An interview between conversion strategy specialists Hugh Gage and Craig Sullivan

Structured testing to improve website effectiveness has gained a lot of traction among digital marketers in recent years. Its adoption has been helped by success stories of subtle changes such as Google adding $200m in revenue by testing 41 shades of blue on their ad links, or the $300 million button, or even the $500 million button.

These types of 'quick wins' have encouraged more structured programmes moving from simplistic conversion rate optimisation split test to a more compelling realm of driving incremental revenue and profit.

The examples of improvement above are perhaps too tantalising, since they suggest that it's easy to get started and get great results. For many, the real world isn't like that - you have to make the case to colleagues and tests may fail to give these rewards.

As part of writing the Smart Insights…

Dan Grech interviews David Wood about his email marketing strategy

I’ve been here for about five years and had been doing email for about three years beforehand. I started off working in B2B, at an IT distributor, which was very different to what I do now. And back then I was much more hands-on; creating the emails, structuring, planning, copywriting, all of that stuff.

I wanted to get more immediate results, so I moved into the retail space. The opportunity came up for Email Marketing Manager at Direct Wines, which covered off working with Laithwaite’s, Sunday Times, Averys, and others, so it was ideal really. Within my current role, I directly manage one, but indirectly manage a team of about eight. That includes writers, creatives, HTML, so it kind of covers quite a range.

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A Q&A with Liam Fisher of BuiltVisible giving actionable advice and tools for people looking to improve their content marketing campaigns in the year ahead

Getting started with content marketing can be tough – from researching your audience through to executing a campaign across multiple mediums and devices, there’s a lot for the digital marketer to cover. Often it comes back to really understanding what content marketing can bring to your business, who your audience is and what’s most likely to resonate with them, and what it is you need to achieve as a business from your content marketing. To add a bit more to the conversation, I sat down with Liam Fisher the creative lead at Builtvisible, to talk about his views on content marketing and to share some actionable advice for people looking to improve their campaigns.

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Simon Swan interviews David Edmunson-Bird about teaching Digital Marketing in Higher Education

In this interview Simon Swan talked to David Edmunson-Bird about the opportunities and challenges of teaching Digital Marketing in Higher Education. David, AKA @Groovegenerator, is a Principal Lecturer  in Digital Marketing and Enterprise and Associate Director at Manchester Metropolitan University and has worked for leading companies including BT. He has been involved in the teaching and training of Digital Business since 2004 and was active in setting up the BA (Hons) in Digital Media/Marketing and MSc in Digital Marketing, some of the first and best regarded Digital Marketing qualifications in the UK.

Q1.  MMU seem to have been an early adopter in grasping the opportunity to create recognised digital qualifications, do you see this as a necessary in helping to drive awareness for MMU and…

An interview with Bill Gerth plus a review of social media management tools

When we think of social media, we often imagine a Social Media Manager or Community Manager simply posting marketing content and engaging with their community. However, our guide based on 22 end-user reviews and ratings across 23 different social media management software products shows many more applications. The table below shows how we’ve identified 3 key ways enterprises are leveraging social media: Social Customer Care, Social Listening and Social Media Marketing.  Most companies fit more than one use case. For example, some companies that manage a social customer care program use a second tool that specializes in social listening along with a customer care tool that provides engagement capabilities. …

Simon Swan's interview with Andrew Nicholson, Founder of the-Guku showing how behavioural economics influences customer online purchases and growing demand for Data?

Andrew is the founder of the-Guku, a digital marketing consultancy specialising in behavioural economics and the relationship this plays in influencing customers through their online purchase patterns. Guku combine #DigitalMarketing, #BehavioralEconomics & #Psychology know-how to understand your customers better than they understand themselves! In my interview with Andrew, he lifts the lid on the growing demand for data on behavioural economics,  real-life examples of companies already successfully using these techniques and Andrew’s personal journey of  launching his very own consultancy…

Q. You seem to have uncovered an interesting niche in web psychology, can you summarise what this is all about?

Absolutely.  As I progressed through my MSc, it became clear that there was a huge understanding of marketing technology, but a relative dearth…

Interview with Ollie Bath, co-founder of CloudTags

In our recent guide by Tery Spataro on integrating customer-facing digital technology into retail stores we looked at lots of examples of how retailers are planning to Wow customers with in-store digital tech. One of the most interesting technologies which combines customer engagement with linkages through to CRM and sales is CloudTags. Jill Quick, another of our Expert commentators had been telling me about the example of Made.com who had given customers at its London showroom tablets that they can use to read NFC / RFID tags to learn about each product, while giving the retailer access to data about shopper behaviour and preferences. It's one example of the Internet of Things being applied in retail today. So, I was interested to interview Ollie Bath, the co-founder of CloudTags to find out more about the technology, how different retailers…

An interview with Retail email specialist Dan Jak

There is a LOT written about best practices for email marketing, especially around creative and copy. Mark Brownlow has contributed many great posts to Smart Insights covering subject lines, email pre-headers and Email CTAs to name but 3. But  there is far less written specifically about best practices for email marketing in retail ecommerce. The obvious exception is Chad White's Retail Email blog although Chad has diversified into more general email marketing advice with his new Email Marketing Rules book - we have a competition to win 3 copies running at the moment. So, when I got chatting to Dan Jak in our LinkedIn group and discovered his experience  on Email marketing I was keen to learn and share more. So in this interview we look at some retail-specific email marketing challenges, many of which apply more…

An interview with the VP of Aviasales.ru - a case study of mobile app lead generation

In today’s mobile market, app developers concentrate primarily on making money from in-app purchases. However, there are many other ways to make a profit with an app. At AppInTop mobile app marketing podcast (English, Russian), we talked to Ivan Kozlov, Vice President of Mobile Products at Aviasales.ru about how to leverage a mobile app as a lead generation tool.

A lead gen case study - an airline ticket search app

Airline tickets are a very complicated product, and this is a low-margin business. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money in this niche. It’s perfectly realistic to create a successful product in this area, but to do so you…

Itamar Simonson explains how digital reviews and recommendations mean that consumers are now better equipped than ever to determine the absolute value of any purchase

According to Simonson, Professor of Marketing at Stanford University, today's consumers have so many new sources of information it's much easier for them to assess the absolute value of things, in other words, to know their likely experience with a product or service. Absolute Value is the title of a new book by Simonson written with Emanuel Rosen, ABSOLUTE VALUE: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information.  In it they argue that consumers today take advantage of three trends: 1. the rise of reviews from other users 2. unprecedented access to expert opinions 3. easy access to friends on social media. In this interview we explore the new reality of the influence of digital media on purchase  and its far-reaching implications on everything from competitive strategy to communication…