How to Create the Perfect Email Campaign for Your Customers

How to Create the Perfect Email Campaign for Your Customers

Creating a perfect email campaign is an art every brand needs to learn. The trick lies in the fact that what may prove successful for one business isn’t necessarily successful for another.

If you think about it a bit reasonably, this will come as no surprise. Different brands have different audiences, different offers, and different communication styles, so it is only natural their messages will be different, too.

What you need to concern yourself with, however, is the success of your email campaigns as compared to the competition.

Let’s define “competition” first. Many brands that are just starting out make the mistake of keeping an eye on all brands operating in the same industry and area. That is a huge no-go!

Competition comprises brands that are SUCCESSFUL that operate in the same industry and area. The easiest way to keep an eye on their offer is to subscribe to their newsletters and follow their social media profiles.

The Importance of Stellar Subject Lines

First of all, subject lines must be consistent with the offer. In plain words, that means that they mustn’t be used as clickbaits. If the offer doesn’t deliver on the promise of the subject line, your brand will not be trusted.

Many brands use target keywords in their subject lines, which is great practice, but the rules of the game are somewhat different as compared to subject lines in website content.

For one thing, they shouldn’t include stop words, and for another – they should be separated by hyphens.

Various studies have been analyzing the topic, showing some not so surprising results. I.e., the most effective subject line keywords are “alert,” “free delivery,” “available”, “news” and “new.” Other high-ranked subject line keywords include “thanks,” “thank you,” “off selected,” “brand new,” “sale starts,” “great deals,” “iPhone,” “available,” “latest,” “introducing,” “back in stock,” “breaking,” “golden,” “bulletin,” “order today,” “orders over” and “special.” The study was performed by Adestra and Smart Insights.

Global email marketing agency Alchemy Worx has undertaken similar research, concluding that the five single most efficient subject line keywords are “go,” “just,” “upgrade,” “content” and “wonderful,” followed by “congratulations,” “promotional,” “snapshot,” “deduction” and “voluntary.”

If you can think of subject lines containing one of these words, chances are, your efforts will be more successful… but still not stellar unless your messages have been brainstormed, too.

Now, the whole point of getting your subject lines to catch the attention of the recipient lies in the fact that they determine the fate of your message. If they fail to grab the attention of the recipient, your message will be either deleted or flagged as spam.

Once your message has gotten the attention, it should meet (and preferably) exceed the expectations. It goes without saying that the message must expand on the subject line, or else you’ll be (understandably) seen as a spammer.

Communicate Efficiently

Need we say that, in order for an email campaign to be successful, you need to get to know your audience first?

All marketing efforts target certain people, not all people. Those certain people may fall under one or more target groups, which is to say that one brand may have more audiences.

Now, it’s solely upon you to decide the kind of audience(s) you will serve. Some may be out of the question, though. I.e., if you sell secondhand clothes, obviously executives won’t be interested!

That’s to say, every successful email campaign strategy begins with knowing your audience. If you have multiple audiences, send different emails to each group, offering just the products and services they are interested in.

Research and Then Research Some More

Take your time defining your audience and take your time listening to their feedback. It’s a well-known fact that feedback is the single most important insight determining success of any marketing campaign, and email campaigns are by no means any different than the rest.

Start with the info from the subscription form and don’t shy away from asking for additional info, either via email or on your social media profiles.

Always send a welcome message to every new subscriber and a thank-you message after each purchase. In this way, you’ll establish your brand as trustworthy, and people will keep coming back to you instead of browsing the competition. Oh, and one QUITE important step: always address customers by their first name (subscription form info).

Is There More to Email Campaigns?

Certainly this is only the top of the iceberg. Marketing is not by any means simple!

Fortunately, though, email campaigns follow the very same rules of other marketing strategies, which basically boils down to a couple of things:

  1.     Proper communication
  2.     Listening to feedback
  3.     Remaining competitive
  4.     Being professional
  5.     Offering stellar and prompt customer support

If you follow these five simple steps, your email campaigns are bound to be successful. That isn’t to say it’s not a lot of hard work. It is, but remember that once you have established your brand as respectful, you’ll just need to keep in touch and adjust for the changes!

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Essential KPIs You Should Track for Measuring Brand Performance

Essential KPIs You Should Track for Measuring Brand Performance

Every brand needs to know whether or not their marketing efforts are actually yielding viable results. The main reason is that the online market has become increasingly competitive and saturated. That said, investing time and resources in a marketing campaign needs to pay off. 

Otherwise, your brand may be underperforming without you even realizing it. So how does someone measure their brand’s performance? This is where KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) come into play. 

As their name suggests, KPIs are tied to the company’s or brand’s vital performance statistics, which usually represent every factor related to sales and revenue, as well as the outcomes of various marketing tactics and strategies. 

Measuring essential KPIs is vital for a brand’s development and growth, and it should take priority when creating marketing strategies. With that in mind, here are a few of the essential KPIs you should track for measuring your brand’s performance.

Customer acquisition

Acquiring new customers isn’t easy, and it isn’t cheap either. Brands that wish to grow their customer base must be aware of these costs. If it costs too much for your brand to acquire a new customer, then it’s obvious that your marketing performance is lacking. 

That’s why customer acquisition costs (CAC) KPI is essential to track. When you add the cost of sales to the costs of marketing and divide it by the number of new customers acquired, you can calculate how much it costs your brand to acquire a new customer. 

When you manage to reduce these costs as much as possible, it means that your brand is spending or investing money more efficiently, which will ultimately benefit your profits and return on investment (ROI).

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Another KPI tied directly to sales and profits is the CLV, or the customer lifetime value. This KPI portrays just how much revenue your brand generates from a single customer during their lifetime as a customer. 

For example, if it costs your brand $300 to acquire a new customer but that customer purchases $500 worth of your products, you’ve actually made a profit and your brand’s performance is rather good. 

Moreover, the longer you retain that customer, the more value you gain over time. The key is to not spend more on acquiring a new customer than you can profit from that very same customer. In other words, if the CAC costs exceed your CLV gains, you have a negative impact on your profits, and your brand is underperforming. 

Web traffic

Website traffic is a KPI every brand should track. The main reason is that this KPI shows just how effective your marketing strategies are at encouraging leads to visit your website. However, website traffic is a broad term, and you’ll need to break it down before you can truly understand it and its importance. 

That’s why it’s a good idea to opt for one of the efficient digital marketing reporting tools to help you better analyze your website traffic. That way, you can determine if your web traffic is organic or not. Furthermore, you can determine from which sources the traffic originates from. 

For example, your traffic may be coming from social media and the backlinks you’ve placed in the content you’ve recently published. The more organic traffic you have, the better the performance of your brand is. In other words, your brand awareness is suitable, and your marketing efforts are generating qualified leads. 

Conversion rate

Boosting sales is one of the primary goals of every brand. You want to encourage as many target audience members as possible to convert into customers. That’s why the conversion rate KPI is very important to track. 

As you may already know, brands acquire qualified leads with their marketing efforts. A lead is every person who shows even the slightest interest in your offers. 

How well you can nurture those leads and lead them down your sales funnel until they ultimately decide to convert determines how well your brand performs in the market. 

The higher conversion rate means your marketing tactics are actually working their magic. On the other hand, if your conversion rate is low, it means you’ll have to make some improvements to your marketing efforts.

Engagement

Consumer engagement is a very important KPI. Based on how engaged your audience is will determine the likelihood of them converting in the end. 

Therefore, it’s crucial that you keep your audience engaged at all times and measure your efforts in the process. For example, social media platforms are especially important for brands. The main reason is that brands establish their presence and relationships with their audience on those platforms. 

That’s why it’s important to track how your audience responds to your efforts while maintaining a good reputation on social media. Consumer engagement varies based on which marketing channel you’re currently using. Here are a few examples to help you measure your audience’s engagement throughout various channels:

  • Social media – Shares, likes, comments, brand mentions, brand sentiment, etc. However, it’s vital that brands don’t lose track of what’s really important for their performance by solely focusing on vanity metrics on social media.
  • Email marketing – Click-through rate, open rate, deliverability, etc.
  • Website and blog – Bounce rate, average session time, time spent on a page, total visits, etc.
  • Content – Content views, shares, impressions and so on.

Tracking KPIs alongside relevant metrics is vital for evaluating a brand’s performance these days. As mentioned before, the market is crowded and highly competitive, which means that you need to know that your marketing efforts are not in vain. The key to brand success is in ensuring that your marketing is as effective as it can be.

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6 Best SEO Practices Reviewed

6 Best SEO Practices Reviewed!

SEO practices are a moving target, and all digital marketers are endless chasers. There are many updates in the Google search algorithm, and it is hard to keep up with the latest developments. Even though we trust your research, and we know you are staying at the top of your SERP game, let’s go through the SEO practices for the sake of us all.

Here are a few and essential SEO rules that we all tend to take for granted, but they are crucial. Here they are!

1. Keywords are Early

We do not mean the title; we suggest that try and use the primary keyword in the first paragraph and best if you use it in the first line. For example; for Bird of Paradise linen clothing brand; you will put the keywords in the first few sentences. You will see that it will focus on your content as well. Your content will become clear-headed, and your point will be apparent to your readers.

In an extension of that point, also make sure that you are using the secondary and other variations of your keywords in the first line of every news headline. First of all, you will see that your client and your reader both will see your point of focus being continuously reiterated. Secondly, you will also be able to remind your scanning readers about the point of focus. YOu will see that it makes your content attractive and straightforward to understand. 

2. Catchy, Catchy, Catchy

The best elaboration is through example, and so the heading is the example. Use catchy lines everywhere, from titles to subtitles to headings. Make sure that even if they are not clickbait, they are intuitive.

Click baits are not a good idea to use in professional content, but we will advise you to review clickbait content. These kinds of content are a great way to make sure that you understand how exciting and catchy content works. 

Meta–descriptions are read more commonly then you think, so always try to take the most exciting point or paragraph from your content and paste it into the meta- descriptions. That will allow you to get the audience hooked before they even open the content.

The reason is that they will scroll through the content to get to the point where the information is, and that will keep them on the page for a considerable duration of time. 

3. Titles Tags Count

SEO algorithm reads the titles and makes the categorization of the content. If you add title tags to your content and put them in the correct category of the keyword that you focused on then, the content will rank much higher.

Always make the categories for major topics on your blog and always put your content in categories. It will also allow you to see how much material you have produced in all the major sections.

4. Loading Speed Matters

There is endless research on the topic, and we would instead not bore you with it. But if the website takes more than four seconds to load on an android device, then half of the users will most likely leave. 

The other 25% will leave if the website does not load in seven seconds, and the rest of them will go if it doesn’t open in one minute. So make sure that you regularly speed test your website. Also, make sure that you put eye-catching content on your loading page.

A good sale promotion or a good piece of knowledge on the topic of choice is a great way to keep the user engaged while the page loads. It is also an excellent way to show that the website is not dead. 

5. SEO Friendly Images

This point is pretty simple to go to your image and put your keyword in the alt images. That way, your pictures rank on Google in your keyword. It does not do anything for the ranking of your website.

It merely allows the user to see your image-based content when they put the keyword on the Google search engine. The simple fact is that no one is exclusively looking in the web section of Google SERP. 

People look into images, videos, and news sections as well; that is why it is a good idea to rank in these sections as well so that you will have a better time getting your result. You will get a more robust ranking online because these sections have reduced competition.

These contents, like graphics and videos, are also excellent for social media pages so that you can develop a strong social media campaign to compliment your online efforts as well. 

6. Internal Linking in Great

Every time you develop a blog, link it back to other content on your website, from products to other blogs on the topic. Firstly, it allows your content to rank higher online, and secondly, it will also allow you to present your other content to the user. 

It is a great way to develop rapport about your content. Another way to see it is to create social media content and link it back to your website in every post. That is also a simple and effective way to ensure that your audience understands the material, 

All in all, SEO practices evolve all the time, but there are a few significant tricks shown in the graphics above that stay the same. If you are accurate to the basic principles of SEO, then you will see that you are getting the best SEO results and very effectively. 

Your SEO results that are attained organically will surprise you. If a person is running an effective SEO campaign, they do not have to spend any money on digital marketing and paid campaigns. Instead, they can use their domain for advertisement and gain a considerable revenue stream from the process. 

There is a strong need to master SEO as a digital marketer that will lead to success in the long run. So try until you succeed because the reward is certainly worth the hard work. 

Author Bio 

emmaEmma Thomas is a content writer and a copywriter who specializes in writing marketing blogs and sales pages.  A writer by day and a reader by night, she can be often found picking cherries in summer Afternoons

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Assemble your connections: Link Building Secrets to Success

Assemble your connections: Link Building Secrets to Success

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If you want to rank on search engines, backlinks play a vital role. It is that simple. It is difficult for a page to rank organically without relevant links pointing to the web page. 

According to Google’s Search Quality Strategist “Andrey Lippatsev,” links and content are the two leading factors that can take you into top rankings.

A study by Perficient Digital showed that links are a powerful ranking factor and will likely remain so in the years to come.

Why are backlinks necessary?

Backlinks should be the top priority for any SEO professional. But the question is: Why are they so important?

To understand this, you will need to get your head around the ranking algorithms of the leading search engines. Back in the days of search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista, search results were entirely based on a page’s content.

Today, with algorithms like RankBrain and PageRank (PR), search engines look at a page’s content as well as the number of people linking to the page. 

Each link to a page acts as a ‘vote’ and determines the quality and relevancy of a webpage. Several studies highlight the correlation between backlinks and higher rankings. One study from Backlinko found that links remain critical for ranking positions.

https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking

However, that is not all. With updates such as Google Penguin, Google now focuses more on a link’s quality when ranking various pages.

So, how do you build quality links and ensure that your page appears higher in search results? In this guide, we will reveal the link building secrets that will certainly improve your page ranking.

1. Craft quality content

It is no secret that top-notch content can unlock doors to quality backlinks. But, simply publishing content is not going to earn you backlinks. It turns out that certain types of content work best for link building.

  • Visual content: Visual assets attract not only huge traffic but also generate amazing backlinks. You can add images, graphs, diagrams, charts, and other visual content formats to earn more backlinks.
  • How-to guides: Resources that provide in-depth information about a topic are found to generate maximum backlinks. Guides are the go-to resources because users are always on the search for information on the web. So, help them and give them the answers they are looking for.
  • Surveys and statistics: Content that reveals industry stats, studies, surveys, and data are highly linkable. Research-based content adds credibility to a webpage and presents it as an authority site.
  • List posts: BuzzSumo analyzed 1 million articles and found that numbered lists generate far more backlinks when compared to quizzes, infographics, how-to guides, and even video content. They work because lists posts, pack tons of information into a digestible way.

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2. Email outreach

You can also build links by reaching out to bloggers, journalists, and influencers in your niche. A good way to find out potential linkers is by searching your target keyword and putting the first URL into a link analysis tool. Look for backlinks and find people who have linked to the resource. These are your potential linkers.

In the next step, you have to find their email addresses. Sounds too much work? Worry not. There are several tools that take in a domain name and provide the email addresses associated with that domain. Once you have got their email addresses, you can send your scripts to them, asking for links to your website.

3. Guest blogging

Guest blogging offers a free or nearly-free promotion. It is a valuable way to drive new traffic and generate links to your website. You should search for high-authority guest sites with followers count in millions and craft a quality guest blog to access the fans.

To get started with guest blogging, you will need to prospect for websites that allow guest posting. This can be done by performing a custom search on Google like this:

https://www.google.com

Check out the guidelines and start submitting your guest posts. Guest blogging is more effective because you do not have to spend hours searching for potential linkers and waiting for weeks for their response.

4. Mention influencers in your posts

You might have seen articles with headings like ‘Top X industry experts’ or ‘Best digital marketers.’ These are high link-generating articles because the influencers mentioned in the articles will likely share it on their page, which will generate more links. 

When you mention a person in your blog, you let them know that they are popular and an authority figure in the industry and that you have quoted them. This makes them want to give a link back to your article because, honestly, everyone likes to be praised!

5. Leverage social media

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are excellent avenues to connect with your followers and build a lasting relationship. Engage your fans on these platforms and encourage them to link you on their personal profiles through posts, comments, and inbox. 

This method will be effective only if you keep a strong connection with your fans on social media. If they genuinely like you, it is very likely that you’ll get more links to your landing page.

6. List your site in online directories

There are online directories that offer useful information to users and a link to your website. Search for directories relevant to your industry and list your website there. This makes it easier for your site to get indexed in search engines and help users find you online.

7. Hire a link building agency

Hiring a link building agency is a good option, especially if you are too busy to build links yourself. Choosing the right agency is tough. Many people follow shady practices to build links. Therefore, it is advised to choose a team of professional digital marketers that can cater to your needs.

A blog published by Growth Proton discussed the importance of link building for businesses. According to them, inbound links are crucial. However, the agency you partner with dictates the success of you link building campaign. 

Before you partner with an agency, research about their strategies, practices, and past work. Evaluate your options and go for the one that doesn’t promise only but deliver. 

Take away

Link building seems pretty simple in theory, but it requires a lot of effort, time, and resources. As the search engine algorithms and link building practices are going through constant updates, you will need to keep up with the changes to ensure your success with link building.

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