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19 Feb 2013
Introducing Card Sorting and two tools for managing it
We read a huge amount of visitor feedback from our clients’ sites. One of the most common complaints from visitors is that they can’t find what they are looking for. This is a serious problem: these visitors are actually unable to spend money.
Fortunately, there are several straightforward ways of fixing the problem. One of them is to optimize the information architecture of your site. “Card sorting” is a simple technique that allows your users to do this for you.
With card sorting, you write the name of each section of your site onto an index card. You then ask one of your users to arrange the cards into groups that make logical sense. If you do this with several users, you’ll start to notice trends (and new ideas) about how your…
Personalisation 101 - how to increase customer engagement and conversion rates by "Sense and Respond" to Digital Body Language
In this post I hope to give a practical guide to website personalisation, to show you how to improve customer engagement and increase your conversion rates. Apart from the well-known Amazon example, many other types of business are now seeing the benefits of personalisation.
easyJet increased their conversion rate enormously through personalisation. During the easyJet January sale 2012, they delivered a personalised home page to each of their 2.5 million customers and converted five sales per second. (They used the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform).
John Lewis said that their personalised site was a key factor in increasing Christmas sales by 27.9%. Personalisation is important to business and customer alike and no doubt you have already seen it feature high up in the…
12 practical tips for customer preference centres
Preferences centres have never really caught on have they? Many of the big retailers like this one from Amazon or Tesco have had them for years, but they're still not used so widely.
Here's a great example of a B2B preference centre:
I remember, as far back as 2003 I defined these ‘E permission marketing principles’ to prompt email marketers to think how to improve relevance and targeting of emails - the main purpose of communications preference centres.
The key advice remains valid I think:
1. ‘Offer selective opt-in to communications’
Offer choice in communications preferences to the customer to ensure more relevant communications. Some customers may not want a weekly e-newsletter, rather they may only want…
Responding to the four biggest legal risks of social media to business
With legal cases involving social media are on the rise, businesses need to manage the potential risks. To help review the challenges and solutions to managing the risks of social media, we have recently published our benchmark study on social media and the law. We hope marketers can use the data to evaluate their knowledge and establish the risks they may need to manage.
We’ve summarised the risks of social media in this infographic showing the four main risks as we see them against the awareness of the law.
We see three main takeaways from the research:
Many marketers know the risks, but don’t have company buy-in. Over 50% of companies don’t consider social media legal risks to be an issue or a priority. This was unexpected when respondents made it…
Defining the four pillars of successful content
Many digital marketers are talking about 2013 being the year when Content Marketing becomes a priority. There’s been a lot of focus on tactical elements of content marketing, so in this blog post I will take a look at what I see as the foundations of a sound content strategy.
A comprehensive content strategy project would also involve outlining a plan for content process, such as workflow and maintenance, but in this post we’re going to focus on the foundations of good content. To simplify content marketing to a manageable area you can work on, I see four main areas of a content marketing strategy that need to defined to create content useful for your audience and to give a return on investment to a business.
1. Customers’ goals
Questions to ask include:
Who are you…
The popularity of video has led to a resurgence in interest in marketing using webcasting as a way to reach and engage business audiences, particularly given the reductions in travel budgets.
In this interview I ask Charlie Blackburn of webcasting service provider BrightTALK to take me through the options and give us some examples of what works.
Are webinars still effective?
Q. Webinars are still a core technique for engaging professional business-to-business audiences, but I think most would say they're suffering from burn out and it's more difficult to get audiences to attend. I expect you to say this isn't the case, but how do you show new clients there is still an appetite from decision makers for webinars.
[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTALK]
You're right that I don't agree. The obvious analogy is the continued growth of audiences watching videos, both online and increasingly…
Our experiences with using Social Bakers for social media management
Community management is not an easy job. Anyone responsible for an active Facebook and/or Twitter profile will tell you that. The skill set has evolved quickly and was summed up well in Get Satisfaction’s recent Community Manager infographic.
Despite this skill set emerging there are a number of challenges that community managers face. Facebook and Twitter users want near real-time answers to a wide range of questions which can be on any topic from sales enquiries to specific customer support issues. At TUI, I've believed for a long time that sales questions on Facebook or Twitter should be answered by our sales team, customer complaints should be looked after by our customer services team and so on.
[caption id="attachment_20117" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Content feedback within the Social Bakers dashboard[/caption]
An increasing challenge…
ACT Webcasts from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit
The two webinars from our summit focusing on interacting with new audiences using different digital channels were:
1. Mobile marketing priorities for 2013 with Rob Thurner of Burner Mobile
The agenda for this talk covered how to build mobile into your business strategy, plus more practical advice on weaving mobile into your customer journey and discovery/promotion of the mobile channels.
Related Ebook: Mobile Marketing Briefing by Rob Thurner
2. B2B Digital marketing priorities for 2013 with Rene Power of B2B Marketing
This webcast covered covered the key…
A reminder to factor in variation in conversion from mobile when modelling sales from mobile site visitors
Reviewing the latest statistics on increased use of mobile is useful for making the case for mobile marketing. Earlier in the week I shared 4 key sources on mobile platform usage.
What's of most interest to site owners though, is what happening in their sector, and on their site in particular. In this post, I'll share two examples. The first is most relevant if you work in travel. It's an infographic from Skyscanner. The headlines are:
30% of Skyscanner visits now from mobile (50% in some markets), but...
Mobile users are 39% less likely to book
It shows that, of course, you have to look at both volume and quality of traffic when creating the business case for investment in mobile.
The second company example,…
Our content marketing blueprint - updated
It's almost a year ago since we created our blueprint for content marketing infographic - and with so much conversation now around the converging of digital and 'off-line' media, the proliferation of mobile and the increasing popularity of marketers talking about paid, owned and earned media we wanted to update our blueprint for 2013.
Paid, owned and Earned media meets Inbound Marketing
It's important to be alert to paid, owned and earned, in relation to content and inbound marketing. Especially owned media - this has to be a key priority in 2013. Without your own (ed) brand platform from which to both publish, and to which you want to drive traffic there becomes a far weaker case to create and promote content. Since how will you garner any traction with your consumer, show any conversion? This is the key area that we've updated our infographic from last year, as…
