Month: May 2021

Content that relates to your needs, goals and desires is what is most relevant to you. Relevance is usually what catches your eye like specific trends, stories and updates.

Relevant content is personalized content that feels conversational and speaks to your audience’s needs, pains, goals, and desires. To simplify this concept, your business should think of relevant content for your buyers, as individuals, based on what they do, continuously over time, directed toward an outcome, and everywhere they are (the ABCDs of Relevant Content). Buyer’s expectations of your business are rapidly changing. They expect you to know who they are, know what they like, and have personalized conversations on every channel they are on. Because of this, it is essential to make sure that everything you put out there speaks to your individual buyers.

• Keep Your Competitors Close

Every industry has its key players, so every little thing matters. Tracking similar and competing brands positions you to make proactive competitive changes. Keeping up-to-date on industry newsletters, scanning press releases for competing products and practicing social media listening can help a brand anticipate the various ‘threats’ from competitor activity.

• Analyse market trends

As trends change, marketers need to reinvent their strategies to generate content that engages their customers.

Take, for instance, the video marketing trend that picked up pace in 2017; HubSpot reported that 48% of marketers planned to add YouTube videos to their marketing plan in 2018.

Another recent trend has been to address the needs of the consumer not to the end of making an immediate sale but to ease their customer journey. This is why there’s been a sudden decline in sponsored posts, branded email, and even traditional ads all of which are no longer as effective as they were earlier.

A case-specific example of a brand having adapted its marketing strategy and content would be Warner Brothers Studio.

To prepare for an upcoming movie, it decided to base its media planning on insights gathered from big data. It considered the behaviour and engagement patterns of the target audience. By personalising its approach and tailoring content to the chosen platforms, WB Studio registered a 26% increase in ROI.

This goes to show that analysing marketing trends like these can give you a competitive edge and help your team create customer-relevant content pieces.

• Understand who you’re creating content for

Imagine you’re going for a job interview. How would you prepare for it? You would understand what the company does, where its interests lie, the gaps in its industry presence that you can help fill, and so on.

What you wouldn’t do is walk into the interview without any background research and offer answers based solely on your assumptions and beliefs.

Creating relevant content for your target audience is exactly like that. You need to know the context they function in, what they already have access to, and what they need. So, define demographics, the context of content, pain points, and so on of your average buyer before creating content.

Consider the phone-case brand Peel. It has managed to stand out in an industry where phone cases are bought and sold in bulk, by creating covers that are thin and functional, yet attractive.

The brand has utilised Facebook ads to help differentiate their product from those of their competitors. And Instagram has been used for a dual purpose: first, as a platform to establish brand presence and product identity through an aesthetically appealing feed, and second, as a means to respond to customer feedback.

• Use an apt medium

You can do everything possible to generate and post premium quality content. But if your target audience does not find it, does it even exist?

The truth is that effective content can only have a chance at being path-breaking when an effective distribution strategy is also at work.

Start by finding out how your audience consumes content. Using the right medium to start conversations, speaking in a language they are comfortable with, and using audience targeting options will help you build a better relationship with them.

Lead with Your Purpose

Audiences usually discern what you do fairly easily, but what sets your brand apart is why you do it. At CB&A for example, we’re driven by a passion to increase awareness of education initiatives that deliver equitable learning opportunities for schools and students. This mission influences everything about our brand marketing philosophy. It keeps us motivated, but our mission also drives our engagement in the education community and attracts clients to us in the first place.

Create niche relevant content

As has been discussed by Joe Pulizzi in this blog, creating generic content will lower your chances of breaking through the clutter on the internet, making it difficult for consumers to differentiate you from your competitors. You need to set your brand apart.

But before beginning to create a new area of specialisation, identify your potential competitors. Study their content approach, writing style, popular posts, and specific jargon used to target niche areas. Then build trust and influence by creating a niche content that’s relevant to your audience.

An email newsletter is a periodical email sent by a person or business containing news, updates, curated content from the topic that you signed up for.

Unlike a promotional email that almost hypnotizes you to ‘buy’, ‘join’, ‘enroll’ or email from boss that asks you to change the font on a presentation immediately (at 6 pm on a Friday!), a newsletter just asks to be loved and enjoyed.

Go niche: Write about topics your subscribers signed up for. If you told them, you would send them poetry, it would be awkward & confusing to send them financial analysis or cooking lessons.

Provide value: Before sending the hit button, ask if you were reading this newsletter from someone else, would you trash it in 2.3 seconds or keep it bookmarked as favorite?

Write with intent. Think of what it is that you want to say with this piece. Your every content should either move a reader away from pain or towards pleasure.

Be authentic: Write as if you are having a conversation with someone. Write honestly. Don’t embellish your stories. Write with emotions; to express, not impress.

Steps

Define your goals

Start by defining your goals. They must be integrated into your overall content strategy. Goals must be very specific: for instance, increase prospects by 12%.

Before developing a newsletter, it’s important to ask yourself what focus it will have and how that fits into your overall marketing strategy. Readers have short attention spans that are continuously getting shorter. If they don’t immediately see something relevant and interesting, your email gets deleted. Producing unique content by segment returns routinely justifiable results.

Define your audience

Who do you want to reach and stay in touch with? Should you have one or several newsletters? This can be a matter of resources and commitment within each department, but the closer the content comes to meeting the reader’s specific interests, the better. Of course, recruiting future students is always a top priority and newsletters can be an effective tool in this regard.

Determine how often you will publish

Maintaining a regular schedule is great, but your priority should be on developing relevant content to share. If you send too frequently, you risk recipients unsubscribing from being perceived as a spammer. Some newsletters let new subscribers choose frequency-specific options (“weekly”, “monthly”, “bimonthly”, etc.). Testing which day of the week and times of year are most effective, along with the relative success of all other aspects of your publication, should be an ongoing process.

Continuously develop your contact list

• On your website
• Ask students to sign up on social media
• If it is a general newsletter, have a sign-up button at the end of all your outside communications
• Communicate what they will receive and the benefits of signing up. For a prospective students’ newsletter, an effective call to action could be “Stay tuned to what is happening on campus.”

Create engaging, digestible content based on your audience

Busy readers are likely to browse a newsletter before deciding if any article is worth reading. Enhance your usability with punchy headlines, easily readable short stories and attractive visuals. Since people generally process information better in smaller chunks, be aware that in a newsletter with ten articles, most readers may perhaps only read two or three. Shorter, more frequent delivery might be preferable. Subject lines have to instantly engage, and by limiting what is displayed to an introductory paragraph, encouraging readers to click to see the full article on your website, browsing becomes easier and your website’s traffic is increased.

Use Google Analytics to track your newsletter’s impact on your traffic

Studies analyzing online behaviour suggest email newsletters are the best way to drive users back to websites, where the real engagement takes place, so it is imperative that users are directed to an optimal student recruitment landing page. Feedback and your website’s analytics will allow you to constantly improve the effectiveness of your message and fully integrate the newsletter into your education marketing strategy.

Segmentation is the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on set criteria. Typically, segmentation is used as a personalization tactic to deliver more relevant email marketing to subscribers based on their geographic location, interests, purchase history, and much more. Segments are created so that the marketer can cater specifically to each different email list and that list’s independent interests, rather than creating one mass message for all.

The basic identifiers for someone’s digital existence is their name and their email address. If you’re trawling your database and encounter very old email addresses, fair warning emails tend to degrade. People change email addresses when they change jobs, change webmail providers, adopt a different handle, or simply change their throwaway, but don’t worry about this now. When your campaign is underway, you’ll be able to track unresponsive email addresses and cull them from your list.

• Existing email list: Of course, if this isn’t your first email marketing rodeo, then draw from your previous efforts at list-building.
• Email account: Naturally, the first place you might look would be your present and former email accounts. Webmail accounts in particular make it easy for you to export your contacts, usually in CSV format.
• CRM: If you use a CRM (and take steps to maintain clean data) then you’ll have a wealth of contact information in here. If it’s a fairly well-known CRM, there’s a good chance your email marketing service provider integrates with it already. If not, you can export your contacts in a CSV file.
• Contact management system: Contact management apps can sync with your email, phone, and social media, so you might be able to get most of your contacts in one fell swoop. (Your CRM may have already replaced this, though.)
• Ecommerce platform: Check your online store for current and past customers. Different platforms have different methods for exporting customers: depending on the solution, you may be able to export their purchase orders, their email addresses, and other relevant information. Check whether your email marketing solution integrates with your ecommerce platform.

5 ways you can segment your list:

• B2B and specialization email segmentation: You work with other businesses. You may sell or provide services to other businesses. And because of the different people you work with, you wouldn’t send the same email to a vendor contact as you do to a sales manager, a marketing specialist, or an administrative assistant. They each require their own messaging.
• Geographic email segmentation: The most obvious way to segment emails is through geography. For instance, imagine your business is hosting a special event. You send out content to a full email list, which includes contacts both local and distant.
• Content-specific email segmentation: For this, you need to rely on data collected about specific contacts. What pages did they visit on your site? What did they download from it? What tools did they use? Did they purchase anything?
• Influencer email segmentation: This is more complicated than the title alone suggests. Customer loyalty is no longer just about purchase totals and the frequency of purchases. Today, it’s about who recommends your brand. Who’s given you testimonials or reviews? Who shares your brand on social media? Which platform? How effective are they? Send superficially to those customers and show them some love for being a voluntary brand ambassador.
• Behavior-specific email segmentation: This goes into a level of email marketing segmentation that’s even deeper. How long is a customer lingering on a page? How many pages do they view on an average visit? Do they visit and buy quickly, like an impulse buyer? Or do they visit a few times in a week, loading the same items into an online cart and canceling, like a nervous buyer?

Email marketing tools are very useful and cost-effective to market your products and services. They are especially great marketing tools for small businesses that don’t have the technical knowledge.

Factors

Integrations

It should also integrate easily with other third-party apps and social media platforms. Seamless integration allows you to handle customer data better and easily view key metrics.

Mobile-Optimization

According to an IBM study, most consumers prefer to read their emails on mobile. 49.1% of all emails in the world are opened on mobile. Compare this to 33.3% read on webmail and 17.6% on desktop.

Tools

1. Sender

Sender is an effective email marketing tool built to help startups and fully established businesses grow. It allows them to reach their goals faster by providing useful features that enable them to take their email marketing strategies to the next level.

Sender has numerous pre-built email templates to choose from, but you can also create your own using custom elements. With Sender, you can also create signup forms and pop-ups.

Additionally, you can leverage their email automation feature to manage abandoned carts, welcome emails, and personalized celebration emails.

2. Pinpointe

Pinpointe’s ‘Email Marketing Tool for Teams’ is the best solution for companies who have multiple people collaborating to design and deliver their email campaigns. Enterprises and marketing agencies can define specific user roles like campaign creation, database management and reporting, for each team member. Agencies can set up as many as 500 separate team accounts for each customer and define or restrict what each team member can have access to.

Pinpointe provides one of the best drag and drop editors we’ve seen. With hundreds of templates and pre-made blocks, companies can create beautiful looking, mobile friendly emails very quickly and without having to know html.

The smart-segments feature allows you to target your emails to relevant prospects with precision. Overall, this is the go-to tool if you want to do email marketing at scale.

3. HubSpot Marketing Free Email

HubSpot offers a fully-featured email marketing tool that was built to help businesses grow, no matter where they are on their journey.

The tool has a free-forever plan that allows you to send up to 2,000 emails per calendar month. Once the business grows, you can opt for one of the paid tiers and unlock more features and benefits.

The great thing about HubSpot is that it offers all-in-one solutions to help you do more than just email marketing. They enable you to use your website data to run more personalized email campaigns. You can also benefit from their live chat, form builder, CRM, and other features.

4. SendinBlue

Sendinblue is a great email marketing tool that can help you run effective campaigns in an automated, seamless manner.

It allows you to create professional-quality newsletters using their drag-and-drop feature and just a few clicks. Even professionals who don’t have any knowledge of coding can easily use their platform to create attractive newsletters.

Its advanced segmentation lets you target narrow audience segments with the right message.

Key Features

• CRM integration for you to access contact details and insights
• Unlimited contacts
• Support for bulk emails
• Rich email template library
• A/B testing of email subject lines and sending times
• Dynamic content to give your emails a personal touch

Setup

Determine Your Goals.

If you’re like me, then when you get an idea in your head, you’re eager to rush out and put it into action. Slow down there! If you want your campaign to be successful, you’ve got to step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish.

• If your website earns money on ad impressions, you’re probably trying to drive traffic. Your emails will likely contain links to popular or recent content on your site.
• If you sell products in an ecommerce store, you might be trying to drive sales. In this case, your emails might link to best sellers, promote new merchandise, welcome new members, or reward loyal ones.
• If you’re looking to bring attention to a cause, you might send out a newsletter with human interest stories, current events, details on community activities, or requests for donations.

Choose an Email Marketing Platform.

There are a few ways you can go about doing this. If your email marketing needs are fairly simple, it’s possible your CRM provides email marketing features that fit your needs. However, if you’re looking to build self-sustaining email marketing campaigns with email triggers and autoresponders, you’ll probably want a dedicated email marketing service provider.

• MailChimp: MailChimp allows you to send automated, targeted emails, track performance metrics, design templates with a drag-and-drop interface, and incorporate social media ad campaigns. It also integrates with major ecommerce platforms. MailChimp has a free version, while paid subscriptions start at $10/month.
• Mailify: Mailify Sunrise is the newest version of the email marketing and marketing automation platform. This version brings new features, such as the possibility to create online forms linked to your contact lists or to easily create and send out SMS marketing. Mailify also offers a wide range of fully responsive templates to choose from. With an intuitive interface, you can easy create emails and landing pages that reflect your style with the drag and drop builder. The app is also integrated with Magento, Prestashop and WordPress.
• GetResponse: GetResponse offers email marketing, custom landing pages, and webinar marketing with solutions tailored to different industries. It integrates with popular ecommerce platforms, and its marketing automation scales for growing companies. Its basic email marketing package starts at $15/month, billed monthly, with discounts available for annual/bi-annual plans.
• Constant Contact: Constant Contact offers highly effective email marketing with a bevy of mobile-responsive templates suited for various needs and industries. It tracks KPIs in real-time, simplifies list-building and contact management, and provides campaign ideas by industry. Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial; paid subscriptions start at $20/month with annual discounts.
• ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign offers email marketing and marketing automation with a drag-and-drop campaign builder. It enables highly-specific segmentation strategies by consolidating data from your integrated third-party apps. It provides detailed reports, optimization tools, and ecommerce integration. Subscriptions start at $9/month with annual discounts, and further discounts for non-profits.
• Campaign Monitor: Campaign Monitor provides a library of professionally-designed email templates for branded email marketing. It offers a drag-and-drop campaign builder, dynamic content, optimization tools, and detailed tracking tools. It rates very highly in customer support touted as the “highest among major vendors” with 24/7 customer support. Campaign Monitor offers a very limited free version to get users started, while paid plans begin at $9/month. There are also pricing options to pay per campaign.

Build and Segment an Email List.

Your list may have humble roots with only a few subscribers, but prospects are prospects. It’s tempting to buy an email and bulk-send cold emails (hey, it works for some people), but you probably already have a fair number of contacts floating around in your records. If you choose to build an email list from scratch, there are ways to do that, too.

Consolidate Your Contacts

The basic identifiers for someone’s digital existence is their name and their email address. If you’re trawling your database and encounter very old email addresses, fair warning — emails tend to degrade. People change email addresses when they change jobs, change webmail providers, adopt a different handle, or simply change their throwaway, but don’t worry about this now. When your campaign is underway, you’ll be able to track unresponsive email addresses and cull them from your list.

• Existing email list: Of course, if this isn’t your first email marketing rodeo, then draw from your previous efforts at list-building.
• Email account: Naturally, the first place you might look would be your present and former email accounts. Webmail accounts in particular make it easy for you to export your contacts, usually in CSV format.
• CRM: If you use a CRM (and take steps to maintain clean data) then you’ll have a wealth of contact information in here. If it’s a fairly well-known CRM, there’s a good chance your email marketing service provider integrates with it already. If not, you can export your contacts in a CSV file.
• Contact management system: Contact management apps can sync with your email, phone, and social media, so you might be able to get most of your contacts in one fell swoop. (Your CRM may have already replaced this, though.)
• Ecommerce platform: Check your online store for current and past customers. Different platforms have different methods for exporting customers: depending on the solution, you may be able to export their purchase orders, their email addresses, and other relevant information. Check whether your email marketing solution integrates with your ecommerce platform.

Build and Grow a List from Scratch

It’s possible that even after trawling your contact databases, your emailing list is emptier than a middle school dance floor. Not to worry, there are ways to build a database of contacts from scratch. It’ll take some work, but the good news is your list will probably be more current, with more relevant prospects, than if you scoured addresses from an old database.

• Attract visitors with compelling content. Building organic traffic through inbound marketing (i.e. creating relevant content for your target audience and promoting it) is a slow but reliable way to build an email list. Better yet, these self-selected subscribers are more likely to have interest in your email campaigns.
• Offer relevant, gated assets. This works well particularly for B2B email campaigns. If your company produces a white paper, case study, research report, etc. then you can make it available for free in exchange for an email address. You might collect a few throwaway accounts, but there’ll be a lot of work emails in there.
• Make it easy to subscribe. Putting a nice call-to-action at the bottom of a custom landing page will attract conversions, especially if the visitor is coming from a targeted ad or promoted content.
• Offer guarantees against spam. People are more likely to sign up for your newsletter, promotions, fundraising, and so on if you assure you won’t flood their inbox. If you offer subscribers an option to choose their level of engagement daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly make sure you respect that.
• Offer promotions for subscribing. For example, new subscribers receive 15% off their next purchase and free shipping! Choose any promotion you want. This is a great way to build your list and also drive sales.
• Use a Facebook call-to-action button. Facebook allows your company profile to contain a call-to-action button that you can customize to let prospects sign up for your email list. It’ll appear at the top of your business profile page alongside the like button. Another reason why you need a polished social media presence!
• Tweet about the benefits of your email list. Promote the above gated content and promotions or simply the virtues of being on your email list to all of your followers. Set up an automation using a social media management platform (like Hootsuite) so new followers get a DM with a subscription link.
• Include a subscription link in your email signature. There are dos and don’ts to email signatures, but you can find a way to include a subscription link.

Segmenting Your Email List

Segmenting your email list lets you send highly-targeted emails to people based on their interests or demographic criteria. If it’s relevant to them, they’re more likely to open it; if they open it, there’s a chance they could convert.

Depending on your product or service, there are several data points you might consider when segmenting your audience. These include:

• Geography: The physical location of your recipients by country, region, state, or city. This can help you tailor content specific to certain places or accommodate time zone differences.
• Demographics: Demographic criteria includes age, gender, language, background, job title, or any other data points specific to an individual.
• Firmographics: Firmographic criteria refers to characteristics regarding a company, such as headquarters, industry, revenue, and number of employees. This is particularly useful for B2B account-based marketing or sales.
• Past purchases: This is useful for ecommerce retailers in particular. This can inform an email’s dynamic content or the nature of promotions personalized to recipients’ interests.
• Amount spent: This is useful for encouraging customers to hit a threshold at which they gain benefits, or rewarding loyal customers with a discount.
• Position in sales funnel: The abandoned shopping cart is the most well-known example. However, you can send emails customized to any stage of the buyer’s journey to push them farther down the funnel.
• Time since last purchase: Win back past customers before they go cold. Offer them incentives to return, announce new merchandise, or preview upcoming sales.
• Expressed interests: Send relevant content to the parties most interested based on interests they confirmed when subscribing to your emailing list.
• Email engagement: Customers who opt to receive emails no more than, say, twice a month can have abbreviated bi-weekly newsletters sent to their inboxes with the top topics of that period.

Enable Tracking.

Tracking and obtaining performance analytics is how you optimize email campaigns and marketing assets based on what works with which segments. The possibilities are nearly endless, and you can adapt subject lines, preheader text, email templates, content design, calls to action, and landing pages through A/B tests and analysis over time.

1. Unique Open Rate: This tracks the number of distinct recipients who’ve opened your email. This is a separate metric than Total Opens, which includes multiple opens by the same recipient.
2. Click-through Rate: Your click-through rate measures the number of recipients who click one or more links in the email, which bring them to a landing page on your website. Generally, the more clicks, the better. In practice, click-through rates can vary greatly per industry and by the nature of the campaign.
3. Click-to-Open Rate: This metric divides the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens to tell you the percentage of recipients who both opened the email and actually clicked a link. This gives you a sense of how well your content is actually performing with the people who see it.
4. Bounce Rate: The bounce rate measures the rate at which your emails are rejected by email servers. There are two types of bounces hard and soft. A hard bounce usually occurs as the result of non-existent or invalid email addresses. A soft bounce can indicate recipient’s inbox is over quota or the email message is too large. High bounce rates are a sign you should trim your email list of unproductive addresses or use confirmation emails to ensure subscribers actually want to subscribe.
5. Unsubscribe Rate: This is the rate at which recipients are unsubscribing from your email campaign. Unsubscribe rates vary by industry, but generally anything over 1% means you should look to provide more value in your content, improve the quality of your contact list, optimize the frequency of your emails, and better segment your list.
6. Spam Complaint Rate: A high spam complaint rate is a sign your recipients don’t see value in your emails. This should concern you in particular because an excessive complaint rate may result in your account being disabled by email marketing service providers. Different providers specify different acceptable spam complaint rates, but it’s generally very low perhaps no more than .1%.

Send

Congratulations! You’ve created an email marketing campaign. Now it’s time to send your emails. You might hit a homerun on your first campaign, but don’t be discouraged if it’s a dude. we learn more from our failures than our successes. Segment your lists, study campaign performance, make alterations, test your emails against one another, and every day you’ll get a little closer to your goals.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers.

Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports that will help you analyze all possible data about your website traffic. It not only tracks visitors to your site or the number of page views, it can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, Adsense and emails and much, much more.

GA Tracking Code

Google Analytics will only track pages that contain the Google Analytics tracking code, this is a small Javascript snippet that needs to be added to each page of your site, either manually or through the use of plugins or tool. You will find some tools and plugins to help you do this near the bottom of this post.

For a static webpage or if you want to manually install the code into your pages, copy and paste the code segment into the bottom of your content, immediately before the body tag of each page that you wish to track.

Analytics and Flash and Flex Content

One of the most common Google Analytic implementation challenges has been tracking Flash content. In the past, Flash tracking was not provided out of the box, and every implementation had to be tailored to each individual site, developers who tracked Flash had to create their own processes to get it working.

Social media analytics

Social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our marketing strategy. By paying close attention to social media analytics, you can measure your performance against your social media goals.

Buffer Analyze is social media analytics tool for online brands that want to make better decisions about their social media strategy and measure their results without feeling overwhelmed.

3 cool features:

• Instagram Stories analytics
• Posting strategy recommendations
• Create professional reports in as few as two clicks

Social media channels:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great combination of social media management, listening, publishing and analytics tools. It helps you ascertain what kind of content is working for you, increase the reach of your posts, improve the effectiveness of your ads, and get your whole social media team working in tandem. It has in-depth analytics features that give you a clear understanding of your performance across all social platforms.

Features:

• Customize reports by choosing from over 200 metrics and export them in PDF, Excel, or PowerPoint formats.
• Measure your customer care team’s response and resolution time on Facebook and Twitter.
• Track brand mentions better by integrating with specialized tools like Brandwatch and Talkwalker.

Social media channels:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Pinterest