Good web design is crucial for making the right impression

First impressions are important... Presentable clothes, matching accessories, getting to meetings on time – it all matters. It shows people around you that you care. Online, first impressions matter too. Website visitors make judgements about website credibility in as little as 50 milliseconds, and one in five website visitors will leave your website, not giving you a second chance. Staying on top of the current trends makes it possible to create a website that will impress your audience, and will hold users attention for the first crucial 10 seconds, and beyond. So what are the Web Design trends for 2017?

First things first. Web design is not art.

Art expresses feelings, raises questions, provokes emotions. By contrast, design helps people to find answers, take action, or complete a task. More than ever before, everything in web design, from imagery to navigation,…

Grow your e-commerce sales using RFM analysis - an undervalued online retail marketing technique

We can all agree that conversion rate optimization is one of the most creative and efficient marketing techniques for designing an on-site experience that will amaze customers. Yet even though CRO will help you rectify your approach as you work to align marketing goals with customer’s needs, there is one important aspect to consider: conversion rate optimization is often used in the wrong way. As a marketer or e-commerce website owner, your main goal shouldn’t be only to improve key metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate, average order value, revenue, etc. These represent a direct consequence, the effects of how you treat your customers and how you communicate with them. You should also optimize to create long-term relationships with customers that have chosen your products and services from the crowded e-commerce market. The…

Confessions of an email marketer

Here an email marketer for a major retailer, who shall remain anonymous, confesses his or her biggest worry...

Anonymous: Working at an fast paced online/offline retailer for 3 years now, I’ve been through my fair share of email highs and lows. Preparing for an incredibly busy peak season in November and December I feel as though I’m as ready as I can be in my battle station and have the support of the rest of the business with the calendar.

The last two Christmas periods, I’ve been somewhat forced into committing what feels to me like a major email faux pas. Regardless of whether sales have been good or bad, on two or three occasions throughout the month our managing director (who has no background in email marketing) will ask me to re-send a successful campaign to an audience who did not open after just 24…

Practical content marketing and profiling techniques to identify senior decision makers

Senior decision makers are increasingly reluctant to hand over their contact details when exploring potential solutions. You may have noticed how busy managers often omit their phone numbers from their email sigs! At the same time, the explosion in content marketing with the availability of detailed information online in a range of formats has enabled those seeking to use your products or services to carry out extensive research on you independently without booking a demo. There is now little need to book a demo, take a trial or speak to a salesperson when so much content exists online to inform their decision. Whilst these prospects are carrying out their due diligence research at distance, others who are at a much earlier stage of the buying cycle are seeking content that will inform and educate them. Whitepapers, videos, thought-leadership pieces and research are standard fare in any…

Dan Grech Interviews Teri Rosenbaum, Uber's Head of Email in the UK & Ireland for the latest edition of 'No BS Email Marketing'

[Editor's note: This interview is a taster for a new, free guide : No BS Email Marketing, 2nd edition. It's a great resource for all marketers interested in email and CRM. You can download it for free today from here].

I’m an email marketing manager for Uber in the UK and Ireland, with a focus on  communicating with our drivers. Prior to this, I spent seven years at a small app startup in Southwest London, where I ended up doing a lot of email. I’ve been at Uber for almost a year - since last September. One of my major achievements here has been winning an award for customer obsession. I guess it’s my…

Dirty data leads to costly mistakes. Here's how to prevent them

A co-worker once told me the sort of horror story that causes marketers to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. In a previous position at a large technology company, he and his team generated numerous leads through conferences and trade shows. The field marketing managers would send the leads to their marketing operations team via CSV files, and the operations team would use the information to follow up with these leads. The data came in varied formats and was not always clean or easily segmented. In one unfortunate case, the marketing operations team mistakenly uploaded a file containing 500 software industry leads under the service provider category in their system. The leads were routed into the service provider channel, and all 500 of them received a service provider newsletter rather than a software email. Needless to…

Ad-blockers are a major threat to digital publishers- but help is at hand!

Whether you’re an online publisher, advertiser or even simply a consumer, the ramifications of blocking internet advertising will be massive. In fact, according to a recent study by PageFair, the publishing industry suffered a $21.8 billion loss from blocked revenue due to ad-blocking software last year. As a result, the war between publishers and advertisers is only continuing to intensify. There are steps that can be taken to overcome the issues created by this technology. Below are seven popular strategies that online publications have turned to in a bid to fight against the rising numbers of ad-blocking users.

1. Ask Users to Turn Off Their Ad-Blocking

“Thanks for coming to Forbes. Please turn off your ad blocker in order to continue. To thank you for doing so, we’re…

How to Create An Effective Digital Marketing Campaign for Your New e-commerce Business

Creating a digital marketing campaign for an e-commerce startup is a real challenge. You want to make your mark on social media as quickly as possible, and to begin building a following that will ultimately become loyal customers. The challenge is that you don’t have much to go on. Finances are tight. This means limited resources when it comes to market research, or paid advertising. In many cases, it is up to your team to build a campaign from the ground up. The following six points will outline some very important points to know as you begin to develop your first digital marketing campaign. Keep reading to learn how to develop a strategy that is economical, results oriented, and lean.

1. The Key Starting Point is Great Web Design

As…

The number of social shares per blog post suffers from a massive 89% decline over the past five years

Mark Schaefer originally coined the term content shock 3 years ago. Since then we've seen a massive explosion in the amount of content produced - an almost seven-fold increase -but a huge crash in engagement with each post. An October 2016 study by TrackMaven analysed over 65,000 blogs and found that the number of blogs produced increased by 800%, but the number of social shares per posts crashed by a massive 89%. We can see this huge drop off in engagement is impacting brand's decisions - the number of articles published has plateaued since August 2015. In an attempt to cut through, brands have been driven to creating not just more, but longer content. The average number of words in each post increased by 100 words, to 750 words per post on average. But…

Automated customer lifecycle marketing will be the future of email marketing

To look forward to the future of email marketing 2020 - a report I have contributed to from Litmus, I believe we need to look back to appreciate how little the support for marketers from email marketing platforms has evolved to deliver customised lifecycle messaging. Frankly, I have been amazed how few companies have adopted email as a strategic communications tool for personalised, behavioural based email across the years since I started training on email marketing in 2001.

Research on the adoption of email targeting still shows us a reality where the majority of email marketing involves either no segmentation at all or targeting of just 4 to 6 segments.

So, by mid 2017 I’d like…