Three Vital Steps for Effective Email Marketing

1. Take control of your data

Create a 360-degree view of all customer data sources

Data reflects your customer's persona and personal traits, and so it can help companies better understand and target relevant messaging to them.

In Bluewolf's annual study (email required for access to report), data was the second largest budgeted initiative for marketers, likely because 63% of marketers don't have a single dashboard to measure marketing activities.

Customer data is the backbone of your company's growth strategy, and it's essential to maximizing sales effectiveness, amplifying your marketing messages, and increasing customer engagement. But, oftent, it can also be overwhelming, quickly becoming untrustworthy, outdated, or redundant.

Take an inventory of what data and content you can actually access and measure across Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Social. You need full visibility into how data comes into your organization and its importance for different departments. When your systems are consolidated into a single view, that view fosters a natural alignment and better communication across all departments—leading to greater customer satisfaction.

Standardize data fields and values to ensure data consistency

The best way to increase the health of your database is to start at the point of data collection.

Companies that employ consistent data hygiene generate seven times the number of inquiries and four times the number of leads (email required for access to report).

For example, if your database has multiple titles for the same person, it can make figuring out whom you want to talk to more difficult. To create a solid foundation for effective email marketing, consider standardizing the title data by using the fields of "Function" and "Role" rather than highly variable fields like "Job Title." Doing so brings consistency to the contact list by normalizing around single-defined values.

Establish data de-duplication best-practices across departments/systems

Up to 25% of B2B customer data becomes inaccurate within a year. Duplicate information is a big part of this problem, undermining effective customer communications.

Standardizing your data should be an ongoing process. If you have a CRM system, ensure that data from your marketing and sales groups are flowing in both directions. Both sets of data need to sync to provide an accurate and current view of the customer.

Marketers need to engage every line of business to find out how and where they're getting new data; but, ultimately, database maintenance should be the responsibility of your entire organization. That means enforcing a consistent data governance program across your business and making it a regular part of staff onboarding and training, and ensuring it matches with each department's priorities.

2. Segment your audience

Identify the business objectives of your email campaigns

Segmenting is all about targeting a specific type of customer. Segmenting data enables you to group people with similar characteristics, such as job function, buying habits, and geography.

Segmenting allows organizations to craft unique messages and offerings that speak to the specific interests and concerns of each customer group.

Personalized, relevant marketing will help you improve customer response rates, boost customer loyalty and trust, and ultimately maximize business outcomes.

Implement the right segmentation strategy to meet your business goals

You can segment your audience hundreds of ways corresponding to business objectives, specific products or services, B2B or B2C, global or regional markets... the list goes on.

One useful way to segment your database is by buying cycle, which looks at your customers' purchasing habits to create content that's relevant during specific cycles.

Remember, there's no single right way of segmenting that fits every customer base. The best method will depend on your particular business, your unique sales cycles, and your marketing goals.

It's important to understand the various personas that make up your customer base. Flesh out effective personas by getting in the mind of that customer type. Put yourself in their shoes via shadowing or sales rep "ride-alongs," and identify where the customer experience falls short as they interact with your brand.

3. Define campaign success

Email success doesn't happen overnight. Companies need to set realistic expectations—based on past performance—of what a successful email campaign looks like.

Now there are powerful digital solutions to help track campaigns over time, and shed insight into whether a company is hitting its goals and actually advancing customer engagement.

The best marketing automation solutions, such as Marketo and Eloqua, come with built-in reports that give a holistic view of campaigns, including performance measures such as revenue and profitability, as well as customized dashboards for CMOs and other executives to track marketing effectiveness at a glance, predict customer behaviors, and make fast course corrections.

Marketers today need to measure engagement as they build trust with customers in the email database. When their email marketing efforts are relevant and effective, customer engagement will rise over time and directly feed into driving business results.

Source : http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/26328/three-vital-steps-for-effective-email-marketing

Tags : email marketing malaysia, email marketing

7 Holiday Email Marketing Tips to Avoid Common Mistakes

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Next week kicks off the holiday email-sending bonanza and the one item on every email marketer’s wish list is a holly, jolly response rate to his or her campaigns. Battling the competition will be more difficult as everyone sends more and more messages. What’s the secret to rising above the noise of the inbox over the next month?
These seven holiday email marketing tips will help you avoid an avalanche of holiday woes and ensure your marketing is merry and bright.

1. Ditch reporting? You’re getting coal.
It’s a busy time for all of us. But this is no time to ignore your metrics. If your subscribers aren’t reacting well to your holiday emails, you may have to do a switcheroo. You should be tracking your metrics like NORAD tracks Santa in December.

2. Stay off the naughty list by using responsive design.
A hefty chunk of mobile commerce sales comes during the holidays. According to Adobe’s Digital Index report, 26.2 percent of 2013’s holiday season mobile commerce sales came on Black Friday, and Cyber Monday contributed 18.3 percent. Not only must you use responsive design to make sure your emails render across all screen sizes, it’s important your load time is short and sweet so potential customers don’t get fed up and leave.

3. Don’t be a Grinch: Remember your loyal customers
Make it a point to make your loyal customers feel special during the holidays. Start with an email marketing that expresses your thanks for their business. Include a reminder about their point balance, a VIP-only sale or discount, an exclusive gift-with-purchase, or special holiday products or services only available to loyalty program members.
Here’s a customer-only exclusive email from Petco sent with the subject line “Extended one day! Reveal your exclusive savings!”

4. Keep testing, ya filthy animal

What, no testing? You can’t beat the clutter of the holiday inbox with boring and undescriptive subject lines or hastily put together content. Stand out from the onslaught of competing emails by testing your messages for the best engagement.

5. Wise men use word-of-mouth

Encourage subscribers to buy even when they don’t know what they’re looking for. Clueless customers will turn word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews into prompt buying decisions. Consider working these into your holiday email marketing for more conversions.

6. Make spirits bright with lots of suggestions

Give the gift of a good suggestion via upselling, cross-selling, and sending automated abandoned shopping cart emails. Wish lists are also a great way to keep subscribers’ gift ideas at the top of their minds. Tory Burch offers a gift guide for its customers:

7. The weather outside is frightful, but your emails shouldn’t be

‘Tis the season to be jolly, so make sure you’re not sending error-riddled messages that could put a gloom on your good time. Double check every email marketing newsletter that goes out for grammar and spelling, and make sure all links work as intended. Also, don’t forget to manage unsubscribes, bounces and abuse complaints so your inboxing report brings you good tidings.

All is calm, all is bright

By following these holiday email marketing tips, you’ll fend off common blunders commonly committed at this time of year. Don’t let the rush of the season get to you. Instead, keep your campaign’s priorities front and center and check the important items off your list. Lacking ideas or manpower for your holiday campaigns? Our Agents of Email can help with that light bulb moment.

Source: http://www.whatcounts.com/2014/11/holiday-email-marketing-tips/

SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of foundational SEO isn't to cheat or "game" the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

• Create a great, seamless user experience.
• Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

1. Your Website is Like a Cake

Your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.

2. What Search Engines Are Looking For

Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So how is relevancy determined?

• Content: Is determined by the theme that is being given, the text on the page, and the titles and descriptions that are given.
• Performance: How fast is your site and does it work properly?
• Authority: Does your site have good enough content to link to or do other authoritative sites use your website as a reference or cite the information that's available?
• User Experience: How does the site look? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?

3. What Search Engines Are NOT Looking For

Search engine spiders only have a certain amount of data storage, so if you're performing shady tactics or trying to trick them, chances are you're going to hurt yourself in the long run. Items the search engines don't want are:

• Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords on your pages.
• Purchased Links: Buying links will get you nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
• Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user to get around. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content they're looking for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if it's 80 percent or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong.

4. Know Your Business Model

While this is pretty obvious, so many people tend to not sit down and just focus on what their main goals are. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

• What defines a conversion for you?
• Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what people click on?
• What are your goals?
• Do you know your assets and liabilities?

5. Don't Forget to Optimize for Multi-Channels

Keyword strategy is not only important to implement on-site, but should extend to other off-site platforms, which is why you should also be thinking about multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email
• Offline, such as radio and TV ads

Being consistent with keyword phrases within these platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but also train users to use specific phrases you're optimizing for.

6. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is so important to your overall foundation, so as a best practice you're better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some other best practices with domain names are:

• Consistent Domains: If you type in www.example.com, but then your type in just example.com and the "www" does not redirect to www.example.com, that means the search engines are seeing two different sites. This isn't effective for your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.com and example.com.
• Keep it Old School: Old domains are better than new ones, but if you're buying an old domain, make sure that the previous owner didn't do anything shady to cause the domain to get penalized.
• Keywords in URL: Having keywords you're trying to rank for in your domain will only help your overall efforts.

7. Optimizing for Different Types of Results

In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, make sure to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media.

• Create rich media content like video, as it's easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank.
• Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, make sure you read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it.

8. Focus on Your Meta Data Too

Your content on your site should have title tags and meta descriptions.

• Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make sure it talks specifically to that page and that it is also formatted correctly.
• Your meta description should be unique and also speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta descriptions from page to page will not get you anywhere.

Title tags should also be unique! Think your title as a 4-8 word ad, so do your best to entice the reader so they want to click and read more.

Summary

You should always keep SEO in the forefront of your mind, and always follow best practices. Skipping the basics of SEO will only leave your site's foundation a mess and prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities.

Editor's note: This column originally was published on April 8, 2013, and comes in at No. 2 on our countdown of the 10 most read Search Engine Watch columns of 2013. As the clock ticks down to 2014, we're celebrating the Best of 2013 by revisiting our most popular columns, as determined by our readers. Enjoy and keep checking back!

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2259693/seo-basics-8-essentials-when-optimizing-your-site

Tags : seo, seo malaysia, seo malaysia company, seo services, seo service

How to Write Good, SEO-Friendly Articles

When developing killer content for your blog or website, there are two key considerations: first, how to create quality content that will engage, entertain, and ultimately drive conversions; and second, how to make that content available to a broad audience. As the majority of web traffic comes through search engines, creating content that is optimized for search visibility is one of the best ways to get your name into the world. While traditional marketing may have considered these two concerns separate, they are increasingly part of a unified content strategy that makes SEO a factor at a very early stage, producing content that seamlessly blends engaging writing with SEO-rich markers.

Although these aims - quality content and high search visibility - may seem at odds with each other, it’s vital to your marketing success to start considering them part of a holistic goal. Yes, your content should be well-written, dynamic, and full of valuable information for your audience, but none of that matters if it languishes in an unseen corner of your website. A high SEO ranking can pull your content out of obscurity and get it in front of a new readership. But today’s audiences are smart, and simply peppering your article with keywords will only serve to turn readers off.
What makes an article good? While truly great writing can’t be taught, good writing definitely can. As a marketer, you are ultimately a storyteller, conveying the story of your brand through different mediums and reframed for different audiences. Now all you need to do is translate this skill to the page. Here are some best practices for creating impressive, captivating articles:

1. Use concrete examples: Nothing gives writing more power than strong, relatable examples. Avoid the purely theoretical by using case studies when talking about a product’s success or focusing on one customer’s story. Find points of connection in news or pop culture to give your reader a frame of reference. These tangible stories will stay with them longer than facts or numbers.

2. Don’t hide your voice: One of the best things you can do for your brand is to give it a unique voice. Don’t be afraid to be funny (if you are funny), quirky, even a little bit weird. It can be helpful to read the piece aloud to see if it sounds like you. Your genuine voice is one of your greatest assets. Yes, you need to adhere to the standard of professionalism appropriate for your industry, but the more you sound like a human being, the more people will want to engage with you - by re-posting, commenting, and finally, by purchasing your service or product.

3.  Know your audience: Your blog is not your diary, nor is it an interoffice memo. Make sure you choose language suitable for whomever you’re addressing. If you’re writing for a larger audience, stay away from jargon. Keep paragraphs short and on-point, and section difficult-to-understand material into digestible concepts. Include links to examples that will help elucidate the work. Finally, become your fiercest critic: revise, revise, and revise again. Circle the ideas you find irresistible and cut everything else. The more focused you are, the more your audience will be able to gain from your work.
Writing for SEO

With those tips in mind, crafting a good article should be simple. Now to address the next piece of the puzzle: getting your content seen. Along with cross-posting and social media, optimizing your content for search engines is a proven way to place your work before a new audience. By optimizing your content to appear more often in search engine recommendations, you will be increasing both the visibility and trustworthiness of your brand.
 Some ways to create good SEO-friendly content include:

1. Choose organic: Incorporating highly visible, popular SEO keywords into your articles is one of the best ways to drive up your recommendations. Major caveat: these keywords need to be included in a way that feels organic to the subject matter. They mustn't stand out or be jarring to the reader. Readers, especially those who spend a lot of time in the digital world, are extremely capable of noticing if you’ve just stuffed your work full of words you hope will drive up visibility.

2. Keyword placement: Make sure you optimize the placement of keywords in your SEO articles by putting them in your titles and subtitles. Create a hierarchy of keywords and use the most search generating up front. Be sure to use your most important keywords in the title.

3. Picture this: Include images with alt text to get your page showing up in image searches as well. Images will also break up the text in a dynamic way. Image-driven content is getting more and more play as a digital marketing technique and it is especially suited to viral content.

With these tips in mind, you should be on your way to a higher SEO ranking in no time; and, at the same time, you’ll be enhancing your reputation as a quality content provider. Win-win for your brand!

Source : http://help.outbrain.com/customer/portal/articles/1411677-how-to-write-good-seo-friendly-articles Tags : seo, seo malaysia, seo malaysia company, seo services, seo service

Top 20 Email Marketing Articles of 2014

Welcome to another end of the year roundup! In this series, we’re collecting some of the best posts we’ve come across that encompass the entirety of the industry. Whether we focus on local marketing, mobile advertising, web design, and inbound marketing, we pick the most valuable pieces of content and share their insights.

Email marketing continues to be a point of contention for the majority of marketers. On one side of the spectrum (arguably the much bigger side), blog owners tend to gate their content behind an email subscription requirement.

On the other side, blog owners lead with value in order to entice readers to sign up. And even then, the subscriber is rewarded with more free content the moment they join the list.

Is one tactic better than the other? Well, that depends on what you’re measuring. If you’re measuring subscription counts, it seems likely that the email capture method could be more effective. If you’re recording email list engagement, it may be better to take the latter route.

Whichever mindset you decide to take in your marketing, we advise you to learn from the best in the industry and focus on testing your email communications to improve conversions. In order to help you, we’ve picked some of our favorite email articles from 2014 for you to read.

Enjoy the lessons!

• Don’t treat your audience like lower lifeforms. Educate them with smart content so they can become smarter, and ultimately, more loyal to you. Edward Gotham teaches us to use smart content for more engaging emails.

• Would you rather automate your marketing or do you want to invest in successful email marketing campaigns? It depends on what your sales and marketing goals are. Marketo pens this article.

• We don’t exactly know why your emails aren’t getting results, but Kristen Dunleavy lists some pretty powerful reasons why that might be the case. Check out this post for the full list!

• Building an email list is often times a slow and steady process. Although there are ethical ways to speed it up, we do not advise buying lists to boost your numbers. Daniel Burns gives us five strong reasons why.

• As we say repeatedly, if you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best. Tracey Videshighlights 18 brands that get their email voices just right.

• Learn how Jason Acidre increased his email subscribers by 532% in a single month by reading this post.

• It’s one thing to blast our email to several thousand subscribers. It’s another to have them actually open it. Elisa Silverman shows us how to structure our email messages.

• Grow your email list using a number of smart hacks from brilliant Neal Taparia.

• There’s more than one way to amass a significant following by email. Read through Jeff Bullas’s six simple tips to grow a larger list today.

• The perfect set up for your email list is here! Rob Walling gives us basic guidelines for starting your email list.

• What can you possibly learn from 12,500 emails from Internet retailers? Quite a bit actually.Luiz Centenaro analyzes the common threads in these emails with a case study. Enjoy this smart read!

• First impressions matter, especially on the Internet. Mustafa Khundmiri details how to make a great one through your first email.

• Dynamically target your subscribers through email using two powerful tools Vamshi Mokshagundam expands on in this post.

• Don’t just setup your email list and forget it; continue to add value in order to grow your subscriber count. Satish Patel posts five tips to get you on track to your first 1,000 readers.

• If you’re a startup, your email list is your biggest ally. Joelle Steiniger lists three dead simple tactics for a robust list of loyal followers.

• Even though the first 1,000 email posts are admirable, I go by the philosophy that your first few followers are your most important. Bryan Harris exemplifies this notion in an article.

• Don’t kill your open rates with these five mistakes! Abigail Waterer presents them in a post.

• Use the VENT methodology presented by Justine Jordan in order to create compelling content for your email marketing campaigns.

• You think you know how to build a sturdy email list? Here’s everything you need to know, and more, by Nate Desmond.

• People can spot a sales email a mile away. John Bonini makes sure you write tight email copy that gets you the right response in this article.
  

Source : http://upcity.com/blog/2014/11/top-20-email-marketing-articles-of-2014/

Keywords : email marketing, 電郵推廣

Five Key Email Automation Takeaways for Marketers

Part of being a modern marketer means geeking out on data, so let's get straight to the stats.

Companies that use marketing automation have 53% higher conversion rates than non-users, and an annualized revenue growth rate 3.1% higher than non-users, according to the Aberdeen Group. And B2C marketers who take advantage of automation for everything from cart abandonment programs to birthday emails have conversion rates as high as 50%, eMarketer reports. Yes, you read that correctly: One out of every two of these emails could convert.

Despite such findings, some marketers are reluctant to embrace email automation. Most holdouts think that adoption and integration would be too complicated, too costly, or too much of a time commitment.

It's true that successful deployment of an email automation solution requires some time to get off the ground. But automation doesn't need to be complicated—and it shouldn't be daunting. After all, most of us are already automating in our personal lives even if we don't realize it—setting up monthly utility bills for auto-pay or scheduling regular prescription refills.

Email automation applies that same principle to your marketing—at scale."

To kick-start your efforts, here are five key takeaways from Emma's Automation Demystified guide, which helps marketers set up an email automation strategy for great results.

1. Automation = increased engagement

Want results you can be proud of in your next meeting with the boss? Automation can help. Triggered email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than traditional bulk messages, according to Epsilon.

2. Lead magnets attract subscribers

Create an irresistible lead magnet, and you'll draw in countless new contact opportunities. How? Tie your signup form to a great piece of content (the lead magnet) and automatically collect email addresses from potential leads.

Choose something that is valuable and immediately useful, but also specifically beneficial to your unique audience. Maybe it's a discount, e-book, or webinar—any content that piques the interest of your future customers should work.

3. Don't forget the warm welcome

New subscribers are key to the success of any marketing program. They're more engaged; since they haven't seen your content before, they're statistically more likely to click and open your messages. In fact, an Experian study found that welcome emails have four times the open rate and five times the click rate of traditional newsletters.

Make a good first impression on new subscribers by building an automated welcome series. A welcome series puts you in control of how your subscribers are introduced to your brand. More important, it creates trust and helps you establish a relationship with your customer.

4. Keep the content coming... as long as it's relevant

Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than general e-blasts (gross), according to Jupiter Research, so tailor your emails to fit the lead magnet they used to find you in the first place.

For example, if subscribers found you at a conference and snagged some free swag from your booth, your emails should not only remind of them of who you are but also connect back to that shared conference experience. Include a reference to that inspiring keynote speaker, or the equally inspiring chocolate explosion cupcakes served during the coffee break.

5. It's all in the timing

Automate for all occasions—but make sure the timing and the message are right. Birthdays, anniversaries, and recent purchases are all perfect triggers for a well-timed automated message from your brand.

Simply schedule a date-based automated email paired with a special offer, and send annually on your subscribers' special day—a simple way to stay top of mind and build loyal customer relationships.

Source : http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/26408/five-key-email-automation-takeaways-for-marketers

Keywords : email marketing, 電郵推廣