Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Online, everything is a competition. If your website isn’t healthy enough to compete, you lose, which in many cases affects the profitability and viability of your business.
If you want your business to win the online marketing race — or at least place in the top 10 — you have to train for it.
Here is a five-point training regimen that will help you whip your website into shape and be a true contender in online marketing...
For many, coupons have strange connotations. They're something moms cut out, or they're only used by poor folks or the elderly.
In reality, the opposites of these are true - coupons are incredibly popular among affluent folks and millennials (not to mention every other demographic), and they don't even have to be printed out anymore, so keep your scissors in the junk drawer. As these statistics reveal, the coupon is still a driving force in commerce that connects people (and their wallets) to brands. People will never tire of saving money, and brands are always looking to bring in new customers. Mix in a decade-long struggling economy, and you have a savings-savvy mindset that isn't going away anytime soon.
Enjoy this collection of coupon stats, which we plan to keep updated with the most current and relevant research on an ongoing basis. If your company has completed research into these fields that we should include, please let us know....
Tech giants like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are battling it out to create THE premiere marketing cloud that provides complete measurement, attribution, and automation. Essentially, one marketing cloud to do it all in an omnichannel world.
Marketers are investing billions in technology in the pursuit of true omnichannel marketing, which we all know is important — I’m just not sure we all know what omnichannel means or what it looks like in practice. Let’s take a step back and explore the real definition of omnichannel marketing, and how you can take advantage of it in 2016....
There was flash sales, which, with a few exceptions, are dead as a model that can sustain a huge, profitable standalone business. There was the daily-deal phase, which is also essentially dead as a standalone business, outside of Groupon. The rise and fall of LivingSocial is a good cautionary tale.
And then there is subscription commerce: Products delivered in a box to you on a regular basis. This model has experienced a bit of a renaissance in recent years, with companies like Honest Company, JustFab and Blue Apron landing valuations of $1 billion or more. But there have been flameouts, too, and I think there is the potential for many more.
It’s been fun, but the party could be over Together, these categories have been responsible for a significant portion of breakout commerce companies during this time. The first two categories are built on the back of impulse-driven purchases, with the help of a time-sensitive offer that seems too good to...
A massive 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016, which is a dramatic increase since 2014 (36%) and 2015 (58%).
It’s clear that companies are making customer interaction experiences a priority, and the trends we’ve identified will be critical if businesses want to stay competitive. Of note is that all these trends rely heavily on the cloud, analytics and big data. These now form the underpinnings of nearly all things customer experience-related and will continue to be key components of any successful customer engagement strategy....
Complacency is not an option in today's marketplace. Changeable buying behavior, channel and technology proliferation, data profusion—these are just a few of the realities marketers face today that necessitate transformation. Whether it's improving on marketing strategies that work or taking an entirely new approach, marketers must shake up their practices in 2016. Knowing where to start or what's most essential to improve on can seem overwhelming with so many possibilities. So, DMN asked 15 marketing leaders to provide insight into what they think should marketers do differently in 2016 to attract, convert, and retain more customers. Here, their advice....
Marketers are ramping up their technology investments to better understand consumer needs and behaviors. Technologies to power social marketing, digital commerce and marketing analytics are the highest priorities, per July 2015 research.
Gartner surveyed more than 330 organizations in the UK and North America on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that social marketing and digital commerce were leading technology investment priorities.
Additionally, 61% of marketers said that marketing analytics were a priority and more than half of respondents were prioritizing tech for customer experience and advertising operations.
Understanding the psychology of consumers at different moments is more effective than just knowing their demographics or interests. Timing is everything in advertising, and mobile can wait for just the right moment to reach consumers.
Here are examples of brands that have successfully used a moments-based approach to mobile advertising....
For much of the past 10 years, business has resembled a game of "catch-up". Each new wave of technological innovation has triggered new customer behaviors and expectations, causing businesses to constantly scramble to figure out how to be relevant. This era of disruption has, as often as not, caught business leaders in general, and marketers in particular, on the back foot. This uncomfortable situation looks like it's finally starting to change.
The Marketing Disruption II research highlighted 5 red flags that marketers need to address to deliver on this promise and become a true engine for growth...
If you’ve noticed fewer window shoppers on the streets lately, it may be because they’re at home window shopping from their couches; that is, they’re discovering and exploring products without necessarily intending to purchase.
For our 2015 US Mobile Landscape report*, Forrester analyzed mobile audience data from our behavioral tracking panel to understand how consumers use smartphones and tablets in 2015. We found that although professionals often group both devices under the “mobile” umbrella, consumers use smartphones and tablets in very different ways.
One notable difference centers on mobile commerce: While smartphone commerce is still struggling to get traction, for tablets it’s already one of the most common activities. In fact, Forrester’s US Mobile Phone And Tablet Commerce Forecast, 2015 To 2020 shows that total tablet retail purchases more than double those made on a smartphone.
Our behavioral data shows that in the first half of 2015, 68% of tablet owners visited a shopping site at least once in a given month — that’s more than the number who visited news/media, TV/video, or even social networking sites! And these tablet shoppers aren’t just visiting Amazon.com. Only about half took to Amazon —the other half visited other online shopping websites that fit their interests, brand preferences, and lifestyle....
The business world is a numbers game. How much of a profit can your business turn while still paying employees and covering expenses? That’s just one example of the numbers game.
Numbers also apply to your marketing campaigns. Pay Per Call campaigns work best when you fully understand the customer journey, from the moment a thought pops into their mind through to the final purchase. Here are five stats that will help you better understand the customer journey.
Is there a concept like ‘a complete product page’?
Chances are if you have ever found yourself on an eCommerce product page you have figured out the basic elements - :The Headline
- The Product Image
- The Product Specifications
- Pricing
- The Call to Action buttons
- The Payment methods.
Shouldn’t that be enough to make a sale? The user lands on your product page, a self explanatory title to the product he wants finds him, he reads the specifications (color, size, material, make, model, related features), after a glance he starts to look around for the payment methods. He likes it, presses the CTA button and bam! Sold! Works like the good old brick and mortar stores, or not?
The better question is; Is there something like complete shopping experience?
The answer is ‘Yes’. There are 101 elements to put together on a product page to complete that experience. If you are one of the lazy lot like most, there’s a quick checklist to save at the bottom of this page....
Google processed over 1 trillion search queries in 2014. As Google Search continues to further integrate into our normal daily activities, those search results become increasingly important, especially when individuals are searching for information about a company or product.
To better understand just how much of an impact Google has on an individual’s purchasing decisions, we set up a research study with a group of 1,000 consumers through Google Consumer Surveys. The study investigates how individuals interact with Google and other major sites during the buying process....
|
Are you looking for more business?
Wondering how social media can shorten the sales process?
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook make it easy to develop relationships with potential customers before you ask for a meeting.
In this article you’ll discover how to connect with prospects on social media....
Retention marketing, the mysterious form of marketing that seems to be popping into your favorite ecommerce blogs, podcasts, and even into conversations with your other merchant friends. The whisperings have started, but do you really know what retention marketing is?
What is Retention Marketing? Retention marketing is a new form of marketing that is becoming more and more prevalent in the ecommerce world. The focus of this school of marketing is to create engaged customers that return to your store to shop again. It is a shift in focusing only on the acquisition of countless new customers, to also focusing on the profitability of those you already have!...
In this post, I’m going to show you 5 marketing tactics that are effective for most businesses.
The only catch is they can be difficult or scary to do.
I’m going to break them down as much as possible so that you can determine why they might scare you and what you could do to overcome that fear.
This is going to take a lot of honesty on your part, but if you’re willing to give me that, it could have a huge impact on the success of your marketing....
Marketers are constantly looking to better understand consumers and ultimately deliver an engaging experience. According to Q4 2015 research, many executives are using revenue metrics to quantify the success of customer efforts.
CMO Council looked at how marketing executives in North America quantify customer engagement success. More than a third of respondents said that revenue metrics, like customer lifetime value, revenues per customer and overall revenue increases, were the primary type of metric they used to measure consumer engagement.
Additionally, 30% of respondents said that campaign metrics, such as clicks, conversions, shares, traffic and web analytics, were the primary type of metrics they used. Fewer marketing executives said they relied on sales enablement metrics, service metrics and finance metrics to measure overall customer engagement success....
If last year taught marketers one thing, it’s that digital marketing is moving beyond cookies and browsers to deliver the seamless, personalised experiences customers have come to expect.
To help cut through the noise in 2016, Neil Joyce, MD EMEA from marketing technology gorup Signal, zooms in on four problem areas of 2015 and the solutions that will make all the difference in 2016....
While psychology and marketing are two very different fields, that doesn’t mean that learning psychology can’t help you.
In fact, I think it’s one of the most important things a marketer can study.
In this post, I’m going to show you eight different psychological principles and the ways they can affect your sales.
To take it even further, I’m going to show you how you can apply each principle to your business....
What do a newly married couple, a recent college graduate, and an expectant mom all have in common? Yes, this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but in actuality, each of these consumers are experiencing life event changes. And when consumers make important life decisions or are in a state of change, these milestones tend to define spending habits.
A newly married couple may be ready to furnish their new home. Or a recent college graduate may be in market for a new vehicle. Whatever the circumstance, marketers can take advantage by sending offers to coincide with these moments.
Life event marketing isn’t new, but if you aren’t implementing this strategy into your marketing plans, it is time to reconsider. Historically, businesses understood the value of marketing based on life events but the most common challenge tended to be finding the data and acting on it while it was still fresh.
After all, if you learn about a newly married couple 3 months after the fact, many of the opportunities will have long passed you by. The world is now faster and data is created and collected instantly. Just as important, data solution providers have become more sophisticated in how they source these life defining moments, allowing marketers to target consumers before the opportunity is lost.
Take a look at some of the ways marketers use life event data to target consumers based on life-changing events....
All too often, e-retailers default to a flash sale when they want to boost limp sales. However, recent research has revealed that discounting can actually be a dangerous practice to your business’ profits, meaning that companies need to get to the root of their sales issues instead of relying on offering discounts.
As it turns out, discounting can cause your customers to devalue your product, and it doesn’t provide any long-term benefits. In fact, discounting can even be a slippery slope for businesses, snowballing until the companies are forced to offer discounts in order to get the same sales numbers they were previously getting. One study found that 81% of hoteliers are discounting more now than they were five years ago, and 75% said this had done damage to their brand.
Instead, e-retailers should step away from slashing prices and analyze what could be holding their sales back. Customers reported that they stopped buying because of shipping costs, not being ready to purchase, slow site speed, and a low-security site. By addressing these issues, you can increase your sales without resorting to discounts. For example, you might offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount, or you could add security logos to your checkout page to increase your customers’ trust in your website....
Customers’ desire for deals has become an obsession. Established companies have responded by slashing prices—and, for many, their brand value. With profit margins squeezed, and new providers popping up to offer low cost products and services, companies have reduced quality and, in some cases, even product safety to make the all-important sale. Risks to consumers, workers and the environment have become very real.
It’s time for companies to re-examine their pricing strategies. They need to understand what their customers notice, value and are willing to pay for and educate customers on the trade-offs of low-cost offerings....
More than 90% of shoppers say price is the top reason they buy an item from a different retailer after visiting a store without making a purchase, according to research from Cognizant. As many as 55% of shoppers leave and go to another retailer’s store if they feel the price of an item is too high.
When it comes to retailers that offer the lowest prices, there are still plenty of reasons consumers can be turned off from making a purchase. Almost half (48%) of shoppers say convenience is the top reason they will not shop at the lowest price retailer. Additionally, 32% of these shoppers prefer loyalty programs at other retailers, while 31% will shop at retailers with a better return policy....
Customers want to feel how a product fits in their hand as well as how it fits into their lives. In short, they want to experience a human connection. Every step from the initial introduction of a product to the walk-through of its final setup needs to be engaging and (ideally) enjoyable both in-store and online.
Within the next five years, any vendor with a large offering of premium products will have to provide this immersive experience or risk being put out of business by companies that do....
Over the past 10 years, consumers have increasingly purchased brands from socially aware organizations. With this shift, a huge emphasis has been placed on company procedures and sustainable practices. “Social responsibility has migrated from soft line to hard law,” says Paula Luff, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility at Hess Corporation.
She is right. It’s no longer an added bonus for a business to be socially responsible; it is what’s expected from society. Companies must understand consumer demand for CSR-related information and develop an appropriateCSR strategy based on company branding and values.
The Better Business Bureau recently held their annual forum, “Transformers: How Corporate Responsibility Trends Are Changing Business Now” in downtown Manhattan. This session featured top corporate responsibility professionals sharing best practices and tactics to develop socially responsible programs based on the increased demand for this information from today’s consumers.
While the discussion was related to many elements of CSR programming and reporting, there were five key takeaways that every company should understand:...
|
Get coached by Stony deGeyter.