5 advanced measures to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your emails
How engaging are your emails? You will certainly have ideas about their strengths and weaknesses - but do you really know how engaging they are? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates of different email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is?
In this article I’ll show some advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates.
Techniques to Review Email Marketing Engagement
By using these more sophisticated measures to review your emails you will be able to zero in on which aspects of your emails aren’t working and so improve engagement.
1. Engagement with creative. Let’s start with the obvious short-term engagement with an email communication. This is where it’s common to measure opens…
7 key areas of focus to review and improve your email marketing capability
The last couple of days, I’ve been attending the International Email Expo at Frankfurt. It’s been nice to listen to and discuss the latest advice from email marketing consulting friends old and new @JordieVan Rijn, @KathPay, @TamaraGielen, @DelaQuist, Bruno Florence, @pignonsurmail, Philip Storey, @MichaelLeander and last but not least, my host Torsten Schwarz.
It’s been good to see how email marketing in thriving in Europe. It’s no more than what you would expect since email remains a core communications channel and Email drives far more revenue than social media. It’s been interesting to see from the talks and when judging the email marketing awards some really advanced examples of targeted, relevant emails which are delivering excellent results.
Reviewing your email marketing capability
In my talk I was looking to help attendees…
How e-marketing talent can be improved with digital marketing training simulations
Business owners and agency executives are looking to provide marketing and sales staff with access to the latest technologies for reaching out to potential customers while creative leaders are looking to enable lean teams which use online tools to plan and execute complex action items with predictable results. The cloud is now enabling a new range of simulation services which can help improve the operational skills and decision-making abilities of marketers through training.
For businesses reliant on digital marketing which experience turnover of personnel that holds different levels of expertise we see two areas that will be transformed by simulation: first, on-the-job training and sourcing candidates for project assignments.
Since the advent of readily available computing resources, simulation has been used in training military staff, in medical schools and in the nuclear energy sector. Simulations provide considerable learning value where there is high-risk…
New survey reveals email marketing top for ROI, but still much potential for improvement
Shocking news in the latest Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census: 68% of respondents rated email's ROI as excellent or good (the top result).
OK, not a shock.
However, despite the continuing strong results from email, the report suggests there is still much potential for improvement. The related infographic is below, and one area definitely in need of more focus is mobile email.
When I state the mobile email needs more focus, I don't just mean mobile email design, but mobile email as a whole. So what needs optimising?
Ignoring measurement issues for the moment, around half of mails are recorded as opened on a mobile device. This is the obligatory stat to remind us that mobile is not the future, but the present (almost one billion smartphones were sold…
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12 May 2014
Harnessing the 4 key drivers of customer control
The overwhelming choice of apps, websites and other digital platforms that customers have at their finger tips through multiple devices creates a swirling galaxy for brand owners to navigate and understand when looking to build customer relationships.
Brands need to take advantage of and be part of this technological 'galaxy of delights', as more and more time is spent by customers on electronic devices and the penetration and usage of tablets and smart phones continues apace. Since customers will interact with brands across this range of platforms, it's important to remember the context within a wider customer journey and develop integrated propositions.
But how do you make sense of all of this as a marketer? In this post I will explain a framework on how to approach different technology platforms to create advantage and deliver better customer…
Site relaunch conversion rate disaster recovery
Developing a persuasive and effective e-commerce website for relaunch involves team work and months of planning. But what happens if your new site actually converts at a lower rate than the one it replaces?
After being approached by clients in exactly this situation the team at AWA Digital developed a programme to quickly regain the conversion rates of the old website - and start improving it.
Called the Conversion Disaster Recovery Plan, it incorporates tools and the systematic application of techniques including research, analysis and split-testing.
The step-by-step plan is designed to elicit the underlying reasons why visitors to the new site buy less, uncover where the real problems lie and develop test pages to overcome them. Based on AWA's extensive experience of Conversion Rate Optimisation, the Plan is summarised below as a flowchart and recommended tools to get feedback from customers and assess their behaviour.
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YouTube's 2014 guide to meta data in video optimisation
Did you see that YouTube released a Creator Playbook for Brands in March 2014? The Playbook is essentially a YouTube handbook – it tells you what you need to do as a brand to get the most out of the functions and tools that are available to YouTube channel owners. Possibly more than anyone else, YouTube (of the Google machine) are very aware of how advertising is changing shape in a climate of growing online content and shrinking attention spans.
In this article, I will provide you with what I hope will be a handy summary on what the Playbook says about optimising your content with video metadata.
Why bother with metadata?
There are a number of avenues through which you can generate views of your YouTube videos. Some viewers will find your videos in a simple, direct step. For example, they may visit…
Plus a great Facebook UGC idea
I wrote previously about a useful tool that enables you to link up social conversations from Facebook and Twitter with a blog post that then turns your blog into the engagement hub pulling in comments made on the other platforms.
As I explained before, our usual strategy is to post a nice meaty article on the blog and then create a link to it on Facebook. Now I'd rather have people on the blog than our Facebook Page any day (it's owned rather than earned media and means we stand a better chance of monetising the content too) but the majority of users really like Facebook as the conversation platform so inevitably that's where most of the comments surface.
We also create a lot of content that tends to be "Facebook only". Some of the meme-type content, quick pictures and status updates just wouldn't sit properly…
Improved targeting of Company LinkedIn Company pages and posts
Importance: [rating=3]
> Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement of new International features
This week, LinkedIn have introduced two new features to allow companies to target their content better to LinkedIn members in different countries by improved geotargeting by country location and language preference.
Given that 2/3 of LinkedIn members live outside of the US, and the network is available in 21 different languages, LinkedIn are following Facebook and Twitter (also announced this week), to allow members to connect social updates and ads with local audiences. For LinkedIn, this will be particularly useful for larger B2B brands who tailor content for different international markets.
For full details of the options to tailor company updates, company names, descriptions by country see this Help Page:
For companies using LinkedIn for marketing purposes such as lead generation…
How to win friends and engage your brand circle
Digital marketers understand that there’s strength in numbers better than anyone. After all, in a world where a campaign’s success depends on 'buzz,' numbers are something brands live by, whether they’re spreading the word or planning new ways to engage fans and customers.
But strength in numbers is essential for building a reputation, too. Just look at Governor Chris Christie’s recent press disaster, 'Bridgegate.' At the first hint of scandal, his band of supporters, the Republican Party vanished.
But what if Bridgegate had happened just before the 2016 presidential election? Chances are, Christie would have been getting support left and right. (Well, maybe just from the right.)
At that point, his 'brand circle' (the Republicans) would have tried to win swing voters. And a group is more powerful than an individual, especially when…
