Providing a customer service support line isn’t an automatic way to win more business. In fact, one statistic says it can actually increase the likelihood of customers abandoning your business four times over. But you can make some changes to your customer support team to improve your customer service team overnight.

This will help you to increase customer retention and can even act as a selling point for your company. You’re going to learn about four easy ways you can implement to upgrade your customer service team.

Create an Omni-Channel Experience

You shouldn’t just be available via one means. Not everyone wants to give you a call. In fact, a lot of people resent the idea of having to speak to a company over the phone. They might want to send a message about a non-urgent enquiry over email. Alternatively, they could want to take advantage of a live chat system.

The problem is so many companies will settle on one or two channels for connecting with customers. A great customer support department will be available in a variety of ways. For example, they could be contacted via a mobile app or through a Facebook profile.

Start your journey to omni-channel domination today. The great thing about this is that it’s easier than you think to get started with this. You can easily make other channels available in a matter of days. Your customers will thank you for it.

Focus on the Humans Administering It

Talking to potential customers and talking to current customers in the right way will determine whether they ever buy from you again. Not enough bosses concentrate on what their employees are doing and saying when they’re interacting with customers.

It’s easy to assume a grumpy customer is just a hater, but look deeper into the interaction. You might find that the person is just an irritant, but you might also find that the employee hasn’t spoken in the right way. They might be the source of the problem.

Give regular training sessions and regular pieces of advice to your customer support team. Don’t allow them to do what they like without supervision. This is how mistakes happen.

Make Your Most Loyal Customers Feel Special

Look at any industry and you’ll see most of the big players offering some form of reward for being loyal. A VIP club and different service levels can even apply to your customer support department. Provide a few extra options to your most loyal customers. Don’t just reserve the rewards for new customers.

Bucking the trend and skewing your rewards towards your most loyal customers can help with your marketing. Turn them into brand ambassadors by treating them right.

It doesn’t have to cost anything to do this. You just have to tier the various support options you have. This can be done in a matter of hours.

Be Available

This is the number one way you can make sure that your customers are always going to be impressed by what you’re offering them. Staying available is the number one demand customers have. They want to be able to get someone to help them at all hours, wherever they happen to be in the world.

There’s nothing more annoying than having to wait until the next day because the customer support line closed five minutes ago. You don’t necessarily have to make everyone stay late in a cloud contact center, or hire more employees, but there should still be support options open to them.

For example, you could direct them towards a comprehensive FAQ section. Making yourself available can ensure that you never lose customers because they’ve been driven to distraction.

Last Word - Have You Ever Surveyed Your Customers?

Sometimes you need to survey your customers to find out what they actually want. These four tips are general ways in which you can improve your customer service team, but every customer is different and every audience is different. The only way you’re going to find out what your customers think is through surveying your customers.

Ask them directly what they think about your services and how you can improve. Most customers will be happy that you asked them in the first place. There’s nothing worse than a company that doesn’t listen. You can reverse that trend by showing that you’re putting customers first.

Their feedback can be invaluable for giving them what they want. What is the best piece of customer feedback you’ve ever received?

Source : https://www.huffingtonpost.com/aj-agrawal/4-ways-to-improve-custome_b_11553444.html

Augmented reality is here to stay! Currently, augmented reality is a considerably hot topic that is being discussed by various businesses. Many have already integrated this technology within their business, while many are still clueless about its benefits. To be honest, we all carry AR-ready technology with us in the form of smartphones. One example of augmented reality is a game that broke all records, Pokémon Go. We could actually see a virtual world through our smartphones that are filled with wild Pokémon.

This clears the air that AR isn’t a futuristic technology. Instead, it has already made its mark with various apps and technologies that are being used in our daily lives. However, I’m pretty sure now you’ll really want to know how augmented reality in retail stores can enhance customer’s experience and increase your overall profitability. Here are a few augmented reality retail examples to start with.

1. Increase Customer’s Duration of Stay

The more time they spend in your stores, the more money they’ll spend. This statement has eventually turned out to be true. Especially, after Pokémon Go was launched! Players used to visit shops merely to catch a Pokémon, and most of the time ended up buying something they had never planned of.

Now, that doesn’t mean should also develop such a game to enhance your sales. However, you can work on creating a map that improves your customer’s navigation while they come over to shop. Your app could add a feature in which customers can note down all the products they need. The app will scan the list and display the best route that customers should take to find all their desired commodities. In addition, you also use this app to show all the offers and discounts currently active every time the customer opens the app. – Excellent app to boost sales and bring a smile to your customer’s face!

2. To Provide More Information About a Product

Due to rising competition, not many products sell themselves. You need to use the right set of skills to make consumers pay for your products. However, augmented reality in a business can make your lives easier again. With the help of AR technology you can show your customers how the product works, just like how it used to be within videos. Although, this time you’ll use an AR within you store so that the customer can have a better understanding of the product.

3. Try Before You Buy

I simply never purchase any piece of clothing before trying it on. Regardless of the fact, how much time it consumes! I agree it’s annoying to step into the trial room and look at yourself in the mirror to make sure it fits right and looks good on you.

However, augmented reality in retail stores can save you the time and effort of going through this process. Many top brands have already started using this technology, but I’ll still tell you how it works. This AR technology can be used either on your phone, or a device provided by the retailer. This software will virtually let you try on all the clothing pieces you like and also show you how you’ll look. You can swipe and change products with your fingertips, all thanks to these apps.

4. Training – Gamification

Gamification is the next big thing in running an active talent hunt. Many top businesses around the world are using this technology to create simulations to test how individuals will react in various condition. Having that said, companies can also use this technology for training purpose.

With the help of virtual worlds, you can easily test and teach people without incurring any physical lose. It’s true that virtual reality also uses the same concept. However, in VR stimulations you need to use headsets and physically make actions to perform specific tasks. On the other hand, augmented reality in business only requires a smartphone to complete tasks and get through the training or hiring gamification process.

Bottom Line

The augmented reality retail examples mentioned above crucial for all business to enhance their productivity and profitability. Though this process may increase your operational costs, the benefits will surely exceed the costs in the long run.

Don’t you just love the sight of likes and retweets on your latest social media posts? In fact, we are so obsessed with seeing likes on our posts that we simply delete it within a day or two if we don’t get that many. However, as a B2B marketing agency, this misconception can hurt your business big time. Likes, retweets, comments, and similar engagements don’t show the performance of a particular post. It's only a superficial fact that looks appealing to us.

There are many more such misconceptions that we fail to avoid in our social media marketing plan, and end up damaging our own business. Here are a few of them that you need to start taking into consideration.

· Focusing Too Much on the Vanity Metrics

It’s true that we all get excited with every new like notification that popups up for our posts. However, are you sure that the person who liked your post read the whole thing or clicked through? To be honest, there is no guarantee. Many people just skim through their newsfeed and like almost everything they see. On the other hand, many of your friends will also like your posts just out of courtesy and not read a single word that is written on it.

Therefore, we suggest that B2B marketing agents should look at the number of clicks on the link that you’ve provided on your posts. Or simply the reach of your posts. Since it’s your post, only you are entitled to view these stats, but believe me, it’s how you can evaluate the performance. In addition, if your website is integrated with Google Analytics, you should also look at the average time users from social media channels spend on your landing pages.

· Ignoring Dark Social Shares

Have you ever witnessed a rise in you traffic right after you posted something new on social media without many people sharing your content? If yes, that probably due to dark social shares. Dark social shares refer to those links that are copied and shared on personal chats via Messenger, WhatsApp, email or any other channels of communication. It’s pretty apparent that the traffic that comes from these shares isn’t shown in the same channel at where you’ve actually posted.

Therefore, think twice before deleting a post just because it doesn't show many shares! If you see a rise in your traffic without the shares, the dark social shares are playing a part in this.

· Timing is Key!

Timing matters a lot when it comes to posting on various social media channels. According to HubSpot, the time to post on Instagram for a high click-through rate is 1-4 p.m. You’ll find out that all social media marketing services have their own ideal times for your post to perform up to the mark.

However, posting at the right time won’t always save the day for you. Posting poor quality content at the optimum time won’t help your post garner your desired level of engagement. Even if you do manage to catch viewer’s attention, all thanks to your excellent timing, users won’t think about clicking through.

Note: Fewer posts isn’t considered a bad thing all the time. If you can, you should maintain an ideal posting schedule with high-quality content to capture the highest number of leads.

· Wasting Your Time on The Wrong Site

Yes, we read many success stories about Vloggers earning thousands of dollars and have millions of followers just by posting their videos on YouTube. No matter how useful this social channel may be, but it’s not fit for all types of businesses. It’s good to use various social media marketing services to enhance your brand’s social presence, but stop wasting time on those that aren’t good for you.

For example, if you are running a B2C business, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are the ideal social networks to use. While, B2B companies can rely more on LinkedIn and Twitter to capture more leads.

Wrap Up

At the end of the day, if your digital marketing on social media channels is not planned adequately, you can’t expect it to derive your desired results. A well prepared social media marketing plan is ideal for capturing quality leads and boosting your web traffic. However, don’t get carried away by misinterpreting the metrics mentioned above. Avoid these misconceptions and experience better than ever results.

For a retail or small business, planning to switch from a sole trader to a partnership can be tricky. Without any doubt, partners do bring many benefits with them to the company. However, due to conflicts, these partnerships can turn in to your worst nightmares. What we are going to focus on today are engaged, partners. This means those partners who actually work in the business. On the other hand, a non-engaged partner is one who only provides capital to the company and doesn’t get involved in the operations.

A partnership is formed when 2 to 20 individuals sign a partnership agreement. A retail partnership can prove to do wonders in becoming a business sensation within no time. With all the extra capital and minds collaborating for a single vision, this type of business has pretty good chances of surviving. However, conflicts between these different minds can lead to the partnership ending and the company closing down. Having that said, the following are various pros and cons associated with forming a partnership.

Share of Responsibilities and Workload

Though retail or small businesses don’t really have that many responsibilities, startups can use all the help they can get. It’s true that you can make more money for yourself if you run the business alone. However, by splitting the workload, tasks can be performed more efficiently. While you can also do this by delegating specific tasks to your employees, they won’t show the required interest that an owner would. Imagine if you could split your daily to-do list with your partner, how much more could be done?

Profits Get Distributed

You never get to keep all the profits in a partnership. This factor can lead to many conflicts in the future. Many partnerships dissolve just because owners start to disagree over the share of profits each gets. On the other hand, even if your partner isn’t performing up to the mark, they will still be entitled a percentage of your well-earned money.

Each Partner Brings in Certain Skills

It’s pretty evident that all humans come with different mindsets and skills. Therefore, each partner can manage various functions of a business. For example, if you are a marketing and sales expert, you can create a partnership with a finance expert. That way, you can take care of the sales and marketing of your business, while your partner can manage the books and financial matters.

All the Wrong Decisions Your Partner Makes Impacts you As Well

Since you are operating in a partnership, all decisions made by you or your partner, affect the whole business. This means that you are liable for all the decision your partner makes, whether right or wrong.  Not only will this damage your business’s reputation in the market, but people may point fingers at you also for being a part of these wrong decisions.

Major Factors That Lead to Successful Partnerships

Partners don’t realize that in order to run a successful partnership they need to focus on a few critical factors. Wondering what they are? Take a look!

1. Trust

The first aspect that partners need to establish in a partnership is trust. Partners need to have complete faith in each other. If one partner takes a step without informing or discussing with others, then maybe it’s time for you to move on. You can’t trust someone who doesn’t consider taking mutual decisions important.

2. Communication

A communication gap can easily destroy your partnership. Even if you have all the retail intelligence to run a business, you need to speak with your partner before taking any major step. If you spend money on something your partner isn’t aware of, that is a problem. Communication gaps also lead to trust issues between partners.

3. Money

Why do you do business? For the money, right? To be precise, that’s why all entrepreneurs set up their businesses. Both partners need to be careful with what they do with the company’s money. If one is spending money for their personal reasons and the other partners aren’t aware of it, problems will arise. In the end, the co-owner will develop a thought that their partner is cheating on them by setting up a side business.

Wrap Up

It isn’t that difficult to become a recognized retail expo in your industry. All you need to do is focus on maintaining a healthy business relation with your partner. You should always note down all mutual terms in the partnership agreement before starting the business. That way, chances of misunderstanding and conflicts will reduce. Apart from that, if you believe that you have problems trusting people, then it’s better to run your business as a sole trader.

In the marketplace for consumers, the exposure of the digital commerce has charged a near panic-stricken race to cash in on demand created by the customers for providing fantastic experiences for shopping in different parts of the channels. Albeit the initial movers have somewhat attained exceptional results from the investments, they made in the digital commerce industry, the speed for adopting different trends have been relatively slower in the B2B market.

The same forces in the market that precipitated commerce into the limelight in the customer sector have boasted a digital revolution in the commerce sector in the market for B2B – and are developing considerable yet effective opportunities for the producers and manufacturers.

DIGITAL COMMERCE AND THE NEED FOR B2B BUSINESSES:

Digital commerce merely is not just another channel; it constitutes a considerable shift in way buyers and businesses approximate the marketplace. The buyers, however, today are not using any particular technology like fax machines or phones or anticipate for any sales representative visit next week to position orders.

Instead, they anticipate the same seamless and convenient opportunities for purchasing goods online when they search out and buy products in their personal lives.

Directed towards revamping the expectations of the buyers, the majority of the businesses in the B2B and other manufacturing sectors are expending in banking and digital commerce on significant growth. The most recent survey conducted by CloudCraze about the decisions makers in the B2B market in software, manufacturing, and GCP suggested that nearly 89 percent of the decision-makers in the B2B market fasten anticipated growth in the business to the succession of their digital commerce programs.

Moreover, within the span of the five years, it is expected that about 88 percent of the decision-makers in the B2B market wait to provide different products that could be sold online effectively.

It is worth mentioning that digital commerce solutions for manufacturers are not run through technology or other strategic methods. Majority of the organizations are backing up the idea of developing digital opportunities for the buyers with almost half of the businesses in the B2B market sell their full range of products online.

DIGITAL REFORMING THE B2B ENVIRONMENT FOR MANUFACTURERS:

Digital commerce online is revamping the dynamics of the B2B marketplaces in different ways. Majority of these changes are in acknowledgment of the choices made by the buyers, while others designate a different direction in the way B2B businesses and manufacturers tackle the marketplace.

1) SELF SERVICE – A FUTURISTIC THING:

In answer to facilitating the buyers and fulfilling their expectations for more effective buying and shopping practices, it is necessary for the manufacturers to authorize capabilities for self-service.

2) DIGITAL COMMERCE – A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY:

Regardless of the notion that digital commerce is an essential element for growth, some of the decision-makers in the B2B market stay doubtful because they don’t have what it takes the abilities of the most existing systems.

3) DIGITAL COMMERCE – RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SALES TEAM AND BUYERS:

The demand for buying and providing services has constructed various misapprehensions about the nature of the sales teams. Instead of downsizing and replacing sales teams, the digital commerce improves the relationship between the customers and sales teams for practical purposes.

I still remember those days when my parents had to scream ‘taxiii’ on the top of their lungs to catch one. Nowadays, a cab is only a click of a button away. No one could have imagined that finding a cab or buying products could get this comfortable. However, the world has changed all thanks to technological developments. Technology, is the primary reason we have seen changing consumer market behaviors globally, but is it right?

According to a consumer market survey forecasting by Capgemini and The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), the industry should not consider the supply chain a linear journey. Gone are those days when products and information were passed from one agent to another. Now the manufactures should utilize various marketing and communication channels to create a network around consumers.

The forecast further states,

“Consumer behavior has changed forever. The path to purchase is no longer linear and could involve social media, an app, web-based research, an in-store visit and an online purchase in any order. Consumers now have the means to share their concerns and opinions with a larger audience than ever, through a growing array of social and digital channels.”

This change in consumer’s mindsets has been noticed for many years. When the first ecommerce website was launched, no one expected that it would turn out be the most reliable shopping option. Getting your goods delivered with the click of a button was beyond our imaginations. However, now that it’s done businesses that have learned to adopt this change are surviving and doing pretty good. Although, those businesses that either are too small to take such steps or are egoistic to continue with their traditional methods are losing big time. Don’t believe me? Take a look at what has become of our favorite toy’s store, Toys "R" Us. They simply couldn’t catch up with online giants like Amazon and Alibaba, and eventually had to close down over 700 of their stores in both UK and USA.

Local businesses also lost the monopoly they had of supplying products to their particular region. Now with online stores, an American customer can order a Chinese product from China and get it delivered within a few days. We are always short of time, as no one knows what new inventions will hit the industry tomorrow and change how business is being done. Only those companies that take certain steps to grasp current opportunities will live to see the daylight when further changes arrive.

In this fast-paced market, retailers are the ones standing on the losing side. All their investment in creating fancy and appealing outlets is going to waste. Most ecommerce businesses focus on outsourcing almost every aspect of the business. From product deliveries to customer support, all is being done by third parties. Still, they are managing to earn high returns.

Wrap Up

From groceries, like fruits and vegetable, to ordering a cab or specific products, all is being done either through a website or an app. In addition, customer support is also provided on both platforms to make sure consumers receive a worthwhile experience. Consumers are the kings of the market, and our job as business owners is to provide them with the best. Therefore, if you are left behind in this race, start working on going online and marketing your products through social media channels. The chances are that you wouldn’t end up having your name on the list of businesses that closed down their operations this year.

If you contact a B2B marketing agency today to promote your products, they’ll probably come up with a plan that’ll increase your expenditure. Though their plans and strategies can bring you good business, your shoestring budget won’t allow it. 20% of all small businesses fail to survive in their first year. One primary reason for that is a weak marketing campaign.

However, there are many ways you can create brand awareness, promote your products and even attract more customers without having to spend a lot of money. Take a look at the following marketing tips for small business owners, to kick start your journey towards success.

1. Use Various Social Media Networks

There are over 3 billion active social media users in the world. What have you done to engage them? If you still don’t have an active Facebook, Instagram or Twitter profile to promote your business, I’m afraid you’re missing out on a lot. Social media marketing is considered one of the most effective marketing strategies out there.

The best thing about this channel of marketing is that you barely have to spend any money. In fact, you can even go ahead with it without spending a penny. If you can create engaging posts that receive a lot of likes, views, and shares, you’ll have thousands of followers in no time. As you grow your business, you can always run paid promotions that are quite low priced, to enhance your reach and derive better results.

2. Launch an Attractive Website

Over 3.5 billion people are using the internet. Therefore, it has become essential for all small entrepreneurs to launch a website. A website not only helps you get orders online, but it also lets you use many digital marketing techniques to promote your products. However, in order for your website to generate organic traffic, you need focus on SEO and rank better on top search engines.

3. Collaborate with another Business

We aren’t asking you to join hands with a competitor! Instead, you should look for a business that you can collaborate with to promote each other’s business. E.g., you can offer a discount coupon for your partner’s business every time a consumer buys from your store. Your partner business can also do the same thing. That way, you’ll both benefit in generating more revenue without having to spend any extra money.

4. Retain Your Customers

It can cost you five times more to recruit a new customer than retain an old one. Therefore, you need to start making plans to convince your customers to come back to you. You can start off with a loyalty program. This initiative will provide your customers with benefits every time they purchase something from you. In addition, you can also offer a referral bonus to encourage them to invite others to buy from you. Another effective way to bring back your customers is to approach via email or calls. You can offer a special discount to them to attract them to make another purchase from your business.

Wrap Up

Marketing for small business or a startup can be tough on a low budget. However, thanks to various digital marketing techniques and low-cost promotional tactics you can easily promote your products and still manage to save a lot of your investment. The marketing tips for small business owners listed above are highly useful and have proven to do wonders for many businesses around the globe. – give them a try and experience a rise in your sales without your expenditure going above the red line.

Contacts, leads, and prospects – whatever is your adapted parlance is, the fact is simple: In order for you to be victorious in real estate market, you are bound to generate more leads, and generating leads is the most essential goal of your foundation.

Basically, there are two main essential methods to generate more leads in the real estate market. They are offline and online.

With that being said, let’s take a gander at 10 most mind blowing strategies which you can use to generate more leads.

Generating Leads Online:

Generating leads online is considered as the prime factor for all cash buyers in real estate. For majority, the main objective of the agents in real estate is advertising online, and they use online networks to attain more leads.

However, if you are assuming this than you are probably right. However, you don’t need to worry about it at all; I will be talking more frequently about this.

A lot could be written about using social media platform to generate more leads in the real estate market, but let’s just focus on the basics.

To be precisely accurate, many online advertising platforms are not selling leads at all but rely mostly on impression based advertising.

So what’s impression based advertising in the commercial real estate? According to Wikipedia, ‘An impression (in the context of online advertising) is a measure of the number of times an ad is seen. Clicking or not is not taken into account. Each time an ad displays it is counted as one impression.’

https://www.zillow.com/agent-resources/blog/generate-real-estate-buyer-leads/

On websites online, any agent who pays some cash is displayed next to a listing which is regarded as an impression. During the display, different customers have the ability to contact the agent and that customer is regarded as a powerful lead for the business.

The commercial real estate business has been booming for a while now. Purchasing a house today is incredibly difficult. As an agent in the real estate market, the best feeling you get is when your customers purchase the house of their dreams. All of these things require effort and a little more – and play an integral role in generating more leads.

Similarly, as a salesperson, you might ponder to question what your customers usually think about the process of buying houses and what are their expectations for a perfect house? Thing is, they expect quite a lot.

Having said that, I’m sharing a couple of things which the professionals in real estate business are expecting and how can you improve your relationship with your customers.

1) Be Quick to Respond:

As the headline suggests, real estate agents should be honest and respond to their customers as quickly as possible since it builds a level of trust between the two parties.

2) Don’t Portray Yourself As An Amateur:

If you want to generate more leads in the real estate business by increasing your clientele than you must not show your clients that you’re an amateur. People who are all cash buyers in real estate are intrigued when real estate agents show them pictures and videos of the homes. If you are good in making videos, it should be a striking factor for you, and if you’re not then it’s best that you don’t try at all.

Adding pictures and videos on your website increases your clients and generates more leads.

3) Know How To Negotiate:

The best thing which I have heard in a long time is that people who hire real estate agents for purchase are satisfied with them most of the time and would recommend the same to the others as per the research conducted by Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. If your negotiation skills are high, you might be able to get more customers than your counterparts. The art of selling is something what every agent should learn and understand.

If you are a customer, I’m pretty sure that your eyes and ears are always open for the next big seasonal sale of the year. The discounts, deals and cash-back promotions just make you want to spend all your savings on that particular day. Similar to customers, business owners also wait for such seasonal sales so they can also see their sales make new records.

However, do you really think that selling a product on a 50% off sale can get you high profits? To be honest, all we see on the latest ecommerce news that hits the charts is billions of dollars of sales. Like the Alibaba’s Singles’ Day Shopping Festival crossed $25 billion. Have you ever thought how much profit they actually made out of the $25 billion sales?

According to a survey conducted by CNBC with 350 global retailers, an ecommerce website is only making a profit of 10%. After deducting high parcel refusals, shipping costs and labor wages, a profit margin of 10% doesn’t seem enough to absorb the additional discounts that you offer. After evaluating all the numbers, it looks more like an ecommerce marketing tactic to simply generate more traffic. Without any doubt, this method is considered pretty good to attract new customers, and sometimes it could even produce a short-term loss. However, in the long-term with a higher rate of client retention, you may experience a significant rise in your annual ROI.

Having that said, let's take a look at how all stakeholders benefit from these so-called ‘seasonal sales.’

1. Retailers

Many retailers actually do make good profits in seasonal sales with the help of grey tactics that display fake prices. They simply increase the original prices of their products to show more significant cuts to their customers. Apart from that, many even design the original prices in such a way that the discounts are already built-in.

2. Shipping Companies

Probably, shipping companies that transport the products from seller to buyer are the ones that gain the most out of these sales. Though it increases their workload a lot, they simply love it. Apart from that, now many shipping companies have also started helping shoppers purchase products from ecommerce websites that don’t offer to ship in their region. These emerging shipping companies are reliable and affordable for customers. Here are a few shipping companies that serve this purpose.

• BUY&SHIP (Provide a service to people of Southeast Asia to shop internationally)


• Tenso Japan (Helps customers purchase products from various Japanese websites)


• Peeka (Provide assistance to people who wish to buy products from China)

3. Ecommerce Platforms

Are you familiar with some of the best ecommerce platforms? If not, they are the ones that have provided many ecommerce businesses the opportunity to become recognized in the first place. Wondering how they benefit? To be precise, ecommerce platforms charge a commission on every sale you make through them. They don’t care about your profit margin, as their entire interest is in your sales volume. The more you sell, the more they earn. Some of the best ecommerce platforms in the world are,

• Amazon


• BestBuy


• Lazada


• TaoBao

4. Customers

With all the other stakeholders winning with their nature of business, customers simply love these sales. Even though the chances are that many companies use grey tactics to sell their products, you can still manage to get your hands on some of the best deals in town. You can benefit from those businesses that use these seasonal sales as an ecommerce marketing tactic that doesn’t focus on the profits.

It’s better to purchase products from websites that you regularly visit and buy from. That way, you’ll be familiar with the actual prices of the products you plan on buying when the time comes. If you go for new websites, the risk of getting fooled will always prevail.

Wrap Up

For years many people thought that ecommerce giants are making billions of dollars from seasonal sales like Christmas, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. However, with all the research, this myth just had to be buried. If you think these websites are giving you a favor, or they’re doing it for the spirit of the season, wrong again.

The primary reason behind these sales is marketing and brand awareness. Go back a decade, and you may not even consider buying from Amazon. However, with various digital marketing techniques and trends, online stores have turned out to rule the industry. In fact, they have caused many big companies like Blockbuster and Toy R Us to run out of business. Experts believe that the online market still has much more potential to grow in the years to come. However, there are still many people who aren’t comfortable in shopping online. We’ll just have to wait and see if new records are made this year or not.

The retail industry is profoundly affected by the technological development that’s leading businesses to stop trading in traditional ways. Many top online companies have caused some of the best retail companies to close down their stores, change their way of business and in some cases even go bankrupt. Consumers now prefer shopping online since it’s a more straightforward method and you get more products to choose from. However, even after putting aside all the things that are damaging your retail sales, a sign of hope to rebuild, reimagine and reconquer the market has been seen.

These certain retail industry trends are expected to bring your retail business back in the race and create high-quality products that win back all your lost customers.

Technology Will Replace Your Workers

Chances are you are probably going to replace most of your human workers with robots. Though this may sound a bit costly and wrong, you have to consider the increase in quality and efficiency that you’ll experience. On the other hand, technology also helps you to achieve economies of scale within your business. Your average cost will eventually fall in the long run.

This basically happens as robots are considered more focused and free from emotional factors that affect their performance. You can program robots to pull-off sales, answer customer queries and even enhance your quantity and quality of production. In addition, humans usually get bored from doing a repetitive task every single day and eventually lose efficiency in it. You can tackle this problem with machines that`ll maintain their performance regardless of the hours you put them to work.

Ecommerce Will Run Many Retail Companies Out of Business

If we take a close look at the current condition of the market, retail sales are actually falling. In fact, experts believe that around 15% of all the malls will officially close down due to lack of consumers. The benefits of ecommerce are apparently pulling customers. However, apart from creating websites themselves, retail businesses haven’t experimented enough to tackle the online trend.

There are a few businesses that have used their websites to convince customers to visit their outlets through the click and collect option. Burberry is a retail brand that has adopted this method and has kept its outlets operational. Retail businesses need to take similar steps. Enhance customer experience with better attractions, customer service and live demonstration of your products. One thing that ecommerce firms can’t beat retail businesses at is a live experience of the product. Capitalize on this factor and focus on targeting your audience with this initiative.

Businesses Will Copy Your Products to Sell Online

You can’t stop people from producing similar products to sell on their website. Copying of products has been going on for centuries now. However, one thing that you could do is remodel your business. Come up with a unique idea and hit the market with a new face. You can’t expect to sell the same thing throughout your life. Invest in research and development to create new and unique products. By the time your competitors finish creating similar products you`ll probably be done sweeping all the customers.

Consumers Are Becoming More Health Conscious

There was a time when you could run your business without telling the world how you create your products. You may be the most honest person, but not all are like you. Over the years, the government has established many agencies to evaluate how business owners are producing their products. Such agencies operate in their particular industries. If found using any illegal way or manufacturing products, it could lead you to hefty fines and in some cases time behind bars.

You could use this in your favor by being honest with your customers. Provide them with all your secrets so that they can trust you and your products with their eyes closed.  

Social Media, The Key Digital Marketing Channel

If you're still focusing on investing in traditional marketing techniques, you’re falling behind. Facebook live stories, Instagram stories, Snapchat stories are currently the most vital piece of content you can find. This clearly indicates that people around the world are more focused on social networks. Social media marketing is a great retail management solution that’ll help you get noticed in the digital world. All you have to do is maintain a company profile and update it with useful content or product ads.

Wrap Up

Do you keep track of all the retail industry news? Is not, it won’t take long for your business to end up in the list of shutdowns for the year. By looking at the retail industry news, you understand how the world is changing, and the industry is falling. However, you can change that by taking the first steps in capitalizing on the retail industry trends listed above. Bring these changes to your business and experience a substantial rise in your retail sales.