Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Personalising the perfect online experience

Customers increasingly want, and even expect, fast access to highly personalised content that not only reflects their preferences and interests, but also tempts them into exploring relevant new products and categories that will be of potential value to them - and that means a thoroughly and intelligently personalised approach is needed.

But what does this level of web site personalisation entail? The options are extensive, and should be appropriate for both the customer and the brand's personality. A few of multiple choices include simple personalisation such as displaying a customer's name within a welcome message; indicating the nearest physical store based on the customer's location; displaying previously browsed products and categories; or showing relevant cross-sell suggestions based on the customer's purchase history or sophisticated product affinity analytics.

Tailoring website content on a one-to-one basis in real-time in this way ensures the shopping experience is optimised for each individual customer, similar to the very personable, somewhat "old-fashioned" experience of visiting a local store where they know their all customers' favourite products, sizes, colours etc.

Yet despite the clear benefits to customers and brands alike of website personalisation, a study of Top 120 UK Retailers by web sales revenue (sourced from Internet Retailer) revealed that only 22.5% to have any form of personalisation. In fact only 13 websites provide browsed goods recognition for returning visitors, which is viewed as a pretty basic personalisation technique.

And the situation is even worse on mobile. Mobile optimised websites can offer the same personalised web service as desktop platforms. This ensures an individually tailored browsing experience wherever the user is located; creating a constantly open channel of interaction between the user and the website, which in turn fosters reliability and trust. Despite this, our research again revealed a minority are taking advantage of personalisation, with only 6.7% of mobile sites of the top etailers using any type of personalisation. With the growth of mobile commerce and the increasing pressure for omni-channel marketing, most retailers really are missing a trick.

The change in consumer behaviour and the tendency to now engage with favourite brands not just across a wide array of channels, but also via a variety of devices, from PCs and laptops, to tablets and smartphones, also means brands need to be able to join up individuals' behaviours across these multiple touchpoints in order to personalise the customer experience to best effect and avoid making any faux pas. The ability to stitch together these multiple instances of customer interaction enables a retailer to not just gain a far better understanding of changing customer behaviour through deep customer analytics, but also to personalise the experience for each individual so it reflects that customer's preferences and takes into account the current device and channel being used.

"Moving forward, it is likely that real-time website personalisation will soon become a necessity rather than the source of competitive advantage it is for etailers today. Beyond that, true one-to-one data-driven omni-channel personalisation will not be far behind, especially with the data and technologies available today to help etailers deliver truly sophisticated and effective personalisation programmes. Let's hope that none get left behind," concluded Hulls.

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)