10 tips to create an effective Cart Recovery Programme
According to research recently released by Britain’s Retail E-mpire, the UK will become the world’s leading ecommerce exporter, with online sales generated by UK retailers from international markets expected to soar sevenfold to £28bn by 2020. However, according to our latest research, on average 84% of people who visit a site abandon their purchase before checkout, costing retailers billions in lost sales.
So what can we do about this problem? Well first of all – let’s switch it around and look at it as a fantastic opportunity rather than a problem. Opportunities are always easier to action than problems – right?
The Opportunity for retailers
So we now have a lot of potential buyers who in many case simply need a small nudge in order to complete the purchase and the good news is, that these abandoned sales are 10 times more likely to convert…
A breakdown of online sales in the UK
We're continuing to see a steady growth in online retail sales across sectors based on a range of compilations. In this chart based on data from the UK ONS we see a breakdown by sector of growth and the proportion of online retail sales compared to all sales.
We are seeing growth in all sectors other than textile, clothing and footwear stores. Perhaps evidence of a change in preference back to the high street in this category. Year-on-year growth in most sectors is sub 20% other than the 'other' categories. For reference, the specific figures in each sector are below.
Source: UK Office of National Statistics August 2016 report
Related toolkit: E-commerce and retail marketing
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Bending The Budget: Adapting Your Marketing Budget To The Season
As marketing professionals, we’re beholden to the seasons – some times of year are simply better for sales than others. For this reason alone, it doesn’t make sense to evenly distribute your marketing budget across the year, but there are other relevant reasons you should be budgeting seasonally as well. When we pay attention to our target audience and the needs our products fulfill, we can make smarter decisions about marketing budget allocations.
Identifying Your Strategies
One thing you’ll need to take into consideration when breaking down your digital marketing budget each season will be the question of format. There are many different ways to build your digital presence, but they come with varied expenses.
Search ads – the ads that appear on search engines when someone enters relevant terms – often take up about the same portion of the average digital marketing…
If your open and click rates are dropping, you'll need to re-think your strategy
You had the best intentions; you worked diligently to get those conversions and build your email marketing list; you vowed to run a quality campaign and build relationships with your prospects, turning them into happy customers. Somehow it all went wrong. Your analytics are telling you that only a small percentage of your emails are opened, that you have been marked as spam by many of those subscribers you worked so hard to get.
Crossing the Line
Somewhere along the way, you crossed the line and became a harassment rather than a value. And you didn’t even recognize that you had done it. Is it fatal? No. But as you recover from this, you will need to understand how it happened so you never make the same mistake again.
How to Recognize You Have Become a Spammer
Be honest with yourself.…
How to utilise continuous improvements and ‘big bets’ to achieve operational and strategic excellence
As part of any digital transformation agenda, the ability the test and learn gives businesses the opportunity to experiment, iterate and grow skills and competences throughout the organisation. For digital marketers, this opportunity is becoming increasingly important as technology continues to advance and larger companies face new and emerging threats from more nimble, innovative competitors.
To drive meaningful digital transformation at scale, businesses must therefore be open to the adoption of a test and learn culture, which will enable marketers to optimise digital media activation, create first-class digital experiences and develop learning across the organisation. Much of this will be dependent on each organisation’s stage in the digital transformation journey:
Three big digital trends
The importance of developing a test and learn culture is reflected in the numerous …
Use these essential ecommerce tools to help convert your prospects
To maximise conversion, an online shopping experience needs to be simple and easy for the user, secure at the point of payment and robust so as to deal with both high volumes of product and traffic. E-commerce management tools were designed for this specific purpose and have a number of features that other platforms (i.e. a generic content management system) do not. All of these tools provide a platform for online retailers to sell their products and services online; they create a ‘digital store front’ to enable products in different categories to be search, browsed and purchased.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
Implementation and running costs. There are (often large) costs associated with development, maintenance and migration from these tools. Be clear on these up front.…
Facebook Insights team used a mixed methodology of data to analyse wedding planning behaviour and how mobile messaging apps are benefiting users.
This post is a vasriation of our usual #chartoftheday posts, as we summarise two studies from Facebook's insight division.
I was delighted to listen to the research managers at Facebook IQ, Facebook’s insight division, during their webinar as part of Qualtrics #MRWeek (Market Research Week). Naturally I was fascinated by their approach to how they take insights from one of the world's largest data sources: Facebook, as well as how they complement the data with other research too.
After scanning through the Facebook IQ website I found two brilliant studies, both are summarised below.
The first is about how conversation is changing due to the rise of mobile messaging applications. The Facebook Messaging Survey was actually undertaken with Nielsen with 12,500 respondents who are…
Don't mess with Google
The competition for a top spot in the Google search results is as competitive as ever. Companies spend millions of dollars annually to try and rank at the top spot for competitive keywords. There is good reason for that type of spending. Ranking first in Google results in 33% of all traffic from that keyword. Many high profile companies have taken a rank-at-all-cost mentality to clawing their way up to the top of the Google search rankings. These companies have tried, and failed, to gain an unfair advantage and have paid the price with a Google Penalty on their website.
Major companies like The Washington Post, WordPress, BBC, BMW, Mozilla, Genius, eBay, The Home Depot and even Google itself have been penalized by Google for violations of their guidelines. Digital Third Coast, a digital marketing agency located in Chicago, has compiled a list of high profile companies have…
A guide to the marketing job market for those looking to enter it
In a few months a new wave of fresh-faced college grads will start applying for their first real job. Some may have had internships or summer jobs in the past but this is a whole different thing. This is where your real career starts and it is something to be extremely excited about. I mean you have technically worked your entire life to get to this point.
What is not so exciting is that millennials like those college grads are having a tough time in the job market. Unemployment is at a steady 5% for the recent past. Wages are down 14% in a short ten-year time span and income inequality is rising. And do not even get me started on the explosion of college debt.
Plus the older generation think that we are literally the worst and should have…
Users are changing devices across the customer journey - marketers need to recognise this.
Mobile, mobile, mobile. It's all about mobile. Be mobile first. Do everything mobile first. That's pretty much what you hear from eCommerce or search thought leaders these days.
In fairness, they do have a point. Not only do mobile sessions now outstrip desktop sessions across the web, but they do so by a big margin on eCommerce sites. 59% of sessions on eCommerce sites are on some form of mobile device, according to a study of 87 million web sessions by Wolfgang digital.
But the picture isn't that simple. When it comes to revenue by device, it's actually desktop that still dominates. A massive 63% of revenue comes desktop, 3 times what comes from Smartphones.
So can eCommerce marketers breath a sigh of relief and stop worrying about those pesky mobile visitors that they've always struggled to engage with? -…
