If you've been thinking about starting an e-commerce business, you might want to consider the subscription box market. Subscription-based mail order businesses like Ipsy, Dollar Shave Club, Blue Apron, and Birchbox have been growing by leaps and bounds

According to Forbes, the subscription services e-commerce market has grown by more than 100 percent every year for the last five years. There are countless subscriptions available, from high-end niche products to deliveries that save customers a trip to the store for food, toilet paper, and razors. The typical subscriber has higher-than-average income but little free time, so convenience is a big part of the appeal. Novelty is also a big draw with boxes that provide everything from goodies for Star Wars fans to rare teas from around the world. The costs vary widely. Some subscription boxes like Birchbox and Ipsy charge around…

How AI is revolutionizing e-commerce even for small businesses

If you attended any digital marketing or eCommerce conferences this year then you know that artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics around. Speakers are talking about it, vendors are selling it, and attendees are just trying to keep up. If you walk away from the AI discussions because they’re too complex or not right for your brand, then you’re missing out. [si_guide_block id="18204" title="Access Business Resource - Multichannel retail proposition audit and competitor benchmarking template" description="Review the effectiveness of E-commerce propositions using this Excel spreadsheet"/] AI solutions are easier to use and apply to your eCommerce business than ever. Let’s dispel the myths around artificial intelligence to find out how this tool can benefit your business. You don’t need the budget of a national retailer like Yankee Candle Company to wow your customers with artificial intelligence. …

Predictions, trends and what to look out for in UX and CRO in the year ahead

More businesses than ever are running Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programmes and User Experience research are going mainstream. With CRO and UX in the limelight, what do industry experts predict will happen next? Good user experience is driven by user research and good CRO testing methods combined lead to higher revenues. The result of both higher sales and happier customers. But these worlds are huge, in the UX world there are designers, researchers, strategists and in the CRO world it’s not much different. This is why our trends post covers a lot of ground, from research, to operational trends and beyond. Let's go straight into the trends, first with a prediction from myself, after that, we cover CRO, research, and content UX trends.

1. Quantitative user research becomes the focus

User research was founded in qualitative research principles and methods,…

Agile digital marketing: It's time to consider how focusing on agility can reenergize your marketing efforts.

As a marketer, you are probably familiar with the traditional waterfall process. This is where your team creates monthly, quarterly, and yearly plans comprised of a series of initiatives to launch throughout the year. While it is straightforward, this approach still makes it difficult to foresee the market pulse from 12 or even six months out. As a result, this lack of predictability can derail workflows.

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True, the waterfall process has certain advantages, such as the ability to meticulously plan details, establish timelines, and delegate duties, but as a marketing professional, you should also consider using an agile approach. With agile digital marketing, your team works…

Social media strategy and planning essentials -  Recommended dashboards and tools for creating social media marketing reports for different reporting periods

This is part 8 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at resource planning for social media; in this blog, I discuss what data you should capture and report to measure the impact of your social media marketing campaigns. To frame the conversation, I’ll cover four different type of report: Daily dashboard Weekly KPI report Monthly roll-up report Quarterly strategy review

Reporting scope and goals

It’s important to understand the context, and limitations, for reporting. The data you have access to depends upon your business resources and scale of social activity. For example, many small businesses don’t have subscriptions to social media monitoring tools like Audiense and Buzzsumo, so won’t be able to include data from these in their regular reports. Focus on what data you…

Chart of the Day: Research shows the most popular measurements and KPIs for email marketing evaluation

I’ve been taking a look at the latest trends in email marketing based on the DMA Email tracker in advance of speaking at the Email Innovations Summit at Data-driven business later in the month. Since the focus is data or insights-driven business, I was interested to see how evaluation of email marketing has moved on (or not). I like the DMA email tracker report since it asks respondents to a survey to give an estimate of the average ROI of email marketing. This always shows the power of email marketing as a relatively low-cost responsive medium which drives results in many industry sectors... In 2018, the ROI of email marketing is £32.28 for every £1 spent, up from £30.03 last year.

Metrics and KPIs used to evaluate email marketing

Digging into the details of how email marketing is evaluated,…

Don't fall foul of these common Google Analytics mistakes

Google Analytics is a fantastically useful tool for businesses of all sizes. Rather helpfully for all the SMEs and SMBs out there, it's also free. That means anyone can start using Google analytics to study their web traffic in an attempt to tease out insights, to use to improve their sites.

This openness and low barriers to entry mean it's easy to launch yourself into Google Analytics before you actually have a handle on exactly what you are using for and how you should use it for your business. There's nothing wrong with getting stuck in and learning on the fly, but it can leave you vulnerable to making mistakes that could affect your bottom line. This post will introduce you to some of the basic mistakes people often make when setting up and using their Google Analytics. If you want…

Consumer brand marketing made creative by Honda

We look back to 2003 and Honda were struggling to make a sustainable impact in the European markets so turned to brand marketing . They had seen a decline in sales since 1998 and their 2nd position to Toyota had been lost to Nissan. Japanese car placement in the European market was essential, and Honda needed to make a bigger splash with a smaller pebble. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/]

The Play

In 2001 that Wieden+Kennedy proposed to Honda a new advertising strategy based on the company's Japanese motto, "Yume No Chikara" ("Power of Dreams"). The stated goal of the campaign was to increase Honda's share of the UK market to five percent within three years and to change…

Chart of the Day: Brand loyalty is alive, but customers have expectations

Everyone wants to create brand loyalty with their customers. It means that you’ve become a go-to brand for their needs and that customers will choose your products over competitive offers and sometimes technically-superior models from other brands. Nintendo is one of the biggest companies that rely on brand loyalty. They’ve rarely had the most powerful games consoles on the market (Sony and Microsoft constantly duelling for that honour), but Nintendo fans know that Mario and Zelda titles are only available on Nintendo consoles, so they remain loyal. I will personally ride for Nintendo to the end of my days thanks to their great games I have enjoyed throughout my life (even if they also made the Wii U). While brand loyalty is a goal for many retailers, it can be tough to know just how many purchases it takes from a…

Is your site mobile friendly? Find out how you can prepare for Google's mobile-first indexing

It should come as no surprise Google is working toward indexing web pages primarily based on the mobile output of web pages versus desktop versions in what the search engine giant has called the ‘mobile-first’ index. This is where search engine users are predominantly headed, after all. 2017 marked the year, when, according to Google’s Consumer Barometer Study, mobile internet usage crossed 50% in all 63 countries covered by the report for the first time, albeit the range of usage country to country differed dramatically. Furthermore, from a search engine user perspective, Google have shared there are now more searches on mobile devices than desktop in several countries.

What is the mobile-first index and how is it different?

Historically, Google’s index has…