Month: October 2019

Categories
Apps Marketing & Advertising

What Is A Consent Management Platform? All You Need To Know 2020

consent management platform

Introduction

Since the introduction of more detailed privacy regulations, such as the GDPR and the CCPA, businesses have started to take consumer consent and data privacy seriously.

Consumer data comes in multiple forms, and it’s used for many different purposes, from advertising personalization to monetization.

Because of this, collecting and managing consumer preferences on how all of their data is used across these different use cases is not exactly the simplest of tasks.

Privacy laws have meant that businesses need a robust solution that provides consumers with this choice. Enter the consent management platform (CPM) – a toolkit that is designed to do just this.

 

What is a CMP

For consumer-facing publishers, there is a huge issue here. These businesses work with multiple partners across the advertising ecosystem. Each partner has numerous uses for consumer data, from advertising to personalization. Asking and managing this consent across an entire user base is a daunting task.

This is where a consent management platform comes in. By collecting user preferences for different data types and different uses and various partners, CMPs provide this functionality.

Think of a CMP of something that sits between the publisher and the user. It informs users about the type of data that the publisher will collect, whether through forms, or another method, and what this data will be used for. It allows consumers to modify these settings, stores this, and gives consumers a chance to opt-out and change these settings.

What this looks like for the consumer is usually a simple dialogue. This dialogue allows them to choose how their data is used. These preferences are stored and ultimately control of how user data moves between the publisher and the broader advertising ecosystem.

As a lot of new privacy regulations require businesses to offer this level of functionality to consumers, consent management software is a vital tool for any modern company.

 

Why do you need a CPM?

To give users the option to take control of their data.

CPMs provide the consumer with the opportunity to control their data and how it is used. They allow consumers to understand who is using their data and for what for.

CPMs give consumers the ability to revoke this access and update these preferences at any time. The tools then automatically communicate these consumer requests throughout the data supply chain.

This proves detailed control of personal data at an end-user level. This level of functionality puts the user in control and increases trust between a publisher, app, or other consumer-facing platform and the users that ultimately bring them revenue.

 

To comply with privacy regulation

The main reason that you need a CMP is to comply with relevant privacy laws and regulations. These tools are useful because they can be universally integrated across every consumer-facing platform, allowing companies to comply instantly.

Regardless of whether you’re an EU based business or not, correctly managing user preferences should be a priority. For website owners and publishers, offering users the choice and allowing them to achieve these at any point is fundamental to how regulators see the data-driven world.

 

To deliver better experiences, improve personalization or monetize user data

First-party data uses still require the same level of opt-in as data that is sent on to third-party solutions.

That means if you are using customer or user data for analytics or insights, you’ll need to implement the choice controls that come with a CPM.

This also applies for personalization, whether first-party page personalization or passing data onto third-parties to deliver personalized ads on your inventory.

As well as this, CPM functionality is required for data monetization or other activities where a user’s personal data is used for monetization purposes.

 

Are all consent management platforms compliant with GDPR and CCPA?

Well, no. You’ll have to check with the current privacy laws to be 100% sure. An excellent way to understand which CPMs are is to check to see if they use the IAB framework.

 

IAB transparency and consent framework

The IAB GDPR transparency and consent framework was built to understand what is needed from a CPM from a technical standpoint to comply with the GDPR. If that sounds like a mouthful of acronyms, then don’t worry, it can be a little confusing.

What this does in practice is sets several hoops for CMPs to jump through for their consent management platforms to be GDPR compliant. So, look out for this term when choosing a CPM as it means they have taken the time to verify that they are following best practices according to the leading industry body.

At the time of writing, there is currently no equivalent for the CCPA.

 

The Tamoco consent platform + SDK

A CMP is a powerful tool that should be implemented anywhere where consumer data is being processed or stored. For these reasons, it makes sense to have a CMP that can cope with large amounts of consumer preferences and can manage these in several different locations and platforms.

The Tamoco CMP collects user preferences in applications. It allows consumers to collect and manage use preference for data collection and data use.

Our CMP is the world’s first mobile-first CMP that allows developers to comply with data privacy legislation such as the GDPR and the CCPA.

With a straightforward integration app developers can take control of their app and deliver privacy management at scale for all of their users.

Categories
Data

How Big Data Is Changing The Event Planning & The Events Industry

Big data plays a crucial role in many industries, and event management is just one of them. People all across the world are relying more and more on their smart devices, and it has become increasingly easier for event organizers to gather and use data to cater more directly to event attendee’s experiences.

Event planners are leveraging big data to deliver highly personalized events and boost attendee engagement. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can use big data to provide better event experiences and learn more about your audiences’ needs and expectations.

Let’s put everything into context before we begin.

 

What Is Big Data?

Generally speaking, big data refers to the enormous volume of data that is collected daily. The data itself doesn’t necessarily have to be useful on its own. It’s the insights, trends, and patterns the data reveals that event planners are most interested in.

For event organizers, big data analysis involves collecting vast amounts of data from their attendees, sponsors, and target audience. This might be in the form of emails, surveys, tweets, photos, or location data.

Event planners can use big data to organize attendee-centric events, increase attendee engagement in real-time, and deliver enhanced event experiences.

The good news is that implementing data analytics in your event planning doesn’t have to be complicated. You can work with the data sets that are already available to you and extract valuable insights from them.

If you’re not collecting any data from your target audience or attendees, the first step is to identify the key data points you’re most interested in. For example, if you’re hosting a business conference, you will need to know where attendees are traveling from so you can provide each attendee the best advice for lodging and commuting to the event venue.

Now that you know what big data is and why it’s important for event organizers, let’s look at how you can implement big data in your event management business.

 

4 Ways Big Data Is Driving the Events Industry

Below we discuss some ways big data can help event organizers plan for successful and engaging events.

#1: Improving Targeted Promotions

Promoting your event takes up a lot of monetary resources, which is why you need to make sure you can cost-effectively maximize your audience outreach. By gathering and analyzing data on your attendees, you’ll be able to find ways to connect with them.

For example, attendee surveys might indicate that most of the respondents first learnt about your event from your social media pages. So, instead of focusing on company spending on offline marketing strategies, you might consider spending more on your social media campaigns.

Location data {information about geographic positions of devices such as smartphones or tablets} allows event marketers to connect their digital marketing efforts to how prospective attendees behave in the real-world. As a result, event marketers can provide even more personal advertising to their target audience.

To attract more attendees, you need to ensure that you’re advertising to the right audience; otherwise, you might experience a drop in event attendance and audience engagement. Analytics can help you discover when your target audience is actively using social media, what is the best way to connect with them, and how you should craft your message to get their attention.

Big data can help you identify what your prospective attendees respond to, which you can then use to improve your event planning. Having access to this information will not only help you customize your ads to attract more attendees but will also be useful in delivering personalized event experiences to your guests.

 

#2: Gaining Insight from Analytics

Analytics can help you figure out the specific topics and themes that most interest your audience, the guest speakers they want to listen to, and any tools or presentation technology they’d like you to implement in your events.

By gaining access to the right information, you’ll be able to discover their pain points and what your guests expect from your events. Start by collecting online search data or using pre-event survey forms to gather this information directly from your attendees. Similarly, you can search through social media sites, community sites, as well as this you can make use of powerful location intelligence and analytics to reveal your attendees’ motivations.

Big data can help you identify the different factors that affect audience behavior and leverage them to your advantage. You’ll be able to predict trends months (or even years!) into the future. Predictive analytics lets you make near-accurate guesses and allow you to see which existing topics have growth potential so you can jump on them before your competition.

Google Trends is also an excellent tool for discovering what your prospective attendees search for. By comparing search terms with historical data, you can predict what will be popular in the future, and when you should host an event around it.

 

#3: Personalizing Attendee Experiences

The data you collect from your attendees gives you insights into how you can enhance attendee satisfaction. You can use technologies such as location data, RFID, VR, and beacons to deliver unique event experiences.

For example, you can send information to nearby devices using beacons, allowing your attendees to only focus on the booths they’re most likely to be interested in. This is also a great way to offer location-based experiences to your guests.

Pepsi organized a dance party at SXSW, where dancers wore wristbands that would gauge their reaction to a stimulus. The wristbands measured body temperature, the volume of music, body movement, as well as the physiological arousal through body sweat. This information was used by the event’s DJ to figure out what music people loved the most. In addition to this, it enabled the crowd to control lighting, bubble machines, and smoke machines.

 

#4: Crowdshaping

Another way big data can help you improve your event planning efforts is by letting you better manage crowd densities at the venue, also known as crowd shaping. It’s an effective way to make sure attendees can enjoy your events without openly influencing their behaviors.

For example, if you see a crowd of people around the book signing tables, you may decide to extend the time allocated for that particular activity in real-time. If a guest speaker is about to take the stage, you can send out notifications to let attendees know that they can get their books signed after the lunch break.

In addition to this, you can use data from past events to improve upcoming events. For example, if data from one event indicates that attendees like open spaces to walk around during breaks, you can use this information to book future venues with plenty of extra space.

In its simplest form, geolocation is capable of giving you information about the location of a person. Beyond that, it can be used by event organizers to gather crowd density data about events. This allows them to manipulate crowd flow more effectively.

Crowdshaping and big data come together to help you identify problems in your crowd flow and enable you to solve them by making proper adjustments quickly. In the long run, this information will allow you to make better event planning decisions (such as opening more check-in lines) and go for venues that meet your audiences’ specific needs.

Event organizer at C2 Montreal gave RFID badges to their attendees that collected their location data. This allowed organizers to see where the majority of the attendees gathered and which event places received less traffic. They found more crowds near food tables, which led them to send more food service staff to those places.

 

Conclusion

The data you gather on your attendees is a valuable resource that can help you improve your event experiences. You can always start small and use whatever data you have to learn about your audiences’ needs and expectations. With time, you’ll feel more comfortable collecting and working with big data.

Event Espresso lets you collect, control, and own all the data you collect for free. You can export your event attendees’ data into Excel or CSV format and use it however you want.

Categories
Marketing & Advertising

Advertising Cookies & Retargeting – What’s Changed + Solutions

It seems that you can’t go anywhere in the world of online advertising at the moment without the conversation moving onto the role of advertising cookies, and what the future holds.

With the implementation of GDPR last year, the California Consumer Privacy Act coming into play in 2020, the cookie has come under increasing pressure.

Combine this with Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and the whispers that Google is also looking to block third-party cookies, and you can understand why everyone in the space is a little worried about what the future holds for the cookie.

We’re going to look at this future, how the cookie works, and how marketers and advertisers can adjust for any upcoming changes in how the advertising industry uses web cookies.

 

What are advertising cookies? How do cookies work for advertising?

First of all, what role do cookies play in the world of advertising?

Well, cookies are small code snippets that store information related to how the user behaves on the web. This cookie is stored on the user’s web browser and can be used accessed to store and change data related to the user.

Cookies can store a wide range of information, such as the pages you have visited and for how long.

We can divide these further types:

First-party cookies

First-party cookies are created by the publisher or website owner when a visitor is on their site. Cookies enable website visitor tracking which helps a business understand which user is returning and ensure that the page content is right for that user. Often, this is something like language or another element that helps with the user experience.

These cookies also include analytics, such as Google Analytics, which used cookies to measure how users use the site.

Third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are used in the digital advertising ecosystem for retargeting and for behavioral-based targeting. Adding these types of cookies to pages allows advertisers to understand how users behave across the web. Using these, they can build a profile that can be selected to target with ads that are more personalized to each user.

 

What are cookies used for?

Advertising cookies can be used for analytics and for managing the user experience. But we are interested in the role that they have in the advertising ecosystem.

Here cookies are used mainly to retarget users based on which site and which pages they have visited. What started as a simple way to deliver products to users who had already seen them has now developed into sophisticated methods to target users that have previously visited a specific page or product.

The other side of the advertising cookie is to build audiences based on profiles. As a user visits a site, this information is used to build a profile for that user. This profile contains information such as age, gender, and interests. These profiles allow marketers to build and create new audiences that are relevant for their product or proposition.

 

What’s changing

The most significant change to the advertising industry in the last few years has been the drive for transparency and user privacy.

Privacy regulators have introduced legislation that limits how advertising cookies can be used to collect user data. These have created a massive issue for the advertising ecosystem, which relies heavily on third-party cookies to build profiles and target audiences based on behavior.

This is because programmatic advertising relies on these third-party cookies as the basis for user-level targeting and attribution. Without this process, marketers can’t target users with more personalized ads and understand when these ads lead to conversions.

As well as this, the people who bring the internet to users have also started to take a tough stance on the issue. At the time of writing, Apple has already announced an anti-tracking update to its native browsers, which blocks the use of third-party cookies. Firefox has implemented a similar policy, and there are reports that Google, who’s browser user base makes up over 60% of web usage, is looking at a similar process.

Another implication for advertisers is that the world has become more mobile-first since the invention of the web cookie. Users are using apps and mobile solutions much more instead of sitting behind a computer.

With all this, it makes a little more sense that advertisers are worried about how these changes will impact their business. But it’s not all doom and gloom – we have some examples of how advertisers can still deliver personalized ads and retargeting campaigns that work.

 

Potential solutions

Focus on people and context

Instead of looking at the type of consumer and using this to build audiences, advertisers can focus on context.

Rather than focus on the user, placing greater emphasis on where the user is can be an effective way to target audiences. For example, using keywords to gauge purchase intent. Or using a user’s real-world location or environmental factors to understand factors beyond the user that make them ideal for targeted advertising.

 

Focus on first-party data and reliable first-party providers

First-party data will become an even more valuable currency for targeting users. Solutions that can combine first-party insights and compliance with privacy regulations will be invaluable for advertisers.

These datasets can help to target consumers reliably and with consent from the end-user. For example, anonymized first-party mobile location can be used to retarget users that have visited a physical store.

 

Wait for a persistent identifier

A persistent identifier is a solution that is commonly suggested as the ecosystem moves away from the cookie. Using this form of identifier, that sits with the consumer and requires explicit compliance with privacy regulations could be a solution.

The problem here is getting this to exist in one form, that’s standardized and that everyone can agree upon. Some areas of the advertising supply chain have introduced this already – but these don’t follow the same standards, making it difficult for advertisers.

 

Look at other channels

Advertisers will begin to look at channels that don’t require third-party advertising cookies. These will include traditional channels such as email, TV, and app-based ads.

These systems allow advertisers to use a persistent identifier for personalized advertising and marketing.

 

Conclusion

Marketers and advertisers will need to think about how they can focus on people based personalization in a world where the advertising cookie no longer exists. First-party data or reliable first-party data providers will become a vital source of behavioral data. Using alternative behavioral information, such as location, is a great way to deliver retargeting and personalization at scale.

Mobile ad IDs are currently universal and tracking identity across the moble infrastructure is much simple than the web. The role of advertising cookies is changing and quickly. People-based advertising and first-party data could well be the solution that the industry is looking for.

Categories
Business

What Should You Look for When Choosing a Proxy Provider?

A simple search using the terms ‘proxy server provider’ or ‘proxy service providers’ yields listicles upon listicles wherein the authors claim to have come up with the top best proxy providers. While some of the results paint a true and accurate picture, it is important to arm yourself with information on what to look for when choosing a proxy provider. This information will help you sieve through the noise and actually come to the right conclusion. In this article, we focus on providing this information. Firstly, though, we shall explore what a proxy is.

What is a Proxy?

A proxy is an intermediary that can take the form of a software-based application or hardware (computer or mobile device). This ‘middleman’ routes outgoing HTTP and HTTPS requests through itself before quickly performing a number of important processes. First, the proxy hides the requests’ real/original IP address and assigns a new online identifier. Next, it sends the ‘modified’ requests to the target webserver. Once the web server responds, it is the proxy that first receives the responses before directing them to the browser.

Of course, all the proxy providers you will likely encounter will rate their products highly. In addition, they will often claim that their proxies are designed to be reliable and can perform the functions outlined in the definition above. In some cases, however, the claims could not be further from the truth, and that is why you need to take a few factors into account when shopping for a proxy.

Factors to Consider when Choosing a Proxy Provider

Here are the essential considerations you should make before selecting a proxy provider:

  1. IP network pool
  2. Customer support
  3. Ethics
  4. Price and Offer
  5. Features
  6. Reputation
  7. IP Network Pool

The size of the IP network pool matters a lot. The pool describes the number of IP addresses the provider can assign its customers. Usually, a good proxy provider has a large number of IP addresses from a majority of the countries in the world.

A vast network enables you, as the customer/user, to utilize proxy rotators, particularly when web scraping or managing multiple social media accounts. This prevents IP blocking. Still, a large network provides a buffer even if an IP address gets blocked. 

At the same time, an extensive network encompassing different countries allows you to bypass geo-restrictions, i.e., access content that can only be viewed by residents of a given location. For instance, a provider that promises to provide a reliable Iran proxy must have tens if not hundreds of Iran-based IP addresses in its network pool. Find more info here on Iran proxies and other similar location-based solutions.

  1. Customer Support

A good proxy service provider provides 24/7 customer support. This is an important consideration since proxies sometimes require regular maintenance. Similarly, they can break down or become unresponsive if you do not configure them correctly. And given that not all users are tech savvy, having access to customer support as and when they need it is crucial as they can get assistance immediately. 

  1. Ethics

A reliable and good proxy provider ethically sources their IP addresses. This is particularly essential if you need to use residential proxies or mobile proxies, which route traffic through real users’ devices. Residential proxies assign residential IP addresses, which belong to internet service providers (ISPs). These IPs are assigned to the ISPs’ customers to enable them to access the internet via the ISPs’ respective networks. 

Thus, a proxy provider must first seek authorization from an ISP’s customer in order to lease their unused bandwidth. By leasing the bandwidth, the proxy provider will have to route traffic through the user’s devices, and that requires consent as well as the installation of gateway software. An ethical provider follows the right procedures to lease the bandwidth.

  1. Price and Offers

Proxy providers do not set a uniform price for their services. In fact, some offer free services. However, free proxies are not reliable as they are mostly shared. In that regard, you should choose a proxy server that requires you to part with a fee. In addition, the proxy should be competitively priced, i.e., not too high to make it unaffordable nor too low to threaten reliability. Sometimes, you might encounter discounted offers, which you can consider if the proxy provider ticks all the other boxes.

  1. Features

Some proxy providers offer additional features, such as proxy management via a centralized dashboard. Others provide IP rotation capabilities as well as systems that filter requests and responses for added security. It is, therefore, important to check whether your preferred provider offers such features before making the final decision.

  1. Reputation

A good proxy provider is known for its reputation. And you can establish how decorated their reputation is by checking customer feedback and reviews.

Conclusion

Choosing the right proxy provider from a sea of options can be confusing. But you can and will make the right, informed decision by considering factors such as reputation, features, price and offers, ethics, IP network pool, and 24/7 customer support.

Categories
Business

6 Best Tips to Help You Schedule Employees and Save Time

Optimally scheduling employees is something that every business and HR manager needs to know. The best employee scheduling tips don’t come from a magic book or a secret formula. While many people think that scheduling is about money, it’s actually about meeting people’s needs. While the exact needs of employees may differ, employee scheduling will always be about meeting those needs. When you think about it, scheduling employees is not just about filling time slots. Meeting the needs of employees is the best employee scheduling method. But it’s not always easy to get those needs met.

Considerations for employee scheduling 

Scheduling employees can be a difficult task for managers. It is also very time-consuming and can often cause frustration for employees, especially if they are scheduled for odd or long shifts. When you schedule employees for their shifts, you need to consider the number of hours the employee can work, their availability, and the amount of work the employee can handle. You also need to consider the budget for the workers and the amount of overtime they can work. You can run into trouble with the labor department if you are not careful when scheduling your employees. This is why you need to use scheduling software to make the job easier.

Evaluate business and workforce needs

It is important to know exactly your business needs and how many employees you need to fulfill that needs to ensure that your business runs smoothly. If you have a number of employees, it is important to make sure that you schedule them efficiently so that they are not overworked yet they are not wasting their time. It is important to start scheduling employees as soon as you hire them. An employee’s job should be based on the job description the employee fills out when they are hired.

Know your employees and their needs

Finding the right employees is never an easy task. It involves much more than just hiring the first person who walks in the door. You want your employees to be happy, productive and loyal. You want employees who will work hard and give you their all. The first thing you should do here is to know your employees. Get to know their needs and preferences. If you know them well, you can better meet their needs and ensure they are happy and satisfied. You may also be able to find out which employees are more productive or more reliable.

Managers are busy people, but knowing their employees is an important part of their job. The better they know them, the better they can schedule them. For example, if you have an employee who’s a single parent, you might want to avoid scheduling them for late shifts. Or if you have an employee who drives a long distance to your store, you might not want to schedule them on the graveyard shift. The better you know your employees, the better you can schedule them.

Improve communication both ways

Reducing employee downtime, improving workforce utilization rates, and reducing the likelihood of employee burnout are all key goals of any effective employee scheduling strategy. One of the most effective ways to achieve these goals is to improve your communication with employees, both as a means to educate them on the schedule and to solicit input on their preferences.

Workplace communication is a two-way street. It’s not just about the employer telling the employee what to do and the employee doing it. Communication is a dynamic process, and it’s all about back-and-forth interaction. Communication is also a vital part of any workplace relationship. The more employees can communicate with each other and their employer, the better the relationship will be, and the work getting done on time and with accuracy.

Set scheduling policy and expectations 

The first thing you need to do is to set your scheduling policy and expectations. Let employees know what is expected of them, such as punctuality, time management, communication, and flexibility. It is also important to let employees know what they can expect from you, such as a team-based culture, clear communication, and the support they need to be successful.

Utilize an employee scheduling app

Utilizing an employee scheduling app can help eliminate the hassle and stress of employee scheduling. We are all busy, whether it’s at work, at home, or running errands. We always seem to be in a rush to get to our next destination and then in a rush to get back to what we were doing. With so many things to do and places to be, we don’t have time to worry about employee scheduling. Employees also don’t want to worry about scheduling. Employees want to focus on the job at hand, not on figuring out when they will be working. With an employee scheduling app, employees can focus on the job at hand, and the app can take care of employee scheduling.

Identify scheduling abuse and create solutions

It’s a scary time for small business owners. With unemployment hovering at 6.7% and the landscape of labor laws changing, the burden is on business owners to ensure they comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). One area that many business owners need to be aware of is scheduling abuse, which can lead to overtime pay violations. For example, did you know that if you require an employee to work more than 40 hours in a workweek, you are required to pay the employee time and a half?

Many of the scheduling problems that are faced by businesses are due to abuse of the scheduling. For example, when employees book off for vacation or sick days that they don’t actually need and then go on vacation or take a day off work. Find out what your employees are doing and create a solution for it.

Final thoughts

Everyone wants their staff to be as productive as possible, but managers don’t always have the tools they need to schedule employees effectively. Through the use of employee scheduling software, companies can customize employee schedules to maximize productivity and reduce costs. Employee scheduling software should offer flexible tools, features that can be easily customized to fit specific needs, and the ability to incorporate team collaboration and communication. 

Categories
Business

8 Reasons Why Businesses Should Use a POS System for eCommerce

With an effective point of sale (POS) system for your business, you can greatly enhance the customer experience when they purchase items from your online store. While you may think that the POS system won’t make a difference and has no direct effect on business profit, it does make a drastic change in your sales.

With the help of software, transactions can be faster than before. Every brand can have its personalized POS system according to its features, payment methods, and functionalities.

 

What is a POS System?

An eCommerce POS is a digital solution that builds a streamlined connection between your online platform and the POS system. It also routes funds to your bank account after every sale.

Normally, the term POS system refers to the cash register. But the modern version of it is software-based and can be used on any smartphone device. As an online business, you can serve your customers and take payment regardless of where you are, without needing a cash register. 

How Does it Work?

Let’s start with the basics of how it works to help you understand better. It calculates the sum of the items that the customer has selected to buy. After this, the system processes the payment and modifies the inventory level to reflect sales. 

Here are the steps of how the POS system works:

The Customer Selects the Products 

When a customer searches for a product in an online store, the staff can look for the inventory availability of certain products.

When you click the “add to cart” option, the store staff uses a barcode scanner to add products to the shopping cart. Now the latest point-of-sale systems also enable customers to scan items using a smartphone.

Calculates Total Price 

Once the customer has successfully added the items to the shopping cart, the POS system calculates the total costs including tax and shipping fees. It also mentions each amount and asks for confirmation before proceeding with checkout. 

Payment Options 

To complete the purchase of their products, customers are asked about what payment options they wish to choose. Payment options include cash, gift card, debit card, credit card, Google Pay, loyalty points, etc. 

The Transaction is Finalized 

When the payment is finalized, the sale is confirmed. Then the receipt of the transaction is emailed to the customer and the products are delivered.

Reasons to Get a POS System

Improve Work Efficiency

With a reliable POS system, you can increase your work productivity and finish important tasks on time. You can save time on paperwork, stock updating, accounting, tracking orders, and much more with a single solution. 

This way, you can spend more time perfecting your products and creating quality content to improve the presence of your online website. 

Manage Inventory

You can effectively manage inventory and check the updates in real time. A POS system also tells you what to stock and when is the best time to do so. It will also notify you when a certain product is running out of inventory. 

Such software can also act as your business advisor by showing which products are most liked by the customers. You can also stock up on the products according to the season or day that is recommended by the software. 

Offer Great Payment Experience

If customers find the payment option on your site confusing or slow, they would most likely not return to shop again. It also gives an impression of doubt and they might not end up trusting your site with their money. 

With modern POS systems, you can offer most payment options like MasterCard, Bank Transfer, Visa card, Android pay, Apple pay, etc. With various payment methods, you can attract many types of customers.

Speed-Up Transactions

If we talk about how customers shop today, they are quite impatient. If one online shop does not respond properly and fast, the customers would most likely switch to another brand. With a reliable POS system, you can greatly decrease the transaction time and offer the convenience that online buyers are looking forward to. 

Besides speed, it also reduces the chances of human error and stress caused by work overload. You can attend to more customers in a small period which increases your sales dramatically. 

Receive Feedback for Improvement

With the help of a POS system, customers can rate and share their reviews on your products. Take your time to look at the reviews and make adjustments to your business when you receive a negative review. 

While positive reviews will boost your confidence and keep you going further along in promoting your brand. However, when other customers search for reviews, they can decide whether to purchase from your brand or not. 

Generate Accurate Sales Reports

You can generate accurate sales reports for your business with effective software. These reports usually provide the following details regarding sales:

  • Best selling items
  • Profit margins 
  • Stock Status 

Manually input data has more chances of error and mistakes. With accurate data, you can successfully process future transactions. 

Make Better Business Decisions

A POS system can help you make smart business decisions quickly. It does so by collecting data like customers, inventory, and sales that can serve as a useful resource for decision-making. 

For example, when you look at the dales record, you can identify the most popular product. This way, you can stock up on these products and increase your sales. 

Satisfy Your Customers

Satisfy your existing customers by offering incentives and customized offers. To do so, the POS system can track your loyal customers based on their history and offer them discounts. It can improve your brand image and help retain customers.

Attracting new customers should always be your goal, but it is equally important to focus on people who have previously spent money on your products.

Attracting new customers is an expensive strategy that cannot be implemented all the time. Do not underestimate the power of customer retention, as around 65% of business profits come from existing customers.

Categories
Mobile Payments

What is PSD2 – What You Need To Know About The New Payment Law

New technological changes have enabled the birth of a new economic model that is always growing. European PSD2 looks to generate a safer and more reliable environment in this new digital economy. The Directive affects the banking sector, online shops, and users.

 

What will the new payment law mean for consumers?

The PSD2 has been created to give the user more freedom to pay, more security, fewer costs, and less discrimination.

It prohibits stores from making “recharges” for paying with a particular payment method.

Besides, it limits the user’s responsibility to a maximum of €50 in case of fraud and allows the development of new business models like those based on account information.

PSD2 introduces a controversial obligation: reinforced authentication. In a payment process, the dual authentication system will require the use of at least two of the three methods proposed by the Directive: something the user has (like a smartphone or card), something the user knows (like a code or password) and something the user is, like a fingerprint or facial recognition. 

However, the digital economy is continuously accelerating, and some sectors are not yet ready. On the one hand, many banks are not able to process payments with biometric technology, which can lead to challenges such as false positives in banking transactions.. On the other, not all users have mobile phones with biometric identification technology by fingerprint or facial recognition. 

In any case, this idea might have a significant impact on the e-commerce industry because the payment process becomes more extended, and the conversion rates can decrease. It may also have a direct effect on the accounts payable process.

 

The Direct Carrier Billing and the PSD2 

Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) is a payment method available to any user with a mobile phone. It consists of charging the number of purchases on the user’s mobile bill (monthly or prepaid). 

A regulatory push backs DCB: PSD2 promotes these payment technologies by extending its reach to new sectors (transport, ticketing, or parking). DCB has high acceptance among young and digital segments. It is perfect for buying online products or services that require a ticket, such as sporting events, shows, paying for parking, or even making donations to NGOs.

Direct Carrier Billing technology fits perfectly with the new model of the mobile economy. It’s a safe, simple, and among everything, pure mobile payment system. Smartphones are undoubted, one of the main drivers of the increase in digital consumption.

The digital payments landscape is changing, and the challenge of the entire ecosystem is to keep the balance between simplicity and security. The impact of European regulation is early to see, but it will arrive. 

Categories
Marketing & Advertising

What Is Market Segmentation? Everything Marketers Need To Know

Whether it’s running effective ad campaigns or crafting the perfect message, market segmentation should be a fundamental part of every strategy.

You have spent the time building a B2C or B2B marketing strategy, and now it’s time to make sure that it resonates with the right audiences.

As audiences get bigger, it can be easy to overlook the value of clear and concise messaging. The bigger an audience, the more diverse the needs of that audience are, any digital marketing course will tell you that. That’s where market segmentation comes in, allowing you to focus your B2B marketing efforts on specific segments.

Segmentation provides an edge over the competition as you can prove that you understand who your audience is and what they need most.

 

What is market segmentation?

Market segmentation is the process of dividing audiences into smaller groups that share the same characteristics to optimize marketing and advertising and sales results.

This practice is a standard business practice that involves identifying key traits that group audiences and using these to build more specific audiences. Market segmentation also allows brands to create more personalized ads, marketing, and sale journeys.

At the heart of this is the idea that consumers are likely to respond to more personal and customized messaging and campaigns. As a marketer, it’s hard to appeal to your entire audience with a single message. Some might respond differently to a specific message. That’s why market segmentation is essential – it the method of segmenting audiences to provide a more tailored solution.

 

Types of market segmentation

There are many types of market segmentation. Generally, these methods can be defined into four main categories.

Geographic

Geographic market segmentation is the process of targeting consumers based on a defined geographical boundary. Consumer interests can vary dramatically between different regions, and often preferences can be similar across smaller geographic areas.

Sometimes this process of market segmentation can be a simple as weather associated with a geographical location. It wouldn’t be very productive to sell warm clothes to a region where temperatures are low year-round.

Broader regional segmentation includes looking at countries, cities, and postcodes to group audiences. Specific postcodes can determine household income and even interests.

Geography goes hand in hand with both language and culture. Understanding and segmenting your audiences based on location can help to convey the right message (think soccer in the US and football in the UK).

There are many ways of understanding location, from surveys and addresses through to more up to date and accurate solutions such as location data providers.

 

Demographic

Demographic segmentation is a powerful way of creating specific audience segments that share similar preferences and requirements.

This form of segmentation is a standard method as many targeting and adtech solution provides some way of doing this when building audiences. It’s essential to do the same to your audiences or customer base to segment effectively.

Traditional demographic breakdowns include age, gender, marital status, occupation, education, income, race, nationality, and religion.

Demographic market segmentation is vital to finding product-market fit, but it’s also a powerful way to determine which channel is the best fit. Optimizing channel delivery relies heavily on reaching the right person in the right medium. Demographics are a great way to do this.

Media consumption changes significantly between demographics, so it’s essential to use this form of segmentation effectively to engage your audience the right way.

 

Behavioral segmentation

Segmenting audiences based on behavior is a popular solution in today’s digital world. Improvements in technology have enabled more touchpoints with greater detail into how audiences behave.

Behavioral analysis provides more options for market segmentation based on how audiences interact with your business. There are many behavioral-based traits to segment audiences, including:

  • Web activity – how consumers behavior on your website is valuable behavioral data. Segmenting audiences based on time spent, which pages they visit, and other measurable traffic insights is a powerful way to divide larger audiences into potentially effective smaller segments.
  • Usage with your current product or services. These includes app usage, platform usage, or perhaps just the fact that the person has purchased the last three versions of your physical product. These factors are a great indication of loyalty and where consumers sit in the funnel.
  • Offline behavior – movement data can help you to understand behavior in the real world. This an effective way of building segments that are grouped based on real-world movement. Segments such as gym-goers or coffee drinkers are powerful as they combine behavioral and geographical elements.

 

Psychographic

This method of market segmentation is focused more on the intrinsic traits of audiences. It’s similar in a way to demographic segmentation, but it’s more concerned with the emotional and other underlying factors that audiences believe in.

These kinds of insights can be valuable in understanding the motivations, needs, and exact preferences of audiences to create highly personalized segments.

Psychographic traits include personality, values, motivations, opinions, and lifestyle choices.

There are many ways of collecting this kind of information, including surveys or in some sort of feedback process. But offline and online behavior can also be a good indicator of psychographic traits.

 

Why market segmentation

So now you are aware of the four main methods of market segmentation. It’s time to understand why it’s worth doing. Many marketers identify improved audience segmentation as the most critical priority. Market segmentation offers many benefits to publishers, marketers, apps, and other businesses.

Improves the effectiveness of advertising campaigns

Market segmentation can help to improve marketing activity and advertising campaigns by reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. Segmenting your audiences allows you to provide more personal and engaging advertising, rather than a one size fits all approach.

Targeting a specific audience allows you to tailor the message and timing so that the audience is more likely to respond and engage with your campaigns. Targeting your entire audience with a single campaign is hugely wasteful. A considerable amount of the audience will not be relevant to the campaign, and thus you will be wasting revenue.

Essentially segmentation means that you can remove the irrelevant consumers from this audience, ensuring that you optimize ad budgets, increase ROI and improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Even if your product or service sits across a broad audience of potential customers, it’s still essential to segment audiences. Some messages will sit better with different segments and work better across different channels, even if the product is the same.

 

Informs new products and product development

Segmentation is also a useful tool to drive product innovation and can help to hone product strategy. These insights means that product teams can create products that better fit the needs of their customers.

Market segmentation can also identify a need for more specific products that sit in smaller groups within your customer base. Segmenting products is powerful because it helps to sell more and will make customers happier.

 

Helps to identify new audiences and segments

This process is useful when looking at maximizing the effect of your marketing strategy, but it can also be valuable when looking to grow and scale.

Segmenting your current audience can identify new traits that you didn’t know existed. Seeing this can open up new opportunities related to the newly identified segment. These opportunities can lead to new, engaging marketing campaigns or can even lead to the inception of new products and services that are in need but not currently offered.

 

Improves business functions and can help to make big decisions

Market segmentation can help a business to understand precisely what their customers want and focus their efforts on these to create a highly specific and valuable product or service. This specification could significantly improve brand perception, lead to more sales, and increase repeat business and engagement.

These insights can lead to better decisions across the business. From product-market fit to product delivery and communication, market segmentation can help to identify the best ways to go about these important issues.

Audience segmentation can also help with decisions such as pricing and can even help inform dynamic pricing strategies.

 

Common mistakes

There are some common pitfalls that you should look out for when creating your market segmentation strategy.

Too small segments

The most common problem is that businesses go a little over the top with segmentation. Set too many parameters with too much detail, and then end up with a tiny audience.

This mistake means that you will eliminate audiences that don’t fit into your filter but still carry purchase potential. As well as this, you will lose the opportunity to gain quantifiable metrics and insights into specific audience segments.

Make sure you think carefully about how to segment your audience. One or two filters work best, depending on the size of your total audience and total addressable market, of course. The sweet point between segmentation and scale is extremely valuable if you can find it, so be sure to experiment extensively!

 

Not up to date

Predominantly in the world of traits of digital marketing and advertising, a common mistake is that marketers identify key audience segments that work for their business. But they fail to update these as the needs and products change over time.

Always stay on top of your strategy and constant update and tinker with new methods of segmentation.

 

Targeting segments that don’t convert

Another common mistake is to identify segments that are both large enough and up to date. But these segments still need to carry conversion or purchase potential.

If the segmentation method creates a group that is not a good product fit and does not have the necessary buying power, then the ROI will not improve just because the audience is segmented.

 

 

What is market segmentation?

Market segmentation is the process of dividing their audiences into smaller groups that share the same characteristics to optimize marketing and advertising and sales results.

Why is marketing segmentation important?

Marketing segmentation allows companies to reach consumers with precise needs in a personlized and relevant way.

What is the goal of market segmentation?

Market segmentation can improve the effectiveness of marketing efforts, drive conversions and increase ROI.