Mark Simpson News & Articles

Online marketers spend a ton of time and money collecting visitor data under the pretense of figuring out who their customers are and what they’re looking for. Armed with these insights, they have all they need to make significant strides in improving the customer experience. Instead, many make a couple of tweaks here, a couple of updates there and feel they've sufficiently managed the experience.

A/B testing and multivariate testing both have their purposes, so how can you choose which to use?

Recently I came across a telling statistic: according to a recent survey by PriceWaterhouseCooper seven out of ten people never use social media sites to purchase items or services, even though almost half of the respondents check those sites on a daily basis. 

Having worked with a number of digital marketers over the years, I've noticed a recurring challenge among those eager to make positive change -- their momentum is broken when it comes to getting buy-in. This is especially true of launching testing programs. Multivariate testing is often uncharted territory for many, so they don’t understand it or its potential benefits. Why would they get on board? And why would they spend the money?

So your brand is selling online and on mobile -- after all, who isn't? -- and it’s been working... but you know it could be better. Or perhaps it’s not doing so well at all, and you need to figure out where the problem lies. How do you go about doing that? 

2012 was a great year for e-commerce, for both consumers and marketers alike. And from the looks of it, 2013 is shaping up to be even better.

So, your brand is on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. You refresh your Radian6 hourly, have a killer Klout score, and hundreds of thousands “liked” your brand on Facebook. So what?

E-commerce retailers face the constant challenge of standing apart in a vast, churning sea of online competition. It’s not enough to simply stay afloat; the real goal is to own the waters. In other words, while you’d like to stand out enough to grab online visitors’ attention, what you really want is to ferry them through to their final destination: making a purchase.

According to HubSpot, 93 percent of adults on the Internet are on Facebook, yet only one percent of a brand’s Facebook fans will ever make their way to the company’s main website.

An overarching site overhaul is often a marketer's go-to solution when online sales and conversion rates are sinking. After all, if bounce rates are high, average order values aren’t up to snuff, and one-time-buyers are the norm, it must be the website's fault ... right? 

Summertime is here, the temperature is steadily rising and most people are lounging on the beach, not at all thinking about the holiday season … which is precisely why it’s a good time for e-tailers to get prepared.

Over the last couple of years even the most timid of technology adopters have made the leap to mobile. In comparison to technological innovations before it -- the onerous switch from direct mail to email, the mass migration to online and the initially slow adoption of social media -- mobile has suffered far less from naysayers preaching the “this too shall pass” gospel.

Do-It-Yourself anything is hot, hot, hot right now. And thanks to the plethora of free technology platforms out there, people and companies are becoming instant online professionals -- tackling everything from publishing, website programming and mobile development to SEO, behavioral analysis and content production.

But what gets lost in translation somewhere between identifying a business need and the free technology that promises to satisfy it is the fact that technology is only one part of the equation when it comes to doing things right.

Brands that regard their websites as a primary revenue source have three very distinct priorities: give customers an optimal experience, create loyalty and convert potentially passive browsers into active buyers.

A truly personalized online customer experience -- what essentially amounts to a custom website for every customer -- has been the Holy Grail of Marketing for over a decade.