How important is it to send a product update notification?

Researches suggest that many eCommerce customers spare products in their shopping carts for further thought and don't buy immediately. These customers are in a circumstance of decision and for the most part, need few motivating forces continuing their purchases. However, they will surely rush with the choice- to buy or not to buy. You as a Magento store owner would be facing this for sure- you might know or not now, but the situation is still there. 

There are two situations when customers would not choose to continue the purchase- Either the customers find the price out-of-budget or the product itself is out of stock. In the later situation, you might choose to disable the out-of-sock product from the site, but the circumstance still remains the same- customers would still not be able to purchase. Thus, an addition to the loss of potential sales. 

Both the situations have one thing in common- you are losing a potential sale. 

To overcome such situation on a Magento store, the product update notification would be a great tool in aid. 

Let’s assume a situation when, using the Magento product update notification , you can: 

• Out of stock:  Allow the customers to subscribe for product update notification of the out of stock products.The subscription will enable an automatic cron-based notification system where the customers (subscribed) will receive a mail from your side when the product is back in stock. 

• Out-of-budget: The same subscription can be used to send the customers a notification whenever the product prices are changed on the store. It will help you to recover those customers who could not purchase the product because it was out-of-budget last time they checked.  

The Magento product update notification extension is one such extension which implements the above-mentioned functionalities just after a simple installation. 

Why is Magento product update notification an essential feature?

On every eCommerce site, customer engagement and customer experience are the two important considerations that every CRO expert counts on. A customer experience cannot be degraded more than this when a customer fails to purchase a product that is there on the site. Products being out-of-stock and out-of-budget are the two non-controllable factors that somewhat degrade the customers’ experiences.   

Having the product update notification feature is something that can be a life saver for the Magento based stores in this situation. 

Products being out-of-stock is purely a depended scenario. Even the largest eCommerce sites face this situation because of the limited supplies and inventory. For any reason, if a product (already listed on the site) is showing out-of-stock, you need to handle the situation wisely, because the product is just not available for a while. You need to handle it so that the customers can be converted back into a sale as soon as the product is available. 

A Magento product update notification utilizes the email subscription feature to capture the email address of the customer and use this email data to send automatic email notification as soon as the product is back-in-stock. In this way the, a sale that could have been probably lost can be hoped to get recovered in case the customer had not purchased it already from somewhere else.   

Similarly, customers generally look around the sites to find out if their desired product is available at a budget price. Such customers have sure chances for conversion if the product fits into their budget. Unfortunately, if a product ends up being out of their reach due to unexpected price, a Magento store can be configured to ask the customer for subscribing to a price change alert using this extension. 

The Magento product update notification feature will make sure that your marketing campaigns would have some more likely to get converted data.     

It's more important to follow up the customers lost due to out-of-stock or out-of-budget scenario. Since these customers generally have a mindset of finally purchasing a product, you don't have to follow them for convincing, you have to notify them for what they would like to know. Use of proper email contents and suitable message on the product pages are some of the important things that you should focus on after installing the Magento product update notification extension. So, install the extension, configure it, modify the email templates, customize the product page texts and you are ready to go.

Related Post:

• Magento Product Update Notification – User Manual

Features that make a true one page checkout

You might have come across various one page checkouts as of now. Each of them having their own look and feel and providing different ways to complete a purchase. The Magento platform too provides a built-in one page checkout that comes with every installation. Question is, does this default checkout provide a true one-page checkout experience?   

If we take a look on this checkout interface, despite all the checkout steps being shown on a single page, it is not a true one-page checkout in various aspects:

• It’s not one-page: You cannot go to the further steps until you complete a preceding step. If you do not complete and submit the ‘checkout method’ , you cannot move to the ‘Billing Information’ and so on.  

• Shopping cart update: The ‘order review’ is a static page which just allows the customer to see the order summary. The customer cannot remove or update a product quantity in the cart from the same page. To edit the cart, it takes you to a new page, breaking the checkout process in the middle.  

• No Social login: There is no option for the customer to use a social login so that he/she can be spared from manually registering a user account. It’s not a necessary requirement for a true one page checkout, but having this option will provide some upper hand in various cases.   

• No information saving: If checkout process breaks in the middle, there is no way to recover the already filled forms. You have to start the whole process again.

 Now, if we compare the checkout page of a custom one-page checkout extension we would be able to understand these drawbacks in a clearer way. 

The checkout page shown below is an example to explain what a premium one-page checkout extension should necessarily offer.  

If we contrast the drawbacks that we see in default Magento checkout, we can see that the customized one page checkout eliminates all of them.  

• Everything on one page: Unlike the default checkout, the one page checkout handles all the checkout steps on a single page structure. You can switch between any of the steps whenever you want. 

• Ajax based shopping cart: The Ajax based shopping cart makes it very easy to update the cart during the checkout. The shopping cart here is dynamic and user can remove a product, or update a product quantity from the same page itself. The benefits of Ajax allow the users to do this without a need to refresh the whole checkout page.      

• Social login: The default checkout lagged this functionality. However, it can be considered as an additional feature in a customized one page checkout that allows a user to login to the customer account without manually creating it. It uses the Google and Facebook Social login option.   

The reason behind this small comparison is to shed a light on how you can make your checkout, even more engaging by implementing some user-friendly tweaks. The default Magento checkout page is a well organized one, but with some tweaks as in a premium one-page checkout extension it can be made even more engaging and conversion friendly.  

Good news is you do not have to knock your head with the codes to make your checkout engaging. Experts have already done this in the various customized checkout extensions. The Knowband-Magento one page checkout extension is one such implementation that you can install on your Magento site to get an already optimized one page checkout for Magento.

Related Blogs:

• Why do you need a One page Magento Checkout Extension?
• One-page checkouts: A customer’s viewpoint
• Why you need a one-page checkout extension for Magento?

Why do you need a Magento Auto Subscribe extension?

Email are being used for a very long time for marketing purposes. Email communication with the customers is the oldest mode that has been used in eCommerce marketing and is still popular till date. It is because of the ROI that we get from email marketing that keeps encouraging its use even after more advanced marketing tools have been introduced today to eCommerce world.   

So, emails are important and we need to keep a hold of them for better growth in eCommerce market. However, to use emails for marketing and other purposes, we need the email ids of our customers. So, to get the email ids?  

Newsletter subscription is the most basic and effective tool that has been used for years to build an email list. Even now, we mostly depend on more advanced versions of the Newsletter subscription forms to get the email ids. However, customers have now become very smart and they know that if they give their email ids, they are going to receive tons of marketing emails in their inbox. So, they prefer not to share their email ids at all.  

It is the time when you need a Magento Auto Subscribe extension on your Magento store to effectively build an email list by encouraging customers to provide their email ids using some different and non-traditional ways.  

• The traditional way: 

A Magento Auto Subscribe extension possess certain features to customize the newsletter subscription forms from the back-office itself. Using these customizations, you can modify the subscription forms and pop-ups to put something that your customers would like to have in return of their email ids.   

• The non-traditional way: 

You can set the Magento Auto Subscribe extension to automatically capture the email ids of the customers from account registration form and checkout form. These are the places where customers easily give their email ids. So, you can use the Magento Auto Subscribe extension to automatically capture email ids from these forms.   

• Utilizing the captured email ids-  

 Capturing an email id not enough to build an email list. You should be effectively able to use those email ids to send marketing emails to the customers. Keeping those captured email ids on your Magento store will not help in marketing. For better and effective email marketing we often resort to the tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact. These tools provide specialized interfaces to launch a marketing campaign in a much better way.   

So, the next important task that your Magento Auto Subscribe extension performs is to sync the captured email ids to your MailChimp and Constant Contact account. You can easily specify the category of the list on your MailChimp where you want to sync the captured email ids.  

 

So, building an email list is not a tough task if you know what your customers will like to have from you in return to the email ids they give. Moreover, there are also the ways to capture email ids without actually asking for a Newsletter subscription. It is up to you how you are using a Magento Auto Subscribe extension for email list building.  

The examples in the screenshot above are from the Knowband-Magento Auto Subscribe extension. It consists of all the features discussed above and certainly a perfect tool in case you are looking for an efficient Magento Auto Subscribe extension for your store.

Related Blogs:

• Redefine your subscription based requests with the support of this Magento Auto Subscribe Extension
• Analyze these top 5 Magento Checkout Extensions for a seamless online checkout process for your Magento Site
• Magento Auto Subscribe – User Manual