Preventing churn is key to improving revenue

For subscription-based businesses like SaaS companies, churn rate is a crucial metric that determines overall performance. Simply put, churn rate is the rate at which customers cut ties with your service during a given period. This percentage gives you a clear idea about your customer retention, which is an important factor defining a company’s success. Looking at the below chart you'll see that the lower the churn rate, the better your business is performing.

Importance of Churn Rate in SAAS

Churn rate is easily one of the most essential metrics when measuring the performance of SaaS businesses. Totango reports that the fastest-growing companies will reduce churn rate less than 5%. For SaaS companies, a lot of time and money is spent on acquiring customers. Since this investment pays off over time, the…

A case study on growing a startup to a billion dollar company

7 years ago Zalando was just an inspiration; it was born from Robert Gentz'z fascination of the recently sold German startup StudiVZ which fetched €85 million. After a failed attempt of their first startup, Unibicate, a social media site for Universities in Mexico, David Schneider and Robert Gentz, with the backing of Rocket Internet’s Oliver Samwer, launched Zalando. It was a well-executed clone of the US Zappos, which quickly expanded beyond retailing shoes. Once a novel single-country startup, Zalando has become a 6-Billion-Euro company and Europe’s top Fashion retail platform. In 2008, Zalando served only Germany, five years later they were serving fifteen European countries.

So Zalando gives an excellent international Ecommerce and digital marketing case study of how digital media and technology can be used to…

With the ever changing digital landscape, where do our CMO's see the future of their marketing departments?

The economist recently published their report The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience, which is based on a global survey of 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, plus in-depth interviews with leading CMOs to research which technologies and customer trends are likely to change marketing organisations. The research eluded to some interesting trends, the first of which is that it takes into account that all CMO's have some form of strategy and a goal they are trying to achieve. At Smart Insights, we're big advocates of having a strategy in place to help you reach your goals. If you want to do a little further reading on developing your own strategy, have a read of this post. …

Recommended design patterns and best practices for your Basket/Shopping Bag

Here is the 6th in my series of posts on recommended Ecommerce page layouts. We've been working our way down the funnel, so now we move from product pages to improving your Basket or Shopping Bag Page. Given it's the launchpad to checkout, it plays a vital driver in pushing the buyer down the conversion path. As with checkout, the basket page has to serve two user types: 1. New users: Reduce barriers to purchase and persuade them to trust your brand and website, with their payment. 2. Returning users: Provide a quick transition to check-out, summarising key information which commit buyers to purchase. If you work in an ecommerce team at a retailer, or are involved in design for your client’s accounts, then I hope these templates and tips will guide you along the design/re-evaluation process to maximise results for your pages.

Key Ecommerce Basket Page…

Selling to your existing customers is much easier than attracting new ones. So keep them coming back.

Do you want more returning customers? The kind of customers who spend more and visit more often? Then a loyalty program could be the perfect tool to add to your customer retention arsenal. Why? You may ask. Let’s start with the most reasonable fact: because it makes you more money. That is, of course, if you do it the right way. Here’s a quick stat that’s worth remembering: Keeping a current customer costs you 3-10 times less than acquiring a new one, depending on the industry you are in. According to WordStream, small businesses spend between $9,000 and $10,000 trying to attract new customers on Google paid search campaigns in just each month on average. Just image how much more efficient you could be if you could switch that re-activating existing customers and getting repeat…

How to avoid letting these PPC Myths Corrupt Your Marketing

Have you heard about some of these PPC (Pay Per Click) myths before? As so many businesses use PPC, it’s not surprising there are lots of myths about them. Over the years, PPC has changed and been updated. Some of the old strategies that were successful ‘back in the day’ are now outdated. Common misconceptions have allowed many myths to spread and have negatively influenced how people understand PPC advertising. There are many PPC myths out there so we’ve picked some of the most dangerous. The myths we’ve chosen are so believable, they have the potential to corrupt marketing strategies or stump success.

1. PPC guarantees instant and fast results

Some marketers quickly jump on the PPC train because they believe it will win instant results. In truth, sometimes you can see a rapid rise in traffic but it definitely does not guarantee positive results. …

China to drive growth of global eCommerce sales

eCommerce has been a booming sector for several years now. The good news is that isn't about to stop. Global retail sales are expected to  almost double between now and 2019. However if we look at the data for established markets like the US, we see a less exciting picture. eCommerce will still grow, but the growth has pretty much plateaued. The big growth is in emerging markets, and China with over 1 billion people is the biggest emerging market of them all. Chinese eCommerce sales are already enormous yet are predicted to more than double between now and 2016. This will present enormous opportunities to international eCommerce businesses. That said, China is a tough market to crack so don't rush off too fast to established a Beijing office. Dip your toe in before taking the plunge. …

Recommended design patterns and best practices for retail Search Results Page

This is the 5th in the series looking at key Ecommerce pages, we hope it gives you some ideas for testing and improving your on-site search page. It's a key page on retail sites, since a high proportion of sessions can involve a search and typically average order is higher when a search takes place. In the context of different types of user journeys, this page can sit in different places in the conversion path. It may support early stage research to help visitors learn more about your different product categories or services or it can be an end-stage conversion driver to match people to specific products as they search for specific product names, types and product labels/SKUs.

Key Ecommerce Search Results Page Wireframe requirements

This template provides an outline of the core elements, with colour coding definitions referenced in the Guide. UX and UI designs can vary across…

There are major obstacles to using brand awareness as a marketing objective

Over the past decade marketers have relied on quantity based measurements as a proxy for campaign performance. The volume of impressions, clicks and likes indicates that people see the ads and find them relevant and compelling. But with the increase of ad blocking and bot frauds, as well as demand for more data transparency, evidence suggest that traditional metrics do a poor job is measuring sales, engagement and, ultimately, ROI. A study from the IAB and Ernst & Young confirmed this trend, estimating that $8.2 Billion are lost as a result of traffic frauds, bots frauds, ad block and other threats. Specifically, the IAB found the following major reasons (the full report is in PDF form here): $4.2 billion is lost due to “non-human traffic” $1.1 billion is lost due to “malvertising-related activities” $2.4 billion is lost due to…

Pokemon Go beats top social Apps for engagement

The hype-machine is very much in gear when it comes to Pokémon GO. We've seen at the top of the app store for downloads since it came out, and all manner of viral videos involving it. You may have heard about the number of Pokémon GO downloads which are astounding with over 65 million downloads and 10 percent of Android users who have downloaded the game. But it doesn't look like GO is just a quick 'flash in the pan'. People are doing a lot more than just downloading it. According to data from SimilarWeb, Pokémon GO is the leading app for daily engagement time in the US right now. It's users are on the app for an incredible 43 minutes a day, double other engaging platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and four times what Facebook messenger manages. These are pretty amazing engagement stats, and whilst Pokémon…