How to set up a good mobile friendly website
Having a mobile-friendly website extends beyond good practice, it’s a requirement if you want your business to succeed. Mobile now exceeds desktop Internet usage and this means mobile users expect businesses to provide an excellent experience optimized for their device. In fact, nearly half of consumers won’t return to a website if a website doesn’t load properly.
If you aren’t sure if your site is mobile-friendly, you need to make sure it is as soon as possible. It’s crucial to find ways to convert leads into sales and not turn people away because your website fails to load correctly. Customers on the go have their mobile devices in hand and want to be able to look up your business no matter where they are located – and possibly even contact you. There is a lot of competition in the small business arena,…
Chart of the Day: Email benchmarking report 2016.
The DMA’s Email benchmarking report, sponsored by dotmailer, covering email performance data from 2015, has been recently released. They cover emails delivered, open, click through and click-to-open rates. But the dramatic statistic is the click-to-open rate (CTOR), which has declined to 20% in 2015 from the high of 32% in 2013. So, why the extreme decline?
Let's look at what a CTOR is first: a CTOR, used to report on the effectiveness of your email content. It is calculated by taking your unique clicks and dividing by your unique opens and multiply by 100 to get the percentage (eg: (232 unique clicks ÷ 1200 unique opens) x 100 = 19%). Now to calculate an accurate CTOR, we need accurate clicks and opens. Unfortunately, open rates aren't always an accurate reflection…
Content Recommendation Engines are used by over half of all top sites
We're all familiar with those 'around the web' sections featured at the bottom of articles in many news sites. These 'advertorial' boxes can sometimes show dubious content which hasn't been short of criticism, specially among the editorial stuff of leading publications. However, the reality is that they're a significant revenue stream for some of the biggest media sites in the web. While the proliferation of content recommendation engines as a monetization tool for sites of all sizes has been remarkable, recently Slate.com and The New Yorker decided to drop them due to links that can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities.
SimilarTech released new insights showing the market share of content recommendation engines to understand their popularity among the biggest US & UK media publishers online.
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3 key steps for fueling your performance with the latest news and information
Google Reader is long-gone as a way of keeping track of the latest developments in digital marketing. The important industry information on platform changes that we still need is out there but it is coming at us from more sources than most of us have the time to track effectively. The good news is that, with just a little planning, you can still stay on top of exactly the information that you need to fuel your own performance and also give your bosses, clients, co-workers and followers great reasons to be glad that they have you around.
Gathering business information is a full-time job for me; I publish a newsletter, Who's Blogging What, that highlights important blog posts for 20,000 subscribers working in social media and online marketing. Given this, Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights thought it would be useful…
Our interview with Template Monster's CEO, David Braun
What are the challenges and success factors in creating online startups serving small businesses? To shed light on this with a case study, we spoke to David Braun about why he founded Template Monster and where he is taking the businesses during an interesting time for web developers looking to serve small businesses.
How did you come to a decision to start template monster ?
David: It all started quite a long time ago, although it seems as if it were yesterday. TemplateMonster wasn’t created from scratch, it was based on a local web development agency. We owe the idea of TemplateMonster to the customers who didn’t need a custom design, they needed a cheaper solution. At the moment we didn’t have anything that would meet their requirements. Once I saw a designer working with his templates and that was the moment when the idea…
Examples showing how Chatbots will become an increasingly important marketing app in the future
Artificial intelligence and machine learning is one of the top trends in digital marketing for 2017. At the same time, we are seeing a reduction in demand for apps, particularly as the largest platforms are reaching saturation.
You could say that chatbots are the new apps; the new customer service reps, not to mention the new support system for marketers. In future, more people will turn to chatbots to manage their daily chores, be it ordering a ride or a pizza. Often these are built within Messenger apps themselves.
In fact, the rise of bots could be plainly attributed to increasing usage of messenger apps. According to Forester, people spend a staggering 85% of their time using the top messenger apps including Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack and…
Chart of the Day: What is the best day to send your emails
In the chart below we look at B2B customers engagement with marketing emails they have been sent. It shows a spike on Mondays with 4.70% higher open rate than the industry average and then it slowly drops through the week. However, click-to-opens increases from Thursday through till Saturday.
These results are surprising as this is for the B2B sector and generally the working day is from Monday - Friday. In the past, we have been told by blogs, papers and trends not to send on Mondays or weekends. But working hours are changing, due to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and mobile working. Our clients are being offered a more flexible working day, so this changes all previous trends or assumptions and will most definitely…
Chart of the Day: Key Financial Services Industry Marketing Trends
There were 347 million mobile payments made via banking apps in 2015. This is a rise of 54% compared with 2014. In addition to 417 million payments made via internet banking in 2015, a modest 2% rise from 2014.
The chart comes from a report by BBA, which is the UK's largest trade association for the banking sector. The report found:
With 40,000 financial app downloads a day in 2015, this is a 25% increase on 2015. The question for the beginning of 2017 is, what will 2016 show?
There were also 4.3 million mobile banking logins in 2015 and 11 million app logins a day.
There were 15 million Contactless cards issued in 2015 and 250% annual rise in spending using Contactless cards.
There were just 71 bank branch visits a day in 2015.
Source:…
Chart of the day: Case studies, best practice advice and how to guides are the most effective types of content.
A recent survey of over 600 B2B marketing professionals reveals what types of content they found to be the most effective. The report makes for interesting reading, and as the chart below clearly shows, case studies stand out as the most effective content type for B2B marketers. Best practice advice was extremely close behind, whilst how to guides and market trends were also judged to be effective.
Other types of content were found to be useful by less than a quarter of B2B content marketers. This shows that the 'hard sell' and listing product features is no longer effective, and providing information such as case studies and guides is now the superior tactic.
Source: B2B Content Marketing Report
Sample:…
Content marketing best practices and examples for financial services
It’s important to review how content can be used effectively in your specific sector. In this article I will review content marketing approaches for financial services, a sector I'm involved with.
Each industry sector has its own unique traits and idiosyncrasies and financial services is certainly no different. In fact, due to the complex nature of many financial products, the challenges of creating engaging content and an increased focus on compliance and regulation, one can argue that content marketing for financial services companies is a particularly tricky discipline to master.
Nevertheless, despite the challenges that exist within financial services there are also considerable opportunities that content marketing can exploit if planned and executed effectively.
I would suggest that the steps for establishing a content marketing process is very much the same as it is for any other…
