Product Experience Management

Internet Trends 2019: Key Takeaways

1. Established B2B marketing practice won’t suffer from expanding mobile use.

Mobile device usage among U.S. adults has exploded from about 20 minutes per day in 2008 to 3.6 hours per day in 2018. But, it’s critical to note this growth has occurred on top of laptop and desktop usage, not at the expense of either.

Laptop and desktop usage rates have only declined slightly, from a high of 2.6 hours per day in 2011 to 2 hours per day in 2018.

Implication: B2B customers are far less likely to make purchases with a phone than with a laptop or desktop computer. This means established B2B marketing practices are not being negatively effected by the expansion of mobile.

Nor are they likely to be in the near future, as the only other platforms with expanding usage are game consoles and other OTT devices like Apple TVs and Amazon Fire sticks (source).

How many B2B product managers do you know who sell on Xbox?

2. The re-emergence of brick and mortar is no threat to ecommerce whatsoever.

As a percentage of total retail sales in the U.S., ecommerce has gone from less than 2% in 2000 to over 15% in the first quarter of 2019. The only decline over that entire period took place in 2008.

Implication: recent articles like this and this hype the re-emergence of brick and mortar retail as part of retail’s inevitably diversified future. But they fail to acknowledge at least 2 critical points:

1. Money is money: If you’re already selling on Amazon, do you care whether customers buy your products online or in one of their new stores? If anything, this will be good for your business.
2. Size matters: The amount of retail stores predicted to open in the next five years is dwarfed by the downfall of a wide variety of major brands from Sears to Radioshack to CVS (source). Toys ‘R’ Us alone was operating over 800 stores less than 1 year ago (source).

3. Product integration and association will drive your sales.

• 88% of Americans report using a second device while watching TV
• 71% use that device to look up content related to what they’re watching on TV

Implication: if 88% of Americans are using their phones to look up information about what they’re seeing on TV, your products need to be positioned in combination to maximize reach and sales results.

Think about the enrichment of your product pages and the amount of images you offer for each. Are you showing every angle and every feature? Are you providing close up shots?

Placing products in context and highlighting their practical association with other products is critical for maximizing conversions.

4. Word of mouth is the key to expanding market share.

41% of Americans currently use a device to send messages about television content to friends and family, specifically while they’re watching TV. These individuals generate wider interest in your products by telling their friends and family members about your brand.

This finding is bolstered by the fact that a 2017 poll found that at 23%, the largest portion of individuals signing up for new online services had done so on the recommendation of another.

Implication 1: people search differently on mobile than they do on desktop/laptop computers, so optimizing your product pages to rank high for mobile search is a skill you must master.

2 points to think about:

1. Mobile users often search by voice, using full questions.
2. Questions address different kinds of information: do they want to buy right away or do they want to know more first?

Implication 2: in the same 2017 poll, financial incentive accounted for only 22% of new service sign-ups and only 12% even reported liking the product.

Because this poll shows word of mouth has the potential to play a bigger role in driving ecommerce decisions than cost or preference, marketing needs to focus on building customer trust and maintaining authenticity.

People want to buy products packaged as authentic experiences they can share on social media.

5. You need to be selling in India and China today.

India

• 1.34 billion total population
• accounts for 12% of global Internet use
• approx. 900 million did not use the Internet in 2015 (source)

China

• 1.39 billion total population
• accounts for 21% of global Internet use
• approx. 640 million did not use the Internet in 2018 (source)

And a staggering 98% of Chinese on the Internet access it with a phone.

Implication: ecommerce operations already operating in these countries are poised to take advantage of the fact that both hold massive untapped markets. And these are countries that have already made enormous commitments to drive provision of Internet service.

Indians already trust Amazon more than any other Internet brand (source), and the Indian government is working to provide Internet service to everyone in the country by 2022 (source).

Are you selling in the Indian and Chinese markets? Are your product pages optimized for them? If not, what are you waiting for?

6. Content must be tailored and dynamic to maximize conversions.

89% of North Americans regularly use the Internet and in 2019 Americans will spend an average of 266 minutes on their phones, but only 216 watching television.

Implication: if your ads and content aren’t optimized for mobile devices and tailored for your potential customers to find them in the spaces they utilize, you won’t sell to them.

For example, Alexa Skills are like apps for an Amazon Echo that can be triggered by speaking a key phrase. Nearly 100,000 Alexa Skills are currently available for download.

This new vocal channel provides an opportunity to answer specific questions directly with a product offer.

Stats to think about:

• 1.244 bil. – number of Android phones sold in 2017 (source)
• 2.1 mil. – number of currently available Android apps (source)
• 215.8 mil. – number of iPhones sold in 2017 (source)
• 1.8 mil. – number of apps in Apple’s App Store (source)
• 100 mil. – number of Alexa devices sold to date (source)

Simple math tells us the room for growth in the total number of Alexa Skills apps is massive. Getting ahead of this trend immediately virtually ensures increasing sales and larger market share.

7. Grab your competition’s market share by cornering the wearable device channel.

Between 2014 and 2018, the number of Americans wearing electronic devices embedded in clothes or accessories more than doubled, from 25 to 52 million. And it’s estimated Apple has sold 46 million watches since the 2015 launch (source), including 10.4 million just in Q4 of 2018 (source).

Implication 1: This should be obvious, but pairing your products with wearable devices in product page photographs is an easy way to speak to customers.

Your products don’t even need to relate to wearable devices, as customers will still notice the combination.

Implication 2: Wearable devices offer an incredible opportunity for collecting information that can be used to sharpen buyer personas and content offers.

Only when you know what your customers are doing, do you really know who they are, so you can speak directly to them.

Implication 3: This new channel allows for delivery of information, but not if your content isn’t tailored for the space.

When it comes to the tiny screens wearable devices include, less truly is more.

8. Massive ecommerce offer growth has made it easier to rake in ecommerce sales.

Shopee is a mobile-centric social media focused B2C and C2C ecommerce platform launched in Singapore in 2009, which sells over 180 million products across SE Asia (source).

Between 2016 and 2018, the gross value of all merchandise sold through Shopee increased roughly by a factor of 10, in spite of heavy competition from regional companies like Tokopedia and Lazada, to say nothing of Amazon.

Implication: By focusing on an innovative, winning offer, Shopee was able to dominate SE Asia.

But they’re only 1 player in only 1 regional market.

Shopee’s success can be repeated by finding a balance that takes social media, ecommerce, brick and mortar retail, average cost, buyer personas, preferred method of delivery, and design presentation into account. That balance must be struck according to the preferences and behaviors of the target market.

The main takeaway here is:

New companies are constantly figuring out ways to carve ever more nuanced, niche markets off giant platforms and develop them into tremendously profitable businesses.

Traditional economic thinking argues sales would be more likely to go down as competition goes up. However, as customer preference for niche spaces increases, so does the opportunity to find customers where they already exist online, in spaces where they want to be.

To convert customers in niche markets, you must hyper-tailor your offers to them.

9. Images convert customers, not text.

Instagram has 1 billion monthly users and more than half of them use it every day (source). Also Vishal Shah, Instagram’s head of product, says they intend to focus on driving profitability by turning the platform into an ecommerce powerhouse (source).

Implication: Shopping has always been a sensory experience, so why should ecommerce be any different? By subtracting all other sensory information, ecommerce has to be as visually pleasing an experience as possible.

Everyone selling on Amazon knows product pages should display at least 7 images, because that’s currently the maximum number of images that display on one page. But there are two easy ways to get around this limitation.

1. Encourage your customers to upload pictures along with their reviews.
2. If your customers click into the gallery of images, they will see ALL the pictures you upload. This means you can actually display up to 9 pictures.

P.T. Barnum said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” and ecommerce demonstrates it. Every good review posted to your product pages is an endorsement. Every bad review is an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to your customers.

Also, it really doesn’t matter how simple your products are, you should be taking advantage of all 9 picture slots. Cover all of the following:

• 1 rich, beautiful main image
• 2 or 3 close ups from different angles
• 2 or 3 close ups of highlighted features
• 1 shot of the product in use
• 1 shot of the product in combination with other products you sell

10. Tie everything together, and do it with authenticity.

You should have noticed by now that certain themes in this post have been repeated. The fact that these takeaways compliment each other, demonstrates their efficacy, their strength in practice. It also makes incorporating them into your overall strategy easier.

Let’s recap:

Mobile won’t hurt B2B marketing, because converting is all about reaching people where they already are, and B2B customers don’t shop on mobile.

Authenticity means knowing as much as you can about your customers, so don’t insult them by barging in on their Facebook and Instagram feeds (at least until Vishal Shah’s plans come to fruition). Find them on LinkedIn and Pinterest, platforms designed for business and optimized for sales, respectively.

Use images to bring products together, because pictures give you more than the opportunity to showcase your products. They let you show your customers how well you know them. Unlike static product photos, action shots promise the authenticity of showcased reality.

Move away from airbrushed, obviously staged photos toward real pictures of real people really living their lives. Include visual cues, like wearable devices, to point people to recommend products to their friends and family. Associate your products with others to give a fuller, more realistic picture.

Sell in India and China, but without authenticity your chances of success are low. Authenticity means investing in research, asking questions, respecting local cultural practices, and absolutely not selling down to people.

Authenticity means taking the time to create tailored, dynamic content with culturally correct imagery that changes with the origin of the viewer. People from different places obviously like different things, so give them what they want to see according to where they are. Speak their language, and give them specifications in units they understand.

Finally, India and China are where shaving niche markets off giants is most readily possible, because both contain massive markets yet to dive into the online space. They also offer recently moneyed youth, the people most likely to develop and maintain lifelong niche preferences and interests which include international products.

Who wrote the Internet Trends 2019 Report?

Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist who focuses on the Internet and new technology investment, spearheaded compilation of the report. Meeker is a former partner with the noted Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins.

Since September, 2018, she has raised $1.25 billion at Bond Capital, a new firm she started and the publisher of the highly anticipated Internet Trends 2019 report.

Why should I listen to what Mary Meeker has to say?

In 1995, Meeker was working for Morgan Stanley while they were taking Netscape public. During this time she co-authored The Internet Report, known as “the bible” of the dot com boom. At Morgan Stanley, she was also the lead manager on the Google IPO.

In 2010, Fortune magazine called her, “one of the ten smartest people in tech” (source). And Forbes included her at 77 in a list of the most powerful women in the world, in 2014 (source).

So, when it comes to tech trends, it’s safe to say Mary Meeker knows what she’s talking about.

Now that you know where ecommerce is going, click here to see how CATSY can help get you there.

Struggling to increase ecommerce revenue?

2019 is poised to offer 1.92 billion ecommerce shoppers, that is, if you can get them to your site. (source)

Whether you’re new to online business, or just need help ramping up online sales, this blog has the information you need to make strong choices today.

Have an Ecommerce Marketing Strategy in Place

You can’t talk about increasing online sales without drafting a strategy to guide you to the results you desire.

Your marketing strategy should:

• Contain your value proposition
• Cover all goals and objectives
• Reflect a specific period of time
• Communicate your mission statement
• Describe your target market
• Outline your buyer personas
• Detail your pricing
• Include your positioning strategy
• Discuss distribution strategy
• Summarize content mix
• Cover your digital channels
• Explain the processes you will use to execute the strategy

Your marketing strategy should communicate a clear and consistent message to your customers about your brand. (source)

Extra advice: you can step things up by educating your prospects with tools like webinars, video tutorials, and online chat. Use all of these to guide customers through every step of the buyer’s journey with your store.

Know Your Audience

You already knew that, right?

But roughly 60% to 70% of marketers in B2B businesses know true understanding of their customers escapes them. (source)

That stat alone demonstrates the importance of simple preparation, and the edge it will give you.

So, before even thinking of starting an online business, let alone increasing online sales, you have to know who you are selling to.

Can you comfortably say with absolute authority that you know your customers?

Don’t waste money on inefficient campaigns that yield little success. Know your audience to build buyer personas.

Buyer Personas Must Be Detailed

The questions you need to answer to create strong, useful buyer personas will tend to vary depending upon what you are selling and where.

Here are some examples of important questions to answer:

• How old are your customers on average?
• Where do they exist online?
• Where do they look for information online?
• What problem do they have that your product can solve?

You should know what your customers are interested in, their demographic characteristics, and the media they use to search for products and services. This will help you select the best marketing channel to communicate your message. (source)

Remember, you can’t please everyone, so keep your offer focused.

No customer is going to buy your product if it doesn’t satisfy a need or solve a problem. This is why it’s key to know which specific market appeals to your products and services.

Customer Experience with Your Brand

Customers are no longer passive when it comes to information, especially product information.

86% of customers would likely pay more for products that come with a fantastic customer experience. (source)

The availability of information via the Internet means your customers have access to myriads of products offered by sellers the world over, all vying for their attention.

If you’re only offering a product, you’re already off on the wrong foot.

There are a million online stores offering products like yours.

To customers, your brand and their experience with it are one and the same. You have to ensure your customer experience is enjoyable and personalized to their specific needs and preferences.

The customer experience will make them return to buy far more than your products will. This is brand loyalty. A solid customer experience sets you apart from your competitors and brings your brand promise to life.

Today’s customers are looking for meaningful engagement, a “wow” experience, from brands.

Customers are loyal to brands that demonstrate a commitment to them by consistently exceeding expectations. The key word here is consistency both before and after purchase.

Your marketing communications must be consistent across all marketing platforms and online sales channels.

Available digital technology is yours for the taking. Make use of it to personalize your service offerings to create a deep connection with your customers. Customers tie what they think about your brand to their loyalty.

This is why it’s important to provide a delightful brand experience across all platforms. (source)

Find the Right Marketing Channels

A mere 14% of companies currently have a true omni-channel campaign in place. (source)

You need a channel strategy that will be the best fit for your business. It should ideally focus on spaces where customers falling into your buyer personas already exist.

1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

You pay websites like Google and Amazon for every click an ad of yours gets.

PPC ads can be Paid Search Ads. These are usually text-only ads at the top of search engine results. Display ads are usually banners on popular sites, blogs, mobile applications, games, and shopping campaigns. Here, images of your product appear alongside search engine results.

PPC is an easy way to sidestep the time required for SEO.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How your site ranks in search results.

When potential customers are looking to buy a product you sell, they are most likely to use a search engine, like Google, to find you. Those customers aren’t going to look through dozens of search results or even scroll to the bottom of the first page.

You have to provide your content at the top of search results to sell.

3. Content Marketing

Provide useful information to build a base of potential customers.

Also known as inbound marketing, you write blogs, create infographics, and make videos to get shoppers to your doorstep.

• Pro: cheap, long-term approach
• Con: requires a lot of work

This slow process builds traffic organically, but there are ways of speeding it up.

4. Influencer Marketing

An influencer is someone with a large number of social media followers.

People who pay attention to influencers online think they are credible sources of information. You increase awareness and push more sales by getting the influencer to post about your site.

This channel has become extremely popular across social media, popular blogs, and channels like YouTube.

Influencers are free, but you can also pay people to drive traffic to your site.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Increase your brand’s online sales by paying an external website to generate traffic.

The advantage is payment occurs only when affiliate traffic generates actual sales. This affords you the opportunity to generate online sales from customers you didn’t or couldn’t target.

Affiliates are like professional influencers, meaning they tend to be social media experts.

6. Social Media Marketing

Engage with your customers where they already spend time online.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others offer different ad types to suit the your brand’s advertising strategy. They’ve also innovated features to bridge the gap between brands and target audiences.

The goal is to connect directly with potential customers.

7. Email Marketing

Send marketing content and offers directly to potential customers’ inboxes.

Because it’s interest-based, you get customer contact information when they sign up to receive a newsletter or content offer. Proper maintenance of your email marketing campaign, to ensure the emails are attention-grabbing and sent to the right people at the right time, is absolutely crucial.

Find a balance between not enough and too much, you don’t want to lose subscribers or have them flag your emails as spam.

Choose Wisely

Ultimately, the channel you choose has to support your marketing strategy and how you broadcast your message. (source)

Content Marketing to Ramp up Online Sales

60% of marketing professionals make 1 content offer per day and content marketing is up to 7.8 times more effective for driving traffic to leader sites. (source)

Think of product content as the juicy appetizer that invites customers to stay for a main dish. Not everyone knows how to create appealing content to pave the way for increased patronage.

Create custom content with conversions in mind and build a long-term content marketing strategy.

Your content is a reflection of what you truly are as a brand. By closely managing your product content, you can get the right products to the right market at the right time using the right channels.

Content encompasses every message used to market your brand, giving customers memorable experiences.

This includes:

• Blog content
• Web copy
• Graphics
• Animations
• Videos

Everything you create must be useful, informative, credible, and engaging, telling a story that speaks to the emotional side of your market.

This can be an original story, a testimonial of how your brand has made the lives of your customers better, a description of how you solved a problem, or all of the above.

Listing the same old product descriptions and statistics is boring, be memorable instead.

With content, you can also showcase the industry authority your brand commands. This need not be limited to your products and services. Discuss the issues that are important to your customers.

You may not get results immediately, but content marketing will impact future conversions.

Good ecommerce content includes compelling descriptions of product attributes. All sense of touch, sight, or smell is eliminated in online sales. So, it’s critical to ensure your product descriptions give your customers the same feeling they would get in an actual store. (source)

Content Must-Haves

Images

Written descriptions go hand in hand with rich, colorful, high-resolution images displaying your products from every possible angle. Display products being used and in tandem with associated products you sell.

Keywords

How are potential customers finding the sites where they are buying products like yours? Make use of relevant keywords to boost your web page ranking and increase traffic.

CTAs

All content must include a relevant and useful call to action. Content should never just end, it should lead to more content.

Common CTAs include:

• Cheat Sheets
• Guides
• Blog posts
• White Papers
• Ebooks
• Tools
• Links leading to specific pages on your website

Don’t ever give a potential customer an excuse to leave your site.

An Easy, Seamless Checkout Process

Abandoned shopping carts cost between 2 and 4 trillion dollars a year and it’s only going to get worse. (source)

You may have done a great job drawing customer attention to your brand. You held those customers with compelling content and have convinced them to buy. Don’t lose them now with a clunky, cumbersome payment system.

Increase your website’s loading speed and make it easier for your customers to give you their money.

It’s key you make buying from your store an effortless, painless process. If customers feel like it is easier to buy from other sites or physical stores, you need to look into your checkout process.

A seamless checkout process reduces cart abandonment and ultimately drives customers back to your site for more sales.

In the same vein, it’s crucial to reduce distractions to the bare minimum during the checkout process. Ads bombarding your customers during checkout distracts them and will cost you sales. (source)

Build Your Online Credibility

Customer perception of your business is critical, so infuse your brand communication with personality.

Content goes a long way to assure customers that your brand is credible. Display trust seals and highlight both positive and negative reviews on your website if you have them.

Positive reviews obviously speak directly to your brand quality, but why focus on negative reviews?

Negative reviews you have successfully resolved speak to your brand’s commitment to your customers. Showing potential customers that you’ve accepted returned products, processed refunds, or simply reached out to customers directly helps them build trust in your brand.

Only customers who trust you become loyal.

Consumers will always want to know, hear, and see the comments of others who have used your products and services in the past, before they decide to commit to you and what you are offering. Thus you have to optimize your website and social media accounts, to provide avenues for customers to leave reviews about their experiences with you. (source)

You need to convince your customers that their dealings with you are secure.

84% of customers won’t buy if they think a website isn’t secured. (source)

Communicate to your customers the steps, procedures, and software in place to ensure their transactions and information are safe with you.

Have a Feedback Mechanism in Place for Evaluation Purposes

Always take time to analyze and evaluate your performance.

Doing this will reveal gaps and give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Make use of resources that track the health of your SEO.

This can be measured in terms of:

• Referral rates
• Conversion rates
• Leads generated within a specific period of time
• Site traffic
• Social media sharing

Solicit feedback from your customers directly.

Ask questions on social media and encourage customers to fill out surveys about their experience with your brand. Experiment to fix the gaps you discover until you figure out what works best.

Scale up to Online Sales Success

There is no one magic method for online sales success, but be sure NOT to select services that can’t scale up as you grow.

It’s important to make choices tempered according to your future goals, especially when selecting the ecommerce marketing channels that will help you grow as a brand.

Conclusion

Ultimately, ecommerce sales success rests on consistently dazzling your customers with delightful experiences to keep them coming back for more.

Now that you know how to ramp up online sales like a pro, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.

Today, tailored content is king.

More than 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data are made or posted online every day? (source)

Yes, and every moment someone spends looking at a screen the possibility some bit of content will catch their eye increases. Simply dishing out more won’t automatically get you more customers. Customers are smart, so be smarter.

Break through the clutter, if you want to be a customer-centric brand.

In this post, we’ll explain how to tailor your content to improve sales, grow market share, and increase revenue in 7 easy to understand steps.

But first, you need to know…

Why Tailored Content?

Did you know that 90% of all online data worldwide was created in the past two years? (source)

With all that data, your content is unlikely to appeal to customers if it doesn’t speak directly to their needs. Everyone is looking for product information and content that will benefit them and their needs specifically.

Tailored content is all about personalization.

Make your business one that’s concerned with satisfying the particular needs of your customers to hyper-charge the customer experience you provide. Tailored content is all about delivering experiences that speak directly to each individual customer.

It’s the perfect way to deliver solutions that customers aren’t yet aware of.

Personalized content is the heart of the new age digital revolution, helping digitally-savvy shoppers discover what they want, when they want it, and how they want it, with minimal effort.

Personalized product content helps customers find their way by placing them at the center of the digital shopping experience.

Tailored content facilitates the buyer’s journey, because the process will make more sense to your customers. When you tailor messages to customer behavior, demographics, and searches, conversions become more likely.

Tailored content increases engagement by speaking directly about the personality of the ecommerce retailer.

This deepens the relationship your customers have with your brand. First time shoppers will want to stick around if content speaks directly to them. Content that is relevant to the problem or need they have does this.

Start with research and ask yourself…

1. Who Are My Customers?

Tailor content won’t suit your customers’ needs if you don’t know at least as much about them as they know about themselves.

Buyer personas are generalized descriptions of people who make up your ideal market. But the trick is to make them as detailed as you can.

How is it possible to make buyer personas both general and detailed?

By including as much information about them as possible:

You might think it’s most important to know what your customers want to buy, but don’t forget about why.

For example, are they buying for themselves, to give to others as a gift, or for further resale? You need to know whether your business is specific to different demographics or does more business on holidays.

Knowing your customers inside and out speaks to your brand’s authenticity.

You need to know their reasons for buying from you and what doubts they have about you. Also, you need to find out which media they use regularly so you can make sure you’re reaching them.

Find all this information by:

• Surveying your customers directly
• Studying their past purchases
• Examining their account setups
• Looking at your site analytics
• Going through their profiles
• Soliciting feedback
• Reviewing and responding to comments

Two ecommerce retailers may be functionally identical, but appearing exactly the same will spell ecommerce suicide.

What’s even more important is to come back to buyer personas from time to time. The audience you had when you started your business is unlikely to be the same group of people you’re selling to today.

Who are you selling to now?

Your target audience is at best simply older than they were when you got started. Do they like the same things and find information in the same ways? Alternatively, they might be a completely different group of people, with preferences you never even considered.

And ask…

Who is my competition?

You should routinely visit your competitors websites and social media pages.

This is a good way to stay on top of current trends and gauge your competitiveness. Knowing what your competitors are doing allows you to spot gaps in your service and content to fill.

It’s a great way to come up with new blog ideas.

There are companies, like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs, that provide products like consolidated lists of content by URL and numbers of social media shares. However, doing the research yourself comes with 2 distinct advantages.

1. It’s free.
2. You are likely to find more than just what you are looking for.

Doing research yourself is by no means easy, but the price is right, and who knows what you could find? Because research companies provide a specific product, they may not be set up to get you that little something extra you can find by accident yourself.

Differentiate yourself.

Developing your brand has to do with communicating something to your customers that your competitors are not. Your tailored content needs to strategically highlight how what you offer is both different and superior to other companies in your space.

Tie functionality to benefit to sell your brand.

Directly trashing your competition with a long, complicated list of everything you offer that they don’t is going to turn potential customers off. Instead, provide easy to absorb examinations of how your products’ features translate into concrete benefits for anyone who buys from you. Back these up with customer testimonials and reviews.

Bring customers to your website with…

2. Dynamic Landing Pages

How customers find your site is equally as important as them finding it in the first place.

You already know who your customers are and where they exist online. Your landing pages need to reflect this origin. Each link you share should lead to a landing page personalized to the interests and needs of the specific persona you target in that space.

If a potential customer clicks one of your links and doesn’t immediately find what they want, guess what they’re going to do?

Reduce your bounce rate and demonstrate your commitment to your customers at the same time with personalized landing pages. Dynamic landing pages can be set to display a wide variety of different information based on how each visitor gets there.

Set landing pages to change by keyword searched, too.

You don’t always have to build content from scratch to cater to different market segments. Making a few small tweaks to the targeted content you already have is easy and far more likely to pay off than presenting everyone with the same message. Also, if you want to increase lead generation, it’s important to tailor calls-to-action by persona.

When are your offers being made?

There are several time-related factors to keep in mind, if you want your content to resonate more deeply with your potential customers:

• Are your social media posts timed by channel to reach your target audience?
• Have you set up automatic emails that trigger when a purchase is made or by length of time since then?
• Do you collect personal information about your customers, like birthdays or work anniversaries, which also trigger emails?
• Is your systems designed to leverage Christmas or another holiday when your sales tend to spike?
• Do your products have a long history or have any of them changed significantly over time in ways you can highlight in your content?
• Can you create or participate in events that would allow you to highlight your company and products?

You need to offer…

3. Personalized Website Design

Reduce the likelihood your customers will abandon shopping carts.

Your website design and layout can be more instrumental in keeping customers glued to your website than you think. This is especially true when websites are designed with customer preferences in mind. You should offer a persona-centric website experience to make customers feel comfortable and fulfill their expectations.

Personalization of your homepage will increase online sales.

It’s important that you craft your website’s design with your buyer personas in mind. The more your website gives customers what they expect to experience, the more time they will spend there. As a prospect spends more time on your site, the chances of you making a sale increase dramatically.

Your website needs to be packed with…

4. Personalized Product Descriptions

Descriptions are the virtual equivalent of a sales pitch.

Product descriptions answer customer questions and arm them with the information to make informed purchase decisions. With the help of your buyer personas, you can tailor product descriptions to your customer.

Under-promise and over-deliver.

Many sites miss from the beginning by writing specifications instead of true descriptions. Specifications do not communicate experience, because they focus on what a product is, not how it will solve their customers’ problems.

Customize descriptions by including only what customers care about.

Just because you think something is important, doesn’t necessarily mean your customers will, too. Help customers by replacing bland repetitive language with specific helpful information. Also, make suggestions that make sense with what they want to buy.

Less is more.

This is especially true for those well-versed in scanning pages. You can attach more detailed descriptions to address further concerns. Also, use easy-to-understand grammar and vocabulary.

Revisit your content regularly.

It’s going to take Google about 35 weeks to rank your pages. Once you’ve identified content that’s off or stale, update it as quickly as you can. Remember, just because that blog post of yours popped when you wrote it, doesn’t mean it’s going to forever, so update anything that looks dated.

Your descriptions need to feature…

5. Rich Product Images

Ecommerce’s one drawback is its lack of immediacy.

Your customers are not going to be able to pick up and hold the products you’re offering, so your pictures have to do the work. All product details must be clear, so the same hand-held feeling comes through.

Include high resolution pictures taken from all angles.

This will help clear up any misgivings customers have about buying from you. Make sure you have a relevant picture for every product variant, and that you show the product being used and in tandem with associated products.

Here, it’s better to provide more than not enough.

People often abandon purchases because they can’t reconcile product images against descriptions. They need to see highly detailed images, so they don’t feel the need to examine the item in person. Including a variety of close-up images of your products will dispel customer doubts.

Pay close attention to…

6. Customer Ratings and Reviews

Publish all the reviews you receive, whether positive or negative.

When you get negative ones, reply courteously and strive to bridge the service gap. Often times, if you turn bad reviews around, you can turn customers into brand advocates.

Negative reviews are golden opportunities to turn a prospect around.

Have a personalized system for handling complaints and negative reviews. Address each one in a personal manner to show prospects you hear them. Do this even if you don’t immediately have a solution for them.

You can also find out about potential customer questions on Q&A sites.

Use sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers to identify the questions your potential customers have before they even find your website. Make sure that if you use these sites for marketing purposes, you state your intentions clearly and at the beginning of your post.

Nothing erases brand authenticity faster than deception.

These websites are yet another way to find out about and stay ahead of changes in trends. The Internet isn’t doing anything if it’s not changing all the time. Research is the only way keep up.

Monitor social media to demonstrate customer satisfaction.

You could either manually publish positive customer comments and tweets or set up a stream to bring them in as you “like” them. Use these to add that additional pop to your landing pages, as well.

Don’t forget to…

7. Tailor Content by Specific Channel

The average Facebook user is 40 and a half years old. (source)

But is that the same for Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn? Definitely not. Each channel you sell on is already attracting a certain type of visitor, so you can only disregard those differences to your detriment. New channels are coming up and older channels are going out of style, so make sure to figure out a way to stay on top of those changes.

The average age of customers buying on Amazon is 37.

It’s not an overstatement to say you’re unlikely to enjoy the benefits of personalization unless it’s applied across all digital channels your customers interact with. Documents, text, images, manuals and other business tools inform your customers about products and services. All these must include tailored content.

Finally…

Bring It All Together

Nobody’s going to read your content if it’s not informative.

According to McKinsey and Company, the 3 Cs of customer satisfaction are consistency, consistency, and consistency. In practice, the easiest way to say this is that you have to make promises you can keep and then keep them. (source)

Customer experience is as much a promise as high product quality, good prices, and fast delivery.

Personalized content is your path to improve overall customer experience and overcome the constant stream of new competitors. This, of course, relates positively to sales, because personalized content warrants continuous consumption, keeping customers coming back to your site.

Now that you know why product content needs to be tailored to boost sales, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.

‘Content is king’ is the popular axiom in the ecommerce marketing space. There are many reasons why this assertion is true. For starters, a company’s content regarding the goods or services it offers is often the difference between selling and not. Your company’s product content forms a direct link with generating and attracting traffic to an ecommerce website. Analysts believe product content has a great influence on consumer buying decisions, behind pricing and product delivery times. You need to set up a system for grading content quality and effectiveness to turn lookers into buyers.

Product content bears its potency from strong descriptions of product information. Visitors to your ecommerce website are not only busy, they also have an avalanche of options. In effect, the content for your products and services must be concise, understandable and straight-to-the-point. Therefore, common sense points to the need to have useful product descriptions that meet the mark. These tips can serve as rules of thumb to follow for grading content and writing potent product descriptions:

1. Have a good idea about your target audience.

The first step to creating a great product description centers on identifying and marking your target audience or market. Knowing your market will help you ascertain the most compelling features of your product. These will attract and keep the attention and loyalty of your audience. At the heart of producing an in-depth product description is assessing the personae of the buyer. A buyer persona comprises the natural characteristics of potential and existing clients. As you construct your product description pages, the following questions should shine a light the buyers you seek:

• How did this potential or existing client reach your product page? What are his or her interests, hobbies, likes, put-offs among others? What aspects of your ecommerce store would attract this buyer and why? How do you think this person would describe the product to another individual? What features or benefits would interest this person the most?

Keeping these questions in mind enables you to create tailored content that turn visitors into customers.

2. Zoom in on the benefits of the product for the client

Don’t necessarily bombard your audience with descriptions of features and benefits right from the outset. Rather, after an adequate introduction, it’s standard practice to lay out a structured description of your products’ benefits. You may want to showcase benefits as much as possible. But another rule of thumb is to show the buyer how using your product or service will benefit them.

Remember that a product feature is an accurate description of one product feature. This description should provide technical information. On the other hand, a product benefit tells the customer how the product can improve their life.

Start writing product descriptions by outlining the product’s features and benefits. Think about how your product or service enhances the pleasure or assuages pain points for your customers.

3. Don’t cut corners – tell a compelling story

While at face value this tip seems to stand at odds with the preceding one, it reinforces the underlying principle. At its most basic, a strong product description should contain relevant details and possess the power to convince. It should pack an emotional punch. Beyond your choice of words and page set-up, closing the deal means appealing to your customers’ emotions.

Telling a product story connects with potential and existing buyers on an emotional plane, rather than a transactional level. Make your story link with the buyer’s experiences by shining a light on questions they ask. Who invented the product or service? Where did the creators draw inspiration from? What challenges were encountered in bringing the product to reality?

Outlining this scenario vividly shows the product to the buyer beyond what just talking about features and other specifications can do. Rest assured, if the buyer thinks the product meets their needs, you’ll get the sale.

4. Mind your language

Your medium of communication matters if you want to make consistent online sales. Your product description should have the tone and feel of having a conversation with a close friend or family member. Remember that in this circumstance, you are not reading from a prepared script; instead, your tone is natural as you give the benefits of the product or service in a natural manner.

Often, this friendly talk abhors empty adjectives or sweeping claims; rather you will dwell on giving a helpful description that focuses on the benefits of the product.

5. Go for words that precipitate action

You must understand that certain words and phrases have the inherent capacity to elicit an emotional response in people. Studies show once individuals connect with your products emotionally, chances are higher they will buy. These words, sometimes known as Power words, make your descriptions of product attributes jump off the page. They enter the minds and hearts of your target audience. Some of these words include the following:

Great, amazing, beautiful, blissful, magical, mind-blowing, wonderful, and wondrous

These power descriptions tell your customers your products are genuine. They also convey the idea that they are getting the premium value for their money.

6. Make your product description easy to understand

In this millennium, time is of the essence, and as people continue to live life on the trot, you can only afford to have a product description that is easy to scan and concise. A study reveals that due to increasing shortened attention spans, individuals will often read only 16 percent of the content of the average product page.

So it’s best to capture all the essentials of your product description pages in that readable bracket to stand any chance of connecting with your client and making a sale.

7. Search engines are your friends

To further boost your sales, you must get a hang of using search engine optimization (SEO) to give mileage and visibility to your products. The bottom line is that SEO is an effective means of attracting new clients to your page, which is the very first step in convincing an individual to buy your products.

SEO revolves around the use of keywords, especially the kind of words that search engines like Google index as a response to inquiries from online visitors and customers.

8. A good image drives sales

A great addition to accentuates great product description writing is a rich image. Why you ask? Recent studies reveal over 63% of customers consider digital assets, such as photos, accompanying a product as the primary purchase influencer.

More often than not, vivid photos will show the customer all or most of the key features about your product. They will also appeal to the mind’s eye of the client, allowing them to imagine having this product as a part of daily life.

The above tips are part of the arsenal you need grading content to boost your online sales.

Grading Content

At its core, grading content looks at the means and processes you can take in ensuring that your marketing content passes necessary assessment tests on both qualitative, and to a lesser degree, quantitative levels.

Grading, in a sense, equates to evaluation, and as a business owner, you would need to shine the light on what works continually or not, concerning product sales. Questions that readily come to mind for online businesses should include the following. “Is this ad, blog post, or social post good enough to share?” “Will this marketing strategy or channel increase my revenue base?”

Grading content often comprises taking steps and implementing measures, based on observable market trends and expectations. The ultimate aim is finding the right mix for product content and marketing strategy that leads to sales and repeated transactions.

The following ways are good points for grading content to drive sales:

Place a Premium on Value

Your product content can only go so far in boosting your financial bottom line when customers feel and believe that your product description will do all that it says it will do and so much more.

The latter “so much more” can mean a number of things. To some, the value might be a comic rendition on using the product, a free sample of designer perfume, or a helpful tip on purchasing a home. The bottom line borders on the customer leaving your ecommerce platform satisfied with the thought that they received some added takeaway from the transaction.

In another sense, the value derived from your product content should comprise any material any unique, original, or exclusive content or information that your target audience cannot get anywhere else. So a good strategy is sitting back and taking an overview of your business, to determine ways by which your product can satisfy your customers on many fronts.

Go For the Right Context

Have you noticed that there are periods you experience super bumper sales, while at other times, transactions seem to trickle in a dime a dozen? Well, it could be that you have not given much thought to the issue of context in your product content marketing efforts. No two customers are ever the same, and each comes to the marketplace for different reasons.

Some instances will suffice at this point. For some people, ad campaigns are more meaningful when there are no distractions like an exciting book, hence they are better able to pay more attention. In another scenario, using a comedian to play up the efficacy of a diet plan, may shore up purchase numbers, even as your customers enjoy the laughter.

These scenarios collapse into a term known as Context marketing. In a nutshell, content marketing involves timing your product content communication. You want it to reach your target audience when it’s most necessary. In other words, your product content provides the appropriate content to the right audience at the most appropriate moment. Context marketing also weighs heavily on the specific traits and personality of your target customer.

So successfully grading content should lay sufficient emphasis on providing the appropriate, time-based context.

Meeting Expectations is Key

Your product content should set realistic goals, so that the customer can look forward to achieving their objectives of using the product or service. Your product features should do what they say they will – and on a consistent basis. You must understand that customers have numerous choices for their online shopping needs. It’s essential to deliver a customer experience that meets expectations, and pushes customers to shop with you – and it all starts with your product content.

Embrace Originality

Again, this tip wants you to focus on the areas that your product content can open new doors and give new experiences to your existing and potential clients. Originality can hover anywhere from creating a new type of product or service, churning out a creative design for something that already exists, or presenting a unique mix of two everyday things or ideas or concepts.

If a product offers something new and off-the-chart, customers will often engage in word of mouth advertising to achieve two things: tell of their pleasant experience using the product and make actionable recommendations to other individuals to try out your product.

Raise the Standards for Quality

In the immediate analysis, product content quality involves factors such as eliminating typographical errors and ensuring images are vivid and purposeful. Other considerations will look at the ease with which your business pages load and present information when queried.

If your medium of communication is full of errors and your site is slow, customers may think your products will perform just as badly.

Therefore, you should note that consistent, compelling, engaging and qualitative content increases brand loyalty, minimizes shopping cart abandonment and reduces the number of complaints and returns. Ultimately, a product is deemed just as good as the information given alongside it.

Find a Balance on Length

At every point in your advertising campaign, you will have to decide how long or short your engagement with your client will be. Especially in this age of Google crawlers and SEO. And in most cases, the wants, temperament of the customer should determine how long or how brief your post should be. If your audience wants to learn a 3-second trick to folding shirts faster, then your educative material should not put them through a 45-minute video tutorial. If people need just some contact information to help make a decision, they should reach their goal in one or two clicks on your web pages.

One effective means of assessing how long your product content should be is looking at the demographics of your existing and potential client bases. Are your customers always on the move, viewing pages and placing orders with their mobile phones? If that is the situation, you should obtain additional metadata such as the times spent on each page and information searched for. The knowledge gleaned from these sources should help you craft the most appropriate product content strategy regarding the length of your posts.

Clarity is King

From the outset, jumbled, disjointed product content increases the chances your customers will leave your site. At the very minimum- for the sake of clarity, visuals should complement – and not compete with text; ideas should have the property of easy identification, and design should embrace intuitiveness.

You can avoid enemies of clarity and precision such as using illogical and incomplete arguments, industry jargon, metaphors as well as business buzzwords.

The simple premise for achieving clarity is keeping your message straight-to-the-point and straightforward, so your customers see only the most relevant material on your product pages.

Temper your Content with Credibility

Your content must have the essential trait of being believable; otherwise, you may find that your customers may leave your pages altogether. For instance, promising users will shed 30 pounds in days taking a weight loss pill is lying. However, providing referrals from trustworthy sources and using original, unedited images isn’t. Alluding to the possible is the right place to start in building credible content.

Be Guided by a Rubric

To derive the most from your product content regarding boosted sales, you would need to create a framework to oversee your posts. According to workable global standards, specific content and the form of the rubric depend on associated factors. Your target audience and client base, including consumer search preferences and behavior, all matter. You also need to keep your content marketing strategy in mind.

Reviewers can help provide a third eye, providing objective analysis for increased efficiencies and performance. These reviewers will grade your product content against the following inquiries:

1. Is there an appropriate product description on the page?
2. Have you determined the product description free of factual mistakes?
3. Is the product description free of filler and marketing copy, otherwise referred to as business jargon?
4. Is the product description devoid of spelling, punctuation and capitalization errors?
5. Is the product description of sufficient length, clear and concise?

An essential part of your rubric will center on making provisions for reviewers to leave feedback and suggestions for improving your product content pages, to help bolster sales.

Grading Content to Drive Sales Success

A lot can come from grading content, and for every ecommerce business, sales is one thing that crowns the efforts. Content really is king, and if you have read through this article, you should understand how true this is.

Always remember the number of customers you attract is as high quality as the effort you put into your product content. Grading your content will go a long way toward showing customers you care by giving them content that matters to them.

Always look for areas to improve your product content and sales can only climb. Grading content tells you what content to toss, what to keep, what to fix, and what to build from.

Now that you know why grading content is key to growing ecommerce sales, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.