The anatomy of a perfect checkout page [Infographic]

Use this infographic to perfect your checkout page

There’s no need to wax poetic about how the internet has changed our shopping habits. It’s never been easier to buy anything, from anywhere, at any time.

But when it comes to the online shopping process, there’s nothing more frustrating than reaching a checkout page that is unfriendly, confusing and difficult to complete.

It’s no wonder that the average rate of online cart abandonment is at 68.53%. So what’s going wrong? According to the infographic below by VWO, the reasons vary from forcing shoppers to register to people simply not being ready to buy yet. While the latter might be more of an effort to convert, the former can easily be fixed with a tweak of your checkout process.

So what’s best for you? Every check out process should be unique to a website’s product and audience. Hence, the only way to see what works is to continuously test your pages. This need not be a stab in the dark and a game of trial and error. An A/B test – where you can test changes on your website against a control to see which will produce the best results – can be a structured, planned and financially sound way of seeing what works best. Even the smallest changes can make a huge difference. Continuously play with copy, colour, design and layout. What changes have the best results?

If your website traffic isn’t being reflected into sales, it might be time to see if your checkout page is working best for you.

Thanks to NeoMan studios for this infographic

 

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How to Master Keyword Research for SEO

Simon Swan's interview with Nick Eubanks on mastering keyword research

To ensure the success of any digital plan requires putting the right building blocks in place to guarantee you’re developing your strategy from the ground up. In a recent blog article I discussed the importance of ensuring your website has a sound information architecture and introduced you to the tool Screaming Frog. Another key building block is to ensure your strategy is targeting the right keywords and phrases based on your objectives as well as who and what audience you’re looking to target.

Keyword Research is an essential requirement as part of digital strategy and can be applied for a number of different digital tactics such as SEO, PPC, Affiliate or Social media This visual from Moz.com on SEO fundamentals clarifies the level of importance any digital marketer should give to mastering the art of keyword research for SEO.

To cut through the endless blog posts and text books available on how to understand keyword research, here, I’m giving you a shortcut in how to master keyword research by interviewing to Nick Eubanks, a serial entrepreneur who has carved out a niche to become one of the lead authorities in keyword research and SEO having provided consultancy to Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters and ExxonMobil helping these global brands to drive qualified leads and digital revenues. He is well regarded as someone who provides hands-on digital training and insights.

Nick recently launched his own keyword research online course for anyone wanting to accelerate their learning and become a keyword research pro in 7 days. I caught up with Nick to discuss in more detail the recent changes in the search marketing landscape such as Google “Not Provided”, the rise in mobile usage and implications to keyword research as well as some general digital marketing trends.

Q. Tell us a little about yourself

I’m a serial entrepreneur with a passion for SEO and product development. In late 2014 I started investing in growth-stage tech company’s and have been having a blast.

Q. When did your digital career start?

In 2004 as an intern for Morgan Stanley;  I was a sophomore at Saint Joe’s University here in Philly and realized one-day that making 200 phone calls to sell stock wasn’t for me – and found my way into pioneering the first-ever email marketing campaign to make it past Morgan Stanley’s compliance department (just before the CAN-SPAM Act of 2004).

Q. The course, Mastering Keyword Research in 7 days – can you sell it us in a tweet?

Master Keyword Research in 7 Days is the fastest way to learn effective keyword research and realize ROI from SEO.

Q. Keyword Research has got a lot more difficult since Google decided to shake up the industry with “Not Provided” – What insights do you provide to eliminate this concern?

I use a lot of the more standard techniques at this point including matching up queries from webmaster tools and filtering by landing page. Most recently I have been very impressed with Authority Labs “Now Provided” report which does the same but automates it.

Q. With the majority of data that can be pulled from keyword research, you could easily feel out of your depth to turn the insights into actionable data – what’s you recommendations on where to start with keyword research? Long tail or head terms?

I actually follow my process that I outlined in MKR7D, I identify a variety of terms based on volume, competitiveness, and intent, score and rank them accordingly, and use it to form my timeline for up to 12 months. I almost always start with long tail terms and optimize backwards to build long-term relevancy form tail to head.

Q. Should organisations think laterally about keyword research e.g. opportunities for keyword research to support other digital channels e.g. Social Media or affiliate marketing?

Absolutely. There’s no reason keywords, especially those with high commercial intent or indicative of intrinsic product benefits should be constricted to just organic search. The same high-solution keywords can be used to attract and convey value across almost all digital channels.

Q. The rise in mobile is becoming an ever more important channel to engage with your existing audience and new prospects – do you have insights to suggest how mobile users search via keyword or phrases in comparison to a desktop search?

I don’t have data to substantiate this but based on my personal observations over the last 18 months, within my small section of verticals that I monitor and compete in, I’ve noticed more informational and transactional searches via mobile. So more times than not it seems people are either looking to start their search and begin gathering information, or are in a hurry and are ready to make a purchase.

Q. You provide 101 reasons why Keyword Research is the essential building block for any successful SEO strategy (and it could be argued for any successful digital strategy which encompasses the full digital mix) – how have you seen keyword research change in its usage?

More than anything I think keyword research has grown in importance in the advent of paid social. Suddenly there’s an ever-growing source of direct to consumer touch points, with a lower barrier to entry and engagement, where brands and retailers can leverage keywords to connect with their target audience.

Q. Mastering Keyword Research in 7 days starts with the theme of doing keyword research for existing websites v new websites – what was the significance in focusing on this?

I don’t really see it being talked about anywhere on the web – and as I explain in the lesson, in my mind you need a different approach for each. The problems are different in each scenario, and while there’s overlap, you aren’t starting at the same place. New websites require a lot more gathering, refinement, and testing, whereas existing websites give you a sense of where you’ve been, what’s worked, and can point you in different directions faster.

Q. You’ve worked for large corporations such as Thomson Reuters, Morgan Stanley and ExxonMobil – how do you go about “selling in” the concept of SEO to a non-digital audience?

Morgan Stanley wasn’t SEO as much as it was online, and in that respect, mostly email. Thomson Reuters and Exxon already understood the far reaching implications of digital and more so were concerned with security, compliance, and brand management. In the end it’s a bit too much bureaucracy and red tape for me..

Q. Monitoring and measuring your keyword research is essential to get the buy-in and budgets from the organisation to support ongoing efforts – what key metrics would you recommend are measured to assess the effectiveness of a keyword research strategy?

Conversions, and whenever possible revenue; always tie back new organic traffic to the dollars it’s creating and extending – as the old adage says “sales fix everything.”

Q. There seems to be a distinct lack of actionable, hands-on digital marketing training that’s up to date and relevant. You really need to search out for the right training from individuals such as yourself; Annie Cushing’s Annielytics; Jon Cooper’s Link Building or agencies that have developed their own training e.g. Moz, DistilledU. Do you see this as an issue for the industry that the more “traditional” educational establishments have not addressed? Eg College, Universities etc?

To an extent I guess, but at the same time there’s also been huge advancements in moving education online – with massive investments made into infrastructure, reach, and localisation. I think over the next 3 years we are going to see even more brick and mortar business segments moving heavily into digital, just look at the National Association for Certified Home Inspectors as an example..

Q. How would you suggest a digital marketer develops their career to ensure they keep on top of the breadth of digital channel tactics e.g. Is it time to specialise in a specific vertical or take a broad approach?

Specialization is absolutely key; the noise across industries has become so loud that you need to carve out a niche within a niche to make any kind of name for yourself these days.

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How to compete with digital disruptors through enchanced customer experience

Five recommendations for approaching digital innovation in order to serve the customer better

Through using digital technology and media, customers have found new ways to communicate, consume and share. They now measure the performance of organisations and the brand experience based on the standards set by ‘digital natives’ such as Amazon or Uber. Customers expect the same rapid response times, a seamless omnichannel experience and real-time information from every other organisation they do business with.

While most traditional organisations now have customer-centricity and enhancing the customer experience high on their strategic agenda, they’re at a distinct disadvantage as few of these organisations have been built around the customer’s needs or with an ‘outside-in’ approach. Digital start-ups, on the other hand, have customer-centricity at their very core which gives them the edge on customer experience.

Why digital disruptors have the edge on customer experience:

• Digital disruptors are mainly founded on the premise of improving or simplifying the lives of end users

• Their business is built from the user’s perspective rather than on an established business model

• The digital technologies on which they build their products and services enable a much higher degree of customer-centricity

• They lack the legacy infrastructures, bureaucracy and operating models that force many traditional companies to continue thinking from the ‘inside-out’ rather than from the ‘outside-in’

So how can established organisations compete with digital disruptors on customer experience?

We have seen many companies fade and fold as a result of digital disruption, but rather than dwelling on the threat of disruption it’s time for established organisations to look at the opportunities presented by the increasingly digitised world we live in.

Large global enterprises such as Proctor & Gamble, Disney and GE have already begun to leverage their vast resources and capital not just to react to technology disruption but also to drive the disruption themselves; transforming from digital followers to digital leaders, and embracing digital in an effort to not only disrupt current markets but also to move into new ones.

Five recommendations for approaching digital innovation in order to serve the customer better

1. Focus on people first, not technology

Too many businesses approach digital innovation from a technology perspective, but it is human behaviour and the customer that is driving the digital world of today. Businesses must take note of customer behaviour and how it is evolving in light of the latest digital innovations. How are your customers currently using technology to accomplish things such as shopping, researching, communicating or travelling, and more importantly, how are they going to use technology to accomplish these things in the future?

2. Act now, or get left behind 

According to the 2015 Digital Transformation Review n° 7: Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption research by Capgemini:

74% of companies respond to digital disruption only after the second year of their occurrence, and 38% responded after the fourth year.

The majority of companies that went bankrupt only responded when the digital disruption had already firmly taken hold.

The lesson here is that the time to act is now. Don’t wait for digital disruption to take hold. Get started with your digital innovation strategy today.

3. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and shake up your business model

It’s important to constantly look out for inefficiencies in your current business model. Look for where there is a mismatch between what customers want and what your company is actually delivering, and see where digital innovation can help solve this. Where is your business failing to meet customer expectations? What is a constant source of frustration for your customers? Signposts for vulnerability to disruption can include large fluctuations in financial performance, underutilised resources or excessive inventory. Conduct regular business model audits to identify weaknesses in your current business model, and experiment with new business model ideas in order to accurately predict success of the innovation.

4. Don’t fear digitalisation. Embrace it.

All businesses must position digital innovation at the heart of their business and use it to optimise the customer experience. New channels and technologies offer rich customer information for those that can gather and analyse it effectively. By harnessing digital platforms to your advantage you can anticipate new growth markets and identify untapped resources. Start with your customer pain points and identify how technology can help you solve them. Leverage technologies like social media, mobile and analytics to enhance the customer experience and serve customers in the way they want and expect.

5. Create a top-down digital vision

Create an innovative digital vision that the senior management team is fully engaged with so everyone in the organisation understands what the company is trying to achieve, whether it is focused on operational effectiveness or delivering exceptional customer experience.

Employ an open innovation model for your business that invites innovative ideas. Invest in hiring and nurturing digital skillsets and encourage employees to identify innovative new practises and opportunities for business success. Many companies are now setting up innovation labs and incubators to facilitate this.

The digital world we live in should not be looked upon as a bleak landscape characterised by the threat of new start-ups at every turn. Indeed, new start-ups and budding entrepreneurs are leveraging digital technologies to build successful businesses that are delivering on and exceeding customer expectations. However, these digital technologies also present golden opportunities for established organisations to transform their businesses and become disruptors themselves.

Every business today needs to be a digital business. Digitalisation is not about how you incorporate technology into your organisation, it’s about how you use technology to create new opportunities for your business, ensuring your company serves the customer of today and tomorrow.

Learn more about techniques to respond to Digital Disruption

To learn more about techniques to manage digital transformation, download the free whitepaper from our Content Partners Sitecore: Digital Disruption: Disrupt or be Disrupted.

Thanks to Irene Coghlan for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Irene Coghlan is a London-based marketer who specialises in software and technology marketing with a focus on inbound strategy and content marketing to build brand awareness and drive high quality B2B lead generation. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Image Credit: Digital Transformation and Customer Experience

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Marketing a start-up company on a minimal budget

Use these 5 steps to successfully market your start-up at low-cost or no cost

So, you’ve had a fantastic idea for a new product, piece of software or solution to a business or personal challenge that every one has but no one has fully solved. The idea was so good you decided to quit your day job and found a start-up and have defined your business model using the business model canvas. Maybe you just invented an App that allows you to hire someone to stay in your house for when your waiting for a parcel to be delivered that is going to be ‘The Uber of getting people to wait for parcels’. Maybe it’s a website with a new photo-analysing algorithm you can submit photos of yourself to that finally answers the question ‘does my bum look big in this?’. Maybe it’s a social network for cats. Whatever your idea, no matter how brilliant, you still need a way to tell people about it, but inevitably, initially budget, or rather lack of it will be an issue. You may have budget for coffee-fuelled planning or partner meetings, but not large media budgets.

The problem is, unlike the established players you may well be trying to un-seat; you don’t have a marketing department. It might just be you, or you and a co-founder. Maybe if you are a bit further down the line of start-up growth it is you, your co-founder and a couple of developers. You have to do marketing on a shoestring budget, so how can you possibly compete with the big players in the industry you're trying to disrupt?

The answer is simple, although to put it into practice it is rather complex and needs a lot of hard graft and testing. The essence of this approach is to leverage the excitement around your idea via free/low-cost platforms, using your time or those of your first employees.

As you build a loyal following and have these people become your advocates, you'll be able to reach far more people than you would if the same budget was invested in advertising. These 6 steps give an overview  to break down the process of achieving this and you can also read our other articles on startup marketing:

Step 1: Brainstorm how to generate excitement

When Marketing a start up company always bare this one thing in mind; the established companies you’re trying to displace have vastly larger budgets than you, possibly more experience in marketing and pre-existing relationships with clients and customers. You have one huge asset: the power of your idea and the excitement this can create. You absolutely have to leverage this if you are going to be successful.

Dave's post on the prioritising online marketing investments using our Digital Marketing Radar and Marketing Bullseye gives some frameworks to help you brainstorm.

Think long and hard about how to present your idea to convey how exciting it is and how it will improve people’s lives, save people money, bring people joy, laughter or help people enhance their skills. The tone you use to market your idea and how you convey your brand has to be nailed down right from the start. And if you don’t think about it you are sure to end up with a generic brand tone that won’t do you any favours and won’t set you apart. If your start up idea is for a dating app for Smart Watches that uses Bluetooth to only match you with people within twenty paces of you, then you probably want to take a cheeky and fun loving tone. Conversely if you are creating an Fin-Tech app that lets people loan money to other people to install solar panels on their home in return for them paying the lender the amount they save on their bills, then you want a brand tone that is serious, eco-conscious and conveys how you are going to improve the world by propagating the use of green energy.

Brainstorm with colleagues or even friends about how to convey the importance of your product/service via the right tone. Once you have this nailed you can go onto the next steps, but don’t start marketing before you know exactly what kind of message you want to impart on your audience.

Step 2: Build a presence across social media – use a personal touch to your advantage

For start-ups, social media is a great place to start with marketing because it is low cost and the barriers to entry are so low. You can have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts set up in an afternoon. That doesn’t mean you should only take an afternoon over it though!

If you are going to be successful using Social Media to market your start-up you will need to Plan, Manage and Optimise. Planning, managing and optimising social media for a start up really warrens a post itself, but here is a brief overview of what you need to do to be successful:

Plan: Before setting up on any channel, read about what works and what doesn’t, and what techniques are working well within your industry. Shameless plug: Smart Insights guides provide both handy overviews and great in-depth advice for all the major social networks. Construct a plan for each channel first, and only create accounts on the channels you think you can really use. I’d advise you start out with the larger platforms; Facebook and Twitter, and depending on the nature of your start-up, then branch out to others. If it is a stylish and visually appealing product that is associated with a certain lifestyle, sharing images via Instagram may be good bet. If the product has an audio dimension (maybe it’s an app that can read newspapers via a Smartphone camera and then turn them into audio recordings), then having a Sound Cloud account could be a good idea.

Manage: Whatever you do, don’t go setting up accounts on as many social platforms as you can and then abandon them when you realise you don’t have the time to manage them all and have no content to publish on them. This will look unprofessional and you risk potential customers/clients either being put off or attempting to contact you via the channel but for you to not see their messages because you never log in. For all the accounts you do set up, make sure you manage them, post to them regularly and answer customer questions. Also make sure to have common branding across accounts so your accounts are all pulling in the same direction and none are undermining your brand.

Optimise: To build a following, post content as regularly as you can manage without taking up too much of your time, and interact with other people and companies pages. Particularly on Twitter interaction is a great way to gain visibility, as your interactions with other accounts will often be re-tweeted by the account owner if the interaction was positive. Find out what goes down well with your audience and aim to produce more of that kind of content. Social Media is not a silver bullet, and don’t expect huge results straight away. You’ll have to work hard to build up a big audience, but because of the low barriers to entry and the low costs of using the platforms it is a great place to start for start-ups.

When using social media, make sure to take advantage of something major companies can’t match you on; personality. Your small size means you can engage with your audience much more authentically than larger brands. You don’t have any form of stymying corporate culture, which gives you far more freedom to be witty, funny or clever. Having a genuine personality will reward you with a more loyal following. People are much more willing to do someone a favour if they feel like they know them than if they are a faceless corporation.

Step 3: Run a regular newsletter to build an email list via voluntary organic opt-ins. This will create your future customer base.

Hopefully your social media channels will get people aware of your offering and start to generate a loyal following of people interested in your start-up. Email is the channel that consistently offers the best ROI, but only if done right. Some brands conduct email marketing campaigns by paying data-owners big sums of money for access to their databases of email addresses and then sending out vast numbers of emails which may have low click rates and low open rates if not well targeted. There is nothing wrong with this tactic if it is working, but for you as a start-up, you won’t have the cash for buying big lists of email addresses to send out E-shots to.

Start a simple newsletter to let people know how about the existing developments with your product. It may be that you’re still tweaking the design and adding new features. Loyal fans will want to know about this. A monthly newsletter is probably best if you don’t have much time to spend on it, but bi-weekly or even weekly could also be very effective if you have the time to create the content regularly. Tell your fans about this newsletter via your social channels and on your website, and prompt them to sign up, whilst promising them that they won’t receive any spam from 3^rd parties. This will reduce people’s hesitations to giving away their email address. Make sure to keep up your side of the bargain though. Don’t spam your audience with sales emails and don’t sell your email list to third parties if you’ve told people signing up they won’t be getting emails from third parties. This is common sense, but if it did happen it could be a PR disaster.

When it comes to using your email list to sell, do so softly without being spammy. Use product announcements and perhaps the odd offer in your newsletter to nudge your loyal followers towards conversion. If you were to send them regular emails that are just trying to get them to buy they are likely to un-subscribe from your list.

Step 4: Use excitement to increase reach via PR campaigns.

This goes back to point one; you have to utilise the strength of your idea to increase your reach far more than one would normally be able to on a shoestring marketing budget. Rather than taking out ads, contact journalists about how your product is going to change things in your industry, challenge the establishment or just simply make people smile. Whatever it is that your start-up does, getting a lot of press attention around it is probably the single most effective away to generate a huge reach without spending a huge amount on advertising.

"If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget I'd spend it on PR!" – Bill Gates

Work on your pitch, keep it short, snappy and exciting, and start contacting journalists. You may have to try a huge number before you get success, but once you are in one magazine, news site or paper, then others will sit up and start paying attention.

Step 5: Reward loyal followers to increase engagement

Your social media followers will have been helping you increase your reach at no extra cost throughout this process by sharing stories to their communities which will allow you to get your offering heard by many more people than would have been possible without them. If you are really lucky you may even have had some content go viral and shared exponentially to reach even more than your established competition could with a significant ad spend.

Once your start-up is into the swing of things, has launched its product/service and is starting to makes sales, you should reward your followers/email subscribers with special offers and let them know you are grateful for them being with you along the bumpy ride from young start-up to flourishing company. This isn’t just worth doing because it’s a nice thing to do, it will help you retain that nucleolus of loyal followers and brand advocates which helps you to punch above your weight in reach and conversions. Word of mouth is hard to measure but extremely effective, and stories about a good experience with a brand can have a huge effect on purchasing decisions. Being generous to your fans can thus make great business sense. It will also help build your following which will in turn help you with email sign ups and improve your reach and positive PR. Rewarding loyal customers can create a powerful virtuous cycle.

Summary

Follow these five steps to market your start up effectively on a small budget. You will need determination and a fantastic product to succeed, but the rewards are potentially enormous. These steps won’t be enough on their own but provide a useful starting framework. Be agile, seek out the best advice you can find and always do your research before diving in blind. You don’t have time and money to waste getting things wrong. Needless to say, I think Smart Insights guides are a place to get the advice you’ll need to market your start up effectively, so have a look around the site and see if you could stand to befit from expert membership.

Download resource – Digital marketing strategy guide

Our most popular guide, based on field-tested, proven approaches to create a plan used by businesses, large and small. Gives you 7 steps to structure your digital plan using the Smart Insights RACE Digital Planning system and PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning approach.

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Why you need to integrate your Email and Social Media strategies [Infographic]

Email and Social Media work better together

You may think of email marketing and social media as completely separate channels, each with their own audiences, content, and goals. That’s true to an extent, but with the rate at which both channels are exploding (email is the most popular online user activity on smartphones and other devices, and there are currently 2 billion active social media accounts in the world), marketers have realized that they can take advantage of one channel in order to improve the other, and vice versa.

This new strategy has an especially high ceiling for potential when you realize that crossover between the channels has traditionally been very low. One study recently found that of one company’s social media followers, only around half subscribed to their email newsletter. Marketers have an incredibly opportunity to leverage their social audience to improve their email reach, and vice versa. The only question is how. Reachmail has put together this really useful infographic with these answers.

Companies such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Sony have already (successfully) experimented with integrating social media and email marketing, using strategies such as adding an email sign-up widget to their Facebook page and adding social media share buttons to their emails to increase their followers on both channels. Their results prove that when email and social media campaigns work hand-in-hand, companies can improve results within both channels.

But before you start tweeting links to your email subscription page or emailing your subscribers and asking them to follow you on Facebook, make sure that the heart of your email and social strategies are staying true to the original channels. That is, remember that email is typically a mid-funnel channel, while social media is about engagement; their different purposes should drive the use of the channels. However, by strategically integrating email and social, you can improve each channel’s reach.

See this article for examples of integrating email and social media marketing.

 

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Web Personalisation is more complicated than you thought

Website visitors do not want obvious personalisation as much as they would like to believe something is personal

The chances are you have received an email addressed to “Dear [First Name]” or similar? Email marketers appear to forget to include our actual names from time to time. It is annoying and we all laugh at it, realising that the company involved has failed to populate its database properly or set up its email software correctly. However, do we care? Are we bothered if the personalisation of emails is poorly carried out?

Ask professional marketers and there’s a good chance that they’ll tell you that personalisation is essential. Indeed, according to a report from Monetate, 94% of businesses believe that proper personalisation is “critical” to success. Meanwhile, less than one in every six firms felt that they were getting a return on their investment in personalisation.

Perhaps that is because people are not as bothered about personalisation as many marketers think. New research suggests that what is important is “perceived personalisation” rather than actually being personal.

Names do not matter much

The study conducted at the University of Miami included an interesting experiment in which people were addressed either by their real name or as “Dear Consumer”. The level of interest in what was being sold was then measured. There was no difference in the degree to which people were prepared to consider what was on sale. Whether they were addressed by their real name or as “consumer” made no difference to their level of interest.

This goes against the long-held theory that names matter and that “Dear First Name” is a negative turn-off. What appears to matter most is getting it wrong. The Miami research found that when they called someone by the wrong name, that led to disinterest. When someone who was called David was addressed as Kevin, for instance, they became completely disinterested in what was on offer.

What this research shows is that we are not that bothered about being called by name. The study included a third experiment that shows why. The preferred holiday destination of participants was known in advance. These people were then asked to look at a web page where a holiday advert for the kind of destination was included. For some participants, the name of their favourite destination was included in the advert. However, it transpired that people were equally interested in the advertisement, regardless of whether or not it contained the destination name. It appears that the mere notion of the holiday was enough to convince people that they should be interested in the advert. The presence of the name made no difference.

Target people’s interests

The three Miami experiments show that as long as people think information is personalised to them they are interested – even if there is no actual personalisation. The “Dear First Name” error is not a problem if the remainder of the email contains information that is of interest to the recipient. Because of this, they think the material is personalised.

Of course, this assumes you know the real interests of your target customers. This is where web technologies let marketers down. Web page advertising, for instance, uses past browser history to target adverts to people. However, it becomes incredibly annoying when you always see advertisements for items you have already purchased. No longer is the advertising about something in which you are interested. As a result, it is like calling David by the name Kevin.

Similarly, many e-commerce sites use visitor purchase history to present a page of options that is “personalised”. However, this frequently fails. If you have been shopping for gifts for a friend at an online retailer you are not that interested in the items yourself. Hence, the so-called “personalised” page is nothing of the sort. It would be better suited to your friend.

For marketers, there is another problem. People do not like their activities being tracked. In one study conducted by Adobe more than two-thirds of people say it is “creepy” when websites track their activities. Increasingly, too, web browsers offer private browsing and Internet security suites are preventing the data from being collected in the first place. The result, inevitably, is going to be that just as marketers start to be able to gather more information to provide greater levels of web personalisation, users are going to stop that from happening.

How can you collect useable data?

People want apparently personalised material and they like web pages that are targeted to their precise needs. However, the desire for privacy is making this harder to achieve. So how can you make people believe the web page they are looking at is personalised to them? After all, the research shows it does not need to be personalised, but it needs to appear to be personalised.

One way out of this is to not personalise at all but to provide people with choices, allowing them to “drill down” to what they are interested in. Human beings are really poor at making decisions. When we are faced with more than three things to select, we end up with “analysis paralysis” making it almost impossible for us to decide what to do.

However, you can make people think the page is personalised without doing any personalisation if you let people choose things from up to three options. Imagine, for instance, you want to market software. Visitors could land on a page which asks them to select “Windows, Apple, or Mobile”. Let’s assume they select “Windows”. That leads to three more choices, such as “Office, Utilities or Productivity”. If they click on “Productivity” the website then offers them “Time Management, Note-taking, or Filing”. And so on. After four clicks they are on a page that has precisely what they are interested in; it has the perception of being personalised.

To achieve this, you have not needed to collect any personal data. Neither have you needed any fancy web scripts to produce dynamic pages.

However, for large e-commerce sites, such a system would require too many clicks and hence you would need an additional way of achieving apparent personalisation. One way of achieving this would be allowing people to answer a short questionnaire or poll that provided data to produce pages of interest. Indeed, one way of personalising things without doing “creepy” data collection from browser activity is simply to ask people what they want.

Talk to your customers more

One of the benefits of web technology is that we can collect so much data from our clients and targets. However, that has meant that many businesses now rely more on that data than they do on actually speaking with people.

If you consider a bricks and mortar retailer, staff are trained to talk to customers and to personalise the shopping experience. However, they do not usually ask for our names or any personal details. All they do is ask a couple of questions that elicit the kind of thing we want to buy and the reason for purchasing it. Then, the sales assistant focuses their information on what we are interested in buying. To us, it seems like it is personal, but to the sales assistant it is just another customer who is told information that is about the stuff they are looking for. It is apparent, not real, personalisation and it has worked exceedingly well for retailers for several hundred years.

However, how do they achieve this degree of perceived personalisation? They talk to their customers. That is all. No fancy data collection. Just a conversation.

Online, many businesses have started too much to rely on data collection to produce real personalisation. However, as the research shows real personalisation is not what matters – apparent personalisation is more important. You can achieve that by talking to your customers – or asking them questions when they land on your website. There is a role here for webchat systems too, clearly.

Maybe those 94% of businesses looking to ensure proper personalisation are looking in the wrong place. After all, most of them are failing to make returns on their investment in personalisation technologies. Perhaps they could spend less and make higher profits if they did not strive for real personalisation but produced perceived personalisation instead, partly as a result of talking to their customers more frequently.

[Editor's note: Thanks to Graham for highlighting the challenges of personalisation and how to get it right. For more detail on best practices for implementing Personalisation, Expert members can follow the recommendations and examples in 4.2 Web Personalisation in our RACE Digital Marketing Elearning course].

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Omni-channel B2B marketing

The why and how of omni-channel B2B marketing

Omni-channel marketing is a buzz phrase that is used interchangably with other phrases such as cross-channel marketing; multichannel marketing and my preferred term integrated marketing.

I had the opportunity to sit on a panel at The Big Social Media Conference in Manchester in July and discuss how a fundamental shift in consumers' behaviour and expectations across an ongoing proliferation of marketing channels has created challenges and opportunities for the modern B2B marketer. This post summarises some of our discussion.

Omni-channel is a complex, customer-centric approach to marketing. It's all about thinking holistically in terms of customer experience, interactions, and messaging.

From a B2B perspective, it is about being relevant in all the places a customer wants or expects to find you. This, although the use of ‘omni’ implies it, doesn’t necessarily mean everywhere!

A seamless omni-channel experience

What does a seamless omni-channel experience look like?

It looks connected and joined up. That is to say if, on a given day or week, you visited a website, a Facebook page, saw an ad (print, banner or retargeted), received an email, saw a POS in-store, they would be all be talking about the same thing.

Omni-channel marketing works totally irrespective of the channel rather than merely being applied to a specified number and type of channels.

To many marketers, terms like omni-channel, cross-channel and multichannel marketing mean the same thing, so perhaps it is best to think of omni-channel as an evolution of multichannel. Omni-channel is a more comprehensive approach where you prioritise being 'omnipresent' in the consumers' experience. Multichannel is a more marketer-driven, siloed approach and could in fact just be three or four channels.

According to the recent DMA 2015 Response Rate Report, 65% of marketers use two or more media channels in their marketing campaigns while 44% of marketers use three or more.

Omni-channel is also inherent in the design. Campaigns that are planned for all relevant channels, not bolted in to them as an afterthought. There might be data, software, automation and analytics considerations.

Why is omni-channel marketing important for B2B businesses?

B2B marketing is chiefly about ROI and about creating a large top of funnel that can be nurtured through to sales conversion. B2B marketing doesn't always have the same stellar budgets as B2C (simple economics of TV, cinema, radio advertising). And it’s hard to measure ROI so with limited budgets, so B2B marketing has to be smarter.

Taking an omni-channel approach means strategy and ROI are built in from the start too, so as an approach it helps measure what works - allowing accurate attribution of results and enabling marketers to move budget from what doesn’t work to doing more of what does.

This has specific relevance when B2B companies are looking at the rise and proliferation of social media sites, tools and technologies, wanting to try them out in a managed way. GE do a fantastic job right across the mix - check them out on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites (omni-channel in social!)

Challenges businesses can face with omni-channel marketing

Forrester Consulting's Thought Leadership Paper, commissioned by Accenture and Hybris, showed that while traditional B2B buying journeys were offline and linear, the shift to digital and omni-channel expectations –driven by buyers’ consumer experiences – is well underway.

More than half of the 930 B2B customers surveyed said they expect to make one out of two purchases online in three years’ time. Future technology and how it improves organisational output and structure were deemed critical.

Barriers to omni-channel include:

1. Back office integration
2. Difficulty sharing data across teams/countries
3. Limited skills
4. Employee engagement /resistance.

Which analytics should businesses focus on when measuring the results of omni-channel campaigns?

In reality, the same as other campaigns. Focus on sanity not vanity. Smart marketers are driven by uplifts in things like traffic, dwell, actions, conversions – but bear in mind they may be measured not just in sales terms. Impressions can give a general sense of visibility of campaign/brand.

Attribution is critical in an omni-channel strategy. An AdRoll survey of 1,000 marketers summarised that it helps marketers to understand where to apply marketing spend (56%), justify marketing budget (44%) and optimise campaign performance (43%). In total, 71% of marketers track attribution to better understand their customers.

So, what should businesses really consider when putting together an omni-channel strategy?

Good marketing rules still apply. Be where your customers go – it's far harder to transport them to somewhere that feels alien. Talk in their language about problems that affect them. Position products/services on benefits not features. Offer some kind of emotional connection.

Securing data to be able to market to them is key, so make sure all activity is designed to better populate a single view of each customer. Over time build your data set to include the following:

• Name
• Email address
• Cell phone number
• Social media handles
• Home address
• IP address
• Landline
• Behaviours
• Preferences

In summary, what are the key benefits of omni-channel marketing?

Omni-channel marketing in B2B means you'll have a better overall behavioural understanding of your customers. You'll be able to improve your targeting which gives a % step change in conversion. Customers will develop a perception of yours as a business in tune with its market. You'll intuitively have a better grasp of attribution and what works.

Look at companies like Oasis in B2C. They are using iPads in store with customers to check stock, take payment, order for home delivery. How could you translate this use of technology to your site, apps, email and direct marketing to improve customer self selection and their perception of your service?

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