Involve Your Pets - A Strategy For Successful Content And Social Media Fundraising
Clever fundraising ideas for charity giving are a must these days, when people are rather jaded from years of the same old coffee mornings and bake sales. If you’re after inspiration for something a little different, that might attract new fundraisers to your event, why not lead with the new trend – pet participation.
Content is key for any campaign and fundraising event, and a strong marketing strategy should contain priority content areas to promote. Cancer Research UK’s fundraising Best Paw Forward campaign in 2013 is a great example of this and could give you the inspiration you need to run a pet-focused fundraiser of your own and help charities with donations.
Why is having a key content marketing strategy important to fundraising events? It makes sure you socially target the right…
Enhancing the customer journey for your business by integrating SMS marketing
Understanding the journey your customers take is crucial to making sure you're providing the best possible experience. By mapping out potential journeys, you can better understand which customer touchpoints are letting you down and where there's potential for you to improve; allowing you to develop a comprehensive strategy for success.
Mobile devices have had a significant impact on the customer's journey, with many relying on their smartphone to visit your website, compare prices, or read customer reviews prior to purchase. Add to this all the other mobile uses, like capturing an appointment with your business in their calendar or Instagramming a photo of their new purchase and sharing their experience on social media, and it's easy to see how crucial mobile communications have become.
Customer journeys will always be different for individual businesses and customers, but to give you an idea of…
Ensure your mobile app has these 7 features to improve user experience and boost ecommerce revenue
Giant ecommerce companies are now focusing on improving end-user experience on mobile devices, providing a strong technology infrastructure via cutting-edge mobile applications.
Mobile comprises of 34% of all ecommerce transactions worldwide, and this figure is expected to grow to over 50% in 2016. What is more, 85% of consumers today prefer a mobile application over a mobile website. Clearly there are big opportunities here. The biggest challenge any ecommerce business faces is to stand out in the competition with a stunning and interactive app that engages and retains buyers at every level.
With this in mind, here are some essential features that your ecommerce mobile app should include to give it a competitive edge and deliver excellent user experience.
1. Promote Customization
For any ecommerce business,…
Taking you through setting up Facebook's new Canvas ads
The Facebook advertising juggernaut moves on with yet another huge product roll out. This time it's Canvas Ads. As with Instant Articles for mobile, the idea is to provide an "immersive" experience with a rich media combination of images, videos, gifs, text, products, carousels and more for mobile users. As usual the idea is to keep users on Facebook, scrolling through this "canvas"of fun rather than bumping them off onto other website (and likely experiencing poor load time as part of the process). Think of Canvas as very deep web pages on mobile with the added benefit of interaction such as panning and enlarging.
With all those variables it sounds complicated right?
Well actually not so much. I actually had a lot of fun experimenting with the new tool albeit that creating a Canvas is time consuming and once you've hit the "Finish" button there's no way…
Start targeting even more precisely with new Facebook ad-option
Top of my wishlist from Facebook for the last nine years (yes that's how long I've been advertising on Facebook) has been the ability to use the magic "AND" word rather than "OR" when it comes to selecting Interest targeting. I've called this "Boolean Targeting" or "Overlap Targeting" and it became the holy grail for me as a Facebook advertiser. This level of targeting would mean targeting those people in the Venn Diagram overlap - the people that liked ALL the things I was listing in interests rather than just some of them.
OR vs AND, Boolean targeting, Overlap targeting, Detailed targeting: Confused already?
Let me explain. When you select interests (for instance you are looking to target people that like social media marketing so you'd probably have selected some of…
Email marketing in action. A case study in using something more advanced than MailChimp
I've been a heavy user of MailChimp for many years. And as a tutor and examiner for the CIM's digital qualifications I can see that I am not alone. The majority of my students seem to have experience of the platform and only the very larger brands seem to regularly be using anything else like a fully integrated CRM system for email.
MailChimp has some awesome features. And for companies with small mailing lists and limited resources or technical expertise, it's an excellent first choice for regular emailing.
But it has some severe limitations. You can't really do much personalisation. Sure you can put a first name in and you can use Autoresponders to send specific emails in response to a trigger but they are complex to set up and lack the sophistication of a more specialised marketing automation…
Predict what your email database will do to improve your click rate
The growth in Data Science techniques during the last few years has generated a vast interest in using analytical techniques to optimise engagement on email campaigns. Whether a company wishes to compare the performance of two email templates, compare the performance of multiple email templates or see the association between several characteristics of an email and a single metric, Predictive Analytical techniques allow them to acquire the answers they need.
Below we are going to outline 3 techniques you can implement from ‘getting started’ lists of around 500 subscribers, to highly advanced models geared towards enterprise users.
Understanding Sample Size
For these techniques to make sense, it is important to have a basic understanding of statistical significance and what size of list may be required for your tests to be useful. Very basically, the larger the sample size, the more statistically significant…
With the majority of email now read on smartphones, to be effective, your emails have to stand out from the crowd
There are a lot of boxes to tick to design a successful email. It needs to be on brand, it needs to stand out, it needs to work on multiple devices and it needs to deliver enough value that customers don’t just hit unsubscribe when it arrives. The design also needs to be effective on a mobile inbox. As the latest stats from Litmus on Email reading platforms show, over 50% of email opens are on mobile.
A lot of things can go wrong.
But with the channel still delivering higher ROI than any other – an average of £38 for every £1 according to the DMA - getting it right can have incredible results for your business.
So, where do you start?
Here are 5 key steps to designing an email…
Most product launches are complete failures. This product launch example shows the ingredients for a succesful launch
In fact, it’s been reported that about 70% of all new product launches fail within the first year.1 While product launches require input from many teams, if anything goes wrong the blame always points to the marketing team. While most marketers chase after proving ROI—as they should—some clearly overlook the need to get the product out the door in the first place.
So what’s the challenge with product launches? Whether it’s underestimating demand, skimping on the market research, or failing to educate consumers on a new category—as marketers, we’ve all been there. A number of factors can spoil even the most thought-out product launches.
How influencer marketing and research helps overcome product launch dilemmas
When it comes to launching a new product, influencer marketing is your secret weapon. The practice helps you tap into niche influencers already…
How to Easily Cultivate Trust with Button Copy that Puts Your Audience’s Needs First
Marketers are busy and often juggle way too many responsibilities at once. Something’s gotta give, and sometimes it’s the button copy. It’s understandable, but when you skip this one detail, you create a very bad impression with your audience.
By settling on generic button copy, you risk coming off as a lazy marketer who focuses on getting the lead or the sale instead of your customers’ wellbeing. Consequently, conversions suffer.
So it’s time to rid the world of generic button copy.
If Your Button Copy is Good Ole “Sign Up”, “Send” or “Submit”
You’re probably not doing this on purpose, but I’m not gonna lie – it’s bad.
When site visitors scroll through the page, a generic “submit” button doesn’t tell them a thing other than the fact you want something from them. Truth be told, they probably won’t even notice it,…
