Pop-ups aren't always good for your conversion rate
The website pop-up can be the most hated, dumb, and annoying feature of a website. In fact, some go so far as to claim that they're more likely to trust a TV ad, than trust or respond to a banner ad or a pop-up. But it’s no secret that a website pop-up is likely to get you “new” leads and email addresses faster than any other tool on your website.
However, pop-ups are really effective for growing email lists, so it makes sense, that if we are to use them, we do so in such a way they don't annoy the majority of our users.
So, whenever the question of whether or not to use pop-ups arises, experts say that it’s best to stick to them as long as…
How optimised sales messages on category pages can give your revenue a huge boost
On many ecommerce websites one of the first things that is discussed is the design and 'feel' of the site. Phrases such as 'I want the site to look clean' and 'slick' are a frequent occurrence.
Yet it is important to note that a balance has to be struck between being representative of the brand, heritage, look / feel, and actually selling stuff (luxury brands tend to be the exception to this rule).
Offline stores maintain the design and look that you want, with your sales assistants being the ones that can step outside of the 'design', be human and actually do the selling.
Online your website has to achieve this to ensure that you end up with a website that converts as well as looking pretty.
To test the impact that sales messaging alone can have, we looked at a client's website whose site…
Using quizzes to drive e-commerce sales
Social media is a tricky too to apply. You can use social networks to engage your fans, conduct discussions or ask for the opinions, but at the same time it may be really hard to get a real profit out of your audience.
Very often marketers are getting excited with ideas that are highly interactive, unfortunately, they lack it terms business sense. In this article I will show you how to create quizzes for social networks that will not only engage your users but also improve your sales.
Why quizzes?
Take a look at this infographic with 6 interesting quiz statistics to discover the potential of the quizzes:
First advantage: Personalization
Personalization is one of the most important triggers that can help to increase your sales. Consider an e-commerce site where the content that is shown…
Demystifying personalization for retail e-commerce - examples of the three ways to do it
Personalization is either 'freaking people out' or enchanting them. It’s scary for people who believe that it may freak out their website’s visitors. But it’s blissful for those who believe that it will provide an incredible experience for them and the facts about consumer preferences support this too.
Even if you’re scared of personalization, or you love it, more than 70% of consumers get frustrated when website content has nothing to do with them.
Instead of waiting until Amazon tries something new and test it on their website, you can be more aware of your capabilities right now.
To understand what personalization is all about, I’m going to share with you what types of personalization are available now on the market and how they…
Marketers need to learn how to master data science to stay ahead
Twenty years ago, marketing was a whole different ballgame. You’d buy a magazine ad or a billboard and hope for results.
Today, marketing looks much more like a science; it’s data-driven, precise, and numerically grounded. For example, it’s possible to know how many people landed on your company’s latest blog post last Wednesday, what city each person was located in, and how long each visitor stayed on the page.
But just because that information is available doesn’t necessarily make it useful. The current marketing dilemma isn’t in gathering data; rather, it’s sifting through the mountains of minutia without getting buried in a veritable landslide. The challenge of marketers is now fishing for concise, actionable insights in a stream of scrap data.
Symptoms of Analysis Paralysis
CMOs want quantified, useful information about how customers…
Product content driving visual commerce
There are many different types of content. Product content is vital in online retail because it is the digital representation of the product being sold. In its simplest forms, product content is product images, video, copy and technical drawings.
Until recently, product images were just considered assets, and the quality and consistency of them could be very poor across a site.
However, product content is coming to the fore under a new label of ‘Visual Commerce,’ in recognition of its role in improving conversion in online retail.
Linking retail content with user-generated content
Visual commerce also includes customer generated images that link back to a product via Instagram or Pinterest for example, but retailers have the greatest control over the content they commission themselves, and making their own product content work harder will give them better returns from ever-growing content budgets.
So how can retailers make product content work harder, and…
An integrated small business campaign example
I awoke on the last Friday of November to the usual Black Friday hangover. On checking my emails I was inundated an avalanche of offers in relation to that American import which, like Halloween, is now huge over here in the UK too: Black Friday. With the Argos, Currys, Tesco and Boots' websites all experiencing outages due to weight of demand, the British public appears to have got over its aversion to this American celebratory holiday of all things consumer.
I run a niche ecommerce business that has a big US subscriber base, and based on previous Thanksgiving weekends it was clear that we needed to have a planned approach to the "holiday" season. As the day drew nearer we had customers emailing asking what we had planned as offers - it was going to be a big sales day.
Now we are a small business, our turnover…
Analysis and actions showing the best ways to increase your conversion rate
An abandoned basket is exactly as it sounds; it’s when a visitor who already added a product/service to the shopping cart then, for whatever reason, abandons their shopping cart and never proceeds to make a purchase.
At best this is very frustrating; at worst it can be a business critical problem for your ecommerce site.
However, it’s not all bad news; your visitor at least managed to find your website and even went as far as selecting a product to add to their shopping cart.
This is a solid foundation to build on, but how can we reduce these instances of online shoppers abandoning their baskets?
Find out where customers are exiting from your checkout flow
Your “checkout” flow describes the entire process of buying a product via your website, from to adding an item to basket, through to completing payment.
A good place to…
Exploring the benefits for small and medium businesses
Marketing Automation is one of the hottest trends in 2015, according to a recent SmartInsights survey.
However, adoption of this key technology is still in its early phase, especially amongst small businesses.
This article explains how small businesses are using a wide number of solutions as simple as keeping customer data on an excel spreadsheet, that they can see the benefit of using integrated marketing systems, just not yet. Because it is still a relatively new field, let's start with an explanation of what marketing automation is. I'll then go on to explain the overall benefits to business and the specific value that individual SMEs have expressed in our in-depth conversations and summarise with our predictions for SME adoption of automation.
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8 examples of CTAs that Should Inspire You to Assess Your Own and Make Some Changes
“If you build it they will click?” Not likely. Your visitors do not have some instinctive urge to click a button just because it is there. They have to want to click that button because there is some value in doing it. The questions to ask yourself are as follows:
Have you created enough value or benefits?
Is your CTA really “connected” to the conversion?
Are you providing “no-risk” for clicking that button?
Have you told the visitor exactly what to do?
Have you established some form of urgency?
Are your CTA’s taking advantage of the psychology of conversions?
While no single CTA will probably meet all of these criteria, the more that can be incorporated, the better. Here are 8 example CTAs that are getting conversions, with an explanation of why they do.
Manpacks Wants You to Get Creative
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