According to Value Walk, a news and opinion website that covers financial and investing news, “Five years ago, just 13 percent of American households had some sort of smart technology integrated into their homes. In 2019, it’s anticipated that at least 38 percent of American households will have entered the market.”
Energy and cost savings are the two largest drivers in the global smart housing market, but there are a number of other important factors contributing to its growth—including the increasingly aging population and the marked improvements in comfort and convenience.
Let’s explore the auxiliary perks of the smart home and discover how you can help your customers take advantage of the smart home technology available today.
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Smart homes still face the problems of subpar intelligence hampering functionality. But as intelligence systems mature, including more sophisticated algorithms, activity recognition methods and prediction accuracy, smart homes will transform and become more desirable. The gold standard: a multi-agent, interoperable system with distributed intelligence by integrated smart appliances across platforms. In simpler terms, it means all appliances and applications working together seamlessly, despite running on different platforms. To get there, here are five trends that herald the smart home 2.0.
The idea of a smart home is attractive for a number of reasons, including convenience, safety and a sleek home aesthetic. From an industry standpoint, one of the most compelling advantages is that it increases energy efficiency by reducing unnecessary usage. In fact, according a 2018 ACEEE report, Energy Impacts of Smart Home Technologies, “U.S. homes can lower their energy use by up to one-sixth simply by incorporating smart technologies.” And with each new iteration, the technology becomes more viable, affordable and user-friendly.
Here are seven of the most promising areas of smart home living – and the potential cost savings from adopting each one.
Although sales of smart home devices are ramping up, the daunting prospect of compatible platform integration, or interoperability, is still scaring off prospective consumers.
We’ve all been there before. We’ve found ourselves browsing the internet and come across a great-looking online store we simply couldn’t resist. We clicked around, browsed products, read descriptions and reviews, confidently added items to our cart and checked out. We smiled in satisfaction upon receiving an instant confirmation that our new purchase was being prepped for shipment right to our door. Throughout this whole process, we never stopped to take note of the intuitive and intelligent design that made our shopping experience so easy and delightful.
In urban and suburban areas, utility customers have multiple ways they can conserve power and save on their energy bills. They have a median energy burden of 3.3%. But this is not the case in rural areas. Americans in rural, low-income areas spend a higher percentage of their incomes on their energy bills, with a median energy burden of 4.4%, a number nearly three times higher than their urban counterparts.
To turn more website visitors into customers, it’s best to follow industry-recognized best practices for your online store product pages. Mastering these should increase your conversion rates.
“If you build it, they will come,” may be true for baseball—but not for your online store. In the competitive and constantly changing world of e-commerce, overlooking new technologies and trends means your store will likely get more strike-outs than hits with customers.
E-commerce specialist BigCommerce talked with 31 e-commerce experts about what they’re focusing on in 2018. In some of these areas, utilities are already ahead of the game because they know who their customers are and how to reach them. But in other aspects, utilities could learn from online retailers in other fields.
Marketing plays a crucial role in the success of your online store. Without it, sales dwindle and growth stagnates. It doesn’t take long for online store owners to realize that they need to keep marketing if they want to keep their sales up.
The good news is, there are a ton of ways to market your online store. The bad news? Most of them are time-consuming. From being active on social media to running promotions—it can feel like a never-ending job. All it takes is a small lull in your marketing for sales to drop.
In the first part of this series, we discussed strategies for overall market research. In this post, we'll dive into how to better understand your customers, so you can market to them more effectively.
Online stores commonly make this mistake when marketing their energy and water efficient products: They assume that one marketing message, which they spent all this time and money developing, applies to their entire target market.
