Big Change: Starbucks in China accepts WeChat Pay mobile payments

Image from http://wechatbusiness.com/wechat-pay-for-cross-border-payment-in-overseas-wechatglobalteam-com/

It is not surprising to hear that Starbucks in China accepts WeChat Pay mobile payments.WeChat is one of the world’s fastest growing social apps with hundreds of millions of users internationally. WeChat allows you to make a payment to merchants and send money to your friend, which is very convenient and easy to complete the purchase process. When I am in my home country China, I will go out and purchase products with  a scan of my phone. I do not worry about forgetting my wallet at home. There are so many stores accept WeChat payment. I just need to open my WeChat app and make a purchase. If the price is less than two hundred CYN, I can use the quick pay.  Or if the price is more than 200 hundred CYN, I need to provide the payment code to complete the purchase process.

Well, it is a big change for Starbucks in China to accept WeChat Pay mobile payments. It is a new trend of payment for the future. Although the credit card is the main payment in the U.S,  I think it will move the next new payment- mobile payments. Now, Starbucks is the first foreign retail brand to give the customers’ digital payment experience easier on WeChat in China. The customer shopping experience will be enhanced through the convenient payment process. I think that more and more foreign brands will accept the WeChat payment and Alipay in the near future.

“Accepting mobile payment would unlock massive value for Starbucks,” said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group, in an interview. “Since they couldn’t move customers through the line faster, they were losing 5 to 10 percent of business.”

(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/faster-frappuccinos-in-china-as-starbucks-joins-wechat-payments)

As we can see above, Starbucks in China is doing well in customer shopping experience. There are so many people in China. When you want to buy something, you must wait in line to pay the product. WeChat pay makes it easier for customers and gives them a better shopping experience. At the same time, they will have a great growth in sales. It is a wise desition that Starbucks in China accepts WeChat Pay mobile payments.

Image from http://asiarisingtv.com/starbucks-storms-china/

 

The next generation of online marketing: Game Ads

Image from http://www.nanigans.com/2014/05/12/mobile-app-install-ads-best-practices-by-game-genre-plus-some-extras/

Game Ads are the next step in the evolution of advertisements. Placing ads on the game platform is a new advertising model for marketers. It uses the customers’ preference for the game and interaction with them to enhance advertising performance.

There are two advantages for Game Ads.

 Attraction

A well-designed game attracts a large number of players. Game advertising can lead to spontaneous attention and active participation of consumers, which will attract customers to actively find out Game advertising to play. The use of game advertising on the network organized awards activities can enable companies to directly face a large number of consumers, to maximize the impact of the expansion of activities. The participants will be more willing to play the game because they will get all kinds of prizes based on the level they achieved. With a lot of customers playing the game ads, the company can collect customer reviews and valuable customer information. It is easier to interact with potential customers than ever before with game ads.

Satisfaction

When we put ads to customers, we need to take their feelings into account. Since the customers have a high interest about the game ad, they will be satisfied and show a very positive attitude towards game advertising. With receiving a reward when players complete the game, they will have a good feeling about self-achievement. At the same time, players will have a good time and transfer from a potential customer to a customer. Customer experience is of great importance in today’s world. So, we need to enhance it with the new game ads. And these customers have the potential to become loyalty customers.

Here is an example for McDonald’s game ad.

Image from http://www.digitaland.tv/web/blog/7-gamified-banner-ads-taking-display-advertising-to-a-whole-new-level/

Well, McDonald’s placed the game ad for its product, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich. The gamers will be attracted to play this game, interact with McDonald’s products and satisfy with the Filet-O-Fish sandwich . As a result, the players will have a strong impression about the sandwich.In this game, you must try to last as long as possible without being caught. After each game, you can view how high you rank.So players will have a good experience in this game and may want to try this food when they come to McDonald next time.

 

How does big data affect marketing?

Image from https://www.qubole.com/blog/big-data/big-data-marketing/

With the development of the internet, we can see that Big data is being generated by everything around us at all times. We are now living in a data record world. Every digital process and social media exchange produce it. Wow, it is easy to see the Big data is arriving from the digital world. Let’s watch a video that what Big Data means to you.

When we get data, we get a lot of  information. Then with  this knowledge,  we can be wisdom to make decisions. And we can see from the video that the emerging markets are showing the largest increases in data growth. However, we only use less than 5% of the total data, we get a lot of information. When it comes to marketing, Big data means a lot to marketers. Here are three aspects that Big data can affect marketing.

Know Customers Better

Big data can deliver insight into not just who your customers are, but where they are, what they want, how they want to be contacted and when. We can collect a lot of information we want to know our customer better. There are a lot of cookies that record customers visiting the website. They record the information we need to know our customers better.

Improve Marketing Performance

For marketers, with Big data, you can determine the optimal marketing spend across multiple channels, as well as continuously optimize marketing programs through testing, measurement and analysis, such as retargeting, remarketing. With acquiring the customer knowledge, marketers can do the right marketing campaigns and  improve marketing performance.

Reasonable budget

The Big data can not only tell you that how much you invest in the marketing campaigns but also tell you that what you will gain from sales, revenue and profits. It is easy to see that data-driving marketing deserves the investment. So, it will let the company have a reasonable budget to carry on the marketing campaigns.

How to improve Customer loyalty in a digital world

Image from https://jennahindry.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/edc-101-topic-six-digital-fluency/

With the high-speed development of the internet, digital marketing has become more and more important in today’s world. At the same time, as a customer, I will have many choices when encountering so many alternatives products and services. Most time, I will consider more about the price of the products that I want to purchase. It is not hard to see that many customers have the same preference as me. So, for marketers, it is hard for them to improve customer loyalty in a digital world. Although it is hard to improve, we can still do a lot of things to improve the customer loyalty in the digital world. Here are  two aspects that marketers can do to improve the customer loyalty.

Become a loyalty company

Nowadays, every company offers a loyalty program to enhance customer relationship. But it is not the wise way to just put every customer. When you do some shopping, you must want to save time and convenient  with completing the purchase progress. These people do not want to join your loyalty program, so,  make them easier and maybe they will come again next time. What’s more, marketers should focus more on customers who already become members. These people deserve the loyalty rewards program and be more interacted with personal customer relationships.

Enhance customer experience

Customers are more likely to buy a product or service based on social media recommendations. When I want to look for a restaurant to have dinner, I will open the Yelp app and look into reviews in the restaurant. If the feedback and evaluation are good, I will trust the former customers and try it. Just like me,  customers are more likely to use their smart devices while in your store to comparison shop or get reviews by other customers.So, it is of great importance for companies to enhance the customer experience and leave a positive impression.

Image fromhttp://www.b2bmarketingblog.site/how-to-synchronize-customer-experience-online-and-offline/

How to improve your Holiday Marketing Campaign

Image from https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/holiday-marketing-campaigns/

When we think about holiday marketing, maybe some of you do not know what the holiday sales percentage of annual sales is. Well, here is something from statista.com that Holiday sales as a percentage of annual sales in the United States in 2015, by sector. In that year, jewelry stores made up 27.4 percent of annual sales in the United States. The holiday season accounts for more sales than Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day combined. Total holiday retail sales amounted to approximately 632.84 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

Image from http://socialknx.com/tis-season-using-social-media/

According to eMarketer’s holiday sales preview forecast,  The e-commerce holiday sales will jump 17.2% this holiday season with strong online demand in November and December this year. Marketers everywhere are trying to make the most of the holiday season to increase sales. Here are three tips that you can improve holiday marketing campaign.

Go email, like Amazon

Amazon continues to be the powerful driver of e-commerce while it accounted for over a quarter of online holiday sales last year. It should be even higher this year, as Amazon’s revenue growth continues to outpace e-commerce growth as a whole. Amazon continues to send emails to me every day in holiday seasons. Some of them remember me of the things that I added to my chart but did not purchase. So, it is not hard to see how success Amazon play in the holiday seasons.

Go mobile, like Macy’s

Last year, mobile devices grew a heady 16 percent ($72.03 billion) of e-commerce holiday sales overall, according to eMarketer. Consumers are researching purchasing items on mobile and tablet devices more than ever, so make it easy for them to engage and buy across screens. Macy’s teamed with eBay five years ago to launch it’s Black Friday mobile app. Users receive push notifications of sales and special deals, can browse items in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, and create and share wish lists.

Give discount, like Swarovski

Holiday promotions that run discounts and sales usually generate price-sensitive shoppers. On this Cyber Monday, Swarovski has a fifty percent of discount for its most products. It is so cheap for the elegant pieces of jewelry in Swarovski, such as Swan Necklace is only for $49 while the normal time price is $99. Customers do really care about the price because we all want to buy cheap things. So, giving discount is a good way to improve holiday marketing performance.

The Best Video Ad Length For Facebook

 Image from https://www.wochit.com/how-publishers-increase-engagement-facebook/

Do you know the optimal video length for your Facebook video upload? Video ads are everywhere when you are trying to play a video. Well, it is a chance for marketers to use it correctly to attach their potential customers. Nowadays, people do not pay attention to these things they do not care about. But some ads are some kind of related to their daily life. Will they watch it? Or will they just click the skip video? Well, this blog will tell what is the optimal ad video length for markers when they put the video on Facebook.

As for me, I will click the skip this video ad at the most time. But if the video ads are short, I will continue to watch it. I will be a lack of patience to watch long ads video even though they are the things I care about. But for short videos, we skip it because it lacks relevance to us and our lives.

We show you what video lengths work best for maximum viewers. Here is a result from Emarketer.com.

Image from https://www.emarketer.com/Chart/US-Facebook-Video-Ad-Benchmarks-Completion-Rate-by-Ad-Length-Q2-2016-of-total-impressions-analyzed-by-Kinetic-Social/196484

For less than 15 seconds video ads on Facebook

We can see that 46% of viewers will stop watching a 15-second video ad after watching 25% of it, which means they just watch it for less than 4 seconds. This is the required time for skip the video ads. So viewers have a strong willingness to skip it.

For 15- to 30-second video ads on Facebook

We can see that 42% of viewers will stop watching a 15-30 second video ad after watching 25% of it, which means they will watch it for 8 seconds. This time means that viewers will watch the video ads for 4 seconds even though there is a skip video button occurs. We can also see that only 26% will watch the complete video ad, so viewers are not going to watch the full video ad.

For 30- to 60-second video ads on Facebook

We can see that 27% of viewers will stop watching a 30-60 second video ad  after watching 25% of it and 44% of viewers will stop after watching 100% of it, which means nearly 44% of them will watch it completely. Well, this great time will help marketers to better display their creative ads for potential marketers.

For 1-2 minutes  video ads on Facebook

We can see that 33% of viewers will stop watching a 1-2 minutes video ad after watching 25% of it and 27% of viewers will stop after watching 100% of it. This means that views do not want to spend time in watching the video ads for a 1-2 minutes video ad.

For more than 2 minutes video ads on Facebook

When the length of the video is more than 2 minutes,  it will receive the same viewer watching as  1-2 minutes video ad. This means that the longer the video ad, the worse the completion rate.

According to Q2 data, video ads that were between 30 and 60 seconds long fared better than those of other time on Facebook.

However, the Super Bowl remains the exception to this  rule, where according to USA Today, in 2014 78% of Americans polled in California preferred the commercials over the game itself. This explains why advertisers are willingly paying more than $5 million for a 30-second spot.

Image fromhttp://blog.idomoo.com/blogs/ideal-video-length

What Time and Day Are Best for Social Posts?

Image from http://coursefindr.co.uk/articles/using-social-media-to-make-friends-before-uni/

When posting content on the different types of social platforms, do you know when the best time and day is to post? Although the content of the post is very important, we still want to figure out  that when the best time is  to post content on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. People will check these social websites to look funny things in different times.

As my professor, Evans said, “I used to post every day, but I found that people are more active in weekdays. So I just post five posts every week.”  We really need to take viewers habits into account because we want to share our thoughts with them. For marketers, they need to strength their  market performance. They need to know the right time to enhance brand awareness and do some promotion about their products on social media. So, it is very important to find the right time for posting content on each social platform.

According to TrackMaven, “Best Times to Post on Social Media [+ 75 Industry Breakdowns]”

“We evaluated the best times to post based on the average number of interactions per post per 1,000 followers during each hour of the day and day of the week.”The overall best times of day and days of the week to post on social media are:

Image from http://trackmaven.com/blog/2016/10/best-times-to-post-social-media/

The data is based on more than 17.5 million social media posts by 17,737 brands. According to the data, social posts at the close of a work day (in Eastern Time) at the tail of the week performed the best on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We find that people are more willing to looking for funny things on weekdays and different optimal time for different social media.

For Twitter

Today,  there are 94 twitter accounts created every minute and Twitter service averaged at 317 million monthly active users. We can see that so many people read and post short messages on it. According to the data,   5 pm on Monday on Twitter is the optimal time for marketers  to post. Maybe, this is the time that so many people get out of the heavy work on Monday.

For Facebook

There are 1.79 billion monthly active users on Facebook. This is a huge number of people. We can hardly image  that so many people check their Facebook  all the day. We can see that brands had success when posting at 8 pm on Thursday on Facebook. Maybe, this is the time that people just end their dinner and look for some funny things on Facebook.

For LinkedIn

There  are more than 450 million LinkedIn members and 25 percent of them are actively visiting the professional social network each month. LinkedIn posts, which largely cater to the business crowd, had the advantage when made midweek at 9 am.Maybe, this is the time that people just begin their work and visit the professional social network.

For  Instagram

The mainly mobile photo-sharing network Instagram had reached 500 million monthly active users. People can easily get information from this photo-based social platform. According to the data, 7 pm on Friday on Instagram is the best time for marketers to post. People  finish their job or class on Friday, looking forward to having a wonderful weekend. Then they may look the beautiful pictures on Instagram.

For Pinterest

Pinterest has reached 150 million monthly active users and a big number of people spend much time there. Pinterest took this trend a bit further with posts tending to get the best traction on Fridays at 1 am.  This time is just pass by the midnight that so many people stay up late on Pinterest.

When marketers try to do social marketing, the best times to post on social media is incredibly important when considering how audiences interact with different content. The best time to post varies depending on what your brand is writing about and which audiences you are trying to reach. Now, we know the right time  to post content  on the different types of social platforms, so we can focus more on them and make it more effective.

 

 

Two Tendencies of Email Marketing in the Future

Image from http://www.mktechsoft.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-importance-of-an-e-mail-for-your-business/

If you are currently trying to use Email Marketing to attract customers, do you think it is effective? Well, nowadays, some people consider that Email Marketing is useless but I want to state that  Email Marketing plays an important role in the competitive business environment. That’s about 2.5 billion people worldwide use email. And the E-mail users sends about 196 billion emails daily. Out of this 196 billion emails the majority, 109 billion, is business email.For marketers, Email marketing is  a very personal way of reaching your target customers, build relationships with your customers and grow sales.

Here is a video that tells what Email Marketing is.

Email marketing is a popular way to promote products and services, we can see that email marketing works crazy effective. Email marketers can claim a return of $38 for every dollar spent. When you compare that figure to the return on advertising spend for other media, the difference is astonishing. There are two trends for Email Marketing in the future.

Email Continues to Get More Mobile

Let us turn to the US Email Marketing Benchmarks: Desktop vs. Mobile* Click, Order and Revenue Share, Q2 2015 & Q2 2016 (% of total among campaigns analyzed by Yesmail).

“US email marketers are having increasing success with mobile devices compared to the desktop. According to August research, mobile devices were driving more email clicks, orders and revenues in Q2 2016 than a year earlier.”

 

Image from https://www.emarketer.com/Chart/US-Email-Marketing-Benchmarks-Desktop-vs-Mobile-Click-Order-Revenue-Share-Q2-2015-Q2-2016-of-total-among-campaigns-analyzed-by-Yesmail/196872

For Revenue share

Although desktop still accounts for a very large proportion, we can see from the data that the proportion of desktop decreases 8% from 2015 to 2016 while mobile increases 8% from 2015 to 2016, which means marketers should pay more attention to Email marketing.

For Order share

Customers are more willing to place  orders on their mobile devices. So we can easily see that there is a  9% growth for mobile order share from 2015 to 2016. And the proportion of mobile is 42%, which is nearly the half of the total order share.

For Click share

we can see from the data that the proportion of desktop decreases 6.8% from 2015 to 2016 while mobile increases 6.8% from 2015 to 2016. And at the same time, the proportion of mobile is 52.8% in 2016, which is more than the proportion of desktop. So customers will more often click on their mobile devices rather than desktop.

Email Trends to Animation

Email is not just about the words anymore. Good emails also feature an attractive, professional design. A visually pleasing email is more likely to get a response than a plain text only message. An animated email attracts and holds the reader’s interest. If used properly, an animated email can result in a higher reader response rate. An animation can also convey your message in a clever, unforgettable way.

Following is an example of Amazon’s promotion for Black Friday.

Image from http://giphy.com/gifs/marketing-ORzsP7FYhcdoc