Magento Commerce & Security Update Now Available

January 14th marked the date that Magento made Magento Commerce 2.3.4 available to all current Magento Commerce customers and partners. Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.3.4 will become generally available on January 28th. This release includes necessary updates to quality, security and platform technologies. Including:

Page Builder Upgrades

Magento has upgraded Page Builder to provide merchants with more control over product merchandising and PWA Studio compatibility to bring the easy content editing of Page Builder to PWA Studio-based storefronts.

Adobe Stock Integration

Built through Community Engineering, Adobe Stock is now integrated into Magento so users can simplify their creative process and streamline workflow by adding high quality media assets to website content without leaving the Magento Admin.

Live Chat powered by dotdigital

In the latest update to their Vendor Bundled Extension, dotdigital now provides Live Chat capabilities to give merchants the ability to exceed expectations, increase conversion rates, and keep customers coming back with real-time engagement. All Magento 2 customers will be given access to one free live chat agent seat, without the need for a full dotdigital Engagement Cloud license.

Summary

Magento is encouraging Commerce customers to take advantage of the early, pre-release access and to take this additional time to evaluate their latest patch, begin upgrading and remain secure in advance of general availability. 

January 14th also marks the availability of Magento Commerce 2.2.11 and the latest Security-only patch, 2.3.3-p1. The Magento 2.2.11 release marks the final supported software release for Magento version 2.2. Magento 2.2 will no longer receive security updates or product quality fixes now that its support window has expired.

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Product reviews have revolutionized the way consumers make purchase decisions with nearly 95% of shoppers reading online reviews (Power Reviews Internal Data) before making a purchase.  Reviews are not just a way for consumers to gather information. They have become a key form of shopper engagement. In a recent study Northwestern University partnered with Power Reviews, to understand how reviews impact buyers’ behavior. Their research provide some very compelling insights to the powerful effects that reviews have on customer’s purchase decisions.  

Given the incredible importance of product reviews, it’s imperative that merchants choose a review solution that meets your business needs and provides the functionality required to thrill your shoppers and give them every reason to purchase from your site.  Given our support of many different online merchants, we at InteractOne have been afforded the great opportunity to work with a wide variety of reviews technologies currently offered in the eCommerce space. These are our three favorite recommended review solutions.

Jump To:

Yotpo

Power Reviews

TrustPilot

Summary

Yotpo

Yotpo provides a great many features and pre-built integrations at a reasonable price.  Here are some of the great features provided by Yotpo:

• Reviews
• Question & Answer Functionality
• Multi-Channel Content Generation
• On-Site Widgets & Galleries
• Google & Facebook Integration
• Advanced Content Management
• Widgets & Emails Customization
• Multiple Domains Support

Some of the key features that we love about Yotpo are the widgets and automation tools they offer for post purchase follow-up.  Using these tools, you can setup Yotpo to email customers that have purchased a product and offer them an incentive (coupon, rewards points or gift card) for leaving a review.  We’ve personally seen how these incentives prove to be invaluable for encouraging buyer participation and building a robust database of product reviews. In addition to the great features for post-purchase followup, Yotpo also offers many other valuable marketing tools such as Question & Answer software, designed to help merchants increase customer engagement and grow their brands.

Power Reviews

Founded in 2005 Power Reviews is a veteran stalwart in the product review space.  Aimed more at the Enterprise market, Power Review offers a feature rich toolset including: 

• Rates & Reviews
• Questions & Answers
• Influencer & Sampling
• Visual & Social
• Intelligence Suite
• Customer Experience

While having many, if not all of the features of Yotpo, Power Reviews is not as focused on strictly providing feature value.  Being a little more costly, they typically serve larger enterprises as they help leverage customer data to gain business insights and mine value from their current customer base.  For example, Power Reviews is able to help merchants identify and work with influencers to create buzz, with the ultimate goal of turning customers into mystery shoppers who then are in a position to uncover valuable product insights.

TrustPilot

Focused more on business-level reviews than on product reviews, TrustPilot is a great tool for gathering overall purchase experience feedback and displaying that feedback to shoppers.  Niche sites that sell a very specific type of product (ie. trade show display media) can be better served by a reviews software like TrustPilot. This is because their shoppers are not as concerned with product reviews as they are with overall reviews of the company that is actually  selling the product. TrustPilot excels in this area by offering merchants the ability to reach out and gather post purchase business reviews, manage those reviews and display them onsite. For example TrustPilot allows you to filter the reviews shown on-site, per interest area or star rating.  

Another key feature of TrustPilot is that it allows online users to browse reviews for all of its customers on its website portal at https://www.trustpilot.com/. Being a TrustPilot customer therefore comes with the added benefit of being featured on their public facing website where many shoppers go to review businesses by category before making a purchasing decision.

In addition to offering the business-level reviews and the public portal, TrustPilot can also power product level reviews by allowing you to use their service to cover all your business’s reviews & ratings needs.

Summary

With this blog we’ve covered just a few of our favorite tools for powering reviews, however  there are many other customer reviews tools and options not listed here that might be a perfect fit for your business.  What’s important is that you understand the key role reviews play in the online purchasing decisions of your shoppers and choose the right tools to empower reviews.  At InteractOne we’ve had the privilege of working with many online merchants to choose the right reviews tools, improve conversion and grow their business. Give us a call or fill out our contact form and let us help you grow your business by improving customer reviews.

Digital marketing for an eCommerce company presents a wide variety of challenges. The opportunities for revenue-generating inbound traffic are seemingly endless with new additions regularly. It’s no surprise that many businesses become overwhelmed with the complex, time-consuming work required to implement and optimize the right types of campaigns to contend in their industry. Not all businesses have the resources for a digital marketing specialist or a social media manager, nevermind a full-blown data analytics team.

There are a myriad of options for marketing tools to assist beurgening eCommerce firms. We’re going to exclude Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google/Bing Ads which are known necessities. For this list, if forced to choose just 5 tools to market an eCommerce business in 2020, here are the selections:

#1: Mageworx – SEO

Mageworx is a popular SEO module that currently works with Magento and Shopify platforms. They offer a full suite of add-ons (that do cost extra) to help merchants optimize their website for maximum traffic. The add-ons include faceted navigation landing pages, canonical URL settings, schema markup, and much more. Improve your site’s indexation and rankings with this advanced SEO module.

#2: SEMrush – SEO, Reporting

SEMrush is an excellent tool that can be used for both research and maintaining a site crawl campaign to assist with ongoing search engine optimization. It can be used for keyword and competitor research, as well as a checklist of necessary on-site improvements including, but not limited to, broken links, duplicate content, slow page load times, and broken images. SEMrush is our favorite SEO utility but there are several other valuable SEO tools available for eCommerce marketers to utilize.

#3: Klaviyo – Email

Email is an extremely important revenue-generator, especially in eCommerce. Klaviyo’s automation and interface are pleasant and easy to use. This tool makes setup enjoyable while driving improved results. Automate prospect and customer communications using customer lifetime value, lifecycle stage, and other metrics to make messaging relevant and timely.

#4: GoDataFeed – Feed Management

Google has made their shopping results, also known as product listing ads, extremely prevalent for commercial queries. The bottom line is that if you’re in eCommerce and not in Google Shopping, you’re leaving money on the table. 

A great tool for feed management is crucial to maximizing revenue, it creates the ability to provide necessary product data from an eCommerce website to marketplaces like Google Shopping. Manual feed management can be a challenge unless your product catalog is very small. GoDataFeed not only saves your team a ton of time, it also helps optimize your feed(s). Modify and enhance thousands of feed attributes in seconds with a powerful and easy to use rules engine.

#5: Hootsuite – Social

Managing an eCommerce company’s social media strategy and understanding what is moving the needle can become a complex enterprise. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows a merchant to schedule social media posts, track how people engage with posts, manage multiple accounts from one dashboard, and much more. Rather than switching back and forth between different social media accounts trying to do everything throughout the day, a merchant can get it all done at one time with this great tool.

Make the Most of Available Tools

There is a wide range of tools available to online marketers— this is only a glimpse of some of our favorites. The key is to start with a few of the essentials, master them, and then start exploring others. By doing this, marketers and merchants can learn which tools provide the most value, and which ones they prefer over others.

If you’d like to learn more about online marketing and marketing tools that can help your eCommerce business, please contact us at any time.

The marketing world is in constant motion, always evolving and ever innovating. And as the calendar turns to a new year we here at InteractOne have taken a look into the future to see what innovations and trends will shape the digital marketing world in 2020.

Personalization

As online customers continue to be inundated with generic ads, AI-powered personalization will become more important. Customers decide very quickly—in a matter of seconds—whether they like your marketing message. Provide something relevant and you’ve got a curious website visitor and perhaps a long-term customer. Miss the mark, however, and they’re gone. Customers still want to feel like they relate to your company and AI-powered personalization can go a long way towards accomplishing that. Sending out generic blasts to your contact list isn’t going to cut it in 2020. AI-powered personalization can help you to segment your contacts and website visitors into specific groups based on data, interactions, and behaviors. This allows your marketing team to customize an omni-channel campaign that has a cohesive message. A message that has determined by your customer’s needs based on their interactions with your site and tailored to their location on their sales journey.  

Content

Content marketing will still be king of the castle in 2020. It isn’t going anywhere, but perhaps some of its long-standing practices are. Quality over quantity and diversification will be what drives traffic in the new year. Even though video content is the belle of the ball, it’s not the be-all-end-all. When planning out your content calendar, don’t just put all of your eggs into the ‘video’ basket. People still read blogs, people still download white papers, people still engage in interactive content like quizzes or image filters (when brand-appropriate). Blogs and other long-form written content will still continue to be vital to your SEO. But don’t create content simply for the sake of creating content. You must ensure that it’s of quality, on-brand and speaks to your target audience. If your blog or video doesn’t help solve a problem or answer a question that your target audience has, then what good is it to your brand? Develop a content calendar and stick with it, you won’t see improvements in SEO, lead gen and traffic overnight, but steadily these numbers will increase with your commitment to a diverse quality content calendar.

Voice

It’s estimated that by the end of 2020 45%-50% of all search will be Voice Search. As of today, according to Google, 20% of all Google search queries now take place via voice search, with 71% of all mobile users between 18 and 29 utilized the voice assistants on their smartphones. Brands are already beginning to incorporate more voice technology into their digital offerings. Magento recently announced a new integration will allow Magento merchants to offer their customers a more personalized and streamlined experience the moment they start their Amazon/Alexa shopping journey, including re-orders, wish lists and delivery notifications. InteractOne was also selected by Amazon to be a partner on beta testing for this innovative integration. You can read more about that here.

Consumer Privacy

While there is a large segment of the population that is more than okay with their voice-activated assistants listening in on their every word, awaiting commands, there is a growing percentage of the population that don’t want their activity monitored in any way. Especially their clicks and searches. The use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) is on the rise, increasing more than 185% in North America since the beginning of 2018. Through a VPN a user can scroll through websites fairly anonymously. The VPN changes the user’s IP address to a different, often randomized location. Meaning that your carefully built cookies, ad trackers and remarketing campaigns aren’t able to continue to connect with VPN users who visit your site. With the continued decline in public trust in entities such as Facebook and Google thanks to their repeated privacy-related faux-pas, look for individuals to take privacy matters into their own hands in 2020 and beyond. Since there will be a growing number of visitors to your site who are surfing anonymously through a VPN or a web browser that blocks ads and trackers (like Brave) you won’t be able to rely on the fact that your remarketing campaigns will continue to follow the user around the web. It is up to marketers and content creators to create powerful, memorable content that will connect with users when they interact with your brand. This connects back to the importance of having great and meaningful content. The only chance you have to capture the contact information of these visitors is through your content, making your content strategy even more important.

Testing

A/B Testing is quite simply the most effective and efficient way to improving your website and to create an improved shopping experience. While you have invested heavily in the UX/UI design of your website the only real way to know what works and what doesn’t is to test it with the general public. Thanks to the fact that there are a number of great Magento extensions specifically designed for A/B testing (HiConversion, Optimizely, Apptemize & AB Tasty) it’s easier than ever to test everything on your site from prices, to CTAs, to page design and color scheme. To learn more about A/B Testing check out our recent blog.

Marketing continues to evolve at warp speed. It’s imperative to adapt and evolve with new marketing trends to stay competitive and retain high-quality customers. Setting an intention to learn and integrate new innovations will help set your company apart from the rest of the herd. To get started implementing these cutting-edge technologies into your eCommerce site and marketing plan contact us today!