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

May 20, 2019 No Comments

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.

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

Sourced from skyword

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Will social commerce ever replace e-commerce?

April 17, 2019 No Comments

By Eileen Brown

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

By Eileen Brown

Sourced from ZDNet

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The Enormous Power of AI and Chatbots for …

January 11, 2019 No Comments

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?

April 17, 2018 No Comments

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

December 15, 2017 No Comments

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.

In News

E-Commerce: It’s Largely Unprofitable

March 27, 2017 No Comments

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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Point-of-Sale Marketing: Give Them What They Want, Wherever They Are

January 6, 2017 No Comments

By Daniel Matthews.

What’s your focus? Are you all about e-commerce, harnessing the Internet for most of your sales, and with an obligatory storefront?

Or do people flock to your physical location, and your website points them there? The reason I ask is this: Where you make your sales informs your point-of-sale (POS) marketing.

If you type in “POS marketing” in Google, most of the search results focus on traditional, physical location POS. But, today, you can’t ignore e-commerce. If you do, you’re missing out on a big piece of pie.

The important thing is to optimize marketing for both e-commerce and traditional POS.

Let’s look at an industry where physical POS is typically the norm. The food industry immediately jumps to mind: People shop for groceries in stores, they dine out at restaurants. But according to Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, food e-commerce is taking off. A quarter of American adults have bought specialty foods online, and meal subscription startup Blue Apron has a $500 million valuation.

For an e-commerce startup, POS is entirely online, turning the traditional definition of POS on its head.

So, the business that optimizes POS marketing for both physical and digital stores will achieve the highest ROI. Let’s take a closer look.

Physical POS Marketing

In an article for MediaPost, Joseph Gelman and Marcus Koch make a fine point when they say, “Marketers should avoid the pitfall of selecting marketing programs based on what has worked in the past.” They recommend customizing POS marketing to each particular location, and aligning it with brand identity.

POS marketing is about every aspect of the shopper’s in-store experience, including layout, appearance, promotions, salespeople, and even the POS system itself. Great marketing will ensure customer don’t abandon their cart, that they potentially buy more than what they came for, and that they will come back because of a positive experience.

It’s important to understand shopper behavior when you’re optimizing in-store marketing. The University of Alabama Birmingham recommends using Big Data for small business. According to research from UAB’s Collat School of Business, data on customer preferences can help you boost sales and loyalty, and help tailor promotions for better results.

Supermarkets use customer data to determine the layout of the store. They segment demographics based on location, analyze data on location-based customer preferences, and then use analysis to determine how to organize the store. But analysis of this sort isn’t limited to the big guys. A program such as Canopy Labs can help predict customer behavior and sales trends.

You don’t have to have fancy software to do this. As Square points out, a POS system for small business has sales analytics to help you determine what’s working well and what isn’t. You can tailor promotions, sales team focus, and store setup to boost sales of low-performing products. You can also include email marketing to customers who volunteer their email address, basing your promotions, once more, on what’s doing well and what isn’t. You can also offer deals on what they like, if the customer is starting to drift and you want them back.

In-store marketing can readily take advantage of things like data and sales analytics; those aren’t just for e-commerce.

Now let’s consider the e-commerce side.

E-Commerce POS Marketing

In the e-commerce world, POS is called user experience (UX). That’s because people don’t think of the website as a physical space in which a sale is taking place. Granted, a website isn’t physical, but other than that how is there not a “point-of-sale” happening?

Users comes to your e-commerce site with the prospect of buying something. Along the way, the seriousness of their intent and their experience with the site determine whether they make the purchase.

Your external marketing efforts help influence seriousness of intent. But once those efforts lead people to your website, it’s about funneling them to a sale.

Doing so might be as simple as analyzing what you place “above the fold” of a Web page. Above the fold, originally a journalism term, is what the reader sees on the screen before they scroll down.

The content above the fold should…

Tell the user what your brand, and by extension, your website, is all about
Tell the user where they’re located on the website
Show the user where to go now

The first thing the user sees should be a visually arresting representation of your brand. Don’t crowd it. Present the product, your brand name, and an easily navigable menu. Here’s an example from Artifact Uprising:

Note how you’re immediately drawn in by the visual. The brand message appears directly below the image. You know that Artifact Uprising prints photos from the simple, “Your photos, in print” message. And there’s a call to action right there next to the visual, so the user knows where to go if interested.

Once you’ve funneled them to product page, the visual quality continues, and there’s more descriptive content on what you’re offering—why it’s good, what its superior qualities are, what it costs, etc. All that is the equivalent of the salesperson’s pitch:

Once users click on the final call to action, the rest of the process must smoothly walk them through the purchase. Any hiccups, including slow loading times, could cause them to abandon their cart.

All in all, the entire e-commerce site is your point-of-sale, with branded pages, captivating images, concise messages, easy navigation, and accessible calls to action. Finally, digital payment must be up-to-date with options such as PayPal, member account, and one-time payment.

POS Marketing Gives Them What They Want

“The best way to make money in business is to not be in business to make money,” SEO specialist Robin Burton writes. Giving the customer what they want will make your POS marketing successful. Analyze your target audience’s buying trends, and customize your POS accordingly.

Your company’s product is what your audience wants and needs. Focus on making that value salient, and the product easily accessible. It will sell itself.