Meaningful Analysis using Product Attributes

Product attributes are considered to be a concrete means of analysis of any product. For an eCommerce business, this plays an important role in analysis since the attributes define the product qualities in a meaningful way. It also describes the inherent characteristics and qualities of a product; which consumers tend to give importance to.

Attributes are what distinguishes products from each other. It includes product aspects like color, size, flavor, package type, and so on. Attributes hold significance for the consumers because it determines their purchase decision. For the business, it offer a structure and help in creating product categories. Many times, it defines the products’ competitive set as well.

In an eCommerce business, if we take products as an example, then the largest level is a category and the smallest is an item. There are several levels between category and items which are defined by them. Different attributes allow you to define various product segments and helps you to stay updated as per trend. This also makes it easy to identify the potential growth opportunities.

All the product database items are coded with different attributes. Some of them are unique to the products, for example – food and beverage products have flavor as an attribute, while personal care products have a scent as an attribute. These attributes are generally not interchangeable. Some of them are applicable to all products, such as manufacturer, brand, category, size, and so on. Once you are sure of the list of attributes, you can analyze their performance depending on what holds importance for the business and for the consumers.

Some examples of meaningful analysis using product attributes include:

1. What is the performance of the different brands and manufacturers?

2. What is the relative pricing between sizes?

3. Are multi-serve packages more famous than single-serve packages?

4. What is the competition between different types of containers? E.g. cans or bottles

Product attributes are generally available at the item level only. They do not apply at the level of total products. Although attributes are important, one cannot rely completely on them. This is because of keeping consumer behavior in mind. They might not necessarily be what the company wants. In addition, not all categories use the same unit of measure for an attribute. For example, for size attributes, different manufacturers may use different units of measures.

One must remember that attributes are related to product values and consequences. The combination of consumer behavior and sales patterns helps the business to determine this framework.

eCommerce Catalog Building and Indexing Services

Catalog building and indexing are important aspects for an eCommerce business as they help to display a company’s product list effectively. Having a good product catalog and index enhances the overall shopping experience and enables faster decision-making of the customers. Most often eCommerce companies tend to look for comprehensive, affordable catalog management services. Therefore, Outsourcing catalog building and indexing services is the best option for such companies.

Here are some advantages of outsourcing catalog management services:

Eliminates any possible product data discrepancies

2. Saves time and efforts of the client company and increases productivity

3. Client receives online and offline product catalogs

4. Highlights product list and increases customer appeal

Catalog building and indexing services enhances a business’s product offerings and expands the scope of their catalog allowing it to reach various marketing channels. Therefore, a carefully organized catalog helps customers, employees, shipping deployment centers, and internal operations keep the track of products, inventory levels, pricing and details.

Several eCommerce business solution providers offer catalog building and indexing services through their catalog management system. These services are required by B2B as well as B2C companies. Certainly, based on the paper product catalogs available and other details provided by the client, a dedicated team starts to create the online product catalog. Hence, the team consists of catalog building experts who analyze and categorize the products under a specific hierarchy. Thereby, ensuring that the products appear in the search results while customers browse over the internet. The end result is an attractive digital brochure that has error-free data in a presentable manner.

In the process of catalog indexing, a team of catalog indexing professionals work to customize digital templates for the catalogs. The existing information is then enriched with the help of alphanumeric codes, graphs and tables, images, text, dimensions, available quantity, attributes, MSRP, and other relevant elements.

The team works to attract customers’ attention and to make the website more appealing. Therefore, the product catalog is created using appropriate headings and subheadings that have the apt keywords for effective search results. Once the catalog is ready, the team checks for any possible errors and accuracy and submits it to the client company.

Catalog building and indexing offers several benefits to the eCommerce business:

Helps to manage the resources optimally

2. Efficiently reduces costs

3. Increases accuracy

4. Improves customer experience

5. Helps to update the key performance indicators

6. Improves quality catalog offerings

Product catalogs continue to be an important marketing channel for every eCommerce business. As a result, Customers come to know about the latest offerings and any promotional offers given by the organization. Hence, Considering the competitive environment of eCommerce, building an effective product catalog on a timely basis and keeping it updated with accurate information becomes a crucial task for any business.

Top 10 Tips for Mobile App Development (Android & iOS)

Mobile app development is a rapidly growing field wherein people from across varied industries and professions are creating different types of mobile applications on a daily basis. To survive in such a competitive and demanding world, one must be able to create a unique mobile application that serves its original purpose and stays updated with the changing market scenario.

Mobile app development can be extremely challenging. Smartphones keep upgrading their versions very often, which makes it even more difficult for app developers to maintain their pace. By the time an app developer develops an app, there are likely chances that the mobile version might change. Mobile app development requires a vision to understand what the users really need. If the app is able to fulfill the need, then it can survive for a longer time.

Mobile is extensively used for communication worldwide and if done right then mobile app can be helpful to a larger audience for a longer time. No matter if you are an experienced developer or a newbie in the field, here are few tips that you must consider while developing a mobile application.

1. Study the Market – Before you start to ideate over developing a mobile application take some time to study the market. Also, understand the needs of users. This is the initial part of creating a mobile app strategy which will later include factors like user interface, languages, regions, and so on. Know the latest trends of the market so that your application stands out from the rest. Today’s latest trends include Augmented Reality app development, Unity game development, etc.

2. Ensure Right Platforms and Features – This aspect comes once you understand your users. Decide over a suitable platform and apt features keeping in mind the likes and dislikes of your users. Focus more on the UI and UX, so that users enjoy using your app for a longer time. The app features must be user-friendly and appealing in appearance.

3. Make your App ASO and SEO Friendly – The app name must be creative, unique, and appealing to the users. It must attract the users, and compel them to install, use and talk about it. Once you have decided on the name for your app, try to make it ASO (App Store Optimization) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly. This means including certain keywords in your app name to make it easier to locate in search engines and app stores.

4. Pricing your Mobile App Correctly – Pricing is an aspect that will decide whether or not people will use the app. It starts from deciding whether the app must be free to use, or should the user pay some amount. If the pricing is too high, then not many users may use it. If the pricing is too low, then the developer will lose out on any possible profit.

5. Optimize your App – If you are a developer, you would not want your app to be too heavy and occupy a major space in the user’s mobile. Developers must keep the app as light as possible by avoiding using unnecessary objects and variables. Apps that are higher in size tend to perform slowly, which is not very appealing to the users.

6. Offline or Online – Smartphone users often struggle to find a stable internet connection. Keeping this point in mind, developers must consider whether their app should be available to users through constant internet connectivity or can be used offline as well. Very often, if users find that the app does not function well under weak internet connection, then they might not use it. Offline apps are hence more popular.

7. Keep the App Simple – Although revenue is important, keep the app as simple and hassle-free as possible. Check the number of ads that follow your app, since users do not like a lot of ads and banners coming in the way of their usage. Also, make sure that most of the age-groups can use your app.

8. Study your Competitors – In order to understand how you can generate more money from the app that you develop, you must study similar apps present in the market. You can analyze the performance of those competitor apps and learn from them. With the help of a careful study of the app features and business model, you can successfully position your app in the market.

9. Have the Right Updates – Offering the right update means offering the right content at the right time. Developers must figure out the exact time when the app updates must roll out. While too many updates might be irritating to the user, too few updates will make the app outdated. The balance must be rightly maintained.

10. Reviews and Feedbacks – No app can be perfect in its first version. Once the app is released take some time out to read and study your app reviews and understand your customers’ feedback. Do not be overwhelmed with positive as well as negative comments. Connect with your users regularly and try to rectify the errors in the app.

Developing an application starts from an idea and the urge to fulfill a need. Once the development starts, one must ensure that everything from user acquisition to retention is covered. Follow these tips to develop a successful mobile application.

Top Three Reasons to Normalize Your Data

Data Normalization

Most businesses focus on data cleanliness. Having accurate data helps to segment customers and analyze the data in terms of marketing in order to engage the brand further. There are a number of reasons to normalize your Data. This facilitates the entire data cleaning process and keeps the customer data clean and organized. Without data normalization one may face several types of data errors.

Data normalization is the process of restructuring the data to ‘normal’ in terms of data integrity. It is a key part of data management that can improve data cleansing, lead routine, segmentation, and other data quality processes.

Data normalization makes the data look clean, organized, easy to read and navigate through, and uniform across the entire customer database. Normalization includes standardization of specific fields in the customer database which brings uniformity.

In addition, here are the top three reasons to normalize your data.

1. Identifying Duplication of Data

Data duplication is a crucial problem that companies face and getting rid of duplicates is an important part of data management. Data duplication can hinder the overall customer experience. Customers may receive the same data more than once which is not very appealing. It not only impacts the sales and marketing aspects of the business, but also increases data storage cost. Normalization makes it easier to locate and eliminate the duplicated data.

2. Improving Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is defined as the process of assigning a value to specific leads in the CRM so that you can identify and grasp potential opportunities. Effective lead scoring is dependent on high-quality data and effective segmentation. For example, a B2B company will assign value to its specific leads based on the job titles as a variable. Moreover, proper segmentation is not possible without normalization. This will impact the values and business might lose out on the best opportunities. Data normalization enhances data quality and improves the process of lead scoring.

3. Reduce Response Times through Normalization

In B2C companies, customers expect faster response time for their queries. Having to feed in thousands of names along with their responses can often be time-consuming. In order to achieve an organized data, companies must have a perfect internal administration team and must use the data normalization tools. Data normalization ensures reduced response times and well-structured data.

There are specific tools that can identify standardization issues and assist in the data normalization process. And also these tools analyze the existing customer data to generate an assessment report. So, based on the report, multiple categories are assigned to help companies normalize and standardize their customer data. This is an ongoing process, which means that the business can track and fix the standardization issues as they arise. In addition, the number of data normalization errors can be limited, resulting in a high-quality customer database.

How to Boost your Marketing Efforts using Data Enhancement Techniques

Data Enhancement Techniques

Every business, be it product oriented or service oriented tends to face multiple challenges. These challenges can be in terms of production, resources, financial, sales or marketing. The marketing department of every business must work harder to satisfy their existing customers and attract new ones. This process becomes simpler with the help of data enhancement techniques.

Data enrichment, also known as data enhancement, is the process of enhancing your first-party data by completing the missing details. Data enhancement offers better insights and resources that help to implement an effective data marketing strategy. Detailed insights help in better decision-making processes and increased revenue. Data is usually obtained through various external data sources and they differ for different companies. While B2B companies use firmographic information such as employee data and revenue, B2C companies rely on purchase data or demographics.

Data enhancement provides a better ability to the sales and marketing teams enabling them to target the potential audience. Data that is correct, accurate, and organized in the right way can prove highly beneficial for right decision-making.

Business intelligence paves a way into developing effective marketing strategies. Companies are optimizing the ways in which the right data can be collected. It is important that before the data is analyzed, right technologies must be used to enhance the data collection process. Here are some of the sure-shot technologies used by businesses for data collection:

Using Internet Technology

Web marketers prefer using the internet to collect their data sources. The internet data can be active or passive. For active data collection, customers are directly asked for the data that is required. And also, for Website visitor to fill in a survey that also consists of some essential personal information. This can be a challenging way to collect information since there are privacy issues related to collection of customer’s private information.

In passive data collection, web marketers do not require the direct involvement of customers. Instead, they use the information that is stored on the website server in the form of cookies. Also, Cookies help to track user history, activities, and website searches.

Using Mobile Technology

Today, smartphones have become an evident part of our lives. This means that using mobile technology for internet marketing data collection is a smart idea. Mobile data consists of a rich source of information related to customers’ shopping activities, preferences, and behaviors.

Using Online Survey Tools

Survey tools are a straightforward means of collecting marketing data. Through surveys one can achieve answers to specific questions, which are relevant to our marketing goals. This makes it possible to understand the customer’s preferences, interests, and opinions on certain products and services and data enhancement can be done.

Using GPS

Collecting data using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology can benefit the local marketers. This technology helps to collect information that depicts the predictable shopping behavior of the consumers and their purchase patterns. Using GPS, we can obtain information like travel history and local competitors.

By using the information gained from the above-mentioned technology, data enrichment process can be carried out. They can be classified as three types:

1. Demographic Data Enhancement

This type of data enrichment involves data such as age, gender, qualification, marital status, number of kids, number of family members, number of cars owned, etc. Thus, it helps to enhance the performance of a marketing campaign.

2. Geographic Data Enhancement

It involves data such as postal address, zip code, office address, mapping insights, etc. This data enrichment is important for businesses to target their audience based on the geographic boundaries accordingly.

3. Behavioral Data Enhancement

This involves data related to purchase patterns, customers preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. So, it is important to understand customer behavior and provide them products and services that they would prefer to purchase.

Data enrichment is not a one-time process but a continuous one. Since consumer data keeps changing from time to time, it is important to update the collected data as per real-time scenario. If not, customers may receive irrelevant offers leading to dissatisfaction. Hence, the more updated data you have, the more satisfying results you will receive from your customers.

Altius Technologies

Monthly Archives: November 2020