The use of Net Promoter® (NPS) score as a way to collect customer feedback has been available for years although it's perhaps better known and applied more widely in the US. We're always interested to find more about new methods to better understand customers, so wanted to alert you to another tool. CustomerGauge, surveys customers continuously and provides the necessary reporting analytics to tie the feedback back to your process improvements. At the same time, I thought it could be useful to explain some of the principles of NPS since it's not known so well in the UK. Robert Kerner of Customer Gauge is in a good position to help here. Rob has worked in process improvement for the last 15 years in various business functions: finance, marketing and sales. I…

Our interview with Brent Coker, creator of Webreep

I love finding out about new tools to help improve marketing, particularly when they help understand customer feedback and drive change. It's one of the reasons I got into web analytics and it's our main focus at SmartInsights.com. Of course, most web analytics tools like Google Analytics are great at telling you what customers are doing, but not so great at telling you why they are doing it and what their motivations and feelings are. Thats's why I've always been keen to share the different types of online customer feedback service available. I was recently alerted to a new tool by Brent Coker which I think adds to tools which help the "Not What, but Why?" question. It's an interesting tool for me since it's based on academic research dating back to 2004, yet is a practical real world tool with benchmarking capabilities.…

Our interview with Claire Rollinson of AlchemyWorx

I've been in touch with Claire Rollinson for a while swapping ideas on Email marketing via the social networks and through IDM Digital courses. Initially Claire worked out as a marketing comms manager at different charities and more recently as head of campaign management at specialist Email marketing agency Alchemy Worx. This gives her great experience of campaigns across a range of sectors and brands. As always, in our interview series, I encourage the marketers I interview to share tips which prompt the question "Can we try that? Should we be doing this? Should we use this tool?". I hope you find Claire's recommendations useful. As she suggests, getting email marketing right is important because "every single message you send can have an incremental – and if you do…

I met Mel Henson at last year's ECMOD conference where we discussed the pleasure and pain of book writing. She was hard at work on a new book on copywriting: [amazon-product text="Flicks & Clicks: How to Create Websites and Catalogues that Sell More" type="text"]1907722041[/amazon-product]. There are relatively few new books on online copywriting and if you want to review your approaches, I highly recommend it. It's full of practical tips and examples blending on and offline copywriting. So, we arranged to have a chat about what works and what doesn't in online copywriting.I hope you find Mel's ideas helpful? What are your pet hates or peeves with online copy? 1. What inspired you to write "Flicks and Clicks?" When I first specialised in copy for home shopping, I discovered that there is real ‘science of…

Our interview with Richard Dennys, Marketing Director of Qype on how marketing drives growth at Qype

Founded in 2006, Qype is Europe’s largest site for user-generated reviews and recommendations of places, events and experiences. Qype has 18 million unique users per month and over 2.2 million user-generated reviews covering business categories in more than 166,000 cities with locations worldwide. Qype allows users to search for and read reviews about a restaurant, shop, service or experience and, with the Qype App, which has been downloaded over 1 million times, users can read and add reviews on their phone and use the application as a personal sat-nav to find places nearby. Available in seven different languages, Qype is a pan-European local review site able to offer its international users a multi-lingual platform. We talked to Richard Dennys, marketing director of…

Lisa Wood, Head of Marketing at HSBC Bank International explains the thinking behind their annual customer engagement campaign

HSBC International offer Offshore banking, so people living overseas are a key audience, with the Expat Explorer survey a key part of customer communications strategy:

It was great to get the opportunity to interview Lisa about the commercial thinking behind the campaign since I've used this brand-led campaign as an example of this customer engagement approach for several years now in my digital strategy and SEO workshops. I think it's a good example of how you can develop a customer engagement device within an audience that's often time poor and it really adds to what the brand offers. The fourth survey has just gone live, so in this timely…

Making analytics make a difference - our interview with David Sealey

How do you try to make use of your analytics? We all know that in theory web analytics tools give us fantastic insight to help us improve results for our digital marketing. In practice you need to know the right questions to ask and use the right reports and measures to find the answer. You also need to know the intuition to follow-up on a hunch. Every marketer and every analyst will have their own unique style. As a consultant I'm always keen to learn how others tackle a problem so I can learn from their ideas. In this interview, David Sealey of Design and Analytics Agency Quba shares his approach on how to avoid "analysis paralysis".

Current marketing challenges for 2011

Question 1: What do you see as the current major challenges faced by marketers and how can analytics help? …

Our interview with Guy Stephens on the past, present and future of online customer service

You may know Guy from his work at the Carphone Warehouse where he was Customer Knowledge Manager or Mars Drink UK Global Online Marketing Manager. I became aware of his passion for building brands through championing customer service when he was at Carphone Warehouse through his Twitter feed and conference presentations. I'm delighted he agreed to talk us through the challenges and opportunities of using social media to deliver customer service since, in my opinion, he is the one of the world's leading thinkers on this topic as his answers to my questions below demonstrate. Today, Guy is a Senior Consultant Foviance and is active in sharing his expertise through various channels: Linked In Group: Where Social Media Meets Customer Service Social media customer service: http://squidoo.com/socialmediacustomerservice Twitter:…

One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media. Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used. This category of website personalization and behavioural targeting tools is also interesting since everyone still quotes the Amazon personalized recommendation "collaborative filtering" technique - read paper describing the algorithm. Most are still wowed by the accuracy of the technique (apart from when buying gifts for others...), but it doesn't seem to give rise to too many privacy complaints.

Magiq dynamic website personalization software

When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was…

I was recently putting the digital world to rights with digital marketing consultant James Gurd (James on Linked In, James on Twitter). We were talking about the ongoing need for straightforward advice on SEO for small and medium businesses who are new to SEO. We both felt there is still too much complexity and too many myths. James finds that when talking to clients that many still want to get to grips with SEO essentials so they can can focus their investment working with their SEO agency on advanced strategy. So I'm delighted that James has offered to share his approach to cutting through the complexity - I hope it provides useful frameworks and interesting reading for marketers grappling with the basic success factors for SEO and also for consultants and agencies grappling with explaining it. [caption id="attachment_2960" align="aligncenter" width="504" caption="A five step SEO Strategy framework"]…