How can online marketers handle the new challenges with the help of one KPI – Customer Lifetime Value?
Marketers are facing a new era in online retail, combining both technology and customer-centricity. It might not be a new thing for most of you and yet a survey shows that most companies are in “digital denial”, not accepting that it is tools and technologies now to help marketers acquire and retain their customers. Important as it is, one-to-one personalization is a challenge as well, which Chloë Thomas indicates in her recent book.
Why that matters in eCommerce?
Customers are more demanding than ever. eCommerce is more competitive than ever. Marketing tools, channels and data flows are more overwhelming than ever.
Online retail marketers today need to be present at the right time with the right message to the right prospect.
So how can we address that?
Let’s try an ACKNOWLEDGE – LEARN – ACT –…
Applying the RACE Framework to eCcommerce
The eCommerce sector is soon to be hit with one of the greatest opportunities of the year. Sales, brand awareness and loyal customers are all opportunities to address within this festive period.
Last year, eCommerce Black Friday sales hit an estimated £4.3 bn in the UK. The growing popularity of Black Friday amongst shoppers opens opportunities for eCommerce businesses that do not usually use discounted offerings (to maintain customer perceived brand equity and quality) to get involved with the heightened retail buzz.
Within this article, the RACE framework is introduced and applied within the context of Black Friday and the e-commerce sector.
Breaking down your Black Friday marketing strategy will give your e-commerce marketing initiatives a concrete structure to thoroughly approach, identify, and meet your outlined Black Friday objectives.
The RACE Framework, Black Friday, and eCommerce
The RACE framework takes into account all aspects of the customer journey,…
Flat Website Design: A Fad or the Web’s New Look?
Like the hottest fashion fads, website design trends come and go. The days when carousel sliders and sidebars ruled the Web are long gone. In the last few years, flat websites have taken over.
The reason? Modern Internet users are savvier than their predecessors. They know how to navigate a webpage, so there’s no need to use shading and textures to guide their eyes.
Flat designs also have faster load times and a clean, professional look. According to Bluehost, these sites offer perfect scalability for mobile devices. These attributes not only enhance UX but also improve a site’s PageRank.
But is flat design a bottle-rocket fad that will burn out as fast as it took off? Or will it be the Web’s new wayfarer – a trend that remains popular through the decades…
Bending The Budget: Adapting Your Marketing Budget To The Season
As marketing professionals, we’re beholden to the seasons – some times of year are simply better for sales than others. For this reason alone, it doesn’t make sense to evenly distribute your marketing budget across the year, but there are other relevant reasons you should be budgeting seasonally as well. When we pay attention to our target audience and the needs our products fulfill, we can make smarter decisions about marketing budget allocations.
Identifying Your Strategies
One thing you’ll need to take into consideration when breaking down your digital marketing budget each season will be the question of format. There are many different ways to build your digital presence, but they come with varied expenses.
Search ads – the ads that appear on search engines when someone enters relevant terms – often take up about the same portion of the average digital marketing…
If your open and click rates are dropping, you'll need to re-think your strategy
You had the best intentions; you worked diligently to get those conversions and build your email marketing list; you vowed to run a quality campaign and build relationships with your prospects, turning them into happy customers. Somehow it all went wrong. Your analytics are telling you that only a small percentage of your emails are opened, that you have been marked as spam by many of those subscribers you worked so hard to get.
Crossing the Line
Somewhere along the way, you crossed the line and became a harassment rather than a value. And you didn’t even recognize that you had done it. Is it fatal? No. But as you recover from this, you will need to understand how it happened so you never make the same mistake again.
How to Recognize You Have Become a Spammer
Be honest with yourself.…
How to utilise continuous improvements and ‘big bets’ to achieve operational and strategic excellence
As part of any digital transformation agenda, the ability the test and learn gives businesses the opportunity to experiment, iterate and grow skills and competences throughout the organisation. For digital marketers, this opportunity is becoming increasingly important as technology continues to advance and larger companies face new and emerging threats from more nimble, innovative competitors.
To drive meaningful digital transformation at scale, businesses must therefore be open to the adoption of a test and learn culture, which will enable marketers to optimise digital media activation, create first-class digital experiences and develop learning across the organisation. Much of this will be dependent on each organisation’s stage in the digital transformation journey:
Three big digital trends
The importance of developing a test and learn culture is reflected in the numerous …
Tackling the challenge of Digital Transformation
One the one hand, we’ve become so accustomed to digital technology, we’re no longer able to imagine life without it. And yet, when it comes to the digital transformation of the workplace, we still have a long way to go. The greatest hurdle digital transformation is going to face is, simply put, people.
To clarify, there are a number of things that don’t have to do with technical innovations that are going to make the process more complicated. That’s not to say that creating the proper infrastructure to accommodate the rapid pace of development is not going to be a major issue in and of itself. But a number of key factors in implementing digital solutions are related to people. And while tech is relatively easy to change and adapt, people are not. However, the situation is not as bleak as it sounds if you break…
Agile and real-time marketing campaigns needs planning for if your going to get it right
There’s one thing that’s certain on the internet: things move fast. And those early bird online marketers, so to speak, get the worm (meaning the traffic). Staying ahead of the game is very important when it comes to standing out from the sea of content and advertising available to modern consumers.
To capture the attention of target audiences, companies need to employ a good agile marketing strategy. Agile marketing exploits topics that are trending on the internet and social media to remain relevant at any given time. Basically, agile marketing means that a company or a brand quickly produces small amounts of content tailored to whatever topic that has the public captivated at the moment.
Agile marketing is timely, flexible, and attention grabbing. Companies absolutely must invest in developing an agile brand to quickly adapt to changing…
Facebook advertising is traditionally best for B2C marketers, but now B2B marketers can get in on the action.
Move over B2C marketers, the B2B crowd is coming to Facebook advertising, and they’re ready to play hardball!
Traditionally, Facebook advertising has been somewhat useless to B2B marketers. It’s a great tool for B2C marketers, who can offer discounts, promote sales and retarget buyers who have left items in their carts through adverts on Facebook, but these tactics don’t always work for the B2B crowd.
When it comes to advertising, B2C and B2B marketers have different goals in the back of their minds. B2B marketers are out to:
Generate increased knowledge and awareness of a product or service. You can create buyer personas to help you better understand who you’re targeting.
Reach out to a company advisors, decision-makers and others involved in a…
Tips to help you learn how to effectively utilise trigger emails and reduce shopping cart abandonment
When it comes to successful email marketing, it is evident that carefully worded calls to action must be married with incentive for the customer to convert. Consumers must be enticed to click through from the email message, enter the retail e-commerce website and make a transaction.. They must be provided with the assurance that their patronage is valued and that their satisfaction is of the company’s utmost importance.
The internet is rich with “email marketing best practices” resources; articles, blog posts, software and how-to lists enlightening those interested in utilizing trigger emails as an effective marketing tool with vast amounts of information on the topic. Despite the wealth in available material, email marketers continue to commit trigger email faux-pas that extend beyond the realm of misspells and misplaced graphics. These errors dramatically…
