How to adapt to the shift to mobile commerce

For a long time, the rise of mobile marketing has been the darling of tech predictions. Since Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, said in 2008 that "Mobile [will] overtake fixed Internet access by 2014", the world has been waiting for that prediction to hold true. It did, at least by some sources, precisely that same year she said it would. According to a study by Comcast, in 2014 mobile usage represented 60% of the total time spent online, while desktop-based consumption made up the remaining 40%. Since the majority of your website visitors come from mobile devices, you need to adapt your digital marketing strategy to take advantage of the…

Predictive analytics and consultative selling among the most important trends for B2B sales strategy in 2017

As a marketer, you’re more than familiar with the importance of closing the gap between marketing and sales. It’s been proven over and over that the more these teams talk, the better the results. Yet according to Aberdeen group, salespeople still spend an average of 440 hours a year searching for the right content to use. Furthermore, 65% of marketing content isn’t used by sales at all! When looking at the most popular sales trends for 2017, three are crucial when bridging this gap. These trends are most likely to inform your sales enablement content over the next year and beyond In this article, we’re going to analyse each trend to see not only how they will contribute to your sales enablement efforts, but your marketing strategy as a whole.

1. Subject Matter Experts will Play Salesperson & Marketer

The…

Chart of the Day: Mobile ad spend continues to skyrocket, but customer perceptions of mobile ads are still in the doldrums

Armani don't do infomercials. Rolex doesn't do direct mail. Ralph Lauren don't do coupons. Why do they ignore these often successful marketing tactics? Because if you put your ad for Rolex watches on a crappy leaflet and shove it through someone's door it degrades the brand. It detracts from it's luxury, it's exclusivity. The lesson is that it's not just the content of the ad that matters. The medium it's delivered in matters. This should make marketers wary about rushing head long into mobile ads when customers are reporting so many issues with them. There's no doubting that such a rush is occurring. Spending on mobile ads doubled in just two years - and will reach an impressive 143 billion this year according to Statista. And…

Use these 'Voice of the Customer' Tools to gather qualitative data on your customers

Web analytics can provide the what, the when and the how, but struggle to deliver the why and the rationale which explains the numbers from your analytics tool. 'Voice of the Customer' tools can run continuously in the background, be focused on specific pages or be time-based, gathering detailed feedback on barriers to conversion, design issues, user confusion – all useful and actionable insight for marketers. These tools allow you to go beyond the quantitative insight of analytics tools and provide a deeper layer of site visitor feedback. Tools in this category are growing in popularity and include general website feedback, crowd sourced product opinions and exit survey functionality.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Be careful not to request too much data. Just like us, users are put off by surveys that are pages…

Improving your use of Product categorisation, Marketing and Custom data will let you get more out of Google Analytics

Google Analytics has changed considerably in the last three years and in the latest update to our 7 Steps to using Google Analytics to improve your business, we have covered off all the major upgrades and improvements. While there are many changes over the last year, probably the most significant is the upgrade to the new Universal Analytics standard and the introduction of enhanced e-commerce tracking. For non-e-commerce sites this is obviously of less significance but for online retailers there are some significant improvements. The advent of enhanced e-commerce brings a far greater emphasis on key areas of site performance and marketing, in addition however it has also bolstered its tracking and reporting around product performance. That means whereas before GA was primarily the domain of e-commerce and marketing professionals it is now moving into…

How to optimize your online images for search engines

There's an old phrase that says, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. This may be true for the rest of world but not for Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. When their bots crawl an image, for example my picture, they actually can't see the image and  but they only see the context of the image from its filename and the Alt Text. Google also pick up the context from any captions and links to the page containing the image so it's important to make web editors aware of these factors too. The potential commercial importance of getting image optimization right is shown by this example where images are shown 'above the fold' and typically get good clickthrough rates. This example shows how, for some queries, Google will trigger a "OneBox" featuring…

9 types of Email Marketing to engage B2B audiences

Email is the go-to form of customer and prospect communication for many businesses today, allowing clear, concise and detailed conversations. In fact, 73% of marketers agree that the email marketing is core to their business and 40x more effective than social media for lead generation.

Is your business capitalising on this B2B marketing opportunity?

The longer life-span of emails in comparison to social posts means there is more time for businesses to leverage on making a sale or closing a deal. With a current estimate of 100 billion business emails being sent every day, this number of business email accounts is expected to rise to 4.9 billion by 2017. Overall, email marketing continues to be ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of…

Faced with continued uncertainty, where should retailers focus their tech investment?

The last 12 months have ushered in a new wave of uncertainty for retailers. Already grappling with challenges created by Amazon’s near relentless drive to dominate the consumer wallet, retailers find themselves faced with a new level of unpredictability at the hands of political forces including Brexit and Trump. In this climate where the only certainty is uncertainty, where should retailers focus? At eCommera, we brought together three experts - economist Alex Hamilton of Retail Week, psychologist Kate Nightingale of Style Psychology, and futurologist Matt Gee of Isobar – to discuss this hot topic. A key area of discussion was around whether – and where - brands and retailers should be investing in emerging technologies. Although all of the participants were quick to agree that 2017 will not be the year of virtual reality, despite myriad tech predictions…

Chart of the Day: Snapchat was the most used social media app for twice as many people in 2016.

Today's Chart of the Day is influenced by the latest news of Snapchat trialing two new features to increase a marketer return on their ad spend on the channel. But before we get into the new features (scroll to under the chart if you can't wait), this chart from the infinite dial 2016 report from Edison research shows that while Facebook is the most used social media channel by a significant margin, Snapchat is the only brand to make major gains when compared to 2015 by moving from 4% of users to 8%. This is only made more incredible for Snapchat when you consider that Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest had their share reduced and Instagram remained the same. For more information on snapchat, see our article on Snapchat Marketing Stats. …

Chart of the Day: A case study shows how integrating these channels increases purchase

This chart of the day is a little different from the typical insights we have about consumer and business use of digital media and tech. It fits with our current integrated marketing theme, showing how two channels can be more powerful than one. We know that is the theory of integrated communications, but you only get to see the reality when a 'hold-out' test is run for a campaign with a control group who saw one media type only. These are rarely published, so this isn't new, but the principle still applies. Here's the test design, you can see that some of the audience of the retailer who ran the test just got to receive an email (the control group), others were served Facebook ads, but the interesting group are the combined 16% who opened emails and…