E-commerce Trends based on Top MarketPlaces in India

Year 2014 has been very promising in terms of new e-commerce companies getting established, companies getting huge investments from investors like Tiger Global, Soft Bank etc. Basis on the research and data collected by Comscore, we have listed down the top 10 websites based on Unique Visitors that they receive every month. So the data shows that Jabong.com is clearly the leader as they have recently invested a lot of money in Television Commercials.

The most surprising thing from the data which is shown above is "Bookmyshow.com" this is an entertainment website where people book their movie/cinema/events/shows tickets but again it has been only possible because of their TV Commercial where they invested a lot of money in making something which went viral.

Now what has emerged from the ongoing e-commerce war is that people are buying it online mainly because of the following points :-

1. Remote Access - You are not required to visit a retail shop, all you need to do is get access to your mobile or a laptop and browse the entire collection with the search filters the online store have.  
2. Saves Time & Fuel - Since you do not have to travel so online shopping saves your time and fuel which you can ultimately utilize in shopping online. 
3. Discounts & Deals - This is main reason why people are buying it online. You get the best of the prices and deals from online stores compared to the retail brick and mortar stores. I have personally got this listened from the retail store representatives that if you would buy it online then you would not get the warranty, well ha ha they have something to say in order to make their sales happen. 
4. Ease - Sit back at your bed, couch or office chair and you can shop the entire day. 
5. Cash on Delivery - We Indians are very spectacle about using debit or credit cards so from the day cash on delivery went live, we have seen a tremendous growth of E-commerce sector.  
6. Easy Exchange - Imagine you bought something from a retail store and now you have to exchange it, for that again you need time and fuel to travel to that place and get it exchanged. While if you shop online then you do not have to worry about this. 

Now let us observe that what all payment methods are used by online shoppers in India :-

• Direct Debit - Internet Banking is 46.4 of the total Transactions
• Visa Debit/Credit - 27.1%
• MasterCard Debit/Credit - 13.6%
• Cash - 11.2%

We have also heard that soon we would have the option of credit on delivery which means that the courier delivery guys would carry the debit/credit card swipe machines along with them which the receiver can use to make the payments. This is further expected to help the e-commerce industry and increase the viewers and transactions on the website.  

 

Surprisingly there has been news that Snapdeal is going to install kiosk's in rural areas which would help to increase the internet penetration and user base.  Not only this it would further lead to increase in number of transactions and revenue for the e-commerce companies. 

Get ready people the Future is around the corners. 

Generate Business & Leads Through Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital was used to be a strategy over a couple of years ago but today Digital is the first and must strategy that any business should keep in mind during planning and forecasting their Marketing Budgets.

Let us evaluate and discuss how does this change has emerged.

In 2005 there were 1,029,717,906 internet users which was 15.8% of the total World Population. But today when we speak about present stats (for the year 2014) then the total internet users have been increased to 2,925,249,355 which is 40.4% of the total World Population. This means that nearly 41% internet has been penetrated into the market which is a huge growth in any sector and when we speak about particularly in India the numbers are 243,198,922 internet users which is 19.19% penetration of the Indian Population. Though as compared to World Stats Indian stats are less in numbers but still the numbers are so huge that it is impacting the overall business trade these days.

How many of these Users Shop Online ?

As per the data released by Comscore in the year 2012, 3 out of 5 Online Indians visit Retail sites which was 43% growth as compared to 2011. And if we discuss on the current situation then we do not have stats but have some interesting facts like cars are being sold online, in recent association with Snapdeal a leading car company of India Mahindra started to sell its cars online. Not only this Tata has also associated with Snapdeal and they are already selling houses and flats online. What else we could expect now?

Actually we should not expect anything now but should start framing our strategies for Online Market. Otherwise an entrepreneur would be blown away from the market competition and would not be able to survive in the coming time. I have met several traditional entrepreneurs who always say that we are getting businesses through our regular links then why should we need this strategy, which actually is fine if they are not looking to expand or multiply their business. But if they are looking to go international or expand their business horizon then it is very important that they should learn to use Digital Marketing as their key strategy to reach out to their potential consumers.

What should be your strategy to Generate Business Through Online ?

To start with one should have a good and attractive website which not only opens up in a desktop but also should be responsive enough to open up in mobiles, thus making the website mobile compatible. A decent looking website which is quite detailed and has a information about your products and services, written by you would make a different impression in the eyes of a website visitor. Copying and pasting stuff from your competitor's website would not make you any different and would also never help you to top the search engines if you plan to market yourself with the website that you have made.

A good website should follow a good designed marketing plan which should have a mix of strategies like Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and a bit of Social Media Marketing to capture leads from the Online Market.

A good digital strategy would look like this :-

To detail in further 30% of your marketing budget should go in Building content and backlinks to your website which you help you to generate leads organically in the long run of the business. Followed by 40% budget to be put in Search Engine Marketing, 10% of the marketing budget should go in Emails and Newsletters and finally 20% of your budget should be deployed in engaging with your customers in Social media Platform.

Investing in search engine whether through ADS or organic search optimization would help you to generate business through a pull based digital marketing approach whereas emails, newsletters and social media investment would create a brand recall and user generated content which is very vital and important for today's business.

Though social media would not directly help you in generating business or leads but the reason I have included social media as a part of my key strategy is that it helps in generating content from users in the form of reviews, feedback, ratings and much more. Today everyone of us likes to read and go through the reviews which has been published or posted regarding a particular company/product or service before using it for our own. Thus Social media plays very important role while making a decision to buy or avail a service from a particular company.

If you would like us to make a detail plan for your business then please feel free to write our experts at info@digistreetmedia.com. 

How to Achieve Less than 5% Bounce Rate

What is Bounce Rate

I have been answering to client questions like What is bounce rate ? Is it how many people closed the website? or is it something which denotes that these many people failed to open our website. With a smile on my face I have been explaining them that a bounce rate to a website denotes a rate on which the visitors only saw our first landing page and thereafter did not browsed it further.

Or in simpler words if your website bounce rate is around 30% then it means that out of 100 visitors on your website "30" viewed only the first landing page on which they landed and after that they closed the browser.

Generally anything which is less than 30% is good enough as the viewers are looking for something particular on our website and if they are able to find it then its likely that our bounce rate of our website would be on a lower site. Having a higher bounce rate is sign of worry for the business owner as whatever traffic he/she is receiving on the website is getting wasted.

Also on the other hand higher bounce rate does not mean that your website load time is on a higher side and people are closing it even before opening the website as Bounce Rate is something related to exit page and pages per session of a website visitor. Anything which is less than 1 or equals to one in pages per session would be termed as bounce rate.

100% bounce rate would mean that all of the visitors are closing the website after going through their first interaction page.

The above screenshot from our Google Analytic Page would give you a fair idea about the variable bounce rate that we have for various websites. One website has approximately 72% bounce rate as compared to 2.36% bounce rate of another website.

Now, let us know how to achieve less than 5% Bounce Rate 

The most important thing in order to reduce the bounce rate is bring ideal traffic to your website. As in target the most relevant Target Group (TG) through the most relevant medium. There wont be any use if we use mediums which gives us bounce rate of more than 90%, then it means that the people who are visiting our website are not finding it attractive and relevant to their needs.

You can always analyze the bounce rate of various mediums through Google Analytics Acquisition Report, sample of the same is shared below

The above screenshot tell us that Display and Referral mediums have the highest Bounce rate on the website which are close to 95% thus we should immediately stop wasting our money in Display Advertising and Referral Marketing.

On the other hand, "Organic Search" that is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has bounce rate which is close to 65% and the lowest for this website. Which also means that we should invest more on these resources as its giving us good results, pages per session and people who have landed through SEO on our website are spending more time.

Once you have setup the right TG in your marketing and advertising campaign then the next and most important step would be to check your website analytics along with Cursor Analytics these reports would tell you what are the most clicked areas of your website and what should you offer more in order to gather attraction of the customers in that area. Below is a sample of such report (sharing the screenshot of the website which has less than 3% bounce rate)

If you would see the above screen, you would understand that this landing page has the right information which our TG would be looking for also since we are not offering everything on this page then the customer/viewer is likely to click and navigate subsequent pages. Thus which collectively helped us in reducing the bounce rate.

Just imagine when 95% of your website visitors are interested in your website then what can you expect ? Increase in the number of leads, thus increase in business.

So to sum up our entire article, here are the key steps that you should follow in order to reduce the bounce rate to your website :-

1. Install Analytic Codes to your website
2. Study the trends, user behaviour flow 
3. Target the right audience 
4. Change the User Interference of your website 
5. & Bingo!  

I hope that this would definitely help you to lower down your bounce rate. If you need any help or assistance in doing so, please feel free to contact us at info@digistreetmedia.com

Selecting the Right SEO Strategy for your Business

What is SEO 

SEO in modern day means approaching your customers when they need you the most. This would only happen when your prospective consumer is looking for a solution and trying to make a search on any Search Engine such as Google.com, Yahoo.com or Bing.com and our website appears as a link on the search engines which he/she is likely to click and reach to us.

On the other hand it wont be a out of box thing if we call this as a Pull based Digital Marketing Approach. The abbreviation of SEO is Search Engine Optimisation and if we try to explain the same then it means that optimising the search engines according to our products and services so that our prospective consumer reaches to us.

SEO Strategies 

There are basically two types of approach that we can use. One is Keyword (Product/Service) based and other one is Location based. For example if being a Digital Marketing Agency, a company has services like Website Designing then it is most likely that it would act as a a keyword for Search Engine Optimisation. But if we use Website Designing as a keyword then it would have two impacts 1) it would take a lot of time to deliver/appear on the first page of Google.com as we would have to build a lot of quality backlinks 2) There are high chances that whomsoever is searching for Website Designing might be searching for its meaning,  courses or how to do website design then in that case we are reaching out to the wrong audience.

Thus it is advisable that we frame the right SEO strategy for our business as while selecting the keywords we are targeting our audience. So if we add Website Designing "Company" then it makes a lot of sense as then we would be targeting the right audience and if your company targets a specific region or area then you may add locations to your keyword such as Website Designing Company in Delhi or Website Designing Company in India.

The above example would help you to understand that what type of strategy you should select in order to capture a better market share.

Selecting the Right SEO Strategy for your Business 

Now let us examine which strategy we should use in order to get maximum returns for our business. We would take hottest example in order to make everyone understand how should you select our own strategy.

There is a company who provides data management services (converting the paper data to an electronic data). They wants to target clients who are located in Metropolitan cities where other corporate companies generally operates as in their right potential is those who are SME's or big corporates and who deals in a lot of paper data for their accounting or other purposes.

Now the next important question would be, what all keywords we should use in order to target and reach out to those corporates.

Before we start preparing our SEO strategy, we should evaluate Google Trends under our category. That would help us to understand the key markets that we can target.

Using Google Trends for framing SEO Strategy

So this is how the keywords should look like (after analysing the trends in searches) :-

1. Data Management company in NOIDA
2. Data Management company in Gurgaon 
3. Data Management company in Hyderabad
4. Data Management company in Chennai
5. Data Management company in Hyderabad
6. Data Management company in Bangalore
7. Data Management company in Chinchwad
8. Data Management company in India
9. Electronic Data Management Company in India
10. Electronic Data Management Company 

These are some of the examples that you should select while preparing your SEO strategy. The reason to suggest the above keyword is that whomsoever that would be searching for these services in "Gurgaon" would probably look for companies that provide data management services in Gurgaon. So accordingly we have suggested the above keywords. 

The next important factor while analysing and finalising the SEO strategy would be how many searches are made on these keywords in a Month.  (please refer to the screenshot attached below)

The above screenshot shows that except data management services no other keyword has any searches. Thus we should not make any efforts in optimising these keywords, rather these keywords should be used in paid search advertising as then in that case if someone (if there) would make a search on Google related to these keywords would see our ad and we would bring that customer to our website. 

I hope that by now you would have a fair idea on how to select keywords for your business. If you still have any queries or problems in doing so then please feel free to write us at info@digistreetmedia.com