Tag: Ahmedabad

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Social Media

Engage with them! How interactive content helps a brand grow online

How interactive content helps a brand grow online

Pick 6 Horror Movies and We’ll Guess Your Biggest Fear with 98% Accuracy
Heels or Flats: How do you dress to impress on date night?

We all have come across such articles on the internet. And in most cases, have clicked on the link and answered all the questions, either out of curiosity or interest in the brand. This is interactive content at play, on web and social media.

What is interactive content?

Any form of content that encourages the user or follower to not just passively consume content, but participate and interact with the brand, is called interactive content. It can include quizzes, surveys, polls, riddles and calculators added into articles, social media posts and stories.

It is an interesting and fun approach to connect and interact with the customer, pick her brain on what they think about the brand, its products and in some cases, even collect data from them for future marketing activities. And anything more than just reading text is always more engaging.

In order to provide the best social media marketing services in Ahmedabad, Flora Fountain has always believed that content must engage, educate and delight the brand’s user.

BuzzFeed – Killing it on the internet with interaction

Everyone knows BuzzFeed. While there might be different reasons why people like them, the one thing that makes them stand out in the market in terms of content, are their interactive posts, quizzes and surveys. According to BuzzFeed, 96% of users who start their sponsored quiz, complete it. That is a very high completion rate!

buzzfeed-landing-page

And the brand has been successful in generating engagement, user interaction and data collection because their content targets specific audiences, it is created to be mobile-friendly and incorporates a lot of visual elements.

It’s very simple, create content that makes storytelling a conversation, rather than one-way communication, where the consumer is only reading and gaining information but cannot interact back.

Like, this FRIENDS S1-based quiz that takes one on a nostalgic trip back to the teens. What’s fun is that they become addictive after a point.

Benefits of interactive content

Increases consumer engagement

When a brand creates any form of interactive content, it is seeking its users’ opinion about the topic. It shows that the brand truly values the consumer and they are open to accepting their users’ ideas, thoughts, and feedback.

Instagram-reel

And no, it’s not rocket science to create engaging content online. And one of the best examples of it is this great use of the Poll Stickers feature by youth fashion brand Forever21 about their footwear trends.

More attention from the audience

When a brand regularly creates interesting interactive content on their social media platforms, it creates a great recall value in the minds of its followers and users. They begin to participate in the quizzes, puzzles and polls regularly and look forward to the next such post.

One such example is of Falguni Vastrapur on Instagram. Its digital marketing company in Ahmedabad regularly creates funny, engagement inducing content on its Instagram pages.

word-puzzal

Most of the participants in their comments are their customers, who are delighted that their favourite snack brand interacts with them like their next door friendly neighbour.

More data captured for optimised lead generation and conversion rates

fusion sweets brand

Interactive content doesn’t always have to be just This or That type of polls and quizzes. They can also be a simple Ask Me Anything (AMA) or DM for Price Request types of questions too.

Ahmedabad-based fusion sweets brand Bellezoe has been known to be keeping its stories interactive in a way that it gets to capture customer data like their social media handles, and in some cases, their contact details too.

With the database of interested users on Instagram, they keep these ‘users’ or prospective customers updated about their latest products, offers and much more.

Types of interactive content

Instagram Polls & Surveys

Instagram is a goldmine of interactive content. Especially its stories, with multiple stickers which offer interactive tools for users to engage with the brand. Some of its popular stickers include the Poll, Question, Rate Me and Link Me.

Some of the top brands from around the world, like Forever 21, Ray Ethnic and local brands like Bellezoe use such stickers to engage with their followers regularly.

Quizzes & Puzzles

As mentioned earlier, BuzzFeed is the champion when it comes to Quizzes. Almost every other media company or brand all over the world uses BuzzFeed’s Quiz template or a modified version of it in their content.

LIVE Q&A sessions

Many celebrities and even brands love using the LIVE feature on Instagram and Facebook to host direct Q&A sessions with their followers in real time.

Some of our favourite LIVE interactive sessions include musician Ehsaan Qureshi’s late-night Instagram LIVEs during the pandemic-induced lockdowns where he’d invite budding artistes and singers to join him on the same screen and perform for his followers. A similar activity was done by the Instagram page Your Food Lab, where the chef would host a Cook With Me with his followers on LIVE, while answering their questions and having fun chats with them.

Calculators

Feed in the data and get to see the results. One of the best and professional ways to interact with consumers and users is to provide them with an easy to use calculator to find out answers to their questions themselves.

It not only improves their engagement with the brand, but increases the chances of them taking the conversation forward and getting converted into a potential sale/business. One of our favourite calculators is the one below, from Ahmedabad-based Investment Advisory firm White Ocean.

sip-dashboard

How to plan your interactive content?

It’s not rocket science. Simply follow this checklist below, created by digital marketers of Flora Fountain, one of the best social media marketing services in Ahmedabad, follow.

    • Outline your objectives clearly
    • Use the language your audience interacts in
    • Keep it simple as you can
    • Keep it mobile friendly
    • Collect & store customer data for future

Easy-peasy? No? Worry not. We’re here for you! Drop us an ‘Allo on hello@florafountain.in and we’ll help you create such amazing, interactive content for your brands too!

Categories
SEO

On and Off: Your brand’s guide to creating an SEO strategy

off-page SEO and on-page SEO

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine like Google.

75% of users never go past the first page of search results.

Knowing such facts is one thing, but internalising them and then acting on them is what helps a brand really shine online.

SEO or search engine optimisation empowers brands to do that. The process of optimising a website to improve its visibility and rank in search engine results is known as SEO. It is a detailed plan which on execution helps a website improve its search engine ranking in order to capture more organic traffic. This plan is built on two different foundational pillars like on-page and off-page SEO. In order to fully optimise a brand’s SEO strategy, a thorough understanding of these two pillars become extremely important.

The difference between on-page and off-page is quite simple. On-page as the name suggests are all the activities done ‘on the pages of your website’. Whereas off-page means all the activities done ‘beyond the pages of your website.’ Of course it’s more than just these two lines.

Read on as Flora Fountain, a top SEO company in Ahmedabad, India, is here to help you get a better understanding of all that SEO jazz.

Let’s jump in!

On-page SEO

The process of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and garner more relevant organic traffic in search engines such as Google and Yahoo is known as On-page SEO. It entails optimising both the content and HTML source code of a page. From creating content with keywords, optimising title tags, meta tags, and internally linking relevant pages as per the URL structure, everything that takes place on the website falls under on-page SEO.

Content and keywords

You might already know all about content and keywords, but a refresher never hurts!

Content is indeed the king QUEEN! Most brands, despite knowing this, fail to optimise content. SEO includes looking for the keywords that your audience is using to search for information on the internet, and then creating, optimising, and regularly publishing website content around these keywords. Content also includes the kind of images you put out on your website. So you need to optimise them as well. Make sure that they are not larger than they need to be and are in the right format (JPG and PNG).

The experienced SEO team at Flora Fountain, the best digital marketing company in Ahmedabad, India, also understands how to optimise existing content, in order for a brand to increase its organic traffic.

title and meta description

Title Tag and Meta description

The main heading or the title of the web page is a title tag. And the short description that appears under it is a meta description. Title tag comes up on the search engine results page (SERP) and is a very important factor for the success of on-page SEO. And because Google search engine usually picks up only about 65 letters or characters from the title tag, a brand needs to choose every word, even letter, very wisely! Meta tags on the other hand describe the content on that page but, more importantly, it’s written to help your web page stand out in the list of SERP results. Keep the meta description under 155 characters to ensure your entire description is shown in search results.

Internal Linking

Connecting any link from one page on the website to another page on the same website is known as internal linking. Linking to various relevant pages on the website makes it easier for search engines like Google to understand the relationship between pages on the site and to crawl everything. Internal linking also provides a more immersive user experience that can keep the visitors engaged for a longer time. Though, unlike backlinks, internal links don’t boost the website’s domain authority. But, they funnel existing domain authority built using backlinks and spread it across the website.

Mobile friendly website

A website designed to show the most optimised view as per a device’s screen size, ranging from smartphones to tablets, is known as a responsive website. The overwhelming majority of website users browse on their phones, and yet 44% brands still do not have mobile-friendly websites. Google too favours mobile-friendly websites, pushing up the ranking of the website if it is mobile-friendly. These are all the considerations that go into website development when you hire a top SEO company like Flora Fountain to work on your website re-design from day 1. Just like this Ahmedabad-based school did!

Another thing to keep in mind is that SEO results are different when it comes to mobile pages. A website does not automatically inherit the main site’s SEO ranking on mobile. The search results on mobile are calculated based on the site’s mobile page speed.

URL structure and SSL HTTPS

URL structure is a very crucial part of any website. URLs with relevant keywords allow search engines to crawl from page to page on a website very smoothly. This also makes navigation more efficient for visitors. While creating a URL, a brand should always use the primary keyword for the page and avoid repetitive words to keep it short.

Similarly, an SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, certificate is also very important as it improves the website’s page security and visibility. With the help of SSL, the likelihood of interference of a third party in between a website’s server and a visitor’s server, decreases, guaranteeing that the content on the website is safe. Moreover, because of this search engines give ranking preference to sites that are SSL enabled.

Website Speed optimization

1,2,3,4,5! If your site takes this much time to load its content completely, chances are that 90% of users will abandon your site before the website loads. This metric is tracked as the bounce rate. And the more time your website takes to load, the higher the bounce rate. While crawling, Google correlates a high bounce rate with lower user engagement which affects your ranking as well. In fact, as per Google guidelines for developers, the site speed does impact search rankings.

So while most website design agencies might not give enough importance to this, from an SEO and user experience perspective, your website must load in under three seconds, so that with the help of SEO services and other on-page and off-page optimization, your website can come up ranking high in Google.

Breadcrumb navigation and Alt Text

Some other important parts of on-page optimisation include adding breadcrumb navigation and alt text. Breadcrumbs inform the website visitors to navigate through the site. It shows them where they are on the website. Moreover, it enables Google to understand the structure of the site. While alt text is a word or phrase that can be attributed to a picture file to help ensure it gets indexed and makes the website more accessible for reading software. Both these factors make a website with alt text for its images rank highly.

As you might have guessed, On-page SEO optimisation is something you have complete control over through your website’s code and content, however that’s not always the case for off-page SEO. So what exactly is off-page SEO optimisation?

Off-page SEO

As mentioned before, this refers to all the strategies and activities planned and executed, outside of your website, to bring traffic to it. It is tremendously valuable because it tells search engines that the website is important to others on the web. Every link that a site receives acts as an endorsement from another source. It shows the quality of the website. This is usually done through backlinks.

Backlinks

Also-known-as inbound links or incoming links, Backlinks are links that are created when one website links to another. They help a website gain more traffic and it also serves as one of Google’s top three ranking factors.

Imagine, a company with a brand new website. And no one links to it and it doesn’t submit the website Google. It can’t be found because search engines will take forever to find it, if at all. But if multiple other websites, especially those with a high ranking or domain authority, link to it, search engines can crawl through that link and index the pages. If this sounds awfully a lot like a popularity contest straight out of high school, that’s because it kind of is. Being linked to by the “popular kids” or high-trafficked websites, usually ranks your website high in search engine’s crawling eyes, and eventually bodes well for your website traffic.

Backlinks

Create. Earn. Build.

These are the three ways to get backlinks.

Creating means when someone manually adds links to their site from other sites. This can be done by regularly leaving blog comments or replying on forums. Earned backlinks or organic backlinks occur when people discover a site’s content after googling it or through social media and choose to link it in their site. This usually happens when the content on your website is rich with information or entertainment, or another quality that the reader highly values. Last but not the least, building backlinks means when a website owner contacts other website owners or editors and requests them to link to their website. This usually works as a barter between websites.

Local SEO

According to studies, more than 50% of ‘near me’ searches result in a store visit and 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information. So your brand needs to show up when someone searches for the service you provide in your area. That means you need to show up in your local google searches. But how does one go about it? With ‘Local SEO’, which helps brands to be more visible in local research on search engines like Google.

As part of local SEO, a citation is an online mention of your business on another’s website, that links not only the name but also the address and phone number of your business. It consists of your business’s name, address, and phone number or NAP. You can submit these citations to the listing sites or can hire an agency to do it for you. These citations work as proof for Google’s algorithm to find out that your brand is a local business.

Social media

Over 93% of regular internet users log into social media. So as a brand make sure to create social media accounts for your business on the platforms where you know your target group is active.

And though it is true that the likes and comments on social media don’t directly impact the website rank, it still enables you to promote your site to 93% of users who are either new or existing customers of your brand. When they see your brand on social media, they get an opening to contact you, and you get to answer them regularly.

Another thing that you can do is join hands with the right influencers and seek collaborations to promote your product or service. When influencers successfully create a buzz for your product, Google takes note of this online chatter and if there are enough shares, they’ll start to prioritise your content over others. Similarly, blog posts are a great way to put out new keywords with more recency, as blogs get indexed by search engines. In such cases, it makes sense to go with a top digital agency, with social media services, content-writing services and SEO services in-house so all the functions can work together without friction.

Reviews

It should come as no surprise that people do a fair share of research on the product they are about to purchase. And 88% of customers trust reviews posted by others online. So the more the reviews, the more your brand establishes itself as a trustworthy online brand among your existing and potential clients.

And according to Google’s local quality guidelines, responding to such reviews can improve your business visibility.

Still on the fence about SEO? Let the SEO experts, at one of the best digital marketing companies and SEO companies in Ahmedabad, India help you get a better understanding, and craft a smart and persistent SEO strategy for you. Give us a call now to inquire about our SEO services.

Categories
Web Design and Development

How we created a mobile-first responsive website for an Ahmedabad school

Shivashish World School Website Desktop

Located in one of Ahmedabad’s fastest developing areas, Shivashish World School (SWS) is a premier co-educational school which started back in the year 1994. A charitable trust started the school with Gujarati medium but with time the school got its CBSE affiliation and introduced English medium. In the year 2021, they went through a major expansion and re-branding exercise, which included a completely new building, identity design and re-doing their digital presence across website and social media.

The school wanted a total revamp of their design and branding, so one of Ahmedabad’s best digital marketing agencies came up with a best in class website to help them achieve a complete image makeover.

The Client’s Problem

Incepted more than 28 years ago, SWS has been imparting high-quality education from kindergarten right to high school. In 2021, they set up a new world class building for their CBSE board, but realized that in the post-pandemic era, most parents were going to discover them online first. Unfortunately, their existing website did not match the scale and aesthetic of the new building. The website was also being used for two different brands, the Gujarat Board school, called Shivashish School, and the CBSE school, called SWS, creating confusion for the user.

Moreover, the old website had been designed primarily for the desktop, with its mobile version created almost as an after-thought. However, a quick look at their analytics showed that up to 90% of their unique users accessed the website through mobile devices. All of whom were being served a sub-par experience.

The school also realized that most of the things that made them unique, such as their pedagogy, amenities and most of all its teaching staff had to be showcased better!

CBSE & GBSE The history of the school as presented in old website

Solution presented by Flora Fountain

Since most parents were accessing the website from a cell phone, we decided to create a mobile-first website, a first for any school in Ahmedabad, that was dynamic and sleek. Modern design concepts like glassmorphism, neumorphism, micro animations, extensive use of swipe, and an almost app-like UI were identified to create a modern website matching the new identity of the school. In order to accomplish this, we decided to design and develop a completely new mobile-first website, which was a first for any school in Ahmedabad.

Neomorphism in the footer of the new SWS website

Phase 1: Analysis

According to research, 61% of mobile users are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. That means, more than half of the target audience, parents, would look for schools in their locality on their phones. So on the basis of the research conducted on their website usage and research on the new mobile web technologies, we listed some points to work on.

1) There was a lot of information available for parents, students, and teachers. So the information architecture of the old website needed to be fleshed out better for users to easily navigate through the website.

2) The new website had to reflect and highlight current school values, while at the same time showcasing the facilities and amenities of the new school building, the talents of its students and most importantly, its teaching staff.

3) The new website had to be Search Engine optimized, or SEO optimized, to improve the school’s reach on search engines online

4) The new website had to provide an intuitive and delightful responsive experience for all its audience, especially those accessing it through mobile devices

5) The new website had to be created on a user-friendly CMS like so the client could edit the content and images on their own going forward

Phase 2: Ideation & Implementation

Committing to a Mobile-first approach

After gathering and analyzing the data and noting that parents would be the target audience and that the site should be easy for them to use, we went ahead with our original idea to create a mobile-first website. This means that our product and design team starts by creating wireframes and mockups for mobile first. This means thinking of a more modular layout than a grid-based one. The modules can then be rearranged to create layouts for desktop and mobile.

responsive vs mobile first web design

Neumorphic, Glassmorphic, Animated

The second idea was to incorporate Neumorphism, Glassmorphism and animation in the user interface or UI. Once the wireframes were sketched, our design team created mockups using these two effects on all the various elements that make up a website, right from buttons and tabs, to images and navigation elements. Each page was painstakingly mocked up so there was no room for error while coding. A document was created for all the animation with adequate references.

To implement Neumorphism all this, the front-end team placed UI elements behind a background in CSS, to make it seem like components such as buttons are actually housed inside the background. For the frosted-glass effect of Glassmorphism, a blur effect was added to the background. Contrasting and vivid colours are used in the background to highlight the blurred transparency, giving a subtle border to the translucent objects. For animation we relied on extensive use of jQuery’s animation libraries.

Creating content through writing and photo & video shoot

Since we had put our heart and souls into designing and developing the website, we realized that we would also be the best people to create content for it. We wrote SEO-optimized content using the information provided by the client, adding all relevant meta tags and keywords on each page to target audiences in the nearby 5 km radius. Since that is the most parents are willing to travel to send their kids to school. We also realized the need for high quality photographs and images to bring this vision to life. So we conducted a shoot to get the right expressions of each child and teacher for the website. We also shot scripted videos with the children each presenting school values in an irrepressibly cute way. We overlaid sketched illustrations on some images to give them an element of storytelling. Finally, we added GIFs for each teacher to give the website a fun approachable vibe.

Testing

We extensively tested this website across top 10 mobile devices used by parents, with at least 5% of the website traffic percentage, such as Samsung Galaxy phones, Vivo, Oppo, Google Pixel, OnePlus and Apple iPhone. In addition to this we also tested it across popular desktop browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari.

Result:

And viola, just like that the new website turned out to be as awesome as we had dreamt on paper and Illustrator 🙂

Let’s take a look!

Neumorphic, Glassmorphic, Animated visuals on the new SWS website

The new website highlighted the teachers and the students in a quirky and creative way, in line with the client brief.

SWS Teachers Mobile friendly views of the new SWS website

It showcased the history of the school in a fun and more accessible way, than the usual text format.

And here is the highlight of the website! A 3-d globe showing the alumni of the school spread across the world.

Want to explore this website some more? Check it out here.

Alumni of the SWS school Mobile friendly views of the new SWS website

So this is how Ahmedabad got its mobile-first school website! Time for your brand to do the same! If your brand needs a kickass and memorable website that works equally well on mobile as it does on desktop, one of the best and most thoughtful website development companies in Ahmedabad, Flora Fountain is here for you! Drop us an email on hello@flora.ffteam.in or call 9558079502!

Categories
Branding Services

Brands, It’s Time to Enter the METAVERSE. Here’s how!

Brands

Imagine a world, where a large number of people hang out together, online. Wait, don’t imagine. It’s already a reality now. Various online gaming platforms have evolved from simple tasks and challenges to a complete universe in itself. (Grand Theft Auto, we’re looking at you!)

At a time when companies like Microsoft are announcing that their number of subscribers are going over 10 million, it is quite visible that the pandemic has dashed any hope of weaning children (and adults!) from the online world.

That is the power of the metaverse.

Meta-what?

Imagine yourself walking into a showroom with a friend and going through different products while customizing them according to your choice. Two clicks and you are out of the showroom. As soon as you take your hands off the mouse and your eyes off the screen, you are at your place sitting in your room.

THIS IS METAVERSE

A parallel virtual world that combines multiple technologies like augmented and virtual reality, videos, and 3D avatars. It creates a space where people can shop and trade but also work, travel, socialize, and interact with one another. All of this on the internet, just like they do in real life.

For a term coined three decades ago by Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, ‘metaverse’ sure took a long time to become a part of the mainstream discourse. Though the actualization of the metaverse can still take a few years, the aspects of it can already be seen in online game universes, like Fortnite, Roblox, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft. These video games provide the closest metaverse experience because players don’t just play games anymore, they also use it for other activities in “cyberspace”.

Brands like Nike have entered the metaverse by creating a virtual world, Nikeland on video game platform Roblox Corp, effectively becoming the first big brand that created a digital space for players to customize their avatars with special Nike products. And like Nike, other big-names are also trying their best to engage young customers while being averse to traditional advertising tactics.

Flora Fountain, one of the best logo design companies & leading branding agency in Ahmedabad is here to share some key takeaways for brands that are still mulling over why and how to navigate through this new frontier.

How can brands map into the metaverse?

Brand placement in gaming platforms

87% of Generation Z, 83% of millennials, and 79% of Generation X spend their time on video games on smartphones, gaming consoles. They meet their friends, select avatars and play in that elaborate digital world of games like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite. There is no doubt that these habits of a customer base will have a significant impact on brands. Brand placement in games can help the brands reach a very very captive audience.

Some of the world’s most valuable brands like Gucci and Ferrari are actively testing how they can lead in the metaverse and engage with more customers to generate additional revenue. Last year, Gucci joined hands with Roblox, a gaming platform with approximately 202 Million active users, and created a virtual Gucci Garden exhibit on the platform to sell several rare Gucci items for two weeks.

Gucci Garden

Similarly, Ferrari teamed up with Epic Games and added it’s 296 GTB to Fortnite.

Create Virtual Showrooms

Digitally created 360° environments, virtual showrooms give similar look and feel and functions as a physical showroom. It lets a brand share its collections with a click of a button and schedule virtual appointments or set up virtual fitting rooms with retail buyers.

According to McKinsey, around 70%–80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service. And with the pandemic, making work from home a reality, more than ever. Brands can use this to expand their reach as buying and selling is happening online. Depending on the software, brands can share 3D product images and product videos and accept purchase orders, all within the same platform. It also allows the customers to avoid spending an entire day running between showroom appointments.

Enable customizers & allow testing

When a person shops for a product. For example a car, he/she decides what model they want and choose their favorite colour, seat style, the style of wheel, along with other specifications. Why? Because 50% of consumers desire personalized products. And studies have shown that customization has proven to be a promising avenue in fields where companies want to attract customers in a competitive market.

Metaverse gives brands a way to create a 3D-exhibition booth space with infinite opportunities to customize. One such example is Mercedes. Which enables its customers to configure their ideal G-Wagon through a live demo and shows them how it will look on their custom vehicle.

Nike Logo in sportswear

Similarly, this customization can be taken to another level, by allowing the customers to test new designs according to their wish. Checkout how Sportswear giant Nike gives its customers a chance to design their ideal shoe.

Indian Tech giants are also mushrooming in this space.

Several mobile app development companies based in India have diversified into providing professional metaverse development services. Other companies like TCS, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, Accenture have also started to develop in the field.

If you are wondering how you can do this for your brand? You can hire one of the leading branding agencies in Ahmedabad, India and let them come up with the perfect branding strategy for you to enter the metaverse. It is very important for you to have pilot projects in place. Start building a core team that learns to integrate such dynamic technologies!

We are excited for the future! Are you?

Categories
Ecommerce

Here’s how to UP your ECOMMERCE game!

Cover-img
Vector flat concept of e-commerce, online store. Payment by computer and fast delivery. Shopping service, digital marketing concept. Buying goods in shop over internet.

Did you know that there are approximately 12 million – 24 million Ecommerce websites in the world? And with every passing day, more sites are being created. This shows how fierce the competition is in the current market and how starting and surviving in an Ecommerce world comes with its own set of challenges.

A brand needs much more than a beautifully designed website to stand out from the crowd. So, to make sure that your Ecommerce store is providing shoppers with a quality shopping experience, it’s crucial to know what pain points you’re likely to face as an Ecommerce business and how to solve these problems.

From audience retention to generating targeted traffic, one of Ahmedabad’s best Ecommerce website design and development agencies, Flora Fountain has identified some major eCommerce pain points faced by brands while setting up their website and is here with some tips on how to solve them.

Abandonment rate

No one likes to be abandoned! Not even the brands!

But unfortunately, ECommerce stores have an average 69.57% abandonment rate, which means that only 3 out of 10 potential customers complete a purchase when shopping online.

Cart abandonment is when a customer picks a product they want, adds it to the cart, goes to the checkout window and leaves the website from there. There could be many reasons behind this action, like unexpected and additional costs (hidden taxes, shipping charges) calculated over and above the sale price, better prices on other websites, long and complex checkout processes, long delivery durations, confusing return policies, to name a few.

How to solve it?

While it is next to impossible for a brand to achieve zero cart abandonments, there are certain steps which could help them bring it down considerably.

– One option is to show progress bars on every step of the shopping process. Because the human mind is hardwired to follow trails and complete them. This will prompt them to finish the purchase.

Abandonment rate

– Maintaining transparency by showing the complete breakdown of the product’s pricing, including the taxes, the shipping costs, and any other fees makes the customer trust the brand more.

– Reminders are also a great way to prod customers to go back to their cart and finish their purchase. It is usually done by emailers or SMSes.

Customer service

Millennials value personalization! Like having recommendations from support staff, prompt replies to solve their shipping or payment issues, etc. Because good customer service makes customers make repeat purchases with the company.

Whereas poor customer service leads to customers backing out from purchases. About 78% of customers back out of a purchase because of a poor customer experience. Customers are not able to speak to a person who can provide them with the answers they are looking for. Customers are put on hold for unreasonable lengths of time.

How to solve it?

A brand should incorporate a WhatsApp number or Facebook messenger chatbot along with other chat options for the customers which are available 24*7. A live customer support team, not robots will be a big help to the site. Encourage user-generated content that spreads the word about their customer service experience.

The brand should also add a ‘contact’ section on their Ecommerce website along with information on top of every page with clickable phone numbers and emails. This adds to a brands’ credibility.

Product search

Imagine what customers would do if they were not able to find what they are looking for on a site because they either don’t know the name or they don’t remember it. They would go on a site where the site itself helps them to find what they are looking for.

This means that if a brand is unable to show its customers what they are looking for, the brand may lose them to competitors who are actually doing what the customers want. Enter, Search Box!

How to solve it?

A brand should place a search box in a visible location like a top right hand on the page and use attention-grabbing colours to it because it matters to the customers. Ahmedabad’s Flora Fountain, with its best Ecommerce web development services, developed Falguni Gruh Udhyog’s ( Falguni Vastrapur) website and added the search the same way to help its local customers.

Falguni’s page

Not only this, a website should provide customers with the ability to carry out searches by multiple parameters like category, manufacturer, part number, brand, etc.

Product Search

A brand should also try to offer advanced search functionality. Like, a visual search, or keywords. With this the customers can upload a photo of the item they like and the search engine will find the product for them. And with the help of keywords or synonyms, a brand can help customers find the product they don’t remember by name.

Hidden costs

Customers work out the price of the product they want from the moment they start adding products in the cart. But as soon as the customer finds out that they are not paying what they thought they would due to additional hidden shipping fees or handling charges, they leave their transaction.

How to solve it?

It’s very important for the brands to let their customers know the exact charges or fees as the hidden fees always irk customers. How to do that? By having a consistent and clear pricing strategy.

Hidden Costs

The customers might be expecting free shipping but if a brand is not providing that, it should make sure to include the fee before the checkout page. There should be a detailed bifurcation about the shipment or handling charges in the menu with a link on every product page.

So, we tried our best to convey common eCommerce pain points, maybe these resonate with you or maybe not. If not, your brand has different pain points. Let the experts at Flora Fountain, one of Ahmedabad’s best ecommerce website design and development agencies, find them and solve them for you.

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Digital Marketing Agency

Social Listening: Why You Must Know What Customers Are Saying Online

Social Listening

3.6 billion in 2020 to 4.55 billion people in 2021!

No, that’s not the increase in population but the increase recorded in social media users.

4.55 billion people, or about 57.6% of the global population, today use social media.

users to pay more attention

This ginormous population is constantly interacting online, collectively creating (and bringing down) trends, fashion, memes and also brands! Whether they are B2B, B2C, B2B2C, every brand today needs to know what people are talking about them and their competitors online. They also need to know where to find the users who are talking about them, and which users to pay more attention to.

How? Through social listening.

Let one of the best digital marketing companies in India, Flora Fountain help you hit a gold mine for customer service and product development through social listening.

Social Listening

Social Listening is a strategy used by brands to monitor and track all the public conversations taking place on any social media platforms related to their brand or product. These conversations or mentions are analyzed for insights to evaluate customers’ feedback.

In simpler words, it helps a brand understand why, where, and how online conversations are happening, and what people think of the brand.

Why do brands need it?

Social listening can help brands understand and thrive in a dynamic industry that morphs faster than a Power Ranger.

A. Brands can learn about their audience & create better content

If a brand actively practices social listening, it can learn a lot about what its customers desire. The strategy helps the brand discover where their audience is most active and which social networks they predominantly use. Also, brands can understand what their audience wants, where their interests lie, and questions they have, based on certain topics and keywords. Knowing where your company falls behind and knowing where you exceed customer expectations will allow you to perfect the areas you’re already succeeding in and build a plan around the areas that are in need of improvement.

B. Brands can build better social media marketing campaigns

Once brands learn the various important aspects about their audiences, this information can help build a better digital marketing campaign. Because the best digital marketing companies will always make campaigns focusing on topics that are relevant to the target audience, so they sit up and pay attention.

Social listening helps a brand uncover such relevant topics by analysing all the social conversations based upon such keywords.

C. Brands can get a better understanding of their competition

Social listening also enables a brand to get a better understanding of how audiences feel about their competitors and the industry in general. This data gives an insight into where the brand fits in the market. It might also reveal competition, direct or indirect, that the brand didn’t even know existed.

D. Brands can find relevant social influencers

Finding the right influencer for a brand is not a piece of cake. But social listening helps brand identify people with a strong following on social media and other online platforms, that match their target audience. Because when the right people talk about the brand to the right audience, chances of higher sales and customer retention increases.

But how does one practice “Social Listening”?

Users are unafraid of sharing their opinions online. So, in order to keep up with them, a brand must listen to them. This can be done by either hiring a team or a social media agency to keep a tab on trends, or by using specialized software or online platforms that offer social listening tools, that give businesses access to more detailed forms of information.

Read More: Tips For Writing Social Media Captions

1) Start with a ‘Goal’ & know whom to listen to

What is it that the brand wants to achieve with promotional activities on social media? Higher sales? Explore new audiences? Improve customer retention or form a new channel of sales/revenue? Once this is clear, it becomes the GOAL of the brand.

Next, the brand must figure out where should they put its ear on. In simpler terms, a brand should know which platforms they need to pay attention to. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google searches, LinkedIn, etc.

Thirdly, how to identify these conversations. Through direct mentions of the brand, social media handles, and/or product names, hashtags, campaign names and relevant keywords, names of important people in the company, and topics related to the brand. And all these points to study the competitors as well.

Starbucks

A great example of it is the following post, where Starbucks was not tagged with its official twitter handle, yet the brand was able to identify it online thanks social listening and respond to it, thus improving their customer engagement.

2) Empathize with the audience & respond fast

The audience needs to feel that they are being heard.

And in order to do that, the brand needs to engage a little more with its audience. Be it negative or positive, the brand needs to empathize with the audience.

brand gets positive feedback

If a brand gets positive feedback, then it needs to figure out what the audience loved about it and build marketing campaigns on that basis. And if the brand gets negative feedback, it needs to know the pain point of the audience in order to solve it.

3) Choose the right listening tools!

As kids, everyone is taught how active listening is important, but when it comes to brands, they haven’t always had the right tools to do so at a large scale. But now, there are many that can help brands in collecting and analyzing data in an easier way. Here are some that work across major social media networks:

Sprout Social Report

Sprout Social:

This tool provides brands with in-depth analytics and insights for organized social listening. One of its features shows the hashtags and topics that are trending across the mentions of the brand and replies on behalf of the connected brand. The name of the people and brands that most frequently talk about and get mentioned with a particular brand surface on the tool.

Hootsuite:

Brands can use this tool to monitor conversations, keywords, and mentions, along with hashtags, and respond to them. The tool helps a brand to analyze many real-time conversations taking place on digital platforms.

Hootsuite

HubSpot:

hubspot report

Brands can monitor social interactions and connect with the right people. It allows a brand to link data from social media with contacts in their database in order to create custom keyword monitoring, email alerts, mention notifications, etc.

Other than these, there are tools like Lately, Brand24, Brandwatch, Buffer, TweetDeck, Mention, which come with comprehensive features to help brands collect brand mentions across major social media networks.

As one of the top full-service digital agencies, Flora Fountain provides digital marketing services in Ahmedabad, India, and across the world. Drop us a message to plan some insightful social listening strategies for your brand.