Modern Consumer’s Buying Behavior Has Changed: Has Your Marketing?

5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … Skip Ad > >

I so hate this drill, especially when I hop on to YouTube to watch a Tom Cruise video. I literally despise these pre-roll ads. These ads are so annoyingly right in my face.

I didn’t log in to YouTube to watch a father scolding his son for losing his laptop and then the son buying a refurbished laptop from a popular ecommerce website (Ad Name: “As Good as New”). Though I’m an online shopaholic but at my own convenience and desired time. I mean I don’t love that shopping portal enough to come in between Tom Cruise (virtually) and me and hamper my video-watching experience like that.

I hate such brands that do NOT seek my permission and expose me to their marketing messages hundred times a day. This triggers a barrage of questions in my mind about their marketing strategy (and their marketers in particular!).

I feel so fortunate as a marketer in my career to have seen traditional marketing getting redundant and less effective in the last decade and subsequently wiped out by permission-based marketing in last 2-3 years. According to an Adobe study, marketing has changed more in the last 2 years than in the last 50 years.

As marketers, we need to acknowledge and respect the fact that with technology adoption gaining pace with each passing day, people are are getting better at blocking out these interruptions.

• TV ads…We’ve TiVO/DVRs to skip advertisements. I so love Netflix’s House of Cards, free of advertising.
• Radio ads…Users have XM/Sirius Radio/Pandora/Spotify to cut their advertising reach
• Unsolicited (cold calls)…Fortunately, we’ve national Do Not Call Registry.
• Spammy emails ….I routinely employ spam filters.

As a matter of fact, a large number of organizations are still not convinced about the merits of permission-based marketing for two reasons:

• Their otherwise expensive outbound methods have fetched results for them so far. So new approach means new risk to revenues. And, not many are risk takers.
• Permission-based marketing requires investment in terms of resources, effort, time and money. And, most of all, PATIENCE for long-term rewards.

So, such brands resort to “spray and pray approach” and thus still do “batch and blast” email campaigns and pray for leads online. And when the results do not pour in, it feels like as depicted in the picture below.

I love this brilliant quote from Dharmesh Shah, cofounder HubSpot

“Market unto others as they would market unto you” –@dharmesh#INBOUND15

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) September 9, 2015

The bottom line is that people are now wary of traditional outbound marketing messages and adept at blocking outbound marketers out. Netizens now learn about and shop from brands in a new way – through search engines, blogosphere and social media sites.

To be successful in today’s times, we need to match our marketing mannerisms to the way our prospects gather information and shop for our products.

How?

Generate leads through #Inbound marketing and target customers with relevance marketing.

Options for marketers:

Marketers either need to adapt to the changing shopping behavior of customers or risk extinction. Only mantra for success: GO #inbound

— Raina (@rainamtrivedi) October 24, 2015

Top 3 Personalization Strategies for Non-Retail Applications

2014 was an incredibly exciting year for mobile apps. With a huge advantage of personalization that mobile apps offer over mobile websites, even the most well-known  brick-and-mortar stores have geared their attention to developing more mobile applications in 2015. Using these apps, these stores successfully leverage proximity functions like geolocation, push notifications, etc.  to deliver mesmerising personalized experiences to shoppers, who so obsessively clutch their smartphones these days.

Many personalization platforms today emphasize primarily on retail mobile apps. But non-retail mobile apps can also keep their user community engaged. Read this post further to explore the different personalization strategies that work greatly for non-retail apps.

Many developers feel reluctant to dive into creating apps for non-retail businesses fearing from the exercise of collecting humongous customer data and developing big algorithms. Nevertheless, it’s a myth that we will debunk in this post.

Here are the top 3 personalization strategies for non-retail content.

1. Geolocation content

This is one of the great ways to personalize content. As majority of smartphones have in-built geolocation features, you can easily target users with newsfeed and even connect them with other users in proximity with same interests. One of the brilliant examples to quote here is that of iBeacon that enables mobile apps with its Bluetooth Low Energy technology to understand the location well and deliver relevant and contextual content to user based on location.

2. Recommendations

The better you understand a customer, the better and more educated recommendations, you can offer to your customers/online store visitors. You can extract useful information from your customers during the sign up process or even later interactions with your website. You can use this information for effective customer profiling when they start downloading and using your mobile app. You can track your customers across:

• User sign up process
• Browsing history
• User generated content like tweets, comments, favorites, likes, etc.
• User preferences
• Ratings and reviews

Once you’ve these data points, you can design a better user experience for your customers. Using the user feedback when they browse through your mobile app, you can refine your app further.

3. UGC

Often, etailers commit the blooper of looking upon personalization as a duty to deliver user experience. Personalization also entails the content and contribution of users to shopping environment. While you take all the necessary steps to offer personalization such as collecting customer data, monitoring their interactions with your ecommerce website and accordingly offer relevant and contextual product recommendations to them. You can let users contribute to your personalization strategy through a mobile application. Your private labelled application can serve as a powerful platform for users to connect and engage with your brand, pitch their opinion and experience. This will empower your users to generate their own personalized content and experience.

Let’s take the example of Gaana.com app, a beautifully designed mobile application that makes it easy for users to discover music from the best collection of national and international playlists. Here users take the music listening experience to a new level by creating/modifying playlists depending on their genres/moods.

Such mobile apps enable users to feel valued and ask for their contribution to make it more interesting a platform to visit and revisit to generate more user generated content and get their varied needs addresses on the online platform. It offers them highly personalized experiences.

Enterprise Mobility: Is it a Winning Proposition in 2015?

For years, enterprise mobility was related to email, some flashy apps and corporate-issued devices. And during this phase, most organizations considered mobile as simply an extension of the desktop. But now with corporate mobility momentum picking up, companies are beginning to realize the potential of mobile more strategically by understanding varied business contexts and embracing a persona-guided approach. This evolved mobile approach addresses the needs of all user profiles effectively inside (better employee productivity) and outside (better customer engagement) the organization.

Let’s have a look at what Mary Meeker (also dubbed as the “Queen of the Net”) has to say about mobile internet usage. As per her recent predictions, mobile internet usage is picking up noticeably faster than desktop internet usage did and by 2015, “more users will connect to the internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” Businesses that will catch up on this trend will win, and those that overlook it will lose.

Mobility isn’t just an add-on capability; it’s much more than that. It encompasses apps, and devices, software platforms, architectures and databases. As an enterprise, you can’t continue with your piecemeal methodology for managing the mobile environment any longer. Since every persona (employees, customers and partners) represents a unique context, the mobility needs are diverse.

The IBM survey of 600 companies across 29 countries unravels an astonishing fact – only 50% of the companies (with more than $500 million in annual revenues) have comprehensive, strong mobile strategies in place to address the challenge of mobility implementation and leverage mobile opportunities fully. Enterprises, should, therefore start looking at mobility through a persona-centric lens and adopt a holistic mobile business model to drive high performance and gain competitive advantage.

Out with the Old

Mobile revolution has completely gripped the IT landscape and blended into nearly every aspect of your business. This ubiquity of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices and consumerization of IT have urged enterprises to adapt to a dynamic environment in which they need to support employees, customers and partners – all with unique set of mobile requirements. Hence, it’s critical for organizations to incorporate all key drivers of mobility into their strategy to optimize the required business functions and applications.

Enterprise (B2B and B2E) vs. Consumer mobile applications

Technology and market forces are the two important factors that drive enterprise mobility. With enterprise mobility focusing on front-user interfacing apps, many brands have switched on from traditional emailing to addressing the end user’s mobility needs with persona-based mobility solutions.

With multiple mobile personas for enterprises to handle, enterprises have a gargantuan task of crafting mobile strategies and applications for different platforms and programming languages.  44% of U.S. enterprises are mainly focused on building mobile applications for native devices (e.g., iOS, Android, Microsoft), and 39% that are focused on mobile web development.

To address the mobility needs of each persona, enterprises need to understand the various user profiles and their relationships and behaviors w.r.t different business processes (like talent management, sales, delivery, etc.) and subsets. There is a huge difference in developing and deploying mobile capabilities for enterprise-based and consumer-based relationships.

 

 

 

 

 

Enterprise Mobile Applications

• Not commonly found in app stores; most enterprises get their own apps built
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Utilitarian; simplify the business processes
• Loaded with ultimate security features (passwords, encryption/decryption, MDM)
• Native or cross platform (facilitating BYOD) compatible mobile apps
• Focus on boosting employee collaboration and productivity, targeted marketing
• g., CRM apps, marketing and analytic apps, sales force automation, collaboration apps, technical computing apps, payroll apps, etc.

Consumer Mobile Applications

• Easily available in app stores
• Built to run on all platforms -Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry
• Packed with emotional designs to attract customers
• Loaded with generic functions and data
• Standalone app or integrated to a backend
• g., Social-based applications, combined mobility applications, geo-mapping services, edutainment apps, mobile wallet, etc.

The Time to Tap the Power of Personalization is now!

As fast as the modern retail environment continues to advance, the competition is getting really tougher. The multiple device types and screen sizes customers use to shop online add to this complexity even further. This has posed some intense challenges in front of e-sellers to adapt to the changing customer shopping behavior and engage with them across this myriad range of omni channels. Almost 200 million US consumers shop online now; an increase in 20% in just half a decade.

Now the question is – should emerchants like you to get personal with customers? The answer is – it’s time to get started right away! Many online retailers have witnessed a significant spike in metrics after they personalized shopping experiences for customers they serve. According to Forrester, personalization is now the top priority for 55% of retailers. Here are the some supporting statistics to understand how customer behavior has fueled this trend:

• 59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on a personalized online retail store.
• 56% are more likely to visit again the same retail store.
• 40% indicate they buy more from retailers, who personalize the shopping experience.
• 51% are willing to share data to receive a better shopping experience.

(Source: http://tinyurl.com/lge3kck)

Personalization in ecommerce store can be equated with a customer’s interaction with the sales staff in store. On repeat visits, the sales executive might know and understand your shopping preferences well, and can help you with your shopping next time you visit the store or even pre-emptively notify you of the discounts or new arrivals. This creates a long-lasting shopping experience in your mind.

Replicating this kind of memorable shopping experience forms the core of personalization in an ecommerce store. This is significant for both – the retailer and the customer. However, personalization can be successfully accomplished only by those e-sellers, who can skillfully use personalization algorithms to their advantage.

Retailers can segregate their personalization plan into different phases that include:

• Navigational personalization
• Customer-specific personalization
• Personalization using third-party data
• Predictive personalization
• Catering to a segment of one

(Source:http://tinyurl.com/opk44m9)

Retailers can practice personalization everywhere across the complete spectrum of customer’s shopping journey:

• Email messaging
• Website messaging
• Social media messaging
• Mobile marketing
• Packaging
• Customer support, etc.

As customers’ choices vary, each ecommerce store aspires to connect and engage with every customer individually by using recommendation tools or custom product-building tools. Modern retailer see personalization as the key to unlocking the door to a shopping experience that customers can remember and cherish, and maximizing ROIs for retailers and improving business performance manifold.

2014 Rings in. Best Apps to help you keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year to all!

It’s 2014 in India and many other places on the “other side” of the International Date Line.

As the New Day and New Year dawn around the world, it’s time for all desk-bound keyboard-toilers (including me!), to draw up our list of resolutions that will make 2014 our best year ever.

I know, I know… we’re terrible at keeping New Year’s resolutions. Shocker! For years in a row, only a few resolutions on the entire list barely last for more than a week. Let’s embrace technology to hold our resolutions together longer. Here are some quick-hit resolutions and cool apps that we can check off in 2014:

# Keep the Weight Off

Eat wise, drop a size. All diet plans, nutritionist’s advice boil down to the same thing: Eat right and exercise well. Meet only your real calorific needs. Check your calories intake and burn out rate. So here are a couple of the obligatory weight loss apps of the bunch – Lose It! from FitNow (free for iOS and Android; for more granularity, “premium” extras available for $40/year), Eat This, Not That! (free app) and Calorie Counter  from MyNetDiary ($3.99).

# Get Organized 

There ought to be a place for everything, and everything in its place since it saves you ideas and time to boost your productivity. Try out these apps for organizing your day-to-day life better – Evernote (an easy-to-use, free app that allows you to take notes, save photos, make to-do lists, record voice reminders – everything on the go; available on iOS, Android, Blackberry). Another app is Things. Available on the Mac App store, Things is an easy-to-use task manager that segments your projects into different milestones, lets you schedule the tasks and puts forth the checklist of the top priority tasks. Things syncs across all your Apple devices and helps you become more efficient as you keep accomplish your goals that come more naturally – one to-do at a time.

# Scale Greater Career Heights

Your job sucks. So does your boss. Fret not! 2014 might be a turning point in your career. Here’s the savior app – Job Search by Indeed. This is a free app available on iOS and Android. As a highest rated tool on Apple’s and Google’s app stores, Job Search helps you scour through its 15 millions+ job database, and helps you meet potential employers in just a few taps on your smartphone screen. You can sort the jobs by relevance or date, GPS-related location, etc. You can also personalize your account to display only the jobs from your preferred employers or companies.

# Manage your Finances

Get your personal finances in order. Mint’s the best app, hands down! Available for free on iOS and Android, Mint is an award-winning finance app with rave reviews on the App stores. Considered as the finest budgeting app, Mint allows you to budget, monitor and manage your money from a single interface. You can open an account and link it to your bank, credit, loan and retirement accounts. This app will then auto-categorize transactions) and then auto-collate all information in easy-to-digest graphical representations. It’s indeed a safe and reliable tool to keep your personal finances organized.

I know sticking to these goals can be hard to accomplish but hopefully your iOS, Android or tablet will empower you this year to keep these New Year resolutions. With this information handy, it’s time to mentally gird yourself to keep the New Year Resolutions in 2014.  I’d love to hear your New Year resolutions in the comments box below.

I wish you all a blissful year ahead.

Welcome Mobile Device Management: Fortified Security Processes in Place

As our on-the-go, internet-dependent lifestyles become more technologically advanced with each passing day, the vulnerability to mobile threats, especially the enterprise mobile device security threats, is on the increase.

Mobile Revolution

With the wireless mobile technology getting hugely exploited by the enterprises, the immediate need to shield our mobile devices becomes paramount. The management and protection of multiple mobile devices in corporate environment has surfaced as a gargantuan challenge. The situation gets magnified with the everyday launch of more and more sophisticated mobile devices in the key Indian market sector.

As per Forrester Research report, consumerization of IT or the bring-your-own-devices (BYODs) phenomenon fueled by tablets & employee-owned devices are debilitating Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals’ existing mobile strategies, tools and people.This leads to 180-degree turn in expectations from IT security operations, which marks an increased importance to be placed on the adoption of new tools and technologies to support multiple mobile applications, platforms, operating systems and architectures.

Mobile Device Management – Now a part of security and defense mechanism strategies of most enterprises

Today, most enterprises are toiling hard to redefine their security and defense mechanisms so as to zealously guard the integrity and smallest details of corporate data across a broad range ofmobile devices, form factors and platforms like iPhones, tablets, Android and Windows devices.

However, coming up with an effective and efficient enterprise mobile device management (MDM) strategy is not a cakewalk. There are some enormous challenges that come into the picture. Let us take a tour.

• The gigantic challenge of monitoring the varyingly distributed mobile workforce
• Towering cost and dearth of time to manage full mobile life cycle and deploy an on-premise solution
• Absolute controlled usage of mobile applications for maintaining corporate security and compliance
• The multifarious task of installing and updating corporate applications remotely.
• And many more!

How to combat these seemingly super-colossal challenges?

Well, it’s imperative for organizations to choose Mobile Device Management (MDM) software well-tailored to suit their business needs. A good MDM solution enables the enterprise to protect, track and support corporate mobile devices across varied mobile operators and platforms.

While the market is mushroomed with ample MDM solutions, a thoughtful analysis can empower the organization with the apt MDM solutions that encompasses all features to address their present and future corporate security needs.

It’s time to sit back and enjoy foolproof enterprise security and compliance with a good Enterprise Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution.

Say “Hello” to Self-paced Online Employee Training!

It’s no magic wand. Yet, it’s an effective remedy to treat the organization ailment of employee plateauing. Complacent employees can plague the work environment. Hence, it becomes imperative to give aimlessly saturated employees the managerial medication of online employee training. 

In today’s scenario when business dynamics are getting more radical and complex and racing against time, it becomes paramount to yank your employees out of their stupor since this employee burnout can act as speedbreaker(s) to the growth of your business. You cannot afford to overlook your employees’ training and development aspect any longer.

A recent study suggests that many SMBs/SMEs and even some Big Daddies in the corporate world have turned to fully customized online employee training programs that are tailor made to suit the needs of their organizations.
Establishing their supremacy over traditional classroom-based training, these online software courses have successfully managed to ensnarl the learner’s interest.

How?

Thought-stirring and interactive real-world scenarios, case studies etc. – tap the attention of employees, and make this employee training method an attractive method for online personal training.

It’s flexible and cost-effective. Self-paced online employee training programs can seamlessly slip into your chock-a- block work schedules and ensure continual delivery of instructions across multi-national, multi-lingual organization(s).

Do you know that you are doing your bit for the environment if you resort to online employee training? Yes! It’s true. You can now do away with the need of traveling and spending piles of papers in conducting classroom employee training otherwise.

Now that you’ve a fair idea about this unique method of training your employees, it must have kindled your excitement to know more about the web-based tools that would help you in accomplishing this objective. Well, we recommend you to use tools like HumaNext, MindLeaders etc.

The 5 Coolest Apps for Organizing Your Business

With your day-to-day life stacked with countless tasks and big aspirations to be a forerunner in the corporate marathon, it’s paramount that your business stays organized. We’ve compiled for you a great list of apps that would help you streamline your business to unimaginable degrees.

Here are a few of them.

Springnote

Springnote is an excellent notetaking and collaboration free web app. It offers a rich repository of features like 2 GB file storage, seamless linking, WYSIWYG editor, Open API, OpenID Authentication, XHTML, dashboard and notebook creation, page hierarchy system etc.

So if you ever have ideas springing up in your  mind, get started with building a notebook for organizing your thoughts, projects, or files using Springnote, your new buddy that brings you an easy and intuitive user experience.

 Needtomeet

If you want to schedule a meeting in a few simple clicks, Needtomeet is the right app for you. This free online meeting scheduling app offers you a user-friendly calendar interface that empowers you and your team to indicate your respective availabilities and pick a date and time that’s best for everyone.

This helpful app can be used by even the non-techies with great ease to schedule once-off or recurring meetings. It provides you with neatly formatted email options with links. So no more writing emails, no more prodding your phones. Use Needtomeet and get your colleagues’ availability at a glance – with no fuss.

Present.ly

An award-winning app (Webware 100 Editors’ Choice award), Present.ly keeps your employees connected and boosts the team’s productivity considerably. This extremely lightweight micro-blogging platform enables your team members to post their status updates, communicate with each other (privately or in the public feed), share ideas and files etc – all in real time.

An enterprise collaboration and communication solution, Present.ly gives your team the freedom to connect in secure software playfield. Get started with Present.ly right away!

Harvest

A time tracking and online invoicing app, Harvest organizes your business by easily creating project estimates and budgets, tracking time, generating invoices  (both  online and print) and print) and richly formatted visual reports – all from a simple user interface.

You can have a compelling glance at the allocation of your organization’s resources through pictorial depictions in visual reports created by this app. Harvest tracks the number of billable hours by its gorgeous flip clock, and thus it helps you bill your clients online with great ease and collect the payments quickly and safely. You can also upload the pictures of the receipts so as to maintain your records.

HassleMe

If you suffer from lousy memory and often forget to attend some significant tasks on your platter, then HassleMe is apt for you. You can use it as your personal nag that would give you the much needed dose of swift kicks in the form of frequent but friendly reminders.

Keeping you always on your toes, HassleMe enables you to set up the type and frequency of reminders. This free app is quite easy to use that nags you at random times via email.

Here is my list of 5 great, must-have apps to organize and optimize your business. Got your favourites? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

After You, Next One to go Social…Weather?

I despise the weather that Delhi/NCR is donning these days. I’m its poor victim. Yearning for the day, when I’d get rid of this prolonged cold & coughattack that I caught almost a fortnight back.

Social Weather: Do you wanna be friends with?

Weather is one of the most downloaded mobile application category. It is indeed one of the most prominent social topics today. Poor weather! Like cricket, it’s also subjected to the disaster of garnering anyone’s and everyone’s opinion and predictions about it. Gone are the days, when we were couch potatoes sitting in front of the giant TV screens with our eyes quite wide open only to know the weather forecasts on varied traditional news channels.

Times changed, and so did the avenues to gather news bits about weather-related events. Thanks to real-time weather source, Metwit. It’s a great destination to know all about Weather, which has now gone ‘Social’.

Curious to know about ‘Social Weather?’ Well, it’s our new emotional companion.  It’s the result of three-month long start-up acceleration program by one of the key members of the Techstars network–SeedStartup. This exciting iPhone application is as dynamic as today’s weather conditions. The beta website is also up and running. To top it all, it’s undergoing the continual process of evolution. You and I can post, tag or share the weather information, which instantly gets broadcasted on Google Maps through text and funny icon sets. Social weather gives you the freedom of personalizing your own weather expression. It helps you showcase your weather personality. And, it’s dearly emotional.

Social weather has given weather a complete overhaul. Weather is now more exhilarating and relevant. Through Metwit, social weather now brings together all like-minded weather aficionados on a common platform. You can share exciting information about the locations you love. Inclusive of rich social media plug-ins and features, Metwit is certainly a fun weather destination to be at. It’s a perfect resource to satiate your weather-related queries, and flaunt your weather expression.

So, it’s time for you to shake hands with this new companion & yeah, don’t forget to carry your raincoat if Metwit has warned you. After all, it’s your reliable weather companion.