It seems you either have what it takes... or not
When speaking to businesses about their marketing, integration is a common challenge, whether that's integration of comms, technology or teams within a business.
The latest Econsultancy / Adobe Digital Intelligence briefing sheds some light on how many businesses have achieved integration. It's encouraging to see that nearly half of businesses can confidently state:
Digital Marketing permeates most of our marketing activities
Kudos to the businesses that say that digital permeates all our marketing activities or that they are 'digital first'.
It's less encouraging to see that this figure hasn't changed much over the last 3 years. What's more, integration is severely lacking in nearly one-fifth of companies say that digital marketing is 'very much separate'.
Source: Digital Intelligence 2017 briefing
Sample: 14,163 respondents globally (64% client-side)
Recommended Smart Insights resource: Managing a Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence -…
Does your digital branding match your audiences search interests?
Defining the metrics of success is of the utmost importance when establishing a brand online. One of the most important metrics which define a brand’s true strength is one that is often overlooked, an audience interest graph. A brand’s true strength is the perception that it holds in the minds of its consumers. There are many metrics that online marketers use to define a brand’s success, however an audience interest graph is most often either unheard of or completely overlooked. This happens mostly because there are so many other metrics available that are easy to understand and completely misrepresented in the industry, such as monthly number of visitors, average time on page, social outreach metrics such as number of likes, shares or comments, bounce rates, click through rate, average cost per click etc. What people fail to understand is that this speaks…
Chart of the Day: Simple vs complex subject lines
Many email marketers keep their subject lines simple and short, but are these causing recipients to fail to read on?
"Not only does this study suggest that complex language leads to greater email engagement, but it also once again proves the value of testing and optimisation."
~ Nikki Gilliland @ Econsultancy
The Automatic Readability index uses the number of characters to gauge the understandability of a piece of text. And that is what is used to create this rather complicated chart.
The chart shows a steady gradient increase in open% and CTO% as the complexity of the subject line increases. The difference may seem diminutive, but remember that this chart is working on a scale of billions of sends. So it can lead to some significant changes.
Before you start making drastic changes, remember to A/B test your subject lines to see if this appeals to your…
Key SEO trends to plan for this year
The SEO industry can be treacherous – you never know when Google will roll out its next game-changing update.
For most SEO experts, every few days is another turning point that marks the need to review one’s strategy. But even if you’re that careful, there’s still a chance that you’ll miss one of Google’s 500-600 updates in a year.
There’s no sleeping on the job when it comes to SEO. If you want to secure your rankings, you need to be vigilant, adaptive, and aware of the ongoing trends in the world of search engines.
Based on the updates observed last year, here are some of the trends you can expect to continue for the rest of 2017:
The Rise of Google’s Rich Answers
SEO isn’t just about snagging the top position anymore. Google has a special place on top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for content…
Which Key Features Must Your Persona Include?
Personas are a well-established marketing technique to help produce more customer-focused communications. They can be applied to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. However taking a look at how marketers search for information about personas in Google Trends shows that there are a relatively low volume of searches.
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You can see there is a clear up-tick in interest in personas over the last few years which I think is related to interest in content marketing for which personas are often recommended to generate relevant personas for different audiences.
In this article I will introduce the value of using personas which we’re big fans of using to create more personalised email and web-based conversations with prospects as part of marketing automation.
The benefits of buyer personas for content marketing
To support content marketing initiatives, personas are valuable…
Most companies are doing nothing to re-activate abandoned carts
A 12-month survey for 2016 conducted by ecommerce recovery specialists Optilead has identified that 81% of online abandonment is totally ignored. This means that in the tests, valued at £2.1m, a staggering £1.7m of abandoned transactions were not followed up.
Over the past few years, online sales have increased in the UK in excess of 10% per year – with this continued increase comes higher competition and the increased need to maximise each opportunity. Despite this, recent reports suggest $4 trillion worldwide would be lost to abandonment alone during 2016.
Optilead surveyed 946 websites in the UK to identify how they react - and determine whether they engage with customers or leave them to become part of the global abandonment issue.
The average abandonment rate across all sectors is 76%. But it's not just the abandonment rate that's of concern – it's the low…
