How are businesses improving their user's experience?
Improving your online customer journeys is critical both to boost conversion rates and to improve customer experience to boost customer loyalty. So when experiences are optimised, it's one of those rare improvements that can boost revenues in both the short and long term.
But improving the journey is far from easy, and to do it you'll need lots of data of how your customers actually use the site. When it comes to testing, we have a rule of thumb we have seen in our tests and others. 1/3rd of tests will lead to a significant improvement; 1/3rd will have no effect, and 1/3rd will make conversion significantly worse. It really is hit and miss, but it's important to try plenty of different tests, as it often surprising what yields positive results and what doesn't. If you just assume you know your customers without looking at the data…
New research shows the growing importance of social media in influencing purchase in younger demographics
Global Web Index, asked Internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 to compare their use of search engines and social media when selecting products:
"Which of the following online sources do you mainly use when you are actively looking for more information about brands, products or services?"
According to this research, search is still the go-to place, particularly amongst older audiences. However, the gap is closing for those aged between 16 and 34, since over one third of the respondents indicated they research products over social media.
As expected, as the age of respondents increases, the usage of social media for research decreases. Users between the ages of 35 and 44 lean more heavily on search, with only 29% of respondents saying they research brands,…
How to use financial data to win over stakeholders to your email marketing strategy
LinkedIn hosts 2.7 million+ profiles for people with 'Email Marketing' skills. Our field is growing constantly growing in what to me, is inarguably one of the most versatile and creative areas of digital marketing. Whilst there are some amazing resources, such as Litmus who write the gospel for designers and coders, we wanted to create something focused on the the challenges of the email marketing manager.
We had an itch. We spoke to a lot of people who had this itch too. We wanted to scratch it. Thus, the No BS Email Marketing guide was born.
In Edition One we hired nine Email Marketers across a range of industries. From Financial Service Tech to Retail, MMORPG to…
The way people use social sharing is changing markedly. Does this mean the 'collapse of context'?
That we see changes in the way people use social networks is hardly surprising since social media demographics have changed. Networks once dominated by teenagers are being 'invaded' by the middle-aged and elderly. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is the over 65s. Not just that, the very college students that started out as Facebook's core user base are now in their 30s, and probably settling down, starting to have kids.
But some of the ways Facebook is changing could prove to be a threat to the very characteristics that make Facebook so successful. The latest figures on social sharing from GWI show what Facebook itself calls the 'collapse of context', where people are sharing far less about their personal lives, and instead tend to share things not personal to them, such as news articles.
The number of…
Out with the old and in with the new
The idea of scheduling all your appointments on large excel sheets or overfilled diaries is a thing of the past. Small businesses are now gradually switching to digital calendars and online appointment scheduling and in turn improving their business output as customers have the ability to make appointments online, anywhere, anytime.
To get to this stage, it is recommended to follow the next 7 steps for success as a small business.
7 methods for a small business to boost adoption of online booking
1. Promotion, Promotion, Promotion
When committing your business to a CRM / Online booking system you need to “go big or go home”. Meaning, you need to promote the fact that you are now accepting new appointments through online booking.
This should be advertised anywhere your customer has most interaction within your business. For example, good places to advertise would be next to your cashier,…
Content Marketing is evolving into an era of hyper-personalisation
One of the more advanced pieces of advice we tend to give to people looking to improve their content marketing is to make better use of personalisation. It's easy to see why. If you can target people will content that is far more likely to appeal to them based on what they're interested it, then they're far more likely to engage with that content, spend longer on the site and once you've hooked them in you can set about trying to convert.
It's a simple narrative based on simple logic. But does it hold up to rigorous analysis? When we're A/B testing various different types of messaging on Smart Insights, it's not always the one that you'd logically think should work best that ends up performing optimally. The best way to find out the answer is to test, test and then test again. To…
Review and improve your UX on mobile using the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework
Should we be focusing our mobile marketing activities on the device, or the consumer?
Allow me to rewind the clock, briefly, and explain why this matters:
Back in 2004, when I got started in mobile, our expectations about a great mobile customer experience were blinkered by the capabilities of the handset. Nokia dominated the handset market, with 9 of the top 10 best selling handsets that year - some came with a colour display, most provided polyphonic ringtones, (very) basic games, and desktop tools. But no camera, no Bluetooth.
The ‘mobile internet’ was a tedious affair delivered on a smaller screen, accessed via an even smaller keypad, over patchy 3G coverage, using WAP (‘Wireless Application Protocol’, or ‘WAP is crap’ for short). Hats off to the brands that tackled mobile then - usually focussing on…
New study shows how shoppers are using their Smartphones in store
We're all familiar with 'showrooming', where people visit a shop to compare products and then buy it online later, often at a cheaper price. Until a few years ago, buying online generally entailed going home, logging on and remembering exactly what is was you fancied buying back when you were in store. Easily done with big ticket items like laptops, fridges or bikes, but not so easy with products like clothes or food. Generally by the time you get home you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking at.
But the massive advance in mobile technology over the past few years means that now pretty much every consumer has a computer in their pocket capable of checking prices in seconds. No longer is there any need to remember what you were looking at for when you get home, the whole showrooming…
Use these 12 insights from ground-breaking eye-tracking research to improve your email campaigns on mobile
How much do you know about how your subscribers really perceive your emails on mobile? If the answer is not much then it’s probably time to optimise: 70% of all emails are now opened on mobile and scrolling on a touchscreen is a completely different experience to using a desktop. Users can interact with content anywhere and anytime and their location, the lighting, sounds, distractions etc. will all have an impact on how our messages are perceived. Additionally, a study by Litmus found that 80% of people will delete an email that doesn't look good on their mobile device.
Although that is worrying, the good news is that there are some very simple changes that you can make to your campaigns to avoid them…
Your B2B customer deserves a B2C experience like these
Comparing B2B and B2C marketing used to be an Apples-to-Oranges situation, but they’re becoming increasingly comparable.
True, you don’t issue RFPs (Requests for Proposal) when you buy a Blu-ray player, and yes, a CRM decision requires a lot of research. But if you take some of the benefits that are common in B2C and implement them into your B2B space, you can create a customer experience that improves relationships and increases profits.
Three B2C Experiences to offer your business customers
Here are three things B2C experiences offer that your B2B customers might be missing out on:
1. Products or service reviews
B2B service reviews often consist of heavily starched long-form case studies and videos, which can’t hold an audience’s attention for long. Reducing the length of this information and implementing a real-time reviews feature like …
