Chart of the Day: Gmail inbox placement and read rates
In 2013, Google rolled out its restructure of the Gmail inbox and introduced their tabs layout. Back then email marketers believed it would be the "death of email marketing". So we are nearly 4 years since the launch, how are marketing emails performing in the Promotions tab?
In the chart below, we see that Promotions has an Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) of 84.5%. We can also see that the read rate is the lowest of all the tabs, at a low 19.2%.
This tells us that out of all the promotion emails, in the tab, only 19% are read. So 81% of marketing emails will be simply deleted/unread. So if you land in the Promotions tab, chances of getting read are very slim.
What can i do?
First, check if you need…
A case Study showing how to use App Store listing testing to boost downloads
On my first day at work my CEO at CallApp gave me a compelling challenge when he turned to me and said, “We need to increase the numbers of users downloading our app on day seven (an acceptable measuring metric), as quickly as we can." The first thing I did was analyze the numbers in order to figure out where I should put my efforts in order to maximize the results and show improvement.
After crunching the numbers, I decided that the best place to start was in trying to improve our conversion rate in Google Play Store. I will try to give you an idea of why I chose this route and what store conversion is all about.
There are several options for downloading the app but the most common is through Google Play Store (for android users).…
Which Key Features Must Your Persona Include?
Personas are a well-established marketing technique to help produce more customer-focused communications. They can be applied to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. However taking a look at how marketers search for information about personas in Google Trends shows that there are a relatively low volume of searches.
trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"buyer personas","geo":"","time":"all"},{"keyword":"marketing personas","geo":"","time":"all"},{"keyword":"design personas","geo":"","time":"all"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=all&q=buyer%20personas,marketing%20personas,design%20personas&hl=en-US"});
You can see there is a clear up-tick in interest in personas over the last few years which I think is related to interest in content marketing for which personas are often recommended to generate relevant personas for different audiences.
In this article I will introduce the value of using personas which we’re big fans of using to create more personalised email and web-based conversations with prospects as part of marketing automation.
The benefits of buyer personas for content marketing
To support content marketing initiatives, personas are valuable…
Most companies are doing nothing to re-activate abandoned carts
A 12-month survey for 2016 conducted by ecommerce recovery specialists Optilead has identified that 81% of online abandonment is totally ignored. This means that in the tests, valued at £2.1m, a staggering £1.7m of abandoned transactions were not followed up.
Over the past few years, online sales have increased in the UK in excess of 10% per year – with this continued increase comes higher competition and the increased need to maximise each opportunity. Despite this, recent reports suggest $4 trillion worldwide would be lost to abandonment alone during 2016.
Optilead surveyed 946 websites in the UK to identify how they react - and determine whether they engage with customers or leave them to become part of the global abandonment issue.
The average abandonment rate across all sectors is 76%. But it's not just the abandonment rate that's of concern – it's the low…
See from this case study how these automated campaigns can generate new streams of revenue for your business
Behavioural emails can generate millions in online sales yet most retailers struggle to get it right.
Time and time again, digital marketers grapple with the existential question: How important is email marketing, really?
Email tends to have an astronomically high ROI of 3800%; for every $1 spent on email marketing, retailers make an average of $38 and it's one of the best sales online retail sales channels.
Itís no surprise that there are hundreds of email marketing software solutions that offer numerous styling, scheduling, and automation options.
As the e-commerce space continues to grow more and more crowded each year, all the software options in the world canít and wonít guarantee new streams of revenue for…
Chart of the day: Website lead response management research
If you're involved in a business where you collect leads from your website you will know the importance of timing - 'timing is everything'. For example, for a financial services or travel company who offer brochures for download, phone follow-up is still often an effective technique if the profile of the lead fits. Of course, within B2B marketing, this approach is even more common when offering whitepapers to help prospects learn about a product or solution.
Today's chart-of-the-day isn't as recent as most we feature, instead it's a classic study designed to identify what day of week, time of day and time from creation to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates.
The full report summary gives details on contact times (similar to best mail contact days Wednesday and Thursday are far more effective than other days and surprisingly, 4…
Expedia give their top strategies for growing new Ecommerce stores
Expedia launched in 1996. That makes us ancient by internet standards. But the benefit of having been around so long is that our team witnessed the rise of e-commerce, and we learned some priceless lessons in the process.
Twenty years after Expedia opened its virtual doors, e-commerce is now booming. Global e-commerce revenue reached nearly $1.2 billion in August, and experts predict more than 10 percent growth annually. Billion-dollar projections are usually cause for celebration, but not everyone sees it that way.
Some people view e-commerce’s explosion negatively because competition is stiff and getting stiffer. Everyone wants in on this lucrative industry, but more than 90 percent of online startups fail within four months. With nothing but growth on the e-commerce horizon, the rate of launches and failures can only increase.
But don’t let the…
The essential strategies you need to successfully win major B2B customers.
Although the phrase has been around for over a decade and arguably being deployed by smart marketers ever since B2B sales teams have focused on target/key accounts, in recent years account-based marketing (ABM) has become hotter than ever.
As far back as 1993, Peppers and Rogers proposed marketing would take an increased role in developing intelligence on key accounts: “When two marketers are competing for the same customer’s business, all other things being equal, the marketer with the greatest scope of information about that particular customer... will be the more efficient competitor.”[1]
In short, ABM is a strategic approach that coordinates personalised sales and marketing efforts, to target specific accounts for new business and create deeper and broader relationships with existing customers.[2]
It’s clear to see from Google Trends, the term account-based marketing, was being searched since the Information…
An in-depth case study from our work with Conversion Rate Experts, including before and after images of winning A/B tests
It's fair to say we talk a lot about how you can improve your digital marketing results here at SmartInsights. It's kind of our thing. I like to think nobody does it better. But those who talk the talk should also be made to walk the walk, else how else do they know their advice is actually relevant and applicable to real business?
Since we're always talking about the need to optimize across the whole customer journey and constantly test messaging to boost your conversion rate, we worked with Conversion Rate Experts to do exactly this. We wanted to share what we did and the changes we made with you so you can make similar improvements to your own sites which can deliver big boosts to your CRO.
Start out with deep research
Stripped…
New research reveals the top tactics ecommerce businesses can use to convert the 68% of people who abandon their shopping carts
In 2016, global ecommerce sales within retail grew to $1.915 trillion, a figure excluding sales for travel, events, and restaurants. What is more, ecommerce is projected to grow to over $4 trillion by 2020. This type of growth isn’t occurring anywhere else in retail (an industry which hovers around 6% growth year to year as a whole), so it’s clear that ecommerce revenue will increasingly become a dominant force in retail. Yet as retail adapts to the digital world, the ecommerce system has evolved into something imperfect.
Simply googling ecommerce business problems reveals a troubling statistic: the majority of shoppers abandon their shopping cart before finalizing a purchase. In fact, according to Baymard Institute, 68.81% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and this figure is based on the…
