Ecommerce Web Design

Web Designer Vip truly believe that Ecommerce web design is an art and a science. It’s easy to throw products up onto a website and hope for sales but how much of your customer base is slipping through the net into one of your competitors due to poor web design?

At Web Designer Vip, our ecommerce experts review the current user experience of your ecommerce store and design with your users and conversion in mind. Our dedicated account managers share your passion for your products and relish the challenge of improving your bottom lineand conversion rates through well thought out ecommerce design.

Why Choose Web Designer Vip: 

  • Years of Ecommerce Web Design
  • Revenue Growth
  • Flexible Systems

Focus on revenue growth

Our ecommerce web design focusses on web design which converts your visitors into paying customers, closely mapping the user journey and optimising the site for sales with the aim of increasing your revenue and improving your bottom line. Additionally, we offer ecommerce search marketing services which boost your online sales to dizzy new heights.

Here at Web Designer Vip we have worked on a large number of ecommerce sites and are fully aware of how to persuade a visitor to stay on the site and convert into a sale and/or lead. It simply isn’t good enough nowadays to have a pretty site, visitors want more and have raised the bar on what is expected from ecommerce websites.

 

Ecommerce websites must be of a good design, search engine friendly, accessible and easy to use. Clear call to actions and simple yet effective menus are needed for simple navigation and an easy conversion. This is something that Web Designer Vip considers itself to be an expert in.

 

Which Ecommerce solution do you need?

Cutting Edge Ecommerce Web Development

Web Designer Vip offer cutting edge ecommerce development and performance services, creating smooth running, robust stores that run and convert like a dream.

Do you have page speed issues? Configuration problems? Difficulty updating your website? Whether you run a Magneto store with thousands of products, or a small store selling only a few, our bespoke ecommerce platform extraCMS, we can restructure, rebuild and redesign your store for optimal performance with one aim in mind – increasing your sales.

What can you expect from our development?

Our Ecommerce Solutions are:

  • Ecommerce Experience
  • Flexibility
  • Reliability
  • Support

Flexibility 

We have total flexibility in the content management systems we can use to build your site. We have experience of building on all of the popular CMS’s such as Magento, Prestashop, ExtraCMS, Shopify and more.

 

We use a variety of different technologies depending on the scale of the project, required functionality and available budget.

With all projects we sit down with you and really try to understand your business first so we can translate this into a solution that offers optimal performance for your customers which translates to an increase in sales.

  • For clients on a more constricted budget or looking for an easy to use online shop that will let you get started selling products online but still give you plenty of room to grow, we offer online shops and ecommerce solutions on our bespoke content management platform, the ExtraCMS.
  • For high numbers of products we provide development on the Magento platform, an enterprise ecommerce development platform. Magento is one of the most popular systems for large online shops and it powers shops such as Kookai, Olympus, The North Face and Nestle.
  • For growing businesses without their own warehouse and fulfilment system or for charities wishing to sell cards or distribute fundraising material we provide an ecommerce with a managed fulfilment option

 

Huge Reduction in Bounce rate for Ecommerce Fashion Store

Beach Cafe is a successful online ecommerce store selling a wide range of beachwear and swimwear. They pride themselves on their ability to supply a fashionable and stylish garments perfect for your holidays, all in one online shop.

Responsive Design Ecommerce

The Problem

It was key from the beginning that their branding remained as is their identity, the main focus was shifting the website’s structure and design to better suit the website being viewed on devices such as tablets and mobiles. Over half of their traffic daily comes from these devices and their previous store wasn’t helping to ensure a good user experience for all customers no matter what device was used to access the website.

Product Page before the Redesign:

The Solution

After a collaborative design process where we looked into the current user experience and website data, focusing purely on the much needed usability of the site when viewed on tablets and mobile, we constructed a detailed, customer focussed plan of action to maximise the potential of the site.

  • Analyse the current site data, trends and traffic identifying important factors for conversion
  • Creating a well thought out design based on useability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • Including the functionality to integrate several shopping feeds and APIs without further development work required
  • Seamless transition between new site and old site, implementing the neccessary 404s to retain search engine value
  • Moving the website and its stock from Drupal to Magento for enhanced usability and integration with third party applications.

Product Page after Redesign:

The Results

Six months on from the site launch and the website is seeing big improvements from the new website. We’ve seen an impressive improvement in the sites ability to attract and retain its visitors. The website’s bounce rate has dropped from a huge 44% on mobiles alone in July 2014 to 1.80% in May 2015.

Below is a graph showing the bounce rates over the last year for desktops, mobiles and tablets. As you can see all devices have seen a huge drop in the bounce rate immediately from when the website went live towards the end of November.

bounce rates decrease

This substantial improvement in bounce rates has coincided with a surge in traffic to the website, with traffic in May 2015 over 50% higher than the traffic levels in May 2015.

beach cafe traffic

(site live end of November 2014)

This surge in traffic has also increased the revenue for the new Beach Cafe site greatly by nearly 300% when compared with before the new website went live.

Revenue Increase of 290% with new responsive website design

The new and improved Beach Cafe website has been well received by clients and customers of Beach Cafe. The stats speak for themselves and the client now has the ability with their new Magento ecommerce platform to expand the business and its functions in the future.

Here at ExtraDigital we have a wealth of experience and knowledge in designing and building Magento websites for ecommerce stores like Beach Cafe. Why not check the new Beach Cafe website out for yourself at www.beachcafe.com or see the many other websites that we have developed in our Porfolio today. On our website you can read many of the testimonials regarding our services and the work quality that our clients love.

3 Top Tips for increasing conversions through web design

Conversion

Having worked in the web design business for over a decade, we have seen many fads come, with trends changing more times than David Beckhams haircut. Whilst some of these trends have been purely based on opinion, guesswork can only take you half the way – Opinions don’t make money! The best trends we have seen are based on good old data.

With this is mind, our clients call us and ask us:

What can I do to increase the sales / leads of my website?

We’ve compiled some very basic factors that have seem our clients achieve some serious gains in leads and sales.

Modern Responsive Web Design

Modernize Your Design

Is your site looking tired and dated? We all know the old saying, don’t judge a book by its cover, but if you want to increase conversions, you’ll need to rethink this!

“Users make up their mind about whether to buy from a site within 3 seconds…”

…and attention span is only getting shorter and shorter. First impressions really do count and it’s vital that you make these precious seconds count. Your design needs to be so good that your users have no choice whether to stay or bounce. Delight your customers with fast loading, interactive and visually amazing design – the design quality of your website is often a direct reflection on the quality of your business.

Web design is an art as well as a science and like all great art, it can always be tweaked, tested and improved to make maximum gains. Simple things such as ensuring your site is mobile friendly is an absolute must for starters.

In the case of your desktop design, place the important elements above the fold but do not clutter the page. Social proof, navigation buttons, a search bar, sign-up forms, call to action and social media links are website elements that belong above the fold.

Ensure you have an awesome site structure in place to communicate your service offering in an attractive way and as quickly as possible, helping the user to get to the content that they need – and quickly. Which brings me to my next point….

Create Clear Landing Page User Experience

So through great web design and internet marketing strategy you’ve managed to attract a ton of visits to your site. Success!

Or is it? Your site looks like a million bucks but…

The problem is your users may have been able to find their way to your website but they can’t get to the content they need, meaning they won’t enquiry about your awesome services or buy your excellent products.

So how do you remedy this?

At the start of your web design project, you need to define your user personas and think of your website as a facilitator to their needs – guiding them on a journey to get to the content that they need. Each user goal can be first mapped out using the current website to identify any flaws or frustrations. This is often referred to as user journey mapping or customer journey. Once this is established, website designers can implement a user simple and intuitive user journey that doesn’t confuse users and enables them to reach their goals in the most efficient way possible.

Large Clear Call to Action

Okay so you’ve done all the hard work and managed to bring users to the correct area on the page with a stunning website design, with clear user journeys to help your users to get to the correct areas that they need to get to.

But still no conversions!

Go back to your design – Is it clear to your potential customers what the next stage is? Do you want them to call you? Fill out a contact form? Sign up for a newsletter? Register for an event? Add item to cart? CRO (conversion rate optimisation) plays a key role in converting your visitors to qualified leads.

We love buttons. Why? Because users love a good old button, they are used to buttons and trust buttons to get them results. But what exactly makes a great CTA button?

  • Compelling, clear, relevant and decisive language – You need to keep in mind that users need exact ‘clarity’ about what they are signing up for – don’t make people think too hard as this creates friction! Make sure your forms use language that tells the user exactly what to do or what they will receive. Results from content verve show a 90% increase in CTR by changing one word in the button. For example, Instead of using the phrase ‘sign up for newsletter,’ use headlines such as ‘Get our latest offers and discounts.’ CTA’s with no clear value for your users will end in failure. If you are offering a newsletter, tell the users what value they will receive in exchange for their details.
    • Increased call to action size – Is you contact form or add to cart button hidden away below the fold or tucked away at the bottom of your page? When it comes to your web pages, no one element lives in vacuum but, your call to action is arguably the most important factor on your page. Users are naturally drawn to the largest area on the page. Make sure the size of CTA button is visible so once again – users know exactly where to go and what to do.
    • Colour of call to action buttons – The colour of your action buttons can make or break your CTA and can be a major influencer to users. The button is a huge visual clue to users who will naturally ask the question ‘where should I click?’ The trick is to make your button stand out from the rest of the page in such a way that it’s easy to spot using contrasting colours.

Examples:

Mail chimp – clear call to action buttons with colour contrast against a visually stunning design. Clear h1 message at the top of the page which summarises Mailchimp in 3 words.

PBWIKI – clear call to actions. Clear value propositions so user knows exact features of the product.

Thinking about increasing your conversions with a website redesign? Before we rush right in there are some things you need to know:

  • Website redesigns can be risky – Changing everything in one go can often confuse users, who don’t like change. To minimise this, we perform a full website analysis to find out what is working and what isn’t – delving into the data to produce a design that is specifically tailored to your end users.
  • Don’t just make a pretty picture– If you really want to get the best out of your website – we can produce a design based on the very latest in conversion, usability, psychology and know-how. You need insight into the modern psychology of designing for conversion to produce a tangible solution that gets you leads.

There are endless other factors to consider with a webite redesign. The best way to ensure you avoid the pitfalls is to get in contact with us today on 01227 68 68 98 or tell us about your project below.

Summer Inspired Content Marketing

Content marketing can be really successful at attracting your customers, but all too often things can become formulaic and bland. A great way to keep things fresh is to bring a bit of summer sizzle to your content.

The following tips can help you get inspired to add a bit more summer to your content.

Target Summer Inspired Events

From bank holidays to summer fayres and festivals there is always a lot going on over the summer months.

Look for events that you can target and bring into your content for example if you’re a young fashion store advice on festival fashion tips or a checklist of what to pack can be great topics.

Think about what events your customers and potential customers will be planning to attend and how you can create content around that event that they will find useful.

If you have a reasonable level of local business then it’s good to attend and support local events but don’t forget to work these into your content too.

One of our clients is very active with local fayres and artisan markets and take an active role in promoting these through content marketing and social media. As a result they have found these to be a great way to connect with customers and build a loyal following at these events and online.

Professional Content Marketing Services – Contact Web Designer Vip

Bank Holidays

Bank Holidays are often great for discount weekends and mini sales so you can plan content that dovetails nicely with your promotions, perhaps bargain hunting tips.

If not promotions then you know most people will be off work so plan relevant content on how to get the most out of the long weekend. Remember to feature your products or services if relevant, but don’t go for the hard sell.

Being the UK make sure you check the weather and plan content for a wet bank holiday as well as a scorcher. That way you can use the most appropriate content in the weeks before and promote it through social media.

Summer Holidays

Summer holidays make a great subject for creative content, what to pack, where to go etc…

Even a B2B business can make use of this subject for example a practical work checklist of things to do at work before you go on holiday.

When planning holiday content you need to decide if it falls into one of these categories:

  • Prep – planning and before you go away
  • During – what to do during the holiday
  • Post – getting back up to speed after the holiday

If you follow this structure you can schedule prep and during content for much of the summer and post content towards the middle to end of August.

Bring a Summer Feel

Remember summer is about having fun so don’t get too serious always keep the feel light and try to add an element of fun.

Use images, colours and a tone that feels more carefree and bright.

Why not try getting out and being creative with video and photos to give a real feel to your content. With a little thought a smartphone can be a great tool to capture that summer feeling.

That being said don’t get carried away, plan what you want to achieve and how it will work.

This is especially true for video, which you want short, sweet and clear.

Conclusion

These are just a few tips to bring the summer to your content marketing, but I’m sure once you start you’ll think of lots more.

Why not try a brainstorming session with your team. Think about what you customers will be doing through the summer months and what help or tips they might need.

Keep the summer feel by being creative, fun and light with your images and video. You could even encourage your customers to contribute their own on social media.

 

Social Media for Ecommerce – Getting Started

A wise person once told me if you want to reach people you need to go to the places they are.

This is a key principle in digital marketing for all websites and works well for ecommerce. So if your business is ecommerce you need to be where your customers and potential customers are rather than just waiting for them to come to you.

This is one of the reasons social media has developed into such an important tool for digital marketing.

Where else can you so easily find connected groups of people keen to like, share and talk about their interests and opinions?

Yet despite what appears to be a perfect situation I have found many ecommerce sites and brands struggle to get to grips with the art of using social media effectively.

So I created this series of articles to help outline some of the basics you need start to master social media marketing.

To start with let’s look at the foundations to successful social media marketing for ecommerce.

Know What You Want

Too often businesses jump into using social media without thinking want they really want to achieve.

Before you start think about your business objectives and goals these could include:

Increase salesIncrease sales from new customers

Increase salesImprove customer loyalty and repeat sales

Increase salesIncrease brand awareness

Increase salesGrow email subscribers

Increase salesPromote new product

Increase salesGenerate positive reviews

Be clear and specific about what you want to get out of your social media.

Know your Audience

Know Your Audience

It’s a topic I bang on about a lot, but you need to know who your audience is and for this it’s worth investing time to create detailed customer personas.

You can create personas using data from your analytics, talking to your team, talking to your customers and doing research including customer surveys.

Once you know more about your audience you can start to understand the sort of messages and content that will appeal and work in harmony with your objectives and goals.

Pay close attention to what’s important to your customers and any objections they could have. Also consider their hobbies and interests as all this data will feed directly into the content you create for and share on social media.

Select the Right Networks

Select the Right Networks

It’s at this point you should start to select which social networks you want to use. Using a network just because you think you should or your competitors use it isn’t enough.

Do consider the following:

  • Used by target audience
  • Used by industry influencers
  • Can manage with resources available
  • Ease of use and available features
  • Good performance data available

You need networks that work well and can be used efficiently and effectively.

Warning: Don’t ever treat social networks as a one post fits all. You need to tailor your posts to your networks with content, links and images, what works for Twitter will need to be adjusted for Facebook. Take this into account when considering resource available.

These three points will give you a solid foundation to your social media marketing. In the next article we will look at Social Media for Ecommerce – Content Planning

Social Media for Ecommerce – Content Planning

In my previous article we looked at creating a solid foundation for your ecommerce social media marketing by:

  • Setting clear objectives
  • Understanding your audience
  • Selecting the right networks.

In this article I’m going to focus on the content that is going to power your social media.

In marketing we regularly hear the phrase “Content is King”, but is this true?

While content is very important not all content is created equal, good content is about quality not quantity.

Quality Content

Quality Content

What makes up quality content varies from one ecommerce site to the next, for example the content used to promote a beauty website should be very different from the content for a DIY online store.

What makes content good quality is:

  • Relevance to your products, customers and potential customers
  • Easy to read and share
  • Appealing to look at
  • Works across multiple devices
  • Helps the reader and the brand
  • Is unique and not duplicated

Quality content isn’t always a long article it can take many forms from quick tips to video.

Planning Social Content

For successful social media campaigns you need to plan your quality content in advance.

Start by creating a week by week breakdown by social channel with spacing for how frequently you plan to post each day (don’t forget weekends). I like to plan a month in advance and will use the data from orvious month’s to adjust posting times and frequency.

Then draft out:

Content TypeContent Typearticle, quick tip, quote, video, image etc…

Post wordingPost wordingthis can be rough to start with

Hashtags & TagsHashtags & Tagslook for popular related tags or start creating your own

You can start with rough ideas and flesh out your content as you refine your plan. By sure to use lots of different types of content to test what works best with your audience.

As I said in my previous article don’t use the same post on every network. You should tailor what you say to the social channel even while promoting the same content.

Be sure to add notes to your plan about key events related to your products or audience. Also include content related to your campaigns and promotions.

You can also look for content trends that your audience like to follow like #motivationalmonday.

Within your plan make sure to leave space to check for and react to trending topics that effect your business and audience.

Some of the best content on social media is planned, but still feels of the moment!

Aim to spend a good amount of time on your content planning it will save you time later on.

Ready in Advance

Now you have a clear plan of all the content you need, ideally a month in advance you need to get it created.

This way you will always have content approved and ready to go when you need it. Not having content preped in advance leads to poor quality as you rush to find something to post. I have seen a number of businesses social media grind to a holt due to lack of content.

Look at your plan and see how you can group similar content together for quicker creation, for example if you plan a series of quotes its best to get these created in one go.

Once the content is created get it checked for any errors or mistakes these can put off potential customers.

Once your completely happy store the content and mark in your content plan to show which content you can ready for posting.

If your using a blog (which we recommend) you can often schedule the content on your blog so it will automatically go live when you want it.

Images & Video

Images and Video

Social Media loves images and video so try to include them in your content as much as possible. It can be tempting to use stock images, but actually real unique pictures and video work so much better and have a greater appeal.

Focus on creating your own quality images and including them in relevant posts where ever possible to maximise your reach and engagement.

You can also ask your audience to share images and videos of them using your products (if appropriate), this will open up the range of images and video content you have to work with. Why not reward the best ones with a free gift or discount.

Be sure to take advantage of image based social networks like Pinterest and Instagram. These channels are great for brand and product awareness and we have seen them generate significant sales for a number of brands.

 

89% increase in sessions for FDS Consult

The Problem

Fire Design Solutions, a leading fire engineering agency in UK, approached ExtraDigital to redesign and market their website www.fdsconult.com.

The FDS Group is a major player in the Fire Engineering space and at the time of reading have reach 1,000 projects completed since 2003. They needed a consultancy website which demonstrated their expertise and showed their excellent work which included the Olympic Athletes Village in 2015 and the Alexander McQueen store in London.

The site had an increasingly high bounce rate and search engine performance was poor. Visually, the site did not appeal to their target audience and wasn’t making use of their brilliant project visuals they had collected since the company started in 2003.

website design for FDS

The Solution

We used the follow in our web design and digital marketing solutions for FDS:

  • User and persona research –
    built a deeper understanding of the target audiences and their needs
  • Creating a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice –
    web designs took into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • Migrated the site from Joomla to WordPress
  • Ensuring all CTAs were clearly visible to increase the volume of webinar sign ups
  • Designed an intuitive case studies section to clearly showcase projects
  • Optimising all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and completing all 301 redirects so as to not lose any previous SEO value

responsive web design for FDS

The Result?

In terms of the marketing, the sites are performing well above the base line. The site operates in a very competitive niche, which makes us extra proud of the hard work and dedication the team have shown to produce these excellent results.

Here are the statistics a year on (November 2014 vs November 2015)

  • 89% increase in Sessions – site traffic nearly doubled year on year
  • 15% drop in the bounce rate
  • 37% increase in page views
  • 43% increase in SEO traffic

Social Media for Ecommerce – Being Social

In our last few articles we have looked at creating a foundation for your ecommerce social media marketing and creating a content plan. In this article we will look at getting to grips with being active on social.

If you think social media success is just about posting up lots of great content then you have really missed the point. Social Networks have grown to be so big online by bring people together to interact with each other.

If you don’t interact on your social channels with your audience and potential customers you are missing a huge part of what makes social media successful.

Audience Engagement

In the physical world if a customer says to a sales assistant they like a product or asks a question you would expect the sales assistant to acknowledge the customer and respond.

Well it’s no different for social media, when people interact with your content through likes, shares and comments it’s your opportunity to be the sales assistant and give a response.

You should always answer a comment even the negative ones, staying positive and be helpful is the key here.

You can thank people for sharing content, but if you have a lot of shares you might not want to do this on an individual level. It’s the same with likes you might not want to thank each person, but you could post how blown away you are by how many likes you got.

Make your audience feel valued and appreciated by not only engaging with them, but also actively asking for their opinions and feedback through questions.

Fan Hunting

As I said in my first article Social Media for Ecommerce – Creating a Solid Foundation you need to actively go out and find your audience on social media.

Try searching on key hashtags to your brand or products and you will find a whole host of content being shared that is relevant to you.

These fans may not be interacting with your channel of page, but are promoting you independently.

Liking, sharing and interacting with these posts can help you:

  • Grow your audience
  • Connect and build relationships with people already advocating for your brand
  • Increase sales

You can also use this method to find key topics being discussed that you might want to contribute on. In this case rather than fans your looking for potential fans/customers, for example someone might tweet about a beauty problem they have and as a relevant beauty brand you can comment with tips and ideas to help.

Following and Sharing Content

On social media it pays to follow the right people this not only gives other a feeling for what you are about, it can also help you connect with industry influencers and find content gems.

So who should you follow?

It’s up to you but a good rule is to follow:

  • Industry news and key publications related to your brand and products
  • Influencers on your subject – that could be a top beauty blogger with a huge following
  • Organisations, charity and bodies that post related quality content
  • Partner businesses – these could include suppliers, sister companies and business you collaborate with

I don’t recommend following competitors, do by all means keep an eye on the competition, but you don’t need to follow them to do this.

While most content on your channel should be your own its good practice to regularly share great content from others. It’s another reason to follow good content on social media.

When sharing keep it relevant to your audience and objectives, check and read what you are sharing carefully and be sure not to share competitor content.

Sometimes you might be asked to share content, which is fine, but always check it carefully to make sure you’re not being caught out with a hoax.

 

So by now you’re well on your way to making social media work for your brand with a good foundation, content plan and active social profile.

 

In my next series of articles I will take things a step further and look at social advertising, running competitions, retargeting and much much more…

 

B2B Marketing 5 Tips for Success

The internet is a great place to market B2B services and solutions, how do I know?

Well for over 12 years I have worked successfully with many B2B businesses marketing their services online. Since joining Web Designer Vip over 7 years ago I have had the pleasure of working with several regular B2B clients who are still seeing great results year on year.

The following are five of my top tips to create successful B2B marketing campaigns.

Set Clear Objectives and Goals

I can’t tell you how many times I run a training session or start a campaign where the first thing I say is “what are our objectives”.

You need clear objective in place with your marketing as these will not only guide all your endeavours, but also give you something to measure you success by.

When planning your marketing objectives and goals think are they:

  • Doable.
  • Understandable.
  • Manageable.
  • Beneficial.

Also make sure everyone knows the objectives and goals for your marketing both in-house and in your external agency.

Know Your Audience

This is more than just a vague idea of who your target businesses are for your marketing. Really successful campaigns have a much more detailed knowledge of the audience that is used to tailor content and messages.

This is often called personas, but really it’s about understanding what makes your audience and tick.

So consider things like:

  • Who makes the purchase decisions
  • What are their problems
  • How can you solve these problems
  • What objections might you need to over come

Select the Right Mix

Getting your marketing mix right is key, as to reach your audience you need to use multiple channels both on and off line.

Most online channels have some interaction with each other and a converted lead seldom comes from just one source like SEO or email marketing.

An example:

Mr Right sees your PPC ad and visits the website, he likes what he sees, but wants to check the market place to see if this is the best solution. After looking online he visits the website again, but this time via organic search results. He needs to get approval so he bookmarks the site. Once he has approval Mr Right comes back and completes the contact form via his bookmark link.

In your analytics you see the lead coming from direct traffic, but in reality both PPC and SEO had a part to play in this lead generation.

If you dig a little deeper in analytics data you can see conversion attribution data and work out which channels are supporting as well as closing leads. This data can help you see where to start to invest in your marketing.

Find more information on Google Analytics Attribution.

Try New Ideas

Sticking to the tried and tested is a common b2b marketing mistake and actually limits your reach.

Don’t be afraid to try something new, but do test it properly with again clear objectives and goals. Also be sensible is posting on Instagram really going to appeal or reach your target audience.

Areas like social media, retargeting, creative content and even ecommerce can work well for B2B marketing, when they are carefully planned and executed.

Here is one of the advantages in using a good outsourced marketing agency like Web Designer Vip as they will be actively training and testing new marketing channels, tools and methods.

Set Targets

Having clear targets helps focus your marketing be that in-house or with an external agency.

Targets must be specific and realistic and so a good place to start is by reviewing your previous results year on year as well as industry data.

Be sensitive to the marketing channel and the resources you have available.

SEO can take time to build strong positioning, while PPC is much more instant, but will depend on competition and advertising budgets. Social may take time to build a following as can email marketing.

Also be prepared to adjust targets if circumstances change for example you may plan to add 2 new case studies per month, but your content writer leaves part way through the year and has not been replaced.

 

What are you doing to prepare for voice search?

Whether you use voice search or not, marketers need to sit up and listen to recent noise and make a judgement – but we urge you to think long term.

We all know the love affair that is teenagers and their mobiles – who has time to type these days? It’s predicted that over 55% of teenage smart phone users use voice search in some form showing signs that it may become ubiquitous in the next few years. Remember, for longevity of your brand, markets should also be thinking about the next generation of users and how they interact with technology to get your message to right people at the right time using the right medium.

So how will voice search affect your content?

Every one of your users’ needs a question answered and are looking for a product or service to solve their problems. In the information age the aim of the game is to education and demonstrate your subject leadership to build trust that you or your product can do exactly what it says on the tin. If you’ve been producing great quality content that users find valuable and ‘answers your consumers questions and concerns’ – congratulations – your 90% there.

If not – where have you been!

Here are some quick content tips:

Consider the questions your consumers ask in your content marketing strategy (sidebar: If you don’t have one see this article on content strategy for guidance in how to get started). Voice search aside, providing this information is the key to demonstrating knowledge and thought leadership. Let’s consider a hypothetical real estate business. Your consumers will be in the market for a new house and asking:

  • Where is the best place to live in X
  • What are house prices like in X
  • Are there any local schools in X
  • (And of course) Is there a Nandos in X

It’s your job to communicate your content, message and brand by being present at this in the sales funnel us marketers call the awareness and consideration stage – remember, content attracts and engages! Be your client’s best mate and be there for them when they need you the most.

To summarise the effect on content:

  • Focus on relevance not keywords
  • Answer your users questions in your websites content
  • Consider your users personas

So how will voice search affect your SEO?

Semantic Search

Remember that Google uses semantic search.

Wikipedia: “Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

This means that Google no longer looks at a short keyword phrase but the relevance and context of the whole site. These advances have moved us from former queries like “restaurants in Rochester,’ to more specific queries such as ‘where to eat Indian food in Rochester’ or ‘what is the best place to eat Indian food in Rochester.’

With that said, again the focus is on creating relevant content that answers questions.

Mobile Optimisation

The majority of mobile searches will come from those using mobile devices equipped with Siri or Cortana. If you still haven’t made the jump to a responsive website yet, maybe this will give you the push. It’s been common knowledge for some time that Google ranks mobile optimised sites more highly in search engines. Be sure to optimise your content for mobile first to take advantage of this rise.

Local Search

Have you invested in your local strategy? Searches such as ‘best Chinese restaurants’ will serve local results as opposed to a list of Chinese restaurants and voice search will take advantage of this!

Local SEO has very much changed. Doing a search for ‘plumbers in Kent’ hardly returns individual websites and results. You will generally see Yelp, check a trade and other review sites dominating the top of search results. Ensure you are listed in Google my business, and build relationships with many local business to promote your local work to help you take advantage of local voice search.

So Should I have voice search on my website?

Our verdict: there is no short or medium term gain in developing native voice search within a website. The technology at present is nowhere near completion due to the following issues:

  • Browser support for voice  / microphone input is too patchy – the infrastructure and technology just isn’t that far along yet to get relialable results from voice searches for websites. Millions has gone into refining mainstream voice search platforms such as Siri. Browsers have a long way to go.
  • Accessibility issues when no microphone device attached – if your user doesn’t have a microphone, then voice search is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
  • Voice search would be used outside the website to access info in the website or land in the website – voice search results will show a snippet of content from a web page and may give users even less incentive to go onto the site.

 

Disadvantages of SEO

Can there be disadvantages to SEO?

Yes there can, as experts in digital marketing at ExtraDigital we know that all marketing channels have their benefits and disadvantages, this article will cover some of the ones we have most commonly observed.

Before we look at the disadvantages let first examine what SEO is.

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimisation is a digital marketing method that works to optimise a website to perform well in search engine results.

This includes ranking and appearing well for search terms and variations that are used by your target audience in natural or organic search listings.

The SEO method involves not only making adjustment to the website itself, but also work on the wider internet to build a sites authority and position.

Benefits of SEO

If you have spent any time looking at the SEO services available you will see lots of focus on the benefits.

While SEO has many benefits two areas we like to focus on at ExtraDigital are:

  • building relevant traffic to your website
  • supporting and generating leads and sales

Disadvantages of SEO

Getting noticed by more than your target Audience

1)  Getting noticed by more than your target audience

As you get more visible online through SEO so your competitors will start to notice and they may well up their game to compete.

Increased competition is fairly common once competitors see your marketing is working especially if their leads and sales are dropping.

Also expect to be targeted by a lot more people trying to sell you their services. From other SEO agencies, to advertising the greater your exposure online the more others will start to see you as a desirable prospect to work with.

Spam too can increase for the same reasons, but with good filters in place this can easily be managed.

Over Success

2) Over Success

As much as every business wants to be a success there is a real danger of too much and too fast. If you can’t handle the volume of leads and sales then opportunities will be lost and customers let down.

Once SEO gets into full swing I have seen cases where the up surge in leads has been more than the client could handle.

Unlike channels like PPC which can easily be switched on and off SEO isn’t so instant. Even if you stop your SEO it’s likely the work already in place will have some lasting effect. Although over time your SEO position will slip if not maintained often due again to the increased efforts of your competitors.

As you can see it’s very important to make sure you have the right structures in place to cope with increases in leads and sales.

Black and White Hat

3) Black Hats and White Hats

The SEO world can feel a little like the Wild West, while most agencies offer a good and fair service there are some that don’t.

Some companies (Black Hats) will happily break the rules to get you to the top in the short term only for you to find you get caught with a Google Penalty that gets you kicked out of search results due to their methods.

Then there are companies (White Hats) who work hard to stay within the rules and give you great SEO results through regular quality work.

There are also companies who sit between both camps almost grey hats so to speak.

Often it’s hard for businesses to know who to trust with their SEO and we sadly do see websites that have been damaged by bad SEO work.

Our advice is to look for the White Hat SEO’s, they won’t be the cheapest, but they will give you the best value for your investment.

Check the company’s reputation, have any of their clients had a Google penalty?

At ExtraDigital we are proud to be White Hat’s, working within Google guidelines with innovative as well as tried and tested SEO. While we have helped websites recover from Google Penalties we happily have never had one of our clients receive one.

Magento SEO – measuring success

What makes a successful SEO campaign? How do you measure it?

This is best answered by first considering that SEO is a type of marketing. So how are marketing campaigns measured?

For a marketing campaign, measurement of success would usually be in terms of the number of sales, the volume of sales, the number of new purchasers, and the number of abandoned baskets or enquiries. Different campaigns would place a different priority on each of these elements.

So surely the same should be true for SEO for an ecommerce store such as a Magento shop. Success should be measured by the number of sales, the volume of sales, the number of new purchasers, and the number of abandoned baskets or enquiries. It should not be measured in terms of keyword rankings or other parameters such as inbound links, but directly on the actual sales data.

Within print or magazine advertising, readership data is used to influence where ads are placed, but the effectiveness is measured on sales generated, not numbers of printed magazines.

Attributing SEO work to sales

In a simple world, consumers would arrive just once at a website and either make a purchase or not. But in reality consumers may visit a website many times before purchase. For ecommerce SEO the most important task is first contact – getting the consumer to your Magento shop when first seriously searching for one of your products. It may be the consumer bookmarks the page and returns later as a direct visitor. For this reason the first interaction attribution model is best for ecommerce SEO.

Many business owners use Analytics to measure SEO success. But not all are aware of the very large differences in conversion data by attribution model, particularly for ecommerce. Analytics by default uses the last interaction attribution model which is well suited to PPC work, but less good for SEO work.

Example of how attribution impacts SEO results for Magento store.

For one particular Magento shop, the number of sales from organic search more than doubled after a couple of months SEO work but the actual data varies considerably according to attribution model used, by as much as 29%.

So in summary when measuring the success of an SEO campaign for a shop use sales data (not rankings or links) – but ensure you understand the details of the attribution model used.

 

SMS as a Marketing Platform

When you walk around nowadays, nearly everyone has their smart phone on them and they use them in ways that we didn’t believe was even possible even just 10 years ago.

SMS as a Marketing Platform

Smart phones allow you to do everything from organise your life, keep taps on family members and friends, make purchases online, sell online, play on games and much more.

Communicating on a smart phone is even easier with the ability to send and receive messages via social media and email as well as traditional calls.

From a business prospective, in all this communication are the ever popular direct emails from companies to consumers getting lost amongst the many emails received from companies each day?

Is there a way to stand out from the crowd?

Is SMS Marketing an Alternative to Email Marketing?

As the use of mobiles as a marketing, promotional and point of sales tool heats up should you be considering alternative channel of communication instead of email marketing? One possibility is the use of SMS Marketing.

SMS Marketing has been around for a while now but has recently gained momentum as a great tool to help distinguish your marketing communication from the many others that an average consumer will receive each day.

The concept of SMS marketing is that you will send text messages to your potential clients reminding them of your sales, offers and deals. They can be used alongside other means of communication to act as a reminder or a prompt.

SMS as a Marketing Platform

The Benefits of SMS Marketing

One of the key benefits to SMS marketing over any other form of direct or online marketing is that this is the fastest way of putting your message into your consumer hands.

Simply Cast states that the average time between sending your message and it being read is just 7 seconds! – couldn’t get any better turnaround time for those lighting sales or promotions.

Simply Cast also states that SMS Messages have an incredibly high open rate and conversion rate with almost every SMS sent opened and read, unlike emails. This instantaneous receipt of the SMS matched with its almost guaranteed action of reading the SMS means that this method of communication is well worth its very cheap cost of sending.

Indeed, when compared to email marketing the cost of SMS marketing is minimal. On top of this SMS marketing does not have to jump through all the hoops that are spam filters that email marketing does. The only restriction on the use of contact details is that you must have received permission from the person’s whose number it is for communication.

These factors make SMS marketing cheap, quick, easy and with minimal fuss and energy needed to run.

Use for Post-Sales

SMS Use for Post-SalesSMS marketing can also be used as a great way to ensure good customer service for your customers.

Many companies use SMS to send messages once orders have been placed directly to the purchaser’s phone. These messages include confirmation of delivery times or notification of items ordered available as click and collect.

Examples of companies who use SMS post sale are Wickes, Argos and Next. All of whom have achieved great results.

Do or Don’t?

As shown SMS marketing has many benefits but when it comes to whether you should, or shouldn’t, carry out SMS marketing it becomes an individual company preference.

If you are an ecommerce shop then yes, SMS marketing can assist you greatly and provide you with many benefits. This grows with the more engagement you have with your customers and how likely they are to appreciate reminders and promotions from yourself.

If you are a hotel or restaurant in the hospitality sector then SMS marketing can be very useful for yourself as it can allow you to keep in contact with previous guests and inform them of deals and discounts coming up  –  if they are a frequent user of hotels or restaurants then their appreciation for these SMSs will be greater.

Other industries like schools and nurseries can also use SMS marketing as a way of getting information directly to parents and guardians. Reminders about open days and events running can easily be sent via SMS and reduces the use of paper/letters which get lost or thrown away.

Even industries such as Recruitment can use SMS marketing as a way of reminding people on their books of new job opportunities and deadlines. An instant reminder rather than an email they look at a day to two later.

The Benefits of SMS marketing

There really is no limit to SMS marketing other than the limit of the characters themselves. With an allowance of just 160 characters per text you need to ensure that you have the ability to get your point across with just a few characters.

What Tools are available to help me with SMS Marketing?

There are many tools out there that will allow you to send SMS marketing text messages, one of these tools is called FireText.

FireText promotes itself as the number 1 SMS Marketing platform for businesses – they provide a simple, flexible and flat rate pricing structure to allow you to use their SMS platform with no contract or commitment needed.

As with most services, the more SMSs you send the cheaper the price gets but you can expect to send each SMS for around 2.2p each.

Their SMS platform allows you to send, receive, track and analyse your text marketing campaigns with ease. Clients of FireText that currently use the service included Volkswagen, Pizza Hut and even The Cabinet Office.

Competitors to FireText include Text Local and Text Marketers.

Text Local offers a very similar service but is marginally more expensive. It’s users include John Lewis and P&O Ferries. Text Marketers’ service is also very similar but is the most expensive of the three platforms on offer. This service is used by Land Rover, BMW, Subways and Dominos Pizza.

Assistance Needed for SMS Marketing?

If you are looking for further information or assistance in running SMS marketing campaigns using any of the platforms mentioned in this blog post then simply contact ExtraDigital today.

Ensuring that your Customers can Contact You

Every good business knows that you need to be easily accessible for your customer. Part of this accessibility is the ease of contacting the business when needed.

Your contact details need to be up to date for this and correct.

Nowadays with websites, social media and online directories a lot of people are finding it harder to manage just a wide spread of contact details. Keeping them up to date is no longer a two second job looking at one location; it’s a multitude of login details and URLs to check.

Ensuring that your Customers can Contact You

The impact that poor contact information can have on your SEO is more than a lot of people think. Considering that all your social channels and online directories are linked on the world wide web, it becomes very clear to Google when you are out of sync. Out of sync signals lack of effort and care which in turn affects your rankings.

Not to mention the confused clients of yours who are reaching out to you cross channels.

If only there was something that could help!

MOZ Local!

MOZ Local allows you to do just that.

You can sign in and push latest contact information direct to all the major data aggregators and online directories.  This is great news as it means that it saves you time and it spreads your contact details throughout various sources very easily.

With MOZ Local you can get emails reminding you to update the listings, delete any listings and it even makes you aware of any duplications / errors in listings that you may have.

On top of all this it also highlights to you any potential channels that you aren’t utilising.  Might even be further avenues for growth to be found here for you.

Naturally MOZ Local offers full reporting of your listing status and allows you to view all rankings, reviews, traffic data and the performance of your listings over time. Great for assisting with your marketing objectives.

The Practicalities

The MOZ Local service itself isn’t cheap but when you look at the time you would spend updating these systems yourself then you may find that you save quite a bit. At the moment it is priced a $84 a year per location for businesses managing up to 99 locations a year.

You can get an Enterprise level for businesses managing more than 100 locations for $69 a year per location which makes it far better for those companies with multiple locations.

However if you want access to the reporting side of the system then you have to pay an additional $120 or $99 with the Enterprise level of business management.

Are There Alternatives?

Alternative sources to use other than MOZ Local do exsist. One example is Yext. www.yext.com

Yext does everything that MOZ Local does with prices available on request. However you can white label this service with your own company branding very easily.

Sources in the online marketing community have stated that there have been rumours of Yext removing all changes made whilst with them if you cancel their services. No concrete evidence of this has yet to emerge BUT MOZ Local state very clearly on their website that if you cancel your service with them then your listings remain and are not reverted to their previous state.

On the other side of the Yext / MOZ Local debate there are sources in the online marketing community who believe that Yext is faster at indexing your websites in the listings than MOZ Local at the moment.

What Should You Do?

Here at ExtraDigital we don’t think that one size fits all, your use of these services should depend on what benefits your company can gain from using them.

However, we do believe that you should make use of the free trials offered by these services as they do provide you with a useful overview of whether your company is actually ensuring that customers can contact you.

Below you can see both the MOZ Local (on the left) and Yext (on the right) results for the popular John Lewis department store.

MOZ Local Listing Results for John LewisYext Listing Results for John Lewis

Fire Design Solutions Case Study

The Problem

Fire Design Solutions, a leading fire engineering agency in UK, approached ExtraDigital to redesign and market their website www.firedesignsolutions.com.

The site suffered from a high bounce rate and poor performance in search engines. The site was no longer reflecting the status of the company. Visually, the site did not appeal to their target audiences and personas and wasn’t making use of their brilliant project case studies they had of the excellent projects they have been involved with.

Fire Design Solutions

The Solution

ExtraDigital put a great web design together by taking the following steps

  • User and persona research to see what type of user would be using the website and what information they would like to see
  • Creating a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • Ensuring all CTAs were clearly visible to increase the volume of webinar sign ups
  • Designed an intuitive case studies section to clearly showcase projects
  • Optimising all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and completing all 301 redirects so as to not lose any previous SEO value

The Result?

In terms of the marketing, the sites are performing well above the base line. The site operates in a very competitive niche which only enhances the results.

Here are the statistics a year on:

  • 56.19% increase in page/session
  • -14.11 drop in the bounce rate
  • 68% increase in page views

Ecommerce Marketing Services

Ecommerce Marketing Services

ecommerce marketing

If you’re selling directly to customers online, either as a small online shop or a full online retail platform, your online marketing strategy can make or break your store. ExtraDigital have one aim in mind – to increase your ecommerce sales revenue whilst actively getting more for your marketing spend.

We believe that ecommerce marketing is all about having your product visible at the time that users are ready to make a purchase. We do this by making sense of the sales data and translating this into actionable items for strategic execution to increase your ecommerce sales.

MobileGeddon : How to make your website mobile friendly.

Welcome to our Quiz on Mobile Websites

Earlier this year Google released their latest algorithm targeting websites that aren’t mobile friendly and punishing them in results. Google is a resource for the searcher and is aiming to provide the best internet and search results they can. A big part of this is page speed and the ever increasing mobile market.

Mobile usage topped desktop in 2014 as the primary device that people use to access the internet. Any savvy marketer should have been ready for Google’s shift in priority. If your site has been left out in the cold, here are 6 top tips to help you create a mobile-friendly website.

 

Off Site Blog, On Site Blog or Both?

New Year we are all looking forward, wondering what this year will bring, making plans and promising to get completed those outstanding projects. For those with big ambitions for their website and business, you are probably looking at 2016 as the year to make that big push online. But how?

One great way to improve you online reach and authority is to start a blog.

Blogging

Blogging is a big area and really started as an online journal or diary, but has grown to be so much more.

For business a blog is a great outlet to write and share content aimed at your target audience and industry influencers. You can promote what you do and show off your knowledge often in a way your existing website structure doesn’t allow.

Why Blog?

Blogging has been very popular over the past couple of years and is still a growth area. Online blogs are seen as a highly trusted source of information and as such have real power to influence customer’s decisions.

Blogs can also be used to provide content for your social media and email campaigns. How often do you struggle to find something good to post on social!

Blogs do need to be posted on frequently and the content needs to be:

  • Useful
  • Unique
  • Quality

Ok so yes you want to start a blog, but:

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

Where to have your blog depends on what you want achieve.

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

 

Benefits of an On Site Blog

There are many benefits of having an onsite blog to your website, 3 of the main ones are:

Fresh Content

Appeasing Google’s Love of Fresh Content

It can often be far easier to give Google the fresh content that it craves through the form of an onsite blog post than trying to add new pages to other sections.

So if you are struggling to put new content regular on your site a blog can help.

Helps On Site SEO
Helps Onsite SEO

With an onsite blog you can target keyword topics in more depth and build onsite keyword authority all under the one domain.

If you are struggling to get ranking positions on keyword areas for your website an onsite blog can give you a place to add the content, you need.

Attract Links to your Domain

Providing you put link worthy content on your blog you can use an onsite blog to help generate more back links to your website.

The key here is to add content people want to link to and to promote it well online.

Benefits of an Off Site Blog

There are also many benefits to having an offsite blog, the top 3 here include…

Tap into Existing Networks Audience
Tap into Existing Networks Audience

Blog sites like WordPress already have huge audiences and having a blog on one of these networks can help you reach a bigger audience than hosting it on your site.

The best way to gauge this is to do some research to see just how big the existing audience for your sector is on these Networks. This can also be useful in highlight good topics and other related tips like tagging.

Create Distance

If the topics and content, you want to cover doesn’t completely fit with your website then hosting it offsite can be a better solution.

You can then preserve the voice and feel of your website without compromising on exploring interesting topics that your audience want to know more about.

This can be good if you want to create more fun focused content that could jar with your domains SEO focus.

Trust Factor

An external blog can have a greater trust factor especially if it has more of an independent look and feel.

You can also invite industry experts and other suitable contributors to create content for the blog to further demonstrate its authority, which in turn will help build its readership.

That being said you should never mislead visitors into thinking they are reading content from an independent source if it is being produced internally.

To go with this content should be less about selling and more about helping and informing.

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

So Should I have an Onsite Blog or an Offsite Blog

If you’re in a small niche and struggle to find somewhere on your site to post fresh content, then an onsite blog will probably work best.

If you’re in a more competitive market and looking to explore topics and connect with a wider audience, then an external blog is probably a better option.

In some cases, you might even want to use both methods, which is fine providing both can be resourced and don’t use duplicated content.

Either way, get blogging and realise the full value for yourself today.

Responsive Website for Inspire Community Trust

With an ever increasing trend for website visitors to use mobiles and tablets the need for responsive websites, (a website that repsonds and adapts to be viewed on the smaller mobile and tablet screens), is becoming a must have.

This need is acute for organisations such as charities; their reach and audiences are increasingly more likely to search for them via mobiles devices, often as a result of the immediate nature of the services and support they provide.

This was very much the case for Inspire Community Trust.

Responsive Website for Disability Charity

The Client

Inspire Community Trust are a growing disability charity based in Bexley. They were founded in 2005 with the aim to improve and develop facilities for less able people and carers in need of support.

With a brilliant hub in the Slade Green area they are able to provide a wide range of services to people with visual impairments, disabilities and sensory impairments.

The Project

The aim of the project was to give the Inspire Community Trust website a complete makeover, so that it would fit in with their new branding and raise the standards of the website to make it truly accessible to all those using their services.

ExtraDigital did this by re-designing their website to give it a more modern look, with a sleek design focused on the ease of use and accessibility for all.

At the heart of all of this was the much needed action to make the website responsive so that the visitor experience for all was the same across all devices. This helped future proof their website, (use of mobile devices will certainly not waning anytime soon), and ensure that all of their visitors could use the website with ease.

Responsive Website for Disability Charity

The Outcome

The website was successfully designed, built and developed by our in-house team of project managers, designers and developers to meet and succeed our client’s expectations.

The website has far more functionality than it had before, which has helped the organisation to use it in a much more useful way. Some of this additional functionality includes…

  • Instant Feedback forms found on all pages to ensure up to date feedback on the services provided,
  • Contact forms for ease of communication by all their users,
  • Staff Only Areas to assist the employees of Inspire with their day to day activities,
  • Online shop to provide instant access for their users to vital equipment and tools,
  • An all round better responsive website that definitely has the ability assist with the aims of Inspire Community Trust.

Overall, this new responsive site has seen a fall in the bounce rate of organic traffic coming to the site of 40%. Whilst the amount of time that an average user spends on the site has shot up by 104% – showing just how much more useful and functional this new site is to its users.

How Can I Get These Same Results for My Website?

If you are a charity or an organisation that wants to see these types of improvements and more then contact our team today on 01227 68 68 98. We have a wealth of knowledge and experience that is sure to give you a better designed, better built and easier to market website.

Check out some of our other successes on our website today or our Portfolio to view more of our brilliant designs.

Should Your Online Shop Target China?

Are you an ambitious UK online retailer?

Do you sell or are you considering selling online internationally?

If the answer to these questions is Yes, then you’re not alone. Almost half of all the big UK online retailers are selling overseas.

However, there is one marketplace even the large online stores seem to be missing and that’s China.

Despite recent news reports saying China is in economic slowdown its online shopping market is growing. In fact, Information Age reported this month that the Chinese total ecommerce market is predicted to grow by 50% to $6.5 trillion by 2020.

The article also highlighted that WorldPay had reported that 44% of people in China shop on overseas websites. Plus other media reports from the 4th quarter of 2015 also confirmed that Chinese shoppers currently make up a quarter of UK online exports.

China is certainly still a country of opportunity for oniine retail.

Online Shopping that Appeals to China

So if you’re an online retailer should you expand your horizons to China?

Well UK products that appear popular in China include:

  • British clothing, footwear and accessories
  • Cosmetics and other beauty products
  • UK groceries, food, drink and alcohol

If you’re online shop covers these markets, then you should strongly consider targeting China.

To reach this audience your going to need to cover some key requirements including:

  • A dedicated Chinese website
  • Authentic quality product range
  • High payment security
  • Offer full duties calculations

But its worth the investment, because if you foster the Chinese market it will repay you with loyal repeat customers.

Chinese Websites and Marketing

At Web Designer Vip we have been working on multilingual web design and marketing projects for many years including Chinese, Russian, French and Arabic markets.

We understand that often these markets have more than one written language.

While the official language of China is Mandarin it has two different written forms, known as simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese is used by people in mainland China and further south, In Malaysia and Singapore. While Traditional Chinese is also used by people in mainland China plus some of the islands such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

We have created website for both including organising all the necessary translations.

For marketing in China you have to start with SEO, but don’t think Google, its Baidu that’s the top search engine here. But again Asian markets have a much wider range of search engines requiring a more skilled approach to maximise reach.

So if you want to expand your online business interests abroad then come and talk to us and we can help you avoid the pitfalls to reap the benefits of international sales.

 

83% increase in total traffic YOY for Logistics Consultant

The Problem

Web Designer Vip had been carrying out the internet marketing for Gideon Hillman for many years which saw his company grow from a 2 person operation to a national business, working with companies such as Siemens, McDonalds, Volvo, Ronseal and the Co-operative.

The website was no longer reflecting the calibre of the clients that Gideon was getting. He wanted a site that reflected his leading position in Logistics Consulting as well as modernising the site the site to appeal to cater for mobile and tablet browsers.

Before:

The Solution

  • Analysis of business objectives to discover what the aims of the website are
  • We conducted research to re-establish the 4 core areas of the business are and how to direct users to the appropriate page on the website.
  • We created a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
  • We designed and created an interactive banner to encourage a higher number of interactions on the page whilst intuitively improving the user journey
  • We ensured all CTAs and contact details were clearly visible to increase the volume of enquiries
  • Made the site responsive to any device the site is viewed with.
  • We re-optimised all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
  • Successfully putting the site live and maintained SEO value by maintaining URL structure

After

The Results

Since then the site, and the business, has continued to flourish. Here are the statistics from the website:

  • SEO Traffic: 83% increase in total traffic year on year
  • SEO Traffic: 54% increase year on year

Gideon was extremely grateful saying:

…the only problem we could have faced from the results we get…was being able to respond to and resource all the enquiries and subsequent projects, however we have as a result of the success of the website employed additional staff dedicated to managing and responding to the enquiries and also increased our consultant team

Online Ecommerce Store

The Problem

Be Safe Direct specialise in selling a variety of fire safety products from full smoke ventilation systems to fire extinguishers. Web Designer Vip has been working with Be Safe Direct for some time and have been able to help the business grow into a successful ecommerce store.

Web Designer Vip currently manage PPC, SEO and email marketing and also redesigned the current Magento store to make it more modern and user friendly.

The original site looked very dated and attracted a high number of useless visitors. The aim was to re-design the site to make the user journey easier for customers to make a purchase and to change the SEO and PPC strategy to attract customers that would convert into sales.

The Results

The graph below shows how conversion rate has increased throughout the year.

Total revenue has increased by 59% when comparing year on year since the website went live. The average order value has also increased as people are spending more time on site browsing through different items and buying more.

We have achieved this result by generally improving the SEO across the website, better optimising the PPC and updating the website to a completely new design.

Do you want to increase your return on PPC investment whilst decreasing your spend or see better success from your SEO efforts? Get in contact with us today on 01227 68 68 98. Or fill out the contact form below. 

 

How NOT to Set Up Event Tracking

How NOT to Set Up Event Tracking

Marketers love data. We love numbers and information and getting inside the brains of consumers who view our websites. Event tracking, when properly applied, can be one of the most powerful tools for understanding exactly how people respond to your content and how other marketing efforts are affecting the top of your conversion funnel.

Unfortunately, in their haste to start collecting data, many marketers rush to put event tracking in place and come out weeks (or months) later with numbers that have no actionable meaning behind them and confuse more than they clarify. Following the few simple guidelines below will help you get your event tracking up and running in a way that will allow your entire team to see a site’s value as well as the potential that various optimizations could have.

Don’t: Track every single click

Not all clicks are created equal, and only a small portion of your site’s total clicks are actually necessary to track. If a click does not indicate a higher-than-average interest in your business, it is not going to give you any insights into how your top visitors operate. Clicks on navigation, pagination and in-text links are almost never worth tracking, except in rare and purposeful situations.

Do: Track meaningful interactions

Focus on clicks that showcase how a user interacts with your site, especially interactions which aren’t automatically captured elsewhere. For example, a contact form on the page /contact which generates a unique URL /contact/thank-you upon submission could be tracked by looking at unique pageviews of /contact/thank-you in the Analytics Content report. However, a contact widget shown dynamically on any number of pages and not triggering a unique thank you page cannot be tracked through default settings in Analytics.

Interactions are also worth applying event tracking to when they can be used to set up an Analytics Goal with an actual monetary value applied to them. An interaction such as submitting a request a quote form could easily be assigned an average value based on the company’s close rate and lifetime customer value. Having event tracking set up on the form will allow such tracking to take place.

In the example below, you can see a client who came to us with event tracking set up so broadly that 98.45% of visitors logged at least one event. After drastically refining their tracking, limiting events to only actions display conversion intent, only 2.86% of visitors now log events. Not only is this number more realistic (how many of your site visitors are actually potential clients/customers?), but it allows us to more intelligently act upon the data with a targeted audience.

Don’t: Take “Action” literally

Of Google’s three mandatory attributes, “Action” is what throws off well-intentioned marketers more than any other. When taken literally (as it too-often is), this results in an inordinate number of “Clicks” and “Submits” in Analytics. Since Event Tracking is used most frequently on a site’s buttons and links, “click” is quite possibly the most redundant and least insightful piece of information to track. Take the account above, for instance. Looking at this report lends zero insight into what interactions took place 62.89% of the time.

Do: Categorize Intelligently

Forget for a moment about the entire notion of a physical action, and instead use what we’ll call Event Tracking Attribute #2 as an opportunity to further describe the user interaction taking place. Consider the two examples below. Without needing any additional context, Example #1 clearly defines what type of interaction is happening on site while Example #2 gives a sense of what item on a page is being interacted with.

Example #1

Example #2

Don’t: Set up without a structure

Most event tracking newcomers I’ve seen approach the process somewhat like this:

1) Load website homepage, make list of all buttons on page
2) Create event tracking tags for each button
3) Click through to first main category or landing page, make list of all buttons on page
4) Create event tracking tags for each button
5) Repeat ad nauseum one page at a time

This “process” if it is even called such, is bound to be rife with irrelevant, mislabeled events along with serious data confusion. In event tracking, attributes must exactly match one another (meaning they are case-sensitive) in order to be aggregated under a common title. As errant labelers will quickly find out, “Contact” and “Contact Type” (and for that matter “contact,” “contacts” and “contact form”) are completely separate items which cannot be combined after the fact.

Do: Track with meaning

Start your event tracking endeavor by closing the website altogether and getting out a piece of pen and paper. Write down the top interactions a user can or should perform on the site. Most frequently, these will include:

  • Contact
  • Download
  • View
  • Register
  • Purchase

Notice that each of these tasks is completely unique from the others. These are your event tracking “categories.”

Next, you’ll apply an “action” to each category. Since you already know that “click” is an unacceptable action, look for something more insightful to contribute to your tracking. Typically an action should describe the type of content being interacted with. For example, under a “Download” category, you might have actions consisting of “white papers,” “case studies,” and “product overview.” After you expand all of your categories, you should have a list that looks something like this:

  • Contact
    • Help Form
    • Free Sample
  • Download
    • White Paper
    • Case Study
    • Product Overview
  • View
    • Testimonial
    • Webinar
  • Register
    • Newsletter
    • Account Signup
  • Purchase
    • Add to Cart
    • Add to Wishlist

Good so far? Great! Now all you need is a simple little label and you’re set. Labels should be used to identify the specific piece of content, product, or location on a page with which a user is interacting. When it comes to forms (such as a Help or Contact form), it can also be valuable to capture any drop down or radio button options your users have to fill out.

If you have a huge product catalog or huge archive of content that you’re dealing with, simply create a standardized template for your developers to apply site wide so you’re not left manually combing through thousands of pages.

Once you’ve gone back through your list a final time, you should wind up with an event tree that looks a bit like this:

  • Contact
    • Help Form
      • Sidebar
      • Footer link
    • Free Sample
      • For me
      • For a friend
  • Download
    • White Paper
      • [White-Paper-Title]
    • Case Study
      • [Case-Study-Title]
    • Product Specs
      • [Item-Number]
  • View
    • Testimonial
      • Client ABC
      • Client XYZ
    • Webinar
      • How To Make a Widget
  • Register
    • Newsletter
      • Footer link
      • Blog widget
    • Account Signup
      • Supernav link
      • Signup widget
  • Purchase
    • Add to Cart
      • [Product-Name]
    • Add to Wishlist
      • [Product-Name]

Once you’ve reached this point,you have satisfied Google’s required attributes for event tracking–pat yourself on the back! If you’re ready to be an overachiever, review your existing list and look for opportunities to incorporate Values where appropriate and determine whether or not you need to implement Non-interaction Events.

Don’t: Write code on your own

Granted, event tracking code is not the most complicated syntax most marketers will deal with on a regular basis. That said, manually writing this code is just asking for a slip-up that fractures your otherwise flawless data (see above: case-sensitivity).

Do: Use a tool to simplify your life

I’m a fan of the Google Analytics Configuration Tool from Raven. This user-friendly site allows you to easily populate code snippets for event tracking, as well as a few other handy Analytics items.

After selecting the general type of event you want to track from the drop-down menu, the tool prompts you to provide a Category, Action and Label, while providing helpful hints and suggestions. Once the three mandatory fields are populated, the tool generates your code snippet which simply needs to be placed into your webpage. Using this system reduces the chances that someone will create manual typing errors by enabling an easy copy and paste procedure.

Have more event tracking Do’s and Don’ts to share? Leave a comment below, tweet

 

How to Create Great Landing Pages That Convert

How to Create Landing Pages That Convert

How to Create Landing Pages That Convert

Building an effective landing page that features a form users need to fill out can help any online business skyrocket the amount of business they are able to generate. This makes it one of the most important parts of any website that is looking to create new leads and business from its website’s users. Understanding what goes into a great landing page where users convert can help your business take a good online presence and make it even better by focusing on improving just a single page.

Seeing as one form can be the difference between a successful website and one that is underperforming, a Reddit user wanted to know: “How do I create a landing page that actually converts?” This is a million dollar question that will vary depending on what kind of website you have and what your landing page form is trying to get from your audience. However, I try and discuss some of most important features of any good landing page and how you can help tailor your form fields so that your audience actually fills them out.

To view more of our videos answering questions from around the web and for more information about video marketing, you can check out our other work here. If you have a question that you would like answered, leave it in the comments section below or tweet it at us at @BFMweb.

Transcript

Hey, I’m Dan Morosi from Web Designer Vip. I’m a Senior Marketing Specialist and I’m responsible for the paid media, paid search and display efforts here. We had a question from Reddit – a user asked: “How do you go about making a landing page where people actually convert?”That’s a million dollar question (literally), and there are some obviously basic things that every landing page should have. If you’re using it for paid search and you know exactly which campaign and keywords are going there, obviously those keywords should be used and targeted on that landing page, it should be relevant to what

 

4 Tips to Increase Average Conversion Rate Using CRO

CRO Superhero Featured Image

Conversion rate optimization can be a huge addition to any company’s digital marketing efforts when done correctly. From increasing click through rates and decreasing bounce rates to increasing on site goal completions, conversion rate optimization (or CRO) can play an integral role for your business when it comes to creating a site that performs well.

With so many case studies around the web discussing how companies leveraged CRO to increase overall conversion rates to make more money than ever before, it can be tempting to jump in and test everything on a website without thinking about the goal of such tests. Not everything on a website that can be tested should be tested. Doing that can actually cause more issues for a website than it does to increase a company’s bottom line.

In an effort to make sure that you are testing the right elements of your website, here are 4 tips to correctly use CRO for your business in order to get the most ROI our of your tests:

1. Look at bounce rates

Out of all the metrics to take note of when deciding whether or not a CRO test on an individual page makes sense, bounce rate and exit rate are the most important. Take a look at the pages that have the highest exit rates and compare them with pages that have a low exit rate. It makes sense to leave pages with low exit and bounce rates alone as they are performing as they should be. However, pages with high bounce or exit rates are often the source of lost traffic (note that individual blog posts are clearly exempt from this general rule) and are sensible pages to test if they have large amounts of traffic coming to them.

When analyzing a page with a high bounce or exit rate, ask yourself why this is happening. Often there is content that is missing from the page that audiences were looking for and the page just doesn’t provide it, or they can’t find key navigation elements to take them where they want to go. This means taking a look at key CTAs to make sure they are clear to audiences both in terms of where they are on the page and what kind of copy is featured.

2. Test the Obvious

Headlines and CTAs are the best pieces of a website that you can test as they will ultimately have the biggest effect on user behavior on an individual page. Changing the messaging, color, or size of your headlines or CTA’s are also great ideas for A/B Testing as they are the main focus point for users who are trying to get to the ever-important RAQ or product pages.

By testing elements that your users are going to be using to get through to your key goal completion on a site, you will get to test the most helpful elements that affect your bottom line. Tweak these elements to the point of being blatantly obvious so that users don’t have to guess what they are supposed to do next.

3. Use User Surveys to Inform Your Tests

A great way to make sure that your CRO tests are going to have the biggest impact possible is to understand what users need or are looking for before you even start CRO. Using user surveys or user testing tools is a great way to understand why your website is not performing to its full potential. When using user surveys, make sure to use qualitative questions in order to get the most out of it! Don’t make your questions make the process seem like a net-promoter score survey for users. You want to avoid leading users into simple “yes” or “no” responses, and instead aim to ask open ended questions so that you get specific feedback about what you can do to make your website work better for your audience.

Dive into the responses you get and explore any potential trends in responses that users are giving about your website. If you notice patterns in terms of the feedback suggestions you get from your audience, it makes sense to test them in your CRO tests. This way, you’re sure to be testing things that your audience actually wants or needs instead of basic elements that users might not even be noticing in the current version of a page or website.

4. Don’t Micro Test

Testing little elements on your website one by one is often not beneficial enough for your website and testing timeline (especially if you have low traffic) to be worthwhile. Some websites, like Google, can get away with testing micro-elements because they have millions of people using their site, so it takes them less than a day to get statistical significance on their tests. However, for sites that only get a couple of hundred visitors a day, it could take months to reach statistical significance for tests that don’t provide that much ROI for a business. That’s why it is so important to test only the elements that are going to have a big impact.

The founder of Optimizely and author of A/B Testing, Dan Siroker, states that it’s better to make big drastic changes and test it, instead of small changes. Once you have found a big change that works, you can go back and analyze the next steps of how to optimize that change and understand what worked in order to get the most out of the new element that you’ve found.

Don’t Lose Sight of Your Goals

It can be tempting to wildly test a variety of different parts of your website and justify doing it by telling yourself that regardless of what happens you will have some interesting data that you can repurpose into case studies about what you’re doing or what you found. However, it is important to not lose sight of the whole point of a CRO study, which is to help increase your bottom line by testing elements that you or your users are having trouble using properly. Keep it in perspective and follow the tips I’ve outlined and you’re sure to find new, interesting ways to increase your website’s ROI.

Do you have tips I’ve missed or questions about CRO that you would like addressed? Let me know in the comments section below.

 

How to CRO and Look Good in The Process

CRO Process Featured Image

I was performing conversion rate optimization tests before I even knew what they were. Fresh out of college, I found myself mercilessly pounding the pavement in a quest for my first job. I went on dozens of interviews those first couple of months out of undergrad, all with conversion rates of less than zero.

Wanting success and finding none, I quickly started tweaking aspects of my interview experience to see if any of the changes netted a beneficial impact. Blue tie over red? Open suit jacket versus buttoned? Hair slicked back or parted?

Personal CRO Test
While I never actually wore a tank top and a baseball hat to an interview, I did quickly find that how I dressed to go to my interviews drastically changed my luck in the job market. Just like that – boom. CRO in action. I like to tell myself that eventually the reams of mini data I gathered were enough to land me my first job (or I just got lucky).

When performed correctly and efficiently, CRO tests on your website can net you a variety of benefits, but you’re going to want to make sure you know what you’re doing before you get started. Keeping the following points in mind before running your first tests will drastically help.

#1. Understand What a Conversion is for You

Knowing what constitutes a conversion is the first step, and it is not always as obvious as you might think. Are you tracking placed orders? Newsletter sign-ups? Booked appointments? Examine your site and take stock of every potential action you are asking of a site visitor. Ascertain which is the most important and set that as your main conversion to track.

Once you’ve figured out what a conversion means for your business, examine the steps that users have to take to convert. More often than not it is the buttons, fonts, and colors that users have to navigate with to achieve a conversion that you will want to tweak in order to increase your conversion rate.

#2 Test Multiple Variables at Once

Text color and size, message prominence, form placement, copy positioning and image use are all variables that can have subtle, yet measurable effects on how willing a person is to convert on your site. You’ll want to make sure you test all of these. There are three types of test you can perform:

  • Time-split
  • A/B Tests
  • Multivariate

Time-splits are generally regarded as not efficient, and A/B tests are solid, but don’t provide the wealth of insight multivariate testing offers. You’ll definitely want to test multiple variables at once if you want to make large changes to an entire page – particularly if each individual element you are testing is relatively minor on its own.

There are programs that are great for these types of tasks, namely Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely, and if you’re looking for a free option, Google offers Google Content Experiments as well.

#3 Know What to Do with Your Information

So you run a bunch of tests and gleam lots of useful data for your site. You’re seeing that your conversion rates are improving and your cost per acquisition has dropped, netting you extra budget. What to do now? Use the money you’re saving on other marketing channels or media. Perhaps you can partition off funds to promote yourself via Adwords campaigns, or invest into print or more traditional media. Partner your conversion data with site usability surveys to add a qualitative aspect to your quantitative data. Or, keep performing CRO tests on important variables of your website. There’s always room to improve.

Engaging in CRO tests forces you to take a very hard look at your website and understand exactly what it’s conveying to the world and how the world is responding to it. Whether you’re a start-up with a tiny budget or an established company with decades of experience, the knowledge you gain from these tests can make your website run smoother, provider a better user experience, and net you money!

 

How to Create Stellar Landing Page Copy that Converts

Landing Page Copy Featured Image

No matter how you’ve driven traffic to your landing page, whether through PPC, Social, or Email, it’s essential to create stellar copy that will make your traffic convert. It doesn’t matter what the end-goal conversion is: crisp, catchy, and minimal copy will drive your traffic down the funnel. If your traffic is coming through organically, that’s another story, and we’ll get to that in a bit.

All landing page copy is cobbled out of four distinct parts: the header, where your visitors will immediately learn what you’re offering; the summary, where they’ll learn more about your product; value propositions, where you’ll convince them that your product is better than your competition; and the call to action, or CTA, where they’ll convert.

In all cases, before writing your copy, you have to know who your audience is, which channel the traffic will come through, and what your audience is looking for. Understanding the demographic and expectations of your audience is essential in writing great copy that speaks directly to their intent, converting them quickly.

Your landing page will be the culmination of months of researching your audience through Google Analytics demographics and interests (below), surveying your audience through email or directly on the site, competitor research, and researching the audience specific to the industry you’re promoting.

Audience Interets
While you can still write great landing page copy without this information, it’s best practice to commit substantial time to establish your audience’s identity and needs to result in the highest number of conversions possible.

Our Example

For the sake of this blog post, let’s create an example. Let’s say that your business specializes in B2B payment solutions, providing call centers, mobile payments, and payment processing. Your audience consists of small business owners and utility companies looking to reduce the expense of paper bills and make payments easier. The specific product you’re promoting is a text-based payment system called Text2Pay that reminds customers when payments are due and allows them to pay their bills with a single message.

Let’s also say you’ve written an email blast announcing the new service, which you’ll send to customers who’ve previously requested additional product information. The call to action will have customers download a demo to learn more about the product. Your traffic will funnel through your email, and your landing page will be the conversion point, so we’ll tailor the page for this purpose.

What We Know

We know that the audience has already visited your site, and that they’re interested in payment solutions. Because they provided their email address, they’ve already shown intent, and possibly purchased products in the past. This means that they:

  • Are current or potential customers
  • Are small business or utility company managers
  • Know your brand
  • Have a need for payment solutions

Now that you’ve written your email, determined your audience, and know who will receive it, it’s time to write the page.

Landing Page Header Copy

It all starts with the header, which should tell your visitor immediately what the page is, what it does, and what you want them to do. Any savvy marketer knows that a visitor’s eye is drawn immediately toward the top left corner, making your header the most important part of the page.

We need to tell them immediately what your product does and what it can do for them:

Reduce late payments and paper costs with Text2Pay.

Here we’ve chosen the two most important value propositions for your customers. They’ll save money and reduce missed payments with this new service, and every company likes to save money. In addition, we’ve worked in two reasons why they should try your product as well as the product name in eight words. Because we’ve peaked their curiosity, the next question your customer will have is, “What is Text2Pay?” That’s where the summary will come in.

Landing Page Summary Copy

Here’s where you tell them a little bit more about your product. Generally consisting of 2-3 lines, it should fully encapsulate the product and make it sound like the only option for your customer’s needs. Our goal is to get them down the page, so we have to keep it short, simple, and catchy:

Text2Pay is a text-based payment solution that reduces payment delinquency, providing payment security and convenience for your customers. Remind subscribers when payments are due and receive their payments 24/7. Download your demo today to learn how Text2Pay works for your business.

In three short lines, we’ve repeated the name of the product, added two additional value propositions while underscoring the first, explained how the product works, and told them what the conversion will be. We’ve also worked in the word “subscribers,” cutting out the need for an explanation of the subscription process. We’ll get to that later, explaining the product in detail when the customer converts at the bottom of the page.

Most importantly, we’ve let the customer know what they’re expected to do before they read the value propositions. That way, your customer doesn’t have to decide immediately whether they want to convert. We have a little more time to convince them. Now let’s hammer home what makes this product unique.

Value Propositions

This is where your traffic will learn why your product is better than the competition. It will consist of 4-5 short and unique value propositions, leading the eye down a bulleted list and toward the conversion button. Your customer is now on step three of the process, so we need to get them excited about the opportunity and ready to press that button:

  • Eliminate the expenses of paper bills
  • SMS platform guarantees text message delivery
  • Adheres to FCC regulations for secure processing
  • Payments processed in real time

With these four value propositions, we’ve told them they’ll save money, the service is reliable and secure, and there’s no delay in processing. We’ve positioned this product as a safe and convenient way for customers to pay bills that will save money and result in fewer delinquencies, which is good for the company and the customer. Now we just have to convert them.

Call to Action

Your conversion button should tell your audience what to do next. There’s no need for additional copy here, just a few controlled words to take them to the next step and convert them. While it may be tempting to try something like “Save Money Now” or “Make Payments Easier,” there’s no need to add another value proposition. It not only sounds hokey, but by adding a specific value proposition to the button, you’re focusing the customer on one point in which he or she may not be interested, leading to fewer conversions. It’s best to go with something simple and elegant that tells the story, in this case something like:

Download Your Demo

By clicking the button, your customers will download a demo that gives an in-depth explanation of the product and features. Congratulations, you’ve begun converting your customers and selling more products.

A Note on Organic Landing Pages

Landing Page Optimization
While this post focuses specifically on paid and email traffic, the same rules apply for organic landing pages. The biggest difference is that these pages exist as an island outside of your website, and don’t need to conform to the standards and format of other pages. Generally, this is the only page your customer will see before they convert, so you’re able to optimize it for conversions however you wish.When writing organic landing pages, they must exist on your site as a natural extension of your content and theme. Generally, organic landing pages are longer and more in depth, as your customer will visit them by navigating through other pages. They haven’t yet displayed the intent of paid and email visitors, and will take additional time, copy, and value propositions to convert.

For more help with writing great copy for your business check out our copywriting page. If you have any questions or comments about creating great landing page copy, let us know

 

Expert Tips on How To Increase Click Through Rate on Emails

how-to-increase-click-through-rates

Nearly all industries and businesses use email marketing as a way to reach their audience. And it’s no wonder why–as email users, most of us are constantly connected, checking our inbox on desktops and mobile devices multiple times a day. By reaching users on devices that are just a touch or click away, marketers hold a major advantage if this initiative is properly utilized and appropriately implemented.

email_marketing_industry

Email allows you to draw attention to any specific asset of your business. Whether you’re trying to drive immediate sales, remind users of an event, or bring traffic to a distinct page on your website, email marketing is often the best way to do so.If you have significant value to offer users, then the advantages of email marketing may seem endless. However, as a platform it won’t be effective if the message isn’t being opened or clicked on. In order for email marketing to be a successful channel, and for your click-through-rate to be significant enough to produce results, apply as many best practices as you can to your efforts.

We’ve asked some top digital marketing experts at our digital agency for insights, and have looked to outside experts at some top organizations to find out what their best tips are for producing emails with high click-through-rates:

1. Customer Logic

Bryan Clayton, CEO at Greenpal, points out the worth of thinking about your audience when you’re crafting emails, and suggests asking people unfamiliar with the content for feedback on how it reads:

“The biggest mistake we were making when crafting our emails was that we were using company logic as opposed to customer logic. You really need to put yourself in the mind of your customer when crafting your emails. Run your email copy by friends, and strangers. Get feedback because it’s so challenging to get out of your own skin.”

-Bryan Clayton, CEO, Greenpal

2. Timing Matters

Finding the best time to send emails to individual users will provide the best results. Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager at Blue Fountain Media, explains the importance of segmenting contacts with consideration for timing:

“While there are some standard times that are widely considered the ‘best’ to send emails based on vertical and email type, you should try and go beyond just finding the best time to send for most of your users and aim to send at the best possible time for each individual on your contact list. For example, if you find that most people like to open emails at 9 am, it isn’t enough to just send an email at 9 am Eastern Standard Time and call it a day. Use the information you’ve gathered in your lists to try and segment your contacts down by time zone – that way you can send to each person at 9 am in their local time. Some mailing platforms will do this for you automatically as a final step before you send – but if your email service provider doesn’t include this it can be as simple as using phone numbers or city data to figure out what state a contact is in and then adding a new time zone field manually. It can be a lot of tiring manual work, but higher open rates and better results make it more than worth it.”

-Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager, Blue Fountain Media

3. Think About Individual Users

It’s important to have relevant messaging, and an understanding of your users at a 1-to-1 level explains Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing at Boomtrain. Then you can deliver only the most targeted content for that individual person:

“As email marketers, we must look to reaching the mythical segment of 1. No audiences, just individual people seeking more personal user experiences. But how do you do this? Previously thought a near impossible task, now, (thanks to machine intelligence), marketers have the opportunity to massively scale and automate not only the actual building of the emails, but the collection and processing of data that surfaces an understanding of the behavior of your subscribers/customers and a deep understanding of your content/products. This coupling of multiple layers of understanding with automation gives marketers tools that predictively populate emails with content most relevant to that individual person, and will deliver it to them at an optimal time. Powerful computers and algorithms have evolved so much that marketers are now able to distribute relevant emails as if sent by a close friend who has known that individual for years.”

-Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing, Boomtrain

4. Quality over Quantity

Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing at Get Smart Marketing explains that sending emails to a ton of leads that aren’t necessarily qualified is far less effective than sending to a smaller, qualified group:

“As a marketer, it is your goal to influence a consumer’s purchase decisions. Email is a powerful tool that helps marketers connect with consumers, delivering them useful and relevant content right to their inbox. So, it seems logical that the more people you can contact, the better your chances are at sending qualified leads to sales. However, more doesn’t always mean better. Adding unqualified leads to your nurture campaigns, won’t help close more sales. Grow your email list the smarter way by serving personalized sign up forms only to visitors who haven’t opted in and that fit within one of your target audience personas.”

-Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing, Get Smart Content

5. Code Images

Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate at Blue Fountain Media suggests always defining your image sizes in your coding, and labeling them with alt image tags for the best user-experience:

BFM_Email
“If your images don’t render in your clients’ email platform, your email will display as an assortment of random white boxes and could come across as spam. By having the image sizes defined with alt image tags in your coding, it ensures that the layout of your email will retain its shape without being jumbled together and your alt tag images will explain and help identify what each white box is. This does not seem like a huge difference to you, but putting in the extra effort can be the decisive factor that might sway your clients to load those images and actually read and react to your email.”

-Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate, Blue Fountain Media

6. Align Content with the Buyer Process

Aligning content with the buying cycle is crucial for every company and should be a focus of any successful email marketing campaign. Troy O’Bryan, CEO at Response Capture explains how organizations should consider where the user is in the buying process when crafting their emails:

ACT_Model

“Each stage of the A.C.T. (Awareness, Consideration, Transaction) Model represents a different part of their journey and the content should be reflective. For example, if a prospect visits the “request a demo” page on your website, they are already in the Consideration stage. A case study or expert guide would be great content for your follow-up email strategy. By tailoring the content to fit the wants and needs of the buyer, they will be more likely to respond because you are providing something of value.”-Troy O’Bryan, CEO, Response Capture

7. What’s the CTA?

Having a strong Call-To-Action allows marketers to encourage users to take a desired action that brings them further into the conversion funnel. Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder at Targeting Mantra suggests making the CTA of your email your core focus:

“Marketers should focus on the CTA that goes with the email. Whether it is a template or a simple HTML message, your email focus should be on the CTA you are including in the mail. This is because you have just 1-8 seconds to catch the attention of the reader and you should be able to direct the reader in split seconds what you want him/her to do.”

-Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder, Targeting Mantra

8. Testing

Like all other marketing tactics, in order to understand what’s going to resonate best with your users and what types of email messages they’re most likely to open and click through, you need to do some testing. Jeff Tomlin, CMO of Vendasta Technologies highlights the importance of this in his tip:

“Get them into the email. First, you’ve got to get people to open the email and they choose in milliseconds whether to do so or to delete based only on who sent it what the subject line is. So make both count. Remember, emails coming from a person usually perform better than those coming from an entity. And while there are plenty of guidelines on creating open-worthy subject lines, if you’re looking for the BEST subject line, you need to test. Test. Test. And, you got it, test.”

-Jeff Tomlin, CMO, Vendasta Technologies

9. Videos

Owner at The Media Captain says his team has had great success with embedding videos in their email marketing, and suggests using it as an opportunity to engage users in a way that many companies don’t:

“When you mention “video” in the title it typically has a higher open rate percentage. We will then embed the video within the email blast and when people click on it, it drives them to a landing page specific to the email marketing message that we’re delivering.”

-Jason Parks, Owner, The Media Captain

10. Build Consistent Confidence

If you’re not delivering in content, you likely will not be converting clicks. Owen Powis, Founder and CEO of Mailflow, stresses the importance of instilling confidence in your users:

“Focus on creating the best possible experience, and people will click when they have confidence that the email will contain something they want to see. If they know when you send them an offer it’s always a great offer they are far more likely to check it out. The more effort you put into creating a fantastic campaign that genuinely benefits your audience the better your CTR will become. This is a far healthier and longer term strategy than just looking at making the subject line stand out.”

-Owen Powis, Founder and CEO, Mailflow

Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best marketing tactics for reaching an audience, and boosting a brand’s ROI. To understand if your efforts are paving the way for your business, take a look at your key performance indicators and examine your open-rates and click-through-rates to identify areas of improvement. If you’d like to enhance the overall performance of your email marketing, and increase your click-through-rates, incorporate some of our experts’ ideas throughout your next campaign.

 

10 Advantages of Social Media Marketing for Your Business

Advantages of Social Media

Social media marketing is a highly valued element of any decent marketing strategy. The benefits of using social media marketing are so great, that anyone not implementing the cost-effective marketing resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity.

According to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers claim that social media marketing is important for their business, with another 80% stating that their efforts increased traffic to their websites. It’s easy to see that social media marketing is definitely making waves in the marketing field and many marketers report realizing the potential for business growth, however they are unsure of the best method.

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Social Media Examiner states that 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media, but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use. There seems to be some uncertainty when it comes to social media marketing. With our help, we will diminish the confusion by thoroughly explaining the best ways to use social media to market your business.

There are an immense amount of benefits of using social media to market your business. We’ve chosen 10 to highlight:

1. Increased Brand Recognition

Social media marketing is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods to syndicate your content and increase your business visibility. Implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition because your business will be reaching such a broad audience of consumers. To get started, create social media profiles for your business and begin networking. Have employees, partner businesses, sponsors, your mother, anyone “like” and “share” your business content on social media. Simply having content “liked” and “shared” makes your business more visible to new consumers which will lead to retaining customers. The more people who know about your business, the better – and social media is a fantastic outlet for showing people what your business is about. Social media marketing increases any businesses’ ROI (return on investment).

2. Improved Brand Loyalty

According to a report by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. Social media creates the perfect environment for brands to communicate with their consumers and create a bond of brand loyalty. The report proves that brands who communicate with their customers on social media obtain higher levels of customer loyalty.

The millennial consumer generation is known for being the most brand loyal generation of all. The millennial generation is the largest generation in US history – born between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s – and will soon completely consume the market. Studies show that the millennial consumer generation is 80% more likely to use a brand again if they are pleased with their first purchase. With these technology natives requiring communication between themselves and their brands, businesses must implement social media marketing to catch the eye of the most influential consumer.

3. More Opportunities for Conversion

The more visibility your business has, the better. Every blog post, image, video, or comment may lead viewers to your company website, providing the opportunity for traffic conversion. Social media marketing allows your business to give a positive impression. If a viewer comes across your content and has no need for your products or services, the consumer is more likely to think of your business when the need arises.

4. Higher Conversion Rates

There are several ways social media marketing results in higher conversion rates, the most prominent is its humanization factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it personifies a brand. People prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies.

Studies have also shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. When a brand is interactive on social media, consumers who follow your brand’s social media accounts often gain more trust for your brand and view your business as more credible. People use social media platforms to stay connected to their friends, family, and communities. Since people are already talking, why not throw your brand into the mix? More likely than not, they’ll mention your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed, overall providing your business with social proof of its quality. Putting your brand in an atmosphere where people are sharing, liking, and talking, can only improve the conversion rates on your existing traffic.

5. More Brand Authority

When consumers see your business posting on social media – a marketing strategy that only top businesses use – it makes your business appear more credible. Interacting with your customers frequently demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that customers might pose. When a satisfied customer wants to spread the word about a great product or service they received from your business, they often turn to social media (especially if social media is the platform where they heard about your business in the first place). Having authentic customers mentioning your business on social media will advertise your business to an even broader audience. The average person has over 300 friends on Facebook, that’s 300 more people that will hear about your business if they scroll through their news feed.

6. Increased Inbound Traffic

Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. The people familiar with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. You’ll have much more difficulty reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle (if you have loyal customers) without social media marketing. Every social media profile you add to your marketing mix (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc.) is a gateway to your website, and every piece of content you post is another opportunity to acquire a new customer. Social media is a melting pot of different types of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and no two people have the same profile. With different people come different needs and different ways of thinking. Perhaps someone in an older demographic of consumers will search your website for the same keywords, however a millennial generation consumer could think totally differently. By marketing on social media, you are opening your business to versatile consumers all over the world.

7. Cost-Effective

Social media marketing is the most cost-efficient advertising strategy. Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can sit back and let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.

According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found that as little as 6 hours a week spent on social media marketing efforts saw a benefit of reduced marketing expenses. Even paid advertising through Facebook and Twitter is the cheapest form of marketing compared to other methods. If paid advertising on social media is the way you decide to go, you can always start small and watch your conversion rates rise, which will pay off the money you initially put in.

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8. Better Search Engine Rankings (SEO)

Search engine ranking is very important for obtaining traffic to your business website. More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings. Ranking in the top positions in SEO for your keywords will revolutionize your traffic. Let’s face it, everyone uses Google to find information, and they likely won’t click “Next Page” because they don’t have to, they’ll find the answer within the first URLs they click on. If your business website isn’t ranked high in search engine results, you should probably adjust your marketing strategy.

Although posting on social media might get your business some site traffic, more is required to succeed at social media marketing. First, you must create high quality content. Content such as blogs, infographics, facts, advertising your products or services, employee photos and events, and much more will make your business’s social media profile intriguing and credible. Once you begin posting quality content, you’ll begin to build a social media community. Your followers will “like” and “share” your content, which will give your business more visibility, however it is about quality over quantity. An engaged community is more likely to link to you, which will make your website rank higher in search engine results. Social media can be used to publish your content in order to obtain more links to your webpages, which will rank you higher in search engine results.

9. Overall Better Customer Experience

Social media is a networking and communication platform. Every customer interaction with your business on social media is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your compassion for your customers. Whether a customer has a complaint you can address, or a compliment to give, social media allows you to address the matter in an interpersonal dialogue. A brand devoted to customer satisfaction that takes the time to compose personal messages will inherently be viewed in a positive light, even if responding to a customer complaint.

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10. Improved Customer Insights

Hubspot reported that 69% of marketers found social platforms provided market place insights. Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in. By monitoring comments, you can see customers’ blunt opinions of your business that you might not be aware of if your business didn’t have social media presence.

Another insightful aspect of social media marketing is the ability to segment your content syndication lists based on topic and identify what types of content generate the most interest and then produce more of that type of content. With social media marketing you have the ability to measure conversions based on different posts on various social media platforms to find the perfect combination to generate revenue.

Now Get Started

Still don’t know where to start? First, create your business’s social media profiles, next, post engaging content, gain some links to your webpages (which will improve your keyword search engine optimization), and boom: you’ve got yourself a functioning social media marketing strategy.

There are virtually no reasons not to implement social media marketing into your marketing strategy. Your competition is most likely already on social media. Don’t let your competitors hog the playing field. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see growth in your business. There is no reason not to market on social media when the potential losses are statistically insignificant.

The longer you wait, the more time you’re losing, the less traffic you’ll receive, and the less customers you will retain. Check out Web Designer Vip’s social media marketing strategy to get started right away.