To make the benefits of online marketing more concrete, let’s consider some common goals for auto dealerships
The automobile industry has come a long way — and not just in terms of technology. At the beginning of the millennium, those looking for a new car would typically go around town trying to find the right model at the right price. But according to research from Google, the customer journey has become much less physical. Questions about product affordability, suitability, and ranking are increasingly being resolved during online micro-moments.
If you’re in the automobile sales market, the message is clear: with car shoppers spending less time exploring dealerships firsthand, digital marketing is gaining more importance in capturing their attention and business. To make the benefits of online marketing more concrete, let’s consider some common goals for auto dealerships — and how digital tactics fit…
Three tools and frameworks to shape your brand’s positioning
Defining your business or brand’s value proposition is one of the most important tasks you will undertake as a marketer. A clear, differentiated value proposition is what will enable you to communicate to prospects and customers the overall benefits you have to offer and why you are better option when compared with your competitors.
The value proposition is an articulation of the overall position your brand occupies in the marketplace from your customers’ point-of-view. Although you will always start with an internal view of how you want to be perceived, the customer will ultimately make a final decision. I’d therefore like to look at three practical frameworks that can be used to develop a brand proposition that will keep the customer front and centre.
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Does your business have what it takes to make the customer-centric shift?
To be a market leader, customer-centricity needs to be embedded within every facet of your organization. Modern companies need to truly understand what their customers and prospects expect, so they can deliver a customer experience that meets, and ultimately exceeds these expectations. The highly fluid nature of interactions across online, mobile, in-store, and customer service channels makes understanding customers more challenging than ever, yet vital to effective customer engagement.
With new market entrants disrupting the landscape every day, companies need insights in real-time to capture the constantly evolving needs of their customers, and be able to accurately predict what they'll ask for next. The pace of innovation needs to be accelerated in order to outperform and differentiate yourself from your strongest competitors.
Understanding the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’
Therefore, you need to go beyond transactional data and unlock the attitudes, emotions and…
Find out how strong branding adds value to your business, and how to get started when it comes to building your own brand
Branding. The word is often thrown around in conversations about marketing, but what does it really involve and is it worth the effort?
Broadly speaking, branding is the sum total of anything you use to differentiate your business from the competition, while also creating a unique identity that is recognizable and elicits an emotional response from prospective and existing customers. It’s essentially every strategic move you make towards crafting your image, and includes everything from your logo and brand colours right up to your tone of voice, tagline, product offering, and customer service.
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The benefits of effective branding
Increase recognition:Your branding needs to be consistent…
Compilation of abandonment rates and follow-up email conversion rates in retail, fashion, travel, finance and not-for profit
We recommend retargeting as an essential activity in our RACE framework customer lifecycle activities. That's because it can help boost both conversion to lead and conversion to sale conversion rates. This pair of charts focusing on email retargeting show it's worthwhile putting a range of retargeting tactics in place, regardless of the type of business.
Cart abandonment rates
This data is based on abandonment rates from Salecycle customers. It shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 75.4% with rates in some sectors such as travel and finance being even higher.
Following up on this interest with a reminder email (if you have collected it, which you should) is one way of increasing conversion, using a simple reminder or a more persuasive discount. It's worth testing which discounts…
How brands are bridging the gap between online and offline shopping experiences
The age of the customer is upon us and a big reason for it is the growth of technology. Customers can thoroughly research a brand or a product before buying. They use several devices and channels to look you up and, what’s more, they’re also expecting a different customer experience – a better one, in fact.
In my latest guide for Smart Insights, I take a deeper look at omnichannel marketing and what it means check it out if you want to create better customer experiences for your e-commerce or retail business and to boost your sales.
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Right now, I want to share some examples of omnichannel marketing in action to…
We analyzed more than 791 million emails to see what the best hour and day is to send high-converted email marketing
Every year at Omnisend we analyze our clients’ email marketing and marketing automation data to see the biggest trends, opportunities and best practices that lead to great conversions and sales.
Recently, we dug deep into 9,500 brands that sent more than 92,000 email campaigns (that’s more than 791 million emails, by the way) to see what the best hour, the day of the week, and day of the month is to send out email campaigns.
By understanding these practical results, you’ll be able to adapt your own email marketing strategy to improve your conversions and skyrocket your sales.
But first, it’s important to emphasize the importance here of list-building. If you don’t have a big enough list, you won’t really see significant results that can help inform you about the best email marketing…
Let us look at the rise Google Shopping
New research by Adthena uncovers the extent to which Google Shopping ads, commonly referred to as Product Listing Ads (or PLAs), have become the most popular ad format for retail advertisers, with ad spend now far in excess of text ads in retail categories.
Google Shopping ads now drive 76.4% of retail search ad spend, generating 85.3% of all clicks on Adwords or Google Shopping campaign ads. This report benchmarks Google Shopping (PLA) ad spend across 40 million ads in the US/UK. From 267,000 competitors, encompassing over 1 million search terms.
The data reveals the true extent of Google Shopping ad format adoption in the US/UK, among advertisers across retail categories such as Fashion and Apparel, Consumer Electronics and Home & Garden.
“The bigger picture here is the shift in which audiences are consuming new ad formats,” says…
With the increasing amount of data breaches, internal controversies, and shady business dealings that have been uncovered in the past few years, consumers are finding it difficult to trust businesses
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer report, 42% of customers claim that they have lost trust in many brands. In fact, customer confidence in American companies has continued to decline over the past few years.
Trust is earned, and it must be cultivated over time. This is tricky, especially for new brands who have little experience to go off of. So, how can you establish this with your own audience to not only attract customers, but also build brand loyalty for years to come?
Let’s discuss.
Define Your Brand Voice and Stick to it
Every business has a personality. There are words you would use to label a brand that could easily be used to describe a person.
For example, what is Apple’s brand voice? Perhaps…
Urgency messaging is a great way to raise conversions but is getting an increasingly bad rep
Getting visitors on your site and converting seems to be more difficult than ever. Consumers are indecisive, and, with more choice online than ever before, your website visitors are less likely to hang around.
Creating urgency is one of the best ways to raise ecommerce conversions. In my 16 years in ecommerce, there are few techniques I’ve seen that so reliably raise sales.
Urgency works by overcoming your visitors’ mental hurdles to purchasing from you. Perhaps they’re indecisive, prone to overthinking, or they just want to shop around a bit more. There are so many psychological factors at play that influence whether someone will buy from you.
It is, however, a technique to be used with caution. The problem with urgency messaging is that it can come off as disingenuous or just all round scammy. At best this…
