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October product updates

October was a month of lots of small improvements, bug fixes and stuff to increase sales for our happy clients.

What we’ve did in October.

use your own domain for push notifications (you need to have https on your website)
recurring push including product recommendations
mix algorithms for facebook share
catalog discovery.
open cart integration (modules for all versions)
subscribing back users who previously clicked SPAM or hardbounced is not possible anymore.
our 5 predefined segments are added to all accounts (evolution is enabled and changes for those segments are not available). You can copy them are change conditions
better overview of user reports, to also include total values for email and push subscribers
agencies are now able to customize billing per client, change color theme and a few more tweaks

Black Friday Step by Step – Learn how to prepare your Online Shop

If you have not already started, it’s time to get ready for Black Friday, the world’s largest sales campaign.
The phenomenon has grown year by year and the sales generated by Black Friday have increased steadily, reaching about $3 billion in 2016.

Whether it is the first Black Friday you organize or not, we have prepared a guide through which we share our experience: how to prepare yourself starting from planning your campaign to delivering products to customers.

When does Black Friday start?

The rule that sets the day for the Black Friday campaign is simple: usually the last Friday of November. In 2017 Black Friday will be organized on 27

BLACK FRIDAY IS A COLLECTIVE CAMPAIGN
Black Friday is a collective campaign, so do not run the campaign a different day than other stores. There is a risk of losing the start, and buyers will spend their money in other stores.

Start early, don’t go with the last minute strategy

The first and most important rule is to not set up the campaign the last minute. You will not have time to announce your customers, stock availability, talk to suppliers, marketing campaigns, and so on, and this will lead to a failed Black Friday campaign.

BLACK FRIDAY CALENDAR:

Analysis and documentation;
Establishing physical stocks and suppliers – discussing discounts and product availability;
Preparing the necessary materials (banners, covers, text content, video content, etc.) and setting up promotion channels;
Preparing the landing page and the store;
Campaign marketing;
Black Friday: Campaign unfolding;
Analyze your campaign results (expect to see returns);

If you can not participate in the Black Friday campaign, there is no problem. You can prepare better for the following campaigns, such as Cyber Monday or Christmas.

Tell your customers in advance that you will have a Black Friday

Your customers will need to know that your store will participate in the campaign. Announce them 1-2 weeks in advance, using all of the resources you have.
Even more, in addition to telling them about the campaign, offer them a “sneak peek” with some of the products you will have on discount on that day. This makes them curious and makes them look forward to when your campaigns starts.

EMAIL MARKETING
Your newsletter subscribers are one of the cheapest and most effective resources you can call. Subscribers already know you and probably already have purchased from your store, so do not hesitate to let them know and send them a newsletter.

Announce that you are doing a Black Friday campaign;
Send a reminder one day prior;
Exclusive discounts for subscribers to the newsletter;
Give them a sneak peek with some of the campaign products;
Emails for abandoned baskets during the campaign.

BANNERE ON SITE

Display banners in the campaign promotion areas available in your store, such as: homepage, category, menu, sticky bar or product page.

SOCIAL MEDIA
Are you proud of the number of Facebook fans, followers on Twitter, Instagram or other social networks? Do not forget to tell them about the campaign you will be doing.

RETARGETING
Use retargeting to track your customers who visited the store and let them know that soon you will have great Black Friday discounts. Thus, you will bring them back to your store on that day.

BLOGGING

Do not forget to go to the blogs you are working with to let your readers know about the campaign and the great discounts you’ll have on Black Friday.

SMS MARKETING

You can run an SMS campaign to let your most active customers know about Black Friday. It is not necessary to let everyone know if the dedicated budget will limit you.

PAY PER CLICK

If the budget allows you, we also recommend that you use campaigns in Google Adwords as a way of communicating the discounts you are about to offer. Keep in mind, however, that because of the popularity of the season you will have to bid a bit more aggressively than usual for your chosen keywords.

POST ON DEDICATED SITES

With this phenomenon there have also been developed sites dedicated to it. Do not hesitate to register your store to announce your participation.

Keep an eye on the competition before Black Friday

Keep an eye on the competition (we all do it) because it will help you gather new ideas and you can learn from the mistakes that other stores can make. So, you can see the missing points in your competition strategy and integrate them into your Black Friday campaign.

The easiest way to monitor your competition is to subscribe to their newsletters and track them on social networks. Study what type of emails they send to their clients and what kind of public content they have in the online environment.

If your competition is the big online retailers, do not be discouraged by them. If you are creative, you can make a successful Black Friday campaign with 10 products, so take full advantage of this opportunity.
Another way to keep an eye on the competiotion is to use Visual Ping or Google Alerts.

Ensure your stocks and suppliers

Black Friday gives you the chance to get rid of physical stocks faster or to reach a higher turnover target for suppliers. You can increase your sales on certain categories, launch new products, or grow your customer base.

Make sure you have enough stock and start preparing them early. At the same time, discuss and negotiate with your suppliers early on to ensure that you do not run out of stock in the early hours. One of the worst things that can happen during such a campaign is to sell faster than you planned and not meeting your customers’ demands.

Create a landing page dedicated to the campaign

On that day, replace your homepage with a landing page for the campaign. Do not let the customer look for discounts through the thousands of products you’ve grouped into dozens of categories. He will get bored and will go to another site, most likely to your competition.
Show the stock status you have available and also the “out of stock” badge if you no longer have stock on certain products.

MOBILE FRIENDLY

Being mobile is no longer an option, because mobile traffic and conversions are on the rise. So your landing page will have to be 100% responsive for all devices: laptop, desktop, tablet and mobile.

STABILITY

Make sure your landing page loads quickly and your server will have a 100% uptime. When customers access your store, you definitely do not want to be offline. On that day you will have a much higher traffic than usual.

NAVIGATION

Create an intuitive menu / navigation, because on that day everything will be done in an accelerated way. The customer will not have time to search too much among the tens or thousands of available products.

CHECKOUT CURSIV

The order flow must be smooth (without errors and without interruption of additional actions) with checkout as a guest (no account, as a visitor), for order placement efficiency.

SEO FOR BLACK FRIDAY

Do not forget about SEO, even if on that day SEO does not count as much and you will rely more on traffic from email marketing or pay per click. It will help you in future campaigns. So, when you create the landing page, use a structure like www.shop.com/black-friday in its URL in exchange for the structure of www.shop.com/black-friday-2017. This way, you’ll get permanent indexing and not targeting a specific year. Apply the same rule when it comes to titles or meta descriptions.

Keep it simple: the price

When it comes to Black Friday try not to complicate things with various types of promotions: bundles, gift products, loyalty points, etc. A customer who buys on that day is looking for one thing: the lowest price. That’s why all you have to do is to apply a discount as high as possible to your campaign products.

QUALITY IN QUANTITY DETERMINATION

Do not focus on the number of products with discounts offered in the campaign. If the discount is not quite attractive to the customer, and you’ve listed a large number of products with insignificant discounts, customers might not be able to reach the attractive offers you have and you might not have as many sales as you wanted.

Payment methods available to the customer

Make sure all of your customers can make purchases using any of the payment methods:

Cash on delivery – surely the cash on delivery will be the most used payment method;
Card payment – a way of payment that grows and gains confidence from year to year;
Interest-free payment – is a payment method that you can not ignore especially when selling high-value products such as home appliances. It is preferable that the number of installments be as high as possible (for example, 12 installments are sufficient);
Payment order (for companies) – this part will be a little more difficult to manage, due to the agitation and fast pace of things going on that day, both for order management and for the relationship with related services.

Prepare your staff for Black Friday

Depending on the size of your store, make sure you have the minimum staff required to handle the volume of requests. You will be faced with a much larger volume of work than on a normal day and, of course, there may be problems. That is why you should consider increasing the work schedule for that day.

INTEGRETE A LIVECHAT

Livechat offers the customer the opportunity to quickly get in touch with your store’s staff. If a customer can not get the information or response he needs quickly enough, he will leave the site without buying, which you certainly do not want.

Make sure the products arrive on time

We know that parcel delivery does not entirely depend on you, but try to make sure that they will arrive in a decent time. Customers are aware that the Black Friday order will not arrive on the 2nd day, but it is not good for them to wait a month to get what they ordered.
If you work with more couriers, choose the courier that you’ve worked with best and that has met your needs and your customers’.

FREE SHIPPING ?

If profit margins allow you, offer customers free shipping on all orders of the day and you will have an edge over your competition.
According to Kissmetrics, free shipping can increase your sales by up to 30% if you apply it correctly.

Monitor your store permanently

Make sure your eCommerce platform provider will provide you with the necessary technical support throughout the campaign so that if you encounter a problem, do not be offline too long.
Track your store permanently with Google Analytics (real time) and report any issues as soon as you notice them.

Returns will be inevitable

Do not underestimate the number of returns you will have on products ordered by customers because they will be more than usual. It happens that some customers place orders with the same products in several online stores and keep those with the highest discount or those that are delivered in a timely manner.

Make your customers loyal

Black Friday offers you the opportunity to build relationships and to make your clients more at ease. That’s why you can offer them:

Vouchers or promotional codes for future orders;
Points of fidelity to use in the future;
Free samples, if you are talking about cosmetics or other types of products for which there are samples;
Congratulations or personalized messages on shipped packages;

Analyze your results

After each campaign that you run for your online store, you should do an analysis of the results. Use all of the tracking tools you have: Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, internal reports, etc.
Do not rush, wait for the returns, because you have to take them into consideration as well.
This analysis helps you see which marketing channels worked, where you went wrong, where you scored well, to be more prepared for the next Black Friday.

8 Ideas for Effective Emailing For E-commerce

If you are already using “Set and Forget” Email Automations, you need to know that there are some other very effective strategies along with them.

One of the reasons having a solid email marketing automation strategy in place is valuable for online businesses is that much of the top revenue is added without additional work. After initial setup everything runs by itself and just brings money.
You do need to optimize them over time – however after implementing the main 10-20 automations they’ll keep delivering you sales every day… forever.

But automations are only half the story when it comes to maximizing e-commerce revenue from email.
If you want to see 25 – 30%, or more, of your total total sales coming from email each month then you’ll likely need more than set and forget automations, powerful though they may be.

Email automations will often get you a 10-15% revenue increase, but to start pushing that to 25% mark you’ll need more tactics in your arsenal.

How to get to the next Level of email marketing?

The next level of email marketing implies two main parts:

email marketing automations
intelligent manual campaigns

The manual part is equally important with the automations. It’s easy to get lazy or just forgot that in addition with all email marketing automations, your email list is massively valuable when sending manually on regular basis.

An extra 10 to 15% in additional revenue is available on the table, on top of the top 15% you get from automations. Manual campaigns depend on each business, industry, target niche and so on.

For some businesses manual campaigns will be sent once per week or once per month. But for some it might work sending 2 or 3 per week, where most online stores fall, for their most engaged subscribers. Don’t send those emails to unengaged subscribers, it’s important !

The easiest way to go is to run promotions every time, hoping that people will bite and buy something and so on. But running promotions all the day is something that everybody is doing and has 2 negative effects:

your email list will shrink, customers will unsubscribe because of hard-selling techniques and promos
effectiveness is going to lose over time

What’s the solution for smart email marketing?

Maintaining a regular contact with the most engages subscribers using a balance of promotions, value-based emails, social-proof and branding.

Engaged subscribers want to hear from you, but don’t push the limit by constantly hard-selling them. This is the best way if you’re in a niche market, or in a market where all of your customers and prospects have something in common.

Ideas you can start using now

Here are some emails you can send regularly which are not just straight up discounts…

1. New products or exclusive items

Pretty self explanatory. Tell your customers about your new stuff first.

2. Presales

New product on the market? Tell everybody about release date, pre-sale registration or whatever else you’re doing. You might link the newsletter with a landing page to collect extra information about subscribers.

3. Blog posts

Publishing good blog content is helping SEO and usually brings extra free traffic on the long run. Is also going to help big your emailing. If you have something like a few new posts monthly, that’s a good reason to send them in the last week of the month. Just include title, a short introduction paragraph and maybe an image.

Lots of sales come from these emails, if you promote valuable blog posts that include links to your products or our product recommendations widgets.

4. Weekly Tip, Thought or Industry News

Something short and valuable to your market. For example if you sell beverages, maybe the new alcohol limit was increase. Or for food shops you might want to send recipes. A bite-sized piece of value or entertainment will give your customers the attention and value they are looking for and make you different from the competition.

5. Latest Customer Reviews/Photos

Hopefully you are already collecting customer reviews. Keep a note of the best reviews, and any pictures they send based on your orders. These are great to send out as lighthearted emails.

6. Product of the week/month

If you’re already using Vibetrace, this one can be automated. (actually you have 4 algorithms here: most viewed, most purchased, most wishlisted, most added to cart). But what about a product that you are proud of and want to show off?
If you want to run weekly promos, this is a good way to do it without discounting an entire category or everything. Give only this product with a discount or free shipping.

7. Company/Brand news

Is there anything noteworthy happening in your world in the last time? Maybe you’ve just made a new hire, you’re proud of a new accomplishment in number of orders/traffic, or you’ve just moved to a new office. Share with your customers! This also connects your business with them on a more personal level.

8. Seasonal events and key dates

Things like Mother’s/Children day which repeat every year or some once in a life-time events (solar eclipse!) can bring back some of the website visitors. It’s worth connecting the events with your business and your products (maybe you sell some crayons to draw a solar eclipse!).

Combination of all of the above

Of course it’s indicated that you mix campaign types and do whatever fits your case better. For example, let your subscribers know about an awesome new blog post you’ve just published, plus include a dynamic product block with bestsellers so far this month.

There are tons of potential variations, and you can be as aggressive or passive as you like in terms of how often you’re emailing, and what you’re actually sending. But always remember that sending too many emails is similar to spamming.

These are just a few ideas. There are lots more you can find.

Final thoughts

As you’re putting together individual emails like the ones above, it’s possible to feel that all the work is useless. Especially with the non-sales emails, that run counter to the business.

You may be thinking: “What’s the point of sending my blog posts/new employees information to my list?” But… if you’re consistent, then the cumulative effect does build up into a consistent revenue stream.

It’s reliable, you can control it, it’s cheap and it grows together with your list size.

August Updates

New design templates

If you use our interactions, email collectors or other onsite personalization message you’ll see those new elements in the gallery

Integration modules were updated.

If you use any of our Prestashop/Woocommerce/Magento modules please contact us to upgrade them

¿hablas español?

We’ve translated our dashboard to Spanish using machine translation! Because we believe in automation this is something we wanted to do using an automated service!

Why Personalization is Important for Marketing

In the fast-changing internet world, marketers need to constantly reinvent themselves to execute more effective campaigns. Most marketers are unanimous that personalization is the key to success. You need to infuse creativity into your personalization efforts to find long-term success.

We all receive a good amount of email spam every day. Plus, we see annoying banner ads on almost every website we visit. The audience today is bombarded constantly by businesses trying to hawk their products. This leads to oversaturation and consumers can get fed up and ignore all ads.

Therefore, marketers need to provide a different online experience by catering to the interests and passions of their target audience. You need to make the consumer feel connected with your brand and product. This can create an individual yet community feeling in them. So how do you personalize your marketing efforts? This article provides effective tips to help you.

Provide Relevant Content

To start, you need to define personalization properly. Don’t stop with merely addressing the reader by their first name in the email you send. Effective personalization occurs when you can make a content piece more helpful to a specific customer or prospect. You can do this by creating prospect- and customer-specific content collections, topic pages, and news feeds. Consumers won’t get fooled when you address them by their first name in your email as they know you haven’t typed the message personally. Therefore, personalization is not about using fancy automation software, it means offering relevant content.

Make the Customer Feel Special

In today’s high-tech world, high-touch is missing in most customer engagements. Consumers are greeted by an impersonal phone agent when they call for support. They are just an account number, or username and password to most businesses. Therefore, personalize your marketing as well as customer support efforts to make your customers feel special. Don’t treat them as just one among the crowd, but recognize their unique needs and wants. Consumers get turned off by mass marketing as they are constantly bombarded by ads everywhere. To stand out, personalize your messages to look more credible and get their attention.

For instance, businesses can hire social media experts who can connect with their audience on social networks. This type of personal engagement can make your brand look more authentic. Cater to the individual requirements of each of your customers to make them understand their voice is being heard and attended to.

Use Responsive Design

Make use of the best technology and software solutions to personalize your marketing. With their assistance, you can create dynamic and relevant content for each consumer. Now, you don’t have to spend time on individual campaigns. Instead, you can create a single landing page, email, and campaign that show up differently based on the prospect or customer who receives them.

Marketing personalization is not just about messaging. You can also utilize responsive design to make your website browsing experience more personal. For instance, you will be left behind if your website is not optimized for mobile devices. Make use of mobile-responsive templates and add mobile-friendly features such as click-to-call and swipe to increase your conversions.

In short, personalization means convenience. Customize your email and page for the consumer to make them feel your company is making the effort to know them personally. Today, you need not even hire a web developer to design your landing pages, web pages, blog posts, and emails. Simply subscribe to a quality marketing software solution such as HubSpot to get these benefits. The market abounds with other equally excellent choices so you can also scout around for a good HubSpot alternative.

Personalization Fetches Better Results

Personalize your emails to boost your open rates and click-through rates significantly. The internet is influencing consumer behavior and buying trends, and personalized marketing is the key to boosting your online store’s sales. Personalization stats show that 75% of customers prefer buying from a seller that knows their name and purchase history, and recommends products based on their previous purchases. All these findings indicate that undoubtedly personalization is the key to gaining loyal customers and boosting revenue.

Futuristic Trends

Business intelligence and personalization technology are revolutionizing marketing. Now, you can use offline touches to make personalization more relevant and effective. Savvy marketers are utilizing predictive analysis as well as buying signals at the account level to inform their sales agents that a prospect needs a product even before the person himself realizes it. To gain greater market share, your company needs to successfully leverage these technologies and software solutions as well as pertinent buying signals.

The future of marketing is going to become more personal. Soon, consumers would not even need to look for their favorite products as marketers will make these items accessible to them beforehand.

Conclusion

As our article shows clearly, customers are increasingly asking for more customized and personalized service in both the physical and digital worlds. Read expert saas software reviews online to learn about the latest features that the best marketing platforms offer. Then, make smart use of these technologies and software solutions to provide the personal touch each consumer craves for.

July updates: Scenarios

Coming up after a huge June update, this month we’ve invested our resources into making life easier for new and existing clients. So here are Scenarios, pre-made campaigns ready to start in no time.

Each Scenario is like a recipe for success. We’ve taken most common campaigns from all clients and made them very simple to set up and start.

List of scenarios

Vibetrace is a dedicated marketing automation solution for ecommerce, so we decided to put automation before our daily tasks. And one of the hurdles of working with us was setting things up.

Now we hope the first step was done and you get 23 scenarios you can start in less than an hour. So it’s a 3 minute/scenario.

Here are some of the 23 scenarios ready to start.

We’ve currently grouped them by the channel used to reach the customer:

Scenario form

Each scenario has a dedicated page where you can easily change texts, colors, style or translate the template. You can include vouchers automatically, and product recommendations will auto-fill the content.

Try scenarios now. We will continue to add scenarios to the list, as we expect them to be much easier to use than to create each campaign separately.

June Updates: 2200 work hours into new statistics

We’ve completely rewritten all code behind statistics/reporting and the interface that displays those in your admin panel. The decision was taken after looking at the old system that made it hard to create new reports in real time.

Looking at the Time Report we have with our developer team, it was a total of 2200 hours, including coding, testing and some more needed tasks for more than 15 smart engineers

For you as a client, (or future client if you don’t already have an account) there will be only a small difference on how things look like:

Campaign Reports

All campaigns looks very similar, only the events are different:

email reports show you how many were Sent, Opened and Clicked
onsite campaigns display their Impressions, Clicks and Submit (for forms) events.
Push campaigns are being Delivered and Clicked.

Newsletter campaigns also get extra information on processing the emails:

Emailing Activity

Sending emails bring you more profits, so now you know what happens in a simple overview available under Reports section.

Ecommerce Report

Now you have both assisted carts and conversions, on a daily basis.

Catalog Report

Catalog report is new and shows data related to items/categories and specific events from your shop. Here is just a preview:

Having the new engine behind the reporting system allows us to build any display any other metric. While some more are on the list to be built over the next months, you’re more than welcome to send us your suggestions.

Difference between demarketing and remarketing

Do you know what is the difference between Demarketing and Remarketing? We didn’t know either until a client asked us, so we decided to deep further into these 2 terms.

First of all here are the definitions of both demarketing and remarketing:

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing: An online marketing technique that enables advertisers to reach out to visitors who already visited a website. It can be done through ads, emails, push notifications or any other way of contacting visitors

As explained above, retargeting (or remarketing) is simply the strategy of re-engaging with your visitors after they have visited your online site.

What is Demarketing?

Demarketing: A type of marketing which discourages certain customers on a temporary or a permanent basis. This marketing is mainly applied on such products which are either harmful or very rare. Example: Tobacco, petroleum products, water, electricity etc

So, what’s the difference between Demarketing and Remarketing?

Based on the definitions the terms are somehow opposite: remarketing tries to encourage you to buy/consume something, and demarketing to discourage of buying a product.

Image from: http://realfunny.net/picture-3235-do-not-consume-if-the-seal-is-broken-.html

May Product Updates

Every month we send an update with improvements for our product. This month is no different.

Segment evolution

View how a segment evolved over time. System computes the count for these segments every day and displays the result in the evolution tab.

Push Actions segmentation

4 new events are available for users segmentation, related to push notifications: send , display , click and close . Use these events to create new smart segmentations for your campaigns.

Beautiful Funnel Charts

Because ecommerce it’s most about funnels (sales funnel, conversion funnel, goal funnel) we’ve improved our charts with a much better visual. Let us know what you think.

Extra improvements

Simplify campaign creation editor by removing ” Sending ” step where you can change UTM params for the campaign. Now you can do this in the Content step.
Changed Action Buttons to green and simplified the status of a campaign (so you have a better view of it’s current status when editing it)

The newsletter is available here:

User Dynamic Segment Evolution

You already know that Vibetrace allows for a very deep segmentation of your user data and behaviour.

Using Segment Evolution you can now follow how a specific segment evolves over time. Our system will count number of users matching the segment daily and save it so you can see a evolution chart like the one bellow:

By default, all new accounts get 3 segments with evolution enabled:

Newsletter subscribers
Web push subscribers
Active Email users in the last 3 months