Are the myths about deploying web personalisation tools holding you back?
Personalization has been causing major ripples in the digital ocean for many years. Most notably, Amazon pioneered and leveraged the technique in their successful quest for retail domination. Now, they enjoy 30% of their revenue alone through their skilful use of personalized product recommendations. Similarly, whether choosing a movie on Netflix, or flicking through your social media news feed, you'll find personalized content served at every turn.
The benefits are indisputable. Research by Forrester found personalization to be the top priority for 55% of retailers. Similarly, it was found to be this year's top digital priority for B2C marketers. An effective personalization strategy is now widely recognised as essential to reaching the top global levels of conversion.
And it's not just the marketers who agree. Another interesting survey revealed that 83% of consumers themselves want to receive a personalized cross-channel experience.
Yet,…
Mobile payments are a huge opportunity for marketers. Here is why:
Mobile payments aren’t just a way to process credit and debit card payments; they can offer an inexpensive means to help you reach a wider customer base, and cultivate lasting relationships. Here are a few of the marketing advantages mobile transfers and communications can offer.
Mobile payments and promotions reach customers via the tools they use most often — cellphones and tablets.
When businesses send a letter via direct mail, or advertise in local media, there are a host of unknowns: Will the marketing piece reach the intended recipient? Will it be read? If it does get noticed, will it arrive when the customer wants to purchase what you’re promoting? Most importantly, will the prospect remember your business once he/she is ready to buy?
These variables can be a costly gamble, since they are virtually impossible to control. Mobile marketing campaigns, on the…
Avoid these 7 mistakes at all costs when building and managing your sales funnel
Your sales funnel is the core of your marketing plan. It's the map of a customer's journey, right from the first interaction with your brand all the way to the final sale. Every piece of content you create and every marketing strategy you implement is built around your sales funnel.
In short, your funnel is a critical component that decides your online success. And unfortunately, you could be screwing it up.
In this post, we'll explore 7 of the most common mistakes that plague sales funnels, plus strategies you can apply to overcome each error.
1. You're not tracking enough data
A lot of marketers focus only on the big-picture metrics like page views, visitor-to-customer conversion rate, and bounce rate. Whereas, metrics with smaller scopes—like return visitors, exit pages, and scroll patterns—remain totally ignored.
This is a fatal mistake. Even though big-picture…
Email Still Outperforms Social Media for Engaging Your Customers
With some exceptions, social media has really poor engagement rates (people clicking links and taking action). And many companies are wasting their precious marketing budgets on an audience that rarely sees their posts, and when they do, is distracted and often uninvolved.
The proof is in the numbers: email campaigns see 50-100 times the click rates that Facebook and Twitter do.
If you’re after traffic that convert, clicks, comments, opts-in, and takes a credit card out to actually buy your product- you can’t afford to ignore the power of email.
Take Max for example…
Max wants to start selling a personal finance product online. He is an incredibly successful financial advisor in his town, and he’d like to share his wisdom with a broader audience.
Max gets off to a good start by writing detailed and informative blog posts that are relevant to his target customer. Unfortunately,…
5 areas you need to look at to improve your ecommerce
As digital marketers, we spend a lot of our time perfecting landing pages and ad copies. We also hire the best writers for our content. I am not here to say that those dollars are spent in vain. But when everything’s said and done, these efforts and dollars are all spent to produce a conversion.
When it comes to eCommerce, this sale/conversion has to happen via the shopping cart that leads to the checkout page. I am afraid that the shopping cart is where most marketers fall short and thus lose what they have gained with great pains.
In this post, I am going to list exactly what you should do to get all those sales and optimize your shopping cart to perfection, in order to boost conversions.
1. Best Shopping Cart Design
The shopping cart is an integral part of the shopping experience.…
Focussing on the wrong metrics can be a distraction and a waste of time but there are ways to keep your focus and make measurement worthwhile
When it comes to marketing metrics, do you ever feel like you’re chasing the wind? In the case of false metrics, that’s exactly what you are doing.
False metrics are the metrics that distract you from the metrics that really matter. They’re likely to be everyday KPIs, but they don’t really have an impact on the bottom line.
In the world of marketing, false metrics appear all too often and it is commonplace to hear about the wrong metrics being measured and reported.
Examples of the wrong metrics would be:
Chasing Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter followers
Looking at social media reach
Undertaking an SEO campaign in order to increase traffic to your website.
There is a tendency to just gauge what…
Do you nurture your leads and know when they are 'qualified, sales ready' contacts?
Some interesting sales statistics to keep at the forefront of your mind when planning how to convert your leads. They could also help build your business case for investment and resources to manage your lead nurturing program. It can work both ways, in that you can miss out on sales by not responding to your 'sales ready leads' or provide irrelevant information at the wrong time to prospective buyers, which pushes them towards another brand.
The key is covering all bases; defining your personas, sharing relevant personalised content, understanding how they search for information, knowing where they are in the sales funnel and efficient internal processes.
For example, stats in the infographic from Orchestrate show by ensuring you have customer service SLAS can increase sales - 35% to 50% of customers buy from those who respond first!
The…
Basic Tips and Tricks Every Business and Marketer Can Use to Prove The Source of Campaign ROI
Whether or not your business is advertising, you’re always marketing. Every phone call, mailer, coupon, Facebook post, email… everything is a representation of your brand. Knowing what marketing piece works and especially what doesn’t, reveals what steps to take in the future. Numbers don’t lie. The analytical success and failures of your pieces cannot be ignored. In order to hone your marketing efforts, tracking, both print and digital, is no longer an option, it’s a mandatory, tedious process, but like everything, there are tricks to marketing campaign tracking.
Track Everything
Your marketing pieces aren’t just advertising, they’re raw data!
Phone Calls, emails, web banners, social media posts, mail pieces, billboards, TV commercials, radio spots -- every campaign can, and should, be monitored to the…
Understanding Google’s latest research on micro-moments and the implications for your marketing
It’s no secret that mobile has dramatically impacted how we do business and how consumers interact with brands online - the latest mobile adoption data indicates that mobile is still on course to overtake fixed internet access and that mobile ad spending accounts for 49% of digital ad spending.
As a result of this mobile shift, Google has conducted some interesting ethnographic research over the last year to explore how consumer behaviour is changing and gain an understanding into the needs of real people. Some of the stand out insights from the research includes:
82% of smartphone users use their phones to influence a purchase decision in a store
62% of smartphone users are more likely to take action right away to solve an unexpected problem or task because they have a smartphone
90% of smartphone users have used their phone to…
While you may have thorough buyer personas sketched out for your customers, there may be one piece of the puzzle that you’re missing: behavioural psychology.
Behavioural psychology often dictates how people make choices, whether it’s what to order at a restaurant or whether to subscribe to a company’s email newsletter. Within your digital channels, you can incorporate certain principles of behavioural psychology into your strategy in order to keep your marketing customer-centered, engaging, and conversion-driven. This will help turn your website visitors into conversions.
Anchoring
This is a principle of behavioural psychology that guides people towards context clues when making decisions. Oftentimes, your audience is unsure about how much time or money they should spend on a certain product or service, and when that’s the case, they turn to context clues to help them decide and usually settle on a middle ground. Incorporate anchoring into your digital marketing strategy by adding an “extreme”…
