Shine Marketing collaborates with Kingston University to improve the online shopping experience

Shine Marketing, a specialist in building and marketing eCommerce websites, is pleased to announce that it is working with Kingston University on a new eCommerce research project.

The project will help Shine Marketing increase its service offering to its online retail clients through a deeper insight into ways of measuring customer behaviours on shopping websites.

The collaboration is through a Knowledge Connect programme which is part funded by the London Development Agency and provides a way for Universities in and around London to share their research and knowledge for the benefit of small to medium enterprises.

Shine Marketing will be the first business to take advantage of this scheme with Kingston University.

The habits of online shoppers can be measured in many different ways but the eCommerce industry still has much more to learn about consumers shopping habits to better the customer experience online.

Stephen Pratley, managing director of Shine Marketing comments:

"As a specialist agency in eCommerce, we wanted to work with a leading eCommerce professor in the UK to further our knowledge in the area of tools that measure consumer behaviour online and in turn help our clients improve the online shopping experience they offer their customers. We are thrilled to be working with Jonathan Briggs, Professor of eCommerce at Kingston University. Professor Briggs brings the unusual combination of practical experience and academic theory through his work at the University and his own company Other Media."

The Knowledge Connect project will run for three months over the summer. It will involve detailed research and analysis of existing measurement tools on the market and how these tools can be adapted and the then replicated across different types of online retailers.

Professor Briggs comments: "I'm really excited about this project; it provides a fantastic opportunity to do some well-targeted research and development with a local company. Stephen Pratley has a high level of knowledge of eBusiness and this collaboration will be mutually beneficial to both parties. We are already seeing signs of being able to extend this collaboration beyond the initial project and hope to find and develop an entirely new tool that enables online retailers to gain a better understanding of the customer experience and in turn build better eCommerce websites. This project provides a very quick way to make a rapid assessment of whether some eCommerce ideas have wings and warrant further funding and investigation."

Briggs continues: "This project will also allow Shine Marketing to be part of a network where specialists from industry and research can come together to strengthen the local eBusiness community in South London and compete against the large agencies for big client projects."

Ends
About Knowledge Connect
Knowledge Connect (knowledgeconnect.org.uk) is a dynamic and practical programme that's helping London's businesses to grow and prosper by connecting them to the knowledge and expertise of the City's universities, colleges and research organisations. This funded programme provides a fantastic opportunity for businesses to develop new products, services and markets and for knowledgebase organisations to put their expertise to practical and commercial use.

About Shine Marketing
Shine Marketing (shinemarketing.com) is a specialist in building and marketing websites and eCommerce websites. Run by marketeers who have experience of running successful eCommerce businesses - Shine understands what is needed to create a successful retail business online with its strong focus on achieving return on investment for clients through user-focussed design and effective marketing.
With specialist interests in fashion, beauty and fitness, Shine Marketing has built and marketed websites for upmarket brands such as Sahara, Zelens Skin Science ZPM and DeviDoll.

Shine Marketing is based in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey and was established in 2006.

About Enterprise at Kingston University
Kingston University (www.kingston.ac.uk/services-for-business) believes it is very important for the local economy that education works effectively with business and industry, and offers a range of knowledge transfer and consultancy services as well as professional focused work-based training programmes.

For further information please contact:

Caroline Wiggins
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mobile: 07739 709073

Katrina Suppiah
Business Accent PR
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mobile: 07809 028711

New email research shows growth in use of mobile devices

New research released today by Campaign Monitor shows some big moves in the way people are reading their email, with big shifts towards mobile devices and little or no growth on web-based clients like Gmail or Hotmail.

The biggest winner is the iPhone, which, with both versions added together is now more popular than AOL, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird and Entourage put together.

More and more, marketers need to be looking at simpler versions of how their emails are rendered by these small mobile devices, and including tests for devices such as Windows Mobile, Blackberry and the iPhone when designing their marketing communications.

Moving to a professional email newsletter platform

Many companies and clients wonder what benefits an external email service provider can offer them, and whether they could just do it in-house themselves. In this article we will cover the major benefits of using an email service provider to send and manage email campaigns.

Easily measure the success of your campaigns

If you know who opened your emails, what they clicked on, who bounced and who unsubscribed, you can start to understand who your audience really is, and what they are interested in.

For every campaign you send, ShineEmail automatically creates reports that are:

• Easy to understand
• Automatically updated
• Simple to share with other people

Save time

What administrative work? Sending the email might not take too long (although it may crush your mail systems internally!). It’s dealing with the results of your campaign that can eat up your time.

• Subscribe and unsubscribe requests — every time you send a campaign, some people are likely to want to get off the list. It may only take you a minute or two to deal with, but if you need to stop what you are doing and switch tasks, it adds up quickly. And what happens if you miss one and send to that person again?

  ShineEmail lets people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically.

• Dealing with bounced emails — For any given campaign, you might expect up to 10% of the emails to be bounced back to you. That could be hundreds or thousands of emails you need to handle somehow.

  Are they permanent bounces? Then should you remove them from your list? Or do you need to resend the email to them?

  ShineEmail instantly removes hard bounces, and re-sends your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

• Dealing with spam complaints — Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. ShineEmail instantly removes people from your list when they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

• Avoid hold ups on your own mail servers — We’ve heard of more than one marketing manager staying up till all hours trying to send email campaigns out without shutting down the company email network.

  Let our servers handle that load for you.

Improve your deliverability

Your email campaign can only succeed if your recipients are actually able to read it. Using ShineEmail to send your campaigns can have a big impact on the number of people receiving the emails.

• Whitelisting and feedback loops — We have relationships with major ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and many more that mean our mail servers are recognized as legitimate senders of bulk email, so your campaigns have a much greater chance of being delivered.

• Monitoring of blacklists — We continually check blacklisting services to make sure our servers are not being listed, something which is time consuming and complex to do for your own servers.

• Specialized network of mail servers — our mail servers optimize email delivery for particular recipient mail systems, throttling the speed of delivery to match acceptable levels for each system.

Use advanced options and smarter features

• Personalization — Use custom fields to adapt your emails for individual subscribers
• Segmentation — Send focused emails to subsets of your full lists
• Powerful import and export — Easily get your subscriber lists into and out of the system at any time
• Archive your campaigns — Easily display your previous campaigns on your website

Constant improvement

A web based service like ShineEmail can be updated with better performance, new features and smarter tools very quickly, and at no extra cost. You don’t have to worry about having the wrong version, or getting out of date.

Every month we are adding features and making updates to make ShineEmail do more for you in less time.

Secure, reliable and supported

Your valuable subscriber information and campaign details are kept safe in our data centers. With biometric security, uninterruptible power supplies and environmental control units, our physical security and reliability is state of the art.

We keep your data backed up and duplicated across our network at all times. Our hardware is completely redundant, meaning that even if one disk or server fails, nothing will be lost and the system will stay up.

Focus on your customers, not on your technology

Sure, you can use your own email client, or some other in-house tool to add your subscribers and deal with unsubscribe requests and bounces from bad emails all day.

But wouldn’t you rather spend that time working on the email itself, crafting the message to better meet your customers requirements and tweaking subject lines and headlines to get better results?

Using an email service provider lets you avoid the mundane administrative work and concentrate on serving your customers better.

To find out more about our email marketing solutions, contact Shine Marketing on 0208 973 4637, or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)