The connected customer
On average, the British household owns over 7 internet devices and unsurprisingly, smartphones are the most common followed by laptops and tablets. More than 60% of all email opens are with a smartphone (Communicator Benchmarking Report 2016), with 50% of all mobile searches conducted in the hope of finding local results and 61% of those searches result in a purchase being made according to Search Engine Watch. The customer is more connected than ever and this is changing buyer behaviour.
A change in behaviour means a change in strategy
A change in behaviour means an impact on the customer journey. Journeys are no longer linear –now we must focus on the multiple touch points to create the ultimate customer experience. The change in customer journey has developed a change in consumer behaviour and expectations, meaning brands need to evolve their products to be one step ahead to stay competitive;…
Learn how to create interactive content and use it to boost your PR efforts
One of the biggest challenges that digital PR practitioners face today is getting their client noticed by customers. In addition, they work very hard at differentiating their clients from their competitors in the market with the help of social media, articles, and blogs.
Customers are bombarded with volumes of information every day through their laptops, smartphones and tablets. In order to grab and hold their attention, PR professionals need to stop selling and start engaging.
Herein lies the importance of interactive content.
The last thing modern customers want to do is sieve through a pile of data for a small piece of pertinent information. It is, therefore, necessary for marketers and PR practitioners to whip up creative ways to not only gain audiences’ attention, but also keep them engaged.
Enter interactive content
Speaking of interactive content, here are a few interesting facts:
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You've invested in personalisation for email, so why is your site the same for all users?
Your email marketing is up to par; it’s personalized, automated and monitored. Exactly like it should be. But what about your website, does it adhere to the same standards? Probably not, since 95% of anonymous website visitors, remain just that - anonymous.
The main reason behind this is that your Website Visitor Experience isn’t personalized. Which is strange, since ALL B2B conversion action is happening on-site. The same way your email marketing is personalized, so the on-site experience you offer to visitors should be.
Why 95% of Anonymous Visitors Don’t Convert?
It’s a staggering number, one that marketers need to stare at. There are three main reasons for this:
Irrelevant content, product or services
False promises
Sometimes people are just not in the mood…
Acquisition cost, lead gen, cost per lead, customer life-time value, ROI... Making sense of customer acquisition metrics
We live in a world of supply and demand, this applies to customer acquisition. Gaining a customer isn’t free, nor is it cheap. It’s a necessary expense when running a business, but it is possible to overspend. It’s important to find a good balance when it comes to customer acquisition, but that’s no easy feat.
It’s difficult to keep costs down because of the competition that’s inherent in any industry. Marketing costs are necessary to beat out the competitors. With so many more demands for customer attention circulating in the modern world, your draw needs to stand out in order to succeed.
Looking at the overall economics of the situation can help with this.
Supply and Demand
The idea of customer acquisition isn’t much different from the way the stock market runs. It’s driven by supply and demand.…
Make sure you remember your target audience aren't always like you. Write emails for them, not you.
I collect first names on my newsletter sign-up form, but I never use them.
[Cue embarrassed silence and nervous shuffling among the experts out there.]
Yes, it’s an email marketing no-no. The extra form field hurts sign-up rates and it raises expectations that subsequent emails will be personalized more than they are. The survival of my “first name” field is partly down to the delusion that I’ll bite the personalization bullet “sometime soon”.
Call me a database coward. But it also survives because seeing those first names acts as a necessary reminder that my emails go to, um, human beings. As in many online industries, the idea that the audience actually includes sentient beings is often trampled into oblivion by our technology focus and the words that go with it:
Targets, segments, cells, addresses, clusters, groups, samples, lists, databases,…
Do you know what pages are drawing valuable traffic and which aren't pulling their weight?
For all of the discussion about creative content marketing campaigns, and for all of the plaudits that they attract, there is an elephant in the room that many brands are ignoring. These brands are investing significant sums in producing campaign-led creative content, but it is the content that they already have that is arguably where that investment should be focused.
Functional content, on-site content, static content or whatever term you prefer to use, is the lifeblood of your digital presence. It is what drives your search visibility, guides your users through the customer journey and reflects your brand personality. But it is all too often neglected.
As search engines continue to change their approach to assessing on-page content, many organisations fail to review and update their content to keep pace with the ever changing, and ever-growing list of…
How to nudge your customers towards conversion
Take it as an established truth: your customers are lazy. They want you to come to them, offer your product and ask minimum effort in return. They will pay you more if you allow them to be lazy.
This means your first concern is to check whether your website will be admired by anyone except you. Ask your friend to “buy” something there. Did they manage it in 4-5 clicks? Have you made your registration form too complicated? Are delivery prices and conditions clear? To scale this to a more, I recommend you run a series of user tests with services like User Testing or What Users do in this Smart Insights list of online customer research tools. You can also review this checklist for eCommerce beginners with which you can verify your online store. For those who want to get a…
From banal to the facile; a review of Cannes Lions thusfar
Cannes Lions has always showcased the best in creative advertising. Each year the event reflects society trends. 2016 is no exception to the rule.
In chandelier adorned halls Creatives and Suits keep fingers crossed, trouser zips in check and lipstick refreshed …all in the hope that they will walk away as champagne winners rather than stumble through the rest of an evening in a drunken stupor.
Behind the scenes, organisers check that entrant ‘invitations’ to submit work have covered costs for food, guest appearances, judge ‘expenses’, photography, staging, hotels and left enough to cover personal executive comfort upgrades.
Beyond behind the scenes smoke and mirrors, the real winners of the Cannes are neither the brands nor agencies that pick up coveted gongs to display in otherwise drab offices (beyond reception areas) or feature in resumes as power-play points for claiming higher salaries. Valiant victors…
What a high converting landing page needs
Being a digital marketer is simple. All that’s required is to get people to do exactly what you want them to do. That is: act. That act may be as basic as wanting them to click on a CTA button to “learn more.” The act may be a tad more complex, like getting someone to share their personal information with you. Or, the act might be transactional (i.e. getting a customer to buy your stuff).
Unfortunately, getting a person to do what you want, be it online or in person, is one of the most difficult tasks in the world. Some might say, darn near impossible. Among the many powerful tools a digital marketer can enlist to aid in his/her effort to get someone to take action, the most effective is a dedicated page for a…
Write better copy to get better results
I once had a tarantula walk over my hand. The experience comes to mind every time I face a blank piece of paper. A rising sense of panic…paralysis…a prickle of sweat. Sound familiar? So I thought I’d share the practical tricks I use to write email marketing copy. Not so much the intricacies of word choice or paragraph structure, but the process of actually getting the job done and done well. Your tips are also welcome!
1. Define the recipient
The writing process needs a framework to proceed in: a real or implicit briefing…the whos, whats and whys of the task. Who will get this email and in what context? Have they undertaken some specific action (like registered for an event)? When will they get the email?
How does this email fit, conceptually and in terms of timing, with other emails or related marketing campaigns…
