Many businesses are now looking to use mobile apps to encourage customer interaction and loyalty. Fortunately, this seems to fit with the preferences of mobile users; recent research from Comscore showed the popularity of apps compared with mobile sites: 82% of mobile media time is spent with an app. So how do you get users to start using an app rather than a mobile version of the website?
Popular app discovery methods
A good place to start your plans for app promotion is to look at how apps are commonly discovered by mobile users. For popular apps from well known brands like those for Facebook, Twitter, eBay and Amazon, gaining adoption from an existing user base is relatively straightforward it seems. But what about everyone else, how do you encourage adoption of your app from existing and new customers?
This research on…
...from notepad sketch to more than 140 million active users...
If you're based in the UK, you've likely heard the announcement this week from Twitter about UK usage of Twitter from the traditional media. As a big fan of Twitter I wanted to look beyond the "10 million users" headline to see about how this compares to use in other countries.
Twitter has certainly come a long way since founder Jack Dorsey sketched out this wireframe in 2006!
Notice how the status updates are "in bed" and "going to park" - content sharing wasn't on the wire at this point!
Appropriately, the current coverage stems from a single tweet sent out from the official @TwitterUK sent this tweet out on Tuesday:
Snapshot of Twitter in the UK: 10m active users, 80% of which are also active on mobile. And an office that’s…
Aimed at capturing a greater share of higher converting ‘long tail' traffic
Ecommerce websites can inadvertently fall short of SEO best practice because, for example, the site may be accidentally riddled with crawler and duplicate content issues. Such issues are inherently linked to product optimisation, an oft-neglected aspect of SEO which is the focus of my post.
It’s surprising how often ecommerce sites neglect this dimension of SEO.
People tend to be distracted by the high volume head and middle keyword terms and forget to pay attention to the crucial keywords pertaining to the long tail.
Many sites succeed in capturing a fair amount of long tail traffic without paying particular attention to it. Nevertheless, it’s still important to capture as much of long tail traffic as possible because long tail traffic converts better than head term traffic.
Tip 1 - Duplicate…
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15 May 2012
Social media marketing gives new options for segmentation
Since the 1950s, when the practice of market segmentation began, it has been the cornerstone of any marketing strategy.
Accurately define your market segments and then the follow on activities of targeting and positioning are much more effective.
With the advent of social media marketing, many are asking whether social networks, and their ability to engage with individuals interactively and in real-time, made the practice of categorising people into groups redundant?
The answer has to be a resounding “No!”, but the way brands categorise consumers is changing.
Towards ‘socialgraphics’
Consumers are considerably more socially mobile and transient than when demographic segmentation was first adopted by marketers. Also, as a result of the web and social media, consumers are much more informed and influenced, think 'Tripadvisor'. They have access to greater choice and their smartphones are…
A new look and less features for GWT
Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended link: Google Webmaster Blog announcing the new design
In the past 3-4 weeks Google have made various changes to the Google Webmaster Tool platform, including, more recently, updates to the design.
The new design implementation is focused on bringing the platform into line with other recent design updates for the search giant. During the update Google has also updated the navigation grouping of features:
We distinguished the following groups: Configuration, Health, Traffic and Optimization. Each group represents a related set of functionality:
Configuration: Things you configure and generally don’t change very often.
Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK.
Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who’s linking to you; where you can explore…
Is customer experience management the new CRM?
This year, many CRM vendors and commentators are hailing the age of customer experience management, raising the question of whether we are witnessing a sea change in CRM?
When SAP held its Influencer Summit in February, the vendor revealed it would be repositioning the focus of its CRM proposition from ‘relationship’ to ‘experience’.This wasn’t altogether a huge surprise. Last year, SAP executives Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer, and Volker Hildebrand, published a book reflecting this flavour, entitled The Customer Experience Edge. Indeed, Vinay Iyer told MyCustomer.com that customer experience was “beyond” CRM in a recent video interview by BPT Partners.
At Oracle’s Steve Fearon, vice president, applications sales development, alliances & CRM On Demand EMEA recently said:
"Customer relationship management is the corner stone of a customer-centric approach, but as the brand needs to be able to address the customer…
Are you taking apps seriously in your marketing?
The big mobile manufacturer and software brands, like Apple, Google and Samsung, are adding more and more functionality to mobile phones. From games, to shopping, travel, social and even health. We also know that the by 2014 we're expecting more surf time to be on a mobile device (iPads included) than via desktops PC's.
comScore have pulled together analysis of mobile usage including a list of the top apps and there are some surprising observations. It is interesting that iPhone and Android users differ more than you might expect. The most important point is that apps are what take up most of the consumer's mobile minutes. 82% of our media time is spent with these mini-applications and it's only growing.
Note Android with the most unique visitors, important to remember when planning…
Kath Pay interviews Dela Quist about why he thinks "more is more"
Hands up those who have always been told that “less is more” when it comes to sending emails? Well I had the opportunity to interview the often-controversial Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx to ask his thoughts on the “how much is too much?” question that vexes email marketing, or, as he sees it, “how little is too little”?
Of course, this advice comes with a disclaimer – commonsense needs to be used and as Dela puts it ‘Muppets’ shouldn’t be following this advice dogmatically without the input of logic and commonsense. But none of us are Muppets are we?
It’s a matter of applying Dela’s advice to your database, watching the results and determining the correct frequency based on the response of your database – Have conversions increased? Has it helped you to meet your KPI’s?…
How one creative agency got creative with its offline advertising
If you’ve ever travelled on the London Underground you’ll be well aware of the fact that virtually all space is for sale.
Over a billion passenger journeys are made every year which, coupled with an average platform wait of three minutes, gives brands an amazing opportunity to engage with a large number of people during their commute.
In fact, according to data from CBS Outdoor, 87% of consumers actually welcome tube advertising as it provides them with a distraction on their journey.
A 'London' voice and engagement measurement
With so many brands competing for space, there is a need to develop a tone of voice that speaks specifically to London commuters. Holiday or dating agency adverts are likely to focus on the convenience of London transport for selling their product.
And how do you measure…
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09 May 2012
What is the key to relevance in email marketing?
The answer to this question is simple… relevance is driven by knowledge of what each customer is interested in.
While this may seem a prosaic statement, it is true that email marketing is all about the pursuit of relevance.
Relevant emails are read and make money. Irrelevant emails end up in ‘junk’ or, worse still, lead to unsubscribes and loss of lifetime value.
The art of good email is knowing what someone is interested in and then applying this knowledge to all future email communications.
The search for relevance is as old as marketing itself
Back the late 1930s, radio programmes called ‘dramatic serials’ were soon renamed ‘soap operas’ because their main sponsors were washing powder advertisers. The soap advertisers, including such illustrious brands as P&G and Unilever, realised the ‘dramatic serials’ provided them with the…
