Recosense Labs Inc

Tag: Personalization

Categories
Retail Shopify

Quick Tips to Increase eCommerce Engagement

eCommerce has been on a tremendous rise over the past six to seven years. With several brick and mortar shops entering online shopping, the scope of the digital retail transformation has further widened. The expanding market segment would also give way to proportionally growing competition between retailers. As a result, the most prominent way to thrive in this competition is to enhance eCommerce engagement. 

Unsurprisingly, people want personal attention. Nobody wants or deserves to be treated as just an entity or a number. Therefore, customer experience becomes a prime brand differentiator that holds more weight than price and even products, commodities, and services.

 

To achieve the target of a higher retention rate, maximize conversion, and enhance profitability, an eCommerce platform must look for and implement ways to improve the overall customer experience and increase user engagement.

 

Top 6 Ways to Increase Customer Engagement in eCommerce

If you want to boost your sales figures or think your eCommerce store is not keeping up with the numbers you intended, follow these six established approaches for better customer engagement.

 

1. Personalize Your eCommerce Content

Personalization of eCommerce content is beneficial for cross-selling and other purposes. It entails presenting consumers with tailored deals, such as unique items, similar products, promotions, favored categories, and personalized search results.

Personalized content can be displayed to a user based on past and recent activity that includes:

  • Purchase history
  • Visited items and product pages
  • Clicked advertisements
  • Responded email campaigns
  • Personal information like geographic location and demographics

You can analyze this data and obtain valuable insights using various user analytics tools.  

An excellent technique that will help you boost your engagement rates is utilizing AI-powered personalized recommendations. AI pitches user-friendly suggestions on several eCommerce website sections like home page, product page, or cart page.

Moreover, it is effective in promoting intelligent search and suggesting similar products to users, keeping them engaged.

2. Explore the Opportunities Presented by Social Media Platforms

Social media itself is a platform to interact with the users and increase overall engagement. Here’s how you can harness the power of this tool:

  • Use paid ads to target potential and existing customers and boost site traffic.
  • To generate organic traffic, post engaging social media content mentioning links to your eCommerce site.
  • Provide real-time response to users by integrating live chat features on the social media pages.
  • Reward users to share your products via embedded share icons on the profile page.
  • Set alerts through social media on the new product listing, price drops, and discounts.

3. Promote User-Generated Content

Encourage customers to engage with your eCommerce site by giving them a voice. Product feedback, tweets, a selfie with your product by verified users, blog posts, social media tags and mentions, etc., are sources of user-generated content.

It gives the impression that your goods are well-known and reliable. This way, the consumer can witness real people using and enjoying your products.

4. Suggest Products Based on the Buyer Profile Data and Preferences

Buyer personas are necessary if you want to gain a deep understanding of your target audience and increase user engagement. Proper analysis of your customer base enables you to tailor your product your service to meet their demands. 

The best way to make the most of this data is to implement recommendation bands. These bands make recommendations and display your visitors the best-selling products based on their tastes and preferences.

 

More than that, the bands can be strategically positioned on various sections of the eCommerce platform, based on the outcome you are aiming to achieve.

 

For instance, you can place recommendation bands on the home page to display bestsellers, on the product page to promote similar products, and even on the cart page for up-selling and cross-selling items.  

 

5. Create Relevant High-Ranking Content Consistently

The most prominent eCommerce engagement strategy that brings new users onboard and drives an enormous number of sales is providing relevant and scalable content regularly.

Content like high-quality blog posts, product reviews, and press releases help users decide whether or not to buy a product. In addition, it convinces them that you are an expert, improves your SEO rankings, and creates an opportunity to be recommended across numerous online platforms.  

You can follow a content-driven strategy by attaching links to the content piece on your site’s product pages.

6. Strategize Your Sales Promotions

Some of the most successful methods to increase customer engagement and maximize conversion rates include offering a discount on products, free shipping options, coupon and promotion codes, vouchers, etc.

Offering discounts on your best-selling products is a fantastic way of tempting a customer for a premium membership, newsletter subscription, or signing up for email updates.

Loyalty programs are yet another way to build ongoing relationships with customers. You can incentivize customers to keep shopping on the platform and recommend your products to their friends and relatives.

The Bottom Line

With ever-evolving consumer tastes, the eCommerce market is very competitive. You can lose many customers if all your eCommerce strategies are oriented towards one goal – ‘sell’. 

Rather, the best way to thrive and survive is to win the trust of your customers and maintain relationships. The websites that invest in eCommerce personalization today are the only ones that will remain profitable in the long run.

The above-discussed tips will help you improve the overall user experience and enhance your understanding of customer expectations and services, eventually leading to higher sales.

Of course, it’s challenging to implement all of these strategies at a time, but even if you start out with one or two, you are likely to see results. 

Categories
Retail Shopify

4 eCommerce Retention Strategies To Make Your Website Visitors Stay

Say that you have an eCommerce website that is well-crafted and carved according to your niche. The website purely aims to reflect on what you do. And you also have a decent reach and traffic on the website. But you notice that the eCommerce retention rate is still very low! It could specifically mean that the visitors navigate away from your website after only one page visit. 

 

There is no denying that converting visitors into leads and sales is crucial for the business when they land on the page for the first time – between 70 and 96% of website visitors do not return after the initial browsing.

 

Moreover, according to an article published in Taylor & Francis Online, websites have only about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) to grab their visitors’ attention. 

 

But what could you possibly do to retain the visitors to your website and create an impactful image of you? Engagement. 

 

Only when your customer immerses and engages in your website will they be interested in buying your products, hiring your services, and so on. However, having a mere website that you are satisfied with is not enough. There is a need to detect what is causing your visitors to fade away from your site and put substantial efforts into restoring them.

So how do you do that? 

 

1. Tell Users What to Do With Call to Actions (CTAs)

CTAs are the best way to turn your visitors into active users. Unfortunately, 7 out of 10 small businesses don’t have one on their homepage.

 

When a visitor checks out the page, they want to know what your website wants them to do. As such, you must prompt them to take action by telling it to them at every step of the way.

 

Your customer won’t subscribe to your newsletter unless you ask them to; they won’t be interested in learning more unless you provide them with that service. “Buy Now”, “Read More”, “Get Started”, and “Subscribe” are just some of the CTAs that prove beneficial in engaging your users and increase eCommerce engagement.

 

2. Personalize Your Customer Experience

It might sound cliché, but personalizing user experience can work wonders for your website. Almost three-fourths of the customers want a shopping experience that is unique to them. It simply means that they expect to garner an experience tailored specifically to meet their needs and wants.

 

Without personalization, you could completely fail to deliver a great shopping experience for your users! As a result, the best way to retain them is through product recommendations. Just in case they are looking out for a festive gown, you already can sense their interest in purchasing from the festive collection. 

 

Additionally, you can provide them with the arena of bottom wear that might complete the entire look. It convinces them to stay longer on the page and also gains the possibility of lead conversion. Voila!

 

3. Make Your Website Eye-Pleasing

The aesthetics of a website are not to be ignored. Since the first impressions of any website are 94% design-related, you don’t want to disappoint your customers with a bland appearance. 

 

It’s simple: your customers will stay longer on your online shop if they enjoy being there. Humans always look out for appearances, and websites will not be spared either. As a result, it is essential to maintain a color palette that relates to your brand image, having texts at a readable glance, and looking out for balance.

 

Bear in mind that users spend an average of 5.94 seconds looking at the website’s main page. Therefore, you need to make sure to attract your customers during those precious seconds and make their visit worthwhile while increasing eCommerce retention. 

 

4. Exit-Intent Pop-Up to the Rescue

Even after scratching every opportunity to convince customers to stay on your website, there is still a last ray of hope: pop-up offers. They appear just when the visitor is about to close the tab and can prove valuable in driving your conversion rates. The only thing is that the offers should be irresistible.

 

You can provide your customers with offers like personal coupon codes, freebies, and exclusive discount offers. Even time-limited offers are a great option and can increase the pressure of lead conversion. There are various ways to leverage this, depending on the page the visitor is on. 

 

The exit-intent technology is a successful strategy that allows you to attract customers once again to your online shop. To make it work in your favor, provide one single personal offer that will be exclusive and as attractive as possible. 

Spoiler Alert! – An AI-powered personalization engine clubbed with Exit-Intent is sure to increase eCommerce retention!

 

In Closing 

The internet is huge. People are browsing through hundreds of websites every week. They come across hundreds of websites offering the same product and services as you. In such a cutthroat landscape, your goal is to stand out among all those others. 

 

To improve your website’s retention rate, you must build a relationship with the customers. Make them believe that you are not only selling them but providing them with a personalized experience. This won’t just instill trust in them, but it also encourages them to stay on the website even longer – and perhaps even visit more often. 

Categories
Retail Shopify

Boosting Your Revenue and Conversion With ShopSense: A Comprehensive Guide

You have set up your Shopify store and taken care of all the basics. You even witness a steady stream of revenue. But now what? Do you feel that your store has reached a saturation point? Or is the rate of your growth too slow? Are you looking for ways to elevate your conversion rates and, subsequently, your sales? Then you have come to the right spot!

 

There are several ways through which you can increase conversions. We have compiled some of these Shopify growth hacks that you can employ. Let’s check them out.

 

1. Website Personalization

In a survey, it came to light that more than 80% of buyers are more willing to buy from a brand that gives them personalized experiences. In a nutshell, personalization is the name of the game.

 

There are several elements of your Shopify store that you can personalize, with your website being an excellent starting point. 

Personalization

 

Your home page can display relevant products or product discovery at a prominent location (think banners), depending on the buyer persona and the user behavior. Similarly, when they search for a particular item in your store, the best performing products can be put in the spotlight, along with relevant product tags. This consideration can be particularly helpful in the case of stock changes or when relevancy changes as per variables like seasonality, new launches, etc. 

 

You can carry out personalization from your home page right until the checkout page – every page of your Shopify store offers ample scope to personalize and connect with buyers.

 

2. Custom Notifications

Once your personalized Shopify store is ready, the next line of action would be to personalize your notifications. Whether you are alerting your buyers on a flash sale or re-engaging them through cart abandonment messages, custom notifications perform better than generic ones.

Custom Notifications

Apart from the personalization of notifications based on the name, product, etc., you can also personalize the notifications as per the buyer persona. For instance, if you know that FOMO works for a particular segment of customers, you can generate a sense of urgency to get them to purchase your goods.

 

Similarly, if someone is a soft target for impulsive buying or increasing their sales volume, you eliminate any visual clutter or distractions and smartly position upsell recommendation bands to lure them in.

 

3. Tailored Recommendations

Tailored Recommendations

 

Since we are on the topic of upsell recommendation bands, it is worth mentioning here that they possess immense potential to upsell and cross-sell through recommendations. Cross-sell and upsell recommendation bands like bestsellers, you may also like, inspired by your purchase, also view, similar, also bought, etc. see many takers.

 

Amazon is a classic example of what a roaring success upselling and cross-selling can be as it improved the eCommerce giant’s sales by 35% – and this was way back in 2006! The effectiveness of upsell recommendation bands has only increased by many folds in the current years.

 

In addition to incorporating product or service recommendations throughout your Shopify store, you can even integrate it with an omnichannel marketing campaign to suggest products over emails or push notifications!

 

4. Product Visibility

If you want to catapult your sales, you need to make your products more visible. Cross-selling and upselling are both techniques to offer greater visibility. But you also need to diversify how you make your products accessible.

Product Visibility

 

  • First, you need to focus on site navigability. A pleasing UI retains more buyers and encourages them to explore your store.
  • Next, you must sharpen your search engines. Implement semantic search in your Shopify search bar to make product discovery as painless as possible. Semantic search deconstructs the intent and context behind a search and makes accurate recommendations. As such, you can redirect your buyers towards the intended products without having them struggle.
  • Product tags would be the final addition to the product visibility arsenal. Personalizing product tags and making them clickable allows users to explore a specially curated collection that corresponds to their individual user profile. Ideally, the product tags should update automatically and in real-time to capitalize on every opportunity.
  • You can further expand on its capabilities by tapping into the potential offered by artificial intelligence. Unlike basic product tags, AI can offer a contextual understanding of the shopper’s intent or requirement to dynamically assign relevant and value-added tags. It captures specific details about products that normal filters cannot – such as ‘halter neck tops’ or ‘lobster clasp bracelet’ – allowing customers to quickly find the product they want.

As stated above, relevant recommendations based on buyer preferences will skyrocket sales and improve customer experience. 

 

5. Reporting and Analytics

Reporting & Analytics

 

Setting up your Shopify store is a one-time thing, but expanding its growth requires constant efforts and scrutiny. On that note, simply executing various strategies, be it marketing or growth hacking, is not the solution to drive conversion rates and increase revenue.

 

You also need to closely monitor the impact and success of these techniques. And for this reason, you will require a powerful reporting and analytics platform that tracks such metrics and offers insights on the future course of action. 

 

6. ShopSense: An All-in-One Shopify Growth Hacking Tool

The above tips can increase your conversion rates and enhance the profitability of your Shopify store. However, these are beyond the realm of manual intervention, and you would require a robust tool to facilitate these tasks and execute them. 

ShopSense

 

Fortunately, ShopSense is your one-stop destination for all these requirements. ShopSense is an AI-powered personalization application that can carry out a range of activities from buyer persona generation to data analytics. Use it to engage with your customers, improve conversion rates, and draw long-term benefits extending to an increase in revenue!

 

ShopSense is your growth hack to growth hacking!

 

Categories
Retail Shopify

Top 10 Effective Ways to Maximize Your Revenue With eCommerce Personalization

The introduction of eCommerce has dramatically changed the marketing dynamic and how marketers and advertisers engage with their target audiences. Almost every day, several new eCommerce stores open, and the customers are spoiled for options, making it tricky to keep them engaged with your brand. When it comes to improving the online customer experience, many businesses are having trouble overcoming certain major issues like low average order value, high bounce rate, low customer retention, and low user engagement, to name a few. The most effective way to solve these problems is through eCommerce personalization.

 

eCommerce personalization is a strategy that focuses on providing customers with remarkably relevant shopping experiences and interactions based on their browsing habits, preferences, and demographics.

 

Here are some proven techniques or strategies you must implement to increase your online sales, maximize conversion, and create brand loyalty among customers in a cost-effective manner.  

 

 

1. Personalized Product Recommendation

Conversion rates are significantly influenced by personalized product recommendations. By implementing AI and machine learning tools, you can display relevant products and deals to each customer segment, regardless of their customer profile.  

 

Personalized search and merchandising provide predictive relevance of products and recommendations to the individual, thereby increasing company revenue. The strategy focuses on your consumers’ preferences, behaviors, trends, dislikes as well as customer-specific recommendations.

 

2. Personalize Your Homepage, Cart Page, and Other Landing Pages

If you face issues like high bounce rates and low user retention on your homepage, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you get back on track. With AI, you can track customer activity, search interests, and behavior across pages and throughout the online store. Every page, including the homepage, cart page, etc., can be personalized from an individual customer point of view.  

 

Moreover, you can implant upsell recommendation bands on the home page, product page, and cart page to offer suggestions and show best sellers to customers visiting the store.

 

3. Send Personalized Emails

Email marketing is considered the most effective organic medium for marketing online, especially for the eCommerce segment.

Before launching an email marketing campaign, any eCommerce store should first dynamically classify website visitors based on their searching behavior on the store website. Segmentation could be done based on various characteristics like new sign-up, product viewed, added to cart, subscribed to the newsletter, and much more.

 

Along with this, personalizing the email subject line can do the trick. You can incorporate the customer’s recent interests and trends, increasing the chances of generating further conversions.

 

4. Geography-Based Personalization

With the use of web analytics, any user’s geographical location can be determined. You can use this information to optimize your online store for different regions and customize the shopping experience for users.

 

You can use some tactics like communicating in the local language, seasonability-based orders, product price set according to the currency, and product listing and recommendation based on local trends.

 

5. AI for User Data Analytics

The massive amount of consumer data gathered regularly can be intimidating for marketers, to say the least. This is not only because of the amount of data but also because converting it into concrete insights for your marketing strategy is time-consuming and prone to costly human errors.

 

But thanks to AI and ML techniques, this data can be processed in real-time. In addition, AI can provide real-time insights on the personalized web search, behavioral merchandising strategies, and personalized email marketing campaigns.

 

6. Provide Personalized User Experience to Customer Segments

Use eCommerce personalization platforms for data interpretation across customer groups. The behavioral data of every visitor can be collected by applying various AI-based systems. After data analysis, several relationships are established between basic customer information, including views, searches, time spent on a product page, and transactions. Finally, products are suggested using a predictive modeling approach.

 

7. Provide a Curated Product List

Customers want to purchase the items they want without scrolling through the entire store. Preparing a curated list of products based on their browsing and purchasing history will help them save time searching for and choosing these items.

 

Moreover, notifying them about the latest curated list via an email or desktop notification can bring in more revenue for your eCommerce venture.

 

8. Loyalty Program for Customers

Prepare a loyalty program for your regular customers where you can reward them with attractive offers such as early access to sales, discount coupons, loyalty points, exclusive offers, promo codes, etc. Plus, you can reward them for referring your services to their friends. This strategy not only allows you to establish a close bond with your users but also provides your business with some word-of-mouth publicity.

 

9. Deploy Chatbots to Engage With Customers

Chatbots offer a fantastic way to personalize the customer experience. The best thing about chatbots is that they can work 24/7 to keep the business running, thus bringing in customer delight. Just by setting up auto-responders, you can provide round-the-clock customer support, complete customer purchases, offer product recommendations, and much more. 

 

10. Measure Your Performance

It’s crucial to assess how well the online store website and emails have performed before investing in eCommerce personalization.

Make sure that the tool you’re using has comprehensive analytics and a performance-metric dashboard that displays the targeted keyword search terms, preferences, promotions, etc. Keep a constant check on marketing campaigns to ensure that they are yielding the best results – specifically related to the tool in use.

 

The Bottom Line

If you successfully implement the discussed strategies and make shopping a personalized experience for your customers, nothing can stop you from boosting your revenue, gaining more customers, and achieving brand loyalty. 

 

Categories
Retail Shopify

How Automated Product Tags Help in Better Product Discovery

The world of eCommerce has seen scores of innovations in the past few years, partly because of the domain getting saturated due to competition. With each eCommerce website offering its own niche, discounts, and expertise, every site needs to stand out.

 

In this day and age, it is inevitable for eCommerce websites to resort to technological innovation to develop a unique selling point. However, several of these USPs are not important to your end customer. To the average buyer, what matters is how easy the buying experience is.

 

Are they able to look for the right products? If they do not have a particular brand in mind, can they browse through the best choices in a particular product category? These considerations are what the customer factors in before becoming loyal to any particular eCommerce website.Automated Product Tags

 

In this regard, a good way to improve customer services is through automated product tags. Personalization through the automated product tags aids your customers in product discovery and allows them to search for products by type, features, and tags rather than by just brand or category.

 

Let us explore the advantages of automated product tags for product discovery and customer experience.

 

Advantages of Automated Product Tags

 

Improved Search Capabilities

Automated product tags harness the capacity of AI to improve product discovery. All customers are provided recommendations based on their previous purchases as well as the tags they have chosen to search for. Through AI-based product discovery, buyers are able to navigate to your product much faster if they have bought similar items in the past.

 

Using these tags, your customers can carry out an intelligent search for the type of product they are looking for. This not just improves the customer experience but also their tendency to purchase more stuff from your website. They are likely to keep coming back to you since the probability of them finding the ideal product from your catalog increases.

 

Personalization

Regardless of which industry you are working in, being able to personalize your offering for each customer gives you an added edge over your competition. Through personalization, it is also possible to develop a sense of loyalty in your customers and have them stay on your site for much longer. Intelligent search capabilities through automated product tags bring this very element of personalization to your eCommerce website.

Buyer Persona with Tags

 

On every page that customers visit, they are provided recommendations regarding products they might like based on their previous search. They can also view the automated product tags that they have chosen to search for. Additionally, they know what other customers “who purchased the same product bought along with it“.

 

All these elements allow customers to search for a far greater number of products than they otherwise might have been able to discover.

 

Intelligent Search

More often than not, customers will visit your website looking for something very specific. If your website does not have the right filter and detail in its search capabilities, your customer might not be able to find the product, despite it being in your catalog.

 

This is where the benefits of automated product tags in product discovery come to the fore. Using an automated buyer persona that includes the tags of user preferences, your customers can simply click on a tag to view all associated products in a particular category. This way, all they need to do to filter their search is add a relevant product tag, enabling them to find products in a much easier and faster manner.

 

Omnichannel Benefits

In today’s world, no company sells goods on only one avenue. You need your back end to be seamlessly integrable on various devices, including your website and mobile app. While automated product tags are only a small part of this integration, they can help in making the process smoother.

 

When you implement product tagging based on AI, you ensure that the tags assigned will be accurate and widely applicable. This way, regardless of the device on which your prospective customer is looking for the product, the same accurate results will show up.

 

Brand Visibility

Given the immense competition in the eCommerce industry, there’s always a better deal than yours on some other website. However, what matters is customer experience.

 

Regardless of other available deals, you need to take care of accurate search results, standard tags, and intelligent product discovery to ensure a great experience for your clients. If you are able to do this, your customers’ loyalty to your brand is likely to increase.

 

To Conclude

Automated product tags are a firm part of the future of eCommerce, and your brand would do well to be future-ready by implementing them in your systems. ShopSense provides accurate and personalized product discovery capabilities that can help your customers find just the product they need out of your catalog. This, in turn, helps improve your sales and bottom line.

 

Categories
Marketing

How Omnichannel Personalization can Enhance Customer Experience?

With advancing times, people are getting more and more connected in every sense. Thе result is that we are becoming a demanding audience to entertain when it comes to products and services we cheer for.

Thе progress within thе customers consciousness should make customer support, as well as marketers аnd salespeople, reconsider the waу they communicate and сraft their message towards the users. Companies that are trying to become customer-oriented are turning to long-term omnichannel strategy design.

What is omnichannel personalization and why does it matter?

Omnichannel is a communication and sales approach allowing integrated customer experience (CX). Broken down to elements, it allows users to consume (shop, communicate, research) brands with thе same level of experience regardless of thе device, platform, or communication channel. Brands that fail to provide a great omnichannel personalization experience are doomed to lose their customers.

An omnichannel customer experience strategy can create better engagement and increase loyalty among customers. Using the right technology tailored to your business needs, you can craft an integrated experiencе for your users allowing them more personalized interactions with your brand.

Seamless omnichannel personalization and customer experience are thе ultimate requests from digitally advanced users. To achieve that, brands need to combine the right set of knowledge – analytics, helpdesk, CRM, customer service tools, etc.

But, a well-crafted and executed omnichannel strategy will provide companies with more personalized marketing campaigns, improvements to their website shopping experience, and better communication with their customers.

Customer experience: The new front 

No one wants to do business with a company that treats you poorly. How you feel after an interaction with a customer service center has а huge impact on your future purchase decisions. A good interaction keeps you happy and satisfied, while a poor interaction could lead to you stop doing business with that company again.

If you visit any IKEA store around thе world, you will get thе samе experiencе. IKEA invеsts heavily into thе customer experiencе. They’ve opened more stores, invested in its home delivery network, and launchеd а brand new app – all to thе benefit of their customer.

Importance of customer data in personalization

No mattеr the industry, the demographics of your targеt market, or thе kinds of goods/services you provide, you know that collecting data about your customers helps you improve nearly every aspect of your business.

The biggest reason why so many companies collect consumer data is to get a bеtter understanding of thе way their consumers behave onlinе. The data defines their overall demographics and helps identify the ways in which they can improve the overall customer experience

About 60% of consumеrs expect personalization from thе companies they work with when it comes to marketing and product suggestions, order confirmations, and any sort of communication between themselves and your business.

How-Omnichannel-Personalization-can-Enhance-Customer-Experience

Additionally, thе more you know about thе kinds of products/services your customеrs arе interestеd in, thе more likely you are to pitch them products they want to buy and close thе sale.

Benefits of omnichannel strategy in personalized customer experience

1. Direct customer impact

Thе biggest benefit of an omnichannel strategy is a better customer experience. Customers interact with brands through advertising, sociаl media, e-commеrce platforms, physical stores, etc.

Thе omnichannel approach makes that experience more personalized and tailored to thеir needs. Leading to increased customer loyalty, better conversions, and more advocacy from word-of-mouth.

2. Better and more successful marketing campaigns

Successful omnichannеl strategies lead to better markеting campaigns. With аll thаt data on their hands, brands can craft better marketing messages and target more specific audiences using different channels.

Bе it а nеwslеttеr with pеrsonаlizеd must-hаvеs thаt your customеrs hаvе bееn lurking through or а discount on an Instagram pаgе, your customеrs will lovе it.

3. Large and diversified data sets

A company with an omnichannеl strategy havе several data sources. This allows them to understand customer touchpoints (points of communication) better and design a morе аuthentic customer journey that’s tailored to their customer’s nееds.

Moreover, this kind of data cаn bе interpreted in new product design, or new feature development as well as detecting new trends on thе market.

4. Real-time inventory visibility

Real-timе inventory visibility is perhaps onе of thе most obvious wаys to improve omnichannel experiеnces. Without this inventory data, companiеs cаnnot fulfill thе cross-chаnnel purchases аnd help customers stay informеd.

Omnichаnnel personаlizаtion and customer experience are аbout giving customers options right now, not tomorrow. Hence, implеmеnting rеаl-timе inventory management systems thаt considеr thе wholе nеtwork of inventory is kеy to your business’s success.

5. Multiple fulfillment and shipping options

Your omnichаnnel customers expеct to have items delivered anywhere, while still аlso having thе ability to see thе physicаl items in physical stores. Thе variety of buy online, pick up in-store аnd ship-to-home mаkе managing omnichannel more chаllenging.

Thus, compаnies should focus on crеаting а diverse fulfillment strategy thаt leverаges physicаl locations as order fulfillment centers — capablе of handling in-store, online, аnd blеnded fulfillment as and when required.

How to Personalize User Experience

Pеrsonalized service is thе cornerstone to omnichannel customеr experience. Customers want a variety of options for certain products and thе level of personalization depends on the product. For instance, apparel sizes can vary widely, and thе аbility to view colors can only go so far on an online device.

Thе kеy to success lies in building thosе personalized customer experiences by using augmntеd reality, custom options, increased visibility into manufacturing capabilities, and othеr ways to keep customers in thе know.

Conclusion

Consumers today expect personalized services to bе avаilable on every channel and touchpoint. They also expect the omnichannel personalization experience to bе seamlessly connected on every medium on-thе-go.

Modern technologies are powerful weapons that aid in perfecting an effective omnichannel strategy, and cаn help in winning customеrs who dеmand simplicity and convenience irrespective of thе chan
nels or devices thеy use.

Omnichannel personalization has thе capability to enrich customer experiеnce аnd increase brаnd loyаlty. Therefore, it’s high timе thаt today’s companies usе it to optimize thе customer journey аnd stаy аhеаd of thе competition, and we are beginning to see the change.

Categories
Media

Top trends of data engineering in OTT

The rise in OTT in the number of platforms leads to innovation of Data engineering in OTT in terms of user personalization, personalized recommendation.

 

Subscription-based on-demand content and media platforms have risen in demand over the years as they offer more flexibility and better entertainment to users. As OTT platforms replace traditional TV sets, they are becoming the preferred medium for consuming content, be it around entertainment, news, sports streaming, or education.

 

Resulting in overwhelming competition Data engineering for optimizing user experience has been a requisite for any over the top platform.

 

In India, the growth of OTT players is astounding. According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, the Indian OTT market will grow ten times to reach $5 Bn by 2023 from $500 Mn in 2018.

 

As television programming undergoes a renaissance, the promise of more and better data allures advertisers. Data and analytics stay as the key to television’s profitability. Advertisers now have more access to data due to OTT platforms, while content providers and networks leverage data to guide programming decisions.

 

The Need for Data Engineering in OTT Content

The growing abundance of data available to marketers, advertisers, and content providers makes it necessary to have systems in place to analyze, process, and transform this data into something meaningful.

Data engineering in OTT

 

To offer better personalization, content discovery, and push the continuous development and transformation of underlying systems, it is critical for OTT platforms to use data and Data engineering in OTT to its full potential.

 

How OTT Players are Leveraging Data and Engineering in OTT?

 

Data to Drive Content

For homes that have a subscription service, OTT players are using data to guide viewers to the right content. The most famous example of data-driven viewership is Netflix’s House of Cards. The content is designed to be a hit considering platform data such as ratings, preferences, user viewing habits, and so on.

 

Netflix’s data pipeline is fed with data from millions of set-top boxes and online accounts, which the company processes and stores using the Hadoop ecosystem and leverages Amazon’s AWS platform for cloud computing resources. Data from A/B testing has led Netflix to insights that have given tangible results such as an up to 30 percent increase in a particular content’s viewership. 

 

Personalization for Loyal Viewing and Revenue

Alluring and retaining the generation of cord-cutters and cord-never takes more than great content. These viewers expect tailored services in the form of personalization, served based on their preferences and choices.

 

Personalization is not just about the content. Everything from subscription plans to metadata, frontends, and recommendations can be personalized by breaking through data engineering for greater impact in OTT in terms of viewership, which ultimately drives revenue.

 

Enhancing User Experience

All OTT players sit on a huge pile of relevant data about their viewers and their behaviors. By putting this data through a cleaning process and leveraging insights for improving the recommendation engine or personalization feeds, OTT players are enhancing the user experience.

 

By knowing what will keep users coming back for more, companies are making personalized recommendations and accurate predictions for cross-selling or upselling opportunities. Having a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the customer can help companies keep track of this trend in data analytics and OTT media suggestions.

 

Personalized Emails and Push Notifications

Customer-specific data collected by means of AI and ML, and churned with the help of analytics, helps OTT players recommend shows, series, and movies to viewers through personalized push notifications and emails.

 

Since both of these marketing media are proven to have exceptional RoI, OTT companies can now use them to make relevant recommendations on the basis of viewer interest and viewing behavior.

 

Furthermore, the push notifications and emails can be timed for when the user is more likely to access the OTT media site or mobile app- for greater impact and conversion. 

 

Personalized Digital Advertising

Programmatic media promises data harnessing for advertisers, using set-top box data to inform OTT players about viewers and their behavior in consuming content. Building on the viewer’s inclination for customized viewing experiences, programmatic television can deliver unique advertisements, even though viewers are watching the same programming.

 

According to eMarketer, only 5-10 percent of the TV inventory is available and addressable for programmatic. Even then, the market looks massive and promising. Programmatic advertising is all about the efficient spending of dollars by careful targeting and retargeting. This is why data and analytics look vital for personalized digital advertising.

 

Omnichannel Advertising

Companies are now working with entertainment players to measure audience metrics across platforms and channels. By aggregating viewers and their behavior, companies get a more holistic view of their audience, offering advertisers opportunities to execute an omnichannel advertising plan.

 

By augmenting data such as viewing history, demographics, political inclination, and so on, companies can now offer in-depth insights to advertisers for improved ad delivery and execution.

 

Converging OTT with eCommerce

OTT ad spending has skyrocketed, and providers are maximizing their investments in correlating viewership with consumer purchasing behavior. The convergence of OTT with e-commerce, driven by analytics and personalized advertising is opening up better and more avenues for profit for providers.

 

AI and ML-based Content Creation and Recommendation

The cutting-edge technologies of artificial intelligence and machine learning are also playing a strong role in facilitating content discovery, creation, and recommendation in the OTT arena.

 

A personalization approach backed by these sophisticated technologies can help companies make leaps of progress in regions such as India where people in the regional market have their own sensibilities and entertainment preferences, besides language inclinations.

 

Data Engineering in OTT for Better Viewership and Viewer Retention

Data available to OTT players needs to be churned and utilized for insights so that effective decision-making can be practiced. When that happens, data utilization will be the driving fuel behind the success of OTT players and their expansion.

 

Speaking what user wants is vital for optimized customer experience and engagement. Leading-edge advancement in data engineering in ott has helped itself in developing a user-centric approach which has been a game-changer.

 

At RecoSense, we use artificial intelligence to build deeper insights across touchpoints for OTT players and digital media providers. Learn more about how we do it here.

 

Categories
Retail

Learn How to Optimize Product Discovery for eCommerce using AI

Product management in eCommerce has its roots deep down in discovery. Enabling product discovery for eCommerce generally differs across websites, but the essence is to help the customer find what they are looking for sooner. Optimizing product discovery for eCommerce increases the chances of conversion. Therefore, your eCommerce portal must be intuitive and intelligent enough to facilitate efficient product discovery for each customer.

 

A study by ClickTale revealed that shoppers spent more time attempting to find their product on eCommerce websites that were not optimized for product discovery, but left because they were unable to find it.

 

On the contrary, eCommerce websites with strong user insight make the customer stick around to make a purchase despite spending less time on the site. The study said small retailers tracked a longer time on site (around 200 seconds) than large retailers (around 70 seconds). But, the bounce rate for small retailers was higher at 34 percent in comparison to that for large retailers (9.4%). Quicker and efficient product discovery becomes a positive customer experience, leading to retention.

 

Why Product Discovery for eCommerce is Essential?

These numbers prove that large retailers are beating small retailers in the game of optimizing product discovery, and thus reaping benefits in terms of revenue and conversions. Due to substandard customer experience, customers are abandoning their purchases midway from small retailers.

 

We can derive from the study that Product discovery is essential for any eCommerce store irrelevant of the size and scale of your retail eCommerce store. This further raises concerns on how to enable product discovery in your eCommerce store?

 

Optimizing Product Discovery for eCommerce

 

1. Optimize the Home Page

Here is what customers first see when they land on your website. Make sure you are leveraging the home page to ease product discovery, using one or more of these elements:

 

  • Promotions – These are your current discounts and ongoing time-sensitive offers. Use intelligence-infused solutions that help you personalize offers for customers at various buying stages such as first-time users, first-time buyers, repeat buyers, and so on.
  • Personalized elements – These might include the ‘Recently viewed’ or ‘You might like’ sections. Where the user is logged in, or where their browsing history is saved via cookies, pull products based on the customer’s past purchases or cart additions. You can even leverage customer data such as their gender or location to personalize recommendations on those factors.
  • Popular products – These are the products you can show to people who are in their initial journey with your website. A display of the fast-selling products can help customers choose between two brands.
  • New arrivals – If fashion is one of your eCommerce offerings, it makes a lot of sense to show what’s new. Most customers would love to buy something that’s fresh and so these product displays are compelling.
  • Educational content – Your homepage can be the right place to ease the customer deeper into their buying journey with you. To do so, you can offer informative content such as product reviews and ratings so that customers who are not yet ready to make a purchase can still find something of use.

2. Streamline the Navigation

Product navigation is a critical component of the shopping experience for buyers who know what kind of product they want but have not yet made a decision. Otherwise, they might have used the search feature. If you are looking for a new couch and are not hung up on a type, color, brand, or size, you will want to explore. And that is exactly the reason why product navigation needs to be quick and seamless. Flyout navigation menus work great here. They offer a way to start with a broad idea and then subsequently narrow down your desired product as you go.

 

3. Strategize the Filterable Product Attributes

Now, you need to focus buyers on getting what they want. If you don’t help them make a purchase soon, they might abandon and go back.

There are two ways to do this:

 

  • Make use of rich product attributes that cover every aspect your customer would want to customize and filter. And, make sure you allow the customer to filter as well as sort by these attributes. A few of the factors can be height, weight, color, availability, reviews, brand, cost, and so on.
  • Optimize the filtering and sorting experience for your customer. Avoid reloading the page for every added filter. This only decelerates decision making and increases buyer frustration. Use checkboxes to allow the customer to add multiple filters at once and see consolidated results.  

4. Faster, Accurate, Personalized Search Results

For powerful discovery, enable auto-correct, search by attributes, brands, and auto-suggestion capabilities in the search bar. Building a strong user persona for aiding personalization also helps make the search inputs more effective. Aim to feature relevant products immediately from a product search. 

 

For instance, if the buyer searches for ‘black shoes’, the search should direct them to the ‘shoes’ subcategory with ‘black’ pre-selected as the color attribute. Leverage Error 404 pages to display hot and popular items in the same category the user was looking in. An error can turn the user off, but you can leverage it as an opportunity to drive sales.

 

5. Secondary Product Discovery

For customers who recently bought a mobile phone, for instance, you can make secondary product recommendations such as screen-protection glasses or mobile holders. Upsell using personalized secondary product recommendations. If a pair of pants were frequently bought with a shirt the buyer selected, make the recommendation under the ‘Complete the Look’ feature. These specific steps can highly optimize product discovery for your audience in eCommerce and help them swish through the shopping experience, coming back to you for more!

 

Intelligent Product Discovery for eCommerce using AI

Artificial Intelligence can reduce stress by analyzing, segmentalizing, and orchestrating the data of each customer. Instead, it makes it less tedious and Intelligent by providing personalized recommendations and makes it easier in the decision-making of the customer.

 

Using intelligent personalization, recommendation, and visualization will help you leverage AI and analytics to their full potential. Experience increased conversions, lifetime value, order value, revenue, and repeat purchases with a data intelligent SaaS platform empowering product discovery for eCommerce using AI, such as RetailSense.

 

Categories
Media Retail

Hyper-personalized content is NOW. Is your content distribution strategy up to it?

Hyper personalized content

While the world we live in may be a hyper-connected global village, humans remain creatures of uniquely distinct tastes and inclinations. While we may all exist on similar platforms and channels, use similar apps and sites, but despite the interconnectedness of it all, all humans behave differently from one another, and more often than not, uniquely so. And in the age of AI, it is now easier than ever for content publishers and media entities to understand individual choices; to figure out what people like to read, listen to, and watch and create Hyper personalization for the user. we shall delve into why hyper-personalized content? What it can do for the online media and retail platforms.

 

Hyper personalization is therefore about producing on-site experiences as unique as the fingerprints on a person. It entails, essentially, a deep dive – an attempt at exploring the complex psyche of your consumer, all in an honest effort to relevantly curate experiences that fit with their consumption patterns and also the [content] tastes and preferences on most days. And so, by delivering hyper-personalized content recommendations based on, say past searches and browsing patterns, a person ends up discovering ‘their-kind-of’ content easily.

 

Not quite altruist, but making it easy for someone to discover and indulge in content and media that matches that preferences have merits that are hard to ignore

 

1. It increases individual relevance

Prediction algorithms reduce the time and energy it requires for someone to arrive at content that’s relevant for them.

 

2. It powers consumption

When people spend less time searching for what they might like, they end up discovering and consuming content much faster and more frequently.

 

3. It builds brand stickiness

When a platform ‘understands’ consumer tastes and preferences and provides content that matches individual sensibilities, consumers are far more likely to stick around on such a platform.

 

What hyper-personalization means for content creators and publishers?

Few content publishers get away with delivering broad-brush experiences. The fact is that unless your content universe is hyper-niche or that your consumers are all from the same flock, it’s unlikely you can continue to win with content crumbs that appeal-to-all, no matter how good the quality of the content.

 

What you, the publisher, and the marketer, must understand is that content consumers are, invariably, convenience shoppers. They are most likely to use a platform that makes their life easy – as consumers – by recommending curated watch lists and playlists. The more the effort a consumer must put in to discover content, the lower their affinity to the content brand.

 

How to deliver personalized content experiences

Assuming you have a wide pool of content to deliver to your audiences, being able to provide relevant content to your audiences is really just a matter of choosing the right content delivery tool.

 

Plug-and-play tools featuring prediction algorithms and recommendation engines can help you accurately identify which piece of content a consumer can be interested in. Tools like Recosense’s pick on a consumer’s profile – their demographics, geolocation, browsing history, and consumption patterns (if any) to deliver, in real-time, content that a user is most likely to consume. Based on the action the consumer takes, the tool learns and betters itself at recommending, getting more and more relevant each time.

 

In addition to having a top-quality tool and a wide variety of content, choosing the right segmentation parameters is the key to hyper-personalized content recommending well and recommending right. The experiment in the first couple to days to know where the gaps are and attempt personalized on-page experiences like a pro in no time.

 

Categories
Marketing Retail

E-commerce and Media Companies are Missing out on Content Personalization Strategy! 

E-commerce and Media companies like Amazon and Netflix are the first to use content personalization. One can notice that Amazon has mastered the art of displaying personalized home pages to different customers. Netflix has mastered the art of delivering personalized content that is both contextual and adds value without appearing to surplus or self-serving. Content personalization is the next big thing for e-commerce and media companies that are going to give you an uplift in conversion that you need.

A recent survey by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs sponsored by BrightCove, showed B2B companies allocate 28% of their marketing budget for content marketing.

An effective allocation was found to be 42%. It went on to say that more than 50% of the B2B companies are planning to spend more on content strategy.

What is Content Personalization?  

It is a marketing strategy used by companies to deliver the best and relevant content based on the visitors’ interests and motivations. Interests can be based on the previous behavioral pattern on the website or based on the relevance of a similar audience.

The only time your customer engages with you is when they feel they are personally connected. There was a time when the thinking was that personalization is only human-driven. However, RecoSense is changing the way E-commerce and media companies think. Using their smart personalization engine, companies can deliver personalized content to every individual.

Why is Content Personalization Required?  

Static Websites are DEAD!

 

How boring would it be to see the same content that everyone sees? As a customer, I would love to see the content that I like and that I love watching/buying. I want websites to speak my language than what they have to offer. This is where content personalization comes into play.

Research by Forrester says that every audience would consume three pieces of content to buy one piece of content.

How Does Content Personalization Work?   

Content personalization is done by comparing the available data about your visitors against the variables that you have put in to place. It always depends on how much information you have about your customer.

Content personalization generally considers the data that is available to you about the visitors and compares them with the details that you have put in place. It might include things like location, the keyword that they used to search, how they reached your website – through advertisements, blogs, or any campaign you ran.

What are the Different Types of Content Personalization?  

We noticed that 45% of consumers are not ready to spend time with branded content if it’s not relevant to their interests. And 42% are less interested in a brand’s products and services if the content which the brand provides is not personally relevant.

Data-driven Personalization

Data-driven personalization is delivering content based on previous interactions.

For years, publishers and brands have been creating content based on their strongholds. However, with time they had to change their contents, to the interests and preferences of their customers. The difference today is the technology behind the process. This is the most basic form of personalization.

Segment-based Personalization

Delivering the same set of content to a select group of contacts who have the same interest, preferences, and behavior is segment-based personalization.

This is ideal for customers who are still analyzing the product i.e, they are in the awareness stage of the buying cycle. As a marketer, it is ideal for you to share the contents that are at the top-level and not in-depth. People in this stage are not even thinking of buying the product, so you need to create a NEED for them to buy.

e-Commerce Personalization

With E-commerce personalization, you can display ads of the exact product that the customer had viewed earlier.

This is ideally used by product companies who sell goods. Companies try to re-target customers who showed interest to buy the product. Generally who have added products in the cart or wish list or seen the product many times. This is like pushing customers to buy the product by repeatedly showing the product. Amazon is one of the best in e-commerce personalization.

Content Sequencing   

Content sequencing is delivering content based on user behavior, interest, and context.

A major challenge that marketers were facing was when to serve a piece of content to every individual. With machine learning, it is easy for marketers to predict and personalize content for every follower. The algorithm dynamically predicts individuals’ content journeys to engage them on your channel repeatedly. This helps in building a healthier relationship between the channel and the viewer or the reader.

As a company we need to understand, providing the best possible experience to customers is a basic requirement whether it is online or offline marketing. This is where content personalization comes in while doing online marketing. It helps you to engage your customers across channels repeatedly and helps them to build a deeper relationship with your brand.

Understand how the personalization of push notification can boost user engagement by 2X.