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Why Facebook Has a Better Shot at E-Commerce This Time

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By Donna Fuscaldo

Online shopping is seeing a surge amid the pandemic, presenting Facebook with a big opportunity if it can succeed in a market that has long been out of its reach.

“Been there, done that unsuccessfully.” That’s what some investors may be thinking about Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) new e-commerce push. The tech stock has made online shopping missteps in the past, and it still has trust issues even if its user base continues to grow. But with online shopping increasing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and with a potential shopping base of more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook has a real shot at succeeding this time around.

The pandemic is changing the way we shop, potentially forever

Shopping online was already a big story prior to the pandemic, but with stores shuttered and stay-at-home orders still in place in some cities, consumers have been turning to e-commerce to get their goods. At the same time, small businesses, many of which remain closed, have to find alternative ways to get products in front of customers — thus the increase in online shopping.

Those trends alone don’t ensure that Facebook will be a winner. It has to offer an easy and hassle-free way to shop in order for it to take off with the masses. If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that loyalty can only go so far — consumers want service. With delivery delays hurting Amazon‘s ability to get products to customers in under two days during the pandemic, shoppers turned to alternatives. That’s helped drive sales at retailers that offered same day pickup and delivery.

So how does the tech stock plan to make its offering superior to one-click shopping pioneered by Amazon? By not requiring small businesses and consumers to jump through hoops to buy and sell across its rather sticky platforms.

Facebook Shops, which are free for small businesses to create, live on their existing Facebook and Instagram accounts. That means small businesses won’t have to learn a new application or create a new page to get up and running.

On the consumer side, users will either be able to purchase directly from Facebook and Instagram, or they’ll be taken to the business’s website to complete the transaction. Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, Facebook will soon be able to automatically tag items users may like and place them in their feeds. That could encourage impulse shopping, particularly if it only takes a couple of clicks.

coming soon will be the ability to tag and purchase items from users’ feeds. To make the process easy for small businesses, Facebook is partnering with Shopify, Bigcommerce, and other third-party providers to power Facebook Shops.

Facebook has the base

In addition to making shopping easy, Facebook needs a large base of merchants for its efforts to take off in a meaningful way. The more e-commerce sales it does, the more advertisers will flock to Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook makes money off of ads as well as transaction fees when users purchase on its platform. It plans on adding Facebook Shops to Messenger and WhatsApp in the near future.

The social media giant is no Amazon when it comes to online shopping, but it does have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users that could turn into potential shoppers. It also plans to promote merchants’ products with dedicated shopping tabs and eventually enable real-time shopping events. That provides small businesses with a new opportunity to reach existing and potential customers without much effort.

It’s not a slam dunk

In order for Facebook to be successful and realize even a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars Wall Street thinks may await the company , it will have to win consumers’ trust, especially if it’s storing payment information. That could be a hard sell given its history with data leaks and privacy breaches.

It also has regulators and now the White House breathing down its neck. Any negative publicity could erode trust even further. Facebook has been trying to win back trust by blocking misinformation during the pandemic and supporting struggling small businesses. It’s also proven it can still grow even with a battered and bruised reputation.

This isn’t Facebook’s first rodeo. It tried several times before with shopping on its platforms but it failed to take off. The company tried launching Facebook stores with big brands back in 2009; it fizzled. An online gift shop dubbed Facebook Gifts was unsuccessful. And it has also tested a Buy button directly in ads that show up in Newsfeeds. None of the shopping features resonated with users, in part because consumers haven’t been too willing to store sensitive data on its platforms.

The timing is different now, thanks to the pandemic. If Facebook can deliver an easy-to-use experience and protect customers’ sensitive information, the social media giant has a good chance of becoming a real player in the post-COVID-19 e-commerce marketplace.

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John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Donna Fuscaldo has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon, Facebook, and Shopify and recommends the following options: short January 2022 $1940 calls on Amazon and long January 2022 $1920 calls on Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Donna Fuscaldo

Sourced from The Motley Fool

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Can’t Imagine Going Back to the Mall? Maybe You’ll Shop at Your Best Friend’s House Instead

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By Emily Farra

Most of the retail headlines we’ve seen have focused on two types of shopping: brick-and-mortar and e-commerce. But that myopic view leaves out the various other ways people engage with fashion, like trunk shows and home shopping events. Consider Sarah Easley’s two-year-old endeavour, Maison Marché, which essentially creates a pop-up shop in your living room—and introduces you and your friends to a few dozen independent or emerging designers in the process. Most of her events, or “fêtes,” as she calls them, take place in New York and throughout the tri-state area, but she’s brought her “fashion circus” as far as Aspen and Mexico City. Wherever she goes, the takeaway is the same: “There’s an authenticity to it, and it’s completely based in reality,” Easley says. “It’s wonderful designers in pretty spaces, surrounded by your friends.”

That sounds particularly nice right about now, since most of us haven’t seen our friends in months (let alone gone shopping with them). But Maison Marché has been affected by the coronavirus just like any “store”; Easley’s last event took place in early March, and she swiftly cancelled everything she’d booked for April, May, and June. “I hit a full pause,” she says. “But slowly and surely, brands started reaching out to me, and my clients were reaching out too.” Designers who had just received their spring collections had nowhere to sell them and hoped Easley might be able to help, while clients were coming to her for a mood-boosting pair of earrings or a fun blouse to wear on Zoom calls. So she began experimenting with a virtual fête through Instagram, sharing one independent designer a week and taking orders directly from her followers. “It’s a very engaged group of women,” she says. “I’ve sold about 25 units a week, which is typically what we sell before lunch at an event. But I’m so happy to support these designers in a small way, and my clients are super happy.”

Easley also has a team of freelance stylists who are staying in touch with clients and facilitating sales when necessary. That personal connectivity is no doubt a huge part of Maison Marché’s success. But Easley’s edit of brands is also key: She’s passionate about supporting small-batch, artisanal, and sustainable designers, and is careful to avoid “mood overlap” between brands. There might be a casual, utilitarian label like Nili Lotan next to a more bohemian one, like Warm or Isla & White; the goal is to avoid redundancies and the frustration caused by the choice overload of e-comm sites with their daily new arrivals. With most of her customers at home, Easley is promoting items with relaxed silhouettes, joyful prints, easy care—i.e., no dry cleaning—and friendly price points, mostly in the $300 range. “My team and I are posting on Instagram, sending photos [via text], and trying to tell the brand’s story digitally,” she says. “It’s been working really well for us.”

Sarah Easley
Sarah EasleyPhoto: Courtesy of Maison Marché

Easley doesn’t have a website, but is working on building one so more people can participate in future fêtes. She’ll continue her virtual sales throughout the next few weeks and is tentatively planning home events for July—with plenty of new protocols and social distancing measures in place. “I’m going to use a lot of outdoor space, so we can set up racks by the pool or on the lawn, and we’ll stagger appointments throughout the day so you really can be six feet apart,” she explains. “In most cases, these homes are pretty spread out. So I think it’s going to be more about keeping your distance than using tons of Purell and masks and not touching. But ultimately, the tone will be set by the host, because it’s her home and her community. I don’t ask hosts to do this—they ask me, and they invite their friends. So anyone who isn’t ready [to meet in person again] can wait until our next event in the fall.”

Still, most of us would probably rather shop at a friend’s house than at the local mall. That goes back to Easley’s initial inspiration for Maison Marché: After years of working as a buyer and retailer—she cofounded Kirna Zabete and sold her half of the company in 2016—she became acutely aware of how our shopping habits were changing. “So many people I knew were not going into stores anymore, and they were just having this lonely experience of shopping online,” she says. “But they also weren’t taking a risk on a new brand, because they didn’t know if the fabric was good, or what size they should get. And no one was shopping with a sister or friend anymore, because everyone is just too busy. But no one tells you the truth like your best friend! So my idea was to bring all of those things together.”

With the fate of department stores and physical stores in the balance, Easley’s nimble, ephemeral business model is primed for what comes next. “I feel really good about the Maison Marché model on the other side of this new world,” she says. “Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of stores will be able to reopen, and I don’t think people are going to be jumping on planes to go shop in big cities soon. But they’ll be happy to go to a neighbour’s house down the street and shop globally there.”

Feature Image Credit: A recent “fête” by Maison Marché in a client’s home.Photo: Andrea Ceraso / Courtesy of Maison Marché

By Emily Farra

Sourced from VOGUE

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Turn Browsers Into Buyers With These 4 E-Commerce Marketing Strategies

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By .

Using these marketing tricks, there’s light at the end of the funnel.

Whether you’re a novice e-commerce entrepreneur or a veteran in the space, it’s a good idea to continuously set new, higher sales goals. Greater sales translate to greater benefits for your company.

But the rules for how to increase sales aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all. There are numerous variables to consider, such as product offering, existing customer base and customer demographics. It’s natural, too, for businesses to go through ups and downs, which requires entrepreneurs to keep an eye on e-commerce and purchasing trends and adjust ccordingly. After all, tried-and-true methods may have worked in the past, but eventually, the same old strategies can lose their touch.

Consumer habits tend to change quickly, especially as far as e-commerce. Here are four marketing tricks that could help you bring in a new wave of sales and revenue.

Prove your site is trustworthy

Concerns over cybersecurity have risen exponentially in recent years, which makes it more important than ever for e-commerce entrepreneurs to make their websites secure and even display badges reflecting their relationships with security providers (such as Norton Secured, Google Trusted Store, Verisign, McAfee Secure or BBB Accredited Business).

Think mobile-first and utilize video

Customers are not limiting themselves to shopping from their computers; instead, they’re increasingly using their mobile phones and tablets to make purchases online. This is especially the case for millennials. And it’s also why video demonstrations are great e-commerce tools: Not only do they often encourage consumers to stay on the site longer, but they can also increase engagement no matter which kind of device they’re shopping from. With video, you can showcase how a product works, and this is especially useful for new or unique products.

Create a sense of urgency

Amazon.com mastered many tricks, and the ability to create a sense of urgency in their listings is one of them. Merchants on Amazon know that if you enter an inventory of less than 20 items, the product page will show potential customers the number of items remaining, which can trigger someone to quickly make the purchase before they miss out. Inventories are often kept artificially low to take advantage of this trick.

Another trick that creates a sense of urgency is to offer deadlines with a countdown timer to hook potential buyers who might be on the fence. When it comes to timing, it’s also useful to let people know that if they finalize an order by a certain time, they will receive it before the weekend.

Send abandoned cart reminders

Depending on your customer base, you want to proceed with caution with this one, but it can be extremely beneficial to send emails to customers who abandoned their carts before finalizing a purchase. They’ll be reminded of the product they were considering (make sure to include a photo), and you can even include discount codes or other incentives to buy it that day.

Feature Image Credit: svetikd | Getty Images 

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Vice President, Innovation at Massive Alliance.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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The Emerging Challenges For E-commerce Startups In 2020

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By Ankush Mahajan.

As people are getting to know about this industry, many are striving to carve a niche for themselves

The e-commerce industry is a fast-growing sector with demand going through the roof and more people adopting this stress-free method of shopping. In 2015, the e-commerce retail sales amounted to over $340 billion and by 2019 the total sales are projected to be double that amount. This means more people are getting to know about this industry and so much more are also striving to carve a niche for themselves by opening up online retail stores. The e-commerce industry as a newcomer is bound to face certain challenges ranging from economical to technological down to the social sphere.

Here are the four major challenges faced by start-ups in the ecommerce industry.

Direct Competition with the Big Brands

The big brands are the first and one of the biggest challenges a newcomer will face in this business. Companies such as Walmart, Amazon and eBay, who are giants in the online retail sector will easily knock a start-up off the market. Statistics show that Amazon is doing better as each year passes, surpassing every other online retail store both in sales and popularity.

The solution to this particular problem will be to avoid direct competition with giants in the business, you are advised to choose a less competitive niche and grow your business one step at a time.

Managing Shipping, Delivery and Returns

Newcomers or start-ups in the e-commerce industry face a lot of challenges when it comes to a seamless flow of transactions after orders have been placed and paid for, shipping charges, on-time delivery or return policies may pose a serious threat to your business. Most shoppers also complain about the quality of products they are supplied after payment has been made, to stay in business, companies will have to go out of their way to provide their customers with the best services there is.

There are different order fulfillment models attached to the shipping of products, thorough research has to be carried out, to ascertain which suits your business the most and maximizes productivity.

Expensive Marketing and Advertisement 

With the growing competition, digital marketing and advertising is getting expensive every day. Most start-ups made the mistake of spending their entire budget on website development and ignored the marketing aspect. Before you start, all your company expenses should be documented and properly verified to ensure its necessity; you also do not want to spend too much on your Web development. You can start with free e-commerce platforms such as Quick eSelling to save your budget. Along with regular digital marketing activities, you should also try out other means to keep your customers coming back, such as rewarding customers with points which can be redeemed and used on your company; discounts too will go a long way in ensuring you keep customers coming back.

Staying Up To Date 

The trendsetters are the big brands, they are the ones who bring up innovations, create new ideas, then smaller companies have to catch up, which most times is capital intensive or just way above their reach. A new company looking to withstand the test of time in the e-commerce industry will have to do all it takes to catch up and stay up to date with the latest technological advancements such as mobile applications, multi-channel selling and automation, among others.

One of the ways to tackle this challenge will be to team up with the right technologically advanced partners who share the same vision as your new start-up company and will work equally hard to keep you up to date.

Conclusion

With all that’s been said, we all agree that challenges are bound to confront newcomers and already established companies in the e-commerce industry, but how you manage to overcome these challenges, say a lot about your competency and readiness to take on and run a business that its profit runs in millions.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock 

By Ankush Mahajan

Digital marketer & e-commerce consultant at FATbit Technologies

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

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The New E-Commerce Social Media Strategy: Why Direct Selling Is the Future of Retail

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Social media has become central to the customer shopping experience, and it’s all due to the value consumers place on social media content. According to eMarketer, the role of social networks as a research tool for gaining product and purchasing information has risen steadily in recent years, with 36 percent of consumers citing social platforms as essential to their purchasing decisions.

As a result, brands have had to reshape their e-commerce social media strategy around the increasingly primary role social media is playing in driving sales. While social channels have long been viewed as referral channels for e-commerce websites, new social functionality and shifting consumer preferences are changing the role of social content in e-commerce strategies.

In short, when it comes to e-commerce, social media is becoming a primary destination for sales.

This trend of social commerce is backed by evidence on all sides of the transaction. According to Business Insider, 500 top retailers earned roughly $6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, a 24 percent year-over-year increase. Since then, social platforms have been testing and deploying new direct-selling functionality that lets retail brands create social content which can lead to a quick, social-based purchase.

According to a consumer survey by Avionos, 55 percent of shoppers have made a purchase through social media within the past year. All the signs point to continued growth of social commerce and to social media’s increasingly central role in retail e-commerce. Today’s brands are starting to think of social media as a sales platform, and consumers are using social content as a discovery tool for new, exciting products—especially products that fall into the lifestyle category.

Here’s a look at how some brands are transitioning from using social media as a referral channel to a lucrative direct sales opportunity.

Using Social to Drive Direct Selling

Thanks to the development of buy buttons and other e-commerce features, social networks are turning their individual pieces of content into potential points of purchase. Social content isn’t something you click through to reach an e-commerce site anymore: Rather, it is the front page of your e-commerce sales.

Brands have taken note, and they’re trying to build effective strategies for selling to an audience directly through social ads and content. The retail apparel brand J. Crew has been working on these strategies for years, and more recently it has embraced social commerce opportunities as a potential strategy to turn around its slumping retail sales. In 2016, the company launched a promotional social campaign that plugged a new pink version of its popular “Jane” sunglasses line.

The social promotion was primarily designed to drum up interest in a full product release the following week; but to increase engagement with the brand, the company offered a limited presale, where consumers could purchase the sunglasses early through its Instagram Stories promotion. The promotional inventory quickly sold out, scoring J. Crew a win on multiple fronts: Not only did the brand succeed in building hype for its impending product release, but it also demonstrated the potential selling power of social direct selling.

The ability to sell products directly through social platforms is something brands are eager to deploy on a larger scale. According to ZDNet, 48 percent of marketers say that if social media offered direct selling products, they would be more likely to increase their use of social media for marketing and business purposes.

Even with hurdles to clear in execution—such as reducing friction in social selling via one-touch ordering and other features—it’s clear that brands and consumers recognize the opportunity and advantage of social-based retail.

Leveraging Influencers and User-Generated Content

As brands look to shape an e-commerce social media strategy built around social purchasing, the original appeal of social content must not get lost in the fray. The principles of great social content still apply, even when brands are transparent about their sales aspirations. As Econsultancy points out, consumers still possess a natural aversion to advertising, and visual content that lacks a brand’s typical social authenticity could turn consumers away in these coveted sales windows.

But this can be a difficult tightrope to walk since any branded social account features content that comes with a certain degree of artifice. The easiest remedy, then, is to lean into the strategies that have helped brands sell their authenticity in the past, namely influencers and user-generated content (UGC).

Consumers prefer to purchase products that they discover in an organic way, according to Econsultancy, rather than finding products in their social feeds via brand sponsorship. Seek out influencers that have a reputation of trust with their followers, and solicit UGC that aligns with your brand’s storytelling goals as a way of building authenticity into your social shopping channels. In other words, make sure social commerce strategies are an extension of the brand experience you’re already offering on social media, rather than an inserted ad that looks and feels out of place with the rest of your content.

Influencer selfies

Image attribution: polybazze

The Goal: Efficient Spending Through Social Selling

The ease experience of shopping via social media is a big advantage when trying to better serve customers. But where your e-commerce social media strategy is concerned, direct purchasing through social media also eliminates a costly step in the consumer path to purchase. In a more traditional marketing strategy where social media is referring traffic to the e-commerce site, the value of that exposure is dependent on what the customer does on the site.

With purchasing options built into the social content itself, ROI is still dependent on making a sale, but there’s greater efficiency in the entire marketing campaign. As TrackMaven has pointed out in the past, the ultimate goal of retail marketing is to lower the overall customer acquisition cost for an organization. You’ll always need to be marketing to current and prospective shoppers, but you want this expense to be as efficient as possible, while also driving the largest volume of sales.

In theory, direct social selling should be able to improve your organization’s spending efficiency for its marketing campaigns. Recall the J. Crew sunglasses campaign: Through a simple promotion via Instagram, the company quickly sold out of its promotional inventory. This ability to drive purchases via social represents low cost, high ROI opportunities, which can boost both your customer acquisition cost and your spending efficiency. And it’s a strategy which can be easily replicated by any brand—big or small.

If consumers are eager to follow brands on social media, as we know is the case, then brands have a direct channel to sell products to them. On Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and other social platforms, direct social selling can be a quick, cost-effective marketing tactic that pairs cost-effective spending with the ability to seize upon consumers’ impulses.

The infrastructure for social media as a sales platform is still maturing, so there’s progress to be made on the platform side. But because social retail is already driving billions of dollars in annual sales, it’s time for every retail marketer to start testing new ways to take advantage.

By 

Jonathan Crowl specializes in digital marketing and content creation for both B2B and B2C brands, with an emphasis on startups and technology. His past and current clients include B2B brands IBM, LinkedIn, Mad Mobile, Oktopost, BrightSpot, and Waze, as well as B2C brands Porsche, Epson, and PayPal. He lives in Minneapolis.

Sourced from skyword

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Will social commerce ever replace e-commerce?

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With native transactions happening on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms, how can e-commerce sites step up and avoid the threat from social commerce?

Salesforce study suggests limited social media impact on ecommerce

E-commerce sites are under threat from the rising tide of social commerce transactions. Seamless purchases from Pinterest’s 60 million buyable pins and Instagram’s frictionless sales directly from within the app make it more difficult for e-commerce sites to compete effectively.

Over 550 million people use Facebook’s Marketplace, enabling seamless transactions on the platform — and e-commerce is starting to struggle against the rising tide.

Menlo Park, CA-based online video editing company Magisto, surveyed over 750 decision makers in the US throughout May 2018. It wanted to highlight the difficulties e-commerce sites are facing with the rising trend of social commerce transactions.

Although three out of four (75 percent) of respondents manage at least one third-party e-commerce profile, they are being used in a passive way. Instead of cultivating good customer relationships, these passive transactions are satisfying customer demand only.

Already sales through social media is rising. Only 26 percent of respondents say they use third-party e-commerce platforms to market their business, compared to 71 percent who use social media.

Almost three out of four (72 percent) of marketers say they would be more likely to use third-party e-commerce sites if they offered more tools to actively market or promote their business, or if they could natively create, upload, and edit content on the platform.

It discovered that the gap between social and e-commerce sales will narrow dramatically in 2018. Almost half of marketers surveyed said that they would use social media for all of their business and marketing transactions if social media platforms offered direct sales.

Almost half (48 percent) of marketers say that if social media platforms offered direct sales, they would be more likely to use social media for all of their business and marketing transactions.

A similar amount (49 percent) said that they would be more likely to use an e-commerce site if they offered video creation as a marketing tool.

Businesses want to become a one-stop-shop, combining social media with e-commerce sales. The challenge is that targeting audiences is hard on third-party e-commerce sites.

The challenge for e-commerce sites is to become frictionless, and take the customer through a simple journey to sales, maintaining, and growing the relationship with the customer, putting them at the heart of the relationship.

Social media used to be disconnected from direct sales, but that has changed really quickly. E-commerce sites need to up their game in order to keep up — or be left behind in the social commerce race

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Sourced from ZDNet

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The Enormous Power of AI and Chatbots for …

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By Alice Berg

The bots are here and they here to stay. See, despite the chatbot phenomenon has gained ground only a few years ago, it has since become a full-on revolution worthy of the attention. In fact, by 2024, the bot market size is expected to exceed $1.34 billion. And as you ponder on that, it is also important to note that in 2019, at least 40% of large business ventures will implement the use of chatbots.

Let’s take a look at some AI applications in business in 2019 and beyond.

Chatbots and AI in Customer Service

Presently, bots have already delivered impressive results in customer service. Many businesses have rolled out chatbots to help them in distributing useful information and engaging the customers. For instance, Starbucks uses a system that allows customers to easily and quickly place orders using voice commands. The good chatbot will tell you the total price of your order plus when it will be ready.

Another noteworthy customer service company that uses bots is Lyft. Customers of the service can use online chat (Slack or Facebook) or AI voice chat (Amazon) to request for rides on the service. Lyft’s messenger bot offers the customer vital details. It shows the car model, a photo of the license plate, and the location of the driver.

Here are some practical ways you can use bots in your customer service business:

In the Automation of FAQs

Ask anyone if they read the FAQ section of a website, and you will probably get a hard and repetitive “no.” Rather than customers reading the questions, they would opt to email the company their queries. By leveraging chatbots and artificial intelligence, businesses can use appropriate documents to respond to any relevant questions.

As the Internal Help Desk

When an external customer service agent does not have an answer to a customer’s query, logically they would refer to the internal desk. And more often than not, this desk has to respond to the same questions over and over again. By using bots, internal customer service agents will not have to respond to common concerns.

In Offering Confident Responses

Interactive bots can ascribe a confidence score to their response. And if the score is below the threshold you had set, the bot will automatically contact a live agent and come back with a more satisfactory answer. In turn, the bot through Machine Learning can respond to similar queries in the future.

AI in Online Marketing and E-commerce

Some players in e-commerce have already started leveraging AI, and by the end of 2019, we can expect mainstream acceptance of the same. E-commerce companies such as Sephora, Asos, Sun’s Soccer, 1-800-Flowers, and Nitro Café are some of the companies that are already bringing in dollars in profit by deploying bots.

So, how can e-commerce stores and marketers use bots? For one, they can be used in customer support. Personalization is the key to every marketing strategy. And so far, bots have proven to be quite useful in providing personalized responses as compared to email or social media. People can express themselves much more freely when talking to chatbots. Therefore, to connect more with your customers, you can use a bot to interact with them and build or improve brand loyalty.

Another way e-commerce players are using artificial intelligence is in building interactive sales funnels. Marketers can use AI to group their customers and sell their products or services. A bot offers an opportunity to be dynamic and engaging. If a customer declines to try your service or product, the program can analyze the possible reasons to avoid the cases in the future.

You can also substitute emails with AI. By using a messenger chatbot, you significantly increase your click-through rates as compared to email. Most online marketers are already using chatbots to get information about visitors on their site as pop-up messages.

Some other benefits of using artificial intelligence in e-commerce include recouping abandoned carts, upselling after purchases, generating leads, providing useful AI algorithms for product recommendations, and boosting customer retention.

“83% of people who shop online need support, 56% prefer to get a text message, and 38% of people consider chatbots are even more useful. It is, therefore, good business to invest in a bot as an online entrepreneur,” – noted Andrew Ortiz, marketing specialist at Skillroads.

AI Online Chat in Tourism and Hospitality

Chatbots are already among the top technology trends in tourism and hospitality businesses. And in 2019, there are expected to be adopted on a wider scale. Bots are helping companies in this sector to reduce costs while also providing an excellent user experience. So far, bots have helped tourism and hospitality companies increase customer satisfaction. Some of the firms that have already witnessed the good results of using AI applications include Marriot, Snap Travel, KLM, Waylo, and Wynn.

You can use a bot in your business for different reasons. For instance, you can use it to engage customers before, throughout, and after the trip. Bots can send prospective and existing customers links to personalized content on hotels, destination sites, top restaurants, and so forth. Once a customer has booked a room, for example, a bot can come in to help them check in, request service, suggest activities, order meals from the restaurant, and more. Upon checking out, a bot can assist in collecting feedback and comments from customers.

Bots can also help in personalizing the customer experience. By doing this, they eliminate competition based on pricing. Customers often consider factors such as location and brand along with the price when choosing hotels. A bot can thus assist you to send out personalized packages to your customers and appeal to them. They help you put together all activities that interest the target audience and market the package to them specifically.

Chatbots and artificial intelligence can also be used in anticipating customers. By using predictive analysis, a hotel owner can identify future patterns and send out targeted campaigns to customers. For example, in 2014, Roof Inn used flight and weather data to predict the customers that were likely to face cancellations of their flights. In turn, they were able to send out campaigns on mobile devices to customers in locations that were likely to experience harsh weather. So what can we take from this? Bots can help in anticipating problems and addressing them way before they happen.

Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services and Banking

Financial tech companies such as Fintech are already causing waves in the industry by introducing bots. By 2020, it is expected that 85% of customers will use Fintech Chatbots to manage their bank transactions. Currently, some big banks are already using bots. These include Visa, MasterCard, Chase, American Express, Capital One, PayPal, Barclays, Ally Bank, and Bank of America.

So, how are financial companies using bots? First, Chatbots and AI are helping in smart messaging whereby they warn customers about dangers or other issues affecting their accounts. Second, they can also give you personalized tips on things you can do with your finances. Moreover, they can help you know how you are using your funds, how you are repaying your loans, and how you can save more money. And not to forget, bots are offering customers around-the-clock support and useful insight that improves customer experience.

It is important to note that, bots are expected to save financial institutions over $8 billion per year by 2022.

AI in Human Resource Management and Hiring

One of the big beneficiaries of AI has to be HR and recruiting. Bots have become integral in virtually all aspects of the employee lifecycle from sourcing, to screening, to interviewing, and finally to hire.

Employers are also using bots to boost customer engagement. These systems act as a bridge that connects employees to the existing job systems thus giving them better experience at the workplace. Maya is one of the companies that is automating all the stages of recruitment. SAP, Wade & Wendy, Loka, and SGT STAR are some other firms that are also using bots.

AI in Voice and IOT

Voice-powered assistants are increasingly becoming popular. Alexa, by Amazon, is one of the pioneer voice assistants and accounts for up to 70 percent of the market share. Come 2020; it is projected at least 128 million smart speakers will have been sold.

Final Thoughts on AI for Business

As an entrepreneur, AI is a tech trend to watch out for if you are keen on staying relevant, growing your business, and making a profit. Chatbots are cost-effective, time-saving, and most importantly give your customers a personal touch.

By Alice Berg

Alice Berg is a career advisor, who helps people to find their own way in life, gives career advice and guidance, helps young people to prepare for their careers. You can find Alice on Twitter and Medium.

Sourced from RUHANIRABIN

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How Can Your E-Commerce Business Leverage The AI Trend?

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By Stankevicius MGM

AI-powered email marketing tools are revolutionizing the way email is built.

Business owners would agree: email still holds the crown as one of the most valuable ways to connect to customers. And rightfully so, as, according to the Direct Marketing Association UK, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $30 in revenue. However, approaches to email campaigns remain largely outdated. The result: the more emails users receive, the more they are ignored, which has led to a decline in email use, at least among millenials.

Thus, AI has emerged as an increasingly important part of email marketing for businesses across the globe. And thanks to AI, email marketing is getting a revamp which solves many challenges that e-commerce business owners have been facing.

In today’s era of micro-personalization and increasing data protection demands, e-commerce business owners find it difficult to adapt to the ever-changing rules of email marketing. Too often, in order to maintain the competitive edge, entrepreneurs face the need to hire additional help such as marketing assistants or agencies. Now, with a new generation of smart and simple AI tools that support most e-commerce platforms, an e-commerce business owner can supercharge their email marketing campaign single-handedly. Instead of learning new rules or bringing on board new hires, AI does the work for the e-commerce business owner.

Here’s how AI raises the bar for e-commerce email marketing.

Predictive Personalization

Personalization means to email marketers what the Holy Grail would be to Indiana Jones — rare, elusive, seemingly unattainable. Not anymore, thanks to AI.

AI helps the business owner to identify the behaviors and events that should trigger email-based marketing communications, determining which offers will produce the desired results.

This level of personalization would be all but impossible to achieve without AI.  “Machine learning helps AI-based email tools to understand what is most meaningful for a specific audience,” says Igor Solovyov, founder and CEO of Triggmine, an intelligent AI-powered email marketing platform.

Powerful Ambition

Triggmine’s goal, among others, is for the platform to segment and target audiences using “natural language technology to select the words for subject lines, body copy and calls-to-action. This way, the message not only sounds like it has been written by a human, but is also consistent with the language generally used by the e-commerce business”. While that ambition is certainly powerful, it is not unwarranted. When tech research firm Gartner gave its predictions for tech in 2018, its first was that machines would play a role in writing copy because of the unique insights big data can provide. Intelligent AI-powered email marketing platforms like Triggmine’s are paving the way for a revolution in the way E-Commerce is practiced.

Seeing the potential of AI for the E-Commerce business owners that they work with daily, Triggmine made the decision to switch to AI due to the speed, precision and specificity that an AI platform can provide its customers. For small and medium business owners who don’t have time to handle their marketing activities, this allows business owners to focus on running their business whilst optimizing their marketing campaigns, for minimal effort.

AI tailors messages for various segments of an email list and delivers suggestions precisely for a particular niche or person. AI-powered email applications use big data to suggest the type of content that complements each stage of the buyer’s journey. By analyzing behavior and clickstream, AI essentially replaces the function of not just the copywriter, but the marketer too.

Time It Right

For years, marketers have recognized that when they send emails has meaningful impact on open rates and click-through rates.

For example, an email recipient in Paris might be less likely to open an email that is delivered in the dead of night because the send time was optimized for subscribers in the U.S. Central Standard Time zone. For this reason, some email marketers segment their subscribers in an effort to ensure that their emails are delivered to each segment at a good time.

Besides, the attention span of customers is so short that if the message arrives in customer’s inbox at the wrong time, it gets buried or even deleted straight away. AI combats this peculiarity in a certain way. By determining when a particular customer is most active online, AI can judge when there is a higher chance of the customer reading and acting on the message. The AI-powered marketing tool then acts even more intelligently: instead of emailing large segments of email list, it optimizes send time on a per-subscriber basis. Doing this manually would be nearly impossible, but it’s easy work for AI.

Historically, email marketing has been mostly manual, strongly oriented towards campaigns. With the arrival of AI, email is laser-focused and single user-oriented. This of course begs the question, what‘s the next frontier for e-commerce email marketing? The answer is clear: optimizing the mobile experience. According to recent studies, by 2020 there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users worldwide. That’s nearly as much as the current population of the earth!

For this transformation, marketers need a helping hand and what will be better than a smart robot? Artificial Intelligence tools such as Triggmine are fundamentally reshaping different marketing channels such as email marketing — and there’s more to come.

Feature Image Credit: Courtesy of Stankevicius MGM 

By Stankevicius MGM

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Most Online Shoppers Don’t Write Product Reviews, But Do Rely on Them When Considering a Purchase

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

How can you get your customers to write more online reviews?

Most online shoppers (81%) do not write reviews of their purchases, according to a new survey by Clutch. However, many of those same online shoppers say they rely on product reviews when considering a purchase.

E-commerce businesses face the challenge of growing the approximately 20% of online shoppers who regularly write reviews, since online shoppers often rely on reviews to make purchasing decisions. The study suggests the gap is an opportunity for e-commerce businesses to engage more online shoppers and address the reasons why they typically don’t write reviews.

Email marketing is an effective strategy for garnering reviews, prompting nearly one quarter (23%) of shoppers to write reviews. However, online shoppers cite lack of time and incentives as key reasons for their unwillingness to write reviews.

E-commerce businesses can potentially reverse that unwillingness with simple changes to their review gathering process. For example, businesses should ensure that the review process is as efficient as possible by requesting specific feedback through guided questions or star ratings.

Incentives, such as a discount or contest entry, can also help secure more reviews. However, companies should be aware of any local laws that prohibit exchanging incentives for favourable reviews.

Timely and effective customer service, including resolving an order issue or complaints, can also increase the likelihood of garnering reviews. Shoppers are more motivated to write positive reviews than negative ones: One third (33%) of online shoppers who write reviews share an especially satisfying experience, compared to 2% who write about negative experiences, according to the survey.

Experts say companies should use the review-gathering process to give customers the opportunity to alert them early on to problems that could undermine their satisfaction.

“If any issues arise within that initial use of the product, you can usually remedy the situation and put a stop to anything that might put a damper on positive reviews,” said Dan Scalco, CEO of Digitalux, a digital marketing and SEO agency.

Let’s get those happy customers reviewing your products ASAP.

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E-Commerce: It’s Largely Unprofitable

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By Steven Dennis.

The disruptive nature of e-commerce is undeniable. Entirely new business models are revolutionizing the way we buy.

The transformative transparency created by all things digital has revolutionized product access, redefined convenience and lowered prices across a wide spectrum of merchandise and service categories. The radical shift of spending from brick & mortar stores to online shopping is causing a massive upheaval in retailers’ physical footprint, which looks to continue unabated.

But the inconvenient (and oft overlooked) truth is that much of e-commerce remains unprofitable–in many cases wildly so–and many corporate and venture capital investments have no prospect of earning a risk-adjusted ROI.

While it was once thought that the economics of selling online were vastly superior to operating physical stores, most brands–start-ups and established retailers alike–are learning that the cost of building a new brand, acquiring customers and fulfilling orders (particularly if product returns are high) make a huge percentage of e-commerce transactions fundamentally profit proof. Slowly but surely the bloom is coming off the rose.

Despite the hype–and a whole lot of VC funding–it’s increasingly clear that most of pure-play retail is dying, as L2′s Scott Galloway lays out better than I can. We have already seen the implosion of the flash-sales sector and the collapsing valuations of once high-flying brands like Trunk Club and One King’s Lane. Just the other day Walmart announced it was acquiring ModCloth, reportedly for less than the cumulative VC investment. A broader correction appears to be on the horizon and I suspect we will see a number of high-profile, digitally native brands get bought out at similarly discounted prices. And, ironically, we will continue to witness a doubling down of efforts by many of these same brands to expand their physical footprints, some of which is certain to end badly.

The challenges for traditional retailers and their “omni-channel” efforts are even more vexing. Walmart, Pier 1, H&M and Michaels are among the many retailers that have been criticized for their slowness to embrace digital shopping. Yet I suspect their seemingly lackadaisical approach owes more to their understanding of e-commerce’s pesky little profitability problem than corporate malfeasance. Alas, more and more retailers are increasing their investment in online shopping and cross-channel integration only to experience a migration of sales from the store channel to e-commerce, frequently at lower profit margins. Moreover, this shift away from brick & mortar sales is causing these same retailers to shutter stores, with no prospect of picking up that volume online. The risk of a downward spiral cannot be ignored.

Given the trajectory we are on it’s inevitable that more rational behavior will creep back into the market. But with Amazon’s willingness to lose money to grow share and investor pressure on traditional retailers to “rationalize” their store fleets, I fear it will take several years for the dust to truly settle.

In the meantime, e-commerce continues to be a boon for consumers and a decidedly mixed bag for investors.

By Steven Dennis

I’m a consultant, analyst, writer and keynote speaker on retail growth strategy and innovation, with a particular focus on omni-channel, customer insight and digital disruption. Prior to launching my own firm (SageBerry Consulting) I was the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Multichannel Marketing for the Neiman Marcus Group. During my nearly 30 year retail career I’ve also held senior strategy, marketing and general management roles at Sears, Lands’ End and NutraSweet. I was recently named by Vend as a top 50 retail influencer. I have a BA from Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sourced from Forbes

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