Content Shock has arrived [#ChartoftheDay]

The number of social shares per blog post suffers from a massive 89% decline over the past five years

Mark Schaefer originally coined the term content shock 3 years ago. Since then we've seen a massive explosion in the amount of content produced - an almost seven-fold increase -but a huge crash in engagement with each post.

An October 2016 study by TrackMaven analysed over 65,000 blogs and found that the number of blogs produced increased by 800%, but the number of social shares per posts crashed by a massive 89%.

We can see this huge drop off in engagement is impacting brand's decisions - the number of articles published has plateaued since August 2015.

In an attempt to cut through, brands have been driven to creating not just more, but longer content. The average number of words in each post increased by 100 words, to 750 words per post on average. But as you can see from the chart below, it's failing to increase engagement, at least in terms of social shares.

• Source: TrackMaven
• Sample Size: 65,000 blogs
• Recommended resource: Content Marketing Strategy

source http://www.smartinsights.com/content-management/content-marketing-planning/content-shock-arrived-chartoftheday/

New study reveals Facebook’s massive reach on third party sites

47% of the 100,000 most popular sites now contain one or more Facebook technologies, giving Facebook unprecedented access to data and web traffic.

The results of the new study from SimilarTech shows the scale of Facebook operation beyond its own domain, with insights on the platform's reach and exposure through the use of Facebook technologies, giving Facebook its competitive edge on audience data and referral traffic to its site.

This enormous audience reach has been achieved through the widespread popularity of the company's technologies and plugins such as ‘share buttons’ or ‘comment boxes’ on 3rd party sites which deliver traffic to Facebook and strengthens the presence of the Facebook brand across the web.

The most popular technologies from Facebook being used on the top 100k sites are Facebook Connect, followed by Facebook Social Plugin and Facebook's Like Button. 

While Facebook web technologies are present in almost any content-oriented site on the web, for the first time we are able to see the magnitude of their operation in terms of reach.

Considering Facebook's brand reach resulting from the visits to the sites currently using Facebook technologies, the exposure of Facebook grows tenfold. Facebook is indirectly accessed by more than 300 billion visits in Sept 2016 which were exposed to Facebook products on 3rd party sites.

The Facebook Social Plugin is present in more than 17 million websites, making it their most widely used technology. It’s important to take into consideration that while some Facebook technologies such as Facebook Comments are embedded in fewer sites (1.3 million), many of the domains where they are used are major media outlets such as USAtoday.com, Politico.com, NFL.com and Vice.com  

Facebook's online presence seems stronger than ever and it shows no sign of decline, especially when they have managed to create technologies which sites across the web have become so dependent on.

Read the full research findings on this link.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/facebook-marketing/new-study-reveals-facebooks-massive-reach-third-party-sites/

10 extremely costly AdWords mistakes you need to avoid at all costs

Make sure you don't fall foul of these common but expensive AdWords mistakes

When it’s used correctly, Google AdWords can be a fantastic way to drive relevant visitors to your website and generate new enquiries or online sales for your business. AdWords works well for all sorts of products/services and you don’t need a huge budget to get started. Plus, it’s quick and simple to set up a basic AdWords campaign even if you’ve never done it before.

And that’s where the problems start. Yes, it is very easy for a beginner to set up and run their own AdWords account, but if you just accept all the default settings and don’t take the time to properly understand all the finer points of how AdWords works, you’ll end up spending a lot and getting very little return on your advertising budget.

Here we provide a list of the top 10 most costly ad-word mistakes we most frequently find marketers guilty of.

1. Choosing the wrong keywords

If you bid on the wrong keywords, you’ll waste money driving the wrong kind of visitors to your website – the kind of people who have little interest in the products or services you sell. Visits from more specific searches tend to have higher conversation rates, so bidding on lots of non-specific keywords will mean your wasting far more money than you would if you properly researched the highest converting keywords.

2. Using the wrong match types

If you don’t specify anything different, all your keywords will be set to broad match by default. With broad match your ads will potentially appear for any search that Google thinks is related to your keyword – even if the relationship is very weak. This can lead to a lot of your ad spend being wasted.

3. Not using the search terms report

Negative keywords are a way of telling Google that if a searcher includes one of those negative keywords in their search query then you do not want your ad to appear. This means you can filter out the kind of visitors that are of no interest to you and avoid wasting money driving them to your website. Too many businesses aren't using this feature and are thus wasting a lot of their PPC spend.

4. Not understanding Quality Score

A lot of people (including some who have been using AdWords for a while) think that the position of your ad on the search results page is determined purely by how much you bid, and that the more you bid the higher up you’ll appear. But in reality, your position on the page is heavily dependent on something called Quality Score (QS). You need to understand what this is and how to improve it if you want your AdWords spend to be used as effectively as possible. We detail how to do this in our new guide on costly Adwords mistakes.

5. Setting up AdWords and then walking away

Even the most perfectly configured account will need optimising and adjusting in the light of the real-world data that your campaigns will be gathering on an ongoing basis. You can find out how to keep it in tune by reading our new guide to costly AdWords mistakes.

6. Having poor quality ads

There are lots of ways you can make your ads more eye catching and more engaging. Doing this will increase your CTR and hence improve your QS, which means you pay a lower cost per click. Our new guide on Adwords mistakes details examples of things you can do to your ads to make them more clickable.

7. Having a poor account structure

If you simply follow the default options and put all your keywords and ads into one Ad Group you won’t get a good degree of control over a whole number of factors that can affect the effectiveness of your AdWords spend. You need to develop a properly thought out account structure using Ad groups if you're to get the most ROI possible.

8. Not measuring phone calls

Tracking conversions in the form of online purchases or enquiry form submissions is pretty easy, either with AdWords itself or by coupling it with Google Analytics. But for many businesses (particularly service-based ones) a lot of the enquiries or sales will happen over the phone. These conversions via the phone are just as important as online ones but, by default, you won’t get any data about them in your AdWords reports. This then means you loose out on one of the most important metrics for judging AdWords ROI. With incompete data you're far more likely to make bad, ill-informed decisions about future budget allocations.

9. Not optimising Mobile separately

By gathering data across the whole customer journey you can properly assess the true conversion rate of mobile visitors (those browsing on mobile but converting on desktop) and plan your bids accordingly. If you don't do this you will either be loosing business because your not bidding highly enough for mobile users and loosing them to competitors, or be loosing money because your bidding too highly for mobile users less likely to convert.

10. Not keeping up to date with new features

Google is forever releasing new features for AdWords – some of them very useful and others less so! It’s important you keep abreast of these changes and enhancements because, if you don’t, it gives your competitors a chance to get one step ahead of you. To find out more about new Adwords features, read our new guide to AdWords mistakes. Unlike this post, it details how to prevent each mistake and gives real word examples to illustrate how critical it is to avoid these common and costly mistakes.

Download resource – 10 Costly AdWords mistakes

Yes, it is very easy for a beginner to set up and run their own AdWords account, but if you just accept all the default settings and don’t take the time to properly understand all the finer points of how AdWords works, you’ll end up spending a lot and getting very little return on your advertising budget. In this guide, we explain the top ten (often very costly) mistakes that people make with AdWords so as you can avoid getting your fingers burnt.

Access the 10 costly AdWords mistakes

source http://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-strategy/10-extremely-costly-mistakes-need-avoid-costs/

Which are the most important e-commerce traffic sources?

Data from 65 million ecommerce orders shows the crucial sources of traffic for ecommerce websites

Ecommerce and online retail is a booming sector, but because the latest marketing techniques change so rapidly it can be tricky to keep up with the latest trends whilst also keeping your feet on the ground.

In a new report, Yotpo collated data from 65 million ecommerce orders representing $2 billion dollars in transactions over 120,000 ecommerce stores, and established what the industry average is for digital media.

The results make for slightly surprising reading. On the face of things, Social makes up a healthy 6%, but this is still a relatively small slice over the overall pie. Paid makes up 5%, which leaves considerable room for growth, whilst email makes up a rather small 3%. It would be interesting to see the conversion rates by traffic, as it may be that referrals from emails are on the site because they’ve decided to purchase, whilst those from other sources may be more likely to be there to browse or research. I was slightly surprised search didn’t make up a larger share, since it is how most customers generally start their buying journey. Investing in better content marketing efforts could be more than worth it for many ecommerce stores, as if done well it will attract quality links and boost SEO.

Relying too much on one source of traffic leaves you exposed to risks, just because a channel is fantastic for generating traffic today doesn’t mean it will continue to be. Some sites lost out when Panda put penalties on certain SEO linking practices. Others lost out when Facebook decided to massively restrict organic reach. If your site had relied exclusively one of these sources of traffic then the changes may have put you in some serious trouble.

The best way to avoid these risks is by hedging your bets by acquiring your traffic from a considerable variety of sources. But what is a good variety? That’s where the data comes in.

Direct

The big surprise in many ways is how large a proportion of traffic comes from direct. Fully 40% of traffic came from direct, which accounts for more ecommerce traffic than any other single source. Direct in theory is the people who have typed in the URL directly to their browser, but in reality it means anyone who arrives at the site from a source that cannot be tracked. The source of this traffic is generally links that have been sent to friends/colleagues and then copied and pasted into web browsers. Traffic of this kind is generally referred to as ‘dark social’, as it is comprised of links that are shared socially, but cannot be tracked. This means ‘dark social’ actually accounts for a considerable percentage of direct traffic.

Dark Social

By its very nature, it is difficult to accurately account for what percentage of your direct traffic is actually ‘dark social’. However with direct accounting for 40% of of ecommerce traffic it seems likely dark social is making up a large proportion of the total. A general rule of thumb is that for every three people reaching your site via social, a further 7 will be arriving from ‘dark social’, which will appear as direct. If this is true for ecommerce traffic then dark social accounts for half of all the direct traffic, which is 20% of the total traffic. This makes dark social the 3rd largest source of ecommerce traffic by a considerable margin. Bear that mind when designing you’re landing pages and crafting the copy for your social shares. Social is probably more important to your bottom line than you think.

Other statistics on the most popular traffic sources and media channels for retailers?

If you're not aware of it the excellent Custora Ecommerce Pulse showing orders by channel is also of interest for retailers to benchmark against. This is the latest data in 2016 from the end of 2015.

It's a compilation of traffic or media sources from some of the top US retail sites which drive sales.

What channels draw the most engaged traffic?

Not all clicks are equal, and some visits are more valuable than others. Some channels bring traffic that is more likely to spend plenty of time reviewing the site, whilst others are more likely to bounce back relatively quickly. Email, Instagram and referral are the stars here. Conversely, Pinterest and Facebook bring traffic likely to spend only half as much time on site as the top performers. It is important to tie this information into budget allocation models, as a click from an email may be worth considerably more than one form Pinterest for example.

How important is mobile?

Mobile has been a buzz word in digital for several years now, to the point where it seems almost out-dated to talk about how important it is as everyone should know by now. Mobile now makes up the majority of visits across the web, but this is not the case for ecommerce. Because of the fiddly nature of payment forms, mobile accounts for slightly over 1/3^rd of all ecommerce visits. If your rate of mobile traffic is lower than this it might be worth seeing if your site needs further optimisation for mobile. Responsive design should be your first priority, and if this is already in place then it may be worth a bit of user testing to see if the customer journey is as smooth on mobile as it is on desktop.

We hope this ecommerce traffic data has been helpful for benchmarking where you currently are against the industry average. If you want more data on ecommerce traffic you can see the full report from Yotpo. For more advice on making the most of your ecommerce traffic check out our ecommerce design pattern guide.

Download Expert Member resource – Ecommerce design pattern guide

We created this guide to give our members a definitive reference of best practice for the design of key website page templates essential in retail ecommerce websites.The purpose of this guide is to give you a toolkit to use to review tests to optimize existing templates, or alternatively, as a blueprint that can be adapted when you are planning a site redesign.

Access the Ecommerce design pattern guide

source http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-analytics/important-e-commerce-traffic-sources/

Don’t forget about the Wireless with Onmichannel Marketing [#ChartoftheDay]

Radio isn't dead. Don't make the mistake of writing it off.

The importance of omnichannel marketing is an ever increasing reality for high street retailers to succeed. Online-only retailers are starting to see the benefit of having physical locations to serve their customer in the real world, this year has already seen Amazon opening its own high street bookshops. As consumers across the globe demand more from every retailer big or small, our shopping habits are changing and the internet has opened a new always-on world, where if we want it, we want it and nothing else will do.

Retailers are wising up new customer experiences and implementing real digital transformation change across their business's, to give their customers the choice they desire, to buy online or in-store for home delivery or store pick up, but the marketing departments still have work to do, to prioritise their marketing activities across the whole customer lifecycle.

The Nielsen Comparable Metrics Report found that while 37% of adults spend their time online using smartphones, tablets, PCs & TV connected devices, 63% of adults spend their time watching TV or listening to Radio. This raises an interesting question for ecommerce brands, How do you get 63% of adults who are not using a digital device to your online store?

Millennials are spendings over 10 hours a week listening to the Radio, could this be the missing piece of digital marketing strategy you didn't know you needed?

Provided you provide a strong offline to online or store call to action within your advertising you have the potential to drive an untapped audience into the top of your purchasing funnel. Traditionally Radio has been a cost effective marketing channel for  only brands This coupled with a creative targetted remarketing campaign bringing non-converting customers  back to your store, you might be surprised at the ROI you can achieve.

• Source: The Nielsen Comparable Metrics Report
• Recommended toolkit: E-commerce/Retail Toolkit

source http://www.smartinsights.com/online-brand-strategy/multichannel-strategies/dont-forget-wireless-onmichannel-marketing-chartoftheday/

6 automated customer lifecycle marketing trends for 2016-17

Automated customer lifecycle marketing will be the future of email marketing

To look forward to the future of email marketing 2020 - a report I have contributed to from Litmus, I believe we need to look back to appreciate how little the support for marketers from email marketing platforms has evolved to deliver customised lifecycle messaging. Frankly, I have been amazed how few companies have adopted email as a strategic communications tool for personalised, behavioural based email across the years since I started training on email marketing in 2001.

Research on the adoption of email targeting still shows us a reality where the majority of email marketing involves either no segmentation at all or targeting of just 4 to 6 segments.

So, by mid 2017 I’d like to see more support within platforms to deliver on the promise of Email Marketing Automation including:

1. Automation of benchmarking and recommendations. Given current variable adoption of best practices, by 2020 systems should step marketers through all the best practices for customised lifecycle marketing, creative and delivery. This should be based on ongoing benchmarking and anonymous comparison against other similar companies.
2. Automation of customer lifecycle sequences for the individual. Platforms need to evolve beyond ‘drag and drop’ editors to libraries that automate creation of lifecycle sequences.
3. Automation of segmentation. By 2020 platforms will automate creation of target segments based on profile, behaviour and value propositions available from a brand.
4. Automation of reporting to show the true effectiveness of email in providing relevance to the individual and value to the company. Much reporting is still based on performance of an individual broadcast. Reporting needs to be smarter, showing success in engaging individuals over time based on segmentation, targeting and value offered to subscribers.
5. Automation of creative optimisation. Much testing of email creative is still limited to subject line testing. Why? For larger lists, systems should evolve to better support AB and multivariate testing as has been more widely adopted for websites.
6. Automation of integration. Email marketing isn’t a separate activity, but often email activity isn’t integrated with other experiences as a subscriber browses the website or uses a mobile site.

Today the Single Customer View is still a myth for most businesses. Let’s hope this can change if the integrations within Marketing Cloud services improve such that email is just part of the overall digital experience across website and mobile interactions integrated with apps and messaging systems provided by messaging systems like Facebook’s Messenger. But will this happen? Platform vendors have just 4 or 5 years to achieve this; not long given how well-established email marketing is. 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/behavioural-email-marketing/customer-lifecycle-trends-2016/

15 Website Personalization and Recommendations Software Tools

A listing of personalised production recommendation services to increase conversion and Average Order Value

These website personalisation tools enable you to segment visitors and then deliver personalised messages within containers as with the classic Amazon personalized recommendations – read their published methodology from this fascinating whitepaper from back in 2003. I originally wrote this post in 2010 when there were fewer options. I have updated annually since with the help added by commenters - thanks!

Access resource – Web Personalisation guide

Our E-learning topic will show you
the options for delivering more persuasive, relevant dynamic web content at relevant points in the onsite customer journey for B2B and B2C sites. As well as the techniques and tools available for personalisation based on audience characteristics and behaviour.

Access the Website and Ecommerce Personalization Guide

Personalization integrated with web analytics

• Coremetrics Intelligent Offer IBM Coremetrics is widely used by retailers for analytics – and increasingly personalization for cross and up-selling.
• Adobe Test and Target One of the best established personalization engines evolving from the original Touch Clarity back in 2004.
• BT Buckets A lower cost option that integrates with Google Analytics.

Personalization Software as Service (SaaS) for Ecommerce

The second category we review here is specifically for E-Commerce merchandising giving automated product placements using aggregated behavioral data (those that viewed this, also viewed that) and personal recommendations (you previously bought this and might like that).

I’m indebted to an anonymous contributor who has recently reviewed and recommended these for the original article.  He says: “The following offer enterprise level SaaS solutions to deliver increased sales and a better customer experience“.

• Barilliance - Saas Personalisation for Ecommerce
• Pureclarity - Ecommerce Personalisation
• Bunting Website Personalisation
• Marketizator
• Monetate Personalisation Software
• Rich Relevance 
• ChoiceStream 
• Personyze
• Apptus 

Personalisation features available as part of CMS or Commerce management systems

This category wasn’t mentioned in the original post since personalisation features were limited in CMS when the post was originally written in 2010, but I have updated in line with a suggestion in the comments.

According to the comment from Damien of Digicon, Episerver, Sitecore, Kentico and Adobe with Target have built in tools to personalise content based on various rules, such as geo-location, search terms, referrers, lead scores and also provide more advanced personalisation based on user behaviour and profiles.

Episerver have an interesting approach to personalisation which they describe as 'No-rules personalisation: more intelligence, less-work'. Rather than traditional rules-based personalisation used by many of the specialist services, this applies machine learning and statistical analysis to visitor behavioral data to tailor category and product pages without rules configuration.

Magento also has personalisation extensions available such as Product Personalisation, Commerce Stack.

B2B and publisher personalisation tools

Evergage is recommended as a tool that fits best in this category that has a wide range of options for serving personalisation for content marketing in different placements on a site.

Of course, Recommendations aren’t limited to websites only, as you will know from Amazons’ newsletters. To learn more, I recommend this article explaining the inner workings of email marketing recommendation engines which reportedly boost click rates by 50-400%. It shows what to look for when finding the right tool to serve the recommendations inside your newsletter.

Thanks for all the comments sharing options in the post so far, please share others you recommend to build this list.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/web-personalisation/web-personalization-software/

Penguin 4.0 and Disavow: The Hard Truths that Need to be Told

Just because Penguin constantly updates, doesn't mean you can throw out the disavow file

When taking to the familiar waters of the social media swimming pool this morning, instead of enjoying my relaxed, smooth, exercise regime, I was met by the sound of shrieking and splashing from the children’s pool of Twitter. Upon investigating, I see there is a lively debate about the implications of disavow in the fallout of Penguin 4.0.

The main topic for the heated discussion? With the new incarnation of Penguin and its constantly refreshing live scrutiny when it is evaluating domains and URLs, is the presence of a disavow file even necessary for your business going forward? There are arguments both for and against this, there are those who are of the inclination that complete and utter removal of the disavow file is in their best interests as Google Penguin 4.0 algorithm is only doing minor devaluing and penalties.

“The largest majority of the websites don’t need to do anything with the disavow because like you said, we are able to pick up the normal issue anyway and we can take care of that.”  John Mueller, Google.

Then on the other side of the argument are those who state that removing the disavow file and laying bare everything linking to your domains and URLs at the feet of Google is the worst idea this side of Greedo shooting first!

I am of the mindset that there is no need for this debate or argument, but there does need to be a discussion about how anyone with SEO experience could ever see value in removing one of the greatest tools on their utility belt. The disavow file is vital to continued SEO support for your domains, as Google Penguin 4.0 scrutinises at the URL level and penalises if spam is detected. As such, losing the ability to disavow at ANY level, let alone the URL level, is nothing short of short-sighted. The importance of disavowing at the URL level is embedded in the fact that granular disavow saves both overall time and rescues the positive links that would otherwise be lost to the disavow file. Standard disavow methods are based on disavowing the entire affected domain, this is a prime example of overkill. When you disavow the entire domain, you let the diamonds sink with the ship.

Confucius said: “Never use a cannon to kill a fly.”The actual Confucius quote is "never kill a chicken using a cow knife", but we thought the quote above that is frequently but wrongly attributed to Confucius worked a little better.

“Used properly, the disavow tool can be a fine scalpel to remove the last few traces of poor quality links remaining from a clean-up effort – it certainly isn’t a scatter-gun that can devalue an entire backlink profile.” – Matt Cutts, Google.

Dismissing the disavow file is like opening Pandora’s Box and tearing the hinges off. Once that box has been pried open everything that had been hidden away and unacknowledged crawls from that dark place and lands under the microscope of Google, to be dissected and categorised.

This has the potential to be rather embarrassing, if previous SEO agencies or teams had been disavowing at the domain level (being honest, I’m sure many SEO specialists reading this will know times they have done that), then they will see the hidden URL gems that, unfortunately were painted with the same brush as the bad eggs. There will also be penalty worthy pages in there which, since you have removed the disavow blockage, show that you are not acting within the guidelines set by Google. The swift penalising gavel of Google is quick to pass judgment at both domain and URL level, while some say that they are minor penalties, in our industry there is no such thing as a minor penalty. Time a vital page is offline is information not being displayed, support not being delivered, business not being created and audience not being reached.

If you are considering dumping out the disavow file and “cleaning house” with it, it would be wise to keep in mind the old phrase “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” or, in this case “don’t kick all of your eggs out of one basket!”.

When going through the disavow file, using a fine toothed comb and extra sets of eyes to check each and every domain and URL to find the diamonds in the rough. Will this process seem impossibly long? Yes. Will this be a strain on your company and sanity? Yes, absolutely, but by the end of it, you will have a potential gain in your linking domains and URLs and you will have done all you can do for now to keep the riff raff out of your web presence and in the broom cupboard of disavow where it rightfully belongs.

“I’d personally just keep it the way it was before. I know there’s some sites that have gone in and said okay, we’ll just disavow everything that’s been linking to us, and that was probably a bad strategy before and just as bad a strategy now and that’s something you might want to clean up. But in general, if you were using the disavow file for what it was meant to be used for, I would continue to use it like that.” – John Mueller, Google.

With all the talk about disavow, there is strong, sensible advice clearly stating that SEOs need to keep utilising the disavow tools and the disavow file when they know bad links raise their heads from a time when bad link building took place on the site.

I have seen a lot of people declaring that they are doing tests on experimental sites to see if there is a benefit to removing the disavow file. This is a waste of time and resources and will do nothing but tarnish your reputation, not to mention illogical. It is a blind gambit for people who do not have access to the tools necessary for advanced SEO tactics, especially if those people are still learning the trade.

A lot of this debate stemmed from a rumour, the rumour was that Google was changing the interaction of disavow, many people have jumped up on the band wagon, for both sides, without really getting the facts straight. They say if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. They don’t say “If it isn’t broken, smash it, throw it out, dump it in the river and go with an opposite plan”. Since the lively discussion took place, Google have said that there has been no change to the disavow plan with the penguin 4.0 launch, and there is no plan as yet to change it any time soon.

So, with that explanation now out there, I hope the debate can end, people can see the wisdom and make sense of what is happening, and we can look to our own in house strategies going forward, if indeed they need to change. But for the very few of you who are still on the unnecessary fence out there, I just have this for you: if you are concerned, if you are in any doubt whatsoever as to which way you should hop down just remember, when in doubt, use the disavow.

Thanks to Martyn Clayton for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Martyn Clayton is the Director of Client Relations at Intelligiants, an experienced SEO, keen to spread the word about the changes that are constantly occurring around us in the SEO landscapes. He like long walks, candle-lit dinners and heralding the changes in our industry that will affect your business.  You can follow him on @ TheMartynC or connect on LinkedIn.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-strategy/penguin-4-0-disavow-hard-truths-need-told/

7 examples of the applications of the Internet of Things which are here now

Examples showing how Products become media and a service

Marketers love new tech and new trends, sometimes they don’t get them quite right at first, or sometimes they nail them (e.g. Buzzfeed on Snapchat). One of the biggest technology trends right now is the Internet of Things, which promises to bring the connectivity of the Internet into every facet of our lives. Making our devices and homes smarter and more efficient. The internet of things promises to be a revolution on par with the original connectivity revolution that the internet has unleashed over the past twenty years.

There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet! The implications are huge and far ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives. Yet to date it has been unclear how the Internet of Things will affect marketers. This is something which marketers will have to get to grips with as the Internet of Things expands and becomes ever more relevant.

It is easy to talk about the potential of the Internet of Things in future. One day it will be possible for your light bulb to tell the manufacturer when it has broken, who can then automatically send the person who purchased it a coupon for a new light bulb. That day isn’t far off, but it is still a few years away. We want to give you examples of how the Internet of things can be used for marketing right now.

Products as Media

With the Internet of Things, products are smart, and thus can be used to market themselves in a way that was previously unthinkable. A bottle of Prosecco could have a chip that links to your Smartphone via Bluetooth that if you allow it to could post to your social media accounts when it’s opened telling your friends that you are enjoying a drink and whereabouts you are when you are enjoying it. Just look how many people do that already and you’ll quickly see there is demand for such a product! The Product thus becomes a media device that is able to market itself digitally.

FitBit

A real world example of this that already exists is FitBit. The product allows the user to post the stats that the FitBit gathers from a run to their social media, essentially advertising the main benefit of the product to their friends. This massively increases the reach of the product on social media and acts as a form of social proof. Users can see their friends are using the product and are enjoying doing so, and so will be encouraged to purchase.

Diageo

Products can get a lot more personal when the Internet of Things makes them smart. Diageo whisky decided to position itself as the drink to celebrate fatherhood by connecting 100,000 bottles to the internet so they could be used to send a personalised, one-to-one digital video message to fathers. The givers (of the Whisky) were able to personalise the message with their own content. By doing so it calls upon the giver to create what is, in effect, the advertising message to augment the product, making this an example of participative (and, at scale, crowdsourced) creative.

The results were fantastic. Diageo saw a 72% sales uplift on the lead up the father’s day, and the cost of the campaign was repaid five times over. It also helps portray the brand as innovative and positioned whiskey as the perfect fathers day gift in a way that will pay off for years to come. The campaign also won the International Advertising Associations top award.

You can read more about the Diageo case study on their Marketing Agencies site

Amazon – Tide

Connected products don’t just have to be tools for marketing; they can also be used for sales! Products that order more of themselves are somewhat of a holy grail for B2C brands, and that is just what tide has achieved in cooperation with amazon. Amazon’s dash buttons connect to your home wi-fi and link to the Amazon app. They can be pressed whenever you are running low on a given product- i.e Tide detergent, and the product the button corresponds to will turn up on your door in a couple of days. Talk about a customer loyalty program! This way your customers aren’t in a supermarket looking at 100 different brands of detergent which do similar things and make similar promises, instead they're in their house looking at the almost empty bottle of detergent and thinking they could do with a bit more, so they just press the button and they're done. It also makes the purchase process so frictionless that it literally is at the touch of a button.

Product as a service

The Internet of Things also means that products can include features that would previously be impossible, and these can be highly attractive selling points that differentiate you from other brands.

Big Ass fans

Worth mentioning purely for their fantastic name, Big Ass fans have created what they call ‘the worlds first Smart Celling fan’. The fan has speed, light and temperate sensors, and can be controlled by a Smartphone app and learn you comfort preferences, tailoring fan speed accordingly. This sets it apart from other ceiling fans on the market and thus is a great USP.

Tesla Motors

Tesla is known for their ground breaking electric car technology. But they also are pushing the boundaries of connecting devices. They updated all their car’s software remotely so improve performance without any inconvenience whatsoever to the consumer. Updates to physical products that happen in a similar way to the kind of updates we are now used to with the software we use will increasingly become standard and expected.

Gooee

Gooee are a lighting provider who aims to turn lighting into a service. Their connected light bulbs can provide predictive and pre-emptive maintenance, warranty and proof of performance, energy savings, smoke detection, data analytics and even light! These put them considerably ahead of the competition, and thus are a prime example of using the product to provide a service via connectivity which couldn’t have been possible without it.

Eco-system connect products

Uber – Spotify

Uber and Spotify have linked their services so that customers can connect their Spotify account to their Uber app, and then when taking a ride in an Uber you can use the Uber App to play music through the car’s speakers via your Spotify account. This is two Apps talking to one another, and then talking to a car! There could hardly be a better example of the Internet of Things. It improves the customer experience and helps retain customers by getting them locked into their product ecosystem.

Conclusion

The internet of things presents a fantastic opportunity for marketers. Products that market themselves, order themselves and integrate into an ecosystem that will increase customer retention. 10 years ago marketers could only dream of such things, now they are a reality. These trends have to be seized by marketers, as those that do will see fantastic growth, whilst those that don’t will rapidly fall behind.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/7-examples-applications-internet-things-now/

The ‘Multi-Channel Majority’ now accounts for over three-quarters of users [#ChartoftheDay]

76% of adults use multiple devices to access content- only a tiny minority uses desktop only

The results of Comscore's 'Cross-platform future in focus 2016' make for interesting reading. One of the most interesting charts from the report show just how tiny the number of people not using a combination of devices to access content online is. For those aged between 18 and 34 only 3% are only accessing content on a desktop device - if trends continue then the figure for December 2016 will be less than 1%.

But we're not seeing a dramatic shift to pure mobile - instead users are making the most of both mediums and utilising desktop and mobile together in order to suit whatever their needs are at the time. This explains why we are seeing high levels of mobile traffic on ecommerce sites but very low mobile conversion rates. Those people browsing on mobile are converting - it's just that they're switching to desktop to do so.

The ramifications are clear - marketers should be making seamless experience across devices a priority, and looking at ways to help users switch between devices and start where they left off, rather than re-find what they were looking at.

• Source: Comscore
• Sample: US adults, behaviour assessed by 300,000 digital media entities using Comscore's MMX™ Multi-Platform.
• Recommended resource: Mobile Marketing Guide

source http://www.smartinsights.com/online-brand-strategy/multichannel-strategies/multi-channel-majority-now-accounts-three-quarters-users-chartoftheday/

Google to divide its index- creating separate mobile index [@SmartInsights Alert]

We asked top SEO experts about how they saw Google's announcement of a separate mobile index affecting marketers

Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst, announced this month that rather than its current single index for all sites, Google will run two indexes in parallel. One will be for informing mobile search results, the other desktop, but the mobile one will be the primary database and will be updated more regularly.

It's a big, bold move from Google, and there's no doubting it will have a huge affect on SEO, with the possibility of a big divergence between mobile and desktop search results. For marketers the implications will be less instant, as they'll take longer to filter through. But that is no reason for complacency. A change in rankings one day is a change in sales the next, and marketers can't afford to ignore this.

To help marketers understand the ramifications of the Google announcement to their businesses, we asked top SEO experts, as well as our resident digital marketing boffin (and former professor of digital marketing) Dr Dave Chaffey, about how they see the changes affecting SEO and marketers.

Patrick Langridge - Head of SEO - Screaming Frog

We’ve been following the announcements and news from Pubcon closely, it’s certainly been a busy couple of days! I don’t think anyone in the industry will be surprised to hear the news of a ‘mobile first’ index coming soon, as Google have been pushing mobile and emphasising its importance for some time now. The news simply goes to reinforce how crucial mobile is to the future of search – unfortunately we certainly see a lot of cases of established businesses without a mobile friendly website. That said, I take all Google announcements with a pinch of salt, especially those made in a keynote to a largely SEO industry audience – note the lack of formal announcement on https://webmasters.googleblog.com/ for instance. Google have a vested interest in pushing mobile, like they do in pushing HTTPS, AMP etc, so I hope the industry isn’t in a sudden panic this morning. If you weren’t already planning from mobile before this news, maybe there is some reason to panic.

Dave Davies - CEO - Beanstalk

Why do you think Google have decided to make this change?

As with similar changes out of Google, I assume that this has to do with user data and usage patterns not to mention that there are more people searching on mobile than on desktop at this point. If we think about users on mobile and their needs vs users on desktop it does make sense. When a user is on mobile they are on-the-go and making queries to fulfill instant needs. On the desktop this isn't so much the case. We also have to remember that Google does have finite crawling capabilities. I'm sure they'd give both heightened priority if they could however, they can't and so they have to pick one.

What impact to you think this change will have on marketers, and what should marketers be doing to prepare for it?

While this will be a benefit to publishers and sites focused on up-to-date information for mobile users, overall I don't see a huge change beyond awareness. The goal is always to provide the content a user needs, formatted for the device they are on. This won't change so I think the principle change to marketers is a reminder that it's a mobile-first world and we need to adapt or perish.

Dan Ray - SEO Consultant - RayDigital

Why do you think Google have decided to make this change?

It just makes sense, their primary aim is to provide the most useful content to their users, with more searches coming from mobile than desktop it's logical that they would be served the most relevant content to them.

With the same thinking, desktop users will be served the content that is most relevant to them, Google has obviously decided (and rightly so) that those 2 platforms require different content.

That's assuming that the mobile index won't include non-mobile content (or at least penalise it).

What impact to you think this change will have on marketers, and what should marketers be doing to prepare for it?

Nothing new to be honest, for a couple of years now we have been told to mobile optimise our content. That's a logical trend for the way that people are consuming content online and we always have to bend to the way things are consumed.

From my understanding, the desktop index won't be kept as fresh as the mobile one (which will be the primary index) so it will likely lead us further down a path of producing content for mobile devices.

As always, we will have to adapt to the landscape that's in front of us.

Dr Dave Chaffey - CEO - Smart Insights

This change by Google could have massive implication for the kind of content featuring in mobile SERPs. Firstly AMPs are going to become even more important. To quote Gary Illyes: 'They're going to be huge'. A different mobile index means Google could start featuring totally different content types in mobile SERPs to desktop, which may mean a huge push towards AMPs delivering content. There are also big implications for image search. Google is now featuring visuals in SERPs a lot more than it was two or three years ago. Will this accelerate this trend? And will desktop and mobile users be served image content differently?

The change also raises the prospect of having to develop separate mobile link building strategies. Google haven't been clear if the mobile index will attach more importance to links coming from pages designed specifically for mobile - like AMPs, but it could be something they're considering, and it would explain why they'd need to take the step of maintaining two separate indexes.

In many ways, the announcement leaves us with more questions than answers, but we should get more clarity on this in coming months. So sit tight, make sure your dev team is implementing AMPs, and keep an eye out for future updates.

 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/mobile-seo/google-divide-index-creating-separate-mobile-index-smartinsights-alert/

38 Indispensable E-commerce stats to inform your 2017 multichannel sales strategy

A Smorgasbord of cutting-edge e-commerce stats to benchmark your business against

'It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics' - George Bernard Shaw.

I don't think these statistics can lay any claim on being moving. Least not in the sense old Georgie B intended. But any good plan to move your Ecommerce needle in the right direction needs to be based on a solid foundation of accurate online market forecast data for your sector. If you live in blissful ignorance of key stats relating to how people are using mobile devices or what social networks are driving the most revenue on e-commerce sites, then it will be all too easy to misallocate budgets and resources and end up with a sub-par plan that doesn't get the results you want. So take a look that these 37 crucial Ecommerce stats structured around all customer lifecycle touchpoints using our RACE planning system to make sure there is no key trend your plan has missed.

Plan - create a long-term roadmap for growth based on the opportunity

1. Market potential. E-commerce sales account for just 8% of total retail sales in the US and 14% in the UK - so still lots of room for growth! (Source: Census.gov and Office of National Statistics).

2. Market potential. 53% of global internet users have made an online purchase in 2016- approx that's 1 billion. (Source: US Government)

3. Market potential. B2B eCommerce sales are expected to outgrow B2C sales, reaching 6.7 trillion USD by 2020. (Source: CMS connected)

4. Market potential. Total average eCommerce spend per customer over the course of the year is estimated to be $1,800 in the US and 1,600 in the UK. (Source: Statista)

5. Marketing Technology. The availability of marketing tools for e-commerce has exploded - over 3,500 different types of MarTech on the market in 2016. (Source: Scott Brinker)

6. Consumer insight. 40% of US males aged 18-34 say they would 'ideally buy everything online, compared to 33% of females in the same age bracket. (Source: DDB Worldwide)

Reach your audience - increase site visits, build awareness

7. Traffic sources. The top 3 traffic sources driving sales for Ecommerce sites (last click) are Organic (22%), Email (20%) and CPC (19%). Display and social account for just 1 and 2% showing the importance of measuring these using attribution. Source: Custora.

8. Traffic sources. 43% of e-commerce traffic comes from Google search (organic) and 26%  comes from Google Adwords. (Source: Wolfgang digital)

9. SEO. 1 in 5 searches on US android mobile app are voice searches - Does your e-commerce SEO strategy reflect this? (Source: Google)

10. Social media. 55% of US Pinterest users use it for finding products (Source: KPCB Internet Trends)

Act - encourage interaction with product information and basket adds and email subs

11. Online behaviour. 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if it takes too long to load (Source: Adobe)

12. Online behaviour. 38% of people will leave a website if they find the layout unattractive. (Source: Adobe)

13. Online behaviour. 400 pixels from the left edge is the area of desktop site viewing which gets the most viewing time according to eye tracking surveys. (Source: Nielson Norman Group)

14. Marketing Automation. 49% of high performing marketing teams are using predictive analytics to inform their approach to the customer journey. (Source: Salesforce State of Marketing research)

15. Multichannel behaviour. 81% of shoppers research their product online before purchasing (Source: GE Shopper research study)

16. Multichannel behaviour. Only 11% of users access the Internet via desktop only - almost all users are using multiple devices (Source: comScore)

17. Consumer insight. 61% of high performing marketing are actively mapping the customer journey, compared to 22% of averagely performing teams and 6% of underperforming teams. (Source: Salesforce Research)

See our Persona toolkit for the best techniques for mapping the customer journey.

18. Consumer insight. Mobile sessions accounted for 59% of all sessions by device on eCommerce sites, but these mobile browsers made up just 38% of revenue (Source: Wolfgang digital)

19. 70% of eCommerce site users rank the ability to zoom in on product images among their top priorities for deciding on purchase. (Source: UPS)

20. Online behaviour. Referrals from Instagram spend the longest time on eCommerce sites, with an average session duration of 192 seconds - almost double Facebook and Triple Pinterest (source: YOTPO - Ecommerce traffic sources)

21. Lifecycle email strategy. 58% of the Top 1000 US online retailers send welcome emails. Why not more? (source: Internet retailer)

Convert - achieve sale online or offline

22. CRO. Average e-commerce conversion rates vary from 3 to 4%. (Source: Monetate)

23. CRO. Conversion rates on smartphone (1.5% average) are one third of those of desktop (4.4%). (Source: Monetate)

24. US e-commerce sales reached $396 billion in 2016 - and are predicted to grow to a massive 684 billion by 2020. (Source: Statista - e-commerce sales forecast)

25. China's eCommerce growth will massively outstrip the US, with $1 trillion in eCommerce revenue in 2016, growing to 2 trillion by 2019. (Source: Atlas)

26. Multichannel behaviour. 85% of customers start a purchase on one device and finish it on another. (source: Google - How digital connects shoppers to local stores)

27. CRO. 44% will abandon their shopping card if the shipping cost is too high or if there are unexpected additional charges. (Source: Receiptful)

28. CRO. An Inconvenient returns policy deters 80% of shoppers (Source: comScore)

29. CRO. 78% of internet users are concerned about sites they sign up with selling their data - make sure you make it clear you don't (or make it clear why if you do). Source: Altimeter Group - online trust report.

30. CRO. Apple users are the most valuable online shoppers, with an average order value of $228, compared to $187 for a windows PC. (source: Statista)

31. Social commerce. 31% of Chinese WeChat users made a purchase through WeChat in 2016 - Double the rate of 2015. China is leading the way with the Chatbot revolution (Source: McKinsey’s 2016 China Digital Consumer Survey Report)

Engage - build loyalty and sales from customers

32. Customer loyalty. It's 7 times more expensive to get a new customer than retain an existing one. (Source: Invesp)

33. Average Order value (AOV). AOV for repeat customers is twice as high as for first-time customers (Source: McKinsey)

34.  Multichannel behaviour. Multi-channel shoppers spend 3 times more than single-channel shoppers. (Source: Euro IT group - Ecommerce trends)

35. CSAT. 89% of shoppers have stopped buying from online store because of bad customer service (Source: RightNow)

36. Consumer reviews. 75% of reviews on eCommerce sites give the full 5 stars (Source: YOTPO)

37. Delivery and returns. 92% of US customers would consider delivery within 2 days to be 'fast delivery', but only 18% would consider delivery within 5-7 days as fast. (Source: Criteo ecommerce outlook)

38. Delivery and returns. 30% of products bought online are returned - and users expect this process to be easy! (Source: Invesp)

 

 

 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/37-indispensable-ecommerce-stats-to-inform-your-2017-strategy/

Best practices for Optimizing Email marketing for Ecommerce

Litmus, Liveclicker and Unbounce speak on conversion optimisation for ecommerce

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) can be a very complex creature – particularly when it comes to optimising ecommerce sites and campaigns using Email marketing to engage our audience. The opinions in this article focus on email marketing. A common theme is that during the process of optimisation we need to put our subjective opinions aside, create some robust hypothesis-based upon data and insights and try to start optimising for the biggest wins first – not always an easy task.

So we asked three of our expert speakers from our email marketing summit the following question:

“So many channels, so many aspects of a campaign to test. What’s your key piece of advice that you would provide to increase conversions for an ecommerce site?”

Dave Holland, European Regional Director of Liveclicker and expert presenter, gives us his thoughts:

“Marketers have a new opportunity to drive site conversions through contextually relevant off-site messages - email, in particular.  Every marketer knows that personalized email messages convert better than 'batch and blast' messages.  Unfortunately, most e-commerce businesses lack access to the rich store of data that's required to deliver personalization at scale.

To solve for this, marketers should seek to capitalize on each recipient's real-time personal context: geolocation, time, device, weather, etc.  All of this can be done at the moment a recipient opens his email, thereby enabling 1:1 personalization to everyone in the database.”

Justine Jordan, Marketing Director of Litmus, provides us with her advice on the matter:

"While many marketers utilize A/B testing with email, the focus is often on the subject line. To increase ecommerce conversions, incorporate new and varied A/B tests into your email marketing. One of my favorite things to test is preview text—the little bit of copy that follows the subject line in many email programs. Instead of the all-too-common "click here to see images in this email" (or even worse, "having trouble?") copy that is often standard in this space, highlight a promotion, free shipping offer, or other content that will encourage the subscriber to open.

Your call to action (CTA) is arguably the most important part of any ecommerce email and should also be the subject of A/B testing. The possibilities are endless—try testing different language ('shop now' vs. 'buy now' is a personal favorite), adding an arrow, or changing the color. Bulletproof buttons used for CTAs will also display even when images are turned off, which can help increase conversions in otherwise image-heavy emails."

Oli Gardner, Co-Founder of Unbounce, provides us with his wisdom on this subject:

“One of the most under-utilized aspects of e-commerce optimization is to create specific experience for each of your most competitive features/benefits and business advantages.

If you have same day delivery, next day delivery, locally sourced ingredients etc. you should be running paid search campaigns to capture those searches, and drive them to landing pages that confirm that your business has this feature before you send them to your site and further down the funnel.

Without this you risk your website not communicating these things in a timely enough manner – especially if you send campaign traffic to your homepage. If you can own these types of search queries you will have a large competitive advantage.”

So, there are some ideas to inform you tests - both of email marketing activities and on-site.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/landing-page-optimisation/email-marketing-commerce/