New research shows consumer preferences for online service and experience
LivePerson carried out a survey with over 6,000 consumers to understand their online consumer behaviour and expectations of the digital online experience from an organisation. Although they are known as an online customer service chat service the report covers broader perceptions than this.
Did you know that a consumer will wait no more than 76 seconds to receive help online? - a small window of opportunity to retain the customer.
The full report can be downloaded from Liveperson's site. Here is an overview of the four key themes from the findings:
1. Do not be complacent! Consumers will switch brands for a better experience - 48% are still experiencing problems navigating websites and 33% can not find a customer service contact.2. Create trust and loyalty with your brand Consumers still expect the personal touch and to speak on…
Making the case for optimising your mobile site with split-testing
Websites that use split-testing regularly will gain an increasing advantage over their competitors. By steadily increasing their conversion rate, they’re able to get higher returns for the same advertising spend and that means they can invest more in advertising and grow their market share.
Today, split-testing is especially relevant for mobile commerce. We’re at a stage where many companies will have a mobile version of their website that they serve to visitors from smartphone or tablets. But a lack either of focus or understanding of the opportunity means that very few websites are split-testing their mobile sites. And as mobile commerce grows, companies that split-test have a huge advantage.
But mobile conversion optimisation is hard. It forces you to focus on priorities. With limited screen real estate, you need to ensure that your content is well structured, persuasive and accessible.
8 Tips for mobile conversion rate optimisation
Here are…
Creative approaches to say sorry more positively
Having worked on a number of web projects over the years, I still receive great examples of 404 page designs sent to me by my former team members.
Why? A well designed 404 page can be an opportunity to build your brand when something goes wrong for your user and I attempt to bring them in all web projects I work on.
If you're not a webmaster, you may not know what a 404 is, although you will certainly have seen them! Technically speaking Wikipedia describe it as 'The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested.'
Your users will describe it, to quote a great TED talk by Renny Gleeson as 'a slap in…
Our interview with Michael Welch of Blackcircles.com
Michael Welch created Blackcircles.com as a new way for consumers to buy tyres at competitive prices either over the Internet or on the telephone. From the site, consumers can find the best deal from a network of over 1,000 local dealerships.
Blackcircles.com now has a turnover of £18 million and is growing rapidly, so we thought it would be interesting to learn the approaches its founder, Michael Welch has used to grow and sustain the business. Thanks Mike for sharing your story!
Key success factors for the business
Q1. Which factors do you put the initial success of Blackcircles.com down to?
At the very beginning it was mainly about hard work, determination and not ‘taking no for an answer’. If I’m honest there was no real difference between me…
New research from the DMA compares the effectiveness of online and offline customer acquisition channels
I recently attended the launch of the DMA Customer Acquisition Barometer commissioned by McDowall. This is set to provide a regular benchmark to help marketers compare their approach to customer acquisition. In this post I will highlight some of the most useful findings from the detailed report.
What does customer acquisition mean in 2014?
The video below summarises some qualitative evaluation from marketers showing their views on customer acquisition. The panel, Chris Bibby, Head of Performance Marketing and Wonga, Michelle de Souza, Head of CRM and Customer Insights at Age UK, and the Business Development Director at HP discussed how for customer acquisition investment to be effective it needs to review the long-term impact in terms of lifetime customer value and churn, showing the importance of having the right measures in place.
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Best customer acquisition sources
The headline…
Building the business case for more investment in Instagram marketing
Instagram recently announced that it now has 200 million monthly active users who between them, are sharing 60 million photos every day generating a mind-boggling 1.6 billion Likes. That's over 20 billion photos shared since its launch in 2010.
What's more, since releasing figures at the end of 2013, the platform is said to have added around 50 million users in the last six months - a staggering 170 million since its acquisition by Facebook for £1bn in April 2012.
If we compare it to the growth statistics for other social media platforms we can see that it is currently the fast growing social network in terms of active users.
So with this apparent unstoppable growth, what does this really mean for marketers, and should your brand be joining…
Should we start using Universal Analytics now it's out of Beta?
This post was prompted by a question in our from from an agency advising a publishing company asking whether they should use Classic Google Analytics or the new Universal Analytics in future.
April 2nd 2014 update - Universal Analytics now out of public beta
It’s a timely question since Google's Universal Analytics is now out of Beta. We're alerting you to this since this now means there is feature parity between Google Analytics and Universal Analytics. According to Google:
"Bringing Universal Analytics out of beta means that all the features, reports, and tools of Classic Analytics are now available in the product, including Remarketing and Audience reporting".
When will update to Universal Analytics become mandatory
Google's update doesn't mention if and when classic Google Analytics will be required although they have said that the intent is that all users will eventually have to upgrade to…
A review of the options to avoid 'showrooming' and connect with customers digitally when they are in-store
As retailers figure out how to incorporate the ever-changing omnichannel and added extra credit card processing security, they will also need to think about the Internet of Things [IOT] and how it fits into the retail experience and marketing budget. Some retailers are using digital in-store to enhance the shopping experience of their customers. But implementing these devices could be costly and time-consuming, especially if they fail to produce results for the retailer.
But we must recognize that customers have overwhelmingly connected lives. In their daily journey, they are shuttling between their homes and work in a constant connected state. This connected state has an effect on their shopping behaviour. Customers will search online, comparing prices, promotions, ratings and reviews. Internally, the customer may debate things like the difference between shipping costs versus the cost…
Research showing how brands can struggle with the real-time challenge
In theory, real-time marketing seems straightforward. Follow the trends, be responsive to the interests of your audiences and build a live, relevant relationship with them. In practice, real-time marketing is not quite so easy though. Combining real-time online PR and social media marketing and integrating it with offline communications is time, resource and investment intensive.
In the latest benchmark report from immediate future, ‘In The Social Moment’, our research shows the practical hurdles of managing real-time marketing. It seems the struggle is more operational than about the risk to reputation...
It’s the everyday management, processes, technology and people, that is proving to be difficult. Most of the report’s survey respondents came from well-known, established brands. Brands with complex structures and traditional ways of working. The results reflect the…
A briefing on the options for creating more relevant, personalised offers for online shoppers
A recent report from Razorfish showed that 76% of businesses don't use behavioural targeting (or at least 'C-level' execs who responded to the survey weren't aware of it it being used in their companies). In this article, Jose Carlos Cortizo explains what Behavioural Targeting is and introduces how it can be used within E-commerce sites. Many of these approaches can and should be used for other types of business, so you may want to serve different content or offers to returning visitors for example.
What is behavioural targeting?
At its simplest, Behavioural Targeting is segmentation based on customer behaviours. One benefit of Behavioural Targeting is the ability to organize our customers based on variables related to their behaviours, such as the number of visits they have made to our online store, what products they have bought, what categories…
