Europe ahead of US in mobile engagement

Adobe have released new research comparing mobile engagement in different countries and across different sectors. We thought it could be useful for benchmarking your use of smartphone and tablet on your site and the engagement you're getting. The research was released at this week's Adobe Summit for EMEA in London. It's from the Adobe Digital Index (ADI) and part of a new report which analyses website metrics such as stickiness, consumption, and conversion rates. It's a big study based on data from 100 billion visits to more than 3,000 Web sites in Europe (Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK) - comparison are given to the US too. According to Tamara Gaffney, principal at the ADI: "The big difference Gaffney noted between Europe and the US was in traffic coming from smartphones. In Europe, the Nordic countries were the leaders, with smartphone…

It's about content, style and value more than SEO

We like this infographic which has been created with newcomers to blogging in mind. It practices what it preaches by using an interesting visual style with useful recommendations rather than less useful 'facts and figures' about how to promote your blog. It recommends how to develop the right types of content and style within your blog post rather than providing SEO techniques or basic social media promotion. It can be a learning curve and take time to build up your followers, so why not learn from existing bloggers to speed up your success rate by reading further.  …

Strategies to enhance customer service levels across peak response

How capable is your contact centre when it needs to deal with unexpected peaks in traffic or even the normal throughput of customer interactions?  To a large extent the answer to that question will depend on the number of concurrent users the system can handle as defined by both the technology (and licensing) available and the number of staff on hand to take enquiries. And if the number of concurrent users is limited to say 50 an hour and number of customers seeking to contact the company amounts to more than that on a regular basis then you're going to have a problem in terms of customers left on hold or abandoning calls. Clearly the way to solve the problem is to increase the number of concurrent users that the system can deal with but in the…

Why the marketing hare beats the tortoise

Traditional marketing has been turned on its head by increasingly disruptive technology and the connected customer. It’s not enough to plan campaigns and follow best practices anymore; as a marketer you have to be agile.  Why is that? Because the connected customer, your customer, people just like you, is ‘always on’. You don’t have a small window in their day to try to reach them anymore, as they’re switching from screen to screen, device to device, which such limited spans for attention, you have to be able to keep up. To be a customer centric business today means that you as a marketer need to be able to think, and act, in real-time. As a result, marketing professionals are faced with a new age of engagement - an age in which a series of targeted short-term promotions or messages are beginning to outperform more traditional long-term “integrated campaigns”.…

Recommended design patterns and best practices for your Checkout Funnel

Checkout design is the last in our series of posts covering design best practices for different parts of the Ecommerce customer journey. Previous posts include discussion and examples and potential design elements to test for: Home page Product listing or category page Product page Site search pages Shopping Basket design

Design issues for the checkout pages?

Checkout is the most critical part of the conversion path in some ways since it throws many challenges, due to the multiple stages, with each step influenced by the previous one. It is further complicated since it's not necessarily linear; so there is no standard path from start to finish and so this depends on the user's profile, where some steps can be skipped. In the Smart Insights Ecommerce design guide, I focus on 3 stages: 1. Sign-In /Register 2. Personal Details and Addresses. and 3. Payment. One size doesn't fit all for the checkout flow,…

Using LinkedIn to increase visibility of your content and drive referrals to your website

I've seen lots of case where people aren't really making the most of LinkedIn. Yes, they may use LinkedIn to keep their CV updated and occasionally send a little digital love to colleagues by way of endorsements. But if you are working in social media, content marketing, or simply trying to get more interest in your company’s activities, there are a lot of simple things you can do on LinkedIn that will take seconds but should increase traction for you. LinkedIn changes its features regularly, for example it recently had a homepage redesign. So, if you haven't looked at some of these new features I'll cover in this post it could be worth a refresh, or even a 'spring clean'!

LinkedIn Status Updates

Most people are aware that you can create a little update on LinkedIn pretty much like you…

How many businesses have achieved a single view of their customers and prospects?

This new research reviews how successful businesses have been in creating a single view of their customers. It suggests it's becoming more difficult to gain full visibility of the path to purchase with today's omnichannel consumer experience and that businesses are still facing many challenges around data and the system infrastructure to support this. Marketers are aware of the importance of trying to move towards a fuller 360 degree view of their consumers, to capture and maintain information at every touchpoint throughout the buying cycle, and how a one-to-one personalised relationship marketing approach can generate return. This global online survey from Signal, across 17 verticals. delves into these challenges which businesses are facing in the 'cross-channel world' and reviews how many businesses are adopting a single viewpoint of their customers.

How many businesses have a single view of their customer?

The survey identifies that although nearly half have…

Key marketing tactics which come before your content marketing

Content marketing is the buzzword on everyones lips right now. For some, it's becoming an increasingly big part of the marketing mix. For others, particularly small businesses, it shouldn't necessarily be at the top of the list of priorities. The theory of content marketing is an attractive one – produce interesting and engaging content which will be shared by your audience, and wait for the leads to roll in. Done well, it's a very effective channel, however, it takes time, effort and even the most brilliant pieces can be hit and miss in terms of uptake. Sign up for Hubspot, Kapost, Marketo, or any one of the hundreds of content marketing platforms that are available, and you'll have all of the tools at your disposal for implementing content marketing.…

Newsfeed algorithm changes which could affect the number of organic site referral visits you get from Facebook in future

Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Facebook Official Newsfeed FYI post from 21 April 2015 We're alerting Smart Insights readers to this change to personalisation of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm since it could potentially affect the volume of referrals that your site gets from Facebook if you're not posting the right type of content or at the right frequency. In their announcement of the change Facebook explain that their algorithm aims to...

"give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and local organizations you are connected to.

This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving…

How to use Custom Segments in Google Analytics to check the impact of Google's mobile-friendly algorithm changes live since April 21 2015

Well, the mainstream media have been calling it 'Mobilegeddon', which maybe overstating it, but it's going to increase the questions by colleagues about 'have we been affected by this Mobilegeddon update?'. So, we definitely recommend checking in your analytics, now it's live to see what the impact is on you or your clients. To help businesses prepare, we featured Google's guidance on mobile-friendly when it was first announced in November and more recently, Gavin Llewellyn explained 5 tools to help check your site is Google mobile-friendly. I've been anxious to check the impact on SmartInsights.com too, so I thought I'd share the approach I've used and share what we found.

3 steps for using Google Analytics to check the impact of Mobilegeddon

The analysis used involves isolating the organic traffic from Google which arrives at a…