Chart of the Day: How email marketers plan email marketing campaigns (Email Workflow) - Part 1 of 6
What process do you use to send your emails? What is your workflow? Well, I'm here to tell you about best practices from start to finish.
Planning
Time spent on tasks
Technology
Quality assurance
Approvals
Sending
For today's chart, I'm starting at the beginning of the email journey - the planning. I have mentioned before that planning is one of the most important tasks to complete before work should begin. I know sometimes it isn't possible because of demanding senior leadership, clients etc. But it's something we should all strive for.
So let's stop procrastinating and get on with our planning.
Calendar
We all need a calendar for scheduling email dispatches. How you use that calendar depends on your…
How your users' content can boost your results
The best things in life are free. And user-generated content (or UGC) — which costs nothing — is one of the best marketing strategies available to brands, especially on Instagram. While its user base isn’t as large as that of its parent company, Instagram is crushing Facebook in terms of brand engagement.
How would you react if someone you feel a genuine connection with posted about how great his experience with a brand was? You’d likely believe it.
That’s why UGC is more trustworthy, influential, memorable, and, ultimately, effective for brand promotion than many traditional advertising techniques.
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What Is UGC?
While the name is fairly self-explanatory, here’s a quick primer: If a customer or fan posts a photo…
Chart of the day: Most customers have to contact companies twice to get a resolution to a customer service problem
Research by maru/edr has found that almost 8 in 10 customers contact companies by one method (such as online chat) and then by another (such as by phone) - customers feel they need to use multiple channels to get a resolution.
The research also found that (as expected) email is the easiest method of contact, but phone contact led to a more immediate resolution. Live chat also led to a slightly higher number of resolutions than email. Social media was found to resolve issues the least and the most difficult method for contact, which is surprising - especially with the wider use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We have seen that more and more companies are investing time to integrate social media into their…
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18 Jul 2017
A guide to the benefits and setup of 3 essential Google Analytics features
Adding Google Analytics tracking code to a site is quick in most cases, but I find that many businesses leave it there and don't add more customisation to use some of the more advanced Google Analytics features. These features can give great advantages in understanding how users interact with your site, to support ideas for conversion optimisation. You may not consider these features advanced, but they are missing in many cases, so are advanced in this sense!
The three customizations I will cover, which work best when considered together, are:
Event tracking codes
Goal setup
A/B testing and content experiments
1. Event Tracking Codes
The power of event tracking codes is shown by the many user actions that you can monitor within your website. Event tracking codes can make your life easier since you can monitor all these micro-conversions that matter to your…
What to measure when conducting customer surveys
The customer has to be at the heart of your strategy. That's so elemental it hardly merits saying. But how do you accurately build up a picture of your customers desires, wants, and needs?
Customer surveys offer a valuable way of connecting with your customers and understanding them better. But, often it's extremely hard to get your customers' attention for periods long enough to get detailed results. After all, we're all busy. Let's face it, how many emails asking you to give your feedback have you ignored in the past week? More than the number of surveys you've answered in all likelihood.
If you need tips on how to get more from your customer surveys, this infographic from appuri offers four ways you can improve them. Also, see our new Quick Win for members on Customer Satisfaction Surveys and measuring NPS for more detailed recommendations on best practices for…
5 awesome examples of how brands have integrated emojis into their marketing campaigns
Happy World Emoji Day!
Whether it’s a customer service reply or a marketing campaign, brands all over the world are using emojis every day. Emojis present an opportunity to connect with consumers in a fun, informal and creative way. For many, emojis express more than words and over the years we have seen more emojis used by some of the most well-known brands.
How do you feel about using emojis? According to a recent survey, 59% of people aged 18-34 say companies are trying too hard when using emojis in ad or marketing campaigns. It was also found that 53% of young people think mixing emojis with text helps people better understand each other.
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Here…
Chart of the day: UK users spend almost 2 hours per day online via mobile
Mobile takes center stage today as we focus in on the UK, taking a look at the increasingly important role mobiles have to play in online behaviors. According to recent research, internet users are spending on average 1 hour and 42 minutes per day on their mobiles. This is an hour more compared to 2012.
This time is mainly consumed by those in the 16-24 bracket and spend an average of 3 hours 16 minutes on their mobile per day. This number will only increase as we become more dependant on our mobile and tablet devices.
What does this mean for marketers? As time spent online on mobile increases, marketers will need to migrate all their online activity to mobile. The increase in ownership…
Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, Social Media and Memes
As a PhD student, I’m keen to discover the latest academic research, which often happens at conferences. Although my main area of research is within marketing, my specialist area is social media. This year I stumbled over the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media.
In case, like me, you didn’t know, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is a major international organisation focused on ‘Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession’. Their members include Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and many of the computing great and good. They hold 170 conferences a year and have 37 Special Interest Groups, including Hypertext and Social Media.
Academic research source: ACM Digital Library
They also have a Digital Library that contains a wealth of significant academic articles about fake news, analysing Twitter data, bots and big data, privacy and artificial intelligence, as well as every aspect of applied…
Average just won’t cut it...
95 million images and videos are posted to Instagram every day, and more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook since its conception. The need for brands to stand out in the digital era is obvious, yet every day you’ll see generic and uninspiring images carelessly repurposed across the web.
Even household brands fall into the trap: at Picfair, we frequently run reverse image searches of globally-distributed magazine covers to show just how frequently an image has been used. This lack of care shown when selecting imagery runs the risk of brands not only appearing inauthentic but also minimising cut-through on crowded news feeds.
So how can brands ensure their visuals stand out?
1. Be bold
Tapping into trends can work wonders, but it’s also good to break the rules…
Chart of the Day: Consumers prefer to compare and switch on desktop
The need for businesses of all industries to perfect their mobile experience has never been more important than it is in 2017. Google promoting Accelerated Mobile Pages and their announcement of a Mobile First Index mean that we need to optimise our websites for mobile and desktop to remain relevant in the coming years.
As marketers, it is vitally important that we create a great online experience for our customers and potential customers no matter which device they choose to use. To help deliver the best experiences across the purchasing funnel, you need to have actionable data to guide you in the right direction for each of the marketing channels including Search, Social, Email, Display etc.
This is where recent research from Hitwise will come in useful. It shows the distinction between an industry pushing towards mobile and a consumer still using…
