Are you really being Personal!!! [Mobi-Commerce]
Modern Retailers are discovering the value of letting customers create their own unique products and thus understanding the potential value of User Generated Content. The use of Big Data to present a personalized set of products to their customers has actually been a driving force behind Brand success. Now, brands are taking personalization to a big step forward into mass customization by discovering that they can elevate customer loyalty and engagement and smart use their customer base as an engine customer acquisition.
Customization also helps companies reach specific consumers—such as the unpredictable Gen-Y shoppers, a group known for their fast- paced preferences. Young shoppers demand more individualized products than their older counterparts. Certainly they are not a “one-size-fits-all” generation. With the booming marketing via social media and online publishing, styles and trends change more rapidly than ever before, forcing sellers to keep up with shifting preferences. Companies that offer customization are able to use consumers as merchants, thus continuously gaining insights from customized designs and fine tuning their products in a feedback loop that helps companies stay one step ahead of the competition. With each new choice, that customers share real-time shopper preferences, that go well beyond what they would say in a focus group.
For example, what Brooks Brothers learns from its customers in one season is systematically used to help it deliver the next season’s product line.
- But certainly there are key factors that a Retailer needs to emphasize on for reaching similar platform. Refining the user experience and delivering a seamless usability and experience with the retail websites [e-commerce] and mobile apps is a bigger challenge.
- Integration of digital channels is a major challenge among consumers. Final conversions often don’t happen on the same platform or even the device where the shopping process was initiated.
- Easy social [media] platform capability of their digital landscape is a must. Every Facebook Like adds value to a Brand today.
- All web information needs to be mobile optimized.
So how important it is to go mobile?
Well, in the past, consumers would spend hours going through the newspaper, cutting out coupons and organizing them by hand. Over the last couple of decades many retailers have provided plastic cards to consumers which give them access to deals and promotions.
But that was all before humanity decided that they will stay hungry and foolish, but be smart with phones.
By mid of 2013, 56% of mobile phones in the United States were smart-phones. To capitalize on this trend retailers have begun providing digital alternatives to physical loyalty cards and coupons by utilizing mobile wallet apps. Not all mobile wallet apps are created equal. Some simply store loyalty cards, some process payments and some include coupons and deals.
For example, Apple’s Passbook allows developers to create loyalty cards or tickets which users can store, but it will not process payments. On the other hand there are apps like ISIS, which not only stores cards but also processes payments. Despite the differences, one thing they all do is store digital versions of some real world object that contains a bar-code, whether that is a loyalty card or a coupon.
Then the obvious question is, why are retailers still so bad at Mobile?
Well, here are a few factors:
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- Though it’s a profit winning model, still it has yet to emerge because the industry is still in experimentation mode.
- Very few retailers have created apps on all platforms.
- Very poor use of rich media like 360 degree product view or even product zoom.
- Understanding the importance of Social and providing an easy integration for FB like.
- More emphasis on promotion than loyalty.
Its time to adapt the smart way quickly and seamlessly. More and more consumers in the US are predicted to get on the mobile payment wagon over the next five years, and analysts expect the amount to reach $90 billion by the end of 2017.The time consumers spend on retailer apps has increased by 525% from December 2011 to December 2012.
Engage better with The Customer who is Controlling Your Brand.
Research suggests that 70% of customers don’t come back, until and unless you bring them back. Alarmingly, only 15% customers believe it pays to be loyal to a brand.
Seasoned retailers understand that Loyalty program is not in its infancy. There is always a fixed number of time and dollar that your consumer will invest in. The Challenge is to make your customer invest that dollar in your brand.
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Between 2006 & 2012, the number of Loyalty members in US has gone up by 172%.
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The alarming figure is 1.161 B member in 2012 compared to 0.958 B in 2010.
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On the flip side 44% active members compared to 46% in 2010 and the percentage of active members are slipping every day.
Retailers are opting different methodologies to add sizzle to their loyalty programs retain customers by increasing benefits and opting to converse with their customers in multiple platforms.
The customer engagement model is majorly dependent on effective utilization of the 4 “I’s” i.e.
- Involvement
- Interaction
- Influence
- Intimacy
It is also equally important that this model is well planned, properly designed, well implemented and effectively managed, to meet the desired expectation. Here are a few key factors that that make this model more robust.
Ideal time for Engaging your customers:
The ideal time to engage with the customer is when they are present at the store – in fact research shows, the chances of in-store up-selling and cross-selling are up to 3 times higher – as opposed to at home or at work.
Start engaging with the customer while they are still in the store. Understanding customers’ purchase patterns and current basket data analysis to offer relevant and appealing choices.
Integrated storefront POS module capture store-level purchase information. Instantly integrate this information with existing CRM data to make the best offers
Empower store managers and cashiers to offer instant recommendations and issue the most relevant voucher/reward to customers within 3 seconds of billing.
Align your data:
Customer data is the richest resource for any Retail brand and every retailer is likely to have a substantial amount of customer data in their database. But with the size of data-sets growing every day, the process of Capture-Analyse-Action, is becoming more and complex. With the growing complexity, the platform to draw insights and derive returns is becoming more difficult for any structured marketing program.
Staying Nimble:
Knowing your Generation Y shoppers, between the ages of 18 and 35, is utmost important and they represents the future generation of shoppers.
Recent study explores the shopping preferences of Gen Y-ers and finds that this group associates shopping with socializing, places high value on living close to retail, and makes a majority of purchases in-store vs. online. Gen Y-ers use the Internet to research products, compare prices, envision how clothing or accessories might look on them, or respond to flash sales or coupon offers, as well as to purchase items; they are definitely multi-channel shoppers. These findings underscore the importance of multichannel communications for retailers. They need to evaluate and understand how the various channels interact and how the profile of their online Gen Y customer compares to the in-store shopper. A new approach for understanding this involves using retail analytics to understand the market and spatial relationships among today’s increasingly agile customer base.
Using data analytics and location intelligence technologies, retailers can get a better sense of what their brick and mortar Gen Y customer looks like as well as what their online customer looks like and determine if they are the same or if there are levels of intricacy that differentiates the two.
Please share your thoughts and ideas on effective engagement model.
Meet your Revenue Target: Calculate backwards
To start with, let’s say your revenue objective for the year is $10 million and that your average sales size is $25,000. Therefore, on average, you will need to close 400 deals during the year to achieve your revenue target.
You know that you will not close every single sales opportunity. However, you probably know your average closing ratio out of a given number of well-qualified leads, on average, how many does your sales team close.
Armed with your average closing ratio, you can calculate the number of well qualified leads you will need to close 400 deals.
This is also the focus of the next funnel, Sales Qualified Leads.
Let’s say that you can close one out of every four (1:4) well qualified leads.
Therefore, in order to close 400 deals you will need to meet your revenue objective of $10 million for the year, you will need 1,600 Sales Qualified leads (SQL).
The goal here is to pre-qualify a lead to determine that the prospect meets your minimum sales qualification criteria: prospect has a well defined pain that you can address; he/she has authority and budget to purchase your solution; he/she wants to address this pain within your minimum timeline requirement (e.g. next 3-6 months), and is willing to setup time to meet with you.
Of course, you will do further discovery during the scheduled sales call to make sure that this is a viable sales opportunity. But, you can see how such pre-qualification over the phone can significantly reduce the time you spend qualifying leads that may not be viable in the first place.
This SQL Funnel is the key to integrating Marketing and Sales. Without this, leads that are not well-qualified will be passed on to you and that will increase close cycles and reducing closing ratios–which in turn will result in missed revenues.
Now we have calculated that we will need 1,600 Sales Qualified Leads. So where will these SQL come from?
Let me tell you that this is where things break down. In most cases, marketing sends over the requested 1600 leads, and Sales rejects many of these as unqualified. These are called Marketing Qualified Leads.
MQL’s are prospects that have indicated interest in your company’s products or services by doing something such as downloading a white paper, attending a webinar or seminar, giving you their cards during a trade show, etc. In other words, they have shown some interest, but you don’t really know if they are qualified to purchase your products or services yet.
In other words, these are not yet ready to be passed on to Sales until they are better qualified.
If we assume that the ratio between MQL’s and SQL’s is 5:1 or out of five prospects that indicated interest, only one will be qualified enough to be passed on to Sales.
Therefore, your Marketing Organization will need to provide at least 8,000 such Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) so as to obtain at least 1,600 Sales Qualified Leads, which the Sales Organization then takes as its Sales Funnel to close the 400 deals it needs to generate the targeted $10 million for the year.
Funnel 4: Touched Unqualified Leads
However, how many of these you will be able to reach is a function of a number of factors, many of which are hard for you to determine without the use of fairly expensive tracking tools requiring some specialized knowledge.
What you know is that you need at least 8,000 of them to take some action that will indicate to you that they want to be contacted so you can better qualify them.
So, working the numbers backwards again, if you need to reach 8,000 and you assume maybe one of out of three (1:3) of those that you touched will actually act, then you will need to reach 24,000 of the 32,000 available. So, does that mean you need to create 24,000 marketing impressions? Not so fast.
There are studies that suggest that in this “overly-communicated” world, you will need to reach a prospect with at least 10-15 impressions before he or she will even notice you and act on your marketing message.
So the real number of impressions you need to create is more like 240,000 to 360,000 impressions through a variety of programs such as email campaigns or online marketing
Sure, you can cold call every one of those 32,000 contacts, but this is very time consuming, not to mention prohibitively expensive.
Now on, every time you hear this ” We don’t have marketing budget for this year”…..well, God bless them!!!
1 Second costs retailers $1.6 Billion annually
Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2013!!! Well for the retailers who underwent a “not so good holiday season” for 2012, I wish them Happiness and Prosperity for 2013, again.
Overall the conversion ratio for retailers globally and annually was towards the downside this season. Some experts even compared it as the second worst for over a decade, after the slowdown of 2008.
So during this holidays, time and inquisitiveness on my side, I tried digging a few key points as whats basically causing this havoc. The facts that I could uncover were fascinating but practical indeed.
Today’s buyers are more empowered with easily accessible information and thus demanding. In order to cater to smarter consumers, retailers need to perform smart. In short transform from being product to customer centric.
A few Key Points that I could gather are:
85% of shoppers expect a seamless experience across all retail channels.
13% of retailers are able to provide a “consolidated” shopping experience across channels.
Now lets look at the figures for this year:
So an overall increase of 15% for 2012. Well that’s been standard for the last few years. Its obviously is below expectation and alarming figure for few.
A significant amount of the purchase done for this season was done online and retailers paid a heavy price too for poor web performance.
Obviously, poor load time caused a greater deal of annoyance during the holiday season and apart from increasing bounce rates and turning off buyers on several brands, the monetary loss that followed triggers an alarm for many.
Lets put a few facts infornt of us and that will hike up the ratio of the loss by a few fold. May trigger a few damage control measures too.
1. In 2012, 167 Million users in US Shopped online. Well that’s 53% of total US population. By 2016, its expected to reach 200 Million.
2. 10% growth was found across all e-retail categories with focus on sports & fitness products, along with Watches & Jewelry. By 2016, about 9% of total retail sales will be online and the online spend will increase to 62%. So poor load times will be even costlier by 2016.
3. 1 in 10 e-com dollars were spent via m-com for 2012. Infact 9% of e-com transactions got done via tablets or mobile phones. 74% of surfers leave the website if the site takes more than 5 mins to load.
So a 1 second delay in load time is costing Amazon $1.6 billion (annually) in 2012. Whats the cost for 2016? Well, Lets watch…..
Customer Loyalty – Obey the King for YOUR success!!!
Time and again, we have all heard it numerous times, that – “Customer is the King!!!” This saying is also backed by comments like “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will”.
Well, both the statements are true for any organisation and any organisation who has been in the market long enough, have all experienced how fast customers change their preferences and taste. Keeping track of Customer behavior is the major challenge and today all big brands are focusing on this platform to keep the customer engagement high. Apparently to retain the Customers.
Why is it so important to listen to your customers? Think for a while how many customers do you have? Yes millions….And Each of them are different. Then does this exercise actually help? A recent study by an American Fast food company revealed that customers who are members of the loyalty program order from them about 33 percent more frequently than those who haven’t joined yet.
But why are the customers so distracted that all brands loose their customers the moment they go low on engagement. To answer that we should understand the complexities of today’s market. As a student of business management, my text books taught me that the cycle in which a customer align with a brand are as following:
Well, both the statements are true for any organisation and any organisation who has been in the market long enough, have all experienced how fast customers change their preferences and taste. Keeping track of Customer behavior is the major challenge and today all big brands are focusing on this platform to keep the customer engagement high. Apparently to retain the Customers.
Why is it so important to listen to your customers? Think for a while how many customers do you have? Yes millions….And Each of them are different. Then does this exercise actually help? A recent study by an American Fast food company revealed that customers who are members of the loyalty program order from them about 33 percent more frequently than those who haven’t joined yet.
But why are the customers so distracted that all brands loose their customers the moment they go low on engagement. To answer that we should understand the complexities of today’s market. As a student of business management, my text books taught me that the cycle in which a customer align with a brand are as following:
- Awareness or advertising
- Interest – created by the information shared
- Evaluation
- Commitment
- Loyalty
Today, this concept is buried in Jurassic park. Today The Customer looks like this:
Customers have access to Brands everywhere today, be it when they are relaxing at home or in the hurry while travelling. Internet and smart apps have bridged all geographies and access to the physical store doesn’t really matter today.
So how do one keep a customer brand loyal. Its very important to understand the customer’s buying behavior here and cater to them as required. About 40-60% of customers within the demographics of 16-26 years are spontaneous buyers where as the customers belonging to the age group of 30+ are research oriented buyers.
For both these customers active visibility at their preferred locations are extremely critical. In order to do that, one has to be extremely thorough with the source which basically helps the customer to make the buying decision. This actually follows this cycle and here is what you should understand:
For both these customers active visibility at their preferred locations are extremely critical. In order to do that, one has to be extremely thorough with the source which basically helps the customer to make the buying decision. This actually follows this cycle and here is what you should understand:
- Idea – Know what your customer thinks and understand that these are intrinsic triggers.
- Research – Have the right mix of information that your customers are looking for and at the right places
- Decision – This is extremely critical. This is where both worlds meet. One who has strongest of information and impulsive content, definitely wins.
- Transaction & Purchase – Give value for the price and even deliver it to The King’s Palace, but smoothly.
- Support and retain – Give value to your customer. Make him feel how important it is for you to have him as one.
You must have be familiar with “Money makes money”….well, a happy customer also creates many customers for you. So it again comes down the same challenge, how do you keep your customers loyal and engaged with the brand. Here are a few things that one can practice to achieve this:
- Create relevance – Know your process. Build a strong team of Customer analytic and Customer relations who inputs customer data into into system at regular intervals and keeps your relationship with your customer fresh and strong.
- Know your customer and know them the best [At least the best you can] – Periodically its important for every brand to derive intelligence from the focus group. Doing customer segmentation and periodic surveys and inputs from these groups can have strong inputs to shape your business intelligence. Today this should also be practiced through web analytics of different online properties that a brand holds.
- Share your customer stories – Like every event in life, every customer to a brand, leaves a mark for your business. It is important to share your customer experiences and integrate your promotional channels with them. With this you also need to track the conversations and create a connected brand experience.
Indeed in today’s marketing the shortest distance between two points is NOT straight line anymore….So, Good Luck!!!
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Inside Sales vs Front-line Sales: Whats your Success Strategy?
Often I hear people inferring making a strategic investment in your front-line sales managers always yield in higher productivity. Strange, I still find Companies cannibalizing each other’s Inside sales Reps with top-tier candidates. Undoubtedly, the Inside Sales market is still “On Fire”.
Then the obvious question is what triggered this change. Well, a lot of factors put together. This shift from field sales to inside sales – Even in sectors that have traditionally relied heavily or exclusively on direct or front-line sales teams – has accelerated in the last few years.
Unlike front-line sales, Inside sales is cheaper to execute. Although many companies have assumed that having field sales, leads to higher conversions. The fact that the face-time it allows in front of prospects, and based on their size or the complexity of their problems, drives greater success, differentiation and deal conversion. May be it WAS true but Jurassic .
As far as I can understand, there are a few basic but critical factors that are leading to the success of Inside Sales. I have tried to shortlist them in a few pointers, please add more if you can, may have missed out few. Here they go:
1. Changes in Buyer’s behavior : The preferences or Choices that a Buyer typically shows today are different from the Last decade. Today they are busier like never before. Thus having a Face-to-face meeting is not preferred. Indeed it calls for higher commitment. So having a quick call or a Video-Conference is more flexible, yet it gives the same result or outcome.
2. Not so Tiring: I have a colleague who points out his days when he started in sales. Yes, it used to be tiring field sales job. With no end to travel and far from families for days use to crush the Work-Life Balance. Inside sales in its toddler days was typically looked down as the breeding ground for the future sales reps [Field sales of course].
But today the concept has changed, today my same colleague sits in a comfortable air-con office, interacts with his prospects in the same manner [Thanks to improved internet and VOIP connections], reaches his sales targets and still takes home a handsome pay cheque. Oh yes, he is a part of Inside Sales too.
3. Improved Technology and lower cost to Action: Traditional phone carriers may still be pricey, but the cost of doing business all day via phone and Web (VOIP phones, Skype, WebEx and other Web-based means of prospecting and meeting) has decreased dramatically, which if nothing else has organizations re-evaluating their sales deployments. Again the accessibility to all these modern technology has also become much easier. These multimedia tools enables any sales team to do presentations and combine other sales factors to effectively engage a prospect during the sales pitch. Thats the power of “Going Live” or “Join The Meeting”.
I think I don’t have much to say beyond this about why Inside Sales is the Success Mantra for Sales Teams today. Its all a part of the same system of changing market trends [or should I say “Sales Trend”] and Excellent managers don’t fight the system, they make the system work – period.
Social Connect – Do it Right.
The trending factor in any organisations marketing program is social connect or social engagement. But organisations often fail to analyse the message it is trying to deliver. If your goal is to create a Winning Social Strategy, one should focus on tracking the growth and measure the success of the effort.
Correctly said that- In marketing, $50 is always a waste, but the BIG question is WHICH $50.
Every Marketing Channel has its own Pros & Cons. Infact there is limited resources where we only have so much time, money, or energy to invest into something at one time. So the basic question to ask before we venture into social is – whats right for the organisation.
Social experts narrow down the equation by saying if you’re primary goal is to increase sales, then you should obviously invest in marketing tactics that give you the best returns.
Correctly said that- In marketing, $50 is always a waste, but the BIG question is WHICH $50.
Every Marketing Channel has its own Pros & Cons. Infact there is limited resources where we only have so much time, money, or energy to invest into something at one time. So the basic question to ask before we venture into social is – whats right for the organisation.
Social experts narrow down the equation by saying if you’re primary goal is to increase sales, then you should obviously invest in marketing tactics that give you the best returns.
- Paid search for new visitors
- Email marketing for repeat visitors.
But even there we have tremendous under-utilization of resources. An important marketing tool is undoubtedly the most under-utilized factor with marketers. I fail to understand why. May be its not trendy as the social media but it’s still way more efficient because you can automate almost everything.
Most companies spend their social media budget without a targeted goal. Do we expect Fans, Followers, Likes and Pins to fall from the sky?
Driving a consistent social campaign, matching medium with the message and integrating your social platform with other channels should be the key focus to drive the challenge. Do a reality check and before venturing into social, ask: When? How? and most importantly Why?
In Dec 2009, Dell made headlines with $6.5 million in Sales riding on Twitter. Reality check: Dell recorded $61 billion in revenue the same year. So we are actually talking 0.01% of actual revenue here.
So it is important to understand the medium which will empower you to deliver your message in an interactive manner and develop the audience or prospects for you. This can also be done by funneling people from your existing resources like existing website traffic or email database or it could simply mean your foot-traffic and other offline sources.
Recently in an interview speaking about the trend in Digital marketing, Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe, said:
” Globally, digital is about 20% of overall marketing spends. TV still dominates. But digital provides the opportunity to get far more measurement in terms of return on investment. Which is why search spend, social spend is increasing dramatically.
But getting people to look at ads on mobile devices, especially on social media sites on smartphones, is still a challenge.
I certainly believe social is going to be far more important in the future than it is today. Like any other piece of technology, marketers have to learn how to use it. You will find innovation in the mobile space. There are retailers who are saying, if I have a mobile device and I’m in a physical store, I should be able to press an in-store application button on the phone and as I’m walking down the aisles, I will find coupons that are appropriate to me. Does the medium offer opportunities for tailoring the right ads, absolutely. Is it as advanced as we would like it to be, probably not. “
Thus before venturing into any form of Social connect one need to keep in mind if that is the correct medium that will also put a tick mark on the important check boxes of
- Connecting to share the correct message.
- Reaching the targeted segments
- Ongoing conversation to Share more and more
Remember, the success of your marketing campaign does not depend on the number of Fans, Tweets or Pins. It is judged on the ROI of your campaign.
Sell Benefits, Not Technology
Technology-enabled solutions are intangible sales. We should keep it mind that people don’t buy the machine; they buy what it enables. We often pitch the features of the solution and do not detail the utility of it to our prospects. Here are a few important pointers that we can focus on while driving these sales. But we should keep it mind that each one of these pointers are unique and they formulate a complete process. Thus keeping the pattern intact is inevitable.
Discovery: Discovery is the stage of the sales cycle where you can build trust and rapport through consultative selling. The more you educate the customer during this phase the more they will value your opinion. As you solve their problems, your credibility will increase. Apply your value building strategies to build the customer’s commitment to your solution. When you educate the customer on how their business strategy translates into technology needs and issues, you are helping them solve their problems, so they come to trust you and value your opinion.
Prospecting:If you don’t understand how your market is evolving and who wants to buy your product when and for what reason, then you are going to be in trouble. Market leaders know how to evolve along with the market to maintain dominance. Know who to call on when accelerates your success.
Building Value: Selling value creates momentum because it links your solution to what is happening in the market. Understand and make it believable that market doesn’t wait for the customer to make up his mind. Value is the only thing that builds belief. Features and benefits build points in your favor. Solving problems builds confidence that your solution works. But value builds the customer’s belief that they will be successful. Learn how to use the customer’s belief in the value of your solution as a powerful source of energy to drive the sale.
Qualify: Good qualified leads/prospects can make an extraordinary difference in overall sales productivity and a company’s profitability. Often they can cut out days of unproductive sales calls by asking the prospect’s executive team about their business strategy. Learn how to combine value building and solutions selling techniques to dramatically improve your ability to accurate and quickly qualify an account.
Close [and close faster]: When you are launching a new solution, building credibility in the early stages of market adoption is critical to your long-term success. Identify early and quick wins, so you can build the track record you need to ride. When you qualify [and qualify well enough], you confirm up-front the prospect’s buying cycle. This is to set mutual expectations about working together to make the best decision. Then use these expectations to keep the sale moving forward.
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