Chart of the Day: Digital offers can help drive shopping and brand engagement
Email campaigns are a great asset to generate traffic to your website and keep your customers informed about your latest offers. However, research from Adobe has revealed people’s most annoying aspects of branded emails and receiving too many of them comes top of the list.
Personalization was a big factor in email annoyances, with incorrect data (22%), already purchased product info (22%) and ‘creepy’ over-personalization (16%) also appearing high up the list. Too much personalization is a bigger issue than having too little, which garnered just 9% of responses.
You want your emails to be customized to the reader but still read like one human being speaking to another. The quality of this written communication was second-most annoying, with 23% of people saying they received emails that were too wordy or…
Chart of the Day: Research for 2018 shows the dramatic growth of Snapchat and Facebook static for most age groups in the UK
The government-commissioned annual "Communications Market Review" is one of the best sources for compiling data on Internet and Social Media usage.
Variations in age-related usage of social networks
The latest report, published last month has a good visualization summarising the most recent changes in use of the main social networks between 2016 to 2018:
The visualization gives a great summary of the changes in three of the main consumer network:
Facebook - Static or declining in most age groups except the older (55+ age group) which is now the biggest group of users
Instagram - Increase in usage across all age groups with the largest, the 25 to 34 age group followed by 18 to 24
Snapchat - The largest increase…
Chart of the Day: Work-related customers are rarely having their questions answered
84% of B2B customers don’t expect to hear back from companies when they have a purchase-related question.
Not a third. Not half. 84%.
This research has been revealed by intelligent appointment scheduling company TimeTrade, who polled B2B buyers about the purchases they make for work. When asked how frequently they don’t hear back from a company after asking a purchase-related question, 59% replied “frequently” and 25% said it was “all the time”.
It’s ludicrous that companies are so often missing a golden opportunity to communicate with prospects who are likely close to converting. Your sales teams can spend weeks or months nurturing leads until they convert, so why not give that same attention to the people actively getting in touch with you?
Defining your lead generation strategies and…
Chart of the Day: Almost half of content writers struggle to balance creativity with technical skill
47% of content writers say their biggest challenge is finding the balance between creativity and search optimization in their content.
That’s the heart of this blog post, so that’s what it leads with – pulled straight from the pages of SEMrush and Content Marketing Institute’s research into the keys to content success, released in April.
Content creation, from the writer’s point of view, is a constant struggle expounding the virtues of a product (its durability, value for money, luxury materials etc.), mimicking how people naturally speak, and what Google wants to see.
Have you ever seen a movie and thought ‘that’s nice, by why is it called (blank)?’* That’s how Google looks at your content. Google doesn’t care about flowery introductions or that wonderful character-building moment you…
Chart of the Day: A third of marketers report open rates of 10% or less
Email marketing is an effective way for you to build brand awareness, communicate with your customers, and generate revenue. However, when your email address list sits in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands, it can be easy to settle for low open rates.
After all, let’s say 16,000 people open your latest sales offer email. That almost enough to fill an NBA arena. Sure, it’s the New Orleans Pelican’s Smoothie King Centre, the smallest one in the league, but doesn’t it sound better this way? Anyway, on an industry level, 8% is below expectations. Why not tweak your message or layout and aim a little higher?
Demand Metric and Return Path asked marketers to share their average open rate for bulk email sends. Let’s take a look how they answered, how you should rank your own email…
Chart of the Day: Which resolutions of web browsers should you target when testing new website designs?
If you have ten people in a room together, chances are high that most of them will have different device types that use a different browser and have a different screen size.
This is why it is important to be aware of screen resolutions and the devices your prospects and customers are using. The quality of experience you deliver through your website can vary greatly depending on how well your design works at different resolutions. Due to the countless resolutions that exist across the same screen size, designers use viewports to help create mobile-friendly pages. Viewports are scaled down versions of resolutions that allow sites to be viewed more consistently across different devices.
The tables below show the most popular screen resolutions and viewports for both Apple and Android products:
…
Chart of the Day: ‘Accurate and informative’ are most important aspects of online content
Everyone is always asking ‘what does good content look like?’ Turns out, people don’t mind what it looks like, so long as it’s accurate.
A survey of over 1,000 adult consumers (for my money, the most knowledgeable of all consumers) from Adobe has shown that people put higher stock in the factual base of content than how it can be consumed, such as its simplicity or interactivity.
There’s no doubt that videos and interactive landing pages can make your content memorable and shareable. They could even end up bagging your brand an awwward, being showcased as some of the internet’s most well-crafted content, but they won’t put you at the front of people’s minds when they want what has become the most valuable commodity of this century:…
Chart of the Day: Which are the most important skills for you to develop for your future career
In a previous article, I reviewed the most important marketing skills based on the recently published research from The IDM and Smart Insights. In this follow-up I'll drill down to look at specific skills gaps.
This first chart is helpful since it highlights the main categories of transferable generic skills which are most important to career progression. This is based on marketers who rated these as very or extremely important. You can see that these include many of the skills topics that we focus on at Smart Insights include strategy and planning, data and insight and, of course, digital marketing. As we say, we look to help our members 'Plan, Manage and Optimize' their digital marketing.
The second chart drills down to show more specific skills. You…
Chart of the Day: Having the right talent is the most important factor for organizational growth
As marketing technology evolves and more of its tasks are automated, it is only natural for people to fear that the tech they use could compromise their own value. After all, isn’t it better to place as many responsibilities in the hands of machines, which can work faster than humans, without the need to pause due to fatigue or sickness, and to a higher degree of detail?
The answer from US CMOs is ‘no’. A survey of over 300 US marketers who were asked what they believe is the most important factor for the future organic growth of their organization showed a great emphasis on the human element. Data capture and analysis is a growing factor for many companies, though it has some way to go…
Chart of the Day: What do Marketers want from AI?
AI and Machine Learning is not just for the biggest of companies with a large budget - yet many SMEs still think so. There are various ways of adding AI into your business' customer lifecycle, as demonstrated in our infographic below.
Machine learning can be applied to interact with first-time customers and those that show purchase intent, to repeat customers and re-engage lapsed customers. Yet the majority of B2B marketers asked, expect AI to help them with identifying prospective customers and improving marketing effectiveness in driving revenue.
"B2B marketers surveyed for this latest report were twice as likely to say they’re unclear as to the differences between AI, machine learning, and predictive (37%) as to say they have a strong understanding (19%) of how they differ."
Knowledge of AI is still limited, which means…
