September 11th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Online retailers are finding the bricks-and-clicks strategy to be an effective way to serve and engage shoppers. Perhaps that is why an increasing number of ecommerce merchants are setting up shop offline. It’s important to note, however, that a bricks-and-clicks business isn’t just about having a physical store and an ecommerce site. For this model to be effective, each channel must complement and add value to the other.
Guidelines to execute a bricks-and-clicks strategy:
Allow Access to Online Account Information in Physical Store
Bridge the gap between bricks and clicks by giving your customers and physical-store staff access to online account information. Doing so can enhance shopping experiences and drive sales.
Integrate Online and Offline Inventory, Fulfillment
Offer click-and-collect services that allow shoppers to buy merchandise online and pick it up at a local retail branch or service station. Many consumers would rather forgo the shipping costs and wait time and instead pick up their items at a time and place that’s convenient for them. Also, use your brick-and-mortar inventory when an item is out of stock online.
Use Online Data for Offline Selling, and Vice Versa
Data pertaining to online sales and traffic won’t just help you optimize your ecommerce site. It can also apply to offline decisions. For instance, if you see an increase in sales for a particular product on your website, you should consider promoting it offline, as well, to your brick-and-mortar shoppers.
Also pay attention to social media data such as Facebook likes and Pinterest pins. What’s trending on social sites can help with merchandising and marketing. Consider something similar in your brick-and-mortar business. Take note of the most liked, viewed, and pinned items online and then leverage that information when making decisions regarding product displays, inventory and more.
You can also use offline information to enhance your ecommerce site. Utilize in-store analytics tools, such as people counters and sensors, to better understand how your offline customers behave and then compare that with online behavioral data to spot patterns and opportunities.
Qualitative information, such as shoppers’ common questions and concerns, can also be used to improve your online shop. For instance, if your physical store associates keep getting the same questions about a particular product, there’s a good chance that online shoppers have similar queries. So you may want to include the answer in that item’s product description page.
Use Smartphone Beacons in Physical Stores
Beacons are Bluetooth-enabled devices that let brick-and-mortar merchants send customized offers and recommendations to their shoppers via their smartphones based on where the shoppers are in the store. For example, if a shopper is in the footwear department, the retailer can use its store beacons to send the shopper a coupon for shoes. Bricks-and-clicks businesses can also use the technology to send tailored offers to shoppers based on their online behavior.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: account, Beacons, bluetooth, brick and mortar, business, consumers, coupon, customers, data, devices, ecommerce, Facebook, inventory, marketing, merchandising, Merchant's, Online Account Information, Online Data, pinterest, product, sales, shoppers, site, smartphone, social sites, store, website
August 18th, 2014 by Elma Jane
As a small business, you may have ignored Facebook, but it turns out that by not having a presence on Facebook, you could be missing out on a huge business opportunity. The social networking site has a huge influence on what products and services people buy. More specifically, Facebook significantly influences millennial shoppers’ opinions of small businesses, including their decisions to purchase items not just online, but in-store as well. Nearly 60 percent of consumers ages 18 to 29 engage with Facebook ads at least once per week before buying an item in-store from a small business. Additionally, 62 percent believe Facebook is the most useful social media outlet for researching small businesses before visiting a store in person. That’s considerably higher than the 11 percent who feel the same about Twitter and the 12 percent who believe Pinterest is the best site for researching small businesses. Overall, 59 percent of millennial consumers visit the Facebook pages of small businesses at least once a week. To succeed both online and offline small businesses must first understand consumers’ online-to-offline shopping behaviors and invest at least a portion of their digital marketing dollars into the right technology and tools to create precisely targeted, relevant and personalized experiences.
The true value of Facebook, doesn’t lie in simply driving likes and adding new fans. It lies in using personalized content to convert digital hunters into loyal, repeat in-store buyers. The study discovered that by increasing the deals they offer on Facebook, businesses have the potential to make an immediate impact on their bottom line. Nearly 85 percent of the shoppers surveyed said local deals and offers on Facebook are important in their decision to purchase an item in-store. Forty percent of those surveyed said they think Facebook offers that can be redeemed in local stores are most likely to influence their decision to visit the website of a small business. With so many consumers constantly turning to Facebook when making purchasing decisions, business owners especially those in the restaurant, spa/beauty and education industries need to come to terms with the fact that Facebook is a highly important marketing tool that needs to be actively attended to and not just something they check in on every now and then.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Small Business Improvement Tagged with: consumers, digital marketing, Facebook, marketing, marketing tool, millennial consumers, networking, pinterest, products, purchasing, services, shoppers, social media, social networking, twitter, website
May 30th, 2014 by Elma Jane
The Challenge with Search and Identity
Search engines are working on making their results ever more personalized so that their search results will contain more content directly relevant to you, either based on location, past behavior, or from people you know or are likely to trust. Social media brings a wealth of identity and relationship data to the search engines’ algorithms. A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.
How Social Feeds SEO
By understanding that identity and relationships are important to search engines and therefore to SEO, we can begin to change our marketing behaviors so that we’re positioned to benefit as the tide swells.
But blasting Facebook posts out that link to your site won’t give you an ounce more link authority in the search algorithms. All reputable social networks strip the link authority from the links off to other sites by using 302 redirects or nofollow attributes. So where exactly is the value to organic search?
Indirect link earning – If no one sees your content, regardless of how amazingly awesome it may be, no one can link to it. Social media can be a powerful way to expose masses of customers to engaging content. The more people that see that content and enjoy it, the more likely it is to earn reshares that expose even more people to your messages. Increasing the number of exposures logically increases the number of people who are likely to link to the content on a blog or another site that does pass link authority back to your site.
Performance Data – Social listening data, including sentiment data and topical data, can inform keyword research for search marketing. Naturally, the benefit swings both ways. Keyword data can also inform social media strategy. These two data sources are both windows into customers’ desires, beliefs and needs. To analyze the data in silos makes zero sense.
Personalization – Social relationships also create opportunities for your content to show up in individual customers’ personalized search results. For example, If Alice uses Google+ to +1 an informative tips and tricks page on your site, and Alice is friends with Amy, the next time Amy searches for similar tips content she will likely see that Alice liked your tips and tricks page enough to share it. Your page may display in Amy’s search results purely because Alice shared it, when it wouldn’t have normally been displayed in search results. And the search result will be visually augmented with Alice’s picture and the notation that she shared it. That personalization benefits your ability to rank, your visual appeal to increase click through, and boosts trust based on the relationship between Alice and Amy. Multiply this interaction by 100, 1,000 or 10,000 and you can understand the widespread impact that personalization based on participation in the right social networks can have. For Google search results, the social network that matters most is Google+. Don’t roll your eyes, there are several very good reasons to participate in Google+. Bing has relationships with Facebook and Pinterest, and can use their APIs to adjust various elements of search results pages. The Pinterest integration primarily appears in Bing Image Search. Facebook’s data primarily displays in Bing’s Social Search and social bar to the right of the traditional web search results.
Keep in mind that building identity and relationships, while beneficial to SEO, is not a replacement for SEO. Social media is an amplifier of SEO. The fundamentals of search engine optimization still apply. If the search crawlers can’t access your site or if there’s no textual content on the site to index, there’s nothing to amplify and no signals with which to rank.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: Bing, data, data sources, Facebook, google, keyword, Keyword data, pinterest, sentiment data, SEO, social media, topical data, web search
April 8th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Today’s consumers are defining themselves by their mobile devices, their social presences and how they interact with brands, both offline and online. The digital evolution of the average consumer is alive and kicking.
Today’s consumer is more connected than ever, with more access to and deeper engagement with content and brands. Thanks to the proliferation of digital devices and platforms. Content that was once only available to consumers via specific methods of delivery such as via print, radio and broadcast television can now be sourced and delivered to consumers through their multiple connected devices. This is driving the media revolution and blurring traditional media definitions.
What are the specific characteristics or dynamics shaping today’s consumer behavior? Digital consumers are social-savvy and more connected to their friends, family and favorite brands than ever before.
Focused On The Gadgetry
Consumers love gadgets.
One out of four Americans plan to buy a smartphone in the near future. Thirty percent intend to upgrade from a regular mobile phone to a smartphone once able. For those ages 18 to 24, 49 percent they want to upgrade to a smartphone.
How frequently consumers use their mobile devices in a given month? Consumers spent an average of 34 hours and 17 minutes per month using apps on their devices, an increase of 9 hours and 52 minutes from 2012.
Interestingly, the amount of time consumers spend surfing the Web fell 1 hour and 54 minutes to a total of 27 hours and 3 minutes. The amount of time used to watch videos online increased by 43 minutes, to 6 hours and 41 minutes.
Social Media & Everyday Life
Digital consumers, by and large love their social media.
Sixty-four percent said that they use social media at least once per day. For mobile however, the growth figures reported suggest a broad shift is happening, pushing more people to access social networks via mobile platforms.
Forty-seven percent of smartphone owners log onto a social network each day. Additionally, the number of people who use social-media apps on their smartphones rose by 37 percent from 2012.
Digital consumers are also diversifying their choice of social networks, opting to use LinkedIn and Pinterest in addition to so-called traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
As digital consumers find their own mix of devices and platforms to access and engage with social media, they are building profiles and connections on multiple social networks as well.
Two Screens Is A King
Digital consumers also rely on their mobile devices as a second type of television screen.
In a survey, eighty-four percent said they use their smartphone or tablet to surf the Web or to use apps while watching television. Of those, 44 percent of tablet owners shopped while watching TV, and 24 percent used their smartphones to make purchases.
Fourteen percent of tablet owners used their device to buy a product or service as it was being advertised on TV. Just 7 percent of smartphone owners said they would do the same.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Financial Services, Merchant Services Account, Mobile Payments, Small Business Improvement, Smartphone Tagged with: apps on their devices, average consumer, content, deeper engagement, digital consumers, digital devices, digital evolution, Facebook, gadgets, linkedin, media revolution, Mobile Devices, mobile platforms, offline and online, pinterest, regular mobile phone, smartphone, social media, social network, social presences, social-media apps, social-savvy, tablet, traditional media, twitter
October 22nd, 2013 by Elma Jane
The best place to start understanding your customer is to put yourself into every step of a buying cycle and analyze what influences various purchase decisions.
Who is your customer?
Basic demographics and usually includes the following:
Age range Education level Gender Income level Location Marital status Profession
Many of these basic demographics can be inferred from your interactions with customers. In many cases, you can simply ask them.
Beyond the basics, you will also benefit from more personal data, such as the following:
Interests Activities Political affiliation
That data is harder to access, but there are databases that will allow you to target individuals based on those criteria. Facebook’s ad platform provides an incredible amount of targeting data. You can infer your customer profiles by the types of results you get by running ads aimed at specific target markets. That will help identify the interests of your customers.
What? consider what consumers need to know about a product to make a purchase.
Are there ongoing costs? Does it need anything else to make it work? How big is it? How does it function? How long will it last? How much does it cost? Is there a warranty? What are its specs? What does it look like? What options are there? What sizes and colors are available?
To find those details, shoppers will seek different sources: articles, websites, blogs, and actually looking at products and trying them on. Make sure you understand the “what” questions for your products. Then, provide answers to those questions.
Why? The “why” questions are important. Do you know why your customers buy your products?
It could be for the following reasons.
Address an immediate need or desire. Loyal to a particular brand or store. Need flexibility to return products. Need product occasionally or on a regular schedule. Purchase because product is cool or trendy. Seek bargains. Seek high-quality products Seek little or no shipping or sales tax. Seek the lowest price possible. Shop around every time they buy.
Answers will surely vary. Consider also, what motivates your customers to purchase the products you sell and also why they purchase them from your company versus your competitor. This will help you better refine your value proposition of why shoppers choose your company.
How? This area is the most significant change in a consumer’s shopping cycle. As recently as 15 years ago, most product research was done in stores or catalogs or magazines. Today, product research is done in many ways. In the living room, in the boardroom, at the hospital, you name it. Most shoppers start their search at Amazon.com or on Google by searching on a product.
Many searches start with an opportunistic email promoting a product. From there, we may find the shopper looking at the item on that store’s website.
Consumers likely check product reviews, from other consumers. They may read professional reviews. Browse the Internet on SmartPhone.
The point is to understand your customer’s research process. It will vary widely. But in many cases it’s something like this.
An event triggers an interest in a product. Check other brands or alternative products. Conduct research by looking at a product’s pictures, reading descriptions. Evaluate the product’s real value, and eventually make a purchase decision. Narrow your selection and shop for price. Seek out reviews or ask friends.
Where? That leads us to the where customers are researching. They could be reading relevant blogs, going to brick and mortar stores, checking comparison shopping engines, and reading trade publication articles. They may be looking at Pinterest boards, Facebook posts, and checking with their network of friends on Twitter.
They will be using tablets (increasingly the shopper’s preference), smartphones, laptops, desktops, Xboxes, and store visits.
Can an ecommerce merchant be in all of these places with your message? Likely no. But you can identify where your customers are looking for information as they move through their cycle and try to make sure you are seen. You can also ensure that your messaging and content are mobile friendly.
To compete in the future, your store needs to provide input and information to support all those steps. If you lack reviews, your customers will seek them out elsewhere.
Most ecommerce merchants can describe their customers in a general way. They likely know basic demographics – age range, gender, income level. But, do they understand the “why, where, when, and how” their customers make their purchases? These basic tenants of marketing are more important than ever.
The buying process has never been more complex. Consumers have hundred of places online to purchase products that meet their needs. They may shop at home, at work, in the grocery store. They may be using an Android phone, an iPhone, or an Xbox.
Posted in e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: alternative, Android, brick and mortar, comparison, competitor, consumers, content, costs, customers, cycle, data, databases, desktops, ecommerce, Facebook's, flexibility, Iphone, laptops, leads, Merchant's, mobile, ongoing, online, phone, pinterest, platform, price, product, profiles, purchase, selection, shop, shoppers, smartphone, store's, tablets, target, trigger, value, websites, xbox
