Best practices in carousel design for effective web marketing
Carousels are an extremely popular element on home pages, intended to display a variety of content in an aesthetically pleasing way. Since I’m based in Australia, they’re more often called “Sliders”, others call them “rotating banners”. The inclusion of a carousel is probably one of the most common requests I get from clients during design revisions:
“Can we put a carousel there?”
Sure, why not you may say, they look great right? With the gentle animations and dreamy transitions, who wouldn’t want to sit there and admire it. But more often than not I think that carousels are wasted real estate, done poorly, and highly unusable.
While carousels are still a very popular tool, I’m actually noticing a decline in their use on larger sites who are often leaders in modern design/layout techniques. Still, the trend decline will take a while to hit the majority…
An introduction to segmenting Ecommerce site visitors to increase conversion rates
We humans tend to stick with what we know. That can lead to great things as we specialize (the invention of the light bulb and the telephone for instance). But it can also lead to diminishing returns, especially when our business requires us to deliver results across a variety of disciplines.
For online merchants, familiarity with the methods for driving website traffic often creates a tendency to get caught up in driving more and more traffic. As an industry, we’re starting to see increased focus on optimizing conversion rates as an alternative to chasing increasingly expensive sources of traffic coming from SEO, PPC, email, and social campaigns.
But as with most relatively new fields, venturing into conversion optimization can be daunting, and it can be hard to figure out where to start. A good place to start is by figuring out where…
A case study of how an international company manages conversion-rate-optimisation
I think all digital marketers know we should be testing and improving our sites, but the reality is that often we’re focused on day-to-day activities like getting new content live and setting-up campaigns. This means that not enough or more commonly, no time at all, is devoted to structured improvement programmes.
One company which certainly does put the time into testing is Belron. They're a multi-channel business with sites operating in thirty-three countries with 19 languages with online revenue of over £400 million. You may know them as Autoglass or Safeglass in the Major markets such as the UK and US. Here Craig Sullivan, Group Ebusiness Manager explains why they invest in structured experiments on their site and some of the benefits they’ve seen.
I always enjoy listening to Craig speaking at events because he’s generous in sharing his learnings and tools that they use. This is…
Trigger emails are great, but they have their issues
My sister calls me Eeyore, as I'm ever-ready to puncture her bubbly balloon of optimism with a pithy "I lost my tail".
One of email marketing's brightest balloons is the trigger email.
We can describe trigger emails as the emails you send out in response to a customer action (e.g. an order confirmation mail) or a specific piece of event-related customer data (e.g. a birthday email with a coupon inside).
They've lovely beasts.
Because they're customised to a tightly-defined action or piece of data, trigger emails tend to be more timely, relevant and valuable than your traditional promotional email.
The results speak for themselves.
For example, for every £1 VIE at home spends on refill reminder emails, it gets £190 back in sales (£243 for cart abandonment emails).
So trigger emails, which vary from the lowly welcome series to emails activated by very specific website browsing behaviours, are a…
8 reasons to invest in mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is fast becoming a mainstream activity for those companies that get it. But for every company that does, there are many more that still don’t. Whether it’s because they think it’s a passing fad, or because they don’t quite know where to start, these companies are missing out on a commercial revolution. Here then, are eight reasons why you can’t afford to ignore mobile marketing…learn more from companies already reaping the benefits of mobile presented at the upcoming Mobile marketing Live on the 1st and 2nd October at London.
Reason 1: Consumers are already there
[caption id="attachment_17212" align="alignleft" width="158" caption="Marks & Spencer mobile site"][/caption]
When Marks & Spencer became the first UK retailer to launch a mobile-optimised, transactional website on 12 May 2010, its rationale came from an analysis of traffic to its website. Five per…
A tutorial to building a content marketing dashboard in Google Analytics
This post is the third in the series Measuring your content marketing efforts. The first two posts are: The Geek Guide to Measuring your Content Marketing Efforts and Introducing Profit Index: Revolutionary Way to Measure your Content Marketing Efforts.
In the first post I outlined the definition of great content and how this greatness can be measured in monetary terms. In the second post I have talked about a new type of index called ‘profit index’, why you need one and how it can be optimized to increase the conversion volumes and sales on your website.
In this post I am going to explain how to create what I believe are two "top notch" dashboards (in Google Analytics) to quickly measure the performance of your content. Let us start with measuring the performance of a piece of content you have…
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04 Sep 2012
How Conversion Rate Experts helped Top Cashback optimise sign-up
We recently shared this case study of one of our clients, Top Cashback, who are ranked number five in a list of the UK's fastest growing companies. Dave Chaffey suggested we share it with Smart Insights' readers since he liked the level of detail on the process we used which we hope other businesses can learn from.
The Top Cashback team has kindly allowed us to describe what we did—with a focus on the techniques that are likely to be applicable to your own business. We can’t promise that the following techniques will get you an invitation to Richard Branson’s house, but we’d be amazed if some of them weren’t hugely profitable for you.
The problem
Dubious... That’s how a lot of people used to feel when they first visited the Top Cashback website. Meanwhile, Top Cashback’s owners wondered why more people…
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28 Aug 2012
Managing Conversion Rate Optimisation, Stage 3: Plan
In this article we continue to follow the 6-step Conversion Architecture model I outlined in Part 1. Analyse and Part 2. Talk. This 6-step process has been developed over the last 10 years of our work to become the foundation of all our clients’ projects so I hope it’s useful both to agencies and clients reviewing their approach to conversion rate optimisation (CRO). In this article I look at key issues to think through as part of planning after the analysis and research have been complete.
Demographics vs. Psychographics
Demographics looks at variables like age, gender, education, ethnicity and income level. Marketers are familiar with this, but for CRO planning you also need to think about Psychographics; which looks at the thought processes of site users. You need to think about your audience from a User Experience perspective. How do they interact with a…
Look to your site first, or opportunities will go down the plughole
Digital marketing strategies vary wildly from business to business as well they should. Not every website has the same business/ sales goals and they most certainly don’t use the same marketing or technical platforms. To a certain degree, before starting to develop strategies for new clients you never know quite what challenges are going to be "thrown your way"!
However, there are some fundamentals to consider in advance of setting or spending budget. The website that you want to digitally market should always be assessed or audited to identify if the best use is being made of the additional traffic that digital marketing will invariably drive.
Let me break this down into an analogy that I like to use with my clients: think of your website as a bath, and your…
8 practices and examples that show how savvy companies are using Pinterest to engage and sell
Now it’s even easier to get started on Pinterest,. Previously you had to be invited to join, but now Pinterest have opened up membership to all and so “pinners” are likely to rise so now could be the time to get onboard and see what it’s all about and how it can work for you.
More and more businesses are signing up with varying levels of success. Both B2C and B2B are giving it a go, although not all businesses seem not to be using Pinterest to its full potential because their isn't a planned approach leading to sale. In this post I’ll look at examples of eight key practices to make Pinterest support online and offline sales.
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