9 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From This Week
The past few days saw the digital marketing world awaken from its post-holiday slumber and really put out some eye-opening stats.
Tag Archive for: Email Marketing
5 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017
This past year has been an intense one, to say the least. But we’re finally nearing the end, and we’re ready to set our sights on 2017! Of course, in order to make appropriate assumptions about what will occur next year, we have to look back at some of the notable digital marketing predictions that came true this year.
Throughout 2016, we saw a rise in voice search queries, Google’s Penguin algorithm began updating in real-time, mobile-friendly sites continued to be rewarded, and so much more. Social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram expanded their arsenals, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology was such a favorite this year that Amazon was sold out of its Echo and Echo Dot devices at one point.
Since many of these popular trends are still pretty new, we can only expect them to continue to grow in the new year.
Below are some of our digital marketing predictions for the upcoming year
1. The shift from desktop-first to mobile-first will continue
Mobile search has always been an important component of SEO — and of digital marketing in general — so it’s no surprise that its role continues to grow as years pass. In 2015, Google released a mobile-friendly update to their search algorithm. Since this update, mobile-friendly websites have had the advantage over others when it comes to mobile rankings.
Today, many businesses are receiving more traffic from mobile search over desktop. In fact, Moz performed a study that showed 20 out of 24 industry niches note mobile as their primary source of web traffic. As technology progresses and Google continues to reward those with mobile-friendly sites over others, we have no doubt that the mobile-first trend will continue to rise and most likely overcome our desktop-first mentality.
2. Say hello to Progressive Web Apps
If the mobile-first shift comes to pass, it’s possible that the move towards PWAs will as well. Just as AMP (a code that optimizes mobile websites) took precedence in 2015 and 2016, PWAs, or Progressive Web Apps, may take center stage in 2017. Users are becoming less and less patient with page load speeds, and even a highly optimized site has trouble loading within 3 seconds. Enter: Progressive Web Apps.
They’re defined as user experiences that have the same capabilities as a web page, and are reliable, fast, and engaging. In other words, they allow a website/website page to work as if it were an app, without actually being an app. Although PWAs may not be suitable for every type of business, there are plenty that could benefit from them, such as content-heavy or real-time data sites, chat-related platforms, news outlets, and blogs.
As consumers yearn for safer, faster, and easier-to-use mobile-friendly websites, we can expect to see a greater prominence of Progressive Web Apps in 2017. They may even replace the use of separate mobile sites or apps entirely — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
3. Live video will take over (at least with social media and content marketing)
Consumers have become accustomed to carrying around mobile devices and having practically anything they need right at their fingertips. Now, both brands and individuals have begun using livestreaming as a way to be more in-the-moment with their followers (capitalizing on that whole #FOMO trend of the last couple years).
In the past, brands chalked up their entire video marketing strategy to the hope that one of their videos would go viral. However, as video (live video, in particular) becomes a larger part of users’ everyday lives, brands are going to have to work on continuously creating quality video content.
Joe Pulizzi remarks on how video will become an important part of content marketing strategies in 2017 in an article for the Content Marketing Institute:
“It doesn’t take “Chewbacca Mom” to show us how big and important using video and having a visual storytelling strategy are…most brands [should begin] building a process and organization around the ongoing delivery of valuable information through video.”
As top platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are incorporating live video, we can be sure we’ll see it grow in 2017.
4. Native advertising will flourish
Back in the good ol’ days, online advertising was defined by intrusive pop-up ads and annoying flashing sidebar ads. And it’s important to remember that most of those ads were irrelevant and spammy.
While there are still plenty of ads like this, native advertising has helped online ads become more user-friendly. And to ensure that users don’t click on unwanted ads, brands are required to clearly label these ads as such. Websites like BuzzFeed, Mashable, and even The New York Times offer sponsored content that relate the ads to content users are already interested in viewing.
Brands are also taking advantage of the native advertising potential on social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. With Facebook pushing their Promoted posts and ads and Instagram releasing it’s “Shop Now” button, we’re sure to see more online native advertising in the coming year.
5. People are going to want to SEE the data
Data is key to knowing the who’s, what’s, when’s, why’s, and how’s of your marketing strategy. However, that doesn’t mean analyzing data is easy. In all honesty, it can be boring and immensely time-consuming when done properly. Even if you analyze data every day, digesting all those numbers can be tricky.
Thankfully, there are plenty of data visualization tools that can help. As technology evolves, so are visuals; and as more data visualization tools become available, the more businesses are going to start using them. In addition, as narrative content grows in popularity, the need for visual storytelling grows.
Keeping these technological and content marketing trends in mind, 2017 is probably just the beginning of the data visualization revolution.
Recap
While we don’t have a crystal ball to know exactly what 2017 will hold, we feel it’s safe to say there is a lot to look forward to. What are your digital marketing predictions for the upcoming year? Leave your thoughts in the comments — we’d love to hear ‘em!
H/T: Business2Community
Why Email Is Key To Maximizing Owned Media (And Assets) In Digital Marketing
Every company has digital marketing challenges that are unique to their industry, their selling model (direct to consumer/wholesale/hybrid), their technology stack and their organizational structure. But acquiring first-party data to create a true model of customer journey is a struggle that persists across the board.
This post will focus on a topic that I believe is at the heart of a successful addressable marketing strategy: growing email and SMS lists.
More touches generally mean more responses, which is ultimately what we’re after. To be effective, you need to maximize data collection on your owned media.
An email address is the foundational digital currency that allows you to market to individuals, not just in email, but on social networks and through addressable display. It is, therefore, the most important permission to get.
As such, the number one rule is to ask for an email address at every direct customer touch point across all your owned media — point of sale, customer service, website and so on.
A Typical Scenario
If you look at most companies, you will find:
• Fewer than 5% of site visitors transact.
• A passive “signup for email” link exists somewhere on the home page. Some are more prominent than others, but they are often buried, especially if the company is not a retailer or publisher. In the best cases, there is a Lightbox that asks a user to sign up for email, but it usually doesn’t include any real value statement.
• Customer service doesn’t ask for an email address or verify the one on file if they already have it, unless completing a transaction (think travel).
• Point-of-sale systems will be somewhat dependent upon industry, but many companies don’t ask for any information at the point of sale.
• Many use remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and retargeting cookies, which are great. But they’re still missing a huge opportunity to collect an email address, tie it to their web analytics package for analysis and later use it for segmentation.
The Resulting Potential Drawbacks
These methods can create a number of problems:
• You are not capturing as many email addresses as you could be by making some minor changes. This not only impacts your email program directly, but it also stifles your ability to create true addressability in other channels.
• You’re not rounding out your data set with other information, such as SMS, which means that you are limiting your ability to create a multi-channel journey for your prospects and customers. If you only have an email address or a cookie, then it is difficult to create an experience across multiple channels.
• You are not optimizing your search bidding if you’re not factoring in that extra value created when people provide their email address.
What To Do
Here’s what you should be doing:
• Actively ask for a mobile number (for SMS) and an email address when visitors come to your site, and clearly state the benefits of providing them. Don’t wait for them to find your link or text box somewhere on the page. (Tip: Make it easy for them to get out of the Lightbox on desktop and mobile. Test this yourself.)
As with many tactics, there are ways to do this well. Immediately hitting someone upon entrance with a value-less signup message and no easy way to get out of the Lightbox will likely drive up your bounce rate.
But if you can improve the Lightbox timing (test delays) and the relevancy of the signup value statement based on information gathered when the person enters the site (e.g., search term), you should see good results and little to no impact on your bounce rate.
• Ask again differently if they dismiss the first Lightbox. Let people browse before asking again, but leverage technologies that incorporate browsing behavior into the message.
So if a visitor is looking at product A, product A can be featured in the Lightbox with a customized message that asks for email to learn more about that product. This tactic can easily help you double your email signup rates.
• Create a simple web application for your customer service agents to enter emails if your current system doesn’t make it easy. When customers and prospects call in, there is a capability to capture an email address and what they called about.
Almost every email service provider (ESP) can be integrated into something like this. It may not be perfect compared with a full platform, but at least you are capturing email addresses.
• Constantly ensure your customer data is current. Leverage the post-login experience to get updated email addresses and SMS information. When people log in to your site, check to see if you have an email address for that person, if it’s valid and if people are responding.
When a person logs in, ask for an updated email address or SMS number if he or she isn’t responding to email, you don’t have one on file, the one you have has been deemed invalid or the person has unsubscribed.
Your ESP has this data. The question is whether or not you can leverage it fast enough. But the rewards are that you have more complete information on your best customers — the ones who are using your site.
Final Thoughts
When people come to your site, a retargeting cookie is vital but it’s critical to create addressability and, if possible, connect your known and anonymous data for greater segmentation and personalization.
It’s important to ask for an email address, at the very least, if not SMS permission. Once you have these, you have the ability to connect with key people and segments across multiple media.
This gives you the ability to leverage most marketing clouds to the fullest. But incorporate the information visitors give you in a smooth way, not in a creepy, in-your-face way. Stay classy!
H/T: Marketing Land.
Tips For A Successful Email Marketing Holiday Season
With the holiday season upon us with Black Friday right around the corner, it’s time to super-charge your email marketing strategy.
The holiday season represents a huge opportunity for marketers to connect with their audiences and drive sales. Holiday sales in 2015 are expected to represent approximately 19 percent of the retail industry’s annual sales of $3.2 trillion. Additionally, the National Retail Federation is forecasting online sales to increase between 6 and 8 percent to as much as $105 billion.
To help you make the most of it, here are 10 tips that will make your email marketing results merrier:
1. Mark Your Calendar
Email marketing is a highly effective method to reach people this holiday season. With 57% of email subscribers spending 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week, you’re likely to reach people no matter where they are. Here are this season’s most notable holidays to plan your email campaigns around:
Veterans Day – Wednesday, November 11
Thanksgiving – Thursday, November 26
Black Friday – Friday, November 27
Small Business Saturday – Saturday, November 28
Cyber Monday – Monday, November 30
Hanukkah – Begins Sunday, December 6
Green Monday – Monday, December 14
Free Shipping Day – Friday, December 18
Winter Solstice – Tuesday, December 22
Christmas Eve – Thursday, December 24
Christmas Day- Friday, December 25
Boxing Day – Saturday, December 26
Kwanzaa – Begins Saturday, December 26
New Year’s Eve – Thursday, December 31
New Year’s Day – Friday, January 1
2. Use Progressive Profiling To Send Segmented Offers
Predictive intelligence and individualized recommendations are great, but during the holiday season, your subscribers’ historical data (even very recent data) may not be very helpful because they’re shopping for others more than themselves. Rather than using data to make guesses, it can be more effective to just ask your subscribers what kinds of products they’re interested in.
For instance, on Nov. 13, 2013, Zulily sent a progressive profiling email that resulted in a brand alert email being triggered on Thanksgiving Day. And on Nov. 5, 2014, Sony sent a progressive profiling email where respondents received a targeted triggered email on Black Friday.
In both cases, that’s great timing for an email that the recipient is already primed to act on.
3. Add Seasonal Content To Your Triggered Emails
Triggered emails are not “set it and forget it,” they are “review and renew.” That’s especially true going into the holiday season.
Make your triggered emails more relevant to holiday shoppers by adding seasonal imagery to the headers and gift services footers to the bottom of those emails, and adjust the logic and timing of your cart and browse abandonment emails. For instance, time to purchase is compressed during big shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Green Monday, so you’ll likely want to fire off your abandonment emails more quickly than usual.
4. Use Preview Text To Support Your Subject Lines
This is a quick win for the holiday season. Preview or snippet text is displayed under or to the right of the subject line in the inbox view of many major email clients, including the native iPhone email app, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
Last November, only 47 percent of B2C marketers were optimizing their preview text so that it supported their subject lines. Anecdotally, it’s only slightly higher today.
Think of preview text as a second subject line — and you wouldn’t dream of having long URLs, administrative text and other nonsense filling up your subject line. Whether you use visible or hidden preheader text to create your preview text, don’t leave it to chance.
5. Use Social Media For Aspirational Discovery, And Site Search And Purchase Data For More Practical Discovery
Social media sites like Pinterest can tell you what people aspire to buy from you, and that information can be super-useful in getting your subscribers excited about the holiday season and thinking about the possibilities. That’s especially true early in the holiday season.
But what’s actually happening on your site and in your stores, regarding the products that your customers are buying or actively considering, can be much more telling and worthy of focus.
Consider using this information in your email campaigns more as we get further into the season, when the wisdom of the crowd can be a powerful tool to direct shoppers to your most popular products.
6. Resist The Urge To Email Chronically Inactive Subscribers
It can be oh-so-tempting to want to get a little holiday boost by emailing a bunch of your subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time, but resist the urge. The vast, vast majority of subscribers who haven’t engaged in more than two years are likely long gone, with a good chunk of those having abandoned or changed their email address.
Email a bunch of those folks during the holiday season, and you risk getting junked or blocked — which means that you risked your ability to reach your loyal, engaged subscribers for a shot at re-engaging a tiny percentage of inactive subscribers. Not a good bet.
For a smarter, less risky bet, try to identify the seasonal shoppers among your subscribers, those who were engaged and purchased during the holiday season but then quickly became silent afterward and haven’t engaged since. Those subscribers are much better candidates for re-engagement efforts going into Thanksgiving week.
7. Merry Mobile-Friendly Emails
Lastly, and perhaps most important, is ensuring your emails are mobile-friendly. It’s no surprise that prior to (and during) holiday shopping trips, consumers are looking to their mobile devices for the top email offers in their inboxes. Data points in this direction, with internal analytics showing that 50-70% of merchants’ marketing emails are being read on a mobile or tablet device. Coupled with Goldman Sachs’ forecast that mobile commerce will jump to $626 billion in 2018, proves the importance of meshing mobile and email.
Note that 65 percent of all email in the US is now opened first on a mobile device. Take advantage of this device segmenting by sending email offers with key words such as “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][INSERT HOLIDAY] SALE!” or “[INSERT HOLIDAY] – 30% Off Online Only!” Phrases such as “Early-Bird Special” or “24 Hour Sale” work well too.
Keeping mobile top of mind will improve your lead generation and customer acquisition numbers.
8. Have A Plan For Last Sleigh Day
Because Christmas falls on a Friday this time around, express shipping is likely to play a bigger role in the final days of the holiday season. Last Sleigh Day, which is Dec. 22 this year, marks the last chance for guaranteed Christmas delivery with express shipping for most retailers.
After you wrap up your Cyber Week promotions, be sure to include your order-by deadlines for standard shipping and express shipping in a module at the bottom of your emails. And if your brand is going to offer discounted or free express shipping going into Last Sleigh Day, be sure to communicate that to your subscribers.
For more expert advice on how to captivate your customers this holiday season, contact an Onimod Global Digital Marketing expert today.
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