#who on the ux team thought it was a good idea to remove the search rumble feature from the users main page

[psalm420]

no offense but the iOS tumble update really wack

[clarencenicholsonata]

10 Best Brand Management Tools To Improve Your eCommerce CRO

Most eCommerce shoppers are open to buying more than the product they originally came to your site for. But you will only be able to tempt customers to add a few extra bargains to their basket if your site is optimized for conversion.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) increases the number of visitors to a site that will ultimately make a purchase, or carry out any action you want them too.

The average CRO for sites is around 2.35%, which equates to around 1 in 40 visitors. If you can improve that percentage you could increase your CRO by 3-5 times.

Intriguing, right?

With those dollar signs in your eyes, it’s about time you took a closer look at your CRO. Instead of providing long-term strategies that will help but will take some time, here are some shortcuts instead: the 10 best brand management tools that will help you improve CRO.

1.Wishpond

If you are a startup company with limited budget, then you will understand the importance of choosing tools wisely. If you need a tool that will help your CRO in more ways than one, Wishpond is an excellent choice.

As Wishpond states themselves, they can give you everything to grow your business. Some of the key features which are particularly important in improving CRO are the abandoned cart emails, which can help recover sales, pop-ups to convert more traffic on your website, and an advanced lead management tool that can help you effectively target your best leads.

2. Paperform’s Quiz Maker

If you really want to improve conversion, especially in relation to social media, then you need to work on engagement.

Ever thought about making quizzes for your audience? This might not be such an obvious choice but Paper Form’s quiz maker helps brands customize questions and quiz design using stylish forms.

People love to quiz themselves, so publishing a few head-scratching questions should direct even more web traffic to your site.

Quizzes are particularly great for fashion eCommerce sites, as personalization quizzes can inspire shoppers to find new clothes and trends that match their style. Most industries can use quizzes in this way; simply put a few personality questions to customers and then show them which products match them best.

3. Latana

Consumers purchase from companies where they feel a connection with their brand. And to improve CRO through branding, a company needs analytics where they can gain useful insights into how their target audience feels about their brand.

Latana is AI-powered brand tracking software that provides regular insightful insights that will go deep into your brand.

All you need to do is indicate which target audience, brands, and markets you’re interested in analyzing, and then the software will do the rest. What’s most important here is that Latana shows you how your target audience converts through the brand funnel.

It will help you recognize where things are going right, pain points, and, thanks to the comparison function, understand how the competition is performing with the same audience.

4. AB Tasty

You need to know that your customers are having a good experience when dealing with your brand. If they aren’t, they won’t convert and will ultimately migrate to your competitors in search of a better and easier experience.

Once you’ve launched your website and eCommerce platform, there’s no way of knowing how the overall experience is for web users unless you test it yourself.

AB Tasty is a tool for marketing and production teams that gives them the chance to test and optimize the customer environment.

Using its server-side experimentation and AI-powered personalization, you can get to grips with your brand’s user experience and ensure it’s up to scratch. That means customers will easily find the products they’re after and there’s a far smaller chance of them getting frustrated with your site and going off to competitor brands.

5. Brand Mentions

Hashtag marketing is one of the newest ways to increase conversion rates, with studies showing that posts with relevant hashtags resulted in a 70.14% increase in likes compared to those without hashtags. All it involves is some careful monitoring of social channels. After this initial monitoring, you can use the data collected to analyze what all those whisperings mean and how you can use them to improve CRO.

No doubt you already have a social media presence and are using hashtags, but are you analyzing results for better conversion?

Brand Mention’s hashtag tracker gives you the chance to monitor your hashtags to see how they’re doing. It’s also super simple to track trending tags to see which ones are the most relevant for your brand to join in with.

For instance, if you follow all of the latest viral tags, you might notice one that suits your brand and that your audience is interacting with. Jumping on board this kind of hashtag could quickly raise your profile amongst those in your target audience. They might not have seen any of your previous marketing or branding before, so here’s one extra way to target them.

Ready to start automating your email marketing campaigns?

Book a free call to learn how our team of marketing experts can help you to create high converting email marketing campaigns today.

6. Mouseflow

If your brand is having a hard time converting web users, then Mouseflow could be the missing piece of your puzzle.

This tool lets you see users’ behavior by replaying the entire customer experience on your site. You’ll be able to see any sticking points that are preventing conversions. This will take all the guesswork out of figuring out what’s hindering your conversion rate, such as Javascript errors and broken navigation, so you’ll have a clear idea of how to optimize.

7. Ethnio

When it comes to testing your brand’s UX experience, testing on your target audience is the way to go, as this will show you what the people who you’re aiming your brand at will think about your site.

If they have an easy time navigating around and quickly find what they’re looking for, then there’s a strong chance they’ll convert and make a purchase.

If you struggle to find the right people for your tests, it’s a good idea to sign up to Ethnio, which does all the research recruiting for UX testers. So you and your team can focus on setting up tests and analyzing data rather than getting caught up with who is actually taking part!

8. WebEngage

Conversion rates increase significantly with personalized pages. WebEngage knows that personalized communications are key in bringing new customers on board and can help you get yours just right.

From creating contextual campaigns to improving engagement through push notifications and in-app messages, there are numerous ways to use this creative tool.

WebEngage also features a brilliant analytics section, so you will be able to see insights into which personalization efforts are working and which could do with going back to the drawing board.

After using this tool, you and your whole marketing team should come away with a very clear idea of how to keep your audience as engaged as possible!

9. Woopra

Knowledge is power when it comes to CRO. With this in mind, it’s worth signing up to use Woopra. The team at Woopra know that sifting through data and analytics can be super time-consuming, so they’ve created this efficient tool that does all the hard work for you.

Tracking and unifying brand data is made easier than before, and this can then be used to analyze the customer journey, retention, segmentation, and so many other useful aspects of your eCommerce campaigns.

Once you’ve got this snapshot of data, you’ll see your conversion rate clearly and will see the best ways to increase engagement and CRO, whether that’s buying a product, downloading a PDF, or subscribing to a newsletter.

10.Hotjar

Hotjar analyzes your site without giving you any confusing numbers. Instead, it’ll serve you up a website heatmap so you can instantly see which parts of the site are popular with web users.

Used by marketers, product teams, and UX designers, this tool cleverly removes any guessing and badly interpreted data.

Hotjar can also show you where, if anywhere, customers drop off along your funnel. Tightening the overall sales funnel will help move consumers along the process, easily transforming them from web user to customer.

All of these tools make the process of CRO easy. You’ll find they massively reduce the man-hours of manually combing the web for data and then picking through it to analyze.

Once you’ve worked on the CRO, you’ll then find that web users become active customers and sales start to increase. A good CRO means you’ll end up spending less to get those sales, too.

Final Thoughts

So, what’s next? First of all, have another scan through this list of brand management tools to see which could be the best bet for your site and CRO efforts.

Take a look with your team to get their input too. After all, they’ll be the ones that are actually working with these tools.

Most in this list feature free trials, so you might want to try before you buy. During the trial, you’ll see exactly how the tool works and whether the benefits will work both for website commerce and your overall CRO. Once you’ve test-driven a few, see which provides you the most bang for your buck.

When you do notice an improvement in your eCommerce CRO, don’t just stop there. Continued efforts will prevent any future dips and will see your site become incredibly efficient in converting web traffic into sales.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230801 https://ift.tt/2EisEdt via IFTTT

[uxkick-blog]

The Top Six Good Website Design Examples

In our previous article, we have outlined what is a good experience along with giving reference to handpicked best websites illustrating the specific principles of good UX Design, from simplicity to gamification. In this article, we have compiled a list of top six good website design examples that would give you a first-hand experience.

It was Albert Einstein who said; “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often misreported as being; “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it well enough.” what Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “Keep it simple, stupid”. You know a good website when you see it. But what is it exactly that makes it so good? Whether it is design aesthetics, usability, interactivity, or a value that site provides, each one is a masterpiece that is inspired by in the specific industry. Below is the list, We found Top Six Good Website Design Examples whose designs are simple, unique and worth learning from. As you browse through the list, each website excels in its own way and seeks through serving its own purpose. While one site may be a great visual design, another website can be an excellent example of interactivity. This means not all the websites fit your industry, business that you can easily copy to your website.  Rather, they’re a great way to gain some website design inspirations and see the cutting edge user experience that happens across the web industry.

Google: Powerful, Super Fast Since 1997

Fast loading has always been a priority for Google since its inception. Being fast and efficient helps users get what they want without waiting. The first thing we have to understand is that Google does not search the internet when a user submits the query but it searches its an index of the internet which makes the search infinitely faster. For example, when you hit the term “UX design” into Google search box, it returns about 600 million results in about 0.87 seconds which makes it efficient too.

Mailchimp: Humanizing Technology

Mailchimp gives their platform a face of a chimp, their mascot named Frederick von chimpenheimer IV or Freddie for short pops up throughout their web interface adding humor, emotional connection with their users which is one of the aspects of good user experience. This humanization of technology adds fun to the otherwise dull and boring experience of managing your email marketing campaigns. The Mailchimp becomes more like a team member and less like a marketing automation platform to get your email marketing done.

Duolingo:  Tearing Down Roadblocks

Learning any new language is challenging and overwhelming too, Duolingo is a language learning platform that pours gamification into your learning. Its lessons adapt to your learning style, Exercises are tailored to help you learn and review vocabulary effectively. Contrary to its competitors which have a rough and rigid signup process by deciding on a plan, pay before actually getting started. Each of these steps adds friction to the users, causing users to drop out of the process.

Airbnb: Holiday Lets, Homes, Experiences and Places

The user interface of Airbnb does two things exactly well: booking a place to stay and creating trust between two complete strangers. The home page makes it easy for the user to get started with the booking. The listing page is complete with a description of any additional fees that make it straightforward for any user. The “Request to book” button sits right under this, being one of the brightest buttons on the page, invites users to click in order to finalize their booking. Airbnb has clearly thought out its copy and used engaging photos and videos to ensure that the interface conveys an emotional tone that helps create a sense of trust between strangers.

Dropbox: File storage and sharing are just the beginning

Dropbox has one of the most easily understandable interfaces by far, Having a file and folder organizational structure is easily recognizable for an average computer user. In terms of learnability, there is nothing too new to learn, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping files from your desktop to dropbox interface because of familiarity. Dropbox friendly personality, created by lighthearted illustrations, helps the user feel familiar while using it. There is so much attention to detail, sequenced with color palettes, animated icons and wonderful illustrations that it manages to come across experimental, creative and consistent. Check it out! 

Zara: An ode to Hicks Law

A design principle that limits navigation choice and gives the user clear but restricted options. Zara’s website is a masterclass in simplicity, clean, intuitive and limited. The design idea behind it is that too many options will overwhelm your users. By offering fewer options, they feel confident and its navigation is also considered to be one of the best among eCommerce websites.

Conclusion: These are just a few of our favorite Good Website Design Examples. Creating a usable, frictionless UI is an essential part of creating a positive connection with a user. When designing or evaluating an interface, it’s best to refer to usability guidelines set forth by Nielsen in order to build a product that provides the best possible user experience. As per me a good example of a user experience website should imbibe all of the following characteristics. Should unify the experience Emphasize the contentDelivering a unique brand proposition Should be flexibleStreamline processes (by removing friction along the user’s path) Read the full article

[douglassmiith]

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

About The Author

Suzanne Scacca is a former WordPress implementer, trainer and agency manager who now works as a freelance copywriter. She specializes in crafting marketing agency, web … More about Suzanne Scacca …

There was a time when marketers used things like urgency, scarcity and FOMO to drive online shoppers to a sale. But scare tactics can actually hurt a brand’s relationships with customers. By their very nature, we run into similar problems with shipping and inventory alerts. That said, there are ways that web designers can keep panic and frustration from seeping into the shopper’s experience.

When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

When people panic, the natural response is to find a way to regain some control over the situation. The problem is, that regained control usually comes at the expense of the business’s profits, trust, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, some of the design choices we make in terms of alerts can cause undue panic.

If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, keep reading.

Note: Because the following post was written during the coronavirus pandemic, many of the alerts you’re going to see are related to it. However, that doesn’t mean these tips aren’t valid for other panic-inducing situations — like when a storm destroys an area and it’s impossible to order anything in-store or online or like during the November shopping frenzy when out-of-stock inventory is commonplace.

1. Avoid Out-Of-Stock Notices When Possible

Colleen Kirk is a professor of marketing agency at the New York Institute of Technology and an expert on territorial shopping.

She has a great analogy to help us understand why this happens:

Have you ever felt as if another driver stole your parking spot or were upset when someone else nabbed the last sweater that you had your eye on? If so, you experienced psychological ownership. You can feel psychological ownership over pretty much anything that doesn’t belong to you, from the last chocolate truffle in a display case to the dream home you found on Zillow and even intangible things like ideas.

When it comes to shopping in person, people exhibit territorial shopping traits by placing their items in a shopping cart. Or when they put a separator bar between their items on a conveyor belt and the person’s behind them.

We don’t really have that lUXury on a website. The best we can do is enable shoppers to save their items to their cart or a wishlist, but that doesn’t keep the items from selling out before they have a chance to buy them.

This can lead to huge problems, especially when a shopper has gotten excited about that toy or shirt they “put aside”, only to discover a few hours later that the item is gone or no longer available.

The worst thing you could do is to remove out-of-stock product pages. You don’t want shoppers running into a 404 page and experiencing not just panic but also confusion and frustration.

While not as bad, I’d also recommend against displaying an inactive “Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” notice or button to shoppers as Olivela has done here:

The Olivela website displays an inactive ‘Sold Out’ button for its denim mask product. (Source: Olivela) (Large preview)

Seeing this kind of feels like Google Maps directing you to your destination, only for you to end up at the edge of a lake where there’s supposed to be a road.

“Why the heck did you even send me here?”, is what your shoppers are going to wonder. And then they’re going to have to turn around and try to find something comparable to buy instead.

There are better ways to handle this that will also reduce the chances of your shoppers panic-buying a second-rate substitute for the item they really wanted. And this plays into the idea of territorial shopping (but in a healthy way).

This is what Target does when an item is “temporarily out of stock”:

Target provides shoppers with the option to get notified when out-of-stock items become available. (Source: Target) (Large preview)

Rather than display an unclickable button and just completely shut down shoppers’ hopes of getting the item, a “Notify me when it’s back” button is presented. This is a more positive approach to handling out-of-stock inventory and, if customers really want the item, they’re more likely to use it rather than settle for something else or try another site altogether. (I’ll talk about the “Pick it up” option down below.)

Another way you can handle this is to do what Summersalt does and turn your “Sold Out” button into a “Pre-order” one:

Summersalt provides shoppers with ‘Pre-order’ button for out-of-stock items. (Source: Summersalt) (Large preview)

What’s nice about this button is that it not only empowers shoppers to secure the currently unavailable item they have their eyes on, but it tells them exactly when they will get it.

So, if you know when inventory will be restored, this is a better option than the “Notify” button as there’s more transparency about availability.

2. Don’t Over-Promise Or Give Your Shoppers False Hope

It’s a good idea to keep your shoppers informed about how external situations may impact their online shopping experience. And you can use key areas like the website’s sticky banner or a promotional banner on the homepage to do that.

That said, be very careful what you promote.

Special notices aren’t the kinds of things that get ignored the way that cookie consent notices or lead generation pop-ups do.

Consumers know to look at these areas for things like promo codes and sales event details.

If you put anything else in there, you better make sure the notice is positive, useful and truthful.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Gap website:

Gap’s ‘Taking Care Takes Time’ notice addresses shipping delays due to COVID-19. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

Gap has three notices that appear in the header of its site:

In black: “Free shipping on $25+, free returns on all orders.”

In white: “Taking Care Takes Time. We’ve implemented special procedures as we work to keep our teams — and you — safe, so shipping of orders may be delayed.”

In blue: “Extra 50% off markdowns + more.”

It’s overwhelming. And it’s almost as if they wanted the alert in the middle to be ignored (or missed altogether) as it’s sandwiched between two very sharp-looking banners that promote attractive deals.

If your alert is related to something that’s going to affect the shoppers’ experience, don’t bury it and don’t try to massage it with overly optimistic messaging. Also, don’t contradict it with another alert that suggests the first one isn’t one to worry about.

Here’s why I say that:

Gap promotes ‘Our Masks are Back’ on the homepage of its website. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

This message is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, Gap’s masks aren’t really “back” if they’re only available for pre-order. Second, it runs contrary to the top banner’s message about shipping delays.

Unsurprisingly, shoppers did not react well to this hyped-up announcement:

Gap receives an extraordinary amount of backlash on Facebook over mismanagement of shipping and promotions. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

When Facebook ran a promotion on Facebook about the masks, it received a huge amount of backlash from customers. Many customers didn’t want to hear about the masks because they’d been waiting over a month for existing orders to ship and couldn’t get a customer service rep to talk to them. There were also complaints about items being canceled from their orders, only for them to magically become “available” again in the store.

A website that’s handling similar circumstances well right now is Urban Outfitters:

Urban Outfitters is focusing on the positive of a bad situation. (Source: Urban Outfitters) (Large preview)

Urban Outfitters, like a lot of non-essential retailers right now, has had to make some adjustments in order to stay alive. But rather than displaying a notice alerting online shoppers to shipping delays like many of its counterparts, Urban Outfitters has turned it into a positive.

The banner reads: “Your local UO is now offering curbside pickup!”

There’s no hidden message here that tries to explain away the brand’s bad behavior. There’s no greedy cash-grab, promising deep discounts for people who shop with them despite likely delays in shipping. There’s no overhyping of a promise they can’t possibly keep.

This is an actionable offer.

What I’d suggest for e-commerce businesses that want to keep customers on their side — even during a tumultuous time — is to keep their alerts simple, honest and useful. And if you’re going to promote multiple ones, make sure they tell the same story.

3. Soften The Blow By Promoting Multichannel Options

I recently signed a new lease on an apartment but was dismayed to discover that my move-in date and furniture delivery date wouldn’t line up because of shipping delays. I was well-aware of this when I made the purchase, but I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be. And because we were in the middle of a city-wide lockdown, I was unable to crash with friends who live over the state border.

I thought, “I’ll sleep on an air mattress. No biggie.” But then remembered I left mine behind in Delaware. So, I had to figure out a way to buy a cheap air mattress.

All of my go-to e-commerce websites had shipping delay alerts. And as I perused their available products (which there were very few), my panic only worsened. Until I discovered a website that offered BOPIS.

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is a shopping trend that’s proven very popular with consumers. According to data from Doddle and a report from Business Insider:

68% of U.S. shoppers have used BOPIS on numerous occasions.

50% have chosen where to shop based on BOPIS availability.

Shipping costs (avoiding them), speed and convenience are the primary reasons why customers prefer to buy online and shop in-store. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you’re building an e-commerce site for a company with retail locations that do this, then make sure you get customers thinking about it right away.

Barnes and Noble, for instance, enables shoppers to set their preferred local store:

Barnes & Noble allows shoppers to set their preferred retail store location. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is a great feature to have. The only thing I’d do differently is to place a button in the header of the site that immediately takes them to the “Change My Store” or “Find Store” pop-up or page. That way, shoppers don’t have to wait until they’ve found a product they like to discover whether or not it’s available at their store for pickup.

Once a user has set their store location, though, Barnes & Noble remembers it and uses it to enhance the remainder of the shopping experience:

Barnes & Noble uses shopper location information to enhance search listings. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is what search listings look like for “Magna Tiles” on the Barnes & Noble site when the user sets their search to “List” view. Pretty neat, right? While “Grid” view is standard, only showing the featured image, product name and price, this view provides extra detail about availability.

This can provide a ton of relief for shoppers who too-often encounter “out-of-stock” or “not available in store” notices on individual product pages. This way, they can spend their time looking at the items they can get the most quickly and conveniently. There are no surprises.

If cross-channel options are available — between website and mobile app, website and retail store, website and third-party delivery service — make sure you call attention to them early on so customers can take advantage of the streamlined shopping experience.

Wrapping Up

Panicked shopping can lead to serious issues for your e-commerce site. Rather than put your shoppers in a situation where they grow impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the site that seems to put up barriers at every turn, design your alerts so that they turn a bad experience into a positive one.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping-and-inventory-alerts/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping-and-inventory-alerts

[laurelkrugerr]

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

About The Author

Suzanne Scacca is a former WordPress implementer, trainer and agency manager who now works as a freelance copywriter. She specializes in crafting marketing agency, web … More about Suzanne Scacca …

There was a time when marketers used things like urgency, scarcity and FOMO to drive online shoppers to a sale. But scare tactics can actually hurt a brand’s relationships with customers. By their very nature, we run into similar problems with shipping and inventory alerts. That said, there are ways that web designers can keep panic and frustration from seeping into the shopper’s experience.

When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

When people panic, the natural response is to find a way to regain some control over the situation. The problem is, that regained control usually comes at the expense of the business’s profits, trust, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, some of the design choices we make in terms of alerts can cause undue panic.

If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, keep reading.

Note: Because the following post was written during the coronavirus pandemic, many of the alerts you’re going to see are related to it. However, that doesn’t mean these tips aren’t valid for other panic-inducing situations — like when a storm destroys an area and it’s impossible to order anything in-store or online or like during the November shopping frenzy when out-of-stock inventory is commonplace.

1. Avoid Out-Of-Stock Notices When Possible

Colleen Kirk is a professor of marketing agency at the New York Institute of Technology and an expert on territorial shopping.

She has a great analogy to help us understand why this happens:

Have you ever felt as if another driver stole your parking spot or were upset when someone else nabbed the last sweater that you had your eye on? If so, you experienced psychological ownership. You can feel psychological ownership over pretty much anything that doesn’t belong to you, from the last chocolate truffle in a display case to the dream home you found on Zillow and even intangible things like ideas.

When it comes to shopping in person, people exhibit territorial shopping traits by placing their items in a shopping cart. Or when they put a separator bar between their items on a conveyor belt and the person’s behind them.

We don’t really have that lUXury on a website. The best we can do is enable shoppers to save their items to their cart or a wishlist, but that doesn’t keep the items from selling out before they have a chance to buy them.

This can lead to huge problems, especially when a shopper has gotten excited about that toy or shirt they “put aside”, only to discover a few hours later that the item is gone or no longer available.

The worst thing you could do is to remove out-of-stock product pages. You don’t want shoppers running into a 404 page and experiencing not just panic but also confusion and frustration.

While not as bad, I’d also recommend against displaying an inactive “Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” notice or button to shoppers as Olivela has done here:

The Olivela website displays an inactive ‘Sold Out’ button for its denim mask product. (Source: Olivela) (Large preview)

Seeing this kind of feels like Google Maps directing you to your destination, only for you to end up at the edge of a lake where there’s supposed to be a road.

“Why the heck did you even send me here?”, is what your shoppers are going to wonder. And then they’re going to have to turn around and try to find something comparable to buy instead.

There are better ways to handle this that will also reduce the chances of your shoppers panic-buying a second-rate substitute for the item they really wanted. And this plays into the idea of territorial shopping (but in a healthy way).

This is what Target does when an item is “temporarily out of stock”:

Target provides shoppers with the option to get notified when out-of-stock items become available. (Source: Target) (Large preview)

Rather than display an unclickable button and just completely shut down shoppers’ hopes of getting the item, a “Notify me when it’s back” button is presented. This is a more positive approach to handling out-of-stock inventory and, if customers really want the item, they’re more likely to use it rather than settle for something else or try another site altogether. (I’ll talk about the “Pick it up” option down below.)

Another way you can handle this is to do what Summersalt does and turn your “Sold Out” button into a “Pre-order” one:

Summersalt provides shoppers with ‘Pre-order’ button for out-of-stock items. (Source: Summersalt) (Large preview)

What’s nice about this button is that it not only empowers shoppers to secure the currently unavailable item they have their eyes on, but it tells them exactly when they will get it.

So, if you know when inventory will be restored, this is a better option than the “Notify” button as there’s more transparency about availability.

2. Don’t Over-Promise Or Give Your Shoppers False Hope

It’s a good idea to keep your shoppers informed about how external situations may impact their online shopping experience. And you can use key areas like the website’s sticky banner or a promotional banner on the homepage to do that.

That said, be very careful what you promote.

Special notices aren’t the kinds of things that get ignored the way that cookie consent notices or lead generation pop-ups do.

Consumers know to look at these areas for things like promo codes and sales event details.

If you put anything else in there, you better make sure the notice is positive, useful and truthful.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Gap website:

Gap’s ‘Taking Care Takes Time’ notice addresses shipping delays due to COVID-19. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

Gap has three notices that appear in the header of its site:

In black: “Free shipping on $25+, free returns on all orders.”

In white: “Taking Care Takes Time. We’ve implemented special procedures as we work to keep our teams — and you — safe, so shipping of orders may be delayed.”

In blue: “Extra 50% off markdowns + more.”

It’s overwhelming. And it’s almost as if they wanted the alert in the middle to be ignored (or missed altogether) as it’s sandwiched between two very sharp-looking banners that promote attractive deals.

If your alert is related to something that’s going to affect the shoppers’ experience, don’t bury it and don’t try to massage it with overly optimistic messaging. Also, don’t contradict it with another alert that suggests the first one isn’t one to worry about.

Here’s why I say that:

Gap promotes ‘Our Masks are Back’ on the homepage of its website. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

This message is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, Gap’s masks aren’t really “back” if they’re only available for pre-order. Second, it runs contrary to the top banner’s message about shipping delays.

Unsurprisingly, shoppers did not react well to this hyped-up announcement:

Gap receives an extraordinary amount of backlash on Facebook over mismanagement of shipping and promotions. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

When Facebook ran a promotion on Facebook about the masks, it received a huge amount of backlash from customers. Many customers didn’t want to hear about the masks because they’d been waiting over a month for existing orders to ship and couldn’t get a customer service rep to talk to them. There were also complaints about items being canceled from their orders, only for them to magically become “available” again in the store.

A website that’s handling similar circumstances well right now is Urban Outfitters:

Urban Outfitters is focusing on the positive of a bad situation. (Source: Urban Outfitters) (Large preview)

Urban Outfitters, like a lot of non-essential retailers right now, has had to make some adjustments in order to stay alive. But rather than displaying a notice alerting online shoppers to shipping delays like many of its counterparts, Urban Outfitters has turned it into a positive.

The banner reads: “Your local UO is now offering curbside pickup!”

There’s no hidden message here that tries to explain away the brand’s bad behavior. There’s no greedy cash-grab, promising deep discounts for people who shop with them despite likely delays in shipping. There’s no overhyping of a promise they can’t possibly keep.

This is an actionable offer.

What I’d suggest for e-commerce businesses that want to keep customers on their side — even during a tumultuous time — is to keep their alerts simple, honest and useful. And if you’re going to promote multiple ones, make sure they tell the same story.

3. Soften The Blow By Promoting Multichannel Options

I recently signed a new lease on an apartment but was dismayed to discover that my move-in date and furniture delivery date wouldn’t line up because of shipping delays. I was well-aware of this when I made the purchase, but I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be. And because we were in the middle of a city-wide lockdown, I was unable to crash with friends who live over the state border.

I thought, “I’ll sleep on an air mattress. No biggie.” But then remembered I left mine behind in Delaware. So, I had to figure out a way to buy a cheap air mattress.

All of my go-to e-commerce websites had shipping delay alerts. And as I perused their available products (which there were very few), my panic only worsened. Until I discovered a website that offered BOPIS.

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is a shopping trend that’s proven very popular with consumers. According to data from Doddle and a report from Business Insider:

68% of U.S. shoppers have used BOPIS on numerous occasions.

50% have chosen where to shop based on BOPIS availability.

Shipping costs (avoiding them), speed and convenience are the primary reasons why customers prefer to buy online and shop in-store. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you’re building an e-commerce site for a company with retail locations that do this, then make sure you get customers thinking about it right away.

Barnes and Noble, for instance, enables shoppers to set their preferred local store:

Barnes & Noble allows shoppers to set their preferred retail store location. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is a great feature to have. The only thing I’d do differently is to place a button in the header of the site that immediately takes them to the “Change My Store” or “Find Store” pop-up or page. That way, shoppers don’t have to wait until they’ve found a product they like to discover whether or not it’s available at their store for pickup.

Once a user has set their store location, though, Barnes & Noble remembers it and uses it to enhance the remainder of the shopping experience:

Barnes & Noble uses shopper location information to enhance search listings. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is what search listings look like for “Magna Tiles” on the Barnes & Noble site when the user sets their search to “List” view. Pretty neat, right? While “Grid” view is standard, only showing the featured image, product name and price, this view provides extra detail about availability.

This can provide a ton of relief for shoppers who too-often encounter “out-of-stock” or “not available in store” notices on individual product pages. This way, they can spend their time looking at the items they can get the most quickly and conveniently. There are no surprises.

If cross-channel options are available — between website and mobile app, website and retail store, website and third-party delivery service — make sure you call attention to them early on so customers can take advantage of the streamlined shopping experience.

Wrapping Up

Panicked shopping can lead to serious issues for your e-commerce site. Rather than put your shoppers in a situation where they grow impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the site that seems to put up barriers at every turn, design your alerts so that they turn a bad experience into a positive one.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping-and-inventory-alerts/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/07/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping.html

[riichardwilson]

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

About The Author

Suzanne Scacca is a former WordPress implementer, trainer and agency manager who now works as a freelance copywriter. She specializes in crafting marketing agency, web … More about Suzanne Scacca …

There was a time when marketers used things like urgency, scarcity and FOMO to drive online shoppers to a sale. But scare tactics can actually hurt a brand’s relationships with customers. By their very nature, we run into similar problems with shipping and inventory alerts. That said, there are ways that web designers can keep panic and frustration from seeping into the shopper’s experience.

When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

When people panic, the natural response is to find a way to regain some control over the situation. The problem is, that regained control usually comes at the expense of the business’s profits, trust, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, some of the design choices we make in terms of alerts can cause undue panic.

If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, keep reading.

Note: Because the following post was written during the coronavirus pandemic, many of the alerts you’re going to see are related to it. However, that doesn’t mean these tips aren’t valid for other panic-inducing situations — like when a storm destroys an area and it’s impossible to order anything in-store or online or like during the November shopping frenzy when out-of-stock inventory is commonplace.

1. Avoid Out-Of-Stock Notices When Possible

Colleen Kirk is a professor of marketing agency at the New York Institute of Technology and an expert on territorial shopping.

She has a great analogy to help us understand why this happens:

Have you ever felt as if another driver stole your parking spot or were upset when someone else nabbed the last sweater that you had your eye on? If so, you experienced psychological ownership. You can feel psychological ownership over pretty much anything that doesn’t belong to you, from the last chocolate truffle in a display case to the dream home you found on Zillow and even intangible things like ideas.

When it comes to shopping in person, people exhibit territorial shopping traits by placing their items in a shopping cart. Or when they put a separator bar between their items on a conveyor belt and the person’s behind them.

We don’t really have that lUXury on a website. The best we can do is enable shoppers to save their items to their cart or a wishlist, but that doesn’t keep the items from selling out before they have a chance to buy them.

This can lead to huge problems, especially when a shopper has gotten excited about that toy or shirt they “put aside”, only to discover a few hours later that the item is gone or no longer available.

The worst thing you could do is to remove out-of-stock product pages. You don’t want shoppers running into a 404 page and experiencing not just panic but also confusion and frustration.

While not as bad, I’d also recommend against displaying an inactive “Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” notice or button to shoppers as Olivela has done here:

The Olivela website displays an inactive ‘Sold Out’ button for its denim mask product. (Source: Olivela) (Large preview)

Seeing this kind of feels like Google Maps directing you to your destination, only for you to end up at the edge of a lake where there’s supposed to be a road.

“Why the heck did you even send me here?”, is what your shoppers are going to wonder. And then they’re going to have to turn around and try to find something comparable to buy instead.

There are better ways to handle this that will also reduce the chances of your shoppers panic-buying a second-rate substitute for the item they really wanted. And this plays into the idea of territorial shopping (but in a healthy way).

This is what Target does when an item is “temporarily out of stock”:

Target provides shoppers with the option to get notified when out-of-stock items become available. (Source: Target) (Large preview)

Rather than display an unclickable button and just completely shut down shoppers’ hopes of getting the item, a “Notify me when it’s back” button is presented. This is a more positive approach to handling out-of-stock inventory and, if customers really want the item, they’re more likely to use it rather than settle for something else or try another site altogether. (I’ll talk about the “Pick it up” option down below.)

Another way you can handle this is to do what Summersalt does and turn your “Sold Out” button into a “Pre-order” one:

Summersalt provides shoppers with ‘Pre-order’ button for out-of-stock items. (Source: Summersalt) (Large preview)

What’s nice about this button is that it not only empowers shoppers to secure the currently unavailable item they have their eyes on, but it tells them exactly when they will get it.

So, if you know when inventory will be restored, this is a better option than the “Notify” button as there’s more transparency about availability.

2. Don’t Over-Promise Or Give Your Shoppers False Hope

It’s a good idea to keep your shoppers informed about how external situations may impact their online shopping experience. And you can use key areas like the website’s sticky banner or a promotional banner on the homepage to do that.

That said, be very careful what you promote.

Special notices aren’t the kinds of things that get ignored the way that cookie consent notices or lead generation pop-ups do.

Consumers know to look at these areas for things like promo codes and sales event details.

If you put anything else in there, you better make sure the notice is positive, useful and truthful.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Gap website:

Gap’s ‘Taking Care Takes Time’ notice addresses shipping delays due to COVID-19. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

Gap has three notices that appear in the header of its site:

In black: “Free shipping on $25+, free returns on all orders.”

In white: “Taking Care Takes Time. We’ve implemented special procedures as we work to keep our teams — and you — safe, so shipping of orders may be delayed.”

In blue: “Extra 50% off markdowns + more.”

It’s overwhelming. And it’s almost as if they wanted the alert in the middle to be ignored (or missed altogether) as it’s sandwiched between two very sharp-looking banners that promote attractive deals.

If your alert is related to something that’s going to affect the shoppers’ experience, don’t bury it and don’t try to massage it with overly optimistic messaging. Also, don’t contradict it with another alert that suggests the first one isn’t one to worry about.

Here’s why I say that:

Gap promotes ‘Our Masks are Back’ on the homepage of its website. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

This message is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, Gap’s masks aren’t really “back” if they’re only available for pre-order. Second, it runs contrary to the top banner’s message about shipping delays.

Unsurprisingly, shoppers did not react well to this hyped-up announcement:

Gap receives an extraordinary amount of backlash on Facebook over mismanagement of shipping and promotions. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

When Facebook ran a promotion on Facebook about the masks, it received a huge amount of backlash from customers. Many customers didn’t want to hear about the masks because they’d been waiting over a month for existing orders to ship and couldn’t get a customer service rep to talk to them. There were also complaints about items being canceled from their orders, only for them to magically become “available” again in the store.

A website that’s handling similar circumstances well right now is Urban Outfitters:

Urban Outfitters is focusing on the positive of a bad situation. (Source: Urban Outfitters) (Large preview)

Urban Outfitters, like a lot of non-essential retailers right now, has had to make some adjustments in order to stay alive. But rather than displaying a notice alerting online shoppers to shipping delays like many of its counterparts, Urban Outfitters has turned it into a positive.

The banner reads: “Your local UO is now offering curbside pickup!”

There’s no hidden message here that tries to explain away the brand’s bad behavior. There’s no greedy cash-grab, promising deep discounts for people who shop with them despite likely delays in shipping. There’s no overhyping of a promise they can’t possibly keep.

This is an actionable offer.

What I’d suggest for e-commerce businesses that want to keep customers on their side — even during a tumultuous time — is to keep their alerts simple, honest and useful. And if you’re going to promote multiple ones, make sure they tell the same story.

3. Soften The Blow By Promoting Multichannel Options

I recently signed a new lease on an apartment but was dismayed to discover that my move-in date and furniture delivery date wouldn’t line up because of shipping delays. I was well-aware of this when I made the purchase, but I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be. And because we were in the middle of a city-wide lockdown, I was unable to crash with friends who live over the state border.

I thought, “I’ll sleep on an air mattress. No biggie.” But then remembered I left mine behind in Delaware. So, I had to figure out a way to buy a cheap air mattress.

All of my go-to e-commerce websites had shipping delay alerts. And as I perused their available products (which there were very few), my panic only worsened. Until I discovered a website that offered BOPIS.

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is a shopping trend that’s proven very popular with consumers. According to data from Doddle and a report from Business Insider:

68% of U.S. shoppers have used BOPIS on numerous occasions.

50% have chosen where to shop based on BOPIS availability.

Shipping costs (avoiding them), speed and convenience are the primary reasons why customers prefer to buy online and shop in-store. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you’re building an e-commerce site for a company with retail locations that do this, then make sure you get customers thinking about it right away.

Barnes and Noble, for instance, enables shoppers to set their preferred local store:

Barnes & Noble allows shoppers to set their preferred retail store location. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is a great feature to have. The only thing I’d do differently is to place a button in the header of the site that immediately takes them to the “Change My Store” or “Find Store” pop-up or page. That way, shoppers don’t have to wait until they’ve found a product they like to discover whether or not it’s available at their store for pickup.

Once a user has set their store location, though, Barnes & Noble remembers it and uses it to enhance the remainder of the shopping experience:

Barnes & Noble uses shopper location information to enhance search listings. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is what search listings look like for “Magna Tiles” on the Barnes & Noble site when the user sets their search to “List” view. Pretty neat, right? While “Grid” view is standard, only showing the featured image, product name and price, this view provides extra detail about availability.

This can provide a ton of relief for shoppers who too-often encounter “out-of-stock” or “not available in store” notices on individual product pages. This way, they can spend their time looking at the items they can get the most quickly and conveniently. There are no surprises.

If cross-channel options are available — between website and mobile app, website and retail store, website and third-party delivery service — make sure you call attention to them early on so customers can take advantage of the streamlined shopping experience.

Wrapping Up

Panicked shopping can lead to serious issues for your e-commerce site. Rather than put your shoppers in a situation where they grow impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the site that seems to put up barriers at every turn, design your alerts so that they turn a bad experience into a positive one.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping-and-inventory-alerts/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/623184490375806976

[scpie]

Removing Panic From E-Commerce Shipping And Inventory Alerts

About The Author

Suzanne Scacca is a former WordPress implementer, trainer and agency manager who now works as a freelance copywriter. She specializes in crafting marketing agency, web … More about Suzanne Scacca …

There was a time when marketers used things like urgency, scarcity and FOMO to drive online shoppers to a sale. But scare tactics can actually hurt a brand’s relationships with customers. By their very nature, we run into similar problems with shipping and inventory alerts. That said, there are ways that web designers can keep panic and frustration from seeping into the shopper’s experience.

When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

When people panic, the natural response is to find a way to regain some control over the situation. The problem is, that regained control usually comes at the expense of the business’s profits, trust, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, some of the design choices we make in terms of alerts can cause undue panic.

If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, keep reading.

Note: Because the following post was written during the coronavirus pandemic, many of the alerts you’re going to see are related to it. However, that doesn’t mean these tips aren’t valid for other panic-inducing situations — like when a storm destroys an area and it’s impossible to order anything in-store or online or like during the November shopping frenzy when out-of-stock inventory is commonplace.

1. Avoid Out-Of-Stock Notices When Possible

Colleen Kirk is a professor of marketing agency at the New York Institute of Technology and an expert on territorial shopping.

She has a great analogy to help us understand why this happens:

Have you ever felt as if another driver stole your parking spot or were upset when someone else nabbed the last sweater that you had your eye on? If so, you experienced psychological ownership. You can feel psychological ownership over pretty much anything that doesn’t belong to you, from the last chocolate truffle in a display case to the dream home you found on Zillow and even intangible things like ideas.

When it comes to shopping in person, people exhibit territorial shopping traits by placing their items in a shopping cart. Or when they put a separator bar between their items on a conveyor belt and the person’s behind them.

We don’t really have that lUXury on a website. The best we can do is enable shoppers to save their items to their cart or a wishlist, but that doesn’t keep the items from selling out before they have a chance to buy them.

This can lead to huge problems, especially when a shopper has gotten excited about that toy or shirt they “put aside”, only to discover a few hours later that the item is gone or no longer available.

The worst thing you could do is to remove out-of-stock product pages. You don’t want shoppers running into a 404 page and experiencing not just panic but also confusion and frustration.

While not as bad, I’d also recommend against displaying an inactive “Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” notice or button to shoppers as Olivela has done here:

The Olivela website displays an inactive ‘Sold Out’ button for its denim mask product. (Source: Olivela) (Large preview)

Seeing this kind of feels like Google Maps directing you to your destination, only for you to end up at the edge of a lake where there’s supposed to be a road.

“Why the heck did you even send me here?”, is what your shoppers are going to wonder. And then they’re going to have to turn around and try to find something comparable to buy instead.

There are better ways to handle this that will also reduce the chances of your shoppers panic-buying a second-rate substitute for the item they really wanted. And this plays into the idea of territorial shopping (but in a healthy way).

This is what Target does when an item is “temporarily out of stock”:

Target provides shoppers with the option to get notified when out-of-stock items become available. (Source: Target) (Large preview)

Rather than display an unclickable button and just completely shut down shoppers’ hopes of getting the item, a “Notify me when it’s back” button is presented. This is a more positive approach to handling out-of-stock inventory and, if customers really want the item, they’re more likely to use it rather than settle for something else or try another site altogether. (I’ll talk about the “Pick it up” option down below.)

Another way you can handle this is to do what Summersalt does and turn your “Sold Out” button into a “Pre-order” one:

Summersalt provides shoppers with ‘Pre-order’ button for out-of-stock items. (Source: Summersalt) (Large preview)

What’s nice about this button is that it not only empowers shoppers to secure the currently unavailable item they have their eyes on, but it tells them exactly when they will get it.

So, if you know when inventory will be restored, this is a better option than the “Notify” button as there’s more transparency about availability.

2. Don’t Over-Promise Or Give Your Shoppers False Hope

It’s a good idea to keep your shoppers informed about how external situations may impact their online shopping experience. And you can use key areas like the website’s sticky banner or a promotional banner on the homepage to do that.

That said, be very careful what you promote.

Special notices aren’t the kinds of things that get ignored the way that cookie consent notices or lead generation pop-ups do.

Consumers know to look at these areas for things like promo codes and sales event details.

If you put anything else in there, you better make sure the notice is positive, useful and truthful.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Gap website:

Gap’s ‘Taking Care Takes Time’ notice addresses shipping delays due to COVID-19. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

Gap has three notices that appear in the header of its site:

In black: “Free shipping on $25+, free returns on all orders.”

In white: “Taking Care Takes Time. We’ve implemented special procedures as we work to keep our teams — and you — safe, so shipping of orders may be delayed.”

In blue: “Extra 50% off markdowns + more.”

It’s overwhelming. And it’s almost as if they wanted the alert in the middle to be ignored (or missed altogether) as it’s sandwiched between two very sharp-looking banners that promote attractive deals.

If your alert is related to something that’s going to affect the shoppers’ experience, don’t bury it and don’t try to massage it with overly optimistic messaging. Also, don’t contradict it with another alert that suggests the first one isn’t one to worry about.

Here’s why I say that:

Gap promotes ‘Our Masks are Back’ on the homepage of its website. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

This message is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, Gap’s masks aren’t really “back” if they’re only available for pre-order. Second, it runs contrary to the top banner’s message about shipping delays.

Unsurprisingly, shoppers did not react well to this hyped-up announcement:

Gap receives an extraordinary amount of backlash on Facebook over mismanagement of shipping and promotions. (Source: Gap) (Large preview)

When Facebook ran a promotion on Facebook about the masks, it received a huge amount of backlash from customers. Many customers didn’t want to hear about the masks because they’d been waiting over a month for existing orders to ship and couldn’t get a customer service rep to talk to them. There were also complaints about items being canceled from their orders, only for them to magically become “available” again in the store.

A website that’s handling similar circumstances well right now is Urban Outfitters:

Urban Outfitters is focusing on the positive of a bad situation. (Source: Urban Outfitters) (Large preview)

Urban Outfitters, like a lot of non-essential retailers right now, has had to make some adjustments in order to stay alive. But rather than displaying a notice alerting online shoppers to shipping delays like many of its counterparts, Urban Outfitters has turned it into a positive.

The banner reads: “Your local UO is now offering curbside pickup!”

There’s no hidden message here that tries to explain away the brand’s bad behavior. There’s no greedy cash-grab, promising deep discounts for people who shop with them despite likely delays in shipping. There’s no overhyping of a promise they can’t possibly keep.

This is an actionable offer.

What I’d suggest for e-commerce businesses that want to keep customers on their side — even during a tumultuous time — is to keep their alerts simple, honest and useful. And if you’re going to promote multiple ones, make sure they tell the same story.

3. Soften The Blow By Promoting Multichannel Options

I recently signed a new lease on an apartment but was dismayed to discover that my move-in date and furniture delivery date wouldn’t line up because of shipping delays. I was well-aware of this when I made the purchase, but I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be. And because we were in the middle of a city-wide lockdown, I was unable to crash with friends who live over the state border.

I thought, “I’ll sleep on an air mattress. No biggie.” But then remembered I left mine behind in Delaware. So, I had to figure out a way to buy a cheap air mattress.

All of my go-to e-commerce websites had shipping delay alerts. And as I perused their available products (which there were very few), my panic only worsened. Until I discovered a website that offered BOPIS.

Buy-online-pickup-in-store is a shopping trend that’s proven very popular with consumers. According to data from Doddle and a report from Business Insider:

68% of U.S. shoppers have used BOPIS on numerous occasions.

50% have chosen where to shop based on BOPIS availability.

Shipping costs (avoiding them), speed and convenience are the primary reasons why customers prefer to buy online and shop in-store. It’s the best of both worlds.

If you’re building an e-commerce site for a company with retail locations that do this, then make sure you get customers thinking about it right away.

Barnes and Noble, for instance, enables shoppers to set their preferred local store:

Barnes & Noble allows shoppers to set their preferred retail store location. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is a great feature to have. The only thing I’d do differently is to place a button in the header of the site that immediately takes them to the “Change My Store” or “Find Store” pop-up or page. That way, shoppers don’t have to wait until they’ve found a product they like to discover whether or not it’s available at their store for pickup.

Once a user has set their store location, though, Barnes & Noble remembers it and uses it to enhance the remainder of the shopping experience:

Barnes & Noble uses shopper location information to enhance search listings. (Source: Barnes and Noble) (Large preview)

This is what search listings look like for “Magna Tiles” on the Barnes & Noble site when the user sets their search to “List” view. Pretty neat, right? While “Grid” view is standard, only showing the featured image, product name and price, this view provides extra detail about availability.

This can provide a ton of relief for shoppers who too-often encounter “out-of-stock” or “not available in store” notices on individual product pages. This way, they can spend their time looking at the items they can get the most quickly and conveniently. There are no surprises.

If cross-channel options are available — between website and mobile app, website and retail store, website and third-party delivery service — make sure you call attention to them early on so customers can take advantage of the streamlined shopping experience.

Wrapping Up

Panicked shopping can lead to serious issues for your e-commerce site. Rather than put your shoppers in a situation where they grow impatient, dissatisfied, and frustrated by the site that seems to put up barriers at every turn, design your alerts so that they turn a bad experience into a positive one.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/removing-panic-from-e-commerce-shipping-and-inventory-alerts/

[captainpachacho-blog]

You Will Never Thought That Knowing SEO 2019 Could Be So Beneficial!

What are the suggestions to SEO writing? Without the doubt, one of the greatest trends that has already started to take place and may continue well into 2018 may be the consolidation of niche MarTech gamers by larger content cloud suppliers, with the role and significance of SEO increasing significantly all through this transformation. SEO Internet marketing offers major components, which develop the particular website traffic, and top lookup engine rankings. SEO is brief for Seo, and there will be nothing really mystical about this particular. You might have heard the lot about SEO and exactly how it works, but basically exactly what is a measurable, repeatable procedure which is used to deliver signals to search engines that will the pages are worth displaying in Google's index. Topic clusters possess been lauded since the future associated with SEO and content strategy, yet are widely underreported on (so now's the time to hit! ) 93% of B2B companies use content marketing. Teresa Walsh, Marketing Professional at automobile site, Cazana, forecasts that hyper organic targeting will probably increase its importance in 2019 with more location search plus more voice search. We get to the particular bottom of on-page SEO issues in order for search motors to clearly see what your own website is all about. SEO requires you to continuously become a student because of exactly how quickly the algorithms of research engine companies change. Google's punishing methods probably class pages as some thing akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e. g. lack associated with reputation or old-school SEO stuff such as keyword stuffing a site. If you understand you might have VERY lower-quality doorway pages on the site, a person should remove them or think again about your SEO strategy if a person want to rank high within Google for the long phrase. One of the issues search engines like yahoo and Bing have usually attempted to overcome is knowing which external links exist exclusively for SEO purposes and which usually links represent a true indicator that the source content is usually of value to the visitors. 2018 has currently seen some particularly significant SEO paradigm shifts from Mobile First” in order to the ever-advancing Rankbrain machine-learning formula. Content marketing is definitely a bigger approach which along with SEO forms a part associated with your digital marketing strategy. What You Should Know: This future of search engine search engine optimization is Semantic SEO. Links plus technical SEO are the biggest pieces of the pie, yet multimedia efforts such as video clip, photos, and podcasts will become the game changer and differentiator in many competitive markets. Occasional, and We do more occasional and not really frequent, usage of keywords plus keyword phrases in these hyperlinks may also help very somewhat in your SEO processes. Excelling at SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION means serving your visitors—not simply search engines. Here arrives the idea of SEO or even search engine optimization. The particular fact remains that SEO solutions assure clients that even in the event that the site will not position among the top search motors like google, the money may not be a waste expected to the refund. A great SEO service includes a great deal of research and lots associated with smart keywords application which will certainly period website at a increased notch and provide it the higher ranking in Google web search engine. Professional SEO content authors work on creating articles just after understanding the nature associated with your business, your industry, competition and what kind of content your business might most want for maximum benefits; in the particular short-term and the long-term. Linking to other webpages inside your site, as well because linking to other sites plus getting other sites to url to yours, is a great method to improve your SEO. Influencer marketing doesn't seem in order to be slowing down anytime shortly, so it will probably obtain bigger in 2018 and actually bigger in 2019 when even more companies start to catch upon to this trend. Keeping within mind the last point, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agencies are fluent in navigating by way of a wide range of on the internet marketing tools that helps boost the value of your marketing technique. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be a powerful process that may help make you and your own research more visible to lookup engines like Google and Search engines Scholar. I have simply no clue about SEO only several basics that is available just about all over the place and We feel this article must help as your other articles assisted me give some direction upon recovering my lost traffic plus generating more content as properly as repurposing old content. A several of the popular keyword analysis tools are Wordtracker, SEOMOZ Key phrase Difficulty Tool, SEOBook Keyword Device and Google Keyword Tool. Thankfully, SEO allows webmasters to supply clues that the engines may use to understand content. Because less as 20% dentists within a city hire SEO expert s who really wants that shift within their Google ranking. The particular analytical part of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is about tracking organic key phrase positions, website traffic and the engagement in Google Analytics, Internet marketer Tools and many other specific tools. Mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is nothing than a typical SEO, creating content and marking to be able to endure out online. SEO rankings are placing excess fat than ever upon what users have to state. The Search Gaming console will help you to evaluate your keyword rankings, CTRs, achievable Never Mess With SEO 2019 And Here's The Reasons Why Google penalties and many various other useful data for technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Blog posts, guides, whitepapers, situation studies, videos, and social content all need to include the particular right keywords for social plus SEO. For even more detailed information on the make use of of keywords on your web site visit SEOcious to will discover many other important factors included in having your web web page in the top 10 entries on the search engines. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, search engine optimization is most about search engines, search motor result page (SERP), search rating, online visibility, and quality visitors. If your web site has about 5-10 niche key phrases that are extremely targeted yet not very competitive, your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION pricing is going to end up being quite less. You discuss core SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies and tactics used in order to drive more organic search prospects to a specific website or even set of websites, as properly as tactics to avoid in order to prevent penalization from search motors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Smart links allows you in order to specify a word, like 'SEO' and then link it in order to a post on your web site. It's great for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to feed the search motors a good amount of keyword-rich links. Sites making use of organic SEO in the strict sense is going to end up being much like organisms, meaning these people will grow, expand and adjust over time according to readers' desires. No matter the market, the age of business, or even status of competitors, every company should at least implement fundamental SEO strategies to help their particular offerings get found on Yahoo. So your SEO if your own thinking mobile, needs to become either responsive or app-store technique with the right dimensions, style, user-friendly, UX experience. Dark hat SEO methods, such since the use of keyword filling and link farming, can furthermore boost organic SEO. SEO is usually important in every area associated with advertising, marketing, design, optimization, movie, content, mobile and e-commerce, with regard to without SEO all is untuned in need of synchronization, as an orchestra of musicians without a good experienced conductor. Unfortunately, 95% of links through SEO link building never provide a single new visitor in order to your website. With regard to successful team management and inter-client cooperation, online editors really are usually a must, especially those which usually detect and highlight critical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION errors, non-unique, text, and key word stuffing. By the end of this particular module, you should be capable to define Search Engine Optimisation and explain the basics associated with SEO being a business (as nicely as how SEO shapes the particular Internet itself. ) You'll furthermore be able to explain the particular differences between three main SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION job types, and be ready to choose a career that will best suits your current targets. A highly effective research marketing campaign, will encompass each search engine optimisation (SEO) plus pay per click advertising (PPC). One of our favorite on-line toolkits is SEMrush, which consists of a variety of tools regarding SEO, content marketing, and search engine marketing techniques. An SEO Content Writer is usually someone that writes content for the particular purpose of having it display up on search engines plus gain website visitors. Internet marketing perfect for the platform of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or Search engine optimization. With voice search arrives two areas of interest in order to SEO folks wishing to link with consumers: intent and circumstance. SocialSEO is proud to help future experts in the globe of business and marketing along with the annual SocialSEO Digital Advertising and SEO Scholarship. Finally SEO Wise links enables you to arranged nofollow attribute and open hyperlinks in new window. Google My Business is Google's business directory and, thus, extra vital that you your local SEO Outlined businesses with all the best SEO will certainly appear in the Local 3-Pack, the batch of 3 highlighted businesses nearest you that seem when you do a appropriate local search. Fire up Visibility recently released SEO: The particular Movie ”. This 40-minute movie covers a brief history associated with search engine optimization portrayed via the experiences of some associated with the biggest names within the particular SEO industry. In addition to producing content accessible to search engines, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION also helps boost rankings therefore that content will be positioned where searchers will more easily believe it is. The Internet is getting increasingly competitive, and people companies who else perform SEO may have the decided advantage in visitors plus customers. Unfortunately, SEO - and research in general - is usually soloed into focusing on The particular Google” and not really regarded as for other tactics. This means website owners plus SEO experts will need in order to be on top of their particular game when it comes in order to keyword research and keeping the particular context of their site related to users. Varvy's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Overview tool audits your web site for key parameters like website strength, links, image SEO, sociable counts, on-page SEO, technical standing, page speed, loading time plus more. Typically the trouble is that SEO rating factors have changed a whole lot over the years (find out there how in our keyword study guide ). That means this search engine optimization techniques of which worked 5 in years past won't travel today. The number 1 reason for using video upon your site to improve SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is to increase the quantity of time users remain upon your site. Search engine optimization had been but still is fascinating in order to me. The SEO placement intended for any size business begins along with proper web site optimization, a good excellent link building strategy plus a well planned online advertising plan. One part of focus for better marketing and SEO performance within 2018 is the confluence associated with content, influence, and social. This can be helpful for SEO, because it helps avoid search engine crawlers from getting confused by syntax or affirmation errors, and leads to even more accurate indexing. Stop thinking in terms associated with SEO vs. content marketing” plus start exploring how well they will perform together. (Give it a try tone of voice search using OK Google through your cell phone and inquire "What Is BlowFish SEO" ) In the event that all remains as it is definitely, Google will read out loud most about my company in the short to the point method, These cards are formatted in order to fit the screen of your own cell with no scrolling upward or down. Although SEO is really the time-consuming process but believes me personally, if you work well along with dedication and trendy techniques, the particular combined results of on-page plus off-page SEO holds you upon the top with rank #1 for a specific search outcome. Fairly lately, I've seen a resurgence associated with on-page SEO factors making the difference searching engine rankings. SEO is really the shortened phrase for search motor optimization. I believe SEO within 2019 will largely be such as SEO in 2018, with the particular exception of some big” Search engines update that wipes out sufficient websites to make people think the algorithms have grown significantly smarter. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION works by optimizing a home page's pages, conducting keyword research, plus earning inbound links. The organization offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' web site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. That can make SEO an ideal lead era tool, because when searchers stick to links back to your web site, you have the chance in order to convert them to leads, plus later make sales. Whenever asked to point out ideas that are unique towards the particular web, most people will arrive up with two main types: SEO and social media. How many links do a person need for good off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? If you are carrying out a professional SEO audit for any genuine business, you are going in order to have to think like the Google Search Quality Rater Plus a Google search engineer to offer real long-term value to the client. 44. Give your own social media profiles an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. 10% of our experts believe that will there's likely to be the lot of focus on cellular in 2019, as older SEOs realize optimizing for desktop is usually pointless. White hat SEO is not really just about following guidelines, yet is about ensuring that the particular content google search indexes and consequently ranks will be the same content the user will see. This free marketing device is really a long-term technique and can be time intense but it will worth this. A good user experience is usually the key to satisfaction and also a powerful SEO. 1 SEO might target different kinds of lookup, including image search, video research, academic search, 2 news lookup, and industry-specific vertical search motors. Many of us are in the fourth 1 / 4 of 2018, it is the particular right time start thinking regarding the year ahead and brand new changes SEO realm might anticipate. We've long known that client opinions, input, and sentiment regarding a brand deeply impact SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings, but we wanted the particular information to prove it. Off-page SEO means having action to build trust, power, social signals and inbound hyperlinks. How video affects SEO actually depends on your goals whenever using video in your advertising campaign and which video system you use. LSI is just not what most SEO specialists claim it to be. This is certainly not a idea that can be used simply by the average web designer or even webmaster to improve their lookup engine listings, and it is definitely not what many people, which includes myself, has written it in order to be. Nevertheless, first some history. This particular video walks you through the particular specific steps you should get increased rankings in 2018, including launching speed, technical SEO, content, hyperlinks, and more. Due to the fact it is, all across the particular year companies specializing in SEO were hectic recovering and finding new procedures to optimize the search motor even better than what their particular competitors were doing. Numerous of these so-called 'tweaks' include advertising and link-gathering, and We use SEO and article advertising for that. Within 2018, your SEO success will not depend on how well a person optimize your website for Search engines. But if you're brief on money, use these diy SEO ways to improve your natural rankings. If you choose SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you're helping Google's spiders in order to crawl and understand your posts. The job of a good SEO is to manage the particular optimization of websites to make sure they gain site traffic from lookup engines such as Google and Bing. One great part of content that will ranks well within the lookup results is its beginner's explained SEO. SEOs and even online marketing specialists in common who are dealing with global Blog9T websites or for online organizations thinking about going international will certainly certainly benefit from attending ISS. We would certainly like to serve you in order to save money and your power by offering affordable SEO solutions to increase link popularity. Work the key word into the SEO page name, content header, image, image altbier text, etc. SEO equipment provide position monitoring, deep key word research, and crawling through personalized reports and analytics. Certainly, white hat SEO always incorporated creating high quality, unique content material as a prerequisite for getting long-term quality results, this truth hasn't changed. Beyond compensated and organic, there are some other types of SEO and expertise and niches within search motor marketing. Presently there are a few fundamentals that will can help boost the technique, but SEO, or seo, is usually hardly ever considered. While employing the services of a great SEO agency can get a person good marketing copy for the particular website and an effective make use of of the related keywords, getting a brilliantly designed website will certainly help a lot when this comes to attracting people plus even the search engines in order to your website. You are able to get into important SEO-related data like the particular page title, description, and key phrases for every page or a person can have the system immediately populate this data depending upon a document name or some other fields. SEO has become broadly adopted as an online marketing and advertising strategy due to its effectiveness. Creating high-quality content along with SEO in your mind through the beginning boosts search presence. In contrast, dark hat SEO is about attempting to take shortcuts and video game search engines. You may also use Google Analytics in order to find SEO keywords for content material optimization. Keyword research is the particular process SEOs value to discover what search queries consumers get into into a search engine intended for a given topic. Within today's rapidly shifting world, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques can change on the dime—and the worst part will be that you might not also know it. Hacks that can have won you a front-page result as recently as 2016 are not only obsolete right now, but they may even harm your website's rankings. For blog websites the greatest SEO practice would be in order to set the title of your own post in a heading1 label. Search engines is the gatekeeper to substantial amounts of traffic and prospects - search engine optimization (SEO) opens the doors. Simply because long as they are gained naturally, inbound links are possibly the most dependable authority contractors in the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. All of us call this new methodology AdaptiveSEO so that as its title suggests, it is made in order to adapt to the evolving plus sometimes unexpected changes in research algorithms. Numerous get confused in this region of SEO article writing suggestions for either they in place too little or maybe the particular wrong kind of keywords, or even they mention the keyword method too much which is occasionally called keyword over stuffing. Social SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't a separate branch associated with SEO and it won't shortly be replacing traditional SEO, yet social signals are becoming progressively incorporated into search engine methods. Perhaps the particular most important aspect of research engine optimization is how a person can actually leverage SEO in order to assist drive more relevant visitors, leads, and sales for your own business. Just browse through the various types of our SEO blog site to find those important on-page ranking factors. According to him, key phrases have already lost their significance and in 2019 this pattern would only get stronger. Seo (SEO) will be the most efficient way in order to drive traffic to your site. It's maybe not an ideal SEO page title because of the multiple distinct services, however the structure might give rise to rankings for some long-tail keyword phrases. SEOs will have to collaborate carefully with designers and developers in order to prioritize technical SEO and functionality search engine ranking factors to achieve a competitive edge. Further SEO Smart hyperlinks allows you to set upward your personal keywords and set associated with matching URLs. In case search engine optimization SEO will not involve ethical practices, the particular website may have low presence on Google as well as be eliminated from the Google index. An SEO technique will be considered white hat if this conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deceptiveness. As an SEO, which indicates that you have to considerably raise your standards around high quality content and links in purchase to achieve top search motor rankings. Most SEO focuses on customizing for Google's search engine, which usually dominates the overall search marketplace with a share of more than 90%. 7. Social indicators may even become more essential to SEO as time passes. One Grain is really a electronic marketing agency that helps businesses like Uber, Amazon and Salesforce grow their revenues online making use of SEO plus paid advertising. This may be a growth chance regarding content marketing-specific agencies and the necessary and justified budget series item for in-house SEO groups. SEO includes both technical and creative components necessary to improve rankings, drive visitors, and increase awareness in research engines. Let's confirm our knowing of SEO basics with the one question quiz about the particular factors in search rankings: webpages, links and keyphrases. When it comes in order to Google SEO, the rel=canonical hyperlink element has become VERY IMPORTANT over the many years and NEVER MORE SO. To place the particular focus on the website customer, it has been suggested that will acronym SEO should are a symbol of lookup experience optimization. It's important to remember in order to share content from your internet site or blog socially to provide it an SEO boost as well. Some Webmasters will pay out thousands of dollars to a few so-called professional SEO expert in order to get their Websites on best in the rankings. It is constantly preferable to ask questions upon their SEO procedures and find out whether they have knowledge associated with keyword density or if they will have information about the most recent keyword research strategies and equipment. This combined expertise makes all of us uniquely qualified to present a good ethics-based, search engine-friendly SEO guide to teach you guidelines that will reflect the latest developments looking. They protect important subjects like search motor success factors and how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION relates to social media advertising. In order in order to make web pages appear in high positions in the search outcomes, SEO tries to shape the website according to Google's criteria. The major problem of SEO is the truth that there are billions associated with pages in the internet lookup engine indexes and your placement in the SERPS is reliant on a constantly changing protocol which is not published.

[digitalmark18-blog]

The 5 Most Common Mistakes SMBs Make When Designing Their New Website

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/the-5-most-common-mistakes-smbs-make-when-designing-their-new-website/

The 5 Most Common Mistakes SMBs Make When Designing Their New Website

Image credit: ronstik/Shutterstock

Websites are never finished or done and dusted. Here are some of the most common mistakes small businesses make with their website.

Did you know the first website was made was in 1991 and is still online?

I got involved in making websites in 1996. As a fledgling designer, I was annoyed by all of the bad websites out there. This feeling, sadly, hasn’t faded. Some call it “design disease,” but I wouldn’t trade it in.

The biggest issue with a newly revamped website is that people don’t pay close enough attention to the end result that goes live for all the world to see. So the result sometimes is a site representing a business with glitches and mistakes.

While it’s hard to summarize the many mistakes people make when making websites, I have divided them into five main categories.  

1. Outsourced supplier mismanagement

Outsourcing is a good idea. Those who recognize they’re not good at everything are the ones who go further in business. However, delegation and abdication are two very different things. As the business owner in charge of the website project, you do have to sign things off, and it’s up to you to check things over properly.

Sometimes it’s not completely the fault of the supplier. Sure, it may be a case of “buy cheap, pay twice,” but if you have decided on a supplier, then give them clear and timely feedback, and show gratitude for their work – they will do a better job for you.

2. “I just want something simple up there quickly.”

People either go the DIY route or ask someone else to help them. In either case, mistakes are made. In both cases, a common issue is that people underestimate the thought, planning, time, talent, care and attention a good website requires. It’s seldom that someone with this intention gets what they desire without some consequences.

They either realize it’s taking more time and skill than they expected, or they don’t realize what is needed. And the result of that is usually not good.  

If you decide that you need a new website, plot some time a few months in advance to properly consider who it’s for, what result you want out of it, what you want it to say and roughly how you want the information to be divided up. Then plan time and resources for the steps needed – wireframing, design, coding, content, refinements, testing and launch. Rushing things creates problems.

3. Design glitches galore

It’s hard for a nondesigner to spot what is “good” design” and what constitutes “bad” design. There are many ways in which a design can be bad. However, a few common issues that appear consistently include:

Massive gaps. Many don’t notice when double paragraph spaces happen between paragraphs in website pages. Check the text and correct these extra spaces.

Cheesy images. There are a number of images that people spot and immediately label as “cheesy.” These are the obvious stock photos of people shaking hands, shiny buildings and strange, little 3D people doing different activities.

Full-text justification. While people may think this is a good idea, satisfying our natural desire for symmetry, in narrow columns of text, justified text leaves large gaps between words, making everything look messy.

Poor legibility. This occurs when people use colors that lack sufficient contract between the text and the background.

That picture of you. People put a picture of themselves or their team in About or Meet the Team sections of a website – wonderful! But they use images that are taken on their iPhone, which have poor lighting, are badly cropped, blurry/pixelated, or generally unflattering. There is a better way – use a professional photographer.

4. UX issues: The user journey and user experience

There is a lot of confusion regarding the difference between UX or UI and design. However, some hard and fast rules do apply when it comes to websites. Not everyone follows them, and as a result, some problematic issues come up:

Poor theme selection. If you’re choosing a theme without proper consideration of how your images and content will fit, you’re starting off on the wrong foot. It’s something you need to consider before buying your new template.

Not making the links into links. Many companies will mention their email addresses in the text of a page and then forget to make it a hyperlink.

Using every item from the template. Themes often come with lots of “bells and whistles,” which you may feel compelled to fill in. Just because it’s part of the theme, though, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Sometimes, it’s best to strip things back and avoid adding things to your site for the sake of it. Most people I know prefer simpler sites.

Not checking the site on mobile devices. More than 50 percent of users are looking at websites on their phones rather than their PC. Test your site on your phone – navigate through each page, test links, study each page. This will help you identify things that aren’t lining up or showing up properly. 

Links to social media pages that don’t exist. It’s often an afterthought to add social media links, and if they are no longer active, then it’s best to remove it. 

5. Poor optimization (SEO and speed)

Traffic is annoying when you’re stuck in it, but when it comes to websites, it’s actually something you really want. Even if you have a fantastic website － clear, easy to navigate and visually appealing － under the hood could be some missed details that will affect the likelihood of your site being found (meaning very little traffic) or your site not loading fast enough (meaning people get impatient and “bounce”).

There are many ways to improve the speed of your site and your chances of getting more search engine traffic. Here are some “under-the-hood” things to check on your site:

Did you get lazy with image names? Rather than leaving images with their default file name, name them with phrases relating to the image, using keywords you’d love people to type in to get your image as a result. For example, “fluffy-white-dog-poodle.jpg” instead of “dog3944394.jpg.”

Mahoosive images? Images need to be optimized to load quickly. Many people disregard this and add images in whatever size they were originally, which is usually too big. This makes the site and images slow to load.

Missing keywords To encourage search engine traffic, there are several places in the code of your site where you can add relevant keywords and phrases, including the Title tag for each page, and ALT tags for each image. Make sure you put these in, as these are basic SEO practices that you need to do as a bare minimum.

What, no Google My Business? This item doesn’t have anything to do with your website but with your Google results – a major source of important traffic to your site. When you search for certain companies, their Google My Business profile will show up on the right side of the screen, and it takes up a good chunk of the results page. This info. needs to be updated with the right pictures, correct address and text relating to your business.

All the WordPress plug-ins in one site! Another common mistake people make that really slows pages down is adding too many plug-ins. Not all the plug-ins are needed; limit yourself to no more than seven or eight. 

There is always room to improve. Just like how people never stop learning, websites are never finished. However, if you follow the tips above as your handy life-saving checklist of website love, you’ll have one of the best sites out there.

Keren Lerner

Keren Lerner is the CEO and founder of Top Left Design, a London based design and marketing agency. Founded in 2002, Top Left Design specialises in bespoke designed websites, brands, and marketing material with integrated marketing advice. Keren regularly speaks about design and digital marketing at seminars and workshops for industry organisations across different industries (property, HR, interior design, travel, food, film, finance, and law). She advises on social strategy and communication and trains businesses and teams on how to effectively market themselves online.

Source: https://www.business.com/articles/smb-new-website-mistakes/

[royal-red-asks]

9 Things You Need to Know About SEO

The entire 12 months 2018 is already in complete swing, and it is quick becoming interesting for SEO. With almost all that said…SEO is still regarding content and links. Use long-tail key phrases, full sentences and questions : although your present keywords are usually still important and play the big part in SEO, even more people are choosing to research in full questions now, since they're speaking, instead of within short term. This is the component of an SEO strategy that will focuses on building quality exterior referral links that trust the given site as an power or source in the focused categories. Long gone are the days where very much of what one did intended for SEO was purely for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (link building, highly optimized content material, content only for the various search engines, etc). Well, backlinks are the particular evergreen ranking factor of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, there's no doubt about this. But times are changing plus so does the things. I've been ranking video clips last few weeks for key word like SEO Outsourcing” and Wp training London” and some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency terms here. The biggest craze of SEO 2018 according in order to me could be the use of Synthetic intelligence by the Google plus the increase in the quantity of character within the meta description. I actually see a couple of present trends that will continue in order to dominate SEO in 2018. Google provides stated on the record that will page loading speed is a good SEO ranking signal (and these people recently made PageSpeed even EVEN MORE important ). You are capable to boost your site rate by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to quicker hosting. It is perhaps one of the most important Local SEO ranking factors for local business websites. SEO indicates exactly what it meant within 1997, right about the period I started writing about this. Easily expressed: Creating good, understandable, content that individuals feel required to share (a definition simply as frustrating now to these who want overcomplicated answers since it was two decades ago). Search Engine Optimization, which usually is also known as SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, is the process of growing the volume and quality associated with traffic to a website through search engines via organic or even search engine results. Matt Cutts (no longer along with Google) consistent SEO advice was in order to focus on a satisfying consumer experience. Finally, when you don't have enough guests, knowing SEO can help a person figure out exactly why your own site lacks visibility and help you in taking steps in order to improve your rankings. It's not the perfect SEO page title since of the multiple distinct providers, but the structure can offer rise to rankings for a few long-tail keyword phrases. The SEO fads keep increasing with time and, hence the particular individuals and business organizations as well should get their act collectively to have effect on the particular Google algorithm. It can serve one well to keep in mind that building great backlinks making use of link-building is a valuable search engine optimization tactic. Up-dates in search algorithms and within people's searching patterns and the particular mobile over desktop preferences are usually changing the nature of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. However, cellular trends in SEO have turn out to be quite compelling. Whilst this does mean that many local SEO-rich sites can very large (and therefore, potentially expensive), it remains one of the particular most effective methods to get your own website on the first web page or two of Google's SERP. In purchase to analyze your SERP functions, you'll need a powerful device like SEO Powersuite's Rank System, which lets you track fifteen Google SERP features, along along with your keywords and organic outcomes. And many SEO ideas and tricks increase your cyberspace user experience quality while concurrently improving your ranking in lookup engine algorithms. You possess to know many vital marketing and advertising SEO tools and associated along with order to create good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for the online business. It optimizes technical SEO and can help you with keyword optimization of your content. In case you build quality backlinks regarding your blog post, you'll furthermore rank higher for the competing terms like SEO Tips” easily. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is even more required compared to before, because everything that decreases UX will fck up your own rankings (even in the personalized search).

SEO content re-emphasizes the intention and meaning of what specifically is seen on the web site, and it also increases ratings. The demand for AMP is expected to increase by 2018 and believe adoption of AMP will keep on to lead the top SEO trends. However, SEOs tend to prefer links increased on a page. On the SMB side, there is a higher expectation of SEO performance however often an inability to total (or pay-to-complete) hours dedicated towards improving content, links, or on-line branding, ” which are almost all important to growing performance. Advanced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION really doesn't have everything in order to do with acquiring links for the Website. As a good SEO, this means that a person have to significantly raise your own standards around quality content plus links in order to attain top search engine rankings. This will become a growth opportunity for content material marketing-specific agencies and a essential and justified budget line product for in-house SEO teams. This enables you to react quickly within case of unwanted new inbound links, and therefore avoid common SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques like negative SEO assaults. SpyFu is the paid tool that uses eleven years of historical data in order to assist you find your competitors' most profitable keywords and the particular keywords they've utilized for SEO plus ads. Hence, a person would not like to disregard the importance of content marketing within your SEO strategy 2018. While that theory is usually sound (when focused on a single page, when the intent is definitely SEO 2019 Slide to deliver utility content in order to a Google user) using outdated school SEO techniques on specifically a large site spread out there across many pages seems in order to amplify site quality problems, right after recent algorithm changes, and therefore this type of optimisation with out keeping an eye on general site quality is self-defeating within the long run. 1. I do not think Google uses the content within the comments as an on-page SEO signal. There are many keyword analysis tips that SEO experts make use of on a daily basis. In order to see in the event that your SEO efforts have already been paying off, you will desire to compare visitors your web site over time. Now i'm not exaggerating when I state that without keywords, there's simply no such thing as SEO. Visual Search is definitely the next big SEO method of 2018, so be ready! Rank Watch is the toolset for SEO professionals that will provides Internet marketing tools intended for search engine optimization (SEO”) sociable media management (SMM) website optimisation, including research and analysis, hyperlink building, campaign management, automated monitoring of search engine performance, analytics and conversion tracking, and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION reports. Here are six SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends you should be maintaining in mind when sprucing your own website in 2018. SEOs also pay even more attention to the formatting plus structure of content to allow it to be easier for Google to draw relevant information for featured thoughts. Content is the second major SEO ranking factor, and it is just as important as links. A piece of guidance that refuses to disappear : despite what some guides may say, don't worry about making use of the meta keywords tag, this doesn't help for SEO. Consequently, these SEO tips is heading to be useful for a lot of other bloggers and marketing experts. Google has left a good extremely narrow band of chance with regards to SEO - plus punishments are designed to get you out of the online game for some time when you thoroughly clean up the infractions. This has dug out the particular top 10 SEO tools that will will be inevitable for lookup engine optimization. The SEO position of your website, in the particular modern context, holds paramount significance since it ensures higher visitors and increased browsing. The challenge regarding webmasters and SEO is that will Google doesn't want business proprietors to rank for lots associated with keywords using autogenerated content specifically when that produces A GREAT DEAL of pages on a site using (for instance) a listing of keyword variations page-to-page. I think the particular biggest SEO trend in 2018 would be voice search optimisation. Among the essential SEO tips for you in order to follow is to not select keywords which have already already been used by multiple businesses plus websites. In situation you are improving user encounter by focusing primarily on the particular quality of the MC associated with your pages and avoiding : even removing - old-school SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques - those certainly are usually positive steps to getting a lot more traffic from Google in 2018 - as well as the particular type of content performance Search engines rewards is in the finish largely at least in respect to a satisfying user encounter. Off-page SEO is important, even more because it helps in offering your site out in entrance of the hundreds of hundreds of online users. The SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services are usually cost efficient and they can be actually helpful in diverting traffic from your search engines to your internet site. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION helps to get a brand name recognition searching engine by obtaining ranking of the business web sites at the same time this improves the traffic of the website. Daily information and insights about search engine marketing techniques, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and paid search. Lookup engine optimization, commonly referred in order to as SEO, is the procedure of maximizing visibility by obtaining a website to appear higher on unpaid, organic results. If you do not upgrade your SEO Strategy plus just go with the present and traditional methods, it may be critical to boosting your own site ranking in search outcomes. In order in order to make the content of the particular business website more visible upon the internet and attract visitors, it is mandatory that 1 seeks the services of expert SEO services. If we appear at the Google search outcomes, it shows at least 1 video result in the SERP, which always came from Youtube . com (although it also a component of Google service), but video clip marketing should be considered being a prominent strategy for SEO 2018. The SEO Book Key phrase Suggestion Tool aggregates search information and offers volumes, related conditions, and more.

The on the web marketing strategies are evolving rapidly and are also equally competitive as Lookup Engine Optimization (SEO). When you have more period and are keen to stick to the SEO industry, subscribe in order to Moz and Search Engine Property. In 2018, SEO strategies are usually oriented towards making a extensive relationship, helping brands to make strong networks and links that will will remain active for the long-term. Along with algorithms, technologies and optimization strategies in perpetual motion to obtain a location at the top associated with search engine results (SERP), this SEO experts are on the particular lookout for your next trends that will will shape the digital potential future of companies. Your competition may teach your SEO firm greatly that how to promote your own website with the search motors. A single more thing to bear within mind to be successful along with link building provides quality content material and to follow some evil SEO copywriting best practices. These are called keywords, and as you'll see, they are an important a part of SEO. Being amongst the leading digital marketing professionals, we now have researched more than them and selects few that will will surely have a weighty weightage as SEO 2018. While not really applicable to everyone, if a person have a physical store or even simply want more local web site traffic, local SEO can provide you a nice boost. When asked about the basic cost of an average bundle for SEO services, 60 reactions from 100+ participants including SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION companies and experts were obtained with exact price range billed by them for 10 key phrases per month including on-page marketing & off-page activities like articles marketing and social media advertising. Discover, with old school SEO”, the particular name of the game grew to become all about long-tail keywords. It will improve your own SEO over multiple engines simply by bringing a hike into your own SERPs. In brief, content and links will nevertheless be the foundation of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018. Technical SEO is heading to be one of the particular major SEO trends in 2018. Search engine optimization Professional ( SEO Expert ), one of highly rated Moral SEO Expert posses excellent control over organic SEO, purely white-hat SEO techniques, knowledge and actual time industry connection with customization various theme website, e-commerce SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, small and large size company website's SEO. Thank a person for your awesome In-depth Guidebook, There are learnt some new SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Strategies, I will start along with improving my site's Dwell Period Beside Creating Visual Content, I actually will really appreciate In situation you could Write an In-depth Guide about Creating Embeddable Images”, I must understand it better. The biggest trend for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is evergreen, long-form blog content. Guest post- Guest post is definitely second smart and effective away page SEO technique after hyperlink building. So, the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION experts will try to web page link your app with many additional business apps so that the particular search engines can index plus rank the app. Say, for example, I reveal this off-page SEO techniques article across my social channels. While videos are great regarding SEO, make sure you avoid create video content just due to the fact the format works better. The rise associated with Google-featured-content has provided its very own challenges for SEO practitioners. Our testimonials of the 10 leading search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you choose the right solution. The expression SEO, ” otherwise known since search engine optimization, ” provides increased in popularity over the particular past few years. The truth is that a person can get top Search Motor Rankings spending a little little bit of money and doing the particular work yourself or paying a good expert SEO company thousands associated with dollars to get your Site around the first page. When you stop plus take a look back in where seo (SEO) started, really pretty incredible how far is actually come in the past several years — even the previous couple of months. On the additional hand, focusing on mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is a must, whereas cellular friendliness and user experience are usually considered as a major standing factor in SEO Trends within 2018. I must declare your talk about techniques and research based factors are really helping to improved SEO back linking. Although I actually asked about online marketing techniques, nearly every marketing practitioner We reached out to mentioned SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION being crucial aspect of developing either their businesses or their own clients. 5. Implementing SEO methods enables you to gain beneficial knowledge of keywords used simply by your potential clients to discover the services or products a person offer. As a marketing strategy intended for increasing a site's relevance, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION considers how search algorithms function and what people search with regard to. If you've go through from the beginning, you realize that links are a crucial SEO ranking factor. I believe that will these types of trends may gradually force us to utilize the broad view in online marketing and advertising, instead of merely look at, regarding instance, SEO. Plus that is local SEO which usually has different ranking factors (Google My Business, citations, reviews).

SEO is about the consumer experience and creating great internet sites for your users. This particular really is more tedious plus tasking than inorganic SEO since this is where all associated with the keywords get a complete blast of attention. In the article, we will consider ten important SEO trends, which are worth watching within the coming year 2018. Users' happiness is furthermore an excellent factor, that's exactly why one of the best methods for SEO is to reduce down on as much content material as possible and only compose necessary information with necessary terms to make the website super-fast for users. 5. SEO or search motor optimization helps you in obtaining good Google page rankings. Links and technical SEO are usually the largest pieces of the particular pie, but multimedia efforts for example video, photos, and podcasts would certainly be the game changer plus differentiator in lots of competitive markets. When we're looking intended for a bigger trend it's that will SEO and what we contact real marketing” will continue in order to blur the lines between all of them as the job of a good SEO becomes that of the conventional marketer - having in order to understand the user, the rivals, the marketplace and also the particular implementation side.

The traditional method to SEO has been based on creating excellent content that will is easily searchable via web search engine bots. To understand SEO, you'll also need to know how Google search works. Primarily, technical SEO is concerned along with how a website works, plus how search engines are capable to crawl and index the pages. Some self-created link building techniques tend toward black hat SEO and are usually frowned upon by search motors, so tread lightly here. In our estimation, Google's actions around showcased snippets, knowledge panels, and much better instant answers in the Search engines overall, coupled with more intense ads and slowing search development (at least within the Usa States), will lead to generally there being slightly less SEO possibility in 2018 than what we all had in 2017. These will not only produce a lot of visitors your own website but help in enhancing your rank as per SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't only about building hyperlinks. Voice research is taking SEO to brand-new and exciting levels. After all of the particular above pointers, SEO is nevertheless all about your content plus links. Many small company owners (and marketing consultants) keep on to be using outdated SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics. Off-page SEO very efficiently within promoting your company where cultural media, bookmarking sites, forums, blog page directory, Q&A, articles, videos, picture and infographic sharing, and record sharing play well. Regrettably, SEO - and search within general - is typically soloed into focusing on The Google” and not really considered intended for other tactics. 5. If the answer in order to item 4. is the reality that Google does penalise the particular site's rankings for repeating SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION heading mark-ups on the exact same page, then just one associated with two things can be the particular outcome - SEO heading mark-ups become almost redundant on long-scrolling pages OR Google changes the method of the repetition associated with the same mark-ups on these types of long-scrolling pages and treats areas as separate pages.

Plus spending all your time (or paying some SEO firm) in order to sit there and build inbound links to suit your needs laced with keywords… this is a waste of your own time and money. With a very aggressive technique, proper keyword research, great SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION content, on-page and off web page SEO, you could begin in order to see the rewards of ratings within a few months. Nicely, Hyperlocal SEO should be out there right at the end associated with 2017, many experts believe this and so do I. Nevertheless, it may come anytime plus it's time to focus upon local search as your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION opportunities in 2018. SEO is getting more important year after 12 months and people who spend time upon increasing the high quality and experience associated with their sites will benefit significantly. In today's quickly shifting world, SEO techniques may change on a dime—and the particular worst part is that a person may not even know this. Hacks that could have gained you a front-page result mainly because recently as 2016 are not really only obsolete now, but they will may even hurt your home page's rankings.

[nathandgibsca]

Breaking Silos: Passive Consumption + Active Engagement FTW!

Today something complex, advanced, that is most applicable to those who are at the edges of spending money, and thus have an intricate web of internal and external teams to deliver customer engagement and business success.

The Marketing Industrial Empire is made up of number of components.

If you consider the largest pieces, there is the internal (you, the company) and the external (agencies, consultants).

If you consider entities, you’ve got your media agency, your creative agency, your various advertising agencies, your website and retail store teams, your analysts, marketers, advertising experts, the UX teams, campaign analysts, fulfillment folks, the data analysts who are scattered throughout the aforementioned entities, the CMO, CFO, and hopefully your CEO. And I'm only talking about the small portion of your existence that is your marketing and analytics.

Whether you consider the large, simplistic perspective (internal – external) or the more complex entity view, it’s really easy to see how things can become siloed very quickly.

It’s so easy for each little piece (you!) to solve for your little piece and optimize for a local maxima. You win (bonus/promotion/award). It is rare that your company wins in these siloed existence.

That’s simply because silos don’t promote consideration of all the variables at play for the business. They don’t result in taking the entire business strategy or the complete customer journey. Mining a cubic zirconia is celebrated as if it is a diamond.

Heartbreakingly, this is very common at large and extra-large sized companies. (This happens a lot less at small companies because of how easily death comes with a local maxima focus.)

So how can you avoid this? How do you encourage broader, more out-of-the-box thinking?

This might seem simplistic, but sometimes it helps to give things names. Naming things clarifies, frames, and when done well it exposes the gaps in our thinking.

Today, I want to name two of the most common silos in large and extra-large companies, in the hope that it’ll force you to see them and subsequently abandon siloed thinking and solve for a global maxima.

1. The Advertising Ecosystem: Passive Consumption.

2. The Business Ecosystem: Active Engagement.

3. Accelerating Success: Five Quick Changes.

4. Closing Thoughts.

Name abstract ideas, draw pictures, deepen appreciation, take action.

Could not be simpler, right? :)

Let’s go!

The Advertising Ecosystem: Passive Consumption.

I'm randomly going to use Geico as an illustrative example because the frequency at which they are buying ads means that every human, animal, and potted plant in the United States has seen a Geico commercial at least once in the last 6 hours (contributing to Geico’s business success).

Typically the ads we see are the result of the external creative and media agencies, and their partners in the internal company team/s.

Geico purchases every kind of ad: TV spots, radio ads, billboards (OOH), digital displays (video, online,– social media), print (magazines, newspaper, your cousin's Christmas letter), and so much more.

The teams naturally gravitate towards optimization and measurement that spans their individual mini-universes.

Was that a great ad? Can we test different spending levels in that market? What is the best way to get people to remember the delightful gecko? Can we automate the placement of display ads based on desired psychographics?

Did we get the TRPs that we were shooting for? What was the change in awareness and consideration? What was the reach/frequency for the Washington Post? How many impressions did our Twitter ads get, and how many people were exposed to our billboards?

These are important questions facets of, and delivery optimization of, the advertising. Questions like these, and adjacent others, tend to drive the entire lives of creative and media agencies/teams. For entirely understandable reasons. Siloed incentives delivering siloed local maxima results.

I cannot stress enough that these results can be positive (for the ad business and, in this case, the sales of insurance products). And yet, as a global maxima person it does not take a whole lot of effort to see a whole lot of opportunity if both the siloed incentives can siloed execution implied by the above questions can be changed.

Here’s an incredible simple way that every human seeking global maxima can look beyond the silo: “So, what happens after?”

As in, what happens after the finite confines that are the scope of my responsibility/view?

To see that, the first step is to paint a picture that illustrates the current purpose (your silo), and then give it a name.

Here’s that picture for the example we are using, and the name I gave it is “passive consumption.”

Over 90% of advertising is passive consumption. This means that the ad is in front of the human and they may see it or not see it.

Even on the platforms where interactivity is at its very core (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), almost all of the advertising does not elicit any sort of interactivity. If you look at the percentages, almost no one clicks on banner ads, a small percentage on search ads, and you need only speak with a few people around you to see how many people actively engage with TV ads vs. run to the bathroom or pull out their mobile phone the moment forced-watch TV ads come on.

Keep in mind, this is not a ding against passive consumption or the hard work done by Geico's agency and internal teams. Blasting ads on TV does cause a teeny tiny micro percentage to buy insurance – a fact provable via Matched Market Tests, Media Mix Models. The teeny tiny micro infinitesimally small number of views of brand display ads will cause outcomes. (Hold this thought, we’ll come back to that in a moment.)

So, what is the passive consumption challenge?

First, how far the vision of the creative and media agencies/teams will see (thus limiting success – global maxima). Second, trapped in the silo the vision for what will be measured and deemed as success.

The first is heartbreaking. The second ensures the death of any long-term impact.

Let me explain.

With over 90% passive consumption…. Well, passive… Smart media and advertising agencies/teams will primarily use post-exposure surveys to measure awareness (what companies provide car insurance) and consideration (which brands you would consider).

The brilliant agencies will also measure elements such as purchase intent (how likely it is that you'll consider Geico as your next car insurance provider) and likelihood to recommend (how likely is it that you'll recommend Geico to your family and friends).

All of these metrics will cause surveys to be sent via various mediums to people who've seen the TV ads, the banners on Facebook, and the video ads on YouTube. And a subset of users who were not exposed to the ads. Usually, there is anywhere between a few hundred to a thousand survey responses that will end up providing a statistically significant sample.

The scores from these responses are presented in weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings. Segmented by marketing activity, they are the end-all be-all justification for media spending. Snapchat increased aided awareness by +23%, let us spend more there. Or, billboards in Georgetown and Austin shifted purchase intent by +2%, we should triple our spend in Chicago.

Every measurement and optimization initiative is based on this cocktail of metrics. Thus delivering a positive, but local, maxima.

Even the next best innovation in media will be based on results from the same metrics cocktail. Thus delivering a little more positive, but still local, maxima.

Why not global maxima?

Because success is determined by, innovation is driven by, measurement that is self-reported feelings.

That name captures the actual thing that is being measured (feelings) by the metrics above, and where the data comes from (self-reported) after being exposed to our advertising.

This will help your company, your agencies, understand limits. Limits in terms of what’s happening (mostly, passive consumption) and what data we are looking at (all post-exposure and self-reported).

Limits in measurement that incentivize solving for a local maxima.

Let me repeat one more time. Passive consumption measured by self-reported feelings does drive some success – else Geico would not be the financial success it is. In the short-term some campaigns are trying to drive long-term brand influence or causing a shift in public opinion or simply to remind people your brand still exists as a choice. All good. Self-reported feelings are wonderful. Appreciate that even in those cases where you are not trying to drive short-term sales, if all you have are feelings converted into metrics… You are limiting imagination.

An obsession with just passive consumption by your agencies and internal teams delivers 18 points of success. I’m saying if you think global maxima, remove limits, you can do 88 points!

The Business Ecosystem: Active Engagement.

Getting those additional 70 points success requires breaking the self-imposed creative/media/advertising silo and caring about the human behavior if people lean-in instead of passive consumption – when they take an action (a click, a phone call, a store visit).

Time to draw another picture, and give this behavior a name.

I call it… drum roll please… Active Engagement!

Some people, between 0.01% to 10% (so rare!), who see Geico’s online ads will visit a Geico retail store or Geico's website.

People are actually doing something. They are walking into your store, talking to an agent, picking up the literature, calling you on the phone, clicking on to your site, watching videos, comparison shopping, and more. This is all human behavior that your tools can report for you.

A small percentage will end up buying insurance – mazel tov! –, providing perhaps the most valuable data.

The lucky thing about active engagement is that, in addition to self-reported feelings, you also get tons of highly-useful quantitative data representing human behavior.

I call this type of data: Observed Human Behavior.

If you are a part of an creative, media, or an internal company team, you have two powerful issues you can solve for: passive consumption (happens most of the time) AND active engagement (happens some of the time).

Likewise, you can seek to understand performance using self-reported data where the people reflect on how they feel, along with behavior data that represents what they actually do.

The combination of these two factors deliver the much needed Global Maxima perspective.

That is how you shatter silos. The creative agency has to care about how ads perform in their labs, in the real world, and what kind of online and offline behavior the creative is driving (end-to-end baby!). The media agency has to care about the creative and where it needs to get delivered (recency, frequency FTW!), and the bounce rate (70% ouch, 30% hurray!) and profit from each campaign. The retail experience team, the call center delight team, and the site experience team will break their silo and reach back into understanding the self-reported feelings data from the media agencies and the ideas that lead to the creative that delivered a human to them.

Everyone cares about the before and after, solving for the overall business rather than their little silo. Passive consumption plus active engagement equals global maxima. Or, self-reported feelings plus observed human behavior equals global maxima.

: )

Here’s a massively underappreciated benefit: It also encourages every employee – internal and external – to take full credit for their impact on the short and long-term effects of their effort.

It is rare to see this happen in real life, even at top American and European companies.

What’s usual is to see the three silos between creative agencies, media agencies, and company internal team. There is usually further sub-segmentation into passive consumption teams (also lovingly referred as brand agencies/advertisers) and active engagement teams (performance agencies/advertisers). The further sub-sub-segmentation into products and services (depending on the company).

They then quickly fall into their respective measurement silos, solving for the local maxima.

Change starts with naming things and drawing pictures. Gather the key leaders at your company and agency partners. Show them passive consumption and self-reported feelings along with active engagement and observed human behavior. Talk through the implications of each picture. Ask this influential audience: What can you contribute to when it comes to breaking silos?

I have yet to meet a single company where simply drawing the picture did not result in a dramatic rethinking of focus areas, responsibilities, and ultimately priorities.

Accelerating Success: Five Quick Changes.

Once you have that discussion, what should you do to truly cause a significant change in behavior?

Five Es form the core of the strategies that I end up using (please share your's via comments below). They are:

1. Expand the scope of data your employees use.

For the people who buy your television ads, include both store and website traffic data. Break the shackles of GRPs and Frequency.

For people buying your display ads on Facebook, include page depth, bounce rate, as well as micro-conversion rates for those campaigns. Break the shackles Awareness and Views.

For people buying your videos ads on Hulu, complement Hulu's self-reported feelings metrics with user behavior and conversion rates.

And continue going in this fashion.

2. Expand the incentives structures for your employees.

Most marketing employees, both internal and external, undertaking passive consumption initiatives are rewarded for cost per TRP, effective reach, awareness and consideration increases, etc. Whatever this bucket as an employee incentive, it can stay.

Consider adding one or two KPIs from active engagement. For example: Store visits, phone calls (as a result of that increase in consideration). Website visits, loyalty, micro-outcomes, and 25 other easily-available observed human behavior metrics are available to you pretty much in real-time.

For people who own responsibility for your stores, call center and website, take a metric or two from passive consumption and make it a small part of their incentive structure.

People respond to what they are compensated with, or promoted for. Use it to solve for a global maxima in the company and its customers.

3. Expand the time horizon for success.

This is really hard.

You buy 100 TRPs, it’s expensive, and the executives tend to start badgering you for immediate results.

The problem is that self-reported feelings data takes time, and since at least 90% of passive consumption leads to no immediate active engagement, all this does is incentivize bad behavior by your agencies and employees. Long-term objectives are thrown onto the chopping block and long-term strategies are judged on short-term success – which immediately ruins the campaign’s measurement. Oh and the audience being bombarded by your ads that are trying to deliver short-term outcomes from long-term creative and campaigns… They despise you because you are sucking, they can see that, and they instantly realize your are wasting their time.

No matter how much your wish, a Chicken won’t birth a Lion’s cub.

If you want short-term success, define the clearly as a goal, pick the right short-term self-reported feelings metric and observed behavior metric, now unleash your creative agency and their ideas (on that short-term horizon), then plead with your media agency to buy optimal placements, and ensure the retail/phone/web experience is not some soft and fuzzy experience, rather it is tied to that clear goal and success metrics. Sit back. Win.

If you want long-term success… Same as above, replace short with long. How amazing is that?

4. Expand the datasets that teach your smart algorithms.

If you’ve only visited this blog once in the last 12 months, or read just one edition of my truly amazing newsletter :), Marketing <> Analytics Intersect, it is quite likely I have infected you with the passion to start investing in machine learning in order to bring smart automation to your marketing and user-experience initiatives.

If you are following my advice, make absolutely sure that you are not training your algorithms based solely on passive consumption, self-reported feelings data. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

Rich observed behavior data will provide your algorithm the same broad view of success as we are trying to provide the humans in #2 above. In fact, the algorithms can ingest way more data and complexity. Thus allowing them to solve for a super-global maxima compared to our humble abilities.

Every algorithm is only as smart as the data you use to educate it. Don't short-change the algorithm.

5. Expand leadership comfort level with ambiguity.

For your TV efforts, there are limits to what you can measure. You have self-reported feelings data, and usually that’s about it. If you have a sophisticated world-class measurement team, you may be running some controlled experiments to measure one or two elements of active engagement observed human behavior data.

For YouTube or Hulu on the other hand, you’ll have additional self-reported feelings data, and if you follow my advice today, plenty of directly-causal observed human behavior data at your disposal.

Get very comfortable with this reality, and execute accordingly.

When some executives are not comfortable with this reality, they typically end up gravitating towards the lowest common denominator. Even in regards to strategies where more is possible (digital), they just end up using self-reported feelings data for everything.

I do understand why this is; executives are pressed for time, so the executive dashboard needs only one metric they can compare across initiatives. This instantly dumbs-down the intelligence that could help contribute to smarter decisions.

Kindly explain this to your executives, share with them the value of being comfortable with a little ambiguity that comes from using the best metric for each initiative type.

We can achieve smarter global maxima decisions if we just use different metrics in some instances.

Closing Thoughts.

The larger the company, the harder it is to solve for a global maxima. Companies need command and control. Companies worry that people are going to run wild in 15 different directions. Companies need to reward an individual, that means creating a finite role that can be defined and measured at a small level. Companies add layers upon layers to manage. Companies create org clusters (divisions). And, more.

Every one of these actions forces a local maxima. Every human can see their few pixels and have no idea what the image looks like.

Even if then the company progresses little by little, they’ll run out of luck one day. Worse some nimble small company – that does not yet have to worry about all of the above – will come eat your breakfast first, then dinner and then lunch.

The lesson in this post applies across the entire business, even if in this instance it is applied to marketing and advertising.

Paint a picture of what the local maxima execution looks like in your division – or better still company. Give these pieces a name. Then, figure out, like I’ve done above, what the connective tissue is that’ll incentivize global maxima thinking and execution.

Carpe diem!

As always, it is your turn now.

In your specific role, are you solving for the global maxima or a local maxima? How about your creative and media agencies? Your internal marketing or product teams? Has your company done something special to ensure that teams are considering both self-reported feelings and observed human behavior? Is there a magic metric you feel that’ll encourage each piece of the business success puzzle to solve for a global maxima?

Please share your wisdom, tips and secrets to success via comments below.

Thank you.

The post Breaking Silos: Passive Consumption + Active Engagement FTW! appeared first on Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik.

from SEO Tips https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/breaking-silos-passive-consumption-active-engagement-ftw/

[raystart]

No Clients, No Limits, No Deadlines—Welcome to the Hell of Redesigning Your Own Website

Redesigning your company’s website should be the ideal design experience—an opportunity to highlight your proudest achievements without a pesky client looking over your shoulder—but it’s often the one task every agency employee dreads. There’s no shortage of excuses. An agency’s site is a vital tool for generating new business, but it’s the only project that doesn’t end with an invoice, so it’s constantly competing with paid work. And when 30 or 40 cooks are messing around in the kitchen, a few food fights are inevitable. If there’s any truth in the old trope about the cobbler’s children having no shoes, then the design industry has barefoot kids running rampant.

We spoke with several agencies that emerged from the experience with plenty to say.

In the fall of 2016, Threespot’s chief creative officer William Colgrove noticed their website had gotten a little stale, so he created a simple one-page “front door” with a graffiti aesthetic that announces: “We help progressive causes make the world a better place.” The approach is consistent with the founders’ history of performing together in Washington D.C.’s punk scene in their younger years; and when Donald Trump was elected weeks later, it seemed even more appropriate.

“One of our clients recently told me, ‘I hire you so I can put you in front of people and you can say unpopular things that they need to hear,’ so that ‘rebel’ aesthetic makes sense,” says Colgrove, who believes too many agencies construct bland, soul-less portfolios for fear of putting off clients in search of versatility. Colgrove sketched out Threespot’s punk aesthetic on his own, then brought it to fruition with the help of a creative director steeped in UX design.

“The idea was to make it like a Ramone’s song—a tight, catchy, two-and-a-half-minute song that you’ll remember.”

Once the design was locked, staffers selected six of their favorite projects just before launch. Animations were added as an additional touch, later in the process, and the site was coded from scratch, without a CMS.

Ammunition (in Brooklyn and San Francisco) also realized the need to add energy to its site, which includes a portfolio of industrial design, brand identity, and user experience work.

“In the past, we’d always created beautiful renders of our work on a grey background with drop shadows, which was all we could really do the day a product launched,” says Aaron Poe, VP of digital. “But we realized that we needed to show the Square stand in a cafe, a Lyft driver out in San Francisco, and Beats headphones worn on a subway because brand development is about all those touchpoints, not just a logo.”

Homepage layout, courtesy of Agency Leroy

Helsinki’s Agency Leroy took a distinctly Scandinavian approach to its site (surprise, surprise), echoing the sparse design of Tumblr with scrolling series of images introduced with one or two sentences of copy—and that’s it.

“With copywriting, the shorter the text, the longer it will survive,” says creative director Janne Hänninen. “If you say, ‘This year, we did this…’ and launch into the details, it’s going to age faster than something more neutral—and every case should be pretty self-explanatory, anyway.”

“For us, the goal is to promote the attitude of the agency itself rather than explaining every single case.”

Agency Leroy also has one of the simplest staff pages you’ll find, eschewing colorful portraits of employees for a simple listing of names, titles, and contact info. “The photo archive of our personnel is never quite complete—someone always says, ‘My hair doesn’t look like that anymore,’ and it’s just one more excuse to avoid launching your site. Remove those obstacles and lower the threshold—that’s my design philosophy.”  

Perhaps that’s why the design process was led by a two-person team that included Hänninen. “We kept the rest of the agency aware of what was happening, but it was presented more as, ‘This is the direction we’re going in. If anyone has anything to say, now is the time,” he says.

“The process was intentionally forced [to move quickly], because we know that this site will be run over by the next design pretty soon, anyway.”

For its part, Ammunition worked hard to keep people within the agency informed, so they’d feel more comfortable with the changes ahead. “We were very transparent throughout the whole process” says VP of marketing and communications, Sara Munday. “We didn’t want to go away for months, do the work, and come back with this big ‘Ta-da!’ moment.”

Project page layout, courtesy of Brand Union

Of course, it’s a fine line between checking in and being beholden to dozens of opinions, a lesson that Brand Union’s digital creative director Marta Swannie learned quickly. “When we began our redesign we had a lot of people involved, but in the end we narrowed it down so that key decisions were being made by two people—the CEO and the chief product officer—and that really sped things up,” she says. “With the size of our network and so many people in different time zones, it was the only way to [keep things moving forward].”

Move quickly, yes, but don’t mess it up. Swannie was tasked with the redesign her first week on the job in London, making her first client the company’s global CEO, no pressure.

“We treated our site design like a proper client project: we had to reconcile the budget every week, check in with the worldwide client director, and we had a full team [assigned to the work].”

When the design team needed content from offices, official briefs were sent out to staff and followed up with a note from the CEO. Ammunition took the same tack, advertising the project as a “nine-month labor of love” that started with the typical stakeholder insights they’d pursue with any substantial project.  

“We discovered the site itself was being viewed 82% on desktop and only 18% on tablet and mobile, and we thought there was an opportunity to improve that,” says Poe. “But we also learned that a lot of our prospective clients were viewing everything on 27” monitors, so there was a big opportunity to fill that gap, literally, with richer images and more animations so the site didn’t feel so static; those findings were key to making the site look the way it does now.”

Building the site is one thing, but once it’s live, whose job is it to add new work and updates? Unlike a typical client project, there’s no hand off and walk away at the end of your own site redesign. “In managing Ammunition’s previous site, I was the only person who knew how to upload new content, which was a lot of work,” says Munday. “Our new site has a more comprehensive content strategy that requires editing images and wrangling video, so we had to discuss how things would work in practice. In the end, we created a team of people to help out.”

Homepage layout, courtesy of Ammunition

Once Ammunition’s site launched, account reps continued to schedule five hours a week for upkeep, which includes creating assets for the blog, writing copy for new projects, and photo shoots of client work “in the wild.”

Making the new site easy to update was also a top priority for Agency Leroy. “We made the backend so straightforward that it’s impossible to fail,” says Hänninen. “There are no options and no layout decisions to be made. For creative people, the self-criticism is so bad, we put the threshold for publishing as low as possible.” Hänninen admits that the simple layout means that small projects and huge projects all receive the same treatment, but it’s a small price to pay.

“I believe agencies should think of their own sites like a magazine—there’s always going to be another issue. You’re going to have to re-do the entire site in a year or two, and that should lower the pressure; it doesn’t need to be perfect.”

You will make mistakes. You may waste time, and you may waste money. And you’ll probably argue over quite a few things that don’t really matter all that much. Just take note, for the next time.

Brand Union’s lesson was a simple one: add a little more padding into the schedule before flipping the switch. “We were about to go live and I remember realizing that we were still waiting for client sign-off for several of the case studies,” says Swannie. Clients had all asked to see the design in situ, which means there was little alternative to waiting until the last minute, but when you’re juggling dozens of approvals over the course of months, the very last one can easily slip your mind.

Threespot’s Colgrove looks back on the project and wishes he had been a little more forthcoming early on. “Sometimes I have a very clear idea how a site should look, from the language to the design and the tone, and I haven’t been clear with my staff, because I wanted to give them a chance to run with their own ideas,” says Colgrove. “But I’ve learned I should be more honest and more direct early on—I shouldn’t be afraid to say, ‘This isn’t good’ or ‘I don’t like this typeface. If you’re particular, then you’re particular—own it.”

[realitycrazy2017-blog]

Mobile App Marketing: 5 Success Stories to Draw Inspiration

New Post has been published on https://realitycrazy.com/mobile-app-marketing-5-success-stories-to-draw-inspiration-from/

Mobile App Marketing: 5 Success Stories to Draw Inspiration

By 2018, less than 0.01% of all mobile apps out there will be commercially successful. That’s what Gartner says – and we’ve got no reason to doubt the forecast. With the proliferation of mobile app development tools & the rise of “citizen developer” initiative, building mobile software has never been easier. Code quality & application performance aside, the main reason why companies fail to crack the App Store and Google Play charts is poor marketing. If you have a brilliant idea for an mobile app, you’d better forget about Rovio’s overnight success and spend some time (and dough!) on marketing.

Top Earners (iOS developers who generate at least $ 50 thousand in revenues – 12% of the App Store’s registered publishers) have $30 thousand as an average marketing budget and devote 14% of project time to promoting their project. In case you’re a startup & barely raised funding through Kickstarter, your app can still be a hit – as long as you choose the right marketing strategy. Here are some app marketing success stories that prove you can do more with less.

Marketing did right: top 5 app success stories

Stay.com. Although building an application for Android first is not a major trend yet, that’s what the guys from Cutehacks did. Stay.com enables users to create personalized travel guides, store them on a smartphone and use the data offline. The app uses first-hand information provided by best baristas, chefs, and media personalities from all over the world, so you can feel at home no matter what city you stay in – and save some money on roaming. Cutehacks spent nearly 6 months simultaneously developing the Android and iOS versions of Stay.com, and here’s what they learned. First, you can’t ignore the Android look of an application. iOS-inspired layouts will probably alienate Android users – after all, the App Store and Google Play have totally different UX/UI policies. Although Cutehacks delivered a good-looking app that easily handled different Android resolutions, they received tons of negative reviews from devoted Androiders. Second, there’s memory and performance. Back in 2012 (and that’s when the Stay.com app was launched), the size of an Android application was device-dependent, so Cutehacks had to do some major re-coding. Finally, they found out Facebook APIs were unstable and poorly documented and spent quite a lot of time searching for developer tips on Quora and Stack Overflow. It sounds like everything Cutehacks did go wrong, but it’s far from being true. The guys successfully implemented the ACRA tool, enabling users to send failure reports every time the Stay.com crashed. They also used Trello to enhance project management (and poor management is the reason why approximately 30% of all IT projects fail). But what makes their story worth citing is the timely changes they made to Stay.com once they discovered users weren’t happy with the current Android version. If you want to succeed, you should pay attention to user feedback – and follow the App Store/Google Play developer guidelines, of course;

  Languages. Jeremy Olson, a tech-savvy college student from North California, launched the Languages translation app back in 2013. He was no stranger to mobile software development: his Grades app (enables students to track their grades throughout a semester) generated favorable reviews from both tech experts and the general public. However, Grades didn’t bring any money, so Jeremy went for a more commercial project. The demand for translation application was – and still is! – really huge, so it was an easy option. Besides, there was no affordable translation application that worked offline on the market back then (takeaway #1: consider timing & demand for your product). Jeremy’s team went a long way to validate the app idea, determine desirable functionality and create great UX. However, the very first thing they did was define customer personas. Jeremy and his confederates were quite familiar with the translation experience, so they didn’t have to talk to potential users in person (although that’s how Zappos’ founder validated his business idea). A customer (or buyer) persona is a purely fictional character who possesses characteristics of your target audience. Olson chose several factors that influenced a person’s decision to purchase the program, including his age, occupation, language proficiency and the environment where Languages would come in handy. The team created three detailed personas, thus covering the majority of key characteristics of their target market. Creating a buyer’s persona is a key success factor to launching & promoting a mobile app – and most marketers still keep personas in a closet for whatever reason or simply don’t know how to use them;

  Flappy Bird. The viral game hit iTunes in 2013, but it wasn’t until early 2014 when the app gained immense popularity. Dong Nguyen, a Vietnam-based independent developer who built Flappy Bird over a couple of days, said he managed to achieve the so-called virality through addictive gameplay. However, some tech experts (including Michael Silverwood of VentureBeat) believe it wasn’t the case. In order to understand how the game topped the App Store chart in the first place, we need to get a better insight into Apple’s ranking algorithms. There are several factors that influence an application’s chart position, including the number of installs received for the past few days/hours, reviews and retention. Instead of spending huge money on user acquisition, GEARS Studios decided to focus on reviews. By the time Flappy Birds reached #1 on iTunes, it was getting over 400 reviews per day. It went on to receive 700 thousand reviews in a couple of months, and that’s almost 200% more than Candy Crush got after a year. It looks like GEARS implemented a “dark pattern” – a rate button displayed every time a user ended a game session and wanted to start anew. The button has located a place where the play button would normally be; users tapped it by chance and were transferred to the App Store rate page instead. Pretty soon writing reviews of Flappy Birds became a trend, so GEARS Studios simply removed the button with another application update. We do not encourage you to track app users. The lesson to be learned here is that application chart performance is not always determined by the number of downloads;

  Clash of Clans. Coming up with a great & 100% unique idea for an app surely increases your chances of success – but there’s nothing wrong with being a little cliché, too! There are hundreds of strategy games out there – with heroes, monsters, fairies and precious stones. Supercell, a previously unknown mobile software development company from Finland, decided not to reinvent the wheel and… simply built another one. In 2013 Clash of Clans was reportedly generating $ 4 million in daily revenues through in-app purchases – a lot more than an average freemium has ever earned. Supercell surely did their best to create beautiful layouts and addictive gameplay. Yet, it’s the right choice of app monetization tools that made Clash of Clans an instant hit. Basically, the game is all about monetization, but Supercell tactfully keeps it under the pushy line, so users who cannot (or don’t want to) spare a few bucks on virtual currency can still enjoy the game – they simply wait for another level-up a little longer. Once you download the game, you enter the tutorial stage and receive tons of gems for free. You spend the gems on upgrades, gold and magic elixir that protects you against goblins’ attacks. Everything is really cheap, so you keep on spending and go broke pretty soon. As the gameplay evolves, the prices skyrocket, and your buying behavior has already been formed! There was Clash of Clans users who spend up to $ 20 thousand on precious stones when the game was in its prime. The viral application maintained its top-grossing status throughout 2015 and beyond; in the ever-changing world of mobile applications, longevity is hard to achieve. In case you want to replicate Supercell’s success, make sure to develop a solid and well-thought-out monetization strategy;

  CheckPoints and List Bliss. Todd and Mark DiPaola, the founders of inMarket, believe building a mobile app is similar to building a house: before you start, you should “put some time into thinking about what the rooms are going to look like”. The CheckPoints shopping app enables users to check in in almost any store nationwide and get instant rewards like digital coupons and discounts. The inMarket network now has over 46 million users; back in 00’s when the CheckPoints was at an early development stage Todd and Mark was struggling to decide on the app’s functionality. With List Bliss, they kept it simple. The app allows users to easily create shopping lists by scanning barcodes for different products and share the list with family and friends to check nothing’s missing. InMarket kept the set of application features focused and easily fixed the bugs at launch. We all know Feature Creep kills an app’s performance; you’ll be surprised to learn it has a similar effect on marketing. A good marketing campaign should clearly (but briefly) outline the benefits of a product and deliver the message to the target audience using as few words as possible. After all, a “fresh” smartphone holder doesn’t even know he needs a better shopping list. How on earth are you going to market your arguably cool & sexy app stuffed with features when you basically have 10 seconds to win users’ attention? Avoiding Feature Creep is a key factor to planning (and launching) a successful marketing campaign.

Let’s go back to what Gartner said. In case you want to make it to the lucky 0.01% of successful publishers, make sure to address a reliable vendor and create a detailed spec before a single line of code is written.

[netmaddy-blog]

Mobile App Marketing: 5 Success Stories to Draw Inspiration From

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/mobile-app-marketing-5-success-stories-to-draw-inspiration-from/

Mobile App Marketing: 5 Success Stories to Draw Inspiration From

By 2018, less than 0.01% of all mobile apps out there will be commercially successful. That’s what Gartner says – and we’ve got no reason to doubt the forecast. With the proliferation of mobile app development tools & the rise of “citizen developer” initiative, building mobile software has never been easier. Code quality & application performance aside, the main reason why companies fail to crack the App Store and Google Play charts is poor marketing. If you have a brilliant idea for an app, you’d better forget about Rovio’s overnight success and spend some time (and dough!) on marketing.

Top Earners (iOS developers who generate at least $ 50 thousand in revenues – 12% of the App Store’s registered publishers) have $30 thousand as an average marketing budget and devote 14% of project time to promoting their project. In case you’re a startup & barely raised funding through Kickstarter, your app can still be a hit – as long as you choose the right marketing strategy. Here are some app marketing success stories that prove you can do more with less.

Marketing done right: top 5 app success stories

Stay.com. Although building an application for Android first is not a major trend yet, that’s what the guys from Cutehacks did. Stay.com enables users to create personalized travel guides, store them on a smartphone and use the data offline. The app uses first-hand information provided by best baristas, chefs and media personalities from all over the world, so you can feel at home no matter what city you stay in – and save some money on roaming. Cutehacks spent nearly 6 months simultaneously developing the Android and iOS versions of Stay.com, and here’s what they learnt. First, you can’t ignore the Android look of an application. iOS-inspired layouts will probably alienate Android users – after all, the App Store and Google Play have totally different UX/UI policies. Although Cutehacks delivered a good-looking app that easily handled different Android resolutions, they received tons of negative reviews from devoted Androiders. Second, there’s memory and performance. Back in 2012 (and that’s when the Stay.com app was launched), the size of an Android application was device-dependent, so Cutehacks had to do some major re-coding. Finally, they found out Facebook APIs were unstable and poorly documented and spent quite a lot of time searching for developer tips on Quora and Stack Overflow. It sounds like everything Cutehacks did went wrong, but it’s far from being true. The guys successfully implemented the ACRA tool, enabling users to send failure reports every time the Stay.com crashed. They also used Trello to enhance project management (and poor management is the reason why approximately 30% of all IT projects fail). But what makes their story worth citing is the timely changes they made to Stay.com once they discovered users weren’t happy with the current Android version. If you want to succeed, you should pay attention to user feedback – and follow the App Store/Google Play developer guidelines, of course;

  Languages. Jeremy Olson, a tech-savvy college student from North California, launched the Languages translation app back in 2013. He was no stranger to mobile software development: his Grades app (enables students to track their grades throughout a semester) generated favorable reviews from both tech experts and general public. However, Grades didn’t bring any money, so Jeremy went for a more commercial project. The demand for translation application was – and still is! – really huge, so it was an easy option. Besides, there was no affordable translation application that worked offline on the market back then (takeaway #1: consider timing & demand for your product). Jeremy’s team went a long way to validate the app idea, determine desirable functionality and create great UX. However, the very first thing they did was define customer personas. Jeremy and his confederates were quite familiar with the translation experience, so they didn’t have to talk to potential users in person (although that’s how Zappos’ founder validated his business idea). A customer (or buyer) persona is a purely fictional character who possesses characteristics of your target audience. Olson chose several factors that influenced a person’s decision to purchase the program, including his age, occupation, language proficiency and the environment where Languages would come in handy. The team created three detailed personas, thus covering the majority of key characteristics of their target market. Creating a buyer’s persona is a key success factor to launching & promoting a mobile app – and most marketers still keep personas in a closet for whatever reason or simply don’t know how to use them;

  Flappy Bird. The viral game hit iTunes in 2013, but it wasn’t until early 2014 when the app gained immense popularity. Dong Nguyen, a Vietnam-based independent developer who built Flappy Bird over a couple of days, said he managed to achieve the so-called virality through addictive gameplay. However, some tech experts (including Michael Silverwood of VentureBeat) believe it wasn’t the case. In order to understand how the game topped the App Store chart in the first place, we need to get a better insight into Apple’s ranking algorithms. There are several factors that influence an application’s chart position, including the number of installs received for the past few days/hours, reviews and retention. Instead of spending huge money on user acquisition, GEARS Studios decided to focus on reviews. By the time Flappy Birds reached #1 on iTunes, it was getting over 400 reviews per day. It went on to receive 700 thousand reviews in a couple of months, and that’s almost 200% more than Candy Crush got after a year. It looks like GEARS implemented a “dark pattern” – a rate button displayed every time a user ended a game session and wanted to start anew. The button was located a place where the play button would normally be; users tapped it by chance and were transferred to the App Store rate page instead. Pretty soon writing reviews of Flappy Birds became a trend, so GEARS Studios simply removed the button with another application update. We do not encourage you to trick app users. The lesson to be learnt here is that application chart performance is not always determined by the number of downloads;

  Clash of Clans. Coming up with a great & 100% unique idea for an app surely increases your chances of success – but there’s nothing wrong with being a little cliché, too! There are hundreds of strategy games out there – with heroes, monsters, fairies and precious stones. Supercell, a previously unknown mobile software development company from Finland, decided not to reinvent the wheel and… simply built another one. In 2013 Clash of Clans was reportedly generating $ 4 million in daily revenues through in-app purchases – a lot more than an average freemium has ever earned. Supercell surely did their best to create beautiful layouts and addictive gameplay. Yet, it’s the right choice of app monetization tools that made Clash of Clans an instant hit. Basically, the game is all about monetization, but Supercell tactfully keeps it under the pushy line, so users who cannot (or don’t want to) spare a few bucks on virtual currency can still enjoy the game – they simply wait for another level-up a little longer. Once you download the game, you enter the tutorial stage and receive tons of gems for free. You spend the gems on upgrades, gold and magic elixir that protects you against goblins’ attacks. Everything is really cheap, so you keep on spending and go broke pretty soon. As the gameplay evolves, the prices skyrocket, and your buying behavior has already been formed! There were Clash of Clans users who spend up to $ 20 thousand on precious stones when the game was in its prime. The viral application maintained its top-grossing status throughout 2015 and beyond; in the ever-changing world of mobile applications, longevity is hard to achieve. In case you want to replicate Supercell’s success, make sure to develop a solid and well-thought-out monetization strategy;

CheckPoints and List Bliss. Todd and Mark DiPaola, the founders of inMarket, believe building a mobile app is similar to building a house: before you start, you should “put some time into thinking about what the rooms are going to look like”. The CheckPoints shopping app enables users to check in in almost any store nationwide and get instant rewards like digital coupons and discounts. The inMarket network now has over 46 million users; back in 00’s when the CheckPoints was at an early development stage Todd and Mark were struggling to decide on the app’s functionality. With List Bliss, they kept it simple. The app allows users to easily create shopping lists by scanning barcodes for different products and share the list with family and friends to check nothing’s missing. InMarket kept the set of application features focused and easily fixed the bugs at launch. We all know Feature Creep kills an app’s performance; you’ll be surprised to learn it has similar effect on marketing. A good marketing campaign should clearly (but briefly) outline the benefits of a product and deliver the message to target audience using as few words as possible. After all, a “fresh” smartphone holder doesn’t even know he needs a better shopping list. How on earth are you going to market your arguably cool & sexy app stuffed with features when you basically have 10 seconds to win users’ attention? Avoiding Feature Creep is a key factor to planning (and launching) a successful marketing campaign.

[hotspreadpage]

Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics

Editor’s note: Google Analytics is one of the most critical evaluation tools to aid your web-based content. This back-by-popular-demand post has been updated to continue detailing how to measure up for maximum effect.

How do you measure up when it comes to measuring the impact and value of the content you are publishing?

Fortunately, for most questions you may have about your content’s performance, there’s a way to find the answer – and very often, that answer can be found through Google Analytics.

Chances are you already use this robust tool to track key metrics like website visits, page views, and bounce rates. But Google Analytics can also uncover deeper, more-actionable insights that can paint a clearer picture of the results your content is achieving now and reveal critical opportunities to make improvements – if you know how to track them down and analyze those insights.­

To help you do just that, we created an e-book, How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Marketing Decisions, based on the top-rated presentation Orbit Media co-founder Andy Crestodina delivered at Content Marketing World 2015. But, as Google is constantly evolving its search products and marketing solutions, we thought it a good idea to revisit our initial discussion, and share more details that may help you gauge and optimize performance more effectively.

Turn data into decisions

As Andy asserts in the e-book, analytics are particularly valuable when used as a decision-support tool – a way of answering your key questions about what’s working, what isn’t, and what actions you should take as a result. To do this, he recommends following a simple, five-step process:

Formulate an idea about your content performance.

Determine a question you can ask to support this idea.

Create the report that will provide the appropriate data to answer that question.

Take action based on your analysis of that data.

Measure the results of the actions you take against the baseline data you gathered.

Web analytics are valuable as a decision-support tool, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Four reports to rule them all

When using Google Analytics as your data source for this process, there are four categories of reports you can view – each one is the key to understanding certain insights that impact the performance of the content marketing on your website:

Audience reports: Understand who your audience members are, what their content interests are, and how they interact with the content you publish.

Acquisition reports: Glean insights on the search terms visitors are using to discover your content, and the specific sources of your traffic.

Behavior reports: Evaluate the actions of your site visitors, uncover ways to improve their user experience, and optimize the engagement potential of your content.

Conversion reports: Determine whether your content is helping your business achieve its marketing goals, and discover which content efforts are achieving the best results.

Take a look at just a few of the questions these four reports can answer, along with some tips Andy offers for analyzing and applying their insights:

Performance by platform

Question: Are mobile visitors less engaged than visitors on other platforms?

Report to generate: Mobile Overview (Audience >> Mobile >> Overview)

The Mobile Overview report shows the number of sessions (visits) from a mobile device. By clicking on the Comparison View button in the options selector, you can clearly see how mobile visitor sessions compare to other platforms in terms of the engagement metric you prefer – such as bounce rates, pages per session, or average session duration.

Sample analysis: If your bounce rates are extremely high among your mobile users, it could mean you need to better optimize your site’s user experience on mobile.

You may need to better optimize your site’s UX on mobile if bounce rates are high, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Suggested actions:

Create a schedule for regular mobile testing.

Check the design of your website landing pages to see if they are optimized for mobile visitors.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Is Your Content Ready for the Mobile Takeover?

Social media traffic

Question: Which social network drives the best traffic to the site?

Report to generate: Channel reports (Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels, filtered by goal)

When considering traffic from your social networks, the “best” channels are those that convert visitors at a higher rate. You need to view the data that relates to the specific conversion goals. As you can see in the sample report below, LinkedIn had the highest conversion rate of the four most popular social channels.

The best social network channels are those that convert visitors at a higher rate, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Sample analysis: Once you set up your conversion goal in Google Analytics – subscribing to your newsletter, downloading an e-book, completing a lead-gen form, etc. – this report provides data on how successful your content is at meeting that goal.

Suggested action:

Adjust your content resources to place a greater focus on creating content for the social channels converting at the highest rates.

Blog post engagement

Question: Which of the blog posts are the most engaging to visitors?

Report to generate: All Pages Report (Behavior >> Site Content >> All Pages)

If your site page URLs are categorized by content type (e.g., if the word “blog” appears in the URL of every blog post), you can use the search filter on the All Pages report to view only the data related to your blog posts. Then, click on Comparison View to see relative engagement data for your blog posts.

Suggested actions:

Use high relative engagement to discover the topics that visitors find most engaging – indicating that you should create more content on those topics.

Link from high-traffic posts to high-converting posts.

Site navigation pathways

Question: What is the most common path visitors are taking through the site?

Report to generate: Users Flow (Audience >> Users Flow)

Analyzing the flow of traffic through your site can provide insights on whether your visitors are finding what they came for and where they might be diverging from the intended path to conversion.

Traffic flow can tell if visitors find what they seek or where they diverge from intended path. @crestodina Click To Tweet

When viewing the Users Flow report, you’ll find that green boxes represent site pages, arranged in groupings (e.g., by country, publication year, site category). The pages are labeled as URLs so the page that’s simply marked “/” represents your home page.

(Note: This report can require a bit of explanation if you aren’t familiar with how to find and interpret the data. For a full tutorial on how to create and analyze this report, check out Orbit Media’s post on the topic.)

Clicking on the green box for your home page (or any of the top pages of your site) will give you several options:

Highlight traffic through the page, which displays the traffic for that page, while still showing other pages

Explore traffic through the page, which removes traffic data for all other pages

Group Details, which displays more information on the top pages comprising that group)

From there, you can discover the top path visitors take after arriving on that page, and can determine whether the traffic flow aligns with the navigation path you intend for them to follow

Sample analysis: Any wrong turns on the path could indicate a need to make it easier for visitors to navigate to the content they want most or to highlight your highest value/best-performing content to keep them engaged and motivate them to explore your site in more detail.

Suggested action: If data shows that visitors are failing to make progress along your intended conversion path, you have a few optimization options:

If visitors are frequently moving from Page A to pages with high drop-off rates, you can clean up Page A and eliminate links to those irrelevant pages.

Alternately, you can optimize Page A by reconsidering the navigation features, internal links, and calls to action so the desired path is more visually prominent to visitors.

Go forth and analyze

Remember: Tracking and analyzing your performance data is not a one-time task. You need to revisit these reports on a regular basis to ensure that the actions you take are producing positive results and are accounting for new trends and tactics that may impact your content’s performance.

Tracking & analyzing your performance data is not a one-time task, says @crestodina via @joderama. Click To Tweet

For a more detailed explanation on analyzing and applying the insights found in these reports – as well as the additional performance questions Andy addresses in each of the four categories – download the complete e-book, How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Marketing Decisions.

How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Decisions from Content Marketing Institute

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Want more from Andy Crestodina? He’ll be talking SEO at ContentTECH on February 22, 2017, which is our free virtual event about content marketing and technology. Register today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm

[identityshine]

Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics

Editor’s note: Google Analytics is one of the most critical evaluation tools to aid your web-based content. This back-by-popular-demand post has been updated to continue detailing how to measure up for maximum effect.

How do you measure up when it comes to measuring the impact and value of the content you are publishing?

Fortunately, for most questions you may have about your content’s performance, there’s a way to find the answer – and very often, that answer can be found through Google Analytics.

Chances are you already use this robust tool to track key metrics like website visits, page views, and bounce rates. But Google Analytics can also uncover deeper, more-actionable insights that can paint a clearer picture of the results your content is achieving now and reveal critical opportunities to make improvements – if you know how to track them down and analyze those insights.­

To help you do just that, we created an e-book, How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Marketing Decisions, based on the top-rated presentation Orbit Media co-founder Andy Crestodina delivered at Content Marketing World 2015. But, as Google is constantly evolving its search products and marketing solutions, we thought it a good idea to revisit our initial discussion, and share more details that may help you gauge and optimize performance more effectively.

Turn data into decisions

As Andy asserts in the e-book, analytics are particularly valuable when used as a decision-support tool – a way of answering your key questions about what’s working, what isn’t, and what actions you should take as a result. To do this, he recommends following a simple, five-step process:

Formulate an idea about your content performance.

Determine a question you can ask to support this idea.

Create the report that will provide the appropriate data to answer that question.

Take action based on your analysis of that data.

Measure the results of the actions you take against the baseline data you gathered.

Web analytics are valuable as a decision-support tool, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Four reports to rule them all

When using Google Analytics as your data source for this process, there are four categories of reports you can view – each one is the key to understanding certain insights that impact the performance of the content marketing on your website:

Audience reports: Understand who your audience members are, what their content interests are, and how they interact with the content you publish.

Acquisition reports: Glean insights on the search terms visitors are using to discover your content, and the specific sources of your traffic.

Behavior reports: Evaluate the actions of your site visitors, uncover ways to improve their user experience, and optimize the engagement potential of your content.

Conversion reports: Determine whether your content is helping your business achieve its marketing goals, and discover which content efforts are achieving the best results.

Take a look at just a few of the questions these four reports can answer, along with some tips Andy offers for analyzing and applying their insights:

Performance by platform

Question: Are mobile visitors less engaged than visitors on other platforms?

Report to generate: Mobile Overview (Audience >> Mobile >> Overview)

The Mobile Overview report shows the number of sessions (visits) from a mobile device. By clicking on the Comparison View button in the options selector, you can clearly see how mobile visitor sessions compare to other platforms in terms of the engagement metric you prefer – such as bounce rates, pages per session, or average session duration.

Sample analysis: If your bounce rates are extremely high among your mobile users, it could mean you need to better optimize your site’s user experience on mobile.

You may need to better optimize your site’s UX on mobile if bounce rates are high, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Suggested actions:

Create a schedule for regular mobile testing.

Check the design of your website landing pages to see if they are optimized for mobile visitors.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Is Your Content Ready for the Mobile Takeover?

Social media traffic

Question: Which social network drives the best traffic to the site?

Report to generate: Channel reports (Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels, filtered by goal)

When considering traffic from your social networks, the “best” channels are those that convert visitors at a higher rate. You need to view the data that relates to the specific conversion goals. As you can see in the sample report below, LinkedIn had the highest conversion rate of the four most popular social channels.

The best social network channels are those that convert visitors at a higher rate, says @crestodina. Click To Tweet

Sample analysis: Once you set up your conversion goal in Google Analytics – subscribing to your newsletter, downloading an e-book, completing a lead-gen form, etc. – this report provides data on how successful your content is at meeting that goal.

Suggested action:

Adjust your content resources to place a greater focus on creating content for the social channels converting at the highest rates.

Blog post engagement

Question: Which of the blog posts are the most engaging to visitors?

Report to generate: All Pages Report (Behavior >> Site Content >> All Pages)

If your site page URLs are categorized by content type (e.g., if the word “blog” appears in the URL of every blog post), you can use the search filter on the All Pages report to view only the data related to your blog posts. Then, click on Comparison View to see relative engagement data for your blog posts.

Suggested actions:

Use high relative engagement to discover the topics that visitors find most engaging – indicating that you should create more content on those topics.

Link from high-traffic posts to high-converting posts.

Site navigation pathways

Question: What is the most common path visitors are taking through the site?

Report to generate: Users Flow (Audience >> Users Flow)

Analyzing the flow of traffic through your site can provide insights on whether your visitors are finding what they came for and where they might be diverging from the intended path to conversion.

Traffic flow can tell if visitors find what they seek or where they diverge from intended path. @crestodina Click To Tweet

When viewing the Users Flow report, you’ll find that green boxes represent site pages, arranged in groupings (e.g., by country, publication year, site category). The pages are labeled as URLs so the page that’s simply marked “/” represents your home page.

(Note: This report can require a bit of explanation if you aren’t familiar with how to find and interpret the data. For a full tutorial on how to create and analyze this report, check out Orbit Media’s post on the topic.)

Clicking on the green box for your home page (or any of the top pages of your site) will give you several options:

Highlight traffic through the page, which displays the traffic for that page, while still showing other pages

Explore traffic through the page, which removes traffic data for all other pages

Group Details, which displays more information on the top pages comprising that group)

From there, you can discover the top path visitors take after arriving on that page, and can determine whether the traffic flow aligns with the navigation path you intend for them to follow

Sample analysis: Any wrong turns on the path could indicate a need to make it easier for visitors to navigate to the content they want most or to highlight your highest value/best-performing content to keep them engaged and motivate them to explore your site in more detail.

Suggested action: If data shows that visitors are failing to make progress along your intended conversion path, you have a few optimization options:

If visitors are frequently moving from Page A to pages with high drop-off rates, you can clean up Page A and eliminate links to those irrelevant pages.

Alternately, you can optimize Page A by reconsidering the navigation features, internal links, and calls to action so the desired path is more visually prominent to visitors.

Go forth and analyze

Remember: Tracking and analyzing your performance data is not a one-time task. You need to revisit these reports on a regular basis to ensure that the actions you take are producing positive results and are accounting for new trends and tactics that may impact your content’s performance.

Tracking & analyzing your performance data is not a one-time task, says @crestodina via @joderama. Click To Tweet

For a more detailed explanation on analyzing and applying the insights found in these reports – as well as the additional performance questions Andy addresses in each of the four categories – download the complete e-book, How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Marketing Decisions.

How to Apply Analytics Data to Make Better Content Decisions from Content Marketing Institute

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Want more from Andy Crestodina? He’ll be talking SEO at ContentTECH on February 22, 2017, which is our free virtual event about content marketing and technology. Register today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics posted first on http://ift.tt/2maTWEr