Welcome back! As per usual, we have a fantastic curation of marketing resources for you. This week we’ll be discussing SEO tools, analytics and transactional emails. To see our past weekly roundups that are jam packed full of information, check out the Digital Marketing News Section.
Missguided: eTailer Launches “Tinder Style” Shopping App
Missguided is now offering a fully functional app that also embodies a tinder-style “Swipe to Hype” feature allowing the user to show off their taste. The app is build on the Poq app commerce platform and launched on the 8th March.
Nitin Passi, the founder and CEO of Missguided explained that users have been asking for the shopping app for some time and they wanted to deliver something that offered more than their mobile site. The app is being treated as its own channel, part of their multichannel strategy.
They have built the app based on two key attributes: convenience, and engagement. Customers will always be logged into a personalised and addictive shopping experience and can check out using only their fingerprint.
This news comes as reflection on how youth orientated brands are now working around apps and innovating to separate themselves from the pack. Millennials seek creative and cool shopping experiences and are already the most responsive age group to mobile ads. This means that eCommerce is going to have to offer more than just a shopping app and pull out more stops to keep them engaged.
eCommerce Accounts for Almost a Quarter of Abercrombie & Fitch Sales
Abercrombie and Fitch’s direct-to-consumer share of sales has risen by 2% in the last year. Direct-to-consumer, which includes online and omni-channel sales accounted for a total of 24% on overall sales last year. This data shows they’re making serious progress in their omni-channel initiatives.
Like many shopping-centre based retailers, it closed quite a few of its physical stores last year, going from 965 to 932 stores at the start of the fiscal year. (A 3.4% decrease).
Arthur Martinez, the executive chairman said: “2015 was a year of tremendous change for us… We completed our move to a branded structure, strengthened our teams and improved our core processes.” He continues, “In addition, we continued to invest in direct-to-consumer and omni-channel and execute our aggressive store closure program. While we accomplish a lot, there is much more progress we need to make to fulfil the potential of our brands.”
8 Free SEO Tools for Merchants
Optimisation for web searching can be a difficult task, but thankfully there are many free tools out there for you to use, so we’ve listed our 8 favourites:
Google Keyword Planner
This is absolutely essential for taking note of the search query volume estimates. You can get historical statistics, keyword lists and you can even see how a list of keywords might perform.
SEOCentro
This provides a variety of different SEO tools for you to monitor your site’s performance. You can use their SEO analyser, their rank checker, the keyword analyser, the meta tag analyser and social media shares.
Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator
This tool checks if the links in your sitemap work and also verifies if you have a valid sitemap.
Google Analytics Referrer Spam Killer
This tool keeps your Google Analytics data as fresh and clean as possible by filtering our spammy referrer domains, which will otherwise seriously skew your analytics reports.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
This analyses a URL and reports if the page has a mobile friendly design. Since everyone uses mobile these days, this is a particularly useful tool for you to have. And it’s free!
Seoptimer
Seoptimer is a daily-use tool that takes a quick look at over 20 SEO factors on your website.
Moz Open Site Explorer
This tool from Moz allows you to take a look at a site’s influence. You can check our inbound links to the page, root romain, sub-domain and then analyse linking pages.
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
This plugin is amazing. You can take a look at all aspects of your SEO including key words, metadata descriptions, alt text for images, and real time page analysis. Basic is free, but for $69 you can have the premium package which offers a more robust interface and greater tools for improving search engine ranking.
3 Ways to Drive Up Conversion With Email Workflows
It would be ideal if we were able to reach out personally to every lead that we collect and develop one-to-one relationships and feed them the content they need to see to move them down the funnel. However, it’s not that easy at times. So, Crazy Egg have published a list of 10 ways you can drive conversions with email and we picked our favourite 3:
Cyclical
Cyclical counts for items such as toiletries, light bulbs, beauty products, etc., which people purchase on a regular basis. The re-purchasing of such items happens at pretty predictable intervals so when the time of repurchasing comes, the customer has two choices: stick with you, or go elsewhere. Once you’ve predicted when they might need you again, you can get them onto a workflow that shows them your worth and has a bit of extra love. If they are B2B customers, you can send a couple of reminder emails with a value proposition for them.
Up-selling & Cross Selling
These are the staples of eCommerce. They’re effective ways of increasing revenue while serving your customers and that’s why they’re so popular as strategies. You can attempt to interest B2B customers in other parts of offerings or encourage them to move to premium accounts – that would be classed as cross-selling and up-selling. There are a few triggers for cross-selling, and one could be purchases. If someone’s already bought a lipstick from you, they might also want to see a compact mirror or mascara to go with it. Complimentary purchases are the best type of cross selling. If they purchased a digital item such as music, you can email them with similar artists.
Re-Engagement
Customers can get bored and emails can become redundant. Some people might change email clients or change their email address, or another example is work emails – they aren’t a lot of use especially when they’re using all their hours for work, and not reading your email. You can flag inactive addressed by ‘age’ or the time since their last activity.
Between 3-6 months is recommended for most businesses but it all depends on your offering and the buying cycle. You can measure inactivity by lack of response, lack of website visits, and the nonuse of apps and tools. Make inactivity your trigger, and anyone who reaches that point should be put into a re-engagement workflow. You can entice customers back to you with a special offer or even the classic triggers like exclusivity, scarcity or urgency.
We churn these out weekly. Subscribe to keep updated.
