Find out how strong branding adds value to your business, and how to get started when it comes to building your own brand

Branding. The word is often thrown around in conversations about marketing, but what does it really involve and is it worth the effort? Broadly speaking, branding is the sum total of anything you use to differentiate your business from the competition, while also creating a unique identity that is recognizable and elicits an emotional response from prospective and existing customers. It’s essentially every strategic move you make towards crafting your image, and includes everything from your logo and brand colours right up to your tone of voice, tagline, product offering, and customer service.

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The benefits of effective branding

Increase recognition:Your branding needs to be consistent…

Compilation of abandonment rates and follow-up email conversion rates in retail, fashion, travel, finance and not-for profit

We recommend retargeting as an essential activity in our RACE framework customer lifecycle activities. That's because it can help boost both conversion to lead and conversion to sale conversion rates. This pair of charts focusing on email retargeting show it's worthwhile putting a range of retargeting tactics in place, regardless of the type of business.

Cart abandonment rates

This data is based on abandonment rates from Salecycle customers. It shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 75.4% with rates in some sectors such as travel and finance being even higher. Following up on this interest with a reminder email (if you have collected it, which you should) is one way of increasing conversion, using a simple reminder or a more persuasive discount. It's worth testing which discounts…

How brands are bridging the gap between online and offline shopping experiences

The age of the customer is upon us and a big reason for it is the growth of technology. Customers can thoroughly research a brand or a product before buying. They use several devices and channels to look you up and, what’s more, they’re also expecting a different customer experience – a better one, in fact. In my latest guide for Smart Insights, I take a deeper look at omnichannel marketing and what it means check it out if you want to create better customer experiences for your e-commerce or retail business and to boost your sales. [si_guide_block id="122303" title="Omnichannel marketing planning guide" description="Learn what omnichannel marketing, how it’s different from multichannel marketing, and the different ways that you can use technology to improve the customer experience."] Right now, I want to share some examples of omnichannel marketing in action to…

We analyzed more than 791 million emails to see what the best hour and day is to send high-converted email marketing

Every year at Omnisend we analyze our clients’ email marketing and marketing automation data to see the biggest trends, opportunities and best practices that lead to great conversions and sales. Recently, we dug deep into 9,500 brands that sent more than 92,000 email campaigns (that’s more than 791 million emails, by the way) to see what the best hour, the day of the week, and day of the month is to send out email campaigns. By understanding these practical results, you’ll be able to adapt your own email marketing strategy to improve your conversions and skyrocket your sales. But first, it’s important to emphasize the importance here of list-building. If you don’t have a big enough list, you won’t really see significant results that can help inform you about the best email marketing…

Let us look at the rise Google Shopping

New research by Adthena uncovers the extent to which Google Shopping ads, commonly referred to as Product Listing Ads (or PLAs), have become the most popular ad format for retail advertisers, with ad spend now far in excess of text ads in retail categories. Google Shopping ads now drive 76.4% of retail search ad spend, generating 85.3% of all clicks on Adwords or Google Shopping campaign ads. This report benchmarks Google Shopping (PLA) ad spend across 40 million ads in the US/UK. From 267,000 competitors, encompassing over 1 million search terms. The data reveals the true extent of Google Shopping ad format adoption in the US/UK, among advertisers across retail categories such as Fashion and Apparel, Consumer Electronics and Home & Garden. “The bigger picture here is the shift in which audiences are consuming new ad formats,” says…

With the increasing amount of data breaches, internal controversies, and shady business dealings that have been uncovered in the past few years, consumers are finding it difficult to trust businesses

According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer report, 42% of customers claim that they have lost trust in many brands. In fact, customer confidence in American companies has continued to decline over the past few years. Trust is earned, and it must be cultivated over time. This is tricky, especially for new brands who have little experience to go off of. So, how can you establish this with your own audience to not only attract customers, but also build brand loyalty for years to come? Let’s discuss.

Define Your Brand Voice and Stick to it

Every business has a personality. There are words you would use to label a brand that could easily be used to describe a person. For example, what is Apple’s brand voice? Perhaps…

Urgency messaging is a great way to raise conversions but is getting an increasingly bad rep

Getting visitors on your site and converting seems to be more difficult than ever. Consumers are indecisive, and, with more choice online than ever before, your website visitors are less likely to hang around. Creating urgency is one of the best ways to raise ecommerce conversions. In my 16 years in ecommerce, there are few techniques I’ve seen that so reliably raise sales. Urgency works by overcoming your visitors’ mental hurdles to purchasing from you. Perhaps they’re indecisive, prone to overthinking, or they just want to shop around a bit more. There are so many psychological factors at play that influence whether someone will buy from you. It is, however, a technique to be used with caution. The problem with urgency messaging is that it can come off as disingenuous or just all round scammy. At best this…

A Customer Data Platform looks to fulfil that age-old promise of centralizing all the customer data, and it is looking good

Marketers know that data management is the key to data-driven marketing. Traditional methods for trying to bring customer data together into a “360 customer view”, failed to solve the complete problem. But there is a new player in town, and its called Customer Data Platform (CDP). Now it is knocking on your door. Should you let it in? [si_guide_block id="5508" title="Email marketing strategy guide" description="Use our email marketing guide to review your email marketing strategy using the best communications strategy, targeting and marketing automation."]

Bringing together customer data in a CDP

An un-siloed and full view of the customer is not a new concept. Yet the 360 customer view has always turned out to be the just out of reach for the marketer. Custom MarTech integration projects are known to be an especially…

Are you tapping into Customer Psychology for your marketing?

Kahneman popularised System 1 and System 2 decision-making in his book, "thinking fast and slow" - but how can marketers use this Scientific theory in their marketing? Last year I was faced with a fairly every day dilemma, my partner and I were going through the process of buying an IKEA kitchen at home, I'd dropped and smashed my iPhone screen, rendering it unusable (I replaced it with a much cheaper android phone)and I wanted to go on holiday to Italy (Turin). The dilemma was: Did I need an iPhone? Could I hold off on the holiday to Italy? The kitchen was the biggest decision, it was over £4000 in cost - it took time to research what we wanted and plan the whole thing with IKEA. Arranging delivery, getting the whole thing installed. It's a major project and being without a kitchen…

Don't make your customers wait for your site to load

As desirable of a quality patience is, it is the last thing you should expect from clients visiting your website. Just making them wait one second extra can drastically reduce customer satisfaction and cause conversions to nosedive. If that’s not enough, since 2010, Google has taken site speed into consideration in its ranking algorithm. Nothing reeks of unprofessionalism more than trying to find a company and their website is too slow or does not load properly. Research shows that for every extra second of loading time you lose 10-15% of web visitors. For most SMEs that equates to millions in lost revenue. This is something any business focused on CRO needs to keep in mind. This comprehensive guide with eight steps you can take to decrease your load time may help you speed things up. …