EMAIL MARKETERS RESPOND TO RESPONSIVE
Email conversion rates saw a significant jump last year - and that's because more marketers embraced mobile. A new benchmark report from Yesmail reveals that brands' use of mobile-friendly strategies, such as responsive design, paid off with mobile email conversion rates jumping more than 70 percent year-over-year. During the same period, consequently, desktop conversion rates dropped by 4 percent.
Book It On Yelp
Yelp has bolstered its platform through new partnerships with Vimbly (which shows users what to do in their downtime, like ice skating, cooking classes, etc.), BloomNation (a platform for local florists to run their businesses online) and several other enterprises - enabling Yelp to make activities from more than 5,000 local vendors instantly bookable. These partnerships will now allow Yelp users to stay on the location-based platform to do anything from rent a paddle board to book legal consultations.
Square Has Your (Charge) Back
Sure to be a crowd pleaser, Square is now offering a chargeback protection service, providing merchants with protection against chargebacks (the return of funds to consumers) of $250 or less per month. In the same digital breath, Square is now catering to offline merchants with its Square Marketing suite, allowing them to leverage many of the features that their online competitors take advantage of, including trackable email marketing campaigns.
Consumers Demand Free Returns
Seventy-three percent of consumers "always expect" free returns according to a recent report from Royal Mail. The report reveals that the majority of consumers not only expect free returns, but 56 percent also say they will consider using a different retailer who does offer free returns.
Search Spending On the Rise
Search advertising is alive and well with new data from IgnitionOne revealing spend in this area saw its highest year-over-year growth in three years (26 percent in Q1 2015). According to the report, the dramatic increase in paid search spending is attributed to the growth of mobile and the improving economy.
AdWords Wants Your (REAL) Number
As one of the most popular ad platforms on the 'Net, Google AdWords is making an effort to verify the information that businesses place in their ads. Google recently announced that in June 2015 it will require verification of ownership for all call and location extension phone numbers. There are three ways brands can verify the phone numbers on their ads, including displaying the phone number on their website, linking their brand's Google Webmaster Tools and AdWords accounts or adding their unique AdWords conversion tracking code snippet to the landing page featured in their ad.
.CLUB What?
Brands may have a plethora of new domain extension options, but .com is still the most memorable. According to a recent Interbrand study, consumers are much more likely to remember a .com extension over other extensions (like .club or .xyz). In fact, when it came to remembering the domain extension of a Web address, 94 percent of consumers correctly recalled .com addresses while just 7 percent correctly recalled a new domain extension.
More News of Note
--Tinder swipes left on spam: wsm.co/2theleft2theleft
--Twitter Shows Media Publishers Some Love: wsm.co/weloveyoutoo
--Facebook's BIG F8 Announcements: wsm.co/f8roundup
--Instagram Adds New Creative Tools: wsm.co/gramfade
Web Tech Watch
See what has the 'Net community all abuzz with Website Magazine's #WebTechWatch series - a weekly roundup, available online, that profiles both emerging and established technologies and some of the most useful solutions for today's Web workers. If you have a digital product or service you think deserves a mention, tweet @WebsiteMagazine with the hashtag #WebTechWatch.
SatisMeter:
Collect user feedback from within Web applications.
Prisma:
Global color swatches for Photoshop.
Venzee:
Turn spreadsheets into real-time, cloud-based data.
Everlist:
Collaboration platform for product teams.
Loggly:
A simplified log management system for developers.
Roboto:
Build and deploy iOS and Android mobile apps.
Dashtab:
Optimizes how leads are qualified in Salesforce.
Dtermin:
A keyword suggestion tool for modern marketers.
