Internet retail sales now account for approximately 10.5 per cent of all retail sales. This is the highest proportion since the series began. In comparison, in November 2009 this proportion was 7.9 per cent.

On average, weekly internet retail sales in November 2010 totalled £660 million compared with the average weekly value for all retailing at £6,300 million (excluding automotive fuel).

Month on month changes

During the period October to November 2010, the average weekly value for internet retail sales, non-seasonally adjusted, grew by 37.5 per cent. In comparison the average weekly value for all retailing grew by 10.2 per cent.

Year on year changes

Between November 2009 and November 2010 the average weekly value for internet retail sales, non-seasonally adjusted, grew by 36.6 per cent. In comparison the average weekly value for all retailing grew by 3.4 per cent.

Historic

Over the past five years the last Monday in November and the following week has seen a peak in retail sales made over the internet. This period is not included within these statistics but its impact will be seen in the December 2010 data released on 21 January 2011.

Coverage

The ONS experimental internet sales statistics used is part of the Retail Sales (RSI) statistics. Retail sale of goods made over the Internet are collected and included as part of the monthly turnover data provided by businesses. RSI is a monthly survey of approximately 95 per cent of the retail sector in terms of turnover in Great Britain.

Bringing the online and offline worlds together is a rich source of opportunity for publishers, combining the tangible benefits and convenience of physical ownership with the opportunity to deliver up-to-the-minute content. Bringing this concept to the restaurant guide, Italian 2Spaghi.it has launched the SpagoGuida 2011, a physical directory of restaurants that links to online reviews.

The guide is available from the company’s website for EUR 15.90, and offers listings of over 1,000 restaurants throughout Italy. Each listing is provided with a QR code, which — when scanned by a smartphone with the appropriate software — links to that restaurant’s page on the 2Spaghi.it website. These pages are populated with user-generated content, providing the reader with the latest opinions from the 2Spaghi.it community and allowing them to provide feedback on their own experience.

There are over 50,000 restaurants listed on 2Spaghi.it — a fact that highlights the limitations of printing a traditional guidebook. However, rather than focusing on the limitations of the format, the challenge for the creators of SpagoGuida will be to offer their users the best of both worlds…

Website: www.2spaghi.it/spagoguida/

Inactive subscribers frustrate marketers because we don’t know what went wrong. Reasons they ignore us include realizing our product or service isn’t a good fit, waiting patiently for more relevant content, or fuming over bad customer service. In other words, it could be just about anything.

So, how can you deal effectively with inactives? Here is a four-step strategy to reactivate inactive subscribers:

1. Conduct a reactivation campaign.

Create an agreed-upon definition for “inactive” and reach out to that segment with special incentives for opting into your list once again, confirming permission or providing expanded information.

Please contact us to discuss you ecommerce website requirements in more details.

This article will help you pick out some useful data to begin tracking with Google Analytics. The assumption is that you are interested in tracking web traffic trends over time. Other types of analysis are possible with Google Analytics (i.e. information architecture), but are not covered in this article. We’ve also included some pointers on how to interpret the data you are tracking.

The information below will help you analyse your aggregate site statistics, but you can also use the same methods to track particular pages within your website, especially those which you want to drive traffic to. A big part of really making web analytics work for you is to set clear goals and then decide upon specific metrics to track those goals. The specifics of how to craft goals and tracking schemes are not covered in this document, but XTmotion does offer consulting in this area.

1. Establish A Baseline

The first thing you must do in any data analysis is establish a baseline of data to compare future data to. You do this so you can positively identify what the impact of various communications campaigns on traffic to your website. Below are a series of metrics to record before we look into analyzing the data.

Suggested timeframe: last six months or year-to-date, whichever is longer

VISITORS

Use the Initial Value column to record values for your baseline period. Then use the Subsequent Value column to record values for the period you wish to compare the baseline to (i.e. 3 months later).

TRAFFIC SOURCES

CONTENT

2. Analyse The Baseline

Once you have a data set recorded, you can do some preliminary analysis of your site visitors. You have to make educated guesses, but with your data in hand you should be able to make inferences about:

• What are some attributes of your site visitors?
• Are they familiar with who are you and the work you do?
• What websites refer traffic for you? Do you have a relationship with them?
• Are visitors finding your site mainly based on your org name, or based on the content on your site?
• Is your high value content being viewed? How are visitors finding that content?

There isn’t room here to fully explain how to think through each of these questions, but let’s consider an example. We’ll try to answer the question: who is visiting your website?

3. Repeat Data Gather And Compare To Baseline

After spending some time with your baseline data, you should take a second (and ideally third, fourth, etc) look at the same metrics. There’s no hard rule about how long you should wait before sampling your data subsequent times. Unless you’re getting a lot of traffic or are engaging in several communications campaigns at once, anywhere between 1 and 3 months should be good.

During subsequent data sampling, it’s a good idea to take note of any significant new communications that your organization has engaged in. Anything from Facebook posts, to email campaigns, to a major public event would qualify.

Record these events in the table below to help you with your data analysis. You are trying to determine what effect each of these events might have had on your web traffic. Pay particular attention to page on your site that you linked to from emails, Facebook, twitter, a blog, or other channel. You’ll see that you can drill down to a single page and check the referring traffic sources.

4. Deeper Analysis With Navigation Summary

Now that you have gained some experience with Google Analytics, let’s dive a little deeper and take a look at one of the most useful features, Navigation Summary.

Navigation Summary let’s you look at any page on your site and see what page visitors came from to get to that page, and see what page they went to afterward. This lets you do some powerful analysis around navigation paths (also called clickstream). In doing this analysis you can look for engagement opportunities where you know your traffic is spending time.

Should you require assitance with understanding or anaylising yoru Google Analytics, please conatct us.

The main components of an digital marketing plan will typically include the following stages:

1. Identify your target audience

If you identify multiple targets, rank them in order of importance so that you can allocate resources accordingly. Profile each target group and understand their requirements and expectations so that you can pitch your costs and benefits at the correct level.

2. Set your objectives

Possible objectives could include awareness raising (of your business or disseminating information about your products or services), entering new markets, launching a new product, focusing on sales (building internet sales of a product or increasing the frequency of sales from regular customers), or internal efficiency (decreasing marketing costs, reducing order-taking and fulfilment costs, or improving customer retention rates).

3. Decide upon the marketing mix

You should choose a mix of digital marketing activities that will help you achieve your objectives and fit with any existing traditional marketing activities you already have planned. For an outline of the range of digital marketing options, see our guide on how to generate business from your digital marketing plan.

4. Agree a budget

Careful budgeting allows you to prevent costs spiralling out of control. By identifying the returns you expect to make from your investment in digital marketing activities you can compare these with the costs in order to develop a cost/benefit analysis.

5. Action planning

Iidentify the tactics for implementing the selected digital marketing activities. The plan should also cover other non-internet marketing activities that are being undertaken.

6. Measure your success

Build in feedback mechanisms and regular reviews to enable you to assess the success of your digital marketing activities, particularly as e-commerce is such a dynamic and fast-changing area.

Please contact us to discuss you digital markting plan and digital marketing strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is trying to market their product or service to a large general market instead of focusing on a small niche market. As a marketing advisor, getting clients to focus on a niche market is the most difficult part of the job. Whenever I tell a client that they must start off small and focus on a specialised niche market, my client almost always says, “But I think everybody could use my product and if I limit my market, I will get fewer sales.” Then my response is, “Okay, if you want to market your product to the world, how many millions of pounds do you have to invest in regional, national and international advertising campaigns?” Then I get a blank stare or the phone goes quiet.

To be successful in today’s hyper-competitive, over-advertised marketplace, you absolutely must focus your business and marketing on serving a specialised and preferably small niche market. This is especially true and a matter of survival if you have a small marketing budget. If you ignore this advice and try to market to a large general market before first becoming successful in at least one small niche market, I can guarantee you that you will soon go broke and be out of business. However, if you do decide to focus on serving a small niche market, you greatly increase your odds for business success with much less risk.

So what is a niche market? A niche market is group of consumers or businesses that all have a very specific need or want. For example, let’s say you sell fancy and fairly expensive parrot cages. Your niche market consists of people who own parrots, and particularly people who own parrots and earn an income large enough that they can afford to buy your fancy parrot cages.

On the other hand, if you decide to market your fancy parrot cages to everybody in the Britian who owns a bird, you are marketing to a fairly large general market and the money you spend on marketing will be wasted because nearly all of the people who will see your marketing will NOT have a need or interest in buying an expensive parrot cage. Yes, that sound you just heard is the sound of your money being flushed down the toilet because you ignored niche marketing.

Here is another example. Let’s say you invent a new kind of ergonomic chair. This chair is very comfortable and really helps people who suffer from lower back pain. Now, what most inventors would do when they come to me to market their product is they would say, “Everybody will want my ergonomic chair. I want to first market it nationally and then to the world.” Then I ask my famous question of how much money do they have for marketing, and I am told it is a couple thousand dollars. So, my client wants me to launch a national marketing campaign for a brand new product nobody has ever heard of and I am supposed to do this with a few thousand dollars. Not going to happen.

My advice for how to market this new ergonomic chair product is to market it to a very specialised niche market and there are several to choose from. The key is finding the market that most needs this product as well as can afford this product. One niche market to consider would be to market the chair to assisted living centers for the elderly. Another niche market is Chiropractors who could sell this chair directly to their patients who suffer from lower back pain. There are many other niche markets that could considered too. The key is to determine who has the most desperate need for your product or service and then focus your marketing on that niche market. If you are still confused, do this exercise. Find the people who stay up at night worrying about the problem your product or service solves and you have just found your niche market.

Theoretical aspect of the niche market

According to competitive advantage theory there are three main types of business strategies they are: cost leadership, differentiation and focus strategies. Of these three main types of strategy what concerns small business most is the focus strategy. Marketing niche strategy is a special type of focus strategy.

There are two types of focus strategies cost focus and differentiation focus. It is most advisable to the small business owner to concentrate on a differentiation focus strategy, since a cost focus strategy might be difficult to maintain without achieving very large volume of production. On what type of differentiation focus can the small business achieve marketing niche strategy?

The following are a few examples:

1. Marketing niche strategy based on customer needs and wants are the most sustainable – this usually arises when the mass-market product does not produce the item required. For example some products may not be customised to the individuals particular needs.
2. Marketing niche strategy can also be created if there are social and cultural differences within a single community that may require that changes may be required to be made to a product or service. This regularly gives rise to a niche market.
3. Marketing niche strategy is also created through exclusive rights – such as brands, trademarks, patents etc For example under the main brand a niche brand can be created to serve special customer needs e.g. milk high in calcium, certain type of collectors items.
4. Marketing niche strategy is also achieved through adopting particular delivery channels.

How to develop marketing niche strategy sustain nichecompetitive advantage?

1. Select a segment of the market that has a special need.
2. Carry out market research to identify if the market size makes the idea feasible.
3. Ensure that exclusivity through branding, patents or trademarks can be obtained.
4. Prepare inventory and delivery channels.
5. Prepare a promotion plan to reach the particular market.
6. Implement the plan.
7. Monitor market continuously to ensure that ‘niche’ characteristics and market continue to be feasible.

If you need help marketing your product or service, contact us on +44 (0)20 7060 1415 or go to our contact us page.

We have just added some festive spirit to the Horizon-Security website while still maintaining a professional presence.

Please have a look and let us know what you think.