How online retail brands can benefit from video commerce
Consumers today want a visually engaging online shopping experience that is personalized at the same time. According to a recent study, 52% of consumers said that watching videos makes them more confident about their purchase decisions.
As one of the most shareable forms of media, videos not only boost your brand’s voice, but also help you build an emotional connection with your customer.
Thus, including it as a part of your marketing strategy will not only help you drive conversion, but also increase average order value, differentiate marketing campaigns, increase margins and reduce return and development costs.
6 ways for video engagement
Here are six ways suggested by MobStac on how to make videos work for your e-commerce store:
1. Feature engaging product videos
Not only does engaging video content improve the look and feel of your e-commerce website, but also has a huge…
New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites
This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.
Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.
Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…
How intelligent segmentation helped Homebase drive instore bookings and increased revenue
eCircle worked with their client Homebase to support them in increasing their Ecommerce revenue through planning and executing a highly targeted personalised triggered email campaign, to sell their high value kitchens.
This blog post takes you through the campaign goals, planning and execution and to show the approach Homebase used.
Recommended Guide:
Just updated for 2013, our 80 page email guide will help you review all aspects of email marketing from communications strategy to creative and copy.
Download our 7 Steps to Email marketing guide.
Email Campaign Goals
The business goal of Homebase was primarily to increase their sales revenue of their high value products (kitchens) by drawing in customers instore to meet their Kitchen Designers,…
E-retail own goals that gift victory to your rivals
There are lots of common mistakes that I still often see made on a frequent basis when I review e-commerce sites. Sure, you're unlikely to see these on John Lewis and M&S, but some are made irrespective of the size of the project.
Having seen many of these mistakes being made so often and particularly when so little work is required to rectify or prevent them, I have created this list of some of the common e-commerce mistakes to avoid:
Getting the basics of product marketing wrong
Surprisingly, one of the most common mistakes that companies of all sizes have made and will continue to make comes down to viewing the build of a website as a technical exercise only. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. An e-commerce website has to position your…
2 examples of a technique to use for retail SEO
Advice to create quality content is a recurring theme from Google. It’s the recommendation every time someone raises a complaint about their latest algorithm. It’s also what Matt Cutts recommends in response to almost any question from the broad brush, like ‘What’s the best way to rank higher” to narrow focus such as ‘how do we avoid duplicate content’.
If you have already created well-written content on your site describing your products and services, and cracked the keyword conundrum, (appropriate use in page titles and headings, not too many, not too few, plus a smattering of synonyms) you may be wondering what else you can do. One approach is to look carefully at your product pages; earlier this week on Smart Insights, Jimmy McCann showed 5 tips for optimising product…
The latest data on UK retail search volumes
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: BRC-Google Q1 2012 monitor - Published April 16th 2012
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Google produce a regular Online Retail Monitor (ORM) that measures changes and trends in the growth of retail search terms over time. The latest version has some interesting data on the growth in mobile search which also has implications for all site owners. Since it’s direct from Google, using their data on searches for retail terms, it’s a reliable source, although it only gives relative changes not the absolute % of searches that are mobile.
The headline figure is a 132% year-on-year growth in mobile search for retail broken down as follows:
Search volume variation through time
The data is also useful for top-level benchmarking…
How E-retailers can make a sustainable ‘price match promise’ to grow business while protecting margins
As recession continues to bite, forcing even well known and loved names into receivership, we all know it’s essential to keep customers buying from us. And, in order to achieve this, you have to be absolutely certain you are offering the best price around.
Of course in any market sector, there are many online retailers, all competing for the same customers and, more importantly, their money. To triumph in the face of such intense opposition you’re going to need an angle or edge; something to make sure you’re ahead of the competition and that allows you prove it too.
This is where services like Competitor Price Watch (CPW) can help. In this post I'll describe the concept behind these services and finish with three…
A custom dashboard in Google Analytics you can use for checking your checkout process
If you have an ecommerce web site you know that the performance of the checkout is critical. If anything goes wrong with the checkout it will be costing you money.
That’s why first thing every morning, before I even look at the sales figures, I look at my clients' ‘Checkout’ custom dashboards.
It gives me an instant health check. I can clearly see if something has gone wrong with any of the stages in the checkout, such as the payment gateway or the address lookup system. Or if something is wrong with a promotional offer codes and people who use it are unable to buy…
All I have to do is to take a quick look at this…
Tips on Marketplace Conversion Rate Optimisation from Matt Ogborne
We all know that Amazon and eBay are the powerhouses where almost everyone now shops at some point or other. I've no data to support that, but I imagine, every web user has at least visited these sites once. We also know that they both have very successful marketplaces where many retailers, particularly SME retailers sell their products, often in parallel with their own retail site.
Given this, it's always surprised me that relatively little is written (beyond the Dummies guides) on how companies can optimise their sales on these sites. Especially since conversion rate optimisation (CRO) for retailers is such a hot topic.
Dan Barker recently introduced me to Matthew Ogborne, a specialist who helps small and medium businesses sell more on Amazon and eBay when I was sourcing someone…
A key mobile design trend in 2013
Mobile usage is only going one way. Up. Rapidly.
[caption id="attachment_9550" align="aligncenter" width="537" caption="UK mobile adoption exploding: 27 million regular users, 54% of all mobile users. Source: Comscore."][/caption]
But how good are the experiences we're building for customers? Designing experiences on mobile is challenging because of the form factor and because it's a relatively new design approach with the tools and technologies evolving fast. Brands also want to get to market fast.
Today's mobile designs often fail to differentiate brands
These challenges can lead to some "screen scrape" design approaches where every site looks similar, with little differentiation of brand or experience. These 4 retail sites show this:
Don't get be wrong, these sites show a lot of features of good…
