Ecommerce business has taken off for a long flight. With an annual compounded growth rate of more than 25% across the global economy, it looks like finally, eCommerce has announced its bid to stay in time.

These are still early days in the year 2018 and one can expect big things to happen to the eCommerce vertical, especially the manner in which inbound marketing is leveraged shall be a key differentiator.

TIS, the leading digital services consulting company in India offers an insight into these top seven inbound marketing best practices that shall enable the eCommerce vertical to leverage digitization to take the big leap after having crossed the threshold level of growth in sales and gross merchandise value.

Put a Premium on Shortened Lead Times and Charge More from the User

One day delivery or same day delivery is going to be the next big thing for ecommerce enterprises. Walking into 2018, there is ample evidence to suggest that the end user is more than willing to pay a higher price for same day delivery of merchandise at his door step.

Two things matter. First, the creation of a fully digitized supply chain network to facilitate fast innovate to market, time to order and order to cash. Second, the leveraging of smooth logistics infrastructure and assets to ensure last mile delivery of merchandise shall hold promise for the end user to pay more.

Review Marketing for Greater Transparency and Incentivising Customer Reviews

Great customer loyalty is earned. At times when discounts and offers are used as traffic building measures by eCommerce portals, there is a smarter way. Customer review marketing can be leveraged by ecommerce portals on search engines to drive traffic by lending credibility to their brand value.

The eCommerce sponsor brand lavishing praise on itself in advertisements and customers going gaga on it are completely different ball games. Again honest customer reviews with the usual and believable hint of negative reviews that are bound to come from a minor fraction of customers are bound to gain more traction than sponsored reviews that can be easily made out to be false.

Customers can be incentivized for leaving great reviews with personalized discounts and offers that motivate review marketing.

User Generated Content Marketing on Social Media Platforms

User-generated content marketing is expected to pull eCommerce enterprises in a big way on social media platforms in a big way in 2018. This implies that e-commerce brands must resort to and will be seen leveraging new inbound marketing strategies like user-generated content on social media platforms to motivate user engagement, pick insights on trends and market demands, curate product development and delivery and interact with customers to make them feel empowered. Ecommerce brands can be expected to focus more efforts on social media optimization and user generated content that is 20% more effective in gaining traction in the market.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Technologies to Redefine Customer Experience

Small things matter in a big way. The use of augmented and virtual reality technologies to reinforce and strengthen customer experience shall be one of the greatest levers of change and growth in the ecommerce vertical in the year 2018.

Augmented and virtual reality technologies can reinvent the way people try products especially wearable durables like clothes, smart watches and wrist gear, spectacles and others. To be able to experience the look and feel of such wearable products without having to put a toe out in the sunshine is going to be a big brand differentiator for ecommerce enterprises.

Triggered Emails Shall Be More Effective in Driving Sales than Legacy Email Marketing

Imagine the plight of a user that awakens from a state of deep sleep to a flurry of emails that have no context, purpose and value. On top of that, to receive such emails at odd hours is even more frustrating and is likely to draw the wrath not the loyalty of the user.

Triggered emails that are precision controlled for offers, discounts, content distribution and well-timed shall be far more effective in driving sales. Keeping space between two consecutive emails sent to the customer is important. Timing the triggered emails to perfection using automated mailing software products shall also create more value as opposed to legacy email marketing practices.

Digital Wallet Payments for Less Cash Revenue Models

Digital wallet payments are likely to drive less cash revenue models in the eCommerce vertical in the year 2018. A study on digital payment trends suggests that 23% of payments are made on smart phones, 19% on tablets and another 16% on desktop devices. Digital payments can enable eCommerce enterprises to save big time on the shoe leather costs of having to deal in cash, cash logistics, and cash security systems and cash management.

Chat Bots are Likely to Redefine Customer Relationship Management

Chat bots are going to be in use big time in the eCommerce vertical in the year 2018. Imagine the plight of a customer that awakens to a rude shock in the evening after returning from work to open the pack and find a demerit in the product that mandates an exchange or a quick remedy.

The store is closed and the customer services team may have winded up for the day leaving the customer no other option but to share his angst on social media platforms. This can and will change with the use of chat bots that can be used to send automated replies to customers when they send their grievances.

It goes a long way in retaining the customer with credible evidence of care and assurance that the necessary shall be done sooner than later.

Influencer Marketing to Gain Traction in the Market

On the eve of New Year, a reputed global ecommerce brand ran an influencer marketing campaign involving an actress that was shown opening a surprise gift box sent to her on her birthday. The box was personalized and the influencer opened it to explore the inside stuff.

The video of the influencer sharing the happiness of being gifted by an ecommerce brand went viral and caught traction in the market. Influencer marketing on social media channels is likely to be one of the big inbound marketing innovations in 2018.

The post 7 Inbound Marketing Aspects Must for Ecommerce Businesses in 2018 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Three policy design parameters are driving the growth of FinTech in emerging economies. First, governments in emerging economies are moving towards “less cash” economies because of the discrepancies displayed by the cost of cash model.

Second, the financial inclusion agenda needs the creation and leveraging of digital platforms for payments banks to reach people in geographical terrains that are left untouched by brick and mortar bank branches due to lack of economic feasibility.

Third, the expenditure approach to national income accounting is replacing the traditional way of income and value addition based approaches. The expenditure approach to national income accounting offers advantages over the two traditional counterparts in monitoring consumer spending, liquidating black income  and shifting the taxation paradigm from income taxes to expenditure taxes to augment saving and capital formation.

In 2018 challenges exist and impose constraints on the FinTech vertical’s growth. TIS, the leading digital services consulting company does a dissection of the FinTech vertical’s anatomy to show that inbound marketing is the way forward to navigating these challenges.

1. Customer Led Digital Marketing

The first challenge facing the FinTech vertical in emerging economies is the necessity for customer led product development. The first part of the customer journey at least if not the entire journey is taking place on digital platforms and devices unaided.

Customers are using their personal computers and smart phones to search for financial products, mobile apps and payment interfaces for faster, safer and seamless transaction experiences. A responsive website design, fast loading time and user friendly interface are the basic minimum requirements to cater to the digital customer.

Organic search functions like SEO (search engine optimization) and a content distribution strategy based on insightful competitor analysis and keyword research are imperatives to augment the search potential of fintech brands.

2. High Cost per Lead

Reaching out to the customers in the market through traditional forms of advertising has high costs, yields low returns on investment and is not precision-targeted to reach the prospects. Shifts in the business regulatory framework in emerging economies and greater stress on data privacy are exerting pressures on traditional methods like cold calling.

Fintech brands find it challenging to navigate the high cost per lead and the impending pressure on margins. Organic search engine optimization and social media optimization can enable Fintech brands to reduce cost per lead while providing them better quality leads with a higher probability of being converted.

3. Near Real-Time Relationship Marketing

The next challenge for fintech firms is to curate the customer relationship management strategy to empower customers. The crux of the use of inbound marketing strategy is to empower customers to do the talking and shift the focus from customer relationship management to customer-managed relationships.

This enables customers to be proactive and engage in conversations on social media platforms, share feedback on products, ask questions and offer opinion on online surveys. The millennial generation customers are accustomed to near real-time user experiences and want things on demand, then and there. Inbound marketing on social media platforms and websites with chat boxes for instant responses are the way to go for fintech brands.

4. Product Knowledge and Financial Literacy

A major block in the emerging economies stems from the mistrust and lack of transparency towards new-age financial enterprises and fintech brands.

This owes itself to the lack of product knowledge and an inherent assumption of rocket science knowledge being a prerequisite to transact on payment interfaces, use payment banks, online money transfers, social media banking, and digital wallets.

This calls for fintech brands to augment the search potential of their websites, leverage mobile app store optimization for app marketing using inbound digital marketing to enable users to explore new-age financial products.

At TIS, we are enabling fintech brands grow their business with digital strategy consulting to create an ecosystem that has the end-user at the centre with all marketing channels directed towards the latter to open new avenues of engagements, insights, and sales.

The post How Inbound Marketing Can Resolve Fintech Challenges in 2018 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Inbound marketing plays an important role in the web-based business. It is inbound marketing strategies only which helps you to attract visitors toward your website and turn them into sales.

There are three basic strategies of inbound marketing and they are; get found, convert, and analyze. And, this article concentrates on these three strategies of inbound marketing to tell you, ‘how important inbound marketing is for small business?’ Let us start with the Get Found.

Get Found

This strategy helps you attract genuine web visitors, as they are the only one who acts like the strong foundation and without them you are nothing on internet platform. Visitors make a website successful, and if you don’t have them then you’ll not get anything, in general, you can build your business online without web visitors.

In this strategy, content plays a crucial role and the foremost step to start with is Blogging. In various researches it has been found that companies that are into blogging generate 55% more leads than those who do not. The blog gives you a platform to publish genuine and authentic content on a regular basis, which eventually attracts the web users.

The second step in this strategy is SEO (search engine optimization), as it is a general phenomenon to ‘search before you buy,’ and when it comes to purchasing anything be it services or any product online, people often search about them on search engines such as Google.

SEO helps a website to get listed on search engines by using proper keywords and key phrases which are based on your business, and then optimizing the web pages by using them along with some quality content and building backlinks for the website.

The last but not the least step in this strategy is Social Media, as in today’s time people go online to interact with their family and friends by asking or answering questions, sharing content they like, and debating on varied topics. And, as a marketer, you must take your content as something which can attract readers and become the point of discussion. The more people will discuss it, the more you’ll gain from it.

Convert

In this strategy, the main aim should be the conversion of the web visitors gained via Blogging, SEO and Social Media into the paying customers. This strategy generally involves three basic steps where you must concentrate on, and they are; calls to action, landing pages and email marketing.

1. Calls to action: Calls to action are generally links or buttons that encourage the visitor to take a certain action.
2. Landing pages: Send your website visitors on pages where you have mentioned about your offers and rewards by linking them with a call to action links or buttons.
3. Email Marketing: There are times when people engage with your content, products and services but don’t have any interest in becoming a paid consumer that is where email marketing is effective. Send regular email newsletters to your readers or consumers as it will help you to build trust and nurture a long term relationship, which might make them think about buying your products and services.

Analyze

It is the most critical part of the inbound marketing strategy. Once visitors start coming on your website via Blogging, SEO and Social, you need to analyze their overall behavior like engagement with your web page content, overall time spent on the website, leads, and conversion rate.

You have now understood how inbound marketing helps you to reach more and more people. And at the same time, it also entails the following benefits for your business:

Cost-Effectiveness

You have the advantage of generating leads for your business at a lesser cost with inbound marketing as compared with the other marketing forms. As small businesses are constrained by small financial budgets, inbound marketing is an ideal way to make use of every penny earmarked for marketing.

Long-Lasting Effect

Since the fundamental premise of inbound marketing is building relationships with consumers, so you have the privilege of building long term relationships with them if you can gain their trust.

You can reach them every time you post content on social media and your relationship with them remains intact. With a strong relationship, you can easily sell your products and services to them.

Stretch to New Markets and Audiences

As inbound marketing is executed online, it allows you with the advantage of run different types of marketing campaigns to reach various types of audiences and new markets. You can post more targeted as well as more relevant content to engage consumers of various segments for drawing their interests to your products and services.

Building Brand Awareness

Generating awareness about your brand among the consumers is a major goal of all businesses, regardless of the size. Inbound marketing is a good way to build awareness about your products and services and your brand name without incurring heavy costs.

It helps in spreading the word about your brand, and that enables you to generate more and more leads for converting into customers.

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