Blog

Must-Know Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Stats

Published

2 mins ago

December 26, 2019

Holidays are about to come. It is wonderful, isn’t it?

It is not only a great time for holiday lovers, but for marketers as well. It is a good promotional opportunity for them to increase sales, brand awareness as well as get high quality traffic.

Holiday sales represent a high percentage of the annual sales, since people tend to spend more money during the holiday season.

What does it mean?

In order to not miss your chance to bring high profit and success to your business, you need to prepare holiday sales in advance. Thinking and planning your marketing tactics and strategies beforehand will make the process fun for you and your consumers.

Digital Marketing is a must for any online store, since a good marketing strategy builds your business in this competitive market.

However, the holiday season is more challenging. You need to separately have holiday marketing strategies to attract more consumers and get the desired results.

You need many efforts to create creative and impressive marketing campaign for your business. However, the past experiences can become a great indicator to create stronger tactics for the coming year.

For this, let us have a look at some holiday marketing stats, that will help your campaign.

76% of Marketers Change Their Buying Decision when Choosing a Marketer or Brand, after Making a Mobile Search

Mobile Search has a huge role in buying behavior of the customers, hence you need to give much importance to optimize your website for mobile devices.

Even if buyers have researched your product or service and have made a buying decision, mobile experience can wholly change their mind.

There are different factors that play a role in people’s buying decision, including; price, information, alternative paying options, navigation, etc.. Even a small error regarding these factors, can bring negative UX and take your customers to your competitors.

On Average, a person spends over $1226 for Holiday Gifts

Holiday season brings more paying customers. A vital example of it is the period of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, which has brought over 189.6 million US consumers to online stores. This is just one example of huge traffic to online marketplace. A good strategic approach can lead many of these consumers to your own store, if you manage to target the right audience and show your competitive advantages.

People Tend to Make their Holiday Shopping Earlier

Since customers tend to think about holiday shopping beforehand, it is the high time to catch their attention and shine with your bright offers.

Think about interesting and creative options for any budget. Creative ideas will enlarge the buyers’ cycle. Successful holiday sales depend on your holiday marketing planning. Your actions should include:

A competitive Analysis
Testing all Possible Technical Errors
Creating and Targeting your Buyer Persona

What is more, you can make some discussions and surveys beforehand, to find out what customers expect from your brand.

Social Media Influence over One-Third of Holiday Consumers

Being one of the effective channels of engaging and interacting with customers, social media platforms are among the best places of sharing holiday ideas and promoting customers.

Comments, reviews, polls, discussions can become ideal tools for creating interesting offers and targeting buyers. Among the best tactics, you can:

Making visually and financially attractive offers
Optimizing your content and sharing interesting holiday stories
Being active and responsive to questions and complaints
Having special offers

95% of Customers can Change their Buying Decision Because of Shipping Price

Psychologically, some shoppers want to get something for nothing (it refers to shipping price). Companies that offer free shipping for their consumers can attract more traffic and high conversions. Using this fact, you can make your shipping price work for you. Even if you cannot afford to make it for free, you can make some sales and promote it through different channels. For devoted customers you can make some small holiday presents, offering them some suggestions of free shipping.

Conclusion

Planning your holiday shopping campaign beforehand and promoting your products through different channels can bring you a holiday sales boost. The overall preparations of your holiday sales should start from an in-detail analysis of your and your competitors’ last year’s experiences, weak and strong points of your digital marketing strategies and double down on your SEO efforts.

Author

Tigran is a marketing and creative content specialist at Smarketa.com with a primary focus on SEO, PPC and customer satisfaction for eCommerce business. Being a true humanist he draws inspiration from the simple thing as everyday life and the matters one come across on a daily basis doing his best and above to help everyone around.

Blog

Why is a Help Desk Ticketing System Important?

Published

1 week ago

December 18, 2019

Michelle Langton

In today’s world, the new battleground in the business world is customer experience and customer satisfaction. Today, a business that is not customer-centric will not survive long. Therefore, organizations need to ensure that they have all the right measures in place to maximize customer-centricity. And one of the best methods of doing so is by having a robust Help Desk Ticketing System.

What is a Help Desk Ticketing System?

A helpdesk is a support system that enables organizations to take care of customers’ issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. And when the helpdesk’s complaint resolution processes are automated using ticket management, its efficiency is significantly increased, thereby leading to much better customer experience.

This can be done by using a help desk ticketing system software.

Why is it Important to Have a Help Desk Ticketing System Software?

Here are some of the most important reasons why it is important to have a help desk ticketing system software:

1. Increased Productivity

According to Merticnet, the leading source of metrics and benchmarks for the IT and Call Center industry, net first level resolution rates for helpdesks without automation have been as low as 68.8%. The resolution rate is one of the most important metrics by which a helpdesk’s efficiency is measured.

When you use automation such as a helpdesk ticketing system software, efficiencies go up significantly.

2. Lowered Costs

Another metric that goes down is cost. The average cost for voice minutes for helpdesks is about $2.13. This means that the more time that agents take to speak with customers on issues that could be automated, the most it costs the company.

By using ticketing software that automates the most common issues, your organization could end up saving a lot of money.

3. Customer Satisfaction

At the end of the day, the thing that a customer wants the most is getting their problem solved, quickly and with the least fuss. They don’t really care that your helpdesk is overloaded, or that your systems may be down. All they want is that you resolve their issues.

When you have a ticketing software, it can help customers get solutions to simpler issues quickly and easily, without having to contact the helpdesk directly.

Added to that, agents who do take calls will also be able to give customers solutions much faster by having ready access to a repository of FAQs.

4. Keeping Customers Informed

If a solution is going to take longer to achieve than a single call, then customers want to know the status of their ticket. Helpdesk software can ensure that agents are able to give quick updates to customers and customers will not have to wait until resolution to know what is happening.

5. Multiple Channels of Support

When you use a help desk ticketing system software, customers can connect with your team via multiple channels. Such software has something called an omnichannel system, which allows customers to raise tickets via email, social media, voice, and so on.

6. Automating Raising Tickets

In the past, if a customer had an issue, the time it would take just to raise that ticket was enough to cause frustration. With a helpdesk software in place, this process is automated. The ticket is automatically created every time a customer gets in touch with a helpdesk.

7. Ease of Use

The user interface for agents also improves. Earlier, when an agent needed to sort through the customer’s information or get a job done, he or she would need to click through a number of screens. Ticketing software is much easier to use. Agents will have all the information they need on one single view, saving the agent (and the customer) a lot of time.

8. Repository of Knowledge

A helpdesk software also allows you to create a massive knowledge base for your agents. FAQs are easy to find, so new agents don’t have to spend time figuring out what the issue is. Added to that, there are also a large number of cases where customers have some unusual problems.

According to Forbes, a repository of information means an agent can resolve even these problems more easily and enhance your customer’s experience.

9. Reporting and Monitoring

It isn’t only the agents and customers who benefit from the automation of your helpdesk. Supervisors are able to monitor operations much more efficiently and churn out much more detailed reports that can be used for analysis and the ultimate improvement in productivity.

Resource allocation becomes much easier, and overall processes become smoother.

10. Tracking Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Helpdesks have to meet certain standards of performance. These are called Service Level Agreements. These SLAs are a set of metrics of performance that need to be adhered to as much as possible. Helpdesk software can help with the tracking of these SLAs in real-time, which means that supervisors can make changes instantly to ensure that targets are met, or exceeded.

11. Prioritizing Tickets

When you have helpdesk software to support you, then your supervisors can prioritize tickets based on certain rules that you can input into the system. For example, a high net income customer can be catered to first. Or, a customer who has had previous not-so-happy interactions with your helpdesk can be targeted first and routed to a more senior agent who will be able to handle the issue more effectively.

12. Streamlined Operations

When you have an end-to-end helpdesk ticking system software in place to support CRM, you can ensure that operations are streamlined. Silos are no longer a problem and customers do not get frustrated about having to start all over again the next time they have a problem. This will ensure greater customer satisfaction, and also great efficiency for the company.

Conclusion

A business is most effective when its customers are happy and its operations are profitable. These two goals can sometimes be in opposition to one another, and creating a balance between cost, productivity and customer satisfaction is a continuous struggle.

This is where the automation that a helpdesk ticketing system software brings to the table makes a huge difference.