Stopping only between 1pm and 4pm for Dinner, the last-minute rush to beat the Jan 1st VAT rise saw an online purchase made every 10 seconds on Christmas Day!
With UK shoppers spending £5.3bn online in November 2009 – sales up by 25% on October, 11% compared to November 2008 – predictions for 4 million UK buyers going online saw the actual average purchase up by 94% at nearly 4 items per order.
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A new digital decade is only days away! As purchasing online grew at six times the rate of high-street sales in the run-up to Christmas, the future is clear for those businesses willing to embrace the continuing live web revolution!
Despite 2009 being another year of economic uncertainty, Team Provoke have been hard at it, as usual, in the front line of weaving their website design magic for a diverse range of clients, starting right here in Manchester and spreading right across the Northwest and around the UK.
Many of our regular site visitors would of course have noticed our big website refresh, featuring regular and hopefully, insightful blogs and articles plus daily Twitterfeeds to keep everyone aware of our latest info and in the loop with latest digital happenings!
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Social Marketing has made a tremendous leap forward in 2009. Recognition and acceptance of its ability to affect vital outcomes in realtime communications is a step in the right direction for businesses to understand its powerful potential in the year ahead.
Business owners are just now beginning to really understand the potential of how they might interact with their potential customers online as a result of the phenomenal growth of social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook, which are revolutionising online marketing.
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More than 60% of online shoppers who take the time to load a shopping cart and begin the checkout will abandon and never finish the process! In the last few trading days to Xmas, retail sites must double-check to ensure more shoppers are encouraged to complete transactions, online.
Latest estimates are saying that sales are up 10% on 2008 with Visa expecting to process a new record of more than 17 million transactions in the UK on 23 December, up 16% from the same day last year. As a result of heavy snowfall, more shoppers are turning to eCommerce sites to purchase online and many will need help with the purchasing process.
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URL shorteners, TinyURL and bit.ly are now challenged by ‘Fb.me’ and ‘goo.gl’, the Facebook and Google versions, just released this week.
Many platforms, such as Digg, are developing their own shorteners in house, so the flurry of apps activity we are currently witnessing as 2010 appears on the horizon seems to indicate that social media communications are not set to stop their phenomenal rise any time soon!
Up until now, bit.ly has been the standard shortener, but the sheer volume of short links which both Facebook and Google generate soon overwhelms the number of bit.ly links.
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Google’s announcement that they will now include RealTime Search results based upon time/date relevancy of the user’s enquiry means that these will be the vital ingredients to getting your content found.
The bar has just been raised! Online marketing strategies will just have to get that more savvy! Critical daily attention to SEO and writing online content is now the gameplan to maintain an acute, competitive edge – and ensure your website content stands any chance of being returned in word search results.
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The Season is in full swing – time to double check all your preparations to optimise your website Xmas sales to the max!
It’s the time of year that every eCommerce business looks forward to and measures have to be put in place to ensure that everything runs smoothly to deal quickly and efficiently with any last minute site issues.
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The devil is in the detail! Force up your email opening and read-through rate by attention to often overlooked techniques!
Most businesses still look to their email marketing campaigns to create wider brand awareness and attract new customers to their website. Most business owners will have taken advice from their web design and ESP ( Email Service Provider) to ensure precise SEO keyword phrases are strategically positioned and the inclusion of a basic opt-in subscription.
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Sharing news of real interest with your market niche via a sharply written SEO press release will boost visitor traffic and up your page ranking!
An established method of delivering company news to a wide readership, an optimised backlinking press release should feature alongside your online written content, such as the article and blog, as a mainstay of your online marketing campaigns.
But beware – a press release is not a sales letter! It should only be created for one reason only – to announce a real item of news!
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The first rule of good ‘website experience’ is providing a fast loading site. In the age of superfast broadband, visitors expect instant access and will not wait, no matter how cool you think your site looks!
The route from ‘first click’ to ‘page access’ is now so fast, that a website has to load – with all its accompanying images, videos, banners and other wizzy content – in a nanosecond, or the impatient, rapid-clicking visitor will just not bother!
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We are all aware of the rule of three. Site visitors take three seconds – or less – to decide if they like the look of your site or click away. If you want to do business on the web, your site has got to get the look, and that means quality design.
It has been repeated many times before but it’s important to keep on emphasising the fact that website behaviour is essentially all about immediacy, instant decision making – and impatience!
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When a potential customer clicks on a link, they want to go straight to the source – not your Home page or a landing page not designed to close the sale!
Business owners should know the drill by now! A fully integrated online marketing campaign means every step along the way must be an unbreakable link in the chain to bind your captive audience and lead them swiftly and smoothly through the entire process to sales conversion – with all thoughts of escape by mouse-click banished!
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