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Does Your Digital Strategy Cover the Entire Buying Process?

As customers are ever more connected, the “balance of power” in the marketing field shifts towards them at an ever greater speed. This means that you cannot afford to base your digital strategy solely on traditional approaches and techniques such as direct advertising. If you want to be profitable in today’s dynamic online environment, you need a strategy which encompasses all steps to making a purchase, the purchase itself and the actions that the customer will take afterwards. Consider the stages of the buying process and how to influence the consumer effectively at each one.

Step 1: Recognising a Need
At the awareness stage, consumers realise that they can satisfy a specific need or solve a particular problem. The best way to influence them at this stage is education. Your digital strategy should be focused on educating consumers by providing high-quality written, graphic and video content via all popular online channels and more specifically through social media including your blog. The key thing is to provide valuable information and advice focused on the specific need or problem rather than to use direct promotional techniques.

Step 2: Doing Research
Consumers seek information about the possible ways to satisfy their need or solve their problem. This is also a stage at which the marketer can take the role of an educator by presenting different options and explaining them in detail. The social element plays a particularly important role as consumers would typically count on people that they know for advice and recommendations. That is why one of your major goals should be to increase fan following on the social media. Creating brand awareness and building strong reputations are others factors which will make you particularly influential at this stage of the buying process.

Step 3: Comparing Alternatives
This is where you have to stand out among competitors with strong advertising and promotion. What consumers want at this stage is to find a high-quality product at a reasonable price. Polish your pricing strategy and gear your marketing efforts towards making the best offer at the best time. Use marketing channels with high success rate including direct advertising on Google and other websites, email marketing and mobile app advertising through push notifications and in-app notifications. It pays off to invest more in emphasising the benefits of your product with top-quality photos and videos showing how it works. Positive customer reviews can be particularly influential.

Step 4: Making a Purchase
Unfortunately, many marketers think that their job is done at this stage, but this cannot be further from the truth. Once consumers have made a decision to buy your product, you have to give them the easiest, quickest and most secure way to do so. The purchase process requires extensive planning based on rich customer data and accurate design perfected with A/B testing.

Step 5: Evaluation and Further Actions
Your customers’ experience with your brand doesn’t end with the purchase. People will evaluate your product and consider whether to come back again. You should harness this natural behaviour to work in favour of your business. Invite customers to provide feedback and reviews. Engage them with your brand on the social networks as well as on your website and by sending them special personalised content and offers via email. These are just some of the most basic tools for creating engagement and expanding your loyal customer base.

If you plan to give your business a fresh start and/or a more powerful boost with a comprehensive digital strategy, get in touch with me.

How the Internet of Things Is Transforming E-Commerce

Technology changes the way in which we live at an extremely fast pace and businesses have to keep up, if they want to be successful. The Internet of Things (IoT) is not simply the new kid on the block, but a totally revolutionary development of the use of the internet as we know it. It is all about connecting all electronic devices and machines so that they can send and receive data. This is happening right now and has a revolutionary impact on every sphere of life and on all industries including e-commerce. Let’s take a look at the major transformations which this particular industry is expected to undergo in the coming years.

Innovative Shopping Experience and Contextual Purchases
Traditionally, people visit your online store via a connected device, browse through the pages, look at and compare different products and then make a purchase. IoT can make this process quite different. Let’s say a person is watching TV and sees your ad about a great special offer. The consumer can make the purchase directly at your online store via his smart TV without even having to leave the couch. Having prospects act on impulse and making a purchase immediately after they have made the decision to do so can drive e-commerce sales up immensely. To take full advantage of this innovation, businesses need to make the actual purchase process quick and simple.

Shopping and buying will be more personalised than ever. Smart devices will not only be able to alert the consumer when he has run out of something, but to make actual product suggestions. For instance, a printer will be able to tell when new toner will be needed and to present the most suitable types and deals. Similarly, a coffee maker can make suggestions regarding the ideal blend and package size. Retailers involved in e-commerce can take advantage of this trend to gain more customers and keep them.

More Efficient Supply Chain and Inventory Management
As a retailer of physical goods operating online, you would want to have more efficient planning and to reduce delays and losses to the possible minimum. The Internet of Things is making major improvements in this field. With accurate transportation vehicle tracking, you will be able to set precise time frames for the loading and uploading of products. You will also receive alerts about delivery delays and other issues. This will help you to organise processes better and to overcome challenges more quickly.

There are major breakthroughs in warehouse management such as keeping track of the environmental conditions. Special sensors integrated with your inventory management software send data about temperature and humidity allowing you to make timely changes for keeping inventory in good condition. Inventory item tracking is a technology already used by many companies. You will receive immediate notification when an item is removed from the premises. This can help you to reduce losses to the possible minimum and to pinpoint and eliminate ongoing problems.

The Internet of Things is here to stay and you can seize all opportunities which it offers to online retailers.

If you plan to transform your e-commerce business, let’s talk. You can contact me here.

Creating a Mobile App that Gives Value to Your Customers

You are constantly told that your business needs a mobile app to gain and keep customers and stay competitive, but how do you actually achieve this?

How can you develop an application that will prove to be a profitable tool for your business?

Let’s take a look at what you should focus on when creating user experience for ensuring high engagement and returns on investment.

App Doesn’t Equal Website
One of the biggest mistakes which businesses make is to think about a mobile app as an alternative to or a continuation of their website. What is the point of having both if they offer pretty much the same features, experience and value in general? Before you make any plans for app development, you should first get a clear idea of how this new tool is different from your website.

The typical business website is primarily about presenting the company and its products and communicating with customers. It is easy for anyone to visit it and use it regardless of their relationship with your company. A mobile app, on the other hand, is more than just a source of information. In order to deserve a permanent place on the smartphones and tablets of users, it has to offer more. The reality is that people perceive applications as personalised tools that help them in their daily lives. For this, you need to give them value by providing the following:

Solving a problem – Think about the goals which your customers want to achieve with buying your products and help them get even more in an even faster way. If you sell sports equipment, for instance, your app could offer personalised training plans with gym session reminders, calorie calculator and more. This is just a simple example, but mobile has lots of potential for adding value to practically all kinds of products.
Enhancing the customer’s experience with the brand – This is where you can win big time and really stand out among competitors. You can make it easier for customers to find you and to reach you with features like a map and a store locator. You can offer faster servicing to mobile app users both online and at your store. It is also possible to provide unique services like the creation of personalised wish lists for special occasions.
Unique offerings – This is all about giving your customers an incentive to download your mobile app. You can reward them for this by giving them special offers first plus some exclusive bargains too. You can also run entire loyalty programs solely via your app.

Taking Advantage of Mobile Technology
The unique features which smartphones and tablets offer aren’t simply “cool”, but can be invaluable for businesses, especially when it comes to marketing and sales. Localisation, for example, allows you to target your mobile app users given where they are, the time of day and their proximity to your physical location. Another one of the coolest trends is digitalising your loyalty cards and gift cards and integrating them with apps enabling payment via NFC. The sky’s the limit, literally.

What kind of mobile app do you need for your business? Contact me to receive professional consultation.

Mobile Shopping Issues Your Customers Face

Retailers are struggling to offer mobile experiences that customers expect them to offer. MarketingCharts in February, 2016 conducted a survey with a base of 100,000 shoppers. People still face obstacles when it comes to online shopping. Problems found included:
• 33% of the respondents said that there are stability issues with mobile sites such as having to enlarge the order to click the item they want.
• 25% said that pages load slow and that there were other performance issues.
• 21% said that they need to go to the full site to access what they are seeking.
Small pictures, text, security problems, and lack of information all boil down to the user experience.
In the retail world, the user experience is the most important part of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. When you have usability issues this impacts success as customers want to have a seamless experience when using an app on a mobile device.

Looking at the User Experience Issues Through Apps
Mobile website can offer great user experience and many do, when they have the right execution. Native mobile app experiences are the shifting tide now. Retail Me Not conducted a survey which shows that many shoppers have a preference to mobile apps since they offer a better experience than mobile sites. When compared to mobile sites, retail apps offer:
• 63% more convenience
• 57% faster
• 40% better experience because they store user settings
• 31% more rewards and additional benefits

The millennial market is a lucrative one and they have more preference towards mobile apps. They want interactive and interesting experience with apps. Forbes conducted a survey indicating that 54% of millennials enjoy retail apps since they have abetter experience than retail mobile sites. 27% of millennials take advantage of rewards, discounts, and exclusive offers that apps provide them.

More Return on Investment When You Offer a Better Experience
Apps that penetrate the market are lucrative for retailers. The use of apps now counts for about half of all mobile sales for those retailers which have a focus on the user experience. App Annie says that apps also drive in-store visits and users buy more items when compared to the web. Mobile apps are therefore, a critical platform that retailers need to take advantage of for stronger sales, loyal customers, and a better experience.

How to Get the Experience You Want
Apps need to focus on the customer. Friction points need to be eliminated and there should be value for a better shopping experience. For version 1 of your app you should consider the following:
• Have a personalized experience
• Offer relevant product suggestions with a recommendation engine
• Reward customers with the integration of loyalty programs so you get more purchases
• Use promotions, special offers, and coupons to help users save money
• Make sure you have streamlined payments so friction points are eliminated in the payment process
• Add functionality and features so the in-store experience is improved

Once you have collected some data from shoppers that are active in your app, you can refine and improve the later versions of that app based upon behavior and user preferences. If you set KPIs for the app you can analyse, collect, and act upon that data during the revision of the app in later versions.

Consumers want more from their shopping experiences. Apps are becoming a large part of retail strategies. A company has to keep their end user in mind and have apps which reduce friction, add value, and engage customers so they stay loyal to the brand.

Reasons Why User Personas are Important for Your App

Understanding User Personas
After research is conducted on specific users, a persona or profile is created. This imitates a real customer and uses data from the person’s attitudes, user behaviors, pain points, needs and wants in regards to a specific product. When a user persona is created in an app, its’s designed to work with a specific group of people not a generic group.

A persona will illustrate the behaviors and goals of users. Market segments will examine demographic patterns and look at locations, age, salary, sex, and other factors. During the development of an app, personas can provide added benefits.

Promoting User Focused Outcomes
An app at times, can change into the desires sof the developer and not focus on the end user. To eliminate this problem, the development process has to center on a goal which has the end-user in mind. The developers must work from the perspective of the end user.

The app has to resonate with the end user so personas are used through the entire development process. If the user persona is reinforced during the development process, the team stays focused on their main goal of creating an app for the user. If this is not done, then the end product may not be what the end user is going to want.

Consensus During Development is Established
When you have raw data, it’s often hard to interpret this. When you have a persona, this communicates trends and encapsulates the research so it can be visualized and understood. When you have a development team you often have personnel with varying degrees of skill which can cause opinions in what should be done. When you work with a user persona, this makes it easier for the team to avoid miscommunication and confusion when engaged in the development process. The concepts and ideas and communicated with a persona so the entire team is on the same wavelength and that they understand what their target audience actually is.

Decisions are Validated
Once you have an app idea you may not have something that the end user actually needs or even wants. You need to figure out who the app will target, but you also need to know what the end user you’re trying to reach actually needs. You need validation so the end product delivers what the end user needs or you’re wasting a lot of valuable time. When a decision is made during the development process this has to focus on the needs of the end-user. If the development process starts to stray away from focusing on the end user, the app stands a good chance of failing.

During the development process, user personas are important for everyone as they increase efficiency and quality of the work. Product quality is increased when using a persona because it addresses the pain points of the end user and fixes problems with their current user experience. When you understand and can meet the needs of specific groups of users, the app stands a greater chance of being a success. You’ll get a higher download rate and engagement with the user will be maintained.