accessibility
Optimise conversions in four easy steps
Aug 19th
Take the lead with customers
Make sure you streamline your buying process.
Whether B2C or B2B, the actual buying process should be as quick and easy as possible, so take a long hard look at your site and ask yourself a few questions:
- Is it really user friendly?
- Is navigation obvious and intuitive?
- Is it cluttered?
- In short, does any part of your site design stand in the way of sales?
If it does, then you need to consult with a designer and make those changes as quickly as possible.
Your job is to make your customer’s lives as easy as possible and guide them safely through the entire sales process.
Free stuff
Personally I’m not always for free gifts. It’s easy to indoctrinate the customer into getting something for nothing, but as a means to collecting prospect information, offering free content is hard to beat.
If you deal in B2C, then coupons or gifts work well, while B2Bs may favour free reports or e-books, anything you can provide inexpensively in return for an email address.
If a customer takes the time to sign up for free content, then they’re already displaying a vested interest, giving you the opportunity to engage them as active participants.
Keep in touch
If a customer wants extra information, then you need to provide it to them quickly.
If at all possible invest in live support. Dealing with an actual person increases customer confidence in your business and anticipates any frustration points.
If you can’t stretch to live coverage, then at the very least make it as easy as possible for customers to contact you.
Many sites have an online form, but it’s still worth displaying an email address prominently. I often see sites that hide their contact details away in an obscure footer, mainly because of worries about spam.
If you have spam, you can filter it out. If customers can’t get in touch, they won’t trust you and will abandon their basket.
Which of these is a bigger problem?
Make it easy and show the customer that you care about their experience.
Don’t be subtle
Ok, it’s fine to have some lovingly crafted, subtle design elements
on your site, but if they obscure your calls to action then don’t be
afraid to ditch them.
Typically users don’t spend a long time searching around your site,
so it may be better to have a compelling ‘Buy Now’ button rather than a
lovingly detailed storybook that takes you on a journey through the
site.
Calls to action may appear simple, but you should really
dedicate time and effort in this area. Your CTAs should be compelling,
straightforward and informative.
If a customer cannot find the action they are looking for quickly,
you will lose them.
All these points are simple to follow and inexpensive to implement, but will streamline the sales experience and really help increase your conversion rates, so check out your site and make sure the conversion matches the traffic.
Optimise conversions in four easy steps.
Aug 19th
Take the lead with customers.
Make sure you streamline your buying process.
Whether B2C or B2B, the actual buying process should be as quick and easy as possible, so take a long hard look at your site and ask yourself a few questions:
- Is it really user friendly?
- Is navigation obvious and intuitive?
- Is it cluttered?
- In short, does any part of your site design stand in the way of sales?
If it does, then you need to consult with a designer and make those changes as quickly as possible.
Your job is to make your customer’s lives as easy as possible and guide them safely through the entire sales process.
Free stuff
Personally I’m not always for free gifts. It’s easy to indoctrinate the customer into getting something for nothing, but as a means to collecting prospect information, offering free content is hard to beat.
If you deal in B2C, then coupons or gifts work well, while B2B’s may favour free reports or e-books, anything you can provide inexpensively in return for an email address.
If a customer takes the time to sign up for free content, then they’re already displaying a vested interest, giving you the opportunity to engage them as active participants.
Keep in touch
If a customer wants extra information, then you need to provide it to them quickly.
If at all possible invest in live support. Dealing with an actual person increases customer confidence in your business and anticipates any frustration points.
If you can’t stretch to live coverage, then at the very least make it as easy as possible for customers to contact you.
Many sites have an online form, but it’s still worth displaying an email address prominently. I often see sites that hide their contact details away in an obscure footer, mainly because of worries about spam.
If you have spam, you can filter it out. If customers can’t get in touch, they won’t trust you and will abandon their basket.
Which of these is a bigger problem?
Make it easy and show the customer that you care about their experience.
Don’t be subtle.
Ok, it’s fine to have some lovingly crafted, subtle design elements
on your site, but if they obscure your calls to action then don’t be
afraid to ditch them.
Typically users don’t spend a long time searching around your site,
so it may be better to have a compelling ‘Buy Now’ button rather than a
lovingly detailed storybook that takes you on a journey through the
site.
Calls to action may appear simple, but you should really
dedicate time and effort in this area. Your CTAs should be compelling,
straightforward and informative.
If a customer cannot find the action they are looking for quickly,
you will lose them.
All these points are simple to follow and inexpensive to implement, but will streamline the sales experience and really help increase your conversion rates, so check out your site and make sure the conversion matches the traffic.
Six ways to effectively track offline sales
Aug 6th
Traffic
The most basic of metrics but one of the most revealing for offline campaigns.
If you experience a sudden rush to your site as an offline campaign launches or even as a specific ad airs, you can be reasonably sure that it’s affecting web traffic. While this won’t account for everyone it is a reasonable indicator of interest.
If you have several campaigns running at once then you may wish to use this to track brand awareness rather than specific campaign success.
You can also hone in on this by localising your offline efforts. Track localised traffic bursts for maximum accuracy.
Codes
Having a specific code or phrase related to a campaign is an old tactic but it’s still useful, especially if you have a wide range of products available.
By allocating exact codes you can track touch points easily, both through direct response and by tracking searches for your specific code or phrase.
Remember to match SEO around key phrases before launching in order to generate solid results here.
Sales
This might sound obvious but many businesses still funnel their tracking. If you experience an increase in online sales, then remember to attribute it to all campaigns.
It’s easy to say “sales are up 14%, our new Facebook campaign is really paying off” while forgetting about the impact your print ads had on this.
Make sure you include web branding and URLs on all your offline literature to increase cross-channel effect, and consistently track searches for specific products by volume for more accurate metrics.
Opinion
Increasingly consumers are putting their trust in word of mouth, so add space on your site for reviews, questions and comments about specific products.
Most customers who leave an opinion will have already bought the product so others will feel confidant they’re getting an accurate and trustworthy look at your product.
If you have a series of campaigns running, ask customers to tell you more about where and when they purchased.
Unique URLs
If you want to accurately track conversion from offline promotions, then it’s worth considering setting up campaign specific sites and landing pages.
Not only will this provide consumers with an easily remembered phrase or URL to search for, but you can use it as a redirect to your main site and more easily isolate the figures your offline campaign is generating.
Buzz
Again, search queries can really pay off here so make sure you are tracking phrases related to your offline campaign in addition to your regular keywords.
For example, you may be running a TV ad that has a great soundtrack. Keep an eye on searches for that song, and for related searches like ‘xxx product ad tune’.
While these may not be transferring directly into sales they do show that you are having impact offline.
In addition, check your usual web channels. Is there an increase in blog posts about your product or about a specific campaign or are you receiving an increase in links from new sources?
For digital marketers it’s often tempting to think of offline as less sophisticated. However, just as online we have the option to measure email, direct, paid and organic search, affiliates and any number of other factors, offline represents a huge range of interactions and possible effects.
The ultimate goal here is to effectively map customer behavior.
By increasing your efforts to track offline, you’ll also be able to promote your multichannel more effectively, and improve your service across the board.
Seven steps to effective multichannel marketing
Jul 13th
It’s never been more important to implement an end-to-end customer experience if you want to really maximize profits and keep your customer base coming back again and again.
On paper this makes perfect sense, but the logistical challenges involved mean that many businesses are still failing their customers by keeping their marketing functions within strict on and offline silos rather than offering true integration.
Anyone who’s worked in a marketing department will know the high risk of fragmentation that exists. With multiple campaigns running at once it’s easy to lose track of the day to day work and your campaign results.
Worse, there’s often a real lack of online ownership, with companies regarding online as an extension, rather than a full member of the marketing team.
A case in point is the surge in social media presence we’re currently experiencing, but like digital marketing before, many companies are placing social media at the end of the line, relegating it to newsdesk status rather than creating a truly dynamic experience for their online customers.
Part of this is down to inexperience, but without some clearly deliniated lines, it can also easily become office politics.
While your online channels should be promoting your offline efforts, the opposite is also true. Your offline marketing division need to be promoting online campaigns, so that you can unify your brand presence across the board. While it may sound simple, putting everything together this way will require some serious forethought and some clearly deliniated processes.
Whether you have an established multi-channel presence or are currently testing the waters, here are a few simple tips to make sure your strategy stays on track:
Make content a two way street.
Your website shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Make sure all your branding features links to all your sites. I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received that don’t have a ‘follow us on Twitter’ or ‘Like us on Facebook’ button.
Tagging your email is as essential as putting your phone number on your headed notepaper. Pushing your site to your offline customer base increases your sales opportunities.
Keep policies consistent
Ultimately, you should be aiming for complete unification, so credit or return policies should be the same. If at all possible, enable your customers to return items bought instore via the web and vice versa.
Be personal.
You should be monitoring individual customer behaviour. If you have a purchaser who uses catalogues extensively, they may require a different impetus to customers who spend more time online.
Make sure you have clearly defined methods for reaching out through different channels. You should also link these preferences and responses to your customer database so you can more effectively target your future campaigns.
Standardise the buyer experience.
Customers who use multiple channels for purchases are often the ones who purchase more often, but one of the reasons they try different approaches is in order to grab a bargain.
They fully expect to see the same (or more) content online than off. Add online promotions to maximize multichannel purchases, but make sure you promote them through your offline outlets. If you have a smaller outlet that doesn’t carry everything, you should make sure customers know where they can find the item they require.
Make sure you keep staff informed of web initiatives.
If they don’t know, they can’t promote it. Make sure online promos are emphasised in regular meetings and distribute emails and literature so they can more efficiently help a customer.
Don’t just collect information –use it.
At every point of exchange, you have a chance to collect information on your customers. Email addresses, buying habits, demographics. All of which you can use to more accurately target your sales.
Unfortunately, it’s still common for offline marketers to collect information and not pass it to online. Make sure you compile a central, open database and use it to drive and improve the customer experience. Make sure you follow up in-store purchases with direct or email promotion.
Monitor across the board.
Finally, make sure you integrate your results monitoring. Don’t be tempted to put online results into a separate silo, instead check responses across all your channels and track the ones that provided the greatest response. By doing so you’ll be able to construct a production line strategy and more effectively organise promotions so that they flow through all your channels.
By introducing a few rules and making sure you have a non-hierarchal approach to marketing, you’ll stand a far better chance of having a flexible, fast-moving and dynamic brand presence with an adaptable multichannel presence.
Location based services – where next?
Jul 2nd
After several rounds of complex negotiations and on-again off-again deals, location based gaming service Foursquare has acquired another $20m in venture funding – largely courtesy of Silicon Valley doyen Andreessen Horowitz – giving the company a $95m pre-money value and placing it on a much firmer footing in the race for location dominance with rivals Gowalla and Twitter’s new geolocation API.
Andreessen Horowitz had previously been in close negotiations with the company, but called off talks citing “excessive hype”.
Like Twitter, Foursquare has faced some struggles in forming a viable business plan, but with big business increasingly involving itself in social media, the service has attracted several large brands including Starbucks, HBO, Warner and Pepsi, primarily being used as an offers-based marketing service.
While the cash injection has put the company on a more even keel, there are questions worth asking about how businesses utilise location services. With Facebook and Yahoo both initially keen to acquire Foursquare –and now hard at work on their own services – it seems geotagging is the next big thing, and while special offers and digital coupons are great for providing added value and encouraging repeat business, there are still endless pathways that companies considering location services need to think about.
Location tags offer companies the ability to track customers in real time, improving their customer service and experience. What can they keep an eye on? Preferred outlets, times of interaction, and buying habits can all be mapped in intricate detail. Rewarding repeat customers is a smart, solid start, but marketers now need to be thinking about the next steps, and the knowledge that a customer buys the same item three times a week from the same outlet offers a huge opportunity to improve and streamline their customer experience.
Several music festivals have already been trialling cash-free systems, with fans loading credit onto their festival wristbands in advance instead of carrying large amounts of cash around. This marks a huge increase in security and convenience, eliminating the dreaded long queues at the bar that could easily be applied to retail situations. Larger supermarkets have had reward card systems in place for a long time, but by integrating Foursquare or Gowalla, businesses of any size can offer a simple, hands-free added value service.
If you’re already tracking your customer’s check-ins, then it’s a natural step to allow them to preload their location account with credit and provide simple one touch (or one check-in) payment options, while chains can easily offer preordering services, reducing time and hassle further for the customer. It’s a common phenomenon for potential customers at busier coffee outlets to simply walk away rather than face that early morning line, but if they know that their item will be ready and paid for whenever it’s required, the line will quickly disappear, while the customers won’t.
Location offers businesses of all sizes a real opportunity to streamline and improve their entire customer experience, fully integrating web and print offers with simple, convenient payment and collection options. Coupons are starting point but there’s much more to come.
So what are you doing about location?
AGENCIES: Please, please check your websites on an iPad
Jun 11th
Nothing at all
This one just has the word “skip” on a white background:
This one promises “inspiring content” in the top left. But other than that there are some missing pictures and an offer to browse the site without Flash, with no obvious way to do so.
“You need to upgrade your Flash player”. If only we could on an iPad, if only we could..
Branding and not much else …
There’s not much here, but at least you can see the company name, unlike the previous screenshots:
An apology and some contact details
They’re sorry you can’t use the site without flash – but there’s a link to their blog and details of how to get in touch.
A big hole
The rest of these use Flash as an element of the page, as opposed to having an entirely flash-driven site. That means that what you get is a hole where the Flash file would be. These sites are at least usable.
I’m not quite sure why the contact details had to be in flash – so on the iPad it says “Contact Us: Upgrade to Flash 8.0″:
This one looks like they’ve tried to serve up some alternate content. It’s just not quite worked as the iPad shrinks everything to fit the wide image on the screen.
The main thing missing here is under “See what our clients say about us”. A big white space …
You can browse around – but there’s a big white hole on the homepage:
A big black hole this time:
My personal favourite. Squint at the top left – yes, it does say “FAIL”
Conclusion
We’ve chided agencies before about their Flash-based websites. And only yesterday we pointed out that some ecommerce sites don’t work that well on the iPad.
And while you could argue only two million people have bought an iPad so far (probably not a Currys iPad though), I imagine a fairly large proportion of that two million are the people agencies are going to want to impress …
User testing reveals iPad usability flaws
May 11th
To test the iPad’s usability, Nielsen Norman Group recruited seven testers to use it with a variety of popular apps and websites. All seven had at least three months’ worth of experience using the iPhone, but only one had experience with the iPad. That’s a limitation worth noting, but it also means that this study might provide a good level of insight into the new experience new iPad users are likely to have.
What Nielsen Norman Group discovered is a “triple threat” of iPad disadvantages that “causes significant user confusion“:
- Low discoverability. In short, users are given no “perceived affordances” that indicate how different elements on the screen will react when they’re touched. This is problematic, obviously, because without these perceived affordances, users are unlikely to know what they’re supposed to do. Nielsen observes that the price users pay for the iPad’s “etched-screen” “beauty” is that they “don’t know where they can click.“
- Low memorability. Exacerbating the problem of low discoverability is the fact that iPad apps and websites behave differently. One example of this: touching a picture could produce five different results depending on the app or website. Because of this inconsistency, iPad users can’t transfer their skills from one app or website to another.
- Accidental activation. Low discoverability and low memorability above contribute to unexpected results when a screen element is accidentally activated.
Interestingly, initial criticism of the iPad was that it simply looked like an enlarged iPhone. And based on the testing conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, it appears that it’s not just the device itself that has been scaled up, but the interface as well.
Unfortunately, Nielsen notes that the “iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI.” The iPad’s size and physical characteristics make it a much more ideal device than the iPhone to browse the web with. Whereas Nielsen’s past iPhone usability studies revealed that iPhone users prefer the app experience to the web experience, Apple is billing the iPad as “the best way to experience the web.“
That Apple is marketing the iPad as a web browsing device makes sense. Given that the iPad sort of sits in a no-man’s land market between smartphones and netbooks/laptops, one would think that if the iPad is going to realize its full potential, consumers would need to embrace it as one.
The question is whether the usability issues that surfaced in this study will hinder the iPad’s adoption over the long haul. It will certainly be interesting to see if and how Apple, app developers and web designers address some of these issues.
Photo credit: cogdogblog via Flickr.
A new era dawns for international domain names
May 7th
Instead, they can use ccTLDs based on their native languages. For Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emricates are the first three countries that have received ICANN approval for IDN ccTLDs. 21 additional countries have submitted applications to ICANN for IDN ccTLDs, and 13 of these applications have passed the first phase of the ICANN approval process.
Make no doubt about it: ICANN’s move to open up the top level domain system to other alphabets is an important one. Not only is it symbolic, it’s quite appropriate given the fact that the internet is now so widely used across the globe. As ICANN president Rod Beckstrom has noted in the past, “Over half the internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as
their native language.“
Enabling IDN ccTLDs will not only be more convenient for many internet users around the world, it will have commercial implications. For instance, businesses will now be able to promote full IDN domain names knowing that they’re officially supported. Previously, in an effort to make IDNs available, some countries developed their own IDN solutions which were not officially supported by ICANN, and did not have 100% support across all computers.
For users in countries using a Latin alphabet, being able to view and use the new IDN ccTLDs may require a language pack download, as their computers may not ship with the languages in question.
Achieving Digital Balance 2010
Apr 26th
Join Econsultancy for a special evening of cocktails and dinner. Enjoy networking with your fellow colleagues in the digital marketing community. During the evening, we will present our new study, “Achieving Digital Balance,” a must -have report for marketers and media strategists who grapple with media investment allocations across various digital markets.
Meet the Econsultancy team and let us know how we can help you and our industry.
The benefits of taking fashion e-tail international
Mar 11th
Cross-border e-commerce has proven to be hugely successful for online fashion retailer ASOS. Launched ten years ago, ASOS (As Seen On Screen) now sells to 150 countries. From France to Fiji and from Ireland to Iran, ASOS reports having 2.9 million registered users worldwide.
The company states that it increases its multicultural usability of its website by sticking to the guidelines set out in the Plain English Campaign, keeping the English language on the site clear and concise. It also features a currency converter for all of the countries it markets to. By making the website as culturally ‘friendly’ as possible, ASOS broadens it potential customer base.
By using these tools effectively, ASOS managed to up their international sales by 102 % last year alone. In fact, the site has done so well in the USA that the company plan to start up a US-specific site later this year, a project fellow retail giant Topshop has already taken on, and is currently reaping the rewards of.
However, cultural ‘friendliness’ isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered when opening up an online fashion retail site to an international customer base. Potential new markets need to be researched thoroughly, with each local market looked at distinctly. Here are some key points to consider:
- Does the brand already have presence in the targeted country? A brand that already has stores overseas, or features in media coverage (think Topshop) is going to be more successful online than an unheard of brand.
- Check out the competition. Are there similar, cheaper brands already doing well in the region you want to target? If so, how can you ensure your brand works successfully?
- Look at cross-border sales figures for each region. There are some countries that are more open to buying from overseas than others.
- Look for any potential growth in overseas markets. For example, the CRR predicts a 36% growth in online shopping in Poland for 2010.
With such a globalised fashion and celebrity culture, now is the time for online fashion retailers to take full advantage of international e-commerce. Statistics show that shoppers are gradually becoming more confident when buying products from abroad, with cross-border purchasing having more than doubled since 2003.
And while both businesses and customers have expressed concerns over fraud, payment problems, and logistics when it comes to overseas online purchasing, with today’s advanced security software, safe payment options such as PayPal, and with the benefits of selling internationally being so evident, now is the time to reach out to the global fashion community.