Testing

‘Marginal gains’ is dead. Long live strategic marketing.

“Marginal gains and all these buzz words – a lot of the time, I just think you have got to get the fundamentals right.” Words to live by for marketers from Olympic cyclist, Bradley Wiggins. 

The “marginal gains” philosophy is most closely associated with Dave Brailsford, the MBA-holding cycling coach who was inspired by the post-war Japanese practice of Kaizen. Brailsford credits the striking successes of British cyclists over the past decade to the marginal gains strategy that he and others instilled in the organisation. 

How to stay safe when A/B testing

A/B testing is simple.

You just compare a control to a variant. In digital marketing (especially the field sometimes known as ‘conversion rate optimisation’), this generally means doing something like splitting traffic between two versions of the same web page and monitoring their performance. You might also try it out with emails, apps, or any other manner of digital communication, but the point is: it is simple, dead simple.

15 fascinating insights from Econsultancy’s 2014 reports

We’re not just a pretty face.

As a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll no doubt be aware of the magnificent free content on offer to you from our small band of marketing and digital experts here on the blog.

This is just scratching the surface of what Econsultancy has to offer though…

Ann Summers and the pursuit of personalisation

With 1.5m unique visitors and 30m page impressions a month Ann Summers’ multichannel strategy is a very effective one.

In fact Ann Summers commands and impressive 98% brand recognition. This is in no doubt helped by the fact that it’s the only erotic retailer to have a major high street presence. 

75p of every erotic retailer pound is spent with Ann Summers. The brand has also recently introduced international access through its eBay store and has implemented click and collect with 1,754 orders taken in the first day.

To further bolster its online success Anne Summers wanted to improve the way it personalised the experience for its customers, by adopting a more data driven strategy.

Lets take a look at some of the highlights from a talk given by Ann Summers’ head of ecommerce Matthew Gratze at our two day Festival of Marketing event.

Horror stories: how to avoid an A/B testing nightmare

A/B testing has undoubtedly become the buzzword of the marketing world. It has the potential to transform your marketing approach and fundamentally enhance the way you do business online.

It is the only reliable way of establishing cause and effect. In fact, 75% of the internet retailing top 500 are using an A/B testing platform. While 61% of organisations are planning to bolster testing services in the next 12 months.

And yet: poor A/B testing methodologies are costing online retailers up to $13bn a year in lost revenue. 

That’s a really big number. It’s no longer enough to say that you use A/B testing. How you do it is far more important. Here are three A/B testing horror stories.

The cases are anonymous, but the scenarios are very real. Avoiding these traps can help you transform an A/B horror story into the marketing fairytale you always dreamed of.

Let’s kiss the toad and turn him into a prince.

How should email marketers spend their time?

As marketers spread themselves ever more thinly across multiple channels and platforms, time becomes an even more precious commodity. 

Over half of all marketers report to having responsibilities in seven out of 10 other areas of marketing, from offline display to owned media. 

However it’s the email marketers who seem to suffer the most. 

Marketing is becoming increasingly multichannel and relationship focused. Email is the glue that pulls together all of these different disciplines, tactics and partners, as well as being a direct channel to the customer.

The Email Marketing Speed Imperative study, published by Econsultancy in partnership with dotMailer, looks at how the ease of use of a specific email marketing tool affects the daily practice of email and what impact this has on the bottom line.

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