At NetElixir, our proprietary AI-powered digital marketing platform, LXRInsights, is a powerful tool for predictive analytics, from tracking customer journeys to forecasting which customers will return to make a repeat purchase to helping segment your customer base and identify high-value customers. By using AI to understand your customers, you can market effectively to high-value customers while offering a customer experience that will build brand loyalty and bring customers back to your site again and again. 

Tracking and Analyzing the Customer Journey 

A customer’s journey on an e-commerce site has many steps, from the first time they click through from a search engine list, an ad, or a social media post, to the moment they click submit on a purchase. By taking the time to track, analyze, and understand the first-party data collected during that journey, you can learn who your high-value customers are and which channels, touchpoints, products, and content are effective at reaching and converting them from a browser to a customer ready to make that final purchase. 

At NetElixir, we’ve found that high-value customers drive over 40% of revenue while accounting for only four to ten percent of the customer base. Marketing directly to this high-value segment of your customer base can have a huge impact on the growth of your business. LXRInsights uses predictive analytics and customer segmentation to help businesses find and target new high-value customers to improve your return on investment for each marketing dollar spent. 

LXRInsights helps your business find the answers to critical questions such as:

• Who are your high-value customers and what sets their search-shop-buy behavior apart from other customers?
• How many times does a high-value customer visit your website before making a purchase?
• What are the various channel touchpoints for your high-value customers?
• Which customers are likely to churn and which are likely to buy from you again in the next two months?

Targeting High-Value Customers and Improving Customer Experience with AI

AI tools like LXRInsights can help your e-commerce business use data to reach high-value customers and create a smooth customer journey that shoppers enjoy. Creating customer personas from the data gathered about your customer base can help your e-commerce business develop marketing campaign strategies aimed directly at the high-value segment of your customer base. AI can be used to predict what customers are searching for, what channels and touchpoints are the most valuable, and even to personalize the content – from ads and emails to product recommendations and loyalty programs – you use to reach key segments of your audience.

By understanding customers’ preferences, touchpoints, and shopping behaviors, you can target them at the right time, with the right product and right message, improving the likelihood that they will become a loyal customer while also creating a better shopping experience. AI can also ‌support the customer’s journey when a customer needs assistance, from feedback or request submissions to chat bots or a direct connection with customer service agents via chat or phone. At the end of the day, AI can be a hugely valuable tool to improve the relationship between customer and brand while growing your e-commerce business.

Ready to get started with AI?

Is your e-commerce business excited to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to inform your digital marketing strategy? Reach out to NetElixir to book a demo of LXRInsights today!

Additional Resources

• Go Organic: Your SEO Strategy In The Cookieless World
• Your Social Strategy For the Cookieless Future
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World

The post Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence appeared first on NetElixir.

Professor Wind taught us that there is no one driver of innovation; rather, innovation is a process each company has to learn about and experiment with to determine their own path forward. His eight principles of transformation guide our mindset and organizational structure so we can be prepared for whatever comes next. These principles are the foundation to help us cope with and survive current crises from the coronavirus pandemic to racial injustice, capture available opportunities, and be able to anticipate and navigate the next crisis.

Learn how Jerry Wind conceptualized his eight principles of transformation

Eight Principles of Transformation

1. Change Your Mental Model

In changing your mental model, you seek to adopt an insurgent mindset that challenges the reality we have accepted or become complacent to. Wind tells us that returning to a pre-coronavirus normal is the wrong mental model to have, as the world has drastically changed since March 2020. Between work-from-home, the e-commerce boom, zoom communications, e-learning, and the like, we would lose so much if we just went back to the way things were. We are facing a new reality and have to use our learnings to grow and expand.

Wind instructs us, “The most fundamental [task] that I’d like you to explore is what is your mental model? Is it still appropriate for today’s environment of the new reality and how can you change it? What will be the needed changes to the mental model, that how can you become not only a defensive player but actually a disrupter in your industry?” 

2. Reimagine and Reinvent Your Approach to the Customer and Stakeholder

Customer needs and expectations are constantly evolving and successful brands evolve with their customers. Wind notes that current crises, as well as significant advances in technology from apps to AI, are really “enriching and allowing the consumer to be much more empowered in the balance of the relationship between the consumer and the retailer.”

Wind encourages brands to design customer-centric strategies that respond to and anticipate customers’ needs and expectations — ideally, brands should co-create with their customers by offering real-time customizable and personalized experiences. Society is shifting from the traditional shareholder approach to a stakeholder approach, where stakeholders are predominantly the customer, but also partners and employees. A purpose-led organization that has a positive social impact will resonate with customers, new talent, and more.

3. Speed Up Digital Transformation and Design for Personalization at Scale

A rapid, agile system that can quickly respond to changes in the environment will thrive in this rapidly evolving world. As we learned last year, we don’t always have the luxury of time and deep analysis to figure out the best solution. A robust digital infrastructure and omnichannel approach will give organizations the foundation to be able to respond quickly, fully engage their audiences, market globally, and provide updates as needed. A digital infrastructure will also help with personalization at scale, as we move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized approach that directly addresses consumer needs.

4. Reinvent Your Talent Strategy and Embrace Open Innovation and Open Talent

The idea of open innovation and an open talent strategy means we search for solutions outside our traditional domain and knowledge. Many challenges that organizations face have been solved somewhere else in the world, so we should be finding solutions that already exist and not wasting time reinventing the wheel. More and more people, especially under the flexibility of remote working, are preferring the gig economy style, which means companies might not be attracting all the talent they need. An open innovation network curates specific results to a problem, benefits from an interdisciplinary point of view, and is a source of collaboration and communication that can keep innovations cutting-edge and modern.

5. Seize the Need for Speed and Design for Agility, Adjacencies, and Adaptability

Agility is an important facet of innovation and success. To be adeptly speedy and agile, organizations need to look at the adjacencies in terms of similar products and services, available markets, and shared partners and networks where they can pivot, learn from, and expand. Looking at these adjacencies creates opportunities for improvement, a new perspective, and increased efficiency.

6. Innovate, Then Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

“The key to everything we are doing, especially in today’s environment, is the need to continuously innovate and then experiment, experiment, experiment!” Wind shares. Everything from customer behavior to technology to competition is changing, so organizations need to change, too. And we change through innovations, both big and small.

Customers don’t think in terms of verticals, but rather their experience is shaped across industries, which influences their expectations of everything else. Therefore, brands need to innovate every facet of their business, from their product offering to business model to their market approach. We accomplish continuous innovation by creating a culture of continuous experimentation that allows us to come up with new ideas pulled from various industries and domains and test them.

7. Redraw Your Timeline and Build a Portfolio of Initiatives Across All Innovation Horizons

There are three horizons of innovation: one is a brand’s current offerings of products and solutions; two is the markets a brand operates within; third is that which is new to the world. Wind offers Tesla’s series of innovations as an example of operating within all three horizons. In horizon one, Tesla is developing new electric models and creating a lower-priced version for greater accessibility; in horizon two, Tesla is creating autonomous cars; and in horizon three, Tesla is working towards Hyperloop, a tube that makes fast travel between cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles possible.

It’s best to have a varied portfolio of innovation initiatives, dedicating 80-90% of your time and resources to horizon one, and 10-20% to horizons two and three. Your portfolio should seek to address how to improve your current offerings, explore what others are doing in other industries and how you can reach new customer segments, and create new solutions for the world in terms of products, markets, and business models.

8. Deploy an Idealized Design and Recreate Your Organizational Architecture and Network Orchestration

To create an idealized design, start with a compelling vision for your organization of what you want to accomplish and what your legacy will be. Select a date deadline for your objective, select a prize you wish to win (like the most innovative retailer or the best place to work), and then write a story for why you receive that award. That story is the foundation of an idealized design planning process that has you work backward to achieve your goal.

Having your story and design in place, then you look to recreate your organizational architecture — which includes your corporate culture, processes, structure, internal and external competencies, technologies, performance, and incentives — that positions you to accomplish your goal. The trick is moving away from just enacting minor tweaks to leveraging experiments and consistent daily tactics that will get you closer to accomplishing your goal by your set timeline. Through this, you will succeed in capturing opportunities and thriving, not just surviving, crises.

Your Innovation Strategy

Professor Jerry Wind inspires us to think differently, to challenge ourselves to innovate, and to continually learn to create opportunities and transform in times of crisis. 

While Wind inspires us to innovate, he shared a hefty challenge for marketers and businesses to find a place to start within their own organization. Learn where to start applying Wind’s eight principles below:

Learn how you can start innovating new opportunities for your business today.

Insights from the Experts

• Opportunities in Times of Crisis, a recap of Professor Wind’s previous discussion with NetElixir, from June 2020
• Connect the Dots with Natalie Zmuda, Head of Think With Google
• How Vigilant Organizations Gain an Edge
• Revisit the insights and perspectives shared during Connecting the Dots: Driving Change Through Innovation

The post Eight Principles of Transformation by Professor Jerry Wind appeared first on NetElixir.

In this brighter and more hopeful future, we move relentlessly forward on the path to recovery. We left behind a year of uncertainty and difficulty, a year that required us to pivot from known strategies and tactics to try something new. We emerge more connected, more conscious, and more compassionate. These concepts will carry us through the new year and beyond. 

What Lies Ahead in 2021

The age of digitization is fully upon us. Consumers have more information than ever at their fingertips and are spending more time researching prior to purchasing. As we understand more about our customers – who they are and how they shop – we as marketers can create more personalized and targeted messaging.

A key marketing strategy for 2021 is adaptability. Opportunities will come and go quickly and retail marketers need to be able to pivot quickly to explore these chances. As such, data-driven solutions will drive us forward. Online events and interactions will remain the norm for some time, but marketers and retailers still need to showcase a human side behind the screen. Our messaging should focus on starting conversations and discussions, of creating a dialogue between us and our customers to be able to better serve them.

Adapting to New Consumer Behavior

The coronavirus pandemic created a boom in online shopping unlike anything we have seen before. New shopper personas are constantly emerging and old personas are constantly evolving as online trends shift and consumers gain more online experience. Pandemic-led shoppers tend to research more and at greater depths prior to making a purchase. During the pandemic, the latency period (time before first website landing and first purchase) went down 10-22% compared to pre-pandemic latency across retail categories. However, people were visiting the website more frequently as they conducted more in-depth research.

These shoppers are focused on value – both economic and social. Modern consumers are frugal; they are breaking brand loyalty in favor of what is available and what is a good deal. Moreso, Gen Z and Millennials expect brands to take a stand on important social issues beyond something performative.

A social-conscious shopper is emerging, as these shoppers prefer to engage with brands who speak up on social issues. Being silent or neutral is no longer a lucrative option for retailers and businesses.

Emotions have always been a driving force behind purchases, but what emotional states and expectations take priority are changing. Namely, consumers are choosing brands and products that promote safety, wellness, and hope and inspiration. These feelings vary by individual so discover what makes your ideal buyer persona feel safe, healthy, and hopeful; use that messaging in your marketing and reinforce the sentiment throughout your brand story.

While the coronavirus pandemic forced a binary of essential vs. nonessential goods and services, what exactly is an essential need also varies by individual. Throughout 2020, NetElixir noted an e-commerce surge in retail industries like pet supplies, home décor, and DIY tools that helped people adjust to the lifestyle changes caused by the pandemic and shutdowns. Hubspot projects that 2021 marketing will be more empathetic. Consumers will resonate with brands and products that continue to offer help and support.

NetElixir’s Predictions on Emerging E-Commerce Trends

The new-to-online shoppers acquired during the coronavirus pandemic exhibit unique behaviors and patterns. As a demographic largely unversed in online shopping, they flocked to e-commerce stores once in-store shopping wasn’t an option. Having crossed that initial online barrier, they are an untapped resource to building your retail brand and e-commerce revenue – as long as you know how to reach them. Therefore, while live consumer data has always been important, it is crucial now more than ever in truly understanding your customer’s needs, wants, and purchase journey in order to meet them at every turn and create a seamless shopping experience.

Mobile engagement is soaring. Mobile sales accounted for 43% of all orders in February, 2020; by December, it was over 55%. Mobile devices now drive over 72% of all website sessions. The reign of desktop may well be over. 

As increased digitization becomes the norm, extended and augmented reality will become an important tool in consumer engagement to extend the retail shopping experience. Consumers may still be hesitant to shop in-store for some time, but still want to simulate that shopping experience or look for something new entirely. 

The role of gaming will increase in 2021. Gaming quickly became a popular hobby during 2020 as a way to pass time, connect with others, and learn new skills. Advertisers and marketers will want to take advantage of this growing platform to reach younger demographics, gain brand visibility, and explore a whole new market.

The most important characteristic a marketer can have, however, is creativity and agility. Through experimentation and innovation, we can discover new ways to meaningfully interact with and help our customers and each other so we can all make 2021 a better year.

Further Resources

For an in-depth discussion of these trends and more, join NetElixir’s brand new webinar, The Future of Retail ECommerce: Trends and Predictions for 2021. We will be live on Thursday, January 14th at 2 PM ET with Udayan Bose, NetElixir’s Founder and CEO, to explore:

• Why rapid experimentation and creativity are key to effective consumer marketing. 
• Who is the new pandemic shopper, what defines their consumer behavior and persona, and how your strategy should target them.
• Why value-conscious shoppers care about a brand’s stance on social issues.
• Emerging technologies you should leverage for a seamless virtual shopping experience.

Register Now

Read more on eCommerce trends:

• Holiday E-Commerce Sales
• Cyber 5: Results, Insights, and Trends

The post 2021 Marketing Trends for Retailers appeared first on NetElixir.

Three Benefits Of Using PWAs vs. Native Apps

There are many advantages of using PWAs over native apps including:

• Ease of Development: Unlike native apps, PWAs are built on a single codebase (Javascript, HTML) that is completely web-based. This means there is only one version to write code for and resolve bugs on, as opposed to developing and solving for both mobile and desktop. You can also save time and money from less time coding and not having to pay app store hosting fees.
• Better User Experience: PWAs run smoothly and are extremely fast. It’s also simple to launch them with the click of a link and re-engage users with push notifications. Fast page loading times are a major factor in keeping visitors on the site. According to NetElixir tests, lightweight PWA pages load 1 to 2 seconds faster than non-PWA pages, while heavy PWA pages load 2-3 seconds faster than heavy native apps. 
• SEO Friendly: Because it’s a website at the core, search engines can crawl progressive web apps. This makes it important to focus on optimization efforts. Since PWAs cannot be found in popular application stores, good search result rankings are crucial. There’s also progress in creating a place for these apps like Appscope, but it still is not as well-trafficked as Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Quick Tips For Optimizing PWAs

If you decide to go with a PWA over a native app, there are some steps you can take to make sure it follows SEO best practices. Check out some tips below:

• Make Your Content Crawlable: Be sure to use real URLs and not hash fragments. Follow SEO URL best practices by including related keywords in the URL and keeping them short.
• Be Secure: Make visitors feel safe by securing your PWA. In fact, 80% of the web uses HTTPS today. If your site doesn’t support HTTPS yet, it’s a good idea to migrate.
• Measure Page Speed: Page speed is a direct ranking factor in Google. It also indirectly affects SEO by impacting bounce rates and dwell time. Use WebPageTest and Lighthouse to determine your First CPU Idle, originally called the Time to First Interactive, the key page speed metric Google measures.
• Provide a Sitemap: Add a sitemap to your site and make sure you register it in the Google Search Console. This is the first thing Google uses to know what pages are on your site.

PWAs continue to be a great web solution for those who want an app-like feel for less effort and cost. Plus, there’s the benefit of high engagement if done right. If you’re interested in the magic of highly optimized PWAs or having one created from scratch, please reach out to us to learn more!

The post Get Results With Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) appeared first on NetElixir.