8The Mobile Explosion – The Device Changing the Face of Retail
This post is written by guest author Rachel Modiano.
Rachel is the Director of Marketing for iGoDigital, the leading provider of personalization and product recommendation tools that guide smarter retail. The company currently serves many of the world’s most successful and respected retail brands, including Best Buy, Walmart, Nokia, Lids and Scholastic. iGoDigital is headquartered in Indianapolis, IN and was named to the 2008 “Inc 500” list of the fastest growing private companies.
As I scroll through the pages of my favorite industry pubs, it is hard to avoid the topic of mobile shopping. It’s everywhere! It’s going to be a race to the finish line for the top 500 retailer to see who wins the mobile shopping race.
You might ask why is mobile so important now?
Mobile is changing the way consumers shop. According to a recent Internet Retailer survey completed by Oracle and ATG, 29% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase of digital or physical merchandise using their mobile devices. 40% of online consumers ages 18-34 have made a mobile purchase. That figure is 27% for ages 35-54 and 17% for age 55 and older. What does a retailer need in order to have a successful mobile site? The site needs to be optimized for mobile – the jury is still out on which platform retail should use to launch their mobile site - weather an App, WAP, or m. site is the best option.
The Mobile Shopper vs. the Mobile Researcher
Putting actual mobile sales aside there is another trend emerging – the mobile researcher. Even more than purchasing on their mobile devices consumers are researching products on the web, the survey finds, showing that mobile sites and apps hold potential for boosting multichannel sales. 48% of U.S. adults have browsed or researched products on their mobile devices. Additionally, at iGoDigital, we’ve seen consumers take their researching to the next level with the ability to transition their search from mobile device to web.
This might sound great in theory but let me show you a practical example as to why this multi-channel continuity is so important. I was recently at a beauty store and forgot the SKU number of the makeup I usually use. I know I had purchased the product on my home computer so; I took out my phone, launched the company’s mobile app and signed into my account – under recent purchases there was the SKU of my makeup, clear as day. The connection to my information “offline” was the key differentiator weather I made a purchase or not.
Exponential Impact – Mobile + Product Recommendations
You could also use this multi-channel connection in the form of product recommendations and ensuring the recommendations are accurate regardless of channel. Let’s revisit my makeup scenario again. I am standing in the beauty store, I’ve logged into my account, I have my makeup sku and I click through to the product page to ensure this is my makeup. Along the right hand side of the product page are product recommendations – “shoppers who bought this may also like…” - I see a smoky eye shadow kit and decide that would be great to purchase and try out this Friday night. So I also purchased the smoky eye shadow kit. I went to the cash register and paid for my foundation and eye shadow.
I am going to pause the story for a second – this personalized recommendation was instrumental in increasing the value of my basket, which in turn positively impacted the retailer’s bottom line.
Here’s how a retailers can dramatically increase their basket value by adding recommendations:
Pre- recommendations basket value: Foundation = $38
Purchase total = $38.
Post recommendation basket value: Foundation ($38) + smoky eye shadow ($24)
Purchase total = $62.
Recommendations $ impact = 61% or a $24 impact.
On a single purchase this might not seem like a like a big deal but, let’s say 100 people per day utilize product recommendations to boost their basket value.
Let’s check out the impact:
100 people x $24 basket value increase = $2400 more rev/day
= $16,800 additional revenue/week
= $873,600 additional revenue/year.
You can see how much on an impact recommendations on any channel can make. (For more information on iGoDigital’s ability to add personalized recommendations to channels check out the channel page on the iGoDigital Website.
Connecting The Dots Across Channels
Now that we understand the impact of mobile product recommendation Let’s get back to our story. Later that night, the beauty retailer sent a batch file of in-store purchase history to their personalization provider – this tied my in-store purchases to my customer profile. Now the next time I am standing in the store forgetting the shade of foundation I wear or that awesome smoky eye kit I purchased I’ll be able to connect the dots using my mobile device.
This small nuance is changing the way retailers utilize their mobile platform as well as the impact of additional tools, like a basket builder or product recommendations can make in a retailer’s bottom line. Additionally, retailers need to change their thinking in regards to “window shoppers” or shoppers “just researching.” You never know when customer might jump across channels and become your next customer.
3Should my email marketing match my website?
It’s very important to use design elements—such as color, art, logos, etc.—to make visual connections between your Web site and your email. When you sign up email list members on your Web site, you want the email to be an extension of the site that your customers recognize. If there is a disconnect because the email doesn’t look like the Web site, your subscribers may think your email is spam.
Conversely, when you send out emails with a call to action that takes recipients back to a landing page, you don’t want to confuse those readers by sending them to a Web site that doesn’t look like the company you portray in your email.
This happened to me recently. I got an email from a major airline that featured a color scheme that was predominately the company’s trademark yellow and orange. Clicking through to the airline’s Web site, I was shocked to land on a page that was mainly blue and purple. My initial thought was that I was on the wrong page. What I learned is that the company rebranded its Web site but has not carried the new branding elements through to its email program.
While it’s not unusual for companies to rebrand or to freshen their brand, it’s important to keep some of the old elements—at least on a temporary basis—to bridge to the new brand. You also need to make sure that your email program catches up at the same time. This can be a struggle if email marketing and your Web site are managed by different groups, but the outcome is worth the effort.
When designing your emails, look to your Web site for design elements and incorporate some of those elements into your email. If you have an html Web site, you can even use elements from the Web site to easily design your email.
Remember: it’s all about integrating the same look and feel from Web site to email, and even to printed marketing materials. Carrying a similar look throughout all these customer touch points makes customers comfortable with your brand, which in turn makes them comfortable pulling out their wallets.
Carissa Newton is director of marketing for Delivra, an email marketing software and services company.
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3Salaries in the Realm of Design
We recently put together a visual report of average salaries for web designers according to specialty, location, and industry.
Do you want to know how much the average U.S. web designer makes at a hospital?
How about the average salary for a systems administrator of a school district?
Maybe you want to know just how big is the difference between the average web developers salary in the U.S. vs. India? (hint: it’s big)
If you’re hiring web technologists or just looking to see what your value might be in the open market, then you’ll want to check out our report on web design salaries.
0Guerilla Website User Testing: Small Scale Usability Testing, Massive Benefit
Today’s post is from Brian Lehmer of UserTesting.com, a Mountain View-based company committed to helping website managers, developers, and designers — anyone who feels responsible for a website — improve their sites.
It seems like we’re all into website usability these days. And why shouldn’t we be? Usable websites appeal to the masses, achieve record conversion rates, and make the people behind their implementation look like heroes and marketing geniuses. Indeed website usability is brilliant marketing strategy.
Website usability research is readily available and every major online retailer has taken notice, investing time and energy into usability testing. As a result, the list of usability experts is growing everyday, including well known names like Jakob Nielsen, Steve Krug, and Bryan Eisenberg. Retailers and experts alike speak of the importance of user testing – getting websites in front of real users to test usability.
User testing provides essential feedback. You will be surprised by how your customers use your website. After your first test you may even be shocked by what the users actually did in response to the objectives you gave them.
Fixing embarrassing usability problems before you release your website to the public will help you achieve that good first impression – perhaps the difference between success and failure. It’s also a great way to discover how you can boost your conversion rates. After conducting user tests, many companies have found ways to increase sales by tens of thousands of dollars.
Maybe you have an existing website with a problem. Analytics is screaming that a particular section of your website is a trouble spot. Analytics data shows you where the trouble is, but it doesn’t explain why you have a problem there. User testing will show why.
Test a competitor’s website to understand what works and what doesn’t. Offer to test your favorite client’s other website property – you know, the one you’ve been dying to get your hands on, but can’t convince them it needs an update.
Many times, user testing is the fastest and most productive route to discovering what causes users to get stuck – and leave. That’s critical information if you don’t want to waste time guessing what to fix. Once you see a user struggling on your website you’ll know exactly what you can do to correct it. And it won’t take very many struggling testers for your client or executive management to agree that change is needed.
You can afford it too. It’s not just for those with deep pockets anymore.
Once upon a time (not so many years ago) the cost to setup user tests was between $10,000 and $50,000. Not anymore. With usability experts recommending that you spend about 10% of your website development budget on usability testing (largely by having users try it), anybody can now afford to allocate that portion of their budget to user testing. The relatively new concept of crowd sourced low-cost online user testing is what makes it possible.
Sites like UserTesting.com are perfect for fast cheap user tests. Their large panel consists of quality pre-screened and client rated user testers. You can order a single user test for $39. You’ll get a video of a visitor speaking their thoughts as they use your website. You’ll also get a written summary describing the problems they encountered. There’s nothing to download or install and you can share your results with anybody. Most tests are completed in about an hour.
How many user testers you need is a point of contention amongst usability experts. Some argue that for statistically valid and measurable results you need a large number of testers. Others argue that increasing the number of testers only complicates analysis while decreasing the amount of useful information you’ll get per test.
Let’s take a look at what small scale testing achieves.
Website user testing is a qualitative tool, and is not meant to provide large volumes of statistically significant data. It’s perfect for quickly finding what causes common problems.
Doing small, frequent online tests could be called guerilla user testing – a low cost tactic that gives you an edge in usability analysis. You use small numbers of testers to get dense amounts of usability information. It’s very affordable, easy to analyze, and chances are you’ll find the biggest usability problems first.
There’s something strangely addictive about eating website abandonment rates for breakfast, thwarting embarrassing website launches, and taking out analytical anomalies. Once you start carrying out guerilla user testing you’ll get hooked. After all it’s tough not to like being the genius behind website marketing success.
1Winners of our Magic Toolbox Giveaway
This month we partnered with our friends at Magic Toolbox to give away 5 licenses to any Magic Toolbox product, worth up to £99 (that’s currently about $154 for all of us in the United States).
Who is Magic Toolbox? They’re a team of designers and usability experts who have built beautiful and easy to use tools for displaying product images on your website.
Their most popular tools include:
Magic 360 Plus™ - spin products around and magnify into them.
Magic Zoom Plus™ - zoom into your images or enlarge them on click.
Magic Slideshow™ - over 30 options to create beautiful slideshows.
We asked our subscribers to retweet a message, friend us on Facebook, or simply reply to our email, and then we randomly selected 5 winners. Those winners are:
Elliott Benzle – Shatter Box Web Design
Shatter Box Web Design is owned by Elliott Benzle and has been designing, coding and managing web sites since 2002. Our skilled group of freelance professionals focuses on providing high quality, customized websites for small businesses. We work with customers, no matter what their level of internet knowledge to make sure that they get the most out of their website. Our design process keeps you involved in every step of the creation process from the initial sketches to the final coding. We are able to work within both small and large budgets, making a web presence for your business no matter what size.
Matt Baylor – Natural Selection Web Design
We design and support Joomla! CMS websites. Our primary goal is customer satisfaction. We want all of our clients to succeed in their endeavors and strive to provide them with the tools they need so they can focus on running their business and not worry about the operation of their website.
Graham Robinson – Northern Computer Services
Northern Computer Services offers a variety of services to help meet your personal and business goals. Whether looking for a small Web site, custom application or an e-commerce database driven storefront, Northern Computer Services will provide you the absolute best solution to accomplish your needs.
Debiprasad Sahoo – Indibits
Indibits is a small web development company from India. We are building web applications on open source infrastructures for small and medium businesses across the globe. Indibits is founded by Debiprasad Sahoo, who has a good experience in developing web applications using PHP, MySQL and Ajax.
Iggy Makarevich – IFM Productions
IFM Productions offers a complete web design package, including arrangements for your domain name and hosting; the design, build, testing, optimization and publishing - along with “extras” like tweaking basic on-site SEO tools for each and every one of your pages; verified submission to Google; making you a favorites icon, and so much more.
IFM Productions has satisfied a diverse group of discerning small business professionals with custom tailored, hand crafted web sites since August 2004.
53 Methods for Design Firms to Increase Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is a vital for any business, but especially for a small web design companies or freelancers. You do not have the marketing resources of larger organizations so it’s important to work hard at keeping the clients you do have. Here’s three tips for keeping your clients coming back:
1. Regular Communication
Regular communication with your clients does not just mean talking to them about their particular project. Obviously you do want to be accessible as you work with your clients. But you should also remain in contact with them long after you are finished working on any specific task. Regular newsletters, seasonal cards, appreciation gifts, and simple follow up phone calls are all great ways to remind your customers about your company. The idea is to keep your company in the front of their mind on an on-going basis.
2. Offer Referral Incentives
Your existing customers are the best resource for finding new customers-and rewarding them for those referrals is a great way to make sure they stay loyal to you. Be sure you take the time to regularly remind them about your incentive program, and be sure to follow through in a timely manner. Referral incentives can come in many forms including cash, concert tickets, discounted services, and gift certificates.
3. Under Promise and Over Deliver
But perhaps the most important way to ensure your customers remain loyal is to under-promise and over-deliver. That means giving your clients a reasonable expectation that you are certain you can meet and then finding ways to deliver above and beyond your promise. Your customers will be delighted when you are finished with their website a whole week before the deadline; or when you are able to add the additional features without having to charge extra the extra time you originally estimated.
These three suggestions are easy, inexpensive and tried and true. Remember, that as a business owner, it costs more to win new customers from a marketing standpoint than it ever does to maintain relationships with existing ones. You may want to re-evaluate how you have your marketing budget structured in order to take better care of your past and present clients. Finally, the key to any of this is to make sure you keep a comprehensive, updated, and well maintained database of your clients and prospective clients (more on that in a future post).
13Advantages & Disadvantages of Niche Design Firms
I spent two years as the tech lead for a company focused on live auctions and it was a great experience to deal exclusively with one market and build so many interlinked connections. I’ve frequently considered opening up a design company focused only on a particular industry (but haven’t done so yet). Rather than give you my opinions, I’d thought I’d survey some of the experts in the field. Enjoy!
Continue Reading Advantages & Disadvantages of Niche Design Firms »
4Extra Revenue Source #1: Conversion Optimization
This is the first in what I hope to be a regular series focusing on additional revenue sources for design firms. I’m a huge believer in A/B testing, multivariate testing and conversion optimization. Essentially, the art and science of improving the effectiveness of a website - whether the end goal be a purchase, sales lead or simply increased page views.
Just recently, we added an arrow to the signup form on Handbag Planet and increased conversion over 50%. I also added an arrow on a client’s e-commerce site and increased conversion over 10%. This is just an example of what one small element can do.
Benefit #1: Numbers-Based Sell
One of the big benefits of conversion optimization is that it’s completely numbers based. It’s an easy sell to clients and once you have proven success with a few clients, it gets even easier. We’ve all run into those clients and potential clients who don’t understand why design is truly important. You won’t have that problem with conversion optimization. Continue Reading Extra Revenue Source #1: Conversion Optimization »
6Defining this Blog: Web Design Business Help & Advice
Now that I’ve mostly completed my blog redesign, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into my goals for this blog (with a little help from Bryan Veloso too).
I want the blog to be a useful resource for designers and I’m really tired of the “1001 best resources for blank” regurgitation. The blog also needs to fit into the rest of the site and the directory.
To that end, I’ll be focusing solely on meeting the unique needs of web design firms and freelancers from a business perspective, not a “design tips” perspective. My future posts will address client relations, management, outsourcing, marketing and more. I will also do frequent interviews with and profiles of leading design firms. If you have any suggestions or requests, please leave a comment.
Two posts I’m working on right now include E-mail Marketing for Web Designers and Advantages & Disadvantages of Niche Design Firms. If this sounds interesting to you, please be sure to subscribe!
2Most Important Thing I Would Tell A Design Student
Most Important Thing I Would Tell A Design Student
0How to Find and Keep a Great Designer
How to Find and Keep a Great Designer
56 Killer Smarty Features You Need to Know
Smarty is by far my favorite PHP template engine. I’ll debate the pros and cons of using a template engine in another post, but I wanted to share some of the Smarty features that I didn’t know existed until I dug through the manual.
1. {cycle}
{cycle} is definitely my favorite Smarty command. You pass it a string of comma-separated values and it cycles through them. I mostly use this, as the manual demonstrates, for zebra striping tables or comments or any sort of list.
{section name=rows loop=$data} <tr bgcolor="{cycle values="#eeeeee,#d0d0d0"}"> <td>{$data[rows]}</td> </tr> {/section}
Continue Reading 6 Killer Smarty Features You Need to Know »
