All posts tagged ROI

Experience Advertising Released 2014 Ecommerce Digital Marketing, Social Media, And Conversion Rat

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Fort Lauderdale, FL, January 22, 2014 – Experience Advertising, Inc., a leading online marketing agency, has released their complimentary guide for ecommerce merchants titled: 30+ E-commerce Strategies to Grow Traffic, Conversions, Sales, and ROI in 2014. Each year, Experience Advertising releases this guide to assist ecommerce companies with their digital marketing, social media, and website conversion rate strategies.

Experience Advertising’s founder and CEO Evan Weber stated, “As a digital agency, we believe in empowering ecommerce companies with industry-best online marketing strategies, so they can maximize their traffic and revenue. Not every company can hire our agency to handle their digital marketing management, so we provide some practical strategies that their in-house team can execute. When they are ready to hire an agency to better handle their online marketing they will remember us. So it’s somewhat of a lead generator for us as well.”

This ecommerce guide provides strategies as it relates to the following areas of digital marketing:

Sprucing Up the Website

Email Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEO and SEM)

Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram)

Boosting On-site Conversion Rates

Customer Interaction

Affiliate Marketing

Social Media Advertising

Customer Referral Programs

See the entire ecommerce guide here.

Experience Advertising, Inc. manages online marketing and digital strategy in the following areas:

Affiliate Program Management – in-house, major networks and CPA networks

Social Media Management – proactive social channel management

Facebook & Twitter Advertising Management – fan acquisition and revenue generation

Retargeting ads to web visitors that didn’t convert

Paid Search Engine Management – Adwords and Bing Ads

Conversion Rate Optimization – on-site multi-variate testing

Customer Loyalty Programs – customer referral programs, customer loyalty strategies

Sweepstakes and Contests – designed to building fans, opt-ins, and followers

Email Newsletter – HTML design, email list monetization

Webdesign – refurbishing or complete redesigns

Programming – front end and back end coding

For a complimentary analysis, visit Experience Advertising.

Press Contact:
Evan Weber
Experience Advertising Digital Agency
Fort Lauderdale, FL
+1 (954) 662-8010

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The Benefits Of Paid Search Marketing

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When a company is ready to start marketing via the Internet, Paid Search Marketing (Pay Per Click or PPC) is the fastest and easiest way to to get page one visibility on the major search engines and attract qualified prospects to their site. It can be launched in a few hours, and it can produce dramatic results rapidly. It is a great way for a company to start using Internet Marketing techniques to grow their business and increase their top line. There are a number of benefits to PPC campaigns, including:

Precision: PPC enables you to be very precise in putting a targeted offer in front of a specific segment of the market. By identifying specific key words, creating unique offers, and writing tailored ads, you have a tremendous amount of control over who sees your ad, what offer they see, and where they land on your website.

Targeting: Another aspect of precision is the ability to target your market geographically, demographically, and by time of day and day of the week. When combined with keyword specificity, unique offers and well written ads, you can focus very tightly on the target market you are trying to reach. This ensures that the majority of people viewing your ads are qualified prospects.

Speed and Simplicity: This can be looked at two ways. First, while doing PPC right can be somewhat complex and time consuming, planning and executing a campaign can be accomplished in hours. Also, this refers to how quickly and easily a prospect can move through the buying process, a matter of a few minutes, when clicking through to a well designed landing page and taking the desired action.

Financial Control: PPC provides the advertiser with complete control over how much money is being spent. A daily budget can be allocated, then changed depending on results of the campaign, and to take advantage of changing business conditions as they occur.

Length and Scope of Campaign: A PPC campaign can run for any length of time and can be very narrowly or broadly targeted. This enables the advertiser to use a campaign to accomplish different things, from delivering targeted offers to a narrow market segment for a short period of time, to more broad based branding and awareness.

Monitor and Measure: With the excellent analytics tools available today, PPC campaigns provide complete transparency and make it easy to monitor the progress of a campaign as well as the results to date and ROI.

So, when you are ready to start marketing via the Internet, a great place to start is with paid search marketing. You can start up a campaign in a matter of hours, deliver a tailored offer to a precisely targeted market segment bringing them to your website, you can have complete visibility into the results of the campaign, control your budget, and you can start or stop at any time. What are you waiting for?

How To Allocate Retail Loss Prevention

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Profit in any business requires an increase in income and decrease in expenditure. The same theory applies to the retail industry. To make profit in retail requires an in increase sales and reduction in shrinkage. This concept has so far been non-existence in the retail industry where the focus has always only been on increase sales and hoping that the problem of shrinkage will miraculously disappear.
Retail shrinkage occurs as a result of poor or non-existent loss prevention policies and procedures. Therefore, it is imperative that any retail organisation that wishes to remain profitable include loss prevention in its standard operational practices.
Loss prevention is the series of activities that are geared towards the reduction or elimination of all potential loss within an organisation. In the past, loss prevention has been confused with security. While security is a part of loss prevention, security is reactive, basically geared towards identifying shoplifters and employees suspected of stealing, loss prevention is centred around all the activities that are responsible for store loss. It can be known loss such as damages, returns and errors or unknown loss such as shoplifting or employee theft. Preventing shrinkage is simple if we understand the sources of the loss. Last year, UK retail industry spent 771 million on loss prevention, despite this spending, retail shrinkage rose by 5.4%. This has remained the story of loss prevention in the UK for many years. Shrinkage reduced by a few percent one year and increase by several percent the following.
What is the reason for this, the answer lies in the way loss prevention funding is allocated. Even though the levels of funding differ from one organisation to the other, the principle remains the same: spending more for less return on investment (ROI).
The Global Retail Theft Barometer report stated that for the 12-months ending June 2009 crime cost UK retailers 4,063 million. This is broken down as follows:
Customer theft 1,767 million (43.5% of all shrinkage)
Employee theft 1,479 million (36.4% of all shrinkage)
Distribution chain theft 175 million – (4.3% of all shrinkage)
Administrative error – 642 million – (15.8% of all shrinkage)
Total Shrinkage – 4,063 million – (100.0% of all shrinkage)

Total loss prevention spending for the same period was 771 million slightly down from the previous year of 785 million.
Broken down as follows:
Contract Security – 270,621,000.00
In-house Security – 162,681,000.00
Security Equipment – 223,590,000,00
Cash Collection – 61,680,000,00
Other LP Spending – 52,428,000.00
However, in this same period, shrinkage as a percentage of sales rose to 1.37% a rise of 5.4% from 2008 figure of 1.30%.
This brings us to the central thesis of this article: Why is retail loss prevention measure ineffective?
The answer lies in the way funding is allocated. To produce the desired result, retailers first and foremost need to determine the source of loss and allocate funding according to the ratio of loss and the ROI.
The below table outlines this point better, it shows last year retail spending on loss prevention and their return on investment:
Measures: Spending: ROI Achieved:
Trained Employees – 6.8% – 50%
Security Personnel – 56.2% – 2%
Security Equipment – 29% – 45%
Signs & others – 8% – 3%
Customer related theft accounts for only 21% of retail shrinkage the remaining 79% can be broken down into cashier cause 32%, followed by general employee cause 24%, receiving 10% and the remaining 13% is the result of damage and error. But the interesting point that needs to be noted is that even though 79% of retail shrinkage in caused by internal activities, retailers spent more on combating customer related theft than on employee cause.
56.2% of loss prevention resources were on security personnel that produced only 2% ROI, 6.8% was spent on staff training that produced 50% ROI. It is not difficult to see why despite the huge spending on loss prevention, retailers have not been able to affect their shrinkage level. There is a direct correlation between loss prevention spending and the ROI. Until such time that retailers get the balance right, loss prevention spending will continue to produce negative result.

How to make loss prevention effective?
The following are measures when implemented can lead to massive reductions in shrinkage levels and increased profits:
Measure the Scale of the Problem
Analysis daily profit and loss report
Complete top management involvement
Create awareness of the problem
Continuous education and discipline of employees
Inspect What You Expect
Set Measurable Targets
Take Advantage Of Technology
Develop the act of flexibility in approach
Change from present paradigm

Loss prevention is a science and like any science, it requires a systematic approach. Loss prevention personnel cannot approach it with cross fingers praying for the best. Gone are the days when retail crime such as shoplifting was seen as teenage leisure activities, or conducted by drug addicts. Many incidents of shoplifting are now carried out by Organised Retail Theft rings with levels of sophistication never before seen in the retail industry. We as loss prevention experts along with law enforcement agencies have to wake up to this fact and try to build our own capabilities to respond accordingly.
Increase sale does not necessarily mean increase profit the quicker retail executives crabs this concept, the sooner they will be making sustainable profit.

The Importance of Having an Efficient Event Management Process

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In the present economic environment, its fundamental that event managers work as efficiently as possible. Running lucrative events is a time consuming and complicated process. It can take many years of training and on the job experience for an event manager to become extremely effective at what they do.

One of the troubles event management faces is the huge number of activities and procedures that are involved in setting up and running events. Having the capability to multi-task and being well organised are traits that event managers need to develop and perfect as they gain experience in the field.

The benefits of working efficiency are basic:

Time savings

Cost savings

Improved event performance

Drilling down into these areas we can see the particulars of how and where the efficiency gains can be made:

Saves Time:

Its important that the event manager has clear and efficient procedures they adhere to when running events. Establishing processes that other people can keep to also means that other team members can aid or take over the management of an event with ease. Team members are able to comprehend instantly what stage of planning the event is at; cutting down on meetings and training sessions.

Many event managers will generate and revise their processes with each event; learning from their experiences to make the process of managing each event more effective and efficient. Having a set process that is written down means the events can be planned and managed far easier – important areas are never missed out and realistic timescales can be easily produced. Having dedicated processes saves time because event managers do not need to generate procedures from scratch for each event. They can reproduce each event process again and again, building on in and improving it with each event.

Being efficient in the event planning process also helps with event analysis. This involves analysing the performance of suppliers – knowing who has been used previously to provide goods and services and having details of the relationship can help analyse if this association is working at maximum efficiency. Its imperative to understand if suppliers standards are falling, and this can only be done if the event manager is running efficiently and monitoring the relationship with each event. It is massively valuable for event mangers to be able to employ the same suppliers over and over again – sourcing different suppliers is an especially time consuming process. Additionally having suppliers that let you down can be a huge drain on time as event managers try to resolve the issue at the last minute. So understanding and staying on top of existing supplier relationships is a fundamental part of efficient event management.

Post event, its important for event mangers to be able to swiftly and efficiently get management information on that event to analyse the success of that event; was there an increase in delegate attendance, did delegates rate the event well, did you get a good return on investment (ROI) etc. These are critical event metrics that need to be analysed quickly and efficiently. A frequent issue event managers have is that they are so busy arrangement numerous events, that they do not have time for this crucial event analysis stage. However, it is only by analysing events that you can help to improve the performance of future events.

Saves Costs

The common idiom time is money is very applicable in event management. Having an event manager who is efficient at their job, who understands and follows best practice event management processes and who has excellent relationships with effective suppliers is a crucial part of making a high and fast ROI. Bad event managers can cost an organisation huge quantities of money due to their poor efficiency and organisation.

Working with suppliers and building good quality relationships can also save money – the better the relationship, the more probable that supplier discounts will be involved. Running efficient events also means paying your suppliers on time – a critical part of gaining supplier discounts and bonuses.

An ineffective event manager will cost an organisation through the errors they make. Doubling up on orders, missing crucial parts of the process and other mistakes can be costly in terms of the time it takes to resolve, but also through being forced to obtain items at the last minute.

Improved Event Performance

Being able to efficiently run events also has an impact on the performance of the event. Delegates will have an better experience if the event runs smoothly and without mistakes. Being efficient ensures that delegates have an pleasurable and mistake free journey – from the point of booking, to payment, registration on the day, experiencing the event and providing post event feedback.

Events with efficiency concerns are likely to be poorly managed, with |mistakes and errors causing delegates to have unsatisfactory experiences. Ensuring that you provide the best possible experience for delegates is very important for the success of future events.

Increasing delegate attendance is something many organisations battle with, and if an organisation has issues over its reputation, due to their inefficiency, that will have a knock on consequence on future event registrations. A important part of profitable events is building up reputation in the industry and creating a long list of loyal, repeat purchase delegates.

Finally, being an efficient event manager also means that they are able to organise more than one event at a time. For companies that are dependent solely around event organisation, or for companies that simply happen to host numerous events, this is a critical part of the event management process. Event managers must be able to effectively organise the planning and running of multiple events and this can only be done if they are running to best practice, efficient event processes.

Improving Event Efficiency

Event managers can help to improve the efficiency of their working practices by making use of event management software. Event software is able to take best practice event processes and automate and manage them from one central platform. Taking away inefficient spreadsheets from the process and working on a software solution designed specifically for event management has demonstrated to have huge cost and time saving benefits.

Event management software solutions are able to manage all areas of event planning from:

– Website Integration

– Online Registration

– Event Communication

-E-Invite

-Email

-E-Survey

– Badge Production

– Resource Management

– Management of Financials

– Event Reporting and Analysis

With the event management industry being hit with increasing costs and lower delegate attendance, its vital that companies organising events fight back by being as efficient as possible and continually improving their processes. It is the companies that deal with efficiency problems head on, and utilise the use of technology who will make sure their events are profitable now and in the future.

For more information on event management software solutions, talk to evocos. In the past year alone evocos event software solution has created over 7000 events, managed roughly 75,000 delegates and has taken over 50,000 registrations online.

Incorporating built-in reporting and analysis resources as well as social media, email marketing, website integration, registration, online payment, badge production, resource management and event surveys, evocos is one of the most all-inclusive event management software solutions on the market today.

The evocos event management software team ensures you are able to seamlessly manage your events; gaining vast cost and efficiency benefits.