Choosing a conversion optimisation agency is a major businesses decision, here's how to choose the right partner

It’s great that you’ve made the decision to start a Conversion Optimisation programme but the hard part is deciding which agency deserves your investment. So where do you start? This post will give you a few key areas to help with your selection process to ensure you end up with the right partner for successful optimisation. 

1. Chemistry

CIC Chemistry Show by David Carroll. Flickr

Arguably the most important questions are, ‘who are they?’ and ‘can we work with them?’ You are likely to be spending the best part of a year working with your chosen agency, so first and foremost you need to like them as people. Ideally you should arrange to meet with the strategist(s) you’ll primarily be working with, at the pitching…

Leverage the power of your data

Too many marketers are spending vast amounts of ad spend to essentially learn about how their campaigns should work. Why not rethink your approach and use your existing data to transform your paid activity and enhance your return on investment.

The problem with paid content distribution

A campaign manager for a major sportswear retailer is looking at the brand’s customer base, eCRM insight and its demographic profile data. Amongst this data, they identify that a large proportion of their customers has a keen interest in football shirts. It’s the peak season for new shirts being released from all of the major football clubs, so this is a prime moment to be launching paid social and retargeting campaigns for the latest football strips. The retailer starts the campaign, and throws a significant investment behind it – in terms of both content and ad spend. However, there is a problem.…

Personalisation is no longer a luxury reserved for the big players in e-commerce

While Amazon continues to lead the way, a personalised shopping experience has now become an expectation for the savvy customer. And, with a plethora of automated personalisation tools available, it has never been easier for retailers to employ big data in their quest to deliver personalised content.

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that personalisation is now a crucial component of an effective digital marketing strategy. Websites employing personalisation are likely to see higher numbers of conversions, AOVs, and improved customer loyalty. And yet, there is still a large number of retailers who are stuck in the personalisation slow lane, who are yet to fully explore the opportunities offered by targeted segmentation.

In particular, there is one often overlooked area in which personalisation can be incredibly effective - customer retention. …

Using predictive analytics effectively will allow you to increase sales, but only if you have right data

Applying predictive analytics to marketing campaigns will enable businesses to increase sales and returns through visualising the campaign outcomes. Below is an introduction to Predictive Marketing and how you can begin to experiment with these ideas in your business.

Introduction

You may have heard of predictive marketing – it’s an increasingly popular topic. You may not, however, understand what it really means or how it could benefit your business. In short: it involves using expected future events and expected future customer behaviours to create a marketing plan. It has become a lot more relevant to businesses as digital marketing campaigns have generated far more data which is analysed in far more detailed ways. Intuitively, most marketers can see a clear value from understanding customers better and getting detailed numbers around a campaign’s expected returns before it has started. However,…

Examples and best-practice advice on implementing Google ad extensions

Ad Extensions are additional features that enhance, or extend, your AdWords ads. Options include call extensions - which add a phone number or ‘click-to-call’ button to your ads, sitelinks - which let you add links to other pages within your website, and location extensions – which can include a map marker. There are various types of Ad Extensions and each has its own advantages, but in general the overall benefits of using Ad Extensions are: Ad Extensions are free. You only incur a pay per click amount, equivalent to a headline click, if someone engages with your ad. They make your ads more visible, because they take up more room in the SERPs. They help improve CTR, because they let you add valuable information about your products and services. They help improve Ad Rank: Google says “If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then…

Techniques to optimise your ecommerce sites for higher conversions and increased social media engagement

Creating an ecommerce website from scratch can be daunting. The task of creating, populating and launching the site is one thing, but launching it in such a competitive space is another. To begin with, you’re probably not going to compete with a 163 million page site like Amazon. This ecommerce giant has taken years of nurturing and development to get to where it is today and consistently dominates the online space. Instead, you need to start small; find methods of harnessing the small pool of users available to you and capitalise on any quick win opportunities out there. Here are 5 ecommerce tips to help you get started with:

1- Be conversion led from the get-go

Striking the balance between being design-focused and being conversion-focused is a tricky consideration to get right for any ecommerce…

Taking control of your online store to stay competitive

By customizing online stores, merchants are getting much more extensive business opportunities. Of course, it's quite difficult and sometimes rather expensive to customize your own web store, but looking at possible gains we can definitely say that it's worth doing. It doesn't matter whether you will adjust a site on your own or hire a professional developer for this purpose, remember that customization gives you the opportunity to take a competitive edge on the tough ecommerce market. Currently, there are plenty of well-known web stores that impress people with their style, design, functionality, speed and advanced technologies used. So what should a new vendor to begin with? It isn't necessary to order full-fledged customization at the very start (though highly desirable) - you can just go with a single or couple of specific options that will allow you to stand out.

Customizing your ecommerce…

Get those seats filled with these many and varied tips from 10 Email marketing experts

Whether virtual or physical, events are a mainstay of marketing to engage new prospects and build relationships with existing contacts. When you’re responsible for marketing an event it might be something you only do a handful of times a year, so I’ve rounded up some tips from seasoned experts on how to use email to ensure you pack out your event. Read on to find out what you should say and how often to say it. Once you’ve read the advice below, continue on to the examples of event invite emails and why they work for everything else you need to get your event promotional campaign organised.

Justine Jordan, Marketing Director at Litmus

For webinars, send a stand-alone email! We used…

The growth of omni-channel marketing will only make personalisation more important

It probably won’t come as huge surprise that many organisations whether B2C or B2B still don’t engage in even the most basic levels of personalisation in their engagement marketing activities. But as we move (some faster than others) from a multi-channel to an omni-channel ecommerce experience, personalisation triggered by the behaviour of the customer and not just their name has in many respects become the most important element in the optimisation of the customer journey.

How many emails do your receive claiming to be private and confidential but are addressed ‘Dear Occupier’ or ‘Dear Customer’. It does nothing to trigger the desire to act, other than to hit delete, as I know that the content is likely to be neither private confidential nor indeed…

AdTech is a trendy industry but not all trends are worth following

“Hey look over here...we have what you need” illustrates the two main challenges advertisers face and have always faced. First, how to capture the audience’s attention. Second, once we have their attention, how do we sell them something. The reason these two edicts are so challenging is because the advertising highway, leading from initial attention to closing a sale, has several exits. The advertiser is willing to concede that not everyone will digest the message, and even fewer will then continue to make a purchase based on that message. As long as a certain percentage of people follow this (leaky) funnel and complete a sale, everyone is happy. Well, maybe not everyone. Despite heavy efforts by all of the leading AdTech companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and more, it is still not possible to deliver ads only to interested individuals who…