Category: User experience

User experience is a major factor in winning and retaining clients. User experience stretches way beyond websites and businesses need to get it right to keep customers.

Mobile compatible marketing

Mobile compatible marketing -ABC guide

Mobile compatible marketing – ‘going mobile’ or being ‘mobile compatible’ is one of the most current topics in digital marketing. Customers often ask us to factor this in to our solutions and it is for all the right reasons.

This simple ABC gives you an overview of the main considerations that affect moving your communications into mobile territory

A – relevance

You should use the analytical information available to you to decide just how important mobile compatible marketing is. Often when we look at analytics for our clients, the results aren’t what our customers expect. This isn’t solely specific to the use of mobile either. It is surprising how many organisations still don’t use analytics to evaluate their online and digital marketing investments. It’s a free service and helps you make informed decisions about developing your online and email strategies.
Keep your choices in perspective.

B – design

The whole point of mobile compatible marketing is useability. Responsive websites and email work on the principle that on a smaller screen (than a desktop) they look different. This may mean bigger and fewer buttons, larger images and simplified navigation.
The general rule of thumb for us is – the rule of thumb. If a user has to use any more than their thumb to navigate your media, it has failed. If, however you can successfully navigate your media with the use of a single thumb, the design is ticking the first part of the ‘designed for mobile’ criteria. There are other considerations too, including colour choices, font sizes.
The primary focus is the rule of thumb.

C – investment

Going mobile doesn’t need to cost a fortune and you are able to adapt existing collateral relatively easy. Brand new collateral is even easier to achieve the cross over with many templates and themes being responsive out of the box. These form a strong set of foundations to edit and tweak to make them suit your needs exactly.
In terms of budgeting, you will need to allow additional resource for design and programming but its not something you need to do all at once. If you follow the advice in A and B you’ll find that your budget will stretch and accommodate a number of mobile optimised solutions without causing any major upsets.

In conclusion, moving to mobile compatible marketing is as easy as it is effective.

If you need help taking your collateral to mobile readiness, there’s plenty of help at hand.

By Ryan Mullins

Top 5 considerations when thinking about marketing automation

When you’re considering marketing automation there are 5 points that need to sit at the top of your decision making priorities. Although marketing automation has clear benefits for many organisations, the key factors for its success are the same.

1. Data you can use for marketing automation

Organisations that have plenty of data are the ones that will benefit most from marketing automation. The reasons are quite simple, without data, it’s going to be an uphill challenge from the off. The kind of data we are talking about begins with basic contact details. Email, mobile and address details are core to communicating with people.

2. Processes that would benefit from marketing automation

Sales processes and buying patterns need to be mapped out comprehensively to gain the most advantage from automation. By mapping processes it not only makes it simpler for setting up your marketing automation, it also helps identifying where there are weaknesses or opportunities to improve and streamline sales processes. You’ll also need to be considerate of the areas where your sales and marketing processes interface with other business systems as these areas can affect the ease of implementation.

3. Commitment to marketing automation

Before you make the decision to go forward with marketing automation, you need to evaluate your level of commitment. There’s plenty of evidence that marketing automation works but overnight success is unlikely. The setting up process can be time and labour intensive so it’s important to be realistic about the time and budget you’re prepared to commit to setting up and evaluating your marketing automation project.

4. Metrics you can apply to marketing automation

How you measure the success of marketing automation is a principle consideration from the outset. It’s important to be very clear and concise about what your marketing automation investment needs to achieve to make it worthwhile. For many, the metrics are sales related, for others, retention is a principle factor. Whatever it is that your business needs, scoping your success metrics are vital to the longevity of your plans.

5. Budget you’ll invest in marketing automation

Moving to marketing automation from campaign driven communication is a major change in the way you operate. Although you can stage budgets, your overall budget needs to be considerably more than your normal campaign type spends. It is possible to gain quick wins and start to benefit from your investment early but you’ll need to be realistic about the size and scope of your marketing automation project and the subsequent budget needs of such an undertaking.

Summary

Marketing automation is not a quick or simple task. The benefits are increases in sales, reductions in administration, improvements in retention and much more. Before you set about implementation of marketing automation in your business, you should speak with a professional who will be able to assess the ease, cost and benefits to you.

By Ryan Mullins

Why do you need marketing automation? Reduce the cost of communication

Marketing automation is big news in business because it helps reduce costs of communication.

It’s simple, machines do things more efficiently than human beings.

So what’s actually meant by marketing automation?

Communicating can be a costly exercise. When you consider call centres and what it takes to run a call centre. Many businesses have off shored call centres to try to reduce cost. In many businesses this has been criticised as people don’t feel like they get a personal touch.

Personalisation of communication is at the heart of quality information exchange.

Communication has success critical features that, when handled correctly, improve quality, success and efficiency. In turn this reduces cost.

[unordered_list style=”tick”]
  • Timing of contact
  • Relevance of content
  • Information Exchange
[/unordered_list]

Reducing the cost of running a call centre and sales operation.

For a business that has 35 teleappointers making outbound sales calls 9-5, 5 days a week. It would also take a sales team of 15 on the road to sit appointments generated by the outbound team.

This business has access to databases of thousands of businesses around the UK. Each teleappointer makes c.100 calls a day generating 2 appointments each. This means 70 appointments a day are being booked. Of these appointments, around 50% drop out and there is a sales conversion of 25% of sat appointments.

With these kinds of stats it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the sales value of wins needs to be 5 figures upwards to satisfy the wages demand, let alone the commissions and operational costs.

This kind of wastage in sales is undesirable but all too common.

The benefits of marketing automation in sales.

So going on the figures above, the outbound sales team are hitting 3500 contacts a day to deliver 70 appointments. One intelligent e-shot with open and click through notifications would provide enough information to determine warm prospects at the time they are most likely to take a call.

Based on an open rate of 25% and a click through rate of 20%, this activity would generate 175 warm leads, requiring 2 teleappointers to work through. This may provide sufficient leads to convert to 70 appointments. Thats would provide a reduction in cost of 90%.

What’s the cost of marketing automation?

There are 3 major considerations when setting up marketing automation.

[unordered_list style=”tick”]
  • Data
    If you’ve already got plenty of data, you’re onto a winner. Data can be costly dependent on how targeted your audience.
  • Content
    If you’re already have tons of content and produce tons of content, you’re in a stronger position than those who do not.
  • Complexity
    The simpler your processes, the less they cost to set up. As you add complexity, programming and testing become more arduous.
[/unordered_list]

Where should you start with marketing automation?

[ordered_list style=”decimal”]
  1. Gain the assistance of providers who done it before.
  2. Set out your objectives.
  3. Determine your budget for phase 1.
  4. Agree Milestones and KPI’s with your team.
  5. Set out a realistic timeline.
[/ordered_list]

Marketing automation is quickly becoming a need of any business that wishes to communicate regularly with any group of recipients. Whether it be new business, existing clients or simply news subscribers, marketing automation is one of the most effective methods of keeping costs of mass communication to a minimum.

By Ryan Mullins