Techniques and examples of using Pinterest to build a brand and connect with the student community
It’s no surprise - Pinterest drives an impressive amount of traffic. In fact, Pinterest is now 21% more popular than Twitter for US Internet users according to this Pew compilation of online US adults. This image discovery tool lets fans and influencers find and follow their favorite brands, whether it’s through products pinned from the website, or business pages created by brands.
Many brands, like Whole Foods, Etsy, and Kate Spade effectively use Pinterest to share information. The possibilities (and marketability) are truly endless.
Until recently, many universities did not have, or effectively use, Pinterest pages. The University of Michigan, often a risk-taker and thought leader among the Higher Ed social media community, saw…
A discussion of best practices for email capture using popovers
The question on every marketer’s lips if they're considering a implementing a pop-up or popover for capturing email addresses or promotions should be:
Will using a pop-up help us achieve our goals as well as keep our customers happy?
In this article I will focus specifically on using popovers to drive subscribers - here are a few top-line tips on how to get started on achieving the right balance between your marketing objectives and customer satisfaction.
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1. Consider your audience
Your potential customers don’t care what conversion rate you want, what targets you’re trying to meet or when you need to…
Which KPIs will help retailers optimise their mobile apps?
Well, you've finally launched your app and like other app makers in the retail space, you are looking to increase engagement with your users and generate income. You are monitoring your downloads and sources, but is that really enough to understand your users and discover what makes them stick? Will you be able to fully optimise your app based on this information alone?
The answer is a pretty firm NO. You might be monitoring certain elements or metrics of your app, but is it really giving you the info you need? Going one step further, you need to be monitoring the right KPIs under those metrics. Because when it comes right down to it, KPIs are where the clues are at - these will guide you in optimising your app and increasing conversions.
In this post, I…
6 types of user experience and online audience surveying tools to help create a more customer-centred website and brand
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are used by nearly every company since they provide valuable quantitative data on site visitor behaviour. No surprise there.
But web analytics systems don't give direct qualitative feedback from site visitors and customers and the surprise to me, is that relatively few companies use these, although their popularity is increasing rapidly. They can be used to support UX improvement projects both on the live site and when getting structured feedback during website redesign.
We believe that qualitative website feedback tools are also essential to take the pulse of your website and improve your UX, but surprisingly they are less widely used despite paid services such as Opinion Labs being available for many years and some incredible free tools.
April 2018 update to tools
Thanks for your suggestions in previous…
Chart of the Day:A comparison benchmark of add-to-basket rates with conversion rates?
Do you call it add-to-cart or add-to-basket? It depends where you are based - cart is most common in the United States, basket is more common in the UK and Australia.
Regardless of what you call it, adding an item to the cart is an important micro-conversion step to measure and benchmark for retailers. While it is common to compare conversion rates, naturally this measures the efficiency of the overall process including both category or product views, basket adds and checkout.
Add-to-basket rates give additional information about how appealing individual products are based on description and visuals on the product page. It shows intent to purchase by interactions with the site (Act in the Smart Insights RACE Planning conversion funnel). Google has several definitions in its Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and they neatly avoid the use of basket or cart. These measures include:
…
Chart of the day: A comparison ranking AB testing services used for structured experiments to boost conversion
In our Essential Digital Marketing Tools infographic and guide we recommended the top 5 tools for AB and Multivariate testing in category 19 of 30. Our recommendations focused on the best value tools for small and mid-size businesses, but the popularity of the services will vary by company size and there are many more options than the 5 we have recommended.
This analysis by Datanyze shows number of websites using one of the services for AB and multivariate testing divided by the total number of websites using any of the technologies. This is shown for the top 1 millions sites by traffic as ranked by Alexa.
We're fortunate to have a number of services like Datanyze which crawl sites categorising the Javascript tags of different tools (others include…
How to engage your site visitors with your brand in 7 steps
Ever been to a web site and wondered 'Why am I here?', 'How does this help me?' or 'Does this site give me what I need?'. And then left shortly afterwards?
A succinct online value proposition is a crucial way to hook new visitors into your site and brand in those crucial seconds (not minutes!) that a visitor is deciding to click-on or leave your site. It also encourages continued usage and advocacy about your site, so it's vital to an effective web strategy.
An online value proposition is closely tied to your brand positioning which answers questions like: who we are, what we offer, which markets do we serve, what makes us different? But the OVP extends this the difference is that it identifies the reasons why customers will click on, return, register or buy from your site…
Chart of the Day: Why subscribers flag email as spam
If consumers mark your email as spam, then this is clearly unwelcome since not only has your brand been tarnished in their eyes, but even worse your delivery rates to existing subscribers could be harmed. So what triggers a 'mark as spam' click? Technology Advice Research asked 472 U.S. adults, "for what reasons have you marked a business' emails as spam?"
The results show that nearly half of customers mark emails as spam because of the frequency of emails. There isn't a one rule fits all in regards to email marketing frequency because each list, segment or country is different and your frequency should match this.
Almost a third of people claimed they hadn't purposefully subscribed to receive to the emails. This does not mean that they have been necessarily "spammed", it could be as simple as 'forced subscribe', which is the implicit…
How mobile devices are serving a wide range of consumer needs
We all know that the majority of web traffic is now on mobile devices, and consumers around the world are using their mobile devices for a wide range of tasks, including the all-important task of making key purchasing decisions.
But how does the use of mobile vary when it comes to fulfilling different needs? And how does the use of mobile vary between countries? It is important marketers understand the answers to these questions, so they can understand how best to reach and connect with their target audience.
This infographic from ComScore can help you understand how consumers are using different mobile technologies to fulfil various needs.
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Chart of the Day: To code or not to code? (Technology) - Part 3 of 6
We are now half way through our six-week series on email workflow. So far we have discussed Planning and Time spent on tasks. Last week I asked in a poll, "for each email that your company sends, which task takes you the longest?" View our results and find our which task takes you the longest.
This week we will be looking at what companies mostly used for the creation of the emails. There are two options - you can either use an email template or use HTML and CSS coding from scratch. Firstly, let's look at what an email template is.
Email templates - what they are and why you should use them?
An email template is a pre-formatted and reusable HTML file. When you load the template, it…
