The Focus is now on Personalization across Various Channels to Drive Retail Business Growth

Ever tried going back to early nineties and visualizing how shopping used to be in those days. You would go to a store or a mall, preferably the one for which you don’t have to take a detour. Most of your shopping would be completed on weekends with family tagging along. You would rely on your friends’ advice, magazine reviews and TV ads for deciding what to buy. Your friends would also call to inform you about the latest deal or clearance sale. Fast track to the present day and you have Amazon Go. No Cashier, no checkouts; just visit the store, pick up what you want and simply walk out of the store. The shopping experience for customers has completely transformed over the years. The…

Customer expectations are rising fast. Meet them or die.

Today, website visitors expect more than ever before from your website as they compare your user experience against the leaders from different sectors like Amazon, Facebook, HubSpot or Uber. Yet, often there are common flaws in how websites are designed and implemented which means they don't support your communications goals and the customer journey. While mistakes may not be fatal, if you think of every design or content mistake you make as a defect in the customer journey, that will be repeated thousands of time or more if it's not fixed, it's not going to help you compete since research shows that bad experiences mean that visitors or customers won't return. The quality of the Customer and User Experiences that businesses deliver through their customer-facing websites is now vital in most industries. The website experience must support the whole customer lifecycle from acquiring customers…

See from this case study how these automated campaigns can generate new streams of revenue for your business

Behavioural emails can generate millions in online sales yet most retailers struggle to get it right. Time and time again, digital marketers grapple with the existential question: How important is email marketing, really? Email tends to have an astronomically high ROI of 3800%; for every $1 spent on email marketing, retailers make an average of $38 and it's one of the best sales online retail sales channels. Itís no surprise that there are hundreds of email marketing software solutions that offer numerous styling, scheduling, and automation options. As the e-commerce space continues to grow more and more crowded each year, all the software options in the world canít and wonít guarantee new streams of revenue for…

New research reveals the top tactics ecommerce businesses can use to convert the 68% of people who abandon their shopping carts

In 2016, global ecommerce sales within retail grew to $1.915 trillion, a figure excluding sales for travel, events, and restaurants. What is more, ecommerce is projected to grow to over $4 trillion by 2020. This type of growth isn’t occurring anywhere else in retail (an industry which hovers around 6% growth year to year as a whole), so it’s clear that ecommerce revenue will increasingly become a dominant force in retail. Yet as retail adapts to the digital world, the ecommerce system has evolved into something imperfect. Simply googling ecommerce business problems reveals a troubling statistic: the majority of shoppers abandon their shopping cart before finalizing a purchase. In fact, according to Baymard Institute, 68.81% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and this figure is based on the…

The most effective ways to boost your conversion rate 

Have you ever considered why it happens? Why a visitor enters your website, stays there for a while and leaves without purchasing when you have so much to offer? According to the latest trends, you have 5 seconds to engage the customer and make an impression before they leave your website. In this article we will expose 5 major conversion blockers that can be disastrous for your website, but are fixable at the same time. So if you are a new business getting started with ecommerce, you better make those 5 seconds worth your customer’s time.

The Rise of Ecommerce

Ecommerce started as a revolution in shopping. With time, increased competition inspired companies to invest more in their websites, improving their appearance and usability to meet the standards. Ecommerce as we know it today has evolved into a billion dollar industry, but for…

Use these stunning designs and useful tools to improve your Ecommerce UX

Just about anyone can create their own ecommerce store, with the ecommerce site builders available today, it's a 'piece of cake'. Creating a good ecommerce store, now that's a bit harder. But creating one exceptional enough to stand out from the infinitely large crowd and wow your audience. That takes a special something. The key to building a loyal base of customers and attracting more at the same time is building a genuinely exceptional user experience. Achieving this requires sensational visuals, beautiful design, elegant and intuitive menus and features which actively help your users. Doing this for your ecommerce store is not easy by any means, but it is possible, and learning lessons from the most innovative online stores in business is a great way to give your ecommerce stores user experience a big boost. So we thought we'd showcase 3 of the…

Make sure you aren't making any of these costly ecommerce marketing mistakes

Competition is fierce in the ecommerce sector, so to get an edge, you need a planned approach, with clear priorities and a relentless approach to optimisation. It’s likely Ecommerce Marketing is already a massive investment in your business and this will only grow in future as you look to compete. Creating a robust multichannel marketing strategy that balances your business goals with your available resources can be difficult to achieve, but when you succeed, the benefits are immense. Over the last 20 years as we have consulted and trained with many Ecommerce businesses and we have seen many different mistakes which hinder growth. Yet there are some common mistakes we see often, which we have summarised here so you can compare against your approaches.

Strategy Recommendation: Plan, Manage, Optimise!

This is our mantra at Smart Insights and it is shared by many of the…

 Knowing if you’ve got a successful retail SEO campaign all starts with picking the right metrics

With a wealth of information at your fingertips in Google Analytics, how do you determine what the key performance indicators (KPIs) are for your website? Everyone wants to demonstrate the value of organic campaigns but since the cruel and unusual punishment of the removal of the organic keyword conversion report in Google Analytics to be replaced by the opaque 'not-provided', it can seem difficult to measure the impact of all the hard work although the improved Search Console-Google Analytics integration does help. Before we dive into the KPIs, it’s important to remember a few things when you’re pulling data out of Google Analytics and drawing conclusions from this…

What is data without human interpretation?

As with any quantitative data you get the what but not the why. Human interpretation of this data is where the…

A case study on growing a startup to a billion dollar company

7 years ago Zalando was just an inspiration; it was born from Robert Gentz'z fascination of the recently sold German startup StudiVZ which fetched €85 million. After a failed attempt of their first startup, Unibicate, a social media site for Universities in Mexico, David Schneider and Robert Gentz, with the backing of Rocket Internet’s Oliver Samwer, launched Zalando. It was a well-executed clone of the US Zappos, which quickly expanded beyond retailing shoes. Once a novel single-country startup, Zalando has become a 6-Billion-Euro company and Europe’s top Fashion retail platform. In 2008, Zalando served only Germany, five years later they were serving fifteen European countries.

So Zalando gives an excellent international Ecommerce and digital marketing case study of how digital media and technology can be used to…

Recommended design patterns and best practices for your Basket/Shopping Bag

Here is the 6th in my series of posts on recommended Ecommerce page layouts. We've been working our way down the funnel, so now we move from product pages to improving your Basket or Shopping Bag Page. Given it's the launchpad to checkout, it plays a vital driver in pushing the buyer down the conversion path. As with checkout, the basket page has to serve two user types: 1. New users: Reduce barriers to purchase and persuade them to trust your brand and website, with their payment. 2. Returning users: Provide a quick transition to check-out, summarising key information which commit buyers to purchase. If you work in an ecommerce team at a retailer, or are involved in design for your client’s accounts, then I hope these templates and tips will guide you along the design/re-evaluation process to maximise results for your pages.

Key Ecommerce Basket Page…