Email Marketing and Mobile Expansion

Implications: In 2013, just optimizing email for mobile will not be enough. You also must identify your mobile users and send a specific creative developed for their devices, or experiment with responsive design templates.

Responsive email design is an approach to email creative in which the HTML version is built to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices, from a desktop computer email client to a tablet to a mobile phone. This includes easy reading and navigation with minimal resizing, panning, or scrolling.

Relevant Content Is King

Implications: You must use behavioral traits, including opens and clicks in regular email, browsing on your website, or discussing with your sales reps, to segment your mailing list and drive follow-up messaging.

Marketers who don’t track subscriber engagement will find their email engagement metrics will steadily decline as their messages get blocked or bulked. Marketers who use in-market data will yield, on average, three to five times the return in revenue per email over traditional broadcast messages.

At the very least, keep tabs on which subscribers are inactive and reduce your cadence of mailing to these subscribers. Sending more emails to the most active subscribers and fewer emails to those who are less active will help you prevent being banished to the “unimportant” email box.

Rethink How You Send Email Campaigns

Implications: Every organization has some kind of customer lifecycle. Your goal should be to study your specific buying cycle and identify the optimal milestones for building triggered lifecycle programs. Build these programs to be as automated and hands-off as possible to maximize revenue generation 24/7.

The Last Word

The results show that the era of “batch-and-blast” email marketing has come to a close, and these are the three imperatives for your email program:

• Segment your mailing list using behavioral clues such as opens and clicks, website browsing, and follow-ups with sales staff or other company contacts.
• Deliver relevant content using dynamic content modules.
• Identify the key milestones in your customer lifecycle and build automated, triggered programs that drive revenue 24/7.

Your benefit will be a strong-performing, customer-focused email program that will allow you to maximize engagement, conversions, and revenue.

We have all been there before: unable to think past the first sentence of a post, or article. These next two paragraphs focus on the ways that we have found to get past writers block. Content Marketing is driven by your ability to answer the questions that your customers, or readers are frequently asking. Spend time considering questions that you consistently run into and have to answer. If you can write a great post, or article successfully answering these questions then you will have made many individual lives easier. Scan headlines and subscribe to blogs that you are interested in, read them, and if something impacts, or influences you strongly write down your thoughts about it and create your article based on those thoughts.

Discuss relevant topics with your friends, or associates and create a flow chart from the conversation. Block off 30 minutes and just write. Don’t think about formatting, spelling, punctuation etc…, rather just let the words flow and then revisit it the next day to see if there is anything there. Break parent posts, or pages down into sub-pages explaining all of the details that went into the parent post, or page. Quick post, but with helpful information that we have used time and again! Thanks for reading and we hope that this is helpful.

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most powerful tools available to internet marketing, as it provides direct insights into how Google views your website; and best of all, it’s free! However, if you’re not involved deeply in the day-to-day SEO efforts or are not well-versed in some of the more advanced tactics, Google Webmaster Tools can at first be an overwhelming and daunting platform to examine. In this post we’ll review five sets of data for quick SEO wins.

1. Crawl errors. The crawl errors report provides insights into crawling/indexing issues that Googlebot encountered while visiting pages of your site. Ensuring that Google can accurately and cleanly access all valid pages of your site while not wasting time attempting to access invalid pages is fundamental in ensuring that it has an accurate picture of your site as a whole. There are various types of crawl errors that may be reported on, including URLs that returned Server Errors, Soft 404 Errors, Access Denied Status, Not Found, Not Followed, and Other. In most cases, you’ll want to review the list and determine whether or not they should be indexed by the engines, and if not, where to 301 redirect them to in order to preserve any SEO value and/or user experience.

How to access:
Health -> Crawl Errors. From here you can select either web errors or mobile errors.

2. Search queries. The search queries report provides insights into keyword and URL-level information around the number of impressions received via organic search as well as the number of clicks (and therefore CTR) and the average organic position that your site showed up in. Some excellent optimization opportunities can be gleaned from this data by simply reviewing which keywords are receiving the most impressions and clicks but are not ranking in a favorable position. For example:

• Download your data to CSV and begin by sorting by impressions
• Add a filter if average position is greater than three
• Add another filter to the queries to remove branded phrases

What you’re left with are keywords that are resulting in a lot of impressions but do not rank in the top three positions on average. Adding further filters based on click thresholds will allow you to isolate keywords that you may want to focus optimization efforts around. Also, you can marry this data with conversion data from your analytics package to see which ones are actually resulting in KPIs.

How to access:
Traffic -> Search Queries

3. HTML improvements. The HTML improvements report is designed to give you quick insights into improving the title and meta description tags across your website. For enterprise-level sites there is often a wealth of information here that makes identifying problems on a larger scale easier. Included here are listings of:

Duplicate meta descriptions: Meta descriptions, while not visible on-page to visitors, are visible within the search results as the snippet of text below the link. The keywords used within the meta description do not directly influence your organic rankings, but can improve the click-through rates of your result, which can have a positive impact on rankings. Review this data to ensure that all meta descriptions are unique and highly relevant to the content of the page. Duplicate meta descriptions can oftentimes uncover duplicate content issues that you may need to take more drastic steps to correct instead of simply writing a unique description tag.

Long and short meta descriptions: In addition to ensuring that all description tags are unique across your website, it’s important to aim to not exceed around 155 characters in length because that’s all Google will typically display. While going over by a few characters isn’t necessarily going to hurt you, the content will be cut off in the search results. In extreme cases of large blocks of content in the meta description tag, Google may deem this an attempt at spam and devalue the page.

On the other hand, Google will also alert you to description tags that are too short – typically one to three words only. Oftentimes if a meta description is too short or not relevant enough to the content, Google will take snippets of text from the page and use those in the search results instead. Therefore, it’s important to make sure you are fully leveraging the 155 characters to get your messaging across the way you want.

Title tags: Title tags are one of the most heavily weighted on-page elements for targeting keywords and achieving higher rankings in organic search. Because of this, it’s critical to ensure that you are fully leveraging the tag on every single page of your website while not going overboard and looking spammy. Similar to the description tag, each page on your website should have a unique and highly relevant title tag that includes the keywords for which you are aiming to rank. Within the title tag section of Google Webmaster Tools you can identify where you have missing or duplicate tags, as well as which are too long, short, or are non-informative. If there is only one report that you look at within Google Webmaster Tools, let it be this section, as it’s the quickest and easiest way to get the biggest bang for your buck if you have an excessive amount of warnings.

How to access:
Optimization -> HTML Improvements

Beginning your SEO efforts with these three sections within Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to start the process of building a solid foundation for your site’s crawlability, on-page optimization, and keyword targeting. However, there is a vast set of data and advanced optimization options offered throughout Google Webmaster Tools that you should spend time examining and with which you should become more comfortable. While these Google tools and data here are great, you shouldn’t ignore those being offered by Bing’s version of Webmaster Tools either. I think Bing’s tools have become increasingly powerful and useful to search marketers over the last six months. Going beyond these three quick tips, which areas of Google Webmaster Tools do you find to be the most useful in your SEO efforts?

5 Steps To Email Marketing Success:

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Proper Planning – start all campaigns with your bottom line goals in mind. This will influence your email copy planning and design. Consider your marketing strategy as you plan and start to write the email content. It is important to consider your brand’s voice as you write – try to connect on an emotional level with your audience. Best practices like share-to-social links and other linking strategies should also be considered

Attentive Content, Creative and Development Direction – be attentive to the content that you write and share it within your team, or circles for feedback before sending.

Testing and Precise List Preparation – It is important to evaluate your message on different readers and email platforms to make sure that the visual is consistent. Please also consider your target market, filter, and segment your prospect lists to enhance your end readers experience. Tailor the message to the individual, not to a general audience.

Focus on Results – track opens, clicks, deliverability etc… Track feedback on your performance against previous data from within your industry.

Advanced Techniques – A/B testing, triggered email response, resend, send time optimization, automated campaigns, dynamic email, mobile optimization.

Many buyers moving through the different buying stages provide clues and insight that savvy marketers can use to engage them in relevant dialogue in a timely manner. At the top of this buying funnel is the broadest segment of prospects that may be unaware, or at least not actively engaged in self-education. Many individuals that you interact with may keep themselves up-to-date on a particular solution set, but are not actively purchasing. Moving down the funnel buyers who are completing investigation and validation phases show an increase in activity and the questions and search terms that they use are generally more specific. (This is generally a much smaller segment than the broadest segment at the start of the funnel).

Marketing’s role is to facilitate the larger number of prospects at the early stages of the buying processes, and move prospects from mildly interested to active buyers. Sales’ role is to work the individual buying organizations to finalize a deal. As such, the funnel is a great representation of the two departments challenge as it shrinks as prospects become active buyers. The linear form of a shrinking prospect base is often incorrect because prospects frequently move up and down the sales funnel in a very non-linear fashion.

Overall, the funnel does work as a useful construct – generally buyers progress through a sensible buying process and as they do so generally they ask more precise questions and seek more precise topics of interest. Not excluding the non-linear patterns of buying behavior – marketers must be able to understand at any point of time if a prospect is in the buying process.