How Pinterest can drive revenue for e-commerce

Since its launch three years ago, Pinterest now has over 70 million users and it has proved itself to be more than just a platform to drive brand awareness through visual displays, pinning and sharing products, infographics or other boards. Both it's volume of pinners and the success of Cyber weekend has shown that e-commerce sites are reaping tangible sales benefits. Last weekend, Pinterest referrals tripled e-commerce sites' revenue. The boards are driving traffic on and off-line, via websites and into stores. '78% of the retailers in the site’s 2013 Top 500 Guide are active on Pinterest', which shows the investment by retailers to take advantage of Pinterest. Interested in ideas for increasing traffic to your website via Pinterest or increasing pins to your boards, then these campaigns may give you some inspiration? Pinterest has more…

5 ways to use the service integrating with Amazon

You will know that reviews and social proof are an essential strategy to maximise the appeal of an online retailers proposition in order to incentivise a would-be customer to make that purchase and turn prospects into customers. Furthermore, online reviews are more trusted with consumers than bland, manufacturers product descriptions. It's also recognised that to get customers to review a product or service requires a reason or purpose to make the effort.

Enter Hugdug - a product review site with a mission to get millions of us to write reviews of our favourite books, music or whatever takes our fancy. The incentive is to drive people to write reviews through the site where 50% of revenues generated will be going straight to selected charities.

So how does Hugdug work?

Hugdug is part…

Research shows purchase uplift from social sharing and reviews

What is the value of social sharing online? How does it impact sales? Can I charge more if my product has a highly perceived value?  Sharethis and Paley Centre for Media conducted a research stud research sharing behaviour amongst 6,000 consumers, that helps answer these questions. It's a piece of companion research to the infographic we shared recently, asking what prompts online sales? It gives more evidence of the impact of social proof where social sharing and reviews of products or of a brand as a whole give reassurance to purchasers about buying a product or service. This new research shows that the impact of social proof on retail buys is significant, it concludes that: 'Content sharing can influence consumers more than price and brand, and motivate people to spend 9.5% more', according to the research.' In this…

Research showing how social media influences retail purchases

Shopping prompted by social media is on the rise, as we know from research on increasing use of  mobile devices - research and the use of social media. But this research reminds us that there are many other more important communications that first influence purchase. Bizrate's trend tracker survey demonstrates how shoppers are using social media, when buying products or services, researching online or engaging with retailers. Findings show that Facebook still ranks high for 'shopping related activities' for consumers and Pinterest follows for inspirational ideas.

In terms of purchase, Shopzilla's trend tracker shows on average 78% of consumers 'did not look at the product in a store before buying' and females…

Site relaunch conversion rate disaster recovery

Developing a persuasive and effective e-commerce website for relaunch involves team work and months of planning. But what happens if your new site actually converts at a lower rate than the one it replaces? After being approached by clients in exactly this situation the team at AWA Digital developed a programme to quickly regain the conversion rates of the old website - and start improving it. Called the Conversion Disaster Recovery Plan, it incorporates tools and the systematic application of techniques including research, analysis and split-testing. The step-by-step plan is designed to elicit the underlying reasons why visitors to the new site buy less, uncover where the real problems lie and develop test pages to overcome them. Based on AWA's extensive experience of Conversion Rate Optimisation, the Plan is summarised below as a flowchart and recommended tools to get feedback from customers and assess their behaviour.

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Essential techniques for making your communications more customer-focused

It’s no secret that effective timing is an essential ingredient of successful marketing. Spotting seasonality and maintaining frequency are the easy things to manage. Getting people to want to spend time with you is more of a challenge. This doesn’t just mean showing up at the right time, it means earning the right to person’s precious time To pull people through the buying decision, you need to understand how much time they want to give to the process. Then, ensure that you have the right tools and techniques of an appropriate duration, available when they want them. Grabbing someone’s attention is something that’s done in seconds. A person will either notice you, or they won’t. Then the moment has passed. If they then start to consider buying from you, they will gradually increase the time that they’re happy to devote to finding out about your products…

How online retail brands can benefit from video commerce

Consumers today want a visually engaging online shopping experience that is personalized at the same time. According to a recent study, 52% of consumers said that watching videos makes them more confident about their purchase decisions. As one of the most share­able forms of media, videos not only boost your brand’s voice, but also help you build an emotional connection with your cus­tomer. Thus, including it as a part of your marketing strategy will not only help you drive conversion, but also increase average order value, differentiate marketing campaigns, increase margins and reduce return and development costs.

6 ways for video engagement

Here are six ways suggested by MobStac on how to make videos work for your e-commerce store:

1. Feature engaging product videos

Not only does engaging video content improve the look and feel of your e-commerce website, but also has a huge…

Digging beyond Conversion Rate using primary and secondary conversion metrics and avoiding the common testing mistakes

A/B testing is certainly not new, with the number of people and companies involved in testing is continuing to grow at an impressive rate. Many companies start tentatively with a few sample tests, without investing in expertise or training in how to embed robust testing processes. Drawing conclusions based on half-cooked tests is a sure-fire way to kill internal faith in your testing programme. You’re also potentially missing out on some of the most interesting insights. I’ve written before about the importance of using both qualitative and quantitative research to develop the strongest hypotheses for testing. Also the importance of expertise and experience in developing the strongest concepts and then prioritising your testing schedule. However this post will focus primarily on how you then design experiments…

How price, type size, position on page and the colour of prices can all impact on whether people click the buy now button

The ultimate goal of marketing, of course, is to get people to buy. That means, that in an online context, actions that marketers can take to influence the pressing of a “buy now” button are desirable. 

But how often do we focus on what seem like trivial things, such as the size of the type used to show the price? Psychological research shows some interesting factors about the way prices are displayed. Get the display of prices right on a web page and you can affect the chances of that “buy now” button being pressed.

There are several factors which I shall cover in this article:

Should prices end in an odd numbered digit?It is not the last…

New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites

This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.

Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.

Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…