Monthly Archives: December 2013

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Email Marketing Tuesday: Easy Way to Get Email Subject Lines Plus Tips in Writing Email Subject Lines

Email subject lines are the key deciding factor people take in opening emails that a digital marketing manager should take seriously -Source: http://digitalmarketer.com/infographic-subject-lines-that-command-reader-attention/

Image Source: Digital Marketer

The email subject line plays a large part if your email gets opened, so taking the time and effort to create intriguing subject lines is worth your time. The first thing your audience sees when you send them an email is the subject line, so discover what makes your audience open your email.

For me, writing the email subject line is the hardest part of the email marketing process, and crafting the email subject line is usually the last thing I do before deploying an email marketing effort. After writing the copy, a email subject line comes to mind. According to Mequoda, you can just steal someone else’s email subject line. As a Digital Marketing Manager, I receive many professional and promotional emails every day, and I may consider Mequoda’s suggestion one day.

Currently, when I receive a cleaver email, I file it away in my “Good Copy” folder as a reminder for something that I may want to test. Now, I will create a new folder called “Good Email Subject Lines” to file away emails with subject lines that might be worth testing. In the meantime, let’s talk about some tips to help you and me write compelling email subject lines that increase email open rates.

Tips to Help You Write Email Subject Lines:

  1. Offer a quick and easy way to do something
  2. Talk about the reader’s self-interest – something that is a benefit
  3. Give the reader some good news
  4. Arouse curiosity, preferably related to tips 1, ,2, or all of the above

Since email subject lines play a large factor in your email marketing messages getting opened, you, a Digital Marketing Manager, should take the necessary time to craft the appropriate email subject line that your audience will open. You may get inspiration for your email subject lines from your inbox, or use the tips above to craft a clever email subject line that will make your audience open your email. Whatever you decide, always test your subject lines to maximize your open rates.

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SEO Mondays: Improve your Google Rank by Implementing 7 Link Building Strategies

7 Link Building StrategiesKeyword strategies get the most attention for SEO, but link building is another SEO strategy that Digital Marketing Managers can utilize to increase website rankings on search engine results pages. Today’s SEO Monday blog post talks about 7 link building strategies.

7 Link Building Strategies:

  1. Manual Link Building
  2. Competitive Link Building
  3. Links via Embedded Content
  4. Linkbait & Viral Campaigns
  5. Content, Technology & API Licensing
  6. Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades
  7. Link Reclamation

Whatever link building strategy you decide to employ, just keep in mind that you should create relevant links for your content to increase the trust with your customers and search engines. The more relevant your links, the higher the quality of your links, the more value search engines will place on your content, and ultimately, the higher you will rank on search engine result pages.

Before starting your link building strategies, create a profile of websites and social media sites where your target audience spends time. Then, think about how you can build links from those sites to you site.

7 Link Building Strategies Details

1. Manual Link Building
Create a list of relevant non-competitive sites and pages, and then, make a request for a link with the website. Try to find an actual person who manages the site to make a request for displaying your link. This form of link-building is the most time consuming, but it produces high quality links.

2. Competitive Link Building
Complete a search of places where your competitor has links and see if you can post links on those same pages. Examples of where you and your competitor might both have links include industry directories or associations. This process doesn’t produce links with the highest quality, but it isn’t time-consuming like the Manual Link Building Strategy.

3. Links via Embedded Content
By offering widgets and embeddable forms of content, you can earn links back to the page of your choice when other websites include your work in blog posts, articles, or webpages. For example, you can use scribd.com to upload one of your PowerPoint presentations and embed a mini graphic of the PowerPoint on your website. When someone clicks on the graphic, scribd.com earns a link. This link building activity is not time consuming and produces high quality links.

4. Linkbait & Viral Campaigns
Find industry bloggers or content hobbyists that offer relevant content to your website where you both have similar audiences. Contact these individuals and ask them to post your content on their site with a link back to your site. It may take time to develop relationships with industry bloggers and hobbyists, but if both of you share each others content, you can build high quality links.

5. Content, Technology & API Licensing
With this strategy, you syndicate your content or create licenses with other websites to post your content.  Then, who ever distributes your content produces a link back to your site. Producing these types of links my take time, but once the relationship is formed the opportunities for building high quality links is limitless.

6. Partnerships, Exchanges & Trades
These types of links include reciprocal links, discounts, or invitations to events.  To maintain the quality of these links, don’t sell links. Building these types of links can be simple as long as both parties are happy, but the quality isn’t as high.

7. Link Reclamation
Find all potential broken links, out-of-date resources, and 404 pages, and then, redirect them back to your homepage. While this takes time, this strategy produces high quality links. Plus, this strategy is just good practice and can help build a relationship with customers.

Good luck utilizing one or many of the above link building strategies. Just remember to build relevant links for your content. For every link you build, ask yourself if the link feels natural or not.  If the link doesn’t feel natural rethink the link.

Visual of alternative Link Building Strategies

Additional Link Building Strategies listed from hard to easy to implement

Strategies in the above graphic are list from hardest to easiest to implement. However, think about implementing a combination of these strategies to reap all the benefits for your websites SEO. The source of the graphic is from Brands Exposed.

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Email Marketing Tuesday: Taking Full Advantage of your Transactional Emails

Welcome to Email Marketing Tuesday: Taking full advantage of your transactional emails by communicating with your prospects and customers. Transactional emails are an opportunity to communicate with your audience via email messages triggered by an action they took or an action they need to take.

Since you only have a short period of time to attract and maintain your audience’s attention, inserting multiple messages in your transactional emails could be an opportunity get emails opened and call to actions taken.

What are Transactional Emails?

According to Mailchimp, transactional emails include messages with content tailored to a single recipient and only to them through a transaction that they made online. Others consider transactional emails as triggered, automated, real-time, or personalized emails.

Types of Transactional Email:

  • Welcome
  • Thank You
  • Bill
  • Renewal
  • Invoice
  • Receipt
  • Order Confirmation
  • Order Status
  • Post Purchase Review
  • Email Address Confirmations
  • Activation
  • Upsell/Cross Promotional
  • Re-activation
  • Website Behavior
  • Event Countdown
  • Shopping Cart Abandonment
  • Forget Username or Password
  • Notice for an update

According to MarketingSherpa, only 40% of  marketers use transactional emails. So, there may be an opportunity for digital marketing managers to benefit from transactional emails. However, I suggest you use transactional emails that make sense for your audience.

Thinking about the different types of transactional emails mentioned, transactional emails contain short messages to keep your audience aware of their relationship with your website. Some contain a call to action like renewal and invoice emails, and others are informational emails.

Even if you are currently using transactional email, your next step in taking full advantage of your transactional emails is including an additional call to action. Below are different examples you can do:

  • For Welcome emails, include a call to action for them to go to your website to check out some tailored content. If you manage a history website and someone registers on the website mentioning an interest in the American Civil Way, send them a welcome email with a link to an article on your website about the American Civil War.
  • For Order Confirmation and Order Update transactional emails, you can insert a “people that bought your item also bought these items” section.
  • For a Reactivation emails, the email message should contain new or updated content that is similar to the last piece of content they saw.

The key to your transactional email is to make the message about your audience and offering them something that is triggered by their action, personalized, and offering them something tailored/relevant to them  in real-time.

Keep in mind transactional emails don’t have an 100% open rate, so don’t expect transactional emails to be the only solution to increasing website traffic or engaging your audience. Transactional emails are just another tactic to keep in your digital marketing toolbox that have the potential to increasing traffic. Also, just like any other digital marketing and email marketing tactic, you should complete A/B testing to maximize the results of your transactional emails.

Resources:

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SEO Monday: Google Pushs Organic Search Results Below the Fold

Welcome to SEO Monday’s. Last week, Google changed their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) pushing your organic search results below the fold in favor of images for Product Listings.

What does this mean for you?

Include images with keyword descriptions in your product listings, and you may want to test the pricing for your PPC bidding. For more information and screen shots of the new results pages, read Search Engine Journal’s “Breaking – Google Changes the SERP – Images are King and PPC Holds the Key to the Kingdom” article.

In other search engine news, Semantic Search is gaining ground. Semantic Search or entity search, uses machine intelligence to determine the intended meaning of the words you enter for your searches to deliver you more relevant search results.

Semantic Search works behind the scenes to deliver the results you need and takes content, context, and intent in to consideration when delivering results for each search. Now, when implementing your search engine optimization strategies, you need to have a deep understanding of how your current content users are finding you.  Also, you want to understand how the target market of your content conduct their searches on search engines. For more information, go to Search Engine Journal’s “The Stealthy Rise of Semantic Search” article.

Other Articles in Search to help you and your SEO:

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Blog your Way to Giving your Brand a Voice with some Personality and Enhance the Customer’s Experience with Teachable Moments

In the digital world that we live in today, it is a Digital Marketing Manager’s responsibility to make a brand stand out. By blogging, a Digital Marketing Manager can help their brand stand out and give their brand a voice with a personality. A blog not only educates the brand’s consumers, blogs make your brand credible and enhances the customer’s experience with your brand.

Another compelling reason to start a blog is that search engines love blogs. With Google’s Hummingbird, many Digital Marketing Managers are concerned about how to optimize their content to land on page one of a Google search results page.  Well, let your blog be your savior.

Hummingbird concentrates on the long-tail keyword searches, and blog content lends itself to including long-tail key word phrases naturally.  Therefore, if Digital Marketing Managers consistently post relevant content about your brand on a regular basis, Digital Marketing Managers can help their SEO as well.

8 components to include in your blog posts

  • A SEO optimized title
  • A long-tail search keyword phrase
  • Conversational tone
  • Format should include lists and whitespace
  • Length of post should be 500 words or less
  • Create a call to action
  • Don’t make a sales pitch
  • Lastly and most important, a Digital Marketing Manager must make sure the audience learns something from each post

As a school girl, my father asked me everyday what I learned in school, and I usually said nothing.  Then, one day, I asked my dad why he always asked me what I learned in school.  He told me that every day where I did not learn something was a day wasted. Therefore, every post where your audience does not learn something is a wasted post and a chance to alienate your audience which could cause a Digital Marketing Manager to have nightmares.

If you aren’t yet convinced to start a blog, consider the following statistics about blogs from Hubspot:

  •  B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not.
  • B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not.
  • 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.
  • 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog.

Additional Blogging Resources

  1. The Definitive Guide to Corporate Blogging for Marketers
  2. How to Blog for Business Success with Google’s Hummingbird
  3. Blogging 101
  4. “The Make Sure Every Story is Compelling and Share-worthy” section at the end of the Coca-Cola’s Storytelling: Three Lessons on Content Marketing and Creativity article

What and when is next Digital Marketing Manager post?

SEO Monday

Until Monday, have a great weekend and think about how you can make each blog post a teachable moment for your audience!

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A Digital Marketing Manager’s Journey to Keep up with Technology Visits Day 1 of Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2013 Cloud Expo1

Technology is constantly changing and to stay up to date and discover the multitude of tools available to me as a Digital Marketing Manager, I spent part of yesterday walking around Salesforce’s Dreamforce ’13 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center meeting with different exhibitors to educate myself about strategizing, deploying, measuring, managing, analyzing with the latest technology.

As a marketer, it is important for me to stay on top of new marketing tools and technologies that can either engage customer experiences or improve marketing processes.  To deploy email marketing, social media, and other digital marketing efforts, finding the right technology that fits with your company and customers is important to maximize responses and revenue.  In an effort to reduce the length of this post, only a portion of the exhibitors that I met with are mentioned.  The companies mentioned below are no more important than the companies that I didn’t mention, and the companies not mentioned will appear in future posts.

In today’s digital marketing age, capturing data and analytics does not always happen in a timely fashion. However, waiting for analytics from digital marketing efforts may be a thing of the past with Birst, a Salesforce plugin.  Birst pulls all of your data from all of your digital marketing efforts in real time making it easier to calculate return on investment, ROI, make any changes if necessary, and make data driven decisions.

While Birst helps deliver real-time results of your digital marketing efforts, you need to develop objectives that your digital marketing efforts need to meet.  To help you develop those objectives, First Rain can assist you.  They can deliver real-time relevant knowledge and data about your market to help you design realistic objectives and market strategies for your business.

Every day, marketers utilize many types of media for various marketing efforts that drive customers to websites to take actions.  The different types of media include direct mail, email marketing, Social Media, online advertising, mobile, etc. As customers take action on your websites, they follow a path that originated from one of the types of media used.  Standard Register’s SMARTworks Connect solution with Salesforce, you can figure out which effort motivated your customer to take action and calculate return on investment by type of marketing effort.

If your product is subscription based, Kinetic Growth can assist you with renewal automation, billing, invoices, quotes, credit card payments, and account management.

All of these applications assist marketers in their jobs.  Just keep in mind, these applications plug in to Salesforce.com.

Dreamforce ’13 is a conference for marketers using Salesforce.com and developers of Salesforce.com applications to help keep you up with the tools and technologies to maximize your revenue.

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Social Media for Digital Marketing Managers – Marketo’s 7 Golden Rules of Social Marketing

Most of yesterday was spent thinking about the most effective way to organize a weekly Social Media post for the Digital Marketing Manager blog that the day was over before I could post something for you.

Since Social Media falls under the digital marketing umbrella, it is necessary for the Digital Marketing Manager blog to cover Social Media, but how can one blog posting per week contain everything that happens every week in the world of Social Media with 500 words or less.

Social Media has a high number of tactics within digital marketing that a whole separate blog could be dedicated to it.

After contemplating how to organize the Social Media post for the Digital Marketing Manager blog, I found a solution for the time being. However, nothing is set in stone, and I welcome your comments on what you think should be included in Social Media.

Since I believe the strategizing process behind implementing social media tactics is extremely important rather than just diving in head first, the weekly Social Media post will primarily discuss planning and strategy, and then, the post will include links to articles about individual Social Media sites news and tips. Now, for the stuff you have been waiting for.

Social Media for Digital Marketing Managers – Marketo’s 7 Golden Rules of Social Marketing

  1. Don’t take yourself too seriously – give your brand a good personality to make your brand likeable.
  2. Inbound Marketing is not enough – combine inbound and outbound marketing efforts into all aspects of your marketing.
  3. Good Content and Solid Offers – Need content to engage customers.
  4. Strong Call to Action – After your content is consumed, what do you want your audience to do?
  5. Always add value – Social Media doesn’t work if there is no value added to your brand.
  6. Social Media is a 2 way street – Social Media opens the line of communication with prospects and customers, so you need to respond quickly and sincerely.
  7. Peer-to-Peer sharing gets your messages heard.

When implementing your Social Media tactics, keep these rules in mind to help you create superior customer experiences.

Source: Marketo’s The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing

Additional Links to Social Media Sites News or Tips

Thanks for reading Social Media Wednesday on this Thursday evenings.

Tomorrow’s topic – Blogging

Call to Action

Does it make sense for Social Media Wednesday to primarily discuss Social Media strategizing process as well as include links to additional Social Media articles? Please send me your comments.

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Welcome to Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever

Welcome to the 1st Email Marketing Tuesdays – Email Marketing is More Alive than Ever.

For a while now, the idea that email marketing is dead has been popping up. I beg to differ. You just have to re-think your Email Marketing practices by making them more personal and relevant.

In a survey from Act-On, 75% of the 19,464 marketers surveyed said Email Marketing is one of the top 3 most implemented campaigns, and 45% said Email Marketing activities are the top 2 marketing activities contributing to the sales pipeline. Given this information, it sounds like marketers use Email Marketing, and it sounds like Email Marketing activities are effective at getting customers to start the purchasing process.

In an article by Peter Yared called Email is Now Just Another Stream, he wrote, “Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, email marketing exceeds the performance of social advertising.”

Also, if Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn deploy Email Marketing messages as a tactic to get you to their social media sites, I think it is safe to say that Digital Marketing Managers can use Email Marketing as one of their strategies to find customers and generate revenue.

With everything said and done, Email Marketing is still an effective digital marketing strategy. The new challenge is continuing to make Email Marketing effective today, tomorrow, and for the next following years.

One of my favorite Email Marketing Strategies is segmenting my customers and tailoring the content for each segment. By tailoring the content of emails, you can make your email messages personal and relevant. I’ve test this strategy several times, and it always performs better than a generic email message.  Don’t take my word for it, test it on your next email marketing effort. You can test tailoring the email message, the email subject line, or both.  Just look at your database and discover how you can segment your email list.

So, it is safe to say that Email Marketing Managers aren’t going any where.  Just like all other aspects of Digital Marketing, marketers need to adapt to their customers needs and deliver engaging, relevant, and personal Email Marketing campaigns to generate results. I look forward to delivering you strategies and ideas on how to deploy effective email marketing campaigns.

Topics you will see from Email Marketing Tuesdays include:

  • Ideas to Test
  • Email List
  • Content including subject lines, from lines, and email copy
  • Different types of Email Marketing efforts like reactivation, shopping cart abandonment, welcome, and thank you emails efforts
  • Deliverability
  • Automation
  • Segmentation

What’s next up on CindyPlough’s Digital Marketing Manager Blog

Weekday Topic
Tomorrow Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Mobile Marketing
Next Monday SEO
Next Tuesday More Email Marketing

Have a great day.

Resources:
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SEO Mondays: Preparing your Keyword Analysis for your Website’s SEO

Welcome to the 1st SEO Monday: Preparing your Keyword Analysis for your Website’s SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the ability for your website to appear in the top position when your keywords or phrases are entered as search terms in Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The components involved in landing the top position include:

  • Keyword Analysis
  • Optimizing Content
  • Link Building
  • Making Content Easy to Share

Today’s Focus: How to complete a Keyword Analysis?

The Keyword Analysis process will generate the highest return in your SEO activities, and help you get your target audience to your website via search engines. Let your potential customers find you rather than you spending time and money to find potential customers by completing a Keyword Analysis.

The process of conducting a keyword analysis consists of three parts. The purpose is to determine what keyword phrases will help you appear on the first pages of the search engine results page, and then, you want to use these keyword phrases in your marketing copy, editorial content, any titles, and html tags used on your website.

To keep generating positive results from your SEO activities, your Keyword Analysis needs to be conducted on a regular basis as potential customers change the words they use to search for your products/services or how Google tweaks their algorithm.

Part 1 – Generate a list of your Website’s Keyword Phrases

Knowing that the average number of words entered into the search box on search engines are 3 to 4 words, your keywords are more like Keyword Phrases where each Keyword Phrase should be no more than 4 words. By including key phrases instead of keywords on your list, you decrease your competition for your keywords.

To help determine your keyword phrases talk to your sales teams and customers to see what search terms or phrases they use when looking for your products and services.

Part 2 – Determine the Competition for your Keyword Phrases

For each and every  keyword phrase on your list, enter it into Google.com with quotes around each keyword phrase . Look for the “About … results” in grey in the upper left hand section of the screen, and this will tell you how many pages contain your keyword phrase.

Why do we use quotes for this search?
Because Google will give us results with the exact match to what you searched for. Let’s say we are searching for SEO Management. If we use quotes around the phrase, we will get results where SEO Management appear next to each other. If you entered SEO Management without the quotes, you will get results where SEO and Management appear on the page, but SEO and Management don’t appear together. Using the quotes gives you an accurate picture of your competition.

Part 3 – Determine the Search Volume for your Keyword Phrases

  1. Create a list of your Keyword Phrases into Excel and Save the file as a CSV file (make sure the file only contains your Keyword Phrases)
  2. Login to your Google Adwords Account
  3. Under Tools and Analysis select Keyword Planner
  4. Click “Get Search Volume for a list of Keywords or group them into ad groups”
  5. Upload the CSV file with your keyword phrases
  6. Click “Get Search Volume”
  7. Select the “Keyword Ideas” Tab to see your results

After completing parts 1, 2, and 3, you may end up with an excel spreadsheet that looks similar to what you see below if you were looking for a Keyword Phrase about SEO for your website:

Keyword Phrase Google results with Quotes Average Monthly Searches Competition
SEO 191,000,000 90,500 High
SEO Management 207,000 480 High
Starting SEO 10,400 10 Medium
Planning SEO 17,600 10 Low

Given the data in the above table for potential keyword phrases about SEO, I many continue to play around with the words for my SEO Keyword Phrase until I find a SEO phrase that generates about 10,000 Google results and an average monthly searches around 400 with a Low to Medium Competition.

What do you have to look forward to for the rest of the week from Cindy Plough’s Digital Marketing Manager Blog?

Weekday Topic
Tomorrow Email Marketing
Wednesday Social Media
Thursday Content Marketing
Friday Mobile Marketing
Next Monday More SEO

I look forward to writing about email marketing tomorrow, so ta ta for now.

Resources for Keyword Analysis:

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