There's more to social-email integration than share buttons
We know from what happens in 60 seconds in social media that we love to share on social networks. This amplification is what makes social media so powerful. We also know that with so many social updates, getting cut-through with social media can be difficult. Step forward email marketing which still offers reach and engagement. The obvious question; how can we integrate them - can they be "better together"? This was the topic for a recent presentation I gave at the eCircle Connect Europe 2012 event. The full presentation is available at the end of this post, but I thought I'd share some of the great examples of companies integrating social media into their email marketing. Thanks to Tim Watson for sharing some of these with me.
Start with who shares what?
Creating shareable content isn't quick, cheap or easy, you need to…
Which are the most popular search engines I should target in each country?
Its not often I look at trends data but its good to do every quarter. The popularity of search engines does change and within this blended search like video, images, local search is becoming more important.
My comments below focus on how this data has search implications but the links also show popular social networks & entertainment sites. This data is always useful when justifying time & effort for channels or campaigns. Another tool not mentioned below is Google's Adplanner (& its top 1000 sites report), this is a great tool when you need data / demographics on categories or specific websites.
Data on most popular UK search engines - Hitwise
March 2012 update - Hitwise have just published a simple infographic summarising UK search behaviour. The main insight which prompts questions about how we target through SEO and paid search…
By
14 Mar 2012
How to control social media ‘bush fires’ to protect your brand
Prior to the digital social media era, brands could control most marketing and communications channels.
Marketers could determine which messages were conveyed, to whom, where and when, thus ensuring their precious brand image was preserved intact.
Enter social media - the tinder to set fire to a previously dry marketing environment.
Social media’s power and reach deliver real power to consumers
Social media lets consumers refer, recommend, vote, score and comment positively or negatively on anything they feel or experience about a product or service.
A particularly big dose of fuel is added to the 'brand communications bush fire' by social media’s interactive real-time capacity to broadcast messages. Reach is potentially unlimited, extending through compelling multi-media formats, such as pictures and videos ‘taken on the go’ with smartphones.
Brands must be…
New data shows how slow is too slow
Conversion rate optimisation specialists have been recently shared two new pieces of research which show that page load speed should be a concern for all. I thought I'd summarise them here as a reminder that speed matters!
The first shows data shared by Walmart shows how their conversion rate varies as page load times increases. You can see there is a dramatic decline in conversion as page load times increases to 4 seconds:
Secondly Tagman published research that showed a similar pattern, except with specific conversion rates.
How can we review and improve our site performance?
Google has been releasing tools for to help you with your website loading speed for some time now but what is classed as a fast website and does it…
Ignoring customers will cost you revenue
Marketing emails from major and minor brands alike are often sent from a noreply email address - you will have seen them.
Either quite literally an address noreply@, or the email footer carries a statement like; "Please do not reply to this email, the account is not monitored, please contact customer support at ...". I think there's a lot more to them than meets the eye...
If a shop assistant failed to answer your questions you would shop elsewhere. So why are brands ignoring customers, in their millions, through email and social media communications?
Ignoring customers in social media
Interestingly, the social media marketing world is following the same approach as email marketing. This article notes that only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand.
The key to answering the…
Creativity paves the way to commercial success
Let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, people don’t care about brands that much, they care about themselves. As individuals busy in our own worlds, we care about what we want, need, worry about or want to solve.
It stands to reason then, that if we want people to pay attention to our brands (to Like, Click, Share, Comment), we often hear this as "engagement", then we have to face up to this fact and the human emotions where our brands risk falling in to the 'whatever' category, our target audience simply have better things to go and do. This is all getting worse for brands with the advance of mobile technologies and access to more information, tools, apps and social platforms.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you…
What makes the perfect email call-to-action (CTA)?
The recent post by Kath Pay discussing what makes an effective call-to-action in marketing emails showed how it's easy to get this wrong. No excuses now! Check out this new + useful infographic from Litmus that shows every issue about CTAs you could possibly want to know about.
A lot of the ideas are obvious, but the obvious isn't always obvious, particularly when there are other design constraints. Of course, colour and size get a mention, but did you know there is even a law to back this up; this Fitt's Law states that:
"The time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target".
I also enjoyed the snippet that showed that buttons with arrows encourage more clicks than those that don't - collectively these small tweaks can make a…
Five types of tools and techniques to keep up with the socialsphere
I think you'd agree that trying to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest developments in digital and social media marketing is a bit of a challenge? The scale of this challenge was brought home to me by these 60 seconds in social media infographics.
This is a particular challenge for me since I'm keen to keep my books up-to-date and deliver the most relevant info via SmartInsight to our Enewsletter, Facebook and Twitter subscribers. So I need to scan a lot of sources across the whole of digital marketing, as many non-specialist marketers/digital marketers do, but then find the most important ones - this is where software can help. So in this post I thought I'd share a couple of the approaches and tools I use.
It's not at all sophisticated really, so do let me know about how…
How engaged are users of different social platforms?
Back in June 2011, we shared an infographic showing what happens in 60 seconds in social media, now we're updating it with a new infographic from Social JumpStart. This one has some additions including Pinterest showing that for all our current interest in Pinterest it's nothing compared to YouTube. It's a pity they haven't included Google+ either.
It certainly summarises the challenges we face today as marketers and consumers of content today!
How do you find this - exciting? or scary? I find it both - to be involved in such a dynamic area, but which presents huge challenges in being first and getting cut-through. I created a companion post taming the social media firehose which shared ideas on tools I used to keep up-to-date.
Here…
Not Provided search queries will affect how your report on your search engine marketing
Source : Google Inside Search Blog
Importance : [rating=4]
Our Commentary
A recent announcment on the Google Inside Search blog post confirmed Google's plans to roll out encrypted search across local Google services (.co.uk, .fr, .de etc).
You may recall this change was rolled out across Google.com in October last year and you will have undoutedly seen the impact in your own analytics as the amount of keyword data set to "Not Provided" has grown.
Consultant and Smart Insights commentator Dan Barker has catalogued the impact of the recent change in the UK and we have seen this also in our analytics. Here he shows the recent change.
Dan refers to this as Google "hiding search data" and that's how we see it - it's…
