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  • 7 Insights For Email Marketing

    Based on a study of over nearly 750 companies representing 3,000 brands in 40 countries, the email benchmark study done by IBM, and Experian’s Q2 2016 Benchmark report , here are 7 insights for Email Marketing.

    Social Media

    Open rates during the holiday season are lower, making it important for retailers to increase the frequency during the holiday season. At the same time targeting email subscribers on Social Media  has a higher CTOR (Click To Open Rates). According to Experian, Targeting email subscribers based on their interest in social media can lead to high email engagement for brands. For example, welcome emails sent to subscribers who engaged via Facebook had an 11 percent higher click-to-open rate than other welcome emails from the same brand (22 percent for Facebook welcomes compared with 19.9 percent for other welcome emails).

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    Key Takeaway : Increase the frequency of emails during the holiday season. Target email subscribers on Social Media to achieve a higher Click To Open rate for your campaign.

    Click-Through Rate

    Mean click-through rates are 0.80 percentage points lower at 28.6 percent during the holiday season.

    ctrholiday

    Key Takeaway : Marketers need to factor in lower click-through rates, to achieve their KPIs, despite the increased frequency of emails.

    Engagement

    Engagement, often called “read rate,” measures how long a recipient reads an email at three different time intervals: “read”(eight or more seconds); “skimmed” (two to less than eight seconds) and “glanced/deleted” (less than two seconds).
    Overall, more than half – 53 percent of emails tracked were classified as read, followed by glanced 26 percent and skimmed 22 percent.

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    Key Takeaway : With high read rates, emails make for an effective engagement marketing tactic. If the goal of the brand is to engage customers then email should be in your marketing plan.

    Transactional Messages

    Behavior triggered emails have a better performance rate. Transactional messages have been seen to be a powerful customer contact moment and these statistics bear out the point.

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    Key Takeaway : Transactional messages present a new opportunity for brands to engage readers with promotional offers.

    Creative Content

    Email creative that has a sense of urgency built into it for Holiday campaigns saw better performance. According to Experian, use of a Countdown clock in 2015, saw a higher Click To Open Rate.  Marketing campaigns that included a dynamic countdown clock had a 41 percent higher click-to-open rate and more than double the transaction rate of other holiday mailings from the same brands.

    Key Takeaway : Customize your content with tools that create a sense of urgency.

    Email personalization

    Personalization can help boost the performance of promotional emails. Based on data from April 2015 to March 2016, brands that included personalized subject lines experienced 27 percent higher unique click rates, 11 percent higher click-to-open rates and more than double the transaction rate compared with other promotional mailings.

    Key Takeaway : Personalize your message for Holiday Season.

    POS Subscribers

    For the time period between April 2015 and March 2016, welcome mailings to POS subscribers had a 32 percent higher click-to-open rate than for subscribers obtained from other sources (23.2 percent for POS compared with 17.5 percent from other sources). For online customers offer a chance to subscribe to brand’s emails at the time of checkout.

    Key Takeaway : Collect data at POS location that is validated and improve the quality of email data.

  • 8 Steps For Creating Content Marketing Plan For Small Business

    Content marketing Plan is required by businesses for meeting their Marketing and business goals. Create a Content marketing plan in these eight easy steps.

    Start  With Your Content Marketing Goals

    Start with defining your goals. The goals could vary from building trust with your customers to raising awareness or deepening loyalty with existing customers. The goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). Each goal should have a budget assigned to it and check your performance against the budget to achieve the best ROI.

    Identify Personas

    Build a buyer persona for your audience. Identify the top two personas for customers you wish to target. A buyer persona deals with your customers motivations, pains, trusted sources and process of how consumers consume your content. Based on Buyer Persona, yo can determine how you want to tell your brand’s story to them.

    Keyword Research

    Identify the most profitable keywords for your buyer persona. Study competition to understand the keywords they are using to target audiences. Use Free keyword research tools to identify the right keywords.

     Content Marketing Planning Sheet
    Your blog posts, emails, eBooks, social media posts and podcasts need to fit into a bigger picture. Start with audience personas that you are targeting and create a plan to target each
    Points to keep in mind while creating your content marketing Planning Sheet or Calendar:
    What are the most often asked questions for each buyer persona? What are the different buying stages?
    What is the conversation surrounding your brand or category? Collect all possible information by tracking social mentions, Google alerts and any  other source of tracking information.
    What are the preferred content formats? This could be written text, images, infographics, videos, podcasts etc.
    When is the best time to publish? Day, Date, Time
    What is the best way to reach your audience?
    Seasonality and  Holidays
    Write and Optimize Your Content

    Optimize your content for Search Engines, to ensure that your content can be found. This can be done by optimizing your content for SEO, following copywriting tips and a checklist for your blog posts.

    Publish Your Content

    Publish your content on all available platforms including blog, forums, LinkedIn and other third-party sites.

     Promote Your Content

    Promote your content on Social Media sites, and brand sites. Share teasers of your content with paid search and brand sites.

    Measure Refine and Repeat

    Measure the performance of your content by mapping the performance for key metrics.

    1. Consumption Metrics

    2. Sharing Metrics

    3. Lead Generation Metrics

    4. Sales Metrics

  • Content Marketing Vs. Native Advertising

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    Telling the difference between Content Marketing and Native Advertising may not be easy. Here is a summary of key differences that can help you understand how to choose the approach that is right for your brand.

    For Content Marketing the goals are throughout the marketing funnel right from generating awareness to increasing conversions. For native advertising the awareness goal is of paramount importance.

    Content Marketing

    content

     

    Content Marketing deals with bringing informative, educational or entertaining content to users in the format that helps brands change perception, create awareness or increasing conversions in a way that content answers the queries of customers.

    Content Marketing is also seen as a tool for optimizing content for Search Engines to improve your site’s page rank.

    As a marketing strategy Content Marketing, provides long term sustainable value for clients where KPIs are linked to number of leads, shares and high quality links.

    Content Marketing targets different audience personas with a story telling approach designed to answer specific queries.

    Native Advertising

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    Native Advertising follows the natural form and function of the user experience, characterized by special ad format. They follow the editorial guidelines of the publication, to make the brand content seem like an editorial.

    Designed to look like the editorial content they appear in the users direct reading flow and do not disrupt the user experience.

    Designed for the native flow the ads are labeled  as “sponsored” or “ad”. The ads tend to be more persuasive as users are more open to messaging that follows the form of editorial content.

    Though Content Marketing and Native Advertising deal with similar goals of awareness generation, according to Social Times, “It’s important to note that the goals for content marketing and native advertising are very different. While both want to increase brand awareness, content marketing is also intended to drive conversions. This bears out in the key performance metrics as well: The number one metric for content marketing is the number of leads generated, where native ads usually depend on engagement metrics and impressions.”

    To see examples of Native Advertising, click here.

    For Content Marketing Innovations, click here.

     

     

  • Key Insights For Content Marketing For Holiday Season

    Holiday 2015 brought in a 60 percent growth in traffic and conversion rates.  The US retail online sales for Holiday Season 2016 are likely to grow by 13.3 percent according to eMarketer. Nearly 50 percent of shoppers have reported Holiday Shopping begins before Thanksgiving and nearly 25 percent start before Halloween.

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    Optimizing your campaign for audience segments can get your campaigns and content discovered by the target audience . The content Eco-system for your audience segments varies for different demographic. Smartphones are essential in the content path of Holiday Shopper with 76 percent shoppers conducting a local search  and visiting a physical location within 24 hours.  Equally important is the growth of Buy Online and Pick Up in store with 32 percent using the option in 2015.

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    Optimize your campaigns for local search intent. 82 percent of the shoppers refer to Smartphones while shopping prior to visiting a store. The Queries with Local Intent increased by 2X during Holiday season 2015.screen-shot-2016-09-21-at-10-12-30-am

    Define your audience segments and develop a persona for each audience segment. With profiles for each segment you can find out the purchase behavior for each segment, depending on the time they are likely to start shopping and the content that works for each persona. For instance, targeting teens with a personalization content strategy might work better, whereas for targeting  seasoned mature shopper, an opt-in email strategy might bring in best deals on a weekly basis.

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    Your Content Marketing Strategy  centered around your audience ensures sustained interest, throughout the holiday season. Co-promote your offers and campaigns with publisher boosts to ensure sustained interest. This will help your brand with Organic search results. Some of the tactics recommended by SEO experts WPROMOTE are to leave your Branded content on the main site navigation for SERP results. The content pieces that are likely to work for your category depend on what is popular with your target audience. For some categories, Gift Guides work better, while for others an image caption contest may generate increased engagement.

    According to WPROMOTE’s “100 Days Of Holiday” Whitepaper, the SEO firm recommends updating your website content and Metadata with Holiday related terms as early as October.

    Some of the charts from comScore reveal the weekly ramp up of online holiday retail sales making it important for brands to think their Online holiday retail strategy to be ready with Text Ads and Display Ads, as well as Social media strategy to be ready for online searchers and holiday shoppers.

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    The Traffic for Mobile and Desktops varies for different weeks. Keep in mind the changes in traffic volume and searches on mobile to optimize your bids accordingly.

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    Source: WPROMOTE’s Whitepaper “100 Days of Holiday” and comScore

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