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“Your email database might show big numbers,” writes Loren McDonald at Silverpop, “but 25 percent to 40 percent of your subscribers, or more, could be inactive without showing any obvious symptoms.”
Described by Dela Quist as “unemotionally subscribed,” such recipients have active email accounts, but don’t open your messages, click through, unsubscribe or report your messages as spam. They do… nothing.
And while it’s nice to keep subscriber numbers up, the presence of inactive accounts can have a negative impact on your:
- Deliverability rates. “ISPs are beginning to factor activity into the algorithms they use to determine whether to deliver or block email messages,” notes McDonald.
- Performance measurements. “Including nonresponders in your metrics analysis depresses your email engagement and response rates and leads to muddied assessments of your email program’s performance.”
- Resource allocation. Email campaigns have a relatively low cost, but there’s no sense in spending any money on subscribers who will never open a message. “These resources will deliver a better ROI when focused on the actively engaged,” he explains.
To help resolve the situation, McDonald recommends a four-step action plan:
- Segment your inactive subscribers into customers who have made a purchase and prospects who have done nothing more than open a message.
- Create reactivation campaigns that give recipients clear opportunities to re-engage or unsubscribe.
- Manage nonresponders, for instance by sending less frequent, more aggressive offers. If you become confident they’re unlikely to re-engage, remove them from your active database.
- Monitor and optimize your reactivation campaigns based on the results you see.
Give ’em a nudge. The worst thing you can do with inactive subscribers is nothing. So spark their interest—or drop them.
Source: Silverpop
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Don’t make the mistake of assuming thought leadership springs automatically from content marketing. “Thought leadership is not created with one, two or three pieces of content,” writes Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions. “It’s created with the consistent application of ideas and concepts that helps to define a strategic direction your prospects should pursue to get what they want over the long haul.”
So how do you become a thought leader? Albee gives this advice:
Offer a glimpse into the future. “This means that you can’t just pontificate about the current state of affairs,” she says, “but must demonstrate that you have a vision for what’s coming down the pike.”
Bring something new to the conversation. There’s no value in telling people what they’ve already heard 20 times this week—give them a fresh perspective. “For your content to be considered thought leadership, it has to, well, stir up some thinking,” she explains. “Innovative content needs to get people to think about things differently.”
Inspire others to take action. Genuine thought leadership gets people excited about doing something—whether having a discussion with colleagues or improving a process—and provides them with actionable next steps. “You must narrow the focus to a specific audience in order to make these insights relevant and enticing enough because they’re understood and applicable to your audience’s specific situations,” she says.
You’re not a thought leader until your content marketing inspires an audience with innovative, insightful, actionable ideas and perspectives.
Source: Marketing Interactions.
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“It’s a global trend,” writes Geri Stengel at MarketingProfs. “Consumers want to buy from, employees want to work for, and other businesses want supplies from, socially responsible enterprises.” So how can you demonstrate your commitment while improving your bottom line? Stengel suggests the following:
Treat your employees with respect. Social responsibility begins within your organization and can yield tremendous rewards. “Employees who feel valued because they are paid a living wage or treated as an asset in a startup will serve customers better and generate a friendly atmosphere” says Stengel. “[T]hey feel as if they have a stake in the success of the business.”
Partner with a worthy cause. The smaller your business, she argues, the more you’ll benefit from an association with charitable organizations. You might sponsor an event, provide prizes for a raffle or serve as a drop-off point for donations. “Just do your research first,” she says. “Make sure the cause is one that matters to your target customers, and inform them about how you are helping.”
Make a monetary contribution. “Give part of your profits, whether for one night or on a regular basis, to a nonprofit or a fundraising event, such as Pizza Night for Little League,” she recommends. “Chances are, you’ll get new customers from among the nonprofit’s supporters.”
Buy from socially responsible suppliers. Customers want to know that the products or services they buy have a “clean” supply chain. They will look kindly, for instance, on materials acquired through Fair Trade channels and goods assembled without sweatshop labor.
With a socially responsible game plan, you do right by your community and your community does right by you.
Source: MarketingProfs.
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“Brand identifiability is under the advertiser’s control and is a key consideration in ad design,” note the authors of a recent research report on the effectiveness of visual ads. But because of rising “media noise” due to competing advertisements and “active ad avoidance by consumers,” it has become challenging for firms to grab attention, they note.
To clarify what’s working these days, the study focused on two key areas affecting brand recognition:
- Feature complexity was measured by noting an ad’s jpeg file size, which is determined by the amount of detail and variation in the three basic visual features across an image—color, luminance and edges.
- Design complexity focused on six general principles: quantity of objects, irregularity of objects, dissimilarity of objects, detail of objects, asymmetry of object arrangement and irregularity of object arrangement.
Here is the short version of what they found:
- Feature complexity hurts brand attention and the viewer’s attitude toward an ad.
- Design complexity helps attention to the pictorial and to the advertisement as a whole, to ad comprehensibility and the attitude toward an ad.
The authors suggest that designers…
- Keep feature-based “visual clutter” to a minimum: White space is still important; brands still need to be showcased.
- Make design elements more complex: patterns on a shirt; one large object in front, smaller ones in back; objects with differing shapes, textures, colors—to keep things visually interesting.
Keep it simple, with complex touches. As advertisers compete for the attention of an image-saturated audience, a simple overall format with complex elements to draw the eye in may be the best approach to making a brand message stick.
Source: “The Stopping Power of Advertising: Measures and Effects of Visual Complexity” by Rik Pieters, Michel Wedel and Rajeev Batra.
See what Shadowbend Studios can do to help you with your Graphic Design needs…
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“Even in an increasingly real-time Web, email remains a critical channel to embrace for B2B marketing success,” says Maria Pergolino in a post at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog. “However, it’s a channel that’s poorly treated due to our excitement at the extreme ROI potential.”
Sloppiness can impair deliverability and damage your bottom line, Pergolino warns. To avoid that fate, consider tactics like these that ensure your messages continue to reach their intended recipients:
Create a compelling welcome message. According to Pergolino, many companies neglect this action, which is a critical component of any email marketing program. “It is essential as it sets the tone for what readers can expect,” she explains.
Keep your list squeaky clean. The presence of unknown users, inactive addresses and spam traps can do serious harm to your deliverability rate. “Focus on eliminating these addresses from your current list,” she advises, “and add steps in place to keep your list clean, such as quarantining new data, making it easy for customers to provide updated information, considering a confirmed opt-in, and vetting new data sources carefully.”
Authenticate yourself as a sender. The benefit of authentication is that it identifies you “as a legitimate business as opposed to someone involved in spamming or phishing scams.”
Organize your infrastructure. Work with your ESP and IT departments to identify and resolve problems as soon as they occur.
Send ultra-relevant messages. “Take the time to listen to your audience,” Pergolino advises. “Learn their behaviors and motivations; do this through both qualitative and quantitative methods.”
Know your readers, and help them know you. You’ll get the best results from your email marketing program by making sure your messages reach intended recipients who like receiving them.
Source: Daily Fix.
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While most experts will say there’s no such thing as the perfect time to send your email offer or newsletter, conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday—generally speaking—is the best day for a campaign, and Friday the worst.
“The theory behind the rule of thumb makes sense,” notes Caroline Ruggiero at the Marketo blog. “[E]mail too early in the week and people are too busy with their actual work to open or focus on your message. Email end of the week and your message will get buried in a barrage of messages everyone has to dig out of come Monday morning.”
But her own preference for browsing work email on Sundays made her wonder if Sunday could be the new Tuesday for email marketers. Although the weekend is a time to unwind, she explains, “it’s also a time to catch up on newsletters, lower-priority messages, and feeds without the distraction of, well, work. I am absolutely more open to reading marketing messages in this quieter, more relaxed setting.”
There’s some evidence that she’s not alone in her habit:
An AOL survey found that 62% of respondents checked their work email over the weekend.
According to a Pew study, two thirds of Americans do work-related research at home.
The only way to know whether your B2B audience reads email on weekends is—of course—to test it. “Perhaps,” says Ruggiero, “your key target might be guilty of indulging in some Sunday work email, just like me.”
Sunday might work. Don’t just assume that weekdays are the best time to reach your customers. If you check your email over the weekend, it stands to reason that they might, too.
Source: Marketo.
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“To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of [an] understatement,” says Rohit Bhargava at the Influential Marketing Blog. “The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year.”
According to Bhargava, smart marketing has played a critical role in the company’s success—and you might learn a thing or two from techniques such as these:
Setting the stage with amazing photography. High-quality images create a compelling visual experience for Gilt.com customers. “More than that,” he says, “the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.”
Nurturing an atmosphere of exclusivity. While there are ways to skirt the rule, new customers may only join the site when invited by an existing customer. “It doesn’t pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members,” notes Bhargava, “but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.”
Creating a sense of urgency. When online shoppers place items in shopping carts, they have only 10 minutes to complete the purchase before an item returns to the virtual shelf. “The aim,” he explains, “is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase.” But it also converts browsers to buyers with lightning speed.
With 2 million members, Gilt.com is doing something right—meaning some of its techniques might work for you.
Source: Influential Marketing Blog
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Marketing experts often tell you which features your website absolutely must have. But for a post at the HubSpot blog, Kipp Bodnar created a list of items you should delete as soon as possible from your site. Here are a few items that deserve immediate elimination:
Complicated animation. There’s little upside to Flash-based wizardry that hinders the visitor experience and impedes search engine optimization. “Perform a test,” he advises. “Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site.”
Industry jargon. Whatever your specialization, you start to assume everyone understands industry-specific language. This is a mistake. “Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles,” Bodnar says. “Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations.”
Images. Every website needs images—but you might have too many. Excessive images slow download speed when visitors click on a page, and search engines consider this a negative factor in page rankings. “Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site,” he explains. “Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company’s story.”
“Contact Us” forms. While you must provide contact information, Bodnar believes a generic contact form is more likely to attract spam than qualified leads. He suggests landing pages with dedicated forms for specific offers: “For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment.”
Sometimes less at your website is more—both for your customers’ user experience and search engine optimization.
Source: HubSpot
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In a post at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow presents a screenshot that looks like a page from a 19th-century novel: lengthy paragraphs filled with sentences of uniform length.
That, he notes emphatically, is not how your email messages should look.
“In fact, you wouldn’t read the words if that was an email,” he says. “The wall of text is a barrier that few will bother scaling. No matter how good the writing, how valuable the information, how trusted the source, response is sacrificed because the paragraph length demands more reading effort than some are prepared to commit.”
It’s all psychological. The same information that looks ponderous in two paragraphs appears easy-to-digest when broken into five paragraphs. In other words, the rules you learned at school about fully developed paragraphs simply don’t apply to online communication.
Here’s what you need to do:
Write paragraphs that occupy as little as one line but don’t exceed six lines. “This … issue becomes more pressing as screen displays narrow, thanks to the spread of smartphones, netbooks and other mobile devices,” Brownlow notes.
Reduce the sense of monotony by varying the length of your paragraphs and sentences. “Throw in the occasional one-line paragraph or a three-word sentence and you may annoy your English professor,” he explains. “But you give the reading landscape contours and diversity. The content looks like a melody of words, not a dirge.”
Write the words and the music. Engage your readers with lyrically arranged text that gives your message visual appeal.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
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At least once a day, writes Joe Pulizzi at the Junta 42 blog, he receives an email asking how much content marketing (print and online) should cost. The short answer: It depends.
“Look at it this way,” he says. “I can pay $12 dollars to play eighteen holes of golf at a Sandusky, Ohio, golf course.” The course is poorly maintained, drinkable water is scarce and you’ll have to walk since the golf carts are notoriously unreliable. “I can also pay three-hundred dollars at Pinehurst in North Carolina,” he continues, where the course is immaculate, knowledgeable caddies abound and you might see a celebrity.
Which course he chooses to play will depend on his goal. “There are times for each situation (just like content),” he says. “If I just want to swing the club, the $12 course is perfect. Exactly what I needed. If I want an experience, or want to share an experience with someone else, I may take the rare occasion to play Pinehurst.”
In other words, a situation might call for “cheap” content, or it might call for “premium” content. “Just like playing golf where they both have 18 fairways and greens,” says Pulizzi, “500 words is 500 words. What happens with those 500 words is where the price difference comes in.”
So if you hire someone to write 500-word blog posts for $15 or $25 a pop, you’re going to get $15 or $25 blog posts—written quickly, with minimal research or editorial oversight. A solidly researched piece that has gone through a traditional vetting process will cost more.
As you budget for your content marketing, remember that you’re going get what you pay for.
Source: Junta 42.
