Author: yarra

Businesses that use analytics and data effectively in their marketing strategies demonstrate higher productivity and profitability rates (up to 5-6% higher than those who don’t!).

Data marketing has been shown to have a positive impact on:

• Marketing budget management
• Competitive advantage
• Focus on the user experience
• A More Personalized Lead Nurturing Process
• Creating Better Buyer Personas
• Providing better content
• Number of marketing opportunities
• Audience knowledge and understanding

Having a data driven approach at the heart of your digital marketing strategy can increase your chances of overall success.

So how do you utilise data to your advantage, and where do you source this data from?

External vs internal data

There is usually a rather strong focus on data sourced from external sources such as audience and consumer feedback and surveys to implement into digital marketing strategies, however the importance of internally sourced data should never be downplayed.

Most staff in your agency will already have expert knowledge which they regularly provide to clients, so realistically you should benefit from consulting them for your own business. No one knows your business better than in-house staff, so they can provide extremely valuable insights to inform their marketing strategy. In this sense, feedback from your staff can be as valuable as that of consumers.

With all the knowledge and expertise right within reach, you don’t need to look too far for quality data.

Step 1: Identify goals

The first step to any successful strategy is setting out goals. Ensure your goals meet the SMART criteria (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound) so you don’t waste any time with goals that are irrelevant or too difficult to achieve.

Without first knowing your goals, you won’t know what kind of data you will need in order to be helpful to your digital marketing strategy. It’s also really important that every individual in your team is clear on these goals.

Step 2: Identify what kind of data you need

Depending on what your goals are, the type of data you need would vary from business to business, however there are 5 types of data you should fundamentally be focusing on in market research:

• The target market
• Strengths and weakness of competition
• The development of pricing strategy
• Similar products or services
• Best platform/location for your product/service

Based on your individual strategy, this could serve as either a starting point or an expansion of the kind of data you will be gathering from the expertise of your team members.

Step 3: Identify the expertise in the room

Now that you have established your goals, you should ask yourself what kind of knowledge is already at your disposal.

For example, If the goal is to increase customer satisfaction, then you want to have exhaustive information about the consumer’s behaviour and experience. First party data collected from consumers through online experience surveys is often used to provide high quality insights into consumer behaviour. However this data can also be obtained through team members with expertise in audience research. They might already have some pre-existing knowledge about your audience, based on data they have collected and they could have some really valuable prior experience.

Is there any data you can source from your team that you can’t find anywhere else? The answer is: most likely. Every business is different, and no one knows yours better than those who work in it. That’s some insightful data that no consumer survey will be able to give you.

Step 4: Interact with your team

Just like you should be open and interactive with an audience, there is a lot to be gained by just having a chat with your team. As experts in their field, they should know better than anyone what issues are arising and what they think should be improved, so make sure you’re open to feedback.

It’s always a good idea to have a good channel of communication with your team. If your team is feeling more important and involved in your processes, they’re more likely to be more willing to provide positive input.

Step 5: Rework your goals and strategy

Now that you have collected all the data from your team, you can begin to rework your digital marketing strategy. This probably means that you also need to change your KPIs to suit the extra information you’re incorporating into the strategy.

Step 6: Continue to improve

A great digital marketing strategy is an ongoing process, and there will always be something you need to change and improve.

Get your team members to regularly review their own digital marketing experience, brainstorming ideas for future digital marketing strategies.

Stay on top by ensuring communication with your team is always open, so there will always be an abundant supply of data for future strategies.

Make a plan, but never set anything in stone. The digital world is constantly evolving, and so should your strategy!

This was brought to you by Matter Solutions. Matter Solutions are experts in digital marketing with over 15 years of experience in SEO and Web design.

Apparently the jury is now IN and the ubiquitous banner slider that appears on almost every small business website – including mine –  is now OUT! 

“What the devil!” did I hear you just shout? “But everyone who’s anyone has a slider!”

Well no, apparently us interweb users just tune that slider stuff out because we know it’s crap and not worth looking at. While I haven’t performed the experiments and crunched the data myself, here are the thoughts of a whole collection of tuned in people who have, and what they reckon.

Your nifty banner is totally ignored!

Marketing Land says banner sliders kill conversions. Even though we humans have evolved to look at things in motion before anything else, we have now adapted to the notion that anything that moves on a website is likely to be an advertisement and we are literally blind to it! Nielsen eye tracking studies confirm that users totally ignore anything that even remotely looks like an ad, which includes your lovely rotating banner.

Marketing Land assert that people are on your website to find some particular tidbit of information and scroll right past your banner in their quest to find that info. The banner takes up too much valuable real estate because ‘above the fold’ really does matter.

Your banner is frustrating coz it changes slides too fast.

Instapage (and others) point out that sliders that move too fast without the ability to pause or control them creates frustration for your peeps. Slow that mofo down so we can read it!

Your banner sucks coz we can’t control it.

Conversion XL points out that most sliding banners don’t allow the user to navigate the slides and the user will lose trust in your website when they can’t control what’s going on. If your visitors lose trust with you then they are less likely to buy from you.

Don’t believe me? Checkout these sites with no sliding banners:

Microsoft

Neil Patel

Uber

Does anyone even look at your banner slider?

Checkout your Google Analytics reports to see if your banner has been clicked on. Sign in to your analytics account then select Behavior > In-Page Analytics. I would love to show you a screenshot of my own but I just found out I had crappy old analytics code that now needs replacing. I’ll come back in a month and do so.

Wait… maybe I’m wrong, maybe sliders are awesome?

Hmm, why does Apple, the world’s most valuable company use a sliding banner on their homepage? Look:

If the world’s biggest company is still using a slider then how can they be wrong? Let’s break down what they are doing:

1. Each slide shows for four seconds – enough time to see the damn thing.
2. Each slide has very little text, only 3 words in fact. Easy enough to read in the time given.
3. Each slide has good navigability; arrows on either side and a slide “menu” at the bottom.
4. The banner stops sliding on mouse hover and on using the navigation. In fact it stops sliding the moment you interact with it.
5. The slides are simple, one offer on each slide showing one product type.

Also, have you noticed what’s beneath the slider? Basically nuthin, just a few links. So there is really nothing else to look at other than slider.

I would venture if you want to use a banner slider then follow the above rules set by Apple. Here’s the screenshot again with the rules:

1. The entire checkout process is on one page

Many online stores will direct the user through multiple pages of a checkout, one for billing details, one for shipping details, one for card details etc.

Every time you make a user load a new page it creates a chance for that user to drop out of your checkout process. Keeping the entire form on one page in expandable sections eliminates the need for the user to load pages and increases their chances of becoming a customer.

2. Last minute doubts are eased with a live chat widget and a link to the returns policy

Nike have eased last minute purchasing fears by including a live chat widget and a link to their returns policy. Just think, if a brand as big as Nike feels the need to build this kind of trust and ease last minute doubts then what does your unknown brand have to do? At least as much as Nike.

3. Show a cart summary

Have your customers forgotten what’s in their cart? Perhaps they can’t remember what size they chose or if they selected lilac or mauve? Don’t make them click the back button to find out, or even worse, start the shopping process again.

Do as Nike have done, and include a summary including the selected product image showing the colour, size, quantity and any other relevant information.

The only thing Nike didn’t need to add to this is the style number (#708336) as it means nothing to the user. Remember, only show details here that are relevant to the customer.

4. High contrast colours for ‘call to actions’

The “Place Order” button is very bright orange against a plain white background and can’t be missed by the users. Make sure all your call to actions are obvious and unmistakable. If people aren’t sure where they are supposed to click then your store will lose sales.

5. Security logo shown for secure payments

Nike show the Norton secure payments logo to ease concerns over security fraud. If Nike feels the need to show this to their customers then you do to.

As an e-commerce retailer, you want to make it as easy as possible for your users to navigate from your homepage to purchasing the product they want.

Each click in your purchasing process is a hurdle that separates you from your user’s money. Your aim must be to streamline that process to as few clicks as possible.

In this post I analyse four top online retailers; Nike, ASOS, Amazon and  Zara to see exactly how many clicks are required for a user to purchase a t-shirt on each of these sites.

Nike – 7 clicks to purchase

Nike beats the competition with only seven clicks required to make a purchase, shown as follows:

• Click 1 – Homepage with a mega menu linking directly to the desired product category.
• Click 2 – Product category page for t-shirts.
• Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
• Click 4 – Add to cart, which then shows a beautiful pop-up of the item in my cart and an option to checkout, see the screenshot below:

• Click 5 – Checkout
• Click 6 – Enter shipping details with an option to copy the info to the billing details fields.
• Click 7 – Enter credit card details and purchase.

An extremely streamlined, uncluttered process with only seven clicks from the homepage to purchasing the product makes Nike the e-commerce winner.

(Check out my next post to see a review of Nike’s awesome checkout page).

ASOS – 9 clicks to purchase

ASOS is one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers, worth over two and a half Billion pounds, or roughly five billion USD, so they should know a thing or two about selling products online. However, they’re purchasing process involves two more step than Nike’s, and goes as follows:

• Click 1 – Homepage showing mega menu to product categories (like Nike).
• Click 2 – Product category page (t-shirts).
• Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
• Click 4 – Add to cart button which reveals cart pop up, Like Nike’s but messier, see screenshot:

• Click 5 – Pay Now.
• Click 6 – This is where ASOS loses points, by insisting the user creates an account before they can complete their purchase. See screenshot:

• Click 7 – Billing & delivery details.
• Click 8 – Enter credit card details. They also lose points here as I should be able to complete the purchase from this step.
• Click 9 – Confirm and pay.

In my opinion, ASOS has two unnecessary steps for the user to take in their purchasing process, which are forcing users to login to create an account and then another step after submitting their credit card details to confirm and pay…..silly sausages.

I wonder what the user drop off rates at each of these two steps are?

Amazon – 10 clicks to purchase

According to the Economist magazine, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and accounts for a mind boggling 5% of the USA’s total retail sales – both offline & online.

This makes Amazon the world’s best online shop with the world’s best e-commerce store.

However!

Buying t-shirts from Amazon.com is a clunky ten step process. Admittedly, Amazon’s product range is a billion times the size of Nike’s or anyone elses, so we would expect them to have more ‘layers’ in their shop, but I still found the process messy and clunky.

Here it is:

• Click 1 – Homepage with a product search bar.
• Click 2 – Product category page (t-shirts).
• Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
• Click 4 – Add to cart. By the way, after I’ve added my product to the cart, look at the amount of sheisser on the page. So distracting with a myriad of offers competing for my attention:

• Click 5 – Proceed to checkout.
• Click 6 – A page insisting you sign in.
• Click 7 – Enter delivery details.
• Click 8 – Choose shipping options.
• Click 9 – Choose payment method.
• Click 10 – Purchase.

Zara – 11 clicks to purchase

According to Wikipedia Zara is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer and the main brand of the Inditex group, the world’s largest apparel retailer. Zara had revenues of almost 12 billion euros in 2015.

I found their online purchasing process far longer than it could be and there is some obvious low hanging fruit to be applied to make it easier to buy their clothes online.

The process goes:

• Click 1 – Homepage but with no mega menu showing product categories, I can only click on the “man” link to go to all products for men.
• Click 2 – All products for men (such an unnecessary step!)
• Click 3 – Product category for t-shirts.
• Click 4 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
• Click 5 – Add to basket.
• Click 6 – See shopping bag.
• Click 7 – Cart page, continue to checkout.
• Click 8 – Login or create a new account – again unnecessary.
• Click 9 – Enter contact details and choose a shipping method.
• Click 10 – Choose payment method
• Click 11 – Enter credit card details and finalise the order.

11 clicks is just too many. As a comparison, this is almost 60% more clicks than Nike’s purchasing process. Imagine the increase in conversions on Zara if they streamlined this process down to seven clicks!

The bottom line is if you’re setting up or optimising an e-commerce store, take a look at how Nike make their purchasing process as simple as possible with a minimal number of clicks required to go from the homepage to purchasing an item.