Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 25
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans.
Hello! A new edition of my newsletter. I try to write one newsletter a week. In this edition: a bike repair shop I visited and how this shop attracted me to become a customer. A great LinkedIn report on how to get more visibility on LinkedIn, news on progressive web apps (stop developing them if you are, as they no longer work on Apple devices), and user story guidelines. Check it out below.
🎨Bike repair shop uses Cialdini’s persuasion techniques (probably without knowing)
Sometimes you stumble upon creativity with small entrepreneurs. Sometimes you do not need a fancy website to convince people to come to your store. Recently I got a flat tire on my bike. This was the closest bike shop. The owner simply put a TV outside of his store in the passage (where many people pass every day) and the TV continuously plays a video where multiple real customers give video reviews of this store. Some talk about the cheap price, some about the friendly owner, some about the speedy service.
It’s Cialdini’s social proof tactics used, probably without even knowing it. Great bike repair shop in Naarden-Bussum, and the video convinced me to let my tire be fixed at this store.
See for yourself? Check it out. Awesome reviews on Google as well. : https://g.co/kgs/Y1Ajhdf
💸Unleash Your Inner Sales Tiger: LinkedIn Ads Hacks You Need to Know
LinkedIn advertising/lead generation is great fun. There are lots of opportunities and creative ways to set up ads. B2B advertising is usually a bit different than traditional advertising and that makes it extra nice.
Richard van der Blom created a 123(!) page report on LinkedIn advertising and content. (Thank you Richard) This is very useful. So for all you sales tigers on LinkedIn take advantage of this report and discover for example that polls have 1.99x the reach of the median post, that 1 week is the optimal voting length, and that Including "Other" results in a 25% visibility increase.
That and much more in the report, I uploaded it to my Dropbox for easy download, see the link below.
💬Chat with RTX: an AI Chatbot that runs locally
NVIDIA released Chat with RTX, an AI chatbot that runs locally on your PC.
It can summarize or search documents across your PC's files and even YouTube videos and playlists. The chatbot runs locally, meaning results are fast, you can use it without the internet, and the user's data stays private.
I tried to run it on my laptop, but the first time since I bought it, that I had a problem running the software. My laptop does not meet the requirements. So haven’t tested it myself, but I share it because it can be useful to run a local LLM. It looks a bit like the LM studio software I tested a while ago. Read more on that here.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai-on-rtx/chat-with-rtx-generative-ai/
🍏EU/Apple kills PWA
Progressive Web Apps are apps that are built using web platform technologies, but that provide a user experience like that of a platform-specific app. So in other words, it looks and feels like an app from an app store, but it is not distributed via an app store. PWA’s have quite some advantages and I do not see them used a lot, unfortunately.
In my opinion, they can especially work well in retail, for example, shopping malls. Why? There is a low barrier to entry, it works across all browsers and devices, it has offline functionality, push notification, and location awareness and it is much easier and low cost to keep up to date, compared to native apps. But I guess I can forget about PWA’s being used more anytime soon, as the EU -in all its wisdom- triggered Apple to break PWA’s due to its Digital Markets Act.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/apple-confirms-its-breaking-iphone-web-apps-in-the-eu-on-purpose/
https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/15/ios-17-4-web-apps-european-union/
💸Micropayments: I love them, seems they might take off
For a long time, I have followed the micropayment developments. In my opinion, micropayments are a much better way to reward creators than subscriptions. Just pay a small amount for an article you like for example, or directly reward the music artists you are listening, to via a direct payment to their wallet, without any middleman. The BTC lightning rail could be used for that worldwide and would be a perfect use case. But now there is more development on this topic. Not via the lightning network but the team behind Chromium (the open-source browser engine). And that can be a good thing as well. When micropayments take off, more initiatives will follow.
The basic idea is web users will get a digital wallet, provided by Gatehub and Fynbos presently, and web publishers will add a link tag to their site's <head> block formatted like so: <link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example/alice" />.
According to Surkov, Apple and Google have both shown support for Web Monetization, while Mozilla has shown more limited interest. Implementing the specification in Chromium – which would make it available to Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and other Chromium-based browsers – should ensure the technology has enough distribution for experimentation. Before that happens, prototyping still needs to be completed and there's no set date for when that may be finished.
Micropayments have lots of benefits in my opinion. For example
Direct support for creators: Listeners can directly send small payments to creators they value.
More granular support: Users can choose how much they pay based on the value they receive.
Greater creator freedom: Less dependence on ads and platforms creates more creative autonomy.
Let’s hope now the Chromium team is developing, things speed up.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/google_micropayments_plan/
🧑User stories: a cheat sheet & blog post on how to write them well
Writing user stories is fun because you help create value for people. You help people in a (digital) way. But writing good user stories is not as easy as it seems. In a good working collaborative team, everyone can create user stories, so it's good to have knowledge on how to do this well.
wrote a post on how to write good user stories. Great post to bookmark.
That’s it for this edition. I hope you liked this edition. If you do please share!
Thank you for reading,
Alex