A recent report, published here on the Econsultancy blog, revealed a staggering 45% of companies aren’t performing any UX testing when developing a creative project.
Whether it’s a website or an app, user experience (UX) is an important factor in both the success, and the scalability of a product.
Together with the flexibility of the Agile approach to development, it can help you to build a better, more satisfying product.
The Modern Marketing Manifesto challenges marketers to be creative and innovative. But how do we as marketers do this.
David Sealey who is completing his MBA disertation on Disruptive Innovation in Retail Markets discusses how marketers can innovate.
The Modern Marketing Manifesto is absolutely spot on. One of the challenges it sets for marketers is to design services and products with innovation and creativity.
I believe that all of us have the imagination to be both creative and innovative within out industry. You don’t need to be able to draw to be creative, and you don’t need to have the word innovation in your job title to be an innovator.
As a content marketing agency, we are always telling people what a vital role content plays in driving all elements of your digital marketing, be it social media, email marketing, SEO etc.
The good thing is that most people get this now. We seem to have moved past the educational phase with more and more companies publishing fresh content on their websites on a regular basis.
What we wanted to demonstrate, however, was the significant impact that an increase in content output (that is still high quality and original) can have on some of the key digital marketing metrics, such as website traffic, search engine rankings and social media reach.
Video sharing app Vine turned 100 days old last week and according to new research it has proved to be quite the success.
Data from Unruly shows that five Vine clips are shared every second on Twitter and branded Vines are four times more likely to be shared than branded online videos.
It’s also interesting to note that weekends are the most popular time to share Vines and in most cases they are more popular than all the previous weekdays combined.
We’ve previously looked at fashion brands and football teams that have begun using Vine, as well as highlighting both good and bad uses of the platform.
Email is alive and kicking. Worldwide there are almost four times more email accounts (4.4bn) than the number of users on Facebook (1 bn) and Twitter (250m) users combined.
Email is also a more active medium than Facebook and Twitter, generating 8.3 times as much messages a day (45bn emails against 5,2bn Facebook updates/likes and 175m tweets a day), and that’s not counting spam emails.
Or to summarise: if you want to reach a large audience, email marketing is a valuable asset that cannot be ignored.
Here are three essential email marketing tips…
There’s no doubt that Pinterest has grown incredibly quickly, if not too quickly some may argue. The site, which is nearly the second most popular social media site in the United States and most recently had $200m poured into the business.
The backstory for Pinterest is that the image-based, social information sharing network has been one of the fastest-growing consumer sites, with comScore at one point last year noting a 4,000% rise in Pinterest traffic (Tumbler up 168%, Facebook up 4%).
After using Pinterest from the beginning there have always been several features that could’ve improved the usability for everyone.
All the statistics have proved Pinterest to be a leading site with conversion rates been much higher than it’s counterpart Facebook but there’s still room for some significant changes to be made, which will ultimately improve the experience for marketers.
A new TNS study across 43 countries suggests that 21% of shoppers use smartphones in store to ‘showroom’, 43% read reviews, 31% compare prices and 25% seek advice before they buy from friends and family.
This phenomenon has put the fear of God into many within the retail industry, woken businesses up to the link between the high street and internet and made retailers aware that they are not ready to service this reality.
We’ve seen Jessops and HMV go into administration in recent months and Best Buy shrink. The culprit? Supposedly showrooming.
Product returns are a major problem for online retailers as each unwanted order obviously incurs a cost, which then raises the dilemma of who is to pay for postage.
Passing the cost onto customers is certain to put people off ordering again in future, but absorbing the cost might not be feasible for all businesses.
Ideally retailers should try and reduce the need to return items in the first place, and we’ve previously written about a shoe fitting app that reduced fit-related returns by 23%.
Now ASOS has launched a new tool, Virtusize, that has the potential to achieve an even greater rate of success, as it has already proven to reduce fit-related returns by up to 50% on other ecommerce sites.
We are in the age of the customer, a time where technology is changing the way customers engage with our brands.
In each industry vertical, many competitors are taking advantage of the continual emergence of new channels, platforms and touchpoints. Through these touchpoints, relationships are established and nurtured, in turn, engagement and loyalty is increased.
At each touchpoint is some form of content, so the only way to compete in the age of the customer is to evolve with a content marketing strategy.
Taobao is China’s largest online shopping platform and today is its 10th birthday, so what better way to commemorate the occasion than an infographic?
According to the stats, in 2013 the Chinese are expected to spend more than £177 billion shopping online making it the world’s largest ecommerce market.
And despite the fact that internet penetration is just 40% in China, the country’s online population is still 242 million people.
For more information on this topic check out our Digital Market Landscape Report which focuses on the emerging market in China, or read our interview with Net Media Planet on how European businesses should approach paid search in the country.
After this post rounding up some of our case studies, articles and reports on social media, I thought I’d steal Andrew Warren Payne’s idea and do the same for ecommerce.
We have written a lot on ecommerce since the blog launched, but here are 70 or so or our best practice tips, interviews with ecommerce folk, stats, and reports from the past year or so.
Hope you find this useful…
A well known and much discussed component of producing effective paid search campaign management is testing, with the ultimate aim of improving the performance of keywords towards a better ROI or a lower CPA.
There are a number of approaches to this that can be effective, though in my opinion we find there’s one specifically that provides real value for our clients.