Four secrets to successful email marketing

Four secrets to successful email marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels in marketing but in order to succeed it’s vital to use best practices. Why are they a secret?

With over 293 billion emails sent in 2019 alone, email marketing can seem like a daunting and almost impossible market to successfully tap into. With the emergence of new communications channels such as social media, marketers may consider email not as important. However, email marketing has remained strong and powerful, continuously growing with over 3.9 billion users worldwide.

Not only is that more than half the entire global population, but that’s more users than Twitter, Facebook and Instagram combined. If the return on investment (ROI) is more your focus, email alone has been shown to bring 3,800% return, according to the DMA – £38 for every £1 spent.

You can obsess over statistics and open rates, but an email campaign is not going to be successful without following simple best practices. With this, many brands still don’t know what steps to take to go the extra mile with their email marketing. So ultimately, what are the secrets of success? If you don’t know them, then get to know them.

1. Send at the best time

Simply by taking the time to understand your subscribers’ schedules and testing your send times can help you to gain optimum engagement rates. The average marketer will routinely send the same email on the same schedule, without showing any improvement in open rates or click rates. Make the most of subscribers’ habits and test the timings of your campaigns.

2. Testing really does work

You can also refine your testing even further through A/B testing or multivariate testing. Two or more variations are sent through to a small sample of your recipients, then whichever version delivers the most successful results (whether it be unique opens or clicks) is rolled out to the remainder of your recipients. One of the main advantages of this is that you can optimize the results of your campaign almost instantly, without risking its success.

3. Check, and check again

Emails, like all marketing communications, are a direct reflection of your brand and it is, therefore, vital to leave no room for mistakes. Designing and sending an email can be extremely difficult, compiled up of different elements that are susceptible to going wrong for all manner of reasons.

There are tools on the market that can help you visualize how your email will land in the inbox. Are you emails mobile-responsive? Are they rendering correctly on all inbox providers? Whether you’re testing Internet Explorer or an iPhone X, checking your emails helps you ensure that all critical elements in your build are perfected before you hit that send button.

4. Keep an eye on your deliverability

Your emails may be sending successfully, but are they hitting the inbox or are they hitting the dreaded spam folder? The higher the volume you spend, the more common it is to receive higher bounce rates.

The reason is that, unless your recipients are engaging with your content, your inbox will deem this as irrelevant and automatically send this to the spam folder. On average, the more successful email service providers out there will manage to achieve an inbox placement rate of 83%.

Other specialized email service providers, such as Communicator, achieve an inbox placement average of 97%. This is where predictive intelligence comes into play; splitting mailing lists up into segments and creating engagement scores amongst recipients, to deliver to highly engaged recipients first.

This way, more emails reach the inbox. That means reputable email brands benefit from highly successful delivery rates, and who wouldn’t want to achieve 17% higher inbox placement than their competitors?

Don’t just take our word for it, learn more about how to optimize your email marketing in Marketing Week’s Knowledge Bank, here.

Top 7 Types of Content to Improve Your SEO Rankings – a Guide

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for website growth and the statistics back it up. Google alone receives more than 78,000 searches per second, the top results are based solely on SEO and there are also other engines such as Bing. 

Research shows that organic traffic is almost 6x better than paid search ads and 61% of marketers say improving SEO is their top inbound marketing priority. There are many ways to improve your SEO rankings but good content appears to be the driving force behind every successful website. However, not all types of content bring equal results and different sites may benefit from different types of content.

Content and SEO

The purpose of content is to share relevant written or visual media so that your audience can learn something new and share it with others. In short, content addresses some of the pain points of your audience while providing solutions. Great content is consumed and then shared with a larger audience which boosts your SEO rankings.

Today, publishing high-quality content is one of the best ways to improve your SEO ranking. There are many types of content to consider such as blog posts, images, videos, emails, and more. With that in mind, let’s explore some of the top content types that can help you improve your website SEO rankings.

Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the most common types of content and it works wonders. Blog posts are easy to produce, they provide relevant information and people are always willing to read them. In a way, blogging is perfect for both the audience and the website.

When done correctly, blogging has a lot of benefits:

• Engages the audience
• Boosts your SEO rankings
• Attracts new visitors/readers
• Grows your brand

The good thing about blogging is that there are so many options: you can write opinion pieces, reviews, lists, how-to’s, and you can also opt for guest blogging. Write a compelling headline, provide useful information, optimize the content and enjoy the results. Blog posts are excellent for SEO and this type of content will be relevant in 2020 and beyond.

Videos

Video content is growing larger and larger, just take a look at YouTube where thousands of videos are uploaded each day. Video consumption is at an all-time high and this form of content is regularly used to improve SEO rankings.

Video content has a high return on investment, however, it is harder to create compared to content like blog posts. Although it may seem that Video content curation requires a lot of time and resources, there are tools that can help us with it. Websites like Renderforest provide us with Video creation tools that we can use to create video content with little to no effort.

Here are some ways to utilize these tools for your business.

• Create an explainer video to introduce your business/product
• Create a video showcasing your products, services, or features
• Create quick tutorials or step-by-step guides for users
• Promote your brand image via storytelling

There are many ideas for Video content and they all work depending on the business. It’s up to us to test and see what works best for good SEO results.

Long-Form Content

We’ve talked about blog posts but we cannot forget about the importance of long-form content. Although long-form articles appear to be just extended blog posts, the difference is in the purpose of the two. Compared to quick and informative blog posts, long-form articles cover topics in their depth and take way more time and resources to complete.

According to a study conducted by Backlinko, Google’s first page results on average show articles containing 1950 words or more. On top of that, long-form content gets 77.2% more links and more social media shares. All of this data shows how important long-form content is for SEO and traffic. However, long-form content is harder to make compared to short-form content and it’s best to find a balance between the two.

Infographics

If you’re looking to receive those backlinks, creating infographics is a great way to do so. You can collect data, structure it and represent it visually using infographics. This type of content is very user-friendly and it brings excellent SEO results through backlinks.

You can even turn a blog post into an infographic as shown below:

The appeal of infographics is in its visuals and ease of consumption. Compared to standard blog posts, infographics tend to be more concise which means users are more likely to see it and share with others. You will need more resources to create infographic content but it can be well worth it if the topic is well-researched and the visuals match up.

Podcasts

Podcasts gained a lot of traction in the past few years, partly due to availability and ease of consumption. Users can consume podcast content while driving, doing dishes, or similar activities. Creating podcasts is really no different to other content, it’s simply audio instead of video or written word. Due to the demand, podcasts are a good source of traffic and will positively impact your SEO rankings.

Research Findings and Case Studies

In a world filled with opinions, more and more people are opting to look for real data through research and case studies. If you can put enough time and resources to conduct a study, SEO results will surely follow. Case studies usually get a lot of inbound links as they get cited somewhere on the internet, which is excellent for SEO ranking.

According to Buzzsumo, this type of data-backed content can attract millions of shares. A good example of this is CMI’s annual report on Content Marketing. Although this process may be time-consuming, it’s well worth the potential results.

Social Media

Social media content is heavily prevalent in today’s culture with more and more businesses hopping on. Social media deserves a post on its own but we’re here to stress its importance for SEO and website ranking. Although it does not directly impact your SEO, a strong social presence will drive traffic to your website and improve your SEO rankings.

Furthermore, all of your website content can be repurposed for social media with links to the original. Social media audience generally prefers short-form content, but if interested, they will search the original content for more information. Business owners can leverage social media content to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their website and boost SEO in the process.

Social media also comes with certain threats to privacy in the form of data scraping, leaks, and information sharing, so you might want to consider using a VPN and there are A lot of cheap options to choose from.

If you want to have excellent SEO ranking, make sure to create all types of content. Each content format targets a different audience and you don’t want to leave anyone hanging.

Source - https://martechseries.com/mts-insights/guest-authors/top-7-types-of-content-to-improve-your-seo-rankings-a-guide/

Five email marketing trends leading in 2020

Five email marketing trends leading in 2020

Many marketers share a common predicament; they often understand the strategic value of using technology to improve customer engagement, but they don’t know how to use the right tools to achieve this tactically. Email marketing is no different. Although email can deliver impressive ROI, it often isn’t properly initiated using the right tools. As such, teams can struggle to take it beyond just simply sending a newsletter and businesses fail to see the value it can create. This not only means lost revenue opportunities for brands, but a missed opportunity to grow, stand out amongst the competition and successfully grow brand loyalty.

Looking at the year ahead, there are several ways in which brands can transform the customer relationship through email. Recognizing that it can be difficult for businesses to know exactly where to focus their investment and what tools to use to achieve their goals, it’s important to shine a spotlight on the technology available and the strategies most likely to encourage customer engagement. In an era where customer experience counts for everything, tools that will allow marketers to take control of their customer data and then leverage this insight effectively will prove critical for seeing results.

Trend 1: Inspiring consumer engagement and loyalty

Consumers have said that key to their decision making when opening a marketing email is brand recognition. Consequently, brands need to demonstrate relevance, purpose and provide evidence to suggest that they understand what drives recognition through research and measurement.

Accenture Strategy’s global survey of 30,000 consumers across 35 countries found that more than half of customers in the UK want companies to take a stand and communicate issues they care about. This could include sustainability, transparency and fair employment practices among others. Emails that tend to focus on products and discounts, showing no alignment with the right type of brand values, are less likely to deliver brand relevance and ongoing engagement. User-generated content (UGC) can also be an interesting tactic to engage recipients, showing that other people trust the brand, align with its values and regularly purchase items from it.

Trend 2: Designing emails well

Once the overall key messages have been decided, emails need to be designed with all platforms in mind, including the different versions of Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail. Webmail and desktop experiences need to be considered too since the number of emails being opened on mobile has stopped increasing month by month.

Trends that have dominated email design in previous years will still be popular in 2020, including vibrant colors, bold typography, and off-grid designs. But there are some new innovations to be considered. For example, increasing sophistication in 3D tools means we are seeing 3D images replacing some cartoon-style visuals and providing variety from standard photos. There are also new approaches to animation, which bring more colors, designs, and sophistication to standard animation. Similarly, a focus on basic content framed by generous amounts of white space can help make content more digestible and easier to scan. This helps to give the subscriber a clear understanding of the action they need to take. These designs can also look better within the dark mode, in which people are now adopting more with their email readers and apps.

Trend 3: Making use of AI and Machine Learning

The positive impact of AI on productivity and efficiency has been felt across many different industries, but the marketing applications of AI are extremely exciting. Once a carefully crafted email campaign has been created, Machine Learning can be applied to existing data sets to generate insights for future communications via historical data. These insights can then be applied to future campaigns to improve the relevance and response of communications.

For example, by analyzing the historic data of responses by different audience segments to different timings, and different messaging, regression models can be built showing the propensity or likelihood of responses in similar situations. These can be used to create rules and personalize emails to individuals in order to maximize the probability of engagement. For example, machine learning can be used to analyze the performance of email subject lines and previous copy to make recommendations for future campaigns. It’s been identified that in retail, positive emotions such as gratitude encourage the best results. So, leveraging phrases that evoke positive emotions such as ‘You deserve this deal’ can be powerful; expressing knowledge and appreciation in a more personal way.

Predictive targeting can also be a useful tool for sending messages to an audience defined by ‘propensity to respond’. Target audience insights can include demographic characteristics like age and gender but also buying behavior related to recency, frequency, and monetary value.

Trend 4: Intelligent personalization and moving away from “Hi<first name>”

Personalizing emails is a renowned practice, but it has quickly matured from just addressing recipients by the first name. Intelligent personalization begins with reviewing your database and thinking of recipients more as groups of people. It’s important to remember that databases are full of different kinds of people – all with different behaviors, profiles, and interests. As such, it’s worth splitting the email lists into groups that are alike (or segments). Subscribers appreciate receiving better targeted and tailored emails; if emails are more relevant, it makes for far better customer experience.

Product recommendations, for example, have been the bedrock of successful personalization techniques. A product recommendation engine will take all the data it has available from the subscriber and other data sources to make a prediction on which products and content are most likely to be interesting to this user. That said, crucial to successful implementation is knowing how not to overstep the line and become ‘creepy’ to the recipient. This involves being sensitive to new subscribers and being mindful of making them feel like their data is being exchanged for better customer experience. In a similar vein, customers should be clear on how a company is using their data and be given the option to opt-out or unsubscribe at any time. Likewise, automation and personalization techniques need reviewing regularly, to test email journeys from the eyes of the customer and understand where there are areas for improvement.

Trend 5: Becoming more customer-centric in email copywriting

As much as design and personalization techniques are key to the experience an email delivers, style and tone of voice of the copy are just as crucial. The copy should be just as enticing and consistent with brand expectations and context as possible.

Customers are demanding more meaningful and relevant experiences from email, which means brands need to become more customer-focused through their messaging and customer journey. Testing which copy resonates with an audience is essential to delivering an experience in line with expectations. A simple way to determine whether the copy is brand-centric or customer-centric can be to calculate the number of times ‘our’ ‘us’ ‘we’ is used against the number of times ‘you’ and ‘your’ is included. Understanding the performance of customer-centric versus brand-centric copy can provide a clear indication as to which copy style is encouraging engagement. Similarly, when it comes to a ‘call to action’ within an email, many can be dry with little thought given to how these necessary fixtures can be creatively written. Rather than asking people to simply ‘read more’ or ‘shop now’, the call to action is a real opportunity to provide value for the reader.

Email marketing remains one of the most effective techniques for digital marketers across all types of businesses. However, despite being an effective marketing channel, the DMA consumer email tracker highlights the level of inbox competition, with consumers saying they receive around 57 emails each week on average. This makes cutting through the noise exceptionally difficult. However, by following new trends in email implementation and design, it’s possible to create a unique brand experience even within the inbox. Email is one of the most important touchpoints in the customer journey, and with new technological innovations along with increased knowledge, brands can benefit from the impressive return on investment

By Kara Black
VP Marketing

Advanced Guide to Off-Page SEO Techniques 2020

Advanced Guide to Off-Page SEO Techniques 2020

If you know even a little about SEO then you must be knowing about the two types of SEO.

Yes, it is – ON-PAGE SEO and OFF PAGE SEO.

Great!

So if you want to get higher rankings in google then you must work on ON-PAGE SEO and OFF-PAGE SEO.

In this guide, I will cover how you can optimize your website for OFF-PAGE SEO. OFF-PAGE SEO signals are one of the most important ranking signals to Google. Now to make it simple, OFF-PAGE SEO is all about “Backlinks”.

Some of you may say, what is a Backlink? A link on someone else’s website pointing to a page on your website is considered as a backlink. Getting backlinks from higher authority websites will help you to rank higher in Google. And if the number of backlinks you have to your site is good then that’s great for your Google rankings.

Google considers and ranks based on the two types of OFF-PAGE SEO signals.

1.Page-Level Backlinks

2.Domain-Level Backlinks

Page-level backlinks are looked and considered first and then the domain level backlinks are given importance.

And I don’t here mean that the websites having a higher number of backlinks will rank higher.

NO…NO…NO….That’s not what…I am saying.

I am saying that the websites having “number of quality backlinks” to their site will rank higher in google.

Yes, I am saying “Quality Backlinks”.

Great. Now you know about the role and importance of backlinks for ranking higher in google thoroughly.

Now, how do I build quality backlinks to my site? –You may ask.

The answers are…

There are many off-page SEO techniques that you can use to create high-quality backlinks to your site.

And I promise you that these off-page SEO techniques will help you to rank higher in google.

So let us look at the off-page SEO activities list 2020. 

I will rank these off-page SEO techniques according to their effectiveness and popularity.

So let’s get the ball rolling.

List of Latest Off-Page SEO Techniques in 2020 and beyond 

# 1. Guest Posting

Guest Posting is one of the most famous and effective ways of building high-quality backlinks to your site. You have to find sites relevant to your niche and then you can just ask them if they accept guest posts or not.If yes, then just craft compelling content and ask them to publish it on their website.That is it. Now you have earned a backlink to your site through guest posting.

# 2. WEB 2.0

WEB 2.0 is my second favorite OFF-PAGE SEO technique. It is also one of the most effective off-page SEO techniques used by SEO professionals.

To do web 2.0, you will create free websites on sites like blogger.com, wordpress.com, tumblr.com, and weebly.com.These sites are known as web 2.0 sites. Its domain name will look like

this https://www.yourdomain.blogspot.com

As the authority of these web 2.0 sites are high, backlinks from these sites are very helpful.

Now you can yourself post articles on these sites. And that articles can have links to your main site. In this way, you will create high-quality backlinks to your site.

Even, you can create a tier link building strategy from web2.0 sites. That is more effective.

# 3. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are helpful in getting backlinks to your site. And the best part is that “Social Bookmarking is Free”.

In social bookmarking, you just have to share your published content on different social bookmarking sites.

To do social bookmarking you just have to add your URL which you want to bookmark. That’s all.

Some of the well-known and famous social bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon and Scoop.it.

# 4. Article Submission

Article submission is also one of the best off-page SEO techniques used widely. Here also just like guest posting you will need to have an article.

Once you have an article, you can go to the article submission sites and then you just need to submit your article on the article submission sites.

And as soon as the admin of the site approves your article and publishes it….you get a backlink to your site.

# 5. Directory Submission

In directory submission, you have to submit your website to different web directories on the internet. These directories will give you a high-quality backlink to your site for doing site submission.

To do directory the submission you have to enter Name, email, title, site URL, and description on web directory submission sites.

That’s all you need to enter to submit your site to web directories. But always submit your site to the relevant category only.

And stay away from spammed web directories.

Don’t submit too much for a single site.

# 6. Business Listing

If you have a website and physical business too then the business listing is very helpful to you.

Here you just have to list your business on the different business listing sites. You will need to add office address, business name, pin code, website, phone, and email id to list business online.

Business Listing is built authority and it also gives a high-quality backlink to your site.

it plays an important role in local keywords ranking.

# 7. Classified Submission

Classified is another great approach for doing link building. You can use free classified sites to create ads for your website. Creating these ad copies will need a title, URL, and description. It is simple, easy and effective.Mostly classified site submissions are used by e-commerce websites for promoting products and for creating high-quality backlinks for free.

# 8. Forum Submission

Join some forums and participate in topics (threads) relevant to your site.

By doing forums submissions, you can not only earn backlinks but you might also end up getting referral traffic to your site.Therefore forum submissions are very helpful, and that’s why it is a very popular off-page SEO technique.But you should only be a part of relevant and authoritative forums. Don’t join spammed forums.

# 9. Profile Creation

There is a huge number of websites who allow you to create your profile on their websites. These websites even ask you to add your website URL if you have got one.

And this kind of websites are known as Profile Creation Sites.To find these sites, and create your profile (Add your website URL) on these sites and get a high-quality backlink to your site for free.And because these sites have high authority, backlinks from them are very beneficial.

# 10. Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is one of the simplest and easiest ways of earning backlink to your site. You just have to visit blogs similar to your niche and then just comment on these sites.Remember, Don’t SPAM.Nobody likes spam comments. Neither me nor you. So take some time to read the article and then post a comment.And once your comment gets approved, you will add up a domain referring to you in your backlinks list.

# 11. Media Submission

You can also submit different types of media to earn backlinks to your site. There are different types of media submission sites available.For e.g. PDF Submission sites, Infographic Submission Sites, PPT Submission Sites, Video Submission Sites, Image Submission Sites, and Audio Submission Sites.Create these types of media and submit them to these sites and earn free backlinks to your site.

Conclusion:

Might be, few of them are new off-page SEO techniques to follow for you. 

Off-Page SEO is very important for a site. Don’t Ignore it.And don’t be careless about it.

Use this off-page SEO technique to create high-quality backlinks to your site.

Always check a website’s spam score before creating a backlink on that site.

Creating backlinks on spammed websites will hurt your rankings negatively.

So be careful about it.

Happy Linkbuilding!

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