Ark age aware skincare

New ecommerce website for the health and beauty sector

Pomegranate are proud to announce the recent launch of a new e-commerce website for Ark Skincare.

Ark are a successful health and beauty company with a number of acclaimed salons located throughout London. The launch of their new website coincides with the launch of their new Age Aware Skincare product range developed using the knowledge gained from over 10 years of experience and over 100,000 treatments performed at ARK Skincare Centres.

Read more about our project with Ark on the Pomegranate Media website.

Widgets are changing our world

“Today, online retailers are looking for ways to extend their reach to social networks, desktop and web widgets, blogs, and mobile applications to connect with customers,” says Worklight’s David Lavenda. “But the real question is not how to capture customers’ attention, but rather how companies generate sales and enhance customer loyalty via such popular tools as Facebook, iPhone, iGoogle, Adobe Air and others. Secure retail widgets represent a new and exceptional channel for convenient shopping and always-on customer service, one that generates sales for retailers and saves customers time and money.” “Online sales are becoming an increasingly critical element of multi-channel retail sales, especially as people become highly selective in where and how they shop,” Lavenda added. “Retailers that are able to monetize this migration to the online channel, with successful widget marketing and sales efforts, will quickly stand apart from the rest.” • Allow customers to search and shop directly via the widget, without being redirected to the retailer website. • Engage customers by providing personalised widgets with highly-granular, individualised offers to improve conversion rates, lower marketing costs, and increase lift. Enable customers to respond to offers within the widget, without being redirected. • Provide social networking tools to let customers share experiences regarding services and products with their friends. Then let friends order products directly from the social networking sites. • Experiment with marketing messages to quickly and cost-effectively select the most effective messages for micro-market segments. • Monitor response and conversion rates to gauge the success of widget campaigns and improve performance. • Compare the costs and returns of secure widget-based offers against traditional marketing channels or even non-secure widgets

Do you harness the power of a good review?

Customer-written content, in the form of product reviews, community Q&A and shared stories, can both drive down search acquisition costs and improve natural search results, says Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice

In analysing online retailers with customer reviews, Bazaarvoice has found that more than 97% of the search terms used to find the review content are unique; in other words, without the user-generated content, the retailer would not have received search engine referrals for those ‘long-tail’ specific shopping terms.

The more specific, obscure terms are more valuable — though harder to pre-determine — to the retailer, and this is where customer-generated content comes into play. The more content that exists on your site about a particular product or brand, the more likely it is found by these long-tail searchers. Also, the more specific term mentioned above brings up more products that feature fresh, user-generated content. Our analysis has shown that searchers who land on Bazaarvoice-generated review landing pages use 3.5 to 4 words, while Google’s average search is 2.5 words.

Whats your view, or experience with customer reviews? Any major stats to report, what about the negatives policing etc we would love to know.

Source: Internet Retailing

Sweemo BBC Pitch in a lift

Sweemo is launching itself into the new heady heights of featuring on world wide news coverage! The BBC are showing a short video of representatives from 5 of the world’s hottest budding web companies. The representatives have just the time it takes to be elevated 26 floors in a lift to deliver a pitch about their company, and Sweemo are up first! Click here to see the BBC news page covering Sweemo

The hopefuls were showcasing their online innovations at a US technology festival, South By Southwest, in Austin, Texas.

Experiment #1: Media Mash

Pomegranate Media are announcing a new experiment into social media! We are currently in the lab getting out the bunsen burners, tweaking knobs and turning screws to create one monster of an experiment!

The aim of our experiment is to find out just how far we can push ourselves within the social media network. Using sites such as You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and the like we plan on promoting ourselves left right and centre.

Check back here soon for an update on our progress. Keep your eyes peeled and your ear to the ground… You might just see us out there in action!

Getting on well with Google?

As more brands begin to realise the importance of SEO (search engine optimisation) when planning their online marketing strategy our SEO copywriting service is becoming ever more popular.

The purpose of SEO copywriting is to increase traffic from natural searches and improve a brands relationship with their users. Successful SEO copywriting balances the need to intrigue and inform the target audience whilst simultaneously communicating with the search engines through the application of carefully defined keywords.

Search engines place a large importance on the quality and relevancy of content so to overlook copywriting could be detrimental to a websites rankings. To see how Pomegranate Media can help your brand get on better with Google (and other search engines) take a look at our SEO copywriting service and our specialist SEO package PIP.

Are women and Social Media, the perfect match?

It certainly seems so. A recent study carried out by consumer magazine publisher IPC shows that in the last 12 months alone the number of women attracted to social media and social networking websites has grown by an astonishing 53%. The survey discovered that two-thirds of women count social networking as one of their regular online activities, a quarter of women often read online forums, up from 18% in 2007 while a fifth post questions or answers. With the continued surge towards social networks and user generated content it is time to ask yourself whether your brand and your website is seeing the full benefit. To see how Pomegranate Media can help you maximise the impact from this ever growing audience check out PIP our dedicated search engine optimisation service. The survey also highlighted something many of us already know, the fact that women love to shop! With the proportion of women who shop online (57% of the sample) increasing by 8% since 2007. Source: Digital Bulletin

Compare the Meerkat.com

This has to be one of the funniest adverts on TV at the moment and a very welcome relief from the dreary comparison site adverts that we’ve been subjected to in the past. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is the link.

Also, if you’ve got a spare five minutes, it’s worth logging on to www.comparethemeerkat.com.

Too much fun to be had!

Do you twitter?

It’s the latest thing at the moment with many celebs professing their love for the act of twittering, including Steven Fry and Jonathan Ross, but what is it all about? We had a bit of a dabble into the medium here in the office recently. Why not get involved and follow the Pomepeople??!

Four out of five online retailers have digital marketing headaches

Stressed by your inability to track your online marketing spend properly? 79% of the UK’s internet retailers are suffering from the same headache, according to new research from Coremetrics

Four out of five online retailers have digital marketing headaches

A significant 79% of online retailers in the UK are suffering from digital marketing headaches, new research commissioned by Coremetrics has found, and a massive 96% of marketers in the retail sector are not measuring ROI across all of their marketing tactics. Furthermore, 25% do not measure ROI across any online marketing tactics at all.

The biggest marketing headaches are deciding where to spend marketing budget, for nearly a third of respondents, and knowing how to determine ROI on elements of their marketing mix, for 29%. The other main problem areas include:

* Comparing campaigns across vendors and channels (32%)
* Information overload about digital marketing initiatives (23%)
* Understanding relationships between campaigns (14%)
* Understanding which campaigns are driving customer acquisition (9%)

Despite this lack of understanding of how to measure integrated marketing techniques, a third of respondents are expecting to add further online tactics to their marketing mix in 2009. In a bid to entice thrifty shoppers, making special offers was the top tactic expected to be implemented in the coming year. However, ‘special offers’ was the least measured tactic by those who already use it, with 90% not measuring ROI on their efforts.

“Tellingly, all the UK retail companies that have collapsed over the past month have all had a poor web presence, showing that digital is a key weapon in retailers’ arsenal,” says Coremetrics’ Richard Sheppard. “Having a strong and informed web presence, to capture customers that are abandoning the high street, is crucial for retail success in 2009.”