How to measure your Trade Show Marketing return on investment
Do you know the return on investment of your last radio marketing campaign? How about print media? While it’s easy to track the profitability of your marketing efforts online, accurately tracking your offline marketing ROI is tough.
With the right tools and techniques, measuring your trade show ROI is simple
Nowhere is this truer than at trade shows. Although many businesses are fully aware that their trade show marketing is profitable, we recently surveyed businesses and marketing managers and found that almost 50% don’t measure the ROI of their trade show activity.
Although it’s more difficult to track trade show ROI than it is to measure the ROI of a display advertising or social media marketing campaign, it’s still very possible with the right tools, techniques and metrics.
4 steps to measure your ROI for your Trade Show
In this guide,…
Retail store techniques to meet shopper expectations
What are consumers expecting from experiences created by retailers in the UK and USA, and how are retailers satisfying their needs for the ultimate sale? Consumers in the UK and those across the pond are looking for the best offers, a rewarding in-store experience and a high level of customer, which is what we would expect.
It's interesting though that the differences are around stock/production information; 52% of American consumers feel let down compared to 28% in the UK.
So what should retailers be offering their consumers, if it's not already in place? The research highlights tactics such as consistency of prices across channels to reinforce trust and displaying real-time information.
The full In-store retail report can be accessed from Displaydata.
For more on creating in-store digital retail experiences see this post on …
Examples showing the value of social proof in boosting email subscriptions
If you’ve ever watched sitcoms, you probably have a good idea what 'canned laughter' is - it’s a track of 'people laughing played in the background' every time there is something funny on the screen. This way TV producers can alter our perception of a particular scene as its perceived to be funnier. It’s not a secret trick psychologists have been silent about, but one of behavioural patterns we all follow intuitively. It’s called social proof, and it can throw a whole new light on your email marketing operations.
Social proof is a phenomenon occurring when people undergo a process of decision-making. Our brains are programmed to automatically follow other people’s behaviour.
Once we notice a large group of individuals have made certain decisions, it is very likely that we will perceive…
How retailers can boost sales during off-peak times
What do seaside restaurants, ski resorts and lawn cutting services all have in common? They are ostensibly seasonal industries and generate the majority of their income during a relatively short period of time. Yet countless seasonal businesses make the cardinal sin of being content with their small window of opportunity and never look to branch out in a bid to extend their profit-making potential.
If you run that seaside café, do you really want to spend 8-9 months of the year brushing cobwebs from your cash register? In the Internet age, you can be certain your competitors will be conjuring up ways to cope with the off-season so you better follow suit unless you enjoy being left in the dust. Keep reading to discover how to avoid the off-season slump and keep the cash flowing in.
Customer Engagement
This is arguably the most crucial strategy as…
Creating a strategy for integrated in-store digital retail
'Consumers are 'center stage' in their relationships with retailers. The idea that a bricks and mortar store can simply 'pile it high and sell' are increasingly waning. The in-store experience needs to compliment and work with the ecommerce experience by adding a sense of magic and hyper personalization that is so perfect to each individual that it can't be found elsewhere. Retail needs to be the theater!'
Nelson Freitas, Chief Strategy Officer, Wunderman.
Digital technologies inspired new visions for the future of stimulating engagement with retail customers while helping customers move along their purchasing journey. Initially Ecommerce left some retailers scratching their heads on what to do, with many questioning whether the Internet was just a fad. Although the growth of online retail ecommerce sales has been steady, it currently lies at just 8% of all retail sales in the US.…
How rates differed between US, UK, Spain and Australia over the holiday sales period
With over 100 million shoppers and over $40bn in revenue from the top 100 US retailers alone, could retailers have earned more revenue during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday frenzy weekend? Well, according to the new statistics just released by Barilliance, on line shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts at surprisingly high rates:
Average shopping cart abandonments were at 65%, and this was higher in the USA at 75%. Interesting, that conversion rates were 1.5 higher of those buying via desktop, compared to mobile phone users.
Do we think that consumers are still not feeling reassured that mobile phones are secure, or ecommerce sites not geared up for mobile consumers and retailers have not foreseen the risk of optimising their shopping carts.
…
Best practice principles and examples showing how testing colour can boost conversion
In my previous post exploring research and examples showing the principles of Colour Psychology, I illustrated how colour choices can impact user engagement and conversion. There is so much to share on this topic, that in this follow-up I look into more detail on the use of colour for your Call To Actions (CTAs).
When you want visitors to out-click your competition, some people suggest that you do things with big, fancy names like use conversion-centered design principles. It would be a whole lot simpler to say 'design your pages so people are unable to avoid clicking where you want them to.'
One of the best ways to do this is to employ the proper combination of colour and contrast. The colour elements of a landing page work together to immediately capture the attention, and direct the visitor’s eye to that all…
Recommended design patterns and best practices for online retail Product category pages
This is the second in the series of posts from me in which I hope to give you ideas to consider for testing improvements to page elements on retail and other ecommerce sites following emerging best practices. In my first post, we covered best practices for ecommerce homepage designs.
If you work in an ecommerce team at a retailer, or are involved in design for your client’s accounts, then I hope these templates and tips will help generate ideas for testing page enhancements.
Key Ecommerce category page wireframe requirements
In retail, 'product category page' is the general term referring to pages listing the range of individual products. But you may know Category pages as Hub, Department or Division pages. Then there will often be sub-category pages too depending on the information architecture for the catalogue.
The key core elements of…
A briefing on modern social selling
The age of social selling is upon us, although one could argue that it's always been that way. When people make a purchase they tell others. When people have a good or bad experience with a brand they tell others. When people love your products or services they tell others. It's safe to say that people love to share, which is exactly why social networks are so popular.
Selling has always been social, but networks like Facebook and Twitter take that element and amplify it. Today's social selling is completely different, and when you implement it properly, it can do wonders for your brand.
What is modern social selling?
The modern form of social selling involves integrating sale prompts or direct links via social profiles. For example, Amazon allows Twitter users to add items to their shopping cart…
Research and examples showing how the principles of Colour Psychology apply to Persuasion Marketing
Just about everyone has a favourite colour, (and a few not-so-favourite ones), and as such, most of us realize that colour has an unusual ability to influence how we feel. Armed with the knowledge that colour can be a persuasive force in consumer decision-making, Professor Satyendra Singh from the University of Winnipeg asserts that retailers are always attempting to use the influence of colour to their benefit (Impact of colour on marketing, Management Decision, 44 (6), 783-789).
This may involve techniques as simple as targeting consumers of a specific gender based on product colour, to using specific colours to subliminally entice consumers to buy: see Professor Okan Akcay in 'Marketing to teenagers: The influence of colour, ethnicity and gender,' from International Journal of Business and Social Science, 3 (22), 10-18. Available…
