I really love the latest e-mail newsletter from Ordnance Survey. They’re a Snow Valley client so I have to declare an interest, but the execution of yesterday’s e-mail is near perfect.
What they do is to combine interesting content with relevant links to the online store:
Suggestions for walking routes in Wales, linking directly to map products
A [...]
I see that FatFace has added a new interactive magazine to their site. It’s called InterACTIVE and it’s impressive. There are plenty of lifestyle images and video, as well as lots of engaging features. And all of them link directly and overtly to products in the online store.
Waitrose launched something similar with Waitrose Live back in January. Both [...]
At our recent social media event, we talked about the need for online retailers to track the web traffic and sales that are being generated by Facebook or Twitter.
There was a very useful post on econsultancy last week about tracking Twitter and other tools with Google Analytics.
Snow Valley uses all of the major analytics packages and [...]
The uptake of the ‘safe’ UGC technologies such as review technology has picked up a lot of pace recently, with many now regarding this as an essential part of their e-commerce offering.
But many retailers remain confused about social media and its benefit. Once benefit that many people over look is using social media to enhance [...]
I really enjoyed Kevin Hillstrom’s latest blog post on ‘abandoned basket e-mails’ – the automated e-mails that retailers send to me after I’ve been to their website, put something in my basket, and then left without buying.
Kevin isn’t sure about them. He points out that you might well be getting some click-through and sales but might you also be [...]
Tesco has released their new Beauty Room application. It’s a prototype based on Microsoft Silverlight that allows customers to find moisturisers and other skincare products using a visual search, rather than a structured textual navigation.
According to Nick Lansley’s blog, the Beauty Room is an attempt to recreate the in-store experience of shopping for beauty products. In a [...]
Google recently announced a new test that they are running in the US. Retailers that use both Google Base and Google AdWords can now link the two accounts so that information from their Google Base product feeds is displayed in their pay-per-click ads. This could include images, pricing, or specific product information.
This will be particularly useful for retailers that [...]
Marks & Spencer’s financial results reveal that M&S Direct took £324m over the past 12 months, up 34% on last year. It means that Direct now accounts for 3.56% of their total sales.
They highlighted several initiatives that they’ve implemented to improve M&S Direct:
international delivery
wine club
gift card redemption
better product availability
improved order fulfilment
a more engaging shopping experience using [...]
Boots has just released preliminary results for the year to 31 March. They don’t give any specific numbers for how boots.com is performing. They do mention the importance of collect in store, and their plans for a new portal called BootsWebMD:
“During the year we carried out a major upgrade of the boots.com website to make [...]
Snow Valley’s masterclass on social media and online communities was a great success yesterday.
I’ve been posting a lot recently about what HMV, Waterstones, and other UK retailers are doing with social media and online communities and we decided to give our clients some practical guidance on how they can take advantage.
We had some fantastic speakers [...]