Lately there’s been a lot of speculation around whether or not social media networks are replacing email marketing as a channel for nurturing customers. Both are excellent ways to keep your customers interested in you and coming back for more services. However, several email-marketers are convinced that social is superior because users are now spending more and more time on social media and less time on their email accounts. It’s true—according to a Nielsen survey by BBC News, one in every 11 minutes of a web user’s time is spent on social networking sites and blogs. Does that mean social is replacing email? Absolutely not.
It simply means that as a digital marketer, you must work even harder to deliver email messages that are effective and engaging.
Yes, perhaps consumers are spending more time on their social accounts than their email accounts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean social is more effective at driving conversions, leads, and ROI…especially in the B2B sector. Email is still the dominating form of communication for businesses. Many companies in the B2B sector find that email is far more effective and generates more traffic than social media does. In fact, an email marketing census by Econsultancy reported that 70% of responding companies found that email was excellent for ROI.
The problem with email marketing is not social media—it’s poor execution. Users are constantly bombarded with messages from marketers, and most get deleted before they are even opened. Why? Because the volume of messages being received is simply overwhelming. You must make your emails stand out from the sea of offers in our inboxes.
Here are some tips to make sure your emails get opened:
1. Send Your Messages in the Afternoon
What’s the first thing you do when you get to work? My assumption is that after you’ve settled into your office desk with coffee and maybe breakfast, you turn on your computer and check your email. Every marketer is anticipating this, and therefore most emails are sent out in the morning. As a result, users are greeted with a massive list of emails that they must sort through. This is the time when users are most selective—they keep what they need and delete what they don’t. Send your emails after lunch. By now, their inboxes are sorted and your message is more likely to be opened.
2. Offer Exclusive Benefits for Opening your Message
Give your customers a reason to continue to open your emails. Offer exclusive benefits that can’t be found on social sites. Whether it’s a coupon, discount code, or pass to your next event, make sure you reward your customers for being loyal to your email campaign.
3. Quality Over Quantity
Sending an email every day is a sure way to encourage unsubscibes. Instead of sending out as many email messages as you can, try condensing your emails into one high-quality, informative newsletter that will provide much more worth to your customers. Remember, consumers are receiving emails from businesses every day. Focus your efforts on creating a solid engaging newsletter that your customers will look forward to every week. Keep your emails fresh with new offers, quick tips, and helpful articles that your customers will find useful.
4. Don’t Send Messages on Monday
In HubSpot’s The Science of Email Marketing, researchers found that people are most likely to unsubscribe from email lists on Monday and Tuesday…it would make sense then, that the click through rate of an email is high on Wednesday and on the weekends. Why might that be? One can only speculate, but I’m willing to bet that most people unsubscribe on Mondays for the same reason they delete messages in the morning. Countless marketers are expecting consumers to open their inboxes on Monday morning when they get to work, and they want their email to be the first one opened. Instead, consumers are met with piles of emails…and they decide that it’s time to clean up their subscriptions.
5. Be on the Offense
Unsubscribes are a part of life. Consumers might be loyal readers one minute and the next they’ve found a newer, hotter newsletter to subscribe to. My advice is not to waste energy trying to get them back (unless of course you have the energy and money). Instead, take an offensive approach. Always focus efforts on drawing in new subscribers. Promote your email newsletters through an integrated campaign. Encourage subscriptions through your Facebook and Twitter, be sure to have a subscription button on your website, and ask for emails from attendees at company events.
Social media trends come and go, but as online marketers, it’s crucial that we stay on top of them. Like a rolling snowball, social media is only growing bigger and bigger and seems to swallow anything that crosses its path. We know it should be a critical part of our integrated marketing campaigns, but what exactly should we expect to see come 2012?
Gaining Leads from Social Media Outlets
As more information becomes available on social media sites, users will be spending the majority of their time on Facebook, Twitter and the like. Consequently, users will turn to social media to learn more about their favorite brands and what they have to offer. Marketers expect to see improved social analytics that will provide them with more detailed information about their social ROI and how social fits in the conversion funnel.
It will be imperative for marketers to not only produce more social content describing their products and services, but produce meaningful content that will create leads. Blasting a survey or a question to your fans won’t be enough. As social media grows, your fans will become overwhelmed with information being spouted by their favorite brands. Your social content must be both useful and compelling to grab and keep the attention of your fans.
Social on Other Devices
What devices? You guessed it—mobile and tablets. The word “mobile” is being passed around a lot when it comes to speculating 2012 trends, but what does it mean to you as a digital marketer? It means content will be (and should be) targeted to mobile users. And it would be wrong to ignore the renowned tablet. As the variety of tablets increase and prices decrease, more consumers will be drawn to using tablets in place of their laptops or desktops. Marketers can prepare for this by creating content that is quick and easy to access. With more users turning to mobile, start adapting your social content for smaller screens. Bloggers would be wise to shorten the length of their blog posts, and it would behoove social marketers to stay away from flash.
Frictionless Sharing
However controversial, frictionless sharing is likely to grow in 2012. It’s the automatic sharing of content from news sites and music sites such as Spotify, and word is more companies will integrate with Facebook’s Open Graph. Here’s what Facebook has to say on their developer’s page:
“We are now extending the Open Graph to include arbitrary actions and objects created by 3rd party apps and enabling these apps to integrate deeply into the Facebook experience.”
What does it mean? It means frictionless sharing is only going to grow. Users don’t have to hit a button or paste a link onto their wall anymore; it’s the easiest form of sharing that Facebook can devise (so far).
TV + Social
Turn on your TV and you won’t be able to avoid the calls to action propelled by social. At the bottom of the screen, hash tags compel viewers to tweet about the show, and already dozens of shows incorporate Twitter and Facebook into their programming. Shows such as The Voice use Twitter and Facebook to collect public opinion on an array of topics, making the audience a major factor in their planning. The use of social in TV programming will grow immensely within the next year, and social media crowdsourcing will reach a whole new level. The key to using this successfully is to listen to your audience and take what they have to say into consideration. Implement their feedback into your marketing campaigns.
What other trends do you think will arise in the next year?
The time for launching holiday campaigns is now—especially if you are an online business in need of improving your search ranking and lead generation before the year is out. Sure, the holidays are a great time for B2C companies to boost sales with paid ads, but sales aren’t the only things to boost. With the right strategy, your online business can boost its search engine rankings and experience a fantastic increase in lead generation. The key is to have a competitive edge by incorporating integrated marketing efforts.
During the holidays, consumers will be feverishly searching online for holiday specials, gift ideas, and almost anything holiday related. It’s important to take advantage of the increase in search volume by implementing certain holiday search terms into your SEO keyword strategy. Here are just a couple of popular holiday search terms you can use to boost your search ranking.
gifts
gift ideas
holiday discounts
holiday sales
Adapt these terms to fit with your products accordingly. For example, if your site sells men’s cologne, try using the keyword phrase “gifts for men” in your SEO efforts. Apply holiday search terms to your title and description tags. You also want to take advantage of seasonal shopping holidays such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Search terms such as “black Friday specials” or “cyber Monday discounts” are very popular around November, so be sure to incorporate these search terms into your SEO strategies ahead of time so your content may be indexed by the holidays.
Blog about It!
Don’t stop your efforts at meta tags and descriptions. Integrate these popular holiday search terms into your content marketing strategies to gain excellent shelf space and generate more leads. Create a blog entry that encompasses a holiday key phrase. For example, if your popcorn business is in need of more search traffic, create a blog entry entitled “10 Gift Ideas Using Popcorn.” People love numbered lists because they’re easy to read and quick. Use this to your advantage and capitalize on the term “gift ideas” to make a killer blog post. People will enjoy the creative aspect of using popcorn to make a gift, and will likely be drawn to your site to see what assortments of holiday popcorn they can use. Don’t forget to include a link back to your site so that users will know exactly where to go for more information and you can get that lead.
Of course, your holiday blog entries can be much more direct in terms of promoting a product or special. If you have a Cyber Monday special that you want to promote, use your blog to do so! But as always, be sure to make the blog entry interesting for the visitor in order to see real results. Search engines like blogs because they are (or should be) constantly updated and usually spout out new information. People like them because they are useful and fun.
Social Media
The holidays are not the time to shun social media. Users will be turning to social sites to see what their friends are buying or talking about. Use this to your advantage and increase your social efforts and the amount of posts that you publish. Ask questions that will help your holiday campaign as a form of informal research. Going back to the popcorn store example, (I’ve got popcorn on my mind) ask questions like “Which holiday popcorn flavor is your favorite?” or “Which popcorn do you prefer to pair with your hot chocolate? Caramel or toffee?” Etc. This is a great way to increase engagement and get customers going back to your site! If you wrote a recent blog post about the holidays, don’t forget to tweet about it or create a post that will lead visitors to your page and your site.
When it comes to planning your holiday campaigns, the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately, this blog entry cannot be. Read more about ways to amplify your holiday online marketing and learn about how pay-per-click (PPC) and email marketing can boost your sales before the year is out. With an integrated online marketing mindset, you can boost your businesses sales, lead generation and search ranking just in time for the holidays!
In the highly competitive nature of today’s internet landscape, it is essential for your company or business to have a high performing website. It is more important than ever to have a marketing plan that will not only draw in visitors but convert them to customers. Is your site not generating enough leads? Are you experiencing a high bounce rate on your landing pages? If so, you may be in need of some good ol’ fashioned Conversion Rate Optimization (aka CRO). CRO focuses on persuading your site visitors to sign up for newsletters, make purchases, or take actions that allow engagement with your site. CRO involves several different techniques to optimize your conversion rates, but the main idea behind this marketing strategy is to improve your website so that it persuades your visitors to act. Steps taken to optimize pages include:
1. Usability testing and user experience reviews
2. Landing page design and testing
3. Persona development
4. Website satisfaction survey intercepts and analysis
These are just some of the steps taken during CRO, however, every site will have specific needs. In order to address them, proper testing and analysis must be completed before proceeding with your CRO efforts. The benefits of doing so are substantial.
How will CRO help you?
Why should companies invest in CRO as opposed to paid advertising or PPC? Simply put, CRO is an investment for the future. Good optimizers will continuously optimize their sites and utilize CRO as a way to ensure conversions over time. If done properly, CRO can help you:
• Generate more leads
• Increase customer retention
• Create more page views
• Increase profit-per-visitor
• Increase number of email list sign ups
• Enhance website credibility (increasing chances of someone linking to it)
With the overall benefits of CRO, your business will become more competitive and experience an increase in profits. Sounds great, right? Why doesn’t everybody do it? Surprisingly, most companies use CRO as a last resort when they should be considering it as a first step. Many companies don’t know that if properly utilized, CRO will expand your business and open up opportunities for advertising and other marketing efforts.
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Lately there’s been a lot of speculation around whether or not social media networks are replacing email marketing as a channel for nurturing customers. Both are excellent ways to keep your customers interested in you and coming back for more services. However, several email-marketers are convinced that social is superior because users are now spending more and more time on social media and less time on their email accounts. It’s true—according to a Nielsen survey by BBC News, one in every 11 minutes of a web user’s time is spent on social networking sites and blogs. Does that mean social is replacing email? Absolutely not.
