“Baseball is like church. Many attend but few understand” as baseball great Leo Durocher famously said.
While spring training gets underway, let’s explore how three little-understood strategies of baseball have major league applications in winning at business.
As a result of all the issues surrounding Black Friday, customers were left more disappointed than usual.
But will the customer accept Black Friday as an excuse for poor website performance in future?
One of the 35 roundtables at Digital Cream this year was on the topic of Digital Transformation: Getting the right mix of Skills, Culture & Technology.
Customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex.
Not only are they across multiple channels with multiple touch-points, they are also spanning multiple devices.
The vast majority of email marketers are methamphetamine addicts. And not the cool kind like you find in the finest trailer parks of middle America.
This survey of 304 email marketers will show you why.
Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.
But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?
If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks?
This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.
And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.
Many marketing gurus and job ads mention pivot tables as a ‘must have’ skill.
But guides on how to use them are usually too general. Here’s a specific example of how – and why – a digital marketer would use pivot tables.
As a digital marketer you are often faced with the task of making sense of log files. But log files are a blessing and a curse.
A blessing in the sense that they capture everything, but a curse in the sense that we are then expected to turn hard-to-read data into organized reports.
Dynamic pricing is a pricing strategy in which prices change in response to real-time supply and demand.
While this isn’t a brand new pricing strategy, (American Airlines first introduced it in the early 80’s) it is currently taking ecommerce by storm.
Dynamic pricing allows retailers to remain competitive with 24/7 price monitoring and changes, boosting profits by 25% on average.
All marketers are short on time and find it hard to prioritise tasks. Spending 15 minutes on analytics can help a lot.
Here’s a simple how-to guide to help you get started…
When we tell businesses that getting to know their customers is vital, it’s not just so that they can provide the best possible customer experience for them.
Getting to know your customers is most crucial when it comes to helping businesses identify enemies disguised as customers.
Fraud is becoming increasingly widespread since the dawn of ecommerce and as it becomes more and more sophisticated, we need greater visibility to fight malicious activity on our websites.
If you ask anyone in the industry what the biggest trends and challenges of the last 12 months have been you will receive a range of answers.
Chances are the answer will involve ‘not provided’ and content marketing if you are speaking to someone working in the SEO field.
If you are talking to someone with a PPC focus they will probably cite PLAs or rising CPCs.
If it’s a social guy you’re chatting to he will tell you how his channel is finally starting to deliver an ROI.
They will probably all talk about the phenomenal growth in mobile and tablet usage.
What there seems to be very little discussion about right now though is the marked increase in the amount of times potential customers visit your site before committing to a purchase.
This is partly influenced by the changes in device usage but is also symptomatic of changes in user behaviour – price comparison, voucher usage, and the convergence of offline and online worlds all contribute to this trend.
The challenge it creates is how to limit the amount of times we are paying to bring these same users back to the site, and how to pay as little as possible each time.
It’s a challenge which affects everyone working in digital and will hopefully drive more unified strategies, and make us all work closer together.
It’s broadly accepted that social media data contains a wealth of potentially game-changing insights.
It’s also broadly accepted that getting to those insights is nigh-on impossible without having access to data scientists and huge budgets.
I’d argue that the latter is no longer true, here’s why…