Ideas on encouraging pollination to create a better experience

I spent a lot of time observing the bees - mainly because I was s*** scared of being stung and yes, bees CAN smell fear.

This was my first taste of watching 20,000 visitors, with attitude, do something that totally hooked my attention. I read voraciously and absorbed everything I could find at the library.

I was amazed at how they could engineer perfect hexagons out of wax secreted from their own bodies. I read of Their Queen and her subjects, their complex dances, their calculations of distance - always taking account of wind and the movement of the sun overhead. Like an organic machine, I watched over 50 kilos of honey come from one beehive in the hot summer of 1976 from ceaseless industry and coordination.

But one thing really stood out. That call to action,…

Google introduces new customer journey mapping tool

Have you seen Google’s new customer journey benchmarking tool for reviewing The Customer Journey to Online Purchase? I thought I would feature it at the start of our round-up of our advice from May 2013 since I haven’t seen it discussed much, perhaps because it’s built into Google's Think Insights rather than Google Analytics itself. It’s a tool to help understand media campaign attribution, i.e. which marketing channels influence lead or sale. It's based on data collected from Google Analytics, but gives a slightly different visualisation from Multichannel Funnels or Social Reports. It covers data for these countries: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, U.K., US U.S. and these industries: Auto, B2B, Classified/Local, CPG, Edu/Gov, Finance, Health, Media, Retail, Tech and Travel. Here's an example from the travel sector in the UK:

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Webcast catchup and 10 of your digital strategy questions answered

Our recent webcast with PR Smith focused on digital strategy. PR Smith is the creator of the widely used SOSTAC® Planning system voted as one of the top 3 global marketing models in the CIM Centenary Poll. We know from previous polls, that around two-thirds of companies don’t have a digital strategy. Perhaps these figures aren’t surprising since others don’t even have a marketing strategy. Just tactical campaigns. So, we thought it would be useful to look at what involved with developing a digital strategy. We started by looking at the digital strategy question again. This is what we found: Just an informal poll, but showing that many still don’t have a strategy. It prompts the question whether you need a digital strategy - my previous post gives 5 reasons why you don’t and 10…

If User Experience (UX) is a no brainer then why isn't it higher on the agenda?

There are many tools and resources available to help us ensure that the user experience is improved; whether its enhanced through  user testing, eyetracking research or third-party experience evaluation tools.

Vitamin's Talent's Infographic reminds us of the powerful impact of getting this right since:

97% of websites fail at the UX due to a poor customer experience.86% of users give up as they feel companies don't care.Developers spend 50% of their time fixing issues which could be avoided.

We also included this as an example of a full page interactive infographic.

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Insight from Connect2013 – the marketing roadmap and exploiting data in the right way for your business

Update 29 May 2013: Presentations now available: Volker Wiewer's and Herman Wimmer from Terradata  In previous years, Dave Chaffey has spoken at the eCircle conferences, but this year was different since eCircle is now part of  Teradata . In 2012 they acquired Ecircle and Aprimo of which Ecircle’s core business is email marketing solutions and Aprimo, Market Leader in cloud base integrated marketing solutions. I attended to take a look at some of the latest approaches on ECRM/Marketing Automation/Email Marketing/Big Data and we will share some of the most useful Slideshares when they're available. In the keynote, the VP of Teradata Ecircle Volker Wiewer along with International President Herman Wimmer gave their view on…

Paid search marketing - impact on consumer purchasing?

We are highlighting this Infographic as it gives some good tips on how to reach your consumers, their buying process and the mobile devices which they prefer to use. It's from iAcquire who are looking to show the impact of search advertising on the consumer, demographic influences and use of mobile devices. Did you know that the 'likelihood of visiting the second page increases with age' and '70% of mobile searches lead to an action on a website within an hour'. Results are collated from resources including Nielsen, Experian and Pingdom.

You can read further results of the survey in their video.

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Retention techniques to support your online marketing strategy

For any digital marketing strategy or integrated digital communications plan, having a set of objectives and clear strategy behind your plan is essential for the success of what you are looking to achieve. This blog post focuses on creating an actionable plan around retention, which by definition is maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering. Retention should be at the heart of your digital strategy in maintaining and building communication with your existing customer base. Know your audience? Before embarking on your retention strategy, understanding your audience is a key requirement to ensure the chosen retention tactics are in line with your existing customer base - so begin to build up a profile of the type of customer/s that interact with your brand. Retention is about engaging with your existing customer base, so you should already have a wealth of…

Match personas, content changes and stages of the buying cycle to help you nurture your leads

In my last post, Personalisation 101- How to increase customer engagement and conversion rates, I introduced the main types of personalisation available to make your site more customer-focused. In this post I'll expand on this by recommending approaches to segmenting your audience and making sure that your website’s personalisation directly meets your overall business objectives. I will show how to: Use business objectives to define measurable actions Identify the weaknesses in your website Create personas for your core audience types Use a Digital Relevancy Map to plot specific actions to personas and buying stages Create a wireframe to translate this knowledge onto your webpages Test and measure personalisation.

Making actions meet your business objectives

The first step is to lay the foundations for personalisation. To make a business case for personalisation you need a clear map of what personalisation…

Learning from an example of how one startup failed

Ecomom was a small startup internet retail company selling earth friendly mom and maternity products including food, toys, apparel, and other baby related items. With headquarters in Las Vegas and San Francisco and a third-party fulfillment in Los Angeles, any volume could be shipped within 24 hours. Founded in 2007, by 2011 it had turnover of just over $1 million, but a further round of investment of $12 million required further growth, but at what cost? Business Insider describes the story of the eventual failure of the company in 2013  With hindsight it's difficult to understand investment in the company, but perhaps this was buoyed by the success story of Tony Hsieh building Las Vegas-based Zappos into an online shoe and retail business that Amazon acquired for $1.2 billion. Of course, investors, require growth and Ecomum did achieve revenues of nearly $4 million in…

Why you need to jump on the Facebook Exchange Bandwagon right now

In a previous post, Remarketing using Facebook’s Ad Exchange, we gave a quick briefing on Facebook Exchange. I looked at the basics of FBX, factors in choosing a partner and how to target your audience. In this follow-up, I’ll provide you with a more in-depth and advanced look at retargeting with Facebook Exchange, some early performance numbers and why you need to take advantage of FBX right now. Conversion Numbers, Off to a strong start If you haven’t been paying attention to Facebook lately, it’s time for a wake-up call. The early conversion numbers on Facebook’s new ad exchange, FBX, are going to cause some jaws to drop in Internet marketing land. FBX is bought on a dynamic CPM basis, and if you want to…