Marketing & Strategy Articles

Marketing has an important role to play in ensuring that the business is driven aggressively yet with the minimum expenditure. It is extremely important that the company identifies the correct set of customers for whom selling the products or services is utmost important. Companies try to identify the most relevant target audience, who will buy the products as they have the maximum need for the same. Though there are several methods of identifying customers, catching & targeting “interested” customers can generate easy revenue for companies. This can be done by evaluating and studying customer funnels.

Customer funnels are an important way of identifying consumer behaviour at every step before purchase. Companies can maximise their revenues by understanding customer funnels, and then targeting & pitching them products personally. Customer funnels give the target audience who are interested in making a purchase but for some reason opted out. Since the need is there, these customers can be contacted and can be addressed at a personal level.

Image: pixabay

Let us understand the customer funnel journey and how it can be beneficial. Consider an e-commerce platform selling digital cameras. Assume that close to 1000 customers visit the camera page every day out of which 200 customers read all the product details. We can clearly see that these 20% customers have shown an inclination of knowing more about the product. Off these 200, 50 customers select the purchase or add to cart option. Hence, the 150 customers who dropped out, despite understanding all product specifications, chose not to select this camera. But still are prospects and are considering buying a camera. Eventually out of the 50 customers, 20 purchase the camera. Hence, overall only 2% customers bought the camera. But the dropout customers in the journey are prospects and hence can be targeted proactively.

While customer funnel approach is efficient in generating additional revenues, it is important to track the right parameters as well as have a short turn around time, else either the customer will lose interest or purchase another product. For this companies must have realtime data available which can be actioned upon proactively. This is where big data analytics can play an important role in following a customer journey and identify the customers dropping out from the customer funnel. Identifying dropout customers proactively through a customer funnel journey can give a ready base of customers who can be targeted for a quick sales.

Customer funnel also filters out the audience which are less interested in buying a product or service. This enables companies to focus on important customers and channelize their energy on converting dropout customers to buyers, rather than approaching each & every individual. A selective approach to target a filtered audience not only helps in better conversions but also reduces unwanted costs. Hence this increases the ROI through more sales at lesser costs.

Hence customer funnel is an efficient approach is evaluating the customer journey & identifying prospective customers who have dropped out of the customer journey. This way is extremely effective & can help generate incremental sales and help grow business.

The Digital Age is a historic period in the 21st century characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology and finally, to the digitally transformed world that we are in right now. The world is more competitive than ever, there is more scope for R & D, and not to miss out, building something new. Customers remain the focus but a lookout for digitally driven approach would be the new game changer.

Marketing is an ever-evolving field where companies and brands use all possible media channels to reach out to potential customers. Popular advertising media includes having TV campaigns between shows along with prime-time slots. Newspapers & magazines are popular ways to use print media to advertise about one’s products and services. However, all these are advertising channels are not too modern and are pretty old school. With the increasing penetration of smartphones and high-speed data internet, online platforms are popular media tools to advertise. Online advertising can be done on website as banners or on mobile apps. Since a lot of people are engaged with their phones, there is a big opportunity for companies. However, one of the newer ways to engage customers is by live video streaming content.

Base of the economic pyramid provides a great opportunity for any start-up to come up with an innovation as it is easy to find lot of untouched segments in it. A simple solution for a basic problem will make you a hero in this segment. In spite of such huge opportunities why are the big giants not tapping their innovations into this segment is a debating point here. One of the biggest hurdles here is how you make your innovation reach to larger set of customers. In other words, are there enough means to make your innovation visible to people in this segment and attract them to use your services or product? The answer to this question is definitely a starting point for any Start-up to innovate in the base of economic pyramid.

A lot of people feel that if a product is good, it will serve the customers well. A high quality offering which is decently priced is good enough to lure customers. This is the philosophy behind several technology and software startups where they user their creativity and skills to offer a more polished product or service. But in hindsight, it is not the only recipe for success. Thus it is critical for business people to have a thorough understanding about sales and marketing.

E-commerce, a term which has made its presence felt in really short span of time, is an act of performing the commercial activities of selling and purchasing through technology over the internet. E-commerce industry has grown manifolds during last decade because of large penetration of internet, smartphones, strong network and increasing consumer wealth. 71% of the total number of shoppers worldwide in 2017, believe they would grab a better deal online with a better overall experience compared to shopping in high street stores.