New research on smartphone and tablet adoption and engagement

Europe ahead of US in mobile engagement

Adobe have released new research at the comparing mobile engagement in different countries and across different sectors. We thought it could be useful for benchmarking use of smartphone and tablet on your site and the engagement you're getting.

The research was released at this week's Adobe Summit for EMEA in London.It's from the Adobe Digital Index (ADI) and part of a new report which analyses website metrics as stickiness, consumption, and conversion rates. It's a big study based on data from 100 billion visits to more than 3,000 Web sites in Europe (Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK) - comparison are given to the US too.

According to Tamara Gaffney, principal at the ADI:

"The big difference Gaffney noted between Europe and the US was in traffic coming from smartphones. In Europe, the Nordic countries were the leaders, with smartphone traffic growing by an average of 8.7%. In the UK, traffic increased by 8.4%, and in Belgium and Luxembourg by 6.8%. Apart from France, with 5.6% growth, all European countries studied outperformed the US, where growth was 5.9%.

The UK is the most mobile-ready with companies already recording 52% of their Web traffic coming from smartphones."

The report is also interesting since it covers other KPIs for site engagement benchmarks. Here's some highlights of what these show:

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate showed the impact of increased smartphone use. The data compared conversion rates in every country with 2013, and only France, Germany, and the Nordics saw the gap widen between the best and the rest. But that gap can be hugely significant the conversion rate for the best can be almost double the average.

For reference, the benchmarks compare the best sites to the average using this method:

Stickiness

The impact of increasing smartphone traffic also showed up in site stickiness too - overall there were low figures for stickiness which is the number of Web visits that involve more than one page of a site (so it's 100 minus bounce rate which we see in Google Analytics). The report shows that, on average, a little less than half the Web site visits in Europe involve more than one page. Of course this metric varies a lot by page type and type of visitor so it's only useful to review in relative sense across a site.

Visit or Returning visitor Rate

Adobe define visit rate as "the number of times a customer comes back to a site in a given month". Gaffney explains that this metric matters because loyal customers are so much more valuable than first-timers.

In Europe, telecommunications and financial services showed the biggest improvements, with Gaffney highlighting the latter as the industry companies wanting to build a loyal following should study.

If you'd like to review the full research you can download the report via CMO.com site. Smart Insights have a fuller compilation of mobile marketing research.

 

 

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Agile Marketing vs Best Practices

Why the marketing hare beats the tortoise

Traditional marketing has been turned on its head by increasingly disruptive technology and the connected customer. It’s not enough to plan campaigns and follow best practices anymore; as a marketer you have to be agile. 

Why is that? Because the connected customer, your customer, people just like you, is ‘always on’. You don’t have a small window in their day to try to reach them anymore, as they’re switching from screen to screen, device to device, which such limited spans for attention, you have to be able to keep up.

To be a customer centric business today means that you as a marketer need to be able to think, and act, in real-time.

As a result, marketing professionals are faced with a new age of engagement - an age in which a series of targeted short-term promotions or messages are beginning to outperform more traditional long-term “integrated campaigns”.

This is an age in which the hare beats the tortoise, in which sprinting a metre is better than jogging a marathon. This is the age of agile marketing.

What is agile marketing?

Taking its roots from the Agile Manifesto for software development, Agile Marketing is a means to 'create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing customer in an always-changing market'. In its simplest form this means moving away from the ‘waterfall method’ of marketing, the traditional lengthy development process that backs up most marketing campaigns to short iterations.

While there is still a place for such long-term campaigns in the modern marketing landscape, the truth is that within our high-speed always on digital environment, many such approaches are simply out of date before they’ve even launched. In contrast, the objective of agile marketing is to constantly prioritise the customer through short iterations of activity which engage them in real-time. This generates incremental, but still significant results.

Why is marketing going agile?

The need for this increasingly targeted but ultimately shorter-term approach has been driven by a series of recent developments within the marketing community. In addition to the growth of the connected customer an explosion in new technologies has also helped to drive the trend. As social networking has grown in popularity and mobile internet technologies have improved, customers now expect to communicate with brands in real-time, and will actively avoid those that fail to deliver on this any time, any where, any channel world.

I have spent some 27 years as a sales and marketing professional, and for the last 10 years I have prided myself with perfecting the 'product marketing discipline,’ yet I’m here to tell you that job, that role as it’s existed no longer applies. Our profession is one of the youngest, and yet as a discipline it’s been constantly reinvented. What made sense for the Mad Men world of the 50’s and 60’s was totally out-of-place in the 80’s and 90’s, which in turn were changed by the dotcom era. But today we face another fundamental change or as we marketers like to say 'a paradigm shift,' of epic proportions. Today’s Marketing pros need to be ready to take more risks, although they’re risks backed up by more science than we creative folk traditionally like.

Sometimes you just have to seize the moment – carpe diem – and forsake perfection in favour of just getting the message out quickly. Customers are bombarded by an unprecedented amount of marketing messages at all times, we all are, and making your marketing efforts more agile is all about reinventing the way you work based on real customer needs at every moment, and pushing compelling, rich and relevant content out that’s also simpler and quicker.

While many marketers are still afraid of this 'always-on' communication, it is the brands that embrace it that will ultimately reap the benefits early on. The king is dead so long live the king, or at least the digital disrupter – the new breed of confident agile marketer. After all, agile marketing is just another way to improve customer connections and increase your response-time when it comes to managing customer needs.

See why this can only be a good thing with our '‘Best Practice Rant'.

Why Best Practice is Killing Marketing | Agile Marketing Rant from EPiServer

The 5 principles of agile marketing

With a bit of help from agile marketing evangelist Scott Brinker, we have summarized the 5 key principles to help get your started on your agile journey:

• 1. Experience but be focused. It is all too easy to confuse responsive agility with short-term thinking and a lack of campaign planning. Make sure you know what you are trying to achieve with each of iteration.
• 2. Be adaptable. As a marketer you need to know you can’t just expect everything to be mapped out flawlessly every three months. There will be always be things that come along, so diversify your plans.
• 3. Prioritize the problem. There’s no shortage of marketing problems to solve. Know your priority and throw time and energy into your biggest problem first.
• 4. Empower your team.  Sometimes the biggest problem is the management barrier. Give your team the right tools and power to tear up processes, when they need to, and encourage creativity and execution in real-time.
• 5. Test relevance. Test fast, fail fast and learn fast from your data. Success is a process rather than an end product.

As with all the tools in a marketers’ arsenal, agile marketing is just one (increasingly important) part of a wider marketing mix. It is all too easy to confuse responsive agility with short-term thinking and a lack of campaign planning. Overall, it’s about finding a balance between the long and the short term.

For more advice on Agile marketing from Scott and his rant on why best practices are killing marketing, read the ‘5 principles of agile marketing eBook’ to learn how to become more agile. 

Thanks to James Norwood for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. James is Executive VP Strategy for EpiServer. With over 25 years of experience within enterprise business software, James has a proven track record in product strategy, sales and marketing, M&A, brand creation and development, and has detailed industry knowledge. James most recently served as Senior Vice President and CMO at KANA Software, Inc. from 2011 until its acquisition by Verint Systems (NASD: VRNT) in 2014. Prior to that James served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Strategy and Marketing at Epicor Software. You can read Episerver's blog, Follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn. EpiServer are Content Partners with Smart Insights.

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Call Centre Technology – Boosting capacity and ROI

Strategies to enhance customer service levels across peak response

How capable is your contact centre when it needs to deal with unexpected peaks in traffic or even the normal throughput of customer interactions? 

To a large extent the answer to that question will depend on the number of concurrent users the system can handle as defined by both the technology (and licensing) available and the number of staff on hand to take enquiries. And if the number of concurrent users is limited to say 50 an hour and number of customers seeking to contact the company amounts to more than that on a regular basis then you're going to have a problem in terms of customers left on hold or abandoning calls.

Clearly the way to solve the problem is to increase the number of concurrent users that the system can deal with but in the end it's a question of cost.  In a contact centre, you can increase capacity to some degree by taking action to reduce average call length but a more obvious course of action is to raise the headcount - a costly option. The key question then is will the business benefits justify the increase in staffing levels?

But there is a better way.  Rather than increasing call capacity organisations should be thinking of migrating voice call traffic to live engagement via messaging/chat.  It provides a means to improve concurrency without necessarily hiring more people.  Here's why.

• Voice calls tie-up staff

When an agent picks up the phone, his or her job is to achieve a sale or resolve the customer's issue, no matter how long it takes. That could mean just 60 seconds on the phone or it could require an hour's worth of the agent's time. During that period, the agent is tied up with one caller while others are waiting on the line. If all the agents are engaged, you get queues. 

• Messaging instantly increases capacity

In contrast, an agent working in the chat/messaging medium can handle several streams at once. For instance, let's say the agent picks up a chat and within a few seconds another customer needs help. The same agent can pick up that chat/message stream as well. For the customer there is no need to wait in a queue. Now project that simple doubling up over a 20-strong customer service team and you have a massive increase in capacity and the number of concurrent users that the system can cope with. In reality, well-trained agents can handle more than two customers at a time. 

• Tools to increase capacity further

Once agents are working with text rather than voice, various tools can be used to increase productivity further. For instance, if the role of the agent in a particular contact centre is to deal with calls asking for product information, then much of this can be imparted through pre-prepared scripts (served by the agent in answer to a specific question) or even by video walkthroughs.  Agents can also use pre-prepared text messages to speed up basic interactions. For instance, 'Hello, how are you. How can I help' could be prepared along with a range of other typical interactions. 

• Faster resolution

Text based communication is usually more succinct than voice conversation, enabling agents to resolve calls more quickly, again increasing capacity.

Messaging gives you more for less

These efficiencies allow you to serve more customers using either the same number or fewer staff. This builds slack into the contact centre operation, meaning that contact centres are better able to deal with peaks and troughs.

The result is that message-based contact centres can handle a greater number of concurrent users than their voice counterparts. That's good for the customer and in terms of the cost-efficiency of the operation, good for the bottom line.

Source/Copyright: www.123rf.com royalty free

Thanks to Tony Heyworth for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Tony is a Senior Marketing Director for LivePerson International and is responsible for marketing and business development across both EMEA and Asia Pacific. Tony and his team lead the strategy for growing LivePerson’s online engagement revenues and establishing the online channel as a critical force for new customer acquisition and customer service. With over 25 years experience in software and services marketing, and with a unique blend of finance, sales and online marketing experience, he has held various Marketing Director positions held for market leaders including Interwoven, Polycom and Business Objects. An authority in marketing strategy and planning to enabling LivePerson to understand the needs of the customer in a fast moving online, social and mobile world we live in. You can follow LivePerson on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.

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Retail Ecommerce Design – The Perfect Checkout Funnel

Recommended design patterns and best practices for your Checkout Funnel

Checkout design is the last in our series of posts covering design best practices for different parts of the Ecommerce customer journey. Previous posts include discussion and examples and potential design elements to test for:

1. Home page
2. Product listing or category page
3. Product page
4. Site search pages
5. Shopping Basket design

Design issues for the checkout pages?

Checkout is the most critical part of the conversion path in some ways since it throws many challenges, due to the multiple stages, with each step influenced by the previous one. It is further complicated since it's not necessarily linear; so there is no standard path from start to finish and so this depends on the user's profile, where some steps can be skipped.

In the Smart Insights Ecommerce design guide, I focus on 3 stages:

• 1. Sign-In /Register
• 2. Personal Details and Addresses.
• and 3. Payment.

One size doesn't fit all for the checkout flow, and the art of the template design is in masking the complexity of the logic and process flows behind an intuitive and user-friendly page design - not an easy challenge. In our experience, it takes rigorous testing to find the optimal flow for your website.

Key Ecommerce Checkout Funnel Wireframe requirements

The wireframe below outlines the core elements for the checkout funnel, though UX/UI design patterns can vary across websites. Please note that in the checkout we recommend a custom header & footer that is different to the standard site header and footer we discussed in step 1 of this guide. This is because it’s widely accepted that unnecessary navigational elements like mega menus and footer links can distract users from the core goal of completing an order.

1. Sign-In/Register Template

2. Personal details and addresses

3. Payment and confirmation

Case study for Net A Porter

Instead of separating new and existing user checkout (the classic Amazon approach), the user is asked to enter an email address, then select whether or not they have a password. We like this UI design because it reduces the complexity of the page and doesn’t force users to make a tacit decision about which box they fall into. Some of the big multichannel retailers like House of Fraser adopt this approach. You’ll notice how the standard header and footer are used throughout the checkout, which goes against good practice advice.

Key requirements checklist for a Checkout Funnel

Finally, here's a checklist for a process to review and test your checkout;

• Q1. Have we defined and understood the goals for the checkout?
• Q2. Have we defined user cases for each step?
• Q3. Have me mapped the user journey for new and returning users?
• Q4. Is it easy for both new and returning visitors to enter and complete the checkout?
• Q5. Are we providing a guest checkout for new users (if applicable)?
• Q6. Have we defined which data fields are required vs those which are optional
• Q7. Have we removed all non-essential data fields?
• Q8. Have we ensured checkout pages aren't indexed for search?
• Q9. Have we identified web analytics requirements?
• Q10. Have we defined the navigational elements?
• Q11. Have we defined how to handle error messages?
• Q12. Have we integrated a postcode validation tool?
• Q13. Is it easy for users to edit/add addresses?
• Q14. Have we defined all delivery methods and the cost to the visitor for each method?
• Q15. Have we tested all payment types to ensure there are no breakpoints at payment stage?
• Q16. Have we tested the checkout in all key browsers ie. Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome etc.)
• Q17. Do we make it easy for users to add useful information like gift messages and delivery instructions?
• Q18. Do we promote our loyalty scheme clearly and is it unobtrusive i.e. doesn't disrupt the core checkout flow?

Additional requirements to consider in your Checkout Funnel

In the full guide for Expert members I go into much more detail on individual page elements and look at more examples of how these apply in practice from UK and US-based retail sites.

Recommended Guide: Ecommerce Design Patterns

Use our wireframes and examples to test and create more persuasive Ecommerce designs to boost retail sales.

Download our Ecommerce Design Bible.

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Refreshing your LinkedIn profile to boost visibility

Using LinkedIn to increase visibility of your content and drive referrals to your website

I've seen lots of case where people aren't really making the most of LinkedIn. Yes, they may use LinkedIn to keep their CV updated and occasionally send a little digital love to colleagues by way of endorsements. But if you are working in social media, content marketing, or simply trying to get more interest in your company’s activities, there are a lot of simple things you can do on LinkedIn that will take seconds but should increase traction for you. LinkedIn changes its features regularly, for example it recently had a homepage redesign. So, if you haven't looked at some of these new features I'll cover in this post it could be worth a refresh, or even a 'spring clean'!

LinkedIn Status Updates

Most people are aware that you can create a little update on LinkedIn pretty much like you do on Facebook or Twitter – in fact it is limited to 140 characters just like Twitter. The Status Update (also called Network Update) box you post this to looks like this:

Every time you update your status the ‘story’ – be it a simple text update or link share – becomes eligible to appear on the “Home” feed of all your LinkedIn connections. In much the same way that Facebook’s News Feed works with the EdgeRank algorithm, the LinkedIn Home Feed algorithm – not you – decides which updates to show to which of your connections. Some of these updates also work their way into the weekly “Network Update” email. You can see in the screen grab below that my most recent update had 61 views. So yes, of course you can pop in a link to your latest blog post and hopefully gain a little more traction that way. In fact, you can use the status update tool very much like you would use Twitter – links to great articles, thoughts and ruminations, announcements, quote of the day etc.

According to LinkedIn, company status updates with links result in 45% higher engagement than updates without links.

LinkedIn Publishing Platform

But there is a way of making much more impact. LinkedIn has a blogging tool for creating long-form posts which will surface your content with far more visibility and make you look a lot more professional in your profile. You don’t need to be creating brand new content for LinkedIn (although of course you could if you wished). Instead you can re-post content from your own website, blog or other social platforms, ideally tweaked a little here and there so as not to penalise the source content. You can even use video. Here’s how it works: Head to your profile and look for the little pencil sign at the end of the status update bar. Hit that to create your first post.

What you’ll then see is a fairly standard blogging platform. Paste in content from WordPress or similar, or simply write from scratch. There are plenty of opportunities for formatting, adding links, embedding YouTube videos or SlideShare presentations. One thing to note (as the delightful Matt Owen kindly pointed out for me in my first foray into LinkedIn blogging) is that copied and pasted images appear in the editing/preview mode but vanish after you hit publish, so you need to separately upload them. As you’ll see from the wizard below, it’s a good idea to upload an image. This will surface on your profile too.

Here are a couple of examples of people doing it well. The aforementioned Matt Owen surfaces a number of Econsultancy blog posts. Note the number of LinkedIn followers he has:

Matt uses a neat trick to drive traffic to the Econsultancy website. He pastes the first section of the post to LinkedIn and a link to read the rest on the Econsultancy blog:

Daniel Rowles is another social media mastermind and is prolific on LinkedIn. See how on his profile his three most recent posts are showing up. This provides real credibility to his social media prowess as well as opening a door to lots of exploration on his other online properties.

Clicking through to Daniel’s posts you can see that he surfaces a lot of video with links back to his YouTube channel:

And here's I have my profile page setup

Why not just post to your Company Profile on LinkedIn?

Put simply, personal posts have more reach. Daniel Rowles has over 2,000 followers yet his company, Target Internet has only 62. Daniel is, in fact, posting on both profiles, but the key thing here is that his personal profile is what is driving the bulk of the traffic. After all, people buy from people, not brand profiles.

Increased visibility across the LinkedIn platform

LinkedIn Emails

You’re probably aware of the various emails LinkedIn send you about discussions in Groups you’re involved in. Here’s what popped into my inbox this morning having been researching this article. A nominated “Must Read” by Daniel Rowles.

Notifications

Similarly, whenever one of your connections publishes a post using the LinkedIn publishing platform you get a little red notifcation in the nav bar.

And when you click that notification you see a message that your connection published a new post, including the post name:

LinkedIn Pulse

Finally, long-form posts automatically qualify for LinkedIn Pulse, a relatively untapped feature on desktop LinkedIn (where it is confusingly labelled as both ‘Today’ and ‘Pulse’) together with a standalone iOS and Android app which deliver a news feed of content tailored for you but – crucially – including posts from people OUTSIDE your connections. This is the “best of the best” so it’s whatever LinkedIn’s algorithm decides to show. The mobile app sends users a push-notification whenever one of your connections publishes a post too, a nice feature.

Pulse on the iOS app:

Summary

LinkedIn Publishing Platform is a great tool to use to increase the traction on your existing content, help build your personal brand awareness (and that of your business) and drive traffic to your website.

Learn more

If you'd like to know more about marketing using LinkedIn, Marie will be joining her Digiterati colleague, Carlton Jefferis, in two London training days teaching cutting-edge marketing practices on Facebook and the "Other" social networks. The Digiterati team also have a number of advanced webinars on digital marketing topics.

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Digital marketing in Healthcare – examples of Attribution modelling

If 'Last click' tells how a Conversion Story 'ends', 'Points of Attribution' paint the Full Picture

If the digital pathway to purchase was a linear and simple process, consumers would find the product they need…. and then just purchase it.

But it’s not.

How do you measure attribution?

• Before the customer makes that last click, what happened to influence the consumer to make that purchase?
• What are the points that influenced and steered the consumer to choose a particular brand over all others?
• How can a marketer understand how the different channels and different campaigns work together to produce a purchase?
• How can you attribute what delivered success and what didn’t?

Finding the answers to these questions is the ‘holy grail’ for (digital) marketers.

The Global Reviews points of the attribution model

Using findings from the Global Reviews Digital Marketing Effectiveness programme, we measure all elements of attraction which drives a consumer to choose or not to choose a particular brand.

There are a number of different touch points that can be in the model:

1. Previous relationship with the brand

Including the level of that relationship. The concept of retention – is a person already with a brand? Is the customer looking to renew? Has the relationship lapsed?

2. Online journey

Where are consumers being intercepted online and what messages are they seeing as they move through the digital journey? Looking at things like Search engine, aggregators, affiliate models, online advertising, banner ads and SEM.

Traditional through the line advertising - including TV, billboards and radio advertising.

All of these elements feed forward and push value statements through to consumers to consider a particular brand.

Fig 1: The Global Reviews Points of Attribution Model

An example: Health Insurance Providers in Ireland

We ran a Digital Marketing Effectiveness (DME)* study of the Health Insurance providers in Ireland in February. The DME measures how effective Irish health insurance providers are at attracting customers online. ‘In market’ consumer data is gathered at each stage of the sales and acquisition funnel and rolled up into scores. These scores benchmark each provider against other providers and against the industry average.

Aviva’s website challenge

A fifth of consumers chose Aviva as their preferred provider in the February study, but this figure is down 7% since August 2014. We know from the results of the DME that the propensity to actually purchase increases if consumers visit the brand's website.

Irish consumers are far more likely to choose the provider whose website they visit on the purchase decision journey - but only 8% of all consumers in Ireland are visiting Aviva’s site. Compare this to 50% for Vhi’s website and 34% for both Laya Healthcare and Glo Health websites.

Aviva is depending too much on the strength of its brand but the results of our research indicate that the importance of previous brand relationship in choosing a health insurance provider is beginning to erode.

Not enough Irish consumers are visiting Aviva’s site.  Aviva is under leveraging its website as a point of attribution.

Laya Healthcare is becoming more attractive as an alternative to Vhi

Between August 2014 and February 2015 Aviva’s weighted unprompted brand recall fell from 53% to 48%, whereas Laya Healthcare’s score improved from 36% to 43% over the same period.

Laya Healthcare is increasingly becoming the most attractive option as an alternative to Vhi, replacing Aviva who traditionally held the second place spot.

Vhi is, not surprisingly, the first health insurance provider Irish consumers think of when asked to recall brands. The percentage of consumers that recall Aviva after Vhi has dropped from 30% to 24% between August 2014 and February 2015, while Laya Healthcare’s score increased from 19% to 25% over the same six month period

These figures and Laya Healthcare’s increasing ‘top of mind’ recall score indicate that advertising is an effective point of attribution for them.

Three key touch points

The three key touch points Irish consumers move through when searching for a health insurance provider online are:

• 1. A search engine which is used by 91%
• 2. While 76% visit the brand website
• 3. and 31% use a research website

Unlike consumers in the UK, very few consumers used an aggregator site. The brand website is hugely important as a point of attribution for health insurance providers in Ireland. 

Fig 2: Breakdown of how that actual journey takes place

The search engine is not delivering for Aviva, but is for Laya Healthcare

Even though Aviva has a strong presence on the search engine results, the majority of consumers looking for health insurance online in Ireland are still not clicking on Aviva and visiting the Aviva website.

However, Laya Healthcare is enjoying a lot more success from both organic results and paid contextual ads on Google.

What’s interesting to note is that 29% actually clicked on Laya Healthcare from this results page – either on the organic results (which is interestingly listed underneath Aviva) or the “Healthcare from €9 a week” ad on the right hand side. In fact Laya Healthcare scored higher than any other brand.

When used cleverly the search engine can be a very effective point of attribution.

The search is on for Laya Healthcare

Laya Healthcares’s advertising is definitely working as consumers are being prompted to use 'Laya Healthcare' and 'Laya' as keywords when searching for a health insurance provider on Google.

Usage of their brand name as a search keyword has increased from 9% in August 2014 to 15% in February 2015 while other brand terms have dropped. 

Laya is being very clever in their approach to both SEO and SEM, making search a successful point of attribution for them.

*Digital marketing effectiveness

The Global Reviews Digital Marketing Effectiveness (DME) programme focuses on the Discover and Consider stages of the online purchase journey. The best results come from continuous measurement.

The DME identifies both the barriers and enablers to how and who consumers shortlist in the online purchasing decision journey, what drives final preference and crucially WHY your potential customers (but now lost opportunities) pick another brand over yours. We use life-like methodology which virtually places companies in the homes of 50,000 ‘In market’ consumers in the UK annually. Adopting both a passive and claimed research approach, we bridge the gap between claimed search behaviour and actual search behaviour. Using cutting edge technology we measure every key stroke, link clicked and website visited. Most importantly, our methodology investigates and explores WHY consumers search and research the way they do.

We can provide you with a unique insight into how ‘in market’ consumers research and make decisions about your brand, your products and your competitors online and will help you to answer the following strategic marketing questions:
1. How integrated is your offline (traditional) marketing with your digital strategy?
2. Why are competitors winning the online prospects you are losing?
3. Who is stealing the prospects that short listed you?
4. How can you reduce lost opportunities and increase sales?

Source: Global Reviews Digital Marketing Effectiveness studies into Health Insurance Providers in Ireland, August 2014 and February 2015

Image/Copyright: Royalty free shutterstock.com

Thanks to Marie Sheehan for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Marie has 14 years' experience in traditional, digital and strategic marketing communications. She is the Head of Marketing (Europe) at Global Reviews. Global Reviews is a world leading online customer experience intelligence and digital research company provides companies with key customer insights on how to substantially increase their digital marketing effectiveness and digital sales outcomes, by helping companies measure, track and optimise their online and mobile sales effectiveness; by helping marketers understand the journeys and purchasing behaviour of in future customers and by providing marketers and digital specialists with up to the minute insights into what best practice online customer experience looks like around the world. Global Reviews’ clients include many of the world's leading insurance, energy, banking, travel, sports betting and retail companies. You can follow Global reviews on Twitter. You can watch their video on 'Finding their Missing Why'

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The myth of the Single Customer View [#DigitalInsights]

How many businesses have achieved a single view of their customers and prospects?

This new research reviews how successful businesses have been in creating a single view of their customers. It suggests it's becoming more difficult to gain full visibility of the path to purchase with today's omnichannel consumer experience and that businesses are still facing many challenges around data and the system infrastructure to support this. Marketers are aware of the importance of trying to move towards a fuller 360 degree view of their consumers, to capture and maintain information at every touchpoint throughout the buying cycle, and how a one-to-one personalised relationship marketing approach can generate return.

This global online survey from Signal, across 17 verticals. delves into these challenges which businesses are facing in the 'cross-channel world' and reviews how many businesses are adopting a single viewpoint of their customers.

How many businesses have a single view of their customer?

The survey identifies that although nearly half have a solution in place, just 6% of businesses are happy with the quality of their 'customer single view'. So it is possible in the eyes of some, but almost unattainable, myth like!

More that half of businesses surveyed do not have a solution at all, or in implementing one have failed to create a practical solution they are happy with.

Do we believe that these are the main barriers to roll-out?

The survey identifies barriers to the SCV as the inability to capture full data, defragmented system and lack of skills to manipulate and access real-time data. The top challenge is being able to 'merge profile data' which results in a gap or rich data - according to 62% of respondents. Is it not practical to overcome these with the access to technology across desktop, mobile sites, social networking and email marketing?

According to Neil Joyce, Managing Director of EMA, summarising the report:

 "Cross-channel identity is make-or-break for marketing success in today’s connected world. Consumers are always on via the web, mobile, in stores, and more. Yet, this report shows that marketers globally are challenged to create the seamless experience buyers now expect and demand from brands. We found similar results when we drilled down into feedback from European markets. We wanted to understand the importance of a unified customer view and the issues faced by marketers in achieving it. Results confirmed that marketers need data first and foremost to understand cross-channel identity. However, they currently struggle to cover all channels and close the gaps in their solutions".

You can Download Signal report - ' Signal Global Special Report: Solving the identity puzzle' (registration required).

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5 things your business should focus on BEFORE content marketing

Key marketing tactics which come before your content marketing

Content marketing is the buzzword on everyones lips right now. For some, it's becoming an increasingly big part of the marketing mix. For others, particularly small businesses, it shouldn't necessarily be at the top of the list of priorities.

The theory of content marketing is an attractive one – produce interesting and engaging content which will be shared by your audience, and wait for the leads to roll in. Done well, it's a very effective channel, however, it takes time, effort and even the most brilliant pieces can be hit and miss in terms of uptake.

Sign up for Hubspot, Kapost, Marketo, or any one of the hundreds of content marketing platforms that are available, and you'll have all of the tools at your disposal for implementing content marketing. But this is about as far as it goes, there is still the small matter of who is actually going to plan, produce and promote your content – that is the hard part, and the bottleneck for most businesses, who struggle to find the resource to create this content on an ongoing basis.

And then there is the small matter of ROI. Most successful campaigns are built on content that is not overtly commercial in its intent. You might get the traffic and the brand awareness from this content, but it's unlikely you'll get conversions, at least not right away.

Follow these 5 marketing tactics BEFORE you roll-out your content marketing

Here are the 5 quicker wins that I believe all businesses should focus on before they invest in content marketing. You will see they are needed as a foundation of content marketing and if these aren't in place, it's like much of your content marketing efforts will be wasted.

1. Lead generation

By far the most effective, and often overlooked, way of growing your business is lead generation. You can pay companies for these leads, but even more effective is driving them directly to your site through targeted ads, search results and social media.

• First, use the Google AdWords keyword planner to find a comprehensive list of the terms that people are searching are to find your products and services. Remember to localise these to your area for even more targeted traffic. 
• Next, create dedicated landing pages with some engaging copy, maybe a video and a strong call to action in the form of a contact form to make sure you capture as many leads as possible.
• Once you have these, promote them to prospective customers through SEO, paid search, display ads and social media.

2. Good, old fashioned SEO (and PPC if you need to)

Ensuring that your business is visible when people are searching for your products and services is absolutely vital, and it doesn't have to be expensive or complicated. Contrary to popular belief, SEO is definitely not dead. It is, however, becoming increasingly difficult, but if you do it right it remains the most cost-effective marketing channel.

Make sure your business is covering the basics in terms of your site's accessibility and usability, and crucially, ensure that your site is accessible on all types of device. 

While you are waiting for your SEO efforts to kick in, why not invest in a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign to get some instant traffic to your site. Bear in mind that these conversions can run into the hundreds of dollars, so it pays to keep an eye on metrics such as conversion rate, AOV (Average Order Value) and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). You can phase this out as your site gains more and more organic traffic. 

3. Curation

Content marketing is about presenting yourself and your brand as a thought leader on a particular subject. This takes time, and effort, and unless you take the time to do some original research, you will in most cases simply be reiterating what other people before you have said.

Rather than spending hours and hours creating new thought leadership pieces, consider curating the work of others and sharing this on your social media accounts. Klout is a great tool for doing this, enabling users to schedule popular content to be shared with their followers at regular intervals.

4. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

CRO is a series of measures that can be undertaken to improve the number of conversions your site gets.

At a very advanced level, this can involve A/B testing of landing pages, and can be taken to as granular a level as exploring the difference between the colour and shape of buttons on click through rates. At a very basic level, however, it should involve the following simple checklist:

• Does each of your pages offer a clear call to action, such as a phone number or an enquiry form?
• Does your website copy communicate clear Unique Selling Points (USPs) that give the visitor a compelling reason to buy from you?
• Is your site easy to navigate and browse on all devices?

5. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Before chasing new leads, you should be absolutely sure that you are doing everything in your power to convert existing ones. A CRM system will help you to do this effectively.

You don't need to invest thousands of dollars in software such as Salesforce. Streak, a free plugin which handily integrates with Gmail will help you to do this – tracking leads from prospect through to conversion.

Make sure that you follow up on every signup you get, offer a free trial of your service if necessary and even pick up the phone and talk to people – you might be surprised at the positive response you get.

Thanks to Martin Harrison for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Martin is co-founder of copywriting service Copify. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

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Personalising customer Journeys with Personality – an example

Showing how integrating personalisation and automation can deliver a more personal experience

Long gone are the days when a website was a 'one size fits all' online brochure.  Now your web presence needs to play a fundamental role not just in reaching prospects, but also leading them through a personalised customer journey toward conversion to customers and long-term engagement.

According to Econsultancy, 77% of companies are currently planning to increase their digital marketing spend in 2015.  Whilst 38% of companies are focussed most heavily on acquisition, 62% recognise that retention is either as important or more important.  It’s vital to remember that getting visitors to a website through acquisition tools is an expensive exercise if you don’t also successfully convert the customer and grow your customer equity.   Estimates of how much it costs to acquire a new customer vary wildly from the conservative 3 times to an eye watering 30 times the cost of retaining a customer.  Whichever estimate you believe, it’s clear that to make the most of that increase in digital marketing spend, you need to think about the whole customer lifecycle.

We can learning from where the big brands invest to improve their online experience. Here, to illustrate this I have mapped the Ocado customer journey to the Smart Insights RACE model of the customer lifecycle to show how they have used automation and personalisation to manage their individual customer journeys. They also stamp their brand personality on the web and email communications, so the messages received are much more than service messages.

Reach:  Using Acquisition Tools to Encourage Prospects to Visit Your Site

In this stage companies use acquisition tools to drive visitors to their website.    A wide range of online and offline media are used to drive the initial contact with the company. That might start with Google or Bing search, or might be driven by push marketing on TV, radio, or press for example.  In this example, a customer searches through Bing and sees a £20 off promotional offer for shopping at Ocado.

Act:  Motivating the Prospect to Interact with the Brand

When landing on the Ocado website, the visitor is recognised as a first time visitor, and the same £20 off promotion is echoed on the landing page.  The objective here is to incentivise the customer to take that first interaction by registering on the website.    When accepting the cookie policy, the contact will be recognised as a unique individual on each return visit.

Convert: Turning the Prospect into a Paying Customer

Once registered the prospect leaves the first slice of data, typically including their name and email address.   As the prospect continues to interact with the brand online, greater amounts of data are attached to their unique contact record.  From now on the brand is able to customise and personalise every communication.  Emails, mobile communications and web content can be personalised in every interaction.  Whilst personalisation used to be limited to “Dear Julia”, data is now used far more creatively.  For example, in this email received after the first shop, Ocado shows a saving of £ 6.68 derived from the individual’s shopping data.

Engage: Creating a Lifetime Relationship with the Customer

It is the ongoing relationship with the same customer over and over again that really leads to greater profit.  For a brand to lose the customer at this stage would be a tragedy, and so every effort should go into increasing the engagement whilst not irritating the customer with irrelevant information.  The more personalised the communications, the more relevant and engaging they will be.

This email about Fetch, the Ocado pet store, follows on from the purchase of cat food on a previous order.

 

Integrating Marketing Automation with your Website for the Ultimate Customer Journey

According to Digital Marketing Magazine “Audience segmentation is more paramount than ever before, with digital marketing, social media and CRM making the business of drilling down into who your customers are (and minute detail about their personalities) much easier. In 2015, this segmentation will become even more precise, as the communication between brands and customers continues.”

The ability to personalise web content, email and mobile marketing is best enabled by a web presence that is totally integrated with the marketing communications tools and customer records.  Until recently this type of integration has only really been available to the big brands through highly bespoke systems.

Increasingly, integrated marketing software tools make personalised customer journeys available to a much wider range of companies.

The steps you need to take to create integrated customer journeys are:

1. Create a detailed plan of the journey you want your customer to take over the lifetime of their interactions with you.
2. Decide what customer data you want to capture at which stage of the journey.
3. Design your web presence such that you can capture and use that data.
4. Integrate marketing automation and personalisation with your web presence. There are a range of ways that you can do this from bolt-on marketing automation tools, to fully bespoke solutions, or integrated marketing software platforms.
5. Make sure that you research suppliers carefully.  Many automation platforms are primarily lead generation tools.  To create the Ocado experience, you need software that will enable the whole customer journey from cradle to grave.  This may mean some elements need to be bespoke.
6. Create story boards that map how email and mobile communications will be triggered by customer actions on your website.
7. Create personalised message executions and personalised content that are delivered when triggered.
8. Integrate with online and offline acquisition tools and social media.

References

To create this summary, CommsBox followed an Ocado customer journey over 13 weeks.  For an illustrated and more detailed look at that journey, read the detailed Commsbox Analyis of Ocado’s One-to-One Personalised Marketing.

• Chartered Institute of Marketing, Cost of customer acquisition vs customer retention
• Commsbox, Marketing to a Segment of One – an Analysis of Ocado’s One-to-One Personalised Marketing
• Digital Marketing Magazine, What will Digital Marketing Look Like in 2015
• Econsultancy, Marketing Budgets 2015: digital investment continues to grow
• Smart Insights, Introducing RACE: a practical framework to improve your digital marketing

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Global social media research summary 2015

A compilation of social media statistics for consumer adoption and usage

Social networks are well established, so in most countries, there are now a core 'top 5' social networks which are most popular. But, as we'll see in this post, the most popular social media sites vary a lot by level of usage in different countries.

We recommend Global Web Index as one of the most reliable research sources of social media statistics to compare consumer use and engagement across different social networks. Research is conducted in quarterly waves, each of which has a global sample size of more than 40,000 internet users. Many other social media research programmes are no longer active. Although Global WebIndex are a paid subscription service, their blog provides useful insights on digital consumer behaviour and the Global Web Index Slideshare gives good top-level summaries which we share later in this compilation.

The most popular social networks worldwide in 2015?

Here is the latest Global Web Index summary in January 2015 showing social network account ownership and active usage. It's useful to have both since it's the active social media use statistic which really shows the potential of a platform. Although Facebook is no longer growing at the rate it was based on the previous chart, its clearly the number one.

The popularity of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are expected. You can see that Facebook is most popular in terms of active use - other charts in the report show it scores well in terms of frequency.

The ongoing importance of the Google social platforms YouTube and Google+ may be a surprise since Google+ is no longer actively promoted, but they are integrated into their unified account sign-in.

Social network popularity by country

This is a great visualisation of the popularity of social networks based on the interviews in the GWI report. If you pick out your country it's probably way behind the countries in which these four core social networks are most popular. Indonesia, Philippines, Mexico, India and Brazil are in the top 10 for each with significantly higher levels of use than the US, UK and European countries.

The fastest growing social networks?

Which are the fast growing networks? Well, through 2014 Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and LinkedIn had the biggest growth, so we can expect this has continued into 2015. So, if you're not actively using these networks for marketing, this could be a missed opportunity. This chart doesn't show Reddit, which is another network that is growing rapidly.

Use of social networks by different demographics

This chart is striking for the similarity of usage across different age groups. It shows that the social networks are now at a stage of maturity where they give opportunities to reach all age and gender groups. The exceptions to this are Instagram and Tumblr which are clearly popular with younger age groups.

Another good alternative source of the latest stats on social networking is the 'We are Social' - their Singapore office has created these massive country-by-country compilations like this one on their Slideshare channel. These use different data sources including GWI.

Digital, Social & Mobile in 2015 from The Marketing Society

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What are the most popular types of affiliate marketing? [#DigitalInsights]

Trends in affiliate models from 2007 to 2015

Affiliate marketing has been a core acquisition channel for transactional consumer sites for many years now. But over the years, the popularity of different types of affiliate marketing have changed dramatically.

PerformanceIn have published an interesting compilation of the popularity of different affiliate types based on research by Affiliate Network Affiliate Window. The chart below shows the top 20 Publisher Type in the Fashion Sector:

You can see that there was an initial focus on search marketing, through both SEO and PPC with many affiliates specialising in these active. But, it's no secret that Google doesn't favour affiliates, so its algorithms now favour destination sites and it has developed its own comparison tools. PPC through AdWords has also become more important.

The graph below shows how popular voucher codes and cashback have become for both the consumer and Advertisers. Advertisers have had to become more savvy with their strategies by offering one-off discount codes and tighter commission payment conditions. The view of PerformanceIn is that...

' As long as online retailers need to be competitive and consumers want the best deal, online voucher codes will always have their place. More evolution in the way codes get to consumers and more sophisticated management of the impact codes have on online marketing strategies is the key to the model's continued survival.'

You can learn more about affiliate marketing strategies in our guide for Expert members.

Download resource – Affiliate marketing Strategy guide

Our introduction to the options available for setting up or improving an affiliate programme.

Access the Affiliate marketing strategy guide

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Facebook’s new advisory on newsfeed visibility [@SmartInsights alert]

Newsfeed algorithm changes which could affect the number of organic site referral visits you get from Facebook in future

Importance: ★★★★

Recommended link: Facebook Official Newsfeed FYI post from 21 April 2015

We're alerting Smart Insights readers to this change to personalisation of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm since it could potentially affect the volume of referrals that your site gets from Facebook if you're not posting the right type of content or at the right frequency.

In their announcement of the change Facebook explain that their algorithm aims to...

"give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and local organizations you are connected to.

This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right".

So, what will change and what are the implications for newsfeed visibility and so referrers from company pages?

• 1. People who get relatively little content in their newsfeed may get more. This would seem to benefit company pages who post more frequently since Facebook previously had rules in place to prevent users from seeing multiple posts from the same source in a row, but with this update, they are relaxing this rule.
• 2. Friends content will be prioritised more over brand content through personalisation. Facebook explains that:
  

  "this update tries to ensure that content posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it.

  If you like to read news or interact with posts from pages you care about, you will still see that content in News Feed".

  This suggests that company pages may find it more difficult to get visibility since updates from friends will be prioritised. However, it suggests that brand content will still be delivered provided it is a brand that is interacted with...that 'you care about'.

• 3. Updates about Friends commenting on or liking a post are reduced in prominence. Here, Facebook explain that their research shows that people they don’t enjoy seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post, so these updates will appear lower down in News Feed or not at all. This would seem to reduce the 'social amplification effect in Facebook', so perhaps encouraging brands to pay more for visibility perhaps.

Finally, Facebook recommends in company page owners follow its guidance on 'best practice guidelines on driving Facebook referral traffic' highlighted in the image at the top of this post. Although this is labelled 'for publishers', it has guidelines and examples on post content, frequency and targeting that are relevant for all company page owners.

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3 quick steps to check the impact of Mobilegeddon

How to use Custom Segments in Google Analytics to check the impact of Google's mobile-friendly algorithm changes live since April 21 2015

Well, the mainstream media have been calling it 'Mobilegeddon', which maybe overstating it, but it's going to increase the questions by colleagues about 'have we been affected by this Mobilegeddon update?'. So, we definitely recommend checking in your analytics, now it's live to see what the impact is on you or your clients.

To help businesses prepare, we featured Google's guidance on mobile-friendly when it was first announced in November and more recently, Gavin Llewellyn explained 5 tools to help check your site is Google mobile-friendly.

I've been anxious to check the impact on SmartInsights.com too, so I thought I'd share the approach I've used and share what we found.

3 steps for using Google Analytics to check the impact of Mobilegeddon

The analysis used involves isolating the organic traffic from Google which arrives at a site from searchers using Smartphones. We've found that we only see the 'mobile-friendly' label in the search results on smartphone, not on large format tablets like the iPad.

Step 1. Create a custom segment for Smartphone visits

To isolate the traffic, create a custom Segment (formerly Advanced segments) by choosing '+Add Segment' from the bar at the top. We've called the segment 'Smartphone - organic'.

You'll need to choose the 'Technology' segment options and then choose 'Mobile' from the device category. Confusing since this is actually the Smartphone visits - Tablet and Desktop are the other options.

We created this segment from from the default Audience, Overview page, but you may also want to view visits for this segment in other reports like Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.

Step 2. Add organic traffic to the segment

Organic traffic is in the 'Traffic sources' segments tab, so you'll need to click this and then choose a Medium of organic which are 'SEO' visits.

Of course, organic includes other search engine traffic, but with Google accounting for 90%, this approach is fine to identify the change.

Step 3. Review a year-on-year comparison of visits from this segment

Once you have saved the segment you can then review the trends through time. Due to fluctuations in the days of the week, time comparisons are the best option - you can compare to the previous month, or as in this example the previous year.

I've added a new annotation Mobilegeddon which is good practice for all Google changes and major site changes.

You can see that for the two curves for our 'Smartphone - organic' segment there is no step-change after April 21st, but we'll keep looking. We're fortunate that Smartphone users are in the minority (around 11% currently) since we're a business-to-business site, but this could look very different if you're running a consumer-facing site - Smartphone visits could be well over 50% which is why this check is so important.

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