Why Mobile Payments Are Killing the Checkout Form

A colleague recently told me over lunch how much he loves pizza apps. “They’re just so easy.” When I asked him what was so easy, he said that while picking from the menu is part of the ease, the bigger part has to do with paying. It’s one touch.

Now, before you run out and hire a team to create an app for your brand, let’s think about how to make paying easier – whether someone visits your website from a desktop or wants to take advantage of email offers directly from their mobile device.

We talk a lot about omnichannel and the customer experience – making sure the cart is available, regardless of device, and providing a seamless shopping experience. But simply making shopping easy is just step one. Making it easier to pay is the key to conversion.

Mobile Shopping Is Here to Stay

According to eMarketer, 58% of mobile sales came from smartphones in 2016, and that number is expected to grow. Overall, mobile made up 29% of all ecommerce sales. But by 2021, it’s predicted that mobile will make up more than half of all ecommerce sales.

Retailers need to consider what this means for their sales. When consumers are looking to purchase on their devices, they expect a frictionless experience. And what provides more friction than being asked to enter an endless stream of billing and shipping details, often moving manually from box to box, all while on a small mobile screen?

Another colleague tells me she frequently abandons items at checkout when trying to buy on her mobile device. “Those forms are better than a strict budget for keeping my spending in check.’’ She recently recounted how she suffered through one form on a national retailer’s site solely because her too-busy-to-shop teenage daughter actually liked one of the dresses she had selected, and she couldn’t bear to abandon the shopping trip after thumbing through 120 sleeveless mini-dresses. She completed her purchase out of necessity, not convenience. If she could have found that baby blue skater dress on Amazon, she might have been tempted to bail altogether.

If your competitor offers a frictionless purchase experience and you do not, you may not only lose a sale now, but customers may remember this and bypass you altogether the next time they shop.

Security Plays a Key Role In Mobile Payment Behavior

The counter-argument is that most retailers allow users to save their credit card information on their site to make future checkouts easier. However, online security issues have minimized the usage of this tool. In fact, due to hacking concerns, 33% of consumers never save their credit card information, and 30% only use trusted payment methods, such as PayPal.

The result? More and more consumers are storing their payment information in their phones. There are one million Apple Pay accounts being activated weekly worldwide. As consumers continue to adopt mobile payments on their primary connected device, creating an easy way to allow consumers to check out will be an essential requirement in the very near future.

An intriguing facet to mobile payments is that Amazon’s U.S. patent for one-click payment technology expires this year, leaving the door open for other retailers to implement their own one-click solutions without licensing the technology from Amazon. Google is reportedly working on a one-click payment system that integrates with the Chrome browser.

This integration with Chrome goes beyond just mobile, and that itself is telling of the power that mobile payment options hold. The purchase process between an app, a laptop, and a mobile version of a site is almost always different from one another, but the goal is symmetry. As mobile purchasing becomes the standard, non-mobile devices will be forced to match that experience. Storing payment info in Chrome will allow users to easily check out regardless of the device they are on. Creating a symmetrical experience not only allows for a quicker checkout (which should decrease abandonment), but also improves the customer’s overall experience with your brand.

The time is right for retailers to provide a more simplified, convenient checkout experience. Don’t think of it as simply a way to optimize for mobile. It’s not. Mobile is the norm. Think of it in terms of giving your customers what they want. Long checkout forms on mobile devices are a thing of the past. Don’t believe it? Ask 100 people if they’d rather fill out a long form on their phone or make their next mobile purchase with the simple touch of a thumb.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

Stop Slashing Prices, Start Connecting With Your Customers

The retail sector is going through drastic changes. Established names like The Limited are closing or filing for bankruptcy. Amazon and Walmart squeeze everyone’s margins. Special discount shopping days like Black Friday have morphed into Gray November, a month-long deep discounting period. As brands fight to keep up with competitor discounts, profits and customer loyalty are harder to earn.

It is unrealistic for retailers to continue to increasingly discount and remain viable. After all, if a retailer offers 50% off, they’ll need double the sales to reach the same margins. And, oftentimes, the unit sales immediately after the promotion ends suffer as a result. But with global competition increasing, what are retailers to do? Keep up with the Joneses and hope to remain viable, or take a risk and go against the grain to try to increase profits? While some retailers need to rely on discounting, I’d argue that most don’t.

I recently spoke with a fashion retailer who recognized the endless discount cycle dilemma. They had been stuck in this discounting rut, but did not want to be known as a discount brand. They prided themselves on making quality products at a reasonable price, and this constant discounting was bad for their brand and devalued their product. This past holiday season, they made a straightforward business decision: No guts, no glory. At their busiest time of the year, they chose not to discount.

Hello Guts, Meet Glory

While their competitors were running 30%, 40% and even 50% off specials during the busiest shopping period of the year, this retailer resisted the urge. As the season played out, they saw a 10% growth in total revenue until the last week of December (more on that below). On top of the 10% growth, their margins were protected. They generated 30% to 40% greater profits for those units sold.

This retailer also runs an annual day-after-Christmas and clearance sale. This year was no exception. But how would the previous non-discounting impact this sale? As it turns out, one side effect of the non-discounting strategy was that it created and satisfied the demand for a discount. This year’s clearance sale set records in volume of units sold, selling 10 times more year over year. It satisfied the demand of those looking for a deal while not taking away from their traditional after-Christmas strategy.

Having this conversation can be scary. Before you pull the ditch-the-discounts ripcord, first look at ways to strengthen your current brand positioning.

Focus on Your Brand

What does the brand stand for? How consumers perceive your brand can ultimately determine whether they will purchase from you without a discount, much less become a loyal customer. Consider brands that have a cause, like TOMS Shoes. Consumers connect with their cause and, because of that, they are generally willing to spend more on a product.

Does your brand focus on quality, value, customer service, personalized services, etc.? Do you have social causes? Do you convey this within your messaging on your website, email, and social profiles? If you remove or lessen discounts, consider whether you offer customers enough value-adds to purchase from you and not a competitor.

Planning for The Long Haul

Since you will no longer be relying on sending a generic 30% off promotion to drive sales, your general batch and blast email strategy will likely need to become a little more refined. You’ll need to maintain a more relevant customer experience. Focus on segmenting where you can. Include intuitive product recommendations inside your emails and on your website. Analyze your lifecycle messaging and determine how you can redesign them to provide the most value to the end user. Engage, I mean really engage, with your audience on social media. Ask questions, proactively comment, and deploy user-generated content to make the site and email experience better.

Evaluate Your Automated Marketing Strategy

When making the decision to pull back on promotions, the next step is to evaluate this strategy with your automated messages. If you have discounts in your welcome, post-purchase, shopping cart, or other automated message series, determine whether you want to maintain this strategy. In some cases, you may, as these messages are triggered from user actions. Since these messages are sent to single contacts, you may decide it is worth “rewarding” subscribers for engaging.

The Aftermath

Just because you no longer set the expectations of continuous discounting doesn’t mean you have to end discounting altogether. Occasional sales may ultimately carry more weight with consumers as they know deals are few and far between with your brand. This will also appeal to those consumers who specifically look for deals.

By avoiding blanket price discounts, you can experiment in configuring promotions. Consider free or expedited shipping promotions, for instance. These carry weight with consumers while protecting margins. Retailers can run promotions on grouped items instead of single SKUs, therefore increasing average order value while still protecting margins.

There is no one strategy for fighting back against deep discounting. Retailers will need to determine how far they are willing to commit to the strategy, and to what extent their customers are willing to tolerate the pullback. While the retailer I mentioned earlier plans on enhancing their overall strategy by refining their segmentation and timing of messages, I did ask him if there was anything he would do over again based on his experience. His answer, “Not really.” That answer is quite telling. Whether the success of this strategy is sustainable, only time will tell. But right now, this retailer is enjoying the glory.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

Why an Email Unsubscribe Can Be a Good Thing

It’s a fact. Someone will unsubscribe every time you send a batch promotional email. And while we all hate to see our subscribers go, wouldn’t you be open to a higher unsubscribe rate if it meant increasing your revenue? How you view your unsubscribes not only affects your email strategy and its revenue potential but also influences improvements you should make to your automated messages and your yearly list growth goals. Let’s discuss.

People unsubscribe for a variety of reasons. The most common include receiving too many emails and irrelevant content. Often, the “too many” threshold is actually determined by the proportion of irrelevant content, such as those situations when the content is meaningless to the reader or fails to change from one message to the next. I know of retailers who send every day, or even multiple times daily, whose unsubscribe rate is no different than the retailer sending only a few times each week. While there may be an opportunity to drive additional revenue by increasing sends, we need to recognize the full impact of those sends on a subscriber database.

At what point do the inevitable unsubscribes begin to hurt your bottom line? Determining the cost of the unsubscribe is an important step to answering that question. Knowing the cost can help you optimize your sending strategy throughout the year, particularly when planning for periods of increased sending, such as the holiday season.

What Do Unsubscribes Cost?

First, look at your weekly and monthly unsubscribes and their order history. How many unsubscribes were non-buyers, one-time buyers, or frequent buyers? How much revenue did they account for? This is your potential lost revenue on a per email basis. Now that you have this number, determine how much revenue an average email generates. These totals will give you some basic data to figure out how much unsubscribes are really worth.

In the example below, the number of unsubscribes over a one-week period (assuming four sends) was 300, and they accounted for $10,400 in past revenue.

How to calculate the cost of an email marketing unsubscribe

However, we know only 100 of the 300 contacts accounted for that revenue. Using these figures, on a per-send basis, we can assume a loss of $2,600 in past revenue from unsubscribes. However, if each email sent generates an average of $15,000 in revenue, we are left with an overall net gain of $12,400 per email. So, increasing sends from four to five days per week should net roughly an extra $645,000 in yearly email revenue while resulting in an increased loss of 3,900 contacts (75 per week for 52 weeks) in unsubscribes.

In this scenario, the extra revenue driven for every unsubscribed contact was $165. That’s a nice figure, especially considering 2,600 of the 3,900 unsubscribes come from non-buyers.

Are Your Non-Buyer Opt-Outs Worth It?

You can take this one step further and analyze the length of subscription among your non-buyer unsubscribes. How many have been a part of your email program for less than 30 days, between 1-3 months, and so on? Are the non-buyer unsubscribes recently acquired prospects you have lost, or have they simply been dead weight on your email list all along? Now, look at your purchasers. How long has it been since their last purchase?

How Do Email Unsubscribes Affect List Growth?

If we know 300 contacts per week are unsubscribing (4 emails at 75 unsubscribes each), and we add one extra email each week, we assume we will lose 375 per week. Over one year, we will expect to lose 19,500 contacts due to unsubscribing. In order to maintain a positive subscriber churn, this should be the minimum goal for yearly subscriber acquisition. I say minimum because you will naturally see members of your list unsubscribe from other emails you send, such as automated messages.

Having a concrete acquisition goal is imperative for maintaining the health of your email program. If you’re not focused on the acquisition, you should be. Explore all areas for potential sign-ups, especially in the wake of Google’s recent pop-up changes.

What Can Opt-Outs and Converters Tell You About Automated Messaging?

Looking at the order history of your unsubscribes may also indicate engagement opportunities to address. For example, if most unsubscribes are one-time purchasers, you may need to strengthen your post-purchase program for first-time buyers or do a better job meeting overall customer expectations with orders. If the opt-outs are from recently acquired non-buyers, it may be a sign you need to strengthen your onboarding process to help drive conversions or more closely analyze your acquisition method.

Do the same with converters. Look at the makeup of purchasers on a per email basis. Did the conversions come from non-buyers making their first purchase, one-time buyers buying for a second time or three-plus repeat purchasers? Remember, each of your email converters should now funnel into a post-purchase campaign, which should either convert them once more or strengthen your brand loyalty prospects.

Gaining these insights will help you know when to strengthen areas of your post-purchase program specifically dedicated to first-time and returning buyers.

Final Considerations

Honestly, I never worried about unsubscribes. Frankly, if a contact opts out, they have made the decision to stop interacting with you via email well before pushing that button. If it wasn’t this email, it would have been the next one. Do your best to encourage subscribers to want to stay, but focus more on delivering quality to those who still open your messages. Here are some strategies and resources to guide you along this journey:

• Focus on lifecycle messaging. Build a customer-centric post-purchase program that reinforces brand value and helps create loyalty, and create a relevant onboarding welcome series for newly acquired contacts.

• Send relevant emails, especially to previous buyers. Segment where you can, and consider tactics like inserting product recommendations into your emails. Customized product recommendations can even make batch-and-blast messaging more relevant.

• Focus on subscriber acquisition. If you are not creating a positive churn in subscribers, you need to get serious about list growth.

• Consider offering pause or mute options to curb unsubscribes and give your contacts a temporary break from your emails.

• Don’t let the communication end. Optimize your opt-out confirmation page to include invitations to connect in other ways, such as social media.

Start worrying less about unsubscribes, and begin paying closer attention to what those unsubscribes can teach you about how to strengthen your email program and drive more revenue.

Crafting A More Robust Cart Recovery Strategy

Common industry statistics indicate that more than 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned. Yet retailers generally treat all shoppers who abandon carts the same, regardless of what items they were shopping for. While this one-size-fits-all approach may work for many, it doesn’t work for everyone. The reasons for abandoning a cart tend to vary based on cart total, and the needs of the shopper also tend to change as the cost increases. So, using a blanket approach for cart recovery emails is likely costing retailers valuable sales.

Here’s an example: I was recently in the market for a dishwasher and began by shopping online. I browsed via laptop and smartphone, read reviews, carted (and abandoned) products, and viewed products in stores. In the midst of my journey, I started receiving abandoned cart emails. What stood out to me is that they were not at all helpful. As close as I was to making a purchase, none of these messages helped convince me to do so. They failed.

Failure to Launch

These messages failed because they did not consider the buyer’s motivation and obstacles to conversion. Someone shopping for a $30 item likely has different needs and hesitations than someone considering a $700 item. Higher priced items typically generate more comparison shopping and a longer buying cycle, and they might need services attached to their purchase, such as delivery, installation and haul-away. For consumers that have filled a cart with items that equal a high-dollar figure, there often comes the natural hesitation of, “Do I really need all of this?”

Knowing Your Buyer

Consider these two cart recovery emails. They were sent from the same retailer, but the price points of the abandoned products are vastly different.

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The abandoned products should have determined not only the main messaging but also the recommendations inside the emails. The free shipping callout in the example with the $30 EarPods works well, as my cart total is less than the required threshold. However, the recommended products feature items that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. These recommendations simply don’t make sense.

In the dishwasher example, however, the prominently displayed free shipping callout is not appropriate for this message. And while the recommendations are more in line with what I am actually shopping for, they don’t help convert me on the dishwasher purchase.

And in both cases, the main messaging tells me they can help, but they fail to mention exactly how. What’s my next step?

This is just one retailer of many whose messaging strategy could use refining. Had any of these companies considered the product I was shopping for or my cart total, they may have directly addressed the obstacles that caused me to abandon my purchase in the first place. In the case of the Earpods, give me some logical product recommendations to bump me over the free shipping threshold. With the dishwasher, include information about how their staff could help me decide on the perfect model, or give me more information on their haul-away and installation services. Without meaningful supporting content, the brand turned these highly relevant messages into something that was mostly useless.

Optimizing Your Cart Recovery Strategy

Abandoned cart messaging should be used to remove conversion obstacles and encourage the customer to purchase. By factoring in details such as cart total, carted items, and their categories and/or the number of items in the cart, you can begin to customize messaging that better targets the individual shopper. Your messaging can reinforce appropriate value-adds, such as free shipping or links to resources, that can be used to determine how many messages should be sent, the timing of those message,s and if or when an incentive should be included.

Retailers today should be focused on providing the right kind of messaging based on the kinds of products left in the cart. For smaller items, the options are simpler – recommendations to help reach a free shipping threshold or maybe even a discount. For larger, non-impulse purchases, focus on information that encourages shoppers to choose your store over the competitors. By overcoming obstacles and encouraging purchases at this final stage of the online checkout process, you can take the most effective approach to recovering those abandoned carts and converting the shoppers behind them.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

Customers Are King: Are You Giving Them the Royal Treatment?

As memories of the holiday season fade, the focus has now shifted to improving sales in the year ahead. But as competition expands globally and consumer expectations become even more demanding, this can be a daunting task.

Today’s consumers expect more from retailers: relevance, ease of purchase, mobile-friendly engagement, convenient shipping and return policies, availability, engagement, and overall value, just to name a few. While this may seem overwhelming, it’s likely you already provide some of these features and services. Now take that next step and truly make 2017 the year of the consumer.

Audit Your Engagement Tactics

The first step in this plan is to analyze your marketing programs and find the gaps in your consumer touchpoints. Do you use social platforms, and if so, which ones? From an email perspective, how many messages do you send each week? Do you have lifecycle messaging, and if so, which messages are you sending? Which ones are missing? When was the last time you bought from your own brand? Go ahead and do it! Make a purchase and analyze every stage from the eye of the consumer, from transactional messages to packaging. Do you offer an experience that helps create loyalty? Identifying potential weak points in your customer journey can help you begin to fill your immediate needs.

Size Up Your Competition

Now that you have reviewed your own customer touchpoints, how do they compare to your competitors? What value do you provide that they don’t? How do your shipping and return policies differ, and are you communicating these differences to consumers? What marketing automation does your competition have in place? It’s easy to find out.

Sign up for their email programs, and wait for the messages to roll into your inbox. Take a look at their welcome series and their cart and browse recovery messaging. Reply to an email and ask a product-specific question to see what the response time is like.

How else do they communicate from a customer service perspective? Do they offer live chat, 24-7 phone support, or active social channels? Don’t forget to make a purchase and evaluate their customer experience. Do they have an automated post-purchase series? How does it compare to yours?

Adapt Your Lifecycle Messaging

Lifecycle messages are a great part of a customer-focused marketing plan, but as consumer behavior changes, your strategy behind those messages should shift accordingly. For example, does your welcome series speak to all newly acquired contacts with generic content or target them differently? Does your email content relate to what they were viewing when they signed up or what they clicked on in your welcome email?

If not, give such messages a try. Does your cart recovery strategy take into account the differences in your shoppers? For example, the abandoners carting $700 worth of products are much different than those abandoning $30 worth of products. Do you tailor your messages for each audience? Examine all of your automated messages to determine if your strategy needs to change at all.

Optimize Your Promotional Messaging

Now that you’ve identified your gaps and assessed your lifecycle messages, focus on improving your promotional emails. How can you make them more relevant, especially if you are sending batch-and-blast messaging? Including product recommendations, purchase data, or social media content can make these common messages more engaging for the subscriber and more effective for your brand.

Take Advantage of Social Media

Creating an online connection between brand and consumer has always been a challenge for retailers, but social media has significantly bridged that gap. What social platforms do you use? Are they the channels your customers use? Do you monitor your accounts and respond to inquiries? Do you proactively engage with users? Consumers are interacting with social platforms much more frequently than they do with your website and emails. Use them to your advantage and actively engage with your audience.

Implement a Browse Behavior Strategy

While I addressed automated email marketing, the process of capturing and using browse behavior is a strategy that deserves a little more focus. Much like cart recovery, these messages are naturally relevant to the recipient as they target subscribers with emails based on what they were browsing. But as they haven’t yet carted a specific product, you have more room to be creative with your messaging and cross-promote related items. After all, you know they are shopping, but you may not know for which specific product they are shopping for. If they are not yet part of your arsenal, you should strongly consider introducing them.

What’s It All For?

By offering an endless stream of discounts to attract customers, retailers have backed themselves into a corner. While this has implications all year round, this approach has dramatically reshaped the holiday shopping season by turning one-time stand-alone days, such as Black Friday, into a Gray November.

The offers never stop, and therefore, they no longer stand out. By taking the time to evaluate and optimize your strategy to focus on the customer, you’re giving them what they want, while attracting new customers and strengthening customer loyalty in the process. Having a dedicated focus on consumers allows you to test adjustments to your discounting strategy and attempt to retake your margins.

One retailer I recently spoke with took this approach and did not discount at all this past December. Not only did they see an increase in sales, they significantly increased profits. According to the retailer, it was a “gamble worth testing” that ultimately allowed them to take greater control of their own revenue destiny.

Consumers expect more. The ways they engage are evolving, and the competition is heating up. Being customer-centric is no longer a nice to have – it is essential. Dedicate time and effort to providing your customers with the best experience possible, and make 2017 the year of the consumer.

This article was originally published on www.bronto.com

How Retailers Are Redefining the Shopping Experience

I recently found myself popping in and out of stores in the SoHo section of New York City, and one thing stood out to me – the in-store experience left a lot to be desired. Too many times, I walked into a store only to be greeted with a very passive “Hello,” at which point the store associates turned back to whatever they were doing before. To maximize space, stocked items were often jammed together from floor to ceiling, making me feel like I was in some claustrophobic cave of color palettes. The experience wasn’t enjoyable; in fact, it felt more like an exercise in futility.

Years ago, shoppers might have expected a grumpy sales associate and a cluttered sales floor. But as ecommerce and technology have evolved, the consumer has come to expect convenience, both online and in-store. We are increasingly less tolerant of experiences like the one I had in SoHo.

Technology has changed the face of retail. It has affected how consumers shop and interact with brands. Yet, even though ecommerce is growing, a TimeTrade survey revealed that 85% of U.S. consumers say they still prefer to buy from physical stores even if the same products are available online.

In an age where retailers can easily compete with other brands from every corner of the world, customer experience is more important than ever. Technology helped create this expectation for convenience, but it has also provided a means to deliver it. And forward-thinking retailers are really using it to their advantage.

Brick-and-Mortar

According to BloomReach, 88% of shoppers will use a smartphone to assist them when they shop in a physical store. The first instinct for many retailers is to remove the technology for fear of losing sales to competitors. But smartphone-browsing shoppers will spend 20% more than those not browsing online, according to InMoment. So instead of fretting about what customers are doing on their smartphones, give them something positive to do that enhances the shopping experience.

For example, Rebecca Minkoff’s New York location has smart dressing rooms that allow shoppers to interact with a display screen. They can customize their experience by viewing other sizes or colors of available products, adjusting the lighting, requesting assistance, and even saving the session information to their personal profile, which they can conveniently store on their smartphone. In this example, the associate is not driving the interaction but rather ensuring the shopper’s requests are met.

Lowes Home Improvement launched the HaloRoom Experience in some of its US stores, where customers can use a mixed reality environment to plan their kitchen remodel, select cabinetry, hardware, countertops, and appliances, and view what it will all look like in the end. This technology can eliminate some of the uncertainty many shoppers face when planning their new dream kitchen and help overcome obstacles to purchasing such a high-ticket project.

These are only two examples of how retailers are redefining the shopping experience. Retailers such as Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s, Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade and Topshop are also offering, or at least testing, in-store technology.

But we’ve only scratched the surface of how in-store technology will revolutionize the in-store experience. As this technology develops and becomes easier to implement and maintain, it will become more commonplace, and retailers who hold back now will be playing catch-up for a long time to come.

Online Shopping Experience

Enhancing the in-person experience is one thing. Enhancing the online experience is another, especially given that users are ultimately in control and can leave or get distracted at a moment’s notice. While online shopping is as convenient for consumers as a few clicks on a smartphone, it has caused headaches for retailers, from increased global competition to processing returns. According to Shotfarm, 42% of customers returned something they bought online. These returns are costing retailers millions each year and can present logistical inventory and accounting nightmares.

But online shopping lends itself to uncertainty in knowing if an article of clothing will fit just right, or a piece of furniture will look good in the living room, which is precisely why consumers expect hassle-free returns. Retailers must look for ways to redefine the online shopping experience to reduce return costs and also provide customers with an experience that encourages customer loyalty.

Some retailers have begun experimenting with a variety of technologies to provide an easier and more reliable online shopping experience.

FitAnalytics provides a size recommendation engine that uses only a few pieces of information to recommend the perfect size for clothing. It also lets shoppers know how many people eventually returned the product in that size due to improper fit. This reassurance, much like a collection of customer reviews, can help offset any hesitation the buyer may feel when deciding which size to order.

Fashion Metric also offers a virtual sizer, both online and in-store via an app. Online, it allows users to input a few basic measurements, such as waist size for men, and delivers custom suit sizing in just moments. This eliminates the need for tape measures or for customers to keep up with fairly uncommon measurements, like chest size. I own suits but haven’t the slightest idea of my chest size. The entire process took me less than one minute to complete. For a complete suit, that’s pretty remarkable.

Zugara offers a technology that allows a user to virtually try on clothes using their webcam. Customers can select a garment and resize, reposition or change the color of the item they’re “wearing,” giving them a much better idea of how it will look on them.

One complication with these technologies is the disparity of the experience across devices. The shopping experience on a desktop or laptop easily accommodates these webcam features, but those may not be accessible on a smartphone or tablet. While shopping on mobile, from browsing to checkout, has become relatively easy, improving the experience to allow for such technology seems a bit far off yet.

The Good News and The Bad News

At the end of the day, ease of use will be the critical factor in determining whether users will accept or reject shopping technology. If it is easy to use and provides real value to the customer, they will flock to it. If it’s cumbersome or doesn’t significantly improve the shopping experience, they will quickly move on.

The good and bad news is the same, and that is we have only just begun with this retail technology arms race. Personally, I look forward to one day walking into a store and having everything I know about shopping completely turned upside down.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

The Next Generation of Batch-and-Blast Email Marketing

Miami-dwelling Joe likes the colorful Bermuda shorts and green boat shoes he found on your website. But when he gets the email promotion featuring the black winter jacket? Not so much.

Today’s consumers expect relevant communication from retailers, and in this example, Joe’s expectations were not met. It’s also the kind of example that’s been used to knock batch-and-blast emails as an ineffective strategy. But what if you could still batch-and-blast – and personalize?

With segmentation tools, recommendation engines, and easy-to-use lifecycle messaging automation, you can actually make batch-and-blast emails relevant to the individual consumer. Let’s explore how you can use these tools to revive your batch-and-blast messaging.

Segmentation Tools

Tools for segmentation are now built into most marketing automation platforms and make audience segmentation easier than ever. They also put the data, such as web browsing, email, and purchase activity, along with information provided by the consumer, in the hands of the actual marketer, not the IT department. This immediate access to data can be used to seriously enhance the overall user experience in a variety of ways. For instance, location data can be used to insert local store information into emails or target customers in the area when a new store is opening.

Product Recommendations

Once you’ve gathered segmentation data, you can use it to determine which products to display to the individual user. Using product recommendations based on subscriber data as secondary content in batch-and-blast emails increases the relevance of your message, and it can all be done without developing multiple variations of the message. You can use them to recommend similar products, upsell products, suggest accessories, or increase average order value, among other things.

Lifecycle Messages

Lifecycle messaging automation is an extremely effective strategy for retailers and can be a great way to augment batch-and-blast messages. Lifecycle messages, such as a welcome series, post-purchase series, and shopping cart abandonment, are high-revenue drivers, and retailers now have the ability to automate these messages with ease. They’re already very relevant to your audience, but you can enhance the experience for your customers even further with meaningful product recommendations.

Since crafting unique versions of day-to-day emails is no longer required, consider spending that saved time on creating more specific messaging for these series based on other factors, such as the source of acquisition or the category of products purchased. For instance, a post-purchase series for my new television should be different than the one for my new headphones. Combining this unique messaging with recommendations can be a significant win-win.

Having these tools readily available gives you the ability to take a one-size-fits-all email message and make it increasingly relevant. Since that winter jacket email to Joe now also highlights the latest tropical warm-weather items he’s sure to love, he doesn’t have to worry about being left out in the cold by an irrelevant email.

Batch and blast isn’t dead. It’s just growing up.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.