Your email marketing strategy  needs to focus on building customer loyalty, increasing your conversion opportunities, boosting customer acquisition and raising brand awareness. With so many vital requirements for your email marketing requirements, it’s important to take time to investigate which email platform not only connects best to your eCommerce store, but which ones are uniquely equipped to handle your needs. In this blog we’re going to take a deeper dive and explore our  recommended solutions for email marketing.

Emarsys

Emarsys is an innovative, plug-and-play marketing platform that virtually eliminates the need for IT overhead and allows for a seamless flow of data between your eCommerce site and the Emarsys platform. This support allows for your Magento data to automatically be put to work creating automated, multi-channel campaigns with trigger responses based on a wide range of customer actions and data metrics.

Benefits

Reduce data management tasks:

Merchants are empowered to manage all their marketing activities from a single platform by unifying shop data with Emersys’ campaign data. This will give merchants a better understanding of their customers and allow them to create more engaging omni-channel campaigns.

Natively triggered mapped events & Intelligent personalization

With Emarsys, the extension’s data collection scripts allow for merchants to monitor every customer interaction with your Magento site to gain a more complete understanding of your customer’s habits over time. Customer’s activities will also trigger external events such as transactional emails or an automated omnichannel campaign. By mapping the interactions customers have with your site, merchants are empowered to connect with them with context-sensitive content and create offers that are truly personalized. This will help you remain top-of-mind for your customers and increase conversions.

Listrak

Listrack for Magento offers a solid range of customizable options, designed to broaden the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Listrak is able to work beyond your eCommerce site and become fully integrated with your mobile and social channels. It is through this omnichannel connection that Listrak’s robust reporting tool is able to give merchants a wider range of customer data, enabling merchants to produce highly personalized, seamless marketing campaigns that engage buyers across a multitude of touchpoints.

Listrak may be one of the pricier email marketing solutions on the market but it is also much more feature rich and most email marketing tools alone. Listrak is ideal for larger businesses who want to consolidate their marketing channels on to one platform.

Benefits

All-in-one data location

Listrak provides merchants with an all-in-one data portal that pulls from multiple customer and campaign data sources, including social channels.

Automated Recurring & Lifecycle Messages

Automated timed messages are sent to past customers to re-engage them with your store and encourage continued buying. These automated messages can be created from a single template, from which personalized messages are inserted before distribution.

Integrated Product Reminders

Shares targeted content across all consumer channels to connect with customers via product alerts and recommendations via website, social, mobile, and email marketing. These reminders can be based on a customer’s left pages, or an abandoned shopping cart purchase, with a timed personalized message to remind them of their last interaction with your webstore.

Back in Stock and Inventory Alerts

With Listrack you can automatically reach out to customers when the product they desire is now back in stock and available. Listrak will sync up the customer’s profile with the product and send personalized emails if the product is delayed or discontinued.

Bronto

The Bronto Marketing Platform is another drag-and-drop cloud-based email marketing automation software. Bronto was designed to compile all customer data in one place, allowing merchants to create customized campaigns and send targeted messages through multiple channels, such as email, mobile or social media. The Bronto dashboard provides insights that enable simple monitoring and outreach towards customers in all stages of the selling lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion. The Bronto Marketing Platform is intended for mid-size to-large, multichannel retailers due to its ability to control multiple storefronts from the same account & dashboard. The Bronto email app also easily integrates with Bronto’s pop-up and coupon manager apps to provide even more advanced customization options.

Benefits

RFM Metrics & Importing Information

Recency, Frequency, and Monetary-Value metrics regarding purchase history are used to identify target groups within your customer list. This, along with the ability to import past purchase information, with entire order history and product details,  provides in-depth customer information perfect for creating effective marketing campaigns.

Support for Multiple Stores

Bronto allows you to adjust the map data and configuration settings between each webstore you manage, all from the same account dashboard.

Automated messaging

Bronto will allow merchants to automate the distribution of a wide range of messages, based on each unique customer’s current spot in the life cycle. These include: cart abandonment messages, coupon codes, product recommendations and wish list reminders.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing solutions on the market today. It’s another drag-and-drop platform that makes it easy to design and distribute emails, giving merchants complete control over subscriber profiles & campaigns. Mailchimp also boasts an impressive native analytics and reporting feature that is ideal for merchants who want to generate ‘ad hoc’ reports.

Benefits

Segmentation & Automation

When it comes to marketing automation, MailChimp can automatically segment customers based on conditions, including; purchase history, sign-up date, demographic information and much more.  Allowing merchants to target and manage customer groups based on a wide range of factors. With these segments created, merchants can then begin targeting segments with specialized messaging and an automated workflow. For example, Mailchimp can be used to re-engage dormant subscribers or lapsed customers by creating a win-back email series using custom triggers that meet the unique needs of their business.

Personalized Recommendations & Messaging

The automization of Mailchimp extends to the individual personalization of its messages too. Merchants are able to generate unique email messages with product recommendations, based on each customer’s previous purchases and pages visited. Email autoresponders can also be triggered by special events such as a customer’s birthday, lack of activity over time, recommendations after purchases, abandoned cart reminders, and more.

DotDigital

DotDigital (formerly dotmailer) Engagement Cloud is the platform of choice for businesses seeking to engage customers across all touchpoints. Users can connect customer data, surface powerful insights, and automate intelligent messages across email, SMS, social, and more.  This extension enables a seamless integration between your M2 store and your dotdigital Engagement Cloud account. Engagement Cloud for Magento ensures your subscribers stay in sync, and your key customer/retail data is available in Engagement Cloud to empower your email marketing.

Benefits

Marketing Automation

DotDigital’s Omnichannel automation empowers merchants to connect with visitors and customers over a wide range of channels, including Email, SMS, social re-targeting, Google ads, push notifications and web chat. Through these messages merchants can reconnect with visitors and customers to revisit abandoned carts and campaigns.  Welcome, post purchase and birthday messages are just a sample of the automated marketing pieces that can be programmed to connect with clients, leaving merchants free to direct their energies elsewhere.

Commerce Intelligence

RFM-Modeling within DotDigital creates commerce personas for website guests and then empowers merchants to ‘watch’ how contacts move through the customer lifecycle. This way, you can track your most important metrics with customers and crosssell and upsell with best sellers, highlight ‘most viewed’ as well as also-bought product recommendations.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo’s is a favorite amongst the developers and solution specialists at InteractOne. Its power lies in its segmentation and targeting. Klaviyo’s web-tracking system uses specific browsing behavior to segment visitors so they receive tailored ad campaigns and emails based on their on-site activity. Klaviyo will help you identify the visitors to your site: who looked but didn’t buy, who is a frequent visitor, who hasn’t visited recently, who left their cart full without purchasing, etc. Then, you can implement a campaign designed around the visitors’ site-specific actions.

Benefits

Automation

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.

One Click Integration

Klaviyo was designed to virtually eliminate the need for traditional marketing tools such as spreadsheets. The software was designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing tools and pulls data from Salesforce, Magento and Shopify. It also offers an Open API, allowing merchants to build custom integrations.

Ease of Use

Klaviyo is built from the ground up to be easy to use. The solution comes with a WYSIWYG editor that enables you to create compelling emails without a struggle. Also, there are multiple responsive email templates that are optimized for all types of devices including mobile devices.

If you would like to discuss your customer and prospect emailing requirements, we would be happy to help you choose the correct platform for your needs. Just drop us a line.

Having taken effect on January 1st of 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is widely regarded as one of the most expansive privacy laws in the United States to date. The CCPA places limitations on the collection and sale of a customer’s personal information, while also providing certain legal protections when it comes to that same personal information. But the CCPA isn’t just a US version of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While you won’t have to start all over if you’re prepared for GDPR, that doesn’t mean you have all your bases covered for CCPA. 

In this blog we’ll be covering the basics of the CCPA, how it compares with GDPR and some of the FAQ’s that have arisen around each and their implementation in US businesses working domestically and internationally.

Who does the CCPA apply to?

The CCPA applies to any business that satisfies one or more of the following conditions:

1. Does business in the state of California
2. And satisfies one of the following criteria:
   • Annual gross revenue in excess of $25 million;
   • Alone or in combination, annually buys, receives for the business’s commercial purposes, sells, or shares for commercial purposes, alone or in combination, the personal information of at least 50,000 consumers, households, or devices; or
   • Derives at least 50 percent of its annual revenues from selling consumers’ personal information.

The biggest differences between the GDPR and CCPA lie in the scope of the application, the extent of collection limitations and the rules around accountability for breaches and challenges for non-compliance. In this chart, you’ll see some of the subtle, but important differences between the GDPR and the CCPA.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this apply to businesses not located in California? 

A business does not need to be located in the state of California to be subject to CCPA. This means any business that is ‘doing business’ via online transactions with California residents or has employees that live in the state.

Can companies be fined for non-compliance?  

The private right of action in the CCPA is limited to data breaches. Under the private right of action, damages can come in between $100 and $750 per incident per consumer. The California AG also can enforce the CCPA in its entirety with the ability to levy a civil penalty of not more than $2,500 per violation or $7,500 per intentional violation.

I don’t think we really collect personal information. Does the CCPA apply? 

CCPA has an extremely broad description of what constitutes personal information. If you collect resumes for job postings, your website tracks cookies or if you have a ‘Contact Us’ form on your website you are collecting personal information.

Is there an exemption for B2B businesses?

Sort of. B2B Companies are given a limited reprieve from complying with each of the requirements of the CCPA when it comes to the transactions and communications with other organizations, companies and government agencies. Personal information that is collected in the course of B2B communications or transactions from or about an employee, owner, director, officer or contractor of a business or government agency is exempt from most CCPA requirements. But this exemption will expire at the end of 2020. Even if your B2B company is not selling business contact information you still need to determine to what extent the information you collect for marketing purposes must comply with CCPA.

How to cover your bases?

The CCPA requires companies to keep detailed records of all personal information categories dating back to January 1, 2019. You should begin to inventory all the data you have collected since that date. You will also need to update your privacy notices and add a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link to your home page.

Additional Resources for Business Owners

Magento also provides an excellent, more detailed guide to making sure your site is GDPR and CCPA compliant. It is available here.

For an even greater in-depth review of the CCPA law, please consult this great article from the National Law Review.

While the CCPA has some restrictions that currently limit it to the state of California, there is little doubt that it will have reverberations across the US and the world. California is, after all, the 5th largest economy on earth. With something as complicated as this new law and as important as your business we recommend that you consult with your attorney to confirm if CCPA applies to your business before taking action on compliance.

The next decade could very well be defined by the continued proliferation and advancement of AI and Machine Learning and the data that process collects. Assuming that occurs, it certainly means that AI will have a major impact on all aspects of business. How will that all play out? Only time will tell. But there have been a number of recent developments in these fields that are blazing a trail toward rapid changes across the digital eCommerce landscape. Let’s take a look at a few of these developments.

Automated interactive personalization

In the modern world, consumers are inundated with hundreds, if not thousands of ads every single day. And as consumers continue to get barraged with messaging, they are going to become fatigued, if not completely unaffected by seeing generic ads. To combat this occurrence, AI-powered personalization will become more prevalent and grow in importance. Customers decide very quickly—in a matter of seconds—whether they like your marketing message. Provide something relevant and personal and you’ve got a satisfied customer. Miss the mark, however, and they’re gone. While many companies have been able to personalize with a few product lines or segments, most still struggle to scale this personalization across all the ways they engage with customers. Done right, personalization enhances customers’ lives and increases engagement and loyalty by delivering messages that are tuned to, and even anticipate, what the customers truly want. These personalizations for the customer translate into financial benefits for the companies who succeed in this effort. Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent.

What is needed to execute this personalization pace at scale is the right automation technology. Assembling and operating a marketing-automation tech stack, however, can be a challenge. Magento extensions such as Klevu, dotDigital and Listrak have already begun this endeavor. By driving site search, on-site personalization, email, and remarketing. But it is going to be more of an SOP and a necessity as time goes by. Advances in technology, data, and analytics will soon allow marketers to create much more personal and “human” experiences across moments, channels, and buying stages. Physical spaces will be reconceived to include these new personalizations and improve the consumer experience. The new customer journey will be supported far beyond a brand’s front door. AI has been at the forefront, helping companies automate the ways in which they personalize their interactions with customers, thereby enabling companies to scale their operations. Examples of how AI and deep learning impact the customer experience include automating the removal of backgrounds in product images as well as automatically enabling videos originally shot in landscape mode to be delivered in portrait mode, which greatly improves the viewing on mobile phones.

Building a scalable, yet personalized customer experience remains at the heart of what every brand desires to create in the 2020’s. Experiences that harness the power of rich media, whether in the form of images or videos, are a significant driver behind this success. However, business and technology executives need to think through the complexities and implications of these efforts, at both a technical and customer impact level. Doing so, and doing so early on, will enable a more seamless delivery of the campaigns and experiences they desire.

Data & Analysis

Data analysis has changed dramatically since the start of the century and that evolution has only become more rapid and pronounced as we advance into the 2020’s. If you’re operating an eCommerce store, and/or employing any of the AI/Machine Learning developments we just discussed, you’re no doubt dealing with tens of thousands of points of data. Data that is now no longer relegated to just numbers. Data is now music, images, videos, downloadable files and more. Data is large, dispersed and in multiple formats. So, how will you organize and implement this data into your digital sales efforts in the future?

Cloud-Based – As data sets become larger and larger it will become more difficult to run the massive amount of necessary calculations on your local machine. This will create an entire market of cloud-based data services that, simply put, make analysis faster.

A/B Testing with AI – As we recently covered on our blog, A/B testing is only going to grow in importance and the technology being developed and in some cases already implemented is going to be more efficient and effective at A/B testing than any web designer or marketing manager. By way of review, A/B Testing is the altering of elements of your site to different, random visitors. These elements can include, but are not limited to, variations in the content, colors, images, copy, Calls-to-Action, and even prices. It is through A/B testing that you’re able to come up with the optimum combinations of website elements that will keep visitors engaged and making purchases. But rather than having an employee analyze the site, select which elements to alter and test, analyze the data and choose which tested elements to keep and which to remove, AI will be taking over all of these steps. There are already extensions like HiConversion that are currently available that will automatically run its own A/B tests to your pages, changing the elements based on visitor behavior. It will then provide recommendations based on these continual and evolving A/B tests. This AI-driven A/B testing will only become more advanced and more standard as the decade progresses, leaving fewer elements of your UX/UI to guessing or to the discretion of your team. Your real-world customers and website visitors are your greatest teachers and AI will learn directly from them more and more.

Smarter Marketing – But what to do with all of this customer information you’ve gathered? Quite simply, put it to work retaining your customers. With the personalization information you’ve received and the on-site data you’ve collected you can, for example, set up automated messages to reach segments of your customer base, no matter where they may be: Remind visitors of the contents of their abandoned cart via email, show them display ads that tie directly to pages that they’ve visited via remarketing, and use your A/B testing programs to deliver the most appealing and effective User Experience possible once they’ve returned to your site.

Check back next week for the second installment in our ‘What’s Next’ series, where we will be discussing Progressive Web Apps, Headless eCommerce and more.

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.

To stay up to the minute on all the latest Magento updates and upgrades, sign up for the monthly Orange Report and get all of this, and other, vital eCommerce information delivered directly to your inbox.

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.