eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide

You Can Build Your Digital Foundation in Stages — But You Must Build It!

If you accept the fact that today’s digitally sophisticated customer demands personalized, in-context, real-time experiences to be interested in your brand, then certain consequences are inevitable.

You Need Data to Create Unforgettable Experiences.
First, you can’t really create dynamite personal, dynamic, interactive experiences without having access to the volumes of analytic data that are available today regarding your customers’ online behaviors. Next, you must learn what your customers’ journeys are with your brand at all touchpoints and on all channels. Then, you have to create the experiences and use the results of customers’ feedback, changing your campaign quickly to respond to what you learn.

You can’t really do that with fragmented systems and siloed departments, each working for its own operational efficiency without regard for the customer experience.

You need a digital foundation.

Build Your Digital Foundation in Manageable Stages.
Unless you have a huge enterprise with significant resources, you won’t likely go out tomorrow and just buy a digital foundation! It has to evolve — something you can support in manageable steps.

1. Literally, Map Out Your Customer’s Journey With Your Brand.
Get everyone together — from marketing to production to shipping and receiving — in a room around a table with a BIG piece of paper on it and map every touchpoint and every channel and every possible interaction. Sure, you could do this digitally, but good ol’ colored pens and paper work great, allowing everyone to participate and brainstorm together. Show every department how its actions impact customers’ perceptions of your brand. This helps everyone to start working for their true bosses — the customers.

2. Identify Everything — Online and Off — That Makes Up Your Operation.
That includes all the cloud-based services you use, all the local servers, and all the things like your point-of-sale system, email-marketing system, and call centers. Identify places where the customer journey becomes interrupted or sidetracked. Do you see lots of fragments and places where processes could be combined and integrated? This is where the creation of your digital foundation begins.

3. Clearly Articulate Your Brand’s Business Imperatives and Priorities.
Make sure everyone is on the same page and clear about what your business wants. Do you want more customers, better product lines, expansion into more markets? Everyone should understand — and be working toward — the same goals.

4. Totally Clean Up Internal Bottlenecks and Silo Breakdowns.
Maybe you want to start by integrating your production system with your sales and marketing processes. There will be computer issues to face and changes in workflows to consider. Your salespeople should be perfectly synchronized with what marketing is doing and how production is able to respond. Never again should salespeople have to call customers to explain that certain promotions aren’t available like they thought they were or that their orders will be delayed because production fell behind.

5. Create Opportunities to Delight Customers Using Your Customer-Journey Map.
Find a manageable starting point considering your available resources. Maybe you decide that you can create personalized email offers based on analytic data you have or will have. Fully explore your options — including creating email messages that are aware of the customer’s location at the time of opening — and provide offers relevant to that moment.

Or, maybe you decide you should create dynamic and interactive content on your homepage. It’s alright to create the work in stages, do lots of A/B testing, and revise your content often.

6. Make Digital Excellence Your New Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
You need a new mindset and new elements to measure if you are to successfully make the creation of outstanding content a priority throughout your organization. Most businesses focus on sales revenue and view content as they would a product brochure. But today, the content comes first for a customer who may never talk to you. If you are to truly succeed in today’s digital world, you may need to focus on successful engagement, with revenue as a likely byproduct of providing great content.

Measuring engagement is not as elusive as you might think. In fact, it is quite tangible and can be measured through analytics such as website dwell-time, pages per visit, social shares, comments and likes (including making individual content assets a “favorite”), product reviews, video views, and more.

If you get the dynamic content right, then revenue won’t be far behind. But, get it wrong, and your customer will be long gone.

Building your digital foundation in manageable, incremental steps makes sense and can take you where you want to be — within budget and on schedule. Defining manageable steps and stages is much better than staying with old systems and processes that don’t match the expectations of today’s customers.

The post You Can Build Your Digital Foundation in Stages — But You Must Build It! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/can-build-digital-foundation-stages-must-build/

Three Tips to Make Your Mobile App Pay You Back TODAY

Hooray! You have funding for a mobile app. That’s great news. But, here’s the challenge: funding alone is not enough to make your mobile app successful. For your app to be successful, it’s important that you start the development process with purpose and direction. In fact, during your planning process, you should have an eye on your customer experience and how your organization supports it. Without a structure in place that facilitates ongoing improvement, your mobile app will struggle. Your organization should be set up in a way that facilitates the app’s success.

Why You Should Focus on Mobile
Let’s face it, with over six billion mobile-phone subscribers globally, mobile is not something your brand (or any brand) can afford to mess up. Mobile apps have changed the game. Yet, it’s often an area that brands fail to plan for. All too frequently, brands put together a mobile app without forethought for increasing customer engagement or mobile app monetization.

Average mobile-device users spend more than three hours each day using their mobile devices. That makes mobile the platform you’re most likely to connect with customers on. While they may not make purchases from mobile every time, you’re likely to connect with them there. This is why you need to know exactly what you want your users to do — and then drive them to do it.

3 Tips to Make Your Mobile App Pay You Back Today
1. Walk Through the Experience.
It’s important to not only build a mobile app, but also use it yourself. During the mobile app development phase, your team should be regularly walking through the user experience to discover where potential issues — as well as further opportunities — lie. This is a process that should be done repeatedly and by team members at all levels of the organization. Including people from varying backgrounds allows you to see the app from multiple people’s viewpoints. Not all of your customers will have the same perspective that you do, so including as many users as possible will help you catch all those potential issues and opportunities. It’s important to reevaluate regularly and thoroughly so that your app doesn’t become stale or unfocused over time. This is an inherently iterative process — successful brands are never truly done improving. Key to this process is to actually move to where your experience is.

2. Determine the Key Functionality.
If your mobile app doesn’t provide a core service to your customers, it’s unlikely that they’ll use it regularly. It’s important to determine exactly what your app needs to do to serve your customers’ needs. For instance, a restaurant group determined that their app needed to do more than just allow customers to find the nearest locations. By updating the app to allow customers to also place orders from it, they increased not only functionality, but also engagement. In addition, they added the ability for customers to check wait times for the various restaurants in their group so they can help customers move toward the restaurant that will best meet their needs at that given time. Determining the most-wanted, key functionalities for improving customers’ experiences allowed the restaurant group to increase engagement with their brand, and ultimately, drive traffic to their restaurant locations.

3. Know Your App’s Purpose.
If you don’t know the purpose of your app, your customers likely don’t either. It’s important to know the goal of the mobile app as well as your monetization strategy. Perhaps you plan to offer the ability to make in-app purchases. Alternately, you might plan to use the app to build engagement and push personalized messages. In fact, the purpose of your app will even drive which metrics are most important to its success. For instance, a major lifestyle magazine was trying to determine the purpose of its app — social impact or increasing subscriptions. If the app’s goal was to have social impact, then the metrics that determined success were all engagement-based — number of engaged users, daily users, monthly users, retention of those users, and so on. However, if the purpose of the app was to increase subscriptions, the metrics that mattered were much more transactional — conversion rate, total number of subscriptions, that sort of thing. Whatever it may be, the purpose of your app needs to be determined at the beginning of the mobile app development process. This purpose should drive your entire development plan, functionality, and marketing plan.

Your mobile app can be a key touchpoint that builds customer loyalty and improves customer experience. Through careful mobile app optimization, you can achieve these goals.

Learn more about mobile app engagement and optimization and how important it is to your business.

The post Three Tips to Make Your Mobile App Pay You Back TODAY appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/three-tips-make-mobile-app-pay-back-today/

How to Make Your Customer-Centric Transformation a Success

With smartphones dominating the mobile landscape and customers using multiple devices and demanding highly personalized and relevant experiences, organizations have been rushing to undertake customer-centric transformations of their businesses. Many companies have taken on that challenge, and now that a few years have gone by, the experiences of many companies suggests that there are some clear indicators of how to make such a transformation a success.

It turns out that the priorities some companies have embraced in making their transformations haven’t always been the right ones. Some best practices have emerged to ensure that your business has a rewarding customer-centric transformation.

Planning the Digital Transformation Is Vital.


When a company undertakes a customer-centric transformation — shifting fundamental ways of doing business from serving the company’s internal operational processes to applying an understanding of the whole customer journey to every department in the organization — it is common to rush into implementing a solution with very little planning. Successful transformations invest time in planning and have a formal program office to lead the initiative with clear milestones, progress reports, and funding in place.

It’s Not All About the Technology.


It is too easy to assume that, since we are all trying to capture customers’ digital attentions, the technology behind a company’s transformation would be the deciding factor in determining success. While getting the technology right is an important element, it isn’t the top factor. Lack of organizational and executive buy-in, overly ambitious goals, and poor project management are the top reasons for failed initiatives.

Keep Your Transformation Goals Realistic.


Being too ambitious in your transformation goals is risky, since getting your transformation wrong can have lasting impacts in companies that haven’t embraced failures as learning experiences and are slow to forget past disappointments.

Communication Is Key.


The more cross-channel and line-of-business collaboration you have within an organization, the greater the likelihood for success in your digital transformation.

Executive Permission Is Not the Same as Sponsoring.


A compelling case can be made to company executives to transform the business into a customer-centric organization, but being given permission to proceed is not the same as sponsoring the transformation. If your digital-transformation initiative doesn’t obtain funding priority, have executive leadership in the steering committee, and engage in managing conflicting priorities, it is highly unlikely that it will be successful.

Get Outside Help.


The majority of successful transformations are those that have been implemented by teams with the right skills — not all of which can be found in-house. Employing external experts can greatly increase the chances of success. Said one executive, “We are all about doing everything in house. As a result, everything takes forever to get done.”

Getting rid of preconceived ideas of what it takes to transform your business into a customer-centric one may be the most important factor in increasing your chances of success. Remaining flexible, developing an enterprise-wide mindset, and making course corrections along the way will keep everyone on course toward a successful transformation.
For more details on these ideas, check out the Adobe/Merkle report, The Case for Change: Exposing the Myths of Customer-Centric Transformation.

The post How to Make Your Customer-Centric Transformation a Success appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/make-customer-centric-transformation-success/

Get the Most Bang for Your Mobile App Buck

You can probably find a handful of mobile apps that you downloaded with great enthusiasm, only to have them sit untouched on your screen, taking up valuable real estate.

It’s too bad. You thought it would be the greatest app ever — then, it just didn’t keep you engaged. Mobile apps are responsible for fulfilling the promises they made when they were introduced to consumers. In some cases, apps can change the world. But, for many app developers, launching the latest app can mean a lot of work — with little to show for it.

Take a look at Uber, for example. The app changed the way those who need rides get a lift. No more aimless waving; no more walking to bus stops.

As a mobile marketer, you’ll need more than big marketing promises and impressive download figures for your app to achieve Uber status. You need to take action by engaging users through real-time experiences across all their devices.

To make mobile apps work for you, they have to be built on user insights. To get those insights, your apps have to stick.

Many Apps Just Aren’t Sticky.
For a mobile app to not only be noticed in the app store, but also used regularly, it has to make users feel special as well as provide something they need. Did you know that more than 90 percent of apps are deleted because they fail to deliver as promised or are not user-friendly (Thongsithavong, Puma; “The Merits of A/B Testing for Mobile Deployment,” AIM Consulting, April 2015). To earn the biggest return, you have to make the app stick with awesome personalization and utility.

It starts with getting to know app-specific technology — such as beacons and geolocation, both of which help reach customers based on proximity. Having customers’ digital attentions while they’re in your store increases the likelihood that they’ll engage with your app.

When you are armed with data-driven insights and innovative mobile tools, you can provide real-time, contextual app experiences and create the kind of go-to app that keeps customers coming back for more.

This takes us to the first step in getting more from your mobile apps: build your app on a solid analytics foundation.

Even with all the power that mobile analytics can bring, 54 percent of businesses don’t use them, and that means they’re missing opportunities to generate revenue and engage customers. You need analytics to drive a customer-first mentality.

Create a Customer-First Mentality Through Mobile Analytics
App analytics provide great visibility into your customer’s behaviors and interactions, allowing you to enhance the experience with the customer in mind. You can start with these three steps:

1. Dig a little deeper to consider analytics from your customers’ perspectives. Ask yourself what compels customers to open your app, why they would want to stay, how long is reasonable, and what might cause them to jump ship? Obtain the data to support the answers to these questions and then build the app or updates around the results.
2. Use analytics to predict your customers’ actions. When Redbox saw the first push message in a “welcome series” — designed to engage customers with promotional offers immediately after download — garner a 56 percent open rate across Android and iOS, they continued the program. By paying attention to what’s working with real-time insights, you can stay ahead of your customers’ needs by delivering targeted, optimized experiences.
3. Realign app-analytics practices with key business objectives. With analytics that give you enhanced long-term views of customers, you can develop a better understanding of why users are engaging with your app — and then use those new insights to guide your evolving mobile-analytics strategy.

A&E Networks is one of the 46 percent that are putting the power of analytics to work. The company released an update to its app that included a “just added” screen to alert users to new shows available for viewing. Then, they asked themselves, “Did it lead to an increase in time spent in the app?” By using an analytics process that entailed matching insights with opportunity, A&E discovered that its screen update led to a significant increase in time spent in the app.

Want to learn more steps to generate a better ROI from your mobile app marketing practices? Read the full report here.

The post Get the Most Bang for Your Mobile App Buck appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/action-1-get-bang-buck-mobile-apps/

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include a look at the viability of responsive design as mobile conversion rates hold steady, considerations for launching an affiliate marketing channel, and steps retailers can take to better leverage mobile to connect with customers.

• As mobile conversion rate stagnates at 1pc, time to reassess responsive web design? [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Mobile buying behavior is unique, and responsive web design may not be the best solution to optimize mobile conversions.
• Affiliate Marketing: Advanced Commission Structures [Practical Ecommerce]: An overview of the various considerations when launching an affiliate marketing channel.
• 4 steps for leveraging mobile to better connect with customers [Retail Customer Experience]: Supporting customers’ in-store goals with mobile and investing in systems to better understand digital influence on in-store sales are included in ways to better use mobile.
• How Retailers Use Welcome Emails to Engage Consumers [MarketingProfs]: The findings of a new survey include evidence that 40 percent of marketers are not engaging with customers within 24 hours of their first interactions with the brand.
• Google PLAs are poised to produce over half of retailers’ paid search clicks by year-end [Internet Retailer]: Google’s product listing ads’ click volume is growing significantly faster than standard listings.
• Sears borrows from Pokemon Go for app-based in-store scavenger hunt [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Sears moves to incorporate learnings from the success of the augmented reality-based game, Pokémon Go.
• 56% of online retail searches take place on mobile devices [Internet Retailer]: More than half of retail-related searches are occurring on smartphones or tablets, and that increases to around 80 percent for location-based searches.
• This is the first airline to list seats for booking on Airbnb [Business Insider]: Lufthansa, in a surprising move, becomes the first airline to list flights available for booking on Airbnb.
• How Virgin Hotels’ digital marketing strategy has taken shape [Tnooz]: Responsive design and A/B testing have played important roles in the development of Virgin Hotels’ digital marketing strategy.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-18/

Why and how chatbots will dominate social media

Since the early 2000s, brands have experimented with social media platforms and networks to communicate with customers and prospects — first through weblogs, then eventually through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Although the capabilities and sophistication have continued to evolve, at its core, social media has remained a platform to facilitate human-to-human communication.

But then the robots moved in.

Robots, though more specifically virtual robots or chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are transforming the way brands do business with their customers. Domino’s was one of the first companies to dabble in AI, allowing customers to order pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. On the backend, a bot scans to confirm the tweet was not a hoax and processes the order.

More recently, Taco Bell unveiled its TacoBot within the Slack messaging platform that allows busy workers to chat with a bot to order a taco. And at Facebook’s F8, 1-800-Flowers, CNN, Spring — a retail shopping startup — and others released chatbots for Facebook Messenger. These bots offer new ways to shop, make purchases, read the news and more within the Facebook platform.

While all this sounds exciting, what does it actually mean for consumers, and what’s to become of the “humans” on social media?

Chatbots as the factotum for all business needs

The first thing to understand about chatbots is that most won’t introduce new capabilities; instead, brand chatbots will centralize where and how customers engage, using social media as an operating system.

Consumers will engage with bots in three ways: content consumption, customer service and productivity or transactional engagements. Social media is already part of many of these activities between brands and consumers, but social media acts as a gateway to direct consumers to the brand website, blog or separate channels. Instead of using social media as a portal, consumers can read and receive information, ask technical questions and even make purchases from one chatbot.

Take for example customer support. More than one-third of customers already prefer using social media rather than the telephone for customer support, and most consumers expect a response within an hour — if not faster. That’s a taxing load for brands, but the enhanced AI through chatbots makes it feasible to accommodate.

This won’t be the painful automated voice response for most phone customer service — which is good news since consumers are increasingly impatient with customer service. Chatbots will be able to quickly understand the contextual request or problem from the customer rather than force them through a series of selection menus to understand the problem.

Personalized to the context of your life

The second way consumers will benefit from chatbots is through personalization — and this is where social media plays a big part. Unlike the SmarterChild bot hosted on AOL Instant Messenger, the potential for bots is not just completing tasks you assign to it, but understanding the context of the user’s life. With Facebook integration, chatbots already have a rich data source to understand user habits around when they check their device, interests, most valued relationships and upcoming plans and schedule, so bots can deliver relevant updates, information and recommendations that are both location- and context-aware.

Many brands already target content on social media to specific audiences and locations, but there is no silver bullet currently to fully personalize what, when and how messages are delivered to customers. Even the current chatbots available on Facebook have room to improve in this department. Try using one if you haven’t yet, and you’ll receive a flurry of push notifications and updates from the bot to continue to share news and updates. But there is hope: Bots should get smarter with more human interaction, and will learn which information individuals really want, and when they prefer to receive it.

The future is now… almost

While there is no doubt this bot-driven social media system is the future, there is still need for improvements before the bots officially take over. Even beyond the need for improved contextual understanding of when to share updates, there is also no common language or intuitive way to initiate or end chatbot conversations.

Kinks aside, the good news is that artificial intelligence learns, and the more we all experiment — both brands and consumers — the better these tools will become. Although a PR disaster, Microsoft Tay was in some ways a success in demonstrating the incredible speed that AI can learn and adapt. (And also raised the need for brands to find ways to code against or prevent AI from learning unsavory and offensive language.)

Although bots are moving in, and likely to become mainstream within three to five years, humans will still have a place in social media. However, that too will change. As bots become equipped to handle text content, the human side of brands and consumers will gravitate toward new, richer ways to engage, including virtual and augmented reality. So despite the Hollywood horrors around bots versus humans, social media will remain — at least for now — a dual arena where both can coexist.

This post originally published in Techcruch.com. To view the original post, click here. 

The post Why and how chatbots will dominate social media appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/chatbots-will-dominate-social-media/