Which social media drive online retail sales?

Richrelevance carried out an e-commerce survey in the USA for clients of their personalisation technology evaluating more than 690m browser shopping sessions over a period of a year, to identify the impact of Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter on retail sales.

It's interesting if you are managing an e-commerce site, and seeking to understand which is a driver for conversion to actual online or in store sales, which generates referrals and brand awareness or the social media creating more engagement?

Their Infographic shares some expected results, which are mainly due to a variation in  demographics and content sharing features:

Facebook has a greater 'stickiness' and ' higher conversion rates'.Pinterest generates higher order values, though bear in mind the demographics are those who are well educated with high income.Twitter drives traffic into stores and retail sites.

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The only way is… Local SEO.  A tutorial on how to optimise your website for Local Search.

It’s vital that you optimise your site for local results if you have a local sales presence. Google wants to provide their ‘customers’ the best possible and most relevant results and nowadays you don’t even have to type the location after your search term or be signed in to get local results. Let’s have a look at how to make sure your site is well-optimised for local search:

1. On-Site Optimisation

If you’re just starting to optimise your website for local search the first thing to do is to ensure that your core location is included in the following on-page key elements: Title Tag Meta Descriptions Headings (H1,H2,H3..) – Not all of them but occasionally On-page – The site copy as well as on the page itself (e.g. within the footer area) This is really a no-brainer and good SEO practise which…

How to create a mobile friendly email

In May we shared the second infographic in this post from Email Monks which summarises the importance of creating mobile responsive Email designs.

In September Litmus published another infographic on responsive email design. We thought this was well worth sharing also since it adds to the first with a technical explanation of  How to Create a responsive email design with a code sample.  

Email Monks infographic on Mobile Friendly Emails will walk you through the importance of adapting responsive mobile email design techniques in 2013. 

With 43% of the people now reading and responding to emails through mobiles and 97% just viewing their emails once, it is high time marketers should use responsive mobile email design and coding techniques to stop providing bad experience to more than 50% of the email subscribers.

Email Monks code mobile friendly responsive…

Ideas to trigger an emotional response from your campaigns

The use of psychology in email marketing is often not at the front of many Marketers’ minds. This fascinates me since we’re so used to seeing the effects of overtly psychological marketing everywhere else we look; on TV, the radio and on public transport. It’s become part of the scenery of our daily lives. Why then is such an effective factor often overlooked when it comes to designing emails? Surely we should be doing all that we can to engage with people?

An important factor to consider is that everything we send to recipients will generate an automatic emotional response; be it positive or negative, large or small. The reason for this is because of the way our brains are wired.

We have so many decisions to make on a daily basis that it would be impossible for us to make a fully…

The what, why and how of infographics marketing using social media

In today’s fast-paced social media world, if you want your message to be seen, you need to include a visual. Whether it’s a picture of your dog, a map, or an infographic, articles with images attached get 94 percent more total views than plain text. Of all the visuals available, infographics are an especially compelling way to capture the attention of online readers.

Consumers are bombarded every day with so much social media content that you need to include something that can get their attention and educate them quickly and succinctly. Whether you’re using a visual social network like Pinterest or Instagram or a text-based platform like Twitter, infographics fit the bill. So what is it that makes infographics so engaging in a social media format? Infographics are popular…

A 6 Step approach for Targeting Local PPC Campaigns

Last month, I shared my tips for carrying out a local SEO audit on your website. But that’s only half the story. It’s not just your organic SEO that needs to be geo-targeted. With Google placing a great visual emphasis and authority on PPC adverts, you should be integrating geo-targeted ads in your marketing mix. A geo-targeted PPC campaign works best for businesses who perform their services locally, but could attract customers from further afield. Let's take a UK example, Mrs Jones runs Blue Widget Weddings, a store selling wedding dresses in Redditch, UK. She obviously wants to attract brides from her local area – Redditch, Bromsgrove, Birmingham and Droitwich. This makes Mrs Jones the perfect candidate for a local PPC campaign.

Six step Paid Search campaign plan for a local business

Here, is a six step plan she, or any other local…

Key ingredients of the modern marketer's portfolio

For many new graduates encountering the job market for the first time, they’re discovering a very harsh and competitive environment. In the UK, unemployment has been falling recently, but the number of long-term jobless has hit a 17-year high illustrating that competition for jobs has never be tougher for both young and experienced professionals.

However, with the explosion of social media and other digital communication channels, it’s sometimes difficult to understand why prospective employees still rely primarily on the trusty 2-page CV to promote themselves. Whilst still a very important tool, the CV often paints a very one-dimensional picture of one’s professional history, skills and achievements.

In contrast, digital channels such as websites, blogs, podcasts and social networks can be used to build up a much deeper, more fluid representation of one’s interests, passions and professional experience. When we look at what these channels…

Which trends are on your Radar? Which new techniques are you using now?

Adopting the latest marketing technologies and techniques before competitors has always given options for companies to get an edge. 2013 has been no exception, we have reported on many new innovations across all the main digital services in our weekly and monthly updates. Now I'm thinking through which of these will be significant enough to become mainstream trends in marketing practice in 2014. I'm writing this short post to get feedback on which new marketing techniques or digital technologies you are investing in now which you weren't a year ago and which you see as significant in the year ahead. Please add to the comments or use the short hashtag #marketingtrends2014 plus your suggestions for the tools or techniques which you see as significant for you or your business in 2014 and explain why. I'm deliberately not mentioning any specific…

A checklist of 10 best practices for creating infographics for marketing

You'll be all to familiar with infographics, so I won't bore you with an explanation. Some argue that infographics can only be about data visualised (charts, comparisons, Venn diagrams, graphs, flow-charts etc). Suffice to say that we believe the term covers more than just that and includes any graphics that explain something, a concept for example. For us, if it's visual, useful or entertaining and sharable, it's an infographic! We used that approach for our Content Marketing Matrix infographic and the inbound marketing process which aren't classic data infographics, but we got good feedback that they were useful and they were shared. So this is how Dave Chaffey and I see it, here is our checklist for creating the perfect marketing infographic. I've also written a follow-up on promoting infographics. We will illustrate it with extracts…

The rise and fall? of infographics

According to the volume of searches in Google Trends shown in this infographic, the popularity of infographics has increased by 800% over two years since 2010.

Perhaps surprisingly, the latest figures have shown a slight decrease in searches since May this year. Do you think infographics are becoming less effective from your use of them?

We think infographics remain a great tool to visually share and represent information and knowledge, both within the organisation and externally for outreach. Of course, it's important to get the quality right as Dan Bosomworth explains in his post giving 10 best practices for the perfect marketing infographic. We try to produce useful infographics which help marketers explain practices such as those we have collected in our free Digital Marketing Infographics pack.

We've noticed a growth in use of tools for creating…