Monthly Archives: November 2014

The ‘First Choice’ for influencers

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Today I’m looking at the influencers of tour operator TUI Travel and in particular their package holiday brand First Choice.

(Galeotti & Goyal, 2009) state how incorporating social network information in the design of marketing and influence strategies can both reduce waste in resources and generate greater sales. They describe two types of people, the first group (M) are the influencers and their actions result in some information reaching the second group of people (N). Group N makes decisions based on this distribution of information and can generate pay offs.

First Choice currently use influences in the form of travel news sites and social media. See examples below.

first choicethe saturdays

First Choice might have picked these influential websites and celebrities in their PR strategy due the wide range of audience, recognised organisation/people and marketing objectives.

However, maybe blogs could be a way of influencing too, using keywords to link back to the First Choice brand. By searching in Google ‘top 10 travel blogs’ I have managed to locate some sites which TUI could think about targeting.

http://www.cision.com/uk/social-media-index/top-10-uk-travel-and-tourism-blogs/

In summary, although First Choice are already aware of the theory of influences this could perhaps be expanded on by using keywords and blogs to bring users back to the brand.

Galeotti, A. & Goyal, S., 2009. Influencing the influencers: a theory of strategic diffusion. RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 40(No. 3), p. pg. 509–532.

 

20 marketing emails a day, does the placement of call to action buttons make for higher conversion?

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After reading an article by (Hernandez & Resnick, 2013) about how the placement of call to action buttons can impact a consumers desire to continue their eCommerce experience it got me thinking about the 20+ marketing emails I get a day and which ones I actually read let alone click through to the landing page.

The one I’m particularly interested in is a ‘get the latest deals’ email I received from Ebay earlier. It is an opt in email and is an event triggered email to promote Christmas deals, however is not personalised in any way. I believe it also draws on the life cycle theory as well to try and regain my custom. Theory states that these types of emails tend to get very high open rates – but does that turn into conversion rates?ebay logo

The article describes several user scan patterns and how eye tracking research helps companies to lead the consumer through the purchase funnel. When opening the ebay email I believe I used a Z -Pattern to scan the page, this meant I looked at all 4 quadrants and was less likely to miss relevant content.

Z patternebay2

 

The call to action is mainly on the top horizontal line, which meant I was automatically drawn to the seasonal aspect of the email and was encouraged to click through to the landing page, which led directly to their Christmas deals as stated. This allows users to browse categories or conduct searches all leading them through towards a purchase.

ebay christmas

 

By analysing the user scan patterns and the ebay email marketing I believe it has quite a successful placement of call to action.

However the question that I’ve got now… does the same apply for emails opened on a mobile device? Does this encourage different user scan patterns, does the placement of call to action buttons need to be changed for mobile devices?  I’ve come across another interesting blog about CTA buttons which gives some thought into mobile devices.

https://litmus.com/blog/click-tap-and-touch-a-guide-to-cta-best-practices 

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications.