eCommerce can go hand in hand with bricks and mortar, and a bed shop in the Cotswold's proves it!

According to Eurostat, retail footfall in the UK has been down month on month for twenty-three of the past twenty-four months. Bad news. Opening new stores in this climate may seem an odd thing to do, but it is all part of the omnichannel mix.

Beds in the Market Place? Madness.

Back in January, the Sun newspaper published an article about residents of a Cotswold town being up in arms about a branch of Bensons for Beds being opened in their historic market place. The report, culled from reader comments on a local newspaper site and social media, implied that the townspeople thought it was not “upmarket” enough for them. Had the reporter scratched more than just the surface, he would have discovered the real query was about the practicality of this type of retailer…

Cart recovery emails are a powerful tool for converting. Make sure yours are having the maximum possible impact.

If you run an online store, you already know that cart abandonment is one of the biggest conversion killers; causing millions in lost revenue worlwide due to the many reasons for retail basket abandonment. And the chances are high that you must be sending a cart recovery email campaign to recover this lost revenue. But sending a cart recovery mailer doesn't guarantee conversion. You need to execute your cart recovery email program the right way to convince the lost shoppers to come back and complete their purchase. A successful recovery campaign is optimized for everything from design to copy, send time and the right sequence. And, if you are not taking all of these things into consideration you will not get the results that you are hoping for from these email campaigns. …

Disscussing the advantages and pitfalls out outsourcing your lead gen

Do we outsource or keep in-house? That is the question. Let me specify in advance that by outsourcing lead generation I mean transferring the whole process to an outside supplier. You set goals and in turn, you get leads. In this chapter, I shall not speak about any intermediate steps such as pay per click campaigns, landing generation, or outgoing calls without clear results. After all, they have no guarantee that you will reap any potential customers.

Actually, the decision of whether to outsource searching and attracting potential customers is not a matter of cost. Total expenses per employee are significantly higher for a company than just salaries, as this includes taxes, office space, a workstation, IT, holidays, sick-leaves, etc. As a result, the price of outsourcing is comparable to the cost of keeping your work in-house.

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Simple messaging, clean design and the use of white space to steer the eye are key to effective email designs.

While many companies do email marketing effectively, the ones that don’t often are slow to learn from their mistakes. Companies will spend big marketing budgets only to be disappointed with their results, and are often left unaware of what went wrong with the campaign. One key to getting your email marketing campaign right, is to have a full understanding of what exactly people find or do not find engaging with your emails. Easy SMTP and EyeQuant teamed up together to evaluate a number of different email marketing campaigns using their heat map software. They used the results of their evaluations and created an infographic which you can see below. The heat map analysis allowed them to understand how customers are engaging or not engaging with their emails. As you can see in the…

A review of the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO approaches

Segmentation and targeting are so important to delivering relevant marketing messages which boost conversion, yet the research suggests that many digital marketers are leaving money on the table because they are not serious enough about segmentation and targeting. In this article, I'll describe research we commissioned to understand the effectiveness of different approaches for segmentation and targeting as part of CRO. I noticed that another recent study has shown a similar situation in the US where 76% of marketing execs say they don't target with Behavioural targeting data according to a Razorfish study. After 25 years in data-driven marketing, I’m biased, but the facts speak for themselves. The graph below is from the RedEye Whitepaper 'The 7 best ways to improve website conversion and sales for larger e-commerce businesses'. It shows that for website conversion segmentation is more highly rated compared with,…

A user's preferred social network factors heavily in their propensity to spend

There are many ways to try to assess the value of the customer and judge their propensity to part with their hard earned cash on your site. You could go by age, use location data or even job title if you have that data. One signal of propensity to spend which you may be overlooking is the users social media use. Data from QZ.com shows how average order value fluctuates widely between users of different social networks. Polyvore tops the list, which is hardly surprising given it's a site built around fashion and social commerce. If you aren't a fashion retailer it's not really relevant. However, Instagram could be relevant for all sorts of B2C verticals and has an average order value almost double that of the likes of YouTube and Google+. It's interesting how the networks really focused around visuals (Instagram, Pinterest,…

Read your customer's digital body language to discover what they really want

This year has seen big companies make emotional measurement a regular part of their product planning. Marketers around the world can no longer afford to ignore this simmering trend. It's time to sit up and take notice of what’s sure to be the next big thing in community reach and conversion. Think about having a conversation with your partner. They’re telling you that they’re fine, but their tone is abrupt, arms are folded and they’re avoiding eye contact with you. They may be saying they’re ok, but everything else is telling you what they’re really feeling. And it’s just the same for marketers and digital entrepreneurs when it comes to their audiences. Likes and views may give you some insight, but you’re missing the bigger picture – the real feelings behind the computer screen.

Communication is 93% non-verbal with body language and…

A review of the costs and benefits of more investment in CRO / analytics

According to the Customer Journeys research we conducted with the eCommerceExpo conference, surprisingly few business are actively involved in CRO - 33% of companies have limited or zero conversion rate optimisation (CRO) activity. Instead, it seems that many people / business are opting for reinvention every few years and focussing on other marketing activities. It prompts the question of why conversion rate optimisation is under-rated by so many businesses. However, it's good to see that many business are investing in Conversion rate optimisation since its complex, exciting, far reaching, multi-skilled and most importantly a results driver. If your business is not yet utilising CRO principles then you should certainly start to consider how you can help your team and business by building the business case for it. It will require some work…

A structured guide to improving leads and sales from your website

You'd think Conversion Rate Optimisation would a “no-brainer”. You can get more leads/sales from your website without spending extra money on marketing for new visitors. Sold.  But it seems as if the jargon and complexities of analytics can get in the way of understanding approaches how to improve conversion rates. To help demystify what’s involved with a structured approach to improving conversion, we’ve created a 6-step process, which is the foundation of all our client projects, dubbed Conversion Architecture. To help explain to non-specialists what’s involved in a typical conversion project, I’ll be sharing how we approach each step in a series of articles on Smart Insights. In the first in this series, we'll cover Step 1 - Analyse

Step 1 Analyse

This is probably where most people start to get a glazed look…

More than half of app users allow push notifications

Every wondered just how many app users enable push notifications? Well, wonder no more. It's crucial in the busy mobile app marketplace to use notifications sensitively to increase engagement and retention of app users, so this benchmark stat is surely good news to many app developers and marketers. Data: MIDIA Research Source: https://www.midiaresearch.com This chart has been produced with data from 5 leading app vendors, which represent over 65,000 apps worldwide. Further insights from MIDIA Research also include: Travel and transport sectors have the highest push notification opt in rates. As opt in rates vary across verticals some sectors such as food and drink suffer low opt in rates, which could be because the app content isn't time or location specific. More apps than ever are asking users to allow push notifications, which although rates are currently stable,…