Essential checks even the email professionals get wrong. What should your Email marketing broadcast checklist contain?
Does your email campaign check all the boxes? A possible mistake can be at best embarrassing, at worst a legal risk or an opportunity cost of missed revenues that could lose you your job. Although as marketers it is our task to get the most out of our communication, the test, test, test mantra only applies to split testing and sometimes Quality Assurance for email doesn't get the attention it should as we all battle common sense / best practices amnesia from time-to-time and Murphy's law must have been developed for email marketing, right?
You'll know that there was once a man named Murphy whose law simply reads:
'Everything that can go wrong, will.'
Similarly in email marketing, the more campaigns you run, the more mistakes are likely. But rather than just accepting you can manage these risks, in fact this risk reduction approach…
How rates differed between US, UK, Spain and Australia over the holiday sales period
With over 100 million shoppers and over $40bn in revenue from the top 100 US retailers alone, could retailers have earned more revenue during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday frenzy weekend? Well, according to the new statistics just released by Barilliance, on line shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts at surprisingly high rates:
Average shopping cart abandonments were at 65%, and this was higher in the USA at 75%. Interesting, that conversion rates were 1.5 higher of those buying via desktop, compared to mobile phone users.
Do we think that consumers are still not feeling reassured that mobile phones are secure, or ecommerce sites not geared up for mobile consumers and retailers have not foreseen the risk of optimising their shopping carts.
…
8 reasons to use dynamic email personalisation and 18 scenarios for using dynamic content
EmailMonks have produced another informative infographic for email marketers looking to improve their use dynamic content.
As you will see in the infographic, dynamic, also known as smart or adaptive content enables email marketers to personalise their messages in an efficient way. Different messages or different offers can be given to different subscribers depending on their profile fields using the same template rather than creating a separate email for each target segment.
It's packed with examples, so you may need to click to expand to see the detail.
Thanks to Email Monks for sharing their Infographic. Email Monks offer fresh email design, template customization and design to HTML…
Best practice principles and examples showing how testing colour can boost conversion
In my previous post exploring research and examples showing the principles of Colour Psychology, I illustrated how colour choices can impact user engagement and conversion. There is so much to share on this topic, that in this follow-up I look into more detail on the use of colour for your Call To Actions (CTAs).
When you want visitors to out-click your competition, some people suggest that you do things with big, fancy names like use conversion-centered design principles. It would be a whole lot simpler to say 'design your pages so people are unable to avoid clicking where you want them to.'
One of the best ways to do this is to employ the proper combination of colour and contrast. The colour elements of a landing page work together to immediately capture the attention, and direct the visitor’s eye to that all…
What does research show are the emotions that content must create to encouraging sharing?
Marketing has forever been about making people aware of one’s brand, as a precursor to making them actually desire it. Since the very concept of branding and proactive selling (marketing) began back in the late 19th century, the goal has always been the same, even if the methods have changed beyond all recognition; connect with people whom you feel are likely to relate to whatever product or service it is you are offering, and make them want it.
With this in mind, marketing has been, is and always will be about relating to your audience and whether this is done online, offline, through mainstream or non-mainstream avenues, is largely irrelevant; whatever succeeds in triggering a collective positive emotion in one’s target audience, is always going to be the correct approach. Remove all the jargon and fancy marketing terminology,…
How to avoid the all-too-common mistakes of using infographics
Infographics have been around for centuries. According to the infographic entry on Wikipedia, one of the first IGs was published in Rosa Ursina sive Sol in which infographics were used to visually demonstrate the sun’s rotation patterns.
Fast-forward to today and infographics have exploded in popularity! Simply typing 'infographic' into the Google Search bar pulls up more than 15,500,000 results. Visual content is taking over the web, with more people sharing visual content than text or links.
But first, let’s ask whether infographics should be part of a wider content marketing strategy. Of course they should be. It’s a no-brainer, right? But if it's so obvious, why do we see so many one-hit infographic wonders? Many infographics are created in isolation to illustrate a trend or to convey stats without any other content types to support or complement them.
Instead, infographics…
8 ways to integrate social media into your email marketing
Rather than email becoming obsolete, widespread use of social media updates via email has, in many ways, reinforced how email is an even more powerful marketing channel. I'm sure many of you already use email and social media separately to help promote your business but how many of you integrate your social media and email marketing?
Including and promoting social sharing or share with your network options in an email campaign is beneficial for a couple of reasons:
They extend the reach of your emails: The more people who share your email, the more potential you have for opens, clicks and conversions.
They provide an opportunity for list growth: The more eyes on your emails, the better chance you have of gaining new subscribers.
So how do you integrate email and social media? Here…
A creative subject line choice boosts clicks 228% for Money Dashboard
In this example, the email was gave uplift when targeting an inactive list segment and the winning subject line was itself being pitted, in an A/B split test, against a previously strong performer. So this was not an easy win against a poor subject line. It also shows the power of a creative approach to devising subject lines.
Re-engaging inactive customers is an important element of all email strategies.
Money Dashboard email marketing campaign case study
As this case study shows, the gap between good and great for inactive customers is wider than for active customers.
The details below include how it was done and a drill down into the performance difference between active and inactive customers.
Money Dashboard is a superb free online solution that keeps track of your…
A 10 step online PR process to prepare and initiate the perfect Digital PR campaign
The C word, you know the one I’m talking about. It’s the word that can put you in the good books with Google and holds the key to adding value to your clients website. We’ve all heard time and time again that this is the key to gaining success in the world of digital marketing. That’s true, but don’t for a minute think that this creation of content is the end of the road. Contrary to Kevin Costner and his 'Field of Dreams' movie quote, if you build it, they may or may not come.
So! What do we have to do to get our beautiful creations out there? Whether they are artistic infographics or feature length articles, you can guarantee that somebody, somewhere wants them to…
The monthly Smart Insights round up of the latest developments and advice for marketers
There were three major digital marketing platform developments to be aware of in November - these are the changes to the Facebook newsfeed and Twitter tools covered below in our social media section and Google introduced mobile SEO-friendly site labels as featured in the @SmartInsights alert in our SEO and content marketing section.
Digital Marketing Strategy and planning for 2015
Well, it’s already that time of year where it becomes popular to look at marketing trends for the year ahead. Many readers will naturally have been planning and prioritising how you invest in marketing in the year ahead for some time already.
In my article on digital marketing trends for 2015 we asked readers of Smart Insights to vote on what they saw as the most commercially significant trend for their business in the year ahead. We have now had over…
