Retention techniques to support your online marketing strategy
For any digital marketing strategy or integrated digital communications plan, having a set of objectives and clear strategy behind your plan is essential for the success of what you are looking to achieve.
This blog post focuses on creating an actionable plan around retention, which by definition is maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering.
Retention should be at the heart of your digital strategy in maintaining and building communication with your existing customer base.
Know your audience?
Before embarking on your retention strategy, understanding your audience is a key requirement to ensure the chosen retention tactics are in line with your existing customer base - so begin to build up a profile of the type of customer/s that interact with your brand.
Retention is about engaging with your existing customer base, so you should already have a wealth of…
Reaching global customers through your Wordpress blog or company site
Wordpress is a popular blogging and content management tool now used by many businesses for their blog or main site. It's now used by over 60 million websites worldwide according to Forbes, including up to 15% of Alexa’s 'Top 1 million sites'.
Builtwith.com, a competitor analysis and business intelligence tool providing technology adoption and usage analytics for the internet, has reported that Wordpress usage has continued to increase in the past year.
Further analysis of the top 100,000 Wordpress sites by builtwith.com shows that while the platform is being used for almost every type of internet activity, Wordpress is an extremely popular tool for business – accounting for around 17% of distribution.
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No time to Tweet is an excuse, but make sure you have a plan
Do you suffer from 'tweeters block'? Do you find yourself trawling through dozens of websites trying to find something relevant to say to your audience? If the answer to either question is 'yes', it’s time you put together a content plan!
Even if content is not a problem, the quality of your feed and consistency of your message will be so much better if you plan ahead.
Your Twitter feed may look like a series of updates, but to your audience it’s telling a story about you and your business. They can read your tips, view your articles and see what you’re up to. They can see who you’re talking to and eavesdrop on your discussions.
If a potential client sees your Twitter feed, they need to have a…
The One Infographic About the Digital Revolution You Need to Understand
I really like this infographic, it reveals why marketing is so much more complicated than only 5 years ago, in one fantastic visual.
The implications for managing marketing are well worth checking out - it has a commentary by David Edelman of McKinsey on his LinkedIn blog.
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What makes a good ecommerce landing page?
So, what does make an effective landing page for an Ecommerce site? Well, I’m going to give a typical consultant’s answer – "it depends"; on the campaign and your goal for the landing page. That’s not being evasive, it’s the truth; not all landing pages are born equal. For example, some marketers invest in prize draws and competitions as marketing tactics to drive data capture for their eCRM programs, so the landing page needs to focus on making it quick and easy to enter. Typically ecommerce landing pages are used for tactical marketing campaigns (e.g. from AdWords, Display Re-marketing or Email marketing) and are designed to drive sales making use of existing site page templates.
A good ecommerce landing page should satisfy the following criteria:
The creative design is consistent with the marketing campaign that generated the visit.
The copy and CTA are consistent with the marketing…
In March I covered how one can start to evaluate and forecast the potential benefits of SEO by considering the possible traffic volume that individual keywords and phrases can drive to your website based on CTR in the SERPs.
Whilst it’s important to build the case for using SEO and to develop keyword lists as a result, it’s also important to understand different customer behaviours and to group them as part of your keyword strategy. This helps to set targets, audit performance and provide ideas for content development. Content may be king but it’s essential that the right content is created for the right audiences.
By establishing the type of search behaviour exhibited by consumers, you can start to consider not just the different types of content you might need to produce but also where this content will fit within your site, the necessary…
Match personas, content changes and stages of the buying cycle to help you nurture your leads
In my last post, Personalisation 101- How to increase customer engagement and conversion rates, I introduced the main types of personalisation available to make your site more customer-focused. In this post I'll expand on this by recommending approaches to segmenting your audience and making sure that your website’s personalisation directly meets your overall business objectives. I will show how to:
Use business objectives to define measurable actions
Identify the weaknesses in your website
Create personas for your core audience types
Use a Digital Relevancy Map to plot specific actions to personas and buying stages
Create a wireframe to translate this knowledge onto your webpages
Test and measure personalisation.
Making actions meet your business objectives
The first step is to lay the foundations for personalisation. To make a business case for personalisation you need a clear map of what personalisation…
Could Google Hangouts on Air be the solution for your video platform?
Videos are some of the trickiest marketing assets for companies to produce. They require a lot of preparation and are expensive to produce and market. Google Hangouts on Air offer a way to broadcast your videos to the world, for free. Could it be an cost-effective tool to improve your marketing strategies by creating videos quickly and broadcasting them widely?
What are Google Hangouts on Air?
Google created Hangouts as a web-based tool to allow Google plus subscribers to communicate via video. Originally, the tool set up a virtual room where up to ten people could hang-out together to converse or carry out more complexes tasks, like group meetings.
Last year, Google developed a feature that allows you to share your hangouts on your YouTube channels, and more recently, that allows you to broadcast your hangouts live to…
Learning from an example of how one startup failed
Ecomom was a small startup internet retail company selling earth friendly mom and maternity products including food, toys, apparel, and other baby related items. With headquarters in Las Vegas and San Francisco and a third-party fulfillment in Los Angeles, any volume could be shipped within 24 hours. Founded in 2007, by 2011 it had turnover of just over $1 million, but a further round of investment of $12 million required further growth, but at what cost?
Business Insider describes the story of the eventual failure of the company in 2013 With hindsight it's difficult to understand investment in the company, but perhaps this was buoyed by the success story of Tony Hsieh building Las Vegas-based Zappos into an online shoe and retail business that Amazon acquired for $1.2 billion. Of course, investors, require growth and Ecomum did achieve revenues of nearly $4 million in…
Why you need to jump on the Facebook Exchange Bandwagon right now
In a previous post, Remarketing using Facebook’s Ad Exchange, we gave a quick briefing on Facebook Exchange. I looked at the basics of FBX, factors in choosing a partner and how to target your audience.
In this follow-up, I’ll provide you with a more in-depth and advanced look at retargeting with Facebook Exchange, some early performance numbers and why you need to take advantage of FBX right now.
Conversion Numbers, Off to a strong start
If you haven’t been paying attention to Facebook lately, it’s time for a wake-up call. The early conversion numbers on Facebook’s new ad exchange, FBX, are going to cause some jaws to drop in Internet marketing land.
FBX is bought on a dynamic CPM basis, and if you want to…
