Although you may not operate from a physical store, there are still just as many costs involved with running an e-commerce business. Everyone wants their business to be successful, and that success depends on making money. As product and operational costs continue to rise, it’s essential that you keep not only your prices competitive but that you also find ways in which to increase your profits. The first strategy that comes to mind would be to find ways to boost sales or grow revenue. Although cutting operational costs is another critical way, you can put money back in your pocket.
Won’t reducing operational spending put strains on your business? Not if done strategically and practically. Costs can get out of control if not monitored. Here are some great strategies for cutting the operational costs of your e-commerce business.
1. Contract your staff
The top way in which you can reduce your operating costs is by contracting your team. While hiring a full-time employee may be necessary for certain aspects of your business, it probably isn’t for the majority of them. By contracting an employee, you can cut all sorts of costs. Firstly, you will have less to pay for wages. You can pay for exactly how many hours you require the employee to work. Beyond that, you will not have to pay benefits or holiday pay.
Tasks such as web design, admin, and social media management do not take 40 hours a week. Having a salaried employee for these areas will end up costing you way more than is necessary for these tasks. An admin assistant can jump on 30 minutes a day to answer emails. A social media manager can put in an hour a day to schedule posts and engage with your social communities.
High-salaried employees, such as those in your IT department, are huge budget suckers. While it’s nice to have someone on hand to fix inevitable tech problems, many companies contract out IT support. Companies such as Capstone IT Services handle any technical issues that you may have, at whatever time you need them.
2. Make strategic and quality investments from the beginning
While it may be tempting to take the cheap route when setting up your business, it may lead to financial losses in the long run. Investing in quality options from the beginning will mean that you won’t need to keep paying for constant updates.
When it comes to your website design, an investment in a high-quality web designer is worth it. The site is the virtual storefront and, therefore, the most important investment that you can make as an e-commerce business. Investing in quality design from the beginning will mean that you’ll have a great foundation to work from. Web design can get quite costly if you need constant updates and revisions. Start with an excellent base from which you can make small changes as required.
Your branding is another area that is worth the initial investment. Continually changing your logo and brand identity will only act as a deterrent for potential clients. Take the time to develop a well-thought-out brand identity that you are confident about and can stick with going forward.
Always choose quality over a cheap price tag, because in the end, it will end up costing your business more. Try to avoid opting for an inexpensive designer and instead hire experienced, trusted professionals with a proven track record.
3. Know the market
The more products you offer, the more it’s going to cost you. If all your products are flying off the shelves, then that’s great, but this is not usually the case. You need to know the market and understand what your target consumer is looking for. Stocking products that don’t sell is a waste of resources and the physical space that it takes up in your storeroom. Stay updated with current trends in your industry. What’s the competition like? What products are selling the most? You’re better off offering a smaller range of high-demand products than a massive range of items that don’t sell.
The same goes for if you are selling a service. If you offer tons of services, but only a few are selling, then focus on them. While they may not take up physical space, you’re probably wasting valuable marketing budget and your time promoting them. Know when to offer discounts or coupons to help clear out stock that isn’t selling.
Focusing your efforts on the products and services that the market wants will save you tons of money on storage, marketing, production, and more.
4. Limit your payment methods
While it can be tempting to offer as many payment methods as possible, it can cost a lot of money. Payment processing fees will add up very quickly, and the more options you provide, the more expenses you’ll pay. Identify the most popular payment options among your consumers and stick to them. Since the majority of people have more than one payment type, it shouldn’t limit you from converting sales.
5. Choose the most effective marketing channels
Spending on marketing is significant for the growth and success of your business. That said, if you are spending in the wrong channels, you may as well be throwing money into the wind. Marketing costs can be high, so the key is identifying which channels deliver the highest ROI. It will vary for each e-commerce business, depending on their specific industry. The most effective way to find out where you should be allocating budget is through web analytics.
Web analytics will show you exactly where all your website traffic is generating. It will let you know which of your marketing efforts is paying off the most. Maybe you’ll notice high traffic from link-building via relevant blogs, or perhaps it’s from Facebook ads. Regardless of how your visitors get to your website, you will be able to identify which channels aren’t converting and discontinue those campaigns.
You can dramatically cut costs on your marketing by basing your campaigns on your web analytics.
6. Customer retention
Converting sales from current customers costs seven times less than converting new customers. Retaining the customers that you already have will save you a lot of money on marketing. Not to mention, loyal customers exponentially increase your reach through referrals. It’s free marketing at its finest. By engaging with your customer base, offering loyalty programs, and using email marketing to stay relevant, you can encourage your consumers to keep buying.
Conclusion
The quality of your e-commerce business does not need to suffer for you to reduce your operational costs. You can still employ expert, qualified staff who will help your business to run efficiently and productively for a fraction of the cost. Your website design can make an impact and create a brand identity that will help you to stand out against the competition, helping you to form a loyal customer base. By running strategic and analyzed marketing campaigns, you can minimize your budget and convert more sales than ever before.
By making some small tweaks in your current processes and choosing investments wisely, you can cut your operating costs and increase profit in your e-commerce business.
Insights into the marketing technology 2020 and beyond is an online survey conducted by WARC in association with BDO and the University of Bristol on more than 750 brands and agencies to understand their current and future marketing plans for martech tool use, budgets and barriers to growth. This research was conducted on brands and agencies located in North America, the UK, Europe, and APAC.
Moving on, let’s take a more in-depth look at what this 2020 Martech Insights? what are the marketing trends ? and what the future of Matech 2020 is?
You must be familiar with the concept that marketing usually focuses on developing a healthy relationship with customers and satisfying their needs.
Then you must also be knowing that this could not have been possible without technology.
Indeed, these marketing technology tools and needs in marketing are directly proportional to each other. The more the tools, the more their need.
However, due to the modernization of people’s language with time and this marketing technology word clubbed to form a portmanteau, MarTech.
Well, in simpler terms, MarTech is basically a short version of marketing technology. This mixed name concept can be witnessed in various other sectors, such as AdTech (Advertising Technology), a term used in the world of advertisement field.
Well, well, wait! Before hitting the numbers and data, let’s first try to understand the basic concepts of Martech.
What is MarTech?
Source: Chiefmatec
Like any other term used in the Software world, this Martech is also a term used by the software techies and marketers who plan, execute, and measure their business campaigns.
The planning, execution, and measurements are usually carried out with the help of Martech tools.
These tools help you in streamlining and analyzing your data and provide you with various methods or options to reach out to your target audience and keep them engaged.
What are the MarTech Tools?
Martech Tools ranges from content strategy tools designed for different media to data management tools, analytics, and attribution tools.
Some examples of tools are Photoshop, WordPress, MS- Excel, etc.. To sum up, there are about 7040 Marketing tools readily available for you on a global scale, according to Chief Market Technologies. And these vendors vary from start-up specialists to established providers.
Well, speaking of tools while browsing about this vast topic, did you ever come across the term Martech 5000 and wondered what it stands for?
Like, you and I know what I love you 3000 stands for but Martech 5000?
Well, in 2017, there were around 5000 solutions available globally for commercial purposes are these were nicknamed as “MartTech 5000”.
According to Growth, the top 10 market technology tools are:
Source: Growth
Getting back to the basics, let’s understand what a stack is in the retail world.
What is meant by Martech Stack?
A marketing technology stack is an archive of all the technology tools that companies or marketers leverage for improving their retail activities or processes.
In simpler terms, this stack is a collection of the software used by the company for retailing purpose.
I guess you have brushed up your basics, let’s now get into details about insights into the marketing technology aka Martech.
In this article, you will find the current trend, state, use, and future expectations of the marketing technology industry.
Ages of Marketing technology
Source: Chiefmartec
Our tech market’s first era began in the early 21st century and was in existence until 2012.
As you can see, 2012 saw the upleap in the tech market, and the era was called the early age of martech. This early age of martech saw the introduction of new marketing tools into the lives of businesses and companies.
Later till 2017, the graphs of software and tools usage hit an excellent steep, and that age was called the first golden age of martech.
But from the 2018 year, you can observe a bend in the graphs of tech usage.
2018 to 2020, a reckoning in the market is predicted. Therefore the era is called the reckoning age of martech.
However, past 2020, it is said that marketing technology will see a drastic change and will be higher than ever.
Martechs law:
Source: Chiefmartec
As you know, marketing is bizarrely complex and is evolving at a breakneck pace. Martec’s Law is a genuine dilemma for everyone in the corporate industry.
Hold on… Before I talk about how bizarre the market is. Let me tell you what the Law is.
What is Martech Law?
Martech’s Law is a graphical representation of the change in the market and change in the organizations.
Source: chiefmartec
According to this Law,” Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.”
That means the rate at which the technology is updating is faster when compared to the rate at which organizations are adopting the technology.
In other words, the rate at which the organizations are adapting to the new technology is slower than the rate of updation in technology.
Insight of MarTech 2020:
Technical software is developing over time. According to Marketing Technology 2020 Landscape Supergraphic reports by Chiefmartec, the number of solutions in 2011 was 150; from there, it boosted to 7,040 solutions according to Landscape Supergraphic 2019.
The growth of the solutions from the past eight years can be seen in the image below
Source Chiefmartec
The estimated market size of the Marketing Industry in North America and the United Kingdom’s (UK) is as follows:
Source: Martech 2020: and Beyond
From the above image, you can see How the market spending has doubled from $34.3 billion in 2017 up to $65.9 billion in 2019 just in a span of two years. The data is combined spending of North America and the UK exclusively.
However, you can observe a massive difference between the increased amount of spending for each individual annum. The increase in marketing size in 2018 is 18.1 BN, and for the current year, it is 13.5 BN.
This means the corporate spending on marketing software has decreased by 4.6 BN in comparison to 2017.
The percentage of overall retail budget spending on marketing technology:
Source: Martech 2020: and Beyond
The data, in the above image, is split by the proportion of companies spending on in-house and outsourced marketing technology.
As you can see, the results show a rapid growth rate in the spendings in North America
region while the UK has remained steady.
On average, all the brands in North America and the UK are spending approximately 26% of their budgets on software when compared to 23% last year.
That means there is a 13% increase in martech budgets since last year. However, in comparison to 2017 Martech values, there is slight evidence of a decline in the future of the market.
When coming to in-house sourcing and outsourcing by these companies, there has been substantial discussion in the industry regarding the usage of in-housing of tech and optimized utilization of services by brands from their agency partners over the years.
However, what the results suggest is, in the North America region, there has been an increase in both in-sourcing and outsourcing by the brands.
However, when you look at the data of the UK, there has been an evident drop in the outsourcing of resources but a 1% increase in the in-sourcing.
Marketing Technology budget change over 12 months:
The martech budget change of clients by 2020:
The 750 brands and agencies on who the research is done have two opinions on the client’s budget. On analyzing the combined results of these 750 brands, 43% of the brands feel there would be an increase in the client’s budget over 12 months by 2020, 53% of the brands feel there wouldn’t be any change as the clients will still keep their budgets fixed for the annum. However, only 4% of the brands feel there would be a slight drop in the set budgets of the clients.
Source: Martech 2020 and Beyond
When you try to look at the results of the analysis for individual regions, each region has its perspective.
Before moving on with the further analysis of the data, you should remember that the analysis reports of Europe excluding the UK while the others are of the whole region.
All other regions except for Europe strongly believe that most of the client’s budget would remain constant while in Europe, 53% of the brands believe there would be a significant increase in the budgets of the clients.
The martech budget increase of brands by 2020:
When the brands were questioned about their budget increase over the next 12 months, the results were somewhat like this:
Source: Martech 2020: and beyond
As you can see, each percentage of brands has its proposals for the budget increase.
On average marketing technology, 2020 budgets by brands are:
22% believe that their budgets might increase by 0-5%.
26% estimate their budget increase between 6-10%.
21% calculate their brand budget increase to range in between 11-15%.
15% of the brands feel theirs might increase between 16-20%.
9% of the brands say their budget will increase between 21-25%
6% of all brands estimated their budgets to increase by more than 25%.
However, from the results, you can analyze that Europe, including the UK, has the highest percentage of brands, on average, 9.5%, which predicts their budgets to be more than 25% of the current budgets.
While North America has no companies which estimate to spend more than 25%, however, it has the highest number of brands calculating to increase in between 0-5% on their budgets.
How has increased investment in marketing technology affected the companies’ Media Spend?
With the development of Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, SEO tools, and other corporate tools, it has become easier for marketers which media is most effective for their use and promotions.
In the last year’s survey, it was found that the marketers had decreased their market spend when they invested in software tools. But for 2019, marketing technology, the market trends have changed.
Source: Martech 2020 and beyond
From the above data, you can understand how the market trends have changed in comparison to 2018.
Though for about 44% of the brands, their media spend has not been affected, for 32%, it has decreased whereas there was a 57% decrease in 2018.
That means there is a difference of 25% when compared. However, a significant increase of 8% is visible on the media spend from 2018 to 2019.
What do the marketing trends, marketing technology budgets and marketing sizes for 2020 suggest to…..
Brands?
On a global basis for brands the marketing technology, market trends and sizes suggest for the development of in-sourcing resources as well as to maintain good relations with outsourcers too.
Thought the budgets of companies by 2020 are predicted to increase, you can see how more than half of the budget is spent on resourcing.
Hence the companies should focus more on developing their in-source resources or train the pre-existing staff to integrate and upskill their methods and ideas of resourcing.
This doesn’t mean you tend to lose your relations with outsourcers. Incase if the insource resources crash, the only option you have to get your job done is through outsourcing. Hence it is equally important to maintain a balance between insourcing and outsourcing.
Agencies?
From the observations of inhouse and outsourcing future marketing trends, you can see that there is a little momentum in In-housing resources among the respondents.
Hence there is an excellent opportunity for you to grab. You can use this opportunity as an advantage and win back most of your clients, who are about to consider in-housing or have recently shifted to in-housing.
However, winning back is not as easy as you think.
It rarely happens that you go to your client, explain to him difficulties of in-housing, and boom he is impressed and gets back to you.
To impress your client and win him back, you should sell your values according to “COW.”
Now wondering what this COW is?
Well, COW stands for Creativity, Objectivity, and Wider perspective.
Hence, when you are explaining your resources to the client, always try to be creative, objective, and try to have a wider perspective of branding and culture.
Technology vendors?
As you can see, the possibility of an increase in budget spending, there is always a scope of improvement for your tech vendors.
All you have to do is to ensure that your goods and services can facilitate creativity, are easy to operate, and solve the concerns of both brands as well as agencies.
Media Owners?
If you are a media owner and are looking at the data analysis, I bet you must be feeling happy.
Compared to last year, data this year has a piece of positive news for all media owners because there last year had a great decrease in media spent while this year’s research says there is an increase.
For you, the key to making money out of this is by focusing on the importance of data of the brands and agencies as well as keeping yourself transparent.
Now, if you step ahead and prove your effectiveness and relevance to brands concerning the context of increasing usage of technology platforms, that’s it you get clicked just like that.
Now, let’s look at the current usage and capabilities of marketing tools.
Current Use and Capabilities of Marketing technology:
Marketing tools provided by established organizations are where the brands and agencies find their use.
The following are the marketing tools currently in use by most of the brands on a global level.
Source: Martech 2020 and beyond
From the above data, you can analyze various categories of tools used by companies for marketing.
By comparing both 2018 and 2019 data, you can see that for some tools, there is a drop in their usage while some have picked up the graphs.
Though you can observe a negligible difference between the rise of Analytics, Measurements and Insights, Mobile, Data management, and Ad tech’s graph, you can find a significant rise of 3% among Market automation and SEO. A 5% rise in usage of experience optimization can also be seen. But, in the case of collaborations with other software, there is an increase of 9% in comparison to that of 2018.
However, you can see that, and there is a 3% downfall in the usage of Commerce, lead generation and sales, and Customer relationship management (CRM). While coming to Emails, there is a significant drop of 6% in the usage in 2019.
However, the future market trends also suggest that there might be a huge fall in the usage of Emails as only 14% of the population among the 750 brands plan to use it in the next 12 months. Comparatively collaboration usage can be seen to fall as 38% of the crowd have no plans in using the tools.
How can you develop the best MarTech Strategy?
When the Brand respondents of the Survey conducted by WARC in association with BDO, and University of Bristol were asked about the skills they look into while hiring the marketing function for their company the top priorities were somewhat like this:
Source: Martech 2020 and beyond
As you can see, the most important criteria for the brands is creativity. On average, 49% of the brands prefer their marketing software to be creative. Later they look at the brand strategy and then the customer experience.
So similarly, even you should have a clear picture of what you need for your brand. Hence planning a martech strategy is very essential.
Here are some great tips for you to develop the best marketing strategy for the future market trends:
Analyze what you need:
Along with the growing market, new tools are launched every day. It is always tempting to get the best tool or a high-end tool. Every organization, just like yours, wants to have the best.
But what will you do with a tool which is of no use to you? It is just like a person with hearing aid buying a high-end version of headsets.
Hence, always sit with your team and analyze which tool is easy for them to work on and to give fantastic results.
Check for Upgradations of the tool:
Now, you know what you want and started to use it. It is giving the best results. But, with the change of time, tools also need to be upgraded for more optimization.
Hence, keep looking for up-gradation of the tool or alternative sources for tools that are easier to adapt and give optimized results for your brand.
You can save your time of research about new tools and use product hunt for the same.
Understand the role of the tool:
Why do you need a tool? Why can’t you do everything manually?
I know the answers, I was just playing around.
You usually need a tool because it serves several purposes that are important to your business team.
First, they help you in understanding your customers through data and analytics.
Second, they help you in automating processes so you can use that data to work more efficiently.
And third, they help you in making the customer experience even more personal and meaningful.
Hence when you are using tools, make sure that it serves at least one of the purposes. If your tool is not serving any of the purposes, I say ditch it and shift it to a useful tool.
Know what your clients look for:
Having a tool, analyzing the numbers or data will not fetch you anything until the client is satisfied. Hence when you are choosing a tool or planning a strategy, always keep clients persona in mind.
To know what your clients need to look for leads from the customer experience department and choose strategies accordingly.
Keep your data up to date:
Always remember, no matter whichever product services your companies provide, you must have your database. The database helps you understand more about the market; it’s functioning and customers’ persona, which helps you and your company develop to the next level.
How are marketing technology and customer experience related?
When the brands were asked about how important is customer experience optimization for their company? The results are:
Source Martech 2020 and beyond
As you can see, 57% of the population feel customer experience is very important, and 39% feel it is important. Hence on average, 76.5% of the brands and agencies feel customer experience is somewhat important for them.
What is the customer experience?
Customer experience is nothing but the feedback from the customer. The feedback can be in any manner. It can be the impression on your brand, product, or your services.
For most customer-based companies, the customer is the king.
Technologies used by the brands to learn about customer experience:
According to the research, as you can see, Most of the brands use Customer relationship management and social media management the most to get customer experience.
It’s not always necessary that you should also use what the top brands use. Here are some customer experience tools you can use for your company for better results.
Customer experience tools are:
1. Customer review suggestion box:
No one knows what is working and what is not better than your employees. So, first, start from your own office. You know, like charity begins at home, feedback also should start from your own office.
There might be a possibility that if you, the boss, is asking about a review, no one would dare tell negatives.
So drop a suggestion box where the employee’s name can be anonymous, and you get the genuine review.
2. Customer surveys:
Well, well, yes, customer surveys. From your database, you can find out your brand loyals easily, and also you can find brand switchers.
Pick them up and send surveys via online mails, or if you are in the same area, try to meet them up. You can have a little chat about their experience with the brand and then conduct a survey.
3. Social media listening tools:
If you feel that surveys, the suggestion box is too much, and you don’t wanna do it, then you can always turn to technology for help.
Social media listening tools help you monitor what your customers are looking for. It includes the top searched keywords, your brand products, their reviews or comments, your competitors, and many more.
Now you must be wondering where to get these tools? Don’t worry; we have a solution to every problem of yours.
There are an unlimited number of tools out there based on your preferences, for reference Hubspot, Hootsuite, Sprout Social are few tools from where you can start.
There are other Customer experience tools available in the market that fulfill your preferences, and they are IBM Tealeaf, Satmetrix, WalkMe, Khoros, Podium, Whatfix, and on and on.
By reading the above information about marketing technology and trends, I bet you must have understood what it is about and how are the current market trends.
Well, now let’s look at the future.
With 2019 almost coming to an end, it’s time we take our experiences from it and prepare for the future 2020.
Future of Marketing Technology 2020 :
The most used technology in the current marketing strategy these days is IOT- Internet of Things, 38% of the population among the brands use IOT as their technology in marketing strategy. 26% of them plan to use it in the next 12 months too.
Next, catching up technology is Virtual Reality, aka VR, 26% currently use it, and 24% plan to use in the coming 12 months.
The other analysis you can find in the figure below.
Source: Martech 2020 and beyond.
As you might be aware of the fact that along with changing times, technology is also evolving.
So, What will happen in 2020?
This is probably going to be the future of Marketing technologies, aka martech:
Brands will look for alternative communication channels.
Businesses will no longer be built on one channel
Personalization will be the new market trend
#Voice Search Optimization:
Though the research states that the voice search usage in the next 12 months will not be more than 25%, another search, according to ComScore states, over 50% of the future searches in 2020 will be in the from voice search.
Hence, companies to rank on top have to optimize to voice search.
Here we are not just talking about Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa. We are talking about voice searches beyond these.
One such personal best is Jetson.ai. Never heard about it?
Well, Jetson.ai is a voice assistant, which helps in voice shopping.
You don’t have to buy a device; all you need to do is simply connect it to your Amazon’s Alexa or Google Mini.
Then upload the menu and shop.
Voice Shopping in the U.S.is estimated to reach $40 Billion in and $5 Billion in the UK by 2022.” -OC&C STRATEGY CONSULTANTS
Another wonderful thing about jetson.ai learns from the customers and customize it accordingly.
That means, If you are ordering a particular item from the same store over and over, it understands it, and for the next purchase, it makes it easy for you to order.
# Why will dependency on Google Analytics to decrease?
I am sure that every company at one point or the other must have used Google Analytics or is currently using it.
If you have used Google Analytics, you must be aware of how it functions.
If not, here is a brief intro to it. Google Analytics is basically a web analytics service. Google offers it. It helps you to track and report website traffic as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand.
If you ask me if this Google Analytics is not accurate for research? I would say No.
Now, if you ask m if there is something wrong? Still, it’s no.
I bet your next question will be, do people, not like it? Of Course, no, who wouldn’t like a free tool to check Website traffic.
Then why will it be replaced? Let me give you a living example of smartphones.
Nokia phones were considered the best. Even you must have used it at some point. But with time, smartphones came in and replaced it.
People like you and me preferred smartphones cause work got easy and optimized.
Similarly, with Google Analytics. Over time new updated tools and software are emerging, and Analytics has become the conventional method of data analysis.
Nowadays, there are things like repeat purchases, upsells, down sells, and checkout bumps are seen. On top of that, there are various ways in which you can generate revenue for your online business, like partnerships, or webinars.
As a result, it has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that match their database better, for example, Amplitude. Or something more convenient than that.
In the end, all you are seeing is a big push into business intelligence.
In 2020, you will get to see more and more companies adopting these business intelligence solutions. Due to budgets, they might as well shift from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.
If you have no idea about Data Studio, then I suggest you start getting an idea now.
It is easy for you to pass in all of your business and corporate data into one place.
For example, you can pass in more complicated data from your Facebook ad campaigns into Data Studio with ease as it would be a bit difficult task to perform with Google Analytics.
#How IoT will top the businesses?
As mentioned earlier, 38% of the population among the brands use IOT as their technology in marketing strategy. 26% of them plan to use it in the next 12 months too.
According to a report by Statista, the Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices installed worldwide in 2020 will be 30.73 billion. Currently, in 2019, it is 26.66 Billion.
Which means there would be a rise of 4.07 billion in IoT.
If you have no idea about what IoT is then, The internet of things (IoT) is nothing but the data you share over an internet connection.
In technical terms, IoT is a growing set of technologies based on devices that could share data via an internet connection.
Hence, companies will have to look into this for better optimization, and it is estimated according to a report by Statista that by 2015, this IoT would reach 75.44 billion.
That means 48.78 billion rises from the current use.
#Why will brands look for alternative communication channels?
The most conventional communication channel used by corporates is Email. You and I also use it for our marketing purposes.
In fact, email marketing is one of the E-Commerce business ideas and SEO ideas.
The only problem with emails is conversion rates are low. Buyers, most of the time, do not check inboxes or only look for important ones and skip promotions. Hence it is becoming challenging for companies to only stick to emails.
Hence, companies are looking forward to alternative business channels for better conversion rates, which are effective in turning their leads into customers.
Some alternative communication channels are Chatbots, Customer call centers, toll-free centers, and push up notifications.
# Why will business no longer be built on one channel?
In previous years, a lot have companies have been built on a single channel, like facebook, quora, etc.
Facebook uses the email address book as its channel. Whenever you log in for the first time, you must have seen a pop up suggested friends or import email addresses from facebook.
Similarly, Quora is built on SEO channels. It helps companies ranking on search engines.
But, marketing these days is not unidirectional. It is heading fast towards marginal gains.
If you want to win the market, then you must use all the channels possible for business. Hence marketers will shift to use multiple channels to build their businesses or rank number one.
#Why personalization is important in the future?
Personalization is an SEO trick to grab the attention of your customers. There are two types of personalization to a website:
Themed personalization
User personalization
Themed personalization:
This is what you do to customize your website according to a festival. Like recently, we celebrated Halloween. So you must have customized your website to a Halloween theme.
Google always personalizes itself to such events. It makes the users happy and attracts them.
Well, if you do not know how to customize your website, you can use organized themes for helping you with customization.
User Personalization:
This is an important point, especially in the field of online marketing. Let it be your ads or products you sell. You should always know your demographics.
User personalization is what you can find Amazon or Flipkart doing. They observe your shopping trends or recent searches. Later, when you use their services, they will show you related items.
Based on your recent searches, here are some suggested products. A message appears, and we find all our related items.
Now, what will happen if this is not there? If personalization was not there, then you or I can get suggestions for baby clothes or dog food.
Well, if you have a baby or a dog, it will be useful, but I don’t have a baby or a dog, so its a spam to me.
But if you give me some search related to footwear- oh, I love browsing footwear and keep on buying them even if I don’t need new pairs- I will browse and definitely buy at least one pair.
So, personalization helps in business growth and attracts customers.
Now, if you ask me, why is it important? In future people will get so busy that they will not have time to look into anything. If you personalize your products according to buyer persona and showcase them on top of the websites or ads, the chances are high that they will end up purchasing some goods or the other.
You might have definitely been hearing about some of the above points or might feel they are irrelevant to you, but this is the future of marketing technology 2020.
Martech is not a piece of cake. You also must have been facing barriers in technology for marketing. However, here are a few topmost barriers for Marketing technology 2020.
Barriers for MarTech:
According to the report, MarTech 2020 and beyond, the brands and agencies have different views on the barriers of marketing.
According to the brands, 50% of them feel budgets will be the top constraint in 2020 marketing. Still, agencies have a different view; among them, 56% feel understanding the technology will be a constraint for marketing technology 2020.
Here is the data analysis of barriers for both brands and agencies
Image:
Source: Martech 2020 and beyond
Conclusion:
On a whole account, Marketing technology 2020 is going to see a lot of ups and downs. But for you, if you have confusion or dilemma about what to do, where to start, how to start, you can always contact us.
Most things mentioned above are either things that you have been hearing for a long time or have never heard about. But whatever it is, it is in the future, and if you want to survive, you should be prepared.
We would always love to hear your views on the marketing trends 2020 and what you think about your future. Do give your opinions in the comments section below or contact us.
We hope that this article was of excellent help to you in understanding marketing technology and 2020 trends.
We all are aware of the First Purchase we made if we compare the first purchase and now then you see a lot of changes. The perpetual advancement in the technology and changing phase in the Politics made e-commerce an analysis aspect for the customer as well as the seller. E-commerce came immediately and omnipresent. It can be shopped anywhere and everywhere. We can say that our digital shelves have become longer and larger, welcoming more e-commerce strategies for holidays.
What is E-commerce Strategies?
E-commerce Strategies is a buzzword, mostly the wholesale or the retail business that is traditional have faced this and depending on e-commerce. To many people, it is a simple process of establishing the offline business into the online platform.
Engaging people into your fancy Websites and creatively build e-commerce pages, that will allow the business person to sell all over the internet.
If we follow the recent Global Shopper Story that takes into account the opinion of 10,000 shoppers there are many key points found:
Omnishoppers are very crucial for the market that includes
Showrooming: here you see in the store and then buy from the online retailer
Webrooming: here usually, people searching the online and buy in the showroom.
Click and collect: people here buy online and go to the showroom to pick it up
Scan and Scram: Check the product in-store but buy it online from another retailer
Click and Ship: You check the product in the store but buy it on your mobile phone for your personal convenience
In today’s busy life both digital and retail world’s play a very vital role, while the omnishoppers may like to shop online in most of the time, but people also like to shop offline only when they have enough time. It is usually, about the experience and the discovery they can in the offline stores.
There is no less competition for the online sellers, because if we check the records then it is estimated that, 24 million e-commerce websites are there in the whole world. It seems like yesterday when the concept of e-commerce strategies blossomed in the business people’s mind.
As there are 24 million e-commerce website, out of which 650,000 stores are generating more than $1000 sales annually.
What is the current state of e-commerce?
The e-commerce state has shown an incredible growth curve if we check the last few years, the CAGR is even expected to grow to 11.1% from 2018 to 2025. One of the most popular activities in the whole worldwide includes Online Shopping. While the popularity may vary from region to region.
You can clearly see, the tremendous growth in the e-commerce marketing strategy that intensifies the competition in the business. If the competition intensifies this means that people are going to get more options to chose. It gives customers a chance to chose from even the niche categories and this can involve even both high and low level of purchase.
Increasing competition in e-commerce has led Brands attention predominantly towards user acquisition. Usually, innovative user acquisition strategies attract a number of people, however, this also requires a lot of sizeable investment. You may think, that once a customer comes up the battle is won. However, it is not, it involves post-acquisition work that has a different insight.
Once a customer comes on board, there is a high chance to drop off. Normally 70 percent of people drop off after a week and 96 percent of the users churn within 90 days.
We can surely say that if user acquisition is not coupled with successful user engagement and a perfect strategy, then there will be no results.
How can e-commerce attract new customers?
Nowadays, attracting customers is a huge task, and every e-commerce strategies involve these steps as every e-commerce business requires it. The first step to this is the having E-commerce automation checklist. Follow the below steps to have the best E-commerce strategies experience to your customers.
Trigger: For the beginning of the workflow, select a trigger, like Order Creation
condition: To keep the workflow going, set a condition, like Spend $500
action: Set an action that needs to be taken place, like Tag the Customer
This includes a few checklists that the marketers should consider for automating the e-commerce store.
Increase the customer worth
It includes having a marketing strategy in communication with your targeted customer. Reward the customer if they make more sales, gives discounts occasionally, set geo-specific promotions.
The first segment the audience according to their interest, and include personalized marketing communication. Segment the customer with the items they buy or add in the cart.
Send small handwritten notes who spend the most time on your website
Send a customized email, based on purchase history or when the items are in the cart are abandoned.
For every individual customer calculate the average spend on order.
Try to set threshold time, the time more than the average time they spend on the website. Offer the customers some gifts to add products to the cart and achieve the targeted time.
Target the incentive to drive conversions
Occasional offers to the customers, mainly target the customer birthdays
source: milled
Send the customized Birthday mails, earn the customer loyalty that helps to make the customer stay with you longer.
Geo-specific gift, filter the customer by region, place, and interest.
Decrease the cost of customer Acquisition
If you do e-commerce automation you will see a decrease in advertising spends, and reduce the customer churn, that will gradually increase the ROI of the campaigns
Keep a check on the campaigns, and pause those which are not giving any results, order more inventory before you run out of it, pause the campaigns until you are restocked.
Always keep in contact with your team, regarding every issue through channels such as Slack, Milanote, Trello, to avoid any miscommunication.
Deducing customer churning
Have criteria to pull out the customer, like time each customer spends, and the time is taken since the last session, last login, last purchase.
When a customer doesn’t show any action for some days, then start a win-back campaign for them.
Increase Conversions
You can boost your Conversions rates using this e-commerce strategies automation, make your site customized for your viewers, improve the search functionality of your website, add push notification to increase multiple purchases.
Increasing searching and merchandise the store
Give your customers a continuous merchandise shopping experience and make the shopping process easy and smooth
Show the options which are of the same color, fit, brand to continue the continuous product discovery
Add all those SKUs that have a similar description in the appropriate collection.
Add the collections tags in your site search solution, as it will be easy for the customers to filter
Push Notifications to increase the purchase
Browser push notifications are the best if you want to increase the customer’s flow and encourage them to buy.
Segment the customers according to their choices and purchase history.
Target those, customer who is always looking for new products.
Easy Payment options
Check the currency your customer prefers and tailor it accordingly for them.
Segment the customers according to their currency preference, based on their last purchase
Add promotions while they checkout, and while coming to currency add currency based on the countries.
What is Customer Experience?
It is a long journey that we are experiencing, and no journey is the same. Some people like to shop online, while others like to take advice from their family, friends, peers and then act. It is like a big puzzle that has different channels, that has both online and offline shops. However, it is up to the brands how they will create the best brand experience that is frictionless, customized and provide the customer best experience as possible.
New channels keep on adding so that the older ones could be replaced and give a better experience to the people. The higher the consumers are more the interaction is, and more the competition for the brands. Ideal customer experience should contain:
Customization
Quality Content
Omnichannel Experience
Streamlines checkout
Post-purchase experience
source: fico
How can e-commerce strategies build a strong Customer Relationship?
According to some Consumer Survey’s, 48% of the consumers left the site and made a purchase in the competitor’s site just because consumers experience a poorly customized site.
The key for a personalized experience is segmentation, it helps to create distinct journeys for the customers based on their shopping behavior. Whether the customer is a visiting the site for the first time or is a frequent buyer, there are few data points upon which a person and choices can be assessed. All these things will help create a custom persona for the customer.
66.7% of the top brands have a visually attractive homepage.
Suppose you have 3 categories of people coming to your site,
Let’s say the first category of customer to be “Type- A”, in this category, people are usually very busy and want to find the items quickly.
Then, the second category of customer to be “Type- B”, in this type, people are limited to a budget and use the navigation to find the right product that fits their budget.
The third and last category of customer, as “Type- C”, in this type, people are completely new and require a lot of information and content that will make them stick.
For Type-A category, you can add the “Add to Cart” button to all the products in the product listing page. Then for the second category “Type-B” have streamlined navigation and include more categories to the homepage. For the third category “Type- C” adding the user-generated content on the website, including all the how-to tutorials on the homepage.
You can for sure gain a good result, the conversion rate will increase to 10% and the revenue per visitor will increase to 14%
Strategy 1- Increase Loyalty by Personalized Promotions
The surveys say that 77% of consumers love discounts and encourage them to shop more. 48% of the people that discounts make them buy much faster and can take decision quicker.
source: pinterest
Do’s and Don’ts of Customer Experience
Write Bewitching Content
Do’s: Always have a variety of content, such as video, blogs, user-generated content, images, and infographics to make the people understand in details about your brand and the products that you are selling. There are a lot of infographic tools such as Visme are available which provide the best templates and tools to design amazing infographics.
Don’t: Remove all the irrelevant content, because it is one of the biggest reason, where 41% of the consumer’s back out from your website.
Engage using emails
Do’s: Post-purchasing sends the delivery updates and useful information related to the Purchase.
Don’t: Never, attack the customer with a lot of promotional emails, before they buy their first product.
Have promotions
Do’s: Place your promotions on the major locations on the homepage.
Don’ts: Avoid having inconsistent, promotions over social media sites, marketing page, and e-commerce sites.
Add “Finder” to find the store
Do’s: Include the detailed information such as the store hours, exact location, contact number, directions to store, in house services on the Store finder page.
Don’t: never add the Store Finder in the footer
Make returns easy
Do’s: Always have the return option in the product details page, so that it gives confidence that after buying a product, it turned out to be bad or wrong, they can return it anytime.
Don’t: Never add the return policy in the footer of the page.
Path Navigation to purchase
Do’s: The Purchasing path should be clear and easy for the customers to use, this encourages them to come back and buy again.
Don’t: Never launch a new website without proper A/B testing of various designs.
Strategy 2- User Generated Content (UGC)
Engage your customer with high-quality images, videos and Infographics, in addition to this have engaging content. It is the best way to nurture and educate customers.
Usually, there are two types of content that help in brand leveraging: User Generated Content and Branded Content.
User Generated content are usually customer reviews, photos, videos, that allows the brands to share genuine and authentic content from the customers after they use the product.
Branded Content normally keeps the brands on the top when the brand is going through the down cycle, it tells about the lifestyle and story of the brand.
Not just the content, we can say an image speaks a thousand words than the content. If you have checked minutely then you must have noticed that the fashion-related people who are selling their products online, use a lot of images, in different angles, with some closeup image that showcases the type of stitches, color, type of fabric. The video included provides how to use the items, and how it is made.
21.4% of the consumers say that an appealing e-commerce strategies experience motivates them to come back again and again. While 85% of the customers said that Visual UGC that include images and videos are more influential than the branded content. As 95% of people believe in other consumers and their reviews who have already used it.
Leveraging a mixture of high-quality content that has images, videos, and user-generated on the homepage will let the people know about your brand and its products.
Strategy 3- Have the Right offer at the right time
These days people have stopped differentiating between online and offline shopping. The only thing that matters is the customer experience.
To avoid the channel conflicts, co-ordinate with all channels so that it doesn’t impact your physical location, be it with your retailers, or a seller or the brand stores those who are trying to sell at full price. In other words, you can say don’t cut down the brand store, by having a lesser price in the online store.
Check how the customer buys, track down his journey and identify at which point he is getting inspired. By using that inspiration deliver the same inspiration through the consumer-preferred channel.
source: milled
According to one latest report, 74% of the people said they are more likely to make a purchase online if they can have easy returns and exchange in store.
Below you can find an optimal checklist if implemented will give customers the best experience:
High-Quality Product Images
A product description that is informative
Informative Videos
How to do- videos, tips
Add to cart button
Return Policies
Clear Pricing and Promotions
Customer Reviews
Complementary or recommended products, while buying products
Provide an easy return option, never forget to include return instruction in the order. On the e-commerce site of the brand, mention clearly all the return policies. This will remove the need of the call to action or any further customer support.
Strategy 4- Provide a smooth checkout experience
How many times have you seen that people come to your site, and add items in carts and leave abruptly? I guess too many. This clearly states that your website lacks in providing flexible payment options.
75% of customers complain about the lack of flexible payment options. Usually, brands fall as a victim investing heavily on the website videos and images, but lack in providing a smooth functionality or checkout process.
When you are planning to have an e-commerce site, both website outlook and functionality are very important. Always keep in mind, once the consumer adds an item in the cart, then have a clear checkout button both above and below the order summary. It encourages people to complete the action and also makes it easy to have the next process.
Source: Behance
Using Chatbots for conversation is also a good alternative, as using these will make the consumers feel someone is there listening. However, only 25% of the brands are only this Chats and Chatbot service on the checkout page.
Connecting the chat functionality to your website, most importantly to the Checkout Page, it provides the consumers an easy way to get clear their last-minute queries, before abandoning the cart page.
Strategy 5- Most Brands fail past checkout
The first action which most of the brands incorporate immediately after completing the check out process is sending the automated confirmation emails. Consumers read the confirmation emails, with outmost attention than that of the normal emails. It is a kind of habitual, as the email serves as a proof or a receipt.
On average, the consumers spend 4 seconds looking at a banner ad, then 7 seconds looking at a display ad, 14 seconds watching a commercial ad. While major time people spend watching unpacking their box which is estimated to be 45 seconds, in which people spend 22 seconds just removing the product from the box.
Strategy 6- Unboxing
If we follow the analysis of top e-commerce strategies of any website, then it has been seen that people get excited about the order delivery, unboxing experience, returning the item, and receiving refunds.
People are these days are too much interested in unboxing and check a lot of unboxing videos before they go to buy something. Before an item is bought, people go to the video and check the unboxing videos. So a well-designed unboxing video from the brand will increase the best unboxing experience creating an impact.
Make the packaging attractive, so that people get excited while opening it. The excitement in people will increase, and the engagement will increase to 64%, and the chances of more positive customers increases.
Always keep in mind, the size of the product you are sending, people usually complain that small products get big packaging. Due, to this one-fourth of the customers, think that the retailer is careless.
Usually, people think that packaging showcase, how much interested and careful the retailer is about the product he is selling. If it is good, then people use the product for their unboxing video experience.
Never do extensive packing, this frustrates the user. normally people want to reuse the packaging for future use. 95% of the people like to reuse the packaging if packing is good people tend to come back more.
How E-commerce Holiday Marketing Boost your sales?
Optimize your e-commerce website, at least 7 days before the D day. Start sending promotional emails, messages for the holiday. Have the influencers to promote it in social media channels. Holidays are the best time to
Get the top ranking
Increase your CTR
Improve your position in Search Engine Page Ranking
Reset your whole Website and every detail page, with a holiday mood, that attracts consumers to buy from you. It is good to run some tests on the schema that will apply to the on-page SEO with good traffic.
As the holiday becomes a ritual for shopping, increasing sales during these times become important and bring a lot of loyal customers also. Take advantage of the holiday and attract new consumers, boost sales and increase brand visibility.
If you avoid having a holiday marketing campaign, then for sure you will be overshadowed by your competitors, who will, of course, promote during holidays. Gradually, you will vanish in the huge crowd.
The major, upcoming holidays this year, if targeted then it will help you in increasing your sales:
31st October 2019- Halloween
11th November 2019- Veteran’s day
11th November 2019- Remembrance Day
28th November 2019- Thanksgiving Day
29th November 2019- Black Friday Day
2nd December 2019- Cyber Monday
24th and 25th December 2019- Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
26th December 2019- Boxing day
31st December 2019- New Year’s Eve
Below you can read in details about some useful e-commerce holiday strategies that will help increase your sales.
Facebook Messenger Marketing
Up your holiday marketing strategy with Facebook messenger marketing. It’s currently one of the untapped channels that are truly a gem.
You can think of Messenger marketing as similar to email marketing.
But Messenger marketing’s engagement rate is 80% within the first hours, there are a lot of tools like Mobile Monkey, is available which will make your work easy.
The real benefits you can get from messenger marketing comes when you use Messenger chatbots, that allows you to send messages to your Facebook page fans.
Other than that, you can also:
Build a contact list
Nurture leads
Send drip campaigns
Segment your audience
Schedule appointments
Transition to a live operator on demand
Remarket to contacts
Perform e-commerce transactions
To create messenger chatbots, you’d need to build using an easy-to-use chatbot builder like MobileMonkey
Holidize your website
Converting your whole website to holiday mode triggers people’s holiday emotion that essential for that point of time. This makes visitors stay longer and spend more time with shopping enthusiasm.
It should be memorable, not just an ad in the product detail section or special offer sections. Bring the emotional context to your website and to the elements present in it like the header, footer, CTAs, and even in the payment page.
Discounts and Sales
People expect a lot of discounts and sales on every product they are going to buy. Make sure that it is the first thing you have on your website. As you can see Black Friday is just a few days away, it is best to start promoting for the black Friday eCommerce sales.
Showcase the shoppers what they really require, as soon as they log in to your e-commerce site. This keeps them engaged and stops them from going to a competitors site.
Email Campaigns
As Black Friday is on the door, start doing Black Friday Campaigning. Promote your brand, call out for your loyal customers, increase the customer experience by providing the best customer service.
Have emails for the early birds, encourage people to buy, provide amazing discounts for the limited time.
Send some exclusive discount codes, to avail the coupon.
Provide a discount code, after a purchase is made, so that people keep on coming.
Final email, send a greeting email for the Holiday.
Social Media Engaging
Use all the Social Media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest to promote your Holiday Offers and deals in the social media platform. However, it is important to connect or communicate with the people in social media, because when a person watches it he becomes curious and has questions to ask.
Use the special Holiday Hashtags and encourages the Holiday atmosphere. Ask people to use the hashtags and gift them some giveaways, discount coupons or holiday offer.
Pinterest and Instagram work wonders for visual interactions. People mostly looking in both of there sites for gift inspiration, reviews, new ideas, best place to buy, greeting cards and entertainment.
If you want to keep following with the two channels then follow this:
Instagram Planner: It gives your complete year, holiday list, date and time, including the hashtags that you use.
Usually, in all these implementations and improving the brand visibility somewhere, the Customer Experience Lags behind. While a lot of e-commerce companies have understood the importance of Consumer Experience and are looking for various options in which they can implement to increase the Customer Experience.
This is a complete guide for E-commerce Websites and the strategies that the companies can implement. Including the customer experience that most of the people forget, but is the key to keep your business going.
We hope that you like all these strategies and implement in your e-commerce site to increase the sales as well as the consumer experience.
If you want us to write, more about these different kinds of strategies to improves sales and experience, do write to us.
If you are a bootstrapping startup, the last thing you need is a significant expense on different tech and marketing tools to ensure your business growth. There are lots of free tools that will help you in this purpose provided you know about these and all those ways in which you can use these tools like a pro.
You can use a web analytics tool for that matter, and when it comes to web analytics, Google Analytics seems to the best amongst all. This free web analytics tool will help you in a lot of ways, such as providing you with a complete picture of your target audience that may include:
The number of people
The source of your target audience
When they visit your website and
Where they go to!
This tool is important if you want to know the health, performance, and functionality level of your website.
Google Analytics
The tool and its analytical data will enable you to delve deeper apart from helping you to optimize your website to ensure better results. Depending on the type of analytical tool you choose, the features may differ slightly, but in most of the cases, it will be much similar to the characteristics of Google Analytics that may include:
Going through the heat maps that are split according to the device type by clicking, moving and scrolling
Looking at the recordings of the behavior of the real visitors
Seeing and identifying the specific stages where your visitors are dropping off your site and
Providing you with proper insights regarding how the targeted leads generated are engaging with each page of your website.
All these analytical results will enable you to repair anything that needs a tinker so that you can improve the performance level of your site. It will also specifically help you to know the best ways in which you can structure the blog posts for your website.
Just make sure that when you do so, you use the user testers, which most of these analytical tools will allow and deploy the feedbacks you have gathered through different polls and surveys. This will ensure that you know straight from the horse’s mouth, precisely what needs to be improved.
WordPress blogging
If you want the best results and high growth of your startup, then you must focus on blogging. When it comes to blogging, WordPress seems to be the safest bet. This is due to several reasons and advantages such as:
You can use it for building your entire website
While you can use it to create the landing pages more efficiently and effectively
You can also enjoy the benefits of the myriad plug-ins that are on offer.
If you want a more left-field choice, then you should go for Medium. This is more of a social networking tool rather than a marketing tool. However, this can prove to be a great place to start your blog. The device will help you to build an audience and at the same time, use different networking tools to share the content of your website just as it helps those sites that share debt consolidation ratings and reviews.
Social media scheduling and email marketing tools
You can make the best use of social media channels for your startup marketing, you will have to schedule it properly. For this matter, you can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Both these tools will help you in:
Managing your social media accounts more precisely and effectively
Schedule the time and frequency of your posts ahead of time
This will ensure that you publish your content just at the right time and for the correct type of people, over and over again.
As for your email marketing effort, which is another essential marketing technique that all startups should follow, you can use Mail Chimp. This tool will ensure that:
You send better email
Sell more product or service
Manage your email marketing more effectively
Nurture your leads in a better way and
Close the deals fast and just the way it is required to close.
This stool is very easy to use as you will get a lot of free email templates. You will also get a lot of customizable signup forms. These elements will help you to track the performance of your emails and get more accurate built-in reports.
As a startup, you can use the free plan of this tool, which is a perfect way for a startup because through this, you can send up to 12,000 emails every month to about 2,000 subscribers. A massive prospect for any startup!
Lean marketing techniques
No business, startup or established, online, or offline should neglect marketing their business and brand. Sadly, most of them do thinking that it is an expensive affair, which is not valid. Therefore, even if you are a lean startup, there is a way to go ahead as you can take up the lean marketing techniques to promote your brand and product. This too, will drive quite a significant and measurable result.
In reality, these lean marketing techniques followed using by one of the plethoras of free tools available on the internet will not only help you to improve your marketing strategy but will also ensure that you save quite a lot of money in the process.
If you are prudent enough and know the ways to use these tools in just about the right way, you will find that marketing your startup business is not all that difficult as you thought it to be in the beginning.
There are a few typical elements to keep in mind for lean marketing to ensure the current flow of your process. Start with what you do now and gradually build upon:
Your personas you are trying to engage with
Marketing process that will uphold iteration and analytics
Measurement of customer behaviors and interactions
A/B testing of marketing process automation and
A refined support process for launching and publishing.
Business marketing should be well planned and agile and data-driven and responsive just like your business so that you can ensure success within a short time frame.
CONCLUSION
Having a startup and making every possible thing to grow is difficult. But this article must have helped you by finding some of the best tools which are free and are very helpful for your business.
If you have some other tools which you want us to add in the blog, please do write to us we will add it.
Every business owner probably knows what a sales funnel is. If you don’t, sales funnel is a process or set of actions that a customer should go through to purchase your product. Understanding the sales funnel is essential to manipulate it in a way so that your potential customers become your buyers and not chicken out at the most critical moment.
The sales funnel consists of six main stages:
Awareness: The first stage of the sales funnel grabs the attention of your potential customer. Your goal at the awareness stages should keep them coming back.
Consideration: Now that they are interested, they start considering the purchase. The goal here is to get their email address.
Preference: Now, they are hooked. On the stage of choice, you should pre-qualify the prospect.
Purchase: Once they’ve decided, they should purchase. Here, your goal is to make the sale.
Loyalty: After they made one purchase, you should keep them loyal so that they buy something else. This time your goal is to make the sale again.
Advocacy: And finally, they are not only coming back for more but also advocating others to purchase from you.
This article will look into ways that you can decrease the sales funnel by working on the first five stages.
1. Awareness: Blogging
Most probably one of the most recommended ways of increasing your online presence, blogging has proven to be an effective and relatively cheap way of promoting yourself. It doesn’t matter if your business has anything to do with writing – blogging is meant to increase your visibility for search engines and have more customers find you.
Another reason to put blogging on your to-do list is that it is a surprisingly powerful storytelling tool that can showcase the importance of your brand. It is also a perfect persuasion tool.
When used right, blogging can give enormous results. If you are not good at it, you can always look for writing and translation professionals at PickWriters or search for freelancers on Fiverr. It’s ideal for personalizing your customers’ experiences, and this can be achieved by enabling them to access the information on your website in their native language. English is suitable for larger audiences, but when it comes to going global, it is always better to customize your content for each country separately.
2. Awareness: Social Networking
Apart from indirectly impacting your search engine rankings, social networking is also the best way to gain social media recognition.
Your availability on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook may also influence how much customers trust you. Reviews and recommendations are prevalent on social media platforms, which means that this is where your advocacy stage customers will operate to find you, new clients.
Decide on the platforms perfect for you and create accounts. To link them all in one place, you can use Linktree. There are also numerous social media management apps and programs in case you want to be able to maintain them all from one place or even schedule posts. You might want to check out such services as Buffer or Hootsuite.
3. Consideration: Landing Pages
Landing pages are very different from the home pages. A landing page is a page on your website that has content on it addressing a specific problem and containing a clear call to action. A home page, however, will represent the general aspects of your business. For example, your home page might say that your business is called XYZ and you sell ABC, while one of your landing pages may assume that you sell the EFG segment of products (from the overall ABC) and will include a form to order one of the products.
To increase your conversion rate, it is recommended that you work on your site’s landing pages. Make sure that they are as appealing as possible and have the content on them as meaningful as the images or illustrations. Have a clear call to action. After all, the page’s purpose is to capture the prospect’s contact information or make a sale. To see how landing pages work, try to compare the landing pages of big company websites to their home pages.
4. Consideration: Calls To Action
Calls to action are a must when it comes to conversions. For every page on your website, think of what goal are you pursuing. What work should the visitor complete?
Of course, the ultimate goal is to have them purchase the product from you, but what about the smaller actions leading up to it? Most of the time, you will need your potential customer to click a link, leave their email, or watch a video. Making a purchase already comes after it.
When including a call to action, it is better to have several here and there. This way, your audience will be reminded about the operation several times.
5. Preference: Email
Email marketing is a great way to keep your potential customers involved at least to some extent. But even a simple email answering the most frequently asked questions or explaining the basics of your company can keep the person interested.
If you haven’t had any experience with email marketing yet, then this is the perfect time to start. Collect all the knowledge you may need and plan your email marketing campaign before diving-in. You can also set up autoresponders that send out electronic messages once your customers complete specific actions. Do not forget to thank them for what they do – sincerity and gratitude are always appreciated. On the other hand, don’t bury them under piles of emails because they can unsubscribe or mark them as spam.
6. Preference: CRM
Customer Relationship Management, commonly known as CRM, is a program that helps you track interactions with current and future customers. This software enables you to identify on which stage of the sales funnels your prospects currently are.
By using CRM, you can identify which emails each potential customer should receive based on their cookies and what you already know about them. CRM, when combined with email marketing, is a powerful tool that helps you personalize the experience of every customer or prospect and lead them on to the next stage of the sales funnel.
7. Purchase: eCommerce Promotion
Never assume that your customers will easily find their way to check out. You should guide them up until the end of the process and make sure that they follow the calls to action you included. This is why eCommerce promotion is so important, and here are some ways to use it:
Marketing Campaigns: Schedule your marketing campaigns around favorite holidays. This will give your prospects an incentive to buy your product.
New Products: Always email or notify them about new products. If you don’t tell them what’s new in stock, nobody will. They are not on the lookout for new products – you are on the lookout for new customers.
Offers: Offer them various bonuses and opportunities such as free shipping, live chats, etc. Sales and discounts are a sure way to attract their attention and maybe even convert it into a deal.
8. Purchase: Social Monitoring
Social monitoring will not only help you see who is talking about you but will also let you engage with your potential customers.
Set up Google Alerts to notify you when someone is discussing your brand or something related to it. Monitor who has tweeted at you and reply to their question. Reply to comments under your posts on social media and get involved with both your prospects and your customers.
If someone has written a review of your brand or product, it would be good to see what it is about and maybe even display it to persuade more prospects that you are worth the money. People tend to trust other people, especially when the reviews are not fake or bot-generated.
9. Loyalty: Referrals
Referrals are a great way to appreciate your customers and show them that you value them. Ask them to refer a friend and let them get a reward. It could be a discount or a different kind of bonus.
Referrals are useful for establishing long-term relationships with your past and present customers. They help set up a group of people that will come back to purchase more and help you gain yet another client.
If you think referrals are not for you, you may want to try setting up affiliate programs for your customers, but that might take more time and will require more effort both for you and your customers. Moreover, referral programs do not apply to all of your clients.
10. Loyalty: Resells, Upsells, Cross-sells
Last but not least, resells, upsells, and cross-sells are another way to keep your customers interested in the loyalty stage.
Resells mean that you are selling the same product to your customer that they already purchased from you. If they enjoyed the first, they would probably enjoy it again. The only thing they need is a soft nudge.
Upsells and cross-sells prompts your customers to purchase other items that are similar to the one they bought but that are more expensive. These can also be items that function as a kind of an add-on to the main thing your customer purchased. You can market these either before, during, or after the purchase.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, the sales funnel one of the basics that you should know about your business and operating it. Make sure to try out these strategies to decrease your sales funnel and increase the probability of a potential customer becoming a buyer.
