A brief review of 4 E-CRM alternatives suitable for a small business or not-for-profit company
I recently evaluated online E-CRM services for a contemporary art gallery. Dave Chaffey suggested I share my evaluation with Smart Insights readers since it may be useful for others taking the same decision for a small business. This follows on from a question I answered in the Smart Insights LinkedIn Group as to the issues to consider when selecting a CRM or email marketing system.
The review was also a fantastic opportunity to look generally at the CRM market place and consider what CRM system I should have in place for my own marketing consultancy business.
At the outset I had a number of requirements in mind including: the security of data (based on the supplier assurances and, for US suppliers, the Safe Harbor scheme); lists; custom fields; bulk email; online data capture; mobile access; back ups; auto-updates…
ifttt : what is it and how can I use it as a marketer?
Short for "If This Then That", ifttt is an online service that allows easy management of social services. We've heard more marketers mentioning it recently, so thought it was worth sharing to see whether it could help you save time. Alternatively, we're interested to hear how you use? Do you have any other tips to share - these "recipes" are a good place to start if you want to see how it could help you. Here's a simple example:
You can see it's designed for people managing multiple social outposts (or channels as they call them) to manage at once and are looking for more efficient ways to maintain services.
It's a relatively new alternative for using other tools to automate social sharing. Dave Chaffey wrote…
Every website owner wants to know how visitors behave on their website, but how do you get all that information and how can you improve your pages with it?
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you some good information about previous pages and the most popular links, but to show interactions in detail, additional tools are often useful. It’s these specialist tools that I focus on this review.
For more background on applying heatmaps to improve sites, see these two tutorials:
Using Heatmaps to Optimize your Site (Referral Candy - shows examples Click, Scroll and Mouse movement heatmaps)
Using Clickmaps to Understand your viewers - a nice summary of why and how to use heatmaps
There are various ways to collect more information about the behaviour of visitors on your website.…
By
29 Mar 2012
Of the sixteen tools reviewed which two work best?
This article explains why we believe you’d benefit from using these services for feeding back on web page designs. You'll find you can use them for everything from campaign landing pages to new home page designs.
Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents his or her work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants suggest how to improve it. This process allows us to draw upon our team’s wide-ranging experience.
We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works:
Consultants upload an image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.)
The consultants choose whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image.
Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments.
Here's an example…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
A tutorial on reviewing consumer search behaviour in the 2nd Largest Search Engine in the World
As you'll know, YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google in many countries. It's the number one ranked entertainment site and 3rd most visited in the UK by Hitwise. Given this and since popular videos are displayed in the "one-box" of blended search results for some queries it's worth investigating how YouTube can be used to reach a wider audience.
In this post I'll give a short tutorial on how to find out it's relevance in your market by finding out the number of searches. I'm not suggesting it will give instant results or as Forrester misguidely advised that it's the Easiest Way to a First-page ranking on Google. It may even help you "push back" against colleagues who are asking why you're not doing more work in YouTube.
It's an enormous site…
A comparison of the three most popular influencer finding tools: Klout, Kred and Peerindex
As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand.
While FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
Dan Purvis from the Meltwater Group, explains why these tools are growing in importance:
"Identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As…
Value: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Raven GA Config Tool
Our review of the tool
We’ve said many times that Google Analytics is a great tool “out-of-the-box” when you first setup the tags on your site. However, to really get the most from it, it needs a lot of configuration to tailor it for your business as we describe for the new version of Google Analytics in our online training course and Ebook showing 7 Steps to get more from Google Analytics.
I’ve recently discovered this free tool from Raven Tools that I wanted to tell you about since it's a nice tool to help with configuration. It makes some aspects of this an easier process since it steps you through what’s involved for a number of key setup areas of…
Our interview with Richard Beaumont of the Cookie Collective
This is our second look at a technology solution to help marketers comply with the new "cookie law". This was the first - an interview about a cookie free analytics system.
The Cookie Collective have created a toolkit which can help site owners do a free cookie audit and place a consent message on the site giving information about cookies. This is how the consent message looks for the Cookie Collective script:
So, onto the questions, thanks to Richard for his clear responses.
Question 1. What solutions do you have to help marketers many compliance with the EU directive relating to cookies?
The Cookie Collective wanted to create a complete end to end service enabling any website to become compliant with the new law, and we have built a suite of products to achieve this.
The…
An interview with Oliver Birleson of Maxsi Limited
Following on from our posts and discussions on how to best implement the cookie law by May 2012, we're going to take a look at some of the technology and consulting solutions available to help marketers comply.
Our first post is an interview with Oliver Birleson of MaxSi Limited who are offering a cookie free analytics system based on their established eVisitAnalyst product.
Question: Why have you developed your solution?
We have developed eVisit Analyst 8 due to the demand for an analytics system which retains optimal functionalisation regardless of whether or not visitors have disabled cookies. Moreover, as the Information Commissioner's Office have deemed analytics as 'non-essential' cookies, there is the need for an analytics system that is not reliant upon visitors giving their positive consent to store cookies. Users of eVisit can therefore have an analytics system which does not fluctuate dependant…
