look across categories of purchase, there are some sectors where there is still reluctance to buy online, so online retailers still need to work on their tactics to encourage online conversion and multichannel tactics to encourage offline purchase in-store.
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A new report from KPMG has some of the most detailed research evaluating the consumer psychology of purchase, broken down by different countries, so I'm showcasing some of the main findings here. I hope it…
How UK retailers can stand out in the Black Friday American crowd
Black Friday is no longer a frenzy that only takes place in North America. British consumers have embraced the phenomenon with open arms, and sales topped a record £5.8 billion over the four days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2016. This was an increase of 15% on 2015 numbers, and this year numbers are expected to be even bigger.
However, some retailers in the UK have not been as quick to capitalize on the shopping extravaganza, even as sales continue to grow year on year. This has been great news for US ecommerce giant Amazon. The conglomerate sold 7.4m items in the UK last year at the expense of British business and is expected to expand…
What challenges impact the ecommerce industry and how can you overcome them according to your customers?
With advancements in technology, the ecommerce industry has become an intensely competitive space.
As an ecommerce business, you are bound to face competition from not just industry giants but also from nascent brands that are coming up as we speak. As a result, you are in for a tough ride, especially when it comes to attracting and engaging buyers and reducing cart abandonment rates.
We interviewed 1,000 online consumers from the US and the UK on their buying habits and their experiences with the current ecommerce enterprises.
This allowed us to understand the challenges that ecommerce enterprises face and how you can build strategies and tactics to counter these challenges.
You can download the full VWO eCommerce Consumer Survey Report 2017.
This ecommerce report addresses different challenges including:
…
How Personalization, Segmentation, and Optimization work together to create a seamless customer experience
There are three different levels to delivering personalized customer experiences: optimization, segmentation, and 1-to-1 personalization. Many of the ecommerce marketers we speak to are already using one or two of those approaches but haven’t considering how they relate to one another-so we developed a visual we call the Monetate Personalization Pyramid to help visualize the relationships between these three layers.
In this article, we’ll talk you through the Pyramid from the bottom up. If you want to find out more, sign up for Smart Insights and Monetate's Getting Personalisation Right: 10 Best Practices to Improve Conversion webinar.
Optimization
The base level of the pyramid is optimization. This describes the process of testing different approaches, analyzing the results to identify the top-performing design, and then implementing the winner. You'll know this…
Chart of the Day: Exclusives, rewards and a sense of achievement drive people to purchase
Visit any ecommerce company website and you'll likely find you can sign up for a free account or a free trial of the product/tool/service, with which the company hopes to entice you enough to become a regular customer. For example, the office favourite Graze will send you your first box of goodies free, Amazon Prime offers your first 30 days free even here at Smart Insights your can sign up for a free account and access over 20 of our resources.
This freemium model has become the defacto model for most brands online. The issue? You have to try and convince your audience who use your free service how do you convert them into paying customers. This is where new research on the mobile gaming industry from Facebook could help.
The most important benefits for high-value payers in developed countries…
Our recommended blogs that every retail and E-commerce professional should be following to use the latest innovations and grow their sales
Considering the growth in importance of E-commerce, contributed to both by pureplay online-only businesses and multichannel retail businesses, it’s surprising that much advice on marketing best practices is ‘vanilla’, simply covering advice that could apply to any type of business. While some fundamental marketing concepts such as the marketing funnel and lifecycle marketing do apply across different businesses, many of the success factors for E-commerce businesses are specific to this sector. So, it can be difficult to find the best advice to inspire your improvements if you are new to working in the sector, or just want to expand your knowledge.
At Smart Insights we’ve been covering E-commerce and retail since we launched, and have a specific E-commerce toolkit for members, relevant for the main types of transactional businesses of…
