Guide to eCommerce
Retail is innovating at a fast pace with the introduction of many new forms of technology. Due to the high volume of competition online and the essential need for customer relations and satisfaction, if you don't understand these emerging technologies, you could cripple your business.
Retail is innovating at a fast pace with the introduction of many new forms of technology. Due to the high volume of competition online and the essential need for customer relations and satisfaction, if you don't understand these emerging technologies, you could cripple your business.
Retail is innovating at a fast pace with the introduction of many new forms of technology. Due to the high volume of competition online and the essential need for customer relations and satisfaction, if you don't understand these emerging technologies, you could cripple your business. The goal is to make a prospect into a customer, and that customer into a delighted customer, and the following technologies will allow your company to attain that goal and will be critical to your success:
eCommerce Platform: Important Functionality
An eCommerce platform is an essential component to a merchant's success because it integrates all core business functions into a single solution enabling customers to simply buy products and services online. The platform should consist of a product catalogue that is fully merchandised. It also should include customer order data which is the items, shipments, and returns so that everything is easily accessible for the user.
Analytics: Key to Progression
Analytics is a key component to your business and is split into four key reporting areas. These are audience (who is visiting your website and for how long), acquisition (how they are getting to your website), behaviour (what they are doing on your website) and conversions (the results of the visit). These metrics will allow you to gain an improved understanding of your consumers' wants and needs, and enable you to consistently track your progress. By having a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn't, you will be able to determine where it is best to invest further budget. Google Analytics provides you with detailed reports that suggest where to increase or decrease your spending based on the targets you want to reach.
Email Marketing: Manage and Grow your Contacts
Email Marketing will allow you to keep your subscribers and customers aware of any updates your business has to share through email, allowing you to maintain the perfect business to customer relationship. With a proper campaign you can observe the full history of a contact from all your marketing and sales channels on a single screen. You can also create automations, which is the series of actions and/or emails, founded upon contact and behavioural data and activate follow up emails based on contacts' actions, interests or behaviours on your site.
Re-Targeting: Exceedingly Effective
Retargeting is known for generating greater online sales. It keeps track of users who visit your website and then displays your retargeting ads to them as they visit other sites online. Each time your customer comes across your retargeting ads, your business gains more recognition. Google Adwords provides you with lists tailored to your advertising goals, helps you reach people when they're most likely to buy and improves your reach. You will be able to see you the progress of your remarketing campaign within the Google Analytics report.
CRM: Sell better, sell faster
To help you sell better and sell faster, CRM (Customer Relations Management) tools are essential to improving efficiency and can be integrated with other marketing tools. Hubspot, a powerful tool, analyzes customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifespan, with the purpose of improving business relationships with customers, aiding in customer retention and driving sales growth. These systems also provide staff with useful and personal information about your customers so you will know when and how to reach out to the right prospects at the right time.
Marketing Automation: Keep in Touch
eCommerce opens up a lot of great points of engagement, and marketing automation allows you to really leverage them. Instead of the average authorization emails, you are able to cross-sell and up-sell in very tactical ways, which can result in increased sales volumes. Marketing automation allows you to modernize, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows in order to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue. The central marketing database stores all your marketing data, including detailed customer interactions and behaviours, so you can section and target the right message to each consumer. You can also test, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue. This data is incredibly valuable and trackable since transactions occur online, and because all of the product information can be captured at the time of the purchase, you're able to customize the content that a customer receives from that point forward. You can send emails that reference their previous purchase or suggest similar items. You can also send automated programs based on when accessories might be needed.
ERP: Achieve Complete Oversight
Lastly, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a type of business process management software that integrates all facets of an operation, including product planning, development, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. It also integrates business channels such as phone orders, web orders, retail sale, etc. in the same accounting system. It will push huge growth in terms of the efficiency of your organization by protecting the critical business data through distinct security access and secure credit cards processing. In addition, it will ship via the cheapest carrier and increase the comfort with which your consumers can find, view and purchase your products online. ERP provides you with the tools to give a high level of service to consumers, convert your data into decision making information, and allow you to strategize your work load based on current orders and forecasts.
As there is an overlap in data within the different technology groupings, address the essential needs of your company and begin to tackle each of these individual rather than all at once. Knowing what you already have and which systems own which data is a vital component to your planning efforts toward success.