Customer experience management (CXM) for multichannel commerce - moving from insights to action in 4 steps

In my previous post on practical improvements to CXM, the advice was around creating a path in your organisation that includes customer journeys. This article explains how you can plan a better customer experience for multichannel commerce. By implementing certain steps in your organisation you can overcome the difficulty of creating and implementing actionable insights based on qualitative data. Planning is the process of thinking and organising a group of activities towards desired goals. There is not a convenient one-size fits all solution for structuring your customer experience. It is important however to build a structure that gives you the control and flexibility you need to grow. Most organisations are now looking at the opportunity given by multichannel commerce by including their customers into the brand’s journey. But to improve the customer experience all you need…

How Betfair used Persuasion Principles to increase conversions by 7%

The limited-choice days of consumers are long gone. Just a few clicks and you can have retailers lined up at your doorstep to deliver the product or offer the service you want. Such intense competition is probably the reason phrases like, 'persuasion tactics' are reiterated by people all around. But those who know how to put these theoretical 'tactics' into practice the right way are the real winners of the game. Our current case study also talks about one such winner. Betfair claims to be the world’s leading online betting exchange platform. Their business model is to allow bettors to set odds among themselves, which eliminates the need to have a traditional bookie. The site also offers a range of sports betting products, like poker and casino games, and much more. Business need? Attract traffic through various paid channels, like…

Ideas for improving your blogger outreach

In a world where consumers are bombarded by advertising, how can you cut through the noise to deliver your brand message in a meaningful manner? Word of mouth recommendations are nothing new, but with the evolution of social media, recommendations can now reach hundreds if not thousands or millions of people. Then of course, there’s the new breed of influencer - the blogger. With established communities, bloggers command authority and trust from their readers having spent years honing their writing skill and content, studying their analytics and engaging with their readers. They know their audience better than anyone else and can talk about your brand in a way that they know their readers will relate to. A positive opinion about a brand or product by a blogger can be transferred to their audience, resulting in referral traffic and sales. So, we’ve established that there’s significant value in engaging…

A tutorial to getting ready to take advantage of this new feature

Google is readying to add company logos in their search results and they appear to be making it relatively painless to implement.  It is easy to test to see if your site is correctly set up to allow Google to use the company logo. This short tutorial shows you how to test if a business ready and set it up if it isn't. Although this feature hasn't been released yet, you may have noticed that Google is displaying a logo, link to the Google+ page and recent updates using the preview box on the right for a brand search. So it's also worthwhile checking whether you have this covered.

HOW to get your logo into SERPS:

1: Create a company GOOGLE+ account

Many businesses to date have avoided or overlooked setting up a…

Or is SEO just getting some context? 5 ideas for resetting your SEO agenda

I’m not a fan of lightly making big, idle statements and this one has been made before. I say ‘SEO is dead’ now because the industry and culture of SEO, is fast transitioning. SEO Moz, or as they’re now called ‘Moz’, dropping the SEO element of the brand name. Of course SEO is not dead, it's simply now viewed in context, for what it is - one important practice in digital marketing.

When the SEO Juggernaut, ‘SEO Moz’, goes to the lengths of not only re-branding but changing their URL (that can be cataclysmically bad news for an SEO minded out-fit judging by the impact on Econsultancy when they dropped their hyphen), it illustrates just how important it is for them to move away from the pure ‘SEO’ label, a label that seems so dated now. Note…

Ideas on integrating social media into a marketing campaign

While a campaign focused on social media can add a new dimension to a campaign, large "big bang" investments in social media within a campaign may not always be possible. But if you build in social media from the outset there will always be opportunities to integrate smaller elements of social media marketing into the framework of an existing marketing campaign that has already been approved and underway. ‘Socialising’ a marketing campaign can be an effective way of reaching new audiences and generating conversation around your brand on the back of larger-scale paid media activity.

Why use social media?

One of the first questions to ask at the outset is why social media marketing would be relevant or necessary for the campaign and how it could add value. What could social media achieve that other aspects of the campaign (advertising, PR, experiential) couldn't? Some of the…

Review your Email creative against 60 leading brands

Value: [rating=4] Recommended link: DotMailer Email Marketing Intelligence Report.

Webcast

21 tactics to make your email templates more effective based on examples from the report were also featured in this webcast with Skip Fidura of dotMailer which we hosted. 21 Smart Email marketing Tactics from Smart Insights Free webcast 21 Smart Email Tactics You Can Use Today

Our commentary on the Email Marketing Intelligence Report

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Examples and tips showing how to get the best out of YouTube

While YouTube is certainly an ideal place to while away the hours before quitting time at work, many people also view it as the place to head when they want to learn about...pretty much anything. Of course, all of this translates into a lot of people spending a lot of time viewing and posting content on YouTube every hour of every single day of the week. With all of these people looking to YouTube to guide them in everything from their choice of car to the finer points of craft beer making, unless your brand includes YouTube as part of its strategy, you are likely missing out on valuable opportunities to expand awareness of your brand, increase your online visibility, attract new customers, and deepen relationships with current customers. Embarking on a new…

CXM vs UX - an introduction

The children’s TV programme Barney may not be the first place you would think to go to for business advice. But watching an episode last weekend (with my 3 year old cousin I must add) I did start thinking about Customer Experience Management (CXM), the new marketing phrase currently doing the rounds. Barney and his cronies were singing a song about how 'everyone is special' and telling the audience 'you’re important' and 'you’re the only one like you'. I sat there with my cousin, (who was by now not sitting but instead jumping on the sofa with excitement) thinking that Barney had inadvertently done what many experts have managed to make a mess of in recent months, and that is define CXM without any marketing hyperbole or ridiculous buzz words. CXM is essentially understanding that everyone is different…

Some examples of alternative strategies from retailers

It’s a bit of a ‘chicken or egg’ question, but when it comes to mobile commerce, what should come first – a responsive site or mobile optimised marketing? Or both together?

The answer to that question really lies in weighing up the quick wins from mobile optimised campaigns, offsetting poor user experience by driving mobile users to a non-responsive site, and mitigating lost potential revenue by waiting to launch both together.

Q1 of this year saw tablet sites achieving higher conversion rates than traditional desktop sites, and the prediction that by 2014, the mobile Internet is expected to overtake desktop internet usage. Despite this however, lots of big brands still don’t seem to be following a best practice approach.

An integrated mobile strategy - Sainsbury's

Although not perfect, supermarkets seem to be leading the way with end-to-end mobile strategy. …