Ian McCaig

About Ian McCaig

How to grow your international sales using personalisation

Unlocking international or cross-border sales has never been as lucrative as it is today.

Historically, shipping costs, lack of trust and limited information were factors in preventing growth in trade but now cross-border shopping is estimated to be worth $105bn.

While this is a huge growth area for ecommerce businesses, several obstacles still prevent online customers from comfortably venturing outside their borders and buying from international retailers.

Challenges often involve language or currency difficulties, logistics, restrictive local laws, or unclear product information.

However, personalising the shopping experience is one method you can use to increase revenues, allowing you to engage users on their own terms, provide them with the best information and take advantage of local opportunities.

So how do you get started? Read on for five of the best ways to make personalisation part of your international online strategy.

The ultimate guide to personalisation: upselling and persuasion

As technology has advanced, so has the online marketer’s ability to shape website utility and brand perceptions.

Product recommendation engines were the first real move away from a one size fits-all website, but it wasn’t until the introduction of A/B testing that ecommerce professionals started to look at personalisation as more than just algorithmic product curation.

Ecommerce is graduating into a new phase of personalisation where customer segmentation capabilities and the ability to serve targeted content in real-time are a viable reality for most online businesses.

The bricks-and-mortar store is no longer the only place the customer can see the personal face of the business as personalisation bridges the gap between the clicks and the bricks.  

This guide aims to identify some effective personalisation tactics that ecommerce businesses can implement to improve the customer experience and drive conversions.

Crossing the ecommerce pond: understanding US customers

As our world continues to become a much smaller place, the ability to buy goods online from other countries is on the rise.

One valuable target group for UK online retailers are US customers shopping on their sites.

We’ve used our own data to explore the shopping behaviour of this particular customer group to help UK ecommerce companies maximise the revenue opportunity these shoppers bring. 

Five ways to encourage your visitors to view high performing content

One of the best ways to make your visitors convert is by serving them the coolest stuff!

Don’t push them into an overly complicated buying process if you’ve figured out that people who see your style guide are converting at 10x the rate of those who don’t!

Once you’ve controlled for other influences, push your visitors towards your content and watch your revenue fly.

So, how are you going to get them there then?

Five ways to adapt your travel website to make holidaymakers happy

With 71% of customers expecting assistance when stuck within five minutes, high rates of abandonment, and a diverse range of platforms from which customers can speak, it has never been more important to listen to the voice of your customer.

Indeed, we have collected nearly 1.5m handwritten nuggets of information from almost 400 sites.

So, what niggles the modern day holiday maker? What prevents them from converting? And, most importantly, what can you do to keep them from journeying away from your site and into the arms of your competitor?

Why it’s not enough to just have live chat

At the beginning of February, I read a great piece in Econsultancy called “Why do online retailers need live chat?” Live chat, combining the ease of e-mails with the immediacy of the phone, is an excellent way of communicating with customers, explained the article.

This is undoubtable. According to BoldChat, 31% of customers in the UK and US say they would be more likely to purchase after a live chat.

Also, a customer service benchmark conducted at eDigital, rated live chat as the best customer service channel at 73% (e-mail was rated at 61% while phone was at the bottom with 44%).

However, I think that just having a constant link to a live chat tool is actually not enough. You need to take it one step further. Optimization, in this, is key.

Horror stories: how to avoid an A/B testing nightmare

A/B testing has undoubtedly become the buzzword of the marketing world. It has the potential to transform your marketing approach and fundamentally enhance the way you do business online.

It is the only reliable way of establishing cause and effect. In fact, 75% of the internet retailing top 500 are using an A/B testing platform. While 61% of organisations are planning to bolster testing services in the next 12 months.

And yet: poor A/B testing methodologies are costing online retailers up to $13bn a year in lost revenue. 

That’s a really big number. It’s no longer enough to say that you use A/B testing. How you do it is far more important. Here are three A/B testing horror stories.

The cases are anonymous, but the scenarios are very real. Avoiding these traps can help you transform an A/B horror story into the marketing fairytale you always dreamed of.

Let’s kiss the toad and turn him into a prince.

Five ecommerce personalization tips for Valentine’s Day

You’re one in a million. But hopefully your conversion rates will be higher than that this Valentine’s day.

There’s nothing like the feeling of love in the air that gets people wanting to be extravagant with declarations of their love.

But how do you go about providing the best experience for your Valentine’s customers to drive conversions, fast?

Here are my top tips for helping people in a loving mood get the most out of your site.

Seven ways you can become a real-time retailer

Real-time retailing means being able to detect, understand, communicate with and serve your customers at every point in the purchase lifecycle.

So how can online retailers react responsively to customer needs when they visit their websites?

Here are my seven top tips for how you can become a real-time retailer today.