[ad_1] WooCommerce has unveiled the results of its 2024 summer survey, shedding light on how store owners, developers, and partners gear up for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) and the holiday shopping rush. Here are the key takeaways from the survey: BFCM Sales Account for a Major Share of Annual Revenue BFCM plays a crucial role for online merchants, contributing to approximately 30%-50% of their yearly sales. The survey revealed that 66% of stores reported increased sales during the holiday season, highlighting its significance for businesses. In fact, for some stores, up to 50% of their annual revenue comes from this period alone. 46% of stores see up to 30% of their yearly sales during this time. 26% generate over 30% of their annual sales. 8% surpass 50% of annual sales during BFCM. Stores & Early Planning Larger stores with annual revenues of $250K+ are 12% more likely to begin preparations early. In total, 81% of stores actively plan for BFCM promotions. 26% of stores begin planning 1-4 weeks before BFCM. 27% start preparations 1-3 months ahead. 13% dedicate 3-6 months to preparation. 4% start more than 6 months in advance. Preparation Tactics & Strategies 26% of stores planned to increase inventory as their primary preparation strategy. This was followed by marketing, promotions, and website optimization. When it comes to marketing channels: 29% of stores find email the most effective, followed by organic social media (25%). Other popular channels include paid social (13%), search ads (8%), and content marketing (6%). For the 2024 holiday season, 34% of stores are adjusting their strategies, focusing on: Introducing new products (26%) Improving marketing efforts (24%) Enhancing website performance (16%) Starting sales early (10%) Offering special discounts (9%) Making changes to customer engagement, social media, and inventory management completes the list. Multi-Channel Sales The survey also noted that 67% of stores sell through multiple channels, including physical locations and online marketplaces. Specifically, 11% of stores sell on Amazon, 8% sell on Etsy and 6% sell on eBay. Customer Engagement & Analytics A significant 91% of stores use analytics tools like Google Analytics, WooCommerce Analytics Dashboard, and Meteorik to evaluate campaign performance. Despite the busy season, 89% of stores do not implement a special refund or return policy Woo’s Chief Marketing Officer, Tamara Niesen, has shared more insights on the survey results on the WooCommerce blog. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingTag Archives: Insights
Get Data Insights to Fuel Your Ecommerce Business
[ad_1] Do your customers zigzag between your ecommerce site, social media profiles, blog, and marketplace product listings? Then you probably find it challenging to gain insights that enable you to craft a personalized experience at scale. Personalized experiences are important—71% of consumers expect brands to deliver them. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Large b2C ecommerce brands know this and design systems to consolidate omnichannel data, which enables them to tailor experiences with better insights. While you may not have the resources to design such a system, you do have the opportunity to use software that offers the same level of access to your data as the big brands. Custimy is an all-in-one CDP software that provides small and medium-sized companies with the insights they need to fuel their customer experience. Its founders mixed extensive knowledge from the ecommerce and marketing world with a no-code approach, cloud solution, and artificial intelligence to create a customer data platform that blurs the lines between SMBs and enterprises.But exactly what data is used in Custimy? What are its salient features? How does it compare to a CRM? In this detailed Custimy review, I’ll give you all the answers and explain how you can use Custimy to build a better and stronger business. Custimy Customer Data Platform – Overview and Key Features Custimy is a robust CDP that provides the foundation to ensure that your customer data insights and analysis are consistent across all your channels, tools, or platform. It does this by tracking identifiers from your different channels and unifying them in the CDP. These identifiers are based on demographics, personal information, transactional data, and more. Many other CDPs base identifiers on device ID or cookie ID, but with third-party cookies being phased out, this is no longer a long-term or viable solution. Article Continues Below Custimy serves as the foundation of your customer data, enabling your teams and tools that use the platform to become more insightful. Here are some of its key capabilities: Acquire the right customers Typically, companies look at ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and POAS (Profit On Ad Spend) to evaluate the customer’s profitability. But these KPIs only offer a glimpse of the view, and you risk losing out on gaining the right customers. Custimy looks at customers’ behavior, traits, and lifetime value (LTV). It lets you identify your most valuable customers based on these KPIs and synchronizes segments automatically to your marketing channels. This automated, data-driven approach ensures the consistent acquisition of new profitable customers with an expected higher lifetime value. Retain existing customers Getting our customers to repurchase is not easy. That’s because it’s difficult to track their post-purchase behavior and determine when they are ready to buy. Custimy improves your odds of retaining customers by forecasting their buying propensity, identifying their behavior, and tracking their behavior and spending habits within your brand ecosystem (webshop, emails, socials, etc.). AI algorithms in Custimy update audiences for email flows and repaid targeting, making it easier to identify those ready to buy. This helps you avoid losing a customer to your competitors because you didn’t act when they were ready to purchase. Improve marketing results Data-driven marketing is all about ensuring the right customers are exposed to your brand, products, and categories. In other words, you need to feed your marketing channels with the necessary audience signals to outshine the competition and improve your ROI. Custimy helps you take an AI and Machine learning approach to building value-based audience segments. Additionally, it sends updated audience signals to marketing channels like Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, and Google Ads, allowing you to target the right customers at the right moment across their preferred channels. Moreover, Custimy’s CAPI (conversion API) integration allows you to reclaim your tracking and conversion ability. It presents opportunities you haven’t seen since iOS 14, tracking actions across your entire marketing funnel so you know where to tune them for maximum ROI. Minimize return rate Ecommerce return affects many more aspects of your business than you might think. Your logistics, customer support, and shipment provider all get an additional responsibility, while you lose out on a sweet sale. Ecommerce return affects many more aspects of your business than you might think. Your logistics, customer support, and shipment provider all get an additional responsibility while you lose out on a sweet sale. Ultimately, a high return rate will cause you to lose both profits and revenue. Minimizing these extra costs while keeping your revenue is key to growing your ecommerce business. With that knowledge, you can better decide where to increase product information, which items to stop advertising, or even what goods to completely cut out due to too many returns. Along the same lines, targeting customers with products they are more likely to keep can help you cut costs and keep money flowing into your store. Increase overall profits Custimy also provides complete insights into your products and first-hand knowledge of what customers are buying (and keeping) those items. With a few clicks, you can get insights that reveal your best-performing products. You can then allocate more budget toward them to boost your bottom line. Custimy Insights Cockpit Besides the above features, Custimy gives you a full picture of all your data by integrating every channel with customer touchpoints. It automates the whole process for you and ensures you can easily find all your KPIs in one place, i.e., Custimy Insights Cockpit. And with easy reporting, you save valuable hours spent on gathering data from different resources, consolidating them in a spreadsheet, and crunching numbers with disparate tools. Also, I loved that Custimy is easy to use and displays your whole business in numbers. Based on my experience using it, it’s really a no-code platform that empowers you to stay ahead of the game with key business insights. Say goodbye to the days of feeling lost in different tools or programs with your data siloed off. Custimy Data Is First-Party Data It’s no secret that third-party data
Continue readingInsights Into Switching Between Block Themes – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Unlike routine testing rounds for the FSE Outreach Program, Anne McCarthy threw a bit of a twist on the Make WordPress Test blog earlier today. The announcement asks users to think about what they would like to see when switching between block themes. The test is open to anyone who wants to participate through September 29. The steps are loose and not required. The goal is to get people thinking and discussing what the theme-switching flow will look like over time. McCarthy asked several questions, but they are merely a starting point for a more open-ended discussion. While I sometimes need structure, I tend to break the rules anyway. The format of this test suited me well today. I am not one for switching themes. Since I learned how to design for WordPress well over a decade ago, I have never moved from one theme to the next. At least not in the same way that the average user would. Instead, every time I have added a new coat of paint on my websites, I have simply switched over the foundation to whatever I had been working on at the given moment. WordPress themes, for me, were always just an iteration upon the last project. One of the cornerstones of programming is to reuse your code, and it is a principle that I have taken to heart. Even now, as I continue to explore block theme design, I am doing so from a gutted version of the last WordPress theme I built. When I think about switching themes, it is not an experience that I am accustomed to. Even when I started working for WP Tavern, the site already used one of my themes with some customizations. It feels like I have missed out. Throughout my entire journey with WordPress since version 1.5, in which the platform first introduced themes, I have never truly experienced the theme-switching process in the most fundamental way. I will soon, but we will talk about that on another day. When I have “switched” themes, I have done so in test environments for writing about them or running tech support for end-users. The call for exploration mainly focused on global design-related features. However, in my experience, these tend to matter far less than what a user’s content will look like. The first thing I do when testing any theme is to load a demo post. Lately, this has been the “Welcome to the Gutenberg Editor” test post. The primary question: Can I read the content comfortably? If I do not get past this stage, I simply deactivate the theme. For this experiment, I chose three themes: I started with that foundation of testing how easy it was to read a simple blog post. Overall, each theme performed admirably. However, Quadrat’s use of the featured image on a single post view felt out of place. One question that keeps me up at night is how cross-theme compatibility will work on the content level. Default block output should translate from one theme to the next with little or no issues. However, custom block styles, font sizes, colors, and the full range of presets are already a problem area. This is not a new conversation. There is an ongoing discussion on standardizing some features. But the cat is already out of the bag and running loose through the house. Global styles and templates are features that themers have been dealing with for years in some form or another. The new systems are just different ways of doing the same thing. However, when design elements merge with content, switching themes becomes more complex without an underlying, standardized system. To illustrate this point, I checked all three of my test themes against a post that used custom block styles, gradient colors, and font sizes. I wanted to push the boundaries beyond a simple blog post. The content was built with my custom theme and an “open canvas” template. Quadrat had a similar template for hiding the post title, but TT1 Blocks did not. The result was, ahem, rough: Of course, my custom theme looks as it should. This is not to say that TT1 Blocks and Quadrat are poorly designed. They are actually two of the best block themes available at the moment. The problem is that they do not share the same block styles and presets. WordPress and Gutenberg are also missing some fundamental layout tools that could make it easier to carry this design from one theme to the next. The most complex piece of the design is with the opening Cover block pattern: Technically, this is a Cover block within another. The bottom layer has a background image with a duotone filter and sets the inner content to 90% width of its parent. The second layer has a theme-defined gradient background and sets its inside container to the left at 50% width. Plus, it has a sprinkling of custom font sizes. These layout controls are only possible through custom block styles or some hacky uses of the Columns block. I chose the former because it was easier, but it also means they are broken when used with any other theme. While I called this the most complex piece of the design, it is actually a simple thing to do with most page builders or with a few lines of CSS. Until WordPress has some type of grid container block, theme authors will rely on custom techniques to make such layouts possible. It can and will get even uglier than this the longer we wait. The open discussions on standardizing presets like font sizes and color names may bear fruit that could help with the more trivial parts. However, I have not seen gradient names pop up in this discussion. I do have at least one ulterior motive for this test. I have long wanted to try more experimental post designs and layouts here at WP Tavern. However, I know that we will eventually switch themes.
Continue readingGoogle Launches Search Console Insights, a User-Friendly Content Performance Overview – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Google Analytics is powerful if you know exactly what kind of metrics you want to investigate, it but can be overwhelming if you just need a simple overview of your traffic and referrals. Search Console Insights is a new tool from the Google Web Creators team that is aimed at making content performance easier to understand at a glance. It combines data from Search Console and Google Analytics for a user-friendly overview of important metrics for content creators. Search Console Insights can help users quickly ascertain which pieces are their best performing content, how new pieces are performing, and how people are discovering the site. Clicking on the little academic cap icon offers more information about understanding the data and tips for improving content engagement and performance. The first section shows a site’s content performance trend for the past 28 days using page views and page view duration. The next card displays a carousel of new content with page views, average page view duration, and badges for content that has high average duration compared to other content on the site. Other cards include the most popular content within the past 28 days, top traffic channels, top Google Search queries, referring links from other websites, and social media. The performance cards are not configurable but they give you a starting point if you want to dig deeper into Google Analytics. It would be helpful if each graph was linked to more data where you could adjust the date range. Search Console Insights doesn’t include all the features unless you are using Google Analytics and associate it with your site’s Search Console property. Users can access the tool’s overview page by visiting the link directly. In the near future, Search Console Insights will be available in the iOS and Android Google apps when you tap your profile picture. The tool is now in beta but Google plans to roll the experience out gradually to all Search Console users in the coming days. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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