It's true: email deliverability best practice is not the most exciting topic, but it's a necessary evil

Ignore it and, by the time you've run into problems, it will take a very long time to fix. Pay attention to it and you'll have a better chance of landing in the inbox. Not a guarantee, just a better chance. One important thing to differentiate between is blocking and blacklisting, terms which are often used interchangeably although they have different levels of gravity. While no marketer wants their emails to be prevented from landing in the inbox, blocking is not worth panicking about as much as blacklisting.

What happens when your emails are blocked?

Blocking is something that happens at ISP level so your emails could be blocked in Outlook, but not Gmail, for example. All ISPs have different rules that determine which campaigns…

A Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) allows you to measure customer experience, how much a customer would recommend your business and satisfaction with your brand

There are some simple rules to follow when creating a customer satisfaction survey which gives you high-quality insights, accurate data and actionable findings, whether it's the metrics you include or question types which can enhance the feedback. In our Quick Win on how to create an effective customer satisfaction survey, we go into more detail about metrics and question types, how to analyse and interpret results and even how to project manage the process. In this blog post, we'll explore some effective question types which can help you pull together a useful CSAT.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You might be familiar with NPS as it’s grown massively in popularity amongst marketers globally. It’s a low effort and generally excellent indicator of how a business is doing. It’s especially worth adding…

Chart of the Day: Which objectives should be in your digital marketing plans?

"Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.” So said, Kenichi Ohmae, who shared the Japanese approach to business planning with its idea of “long-term planning horizons”. It's useful to be clear on the difference between vision vs goals vs objectives vs KPIs as the measurement pyramid relating them shows. With long-term digital marketing initiatives and transformation projects, the same is true, so it's essential that your digital marketing strategy features clear, SMART marketing objectives so that you have targets you can review performance against. Broader goals and vision can be useful too, to evangelize the benefits of digital marketing to the team. A recent report from Adestra highlights the importance of choosing the right objectives to include within a digital marketing plan structure. According to…

Converting leads into paying customers is the undying challenge for marketing teams and e-commerce companies year after year

Every business wants to grow their revenue and reach, yet many still struggle to understand what the numbers actually mean and how to use them to boost sales. Thanks to advances in big data and analytical technology, marketers now have access to more consumer data than ever before. However, this only serves to overwhelm over 50% of marketers, in turn making their marketing strategies ineffective. [si_guide_block id="5676" title="Download FREE Resource – Digital marketing plan template" description="Our popular marketing planning template built on the Smart Insights RACE planning system."/] Since there is access to so much information within a business’s sales and customer data, marketing teams tend to feel overwhelmed and unsure of the best ways to apply it. While nearly every dataset has its…

The elearning industry shows how to make niche marketing work

The internet is crowded with brands searching for the best way to grab consumers' attention — unfortunately, the roadmap to success is always in flux for digital marketers. With Google's constant algorithm tweaks, for example, tactics that drove traffic yesterday won’t always work tomorrow. Given how quickly best practices evolve, it's easy for marketers to get lost in the crowd, especially when working with a new industry that has no set of "rules" to follow and no clearly defined marketplace. A few months ago, I met with the head of marketing at a company that makes learning management systems, also known as eLearning software. He mentioned that the company's site traffic had been lower than expected and he was having a hard time generating leads. After talking a bit more, I found out that…

Google Analytics has not only made it easier for data-driven marketers to work in compliance with GDPR, but has also introduced a new feature to improve sales and marketing integration

In an era where every marketer is aspiring to be “data-driven”, you, yes you, need to make sure that your marketing decisions are informed by well-rounded data. When we speak about data analytics, Google Analytics is first to make an appearance in any marketer’s mind. Yet another Google tool that has provided revolutionary changes, if we may call it that, in the process of digital data collection, insight and analytics. Google Analytics is widely used by marketers to generate better business results. Hence, Google is always looking for ways to improve this tool and add new, more relevant features to it. As you may know already, GDPR…

Your marketing's most valuable player: using attribution.

Imagine a typical customer journey for a business like TOMS, a shoe retailer that sells online. A user sees a sponsored Facebook post that was liked by a friend about TOMS, and clicks through to Tom's site, browses for a while, then leaves. Later on, the user sees a display ad from a TOMS retargeting campaign, and clicks through again, this time signing up for email alerts from the brand, but still not buying anything. Finally, the user receives an email from TOMS, clicks through, and starts to really think about buying the shoes. They leave it for a bit, and decide to buy, and they type the web address directly in the browser.   Who gets the credit for any revenue created? Well, that will depend on your attribution model. Attribution may sound complicated but in simple terms,…

With more businesses using Facebook Messenger for marketing, brands are also starting to take advantage of Messenger for surveys and research too

I'm always on the lookout for new ways of conducting research with users and customers and one study which caught my eye was how Liberal Democrats are using Facebook Messenger to run a survey. Liberal Democrats are a political party in the UK, we don't support any particular political party, this just personally caught my attention. They paid for sponsored ads, creating a specific "Lib Dems Listen" messenger account and then ran an automated survey. There are great advantages to conducting surveys in this way, firstly like any survey, it's automated but it's also much more conversational and it helps to engage with users who may be tired of taking traditional surveys, thus response rate technically should be higher. Customers always…

As your business engages in both traditional and digital marketing practices for different outcomes you will see cross-overs and similarities in the way you work

There are overarching “rules”, “guidelines” and marketing best practice you can follow but when you delve into more niche sectors, you will need to learn new and valuable approaches, giving you scope to alter your marketing processes across the board. When you’re focused in a particular niche a whole new set of opportunities and marketing skillsets open up to you. The value of finding your specific niche and optimizing for that specific target audience is particularly important for search engine optimization and homing in on those very targeted buyers looking for businesses like yours.

Benefits of Niche Marketing

Niche marketing is an effective way of tapping into a ready-to-engage audience who are specifically looking for your product, service and/or…

Understanding some of the basics of the psychology of persuasion and how to apply them, can make a huge difference to your marketing efforts

We’ve previously spoken about how psychological principles can help shape and optimize brand communications — not least, referral marketing campaigns. In truth, there’s a whole universe of theories and heuristics belonging to a wider field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics basically describes the effects of psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional factors on human economic decision making. This obviously includes the dynamics of deciding to buy. And for this reason, having a good grasp of some key ‘cognitive triggers’, rooted in behavioral economics theory, is a good idea for any ecommerce marketer. Let’s take a closer look at 3 of the most well-known ‘cognitive triggers’, and how they can be applied to your marketing efforts…

Anchoring and the decoy…