.
Along with an announcement of cheaper delivery costs for Europe, Amazon have finally added a a barcode scanner to their iPhone app
The application still includes the ‘Remembers’ function which allows you to take a photo off something to search the Amazon store for, but adding a barcode scanning feature just made comparative shopping a whole lot easier.
Earlier this year, I posed the question Would an online killer deal work in Ireland?. In the subsequent months, a number of Group Buying websites entered the Irish market – all of which were focused on offering services rather than physical products.
Enter GruUpy, an Irish based deal-a-day website with a European wide reach from the guys behind RateMyArea, Jolt, Demonware among others.
The premise is simple: Gruupy.com sells one electronic item a day for as cheap as possible.
What’s interesting with GruUpy is that while offering low price tech products, they are also trying to resonate a little stronger with the customers than normal Group Buying websites – where the standard approach is a little cold in terms of messaging. An example of this can be found on their footer, How It Works & Terms pages where the tone is both light hearted and informative, a difficult balance but shows an attempt of trying to understand their market a little better (Male, Techy 24-40 year olds).
Selling electrical goods online is a very competitive space to operate in as the consumer can quickly and easily compare alternative souces. This will prove a very real challenge for GruUpy if their offering is not highly competitive on price. One strong plus point for them is offering free shipping to most countries, which for electronic goods – is an outstanding offer.
Best of luck to the guys at GruUpy, and I hope their service really grows – not just here in Ireland but further across Europe. They’re taking the right approach with strong Social Integration with Facebook & Twitter and are definitely one to watch.
Email marketing is an area where I have had a lot of fun with over the years. It is something which is really exciting as it covers the full scope of digital marketing, from targeting & segmentation, to message testing and through to technical delivery.
As a marketing channel, the results can be massively important – driving both customer engagement and repeat revenue. One of the key steps to continual improvement in this space is increasing email click through rates, and in my experience the obvious element to first optimise is the subject line of the email.
As with any testing – the methodology behind it is simple; Test different subject lines, with the higher performing variant deemed the winner.
Makes sense, right? But where do you start with your subject line variations? Here is a handy way to do that using Google Wonder Wheel which visualises what keywords that people are searching for.
Let’s assume I’m a travel company which with an email going out to my family segment. Hitting up a normal Google search query, but selecting the Wonder Wheel in the view type.
What stands out here is that a destination is returned at this level – along with generic terms – family holidays scotland. This is something worth drilling down, both for subject line testing and for some market research.
From here, we can see two standout terms with adventure holidays scotland and luxury family holidays scotland. Next up would be to craft up some subject lines based on these two themes.
A: Adventure Holidays Scotland
A.1 Scotland: Adventure holidays for your family
A.2 Adventure holidays in Scotland: Bring the family
A.3 The latest family adventure holidays in Scotland
B: Luxury Family Holidays Scotland
B.1 Luxury for less: family holidays in Scotland
B.2 Luxury family holidays in Scotland
B.3 Scotland: Luxury holidays for your family
Once happy, testing can be through a tool or just keeping tabs with a manual method – taking around 5% per subject line (total: 30%) and whichever subject lines drives more clicks is determined as the winner, and then it’s a simple case of pushing that out to the remaining 70% of the list.
There are more in depth methods of doing this, combining Google’s Keyword Tool & Google Trends to help determine possible segments and to have a more confident view of what people are looking for but I’ve found Wonder Wheel a really simple and visual way of doing this – and it’s quick!