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swifterm · 2 years

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Personalised email automation offers huge potential

Personalised email automation offers huge potential. It’s no secret that the strongest relationships are built on personal connections. Without a personal connection, relationships are usually short-lived and unfruitful for both parties. The same is true in marketing. According to SmarterHQ, “72% of consumers say they only engage with personalised messaging.”

But how can you personalise at scale? Enter email marketing automation.Email marketing automation is not a series of triggers along the customer journey that will spontaneously send the customer a personalised email.Although those that sell this type of software want you to believe it. They are right that each email is curated specifically for each touchpoint, organically moving the customer along in the sales funnel, but at no time are you gaining an insight to that individual other then when they hit a trigger.

Here at SwiftERM we know that totally automated emails create 20x more revenue than any other type of email format. This is further supported by reports by McKinsey and Statista to the same effect. What differentiates an automated email campaign from any other email marketing campaign is that it’s personalised to each individual consumer, rather than just trigger points or or segmentation.

Consider this last point, to segment by its very nature suggests that if you drill down into the client base you have you’ll be able to fulfil demands for segments of that list. But take this to the nth degree and the answer will always be that if you address each individual as such, you can never have a more accurate definitions of the demands and desires of that person.

According to Accenture, consumers are over 90% more likely to shop with your brand when they have a personalised experience. So, if you’re wondering how you can use email automation to grow your business, you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in. By definition if you segment as far as you can, you will get down to the individual, but segmentation email software doesn’t allow this, and as we know segmentation is not personalisation.

Choosing an email marketing automation tool

The foundation for your email marketing automation is the tool you use, so it’s essential to choose one with features that will give you the greatest success. Not sure where to start? Here are the key features you should look for in an email marketing automation tool:

Email automation capabilities — First, and probably most obvious, is the ability to automate emails based how much of the task is truly automatic. Many email platforms don’t have this essential capability, or they only have very basic automation that requires perpetual attention. If you’re lucky you can set it up to run (for a while) based on a set of parameters. Triggered options can be more permanent, but retailers quickly appreciate that consumers receive the same old same old and require changing unless the software you employ allows for change and improvement for itself without need for anyone to be involved. this is an unbelievable rarity, and only Microsoft partner company SwiftERM fulfils this parameter.

Personalisation — If the data above is any indication, the ability to personalise is the foundation to the biggest returns in ecommerce available ensuring your company growth in both turnover and market share. if you don’t appreciate the individual they will go somewhere where they are appreciated, just as you would. Truly ideal solutions watch every KPI on your site, for each consumer when they visit, regardless of purchases or not. It then utilises this data to best predict what that individual is looking for – translates into what that individual is most likely to buy next.

Then without the need of any human being (staff) needing to be involved the totally automatic solution populates a stylesheet with those products and sends them at exactly the right time. From the consumer perspective they have received products they know have been chosen specifically and uniquely for them, and feel the care an attention this offers. So what does this achieve? Firstly the average order basket increases, not double or anything mind-blowing, but substantially on average by around 14% on average. Products chosen from those that are most likely to be purchased reduces the amount of products returned and the RoR falls again significantly. These elements, good independently, then permeate into a significant increase in the lifetime customer value of each consumer, and your churn drops through the floor. SwiftERM offers this technology.

Robust real-time analytics — How do you know if something is working? Look at the data! How do you know where your opportunities for growth are? Look at the data! Any process without a way to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) will be limited in its long-term impact.

Mobile optimisation — Considering nearly half of all individuals now check their email on their phones, according to Adobe, mobile optimisation should not be taken for granted in the user experience.The solution is predictive personalisation software (PPS).

Email design thatis most likely to achieve the maximum effect — Email marketing automation saves your team time that can be better used to connect to customers. But to save as much time as possible, you need to know that you’re not just wasting your time. When reviewing all you time and effort in the year against the results achieved, it is pointless wishing you’d done something differently if someone else could have waved a magic wand over it and instead shown you all the opportunities to achieve maximum effect.

SwiftERM, which use data captured from each individual consumer as they visit your site, including what they look at, return to most often, etc. It then aligns this with both that individual’s buying history and their perpetual purchases, to rank every SKU on your site by the greatest likelihood of imminent purchase. Instead of waiting to convince that person to buy a specific product, (this season’s stock for example) it uses a predictive analytics algorithm to work out what has been achieved already, and simply capitalise on it.

Both Statista and McKinsey readily verify that this type of personalisation far and away out-performs static page personalisation on your site, and literally obliterates the generic email marketing that 99% of ecommerce merchants employ. This is not a clarion call to stop, but rather to be aware of what is needed to add to the mix to keep performing at the top of your game. It goes to your consumer, thereby often negating product price or indeed alternate supplier comparison. What’s more it goes significantly further out-performing, triggered personalisation, omni-channel marketing and promotional email marketing combined. Thereby delivering the greatest possible ROI in ecommerce today.

#ecommerce emailmarketing digitalmarketing technology personalisation

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swifterm · 2 years

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Personalisation disrupting wine ecommerce

Personalisation disrupting wine ecommerce. Historically, the wine industry, one built on a bedrock of traditions, has not been keen on adapting to new trends and technology. But, the recent pandemic with its disruptive effects on the entire alcohol marketplace has forced many winemakers to reassess their business models. Ones that relied heavily on in-person tastings and on-premise dollars, both of which suffered greatly during lockdowns as many consumers flocked to online shopping for their wine.

According to International Wine & Spirit Research, in 2020, alcohol e-commerce grew worldwide more than 42% to $24 billion and is projected to grow to $40 billion by 2024. That has led to a flurry of investment in the segment. Drizzly sold for $1.1 billion to Uber UBER +5.5%, and Vintage Wine Estates recently went public in a SPAC deal.

But, the shift to online shopping for many wineries brought heartache as sites offered discounted prices to move cases. Something many felt cheapened their brand and could have a long-term detrimental effect on their products’ reputations. By directly addressing that fear while offering wineries much-needed revenue, SwiftERM is positioned to help usher many wineries into the twenty-first-century marketplace. The personalisation e-commerce plugin very well might disrupt the entire wine industry and offer a blueprint for other consumer goods industries to follow.

Founded in 2014, the company uses its innovative technology and data engines to create a unique product selection to each individual consumer purchasing wine on a site. The company was born from first hand experience of David Swift, the founder, and CEO had from helping SMEs on behalf of a DTi initiative. “I used to visit retailer after retailer with the same problem, neither the time nor money to actively participate in email marketing, let alone personalise each product selection to each consumer, as much as they’d want to.” he says. “It drove me to create a solution that would be both highly cost effective and purpose built for the depth of data required. That’s the basic DNA of our company.”

Unlike other online ecommerce SaaS products for alcohol, it negates the need for them to ever discount their wines and offers them to consumers at a wineries standard retail price. When someone visits a vintner’s site, their purchases are noted but more importantly as is the selection route taken. What they come back to look at regularly, how ever they move off-piste, what their buying cycle is, etc. Price point for each bottle is integral to the process, as price per bottle spent is seen as the slowest, although not immovable, element of what products to then offer in your marketing to that individual, to keep them happiest.

The effect of the introduction is substantial including a 20x (20 times) increase in annual return from email marketing, broken down into both increases in average order value, and massive uplift in customer loyalty – defined by the LTV (lifetime value – sometimes referred to as LTCV). But one of it’s greatest values comes from being a 100% automatic process, so wine retailers never need sit down to decide what products to segment their audience into, to offer exactly the most likely product each individual is likely to buy. Beware segmentation is not personalisation. SwiftERM, populates a stylesheet and sends, without the need of any human involvement whatsoever, leaving the retailer to concentrate on the role they went into the business for, usually customer facing. Consider the cost to you for staff to run existing email marketing efforts – all saved and improved upon.

Their commitment to maintaining brand prestige and the opportunity to introduce consumers to new products has led many wineries to work with them, especially in the last few years. The company’s unique approach to selling wine is rooted in the fact that it was born from the tech world that thrives and grows regardless of other world economic issues.

“Consumers have finally gotten used to buying wine online. Now the challenge is figuring out how to connect with them more closely, so they don’t become dazzled by someone else offering to look after them better,” says Troth. “We see that the industry is ripe for tech to make a meaningful impact for vintners and vineyards alike.”

The solution is offered to any retail website using Shopify, WooCommerce, Opencart or Magento ecommerce platforms, which account for 78.6% of all ecommerce sites around the world, according to Builtwith. Once installed – which takes just a couple of minutes, post registration, (that they’ll do for you for free if need be), it takes 24 hours to populate the system and thereafter you’re up and running without ever needing to touch it again, enjoying an increase in sales immediately.

With ease they are offering consumers access to exactly the wines that individual is most likely to buy. According to Troth, in their first month on the site, consumers make three visits buying on average eighteen bottles at the cost of nearly £500. In the first year, they spend close to £5,000. It’s really a case of whether you can afford every other wine merchant opportunity to steal a march on delivering customer satisfaction and acquisition through personalisation by installing it before you do.

Where the future takes the wine industry and SwiftERM, no one knows. Still, it seems that they have managed to introduce a new way of selling wine to a sector that is usually slow to adapt to change. https://www.swifterm.com/personalisation-disrupting-wine-ecommerce/

#wine #vintners #ecommerce #marketing #technology #business

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swifterm · 2 years

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Explaining predictive personalisation for ecommerce

Explaining predictive personalisation for ecommerce. While many retailers are talking about consumer experiences and personalisation in their digital marketing efforts, there are few brands that are doing this effectively and at scale. The topic of predictive personalisation can be confusing and might seem intimidating for marketers, but regardless of where your brand is on the personalisation journey, it’s important to get started.

What does Ecommerce personalisation mean?

Ecommerce personalisation refers to tailoring consumer experiences to the preferences of each individual consumer. Curating experiences for individual consumers relies heavily on personalisation AI and data science – the goal is to use the data you’ve collected on your audience to curate relevant and meaningful experiences across touchpoints and email marketing. The more personalised the experience the more likely that consumer to making more purchases, and remain loyal to you.

So, what’s an example of personalisation?

Imagine a hair and beauty brand’s historical data shows that Julianne visits the website to view products designed for curly hair, but their data on Maria shows that she adds lots of hair coloring products to her online shopping cart. Knowing this, the AI that enables predictive personalisation can automatically curate website experiences and email product selection content that are tailored to Maria and Julianne’s preferences respectively.

With the right personalisation algorithm, they’ll will each see personalised product based on the data that the brand has. Avoiding segmentation’s this is now accepted as being a mile shy of a viable solution, SaaS solutions, such as the 100% automatic SwiftERM, can tailor perpetually updated product selections for your email marketing that deliver 20x the return of standard ESP marketing, not only based on prior purchase history, but every nuance of each site visit of each consumer you have. i.e. if Julianne only actually buys when she checks an item 3 times, or indicates her intent by the minimum time she spends reading the product description etc .

How does predictive personalisation work?

Personalisation engines can take the data that you’re already collecting about your consumers and make the analysis process easier, allowing you to pull actionable insights about your audience and improve the consumer experience.

Predictive personalisation is somewhat self-explanatory – you’re predicting what products an individual consumer wants to see. This relies on the combination of historical data with real-time contextual information about the consumer. By it’s very definition a machine learning algorithm can take elements previously perceived as subjective and perpetually incorporate them into product selections, for each individual. This might include the relationships between products to one another, i.e. cloth, texture, material, colour etc all elements a hard-working marketing executive couldn’t hope to include to narrow down the selections for each consumer. imagine preparing content manually only to reach a consumer who that item the night before you pressed send, good that you got the sale but actually annoying for the missed opportunity for a supporting one from the email you just sent.

If an alcohol retailer’s historical data shows that Michael purchases whiskey from their website every two weeks, it would be a safe assumption that the pattern would continue and he might purchase whiskey two weeks from his most recent purchase. This is where it’s important to combine historical data with real-time contextual data. For example, if it’s a bank holiday weekend and the weather is warm and sunny, Michael might be more likely to purchase beer, or gin instead of whiskey. While the historical data may show that Michael almost always purchases whiskey, the ability to provide personalised product recommendations can improve his consumer experience and may lead to more purchases in the future.

What’s lost from this explanation is that Michael is actually a Speyside connoisseur, so finite and accurate can the process be, that it would refine a choice of how old aged-casks Michael prefers too. Sending him anything less finite than this could be quite insulting, if you are trying to win hearts and minds about caring for your customer on a personal level.

The most powerful tool in the toolbox

If you’re trying to improve your brand’s consumer experience, enabling predictive personalisation is a good place to start. Not only can it keep your consumers loyal, it can yield big returns for your business in terms of engagement, loyalty, average order value, lifetime customer value, volume of returned goods, CRM registrations, and sales.

Now, think about curating an experience like the ones mentioned above for every one of your consumers at the same exact time. With the right personalisation algorithms and tools, you can curate a different experience for each individual consumer – if you’ve got 100 consumers, your solution should be able to produce 100 variations of the consumer experience. If you’ve got one million consumers, you should be able to produce a million variations, each changing perpetually, and updating at the nano-second each consumer is about to receive their communication.

Of course, predictive personalisation is impossible to do manually. With thousands or millions of consumers, curating experiences for every single individual isn’t feasible – that’s where the right personalisation tools come in. It takes time to implement a predictive personalisation engine, and without a robust personalisation strategy, it’s hard to get those efforts off the ground. SwiftERM is offered for free for a month, installed as a SaaS on all Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and Opencart platforms, and bespoke ones too. It is offered for free for 30 days to establish viability on your site for yourself, and you are not tied into a contract thereafter and may come and go as you please.

With the right vendor or software solution, you can enable truly relevant and personalised digital consumer experience today.

#Ecommerce #marketing #digital marketing #technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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Personalisation is essential to email marketing

Personalisation is essential to email marketing. Consumers have come to demand and expect relevant and personalised content and experience, both online and offline. To meet those demands, marketers are striving to leverage email personalisation to move toward one to one experiences that not only meet, but exceed consumer expectations and set them apart from the competition.

What is email personalisation?

Personalisation, in the context of email marketing, is the act of targeting an email campaign to a specific subscriber by leveraging the data and information you have about them as an individual, not part of a collective or segment. Ten years ago you’d be offered articles telling you it is information like their first name or the last product they bought, where they live, how many times they log in, or a number of other data points. Today, it is every nuance of that individual’s life when they visit your site. The length of time they browse items, what they return to, when, where they exit to, and importantly the thought process which culminates in a buying decision etc. But beware wherever you read the word “segmentation“, remember it is no longer is personalisation.

Personalising your email campaigns is a proven way to increase your open and click-through rates and can have a measurable impact on your ROI and revenue. Studies have shown emails with personalisation are 26% more likely to be opened than those without.

These results stem from the fact that personalised emails are more relevant to subscribers. Instead of receiving a campaign with generic offers and messaging, your subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly at them, includes their name, and provides offers (products, promotions, etc.) that are relevant to their interests.

It is important tone discerning here, as many articles still flourish online. At SwiftERM each and every email sent by us, for our leading retail clients, is unique to the recipient. In fact, so important are the smallest changes made by each impression as the individual impressions makes, that rarely do they ever get the same content twice. If any pattern (and therefore explicitly alternate pattern too) is established, the artificial intelligence of a machine learning algorithm identifies it, notes it, ranks it.

But instead of acting immediately on it, what is does is to rank that pattern in comparison with others, selecting only the one that deliver the highest buying propensity in choices of product to offer. So if Kylie clicks on a “sparkly top” 7 times, and stays on it for a minimum of 3 minutes at least twice she might have a likelihood of buying it 27% higher than another top visited in the last 5 visits. But if a abandoned cart item out performs the above equation, chances are offering that product first would prove more beneficial – the permutations are endless.

keeping with the same analogy, if having sent the item it is neither clicked on, or indeed the email even opened, without the facility (time, money, effort etc to understand what happened, the algorithm can use historic data from the same process, to decide how much to adjust the Sparkly top in relations to its product peers up or down, according to only Kylie’s actions. In this case it would be reasonable to suggest unopened keeps it up the pecking order, while opened and not influenced to browse let alone buy, would see it moving down the propriety list pretty rapidly.

Performance propels outperformance

Research shows that personalisation most often drives up to 20x the revenue lift (with company-specific lift driven by sector and ability to execute). The more skillful a company becomes in applying data to grow customer knowledge and intimacy, the greater the returns. For digitally naive companies that forge a data-backed, direct-to-consumer model, personalisation isn’t just how they market, it’s how they operate.

Those leading the charge in personalization also have better customer outcomes. Their focus on the relationship and long-term value leads to better upward migration, retention, and loyalty.

Personalisation can also be a revenue accelerator even for businesses that typically lack direct access to customers such as companies in the consumer packaged goods segment. Among these companies, those with the fastest rates of revenue growth were far more likely to prioritise personalisation than slower growers. The research suggests that even small shifts in improving customer intimacy create competitive advantage – and these benefits grow with maturity.

Out-performers organise their business around personalisation

Companies that achieve the best results from personalisation approach it differently. Rather than seeing personalisation solely as a marketing or analytics problem, they view it as an organisation-wide opportunity. Rather than focusing solely on short-term wins, they look for long-term drivers of growth and emphasise customer lifetime value.

Personalisation to succeed in challenging times

If you were interested in a company’s product or service, and that company found a way to reach out to you with a message that showed they wanted your business and truly understood your needs, would you be more likely to buy? Of course, the answer is yes. But the real question is – can your company survive when competitors are doing the same to your customers?

The good news is that it’s easy to stay in the game. Simply invest in an automated, personalised marketing strategy and use an automatic predictive personalisation email marketing campaign as a kick-off point, and watch the leads flow in. You won’t regret it when the time and energy spent is paid back quickly in increased sales – in fact, you’ll wonder how you ever did business without it.

Personalisation and personality

One thing about DTC buyers is they love to feel a connection with the brand they are buying from; a way to show off their personality. Stick to the integrity and story of your brand but embrace the new ways of storytelling and marketing that highlight how your products are different from its competitors. By writing engaging product descriptions, showcasing materials and designs on the website, and more, there is a myriad of ways to emphasise a product’s uniqueness. Embrace other unique ways to sell products with merchandising or special releases.

It is essential to adopt technology to embrace online highest returning experiences enjoyed by customers elsewhere in their lives. Email marketing for example can now be equally personalised to each individual, that in comparison to its peers leaves it standing as far as ROIi is concerned. The introduction of PPS (predictive personalisation software) to email marketing, has surpassed all the comers by a country mile. PPS email solution SwiftERM use every facet of data collected including much not stored even by the most advanced platforms themselves, but rather by a specialist SaaS plugin that retrieves the information for you. It then analyses it to identify what each individual unique consumer is most likely to buy next and when. When doing your calculations take into account that PPS is 100% automatic, so deduct all staff overheads.

Imagine knowing exactly what product each individual person will buy next, and having a means to be able to present that exact item to them, before anyone else gets a look in. Abhorring segmentation, as the practice of shutting the wrong people in a room together always works, not.

Only you have the benefit of the knowledge of everything going off on your website. There is a pattern created by each individual consumer’s activity, each visit for example typically leaves 100 impressions per visit, Each suggest a strategy both rare and personal to that one person. Not forgetting what they don’t look at or fail to be attracted to at that instant is equally important to clear the way for things that are. Market research companies including McKinsey and Statista both offer a figure in excess of 20x the return of traditional email marketing.

#emailmarketing #marketing #digital #technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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What makes SaaS so successful?

What makes SaaS so successful? Since Salesforce invented the term “Software-as-a-Service” more than twenty years ago, the industry has been characterised by tremendous growth and increasing sophistication. SwiftERM found the average employee now actively uses 36 cloud services at work, including nine collaboration, six file-sharing, and five content-sharing services. What’s more, global spending for cloud-based software is estimated to exceed $100 billion this year, according to Synergy Research Group.

All businesses would like to see such success, but many are unable to copy SaaS business models like-for-like. There are, however, four fundamental qualities that have fuelled the industry’s success and carry lessons for that will benefit just about any business.

Make ‘customer success’ truly provocative

Unlike the sales process for traditional businesses, success for SaaS companies isn’t based solely on the initial sale. Subscription is a double-edged sword: it’s easy for customers to get on, but it’s also easy for them to get off. A failure to address churn can kill any subscription business.

SaaS companies therefore typically invest heavily in their customer success, marketing and consulting teams to forensically manage their clients’ satisfaction and address any issues before they arise. The best Customer Success Managers (CSMs) set out to understand their customers’ challenges. They don’t care about being liked; they want to earn respect by helping to address specific pain points. Success is not measured by a stunning presentation deck, a positive health score or the number of engagements they’ve had in the last quarter; the only thing that really matters is whether the customer bought again, and if so, how much more they spent. The large investments in CSMs made by a typical SaaS company means they’ve created a solid foundation for these direct and honest conversations with customers.

The biggest lesson for non-SaaS companies is that transparency breeds transparency. Establish an open dialogue with your customers and ask direct questions. Why would you pick us again? Why would you recommend us? This all helps an organisation become more self-aware in delivering its products and services, direct innovation and keep current clients happy.

Provide easy access to the best and latest products

For big players such as Microsoft, it was only a few years ago that customers had to renew individual products each time new versions were released. Now, the software giant allows individuals and businesses to connect to and use its cloud-based apps over the internet for a monthly fee.

A big driver of SaaS’ success is this cloud-based software delivery, which reduces the need for the large, up-front costs associated with purchasing software or hardware once and owning it, only to be left with an obsolete product once a new version comes out. In the SaaS world, the customer always has real-time access to the latest, greatest versions.

SaaS offers many other potential advantages over traditional ‘buy and own’ models, too. For example, the time it takes to set-up and deploy services is reduced and customers have effortless access to upgrades. This built-in agility helps businesses to scale and grow.

There is a key takeaway here for all businesses: when it comes to offering products and services, flexibility is key. You need to invest in the necessary resources and teams to help your customers upgrade products easily and scale their deployments of your product in a way that suits them. Enable them, don’t envelop them in arbitrary strictures.

Absorb the burden

There is an age-old debate about build vs. buy when it comes to services. Often, successful businesses will only build services that fall within their specialist area of expertise and use SaaS companies (among others) for the rest.

The SaaS pay-as-you-go model often suits such businesses down to the ground. For example, it probably wouldn’t make sense to for a food delivery company to build its own accounting system or online security portal. This point is particularly important, as it is not just about how well a company can build the solution themselves – there are legal and safety implications too. For security and compliance, it is often much safer (as well as easier) to rely on external providers. SaaS enables businesses to plug in the elements they need, and to focus on what they do best.

Another benefit of SaaS is the lowering of barriers to entry for smaller businesses, as “multi-tenant” architecture is typically at the heart of their delivery. This means that all customers, small and big, can benefit from the same top of the line, best-in-class infrastructure, security and compliance that the SaaS provider delivers. It democratises software and services to provide fairer and safer access for all.

The lesson here is to think hard about your clients’ pain points and see how far you can go towards solving them. Businesses across industries could improve their customer journeys by taking away as much of the cost, regulation and compliance considerations from customers as possible, allowing them to focus on their core offering.

Take the friction out of payments

For the end customer, payment is a means to an end; a way to access the service they require. They want simply to sign-up once, pay in a way that suits them best, and then never be troubled about payments again. A seamless, subscription-based payment process is crucial for SaaS companies to maximise customer lifetime value.

An exemplar of payments done well is DocuSign. The SaaS company is at the forefront of trying payment mechanisms that cater to preference and remove as much friction as possible. And it’s all based on real data and insight obtained from its customers. For example, in the initial roll-out phase of offering global subscriptions, DocuSign found a significant portion of its new customers in Europe chose to pay by direct debit when given the option.

When it comes to payments, it is so important to firstly know how your customers like to pay, and then make sure that your solution is seamless. All businesses can learn from this – whether you’re using recurring payments or not, you need to cater to customer preference and maintain payment systems that don’t get in the way of making a sale.

The growth personalised product selection for email marketing

predictive personalisation software (PPS) use every facet of data collected through your platform, including much not stored even by the most advanced platforms themselves, but rather by specialist plugins that retrieve the information for you, analysing it to identify what each individual unique consumer is most likely to buy next and when. When comparing the returns your calculations should take into account that PPS is 100% automatic, so deduct all staff overheads for a fair and accurate comparison.

Imagine knowing exactly what each person will buy next, and having a means to be able to present that item to them, before anyone or anything else in the world gets a look in. Abhorring segmentation, as the practice of shutting the wrong people in a room together always works, not.

Learning from SaaS

The combination of these four approaches has fuelled much of the success and meteoric growth of the SaaS industry. While we can all look on enviously, we should also learn. Because when it comes to customer retention and success, it’s hard to deny that SaaS does it so much better than the rest.

#marketing #Ecommerce #technology #digitalmarketing

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swifterm · 2 years

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Personalisation tops marketers priorities

Personalisation tops marketers priorities. A recent survey of digital marketing and e-commerce executives conducted by CommerceNext in partnership with CommX found that developing more careful appreciation of individual consumer needs and hence personalisation is a top priority for brands and ecommerce retailers alike. Leaning into consumers with predictive personalisation – more with 52% of respondents are planning to launch or expand their current one – was more important than investing in technologies such as crypto payments and AR/VR, the study found.

Personalisation, navigation and discovery, and search in order to keep customers coming back, was the highest on the to-do lists of respondents.

“There’s also a few other things happening in the industry,” said Scott Silverman, co-founder of CommerceNext. “We’re still seeing much higher levels of e-commerce activity that started during the Covid-19 pandemic and hasn’t really dropped back down. We’re also seeing significant increases in customer acquisition costs, particularly, Facebook, where the cost of ads is increasing due to more competition. They’re also less effective due to poor targeting related to the changes from Apple iOS 15.4.

Paid social remains the top acquisition channel, but its high costs have retailers looking for models that will generate higher ROI in the coming year,” Silverman added. “Brands looking to endear their customers to them are prioritising their personalisation experience.

Among all executives surveyed, supply chain challenges continue to be viewed as the primary obstacle to achieving desired sales results, cited by 61% of respondents, while 75% of digital-first retailers surveyed said rising customer acquisition costs were their primary concern. Inflation concerns are top of mind, too, with 56% of respondents anticipating a minimum 6% increase in prices and 20% expecting an increase of over 10%.

“Acquiring customers inexpensively is over,” Silverman said. “The focus now is on delivering better, more relevant experiences to existing customers and new customers. That’s why we’re seeing so much investment in things like personalisation, and site search and navigation.”

Putting your customers first matters – a lot. It should be a top strategic priority for every business. When your customers have a good experience, they are more loyal, spend more, and are willing to recommend you. According to Forrester research, companies that excel at customer experience grow revenue three times faster than companies with poor customer experience strategies.

In a recent study by EverString and Ascend2, 69% of companies rated personalizing the customer experience as a top priority. Survey respondents ranked acquiring new customers ranked at 41% and targeting individual market segments at 36%.

Connected Data Insights

As consumers engage with brands across channels and devices, they leave behind a trail of data – who they are, what they plan to purchase, where they’ve been and where they’re going. Delivering a highly personalised customer experience requires that marketers collect all this data, enhance it with third-party data insights, and integrate it all into a single customer view.

However, this continues to be a challenge for many companies. Enriching data quality and completeness, and integrating this data across platforms, are the most significant barriers to achieving enterprise class data-driven marketing success.

Data integration remains a challenge for a majority of enterprises. A Forbes Insight study reported that, “Only 36% of executives say they have attained real-time, highly integrated capabilities across all the customer channels within their enterprises. At this point, just half of even the most highly data-driven CX organisations consider themselves to be highly integrated. For the most part, information is managed centrally, as reported by a majority of executives. Only 14% of executives are able to report that their data is structured on a crossfunctional, synchronised basis.”

Most Effective Personalisation Tactics

Personalisation is a huge component of the overall customer experience. Take a look at the following stats on how personalisation can add real value to your bottom line:

73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that use personal information to make their shopping experiences more relevant (Digital Trends)

86% of consumers say personalisation plays a role in their purchasing decisions (Infosys)

45% of online shoppers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalised recommendations (Invesp)

40% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalise the shopping experience across channels (Monetate)

80% of consumers like when retailers emails contain recommended products based on previous purchases (Listrak)

In another study from the CMO Council and SAP Hybris, fast response time to issues, needs, or complaints was cited by 75% of respondents as the most important attribute of the customer experience. This was followed by consistency of experience across channels (55%), knowledgeable staff to assist wherever and whenever the customer needs (52%), and clear, consistent messaging across channels (46%).

In a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Accenture Interactive, respondents stated developing and improving digital channels (60%) as the leading action to improve customers’ experiences. Rounding out the top 5 answers, respondents also stated that they are:

48% – Developing and improving traditional channels

47% – Improving analytic capabilities to improve customer insights

46% – Making efforts to create more valuable content for customers

45% – Integrating cross-channel customer experiences

A consumer’s perception of the ideal experience is continually evolving. Consumers expect more and have numerous choices when selecting a brand. Responding to inquiries in a timely manner and providing a highly personalized cross-channel experience are elements that can really wow your customers and get them coming back for more.

Predictive personalisation. uses every facet of data collected through your ecommerce site, including that not collected even by the most advanced platforms themselves, but rather through specialist plugins that retrieve the information for you, analysing it to identify what each individual unique consumer is most likely to buy next and when. Imagine knowing exactly what each person will buy next, and having a means to be able to present that item to them, before anyone or anything else in the world gets a look in. Abhorring segmentation, as the practice of herding people into a room together never works.

#ecommerce #marketing #digitalmarketing #technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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Challenges in ecommerce operation and technology

Challenges in ecommerce operation and technology. An eCommerce store is the primary retail growth engine for any business. In fact, ecommerce is expected to claim 17% of the industry by the end of the year. The meteoric growth witnessed by digital commerce over the last decade has also given rise to several ecommerce challenges. With the increasing size and demand for online business, riding the digital commerce wave is not easy.

A demanding majority of shoppers (nearly 81%) begin their journey with online research. Further, 71% of the customers say that a fast and highly responsive online marketplace is essential for a pleasant shopping experience.

The Total Transaction Value (TTV) in the digital commerce segment was reported to have a worth of $3.7 million USD in 2020, and this value is expected to rise to, $4.5 million USD by 2023. In order, to achieve a competitive edge in this crowded marketplace, leaders must first address the core challenges facing ecommerce businesses.

Ecommerce Challenges Faced by Businesses

Leaders across the globe face many eCommerce problems while adapting to the digital commerce business. Here are the ten most common eCommerce challenges and solutions while working towards building successful eCommerce platforms.

Capitalisation of Data

The expansion and integration of the digital commerce function into the core, holistic brand solution is one of the crucial ecommerce challenges. Quite often, ecommerce becomes an autonomous side business rather than a fully integrated part of the business as a whole.

To facilitate this union, businesses are working hard towards building ecommerce solutions that are data enabled. This will help businesses with shipping to store management and, omnichannel solutions. Fully leveraging the data from digital commerce functions will also help measure, Key Performance Integrals (KPIs) beyond conversion rates and Average Order Values (AOV).

Rather than experimenting based on assumed market trends, data need to be systematically captured and applied in innovative ways. Entrepreneurs need to acknowledge the impact of data on the day-to-day as well as long term business decisions.

Solution Retail businesses should start by making the eCommerce function an integral part of the business rather than a separate segment of a brand solution. They should find smart ways to capture and measure data related to in-store shopping and customer loyalty. This will help them in the data visualisation, targeting the customers more effectively, making a cross-digital impact, and improving monetisation methods in local stores.

Customers’ Exploding Expectations

Retailers all over the world are continuously trying to build their reputation and a sharp brand image with the promise of a great experience. In an era where experience matters the most and tech giants like Amazon are taking the online buying process to the proverbial ‘next level’ with anticipatory shipping methods, it is very difficult to meet customer expectations. Thus, competing with them and fulfilling the ever-evolving customer demands is a huge challenge for retailers today.

Solution

86% of buyers are more likely to pay extra money for a better experience with a hulking 89% starting their own business and turning into competitors as a result of a poor experience.

To meet the customer expectation of good user experience, brands should start analysing their eCommerce trends and must focus on using this data to come up with personalised customer experiences. The customers must feel acknowledged and valued right from the moment they start using your service. To facilitate this type of customer connection, send them notification alerts or product updates for the same.

Agility Challenge

Agility is the capability of a business to accomplish tasks such as introducing advancements, developing and deploying digital content, and reacting to seasonal changes rapidly. Agility drives immediate digital fulfillment, and it is identified as one of the most important initiatives in eCommerce businesses. Agile transformation is at the heart of digital business, and scaling is essential for making it successful.

A large number of companies find it difficult to move or change quickly to adapt to the needs of customers. This is usually because they cannot integrate new technologies efficiently with their existing system, and, as a result of which, penetration into the market gets more difficult.

Solution

Being agile in the ecommerce approach helps a business deliver an enhanced shopping experience. To be agile, ecommerce businesses need to incorporate quick changes across all platforms and must create personalised collections that inspire consumers. They should keep putting out fresh content and this content must be designed separately for all devices and media channels alongside with guided selling experiences.

Personalisation Approach

There is no denying that personalisation is the key factor responsible for a good customer experience. Retailers are obsessed with providing their customers with a personalized experience however, these experiences can become over-personalized without them noticing it. At this point, customers can get irked by the excessive amount of targeted online ads.

In this hustle, retailers miss out on developing a one-to-one relationship with the customers. This turns into a major challenge for the business to ensure that the customer feels valued as an individual. 84% of customers report that being treated like a person rather than just a number that contributes to a company winning their business is integral to their customer experience.

Solution

Ecommerce business leaders must focus on developing the 1:1 relationship with their customers. They need to strengthen their tools and capabilities for better reach and visibility amongst the consumers. Retailers should use additional customer data strategically to better understand individual customer behavior and curate personalised customer experience.

This can be made possible with the integration of the latest technologies and smart algorithms into the current framework to help automate the entire customer journey. Additional commerce tools, a new machine learning approach, and cross-application data sharing can also be harnessed to serve this purpose.

Facing Competition

The internet offers everyone an equal platform and hence an equal opportunity. This makes the environment extremely competitive, with possibly hundreds of other businesses offering the same products or services to the same target audience. Even the most niche brands have to fight hard to carve a place for themselves. Every segment in the ecommerce space is set to get increasingly congested and competitive over the years.

A homegrown startup has to keep pace with a multinational giant and vice-versa. Enterprise is continuously experimenting to come up with an innovative ecommerce business solution to gain an edge.

Solution

This challenge can be mitigated through thorough research and competitive analyses. It is important to categorize the competitors and frequently observe and assess the components of their websites. Characteristics to watch closely are pricing, the website design, products on display, and even the marketing tools and techniques they use. There is ample to learn from the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the competition.

By closely researching successful social media accounts, blogs, websites, and email campaigns, businesses can gain a more insightful understanding of the ecommerce landscape. Analysing the competition can guide a business in its strategy and help them decide which direction to take.

Data Security

The uptake of eCommerce raises concerns about security threats. This is one of the most critical ecommerce challenges. There is a looming threat of hackers and fraudsters attacking the host server and not just stealing confidential data but also introducing viruses.

Breach of credit and debit card details has become common news, and such lapses directly affect the trust of a consumer. Phishing is yet another threat where hackers pose as business and ask for sensitive information from their customers. Several users are increasingly concerned about the ecommerce websites’ capability to effectively shield their personal identity as well as the security of the transaction details.

Solution

A security first approach has to be a priority for every business operating in the digital space to retain the reputation of the brand and attract frequent customers. Some steps to safeguard the data of the business and its customers include switching to HTTPS protocols, using credible third party payment processing systems, and obtaining a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) accreditation. Firewall software and plugins that shelter from SQL injections and cross-site scripting are also effective solutions for evading suspicious networks while allowing reliable traffic onto the website.

Final Thoughts

To overcome these eCommerce challenges, businesses should operate as modern omnichannel retailers. They should focus on turning data into insights, knowledge, and guidance for market leadership. Inspiring shoppers and driving loyalty with personalisation at scale can work in their favour and can help support their brand, business model, and international expansion.

In this highly competitive world, entrepreneurs need to use smart digital retail practices to address the ecommerce challenges facing online businesses with the right set of tools. Finally, all of this must be backed up by strong digital leadership, providing clarity and support with the right resources to help a business become a market leader.

#ecommerce marketing digital technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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Ecommerce has a dark foreboding secret

Ecommerce has a dark foreboding secret, and there are reasons people like to keep it that way. If the truth got out then a lot of work and effort, to say nothing of strategies and employment could easily be perceived for what they are, redundant, irrelevant and unnecessary, they would be terminated.

So what is this poisoned chalice, that we should all be worried about? Quite simply there is little or no loyalty in ecommerce anymore. We are not making such a sweeping statement without acknowleging that there are several grey areas, that we shall come to. So putting instant disagreement aside, let us look at an ordinary person on an ordinary day. They are not, like the beautiful image portrayed by the advertising, sophisticated, mature, highly-organised individuals, that have consciously made a decision to visit your site today to buy something. That’s not to say they won’t, but like muscle memory, their choice to do so can be a far more mundane reason such as they don’t know where else to go, yet. Many marketers practise hard to ensure this remains so.

People or let’s call them consumers, that can organise their lives proficiently are rare, but then we all know life has this habit of coming along and destroying the best laid plans in an instant anyway. Kids for example, as every parent on the planet knows all too well. But for all of us with or without them, there are millions of reasons consumers don’t do what you most desire them to do – which is come and spend their hard earned pennies with you, because something else comes up. Phone calls, friends, work, TV they must watch, shows they must see, places they have to be, even the weather etc the list is endless. All of which destroys your hopes and dreams, and sometimes aspirations too.

Consider the proposition that your website offers. For many businesses these days it is their entire store front, as bricks and mortar outlets have stiff competition from those that can use the cost of such overheads to invest in better marketing on all descriptions instead. That’s not to say the stats say that is the best option. No matter the size of your enterprise, be it huge or tiny, consider yourself as if you are fishing on the river bank, the fish potential consumers. Some retailers have huge trawlers with massive nets and others merely a drop-line and sinker – just starting out. Regardless of where you are on that spectrum before you are a myriad of consumers all swimming about, and either instinctively or when they’re hungry they will be attracted by your lure or bait and eventually take a nibble. But you always have to put them back in the water. If they feel like they enjoyed your offering you hope they’ll be back, either returning blindly or with blinkers, away from the millions of other hooks in the water offering every inducement known to mankind. The case for pro-active marketingAs any email service provider will advocate, instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you can beat the rest by offering the products ahead of the competition. A huge benefit of doing this is the price point you can use. An email from you alone, offers opportunity to enjoy that human frailty of less scrutiny in checking price, the decision is often simply do I like it, need it, want it or not, without ever getting the the second phase, which is “I wonder if it’s cheaper somewhere else”. We are not advocating you do this blindly and continuously, lest it return to bite you.Marketers tend to perceive that as consumers will see this as detrimental to future shopping, that once a consumer feels ripped-off, they won’t shop with that retailer again. But nevertheless they often do but it because despite this they do continue to shop with you, but you have planted the seeds of doubt as to whether they should shop around on price first. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is the preserve of just other-world sites, ordering from unscrupulous companies or Johny foreigner, as you’d be wrong. There are plenty of house-hold names out there that try it on ever so subtly now and again, we’ve all been a victim.“My style”, “my brand” or “my quality” perceived as the cause of continued custom. Those facets maybe, but again part of the dark secret, the consumer suffers from that human trait of apathy, laziness and tiredness. They can’t be bothered to go and find it somewhere else. One of the causes of this is the fog of Google searches, and the volume of rubbish that gets in your way when you think you’ve entered something so simply into the search term only to find everyone and their dog suddenly want a piece of you, wholly unrelated to what you actually wanted in the first place. Remember your consumer’s distractions? Well, that’s another example.The stats for email marketing offer all ecommerce retailers proof that it is without doubt the undisputed leader in go-to sales vehicles. Coming back to the fishing analogy, while you can look up and down the river bank and see all the lines in the water as far as the eye can see, who has got the better bait, better position, sophisticated techniques all in play, nothing is better than going directly the that fish lurking on it’s own and dangling your offer, without competition, right in front if it. So what then would be the worst things to come out of doing something seemingly so obviously successful? What they want – not what you want to sellSo you have a beautiful, sleek, sophisticated “fishing net” ready to snare your catch as it passes, by which we include omnichannel opportunities, advertising, triggered response opportunities for email, marketing and promotional email offers and incentives, personalised content on your site for each viewer, or a fantastic distribution facility that can have the product on their doorstep in 24 hours. The answer is predictive personalisation. This is the art of using every facet of data collected through your platform, including much not stored even by the most advanced platforms themselves, but rather by specialist plugins that retrieve the information for you, analysing it to identify what each individual unique consumer is most likely to buy next and when. Imagine knowing exactly what each person will buy next, and having a means to be able to present that item to them, before anyone or anything else in the world gets a look in. Abhorring segmentation, as the practice of shutting the wrong people in a room together always works, not.Only you have the benefit of the knowledge of everything going off on your website. There is a pattern created by each individual consumer’s activity, each visit for example typically leaves 100 impressions, Each suggest a strategy both rare and personal to that one person. Not forgetting what they don’t look at or fail to be attracted to at that instant is equally important to clear the way for things that are.You, as opposed to any of your competitors, have the benefit of their buying history. The two elements combined, show a unique profile that a clever predictive analytics algorithm can use to rank every SKU on your site, in order of what products that person will buy, but for it being offered to them. Now flip that on it’s head and consider it from the customer perspective. What will be the effect of showing them what they want, when they want it? No hullabaloo, no shouting, not waving your arms around in an attempt to attract their attention, no subversion of what they would otherwise have done. It amounts to the ultimate expression of customer appreciation. So if you are going to keep someone coming back, do you think it will it be because of a. the retailer that simply offered them a product because they bought it before, or b. the retailer who watches the every bit of shopping data to accurately anticipate their next choice? McKinsey stats illustrating it is twenty times the volume of sales proves that b. the latter is the only possible choice.The fastest growing software, having the greatest effect on ecommerce business is predictive personalisation (PPS). SwiftERM, a Microsoft Partner company, is a Saas that delivers permanently unique and personal product selections for each individual consumer, direct to their inbox, to get there first. Because it is PPS software, it is 100% automatic, offering a previously unheard of degree of gross margin, as it eliminates all the overheads associated with employing stafffor this part of your marketing. Made all the more enjoyable by it not being diluted by a myriad of mouths to feed. Finally It is important if not critical to distinguish between segmenting or triggered or omnichannel ESP software that obfuscates this issue, implying segmentation and indeed anything but PPS is the same thing. Like the Cern Collider is to a yo-yo.

#ecommerce #marketing #technology #personalisation #loyalty

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swifterm · 2 years

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Gartner underline relevant content

Gartner underline relevant content. The rapid creation and retrieval of relevant content and knowledge on both your communications and website are critical to improving the overall customer experience. Application leaders should follow these seven best practices to drive improvement in content and knowledge delivery for their customers.

Successful nurturing of customer relationships requires insightful, relevant and timely communications across multiple channels (such as face-to-face, phone, web, email, social media and SMS) and over a host of traditional and new devices.

Organisations often have very complex content/information architecture and service-case workflows. This makes it difficult for your customers to find relevant information quickly. The rapid creation and retrieval of relevant content and knowledge are key attributes of leading enterprises. In this research, we’ll share seven best practices for application leaders. A common challenge that organisations face is they often need a combination of all the tools and best practices to achieve the goal, instead of only using one or two.

Knowledge management traditionally has not shown up on any user surveys as either a business or a technology priority. However, as recently reported in “Survey Analysis: Customer Experience Maturity and Investment Priorities” a significantly bigger proportion of survey respondents indicating higher CX maturity expects to increase investment in knowledge management tools for CX improvement projects, compared with those at lower maturity levels.

Implement Outside-In Design Thinking by Leveraging Techniques to Understand the Goals of Both Internal and External Users

Design thinking is an established methodology for product design, but is relatively new to IT-provisioned solutions. It uses an outside-in approach, requiring the designer to walk a mile in the user’s shoes, and goes further than traditional user-centered design, requiring true empathy with the user. This level of understanding can only be created by observation, and data-driven design is a core tenet of design thinking.

When designing customer-facing applications or web portals, organisations often design the functionalities and information architecture based on the understanding of content and knowledge structure from the organisation’s point of view, without the customers’ goals in mind.

Traditional IT solutions typically solve a problem that is narrow in scope to ensure an effective solution. Design thinking doesn’t focus on solving a problem — it focuses on achieving a goal. This subtle shift opens up the opportunity space and allows designers to derive more creative solutions that provide more value or ease of use for the end customer, and that are not constrained by the bounds of traditional problem solving.

Emotions are part of the customer experience, and designers must be able to empathize with the user’s situation and enumerate the users’ emotional states (frustration, disillusionment, anxiety, etc.). This is done by a process of:

Observing — Viewing people and their behaviors in context. Identifying patterns of behavior and potential meaning, which are often different things.

Engaging — Interviewing, but in an open, unstructured way. Looking for how people understand and explain what they do, and the stories they tell.

Asking someone to go through their tasks, carefully watching what they do and asking them for explanations. Ask about the task, its context and how they understand it Watching and listening - The understanding and analysis of the user may be enhanced with the use of empathy maps. Three pragmatic approaches to empathy include workshops, interviews and design sessions.

Design thinking also requires a collaborative, open and iterative approach. Agile design methodologies employ such a model, but design thinking adds an unrestricted brainstorming activity, where many ideas are tossed around. No ideas are bad ideas, and people are encouraged to think creatively. Depending on the culture of the organisation, this may not be easy to implement and may require a great deal of change management

Through its use of empathy, brainstorming, iteration and collaboration, design thinking can improve the user experience — and therefore the customer experience — of technology. Application leaders should follow the example set by product teams to improve overall customer experience by use of design thinking.

Increase Information Consistency and Ease-of-Access by Consolidating Customer-Facing and Agent-Facing Knowledge Bases

A customer service representative spends, on average, 20% of his or her time understanding questions, searching for correct information and responding to the customer. While employees struggle to target answers to questions, customers face the same challenge.

Many customer service organisations tackle this challenge by deploying or upgrading customer-facing and agent-facing knowledge bases. Improved delivery of contextual knowledge to an employee or customer reduces a provider’s time to answer by 20% to 80%, raising competency and satisfaction.

However, it is not unusual that organisations deploy multiple knowledge bases and create islands of knowledge. These may be for:

Different engagement channels (for example, one for interactive voice response [IVR], one for mobile in-app support and one for virtual customer assistant).

Customers’ direct access (for example, for web self-service).

Industry partners (for example, for repair and maintenance partners or field service contractors).

For some, there is also a treasure trove of knowledge captured in customer service call recordings and collaboration instances between members of discrete teams such as field service technicians, and in customer postings on social media sites. The market overall is only in the early stages of capturing and indexing these kinds of unstructured “shadow” or tribal sources for knowledge management purposes, and incentivising its contribution. Curating this input will be critical to integrating it into a company’s broader knowledge ecosystem.

In large companies, there can be dozens of disparate systems where knowledge is created, stored and retrieved. The proliferation of disparate applications leads to silos of corporate knowledge and an often frustrating user experience for customer service employees.

Application leaders should look at this disparate landscape of knowledge bases and evaluate a path for rationalising the number of knowledge systems by consolidating around key providers where specialty functionality isn’t truly required. We estimate that enterprises that undertake enterprisewide knowledge consolidation projects can lower knowledge management application maintenance costs by 15% to 40%. It will improve the speed of knowledge being authored and released to multiple channels, shorten the time of the training of machine learning or the natural language processing engine, and increase the accuracy rate of the content.

Lowering the cost will depend on having a backbone knowledge management infrastructure in place that is scalable, shareable but compartmentalised by role/user type, and globally searchable across many channels, such as machines, mobile devices, kiosks, websites, communities and social media. For many, the goal of consolidating to a single knowledge management system may be both financially and politically unrealistic. In these environments, the more practical approach will be to leverage system federation to establish a single, “logical” content hub where all relevant content is available over the appropriate API(s) among a rationalised number of systems. Reducing this number to only a few common systems will also support a customer-centric and employee-centric approach to the knowledge management discipline to deliver consistent, contextual knowledge to employees and customers at any channel.

It is also important to know how often employees just ask their colleagues, rather than searching knowledge bases. Collaboration and the tools to enable it are both critical. For example, using a tool like Slack, employees can query a CRM system to get information into a persistent group chat channel so the team can have a dialogue around it.

Select Knowledge Management Solutions to Better Expose Corporate and Community-Generated Knowledge to Internet Search Tools

This challenge can be overcome by selecting knowledge solutions, customer and partner community solutions with search engine optimisation (SEO) capabilities.

In addition, an active community environment will help. Active communities generate a large depth and breadth of variety and scale of knowledge. Search engines pick up on exact phrasing, which customers contribute to the community when they ask a question on a particular forum. Search engines also identify the most frequently visited sites. This means that as organisations drive more customers to the community through search engines or through their own marketing, sales and customer service teams, the likelihood of the customers being exposed as a reliable source of knowledge increases.

For some, it will be important to curate these knowledge sources to ensure that sensitive or competitive information isn’t inadvertently exposed. This can be managed by making a select few items harder to find or only findable if the customer has the specific error code or password.

Enhance Site and App Search by Leveraging Semantic Analytics and Natural Language Processing Capabilities

It is important for application leaders to develop maps of what must be searched, and the search goals of customers and employees, as part of the preparation phase of the search projects.

Use Conversational AI to Allow for New Types of Conversational Engagement When Customers Search for Information

Application leaders and their teams spend lots of effort to improve the user experiences of customer-facing websites. Still, if the information and knowledge structure is very complex, designing the website better can help, but the problem doesn’t go away completely.

A virtual customer assistant (VCA) provides customers with possibilities of “shortcuts,” a way that customers can directly locate the right information without many mouse clicks and layers of navigation.

Application leaders should consider use of a conversational AI such as VCA, chatbot and smart speakers to spare customers the effort of navigating complex site structures and reduce customer reliance on expensive phone or face-to-face support channels. A great VCA offers more than just information. It enriches the customer experience, assists the customer throughout the online interaction and, in some cases, processes transactions through automation and integration with back-end systems.

Contextualise Experiences With Targeted, Relevant Content Across All Channels of Interaction

Personalisation is now a strategic imperative. It has evolved from a “nice to have” to a “need to have.” Personalisation can be achieved with the help of dedicated, “stand-alone” engines or as part of your overall digital experience platform (see “Defining the Digital Experience Platform”). Personalised, relevant and contextual information can save lots of time for customers. Customers also expect organisations to know them and communications to be tailored to their specific context.

Contextualisation of experiences is possible through accessing a multitude of insights. You will then be able to increase engagement with target audiences with the help of the resultant holistic understanding these collective insights provide. In essence, there are four primary areas of insight: environment, identity, community and intent. Overall, such sources can be broken down into historic information about the customer, and information that pertains to the real-time, current interaction (e.g., device, apps, browser sessions, social sharing, and locations) to form the basis of the present context. It is critical to do both — to unify what is known about customers across usually separate (offline and digital) channels to gain a greater understanding of them and deliver engaging experiences based on that understanding.

Organisations should shift the communications initiative from a tactical, “push” perspective to a strategic focus on the customer’s perspective. Emphasize relevant customer communications with high continuity across all channels and all phases of the customer’s lifetime journey. Move content from single-channel to multichannel distribution, from multichannel to cross-channel communication, and optimize customer communications for digital channels. As an application leader you should:

Take a “ready, fire, aim” approach to launching your efforts to contextualize by collecting data and insights from your digital channels, even if you don’t yet know how to use them.

Use design thinking and begin with the organisational outcomes you want to achieve. Then identify the insights you need to collect to achieve them. Then start delivering successively improving experiences based on those insights.

Build your reservoir of insights incrementally over time. Begin with the data you already have. Start small and simple, and build complexity as required. You will, for example, be more adept in mastering multivariate testing when you have experimented with less complex attempts using A/B testing.

Un-intrusive and natural-feeling product recommendations, serving similarities within product pages and personalised bespoke merchandising are key to retaining, gaining and upselling to the new age consumer. The fastest growing software, having the greatest effect on the fashion industry is predictive personalisation (PPS). But if you say the word “personalisation” to your email service provider (ESP) then within a few sentences you will see the word segmentation. This is because they don’t have the technology to compete, and would wish to gaslight you.

But there are solutions, purely using predictive personalisation analytics such as SwiftERM, a Microsoft Partner company, which delivers permanently unique and personal product selections for each individual consumer, based on that individual’s buying history and impressions, and exclude what anyone else does. It is one thing to personalise a web page for their viewing pleasure, but too late if the consumer has already been approached and more critically bought the product, that it was known they were in the market for, elsewhere because someone else go to them first.

One of the lesser appreciate benefits of PPS software is that it is 100% automatic, offering a previously unheard of degree of margin, as it eliminates all the overheads associated with this requirement for this element of the marketing spectrum. The huge margin enjoyed in the fashion industry is no longer diluted but a myriad of mouths to feed. It commonly works both as a complement or replacement to promotional and marketing software.

Evidence

Results presented as part of Gartner’s “Survey Analysis: Customer Experience Maturity and Investment Priorities, 2019” research are based on a Gartner study conducted to understand priorities, investment plans and situations faced in customer experience initiatives. This primary research was conducted online from 12 March through 2 April 2019 among 244 respondents in North America, Western Europe and APAC.

Companies were screened for having a minimum of $50 million worldwide in annual revenue for FY18 and a minimum of 250 employees worldwide. The sample represents organisations in the U.S. (n = 53), Canada (n = 11), the U.K. (n = 62), India (n = 29) Singapore (n = 26) and Australia/New Zealand (n = 63).

To qualify, respondents had to be leading the setting of strategic objectives and priorities for at least one CX-related project activity (85%) or on a team responsible for meeting the strategic objectives and priorities (15%). They must also be knowledgeable about business priorities and/or business benefits for at least one customer experience project in the past year.

Quotas were applied for countries, industries, role, involvement in CX and annual revenue.

The Gartner study was developed collaboratively by Gartner Analysts and the Primary Research Team.

Disclaimer: Results do not represent “global” findings or the market as a whole but reflect sentiment of the respondents and companies surveyed.

#ecommerce #marketing #technology #personalisation

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swifterm · 2 years

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The true value of customer retention

The true value of customer retention. Studies show that acquiring a new customer costs a business between four and 10 times more than it takes to retain a customer. This is caused by the amount of effort it takes to find, target and successfully sell a new consumer a product or service when compared to selling something to a customer who has already previously purchased something from a company.

Econsultancy reports that 82% of companies they surveyed agreed that customer retention costs less to execute than customer acquisition. However, Econsultancy also found that companies were more focused on acquisition marketing. In addition, 63% of marketers surveyed by Kissmetrics stated that customer acquisition was the most important advertising goal for their company.

Acquiring customers will always be a vital aspect in the growth and continued profitability of any organisation. But retaining customers has a major impact on the bottom line due to its relatively low cost, high return on investment and long-term benefits.

When evaluating your acquisition efforts, consider calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC). This metric is determined by dividing all marketing expenses used to acquire new customers by the number of customers acquired during the period in which the money was spent. This can be used to create a measurable number concerning the acquisition of both new customers and the return business of retained customers in order to see the differences in marketing for your individual brand.

The Value of Retained Customers

Keeping a previously acquired customer has been shown to not only typically cost less in terms of marketing, but has also been shown to result in higher value purchases. According to Invespcro, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. In addition, the average repeat buyer spends 33% more than a new customer. When combined with lowering the cost of marketing efforts, the higher spending of return customers can result in a greater ROI for a company in the long term.

Retained customers are also shown to gain value over time, as Annexcloud reports that the typical return customer will spend 67% more by their third year of buying from a business than in their first six months. This means that long-term customer retention, not simply enticing a second purchase, will yield results that increase in profitability over time.

As discussed by Optimove, the specific value of a retained customer can be determined by collecting data regarding total purchases, retention marketing expenses, customer acquisition costs and the general overhead of the efforts made to retain customers. Determining the price of your business’ customer retention efforts can help you optimize your retention marketing and balance your budget regarding both acquisition and retention efforts.

The Value of Retained Customers

The Competition of Lost Customers

It is important to note that a previous customer who does not return for another purchase is most likely to have turned to another company within the industry. According to Kissmetrics, 61% of consumers will go to a competitor after ending a business relationship.

There are a variety of reasons why a consumer may be lost to a business; however, many studies find that poor customer service is a frequent reason. In addition, persuading a lost customer to return to a business is often very difficult. According to Accenture, 68% of customers will not return to a company once they have left out of dissatisfaction. As such, it is vital that companies make an effort to better understand what will encourage their customers to remain with them for future purchases in order to avoid losing them to the competition.

While traditional loyalty programs are having less effect on customer retention, Socialannex surveys show that 62% of customers believe that the brands to which they are most loyal are not doing enough to reward them for their loyalty. As such, brands must rethink what is a valuable reward for loyalty and what can make their audiences feel known and valued so that they give the competition less consideration when it comes time for another purchase.

Targeting Audiences for Retention and Acquisition

While both retaining and acquiring customers benefit a company in their own ways, the ability to provide both audiences with effective marketing is more crucial than ever. Today, technology allows for a greater understanding of individual consumers for targeted marketing and a single customer view.

Whether an individual is a longtime customer looking for a new product or a potential customer looking for a company that will best suit their needs, being able to create a single customer view and market directly to the unique interests and demands of an audience member will play a crucial role in future acquisition and retention.

For strategies on how to encourage loyalty and successfully retain your customers, read https://www.swifterm.com/getting-and-keeping-customers-through-digital-marketing/

Find New Ways to Retain Your Customers

Competition for customers and the willingness of pre-existing consumers to turn to your competitors is higher than ever in the modern age. But engaging and retaining customers is still possible through new strategies that leverage modern technology especially personalisation..

Originally published at https://www.swifterm.com on February 20, 2022.

#marketing ecommerce technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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Fashion ecommerce, personalisation is key

Fashion ecommerce, personalisation is key. With increasing competition for online spend, brands are seeing personalisation as more crucial than ever. The fashion industry, with its many sizes, collections, and styles, is a lot more complicated and overwhelming to consumers than most other retail categories. With all these complexities of the industry, it is no surprise that conventional approaches to personalisation are falling short.

The Importance of Personalisation

Customers’ expectations of digital shopping are at an all-time high. Covid-19 has meant there’s more ecommerce traffic than ever before and there’s also a huge amount of choice. So by implementing a personalisation strategy, you’re removing the complexity of decision-making for the customer and the complexity of manually guessing and updating, making it a two-fold benefit.

Retailers like ASOS do it really well and are market leaders in it. But a lot of other retailers, including some big names, are struggling with the basics.

Successful ecommerce brands must understand that providing a seamless experience is key and that means empowering the customer and helping them navigate their online shopping journey. A seamless user experience is essential to e-commerce success in a post-pandemic world, but it’s the shopper journeythat determines how successful the purchase experience will be.

Data, AI, Marketing Automation and Personalisation

An essential component of any successful marketing campaign is data, and most ecommerce platforms have a wealth of data at their disposal. Without proper oversight, this can be a ticking timebomb for brands.With recent surveys indicating that 90% of retailers have implemented some form of personalisation strategy, however many are lacking the technology to make tracking customer preferences and behaviours a truly seamless and automated process.

Out of those retailers who have implemented a personalisation strategy, almost half (44%) are already recommending products based on a customer profile sadly many of these still use segmenting with is not personalisation, and over a third (36%) are personalising the product search functionality on their websites. This is helping to enhance the experience, not just for mainstream consumers, but also more diverse customer groups with different needs and shopping behaviours.

Meanwhile, data-driven dynamic content is being used by 37% of retailers to actively target and influence browsers as they shop online.

A key part of this is the use of AI (35%) to help identify preferences and trends, whilst marketing automation flows (31%) turn insight into effective communications and campaigns, using advanced technologies like SwiftERM.

A third (34%) of retailers are switching on to the fact that using tech to obtain a single view of the customer is central to delivering personal experiences seamlessly across channels.

Retailers must ensure that consumers have the content and experiences they want as part of their journey through the purchase funnel, ensuring the right information is being provided at the right time. Brands also need to make sure that they are capturing this data in a standardised way across channels and locations.

How to apply personalisation in ecommerce?

Ecommerce marketers need to identify current challenges and start with intelligence. Your e-commerce platform should be able to tap into the rich streams of data at your fingertips. Use your database to segment and manage your consumers. Data should be used to your advantage, to help you identify your top shoppers, reach them with relevant offers and personalise experiences. Imagine being able to automatically deliver the exact products that are most likely to be bought by each individual consumer on your database to them in an email every month. the returns are phenomenal, and significantly higher than any other Martech solution. The strategy you choose to implement will have an impact on where shoppers see you, so make sure you’re engaging with your audiences in the best way possible.

Conclusion

It’s clear that technology is critical in enabling personalised experiences, especially collecting the correct data on your customers and using it at the crucial moment of the shopper journey. But the key thing to remember about personalisation is to be as customer-focused as possible.

Retailers should strive to get more value out of their investment by ensuring customer-facing options are more closely aligned to audiences, their behaviours and needs. Ecommerce platforms that offer 360-degree marketing can help plug gaps and ensure AI, marketing automation and personalisation work in harmony.

As personalisation is becoming more important every day, brands need to pay attention if they want to be successful. If your customer experiences have been uninspired and underwhelming, it’s time to get personal.

#fashion #ecommerce #marketing #technology #personalisation

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swifterm · 2 years

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The wine world in the year to come

The wine world in the year to come. The wine industry is emerging from yet another chaotic year of conducting business in the middle of a global pandemic. Between catastrophic weather events (including California wildfires, devastating April frosts in France and Italy, and flooding in western Germany) and global supply chain disruptions, plus the growing threat of price inflation, instability has often felt like the only constant.

Despite it all, however, the outlook for this coming year is far from bleak. With restaurants steadily on the rebound and off-premise sales continuing their post-pandemic boom, the industry is once again proving its endless capacity for creativity, adaptability, and resilience. “There are many reasons for optimism,” says Ian Downey, the executive vice president of Winebow Imports. “The market will be more responsive to the bold, the new, and the innovative in the year to come.”

In that indomitable spirit, explore six key trends that will continue to shape the wine world’s trajectory – whatever else the year may bring.

Supply Chain Issues and Price Inflation Wreak Havoc—With an Unexpected Upside

Poll a cross-section of wine professionals across all sectors of the industry, and the consensus is unanimous: Supply chain issues will continue to disrupt all aspects of the trade, causing inevitable price inflation and shortages for familiar brands.

While we’ve already seen these issues impact the Champagne market, fueling fears of inevitable gaps through the holidays and beyond, experts expect the effects to be much more widespread. “Our industry is no different than others that have been impacted by supply chain difficulties, and we are starting to see inflationary prices from our winery partners that will come into effect,” explains Rocco Lombardo, the president of Wilson Daniels. “We’re definitely headed into an interesting time with regards to managing costs and margin structure.”

Faced with rising prices, shipping delays, and limited inventory, buyers will increasingly be forced to look beyond the usual tried-and-true options. While that’s bound to create no shortage of headaches, Christopher Struck, the beverage director for ilili’s New York and Washington, D.C. locations, predicts that the situation will incentivize restaurants to turn to boutique wholesalers that carry alternatives to the usual large brand names.

“In my experience, smaller distributors will be more inclined to hustle and get you what you need,” explains Struck. “They also tend to work with independent, conscientious growers that better align with my ethos as a buyer.”

Vanessa Conlin, MW, the chief wine officer at Wine Access, agrees. In her view, the coming year will set the stage for up-and-coming regions and producers to gain newfound visibility and market share. “These shortages actually offer a chance to get lesser-known wines in front of consumers who would have otherwise reached for familiar things like Burgundy or Napa Cabernet.” As these European benchmark items become more difficult to secure, “we’re going to see other regions making a play to fill the gap,” says Conlin. That’s welcome news for regions eager to break through. Stylistic Categories Continue to BlurThe world of wine has long conformed to a fixed set of stylistic categories, grouped primarily according to color. But as a younger generation of boundary-pushing winemakers across the globe explore an array of alternative winemaking approaches and techniques, those once-stable classifications are beginning to blur.“We’re seeing more and more people making these experimental wines that don’t have a firm definition,” explains Chris Leon, the owner of Leon & Son retail shop in Brooklyn, New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He draws a parallel between the previous fashion for genre-defying macerated whites, or orange wines, and a recent interest in co-ferments, produced by fermenting multiple grape varieties (both red and white alike) together in one vessel.Bright, fresh, and eminently crushable, the resulting wines successfully blur the line between pale red and dark rosé, but couldn’t be more attuned to the current “chillable red” zeitgeist. According to Leon, we can expect to see more of this stylistic ambiguity in the future. “The rise of this style of wine feels very apropos at a time when people are increasingly willing to sidestep strict classifications or labels and simply take things for what they are,” he says.

Natural Wine Expands Into New MarketsThere once was a time when the natural wine counterculture operated within a few clusters of activity confined to large coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. With a growing number of small-scale, natural-focused importers, however, the movement is quickly making inroads into parts of the country that had long been dominated by large national distributors and corporate-owned brands. Case in point: the Raleigh-based distributor Kellogg Selections, run by former New York sommelier Jeff Kellogg. Emblematic of this larger shift, he moved south in 2017 with the goal of introducing independent and, in many cases, low-intervention producers (such as Beaujolais’ Mee Godard or California’s Birichino Winery) to consumers across the Carolinas. “I knew there was a real thirst among consumers here to drink things other than Napa as a category, but there weren’t enough people filling that void,” explains Kellogg. “My favorite part of selling these kinds of wines in the Carolinas is that I’m able to introduce natural wines to people for the first time.

I get to provide that experience all the time to buyers who were previously working in places that just made sure they were checking off the usual boxes of California Chardonnay or Argentinian Malbec.” With interest in the category steadily expanding across the United States—“We don’t see interest in natural wine slowing down at all in 2022,” observes Sally Stewart of Colorado’s Denver Wine Merchant—the movement has officially passed from fringe to an essential pillar of wine’s new mainstream. As that evolution continues to unfold, the naturalist gospel is poised to convert a whole new demographic of consumers, many of whom never considered themselves wine drinkers. “If we’re talking about the market in our region, so many people are coming to wine from other beverage categories, especially craft beer,” says Kellogg. “In my mind, natural wine has so much more room to grow.” Sparkling Wine Finally Becomes an Everyday StapleAccording to off-premise sales data from Nielsen, the sparkling wine category grew by more than 13 percent among American drinkers over the past two years—an upward momentum that shows no sign of abating anytime soon, even with the threat of Champagne shortages and price hikes.

Unsurprisingly, Champagne sales have dominated the premium sector of the sparkling market, with sales between January and August jumping 11.9 percent compared to the same period in 2019, according to Reuters. But value-driven options have fueled much of the category’s surge in popularity. “We’re seeing the same dynamism with our Prosecco Superiore, our Crémant d’Alsace, and our premium domestic sparkling wine,” reports Lombardo. As drinkers gravitate towards these more affordable forms of fizz, they’re finally knocking the category off its “holidays and special occasions” pedestal and reclaiming bubbles as part of the everyday drinking repertoire. Though still extremely niche in terms of national sales, one alternative sparkling wine style has played an outsize symbolic role in that transformation: cloudy, crown-capped pétillant-natural. “There’s been a steady interest in pet-net throughout the year, not just on holidays,”says Eric Moorer, the sales director at Washington, D.C.’s natural-focused Domestique Wine. If his experience on the sales floor had taught him anything, it’s that the category’s appeal has yet to peak, helping to make the wider bubbly landscape more democratic.

“As somebody who has always championed sparkling wine as an everyday wine, pét nat has made that conversation much easier for me,” he says. “People no longer believe that sparkling wine is for Fridays and Saturday nights; they’re popping open bottles of pét-nat on Mondays and Tuesdays.” Ecommerce Gets CreativeEven as the world has largely reopened, online wine sales have remained strong. But the future of the ecommerce sector now faces an important challenge: namely, how to find creative ways to drive digital engagement and retain their recently acquired customer base.

The key to maintaining that growth? Convincing customers that shopping for wine online can be every bit as gratifying as seeking recommendations from a trusted neighborhood wine merchant. “We gained a lot of new customers during the pandemic, so a lot of what we did over the past year was try to set ourselves up to deliver a better experience than customers were able to get in a traditional store or retail environment,” says AJ Resnick, the chief experience officer at Wine Access.Critically, as Joshua Lincoln, the senior commercial director—Europe, for Vivino, points out, digital platforms enjoy a distinct advantage: a treasure trove of data with which to customise the consumer’s experience. To him, capitalising on that ability will be the wave of the future for the ecommerce space. “We’ve got more data than any store manager could ever keep in their head, so we can actually be way more personalised than any single individual,” he explains.

“The real winners in the e-commerce space over the coming five to 10 years will be the ones like us, who focus heavily on this aspect of personalisation.”Eschewing Formulaic Restaurant Wine Lists for Experimental By-The-Glass ProgramsWith prices rapidly rising, the pre-pandemic trend of smaller, more focused wine lists will surely extend into 2022. At the same time, though, we can also expect beverage programs to become exponentially more experimental, moving beyond the established templates and reference points that were once considered the industry’s standard. In particular, as sommeliers feel increasingly empowered to depart from expectations, they’re radically reconsidering conventional wisdom about what it means to run a successful by-the-glass program.

To Dallas-based sommelier Tiffany Tobey, the glass pours she offers function as a critical form of research and development, allowing customers to explore more obscure expressions in a non-threatening and cost-effective format. “My by-the-glass program is geared towards a completely different compilation of regions and off-the-beaten-path stuff,” she explains. “I’m offering stuff by the glass that people have never heard of before, but they’re still willing to try it because the rest of my list still contains plenty of the familiar favorites that make them feel comfortable.” At the two restaurants he oversees, Struck has adopted a similar approach. “I think there’s too many self-fulfilling prophecies with beverage directors who insist that you set yourself up for failure if you don’t offer certain specific reference points by the glass,” he says. “That may have been true in the past, but not so anymore. I mean, we’ve already entered a whole new era of dining, haven’t we?”

#wine #ecommerce #technology

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swifterm · 2 years

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Metaverse marketing the essential guide

https://www.swifterm.com/metaverse-marketing-the-essential-guide/

Metaverse marketing the essential guide. Technology has been rapidly growing and shifting. We’re seeing innovations that were previously unimaginable. One of these innovations for many people includes the metaverse—a unique, immersive virtual environment that is quickly taking over the internet. You may have seen it first in science fiction movies like Ready Player One or The Matrix series, but now it is more than fiction.

With the continuous rise of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), metaverses are penetrating the internet. It is estimated that approximately 85 million users will experience AR or VR at least one a month in 2021. While the Metaverse isn’t exactly what sci-fi has depicted it to be, it still continues to produce unimaginable value as a new computing platform.

For one, top-tier media seems to be all in. Forbes even started a column with Cathy Hackl, a renowned tech futurist and metaverse strategist. More than that, there’s an existing fund called the metaverse Investment Fund Metaverse ATF (NYSE: META). All these point to the rising significance of metaverses right now.

And consumers seem to be catching on. The keywords “metaverse” yields 677,000 results on Google. Meanwhile, the hashtag #metaverse is widely used on Instagram, with more than 60,000 posts on the social media platform and is tweeted more than 500 times per hour on Twitter.

Understanding the Metaverse

Today, the metaverse involves a shared virtual space where users are represented by virtual avatars. These virtual worlds continue to evolve and grow based on user decisions and interactions within the space. To that effect, it mirrors the real world in that it has no “end.” It’s just a universe that continues to expand as more and more users jump in.

It’s not just a simple virtual theme park where the design is centrally planned out; nor is it just a simple game exclusively for the enjoyment of children. It’s also not a simple application you can download off the app store and “play” at your convenience. Metaverses are virtual universes that merge reality and the virtual world.

If you find that a little difficult to wrap your head around, Matthew Ball has outlined the key characteristics of metaverses:

Always active. Metaverses do not pause when you leave them, nor do they end. They just continue on indefinitely.

Exists in real time. The metaverse has a timeline that synchronizes with the real-world timing.

Players have individual agency. Players can be doing separate activities at the same time. One could just be standing still in the corner while others are interacting with each other.

Self-contained and fully functioning universe. The metaverse is a fully functioning universe that allows users to create, own, sell, and invest. Users can also be recognized and rewarded for the labor they put out in the metaverse.

Mix of different platforms. Different platforms can work together in the metaverse. For example, in the case of video games, you should be able to bring items from one game to another game.

User-generated content. Metaverses are more than just virtual spaces for users to hang out in. Users can create content that other users can also enjoy. Parallel metaverse marketing within real-life marketing

Marketing in the Metaverse

Digital marketers need to be kept up to speed with the latest technological developments. This includes understanding the metaverse and its full potential. What marketers need to understand is that metaverse is not just a trendy new thing; it seems like it is here to stay and is making its way to be the next big thing.

How can marketers adapt as this metaverse expands?

First, marketers need to keep in mind the value of millennials and Gen Zers as a target market. These generations are also avid users of some forms of metaverses, such as games like Roblox and technologies like VR. With that in mind, let’s explore how marketing can be done in the metaverse.

Create marketing experiences that tie in with real-world experiences or parallel what your brand already does in real life. For example, the AB InBev’s beer brand Stella Artois worked with Zed Run in June to create a Tamagotchi-like experience crossed with the Kentucky Derby. They did this because AB InBev’s Stella Artois is big on sponsoring sporting events, in particular horse races. Hence, creating an online platform where non-fungible token (NFT) horses are traded, raced, and bred seems like a natural entry point for them.

Immersive experience is key

You can offer virtual advertising in the metaverse. For example, Bidstack, a video game ad tech company, transitioned from working off in real-world outdoor advertising to placing ads on virtual billboards.

However, you can go beyond virtual billboards. Since metaverses are experiential and immersive in nature, it’s best to take advantage of this by offering the same immersive experience with your ads and marketing initiatives. Offer branded installations and events that users can interact with, as opposed to just placing simple ads.

We have seen early movers offer immersive experiences to their users such as a Lil Nas X concert in Roblox, the Gucci Garden experience visits, and the virtual rendition of the Washington Heights neighborhood as part of Warner Bros.’ promotion of In the Heights. Brands have recently discovered new revenue streams through collaborations with the Roblox metaverse and other metaverses.

Make collectibles available

People like collecting things, and the metaverse is yet another space for them to showcase their interests. You can make the same experience available in the metaverse by offering assets or limited-edition items that they can only collect in the metaverse.

For example, the Gucci Garden experience on Roblox offers The Collector’s Room. It allows people to collect limited Gucci items in the metaverse. Gucci, from their initial sales of the collectible items, collected 286,000,000 Robux from the game.

Engage with existing communities

Generally, people are opposed to advertising. So as brands try to penetrate the metaverse, it’s important to not show up and annoy people who are already there. More than that, you’ll need these users’ positive reception since you will be trying to market to them.

Remember that you can’t just enter a new platform without taking the new format into account. In Roblox, for example, brands gain more traction when they partner with members of the Roblox developer community in creating items and experiences. Similarly, when O2 threw a concert on Fortnite, they partnered with creators who were already experts on the Fortnite platform.

Continuously experiment

It’s an exciting time for marketers. While there are guiding principles that could inform what kind of strategies and tactics marketers can make, the metaverse remains to be a generally new platform that offers plenty of room for experimentation. Best practices have yet to be properly established, and paradigms have yet to be fully and comprehensively created. This gives marketers plenty of room to try to be unique and experimental in their approaches.

Other Unique Metaverse Examples

Dimension Studio made $6.5 million in revenues as a result of their experimentation with metaverses for fashion brands. They established a virtual production set-up that allows a user to step onto a platform, be scanned by 106 cameras, and dropped into virtual worlds to test out garments and other items. They are most known for their work on Balenciaga’s Afterworld game for Autumn/Winter 2021.

Grand Theft Auto V, an open-world sandbox game, released clothing options that were similar to what the protesters in Hong Kong wore. Hong Kong protesters were able to take their battle in the real world into the metaverse, joining many artists who have been repurposing virtual worlds for political expression.

Home decor company Houzz allows consumers to create digital photo collections of their furniture and home items. Houzz earns each time someone purchases items through their service. In 2017, they added a 3D viewer that lets users view items in 3D directly through a camera and visually incorporates them into the user’s physical space.

Google Maps demoed an AR feature of their walking directions feature. This feature offers exact visual instructions and arrows that would make it easier for users to find their way to their destinations. The user simply needs to point their camera towards the direction with which they need instructions, and the AR feature will point them in the correct direction.

The Future Is in Metaverse

Now, many companies are investing in metaverses. They are betting on it, not just for entertainment purposes, but for business and professional purposes as well.

For example, the biggest social media platform, Facebook, is seeing itself as a metaverse company in the future. Mark Zuckerberg is focused on building social metaverses and investing in Oculus, Facebook’s AR and VR technologies. In August 2021, Zuckerberg introduced a work metaverse for Oculus that allows people to work together, sit in a conference room, and interact as if in an office. This is perfect timing as more and more offices have been switching to work-from-home arrangements.

More than Facebook, Silicon Valley, in general, has been busy betting on metaverses as the internet’s next generation. There are also plenty of games currently incorporating metaverse-like elements on their platforms. For example, Fortnite and Animal Crossing allow concerts in their game.

On top of that, HTC is working its way towards business-based—instead of consumer-based—VR technology. This is a sign that VR technology is slowly becoming more than just for entertainment.

If everything mentioned above hasn’t convinced you yet, then perhaps this will: people are buying real estate in the metaverse, particularly on Earth 2. Now that’s a strong indication that the tech is here to stay.

Challenges in the Metaverse

The metaverse promises an exciting future for brands, but there are still some challenges to overcome along the way.

For one, while metaverses are gaining popularity, they can still use some more traction. Because of the technological requirements of metaverses, accessibility is an issue for it. Not everyone has access to the devices necessary to enjoy the metaverse, such as higher-end computers and VR lenses. This greatly limits the potential market for brands and hinders efforts for mass marketing.

Brands also need to be careful in navigating metaverses. Seamless integration is crucial to avoid alienating players from the brand. Because the technology is new, brands might still be having trouble finding their proper place in the metaverse and may come off as overly blunt in their messaging. Plan your placements well and make sure that it feels natural and well-integrated in the metaverse.

There are also still a lot of misunderstandings surrounding metaverses. People often think of them as a simple game for children. Not everyone understands the value of metaverses, so brands may risk not being taken seriously for their efforts in establishing a presence within these platforms.

Data privacy and security remain to be a challenge in the metaverse. With new technology comes the need for more evolved security measures. This requires building new methods of data privacy and protection where there was none. For instance, personal verification might require more data from users, thereby increasing data privacy risks.

Lastly, because metaverses are free for all, brands need to be careful in protecting their image. The more control users have in a metaverse, the higher the likelihood that your brand might appear next to questionable content. There’s also the risk of getting your placements vandalized or disrespected by users. This is why it’s important to be seamless, mindful, and precise with your marketing strategies so that users can feel good about sharing the virtual space with you and engaging with you there.

Ultimately, metaverses offer a promising future for computing and the internet. Even more so, they offer plenty of room for innovations for marketers and advertisers alike. Despite these challenges, the opportunity to be experimental, provide an immersive experience, and be innovative triumphs.

The metaverse promises an exciting future for brands, but there are still some challenges to overcome along the way.

#metaverse #ecommerce #marketing

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swifterm · 2 years

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The benefits of personalisation for ecommerce

The benefits of personalisation for ecommerce. Ecommerce Personalisation is one of the most powerful tools there is to increase conversions and drive sales. If you’re not using it yet, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. Research by Accenture shows that businesses lost $756 billion due to lack of trust and poor personalisation.

Personalisation should be an integral part of your ecommerce strategy. When used efficiently, it will transform customer interactions and create a seamless and consistent experience that feels relevant and enjoyable. If done right, it will lead to more conversions, higher order values, returning customers, and overall improved trust in your brand.

WHAT IS ECOMMERCE PERSONALISATION?

Before we dive into the details of Ecommerce Personalisation, let’s define what it is:

Ecommerce personalisation is the process of dynamically showing each visitor individualised offers, such as product recommendations or other content, based on their previous behaviour, demographics, purchase history, and other personal data.

As online merchants seek to engage shoppers, drive sales, and increase repeat purchases, personalisation has proven to be one of the most efficient tools in the marketing toolbox. While it comes in many different forms, it’s always about providing a shopping experience that feels timely and relevant to each individual.

Related reading: Why you need a personalisation program as well

BENEFITS OF ECOMMERCE PERSONALISATION

Offering a personalised shopping experience all through the buying cycle does require some work. It takes thoughtfulness and the proper technical tooling to create experiences that wow people from the first touchpoint and through what hopefully becomes a lasting relationship. So is it worth the investment? Just a brief look at stats will give you the answer: a resounding YES.

Marketers report an average increase in sales by 20% when implementing personalisation

77% of shoppers have recommended, chosen, or are even willing to pay more for a personalised experience

80% of shoppers say they’re more likely to purchase from a company offering a customised experience

And it’s not surprising, is it? Flooded as we all are with marketing messages, it takes something special for us to notice an ad or product. Only the ones that feel spot on and relevant to our specific predicament or need, will entice us to click and potentially buy.

7 ECOMMERCE PERSONALISATION TACTICS THAT WORK

If you manage to get personalisation right, you can expect giant leaps in revenue. Gartner predicts a minimum 15% profit boost for those who succeed with personalisation in ecommerce, and there really is no ceiling for how far it can take you. Just as the number of different personalisation tactics and solutions at your disposal are almost unlimited.

To find out what personalisation tactics work best for your audience, you need to combine creativity, empathy, and the right technology with continuous testing and experimentation. Below we’ve listed 7 examples of ecommerce personalisation tactics that have a proven record of driving sales.

PERSONALISED PRODUCTS RECOMMENDATIONS

When you’re browsing an online store, you will often receive suggestions on other products you might be interested in. Those are personalised product recommendations based on your browsing or purchasing behaviour. This is a powerful personalisation tactic, and it can be done in different ways, such as:

Visitors who viewed this also viewed…

Visitors who bought this also bought…

Handpicked for you…

These items are trending now…

Choosing the best way depends on the context, but it’s definitely worth doing because it works. Research by Smart Insights shows personalised product recommendations can generate 68% of total ecommerce revenue. Not bad, right? But remember this requires the consumer to have come to your site first, as you can’t tailor their selection unless they do. Which leave the door open for your competitors doing it better, and you in the doldrums.

The solution is to use predictive personalisation email solutions. Respecting the the word “email” conjures up your existing provider, but by far the majority of providers think segmentation is personalisation, and they couldn’t be further from the truth. The distinction is about 20x more return across the board in comparison, and that blows the other out the water. This unique distinct is commonly a stand-alone additional martech solution for your stack, such is the necessity for utilising such big-data

WEATHER-SENSITIVE PERSONALISATION

This is a fun and efficient approach to ensure visitors see items that feel most relevant to them. Because think about it – when are you most in the mood for shopping for chunky sweaters and rubber boots? When the sun is shining, or when it’s raining cats and dogs? By showing visitors clothing that matches the weather, fashion retailers can increase conversions. And it seems to work quite well. When Indow Windows implemented this personalisation tactic, it resulted in increased click-through and conversion rates as well as a 40% decrease in cost per lead.

TARGET ABANDONING VISITORS WITH PERSONALISED OFFERS

Cart abandonment is a challenge in online sales, and personalisation is one way to tackle it. By offering visitors at risk of abandoning the carts a personalised offer, you can often entice them to go back and fulfill their order; or at least sign up for your newsletter or some other valuable micro-conversion.

COMPILE LISTS OF RECENTLY VIEWED ITEMS

You know how it is when you’re browsing a website; you’re not always in the mood to buy something. Sometimes you just click around, have a closer look at some of the items you like, and then you move on. Reminding your visitors of the things they wanted next time they visit your shop increases your chances of catching them when they’re in the mood to purchase and making sure they don’t forget about your products.

BEST PRACTICES FOR ECOMMERCE PERSONALISATION

Ecommerce personalisation involves many moving parts and requires brands to collect, analyze, and activate big data in real-time. This is only possible with the proper tooling and architecture and when the necessary technological components are in place. These components include, but are not limited to:

Unified and accessible data

An open architecture

Automated decision logic and machine-learning

Related reading: personalisation technology whats the big deal

UNIFIED AND ACCESSIBLE DATA

Information from all touchpoints along the buying journey must be available and shared. Therefore, it’s essential to unify, streamline and integrate your marketing and ecommerce tech stack as much as possible. If not, you risk having critical data getting stuck in silos and breaking the flow of information. This can destroy the seamless and personalised experience you wish to create and ruin the customer experience.

AN OPEN ARCHITECTURE

Integrating your marketing technology, CRM, and ecommerce platform is crucial. To be agile and able to create personalised experiences quickly, you need a high level of flexibility with as little engineering time as possible. Choosing the right tools and a user-friendly setup can generate significant value by accelerating the rate of deployment.

AUTOMATED DECISION LOGIC AND MACHINE-LEARNING

Automating analysis and delivery is necessary to increase efficiency and scale operations. As the number of variations and segments increases along the experimentation roadmap, assessing the impact becomes a very data-heavy task that can only be scaled with machine learning.

Related reading: How to win at ecommerce personalisation

KEY TAKEAWAYS

People have come to want and expect a personalised brand experience, and brands who don’t offer that will miss out on sales. Numerous tactics can be used to increase conversions, sales, and the average lifetime value of your customers. Which ones are best suited to your ecommerce business depends on several factors, and the best way to find out is often through experimentation. To do that, you need a solid, technical foundation where data is unified and accessible, and the architecture of your tech is open and integrated, so you can implement automated decision logic and machine-learning at scale.

#ecommerce #marketing #technology #business #personalisation

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swifterm · 2 years

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Why you need a personalisation program as well

Why you need a personalisation program as well. Most email programs today still rely on basic CRM-based segmentation, with very little personalisation being applied according to meaningful interactions that take place on the site or app. Implementing SwiftERM predictive personalisation in addition – not instead of, creates content unique and individual to each consumer without need of any human input whatsoever. Zero staff, no coding, no design skills, or messy integrations required.

Email remains one of the most effective channels for driving sales and customer loyalty, with email usage continuing to grow year over year. However, siloed data from fragmented cross-channel marketing efforts have made it impossible to deliver emails that truly reflect the interests and needs of consumers, and especially on an individual and personal level.

Instead, most email sent still rely on basic CRM-based segmentation, with very little personalisation being applied according to the meaningful interactions that take place on the site or app. As an extension of the web experience, brands need to be able to more easily utilise personalised content in their emails, not only so they can stand out in the inbox and inspire action but also to create consistency between channels.

That’s why today, SwiftERM is excited to empower brands to experience truly inspirational results from predictive personalisation, never seen before. The way it was meant to be: personalised, real-time, and predictive.

Experience Email, with a unified personalisation solution

Built on our robust predictive analytics facility, SwiftERM allows marketers to track and incorporate important on-site activity from each individual consumer into their email campaigns. For example, what visitors are browsing for or adding to the cart at that moment – information is used to perpetuate the improvement of SKU ranking for imminent purchase of every stock item listed on your site, against each individual consumer, and likewise including whatever the response, or lack of it, is to those selections are too.

Creating a hub of all available individual engagement data – both historical and real-time – artificial intelligence is then utilised to algorithmically match products and offerings to different individuals based on their shopping activity, product affinities, cross-device behavior, and more.

And with optimisation happening at the time of email open, the most recent interactions are always reflected, ensuring relevance even after the timed send happens. As a result, web and email experiences can influence one another, a benefit existing customers of SwiftERM have already come to know and love. The necessity for a static stylesheet and a 20 fold increaseMany marketers don’t, or can’t, understand the necessity for a static stylesheet with big data. Having seen the escalation of creative facilities within email design for the past decade, at first it appears both irritating and incomprehensible that the design for predictive personalisation email content is unalterable. But the quid pro quo for this is truly astounding. The sheer volume of data being processed behind the scenes for each individual consumer is enormous. The system is processing galactic proportions, and even for the smallest retailers, which would necessitate huge resources.The necessary for ever greater precision of product selection for each consumer’s unique content, would then be prohibitive to enable a design facility too. Hence running alongside your ESP allows one to complement the other perfectly, and allows accuracy of data as these services run in tandem.But there is another reason too. Details including where the products appear on a page, their selection ranking from all SKUs, coupled with the peace enjoyed by consumers for the lack of marketing input, promotions, incentives which would otherwise cloud the ability for pure unadulterated product selection, and are all dispensed with. The marketeer, can be assured that because the whole SwiftERM process requires zero human input, that’s 100% automatic perpetually, and because you already have the stock, and warehouse, the GP (less SwiftERM) is the GP achieved, often delivering the highest ROI in marketing. https://www.swifterm.com/why-you-need-a-personalisation-program-as-well/

#Ecommerce #marketing #personalisation #@email technology #business

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swifterm · 2 years

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Personalisation vs. Segmentation distinction is everything

Personalisation vs. Segmentation distinction is everything. Personalisation is many things to many marketers. For some, it’s a business strategy that increases customer lifetime value and paves the way for profitable, sustained growth. For others, it’s a set of tactics used to boost website traffic or email open and response rates. A few marketers probably still see personalisation as a buzzword. And many also, unfortunately, still confuse personalisation with segmentation.

Personalization and segmentation, while both valuable tools for marketers, couldn’t be more different. Segmentation is grouping customers together according to identifiable characteristics. Often, these are demographic characteristics such as age, geography, or gender. Personalisation is the optimising of experiences and messages to individuals themselves — not the group they belong to.

This is perhaps easiest to understand in an in-store context. No large apparel retailer throws kids’, men’s, and women’s clothes all together. Menswear is in one section, women’s clothing is in another, and kids’ clothes might be on a different floor. Within each of these categories, there are sub-groupings: Within women’s, you’ll find petites in one area and larger sizes in another, and the kids’ clothes will be further grouped by boys and girls. Like goes with like. This is segmentation.

And when Boston Consulting Group predicted that companies fully invested in personalisation would outsell their competitors by 30%, this is absolutely not what they meant.

Personalisation is quite different. When a store associate or stylist recognizes you, asks what you’re looking for, and then brings you items particularly well-suited for your body type – and maybe even in your price range – that’s personalisation.

The Technology has Changed, but Perceptions Lag

Why then, are marketing managers and leaders so easily confused?

Partly it’s because of the technology that they’re using, and the ways in which we all tend to think about possibility. To use another analogy, if your boss were to tell you that she’s flying across the country next week, you would picture her sitting on a plane. If you were to have the same conversation with Superman, you would quite likely picture something very different.

So when a marketer is using legacy technology, and they think about personalisation, they may not be thinking about communicating with every potential customer or reader as an individual. Because with legacy technology, that’s somewhere between very, very difficult and impossible. Instead, those marketers see “personalisation” and could very well be thinking about sending guys the emails highlighting men’s clothes and sending women emails that highlight dresses.

Because with a lot of legacy technology, that’s pretty much the limit of what’s possible. The best-known marketing clouds have been built through the acquisition of channel-specific technologies. But the databases that power those clouds are not fully integrated. That makes true 1:1 personalisation, across channels and in real time, impossible. Instead, what’s possible with legacy technology, given database structures and integration limitations, pretty much stops with segmentation. So it’s understandable that at least some marketers might mistake personalisation for a fancied-up form of segmentation.

A semantic confusion is one thing, and we can debate its importance. But the deeper problem is that segmentation alone is not going to increase a brand’s customer lifetime value meaningfully or lead to the profitable, sustained growth that organizations crave.

The Personalisation Maturity Curve

Segmentation is a relatively early tactic on what we term the personalisation maturity curve. That curve begins with a single message mailing, then moves through simple forms of personalisation, such as putting someone’s name in a subject line, and segmentation. But more sophisticated strategies have a bigger impact on revenue and retention: personalised recommendations, omnichannel optimisation, and eventually, predictive personalisation. Figures in excess of 20x greater return are commonly experienced, a number that many retailers are insane to ignore.

Investopedia, a personal finance site, is the perfect example. The publisher had been hand-curating six different emails to appeal to six segments of readers. It switched to a single template in which content was assigned dynamically, based on the behaviors exhibited by users onsite and in email. This meant that each email contained precisely the content most likely to be most relevant to the reader. Year over year, Investopedia saw a 114% lift in pageviews from email and an 81% increase in sessions from email.

Eves and Gray, uses interest and behavioural data to encourage repeat purchases. Instead of relying of shoppers perception of what they think they want, E&G use SwiftERM, which relates pre-captured buying habits, with site-visit impressions using every available UTM, to identify imminent, prospective consumer purchase. Using SwiftERM predictive personalisation software, E&G are able to capture masses of additional sales, omission of PPS software would otherwise result in. Customer churn rates drop through the floor, and product returns, because consumers are being offered what they want rather than speculate on, is drastically reduced, delivering a saving not otherwise appreciated in Martech comparison. Basket values escalate too.

Customers expect personalisation. They’ve lost their tolerance for marketing messages that aren’t immediately relevant to them. They expect content, messaging, and experiences to be tailored to their interests. They expect brands to know them individually, not just their demographics. https://www.swifterm.com/personalisation-vs-segmentation-distinction-is-everything/

#ecommerce #marketing #business #technology

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