Choice is a good thing, right?

Let us take you back to the grand old days of grocery shopping, when butter came weighed out in a scoop, the grocer knew your children’s names and your favourite cut of beef, and a brand was something you applied to a cow’s bum (not too different to shopping in Lidl today, one might imagine). Limited choice made shopping a simpler experience in those days ('You can have any colour as long as it's black'), but surely the huge array of brands, products and quantities available in today’s supermarkets make shopping a more satisfying experience? After all, what brunette with frizzy hair and split ends could argue against a shampoo product made specifically to meet her needs?

What's the impact of choice on consumer purchasing and ecommerce?

However, as previously demonstrated in our series of articles on digital psychology, the…

Why and how to use hurdle rates to set goals for your digital marketing

The concept of hurdle rates seems to be quite widely used within finance and investment circles, but I rarely hear it discussed in blogs about measuring and improving digital marketing. Perhaps that's because they're most useful when related to customer retention, or the 'Engage' part of the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework. It's surprising since they offer an excellent way to set goals and track performance against them when you are looking at your effectiveness in communicating with an audience. You can use them to review email marketing, ECRM, customer engagement with social media or repeat purchases. Here's a brief introduction to hurdle rates and some ideas on where you can apply them.

Hurdle rate definition

The hurdle rate for engagement is simply the percentage of customers who perform an…

How do American consumers rate their level of multichannel CX?

For the 5th year running, the Temkin Experience Ratings has been compiled by researching 10,000 American consumers who have interacted with almost 300 retailers in the US. This survey breaks down by industry sector, how they evaluated their CX across a range of factors including Success (how companies are meeting the needs of their customers), Effort (Customer ease and accessibility) and Emotion (personal views on the customer experience at relevant touchpoints). The top three companies providing a positive experience included Aldi, Publix and H-E-B and 5 out of the 12 top companies were from supermarkets. Whereby, those serving low customer experience were Coventry Health Care, Fox Rent a Car, Comcast and Fujitsu. Source: Temkin…

Trends in affiliate models from 2007 to 2015

Affiliate marketing has been a core acquisition channel for transactional consumer sites for many years now. But over the years, the popularity of different types of affiliate marketing have changed dramatically. PerformanceIn have published an interesting compilation of the popularity of different affiliate types based on research by Affiliate Network Affiliate Window. The chart below shows the top 20 Publisher Type in the Fashion Sector: You can see that there was an initial focus on search marketing, through both SEO and PPC with many affiliates specialising in these active. But, it's no secret that Google doesn't favour affiliates, so its algorithms now favour destination sites and it has developed its own comparison tools. PPC through AdWords has also become more important. The graph shows how popular voucher codes and cashback…

An infographic about infographics

We know that visual content increases sharing across social media platforms as Gary Lipkowitz explains in his article on 'Why infographics should still be part of your content marketing strategy. But do you know why our brain craves infographics or visuals on a more scientific basis? The team at NeoMam Studios have designed this infographic about infographics which summarises why they are such an effective communications tool. Did you that... "70% of our sensory receptors are in our eyes, it only takes one tenth of a second to understand visual content and that we 'recall 80% of what we see AND do'". If you're looking for more practical guidance on creating effective infographics for marketing see this article by Dan Bosomworth of First 10 on A checklist of 10 best practices…

Understanding how your mobile strategy can improve your customer service

Most of us find it almost impossible to spend time without a smartphone or tablet close at hand. These days, to quote the famous ad for Martino Rosso, we expect to be connected and online  ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere.’ Indeed the mobile device has become not only a constant companion but also an essential tool. Witness our shopping habits. According to research organisation IMRG, around half of e-commerce sales in the UK are accounted for by mobile devices. Meanwhile, a 2014 survey by Econsultancy found that 13% of us engage in the art of 'showrooming.' Or to put it another way,  we check out goods in store before buying online, using our mobile devices to compare prices and then make the purchase. And not only do we shop on the move. These…

Content Marketing is more than just publishing content...

When Doug Kessler (Velocity Partners) published his Slideshare ‘Crap: the single biggest threat to b2b content marketing’ it rightly got a lot of attention (one million views and counting). [slideshare id=15931787&doc=velocitycrap-130110064100-phpapp01] I think that the popularity of this Slideshare was not only because of the great title, but because it highlighted the challenge of getting cut-through as more B2B brands are spending more time on content marketing. Now B2B buyers cannot move for the flood of Ebooks, blog posts, and infographics (which are getting longer by the day!). According to the CMI:  74% of marketers say they are producing more content than they did a year ago, but 70% of content produced gets wasted each day!  From my experience of working with brands and training marketers on content marketing, there seems to be a common experience with initial adoption of Content Marketing.  You know you need to be doing something, so you start…

New DMA research shows the trends in email effectiveness - which these types of emails work for you?

We are excited to share the findings from the DMA's 'National Client Email Report 2015' which has just been published. It reinforces the effectiveness of email as one of the core digital marketing techniques and shows that email marketing is still growing in popularity and its success is derived from an integrated marketing approach, accessibility to Marketing Automation and being impacted by the rise in mobile with an email-mobile relationship, which they refer to as a 'mobile first-medium'. Companies are seeing return from continuing to use email marketing - according to the report Email has an average return of 38:1!'

Which emails generate the most revenue?

We know intuitively that effective emails are personalised, so it's good to see an improvement in targeting practice with revenue from unsegmented emails to the whole list…

The massive volume of analytics data can confuse and point you in the wrong direction. Here’s how to understand what your website visitors are really doing...

Web analytics can be extremely useful, but it the data can also be a curse. Indeed, online we now live in a world swimming with data, so much so we have to call it “big data”. The problem with big data is it needs big analysis. The more analytics you collect, the more time it takes to wade through the reports and try to work out what is happening with your website. Google Analytics, for instance, has 103 standard reports you can look at. That’s before you start adding your own specific requirements and comparisons. In addition, there is a problem with all of these reports; none of them tell you “why” a visitor did what…

A summary of 7 principles of persuasion

There is increasing interest in applying the principles of Psychology to Digital Marketing. According to Kath Pay of Cloud.IQ, the benefits of incorporating consumer psychology into your marketing are two- fold: "First, applying the principles of the Psychology of Persuasion can assist your customer in their journey to achieve their objective i.e. buying a product or service from you, and secondly, you, as the marketer, benefits from facilitating more successful conversions". Kath has a new free download 'Leveraging Psychology in Digital Marketing' explaining how the relationship between buyer psychology and behaviour can help marketers optimise the online customer journey. It covers the principles and examples from landing pages and email marketing on how you can improve conversion efficiency as part of inbound marketing. This infographic is a taster of the book's themes to help you get under the skin of your customers through psychological techniques including those focussed on…