Marketing Intelligence and Innovative Strategies

You would certainly find it alluring if the morning coffee is accompanied with a tempting offer on your mobile phone from your favourite brand or a store in your locality. Internet and smart phone applications have made so much progress in today’s time that there has been a notable change in a user’s shopping experience. Sellers are utilizing this upcoming technology to build smart methods to inform their customers, bringing the physical store right to the screen of their phones. Read on to find how all this is happening.

Certain algorithms often referred to as Marketing Intelligence Algorithms have been designed by merchants like Amazon, Best Buy and others that reproduce the real world shopping experience on the web. As in a real world you would like to compare products and have a look at some similar products at a less offered price, the same way these online merchants know what to tell you. They offer you similar products, let you compare products, recommend you products and tell you that something is still left to buy in your digital cart. They pick user data like your shopping history, wish lists, product reviews and feed this data to the algorithms. These algorithms excavate this data that belongs to a particular user and presents him with his personalized Amazon home page. Where he gets to see what he would like to buy.

How all this is happening?

The obvious matter to dwell upon is how all this is happening? How do these online shopping sites come to know about your desires? Your location plays a cardinal role and a lot of data sources go into this predictive analysis. A very profound attention is given to the following data sources while building a customer’s digital footprint:

• Your order history
• Items that you add to your cart on time to time basis
• Items you add to the cart but you don’t buy and stay there
• Responses to pricing and sale experiments
• Your wish list
• Your reviews and ratings of products
• How did you finally reached the product you were searching for?
• The nature of products you buy

Developers are working on the above listed points to design analysis methods that help in predicting what the customer seeks. For instance, if you’ve bought certain baby products lately, AliExpress knows that there’s a new one in your family and this information is used by its suggestion engines to let you know that you have the option to buy nappies from a new vendor at a better price.

These are the trending strategies that are being used in the e-commerce sector to engage customers.

Amazon’s Anticipatory Shipping:

Most talked about is the Amazon’s anticipatory shipping. Yes, it is what you are thinking it is. The developers at Amazon are never at rest and this time they are on to something big. The Seattle based marketing giant is now trying to ship you things even before you order them. How? They are brilliant in mining the user data from the sources discussed above and with the help of that they anticipate what you would be ordering two days from now. The main aim is to beat other shopping sites in terms of delivery timings. Interesting, isn’t it?

Proximity Marketing Methods:

This is prevailing in the mobile app industry from a while now and is the best and the easiest way to hold the attention of the customer. Utilising the location based services and the notification system of your smart phone, the app gives an alert on your phonetelling you that you are near a Burger King outlet. The moment you swipe the notification the app will tell you about the good deals. The idea is referred to as Proximity Marketing or Hyper-local marketing as its lets you know what’s happening in your vicinity.

Implementing these strategies to your new business would remarkably boost your sales as the stats give us a generally fair idea. According to a Forbes survey, more than 65% of people are in an agreement with the fact that the app would use their phone’s location in the background and nearly 80% of the people allow notifications. Similarly people tend to buy from the recommendation list and use offers and coupons for their purchases. Using data in a powerful and innovative way does not only gives customers a better shopping experience but also helps the merchants know their customer better and do productive business with them in new innovative ways.