Bottom lines are important.
But when we look at the data to figure out what influences the bottom line, the quantitative data tells us only half of the story. It tells us what happened and when it happened. It is the qualitative data that tells us why it happened.
This is behavioural analytics.
Behavioural analytics is the browsing patterns, buying patterns and every action they perform in between these two actions. These browsing patterns are influenced by both internal and external factors.
Internal factors: The UI/UX of the website, positioning, product features, shipping and other marketing efforts driving the traffic to the website.
External factors: Some random news, or review or something which is not initiated by the organization’s marketing activity.
Let’s say we have done the behavioural analysis.
What next?
How do we use this analysis to impact the bottom lines? Also, not to forget, always the analysis we do on what already happened. How can we use that past data to impact the present bottom lines and future?
The biggest backbone of digital marketing is technology. Combining it with marketing psychology will give us the best results.
I curated a few tools which will help us in improving the e-commerce shopping experience.
Also, I want to clarify the difference between customization and personalization.
Customization: Giving an option for users to choose from the given options to make their product.
Personalization: You or your systems will analyze different data points and create an individualised experience for the end-users at scale.
I divided these tools into these three categories for better navigation
● Website Personalization Tools
● AR technology-powered product visualization tools
● Conversational Marketing Tools
Website Personalization Tools
1. Bunting
Bunting has built its features to enable a personalized customer journey completely on the website itself. Enabling you to set up campaigns across the three stages of the marketing funnel on the website.
92% of shoppers trust advice from a friend more than any other form of advertising.
So, it has a feature called ‘Shop With’ which enables users to have chat conversations with their friends while browsing. It keeps users on the site for a longer time increasing the session time.
You can customize the chat interface to your brand colours and also the UX goes well with mobile browsing as well.
You or the influencers you hired or your affiliates can do live broadcasts. It can be about showcasing and talking about your products, launches and answering FAQs. You can see this as the best alternative to your FB/Instagram/Youtube Lives.
You can have the live sessions on the website, promote that to bring traffic to your website and have people browse through the products while they watch them live. This is called “Shop Cast”.
Personalization of both product recommendations and content displayed to each user. Its A.I. powered engine captures browsing behaviours and actions taken by users.
This Enables you to segment the audience based on 100 data points like pages users browsed, cart values, products browsed, searched for…etc and show a different personalized message to a different segment of users.
Enables you to personalize the product recommendations based on the pages they are browsing and new vs returning users. You can customize the products on the home page, product pages, category pages, search pages, shopping cart, and error pages.
Enables you to send emails personalized with relevant product recommendations based on the browsing history.
Creating urgency and social proof in your messaging is a proven technique to generate faster results. This feature enables you to personalize the messaging with urgency and social proof. Also lets you measure the performance of the messaging.
Bunting also has plugins for Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento and a few other major commerce providers.
Dynamic Yield is not just for e-commerce but they have built this platform for different industries across the platforms including offline stores. Here, I shall only talk about e-commerce to keep it simple.
You can launch experiences across the funnel stages at different touchpoints.
You can integrate websites, mobile apps, and also pull in data from offline stores and let its A.I. powered engines do their analysis in real-time. Which in-turn acts in real-time when campaigns are launched.
You get deeper analytics to measure the performances of the experiences you created through Dynamic Yield.
You can also launch mobile app specific personalized experiences with content/messaging and also with product recommendations
You can segment the audiences in real-time with logical triggers and create the experiences.
You can launch dynamic content and product recommendation campaigns across the platforms. Dynamic Content is nothing but personalizing the content displayed.
You can also,
- Personalise product recommendations based on user behaviour across the platforms.
- Test multiple widget styles and different forms of messaging through them.
- Create email campaigns with personalized product recommendations, browsing activity and also personalization in messaging
- Build personalized landing pages and deploy them on your subdomain through Dynamic Yield.
- Create A/B variations for every campaign and create unique experiences with the fully controlled dashboard.
Finally, The depth of operations you can perform with this tool is extensive. Much more than what I tried to explain above.
You can simply look at the 100+ example use cases they curated calling inspiration library.
3. Monetate
Monetate is also quite similar to what Dynamic Yield does. In fact, both of them are equally good and leaders in the industry.
You can pull the data from different platforms both online and offline into the system in are real-time for its algorithms to process, analyze, segment and recommend.
The main goal of the tool is to help you reduce the customer journey cycle or narrow down the buying windows. By personalizing product displays at different touchpoints.
Its open architecture makes it easy to integrate with any tech stack.
It can collect all the data, process and let you create goal-oriented personalized experiences. Goals can be to increase conversion rate, reduce bounce rate, or improve engagement and let the machine decide which experience should be delivered to each visitor.
It can collect the data and also push experiences across platforms – websites, mobile apps, emails, call centres, offline stores.
4. Barilliance
Barilliance is built for e-commerce. Its major functionalities are
It can collect, store and process data from both offline and online stores.
It personalizes the product recommendations in real-time across the web pages based on the behavioural data analysis done by its machine learning algorithms.
It will also let you display personalized content dynamically on popups, Coupons and →
- Remarketing email campaigns with multiple trigger points based on behaviours like cart abandonments, browser abandonments…etc
- Social-proof notifications personalized with messages based on user’s profiles and behaviours.
- You can build personalized segmented campaigns based on calculated metrics like LTV and AOV
Here are a few more tools with almost similar functionalities to help improve the e-commerce shopping experience.
5. Intellimize
This tool as well majorly does similar things like personalizing the product recommendations, copy/messaging, placements of CTA buttons and other elements on the pages, social proofs, countdowns and inventory scarcity to create urgency.
Intellimize is also for B2B platforms and not just for e-commerce.
Certona– One good feature in Certona I want to mention is predictive visual search. That is, as users start typing in the search bar, it populates products based on both the search term and buyer intent.
Apptus: Apart from the personalization features similar to the above-listed products, it enables personalized suggestive searches with keywords and visual product displays.
Qubit: Qubit’s open ecosystem allows you to bring third-party tool integrations if you require and perform personalization at a massive scale.
Proof: Most of you have already seen the proof’s notifications like ‘x person has bought this product 1 hour back’. It is one of its tools called a pulse. Proof also has another tool called experiences which enables you to trigger personalizations on your website.
The word campaigns here are referred to the campaigns you can launch through these tools on your e-commerce store. Like personalized upsells and cross-sells or personalized email remarketing campaigns.
It seems like most of these tools have similar features. Yes, in the outer layer they are 70 to 80% similar. But, if you want to do a real technical comparison, you need to understand the Machine Learning algorithms they were built on.
Also, please keep in mind, all these tools work on A.I. algorithms that are data-driven. The more data they have the better those recommendation engines perform.
Relevant Read: Write product description like a pro
2. AR-powered product visualization tools
While using Instagram and Snapchat, we all have experienced AR-powered visualizations. We also have seen a few e-commerce brands already using this technology to help us experience the product by visualizing the product in use. Trying to bring the in-store experience virtually.
Example of AR experience:
- You can visualize how a piece of furniture looks in your living room
- You can visualize how footwear you want to buy online looks on your feet.
- You can visualize how you look with particular eyewear or a cosmetic product or a particular hairstyle or jewellery.
Here are a few tools useful for e-commerce solutions →
These tools enable you to build a 3D view of the product and turn them into an AR view. You need not worry about building the technology in-house and integrating it with your existing commerce tech stack.
Interesting news: Flipkart acquired AR startup Scapic. So, we can soon expect Indian born e-commerce gain bringing in some AR experienced shopping. Already we have cosmetic e-commerce like Nyka, Lenskart using AR technology for virtual make-up and specs try on respectively.
3. Conversational Marketing Tools
As the names say, it is all about creating conversations. But, being able to create these one-on-one conversations at scale makes the difference. When we have to do at scale, automation comes into the picture. So, here are a few tools you can use to build your conversational marketing strategies.
Chatbot Tools to create chat conversations
There are a few tools that help you build your chatbots on existing conversational apps like Messenger and WhatsApp.
There are tools built to track the user’s behaviour on the website and invite a conversation.
I would suggest you look into the following tools.
- Tidio
- Verloop
- Botbaba
- Chatrace (previously Silferbots)
- Google “e-commerce chatbot tools” 🙂
Video Conversation Tools
You can build interactive videos which will let you choose and buy products through the video.
This tip is not much about video personalization but about creating unique experiences. This will make the shopping experience much better.
A few tools you can explore are:
Videoask is another tool by Typeform.
Shop With – a feature in the tool called Bunting (The very first tool I wrote about in this article) is a good option to have influencers on the video engaging and encouraging end users to buy.
You can also google HTML5 interactive videos or interactive shoppable videos to learn more about these.
4. Email Conversational Tools
🙂 There are tons of tools for e-commerce email marketing. In fact, a lot of personalization tools I mentioned above as well will take care of email marketing with personalization.
So, here I am not listing out the tools but I have a point to share. There are two types of emails – sales emails, conversational emails
- Sales emails are sent showing the products they have browsed through or added to the cart or offering a coupon. Anything that encourages a direct sale.
- Conversational emails are to collect information. Basically creating an opportunity to understand them more. Which will help you plan your sales emails better.
Build your email marketing strategies including both sales and conversational emails. These help in collecting better data and personalize the emails.
Conclusion
Whenever we talk about the future of the e-commerce industry and technology innovations in e-commerce. We talk about drones delivery, blockchain payment technology and also a mention of machine learning technologies.
Friends, these are already here!
Go to the websites of the tools mentioned above and check their case studies. A lot of e-commerce websites already are using these technologies and are hugely benefited.
Though they are not widely adopted by many they will soon. Be prepared for the next wave of technology adoption in e-commerce. Be ready to conquer.
Secondly, Data is becoming more important. But, whenever we look at data, we are looking at yesterday’s data and acting upon it. But it is time for acting in real-time. These tools will help you act in real-time by processing the data in real-time.
Lastly, remember these are the tools with a set of features. It is you who have to strategize and make it work. What you make out of these tools are your logic and strategy.
Good Luck!
I am always there for a good discussion, don’t hesitate to ping me for anything related to marketing.
Akathma Devi is a Marketing coach, Analytics-driven marketer, Chatbot Marketing Enthusiast, and Founder of Rubhu Social
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