7 Ways To Improve Customer Feedback Analysis

Posted on Oct 13, 2021 by Simone Somekh

Information is power, so you’ll have a huge competitive advantage if you know how to interpret feedback from customers and use the analyzed tips that can be generated from it. Customer feedback analysis is a powerful tool that helps you take feedback from your audience and turn it into something useful, a clear target for improvements that you can make and complaints that have been made.

Remember, while not all feedback is going to be negative, consumers are far more likely to leave feedback over a negative experience than a positive one. Therefore, don’t be discouraged if the majority of your feedback data is negative: it’s a chance to learn how to be better!

Below you’ll find seven of our best tips for improving analysis of complaints and compliments and how to interpret feedback in the workplace to form a better idea of what the consumer desires.

1. Check and separate the type of feedback you’re getting

When you’re analyzing feedback forms, it’s often just as important to check who is leaving feedback as what is being said. After all, the most important pieces of insight will come from long-term customers who have much more experience with your brand than the average consumer.

However, you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that newer customers have no insight into things. Pay attention to how much the customer has used your products rather than the length of time they have done so for. Remember that your feedback analysis relates to the study of determination of sales performances and potential, you want to ultimately be looking at what will bring in more revenue.

When checking your feedback, it’s also important to keep in mind that the two ends of the scale (e.g. 1 and 5 in a 1-5 rating) are going to be more populated than the middle, as it’s just human nature to act on strong positive or negative feelings. Because of this fact, you can separate your feedback into the positive and negative kinds which will tell you different things about your customers’ experiences. Want to focus on improvements? Complaint trend analysis is your friend. Want to think more about refining the positives? Glowing reviews that give positive feedback for customer service can help there.

2. Categorize your feedback

If you’re wondering how to improve analysis, one of the best first steps is to take your data and categorize it (and subcategorize). How this might be done is up to you, but one of the best ways of doing this is to look at each step in the customer journey and place the feedback into categories that represent said steps. That way, you’ll have an easier time getting your data analysis and interpretation of customer satisfaction right — there’s no use trying to make improvements if you don’t know what your customers want, after all! You can find market feedback analysis templates and similar online if you’re not sure where to begin.

You can also categorize your data by type if you’re using multiple methods of collection (are you calling customers for feedback, or simply leaving forms with their purchases), by date if you want to analyze the effect of a new change in procedure etc., or by how useful you think it is and how detailed a piece of information it contains. When you’re categorizing feedback a lot of it will go into the non-useful categories, junk or generic reviews that give no actual information being two of them. While it’s always heartwarming to see someone leave a comment saying “I love your brand,” it isn’t very useful in this context so you should filter it and comments like it out so you can focus on customer feedback results that you can extract useful data from.

3. Automated tools and software

If you’re a small business that turns over relatively few products, you might be able to go through all of your reviews by hand and sort them into neat little piles. In the digital age where reviews can be left en masse this approach isn’t very feasible, with reviews for even small brands numbering in the hundreds or thousands. This can be aided with software or AI filters that screen feedback and separate it into categories automatically, doing in seconds what it would take a human all day.

Some automated tools that you can use include text analysis which reads the text present and sorts based on words that are within, and sentiment analysis which uses more nuanced algorithms to try and figure out the meaning of the words and sort appropriately. Of course, neither method is 100% effective as the nuance of language is a tricky thing even for humans, but it should vastly reduce the workload when thinking about how to summarize user feedback in a useful way.

4. Finding trends

Trends are one of the most important things when it comes to analyzing feedback forms, as not only do you want to improve upon your faults but you want to do it in a way that satisfies the most customers with the resources you have. After all, customers drive your revenue. Loud voices and strong opinions are easy to fixate on, but you should keep in mind that if you have one extremely negative review and several dozen positive ones, the negative experience is far more likely to be an outlier caused by random factors than an indication of an ongoing problem.

When you’re deciding how to present customer feedback to your team and get them on board with the issues that are occurring, trends are the best way to do this. Not only are they easy to spot if you’ve got the feedback analysis format right but they’re also indicative of where problems lie and what the root causes that you’ll want to find out might be. When planning out how to collate feedback forms, knowing what categories you’re focusing on will help you know what trends might arise in that data.

5. Root causes

Following on from identifying trends, finding the root cause of systematic problems should be your final goal when analysing feedback forms. From the trends you identify, you can move to the root cause of problems and how to improve them. Of course some causes might not be immediately obvious even from lots of data, and you have things such as survivorship bias and similar psychological phenomena to take into account. Getting a second opinion from your team or from outside assistance can go a long way in rooting out the causes of your issues.

6. Context is everything

When you’re thinking about how to analyze feedback data, and even how to collate and analyze feedback itself, you’ll want to put everything into context — no review exists in a vacuum after all. While you might be tempted to cross-reference your quality reviews for different products, unless they share characteristics there isn’t much point in doing so. If you have multiple platforms or store locations, keep the reviews for each separate. Any positive feedback for customer service in one location won’t necessarily hold true for another, so you need to be careful that you aren’t making unnecessary changes, or worse, actively making the customer experience more negative.

Of course, some things will carry over such as methodology problems and similar, so the line between relevant and not is difficult to walk sometimes. Analysis vs analyses is a key concept here, as data sets being analysed both separately vs together might reveal different things that escape notice on a smaller scale.

7. Make a plan

Once you’ve evaluated client feedback, identified trends, set them in context and figured out where the root problems are, the logical thing to do is create a plan of how you’re going to tackle them. Getting each problem tackled by someone who specialises in that area is a great way to see improvements, so don’t be afraid to take advice when you need it. You can collect your data and arrange it into a customer feedback analysis report format if necessary, which will help those unfamiliar with the base data to comprehend what’s going on (customer feedback analysis report samples can be found online) so you shouldn’t shy away from asking people’s opinions if you think they might have insight.

How to Use Consumer Insights in Your Favor: The Definitive Guide (2022)

Posted on Oct 13, 2021Nov 4, 2022 by Simone Somekh

Consumer insights are your customers’ truth – how they experience your product or service, how they felt about it, what they want, need, and desire.

Understanding your consumers’ needs and wants is essential to ensuring your brand’s future. Scanning, collecting, and analyzing customer feedback empowers businesses to learn from their customers – so they can innovate and improve customer experiences and generate positive sentiment.

This blog post is your definitive guide to consumer insights.

We will explain what are customer insights, their importance, how you can use them in your favor, and what impact the spread of COVID-19 has had on customer feedback analysis.

Another note we would like to add, Revuze Explorer is one of the most advanced consumer insights tools out there. Our true strength is turning consumer insights into actionable action items for companies, all done in minutes instead of days & weeks.

Last update: November 2021.

What are Consumer Insights?

Consumer Insights are analyzed data businesses use to better understand customer wants, needs, attitude, and sentiment. Useful Consumer Insights are new, relevant and inspiring, and provide extensive knowledge of consumer desires, needs, and motivations. These insights help improve a brand’s interaction with customers, which creates better customer experience and improves revenue.

So, how do you find consumer insights? Well, data.

Consumer insights are a result of data interpretation and analysis. They are aggregated from data collected with different tools, like trend analysis, customer satisfaction surveys, focus groups, Social Listening, and more.

Why are consumer insights important?

First and foremost, consumer insights give the tools to make better business decisions. Improving customer experience, focusing marketing campaigns, and optimizing brand innovation will help drive brand growth and revenue.

In addition, customer insight analysis helps identify consumer and market trends, pain points and attitudes. This information highlights consumer sentiment and experience on different parts of the consumer journey, data that helps brands build and maintain customer loyalty.

How can consumer insights improve advertising?

I’m glad you asked.

Advertising and marketing your product can be hard. It is hard to know how successful your campaigns are or how your latest ad resonated with your target audience.

The job can be even harder when we talk about e-commerce. Online consumers come from all walks of life, from different generations, with varied interests, and unique needs. For example, Baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are all very different and come with their own particular wants and needs. So, what may work for one audience won’t necessarily work for all.

This is where consumer insights come into use.

Consumer insights allow businesses to get a better and deeper look into their customers’ purchase decisions and behaviors. Insights enable brands to identify the best marketing campaigns and strategies that will resonate most powerfully with the targeted audience.

Using consumer insights allows you to make a smooth and data driven shift from product-focused marketing to consumer-centric marketing. For instance, what if you could focus your ad campaign on a customer-desired feature? Quality consumer insights enable you to do just that.

Taking an example from our latest Headphones Market Report, after analyzing customer feedback we have identified noise cancellation as the latest trend in the wireless headphones industry. Just look at the noise cancellation topic volume chart below –

Using this data to create a more focused, optimized, customer-centric advertising strategy will allow you to achieve your marketing objectives more effectively and efficiently, saving you valuable time and money.

How to use consumer insights in your favor?

Now that you know what are consumer insights and why they are so important. It’s time to understand how to use them in your favor.

We already covered the positive impact consumer insights can have on your marketing efforts. Here are some other aspects of your business can profit from consumer insight analysis –

Consumer loyalty –

Consumer or Brand loyalty is a strong positive consumer sentiment, meaning people will choose a particular brand over all the others. Businesses with a strong and well-founded brand loyalty will enjoy returning customers that’ll make repeat purchases.

Quality consumer insight analysis provides information about which brand aspect is the customer’s favorite and why. Optimizing customer experience (or even the product itself) based on that data will make people feel heard, cultivating customers’ emotional connection and loyalty.

Customer service –

Identifying customer pain points using insight analysis helps brands stay ahead of the game. Knowing what is bothering your customers will help you improve your customer service – you can plan your response, prevent issues from recurring, and even train and educate your staff to better handle customer complaints and inquiries.

Optimizing your customer service will not only create and cultivate customer loyalty, it will attract new clientele through positive word-of-mouth, and might even improve brand equity.

Consumer Insights In the COVID-19 Era

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) spreads across the world, consumers and businesses are forced to dramatically rethink their commercial behaviors. This means customer feedback and its analysis must change as well.

People are afraid and worried not only for their health, but for their jobs and saving too. These financial concerns have resulted in major emotional and economical shifts, ones that have to be taken into account when collecting and analyzing consumer insights.

Maybe the most important thing you can do is listen. The constantly changing global reality calls for flexibility and open mindedness. For example, you might want to abandon the normal barrage of survey questions. Asking fewer, more open-ended questions will help you get more extensive, detailed answers from your clients, so you won’t miss vital insights.

Another much needed aspect these days is adaptability. Quick thinking and short response times are essential for brands to survive such tumultuous times. building up your brand’s capacity to make short-term changes largely depends on quality information. Consumer insights allow you to test changes and prioritize future ones. Knowing what your customers are feeling and thinking will help you adapt to the coronavirus crisis.

Getting started with consumer insights

Establish your goals – Make sure you know what you want to learn from your data.
Identify resources – It’s important to be clear on how you will get the data – who’s going to collect and analyze it, what’s your collection method, what audience are you targeting?
Create a plan – In order to make sure all your efforts won’t go to waste, planning is key. So, think about what departments, processes, and strategies will use and benefit data the most.

We know collecting and analyzing customer feedback can be quite a challenge. Find out how Revuze’s AI powered CX analysis can help you get quality consumer insights that’ll push you to the next level!

7 Retail Marketing Strategies for Product Growth

Posted on Oct 11, 2021 by Simone Somekh

The world’s population is still reeling from the effects of the COVID-10 pandemic, and so many businesses have had to quickly transition online because of store closures and lockdowns. Given the circumstances, this is the right time to discuss what you can do to make sure your business can thrive, even at this challenging time.

Whether you are planning to launch a new product or you just want to expand your customer base, you are going to need a solid marketing plan to acquire new customers and keep your existing ones. In this article, we’ll explore the different things you can do when it comes to retail marketing. Let’s dive right in!

What is Retail Marketing?

Retail marketing is a broad term, referring to various strategies that retailers implement to attract new customers and improve their revenue. At the foundation of retail marketing, there are four elements that need to be taken into consideration; these are often called the four P’s:

Product (or Service): The item that is being sold, or service if you’re not providing physical goods.

Price: The pricing that you use, and strategies that revolve around it.

Place: The location (or, in the digital age, the platform) where your product is located and available for purchase.

Promotion: What you do to get word out and attract potential customers.

These categories don’t cover all of the tactics you can use to improve sales, but cover those directly related to the product itself and the ease of purchase. While a lot of techniques outlined here can’t really be used in full lockdown, they’re ideal to spread the word and get more business as the world opens up and gets back on its feet.

1) Targeted Social Media

Ads are all well and good, but you can utilize social media platforms to a much greater extent if you plan things out. The best news about this strategy is that it’s all online, so there’s no worrying about how to fit it into local restrictions, as you can just sit down and get on with it.

While covering all your bases is good, it’s often a better strategy to begin with focusing on a few social media sites and then expand once your presence has increased. If you keep your eye on the platforms that your target demographics are likely to be using, it enables your ads to be more targeted without doing any filtering at all.

Of course, there’s more to social media than simply posting information. Using platforms such as Instagram you can make use of their tools such as the Story feature and video uploads to create a much more appealing aesthetic, something brands such as Frank Body have used to the tune of millions of dollars of revenue per year by growing their Instagram following to almost 700,000 people by focusing on an all-natural movement that their customers can connect with. Traditional advertising is nothing in the face of genuine connection and feeling of social acceptance.

In fact, several brands have shifted their focus to social media entirely with Instagram helping out by altering their format into an e-commerce platform in addition to their already established social media services.

2) Video Platforming

Tying in nicely with your social media, video advertising is nothing new but is still very relevant in the digital age. Whether it’s adverts that play before videos or simply play in a sidebar, most tech-savvy consumers have grown desensitized to adverts and simply skip them or ignore them as happened with television adverts before them. You’ll need to grab the viewers’ attention by creating a masterful video that not only shows off your product, but provides entertainment value making your brand memorable and interesting to potential customers.

Making yourself relatable and entertaining is the key here, with a great example being BauBax’s video that lambasts airline travel in a way that people can resonate with, as almost anyone who has travelled by airplane has something to complain about!

However you don’t necessarily have to make your products/services the main focus so long as they are visible. A great example of this is the Compare the Market advertisements that circulate to this day, after all who could forget the utterly ridiculous premise of talking meerkats complaining about a website? Even if 90% of watchers never even think about purchase, going viral is a great way to obtain publicity with the meerkats proving their worth by doubling sales in under a year.

3) Referral Programs

Referral campaigns are a more indirect form of advertising, in that you don’t target potential customers, but rather grant benefits to existing customers if they refer new ones to you. Since a high proportion of consumers trust peer recommendation over advertisements it can be an excellent trust-based tactic to attract customers. It’s especially effective if both referrer and referee are granted incentives, such as Koodo Mobile’s $25 cut to both the customers’ bills, and Airbnb’s account credit program. The investment app RobinHood also grants free stock to both the referred and the referee if a successful referral is made.

While the latter two’s methods of seeming to put money back in their customers’ pockets may seem identical to bill cuts, it also encourages future purchases in a two-for-one strategy to boost business.

4) Remarketing

The Airbnb strategy mentioned above is also a great example of remarketing, whereby retailers seek to improve revenue by reaching out to existing or previous customers. This can be done in the form of emails, offers and more, with the focus being on enticing those consumers back into your stores. Since a customer who has already purchased from you is familiar with your brand, you can keep things short and to the point when communicating with them. You can also use technology such as AI in order to target web ads at suitable consumers; after all, one who is more receptive to your brand is far more likely to interact and not simply ignore it. Pinkberry have used this to great effect with their emails that contained both a limited-time free item reward and a message of “We miss you!”, combining both remarketing and urgency in one stroke.

5) Flash Pricing and Urgency

Of course not all retail marketing takes place online, and sometimes you need to get customers who are inside a store to buy your products. That’s where flash pricing, also known as urgency tactics, comes into play. It’s where you advertise for quick, sharp price drops that will last for maybe a few days or even a single day in order to encourage consumers to physically come to your location and increase footfall. You can also do this online, however it’s much more effective at creating a sense of urgency in your customers if you’re advertising with regards to a physical location, or advertise directly at the location. In-store ads have also proven to be highly effective, with 69% of customers who were privy to an in-store advertisement going out of their way to look for the product in question, and 61% of those questioned intending to purchase it.

Urgency is key here, as customers see the price drops and will have to make snap decisions, which more often than not leads to sales if the customer was on the fence about purchase anyway. You need to be careful that you don’t price yourself out of the market, however, keep a good profit margin in order to keep your revenue streams positive!

6) Tracking Seasonal Peaks

A good tactic to pair with the above is seasonal sales, as well as other strategies to take advantage of peak time frames of buying. Holidays such as Christmas and Easter are notable ones with almost every store you can think of having some kind of sale around those dates, but it’s good to look at other key points that are more niche too. Depending on your product, you might want to focus on the beginning of summer, the back-to-school rush, and other times of the year.

Seasonal sales can produce high levels of profit, with Black Friday sales raking in billions each year. However, you need to be aware of the pitfalls that can befall you. Things need to be prepared in advance, and extra support is needed during those peak times to allow for continually high customer experience ratings so you don’t get a bad reputation. This translates into more staff in physical locations and a more robust server for online-hosted retailers.

7) Partnerships

Establishing meaningful partnerships with other brands can be a great way to reach new customers and advertise your product.

Links to other brands online could exist merely in the form of cross-store advertisements, or be as in-depth as co-operative marketing campaigns. Due to the nature of online media it’s easy to reach out to the most compatible partners you can find; those who share a target audience and philosophy are ideal.

In the physical world however, things are a bit tricker. Depending on your market you can make partnerships with local brands/stores, for instance a food supplier might partner with a culinary school in order to promote both businesses in an arrangement that increases reach for both.

Great examples of this in the digital realm include Red Bull and GoPro who both targeted athletes and action-loving individuals with a co-branding campaign, and BMW and Louis Vitton who similarly shared a consumer base but chose to take a more direct partnership with products designed to work together perfectly in order to attract lovers of both brands to the other.

Seven Ways Customer Feedback Can Improve Your Product

Posted on Sep 22, 2021 by Simone Somekh

Customer feedback is crucial in today’s market; consumers want to feel listened to and valued by the brands they interact with. Customer feedback allows you to see into the minds of your target demographics, as it provides you with precious information about what they want from you and how you might go about providing that in your products and services.

This is incredibly useful when building new enterprises and products. Of course, it’s usually not possible to fulfill the needs of every single consumer that you might come across, but general trends and patterns in feedback you receive can help greatly in providing the vast majority of your customers with a great experience.

What Is Customer Feedback and How Do You Use It?

Customer feedback is anything that customers give you after they’ve completed their journey, from idle comments to a list of grievances. It’s best utilized when you have a lot of it but smaller ranges can come in handy too, especially if they’re more detailed. Ultimately it’s all about spotting ways in which you can improve your product and in what ways to do so.

Feedback can come in many shapes and sizes; that may include online reviews on Amazon and other retail websites, or feedback that you request, such as surveys and tick-box questionnaires. In the latter, the information is easier to parse through, but it’s still a lot of data to trawl through to identify patterns. Software and automation can help there, doing things much faster than a human ever could.

How To Get Feedback From Your Customers

If you ask the average person how often they leave feedback, the answer is likely to be “almost never.” Giving feedback is something that takes time and energy, so most consumers won’t think about it unless there’s a particularly strong feeling involved — bad experiences will make up a lot of your feedback! However, you shouldn’t be disheartened by this, as customer service feedback is supposed to help you improve your customer experience (CX) after all, so take it as an opportunity to learn.

Therefore, the question is: how can you collect feedback from your customers if most won’t even think about it? The short answer is that it’s best to reach out to them.

Surveys and requests that are automatically emailed a short time after an online purchase are a good example of a non-intrusive way to get feedback. However, a lot of the time people will simply dismiss this kind of communication, so adding an incentive can boost your feedback numbers. Maybe it’s a chance to win a prize, maybe it’s a discount on their next purchase – a tactic which also encourages more business so it’s a win-win! Never underestimate the power of a good bribe to get consumers interested in giving you your feedback.

Seven Ways To Use Customer Feedback

Once you’ve got your feedback, analyzed it and found the patterns inside the next question is what to do with it? You need some kind of plan to utilize your newfound knowledge into the consumer mind and it’s not always easy to know where to begin. Below are a few tips and tricks for using your customer feedback effectively.

1. Improving Your Customer Support (CS)

Speed and precision are the name of the game in customer support services (CS), with increasing numbers of consumers expecting quick fixes and support staff who know their products inside and out. WIth today’s technology giving access to seemingly unlimited amounts of information at the press of a button it’s no surprise that people are impatient. Having a database of common customer complaints can help speed things up greatly, with solutions being merely a click away. Of course, not every customer is going to take the time to read such information, so having your support staff “read the manual,” so to speak, is a good shout.

2. Taking Your Customer Experience (CX) to the Next Level

A single bad step in a customer journey can often tarnish the entire experience from the consumers’ perspective. This is bad for multiple reasons but don’t fret, it’s more than possible to rectify problems. Negative reviews of your products, services, website, customer support, etc. can be utilized to make future customers have a better time. You should focus on areas where multiple reviews point out a single flaw as that indicates a pattern, and is far more likely to mean you have a flaw in your processes than a simple error or miscommunication occurred.

3. Specialization and Branching Out

Patterns in consumer desires can lead to improvements but of course not everyone is going to want the same thing, people are different after all. If you spot trends of requests or complaints that point to different areas what can you do? You’ve only got one product after all – that’s until you don’t! Specialization is about finding niche areas that you can improve on to boost interest, marketing to more than one demographic by improving your products or services to better suit the needs and desires of said demographics. Some businesses only target one demographic and specialize hard but that comes with it’s own risks and is not recommended unless you know for sure you have a market.

4. Informing Other Buyers

Advertisements were once a new and interesting thing to see, whether on television, in papers or online. Nowadays though the general public is clued into the tactics and techniques that advertisers use in order to make their products seem the best possible, and are far more skeptical when it comes to making purchase decisions based on adverts alone — they know they’re exaggerated and don’t show you the drawbacks. Consumers instead will put their trust in others of their kind, reading reviews and ratings before purchase in order to get a better idea of what quality they can expect. Making your feedback accessible and placing it in a format that’s easy to read is crucial for letting potential customers choose your brand.

5. Making Business Decisions

Feedback from your customers can inform your business decisions too, not just changes to your products or services. From the way your organization is structured to the next big change to your advertisement strategy it’s important to know your target audience, how they perceive you and how they perceive your competitors too. Evaluating the feedback you receive can offer great insights into how to best alter your day to day running in order to give customers the best experience possible, while also providing information on things that are working just fine as is by the absence of negative reviews in that area.

6. Promoting Product Changes

People like to know that they’re being listened to. You need to let your customer base know that you’re listening to them and change the way you do things according to their desires. It’s a cycle, with the reviews and feedback becoming the basis for the next changes that you make in order to improve your product or service over time. Be sure to let your customers know about the changes you’ve implemented in the latest versions, and listen to the feedback that you get on these new changes – rarely does anyone get things absolutely perfect on the first attempt! It’s an ongoing process in a lot of cases, with improvements never quite being “done”. Your launch plan for any new versions should always include responses to feedback.

7. Product Innovation

Product innovation is important if you want to survive in today’s fast-paced market. It’s based on a series of questions that you can ask yourself about your product or service in order to determine whether you’re offering something fresh or if you’ll get drowned out in a sea of look-alikes. The feedback can inform you on whether the product is relevant to your target demographic, whether it’s better than its competitors, and whether or not you can make it obvious that the first two are true. This type of feedback can help you find niches in the market that are yet to be explored! An innovative product is one that brings something new to the table, and feedback certainly helps in that regard by allowing you to spot gaps in the market or see things that your competitors aren’t offering that you could bring to the table.

What Is the Difference Between Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis?

Posted on Sep 15, 2021 by Simone Somekh

A few years back, data was a vogue word; but things have dramatically changed. We are now in the era of big data; most businesses depend on data for their daily transactions and decision-making.

A Forbes article reports that the amount of data created, captured, and copied in 2020 reached 59 trillion gigabytes; an almost whopping 5,000% departure from the 1.2 gigabytes of 2010. While a large volume of data is created and downloaded daily, it’s important to note that the vast majority of the data we can find online is unstructured.

Data that can be used for business purposes and decision-making must be in a structured format, and this is where the problem lies, as most of the data out there is not structured. Technology is advancing at a very rapid speed and with tools such as text mining and sentiment analysis, the problem of structuring and analyzing large volumes of data is now automated.

Text mining, or text data mining, is the process of transforming unstructured text into a structured format; having 80% of data in the world residing in an unstructured format, text mining enables you to identify meaningful patterns and new insights.

On the other hand, sentiment analysis — or opinion mining — leverages natural language processing (NLP) to classify data or reviews into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.

While the two processes might appear to be similar, there is a world of difference between them. But first, it’s necessary to understand what data formatting is before exploring the differences between text mining and sentiment analysis.

Structured data: This is the format that can easily be used by organizations since the standardization into a tabular format with numerous rows and columns that can include names, addresses, and phone numbers allows you to store and analyze with machine learning algorithms.
Unstructured data: This format is not predefined. You can source unstructured data from social media, product reviews, video and audio files, as well as Q&A forums.
Semi-structured data: The name depicts that it’s a mix of structured and unstructured data formats. To an extent, it has a level of organization, but it lacks the requirements of a relational database; you still need to do some sorting to qualify it for analysis. XML, JSON, and HTML files come under this format.

The essence of exploiting text mining and sentiment analysis is to make better business decisions. Advanced analytical techniques, such as Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and other deep learning algorithms, are enabling organizations to discover hidden relationships and make better sense of their unstructured data.

Text mining vs. text analytics

It’s not uncommon to have people mix up the terms text mining and text analytics. While text mining is extensively used to derive qualitative insights from unstructured text, text analytics is used to provide quantitative results. You can use text mining to understand if a customer is happy with your product through the analysis of reviews and surveys.

To have a deeper insight such as identifying a pattern like a negative spike in customers’ experiences or trends, you use text analytics.

The relationship between web analytics, text mining, and sentiment analysis

Virtually every company or organization has a website today. Customers visit websites to source products and services; they leave large volumes of data on their trail through the visits and actions they perform online. Web analytics enables you to collect, report, and analyze website data.

However, you need to integrate text mining and sentiment analysis to make useful sense out of the data that you gather from your website. Data from most visitors are usually unstructured; text mining will be used to structure the data, while you deploy sentiment analysis to understand the real significance and nuances in the data.

With this, you can determine the success or failure of those goals, have a data-driven strategy and improve the user’s experience.

The differences between text mining and sentiment analysis

Let’s take a look at the main differences between text analytics and sentiment analysis:

Text mining	Sentiment analysis
What it does: Shows what has been written by customers about your product or service; what ideas are commonly linked in the text. It also shows which subjects and topics are most discussed by users and customers.	What it does: Allows you to understand if your customers are reviewing your products or service positively, negatively, or neutrally. You can even go beyond non-text feedback, such as video, audio, and images. When a customer smiles, you can easily understand that the customer is satisfied compared to when a customer frowns.
How it can help you: Helps identify early warnings as an indication that your organization is heading into troubled waters or that there is an issue with your product or service.	How it can help you: Negative scores indicate that your customers are on the verge of churning your product or service.
How it works: A patented NLP technology processes text-based data just like the human brain, but this is done with proprietary algorithms to identify parts of speech, words, or ideas that are linked, and comprehensively determine patterns and trends in your database.	How it works: The focus is on determining whether words and phrases are positive, negative, or neutral. This is mostly done on a scale of -1 to +1, where -1 is extremely negative and +1 is absolutely positive.

Popular text mining techniques

A lot of activities go into text mining; these activities are essential for the deduction of useful information from unstructured data. You, however, must begin with text processing for the cleaning and transformation of data into a usable format.

Tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, language identification, chunking, and syntax parsing are necessary steps for proper data formatting before you can embark on the actual analysis. After the completion of text processing, you then proceed with text mining algorithms for veritable insights from your data.

Some common techniques you can use for text mining techniques include:

Information Extraction (IE)
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Data Mining (DM)
Information Retrieval (IR)

Information retrieval (IR)

Information retrieval is the automated process that responds to a set of predefined queries or phrases to enable the return of relevant information or documents. IR systems can accomplish this task by using algorithms to track user behaviors and discover any data that is relevant.

Library catalog systems and search engines such as Google make use of information retrieval.

Some tasks you can use IR to execute include:

Tokenization: Enables you to break down a text that is long-formed into sentences and words called “tokens.” The tokens become the input for other processes such as parsing and text mining.
Stemming: This is the process of removing the suffixes and prefixes attached to words. The essence is to have only the word stem. It’s very important in NLP. When you do stemming, it improves IR by reducing the size of indexing files.

Natural language processing (NLP)

Natural language processing (NLP) is that branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to understand the text and spoken words the way humans do. By combining computational linguistics with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models, NLP enables computers to use these technologies to process text or voice data with a clear understanding.

Some sub-tasks you can use NLP to do include: summarization, PoS tagging, text categorization, and sentiment analysis.

Information extraction

Information extraction (IE) is an automated process of extracting structured data such as entities, entities relationships, and attributes describing entities from unstructured data, and storing the information in a database. Some sub-tasks of IE include feature selection, feature extraction, and named-entity recognition (NER).

Data mining

When you have big data sets, and you are trying to identify patterns and extract useful insights, you can use data mining. This technique helps you evaluate structured, unstructured data, and semi-structured data to obtain new information.

Sales and marketing professionals can deploy data mining for the analysis of consumer behaviors.

Conclusion

The processes involved in gathering customers’ data, and analyzing their sentiments can be overwhelming, but it is absolutely necessary for any brand that wants to remain competitive and relevant in the global market. Text mining and sentiment analysis must go together for you to improve customer experience, and embarking on this manually will ordinarily take you months.

Revuze has integrated AI into sentiment analysis, which is what you need to actually classify your customers’ sentiments into positive, negative, and neutral. A platform like Revuze can automatically carry out the gathering, collation, identification, and extraction processes of trending discussion topics from any set of unstructured data.

Nowadays, understanding context with exceptionally high precision and delivering actionable business insights is of high essence, and that’s where Revuze comes in.

The Ultimate Guide For Product Insights

Posted on Sep 5, 2021 by Simone Somekh

Building a product is not easy. Brands spend years on research and invest millions of dollars to create products that people love. A company is known for the products it builds. Hence, products decide the reputation and trust a business has in the market.

There are several challenges that product managers face to build products for the future. Product insights play a crucial role in identifying the challenges, fixing the issues, forecasting the trends, testing what works best for the users, and delivering an experience that converts a beta product to a consumer choice product.

Similarly, consumer insights help interpret how users feel about a product or a service. Companies can take the required steps to identify the user journey’s challenges and fix them to deliver an exceptional product experience.

This product insights guide for product managers and marketers will cover all the basics of product insights and consumer insights to build a product that customers will love for years to come.

Let’s begin!

What are Product Insights?

Product insight is an interpretation of how users feel when they use the product. It analyzes user behavior and aims to solve the problems that the users face while using the product.

Insights are more than just data; it leverages emotion analytics to identify features that users like/dislike the most. It also forecasts the success ratio of the product when entering a new market.

Businesses should use the power of product insights to learn more about how the product is performing or will perform in the market. It is crucial to building the product of tomorrow that is up to the user’s expectations.

What are Product Analytics?

Product analytics are tools that allow product managers to understand what users do with their product. It also provides product marketers to uncover the reasons that are driving higher conversion rates for increased product sales.

Product analytics is a dashboard where you can run tests related to product performance and experience. It lets you eliminate issues and fine-tune the product features as per the expectations of the users.

What is Customer Insight analysis?

Market research is necessary for product evolution. Customer insight aims to understand the customer’s mind and behavior. It lets you decide what to sell, when to sell them, and how to sell them.

Customer insights analytics captures data at all points in the customer journey and presents it in the form of a dashboard to plan campaigns and strategies to increase product profitability.

Insights help to build stronger customer relationships by gathering the right data from the right sources and interpreting them in real-time. It uncovers market trends, customer pain points, and behavior.

You have the power to mold your product or strategy in the right direction based on data. Hence, effective analysis is the key to business success.

Product Insights Examples

Here are some of the best examples of product insights from some of the leading brands of this world:

Netflix

Netflix decided to build interactive content for kids. The Netflix product insights team spent a lot of time in the lab bringing in kids and showing the product to them.

The idea was to understand how the users would feel when they use the product in the real-world. The team helped them know what the product does and also engaged them with various designs.

Conducting experiments like this helped Netflix figure out the best product experience before they launched Puss in Book.

Envelopes

Envelopes is a leading eCommerce site for buying different kinds of envelopes. They wanted to find out what change they can do in their marketing strategy to generate more conversions.

They thought of sending follow-up emails to all the customers who joined their website, adding products to their cart, but didn’t purchase them. The idea was to persuade customers to buy the product.

They needed the insight to find the best time to send the email to sell their products. Hence, they ran an experiment and sent two emails at two different times, one in the morning around 11

AM and the other 48 hours after the cart abandonment.

They found that the email sent 48 hours post cart abandonment delivered a conversion rate of 40%, while the one sent in the morning had a conversion rate of 28%. They found the answer to sell their products faster.

Combining Product Insights With Customer Insights

Insights help you take the best step to uplift your business. Suppose you know the truth about your customer. In that case, you can make changes in your product strategy, launch new features in your current product, upgrade your marketing strategy, and use a combination of automation tools to reach the customers during their moment of need.

You should always rely on the combination of data acquired via product insights and customer insights. It lets you uncover the preferences and motivations that are crucial to making customers buy your product.

Data acquisition methods like surveys and focus groups are not enough to understand today’s customers. You need the next-generation tools that automatically captures feedback using several channels like user comments and reviews posted on different sites and presents you a real-time dashboard where you can see the products that customer like the most, why they like them the most, what features the product is missing, which features are the favorite, which brands are trusted in that niche, and several other similar questions.

Tools like Revuze let you combine the power of both product insights and customer insights and present a holistic view of the customer. It leverages both quantitative data and qualitative data and uses emotional analytics to offer you a clear picture of your customers’ likes, dislikes, and needs.

Conclusion

As a product manager, you must understand your product’s value proposition, and product insights help you take a balanced approach to build great products that customers would use.

Product designers, managers, marketers, and customers all speak a different language. When you combine the power of product insights and customer insights, you can better understand the mindset of people building your product and using your product. The focus should be on the customers, but you shouldn’t neglect the ideas of your employees.

Remember what Henry Ford said, “If I asked people what they need, they would have asked for faster horses”. Hence, listen to your customers by analyzing customer insights but don’t ignore product insights. The key to building a great product lies in analyzing data.

The Role of Sentiment Analysis in Digital Transformation

Posted on Jul 23, 2021 by Simone Somekh

In a world that revolves around data, can we talk about digital transformation without looking at the impact of data in any digital transformation initiative? If you do have the requisite data, how do you ensure the workability and effectiveness?

Data is gathered from different sources, unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. What puts head above shoulders is to ensure that your data is structured, and this is where sentiment analysis comes in.

Walkme for example, refers to Digital Transformation as the reimagining of a business by implementing new technologies and optimizing legacy systems to improve operations. But looking at digital transformation, especially with data, you need to consider how it’s enabled and enhances processing across your business.

Your focus must be on how to deliver value through great understanding, alignment, and actioning of online and offline data. Digital transformation must not be consigned to only offline brands, it should work towards bringing fragmented data points and platforms together across an organization’s wider ecosystem.

Whether you run an offline or online business, the need to digitally transform your business can arise. As the world revolves around data, any brand must think about relevance.

As a marketer, whether you campaign on mobile devices, social media, or you operate from brick and mortar, the most important thing is how you connect with your consumers. What are their pain points?

Do you fully understand their sentiments about your brand, product, or service? Consumers leave a trail of their feelings along with their purchasing history; data is scattered everywhere; how do you access and utilize these great volumes of data?

What every brand strives to do is to understand how to align all that growing data in real-time, across all sources and platforms, and to leverage it to inform their customers and transform the business. Once you have the correct strategy, platform integration, and can access the requisite data, you have initiated digital transformation as regards data.

You just don’t think of adopting a new digital tool alone for your digital transformation, the idea should be to fuse sophisticated technology that gathers and orchestrates data, and then makes use of that data intelligently to inform your organization. The data that’s gathered will then be combined with technology to enhance superior, data-driven customer brand experiences.

Digital transformation works with the data you have available, which can be in large volumes that are structured or unstructured. Since you aim at making your brand to have valuable insights that can help in digital transformation, your digitization priorities, strategies, automation, as well as improving workflows should be your focal point.

You have reports and process improvements as metrics to understand how far you are going with your digital transformation, but you still need to incorporate big data as well as IoT data from different sources, devices, phones, and machine sensors. This will enable you to extend your digital transformation project across all operations.

How do you structure the data you collect from different sources to ensure your digital transformation project is successful?

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is also known as “opinion mining,” is the analysis of a text and interpretation of the sentiments behind it with the aid of automation. By deploying machine learning and text analytics, you make use of algorithms to classify statements as positive, negative, or neutral.

Companies and brands use sentiment analysis as a strategy for social media monitoring to manage large amounts of data and gain consumer insights; it’s a process that you can use to learn more about your customers’ sentiment and how your competitors are faring.

How can you use sentiment analysis for digital transformation?

Since the basic essence of digital transformation is to improve customer experience and ultimately enhance ROI, you need to understand how your customers feel about your products, hence you can deploy sentiment analysis to analyze social media posts, tweets, and online product reviews, with the aim of tracking customers’ opinions and reactions that can help in your digital transformation project.

It’s a veritable tool for market research, brand and product reputation monitoring, customer experience analysis, and predictions.

Sentiment analysis using product review data

Sentiment analysis using product review data is very vital for any organization that wants to embark on digital transformation. It gives you the insight you need to comprehend your customers’ sentiments towards your product or service.

You can easily ask your customers to review your product with the intention of understanding where changes are necessary and what digital tools you may need for the transformation. However, it may not be an easy task to just collect and interpret product review data, since you must first analyze the data, and the volume can be quite huge.

A good case study of how you can use sentiment analysis for digital transformation with the aim of improving customer experience is the sentiment analysis using product review data Revuze did on Lysol VS Clorox. Though the report showed that customers were more satisfied with Clorox, the two brands can use the report for improving customer experience.

Sentiment analysis of customer product reviews using machine learning

The fact that you need the infusion of technology and data for your digital transformation project does not mean that any data you collect from customer product review works, the data you source from review sites and social channels are basically unstructured. Unstructured data is not easy to analyze, and you need to deploy Natural Language Processing and machine learning to successfully carry out this task.

Machine learning tools can decipher context, sarcasm, or misapplied words. By using techniques and complex algorithms such as Linear Regression, Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machines (SVM), you can detect user sentiments and tag them into positive, negative, or neutral. This enables you to understand customers’ sentiments in real-time.

Conclusion

Where you don’t have the requisite technology, tools, and expertise, it does not mean that you can’t embark on digital transformation. The idea is for you to remain relevant in the market, and that can only be realized when your customers are satisfied and happy with your products and services.

Digital transformation does not stop with your customers alone, where you don’t have the necessary expertise, you can outsource to reputable companies such as Revuze that can carry out quality sentiment analysis for your brand. Where data is involved from different sources, sentiment analysis is the only tool to make it workable for digital transformation.

How to Market to Gen Z

Posted on Jun 14, 2021 by Simone Somekh

Generation Z is rapidly growing in market share and is predicted to impact consumer trends across industries significantly. Last year, Gen Z accounted for 40% of global consumers and held a purchasing power worth over $143 billion. As the oldest members of this generation slowly begin to enter the workforce, we can anticipate that this generation’s financial influence across the globe may only continue to expand. So what does this mean for brands and retailers?

It’s clear that if they want to stay in business and reap the financial rewards, brands and retailers across the CPG industry must learn how to connect and appeal to this new wave of consumers and combat changing consumer tastes. This blog post will break down who exactly Gen Z is, explain why it’s essential for brands to understand this generation, and provide two marketing strategies to reach Gen Z audiences, with examples of companies that did so successfully.

Gen Z and Why They Matter

Also known as “iGen” or “Digital Natives,” Generation Z is arguably the generation that has little to no recollection of a world without smartphones. With the members of this generation born between 1997 and 2015 (or ages 6 to 24 as of 2021), Gen Z comprises the true digital natives who have been exposed to the internet and social media since the time they were born.

Technology plays a significant role in Gen Z’s lives and plays an even more critical role in their spending habits than most realize. Given their lifelong ability to access unlimited information at their fingertips, Gen Z can make informed spending decisions and become even smarter shoppers. Whether it’s reading online reviews of a product, comparing prices with competitors, or using apps to find promo codes and discounts, the Gen Z shopping experience is strategic and tactful. To appeal to Gen Z, brands and retailers must begin catering to this audience’s digital nature and emphasize their online presence and mobile experience.

Not only are Gen Z technological natives, but they are also on track to be the most ethnically diverse and educated generation to date. For example, a series of reports from Pew Research has revealed that one-in-four digital natives are Hispanic, which is significantly higher than 18% of Hispanic Millennials. Gen Z is also enrolling in higher education at a considerably greater rate than Millennials were at the same age. A large majority (59%) of digital natives aged 18-to-20-years old are enrolled in college. Because of this generation’s prominent ethnic and racial diversity, embracing diversity and belonging is vital. A qualitative research study has revealed that 76% of Gen Z members feel that diversity and inclusion are essential for brands to address. However, the demand for ethical commitment doesn’t stop there. These young consumers want to support brands that share a responsibility in making a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s a political, social, or environmental issue, Gen Z wants to support brands that are willing to take a stance on important causes. 66% of young customers agree that if a company is affiliated with a social cause they support, their impression of the brand increases. If brands aim to build a loyal following within this market segment, making ethical choices and embracing cause-based marketing is a strategic approach towards successfully appealing to Gen Z and reaping the financial rewards.

Reaching Gen Z

Building Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Over 90% of marketing teams utilize social media as part of their overall marketing strategy — and for a good reason. Nearly half (49%) of Gen Z members get their news from social media, compared to 17% of the rest of the population. And according to a 2019 study, Gen Z spends nearly 3 hours a day on social media compared to Millennials, who spend an average of 2 hours a day.

While there are many social media platforms to choose from today, not every social media platform is equal. For brands trying to reach Gen Z, it’s best to avoid platforms such as Facebook, whose majority of users are above age 25. Instead, a national survey revealed that Gen Z members use Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%), and TikTok (55%).

To see the effectiveness of social media in action, check out this example of Chipotle.

Chipotle has a solid social media presence across multiple platforms. With over 1 million followers on both Instagram and TikTok, Chipotle is an example of a brand that has successfully tapped into the power of social media marketing. Not only does the restaurant group post content consistently across all of their platforms, but they also engage with their followers by commenting on their posts or replying to their comments. Additionally, Chipotle is unafraid to add some spice to its social media content. The restaurant group is famous for experimenting with memes to promote their content, which typically results in high engagement levels.

Foster Brand Authenticity

Brand authenticity is the degree to which customers believe a brand is loyal to itself, genuine to its customers, and driven by compassion and responsibility, according to G2.

Authenticity is essential to this new generation. In a survey conducted by CNBC, the majority of Gen Z (67%) agreed that “being true to their values and beliefs makes a person cool.” One technique to promote brand authenticity is to utilize brand storytelling. Brand storytelling involves using various narratives to communicate who your brand is, what you stand for, and connect with your audience on a deeper level. People don’t just want to buy what you sell; they want to buy why you sell it. Take Patagonia, for example.

Patagonia is a designer of outdoor clothing and gear. Founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s mission is to “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” The outdooring clothing brand highlights their worthy cause by selling a clothing line known as the “Responsibili-Tee,” which consists of 100% recycled t-shirts.

Patagonia fully immerses its consumers interested in purchasing this eco-friendly t-shirt in the story of how the t-shirt came to be. As a result, not only can you see a complete overview of the recycled materials that make up these clothes, but you can also see the exact location of the facilities that produce it and the direct impact it has on the planet.

However, the storytelling doesn’t stop there.

While the brand displays its worthy cause during the buyer’s journey, website visitors can also read the Footprint Chronicles. The Footprint Chronicles is a resource that keeps Patagonia honest about where its products come from and the resources required to create those products. In the Footprint Chronicles, readers can find the brand’s material and environmental programs, social responsibility programs, and information regarding their facilities and suppliers across the supply chain.

Wrapping up

Gen Z is the next generation of global consumers. As such, businesses must prepare for this new generation by incorporating these young consumers in business strategies, especially as their influence in the marketplace becomes more prominent.

So whether it’s through social media marketing to build brand awareness or by following the lead of major brands to foster brand authenticity, exploring different strategies that cater to the unique characteristics of Gen Z’s diverse demographic is critical in these coming years.

The Complete Guide to eCommerce Data 2021

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Simone Somekh

It’s the era of Big Data; very large volumes of data with a high degree of complexity are now produced daily that you can’t think of using the traditional data management tools to store or process. Any brand that still wants to remain relevant in the global market must leverage the opportunity Big Data provides.

What are the Features that Characterize Big Data?

There is no talking about Big data without looking at the following four features:

Volume
Variety
Velocity
Variability

Volume
Looking at the name Big Data, the very first thing that strikes anybody is the enormous size. The value of data in our context depends on the size and before attributing Big Data to any form of data, you must consider the volume, since this methodology does not apply to small groups of items. A typical database often exceeds a million of individual line-items. That makes the volume a very critical feature.

Variety
The next thing you have to consider is the heterogeneous sources and the nature of data, and this applies to both structured and unstructured, before ascribing Big Data to any form of data. Some time ago, people depended on spreadsheets and databases for sources of data that most applications considered, however, the big transformation in our daily activities have opened up a retinue of avenues for data creation such as emails, microblogs, photos, videos, monitoring devices, PDFs, and audio, that can be considered in the analysis applications.So, variety has come to be a characterizing feature of Big Data, that plays a vital role in storage, mining, and analysis.

Velocity
Another feature you must consider is the speed of data generation which is where velocity comes in. How fast you can generate and process data to cater to the needs, determines its real potential.The velocity of Big Data takes into account the massive and continuous rate at which data flows from networks, application logs, eCommerce sites, social media sites, sensors, and mobile devices. The aim, of course, is to process the data in real time and deliver instant insights & action items.

Variability
Another thing that is significant about Big Data is its inconsistency. Variability impacts how effective our efforts in handling and managing data are. While it may not happen all the time, it’s should still be a consideration for any Big Data analysis system

One important source of data that is growing at enormous rates is the eCommerce stores. There were serious concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to a decline in retail activity, and yet contrary to the expectations, a significant number of retail businesses shifted to online operations. For instance, Shopify reported a 71% increase in new merchants using its platform between Q1 and Q2 of 2020. This shift gave a big boost to eCommerce data generation.

This article will showcase all the different eCommerce data including ways to extract the data, filter & clean it. We will also review real-life examples of brands (and Revuze customers) to better emphasize how brands should use eCommerce data to their advantage.

What is eCommerce Data?

eCommerce data is data gathered from eCommerce stores (websites or apps) & the social media assets of those stores (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc.). The data that is gathered can be either text, voice, or pictures. Usually, businesses get valuable insights from what consumers say and feel about their products, stores, sales, purchases, and pricing. The data can be clean or “dirty” (a vague review that requires the use of AI & ML (Machine Learning) to get to the bottom of it).

The data collection can be from global eCommerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, etc. Online retailers and marketers analyze the information/reviews from consumers for a better understanding of customer behavior & attitude and to improve their online shopping experience.

This is a veritable source of information for online businesses and eCommerce retailers because they need to know what customers think about their different products, customer service, and pricing to serve them better and generate more revenue.

How to Collect eCommerce Data

There are several ways open to an eCommerce store to collect data. The simple format is to ask for customers’ reviews, conduct surveys, request sign-ups, and leverage email preference forms. Big eCommerce stores go a step further to use automated and AI methods such as web scraping, cookie tracking, social media analytics, and natural language processing, to collect data.

From the information, you can obtain insights into eCommerce analytics, such as consumers’ online purchasing habits and eCommerce marketplace improvements. You need insights to understand the value of the customer data trail and the loyalty you can harness if you have a single customer view.

Data holds the key for businesses to unlock potential ways of improvement and ultimately, value. While volume may not be the issue with data, how businesses process it certainly is.

How to Analyze eCommerce Data

Once you have your data, the next step is data cleaning. Text cleaning tools will allow us to process the data and prepare it for the analysis by removing stop words (a, and, or, but, how, what…), punctuation (commas, periods…), and checking for stemming. These tools will allow us to “clean” or “strip” the texts from anything that might be irrelevant to the analysis to a content item which can be semantically understood using AI.

In the lecture “Analytics And Decision Sciences For E-Commerce, An Overview,” by Ravi Vijayaraghavan of Flipkart, he says that a good review should have relevance and depth, which tells you about the product and the detail/comprehensiveness of the review among other features.

Knowing that the data you collect from eCommerce stores can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, is a step in the right direction. Due to the volume of data that is produced daily, it’s almost impossible to use human labor to analyze your data.

Your best option, therefore, is to use sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is using automation to analyze a text and interpret the sentiments behind it. By integrating machine learning and text analytics, algorithms you can determine if a statement is positive, negative, or neutral.

Sentiment analysis is also known as “opinion mining,” and is often used by organizations and brands as a strategy for social media monitoring to manage large amounts of data and gain valuable insights into customers’ sentiment, and those of the competition.

What Is Sentiment Analysis Used For?

The essence of sentiment analysis is to analyze social media posts, tweets, and online product reviews, to track opinions, reactions, and efficiently improve customer service and experience. It’s a veritable tool for market research, brand and product reputation monitoring, and customer experience analysis.

These tools are not only useful for conducting analysis but can also be deployed for predictions as well. According to research, positive sentiments may have an upward effect on stock prices.

What is Market SKU?

For proper inventory management and ease of tracking, a brand assigns a number known as Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) to a product. This means that SKU is a specific identifier for any particular product in the stock that allows easier and more efficient record-keeping. While there is no special way of creating an SKU, there are some precautions you need to take to avoid confusion. You must refrain from leaving spaces and the use of special characters; endeavor to keep your SKU short; don’t use letters you can mistake for numbers such as 0 and I.

Why you need an SKU

SKUs are of great importance to warehouses, retail stores, and product fulfillment centers, which commonly use them to acquire real-time visibility of goods in transit and part of the inventory. The usefulness of SKUs cannot be overemphasized and the following are some areas where they play vital roles:

The identification of a particular item
Tracking inventory to know the stock level of each product
Knowing the expiry date and when each product will run out
Determining the value of each product based on purchasing index
Ascertaining when to reorder a particular product
Enhancing the ease of product location by customers

What are the Different Types of eCommerce?

There are five different types of eCommerce depending on where your business falls in, however, two are very prominent. The five are as follows:

Business-to-Business (B2B)
Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)
Consumer-to-Business (C2B).
Consumer-to-Administration (C2A)

Whenever the word eCommerce comes up, people tend to focus on B2B and B2C. While they may be the “leaders in the pack,” there are others, and even some businesses engage in two or more types of e-Commerce. They may be similar in their modes of operation, but they are distinct.

Some distinguishing traits may include user profile & behavior, price, quantity, order frequency, fulfillment method, product expectations, scale, and even barriers to enter the market.

Business-to-Business (B2B)

This is fundamentally a business type where the transactions are between a business and another business. A B2B transaction comes as bulk pricing, larger quantity orders, or specialty products that a private consumer does not need.

A popular offshoot of B2B is B2A or B2G as it’s also known. This is also sometimes referred to as B2G (business-to-government). B2A transactions are usually between companies and organizations of public administration such as the government.

Examples of goods exchanged in B2A transactions include crude oil, military equipment, ships, and airplanes. These products are too large in scope or sensitive to the wellbeing of society for an individual to purchase.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

The internet has become a full marketplace and businesses leverage it to carry on online transactions with consumers. This is a sort of disruption to the brick-and-mortar model.

B2C is simply a retail transaction between the business and consumer and is the typical eCommerce business. The goods or services are sold to consumers through the brand’s digital assets.

Since eCommerce stores have assorted products, they deploy SKUs to ease consumers the difficulties in picking their choice products. B2C businesses do not stop at products alone, they also engage in delivering services to consumers.

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)

A lot of opportunities came with the internet, and there has been a great deal of transformation in the ease of consumers getting their required products even from across the borders. A lot of eCommerce stores have put in place the avenue for a consumer to sell to another consumer.

There are instances where a consumer may have something to dispose of but does not have a store; eCommerce platforms like eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and Grailed have enhanced C2C. Most C2C models don’t sell goods, they rather serve as a conduit for a consumer selling to another consumer, in what has been commonly called a Marketplace platform.

Consumer-to-Business (C2B)

It’s not only a consumer that may require a particular service, businesses often need consumers to carry out one assignment or the other. The C2B model is an opportunity for businesses to reach consumers online to add value to their operations.

Sometimes, these consumers can execute the project on a contractual basis or as freelancers. This works as a form of outsourcing and ensures that businesses get the best hands in any field, and has seen its popularity skyrocket in the age of the gig economy with such prominent brands as Fiverr, Upwork, etc.

Consumer-to-Administration (C2A)

Apart from businesses, there are authoritative bodies such as governments that consumers can also extend services to. They can use the C2A model to receive information, handle billing and establish a direct line of communication. It used to be difficult for consumers to access government facilities, but the internet has made it possible for consumers to pay taxes, fees, fines, etc., online.

Apart from the ease C2A has brought, automation has also made it possible in real-time. There is also the case of a great reduction in fraudulent practices and increased efficiency.

What are the Benefits of Analyzing eCommerce Data?

Analyzing eCommerce data positions your organization to strongly contend with the competition. When you know the likes and dislikes of your consumers, you can improve customer experience and satisfaction. Other areas a brand can benefit from analyzing eCommerce data include:

Product launch improvement

P roduct launch is not what you ordinarily do every other day. You need to have a comprehensive insight into what consumers want, what the competition is doing right and wrong. You may also have to think about the Go-to-market strategy (GTM) and this brings to mind product innovation, which is a new way of resolving pain points many consumers have been encountering with your products that are already in the market.

This insight is what you get from analyzing eCommerce data. A good example is where Revuze used sentiment analysis on product review data to discover what consumers feel about Lysol and Clorox.

In the report, you can find out exactly how Revuze deciphered the relevant product features by tapping into the consumer sentiment and understand what’s working and what’s not. The result of the analysis will enable the producer of Lysol to know what improvements need to be done to compete favorably with Clorox.

Understanding customer LTV

A very important metric you can garner from eCommerce data is customer lifetime value (LTV). It is a measure of how much money a customer will bring your brand throughout their entire time as a paying customer.

After analyzing your eCommerce data, you can easily determine how much a customer is worth to your brand and how much you can afford to invest in retaining such a customer. You will also have insight into whether you are dealing with a repeat customer or a one-time transaction (and hopefully turn the latter into the former).

Building recommendations systems

eCommerce data is vital in helping brands build recommendation systems. Though before this works out, you need to analyze the data for clarity and then deploy machine learning to help consumers discover new products and services.

Recommended systems can be in any of these three models:

User-product relationship – where users have a common preference towards specific products.
Product-product relationship – similar items by appearance or description.
User-user relationship – customers who have similar tastes for a particular product or service.

Improving customer experience

Businesses have realized the need to become consumer-centric and the only way to ensure this is by having insights into their feelings and pain points. With eCommerce data, you can discover when your consumers are satisfied.

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric you use to determine when you are satisfying your customers. It measures how satisfied your customers are and how likely they are to recommend your products to other people.

Traffic / Prices insights

eCommerce data is a valuable source for insights into the traffic to your selling points as well as product prices in your industry. You can deduce after analyzing your data how many consumers and potential customers click into your digital assets and those of competitors that have similar offers.

The time they spend will enable you to decipher if the price of your product has any bearing on conversion rates. If the traffic is high, and you have a poor conversion rate, then something is wrong with your approach. You then put in more effort in optimizing the conversion rate and test to make sure you choose the correct path for improvement.

Which is the Biggest eCommerce Site?

Amazon is the biggest eCommerce site in the U.S. and around the globe. While this information may seem irrelevant, it should push you to understand what the brand does differently that places it above others.

Statista projected that Amazon’s market share will account for 50 percent of the entire e-commerce retail market’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) by 2021.

What eCommerce data technique does Amazon apply?

Amazon uses recommendation technology that is based on collaborative filtering. The brand gathers information about every customer that visits the site and leverage that to decide what you may want to buy.

Amazon can easily build a picture of who you are from the information it has and use that to offer you products that people with similar traits have purchased before.

The Connection Between eCommerce Data & Product Data

The basic difference between eCommerce data and product data is that product data is all information about the product while eCommerce data gives insight about the product, customers, stores, pricing, sales, and purchases. eCommerce data is gathered from global eCommerce platforms like Amazon.

Examples of eCommerce Data

Data you collect from the eCommerce store can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, notwithstanding, you can still group the data into the following different kinds of datasets:

eCommerce product data

This can also be viewed as product review data that you gather from eCommerce sites, it includes all the information you need about all the products a store has and which a consumer can buy online. The product data will give you details such as the manufacturer, supplier, pricing, brand, and category.

eCommerce sales data

Sales trends are vital for any brand that wishes to have an overview of both its products’ sales performance and those of the competition. The information you require can be in the form of the product category or just a general overview of sales. This helps a brand to come up with optimal pricing strategies and make data-driven decisions about stock orders.

eCommerce customer data

eCommerce customer data will tell you all you need to know about your online consumers and their online purchase activity. With Statista projecting that online sales will hit $6.388 trillion in 2024, you can understand how crucial eCommerce customer data is to online retailers. The eCommerce customer data will give you a comprehensive insight into how you can use consumer behavior and interests to shore up your conversion rates.

eCommerce store data

The list of online retailers you have in the market includes Shopify, Amazon, BigCommerce, Etsy, eBay, and Walmart. It’s not easy to keep track of all the eCommerce vendors, merchants, and platforms.

But with eCommerce store data, you have the information source you need to learn who your competitors are, and how to be relevant in the industry’s online retail environment.

eCommerce Data Analytics Tools

eCommerce businesses now thrive on data. But data can be useless if not properly analyzed. To ensure you are not wasting time and other resources gathering data that will not be utilized to improve the brand’s performance, you need tools capable of analyzing real-time data.

The analytics tool should help you to identify which products sell best, who your customers are, and their pain points.

While you may have assorted tools in the market, Revuze automatically collects eCommerce data, classifies, cleans, and organizes it into foundational, proprietary insights that describe consumer needs across the entire category in a granular way.

Revuze’s machine learning algorithms discover topics in each product category automatically and build a unique taxonomy for each without human interaction.

Revuze sentiment analysis combines computational linguistics, text analysis, and natural language processing to clarify subjectivity in customer perceptions. We filter customer attitude, recognizing contextual polarity and interpolating judgment, affective state, and intended emotional communication to create easy-to-understand and usable analysis.

eCommerce Data in 2021 – Conclusion

You must have reached the same conclusion with us, which is that eCommerce data is a valuable source of information you must strive to have at your disposal. Brands need these insights to remain relevant in the face of the competition in the global market.

The internet has made the world a global village, hence your location can no longer afford you the monopoly you have been enjoying. You need to gear up yourself for the competition.

While you have the data, you still need eCommerce data analytics tools such as Revuze. If you are not working with data, purchasing trends, or behavioral analytics, you’re definitely missing out on important business opportunities!

New Product Launch: A Step-by-Step Guide 2021

Posted on May 18, 2021 by Simone Somekh

Launching a new product is not a piece of cake. It requires careful planning and timely implementation of strategies to make your product launch a success.

Although it’s understood that you are super excited to launch your new product, you should never rush the launch process. Why? Because 95% of new products fail and don’t convert into a super selling product.

It’s a well-known fact that making people buy your product is the most challenging job. To maximize your chances of product success, you should plan your launch and avoid the common blunders that most businesses make during a new product launch.

Common Pitfalls To Avoid On New Product Launch

Here are some common mistakes you should avoid when launching your product:

1- Not Defining Your Target Audience

Unless you know who to target, you can’t create an effective product launch strategy. Defining your target audience helps create personalized marketing copies that best serve the needs of your prospects and builds a stronger referral base.

At this stage, you need to find answers to the following questions:

What is the action you want your target audience to take?
Who is more likely to take that action and start using your products?
What are their demographics (age, location, gender, income level, etc.)?
What are their pain points?
Which channels do they use the most?
How does your product solve their pain points?
Which products are they currently using that closely resembles your product?
How much are they spending on that product?
When are they most likely to buy your product?
How are they most likely to buy your product (online or offline, cash or card, one-time or recurring)?
How can they reach you for feedback?
How can you reach them for support?
What makes them happy? Which offer (free demo/discount/free trial) are most likely to take any action in favor of your product?

Answering the above questions will help you to define your target audience and prepare you well for the next step.

2- Failing to Soft-Launch the Product

Soft-launch is all about offering a beta version of your product to select customers. Soft-launching the product has two significant benefits.

First, it helps identify major bugs/issues in the product before launch, enabling you to make new customers happy and avert bad reviews.
Second, it builds interest in your product and increases the chances of word-of-mouth marketing.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 is an excellent example of product failure because the company neglected the soft-launch of the product. The hybrid smartphone/tablet had two battery design flaws, which caused the phones to catch fire. As a result, Samsung had to recall 2.5 million Note 7s just two weeks after the phone was launched.

Therefore, make sure to conduct usability tests with impartial beta testers before you launch the product.

3- Not Preparing to Market the Product Until It’s Too Late

Simply creating a product is not enough. You need to create a buzz for your product in the market for people to start buying your product.

It is essential to build a marketing plan that covers pretty much everything from generating hype about your product to converting prospects and retaining customers.

Your marketing strategy must include:

The core messaging (or USP).
Product benefits.
Content marketing plan for each stage of the buying funnel.
Plan to acquire more customers.
Strategies for product expansion.
Plan to increase the number of repeat orders, up-selling, and cross-selling.
Techniques to nurture your existing customer base for better retention.

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How to Craft a Pre-Launch Marketing Strategy: 8 Actionable Steps

Most big brands follow pre-launch strategies to build curiosity around their new product. From creating buyer personas to building the hype about the product, a lot goes into successful pre-launch strategies.

Let’s have a look at eight actionable pre-launch marketing tactics that can help you achieve your sales goals.

1- Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the base of all your marketing strategies. The more clearly you determine your target group, the better you can understand how and where to reach your prospects.

Follow these three steps to identify your target audience:

Market segmentation.
Preparing a customer profile.
Creating a buyer persona.

Now, let’s understand these steps in detail.

Market Segmentation

Begin with market segmentation. It will help you understand the specific needs of a customer base. When doing market segmentation, consider these two things.

Define who is likely to use your product.
Organize your market by industry.

For example, if you manufacture biometric products, here’s how your market segment will look. It also includes how far you can break down a particular industry.

Biometrics:

Offices:
- Banks and financial institutions
- Other companies
  - Logistics company
  - SMBs
  - MNCs
Residentials:
- Societies
- Individual homes
Schools/Colleges
- Universities
- Junior college
- Primary and high schools

When you segment your target market, it helps you align your advertising copy as per your target industry.

Preparation of Customer Profile

Next, create a customer profile. It should cover the necessary information about your target market. Your customer profile should include:

Age: What age group is most likely to use your products? Does it comprise millennials, middle-aged people, or seniors? This is vital because customers of different age groups will respond differently to your marketing message.
Location: Where do your potential customers reside? The buying habits of people who live in urban areas differ from rural residents. Besides, the neighborhood will help you figure out the most important hours for you to target people from different time zones.
Income level: Not everyone can afford your product. Therefore, it is essential to target people with the right income level.
Stage of experience: Are your customers likely to be marketers? C-suite executives? Sales representatives? Determining the stage of expertise will help you narrow down the list of your ideal prospects.

Creation of Buyer Persona

The next step is to create a buyer persona. It is a detailed description of your ideal customer. Your buyer persona should include:

Goals: What is your target audience aiming to achieve? It includes their primary and secondary objective. For example, for a gamer, the primary purpose might be to buy a desktop that supports high-end games while the secondary goal would be to ensure that the product has an eye-friendly screen.
Challenges/Pain points: What is the biggest challenge/pain point of your target audience? What are they struggling with?
How do your prospects spend their day: Do they spend a lot of time online or offline?
Preferred mode of communication: Do they prefer emails, SMS or phone calls, and how often?
Motivation: What encourages your customers to make a purchase? Is it because of convenience? Is it to save time? Is it to reduce their work burden? Is it price?

Now that you know what information to collect, here are a few ways to find the answers to the above questions.

Survey Existing Customers: You can discover a lot about your prospects by surveying your existing customers. Send questionnaires to your existing customer base via emails or website pop-ups. You might need to offer some incentive to convince them, but their answers will be invaluable for your buyer persona research.
Check Your Analytics: Data from your Google Analytics account (or any other tool that you use) can provide you with the demographics information (location, age, device) about the people who are currently interacting with your website.
Talk to Your Employees: Your sales team is likely to have a wealth of information about your customers. Discuss with them, and if you spot something occurring regularly, add it to your buyer persona.

Once you’ve collected all the necessary information, compile them together to build your buyer persona. Continuing the above example. Here’s how the buyer persona of a biometrics manufacturer would look like.

Locations: United States, Mexico
Key decision-maker: Financial advisor, principal, security consultant, or secretary
Age: 25+
Challenges/Pain points: To track attendance or strengthen security
Buying Motivation: Wants a more comfortable and better way to monitor the attendance
Buying concerns: Security of users’ data
Primary device used to browse the internet: Laptop
Preferred mode of communication: Email

2- Conduct Thorough Market Analysis

You have created a great product, but how does it compare to similar products in the market? What are the gaps in the current market? What will actually sell?

To get answers to these questions, a comprehensive market analysis is essential.

The three steps to perform a market analysis are:

Competitor Analysis
Identification of Trigger Points
Product Trend Analysis

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis gives you a fair idea about where your competitors are positioned in the market and what trends they’re reacting to. This, in turn, will enable you to improve your marketing strategy and dominate the market.

You need to focus on the below things when conducting a competitor analysis:

How do they communicate product details to their customers: website, ads, social media, etc.?
How detailed are their product descriptions? Are there any missing information?
Where have they positioned the call-to-action? Is it clearly visible, or do they get lost due to poor positioning or color scheme?
What is their USP? What features/benefits they’re capitalizing on?
Why are customers buying their products? Is it because of the value, experience, pricing, or something else?
How are they differentiating their product from their competition?
What is the percentage of customers satisfied with their product? What are the most common issues in their product?
Do they have great social media engagement? If yes, then what do they share the most?
Do they have a great SEO strategy? What are the channels they are using to acquire traffic?

Identifying Trigger Points

Trigger points help you acquire more customers and increase your business revenue. Here are some of the trigger points you must include in your product launch strategy:

Giving free trials: Offering free trials for a limited time, eliminates the commitment from the customers’ side, thereby encouraging them to try your product. Another great thing about free trials is that it can help you generate tons of leads.

Using customer retargeting: Customer retargeting is a form of online advertising that is designed to help you reach users who visited your site but bounced back without taking any action. Retargeting platforms like Google, Facebook, and AdRoll can help you make the most out of customer retargeting.

Writing mock PR: Mock PR is all about pitching your product to stakeholders and employees of your company through a press release-style document. It ensures everyone in the organization is on the same page with the product launch. If they have a hard time understanding your product, your customers might struggle as well. If your team loves it, then the chances are that the new product launch will also go well.

Case Studies: If you have beta tested (soft-launched) your product, you can prepare case studies on people who benefited the most from it. Use numbers to indicate the effectiveness of your product to appear more credible.

Product Trend Analysis

Product trend analysis provides insights about future market shifts and directions. This helps you to identify trends in changing consumer needs and behavior. You can better prepare for it and improve the efficiency of your product launch marketing strategy.

Tools like Revuze can provide a more comprehensive and accurate view of the consumer market. Revuze’s self-training, low-touch AI technology collects data from a variety of sources (like reviews, social media, emails, and more). It then analyzes the data and provides highly-granular customer feedback that helps determine future product trends.

3- Note-down Positioning Statement

A positioning statement describes how your product fills a specific need of your target audience in a way that your competitors don’t.

When writing your positioning statement, consider the following.

The Unique Selling Point of the Product

Why do you want customers to choose you over your competitors? What makes your product unique/better? It could be an additional feature or something that reflects your product. However, make sure that your USP is meaningful to consumers.

For example, Sony devices have robust cameras and sound quality, but so do other mobile devices. Hence, they use the USP: waterproof and dust-resistant.

Sony’s USP indicates that its mobile devices can be used even in the rain or on the beach, thereby encouraging people to purchase.

How Does It Solve The Problem of The People?

Buyer persona gives you a fair idea of the pain points of your customers. Use it to highlight how your product solves their problems.

Mailchimp’s homepage is an excellent example of a brand highlighting how their product solves the problem of their prospects. It reads, “many businesses are working harder than ever to stay connected with customers. Start with a custom domain for up to 5 years, then build a free website to get your business online quickly”.

This is great because the copy first talks about the most pressing problem of their target audience and then provides a solution to it.

Product Innovation

Product innovation is all about representing a new way to solve a problem that a significant number of consumers have. It helps you identify and address gaps in the current market. This, in turn, enables you to satisfy consumer needs in a way that is new and refreshing.

4- Ways to Reach Your Audience

This step determines how you plan to reach your audience.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to create a buzz about your product before its launch.

Content marketing will help you reach people at every stage of the buyer journey.

The best part about content marketing is that it will continue to help you acquire and nurture leads even after the launch of your product.

The content marketing funnel is divided into four stages.

The Awareness Stage

In this stage, people are not aware of your product, and they come across it for the first time.

You should publish articles that provide answers to the questions asked by your target audience.

The awareness stage is all about educating the customers about your product so that they remember it.

Some examples of content you should publish in the awareness stage are:

Infographics
Blog posts
Educational videos
Documentaries
Research papers, etc.

You should reach out to your target audience on social media to spread the word about your new product.

The Deadpool franchise did a great job of promoting the film by creating a Tinder profile for the character. Promotion of the movie at the awareness stage helped Deadpool become one of the highest-grossing R-rated films.

All you need is to think how you can reach out to your audience in the best possible manner so that they remember your product and wait for its launch anxiously.

The Consideration Stage

At this stage, a prospect decides whether your product is the right fit for them by comparing it with other competitors in the market.

Some examples of content you should publish at the consideration stage are:

Comparison articles
Checklists
Ebooks
Product demo videos
Product webinars, etc.

For example, people looking to buy a new laptop might search with a query like “Asus vs HP laptops ”. If you just launched a new version of HP laptops then you need to make sure your content offers a comprehensive comparison between the laptops and highlights the best features of HP laptop to the readers.

Your target audience should be convinced reading reviews and comparisons on different sites that HP laptops are the best. This is the power of content marketing at the consideration stage.

The Decision Stage

At the decision stage, the prospects have made their decision to purchase your product and are looking for reasons to buy your product. You should create content that makes them stick to your product, thereby reducing the churn rate.

Some examples of content you should publish at the decision stage are:

Case studies
FAQ’s
Whitepapers
Reports
Video Testimonials

Slack is a great example of a brand that publishes great content in the decision stage. They publish content that trains users on how to use Slack.

They also have a separate landing page for customer stories (the reviews stage) that indicates their product delivers results.

Customer Feedback and Reviews Stage

At this stage, your prospects have already become your customers. Now, you should reach every customer to collect feedback and encourage them to leave reviews on your site.

Feedbacks help you to improve your product, while reviews will motivate potential customers to purchase it.

Outreach Plus, an email outreach software, encourages its customers to provide reviews. It then publishes the reviews on the website to entice prospects into trying their product.

Bonus Tip: Leverage The Power of Social Media

Another way to reach your audience is through social media. Publish content about your product and how it solves your target audience’s problems. Make sure to use relevant, industry-specific hashtags to broaden the reach of your content.

For example, Later, an Instagram Scheduling product used social media to promote their new feature (Instagram Stories Scheduler). They published a post about a free course on “Instagram Stories for Business” while indirectly advertising their new feature. The post also had relevant hashtags to help them increase their reach.

5- Conduct Sensational Marketing Campaign

Your marketing campaign is responsible for attracting, engaging, and converting potential customers. Your product might be exceptional, but if your marketing campaign isn’t great, you’ll struggle to acquire customers.

Here are three tactics to help you create a sensational marketing campaign.

Include Customer Emotion

95% of purchasing decisions are driven by emotion. It could be fear, frustration, anger, FOMO, or the desire to be first. Emotions can be tied to almost every product.

For example, AWeber, an email marketing tool, knows how stressful it can be to send emails to each subscriber and generate remarkable results.

Hence, they created a copy that triggers human emotions to increase the chances of conversion. Their homepage banner reads, “stress-free email marketing software designed to help your small business grow.”

Look how they focused on the words “stress-free,” “help,” and “grow” while highlighting their target audience, i.e., “small business.”

Build the Hype Everywhere

It’s essential to get your target audience excited about your product. Here are a few ways to build hype for your product.

Conduct special events
Tell a story
Give a sneak peek into your product
Collaborate with social media influencers
Create a feature video of your product

Apple is a good example of a brand that builds hype for its product before its launch. Not only they publish high-quality photos and videos, but they also conduct special events.

Take Preorders

Preorders help you determine how successful your product will be. Besides, you get funds to build your product without taking loans or going through investor rounds.

Preorders also build hype and excitement among your customers. They are more likely to start telling their friends and family about how excited and eager they are to buy your product.

Tesla Cybertruck, for instance, has received more than 600,000 preorders. Besides, their customers are talking about it all over social media. This helped them generate the much needed hype about the product. There are around 90,270 posts on Instagram alone with the hashtag cybertruck. Impressive! Isn’t it?

6- New Product Launch: Activities For The Big Day

The day has come. You’re preparing for the big day. Remember, product launch day isn’t only about marketing, but it is also about closing deals.

Begin with choosing the right channels for your launch.

While creating buyer personas, you have already listed the channels your target audience spends most of their time on.

For example, if you’re launching a tech product, you would like to explore Product Hunt as it already has a massive audience looking for new products.

Here are some activities you should be doing on the product launch day.

Personalize the attendee experience by providing them with a customized template/t-shirt or one-on-one access to your product.
Invite major news outlets to cover your launch.
Request industry leaders to talk about your product.
Distribute flyers with your website’s address and contact information, so that attendees can connect with you after the launch.
Align your marketing and sales teams together. The marketing team will drive traffic to your new product launch event while the sales team will make efforts to convert them.

Whether you’re running an event or launching your product online, it is essential to ensure your sales team can reach your customers. That might include providing the right resources to them, such as a booking system or feedback collection form.

Also, make sure that your sales team has every single detail about your product and can answer all the queries of your customers. This will eliminate any last-minute hassle and increase the chances of conversion.

7- Post-Launch Guidance

Now that you’ve launched your product, you would want to check if everything went as planned.

This comes down to your personal goals, but here are a few metrics to focus on.

Affiliates and partnerships: Who brought the best results? Can you figure out why they brought the desired results while others failed?
Top referring domains: Did the publications you expected covered your launch? Were there any surprising sources of traffic?
Email open and click-through rates: What campaigns worked well and what didn’t? Out of the ones who clicked on the link, how many converted?
Views and conversions from blogs: How many people read your blog? Which post outperformed other articles? Why?
Audience metrics: Look at how much time people spent on your product pages, examine the bounce and exit rates, and identify the sites they went after landing on your site. This will help you analyze if your product pages need a revamp.

Also, revise the marketing strategy that you created before the product launch. Which of your strategies worked great, and which didn’t? What did you fail to anticipate? Was there anything that you could’ve done better?

This will help you improve your future marketing and convert more leads.

When it comes to sales, not everyone will buy your product on the day of launch. But, this doesn’t mean they won’t purchase ever. Therefore, it’s essential to stay in touch with prospects and nurture them until they’re ready to buy.

Offer free-trials, run product-focused webinars, and produce in-depth product demos. This will give you new resources to share and encourage prospects to try your product.

If you’ve their email address, consider sending emails that provide them more reasons to invest in your product. It might mean offering a discount or an insider look.

Additionally, consider running retargeting ads on Google and Facebook to stay on top of the mind of your prospects.

8- Increase Customer Retention Rate and Reduce Churn

Now that you’ve acquired customers, shift your focus to retention. 80% of your future profits will come from only 20% of your customers.

Why increasing customer retention rate & reduce churn is important

Use the following strategies to retain customers and reduce churn rate:

Provide 24/7 support.
Check on your customers regularly via emails or call.
Conduct post-launch webinars.
Collect customer feedback via surveys and use the results to enhance the user experience.
Approach the customers who have stopped using your product to find out the reason for it. Inform them what’s changed in your product since they last used it and encourage them to come back by offering discounts.
Create a knowledge base or community forum that educates your customers about every feature of your product.
Use social listening tools to monitor what your customers are saying about your product on social media. This will help you respond to negative comments quickly and enhance the customer experience.
Create a customer loyalty program that rewards your customers when they take your desired action (e.g., buy from you, refer a friend, etc.)

Remember, the higher the retention rate, the higher the recurring revenue. Therefore, make efforts to reduce the churn rate and retain as many customers as possible.

Conclusion

Launching a product is both exciting and challenging. It is essential to create a marketing strategy that brings results.

Identify your target audience, conduct comprehensive market analysis, and create sensational marketing campaigns to reach the right prospects. Don’t forget to focus on customer retention tactics post product launch to increase your recurring revenue.