Key questions to ask and insights to use when deciding on the best investment of your precious time and money

Using the latest insights showing how consumers and businesses are using digital media and technology is powerful in helping decide where you need to invest more/less time or budget. Using the right insights can also make an impact when presenting to colleagues or clients about improvements to marketing. In this post, I round-up some of the significant stats from 2013 which show the big trends in consumer behaviour across different digital platforms and channels that will help you question your priorities in 2014. If you’re looking for specific insights about a particular channel or network, perhaps in a region or country, we compile these together to make them easier for our members to find when creating presentations - see our Online marketing usage statistics and our online marketing benchmarks compilation.

Social…

10 last minute Christmas retail conversion hacks

Christmas is days away, but there may still be options to drive your your conversions and revenue per visit higher. Despite development lock-downs and short timescales, there’s still time for these types last-minute conversion hacks to give the gift of a higher conversion rate to your marketing team. Here are 10 I've seen used.

1.  Promote any gift wrapping or customisation options

Customers who are buying gifts will appreciate options like gift wrapping or personalised messages since it saves them time and money. Promoting these options on product pages and at the checkout can give a quick revenue boost – plus it gives customers an extra reason to buy from you. Selfridges offer a beautiful gift-wrapping option at checkout which includes their signature box:

However,…

What consumers want and how to give it to them?

This infographic isn't a compilation of different unreferenced sources, rather it's based on a single piece of research by Sociomantic Labs who polled over 1000 US consumers via ResearchNow, specifically to assess their attitudes toward online shopping and digital advertising. 'It found that personalized ads lead to a dramatic improvement in a marketing channel’s perceived influence, as well as a channel’s ability to encourage consumers to take action'. Their findings delved into shopper behaviour by understanding: why and how consumers shop - interestingly, 41% visit a site with a 'product in their mind' to buy or research. how consumers use online shopping carts - 19% add to their cart to create a reminder/wish list. how consumers embrace targeted ads - 70% happy to receive ads and how receptive consumers are to ad targeting - targeted content converts browsers to buyers. The infographic provides more key highlights and…

7 Tips to win the hearts, minds and wallets of mobile shoppers

A recent Google survey shows the importance of mobile in driving shopper behaviour today – at every stage in the customer journey. Pre-shopping: 58% of the sample use their mobile to locate stores, 57% check store hours and 44% browse retailers’ mobile sites. In-store: 84% of shoppers are using mobiles devices in-store. 62% access store websites, 50% access brand sites and 21% use store apps.

7 Tips to engage and transact mobile shoppers

This post picks out 7 tips to engage and transact with today’s mobile shoppers across multiple devices and throughout the purchase cycle. If you're to evaluate the wider developments in mobile marketing that will be important in 2014, see my free webcast.

1. Personalising the shopping experience

In its study 'The Future of Shopping’ commissioned by The Marketing Store, the Future Foundation sets out a…

What’s wrong with endless button colour testing?

Disclosure: We DO test buttons. Size, prominence, copy, positioning and very occasionally, colour. However, in many cases there are higher value tests that we could be running. There will almost always be constraints that limit the number of tests that you can run, based on design & developer effort, a limited number of conversions, limitations of your tools, etc. Therefore prioritising your tests is absolutely crucial. Where can you get the most bang for your buck? In this post I will share the most important things to consider when choosing what to test.

Selecting What to Test

If you've been working on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) projects for any length of time you'll know that there is a huge range of ways to capture insights on user behaviour. No matter which tools/techniques you use, here are the three…

New research shows effectiveness and best practices for CRO across 7 key CRO techniques

Do you know the RedEye annual Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) report? It has now been produced for 5 years in conjunction with Econsultancy. Since the name was changed it has been instrumental in encouraging adoption of CRO and highlighting best practices. The latest practices in CRO are shown by the infographic below which summarises the popularity and effectiveness of different CRO techniques. Use it to review your approach. Ask... 1. Does your company have someone responsible for CRO? Encouragingly, 79% of businesses do? 2. Is there a structured programme of testing and improvements? This is poor, only 26% of companies do suggesting defined responsibility doesn't mean there is a programme in place. 3. Are you using A/B testing? This is the most popular method of structured testing with prioritisation of tests important to success. 4. Should we run usability tests? It's rated as highly valuable by 55%,…

"The true price of free and cheap in A/B and Multivariate testing"

In this infographic, Maxymiser.com as a provider of a paid service are looking to educate marketers about the benefits of paid-for outsourced services for AB testing compared to Google's free Content Experiments tool (formerly Google Website Optimizer) or similar. It's an example of using an infographic to help position a service. We're including it since weighing up the costs-benefits of these services is an issue across these types of services listed at WhichMVT.com.

Their infographic shares advice on how to choose the right tool/software and compares managing MVT in-house vs managed services where experiments are designed and managed by the service provider. It also suggests the hidden costs if you manage a free or low-cost solution in-house.

'Clients using managed services or enterprise graded solutions, have experienced 6x more uplift in conversion than those using DIY testing programs'

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6 reasons you should consider a tag management tool

With the increasing number and variety of tools now available to the online marketer, it’s possible to learn more than ever before about how visitors to a desktop site, mobile site or app are interacting with the content they find. There are also an increasing number of tools to target these users through personalisation. However, many of these tools need their own tag adding to the site pages to record and target users. Tag management systems have been developed to make the process of adding and modifying tags easier and less error-prone for site managers. The release of Google's Tag Manager has highlighted the value of these tools although this is a free tool while many of the others are paid for. In the new Smart Insights guide to Tag Management Systems we show the…

Engagement tips to drive offline action - a not-for-profit campaign example

At charity @vInspired, digital and social media is key to engaging with our young audience. Retweets, mentions and comments can be an early indicator of success, but they are only transitory metrics and not our end goal.

Source: All images: vInspired

If we're not getting young people to take a real-world action, to volunteer, then we are just measuring digital outcomes - what some call vanity metrics.

Our recent research, 'Online Engagement, Offline Action' explores digital behaviours that can be harnessed to help young people discover the value of volunteering. We identified four digital trends that can help us and other organisations use digital engagement to drive offline actions.

Four digital trends to help digital engagement drive offline actions

1. How can…

A primer on Information Architecture (IA) approaches for cross-channel design

We can no longer think of a computer as something that just sits on our desk at work or at home. There are computers all around us, literally. In fact, in most situations where there are groups of people there are likely to be more computers than people and this is only 2013. Imagine the situation in 2018 and beyond... We are now living with computers in a much more intimate way since the inception of Apple’s first generation smartphone back in 2007. In turn, such close and constant proximity has resulted in many interesting changes. Firstly, how we use computers. Secondly, the information we use them for.   Source:  Amit Burstein / Flickr This article is a primer for people that want to gain an overview of cross-channel design. It will also address…