I recently wrote a round-up post on the fairly new phenomenon by ‘buy to give’ ecommerce sites. One of the featured sites was MyGoodness.com.
I’ve been talking to its founders to find out more about its founding ethos and the future of the platform.
Will buy-to-give become a larger part of charities’ efforts and charitable ‘donations’, as the consumer urge continues unabated?
In late 2012, Econsultancy published the latest edition of its Marketing Attribution Management Buyer’s Guide, at a time when attribution was a particularly hot topic for marketers.
Vendors were furiously marketing their attribution platforms, and there were blog posts galore on the subject. Since then, talking about attribution, particularly in the same breath as the dreaded term ‘big data’, appears to have gone somewhat off the boil.
Or so I thought, before attending a recent Econsultancy roundtable on the subject of marketing attribution, where discussion and debate was as lively as I have seen at a roundtable.
Sony has recently began sending out dedicated emails highlighting Pinterest; integrating its own boards & pins into the email and driving traffic to its Pinterest page.
The visual heavy email achieved an open rate 67% higher than Sony’s goal, and a 16% higher click-through rate (CTR) than expected.
Previously Sony had trialled including a Pin it button next to its products in a VAIO summer launch email, so users could pin and share directly from the email.
Users pinned from that email 3,000 times.
Let’s take a closer look at Sony’s Pinterest email strategy..
The Search Agency has just published its Mobile Experience Scorecard, reporting on 100 different US multichannel retailers and their relative mobile readiness.
The report gives each company’s mobile site a score out of five based on seven different criteria: page load times, site format, store locator, search box, social media presence, app presence and click-to-call.
The outdoor and sports gear retailer REI came out at the top with a total score of 4.74, losing a mark for site format and app presence. No retailer achieved full marks across the board.
The major finding here is that of the 100 companies, only one has a dedicated responsive website. The children’s clothes retailer Carter’s.
Responsive design is a key way to increase conversion rates, however 91 of the other companies researched do operate a dedicated mobile site.
It should be noted that this independent study uses benchmarks of its own creation, and is influenced by the subjectivity of its own panel of experts. However it still makes for an interesting overview.
Here’s the top 30 of the 100 companies studied:
Google is constantly testing and tweaking its search results pages and presentation of ads, with the aim of better UX and of course, monetising its pages more effectively.
The two are not mutually exclusive, as the better the user experience, the more people are likely to use it and therefore attract advertisers and clicks.
Dr Peter J Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz, has been keeping tabs on tests carried out by Google, and he has some very interesting predictions of what the SERPs will look like next year.
His article on Moz.com looks at a number of changes, including the knowledge graph and greater use of boxed results, but I’ll be focusing on changes to the appearance and placement of PPC ads.
Instagram rolled out its very first sponsored post on 1 November 2013.
Following Pinterest’s lead in trialling promoted pins earlier this year, Instagram has given fashion designer Michael Kors the opportunity to run the first advert on the photo sharing site.
This could be a mixed blessing.
Nitrogram has worked out a few metrics to uncover how successful this inaugural run was.
A quarter of marketers are yet to execute campaigns across multiple screens, with tracking apparently the main issue that’s holding people back.
New research from Undertone found that 59% of marketers and 68% of agencies say that difficulty tracking people across devices is the main barrier to implementing a multiscreen campaign.
A lack of common performance metrics is also cited as a key barrier to deployment by 59% of marketers and agencies.
Responsive design is a potential remedy to this problem, however the research suggests that knowledge of the technology is still quite limited.
Brands and musicians have an uneasy alliance. For every generation defining Michael Jackson and Pepsi coupling, there’s a whincingly regretful pairing of Iggy Pop and Swiftcover.
In the last few years, more and more recording artists are hooking-up with large brands in order to reach a wider audience and make up for dwindling record sales, and it seems brands are much more willing to invest in the music industry lately, especially in terms of live music and event creation.
American Express has recently linked many different media strands together, including live music, online streaming, social video and social media, to create Unstaged, a channel that caters for an online, music hungry audience while offering effective brand promotion.
Let’s take a look at the ways American Express Unstaged brings the offline, online with storytelling.
We publish a huge amount of content on the Econsultancy blog so it’s understandably difficult to keep track of it all.
To help out, I’ve compiled a list of some of the most useful mobile posts and reports that we’ve written this year. You’ll find best practice tips, stats, reviews, useful examples and more.
This article follows on similar round ups of our email, ecommerce, content marketing and social media posts.
Google has, for years, made no secret of its enthusiasm for blended search results, and for video in particular. But its repeated message is that organisations must focus first and foremost on audience.
The name of the game in video marketing best practices should be delivering first-rate video experiences to real people, rather than focusing on quick tricks to boost discoverability.
This year we hosted our second Digital Cream in Shanghai, and because we liked the venue so much from last year, we decided to hold it again at exactly the same place.
There’s something quite enthralling to be running our Digital Cream senior marketers’ roundtable gathering at one of the top night spots in town, especially when it’s located in mainland China.
There’s the stunning skyline view of downtown Shanghai, the Huangpu tributary of the Yangtze river running through the vibrant metropolis, and the feeling that you’re somewhere incredibly special and, dare I say it, more than a little auspicious.
Did you know that 100 years ago it was expected the average person would only read 100 books in their entire lifetime?
In 2007, following research, it was estimated that the average person is exposed to the equivalent of one newspaper (85 pages) of information every 5.5 minutes during the day (based on an average day of 16 hours and 174 papers a day).
That is a tidal wave of facts, figures, stories, data, images and mental junk. Interestingly, infographics (as a term) has seen explosive growth online in the last three years with a rise of more than 20 times in search volume for the keyword.
Could this growth be indicative of how we now want to consume our information and for it to be delivered quicker and easier to cut through the noise. Are infographics fast food for the brain in response to our info-weary brains?