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…

Introducing the 7 principles of engagement marketing

Just a few generations ago, the world of doing business was driven by face-to-face relationships.  Many of us have heard stories from grandparents who talked about their butcher or baker as if they were old friends. These unique and intimate relationships were powerful, built strong relationships with customers and ultimately drove customer loyalty. This concept was one of the main casualties of the digital revolution – as buying moved into online channels and a plethora of new tools and channels became available to marketers to help them to communicate with customers in a digital world. Databases were blasted, demand was generated and victory was achieved – in the short-term at least. But in today’s digital world, buyers are more becoming ever more empowered.  Steadily, buyers have acquired the power to define their own buying process so the days…

New platforms and techniques for rapidly engaging online audiences

The increasing pace of life means that what little time we have is becoming more and more squeezed. This compression of time is leading to a compression of communication which has some notable implications for brands. One of the big trends for 2014 is the rise of image centric sites such as Pinterest which according to the Global Web Index grew 150% in 2013 and shows no signs of slowing. This format of image based content represents the ultimate distillation of information and ideas.

Density of communication

We’ve gone from reading websites and blogs, to scanning tweets to glancing at rapid sequences of images. It’s the editorial equivalent of skipping a fry up for a breakfast bar on the train.

Video continues to grow as shown in …

How to create a water-tight email marketing strategy for building customer loyalty

The traditional definition of customer loyalty is a financial one– your most loyal customers are clearly those who keep returning to do business with you. But loyalty in the digital world has much wider implications.  For some organizations it can be the bald metric of how frequently their customers do business with them. For others, such as online retailers, it is also a measure of how often customers share favourable reviews or feedback on the organization or brand. However you define and measure customer loyalty Customer satisfaction vs. loyalty At the heart of any loyalty-driving campaign lies the need to raise customer satisfaction levels.

Ten steps to building customer loyalty

Step 1. Gain senior management and cross-business commitment to raising customer satisfaction across the enterprise.

Focus on the channel that lets you build intimacy. One of the most effective…

Engagement tips to drive offline action - a not-for-profit campaign example

At charity @vInspired, digital and social media is key to engaging with our young audience. Retweets, mentions and comments can be an early indicator of success, but they are only transitory metrics and not our end goal.

Source: All images: vInspired

If we're not getting young people to take a real-world action, to volunteer, then we are just measuring digital outcomes - what some call vanity metrics.

Our recent research, 'Online Engagement, Offline Action' explores digital behaviours that can be harnessed to help young people discover the value of volunteering. We identified four digital trends that can help us and other organisations use digital engagement to drive offline actions.

Four digital trends to help digital engagement drive offline actions

1. How can…

Tips on keeping your online customers active

One of the most fundamental lessons that every marketer learns during the first day on the job is that it costs around six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. So says Daniel Binns of Epsilon. In today’s ultra-competitive market, where revenues are under pressure every quarter and margins are continuously squeezed, this lesson is more relevant than ever. The problem is that we now live in an omnichannel world. The brave new realm of always-on communications means consumers are presented with more choice through more channels than ever before. Brands have more opportunities to connect with customers than in the past, but also have to fight harder to win a share of attention in a fiercely competitive market. Winning customers is only half the battle though. Once a brand has connected with a consumer, it needs to devote…

How to create an inbound marketing strategy - some case studies of tools and tactics

I've found setting up and running a small business is both daunting and exciting in equal measure. The combined economic downturn and increasingly crowded competitive landscape mean the need to promote your business and get your message ‘out there’ is as important as ever.

The small business marketing challenge

Marketing is a huge challenge for small businesses, particularly start-ups with no established customer base or community around them. Traditional advertising is an absolute necessity to let people know who you are. But if you’ve limited money and resources, what other options do you have to get your message about your fantastic new business out there? Inbound marketing is one strategy I would highly recommend.

An introduction to inbound marketing -  ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’

For any business, large or small, there are three key media types you can use to connect with consumers;…

Approaches to increase the value of your email messages Part 2 When resources are scarce

When we try to make email more valuable for subscribers, we tend to focus on technical and transactional optimization. Which means we focus on making the actual offer/content more targeted, mainly using tools like segmentation, dynamic content personalization etc. That's a good thing. But there are two limitations to this approach. First, we forget that value doesn't just lie in the relevancy of content and offers. Second, the required tools, data and/or resources for technical and transactional optimization aren't always available to marketers with budgets to care about. Part 1 of this article explored how you might use personality, human voice etc. to address the idea of emotional value: building an emotional connection that keeps people engaged even when the content or offer misses its mark. In Part 2 I suggest five relatively simple concepts you can use to build more…

This report contains useful perspectives from a range of engagement specialists which are useful to review. There are also statistics from over 1,000 client and agency side respondents. Here are the main results from the research: Email newsletters (72%), presence on social networks (48%) and micro-blogging (46%) are the tactics most likely to result in a tangible improvement to companies"€Ÿ online customer engagement. Significantly more companies than last year are planning to increase investment in usergenerated content (+13%), on-site branded communities/forums (+9%) and rich on-page interactive experiences (+8%). The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned mobile investment at the same stage a year ago. The vast majority of company respondents (73%) are planning to invest in the mobile channel in 2011. This compares to 60% who said they planned investment at the same stage last year. Less…

The 4th Annual cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement survey is released today - this post is a preview featuring my contribution. You can download the full survey and read the introduction from the cScape site - this is worth downloading since as well as the research it has commentary from many well-known UK and US experts making recommendations in areas of engagement such as social media (of course), mobile, employee engagement and customer service. Here is my contribution.

Reviewing your opportunities for audience participation

In each of the four years of the cScape-Econsultancy customer engagement surveys, I have been struck by the diversity of aims of organisations in managing customer engagement. But with results now being reported we can see clear, common benefits. Analysis of this years survey of benefits achieved, suggests that the benefits are greatest where active audience or customer participation occurs. The three…