It's DigitalMarketing

Does your Search specialist input into the briefing of your creative agency for your next print, TV or radio campaign? No? How about your Email marketer?

Probably not and why would they? That’s offline. These guys focus on clicks not branding, right?

In many businesses there is a distinct line separating the Online (technical) marketers and the Offline (creative) marketers. And that’s a big mistake.

If you’re a customer of the shopping behemoth, you can’t have failed to have noticed that Amazon let competitors use their website to sell their products. Known as Marketplace, like many others you’ve probably thought it’s a little odd. A bit counter-intuitive, isn’t it?

I’m just guessing, but I suspect you don’t let your competitors do the same?

Why not?

You’ve seen the headlines and read the great case studies and you just know you should be doing conversion testing (A/B, multi-variant, usability, etc.) on your website. Problem is, you have these other projects to do, you don’t have the resource to assign it to someone else and there is little awareness of conversion testing elsewhere in the company, particularly amongst senior decision makers.

So how do you change that?

Find out how.

When you hear someone refer to ‘optimising the website’ you probably think one of two routes – search engine optimisation or A/B or multi-variant testing.

What you probably don’t think of immediately is optimising your website’s credibility.

It doesn’t matter how well you’ve optimised your ecommerce funnel, how much traffic your search efforts bring, you’ll still be missing your potential if your visitors don’t trust you and your site.

They simply won’t buy, sign-up, download or recommend.

So how do you establish credibility?

In early November at the Conversion Conference in London, I had the good fortune to hear Charles Nicholls from SeeWhy speak about abandoned online shopping carts.

He cited a Forrester Research study from earlier this year that examined the reasons why website visitors abandon online shopping carts. The top 5 reasons could essentially be reduced to two factors – cost and readiness to buy. Find out how you can fix both these issues on your website.

Do you know how you could make your blog or website more appealing and usable to your visitors today?

It’s quite simple – make it mobile-friendly.

Econsultancy – unoptimised for Mobile

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been finding it increasingly irksome to navigate or even just read web pages on my mobile phone. The text is tiny, the buttons and links are too small and the page takes an age to load.

Sure, they weren’t designed to read on the phone, so I should cut them some slack, right?

Well, maybe last year, but frankly it’s about time everyone got on board this train, as it ain’t stopping.

We are creatures of habit. We get comfort from routine. We struggle with change.

Generalisations, yes, but you can’t deny you’ve noticed those traits in yourself at times.

We do some things, because we did it yesterday. And the day before. We find it easier to carry on doing it that way, rather than analyse what we’re doing and change direction. Who has time to do that anyway?

Then there’s safety. It’s, of course, in our best interests not to take risks or rock the boat, better to toe the line and do it the way you’ve been told to do it, the way we’ve always done it.

Unfortunately, all that does is lead to disappointment, to average, to bland, to a loss of contention.

Albert Einstein was describing insanity when he said it was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, but he could have equally been referring to our unwavering routines.

In my recent ‘60 second mobile review’ post, I explained a very simple health check for your business to determine whether you should be building a Mobile offering. Even though you may feel your company or industry is not ready, your Analytics may prove otherwise. A quick check will illustrate just how popular your website already is with mobile users.

If you’ve tried accessing your website on a mobile phone, you may have already realised that those visitors might not exactly be getting a premium customer experience. You may already be deliberating which is better for your business – a mobile site or smart phone apps.

However, to get your mobile site or app built you’re going to need to present a business case. You can pull together your supporting evidence – including existing mobile statistics – from both internal and external sources.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. In your very near future, you’re going to see a stupid, crazy spike in your conversion rate. Bold statement, but true.

If you spend any money on advertising your website, you need to be doing this. Trust me.

The great thing is, your competitors are highly unlikely to be doing it, so now’s your chance – your advertising performance will improve and you’ll look like a genius.

And the craziest thing about it; it’s in a place you’d never think to look.

For many companies getting the website right is enough of a task, so something like Mobile just has to wait. Especially as it’s not yet mainstream, right?

Or is it? If you read the press / blogs, it’s very clear that this year is finally the long-promised ‘Year of Mobile’. Smart phone uptake is substantial, Facebook has 150 million active mobile users and more and more companies are making mobile revenue.

Great for them, but your market isn’t quite there yet, is it?

Or is it? I think it’s an easy assumption to make, especially for less ‘glamorous’ industries. But I’ll ask you this, how do you know?