Companies are always looking for new ways to generate leads and increase traffic to their website. These targets are pivotal to reaching the main goal of every company: the highest revenue possible. Why should businesses only use their main website for commerce transactions? A lot are turning to Facebook as a new commerce platform to differentiate themselves from the competition. But will it work? And what do we know about Facebook commerce already? (more…)
2011 is drawing to a close and with that naturally comes a new hype surrounding social media. So we’ll now have a go at identifying what 2012 is likely to bring in the social mediasphere.
An important development we saw in 2011 was that more than 50% of businesses increased their social media spending and more than 1/3 of CEOs said social media was high on their business agenda (Booz & Company and Buddy Media’s “Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media and Marketing 2011” research).
Some things didn’t go as planned, however – Facebook’s location services (Places) did not really spark into life and has now evolved into a more sophisticated part of the status update. Will 2012 be the year of Google? Will Google+ stand toe-to-toe with Facebook or does it want to evolve into a highly complementary social search tool?
So while researching the web for this blog, the following topics kept on cropping up:
Ecommerce sites are generally focused on converting web visitors into sales. However, there is a huge opportunity in capturing the details of those who are ‘non-transacting’.
By capturing site visitors information, you can capitalise on the visitors who are not yet sales ready, move them further down the sales funnel and ultimately increase transaction rates.
There are three critical steps in creating offer drive lead paths and if these are implemented successfully your conversion rate will soar. These are:
1. Call-to-action button
2. Landing page with a form
3. Thanks you page
Keep reading for implementation and design specifics on these three key pieces.
Groupon announced yesterday that they have raised a staggering $950 million worth of funding as they bid to take over the world! So how have they become such a major player in only a few years and what does this mean for commerce in 2011. Consumers, whether it be online or off, have always searched for bargains and technology is allowing us all to become barging hunters that would rival my Mother, which is saying something!
Many consumers are now online constantly both at the PC during work or on their mobile phone, allowing everyone to find out about great deals. These deals are increasingly being communicated across the social media sphere, by people being a part of specific mailing lists or through a variety of mobile apps such as voucher cloud, pointing you exactly to where the best deal is to be had.
Groupon is based upon the concept of Group buying. There are now billions of online consumers and they are using their power in numbers and buying items collectively. Companies can advertise a special price to its online community but only honour that price when a specific number of people agree to buy at this price. Taobao, a Chinese group buying site sold 200 Smart cars in under 4 hours for example last year whereas Walmart demanded 5000 ‘likes’ on Facebook before a special deal was activated.
Not only does this create satisfied customers, it allows organisations to shift a specific number of products, products that are often coming to the end of their shelf life or if there is a surplus of that stock.
With the revelation that Groupon are on the path to world domination it is essential that brands respond to new technology and movements such as group buying. They must consider how they can bring their business models and pricing strategies up to date as they may just be opening themselves up to an online community of billions.
