China to drive growth of global eCommerce sales
eCommerce has been a booming sector for several years now. The good news is that isn't about to stop. Global retail sales are expected to almost double between now and 2019.
However if we look at the data for established markets like the US, we see a less exciting picture. eCommerce will still grow, but the growth has pretty much plateaued. The big growth is in emerging markets, and China with over 1 billion people is the biggest emerging market of them all. Chinese eCommerce sales are already enormous yet are predicted to more than double between now and 2016. This will present enormous opportunities to international eCommerce businesses. That said, China is a tough market to crack so don't rush off too fast to established a Beijing office. Dip your toe in before taking the plunge.
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Pokemon Go beats top social Apps for engagement
The hype-machine is very much in gear when it comes to Pokémon GO. We've seen at the top of the app store for downloads since it came out, and all manner of viral videos involving it. You may have heard about the number of Pokémon GO downloads which are astounding with over 65 million downloads and 10 percent of Android users who have downloaded the game.
But it doesn't look like GO is just a quick 'flash in the pan'. People are doing a lot more than just downloading it. According to data from SimilarWeb, Pokémon GO is the leading app for daily engagement time in the US right now. It's users are on the app for an incredible 43 minutes a day, double other engaging platforms like Instagram and Snapchat and four times what Facebook messenger manages.
These are pretty amazing engagement stats, and whilst Pokémon…
eCommerce organisations prioritise reliability above all else when it comes to delivery
Research by retail week and Metapack has revealed what eCommerce organisations value most in a delivery provider. The answer is clear: reliability. A whopping three-quarters of the businesses asked in the research agreed this - meeting customers' delivery expectations - was the most important thing when it came to delivery.
This is hardly surprising. Customers are not forgiving when it comes to late deliveries, or worse still, when they never arrive at all. As an eCommerce site, you'll know it's far easy to get a previous customer to come back for repeat business than it is to get a brand new customer. So when if you annoy a customer by missing a delivery thanks to an unreliable provider, you've probably lost that customer for good, and with them all that valuable repeat business.
So if you're an eCommerce site, make sure your delivery provider…
Which marketing skills are most sought after by CMOs?
This week, we're launching a survey on Digital Marketing Skills - we'd appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to give your personal views on digital skills development and you'll receive a free copy of the report.
We've designed the research to be quick to complete, but useful and the survey should take less than 3 minutes.
If you complete the survey you will get a copy of the report recommendations with advice to develop your career in marketing.
Take our skills survey.
Since we're covering demand for skills for digital media and technology, I thought it would be interesting to look at the demand for the broader marketing skills-set. Recruitment specialists Spencer-Stuart have recently published their 2016 CMO Summit Survey Marketing Skills…
Periscope proves persistently more popular than Meerkat according to iOS rankings
Live-steaming has created a whole new type of social app, which has already started to have a major impact on how people are using social. Facebook has even sought to co-opt the trend by introducing it's own live streaming feature.
Brands have plenty to gain from live streaming; whether it's streaming a conference, a new technology launch or a behind the scenes video. When considering which live streaming app you should use when starting out with live streaming, the market has a clear answer for you- Periscope. It has been at the top of iOS ranking among social apps since it launched last year, and has pulled far ahead of it's rival Meerkat.
Source: Atlas
Data Source: Apple iOS app store rankings
Date: July 2016
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Mobile revolution spreads eastward in 2016
From only a very slight penetration at the start of the decade, by 2019 over half of people will be using Smartphones in Poland, Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic. These countries will be important for marketers in the coming few years, as a slowdown in China means greater focus on the 'near-East' rather than the 'far-East'.
In these areas where smartphone use currently lags behind the western world, there is still room for double-digit annual growth in penetration. This rapid growth in-turn leaves gaps open in the market just waiting to be filled by people who have developed compelling mobile responsive sites. Marketers should thus pay attention to these often overlooked markets. eCommerce folk that already have great customer journeys for those on mobiles should look at increasing language options to include these countries.
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With Google's algorithms are changing all the time. What works and what doesn't?
Tim Soulo wrote a rather controversial article two weeks ago, the backlash of which has seen Ahrefs remove all the 'controversial' content. However, this shouldn't detract from the data they extrapolated from the study.
The study was conducted to identify the correlations of different on-page SEO factors, with Google rankings across 2 Million random keyword searches. They were very keen to point out that although correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, the results are certainly interesting.
What am I referring to when I say On-Page SEO Factors?
Typically when discussing SEO ranking factors, you have three main areas.
Off-the-page: Which are referring to factors publishers can't themselves impact.
Violations: Typically underhand tactics, that search engines frown upon e.g. spammy link building
On-the-page: These refer to the factors publish can actually control e.g. HTML, sitemaps, page speed. It these, that the chart is discussing today.…
Which channels are best for delivering more personalized communications?
Relevance - Relevance - Relevance! should be the mantra of digital marketers since we know that serving more contextual messaging to our prospects and customers will give an improved experience and boost response.
There is certainly no shortage of marketing services to deliver personalization, but it seems from this recent survey from Venturebeat that ability to customise messages to the individual varies a lot by channel.
It's clear that email is 'streets ahead' in its usage for personalisation although, as the report notes this can vary in sophistication from name personalisation to recommendations based on behaviour. It's surprising that web personalisation is relatively rare, although we can expect it's higher in Ecommerce sectors such as financial services, travel and retail.
Venturebeat: Marketing Personalization: Boosting Relevance
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Analysing time spent on various platforms highlights where engagement is going
As marketers, we're always beeing told to check out a new platform to see if it is worth the company using it to promote itself. When it comes to social networks, we tend to use size as the key metric when we assess if it will be worth using. By size me mean the number of people using the platform, but is this really the best metric? There is a massive difference between someone that logs in to a network one a month to have a quick check of their messages, and someone who spends hours a day deeply engaged with the platform.
So marketers should also consider this less talked about metric shown in the chart below, hours per user per month, or HUM as I'd like to call it.
As we might expect Facebook does well on this metric, but…
When selecting colours for your site, consider which are most popular
You see endless posts about the meanings of various colours. Purple conveys superiority, blue= calm, red= passion and yellow= happiness. This is all well and good, but misses one crucial point which should be considered when assessing site colour; what colours do people actually like?
This chart shows the favourite and least favourite colours of over 200 people across various age groups, although the majority were aged 19-35.
It's interesting that blue was so popular across genders, and brown was almost universally unpopular. When it came to purple there was a big difference between genders, with almost a quarter of women saying it was their favourite colour and over a fifth of men saying it was their least favourite.
So it's probably best not to use too much brown…
