Chart of the day: Time is the biggest challenge when it comes to content marketing

Marketers have revealed time and quality are their biggest content marketing challenges according to research by Clearvoice. Time, content quality and creating content were the top three challenges, which suggest a perception of the number of resource marketers feel content needs. And right they are! Quality and effective content takes time, needs to be good quality and needs the appropriate resource to put aside this time and make sure it's great quality. Marketers recognise that it's quality over quantity and understand quality is the most important aspect. Production is also a big challenge for marketers, the resource involved in making it happen and getting it live and as someone who works full time in the production of content, it certainly is harder than you may think. …

6 emerging email and marketing automation trends to help inform your 2018 email marketing communications strategy

Email marketing continues to be a vital communications channel with the DMAs latest Email tracker showing that email receives 30 times return on investment on average. 95% of respondents rated it as 'important' or 'very important' to their organization. Yet competition in the inbox for attention from email subscribers remains fierce as social media remains important and competitors optimise their approach. [si_guide_block id="44461" title="Download FREE Resource – Email trends 2018: A visual guide" description="Review your approach to email marketing by reviewing the latest trends."/] So, it's important to review the success factors to improving email ROI, which we summarise in this article with the help of the email specialists who kindly contributed their views and predictions on the trends which will be important in 2018. While some of these are not 'new' techniques, they are increasing…

Email marketing may not seem as sexy as some marketing channels. But when it comes to results, it leaves the rest in the dust

Research by McKinsey tells us email is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Once you’ve got customers buying from you, email is your best opportunity to increase their customer lifetime value. Customers who receive your emails spend 138% more, on average, than those who don’t subscribe. There’s a tonne of clever stuff you can do with email. So much so, you’d never have time to do it all manually. This where email marketing automation comes in. Automating your email campaigns allows you to get ahead of the competition, automatically. It frees your team from repetitive tasks and enables you to use intelligent personalization without breaking a sweat. But which automated email campaigns should you start with? Here are ten campaigns you can easily implement…

Chart of the Day: Use Machine Learning AI to understand the propensity of your site visitors to convert

I'm reviewing a different type of Chart today since while reviewing Google's Demo Account while working on some new learning materials for our members I noticed the intriguing new Conversion Probability feature Beta. Here's what it shows for the one hundred thousand odd sessions in the Demo account:  You can see that it breaks down these sessions into likelihood to convert, so if we can learn more about what turns the high-converting visitors onto our products, we have more chance of finding and converting more visits in future. As we explain in our AI and machine learning guide, for us, the most exciting marketing application of artificial intelligence is using machine learning to learn from historic interactions with our audiences see what influences their propensity to convert.…

Are you looking for the right mix of activities that can help you create a power-packed Twitter marketing plan?

Here are a few activities that can get you hundreds of thousands to millions of impressions, engagements, retweets, replies, likes, link clicks, profile clicks and many more. One tip here is before initiating any activity, ask yourself why you are doing this and how can you do this without any friction. Apart from being efficient, your action should be effective! But, before all that, would you like to know why you should train yourself to go for a power-packed Twitter marketing? Have a look at the following statistics. It clearly indicates how brands are taking complete control of this tactic. [si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 common social media marketing mistakes guide" description="Our actionable guide to avoiding common social media marketing mistakes to help you avoid the pitfalls that limit engagement with your target…

The rise in voice search has stolen the marketing tech headlines for 2018

If comScore and Mary Meeker's annual internet trends reports are to be believed, 2018 could indeed be the firing of the starting pistol in the race for brands to optimize for voice. Both of these industry sources reported that: "40% of adults now use voice search once per day and Google voice search queries were up 35 fold in 2016 from 2008 levels" But before jumping head-first into exercising a "voice strategy" let's take a brief look at the opportunity and what it means for brands looking to take advantage of this tactic when it comes to content marketing. For those who have not subscribed to the free online digital marketing conference, Digital Olympus, I would seriously recommend subscribing to it. The event brings together expert speakers from the world of digital marketing to present slide decks on specific subject areas, one…

Which KPIs will help retailers optimise their mobile apps?

Well, you've finally launched your app and like other app makers in the retail space, you are looking to increase engagement with your users and generate income. You are monitoring your downloads and sources, but is that really enough to understand your users and discover what makes them stick? Will you be able to fully optimise your app based on this information alone? The answer is a pretty firm NO. You might be monitoring certain elements or metrics of your app, but is it really giving you the info you need? Going one step further, you need to be monitoring the right KPIs under those metrics. Because when it comes right down to it, KPIs are where the clues are at - these will guide you in optimising your app and increasing conversions. In this post, I…

Create a perfect landing page that converts viewers into customers

Those in the online business may be aware of the benefits of a well-designed landing page. As a goal conversion tactic, a landing page is an effective marketing tool that can help grab the attention of your target audience, helping you increase the conversion rate of your varied marketing campaigns. Mostly, a landing page is created to; Generate targeted leads. Increase email list subscribers. Boost social media followers. Or to increase the sale of a particular product. From a perspective of increasing conversion, it makes sense to direct traffic to a dedicated landing page that provides a predefined action rather than a general web page on your website. As such, if you want to generate better leads that convert then it is essential that you create a landing page when running a marketing campaign.

[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download Premium Resource – Landing…

Short ethnography studies can help to create personas and improve your website user experience and usability

Anyone who reads my Smart Insights blog posts will probably know by now that I try to achieve two things: Show marketers that research isn't too difficult, time-consuming or expensive (ok that's actually three things there) Show marketers the benefit of research and why it's worth the effort The next method I want to talk to you about is a particularly time-consuming type of research: ethnography, which are long-term observational type studies, however, I also believe that a simple short-term ethnography study can also yield fantastic benefits for user research and building personas which I recommend contain these features: Ethnography doesn't need to be time-consuming and there are ways of using this research method on a short-term basis to help increase your conversions and focus your marketing by helping…

The must-knows if you want to create a multi-vendor website

E-commerce marketers who dedicate boundless effort to their businesses aren’t new to being told that “technology” is the best way to make their business work. And as with all good harvests, the yield from the newest of technologies depends on how well you pair them up with your business. Things are not much different for multi-vendor e-commerce websites. In the recent past, these websites have captured both the stage and the spotlight. With the passage of time, and with technology spilling over into every available space on the web, multi-vendor e-commerce websites have become the norm and the way forward. Given the intrinsically global nature of the trending e-commerce initiatives, it is vital to plant your business into a stable marketing matrix. Treat this article more like a preach piece on how to create a Multi-vendor e-commerce website from scratch. Follow the tips catalogued…