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Where Predictive Analytics Is Having the Biggest Impact

Published on June 28, 2021

A couple of decades ago retail business owners would dream of reading their customers’ thoughts to predict long and short-term trends, set the right prices, and make a thousand of other alterations to avoid loss and generate maximum revenue all year round. It turned out that no magical powers are required to know what a customer wants – data analysis is more than enough. And e-commerce is right where predictive analytics is having the biggest impact.

What Is Predictive Analytics and How It Functions

Actually, the name speaks for itself, but let’s get it clear. Predictive analytical technology relies on specific software that is trained to check customers’ behavior patterns, analyze market trends and prices, predict monthly profits, make retail more individual-targeted and protect businesses from unexpected falls, ensuring reasonable confidence in sales. Big data is an inexhaustible source of valuable information crucial for boosting revenue – and that’s where predictive analytics in retail and E-commerce (https://indatalabs.com/blog/predictive-analytics-used-in-business) plays the key role.

Benefits of Predictive Analytics: Ecommerce Usecases

It’s fairly easy to imagine the whole scope of benefits predictive analytics brings to the ecommerce domain, making businesses stronger and ensuring the highest quality customer experience. Still, let’s get more precise about the practical side of the technology that makes modern retailers happier.

Foreseeing Trends

If you’re generally familiar with marketing and ecommerce, you know that it’s all about detecting trends and making money while it’s gaining momentum. With predictive analytics technology retailers can see the most clickable and purchased items to have a clear understanding of what has to be stocked. How do you think Amazon has become so popular? Because it knows exactly what you want to buy next week and prepares for it.

Placing Smart Recommendations

We are already familiar with the feeling of being watched when it comes to online shopping or even mere googling. Recommendations follow us on every site or social media we use. And it actually works. but it’s not predictive analytics. Smart recommendation technology collects as much data as possible to predict the items that might catch customer’s eye on a certain retail website. It analyses your purchasing history, clicks, and average money spent. It might be frightening, but if you’re, for example, a vegan, predictive analysis systems are likely to be aware of it and you’ll never see a sign of non-plant food recommendations when visiting a delivery store. Care as it is.

Building Reasonable Pricing

There’s no surprise that the price factor plays a great role in ecommerce success stories. With predictive analysis development, we saw the arrival of the term “dynamic pricing”. The simplest example of “ancient” price building is that summer clothes are most expensive in the late spring-early and middle summer season. You would agree that it’s not so “dynamic”. Today we have Airbnb, Uber that change their prices swiftly, based on numerous parameters. Retail ecommerce stores also use dynamic pricing strategies to make the most of an item when it becomes trendy.

Eliminating Fraud

Safe transactions are the highest ecommerce priority. Let’s see how predictive analytics is impacting patient care and saves money and nerves. High-quality predictive software has developed multiple anti-fraud models that encompass additional payment checks and identity verification, analyses of buying history, payment preferences, and other details to reduce fraud probability to a minimum. Another advantage of anti-fraud models and patterns is that they can be adjusted to a particular type of business since they have different levels of susceptibility.

Enhancing Supply Chain

“Out-of-stock” is the most disappointing phrase when you finally see an object you’ve been craving. Obviously, lack of items in stock decreases the level of customer experience by making one wait for restocking or go to another retailer. Here’s another case of how predictive analytics can be used in business (https://indatalabs.com/blog/predictive-analytics-in-retail-and-e-commerce). It makes it possible to see which products will be in demand next month and let retailers efficiently plan, supply, and transport them from depots. Good-quality predictive analytics software is the reason why Walmart never disappoints customers with “out-of-stock”.

Making Use of Business Intelligence

Customers do not always know what they want before they see it. So the task of retailers is to show the product a person might want and might like, based on a combination of individual purchasing behavior, clicks, reviews, likes, and saves. All of these form the basis for smart predictive analytics and leave both customers and retailers happy.

A Little Fly in The Predictive Analytics Ointment

There’s no use in speaking about predictive analytics pros and cons, as advantages far outweigh any cons. However, there’re a couple of challenges you might face when incorporating predictive analytics into a business routine. First, predictive analytics don’t work when global changes take place. The pandemic has obviously messed up all the trends, plans, and forecasts, resulting in a shortage of certain items on the market. The good thing is that predictive systems can be adjusted to emerging realities. Second, the quality of predictive technology is in direct proportion to the sufficiency of customer data and its relevance. Without adequate data, analytics is of no use.

The Bottom Line

Ecommerce has obviously overridden traditional shopping and analysts strongly doubt that this trend is likely to be reversed. Since the competition between online retailers is going up with lightning speed, one of the smartest things you can do to stay afloat is to incorporate predictive analytics into your business routine. It might seem that a small Instagram store doesn’t need analytical software because it’s far from Amazon size, remember that big things start small. So by welcoming the technology today, you open the door for tomorrow’s success.

How to Improve Customer Experience in eCommerce Stores

Published on April 14, 2021

Marketing

As more and more shoppers seek convenience, a vast purview of options, and fair pricing, eCommerce shopping has slowly come to alter the retail industry. Consumer activity in eCommerce has been so furtive that the industry’s revenue is expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021, indicating that the dramatic move away from conventional retail will not be reversed anytime soon.

As such, delivering a stellar eCommerce customer experience today is not only advantageous to companies but also a necessity. As an increasing number of people shop online, their standards for a positive customer experience grow. According to research by PwC, 73% of all people consider customer experience to be a crucial component in their buying decisions, but only 49% of U.S. customers agree that they provide a good customer experience. In order to help eCommerce organizations close that gap, we have assimilated a list of five tips in this article that will help you understand how to improve customer experience for eCommerce.

1. Build a user-friendly website

The most crucial element in running an eCommerce store successfully is its website. This is because your website is usually the first touchpoint in your prospective customer’s journey, and thus you have to ensure that the first impression people have is a good one.

You can do this by building easy-to-navigate web pages that allow your customers to gain an intuitive grasp of how to proceed on your website to browse products or seek the services they need. As such, the UI of the website should be categorically organized, much the same way a physical store is. Also, ensure that the search button is easily discoverable and links to all your resources.

Building an easy-to-use website with a well-designed search bar can not only allow customers to find what they need but also makes for a great customer experience. Take the example of Zara’s website. It places the search bar in a way that it is big and clearly visible. In addition to that, it also lists its product categories as a carousel so that the user can skim through them easily to land upon the category that they want to shop.

2. Use upselling & cross-selling strategies

Providing items related to your customers’ purchases is also a very effective way to improve the customer experience for your eCommerce store. However, while doing so, ensure that you don’t bombard shoppers with every relevant product there is, but rather push items to your customer that will complement their shopping cart.

You can also craft compelling CTA(s) and provide offers to customers to persuade them to buy more or higher-priced items. Again, make sure that the frequency of your messages is just right since incessant upsells could alienate clients.

By providing high-value discounts and complimentary items, you can tie people to your eCommerce store so that they buy regularly and become repeat customers. Dollar Shave Club is the perfect example of this. Their confirmation email above shows you how it not only allows customers to know about an incoming shipment but also upsells other complementary products.

3. Employ chatbots to reduce cart abandonment rates

Were you aware that as many as 88% of shopping carts of eCommerce stores are abandoned by customers, irrespective of the industry they belong to?

Many a time, customers add products to their cart without fully understanding what they want or how and which product could fit their needs the best. This makes customers hesitate to buy a product that they might not be satisfied with later. What’s more, buyers could also be confused about different aspects of your website, such as what’s the return policy, how many payment options there are, among others, which often arises as a result of lack of customer support.

In order to help buyers understand these things, you can employ a chatbot to provide customer support to buyers at every hour of the day. Retail chatbots are not only available round-the-clock, but they also remind buyers about products in their shopping carts by tracking them from the time they add products to their cart and activating cart reminders to encourage them to make a purchase.

When it comes to choosing a chatbot for ecommerce stores, there are plenty of players in the market. But Acquire’s Chatbot and Intercom’s conversational platform are industry leaders.

4. Build a great community on social media

According to a study from IAB, around 90% of consumers claim that they would recommend a brand and its products to others after engaging with them on social media.

This is great news for eCommerce store owners. Social media not only allows them to interact with customers through their unique brand voice but also gives them a chance to retarget customers. By being active on your social media page and engaging customers on a daily basis, you can build a dedicated community of followers.

Take Black Milk Clothing, for example. The brand has a host of Facebook groups across the world, along with a huge group called “Sell, Swap, Buy”, with more than 15,000 members.

The brand uses its Facebook page very wisely, sometimes even featuring Instagram photos of their customers wearing or flaunting their products. This maneuver serves a double purpose: it makes existing customers happy and also gives prospective buyers a chance to see what their products look like on real people, giving them more incentive to buy their products.

5. Provide excellent customer support

As said above, the power of excellent customer support can never be understated. And while chatbots come in handy to service customer queries at odd hours of the day or even handle an inordinate number of basic inquiries simultaneously, it doesn’t quite provide the interpersonal connection that a human does.

A customer with a defective product is obviously going to be comparatively more emotional. Having them engage with chatbots could potentially leave them sulking because of the lack of empathy, prompting them to leave you a bad review. That is why you should ensure that your customer support personnel is always equipped to quite literally save the day for your customer, and in the process, save yours too.

At the same time, be extremely pedantic about who you place your faith in since these support personnel are the face of your brand for your consumers. Educate your support team personnel in the art of customer support through real-life examples and exemplars. Take Zappos, for example. Known for having an obsessive focus around its customers’ experience, Zappos is often the benchmark for providing customer support, along with, of course, Amazon.

Shown above is just one example of Amazon‘s many successful customer support stories, where a customer support personnel services the customer while roleplaying with them, adding an extra dimension to their experience in the process.

Conclusion

When everything’s said and done, delivering a satisfactory customer experience is certainly no cakewalk. It is a continuous process that involves tailing the customer on their buyer journey and helping them at every stage in the process. It also involves understanding your audience well and creating the right support systems for them to enjoy a good experience shopping with you.

Benefits of a Landing Page Development

Published on August 26, 2020

Internet/Marketing

Still questioning the importance of a landing page and the ways it can support your business goals? This post will dispel all your doubts and supply practical recommendations on how to develop a website that goes beyond a single marketing campaign and can become your online business card.

What is a website landing page?

Typically, a landing page is a purpose-made web page where you target “land” after clicking an ad or following a link from a newsletter.

Serving different purposes, a one-page website can be used to:

Warm up visitors and guide them to another target page.
Generate leads with free trials, podcasts or guides.
Capture necessary data for further marketing campaigns.
Convert visitors into customers.

Landing pages: key insights

Existing separately from the main website, a landing page can actually consist of more than just one page. You can build a campaign-specific website with more detailed information about the products or services you’d like to generate leads for and it will still be landing. The only rule is that it should have one main page.

Do I really need a landing page?

Being a highly effective tool for lead generation, a landing page may save you a good deal of money. How? It will cost far less to develop a landing page than, let’s say, a corporate website. With a variety of available services, you can get a really good end-product with a distinctive design.

Using a landing page for selling, you double your chances to boost conversions. A sharp focus on key business aspects and visitor-specific problems proves that you are an expert in the niche and helps to build a solid bond with your visitors.

Selling more, selling better

The ultimate goal of any marketing activities is to sell something. Landing pages are specially designed to simplify the task for you by putting the marketing funnel on a single page: from information about the product or service to ordering or buying. The fact that you can use such a website for placing several offers, up to 5 if to be more precise, makes it even more attractive.

Now imagine that you get an opportunity to build a strong brand identity, show your potential clients and partners a successful online presence and market your services 24/7. Sounds like an ideal solution for small business owners, right?

Landing page vs. eCommerce, corporate and other websites

If you are looking for speed and simplicity, a landing page is the most popular and practical solution with a bunch of other pros:

Quick and cheap to create, easy to manage, test and optimize.
Intuitive, straightforward in navigation and, what’s extremely relevant with the recent introduction of Google’s Mobile-First Index, it’s mobile-friendly.
Easy-to-integrate with your PPC or email campaign.
Goal-driven and conversion-oriented, ideal for sign-ups, email subscriptions, newsletters, adds, etc.

Speaking about the cons

Building the complete picture of pros and cons, you can determine what website type is the best choice for your marketing goals.

Along with all benefits of landing pages, there are disadvantages to keep in mind:

Limited content which should be carefully crafted, SEO friendly, engaging and follow a strict visual hierarchy.
You should follow the best SEO techniques for one-page websites, make your limited content match visitor’s queries, without messing up vital keywords to maintain ranking.
Poor scalability that leads to full redesign and additional expense when a website starts to look overwhelmed with additional information. Here, however, you can still opt for a landing, adding more pages for a specific content type or services.

How to build a picture-perfect landing?

What landing pages can show really good conversion rates? The list may vary depending on the niche you operate in and business specific goals. But there are some common recommendations you can take the advantage of.

To encourage your website visitors to convert, you should know your audience, understand what they want and what CTAs attract their attention. Analyze users’ behavior with eye-tracking technology, use A/B testing to experiment with different content and visuals. Track what copywriting style, action keywords, buttons formats increase conversions.

The top rule is to pay due attention at the landing page optimization. Initially, a one-page website is not that SEO-friendly.

To win leading positions in search results, conduct thorough keywords research, take care of link building with the key focus on robust authentic content distribution across the page. In addition, videos can level up content shareability and conversions. Just be unique in what you create. This is what will make search engines and audiences love your website and elevate ranking.

Compelling design, smart colors combination and fonts selection can directly influence sales, enforce or break your landing page. The last option is not likely to happen if all these aspects will be based on your marketing funnel.

More ideas to follow

Do not be afraid to add a few additional pages and a blog to your landing. Despite promotional challenges you may face, it’s worth doing. Your website won’t look overwhelmed with information; you can add more categories, provide more insights about your offering, promote a larger number of keywords and, of course, establish your reputation with niche-specific articles.

It’s not enough to have just good landing page conversion rates to stay ahead of the competition. Work to use this marketing tool to the fullest and reach the best index for your target industry:

Travel – 25.1%
Real estate – 11.2%
Business consulting – 27.4%
Business services – 15.7%, etc.

Check stats for the niche you operate in:

In devenup.com they are very serious and do not work just to make a quick buck providing a landing page service but deliver a really good product based on the individual approach and unique vision of every particular project. Wide-ranging experience and numerous successfully implemented projects in their portfolio are the best proof of the expertise you can benefit from.

Quick insight into the process

Following user behavior factors and your requirements, we develop a custom one-page design, build elaborate website structure and optimize it to meet the latest search engine requirements and go high in search results.

Have you already tried landing pages? From product or company to startup landing page services, our team will help you to get started and support you with valuable tips. Get abroad!

How Videos Help Ecommerce To Boost Sales

Published on October 29, 2019October 31, 2019

Business

Launching an eCommerce website is definitely an excellent idea to start a business. Years of planning, tons of ideas, some chosen, some rejected and you have your website ready to hit the market.

You need to make sure that you have a product page, which needs to be SEO optimized. your blogs need to be up to date and nicely written. You need to have an exceptional UI and offer your customers the best value for their money.

And with still all this work and when you think that everything perfect, you’re still not witnessing bigger sales? Have your figures shown a rise? What’s wrong then? Why is your website not gaining much traffic?

Odds are you haven’t embedded the right things at the right place. Just having a website isn’t enough to witness growth, instead, you need to tailor it in a way that can boost your online presence and help your business outshine in the global world.

And how is that gonna happen?

Well, there are plenty of ways to marketize your product or your business, the one that we are about to explore here are videos.

While designing the product page in your eCommerce store, you would have placed everything right. The product title, the description SEO optimized and the price set as per industrial norms but have you added a video? How can a customer know about using a product?

Whether you want to promote your business or showcase a product, embedding videos is by the far the most effective way. According to a survey, the total internet traffic generated through videos is expected to be 80%. And given the dawn of competition, this figure is far from just being satisfactory.

So, videos are no more an option but a necessity to sustain in the digital world.

Videos For Ecommerce Marketing

As a marketer, you can integrate videos that revolve around multiple ideas. To outline the business objectives and goals and also to promote a product, enabling users to a better view of the functionality of the product.

When we about marketing, this type of advertising has gained tremendous popularity. Nearly 78% of users watch only videos every week. Such a trend is expected to rise further and alter the way customers engage with the brand over the net. The more they see, the more they are attracted to the brand. And once a customer finds interest in a particular brand, the likelihood of making a purchase is higher than before.

As a matter of fact, videos tell a story. It is like a short film that takes customers on a journey of the product or the brand. This has a better and more attractive appeal which leads to better engagement.

According to a survey, landing pages that have video content witness an 80% higher conversion rate. Meaning that your business is not just gaining traffic but that traffic is actually of help and can help you boost your overall sales. Alongside, emails that are followed with a video campaign record 19% higher click rate. Needless to state, greater is the online visibility, higher the possibility of purchase.

Why Use Videos?

Before we move on to outline the top reasons as to why video is the best form for marketing that can boost your overall sales, let’s have a quick look at what marketers say or feel about it.

62% of consumers prefer watching videos on product reviews prior to making a purchase.
84% of the surveyed consumers have an inclination towards a purchase after watching a brand’s video.
97% of video marketers are of the view that publishing an understanding of that product or service, whereas 76% find this method helping them increase eCommerce sales.

The numbers and figures are definitely convincible, however, there still lies this question, why this method?

People prefer viewing that reading: It is and has always been a known fact that people love to watch. Not only are such videos easy to watch but they also entertain customers and the story portrayed draws a connection between the customer and the video. It is important that organization try and mold their videos in a way that provides information and at the same time, are fun to watch. A boring one would be as good as not having one, in the first place.
Information On The Go- Videos talk a lot and they talk about everything. From the business to the product, the detail of the item and the manner in which it has to be used. This saves the user from actually looking out for a manual and learning on the usage. Instead, the customer can simply play it and know about the functions. This helps brands connect better with the customer. An effectively recorded video is an answer to all the questions of a customer. When a customer is satisfied with the product, he/she is more likely to engage and make a purchase.
Videos Drive Greater Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is one of the most important indicators of business success. The higher the traffic, the greater is the visibility in the Google search engine and likewise, the sales. You need to reduce the bounce rate of your website and for that, you need to have a better engagement. Marketers believe that embedding videos within the website are one of the best ways to keep users engage within a website and drive organic traffic.

In a nutshell, this type of marketing works well with an Ecommerce business. An exceptionally curated video would have the following:

Provides an explanation on how to use your products
Give a description of all of the features and the product functionality
Share reviews of the happy customer
Create a story that revolves around your product
Educate customers about your values and the business mission.
Show the entire product in action
Compare your product to one of your competitors
Instill greater confidence in your potential customers
Enlist the benefits and also, factors that make your business stand out from the rest.

Wrapping Up

To sum up, videos have the ability to add more to your product than just a visual display. If used right, a business can experience a steady increase in sales and likewise, an upsurge in profit. And next to this, your whole strategy needs to be planned out, to come to a point where your eCommerce store if blooming. To learn more, we also suggest checking out more resources or a guide like this one on Apptunix, which could steer you even more in the right direction, on the road for a successful online business.

4 Cool eCommerce Merchandising Hacks to Boost Profit Rates

Published on July 5, 2019December 30, 2019

Business

A recent study by Coresight Research showed that 40% of U.S. non-grocery sales are at a discount, representing roughly $395 billion in lost revenue, 12% of sales.

Retailers get to avoid markdowns and sell out of the season at full margin. However, we can’t predict how much inventory they acquire. Merchants usually complain about over-buying (resulting in markdowns) and under-buying (resulting in out-of-stocks).

There are two significant factors causing vitality.

-Changes in customer behavior, coupled with external factors like weather, competitors, and social effects.

-More customer choices, coupled with new channels and alternatives, like direct-to-consumer startups.

Balancing demand with supply is difficult. The conventional aspect of the inventory being a back-office department doesn’t exist anymore. Merchandising is inherently linked to inventory. Most leading brands and retailers currently closely coordinate these two.

In this post, I’ll address four coolest of the cool merchandising hacks that will not only help you effectively manage your inventory levels but also help you boost profit rates.

1. Show variants in pictures

The exposure a product receives directly impacts its sales, hence, more exposure, more sales. Direct marketers learned this years ago. Unusual art choices would have a significant impact on the sale of that product variant. As an example, if you display a black colored dress, then it will sell faster than all other colors. Showing multiple variants in pictures will reduce this drawback.

Online merchants don’t rely on one single image. Instead, we can change the featured image quickly within a given time using artificial intelligence.

It’s common for merchants to manage the highest row of a category grid and to feature product for additional exposure manually. This usually causes those products to sell out of standard sizes-small, medium, giant leaving only, say extra-small or extra-large. So the merchandise isn’t technically out of stock and continues to be prominently displayed.

2. Automate category management

Category management depends on performance tiers and measures every category’s revenue and profit contribution. It provides a structure balance exposure with offered inventory, to get profit. Category management for eMerchandising will automatically increase or scale back exposure, and thereby scale back markdowns — for categories and individual product.

3. Emphasize on bestsellers

Retail sales usually display a few product categories. Often the product in these categories represents just 5 to 10 percent of the entire product range. These categories systematically generate high volume and smart margins.

Cash-machine categories pay the bills. However, the best margins usually return from the products’ long-tail. These best-sellers are high margin, high-inventory things that aren’t obtaining a lot of visibility — ready for additional exposure. Exposing the product will drive significant progressive profit and scale back the danger of marking them down.

4. Leverage out-of-stocks

Out-of-stock inventory frustrates shoppers, mainly if the products are still promoted. A sensible eCommerce store owner will take off all the out of stock products from the promotion as it portrays a bad image about the business— the merchandise and the inventory not being in sync.

Nevertheless, out-of-stocks happen. You can scale back the impact on shoppers by providing the flexibility to back-order the item, or with a button to “notify once available.”

Most retailers commit blunders by hiding out of stock products. They lose business by not giving proper directions to the shoppers to reorder.

Bottom Line

These four hacks are just a starting point and are recommended by GoodFirms. As an eStore owner, you need to do everything it takes to earn profits, especially when the competition is so cutthroat. Digital Merchandising is evolving from a standalone perform to being perfectly synced with inventory, and from a manual, rules-based method to being optimized by AI. Lessons learned today will help to shape the future of eCommerce industry tomorrow.

General objectives that guide the activities and relationships of one state in its interactions with other states.

eCommerce