Ensure your mobile app has these 7 features to improve user experience and boost ecommerce revenue

Giant ecommerce companies are now focusing on improving end-user experience on mobile devices, providing a strong technology infrastructure via cutting-edge mobile applications. Mobile comprises of 34% of all ecommerce transactions worldwide, and this figure is expected to grow to over 50% in 2016. What is more, 85% of consumers today prefer a mobile application over a mobile website. Clearly there are big opportunities here. The biggest challenge any ecommerce business faces is to stand out in the competition with a stunning and interactive app that engages and retains buyers at every level. With this in mind, here are some essential features that your ecommerce mobile app should include to give it a competitive edge and deliver excellent user experience.

1. Promote Customization

For any ecommerce business,…

Introducing Lauterborn's 4Cs - a variant on the 4Ps

Planning models can be useful ways to structure your thinking when creating marketing plans. They can bring clarity to opaque problems and help you build and effective plan. Because of this we, are outlining 10 of the most effective digital marketing models to help you plan, manage and optimise your marketing. Next up, it's one you may not of heard of, but is related to a model you will have heard of.

What is Lauterborn's 4Cs?

In 1990 Bob Lauterborn wrote an article in Advertising Age saying how the “4Ps were dead” (an early example of clickbait?) and “today’s marketer needed to address the real issues”. He didn’t address the 7Ps which include the service elements of the Marketing Mix model. Instead he suggested a 4C model which gives a more customer-centric take on the traditional marketing mix mapping to the 4Ps of the…

Non-profits need to use big data and mobile to present clear messages in 2016

2015 has seen charities gaining increased confidence to streamline, simplify and even surprise. With increasing demands from an ever increasingly digital savvy audience, standing still has not been an option.

The larger charities are capitalising on ever more sophisticated opportunities gained from insights and improved team working and systems.  The best of the medium to small size charity websites are finding cost-effective ways to improve experience such as featuring user-generated content.

There are a host of encouraging trends in the sector, but these ones stand out to me due to their take up across the sector and positive impact are: 

1. Clarity of message

It would seem that many charities have pared down their offering on key pages to focus on core content and calls to action.…

Improving re-engagement emails to help bring a dead email list to life

According to MarketingSherpa, on average, marketers lose 25% of their email list every year. HubSpot have also modelled email database decay and suggest a similar figure if you don't take action. Essentially, subscribers stop engaging with your brand which results in fewer clicks and unsubscribes meaning that the number of active email subscribers falls. Added to this, the role of subscribed yet unengaged consumers can be crucial when it comes to hurting the inbox placement rates, which can ultimately lead you to spam folders. So, what to do when your holy emails are being flagged as this hex called spam? Re-engagement emails- the divine jackfruit can act as an elixir to bring your dead email list to life. Due to its inherent specification, re-engagement emails only target inactive consumers that give your email campaigns an accurate perspective. According to the Stats…

Taking you through setting up Facebook's new Canvas ads

The Facebook advertising juggernaut moves on with yet another huge product roll out. This time it's Canvas Ads. As with Instant Articles for mobile, the idea is to provide an "immersive" experience with a rich media combination of images, videos, gifs, text, products, carousels and more for mobile users. As usual the idea is to keep users on Facebook, scrolling through this "canvas"of fun rather than bumping them off onto other website (and likely experiencing poor load time as part of the process). Think of Canvas as very deep web pages on mobile with the added benefit of interaction such as panning and enlarging. With all those variables it sounds complicated right? Well actually not so much. I actually had a lot of fun experimenting with the new tool albeit that creating a Canvas is time consuming and once you've hit the "Finish" button there's no way…

Key PPC budgeting lessons for modelling AdWords investment for B2B companies

At any one time, there are only a finite number of potential clients searching for your product or service that you could convert to an enquiry.  Above this point, throwing more money at Pay Per Click or AdWords advertising will simply buy more traffic that will not convert to an enquiry. By analysing your data over a statistically significant amount of time it is possible to estimate the optimum PPC budget that will maximise customer enquiries and minimise money wasted chasing enquiries that aren't there.   Here I outline an example of a UK manufacturer running a B2B campaign who reduced their PPC spend by 30% to deliver the same level of customer enquiries.  The article then goes on to discuss applying the approach to your organisation.

PPC budget - the £700 rule of thumb

Deciding you optimum PPC budget is a difficult judgement call…

If you are going to optimise your digital campaigns you need to measure them accurately

How do you measure the effectiveness of your digital campaigns? In this video, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights talks to Grant LeBoff, founder of the Sticky Marketing Club about tools and key metrics to use for digital campaign tracking monitoring that companies should start to consider. Have a watch to find out all about the best practices in the area of measuring your campaigns. [arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFebyszqGKA" /] Or here's the transcript for the quick version: Grant Leboff: So Dave, one of the things that business owners, marketing managers, really struggle with, I think, a little bit on digital, is measuring the effectiveness of what they are doing. How would you go about looking at that? Dave Chaffey: Yeah, that's right, Grant. It's a huge challenge. Almost every business I talk to hasn't really got that nailed yet. The good news…

Start targeting even more precisely with new Facebook ad-option

Top of my wishlist from Facebook for the last nine years (yes that's how long I've been advertising on Facebook) has been the ability to use the magic "AND" word rather than "OR" when it comes to selecting Interest targeting. I've called this "Boolean Targeting" or "Overlap Targeting" and it became the holy grail for me as a Facebook advertiser. This level of targeting would mean targeting those people in the Venn Diagram overlap - the people that liked ALL the things I was listing in interests rather than just some of them.

OR vs AND, Boolean targeting, Overlap targeting, Detailed targeting: Confused already?

Let me explain. When you select interests (for instance you are looking to target people that like social media marketing so you'd probably have selected some of…

It has never been more important for digital specialists to break out of their individual silo and engage key stakeholders across the business operation.

As digital communication channels develop, as search engine algorithms change and as new platforms and trends emerge, many enterprise-level organisations are in a constant race to keep up with the rate of change in digital. Modern SEO now requires digital specialists to engage stakeholders across an organisation in order to deliver the consistent and effective experience that consumers – and by extension, search engines – are looking for. SEO is not just a single technical function and digital is no longer a single discipline that is removed from the rest of the organisation, it is a critical component that relies on an enormous range of skills and resources.

SEO requires a balanced approach

A lot of SEO specialists, digital marketers and agencies will focus very heavily on the creative side…

Understanding the true value of customer loyalty programs

According to Colloquy, there are 3.3 billion loyalty program memberships in the United States alone. When you consider that the entire U.S. population is only 319 million, the amount of loyalty programs per person is staggering. The average member is enrolled in over 13 programs and 71% of those earning $100K+ use loyalty programs. 76% of shoppers think that loyalty programs are a part of their relationship with brands. But most businesses focus their programs on discounts. You can’t substitute discounts for brand loyalty. There is an emotional aspect to shopper behavior that brands can’t ignore. 97% of loyalty programs are transaction-based, where customers receive discounts for purchases. While this is a foundational aspect of a rewards program, most businesses don’t go beyond that. Only 25% of them reward customers for some type of engagement. If you make your customer experience…