High street stores are getting their mojo back, so what can ecommerce do to engage the consumer?
Here are just 10 features that help to keep customers engaged on ecommerce websites. If you’ve seen any innovative new features from ecommerce companies, please let us know below.
For all things engagement and optimisation, why not attend the Festival of Marketing, in London, November 12-13th.
With almost 400m active users and a growing global audience, Tencent’s WeChat app is the new king of Chinese social media.
Often touted as the Chinese alternative to WhatsApp, WeChat actually offers a far broader range of features and tools.
Alongside text, video and voice messaging, users in China can make mobile payments, browse ecommerce stores, play games, or book a taxi. It even offers access to an online investment fund.
All this, coupled with the fact that the messaging app offers a veil of privacy cherished by young Chinese, makes it easy to see why WeChat has become central to its users’ lives.
Which in turn made it inevitable that marketers would seek to get in on the act, with official brand accounts first being made available around September 2012.
The New Mobile Display Ecosystem report, published by Econsultancy in association with OpenX, includes insights from more than 20 leaders in mobile marketing, publishing and technology.
It explores the latest trends in mobile advertising and looks at what the future might hold.
I spoke to the author, Chris O’Hara, to get an insight into the main topics and trends discussed in the report.
Hubba is about keeping all that product information in one place, where everyone can access it and where the data is fit for use in marketing and commerce.
I asked the team about their future. Here’s what they had to say…
We and many others have made our love for Government Digital Services (GDS) quite clear.
From its UX, to its style guide, to its place in changing the perception of the web.
However, I thought it worth quickly flagging up an interesting post on Reddit that shows just how far GDS has come and the standards it is setting.
In the post a redditor from the Home Office highlights a poor experience and a developer from the GOV.UK team fixes it within a day.
If you want to hear from Mike Bracken, executive director of digital at GDS, get yourself to the Festival of Marketing in November.
Earlier this year I wrote about how to start formulating a digital marketing strategy.
Getting the strategy right is of course paramount. But even when the strategy is right, if it’s not understood, supported, and turned into action then it’s barely more than an academic exercise.
Ella Fitzgerald was on the money when she sang “tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it… that’s what gets results”.
Here are some actions to take when creating your digital marketing strategy that will also help to build the foundation for its success.
It’s been another busy month in the world of social media, with several great new campaigns launched and big developments afoot in Zuckerberg’s domain.
Alongside trialling a new ‘buy’ button, Facebook announced second-quarter revenue of $2.91bn, an increase of 61%. Not bad.
And what of these campaigns? Well I’ve detailed several of them below, so go ahead and give them a read.
But just before you do, please note that these examples do not include any information on ROI. I’ve chosen them purely because I find them to be innovative, interesting, or inspiring.
Thanks, you may continue… (or check out these social campaigns from June.)
Five years ago if you were a brand and you wanted to make a video, you went to a video agency, begged them to make it more viral than h5n1 and paid through the nose for the privilege.
If you wanted an infographic you went to a design agency, if you wanted to write editorial you went to a PR agency etc…
Your content creation was almost completely outsourced and, unless you had a reasonably serious budget, a great content marketing campaign was probably beyond you.
That couldn’t be further from the truth today, brands have a wealth of tools that allow them to create highly professional content without the traditional agency brief.
The following are just five examples of the kinds of companies that are driving this change.
Mobile first is not a luxury but a necessity if your ecommerce business is to keep pace with the rapid growth in mobile use.
One in five people in the world own a smartphone and one in 17 own a tablet, according to BI Intelligence.
Revenues from mobile sales in Europe and the US continue to grow dramatically too. In the last four years they are up from 2.2% in 2010 and predicted to grow to 23% by the end of 2014, meaning transactions made on the go will be worth $101bn.
Research from Intelligent Positioning showed that mobile and tablet traffic is also set to overtake that from the desktop this summer.
Last year mobile traffic increased from 23% to 37% whilst desktop’s share dropped from 77% to 63% in the same year.
It found that over a third of all traffic is now coming from a handheld mobile or tablet device.
The Amazon subsidiary AmazonFresh has been selling groceries in the US for several years now but is starting to expand its reach across the US, adding San Francisco and Los Angeles to its delivery areas last year.
With around a fifth of us in the UK buying our food online the practice is well established, so what innovations may the online retail giant bring to this marketplace?
We asked a group of US based users to try out the service using Whatusersdo to record the results.
We’ve all done it – perhaps early in the morning when putting off waking up, or perhaps when at work putting off… erm… work. Maybe you won’t admit it to your friends, but we’ve all done it.
It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s ok. I do it too.
Maybe it’s a “wisdom of the crowds” thing, or a “wikinomics” thing. Or maybe just a lazy way to make sense of this crazy online world in which we live.
In this post, I undertake some serious investigative online journalism to find out what the internet actually thinks about the internet, using Google search’s fancy auto-fill tool.
Read on – it just may change your life.
I’ve rounded up what I think are the most intriguing examples of geofencing.
The list includes retailers but also other sectors such as leisure and education.
Take a look, because this is an area that almost any company could surely find a compelling use case for.