The Art & Science of a Successful Modern Marketer

It is no simple task for a business to be successful at marketing today.

Marketers no longer have the luxury of specialization. In order to compete and thrive, they need a wide variety of skills – skills that incorporate both creativity from the right hemisphere of the brain and analytical thinking from the left hemisphere.

In short, today’s successful marketer must be both artist and scientist, because what works in marketing is both an art and a science.

Salesforce created a fantastic infographic that breaks down todays modern marketer. Here are eight key skills they identified, in greater detail (four artistic and four analytical) that every modern marketer must develop to ensure they adapt and flourish in today’s rapidly evolving world of marketing.

The Modern Marketer

Source: The Modern Marketer: Part Artist, Part Scientist [INFOGRAPHIC]

Part Artist

Written Content

Writing as a skill has become vital for modern marketers.

Content marketing, often in the form of written articles, is now a big component in many brand’s sales funnels. It plays a very important role in how brands are able to be found (through search engines or social media platforms) and then build relationships with their target market. This written content helps their market to know, like and trust them, which is a necessary step before most people will consider a purchase.

Whether or not you are naturally skilled at writing, you can develop this skill with practice. Good research and topic knowledge is vital. It also pays to have one or more good editors review your work to ensure that your content is professional.

Here are nine essential qualities when creating quality content.

Visual Assets

Content marketing is not just written content. It also includes a much broader scope that includes visual assets like video, images, graphics, memes and infographics (like the one in this article).

People love visual content. It is quickly consumed and easily shared.

It has the ability to connect emotionally and covey an entire story, in seconds.

Modern marketers need to be comfortable creating (or at the very least curating) visual marketing that will appeal to their target market.

Great tools for creating your own visual content (that I often use) include apps such as Adobe Spark Post and Canva.

Social Media

The power of social media is that it is often the best place to locate and or build relationships with your target market.

Let’s be honest… most people own a mobile device that travels with them everywhere they go and the chances are very good that that your target market uses one or more social media platform on their device.

You need to know which platforms those are and how to use them efficiently and effectively to reach and engage with your prospects and clients.

Social media can be an amazing marketing tool – if you know how to use it properly. Anyone who has spent any time on social media knows just how easy it is to lose precious time in the time vacuum that is social media. That is having clearly defined goals for social media, understanding what platforms you need to be using and how to use them effectively in the time you have is SO IMPORTANT.

Learn how to create your own social media strategy and action plan.

Email Marketing

Despite what you may have heard, email marketing is not dead. Far from it.

It is still a very important asset and tool of successful marketers.

Let me give you one extremely good reason for this:

You OWN your email list.

I will say it again. You own and control your email list – unlike social media platforms where you are at the mercy of their constant changes. You could literally build up an entire audience on a social media platform and lose access to them with one sudden change to the platform. This happened in the not so distant past on Facebook, when they adopted their business model to a ‘pay to play’ model.

Those that created and maintained their email list were not as hard hit as those who didn’t, as they still had access to their audience through their email list.

Don’t let all your hard work building an audience go to waste. Besides, email is far superior in terms of actual conversion.

Part Scientist

Performance Tracking

While creating content, using social media and incorporating email marketing is absolutely essential to successful marketing, not everything you do will be equally successful. Some of the things you do, when you take time and cost into account, will produce a poor ROI (return on investment).

By tracking the performance of all of your activities and campaigns, you can identify the low ROI activities and either modify them to produce better results or eliminate them and replace them with activities that produce a higher ROI.

Your time and money are far too precious to waste on costly or ineffective marketing methods.

Here are 14 tools to track key performance indicators for your business.

Operations

Usually, the larger the company, the more complicated the running or overseeing of the marketing operations will be. Whether you are a part of a large marketing department or a small business owner, it is likely you will need to understand and work within the strategy created and budget allotted for marketing.

Depending on the size of the company and your position, you may be required to create and or run the marketing operations, which can include tasks such as creating a marketing plan and budget, managing and tracking spending at a detailed level and managing project collaboration and execution.

Analytics

While tracking the performance of your activities is crucial, you need to be able to make sense of the data you collect.

Thankfully there are a number of analytics tools that can help you do this. These range from event based tools like KissMetrics (behavioral analytics) to traffic oriented tools like Google Analytics (a free and widely used website analytics tool), to search engine analytics tools like Google search console (also free and lets you analyze your organic search traffic), to marketing dashboard tools like Cyfe (an all-in-one dashboard) and many others.

While some of these tools are, free or have free versions, the paid tools can be worth the investment to ensure that what you are doing is working or producing the results you want.

Campaign Performance

Campaign performance looks deeply into the ROI of each marketing campaign you run.

Simply explained, ROI is how much revenue you get back for each $1 you spend. A positive ROI means that you are making more than you spend and a negative ROI means you are losing money on your marketing campaign.

To properly track and analyze your campaign performance you will need to determine the channels you are going to track (email, paid, social, organic search, referral, direct, etc.) and the metrics you want to measure (lead conversion, individual visitors, click through rate, bounce rate, social media effectiveness, email opening, etc.). Again, you can do this with a number of tools, which range in features and cost.

Wrapping Up

The modern marketer needs to possess a wide range of skills in order to adeptly navigate today’s quickly and ever changing world of marketing. Thankfully there are many tools, apps and various software, which can assist you to competently create content and engage your market, all the while tracking, measuring and analyzing the results of those efforts. This will allow you to make informed decisions to improve your results in the future.

What challenges have you encountered as a modern marketer? Is there a particular tool that you couldn’t live without? Let me know in the comments below.

Source

Email Reactivation

 Are you looking at your sales figures this time of year and wondering where everyone went?

It’s no secret the middle of the summer can be a slow, syrupy season for sales revenue. That’s what makes it a great time for rejuvenating your email marketing campaign, giving a shout-out to existing customers who seldom if ever respond, click or buy.

The good news is that reactivation campaigns offer great value when it comes to ROI, producing a median return of $28.50 for every dollar spent compared to a mean customer-acquisition cost of $55.24. After all, Internet users trust opt-in email messaging above all other forms of advertising, reports a recent study.

“Consumers don’t just trust email, they look to it for purchasing decisions,” the study notes. “Both B2B and B2C marketers have much to gain by breaking through inbox clutter, but this could prove a more difficult task for B2B marketers in the years ahead.” Prognosticators point to a burgeoning 143.8 billion business emails to be sent this year, compared to 89 billion in 2012.

Creating a compelling reactivation campaign that prompts a response from customers may be challenging, but it’s a low-cost tactic that could fire up your sales this time of year if you follow these steps.

1. Segmenting audiences

If you haven’t already divided your customers by type, that can be accomplished relatively easily. Check out our complete guide to list segmentation. A global study earlier this year found segmented email campaigns produce 14 percent higher open rates, 64 percent higher click rates, and 8 percent fewer unsubscribes than unsegmented plans.   

For your reactivation campaign, your goal is to reach each online audience member with a message targeted (at least partially) toward his interests, values and preferred communication styles, increasing the likelihood he’ll open and respond to the email.

While the potential categories are endless, popular segmentation methods include dividing customers by the kinds of products they’ve purchased or perused, by previous emails they’ve opened, by demographics or by their stage in the sales funnel (awareness, evaluation or purchase). As such, many marketers create fictional personas for their common customer types, establishing a general marketing message for each along with an “elevator pitch” or selling style that might apply.

Depending on your goals, today’s analytical tools can drill down to detailed info like customer occupations, salaries, pain points, hobbies, family, education, values, goals, objections, preferred devices, computer literacy, news sources, hours of availability, and ideal shopping conditions, while simultaneously weeding out customers unlikely to buy your product. 

You might also consider identifying (and creating special offers for) your “gold standard” audience that in the past has bought high-margin products without being high maintenance.

2. Baiting the hook

Your next step is creating your next round of email messages to appeal to your different personas or segmented audiences. Some general tips for crafting copy include:  

• Re-engage customers on a set schedule, perhaps 30, 60, or 90 days after they’ve been unresponsive.
• Most reactivation emails contain some statement of regret that makes the customer feel valued. A Google search shows a range of copy with headlines like “We’ve missed you,” “Let’s stay together,” “It’s been a while,” and “Good friends are never forgotten.” Depending on your audience you can be highly creative with wording and imagery or stick to the basics.
• Reference your past interactions with the customer so they feel recognized.
• Consider the customer’s individual needs, problems, and interests. What might he care about that others don’t, and how can you appeal to that?
• A discount, special offer, free product, or free download or upgrade can be especially effective in achieving reengagement. In one study, the most effective offer involved free shipping.
• Think about where your customer is in the sales funnel. Those relatively unaware of your product might value a free white paper, kit, e-book, tip sheet, checklist, webinar, or how-to video. Those still evaluating may react well to a webinar, case study, product sample, data sheet, FAQ sheet, or demo video. Those close to buying may respond best to a free trial, live demo, consultation, estimate, or coupon.
• Consider the recipients’ level of expertise; should your wording be basic or highly technical? How industry-specific should you be? Should language be formal and professional or casual? Are you using appropriate jargon?

Here are some samples of compelling reactivation emails:

3. Writing open-friendly subject lines

The title of your email greatly impacts whether it will be opened; one study found 33 percent of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. In general, subject lines should contain only six to eight words; differ from past versions; mention the recipient’s name; lead with the most important words; clearly state your purpose and value; and point to any deadlines. Recent research also found subject lines containing “free” are opened 10 percent more often, while “sale,” “new,” or “video” can also boost rates. Another study reports 13 of its top-25 subject lines in reactivation campaigns have contained the phrase “We miss you.” Tickling your recipients funny bone can also lead to an open. Here are some important tips when using humor.

4. Making it mobile

Last year the average adult mobile phone user in the U.S. spent 2.8 hours per day on their devices, with mobile phone use growing 58 percent worldwide between 2014 and 2015. Users worldwide are expected to reach nearly 2.1 billion this year. Need we say more? It’s apparent you must format your email marketing to play well on mobile. One study reports 40 percent of emails are opened first on mobile.

5. Re-confirming opt-in

If you can get customers to click on your reactivation email, you may wish to include a highly visible “opt-in” button to confirm they still wish to receive your messages. That may seem counterintuitive, but there’s no point in continuing to pitch the uninterested, and being vigilant as such prevents accusations of spamming. A few ways other companies have done that can be found below.

6. Rewarding responders

Strengthen relationships with those who respond to reactivation with a follow-up email that says something like “Welcome back” or similar messaging that reaffirms their value.

7. Including surveys

Consider including a brief survey in your reactivation emails to learn why the customer has been non-responsive in the past. Make it clear you’d like to correct any issues, and keep the survey short, easy, and painless to fill out. Online services Survey Monkey, EZquestionnaire, or KeySurvey can help. Below is an example:

8. Following up

Don’t be surprised if a customer doesn’t respond to your first reactivation email; your campaign may well necessitate a series of short, engaging messages over time, perhaps culminating with your most attractive offer. If that doesn’t work, consider sending a message by post in case there’s an issue with the customer’s email or online access. The added expense may be worth your while, considering that retaining existing customers produces a much higher ROI than finding new ones.

Finally, keep in mind that your email campaign should always be a work in progress. To cut through the clutter of the gazillions of business emails out there, you’ll probably need to continually tweak your content and methodology to find fresh ways to reach target audiences.

Source

3 Strategies for Maximizing Email Deliverability

Let’s get one thing straight: deliverability is sexy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s the only way your emails get seen, opened, and clicked on. And if you can increase your deliverability by even just 1%, it can have a significant impact on your ROI.

But achieving high deliverability rates that could make even a mailman jealous doesn’t come easy. Think of it this way: as an email marketer, you’re like the friendly neighborhood mailman. Every house that you deliver email to has a guard dog (ISP). And on days when you have junk mail (spam) or aren’t friendly to folks on your route (poor IP reputation), these dogs will chase you away and only let you deliver some of your mail. To maximize your email deliverability, you need to be familiar with these three deliverability tactics:

1. Set Lower Bounce Thresholds

When you hear the word “bounce,” you might think about fun trampolines or bounce houses. But for marketers, when an email bounces, it’s like bouncing on a trampoline except without all the fun with about 100 times the danger. Okay, I might be exaggerating—but there are definitely some business risks involved. To understand why, let’s first define soft bounces and hard bounces.

Soft bounce: A temporary problem with email deliverability that can be due to an unavailable server or full inbox.

Emails that soft bounce over and over again should be retired from future campaigns. If an email continuously soft bounced 10 times in the last 10 campaigns, it might be soft bouncing for reasons other than a temporary server issue. To keep your deliverability rate high and the risk of that soft bounce becoming something more, it’s best to retire that email for good.

Hard bounce: A permanent failure to deliver an email, usually as a result of the email address being non-existent, invalid, or blocked.

The less hard bounces, the better. ISPs prefer senders to have low hard bounce rates because it shows that you take care of your email lists and keep them fresh. Furthermore, because a hard bounced email may be invalid, non-existent, or blocked entirely, it’s a great candidate for a spam trap, which is an inactive, deliverable email address owned by an ISP to catch spammy senders.

Hitting a spam trap will severely hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, especially with a specific ISP, and could potentially put your IP address on a blacklist, an online database of spammy senders. Once your IP is on a blacklist, you’ll find it awfully difficult to get your emails delivered.
So what should you do to improve your soft bounce and hard bounce rates? Employ a bounce management strategy! Here’s how:

Managing soft bounces: Whether you use an email service provider (ESP) or a marketing automation solution, you should be able to set a soft bounce threshold. Oftentimes, these are set to a conservative number like 10 soft bounces = a hard bounce or an email that should be retired from email campaigns for good. To see how we manage soft bounces here at Marketo, check out my previous blog.

Managing hard bounces: Retire all invalid address hard bounces immediately. Most email providers and marketing automation solutions do this for you, but not all do, so make sure that any email that hard bounces is removed from your list. And if you’re using an ESP where you load email lists into the campaign from an external data source like SQL tables or Microsoft Access, be sure to regularly export all of your hard bounces and add them into a suppression list after each campaign. Then, scrub them against your email database when running a list selection.

2. Don’t Buy Lists

Whether you’ve been doing email marketing for a while or you’re a brand new business just starting up, buying an email list and having a larger email database can seem attractive, but it’s generally a poor practice and it may be detrimental to your deliverability rates and sender reputation. Here are four reasons why:

1. Unsolicited emails: If your recipients have never heard from you before or never opted in to receive your communications, your emails could look like spam to them.

 

When an email recipient marks you as spam, your sender reputation will decrease and ISPs will be suspicious of your activities. With enough spam complaints, you could land your IP on a blacklist, ultimately making it harder for all your future emails to be delivered to the folks who actually opted-in to your communications.

 

2. Quality: You can’t always trust the quality of a list. You don’t know where the names came from, whether the email addresses are correctly formatted, and whether they’ve been scrubbed for spam traps or syntax errors. The email addresses could be old and the demographics can be all over the place. You just never really know what you’re getting yourself into.

 

3. Spam Rate: Email service providers and marketing automation solutions typically have spam rate thresholds in place so if you receive a certain percentage of spam complaints per email delivered, they may terminate your contract. This is because if you are using IP addresses associated with an ESP or marketing automation solution and you’re sending spam, it’s a bad reflection on them as well to ISPs. And they need to maintain good standing relationships with ISPs to properly service their other clients. I’ve heard that for some ESPs, if your spam rate goes above 0.5%, they’ll reach out to you to do a full audit of your sending behaviors and list hygiene practices. They don’t want to jeopardize their business reputation just because you had to buy some lists.

 

4. Bad Metrics: This one should be obvious. Your email metrics will plummet with bad lists! These people didn’t want to hear from you, so very few of them will open and click your emails. Is getting a few email clicks worth losing customer engagement? No, especially when you have to explain the reason to your executives.

3. Segment by Engagement

Getting an ISP to love you is no easy task. Getting all of them to love you is arguably more difficult than getting your celebrity crush to love you. Believe me, I know (you know where to find me, Adele). The number one thing ISPs love to see is high levels of engagement, which means lots of recipients opening, clicking, reading, scrolling, and engaging with your emails on a regular basis.
When you have high email engagement, ISPs will allow the majority of your emails to hit the primary inbox because the demand from your recipients is high. This is called inboxing, which is the percentage of emails that hit the primary inbox as opposed to the spam folder or junk folder. So how do you use email engagement your advantage to get more email inboxing?

Let’s take a look at four scenarios based on this mock situation:

Let’s say you send 100,000 emails that all get delivered. Of those 100,000 emails, 20k engaged within the last 90 days and the remaining 80k haven’t shown any engagement in more than 90 days (the numbers in the examples are made-up based off of my previous experience with campaigns of this nature).

Scenario 1: If you were to just send emails to the engaged group of 20k, the open rate would be 18%, the click-through rate would be 3%, and the unsubscribe rate would be 0%. I’m assuming the unsubscribe rate is 0% because typically when people just engaged, they aren’t likely to unsubscribe. So these are great metrics!

 

Scenario 2: Conversely, if you only sent an email to the 80k group of unengaged emails, the open rate would be 3%, the click through rate would be 0.2%, and the unsubscribe rate is a little high at 0.31%. Metrics that could definitely be better. Again, these numbers are just to illustrate a point.

 

Scenario 3: Now, if you send an email to all 100,000 at the same time, the open rate would be a 6% open rate, with a 0.76% CTR, and a 0.25% unsubscribe rate. This example is probably what most marketers do and therefore the metrics you’d expect based on this example.

 

Scenario 4: If you take a different approach and only send the email to the group of 20k engaged email addresses first, wait 30 minutes, and then send the email to the group of 80k unengaged emails, you’ll get better inboxing rates. This is because when you send emails to engaged recipients first, the ISPs will boost your reputation based on the high engagement on that email. So, when you send to the group of unengaged emails, you’ll actually get higher inbox placement just because you warmed up your sender reputation. In this example (and similar experiences I’ve had), by sending the 20k engaged emails first, inboxing for the group of 80k unengaged emails increased from 55% to 70% when email sends were staggered. The overall effect on inboxing was an increase from 63% to 75%, which definitely moves the needle!

 

Key takeaway: If you stagger your sends by engagement, you’ll see higher deliverability rates and much higher inboxing. This is a really cool strategy that not too many people use today, but it is extremely effective.

Deliver results

Get your emails delivered and placed in the primary inbox by following the three deliverability strategies I’ve outlined. First, set lower soft bounce and hard bounce thresholds to reduce your risk of hitting spam traps and hurting your sender reputation. Second, do not, I repeat, do not purchase lists. You can’t always control for list quality or cleanliness. Lastly, stagger your email sends by levels of engagement. You’ll achieve better inboxing and overall stronger email metrics.

Do you have any deliverability tips or tricks that work for you? Share them in the comments below!

Source

SEO vs. PPC: Pros, cons & an integrated approach

A question we are often asked is, “Which is better: SEO or PPC?” This is not a question with a general answer, as it really, truly depends on your current situation, objectives and marketplace.

Certainly, we are big on SEO at Bowler Hat. My experience in this industry over nearly 17 years shows me that when done well, organic search delivers more volume at a better cost per lead than paid search.

However, this is not the marketing Wild West it once was. New businesses can have a hard time getting started with SEO, and paid search can offer a fast track to search marketing when done correctly.

For me, this all comes back to your digital marketing strategy. Understanding your prospective customers and how they use the web is key to determining whether paid search, organic search or a combination of both is the best approach for your unique and ever-changing situation.

In this post, I am going to look at the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC as a marketing strategy and provide some tips in choosing the right channel for your business. Where both organic and paid are suitable, we will take a look at how to integrate SEO and PPC for improved results from your search marketing efforts.
SEO: Improve your organic traffic

What are the pros and cons of organic traffic from search engines? Let’s begin with the pros:

Awareness. Visibility in search engines for your targeted keywords puts your business in front of potential customers in much the same way as if you were to advertise, and it drives brand awareness.

Branding. Visibility around commercial search terms and informational queries related to your business area can have a positive branding benefit. Your brand can become associated with and trusted by searchers who are asking questions as they conduct the research that will lead to a purchase. You can become an authoritative voice around a given topic.

Credibility and trust. Having your site return in the organic results can influence your perceived credibility with an audience looking for your services. Many users skip ads and trust organic results more highly. Being visible gives your business that all-important stamp of approval. Also having strong review and reputation signals in place will deliver further benefit.

Website traffic. Increasing website traffic provides you with more opportunities to drive awareness of your business and educate a prospect as to why they would buy from you.

Cost per click. Traffic from organic search is free… sort of. Developing that visibility will take time and effort (money), but there is not a direct charge for each impression or click.

Return on investment (ROI). Organic search engine traffic can provide an improved ROI over traditional forms of paid media and certainly improve upon PPC.

Cost. While SEO is neither cheap nor easy, it will generally be more cost-effective than all other marketing tactics for delivering brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website.

Sustainability. Unlike paid search marketing, organic traffic does not dry up the moment you stop paying. As such, efforts to develop organic traffic can sustain a business when marketing spend is cut back.

Improved click-through rate (CTR). A higher percentage of users click on the organic results. While there are exceptions to this rule, you will generate more clicks from a highly placed organic listing than from a highly placed paid ad.

More clicks overall. To maximize visibility and clicks, you will want to have listings in the paid and organic results. Keyword-level experimentation is needed here to see if you are paying for clicks you would get for free or increasing overall clicks and CTR in both paid and organic — but to truly maximize results, strong visibility in paid and organic is needed.

Scope. There are so many new queries every day that to maximize scope, you will need strong organic visibility. You will not want to pay for all kinds of clicks either or advertise every piece of content on your website.

Strategic advantage. Visibility in organic search is not quick or easy — which is a good and a bad thing. Once you have established yourself in the organic results, your competitors can’t simply buy their way in (assuming you have done things the right way). This can provide a strategic advantage over the competition if they are relying on paid search.

It is not all sunshine and rainbows, though, and there are certainly cons to SEO. In many cases, organic traffic can be slow to come by, and you may be wildly outgunned. If you are just starting out, and the keywords you are targeting show results dominated by titans like Amazon and eBay, then you may need to rethink your strategy.

You may also need to develop content assets to achieve strong organic visibility. Not all businesses have the in-house resources to tackle content development, and this can pose a problem. Tactics such as safe, sustainable link building can be difficult to master, and often, a strategy is needed, along with expert support.

Organic traffic may also largely come in via informational or pre-purchase research queries. This is valuable traffic, but a more staged approach may be required to nurture those users to a purchase. This is a cornerstone activity in digital marketing; however, it is not always easy, and it is not a good fit for all businesses.
PPC: Laser-targeted visibility

How does paid search differ from organic search? With click-through rates and trust heavily stacked in favor of organic search, why would a business look at paid search? Here are some of the benefits PPC offers:

Position on the page. Paid search dominates above-the-fold content. With typically four ads on desktop and three on mobile, a user will always see the paid search ads, even if they choose to scroll past them.

Improved ads. PPC ads are just that: advertisements. As such, you have far more granular control and more space for delivering your marketing messages. Calls, locations, sitelinks, pricing and bullet points (callouts) are just some of the options for creating ads that dominate the page.



Visual product ads. Where you sell a product, Google provides the option of visual shopping ads (Product Listing Ads, or PLAs) that can help a user see what they will be clicking on. This kind of ad can really improve the click-through rate by offering a feature not available in organic search.



Brand visibility. Running paid search advertisements gets you seen by the right people. Even if they back off and conduct a brand search before clicking to your site, that visibility will pay dividends to your marketing.

Budget. PPC allows for a tight control of budget. Determine how much you are willing to spend per day (ideally with some initial and ideal ideas of returns), and set that fixed limit.

Targeting. PPC provides a laser-targeted way to get in front of potential customers. Ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, device and audiences based on previous visits. Organic traffic, by comparison, is far more scattershot.

Speed. While developing good organic visibility can take time, a PPC campaign can be created in days and ramped up in weeks. There is no faster way to get in front of customers at the very moment they are primed to buy than paid search engine advertising.

Agile. Speed provides agility. Want to test a new product? A new marketing message? You can get rapid feedback on a new product launch (or minimum viable product) by running a short PPC ad campaign.

Marketing intelligence. Where organic largely hides keyword data in the name of privacy, there is no such restriction with paid search. With conversion tracking and a solid integration with analytics software (like Google Analytics), we can determine what keywords convert and at what percentage and cost. This intelligence can be fed directly into organic search (SEO) marketing and can inform all other advertising to improve results across the board.

A/B testing. Easily split-test ads, landing pages, and even call-to-action buttons to determine where the very best results lie. Again, this information can be fed back into all other digital (and traditional) marketing endeavors.

Stability. AdWords does not suffer the same turbulence that the organic results can suffer from. There are changes, but they tend to have a far lower impact and are more easily managed. Careful use of match types and analysis of the search term reports allow for the removal of junk search and an increase in ROI over time.

Cost. Despite what many advertisers believe, a PPC account that’s well set up and managed can be a low-cost way to generate leads for your business. If you are a local business targeting a small geographic area and a small set of keywords, you may find that you can generate more than enough leads without breaking the bank. Additionally, over time, accounts can be further optimized to drive down costs and increase return.

As with organic search, there are many benefits to paid search advertising or PPC. However, there are also some pitfalls for advertisers to be wary of.

PPC can be expensive. It is not always the case, but costs can quickly add up. If you are targeting entire countries or running international campaigns, those costs can spiral.

Paid search advertising is, as the name suggests, paid — so it requires constant investment. Stop paying the piper, and your ads go away and your lead generation dries up. So long as you have a solid acquisition cost, then this should not be a problem, but in contrast to SEO, it can feel like a bad deal. Of course, SEO should be ongoing to keep the opposition at bay, but organic traffic can be a little more robust.

There are various options for search advertising with PPC, and making smart choices here will influence results. If you see product listings dominating the screen for your keywords, then text ads may not perform so well. Likewise, if you run product ads, and only text ads are returned, then these ads may not deliver the goods.

It is not unusual to get into bidding wars with other advertisers, which can drive costs up. As you start to run your ads, often you are taking a bite out of some other advertisers’ digital apple. Doing so can result in some spiraling costs.

Strategically, PPC is relatively easy to copy. If a competitor notices you are running ads, they can run ads. Your messaging can be imitated. Your entire funnel can be easily evaluated by competitors. This is the digital marketing landscape, and you have to accept that to some extent.

Successful PPC needs skilled management and optimization — from monitoring bids, Quality Scores, positions and click-through rates. Some of this can be done with scripts, but if you are too busy to do this properly, ensure you have an expert on hand to take care of keeping your account in tip-top shape.
SEO or PPC?

It’s just not possible to answer this question without taking the unique situation of a given business into consideration.

A hyper-local business with little competition and a requirement for just a few leads per week could likely develop good visibility in the local and organic search results with a little spend or some DIY SEO.

A new e-commerce store that is competing with a page of results from Amazon, eBay and other major department stores and online retailers is likely going to struggle in organic search (in the short term, at least).

Do you need leads now? Are you looking at the long game? Do you have much in the way of website authority? What is the competition like in organic search? What is the cost per click in paid search?

A clear digital marketing strategy and clear short- and long-term goals are essential in making an SEO or PPC decision here.
SEO and PPC

In an ideal world, we would look at both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best when supporting each other synergistically. Where you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their component parts.

The benefits of running SEO and PPC together include:
Keyword and conversion data from PPC can be fed into organic search (SEO).
The total volume of traffic can be increased by targeting clicks in paid and organic for high-performing keywords.
High-cost keywords, high-volume or low-converting (yet still important) keywords can be moved from PPC to organic search.
A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages can be fed into your organic listing and landing pages.
Remarketing allows you to stay in front of visitors after an initial touch via organic search and customize messaging around their engagement with your site.
Test your keyword strategy in PPC before committing to long-term SEO strategies.
Target users at all stages of the customer journey from research to comparison to purchase with commercial keywords.
Increase confidence and awareness by having both strong organic and paid visibility.

In our experience with hundreds of businesses, an integrated search strategy that looks at both SEO and PPC is the optimal approach. Results are improved in each channel by utilizing both paid and organic. This will not be right for every business, but for high-growth, aggressive marketing, you will want to develop a holistic search engine strategy rather than look at SEO or PPC in isolation.

What are your experiences? I would love to hear your successes and lessons from using SEO, PPC or SEO and PPC.

Source

10 Avoidable Email Marketing Follies

Digital marketing has opened the door for a lot of brand messaging strategies. Even with the rise and rise of popular channels like social media, instant messaging, and now, conversational commerce for communication, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways for businesses to reach new and existing customers.





However, it only takes one quick swipe to land your email into the trash folder. Brands continue to make a lot of simple mistakes that can kill your entire campaign. Let’s discuss some of the most avoidable mishaps you can keep in mind when crafting your next company email.


1. Not personalizing

Perhaps the biggest and easiest email mistakes to avoid is failure to personalize. According to an oft-quoted study by Experian, personalized promotional emails have a 29 percent higher unique open rate and a 41 percent higher click-through rate than ones that are not. Beginning an email message with cookie cutter openers like “Dear Subscriber” or the notorious “Dear Valued Customer” is a one-way ticket to the trash folder.







Doing this makes the correspondence look like spam right off the bat. Contrast that with Spotify’s highly personalized emails that take into account your past browsing patterns, site interactions, and preferences. Kudos to them for making the reader feel like they’re the center of attention!







With GetResponse, it’s a breeze to personalize your emails dynamically for various customer segments.


2. Failing to integrate with other marketing channels

While email is one of the older digital marketing tactics, it is hardly a standalone channel anymore. Therefore, ensuring it works in tandem with your website, app, and social media profiles while incorporating customer data is a must. Even though this seems obvious, there are a number of obstacles that stand in the way.

Integrating multiple channels with your email marketing strategy means that each tool must work in concert to provide the most relevant content in the most appealing way. Every consumer touchpoint needs to be linked to allow the flow of information to run smoothly. Marketers have been struggling with this concept for a long time.







Properly merging multiple channels is crucial in creating more targeted and consistent communication. In order to ensure consistency across all of the channels where you market, you need to make sure your inter-departmental teams communication and document sharing is up to snuff.

Surmount the risk of weak multi-channel campaigns by getting your content creation, customer support, sales, SEO, PR, and email marketing departments work together using a collaboration tool like WorkZone. Individuals and teams working on different campaigns – paid or organic – can easily stay on top of what the others are doing and share updates with them.






3. Bad subject lines

The subject line is by far the most vital part of the entire email. It is the first (and only assured) thing a viewer will see when the email shows up in their inbox. It is what makes them decide whether or not they want to read it.

Subject lines determine the life and death of your email. Drawing in readers depends on how carefully you craft it. Don’t go overboard with buzzwords or “free” or “amazing.” Excessive use can come across as clickbait and will result in a trip to the trash folder. That said, there are no hard and fast rules for subject lines – even a spammy, all caps subject line might grab attention now and then:







You’ll come across innumerable studies and articles on how to write the right subject line that will deliver 541 percent more responses, but the long and short of it is that you need to creatively make it clear, concise and clever. Find a happy medium between boring and overly ambitious. Let your brand’s persona shine through!


4. Focusing solely on promotion

Email marketers should prioritize engaging customers instead of spouting corporate jargon. Consumers today are becoming less and less susceptible to blatant sales tactics such as this:





While the ultimate goal is obviously to sell your product or service, the focus should be on delivering valuable, relevant content. Try doing things like providing links to your blog posts within the email body, directing viewers to compelling brand material instead of just in-your-face promotions.

I’m not advocating not selling your product by any stretch of imagination. All I want to emphasize here is that you need to find the elusive balance of content, design, and deals in your emails.

5. Not proofreading thoroughly

There is perhaps nothing worse than sending out a business email riddled with typos and grammatical mistakes. When this happens, a good deal of your professionalism is diminished. Take a look at this “small” mishap:





In the subject line, “Not Get It” was most likely supposed to be “Now Get It.” See how one letter can make a huge difference? This error completely changes the whole message of the email.

As you can see, the margin for error is extremely small. Before hitting send, be sure you’ve gone over the entire message multiple times. It also helps to get a second pair of eyes on the content before it gets sent out. A tool such as Grammarly will be of immense help, especially if you’re composing quick emails in your browser itself.


6. Not having a call-to-action (CTA)

The end goal of a business email is to push the viewer in the direction that leads to a conversion of some sort. Whether it be directing to product pages, blog content, or just your home page, a good CTA is essential. Failure to place one within the email will result in minimal return and your click-through rate will suffer. Take a look at this email:







While this imagery is compelling and informative about the deal being offered, where does the viewer go from here? There is no obvious CTA button or link to follow.

The CTA is what the entire email leads to. They are one of the most common factors used in A/B testing. GetResponse of course lets you test every aspect of your emails and other marketing ventures. Even the little things like color or text on a CTA button can make a huge different in gaining conversions.


7. Too many CTAs

At the other end of the spectrum, adding too many CTAs can make your email come across as cluttered and unfocused. At first glance, they tend to look like excessive spam and readers will be inclined to skip over it altogether. Take a look at this one:







While the promotion itself isn’t bad, there are just too many options available for one email.

It’s best to keep to one, concise CTA. In fact, emails with a single, hyper-focused call-to-action can increase clicks by 371 percent and can even boost sales by 1617 percent!

Think of your email like a sales funnel in itself. The design should work to bring the viewer to a clear-cut outcome without a second thought.


8. Not getting the timing right

Apart from the email itself, the timing you choose to send out your business material is an extremely important factor to keep in mind. If an email is sent at a bad time, all the effort you put into crafting the subject line, content, CTAs, and graphics was for nothing.

For example, if you are a B2B company and send out an email blast at 5:30 pm on a Friday, chances are, very few people will be on the receiving end and it will be buried come Monday. CoSchedule has put together a number of studies that have found the most optimal times to send business emails.







Additionally, take into account the geographical dispersal of your audience across different time zones. Your email marketing tool will have a simple function to segment your lists and avoid mishaps like these.


9. Sending too many/not enough emails

Flooding your viewers’ inbox multiple times per day is a surefire way to either get your emails deleted, or worse, have viewers unsubscribe. On the other hand, not sending enough can result in consumers forgetting about your brand. You need to find the perfect balance of persistence without being annoying. As each business is unique with a different set of followers, this can be tricky.

For example, National Debt Relief tried to send out promotional emails every day or so. As it turned out, receiving debt consolidation emails that frequently didn’t sit very well with their subscribers and they lost nearly 15 percent of their list before deciding to tone it down.

This will more than likely take some trial and error. Start small and gauge the results. Look at your open rates and find a rhythm that works.


10. Neglecting key metrics

Perhaps the biggest advantage of marketing in the digital world is the ability to track results and learn from both victories and failures. In terms of email marketing, keeping an eye on the reporting section is crucial for any campaign. You will gain all kinds of insights like what kind of messaging results in higher click through rates, how many email addresses should be taken off the list, which graphics work best, and much more.

Failure to look into your detailed reports and data is one of the biggest sins to commit in digital marketing. Without data-driven information, how do you know the degree in which your brand messaging resonates with the target audience?

More importantly, without collecting data on customer actions following the campaign, your ability to nurture leads and send follow-up messages is severely compromised.

There are six key metrics to keep an eye on throughout an email marketing campaign:
Click-through rate – the number of subscribers who clicked on links in the email content as a percentage of total delivered emails
Conversion rate – the number of recipients who followed the sales funnel in the email and took the desired action as a percentage of total delivered emails
Bounce rate – the percentage of emails that were not delivered successfully
List growth rate – the rate of net increase in the number of subscribers in your lists
Sharing rate – the number of recipients who forwarded the email or clicked the share buttons linked to their social networks as a percentage of total delivered emails
Overall ROI – the net profit the email campaign is generating compared to how much you’re spending on it expressed as a percentage of the total cost

Consistently monitoring your campaign and tweaking it is a complex process, but it’s the key to determining success in the future.


In conclusion

The good news is that all these mistakes do not require an enormous effort to fix. With email marketing, the best you can do is learn from your past and try again. The game is all about closely watching the data and finding the right combination of content, showmanship, timing, and creativity.

What have been your greatest email marketing follies? What did you learn from them? Tell us about it in the comments below.

source

5 Signs Your Company Needs Marketing Automation

Marketers have a lot to juggle. Between emails, blog posts, social media, ad campaigns, and direct mail, it’s practically impossible to keep track of all your communications without some level of automation.

That’s why the use of marketing automation tools is on the rise. According to ClickZ, as much as 59% of Fortune 500 companies already use marketing automation, and for good reason. Study after study indicates that marketing automation can deliver impressive ROI.



A VentureBeat survey of 700 marketers found that 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw their number of conversions increase. According to a report by B2B Marketing and Circle Research, after just one year, 32% of businesses see increased revenue. After two years, that number climbs to 40%.


When do you need marketing automation?

Too often, marketers are turned off by the term “automation,” because it sounds cold and impersonal. But done correctly, marketing automation can streamline your marketing efforts, nurture unengaged leads, and provide vital data about your sales cycle. Here are five telltale signs your company could benefit from marketing automation:


1) Your marketing efforts aren’t working as well as you’d like

Are you constantly reaching out to prospects without making any conversions? Without marketing automation, it can be difficult to get the data you need to determine exactly how well your marketing efforts are working.

Most marketing automation software programs have reporting tools that make it easy to see how successful your campaign is. An ROI report typically provides:
Leads and opportunities created regularly
Which campaigns have an impact on sales
Revenue attribution, which tells you how well lead nurturing is working

Keep in mind, this will only work if your sales team puts accurate data into your CRM, and if there’s smooth integration between your website, your CRM, and your marketing automation platform.


2) Your sales cycle is too long

For the most part, today’s sales cycle is driven by buyers who have already decided what they want to purchase and from whom. That can make your cycle long and frustrating, but you still have control over the process.

Lead scoring is an important part of shortening a long sales cycle. If you score your leads, only qualified leads who are ready to purchase get passed along to the sales team. That means your sales team can focus on closing deals with prospects who are already educated about your product or service. The result? They spend a significantly shorter amount of time coaxing leads through the sales funnel.




3) You don’t have enough data to segment your leads

It’s difficult to refine your messaging if you haven’t segmented your lists. With marketing automation software, you can divide your lists by demographic, firmographic, location, behavior, etc. You can also divide your prospects by their position in your sales funnel.

Using marketing automation and segmenting your leads can have a big impact. Companies that use automation will typically see a higher conversion rate from marketing response to qualified lead.


4) You notice a lot of leads falling through the cracks

Without automation, it’s challenging to nurture unengaged leads. If you can’t stay in front of these leads, your competitors will step in. If, on the other hand, you nurture your leads, you can increase both conversions and revenue. According to Annuitas Group, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. An older stat, but if anything, this percentage has increased as B2B companies improved their mastery of marketing automation.

With the right tools, you can deliver relevant content based on how your leads interact with your website, social media pages, or marketing emails. When leads are finally ready to buy, there’s a message waiting for them.


5) Your list is too small

Even the most skilled marketers can’t manage more than a few dozen leads without letting things slip through the cracks. And you’ll need more than a few dozen contacts to keep your business profitable and growing.

Once you set up a marketing automation system, you can capture more leads through your website, segment your list, target your messaging, and start moving more buyers through the pipeline.


Back to you

Marketing automation software represents a sizeable investment and a major strategic shift for most businesses, so don’t feel bad about being cautious. What kind of concerns or hesitations are holding you back? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Source

Customer Lifetime Value Calculation for Email Marketing

“What can I spend to get a new subscriber and what will it bring me?” a question that I often hear when marketers are creating their email marketing plans. The answer lies in knowing what an email subscriber is worth (to you).



A customer lifetime value calculation of your subscribers combined with ROI of your email campaigns helps make smarter decisions, improving your marketing strategy.

So how can you calculate ROI and the customer lifetime value of an email subscriber?
Calculating ROI

The hard part in calculating the Return on your Marketing Investment (ROI or ROMI) is to uncover the data. There is a free email marketing ROI calculator on the site. ROI can show you how much return certain investments have had, and see which have been effective. This allows you to compare and select tactics and channels to focus on more (or see which ones you need to improve).

Calculating your own email ROI also allows you to play with the numbers to see the impact of changes.
Defining the Customer Lifetime Value of an email subscriber

Email subscriber lifetime value is the same kind of metric as a customer lifetime value (CLV). But instead of taking the lifetime of the customer relationship, we take the lifetime of the email subscription and the impact that the email program has during that time.

So we are not looking at the total profits a customer will bring, but the total additional profits that an email subscription represents.
Calculating Email Subscriber Lifetime Value


Calculating Email Lifetime Value is a bit more complex than ROI. If you have the statistics of generated profits per subscriber it would be the most accurate, because that allows for a lot more analysis and insights. But often that data is not (easily) accessible.

Let me show you a way to make an estimate of your email subscriber lifetime value. With that, we mean the added value (revenue) of a subscriber during the lifetime of its email subscription.
A way to calculate the lifetime value of your email subscribers

To get the lifetime value of an email subscriber we need these three ingredients:
1. The profits generated by email marketing
2. The number of active subscribers
3. The average lifetime of your subscribers
Profits generated from email marketing

1. Look up the profits of your marketing efforts during a 12 month period. You want to basically exclude all non-marketing related revenue because those would have been there if you wouldn’t have been marketing at all. Intelligent CRM or financial systems should be able to generate these numbers for you.

2. Dive into your analytics and determine what part of those profits came from email marketing. There are different forms of attribution you can choose from, like last touch (last click) or assisted conversions.

By combining profits and the role of email marketing in generating these, we now have the total profits generated via email in the last year. A common mistake is to look at revenue instead of profits. But you want to know what is the net value email subscribers are adding. Now, who contributed to these profits?
The active email subscribers

Only active subscribers can generate revenue via email. Inactives can still be clients and generate profit, but just not via email. There are probably a lot of inactives in your database. If we want to know how long a subscriber is active, we also need to know when subscribers become inactive.

1. All email addresses that bounce or have unsubscribed are inactive. But also the subscribers that have stopped opening and clicking on your emails for a longer period of time are inactive. You can choose a period or a number of emails received to set the point where you call them inactive.

2. Look up the subscription date and the date they became inactive for these addresses. For all other active subscribers look up the time they are in your database. Now, these two numbers together will give you the average “lifetime” of an email address.
The lifetime value of an email subscriber

1. Now divide the total of email marketing profits by the average number of active subscribers in your base during the last year. This will give you an indication of what an active subscriber will contribute in a year.

2. Take the profit you make of an average active subscriber in a year and multiply it by the average lifetime of an email address in your database. There you have it. The number for your email marketing lifetime value.
Customer lifetime value calculation and Email Marketing

The email subscriber lifetime value calculation can be even more sophisticated and refined. But with the combination of Lifetime value and ROI, you have strong numbers that can help you to refine and create focus in your email marketing program. A huge step forward for most email marketers.CLV image via Brandwise

Source

Essential 2017 Content Marketing Statistics

The must know content marketing statistics to benchmark your plans against this year

Content marketing is now at the heart of marketing and we can see how important it is since marketers rated it as the most important technique for driving incremental sales in 2017 in our 2017 marketing predictions article. But what is content marketing? It means different things to different people.

The Content marketing Institute defines it as:

'a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.'

So, content marketing involves a huge number of different potential formats and content distribution mediums which we recommended are mapped as explained in our free Top 10 content marketing mistakes guide (using the Content Marketing Matrix and Distribution Matrix at the bottom of the article). It is mainly used as a digital marketing tactic, delivered online, but there also many forms of effective content marketing which are offline.

Because online media publishers are engaged in a fierce battle for the attention of consumers, content marketing is becoming ever more competitive. This is driving rapid change, as competition drives innovation and ever more compelling ways to win consumers attention.

In such a rapidly changing environment, it is helpful to keep an eye on the competition and where the industry as a whole is headed. This means it's important to have accurate statistics to hand to both be able to accurately chart where the industry is going and to use to appeal to CMOs, CEOs or CFOs when making the case for budget.

How many are using content marketing?

Content marketing has become an almost universal tactic, with almost  90% of companies using it in 2016, and even more utilising it in 2017 (Source).

75% of companies increased their content marketing budget in 2016, and 43% increased the staffing levels of their content marketing departments (Source).

Every minute, 1440 WordPress blogs are published, and 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube (Source). Although though there are 38 million searches on Google every minute, the vast majority of these go to major established sites- leaving many brands competing with thousands and thousands of other content providers to come top of the pack.

How many brands have a content marketing strategy?

Research conducted by Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter Group found 70% of marketers don't have an integrated strategy (Source). But research from LinkedIn found 72% of marketers did have a strategy in place for content marketing (Source). This suggests somewhere in the region of half of all content marketing strategies are not integrated with the rest of the business strategy, which can present big problems and poor communication between departments.

What platforms are marketers using for content marketing?

Social media content and case studies are the most popular forms of content marketing, according to the 2016 B2B content marketing trends report. Blogs and email newsletters are also very popular, with 4 out of 5 blogs using them (Source).

When it comes to blogging, which is both one of the most popular and most effective tactics, there are many content management systems (CMS) that can be employed to manage the process of publishing content online.

The data from builtwith.com shows WordPress and Drupal are clear leaders when it comes CMS, although there are many other smaller providers (Source).

Are brands successfully measuring their content marketing ROI?

52% of B2B content marketers report measuring ROI as among their top challenges, suggesting more than half of B2B content marketers are failing to properly measure ROI (Source).

This is the 4th most common content marketing problem, behind producing engaging content and measuring content effectiveness.

Ability to track ROI varies considerably by businesses size, with the smaller players often unable to track it as effectively. According to an emarketer study, 6 in 10 small businesses are not able to track ROI from their social media activities (Source).

That's for B2B content marketers, but what about content marketing as a whole? SmartInsights partnered with HubSpot to survey European content marketers and found that 51% of content marketers are either not measuring ROI or are struggling to do so (Source).

Is content marketing entering the age of 'content shock'?

Mark Schaefer has been talking about the impending problem of 'content shock' for a few years now. Essentially he theorised that whilst content production will increase exponentially as more and more brands pile in on the action, the rate of increase in content consumption will only increase slightly and then inevitably plateau. This is because we only have so much time with which to consume content. Therefore content marketing will become a victim of its own success, and brands will find that the same techniques become less and less effective each year.

The question on the lips of many is, are we now in the era of Content Shock? The graphic below shows the crazy amount of content created every 60 seconds across the web.

Competing with the 3 million Facebook posts, 1400 blogs and 500 hours of video content published every minute, is difficult, to say the least. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content you're competing against, you need to develop a strange which focuses on your strengths and lets you win in your competitive niche. Only by becoming highly specialised can we hope to have any hope of beating content shock.

Source