New Client Wins

We are pleased to welcome “Happy Beds” from Batley onto our client roster this month. In keeping with their aspirations to become one of the biggest online bed retailers in the country, they have enlisted our help with their entire digital marketing plan – e-Strategy, Search Engine Optimisation, Email Marketing, Pay Per Click and Conversion Rate Optimisation.

New sites

In addition to the new mobile sites for Ribble Valley Inns we’ve been busy revamping Fairview Windows site.

Ribble Valley Inns

Visit any of the following websites on your mobile device and you’ll be redirected to the mobile version of the website:

• www.ribblevalleyinns.com
• www.thethreefishes.com
• www.highwaymaninn.co.uk
• www.theclogandbillycock.com
• www.thebullatbroughton.com

Fairview Windows

The results give a snapshot of how leading UK retailers are prepared for the rise of mcommerce as most of the UK’s mobile users now own a smarpthone.

The study shows that only a minority of the sites were fully optimised and scored full marks via the service. Apple, scored zero out of a possible score of five and does not display fully when tested using Google’s GetMoMeter. Apple’s site was tested via both the Google GetMo site and failed to display clearly on the mobile screen.

Amazon, Tesco, Next and Home Retail Group’s Next all scored full marks with their sites meeting the criteria of images appearing clearly on a mobile screen, text being visible without having to zoom and easy click-through.

Google’s own shopping site, which is listed as the fifth most popular UK retail site according to ComScore, scored four out of five, with the site falling short by not having its shopping cart visible on the page.

The five questions used by Google to determine whether a site is optimised are shown in the image below:

To check how your site performs on a mobile click here. Don’t despair if you score badly, it’s not as expensive or timeconsuming to fix the situation. A recent consumer study found that 57% of people would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site (Source: Compuware, “What Users Want from Mobile,” 2011). It was stats like these that compelled Ribble Valley Inns – one the North West’s leading restaurateurs – to ask us to mobile-optimise their sites. When you look at the before and after shots its obvious to see the benefits.

1. Highlight an offer in your headline
   Offer a special discount, free gift or rebate. Make sure the offer has an expiration date. Time and again, it’s been proven that more people respond to an offer when there’s a limit on the amount of time they have to do so.
2. Emphasise benefits, not features
   Features are what the product has. Benefits are how it improves your life. The “7-horsepower engine” in a snowblower is a feature. “The horsepower to clear 10 inches of snow from 40 feet of sidewalk in 20 minutes” is a benefit. If you have an important, valuable benefit, you want to put this in the headline instead of an offer.
3. Put a P.S. in the email
   The P.S., that little afterthought at the end of a letter, is often read even before the body. This makes the P.S. a good place to reiterate the offer or main benefit.
4. Make your emails personal
   Always use the customers name in an email. Be aware of your customers needs and recognise them. Here are some examples of how other businesses do this: A flower shop sends birthday and anniversary reminders to its customers. A shoe store tells a customer that a new line of pumps, similar to what she always wears, just came in. These efforts turn email into a customer service tool and your customers appreciate the extra attention and service.
5. Keep them informed
   Auto-responders help keep you in front of your customers. This will make them more familiar with you and more comfortable with your business.
6. Join the “club”
   Say you own the Hillcrest Gourmet Foods store. Don’t refer to the people on your email list as customers. They are members of the “Hillcrest Gourmet Club.” Provide membership cards, recipe exchanges and private sales. Your customers become stakeholders in your success.

In respect of emails from retailers to individual customers, both the Data Protection Act 1998 and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2011 apply. This stipulates that when a retailer wishes to send promotional emails to individuals, the “soft opt-in” takes effect. This means that as long as the retailer complies with the following checklist, the individual may be deemed to have consented:

1. The retailer must have obtained the details of the customer in the course of sale or negotiation of a sale of goods or services
2. The retailer must send promotional emails to the customer relating only to similar goods and services
3. At the time that the retailer collected personal data, the retailer must have given the customer the ability to opt-out
4. The retailer must include the ability for the customer to opt-out at the bottom of all promotional emails.

Last but by no means least, retailers must make clear to customers how their personal data will be used. Hence a “terms of use” page is standard practice on most largescale retailers websites.

For more information on how to run an effective email marketing campaign feel free to drop us a line. We’ve been sending out promotional messages on behalf of our clients for well over a decade now so have all the bases covered. In the meantime check out our feature on the golden rules of effective email messaging.

BW Industires – Revamped the website to make it consistent with the company’s recent rebrand.  The site also features a dedicated section which allows visitors to download product specifications, load tables and bespoke software.

Greenplant – We were briefed to make their second-generation site more user-friendly.  Our UI specialists deconstructed the whole user-journey to determine the optimum design and functionality.

The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. Once, the Prairies were open and shared by everyone. Then the farmers arrived and fenced them in. The same is happening to the Internet: Apple, Amazon and Facebook are putting up fences – and Google is increasingly being left outside.

The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. Often these days, we sign up for Facebook or Amazon’s private version of the Internet. At other times, we use a smartphone and download an App instead of using Google search.

Investors are already placing their bets on who the winners of the new Internet will be: Over the past five years Amazon’s shares have risen 370%. Apple’s are up 438%. Google’s, meanwhile, have merely risen by 17% in all that time.  It is still the early days of this long-term trend, but my hunch is that this gap in performance will widen over the coming year – and that Google’s long slow decline has already begun.

What makes Google’s predicament so serious is that it has little to do with technology and everything to do with business models. You can buy or copy technology, but changing a business model is about the hardest thing any company can do. Google’s business model, and nearly all its revenue and profits, depend on the Internet remaining open. When we search, Google pockets billions from advertising. If the old Internet is changing, Google’s original way of doing business loses value.

When Google reported its results two weeks ago, the first headlines focused on the 25% increase in fourth quarter revenues compared to last year. Investors, however, focused on the drop in the cost per click that Google is able to charge advertisers. The main reasons for the decline in this all-important metric is increased competition from Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

Start with Facebook, which has erected a cyber fence around its 800 million users and refuses to share some important data with Google. This means that Google’s searches are not quite as valuable to advertisers as they used to be when the Internet was open and when Facebook was much smaller than it is today.

Amazon is increasingly playing a similar trick – but with a twist. Amazon has taken Google’s freely available Android operating system and adapted it for its new Fire tablet. Amazon gets to free ride upon Google’s software, in other words, while the search giant gets nothing back in return. No data, and no advertising revenue.

Apple’s land grab, meanwhile, may be the most definitive. The Apple universe is like a cable TV network that owns content or aggregates it. It’s phones, computers and tablets are like the set-top boxes your Satellite TV company gives you. The content you consume might be a film that you download, a song, a book, an application or something you buy on line, like a pair of shoes. And none of the data Apple’s customers generate is available to Google.

The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence.

Yes, Google has the Android and Google+, but these may not be enough to fight the shift to the closed Internet. Google+, of course, has just a tiny fraction of Facebook’s scale and there’s currently little reason to think it can catch up. The Android operating system, also an attempt by Google to build its own internet eco-system, is a more conspicuous success. Most commentators focus on the rapid growth of Android and the fact that it has greater market share than the iPhone.

But this analysis misses the point: The Android may have market share, but more than half of mobile searches come from iPhone users. Google may have developed Android but, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it does not really control it. Licensees like Samsung and HTC are able to adapt Android software to their own ends. And smart companies like Amazon are getting a free ride on Android while sharing little of the spoils with Google.

Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.

Keith Woolcock has been covering technology as an analyst and journalist since the mid 1980s. He has worked for Nomura, Merrill Lynch, the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday; appears regularly on CNBC in London; and in 2010 founded 5thcolumnideas, which provides global thematic research and spots important investment trends – especially in technology – for institutional investors.

Image by Sebastian Bergmann, originally posted to Flickr as Google Campus

Like everything else in the digital landscape, search engine optimisation is also going through a transformation as a result of mobile.  Here are some of the ways your SEO will need to evolve to take account of the increasing number of people searching for your product or service using their smartphone:

Type searching
Desktop users are more than happy to search for long phrases.  However brevity is the default option when typing keywords on a smartphone – especially when you are on the move.  This also means smartphone users are more inclined to accept search engine suggestions and/or predictive text.   This has huge implications on the kind of search terms you choose to optimise for.

Geo-Targeting
Many phones come with GPS technology these days and many apps are using the searchers’ exact location before serving up results.  Google itself is prioritising local search results which means if you haven’t optimised – or worse still – recently updated your local listing it might end up becoming an unfortunate oversight.

Instant Gratification
Up to three quarters of searches for hotels on a mobile are for same day bookings.  Likewise a third of searches for airfares conducted on mobiles are for trips to be made within a fortnight.  Given the immediacy of purchase, would it be better to optimise promotions on your website on a more regular basis?

Image-based search
There are a number of mobile apps that allow users to search using photographs taken on the smartphone.  Ensuring your site’s images are optimised to account for image-based search becomes a strategic imperative for all e-commerce websites.

For more advise on what considerations are most relevant to your search strategy, our team of trained SEO specialists are standing by to address your enquiry.

• Morgan Stanley forecasts mobile internet access will overtake desktop PC access by 2014
• British consumers are projected to spend £19.3 Billion on their mobiles in 2021.  The current figure is £1.3 Billion  (Source: Barclays Corporate).
• According to new research from the Internet Advertising Bureau 51% of mobile owners (23 million people) have used their device to make payments, redeem coupons or research products and services.

In light of the positive market conditions, the commercial benefits to a business for offering a well-designed mobile app are clear.  Brands who have stolen a march on their competitors have enjoyed some amazing returns:

• Dominos Pizza generated an additional £10m in just eight months from their mobile app
• New Look saw an increase of 60% in online orders after launching their mobile app

So are businesses ready for the mobile wave?

According to Google’s Head of Mobile the answer is an emphatic “No”.  At a recent industry conference he is quoted as saying: “79% of companies do not have mobile-optimised sites”.  He further warned they were already missing out on “such a big opportunity” in terms of mobile commerce.

We’re delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted in two categories (Technology and Family Business of the Year) for the 2012 Red Rose Awards.  The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at Winter Gardens in Blackpool on the 15^th of March.

Date – 23rd February 2012
Time – 08.30 am  (Presentation to start at 09.00am prompt)
Place  – Business Development Centre, Eanam Wharf, Blackburn, BB1 5BL
RSVP – Click here to register