Book your place for some great events with SLI Systems, Smart Insights and many more
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Learn how Internet Retailing Top 500 brands such as B&Q, Boden, Aurora Fashions and Thompson&Morgan deliver a constantly improving and relevant user experience by leveraging on-site search navigation, merchandising and traffic, to connect shoppers with the products they’re looking for across multiple devices.
Join usability expert Martin Newman, CEO, Practicology and the retail technology veteran Tim Callan, CMO, SLI Systems for the webinar SLI Systems: Connecting Shoppers to Products to Accelerate E-commerce Revenues to gain a deeper insight into practical ways of increasing conversions.
Date: Thursday 8th May at 11am
For more info and to register click here.
Creating the Ultimate Customer Journey Seminar brought to you by dotMailer, Feefo, Rackspace, Redbox Digital, SLI Systems and Mixing Digital.
Date: Tuesday May 20th
Timings: 8.45am - 6pm
Venue: The Place, Ducie Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2TP
At the event we look at how creating the best journey for your customers can be a long process which involves many different internal and external factors and joining up all the dots can take time. At today’s event, we will hear from many of the experts in that process and look at the best tools on the market that will help you manage the process effectively.
Event Takeaways:
- 10 Practical Techniques for Managing Customer Experience / CXM
- Using Hosting, Hybrid technology, fanatical support and cloud to create effective e-commerce sites
- Connecting shoppers to products to accelerate e-commerce revenues
- Introduction to Feedback and Reviews
- How to humanise your purchase journey
- Best practice on Delivery and Returns.
This event is for brands and retailers only, please book your place here.
Digital Impact 2014 will inspire digital marketing managers, marketing managers, directors and their advisors responsible for integrating digital marketing to use new approaches to plan, manage and optimise their digital channels to grow the commercial contribution from digital.
Date: Wednesday 17th September
Timings: 8.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Cavendish Conference Centre, Duchess Mews, London, W1G 9DT
You will learn from an interactive format featuring:
- Case studies of digital transformation from leading brands
- Roundtables and panels to share your pain-points and best practices
Smart Insights have designed the format of Digital Impact 2014 to maximise involvement and learning for attendees.
For more info and to book your place click here
We are looking forward to seeing you there.
Take care
Miss Charlie Lines
Director and Founder
Mixing Digital
02089854249
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Tesco will launch own-brand Smartphone
Tesco will launch the first own-brand smartphone by the end of the year. The device, that will be pre-installed with Tesco Services, will run Google's Android software, and the specification will be comparable to phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Tesco will launch the first own-brand smartphone by the end of the year. The device, that will be pre-installed with Tesco Services, will run Google's Android software, and the specification will be comparable to phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S5.
The company launched recently a tablet, the Hudl, that entered the the lower end of the market, priced at £119 and competing with devices that had relatively low specifications. A refreshed version of the Hudl tablet will be released in later in the year.
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Great customer service is one of the key ingredients to sustained business growth, whether on or offline. Companies that approach customer service listen to their customers and determine how to specifically address their needs. Marcus Law of SLI Systems explains how SLI’s Learning Search helped leading UK seed and plant retailer Thompson & Morgan achieve this, helping online shoppers connect to the products they are most likely to buy, directly driving increased sales and higher customer satisfaction.
The Importance of Effective On-Site Search
For retailers like Thompson & Morgan, where 60% of the company’s sales have moved online, on-site search requires highly relevant results, merchandising, faceted navigation, social content, and is one of the most critical components of website performance. Optimising site search enables customers to find the right products they want to buy quickly and efficiently, according to group e-commerce manager, Clare Dixey. SLI Learning Search does this through continually improving search relevancy through intelligence gathered from visitors’ search queries and click-throughs, helping visitors more easily find and purchase what they’re looking for. The solution is dynamic, so results change order as customer buying trends and search terms shift, keeping results highly relevant on the retailer’s website.
Accurate On-Site Search improves Customer Satisfaction
Dixey says, “The unique names of many gardening products can be hard to spell correctly, and our previous search often turned up ‘no results’ or poor results when the exact right term wasn’t used.” One of the most important elements of successful search for Thompson & Morgan is therefore Auto Complete, which helps customers identify many hard-to-spell names. She continues, “Offering visitors search suggestions as they begin typing in a keyword is really important in helping them finding the right product more easily, and improving the overall experience.”
Merchandising Drives Business Growth
Behind the scenes there is a great deal of merchandising capability provided by SLI’s Merchandising Console which, Dixey says, is fantastic for the business. She says, “If users search for a specific term, not only can we send them to a specific landing page, but we have the ability to show specific merchandising banners which can be applied to all users, or only to searches which meet particular criteria. We also have the ability to change the order of results. It may well be that we have a surplus line or have a product that’s been in the news. We can change the order of results in order to make sure that this is the first product that people see.”
Redirects Support Customer Need
Redirects allow the company to put up a specific page in response to a search, something Dixey uses for the “no results” page. She says, “If the user doesn’t find what they want on search, we feel it’s very important that the user doesn’t get a dead end page. SLI enabled us to turn this into a merchandising page, so if this scenario happens our top ten sellers are displayed.”
Intelligent Search with Expert Guidance
One of the challenges facing Thompson & Morgan was that despite having refinement information, the site didn’t offer users the chance to bring all the information together in one single source. For example, a customer might want a perennial plant that is easy to grow, with pink flowers that blossom between July and August. Working closely with the SLI team, they created the Garden Plant Finder, a unique feature in online gardening retail and a valuable tool that helps customers narrow down the types of results they want to see. “For every online retailing challenge we’ve faced, SLI always come up with a solution. The best thing about SLI is that it’s a results engine that we don’t really have to touch – it’s brilliant in terms of resources,” said Dixey.
Optimising Search with Site Champion
Site Champion is SLI’s user-generated SEO solution, driving traffic and revenue to a retailer by using popular customer search terms to create optimised landing pages in the major search engines.
“Site Champion really complements the SEO activities that we do in-house. It drives a lot more referrals for non-brand traffic to our site, which then converts to sales,” said Dixey.
Conclusion
The results speak for themselves: Only 21% of site visitors use the search box, but those visitors are generating 47% of the total site revenue. Additionally, SLI’s site search conversion rate is 74% higher than the site average; the average order value for search users is 30% higher than the site average; and the bounce rate for site search users is 45% lower than the site average. Getting your on-site search right can alleviate customer dissatisfaction and happy customers means a better bottom line.
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Amazon lets users shop via Twitter
Online retail giant Amazon has announced a partnership with Twitter that lets users adding products to their shopping basket by tweeting a special hashtag.
Online retail giant Amazon has announced a partnership with Twitter that lets users adding products to their shopping basket by tweeting a special hashtag. They can do so by replying to tweets containing a link to an Amazon product with #amazoncart in the US and #amazonbasket in the UK. Users will still need to go to Amazon to pay and complete the purchase. The move comes as firms are looking at ways to use social media platforms as tools to attract customers.
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Last week Mixing Digital was glad to host another Internet Leaders Dinner: Fuelling Digital Success in 2014 at the glamorous Elysée Restaurant in Central London. Our speaker this time was Dave Chaffey, Co-founder and CEO of Smart Insights. Dave, who is author of 5 bestselling books on e-commerce, founded the popular online publisher and consultancy to provide guides, ebooks and training that help businesses succeed online.
After a couple of drinks in the private room, the discussion kicked off with one natural question: what are the elements that fuel success in digital marketing? Dave invited all the guests to grab their drink and come closer to the screen to show them a slide that outlined what the marketing landscape looks like. It was immediately clear to all the participants that the quantity of apps and platforms in the market is extremely vast and the situation could be potentially confusing for the customer. What is it possible to do then to solve this problem? The first thing that Dave suggested was to focus all your effort on choosing the best channels before choosing a business.
A little survey among the guests showed that the most popular way to give businesses the biggest commercial benefits is content, that obviously goes nicely together with social media. The second step, is planning your digital strategy - there are a lot of companies, like ASOS and Easyjet, that are investing in content and social media, but surprisingly a lot of them don’t have a precisely thought out strategy that helps them get the best results. The first question from the audience came from the Head of Content, Segun Ogunsheye at Havas, who asked what is the biggest challenge in generating content. Being that content is one of the most important elements for a successful marketing strategy and being a main focus for many companies, it might be hard to make it stand out from the crowd and cut through the massive amount of articles, case studies, blogs, etc. that can be found online.
Planning, Reaching, acting, converting and engaging are the key words to a good digital marketing strategy but if you are interested in discovering more about how to be successful in digital, you can download the full presentation here or you can contact Dave on dave.chaffey@smartinsights.com.
We would like to thank all the guests of this interesting dinner, our sponsor Brighttag for their support and our speaker Dave Chaffey for his great session. If you would like to hear more from Dave and other leading digital marketing experts then please sign up to attend the Smart Insights Digital Impact 2014 one day conference on Wednesday September 17th.
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ShapChat has decided to expand from pictures into video and text messaging, following the path of other popular apps. The new features, collectively called Chat, let users swipe the name of one of their friends in their Snapchat contact list to start a text conversation.
Until now, Snapchat mainly let users share pictures, which disappear after they're viewed. With this new feature, instant messages can be saved individually or users can also take a screenshot of conversations to save them. Messages that are not saved will be cleared after users read them.
Snapchat has also added video chat to its features. The app will show when a friend is online, allowing users to start live video chats with the press of a button.
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Whether you’re a web designer, developer, in public relations, advertising or traditional marketing, it’s imperative for you to maintain your on-going education in search marketing and its ever-changing ways. And as organizations integrate online and offline marketing, it’s crucial to understand how search fits in with the “big picture,” not only contributing to enhanced brand exposure but in many cases paying for itself via measurably improved ROI. Don't miss the Search Marketing Expo London - 13th-14th May , Chelsea Football Club. Click here to book and use the code MIXINGDIGITAL14 for a 15% discount.
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Chinwag Psych 2014 is the one day conference that focuses on psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics for business and marketing. Sessions cover a range of incisive areas; from the way cognitive biases affect our decisions, to predicting consumer behaviour and how changes to our routines can enrich the way we work. Expert speakers and acknowledged practitioners showcase techniques that optimize a business, with case studies from global brands. Delegates at the Chinwag Psych 2013 included the brightest minds from Eventbrite, EngageSciences, BBC, Microsoft, Jam, UCL, Lingo24, Nesta, Goldsmiths, University of London, ThoughtShift, U Interactive Ltd, WWF, foursquare, Workdigital.co.uk, Melcrum, RSCPP, Adobe, CorpComms Magazine, Albion, Schuh and many more. Chinwag Psych will be held at The Museum Of London on 15th May.
For more information and to book click here
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Social Media Strategies Summit in Amsterdam: 18-19 June 2014
The Social Media Strategies Summit (SMSS) holds 2 day events around the US and in the UK, and will be coming to Amsterdam 18-19 June, 2014. SMSS hand-picks speakers who provide real-life insights and best practices into building and maintaining powerful social media plans that align with your business strategy.
Join us and other social media marketers and experts for 2 full days of education-packed and interactive sessions on how to build and execute your social media strategy. We focus on learning and case studies, providing you with the tools and strategies you can implement back at the office right away. We also provide a great atmosphere for networking and opportunities to meet other attendees.
We’re featuring speakers from top brands like Bosch, MTV, Hyatt, HSBC, and Audi.
In Amsterdam, we’ll be featuring 2-hour interactive workshops on 18th June, where you’ll be working with smaller groups of attendees and one-on-one with instructors to dive into specific social strategy topics. We organise our sessions into three dedicated tracks: Social Media Strategy Development, Social Tools & Platforms, and Content Strategy & Marketing. This allows you to customise your summit experience and attend the sessions most pertinent to you and your organisation.
Register by 14 March to receive a registration discount!
Questions? Contact Madeleine Umpleby at madeleineumpleby@ems-ltd.org. Group discounts are also available.
Mixing Digital readers receive a 15% discount for SMSS Amsterdam. To claim your discount, quote the code EMSMIX15 when you register. For more info click here
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