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3 Growing Niches That Digital Nomads Can Leverage in the Next Decade

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About two years ago, my wife Anika and I decided to give up our jobs as stewardess and hotel concierge in order to pursue our dreams of living as digital nomads. Since we left the corporate world, we have ventured into various models of online business, from ecommerce to lead generation and coaching, all while traveling to more than 85 countries around the world. Today, we help individuals who are tired of working 9-to-5 jobs become successful online and start their own digital nomad fairy tales.

Since the start of 2020, remote working has become a key element in the fight against the ongoing health crisis. And although traveling might still come with a few hurdles during the next 12 months, it appears that many businesses have changed their attitudes toward working from home. This provides an excellent opportunity for those who are looking to break the mould and work through their computers and smartphones instead of a tight and noisy city office.

If you are thinking about packing on some new skills that don’t demand your physical presence at an office, here are three exciting niches that are not only likely to grow in the next decade, but that are also perfect for remote work.

1. Data-driven marketing

Analysts believe that global B2C ecommerce sales will reach and estimated $4.5 trillion by 2021. In such a fast-growing industry, the need for digital media marketing experts is omnipresent. However, in this day and age, everyone and his mother is calling him or herself an online marketer. Knowing the basics about marketing just doesn’t do the deed anymore. To cut through the noise of tens of thousands of self-proclaimed marketing geniuses, we advise focusing on a bit more complex yet highly efficient marketing strategy: data-driven marketing.

Today, data-driven marketing is a key priority for marketing executives. According to recent reports, 40 percent of companies are seeking to increase their data-driven marketing spending, and 64 percent of marketing executives say that data-driven strategies are essential in today’s economy. While it may sound confusing at first, data-driven marketing is actually not that hard to execute. Did you ever run a social media or search engine ad and later optimized it based on the results that you were getting? This is essentially a very comprehensive form of data-driven marketing.

Thanks to the incredible value of reliable data these days, almost every bit of software tracks user behavior and collects information that might be highly valuable for your marketing decisions. To become a data-driven marketing specialist, you need to learn how to generate useful data, how to extract it and, most important, how to use this data to your advantage.

As you might have noticed, data-driven marketing requires a distinct set of marketing skills, including social media marketing and search engine marketing, which are very effective for gathering data, as well as content marketing and traditional advertising, which are great for using the data to improve marketing results. Nevertheless, as only a few are willing to go this extra mile, becoming a data-driven marketer allows you to position yourself as a valuable team member no matter where you currently are in the world.

2. High-quality content production

Before the introduction of the web 2.0, distributing one’s own ideas and opinions on a large scale was usually reserved for a limited number of people, mostly in the media industry. However, with the rise of user-generated content and social networks, this has changed quite dramatically. Today, almost everyone can upload original content, whether it is in the form of small posts, blog articles, images or videos, at an infinite number of virtual places and at any time.

If you can monetize your content, you can actually make quite a good living off of it. But monetization doesn’t mean merely pushing out tweets for the sake of content. This won’t make anybody rich — well, at least in most cases. Considering that hundreds of millions of human beings are uploading billions of content pieces every day, the key to success is quality.

User-generated content can play a significant role in marketing. According to research conducted by Bright Local, 92 percent of people rely on user-generated content when making a buying decision. In addition, as marketing software behemoth Stackla recently reported, about 57 percent of consumers believe that only a minority of brands create authentic content. The demand for influencers from not only major platforms such YouTube as Instagram but also from native channels like blogs and podcasts is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

The beauty of a content production business is that you can choose from a variety of methods to produce, distribute and promote your content along a broad range of potential topics and niches. Immense possibilities for scaling your operation exist. It may take some time to get the ball rolling, so start by putting out content that supports an existing business or your personal brand. This will allow you to prepare your journey as a profitable content producer ahead of time.

3. Virtual jobs

Thanks to the rapid spread of COVID-19 regulations among workplaces, 2020 has sparked an immense number of new virtual jobs, many of which are expected to remain virtual even after the conclusion of the health crisis. This still relatively novel form of employment does not require any physical presence in an office or even a certain country and is thus perfect for digital nomads both with and without prior work experience.

Besides rising health concerns, another key reason for the substantial increase of virtual employees is the fact that they cost businesses significantly less than in-house job positions, since virtual jobs require less office space, fewer extras and often lower salaries or hourly rates. The opportunities for virtual jobs are plentiful and varied.

As more businesses start to recognize the benefits of remote work, both regular employees and freelancers may have many more opportunities to fulfil their dreams of becoming digital nomads.

Feature Image Credit: Natalie_magic | Getty Images 

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Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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What’s the right way to sponsor a YouTube influencer?

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By Julian Shapiro

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here, here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

How do you sponsor YouTube influencers cost-effectively?

Based on insights from Bjarke Felbo of Rune (LinkedIn). Lightly edited with permission.

  • Influencers often expect compensation proportional to subscribers, but conversions happen proportional to views. So go after the influencers with high views and low subscribers. That’s the trick.
  • We’ve had the best success with 30-60 second promo spots at the beginning of the influencer’s video.
  • We’ve seen success depend on the video it’s attached to and what time of day/week it’s posted, so we’re strict about setting rules around that. Or, we give them a bonus based on the video’s view count to incentivize them to put our spot on a high-quality video.
  • Be careful with repeat promotions with the same influencer. These haven’t yielded noteworthy returns for us — even after months. It’s likely that the audience becomes saturated.

For SEO, how much does link building really matter in 2019?

From Nat Eliason of Growth Machine. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

  • Links are still important, but their importance is decreasing steadily. Google is getting better at evaluating content quality, and it’s focusing more on that.
  • Consider this: Google doesn’t want to be gameable, and domain authority and link building are very gameable. But content quality is not. You can’t fake good content.
  • Many major blogs outside of high authority spaces have grown rapidly using less link-building. Much of their energy is instead spent on choosing the right keywords (low competition, but still acceptable volume) and writing useful content that satisfies the searcher’s intent.
  • However, link-building can still speed up the process quite a bit if you’re on a tight timeline, or if you’ve given content 3-4 months to rank and aren’t seeing the results you want.

Growth masterclasses kick off now

Today, the advanced growth masterclasses kick off. They’re all free.

These are rapid-fire, short, and advanced webinars. They’re not boring introductory lectures. This is some of the best content we produce. Don’t miss these, especially when they’re free.

Enroll here: demandcurve.com/webinars

What’s the best way to take over a Twitter account from an inactive user?

Based on insights from Andrew Ettinger of Atoms. Lightly edited with permission.

Someone has your brand name as their Twitter handle and their account is inactive. How do you get access to it?

  1. Create an ads account with an existing handle you want to swap for the one you’re trying to claim.
  2. Go to twitter.com/en/help
  3. Click on Account issues -> Claim an inactive username.
  4. Submit a case.

You’ll then want your Twitter ads account manager to escalate your case (give them the case #).

This is not guaranteed. Your best chance of claiming that handle will be to have an existing Twitter employee escalate your case.

Demand Curve’s Asher King Abramson will lead a growth marketing session where he’ll tear down your landing pages and Facebook/Instagram ads in front of a live audience. He’ll deconstruct how effective they are at (1) conveying what you do (2) and doing so enticingly — so that people click.

Feature Image Credits: Anueing / Getty Images

By Julian Shapiro

Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, the growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps you hire senior growth marketers, and finds you vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com.

Sourced from TechCrunch

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Clicks Are Not the Only Online Marketing Metric and They May Not Even Be the Best

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For decades the billboard and TV industries have tested markets in a way ecommerce entrepreneurs will find tells them a whole lot more.

Ever since the world’s first banner ad in 1994 asked users to click “right here,” clicks have been the default measure of success online.

But clicks, it turns out, are a poor indicator of how successful one’s marketing really is. Consider the consumer who may have seen 10 digital ads before purchasing — by measuring clicks, you can’t definitively attribute 100 percent of credit to any one of those individual ads. Because of that, it’s difficult to determine which ad to mirror in the future.

Multi-touch attribution — an alternative to “last click” that awards value to each digital ad a consumer sees — is an advertiser’s dream. But collecting the depth of data to measure every factor affecting a buyer’s decision is not possible in reality.

However, lift measurement — a staple of TV and billboard ad measurement for decades — is a much better gauge of online ad performance than any click-based attribution. While digital advertising may be a quantum leap over traditional mediums (because marketers can target with precision whom they want to see their campaigns) lift measurements are one case in which TV and billboard advertising had it right.

How lift studies for TV and billboards work.

Whether examining a drug treatment or an ad campaign, the best way to measure success is via a randomized control trial (RCT). When applied to traditional offline advertising, the preferred RCT is a geographic lift measurement, in which one regional area is put in a treatment group and shown TV commercials or billboard ads. Meanwhile, a similar regional area acts as a holdout or control group and isn’t shown any advertising.

If sales jump for the treatment group compared to the baseline of the other one, then the campaigns were successful. The amount of the rise in sales, commonly known as lift, tells you if the advertising spend was worth it.

For example, imagine if McDonald’s ran TV commercials in Cincinnati for its McRib sandwich but didn’t run them in Cleveland (assuming customers in those cities show similar purchasing behavior). If McDonald’s found that sales were up 20 percent in Cincinnati versus Cleveland, then they can surmise that the commercials prompted that 20 percent increase.

Digital gave birth to flawed attribution approach.

Lift measurements aren’t perfect. Other factors could have increased McRib sales in Cincinnati. Maybe an influential radio DJ talked up the McRib during the morning commute. Also, separating by geography means the groups may not be exactly comparable, due to regional differences in personal preferences, culture, weather, etc.

Regardless, lift studies are far more accurate than click-through rates. Clicks don’t tell you much about whether an ad drove incremental revenue. So why are marketers so focused on them?

One reason is that search pioneers decided that pay-per-click was the best model for sales. It makes sense: clicks provide solid proof that a user responded to an ad. This model underscored the advantage search advertising had over display advertising in identifying short-term intent. Even better, marketers could analyze the on-site behavior of said users.

In the ideal scenario for this model, a consumer sees an ad for a sweater, clicks on it, and buys the sweater online. While that certainly happens, a consumer can also view the sweater ad, think about it for a week, look at other sweater ads, forget about the sweater altogether, and then visit the site and buy the sweater. Or maybe it was the combination of online ads and a billboard that sent the consumer down the purchase funnel. The picture isn’t a clear one for marketers.

TV and billboards have always had one glaring problem: The marketer can’t tell who saw the ads. After all, you can’t click on a billboard or TV commercial. With digital ads, the advertiser does know (at least on an anonymized basis), which creates an opportunity for much better measurement.

But many advertisers falsely assume that because a consumer clicked on an ad, that ad led to whatever behavior followed. Confusing correlation with causation is what’s holding most marketers back from truly understanding the data behind their campaigns and which ones are proving successful. Those who wish to overcome this challenge should take a hard look at their current measurement practices. Then they should begin experimenting with lift tests.

Lift in a digital world.

The advantage of doing lift measurements in the digital realm is that audiences can be truly randomized and used as part of continuous testing and measurement. Analysts need not find a new city to use as a control group for billboards and TV commercials. This is particularly true for some of the largest online retail brands. It’s no real headache for L.L. Bean or Adidas to withhold digital ads from 10 perfect of their online audiences.

Taking a continuous approach to lift tests is the key takeaway. It’s critical to create these holdouts or control groups more than once every six months, or once a quarter, because the revenue from your holdout group provides your baseline (it represents revenue you’d make without advertising). That baseline will vary over time due to seasonality, competition and changes to your products. Continuous digital lift measurements provide the most accurate baseline. From that you can calculate the true incremental return on your advertising.

Unfortunately, many marketers are still focused on the wrong metrics, with no ability to show the effectiveness of their campaigns when it comes to the bottom line. But measuring and optimizing your budgets based on lift measurement finally closes this loop. It directly ties the performance of individual campaigns to the revenue they provide. For CMOs, this is the holy grail of measurement insight.

While this approach isn’t new, it is hiding in plain sight for digital advertisers. Billboard, print and traditional TV advertising budgets may be in decline, but the tried-and-true method of lift testing to measure ad performance is timeless. So, marketers, look to the past to update your measurement strategy today. Stop prioritizing clicks, and you’ll gain tremendous insight into the performance of your campaigns.

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Claude Denton is Nanigans’ co-founder and CTO. Prior to Nanigans, he co-founded and served as CTO of CourseAdvisor. Denton holds 16 patents and four applications in communications and video processing architecture. He has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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How Instagram Is Transforming Into A Fully Fledged Sales Channel For Ecommerce

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By Valerie Lavskaya

The popularity of Instagram is rapidly growing day by day. According to the Statista 2018 report, this is the 6th most popular social media network in the world with the leading interaction rates. Recently, Instagram reported that they have more than 500+ million worldwide profiles which are active every day, and more than 80% of all users follow at least one business page.

Lately, we notice the tendency of using YouTube instead of Google. It has become clear that Instagram marketers have also decided to extend their network’s functionality and encourage people to use Instagram instead of Google. In particular, by the new e-commerce features which were developed in cooperation with BigCommerce and Shopify. These novelties allow millions of any-scale worldwide retailers to offer their products via Instagram accounts, gather feedback, retain their customers, and draw them directly to their websites for purchasing.

In this article, I will try to show some Instagram e-commerce solutions which could help e-store owners boost traffic to their website and improve their customer loyalty, as well as demonstrate how creativity is vital in the era of visualization, and how this can bring you revenue.

Product Tagging

The latest and the most effective e-commerce profile feature is a shoppable photo tag. Instagram’s shopping service was successfully launched in the United States in October 2017. This March, finally, the feature extended and became available in 44 other countries.

The main Instagram shopping feature lies in the ability of e-commerce businesses to tag item prices and include special offers to the photos they publish on their business profiles, as well as connecting these products with an item page on their website. Retailers can also add a description to every appropriate tagged product which can differ from the main text content in the post; this will appear after a user has tapped on the price.

store.png

A seller can tag up to 5 prices to one photo, and up to 20 prices on a carousel post. In a feed, such posts are pointed with a tiny basket icon. Also, the “Shop” section appears on the home Instagram page automatically.  

To implement this feature into the Instagram account, a retailer has to have a full catalog with the same range of goods on their Facebook page. All products must comply with the Facebook Commerce Product Merchant Agreement and Commerce Policy. Retailers must offer Instagram users only physical products, apart from tobacco products or paraphernalia, alcohol, weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Sellers cannot sell animals, any healthcare products, notably including “before and after” images, downloadable digital products, virtual currency, and, certainly, products and services with overly sexualized positioning.

What about services? Agencies are able to offer services, whether it is cleaning or a promotional service, as well as event tickets, but only with Facebook written permission. Each e-commerce owner who plans to sell their goods via shoppable Instagram posts should also obtain approvement from Facebook moderators.

Managing an Instagram shop is available through Facebook Business, Shopify or BigEcommerce accounts.

Instagram Saved Stories

Instagram has forbidden posting links to a website anywhere apart from the bio section. However, since Instagram accounts which have more than 10,000 subscribers received the opportunity to add direct links to their stories, Instagram became a fruitful sales channel for many retailers. Thanks to the usability, a user can be taken to a website using one swipe.

Along with that, Instagram allowed users to save their stories into different folders. A majority of e-commerce accounts find creative approaches for the new section. One of them duplicated the main website categories, and others – split stories with links “see more” to new folders as “summer must-have,” “best-sellers” or “customers” choice.”

Asos instagam.gif

We studied 30 Instagram accounts of the most-visited UK e-commerce stores and found that 14 of these use categorized saved stories with direct links to their websites as an extra and convenient way for users to find a desirable product. The option is catching on.

saved stories

Tags Which Work as Filters

This solution is useful for sales or special prices. When you offer discounts for a specific group of products, you can create a separate tag below each post which contains any of these offers. This way, a customer will be able to see all products at a discounted price by clicking this hashtag. And a retailer, thanks to the “editability,” can easily remove irrelevant hashtags at any time.

For instance, a store “Berry” offers discounts for all green dresses for St. Patrick’s Day. Announcing this on Instagram, they can create a unique tag #GreenBerrySale in this post and add this to all posts with green dresses.

New e-Commerce Features – Coming Soon to Instagram

Instagram is planning to evolve business profiles, and they have been testing new features which will be launched in the very near future.

Instagram Booking And Native Payment System

According to a Techcrunch report, Instagram stakes on booking. Developers stealthily added a native payments feature into the app for some users. Today, this is available for electives from the US only, but it is conceivable that Instagram users will soon be able to book a cinema ticket, apartments or a restaurant directly via an app in the future — no redirecting to websites required.

instagram-book-service.gif

In the future, Instagram is planning to expand their payment system opportunities to allow users to purchase items at a retailer’s online site inside Instagram, by opening a separate pop-out page and following standard online checkout processes.

It is interesting to note that if Instagram implements their native payment system, for the purposes of e-commerce, they will become a hybrid model of a marketplace. And this can radically change the primary vision of this social media network.

Shoppable Video Ads On Instagram

In February 2018, Instagram started testing “collection” campaigns on Instagram. Brands and companies will be able to post their media campaigns with an attached catalog of products used in the video ad. This option consequently reduces the customers time to purchase.

Instagram collection campaign.gif

Is Instagram a fruitful sales channel for large e-commerce today?

According to research discussed by SmartInsights this year, more than 1 million brands are sharing and promoting their products as well as stories on the social network. Moreover, over 75% of Instagram users take action, such as visiting a website, after looking at an Instagram advertising post.

By expanding shopping features to new countries, Instagram presented high results for businesses that started using price tags in Autumn 2017. For instance, they said that accessories brand Native Union announced that thanks to the new feature, their Instagram traffic has increased by 2.666 percent and their revenue – by 100% MoM.

Examining European Businesses

We decided to check if shopping on Instagram has become effective for European business profiles since its launch in March 2018. We studied Instagram profiles of the 30 most visited UK online stores within the following niches: clothing, сonsumer electronics, furniture, home and garden, children, and jewelry.

We found out that 46.7% of these already use Instagram shopping and 53.3% do not. In the image below we can see that all retailers which sell clothing implemented this novelty into their profiles. As well as more than half of home, garden goods and furniture retailers; they have realized that their target audience is actively following them on Instagram and it is a good place to reach their targeted audience.

instagram-usage.jpg

We also checked how their traffic from Instagram has changed since the shopping feature launch. To find this out, we compared the traffic data of three popular e-commerce websites in February and May.

As we can see below, the traffic has increased in most cases, but generally, this share is insignificant. The majority of traffic from social networks comes from Facebook, followed by YouTube and Reddit. Is this due to marketing strategies or lack of options for users? More examination is needed, but we do know Instagram’s upcoming opportunities for e-commerce should be helpful to businesses with or without added website traffic.

instagram-shop-diagram.jpg

Final Thoughts

Instagram is becoming more e-commerce-friendly, and this is easy-to-see from their new “One Tap Shop” feature, as well as from “Now More” function in stories or promotion posts. And as discussed above, they are also working on the native booking and payment system.

The Instagram interface allows e-commerce owners to adapt their accounts into user-friendly “websites”. In many instances, their profiles look better than the company websites. New solutions are molding Instagram into a level playing field for e-commerce players. A business’s popularity, engagement, and traffic to the website have become directly dependant on their creativity and marketing strategies.

Instagram’s popularity is growing, and thanks to the creativity of marketers and social media specialists today, Instagram can bring any-scale e-commerce business real revenue.

By Valerie Lavskaya

I’m a content specialist at Promodo Digital Agency. I’m always seeking for fresh data and actual facts to bring relevant ideas to the audience. I believe that useful content can enrich the experience of marketers and empower businesses to make the right decisions fast and accurately.

Sourced from SEMRUSH

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7 Ways to Promote your E-commerce Product without Being Salesy

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By Lucy Benton

Have you spent thousands of dollars on an online campaign but haven’t seen the results you have expected once the campaign is over? If the campaign was all about letting everybody know how amazing your product is and what excellent features it holds, then the reason for the lack of success is obvious. People probably did not respond well to your ads because they were focused on the brand or product. Modern market asks for a different type of approach when it comes to building up customer awareness for your business.

No matter how powerful and compelling your marketing content is, clients need more to become confident about your brand. There are new e-commerce businesses popping out almost every day so why should anyone trust the word of brand A instead of brand B? To capture the audience and create a bond between you and your client base, there must be some sort of personal relation among the two sides. The customers want to see you caring, not just thinking about how to get them into buying your product.

The best way to communicate with your audience is through social networks, as they offer the most ways to interact. This, however, doesn’t mean flooding everyone’s feed with status updates and promotional content. Your social network activities should be versatile and offer everyone a chance to speak their mind as well as bring your product closer, through creative non-sales related content. It’s less about pushing the sale and more about showing the effort and devotion put into your product.

Simply put, the audience is interested in what you have to say about your business, but what really makes the difference is what everybody else has to say about your brand. There are several ways to promote your business in a manner that doesn’t seem generic and won’t bounce people back but inspire them into wanting to know more about you. Marketing experts at College Paper went to work and created an easy to understand infographics depicting some of the best online marketing strategies. We encourage you to take a look and see how easy it is to bring your business to a whole new level by simply putting an extra effort into your social network marketing activities.

By Lucy Benton

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, business consultant and helps people to turn their dreams into the profitable business.  Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. Also Lucy has her own blog Prowritingpartner.com where you can check her last publications. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on  Twitter.

Sourced from Irish Tech News – Alison McGuire

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Why do Online Shoppers Abandon Their Carts Right Before Paying?

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Shoppers hoping to bag a bargain in the post-Christmas sales are much less likely to go through with their purchases if they are using phones and tablets to buy goods online. This is because consumers often worry they are not seeing the full picture on a mobile app or that they could be missing out on special offers or overlooking hidden costs, according to new research. Concerns about privacy and security can also motivate people to put items into their shopping baskets but then quit without paying.

Although mobile apps are rapidly becoming among the most popular ways to shop online, the phenomenon of shopping cart abandonment is much higher than for desktop-based online shopping. According to Market Research firm Criteo, the share of e-commerce traffic from mobile devices increased to 46% of global e-commerce traffic in Q2 2016. However, only 27% of purchases initiated on this channel were finalised and conversion rates significantly lagged behind desktop initiated purchases.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) investigating why this is so say it represents a huge challenge for online retailers, who are investing heavily in mobile shopping, but not reaping the rewards in successful sales.

“Our study results revealed a paradox,” said Dr Nikolaos Korfiatis, of Norwich Business School at UEA. “Mobile shopping is supposed to make the process easier, and yet concerns about making the right choice, or about whether the site is secure enough leads to an ’emotional ambivalence’ about the transaction – and that means customers are much more likely to simply abandon their shopping carts without completing a purchase.”

The researchers studied online shopping data from 2016-2017 from consumers in Taiwan and the US. They found that the reasons for hesitation at the checkout stage were broadly the same in both countries. In addition, shoppers are much more likely use mobile apps as a way of researching and organising goods, rather than as a purchasing tool, and this also contributes to checkout hesitation.

“People think differently when they use their mobile phones to make purchases,” said Dr Korfiatis. “The smaller screen size and uncertainty about missing important details about the purchase make you much more ambivalent about completing the transaction than when you are looking at a big screen.”

Flora Huang, the study’s lead author, added, “This is a phenomenon that has not been well researched, yet it represents a huge opportunity for retailers. Companies spend a lot of money on tactics such as pay-per-click advertising to bring consumers into online stores – but if those consumers come in via mobile apps and then are not finalising their purchases, a lot of that money will be wasted.”

The team’s results, published in the Journal of Business Research, showed that consumers are much less likely to abandon their shopping baskets if they are satisfied with the choice process. App designers can help by minimising clutter to include only necessary elements on the device’s limited screen space and organising sites via effective product categorisation or filter options so consumers can find products more easily.

Other strategies that might prompt a shopper to complete a purchase include adding special offers, or coupons for a nearby store at the checkout stage.

“Retailers need to invest in technology, but they need to do it in the right way, so the investment pays off,” added Dr Korfiatis. “Customers are becoming more and more demanding and, with mobile shopping in particular, they don’t forgive failures so offering a streamlined, integrated service is really important.”

 

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Want to Sell More Online Products? Make Delivery Free

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This is fascinating stuff.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study has revealed the true cost of delivery to retailers, with more than half (54%) of shoppers surveyed saying they have abandoned a purchase online because delivery was too expensive.

-83% of online shoppers said free delivery was the most important factor when ordering online

-More than half (54%) have abandoned online shopping baskets because of delivery costs

-A quarter cancelled orders because delivery wasn’t fast enough for their needs.

The original research of 2,000 shoppers by Arvato found that the majority (83%) said free delivery was the most important factor when it comes to fulfillment of online orders, followed by speed of delivery (53%) and free returns (52%).

This rang true for basket abandonment too, with nearly a quarter (24%) of shoppers saying they had cancelled an order because of slow delivery speeds, while 26% said that the product had been out of stock and, with no indication of when it would be available, they decided not to proceed with their purchase or shop with another retailer.

When it comes to fulfillment, 45% said that convenience was the most important factor, with 17% saying they liked to be offered multiple delivery options. 56% of shoppers already use the ‘buy online pick-up instore’ (BOPIS) option, but while only 11% currently use two hour BOPIS options offered by retailers, 32% said they would like to see more retailers offering one or two hour collection spots for BOPIS purchases going forward.

Ferka Vukel at Arvato said: “Delivery isn’t just about fulfillment but an integral part of the decision-making process for the online shopper. Those retailers who are not offering a fast, convenient and, crucially, free delivery service are at risk of losing out. With retailers having to balance the rising cost of fulfillment against the cost of losing an order, there is no easy answer, however one thing all retailers can do is to be transparent, giving customers an estimated delivery cost from the outset to avoid frustration at the end of the shopping journey.”

According to Vukel, the importance of delivery will not diminish over time and may, in fact, become even more significant to buyer behaviour in the future.

She explained: “Our research shows that within five years, shoppers expect retailers to offer up increasingly innovative delivery solutions – 7% wanted to see driverless vehicles or Uber drivers doubling up as carriers to get their products to them and a further 17% want orders from multiple retailers to be delivered in one go.”

Amazon’s Prime Air has also captured the imagination with 13% of shoppers wanting to see adoption of drone deliveries from retailers, while 11% wanted ‘drive thru’ collection lockers and 8% even thought that retailers should offer ‘to device’ delivery, where an item is delivered to a customer by using their smartphone or tablet to geo-locate them.

What’s more, 12% would be happy sharing their finger prints with retailers so they can ‘sign’ for deliveries with their finger print for more secure deliveries

“At the moment innovations such as drone delivery are more about capturing consumers imagination than reality, but what we are seeing from consumers is that speed, cost and convenience are imperative when choosing to shop online and that is something that is not going to change any time soon,” concluded Vukel.

 

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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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How Did This E-Commerce Website Take Its Conversion Rate From 0.3% to 15%?

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This is a basic idea that should have occurred to all of us.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Saree.com is an online platform selling culturally rich fashion from the Indian sub-continent to a global audience. The company recently shot up its sales by offering a Video Calling service. This business move helped it dramatically enhance its conversion rates from 0.3-0.4% to almost 15-18%.

The Video-Chat concept centres on showcasing select merchandise live to the customers.  Saree.com’s average order size skyrocketed from around €80 to about €345 per order.

This innovative and customer-centric hybrid business approach combines the best of the both worlds – akin to shopping from a ‘real store’ with all the convenience, accessibility and ease of buying online – while also bringing in the all-important personal shopping edge.

The wedding wear focused Saree.com typically received about 20-22 web orders daily, but the overall revenues were never as high as they are now. From about 15 to 18 calls, organised daily to honour the numerous appointment requests – at least 2 to 3 are converted. Each video call order value typically exceeds €1,100.

There have been customers, who started off looking for a single ensemble – but ended up buying for their entire families. One such jackpot call fetched the company an order equivalent to €13,500 – where as many as 35 garments were sold via a series of Video Calls.

Thanks to wonders of technology, the only tools required are simple hand-held devices like iPad and modern smartphones like iPhone 6 – with any video chat application like Face time or Skype. Saree.com has now developed a dedicated eco-system to enable these services – that are akin to personal shopping facilities (albeit virtually), offered by world’s biggest fashion retailers like Harrods, Nordstrom, H&M, Zara etc.

Learning fast, today, Saree.com now has a special team of 25 personal shoppers, ensuring approval of requested appointments within a time-frame of merely 24 hours. This idea is slated to revolutionise the apparels e-commerce, especially for niche categories.

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What Consumers Want from eCommerce Websites [Infographic]

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By Andrew Hutchinson.

What are consumers really looking for from eCommerce websites?

That’s the question MDG Advertising sought to answer with their latest report – they went looking through various consumer studies and data resources to establish the five key elements that consumers have identified as essential elements of the eCommerce experience.

They’ve compiled their findings into this new infographic – you can check the full data here.

 

 

By Andrew Hutchinson

Andrew Hutchinson is the Head of Content and Social Media at Social Media Today. He’s a multi-award winning blogger and author, a social media marketing analyst and an occasional advisor on social business strategy. He lives and works in Canberra, Australia.

Sourced from Social Media Today

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