Best Ecommerce Articles From Around The Web this December

It's nearly time to put your feet up and enjoy a holiday. And what better way to relax than with some light holiday reading? With that in mind, why not take a look at our collection of 'top predictions for 2015' articles:

1. Web Design Trends - UX, tiled navigation and flat design will dominate. Full list here.
2. SEO trends for 2015: What does the future hold? - how to stay on top of Google next year. Read here.
3. 5 eCommerce tech trend predictions for 2015 - Stay ahead of technological advancement here.
4. The Expert View - 19 of the biggest names in eCommerce share their predictions for next year here.  
   
    ...and for some light Christmas relief...

      5.  Customer journey from search to checkout: Christmas Jumper Special here.  

Need to know more? Visit our website here or send us an email to discuss your ecommerce needs.

Turn Last Posting Day Into Your Biggest Christmas Move

It's December and Christmas is practically upon us. The next few weeks provide a huge opportunity for almost all retailers to end the year on a high.

• Tip 1 - Is your last posting date prominent all over your website? Many of your customers - from emails, PPC, SEO, referral - will land on product pages and category pages. Having the last posting dates on your delivery details page, or your home page isn't enough. 

MoneySpyder's clients all experienced growth on last year in November sales and there's a good feeling about December. Aside from making sure your servers don't overload and your warehouse printer is full of paper, there is still plenty you can do to make sure you get the most out of December.

• Tip 2 - Update your PPC ad copy, email campaigns, and social media with your last posting dates - Don't let anyone miss out on buying from you because they didn't know when the last posting date was.

One key demographic to target are the panic buyers and for them, the most important thing to communicate is your final posting date. 

• Tip 3 - Up-Sell your postage options - Can you offer guaranteed delivery after everybody else? Can you offer Saturday delivery? Use all your delivery options to your advantage. Running a last minute offer on express delivery may be the difference between an online sale, or your customer going elsewhere.

If you need some ideas to maximise your marketing efforts in the run up to Christmas, or if you need an extra hand to help with your email marketing, PR, or PPC get in touch now.

3 Ways to Increase your Online Store Profits with Single Click Purchase

Moneyspyder use SagePay for many of our ecommerce platform clients. Here's some information on exciting product improvements that are coming up, from Katy Wilson at Sagepay.

‘Single-click’ checkouts use tokenisation to convert sensitive shopper card data into an encrypted series of digits (the ‘token’). This token is recalled on subsequent purchases – removing the need for the shopper to re-enter their card details.Using tokenised payments to obtain a ‘single-click’ checkout means that the process is slick and seamless for your customers. It is particularly beneficial when it comes to the steadily increasing numbers of shoppers browsing and buying through mobile and tablet channels.

• Encourage repeat payments: Our Payments Landscape Report 2014 showed that 41% of successful businesses are offering tokenised payments and have seen a related boost in conversions. Single Click checkouts also help you capture loyal customer data that you could use for more targeted marketing.

• Be mobile ready: Although you may have optimised your site for mobile browsers, or even have a mobile app, you may not have considered the payment process. Using a single-click checkout means that customers browsing on their mobile or tablet don’t need to fiddle around entering long card numbers – they can simply click and buy.

• Secure your profits: Our survey reports tokenised payments have saved businesses an average of £6,010.43 off their PCI regulation costs. Large businesses are seeing the biggest impact, with overall savings of upwards of £8,000. The secure technology that Sage Pay provides for ‘single-click’ purchases also has the added bonus of dramatically reducing the cost of PCI Compliance for merchants.

To find out how you can offer Single Click purchases to your customers and increase your sales this Xmas season, simply request a call back today! To speak to someone at Sage Pay about how they could help your business, call 0845 485 6069 or get in touch with us at info@moneyspyder.co.uk

Top Five Ecommerce Articles From Around the Web This October

October has been a bumper month for ecommerce news. Christmas is fast approaching so the internet is overflowing with top ecommerce Christmas tips. What's more, there was a Google Search Algorithm update at the end of September, which also prompted a flurry of blogging. Take a look at our round up of the best articles on both topics this month:

1. How Big was Penguin 3.0 - Find out what the latest Google algorithm means for your business here.

2. Shake up your social media strategy - A good one to think about in the run up to Christmas. Read here.

3. Preparing your online shop front for the winter sales - Whilst we're on the topic of Christmas... Read here.

4. Making real-time marketing less creepy - Read the finer points of how to be pervasive without being invasive here.

5. Content isn't King...here's what is - Controversial but well argued article on the purpose of content. Read here.


Need more help staying ahead of the game? We'd love to help. Visit our website here or send us an email to discuss your ecommerce needs.

Google Shopping Specification Changes - 30 September

On 30 September Google is updating their feed specifications. They are adding some  extra fields to improve search accuracy and making some changes to fields that you should already have.

These changes won't impact the majority of feeds, but they may make your feed more accurate and more useful to Google, and therefore, more valuable to your business. 

It can be difficult going through the Google help guides, so we've condensed the changes here:

• Availability attribute - this is being simplified by combining the 'available for order' value with 'in stock'. If you use the 'available for order' for pre-orders this should be changed to 'in stock'.

• Character length limits - Google are adding limits to how much you can write in your titles, descriptions and other attributes. These limits are quite generous and shouldn't affect too many people. Your Merchant Centre reporting will notify you if any products exceed the limit. You can see what these limits are here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494. 

• Mobile landing pages - if you have a non-responsive site (an m. site) you can now specify landing pages. This cuts out the time taken for normal URLs to redirect to mobile sites and improves the mobile shopping experience.

• Merchant-defined bundles - if you sell products as part of a bundle you can now specify that some products can be bought together. 

• Apparel attributes - to make searches for clothing more accurate new categories have been added to the 'age_group' attribute and new size attributes  have been created. These are 'size_system' and 'size_type'.

These are the main changes. If you have any doubts about whether your feed will continue to work, please get in touch and we'll help you work out what you need to do.

Seven Quick Tips For Optimising Google Shopping Performance

Since Google updated Google Adwords Shopping Campaigns in August we have seen changes in the way Google Shopping has performed for our clients. In some cases traffic has increased dramatically but conversions have not kept pace. We've also found that estimated bid prices are much lower in some cases than they were with the old PLA accounts.

These trends, along with the increasingly competitive marketplace of Google Shopping, mean that you won't get away with turning your PLAs on and leaving them running. The good news is that the new functionality that Google has added makes it much easier to optimise the Shopping ad performance.

Here's our pick of the easiest, and most effective, optimisation techniques:

Pick the right Google Product Category - The feed will run without Google Product Categories but by adding the right Google Product Category you will make it much easier for Google to show your products to a relevant audience. You can download the Product Category taxonomy here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160081?hl=en-GB

Look at device performance - Google Shopping won't necessarily work across all devices. We have seen some clients where adverts have been shown on mobile as much as on desktop, but without any conversions. In this instance we've paused mobile bidding and saved valuable pounds.

Use Impression share and bid price estimates to work out bids - The new Shopping campaigns give competitor data like Benchmark CTR and CPC, as well as impression share. Use these to work out how much to spend on your clicks. 

Add negative keywords - Use the Search Term report to see which keywords are sending traffic to your site via Shopping. Exclude any keywords that are don't cost in. 

Optimise headings for keywords - Unlike normal Adwords, Google decides which searches your adverts should appear for. You can increase the relevance of these searches by optimising your headings and descriptions for well qualified keywords. 

Split Out Campaigns Using Custom Labels - Custom labels, which you can add to your feed, make it much easier to split out your campaigns by product type or category. This increased granularity is absolutely crucial to good campaign performance.

Use the Dimensions Report - Use the Dimensions tab to identify poorly performing products and exclude them from your feed. 

Top 5 Christmas Ecommerce Upgrades

With the drowsy summer months finally at an end, it's time to gear up in earnest for Christmas. The festive season is a fantastic time to maximise on your revenue for the year, with most retailers making over 50% of their profit between October and January. However, that means implementing changes to your ecommerce site and processes now in order to make sure you’re 100% ready for the festive season. Here are our top five ecommerce upgrades to maximise Christmas revenue.

1. Generate more revenue with Google Shopping and Google Remarketing. Make sure your products are easy to find as people search for the perfect gift.

2. Maximise on success by inviting customer reviews. A reliable review can be the difference between a sale and an abandoned basket. 

3. Recapture sales through cart and browser abandonment emails. Approximately 2/3 of baskets are abandoned - but they can be recaptured.

4. If you haven't already then now really is the time to make the switch to a responsive mobile site. Over 50% of ecommerce traffic now comes from mobiles, but optimising your site for mobile is not as complicated as you might think. 

5. Upgrade to Universal Analytics and take advantage of the new demographic and ecommerce insights it offers, before acting on them.

Feel inspired? Need help with any of these? Get in touch by email or 'phone on 020 7492 1929.

Google Analytics Summit 2014 – Key Announcements

Last week Moneyspyder were at the Google Analytics Partner Summit in San Francisco. At the Summit Google announced some great new functionality that improves the quality of data collected by Analytics, as well as making the insights it provides more accessible and actionable.

• Enhanced Ecommerce
• Data Import
• Remarketing 

What This Means for You

1. Upgrade to Universal Analytics - Enhanced Ecommerce and Data Import are only available to Universal Analytics users. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you should consider doing it sooner rather than later. Google are going to start phasing out the old version of Analytics soon

2. Use Google Tag Manager – Google Tag Manager allows you to add and change tracking tags without having to deploy new code, and without involving your developer. This makes upgrading Analytics easier and cheaper.

3. Get a retargeting strategy – retargeting is becoming an ‘always on’ marketing solution. Review your analytics to define your most valuable segments and market to them with the remarketing tool. A good place to start is with Google’s ‘Smart List’, which creates a remarketing list of your most valuable visitors, based on their behaviour on your site.

Google’s main announcement was Enhanced Ecommerce, which is a dramatic redesign of the ecommerce functionality in Analytics. Enhanced Ecommerce automatically tracks and displays your checkout funnel. It also allows you to view more information about products. Whereas previously it has only been possible to see how many products you have sold. Enhanced Ecommerce shows how many times a product has been viewed and how many times it has been added to the basket and then purchased.

This makes Enhanced Ecommerce a powerful merchandising tool; allowing you to identify and promote your top performing products.

You can see a much more detailed summary here.

Google’s other announcements make Analytics a much more accurate reporting tool. With the existing Data Import functionality, businesses could automatically upload cost data such as the cost of your email, affiliate and display ads. This makes Google’s ROI calculations more accurate.

It is now possible to upload many more types of data into Analytics. You can import your refund figures so that your revenue number in Analytics starts to reflect your actual bottom line. You can also upload additional product data, such as what category or brand they belong to.

There’s more information here.

One final thing to emphasise is the improved remarketing capabilities. Businesses can now use advanced segments as remarketing lists meaning targeting has never been more accurate.

To take full advantage of these improvements, and to stay up to date with these Analytics changes, we recommend you do the following:

1. Upgrade to Enhanced Ecommerce and Universal Analytics.
2. Make your life simpler by using Google Tag Manager to manage your Analytics tags. 
3. Grow your Remarketing Campaigns - Make sure you don't miss out on easy revenue.

If you want any more information on what these changes mean, or for help configuring your Analytics call us on 0207 492 1929 or email us on info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

How to Reap Rewards with YouTube SEO Best Practice

Why is YouTube important?

So you don’t sell cute cats? What use could you possibly have for YouTube?

Many people are unaware that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. What’s more, approximately 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Not only does this show that marketers need to be engaging with YouTube, but it also means that competition is fierce and you need to be engaging well, paying close attention to the SEO of your videos.  

Top Tips for YouTube SEO

The Basics

·      Give your video a relevant headline, with proper keywords. Using a colon allows you to ‘double name’ it and therefore to double your keywords. Give as much information as possible in the title as this is the first thing looked at.

·      Maximise use of the description box. Write a couple of paragraphs of good descriptive copy. At the very least, fill it with keywords or put the script from the video in. Don’t forget to add links to your website and social networks.

·      Optimise the channel that you’re posting your videos from. Post regular high quality videos on similar topics. Videos that come from a well-regarded channel will rank higher. Create Playlists, fill in the ‘About’ page and start discussions with your users.

·      HD videos will rank higher than SD videos – So make sure you upload your best quality versions.

·      Use the YouTube Keyword Tool to find the areas of high volume. 

Advanced

·      Use the closed captioning as YouTube searches through the content of your captions in order to rank videos. Since the introduction of speech recognition technology, adding your own closed captions is no longer the laborious process it once was.

·      Submit a transcript of your video so that Google know what it’s about.

·      Make sure you grab viewer attention within the first 3-5 seconds of the clip. YouTube ranks videos based on how long they’re watched for on average.

·      Submit a ‘Video Sitemap’  to Google and use mark up to let Google know about videos on your website.

Other ideas to consider when marketing through YouTube…

·      Use Annotations to give a call to action for liking your video or subscribing to your channel. This helps to promote regular engagement.

·      Promote your videos through all your other social media and email marketing channels.

·      Host your videos on your website and make sure they are easy to browse and well presented.

Want to know more, or would like some bespoke advice for your own business? Drop us an email or visit the MoneySpyder site.

Email Marketing Optimisation Case Study

Flamingo Gifts Marketing Campaign Review
Flamingo Gifts is an online shop specialising in unique and novelty presents. In a competitive market, Flamingo Gifts needed to ensure that they had the edge over rivals. As well as working on their SEO and launching a new site in Summer 2013, MoneySpyder’s in-house team took over the site’s email marketing campaign.

What We Did

Firstly, MoneySpyder developed a marketing calendar for Flamingo Gifts to introduce a more disciplined and forward thinking approach to their weekly emails. We also made the signup process much simpler on the Flamingo Gifts website. This increased the rate of list growth, which was highly beneficial in the run up to Christmas. We tested a number of email elements to ensure that each part of the marketing campaign was optimised.  These included landing pages, enticing subject lines and different layouts in order to maximise engagement with customers. 

The Results

In a two month period Flamingo Gifts saw a 71% increase in email traffic whilst email conversions almost tripled. These improvements have shown the importance of email testing and, more broadly, forward planning for marketing strategy. By developing the process from the marketing calendar upwards we have ensured that this success can be sustained throughout 2014

Are you interested in improving your email marketing strategy? Read more here or get in touch by email on info@moneyspyder.co.uk, or phone 0207 492 1929.

Top Five Ecommerce Articles for February 2014

January flew by and we can't believe it's already February. Here's our round up of the best Ecommerce articles from the first month or so of the year, giving us a broader picture of what 2014 is shaping up to look like for online retailers.

1. 33 Mind Shattering Email Marketing Statistics You Know Need to Know in 2014 - Mind shattering indeed. Read here.

2. Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve People and Topics Rather than Keywords and Rankings - Good overview of optimising landing pages for SEO. Read here.

3. Four Types of Content Every Site Needs - How many types of content does your site have? Compare it here.

4. Matt Cutts Declares the Death of Guest Blogging for SEO - The topic on everyone's lips when it comes to SEO. Read here.

5. YouTube Marketing and Analytics: A Primer for Magnificent Success - YouTube advertising is getting much easier, and much easier to do badly. Read tips here.

If you need help with any of the above areas - SEO, Linkbuilding, integrated marketing, content creation, SEO for YouTube or Analytics - take a look at our site to see what we do, or drop us an email. 

The only thing we can't help with this February is finding you a date for Valentine's Day...

Maximising your Email Content

Email Content

Meaningful Messages

Why make the effort?

Even in this age of shifting social media trends, email is still ranked as one of the most important marketing channels, if not the most important. Good email content not only enhances your brand image but also allows online retailers to build a sustained marketing campaign. It is a crucial for good engagement with customers both pre- and post-sale.

In fact, studies suggest that…

·       91% of consumers check their email daily.

·       74-77% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email.

·       Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%.

Dos and Don’ts of email content

DO

·       Test everything. Especially your subject line. 33-35% of people open emails purely based on the subject line.

·       Include easily identifiable links to your site, remembering to consider your landing page carefully. People don’t want to have to search for a product they’ve just clicked on.

·       Plan. Prepare an email marketing calendar in advance so that you know when promotional/sales events are coming up.

·       Tag your campaigns in order to monitor their success using Google Analytics.

DON’T

·       Forget that around 50% of emails are read on smartphone or tablet screens. Email design that responds automatically to the device it’s opened on is crucial.

·       Write too much. Keep your copy brief and your images engaging.

·       Rely on gimmicks or spammy sounding offers to try and increase customer engagement. Your email will either end up in the junk folder, or you’ll destroy customer trust in your brand.

Tips for growing your email list

·       Incentivise sign-up with special offers for those who are subscribed.

·       Reassure clients that you won’t share their data with other parties.

·       Make sure your opt-in/subscribe box is clear and prominent on your website. 

·       Go for quality of subscribers over quantity – better a few subscribers who buy regularly than a long list of recipients who don’t even open the email.

·       Show people who aren’t subscribed what they’re missing using Twitter, Facebook etc.

Segment your emails

Remember your different sectors of target customers.

Are you trying to…

…engage with people who haven’t bought from you before?

...re-engage with people who haven’t bought for a while?

…encourage people who buy regularly?

The secret to great marketing…

Test everything.

The idea of a generic ‘best email marketing practice’ can only go so far. You know your customers best – and if you don’t, testing is the way to find out everything you need to know about them. The obvious example is A/B testing subject lines to determine best open rates. Other things to consider include:

·       Which are the best days and times to send out emails. This will vary depending on whether you are marketing your products to other business who are usually contained between the hours of 9-5 or individual customers who generally shop out with these times.

·       Different ways of phrasing your calls to action e.g. ‘Buy Now’ vs. ‘Add To Basket’

·       Different layouts. Mix it up, pure and simple.

Want any help or advice on email content? Get in touch on 0207 492 1929, email info@moneyspyder.co.uk or visit our website.

Was your Christmas 2013 better than Christmas 2012?

For many retail businesses most revenue is generated between October and December. If you do one thing in January, make sure you take time to review last quarter's performance compared to the Q4-2012.

Did you have more visitors from all channels? Was revenue up from all traffic sources? And what about other key metrics; average order value, email list size, site speed, international sales? If you've seen a decline in any of these areas you now have plenty of time to put things right, especially as improving some of these things won't happen overnight. Growing an email list that is engaged with your brand, for example, is much more valuable at Christmas time than a list you bought in October to squeeze some last minute sales out of your site.

We've been sitting down with our clients with our one-page Christmas review and helping them set a strategy to exceed last year's numbers in all areas and address any missing links. We have been helping clients perfect their Analytics reporting, online marketing strategy - including email, PPC and SEO - as well as solving technical problems and advancing theirecommerce platform capabilities.

                                                          

This year we built Flowercard a mobile template which increased mobile
conversion rate by 39% - What can you do to maximise sales this year?

If you would like us to put together our one-page Christmas review for your business email us at info@moneyspyder.co.uk or call 0207 492 1929.

Happy New Year!

The MoneySpyder Team