Seedling Concepts

How to increase website traffic

Rick — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 02:21:05 +0000

My fellow marketers and those whom aspire to be; If you have not already encountered a situation in your professional career where you’ve been asked to drive more traffic to a website instantaneously, than you’re lucky, but be prepared as it may happen.

I was recently asked by a friend how to do just that for her business; drive more visits through the email program and this was my response…

Question:

How to get more website visits ASAP, via the email program?

Answer:

As I’m sure you are already aware, there are no magic buttons to increase website traffic through email (or any marketing channel for that matter) outside of spending and sending more or offering something that is not true (like “free money”). For email specifically, the program goal is to always drive as much quality traffic as possible, without jeopardizing the health of the program. Incremental program improvements should always be top of mind and are achieved over time by aligning content offering with the needs and desires of your subscribers and by growing the active subscriber base. No sustainable tricks or tactics should be left in your back pocket for a rainy day. Why you ask? Because if it’s something that you know your customer wants or should have, you should give it to them.

While sending more email is always an option to support a business need, you should present the risks of doing so to the business stakeholders and be prepared to monitor your program closely.

The risks of sending more emails:

Sustained increases in send volume typically lead to poor inbox deliverability- At the end of every day whether your business sends a subscriber one email 10, the content offering is likely still the same. Your subscribers can only digest so much of the same content at a time and as I’m sure you’ve guessed, they are less likely to open all 10 emails than just the one. As a result, engagement with your email program will decline and the Email Service Providers (ESPs) will take note of this engagement decline and if they see fit, they will decide to place more of your businesses emails in recipients’ SPAM folder versus inbox and yet another engagement hit will be had.
Poor inbox deliverability as a result of low quality excess sends may impact other areas of your business- In addition to driving traffic to your website, what else does you email program support? Sales revenue or some other conversion or maybe sponsorships within the email. If email does support other areas of your business, think about the impact if emails are no longer able to reach their intended recipients or if engagement takes a nose dive. What else might your business lose in addition to website traffic?

What you MUST monitor if you choose to increase sends:

Traditional email success metrics- open rate, click-through rate and click-to-open rate.
Email visit rate [successful sends / visits to website from email]- As send volume increases, do visits to the site decline or stay flat? If yes, then this is an indicator that increased sends are not working and are in fact hurting your program.
Email conversion rate [successful sends / website conversions]- If more sends only translate into more visits, then the quality of those sends is poor, assuming conversions are important to your business.
User experience- Like I mentioned above, why send a person 5-10 emails in one day if you can communicate the same message in only one email?

Other important things you should explore

While fire drills are certainly exhausting, times like these within your business also serve as a reminder to do a ‘program health check.’ By this I mean checking to make sure everything is working as it should. A great starting place is to experience your website as if you were a customer. Complete all possible sign-up/subscription forms and ensure the end result is achieved. Depending on how your email platform is integrated with your website, it may take a day to confirm things, but it’s well worth the wait.

The Value of Context in Marketing

Rick — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:56:04 +0000

Just finished reading Why Context Is King in the Future of Digital Marketing an article by Jonathan Gardner, director of communications at Vibrant Media. It’s a great follow-up to my 1/31 post on Making the Most of Seasonal Events. Three key take-aways from Jonathan’s piece:

1. When developing your marketing message, think about where your audience is and what type of message they’ll be receptive to in this context.

An example that comes to mind is an acne prevention company marketing to teen girls. An ad campaign to this audience on a site like ask.com where they’re likely doing research for school would want to focus on the impact clearer skin can have on concentrating in school and making the grade. But if targeting this audience on Facebook, they’d want to focus more on the social element and being comfortable when out with friends.

2. Use geotargeting to your advantage.

As a marketer, if you know where your target audience is when they’re engaging with your brand, then take advantage of that powerful knowledge. Don’t just promote a discount, give the discount and the location of the nearest store to take advantage of the special.

3. Mobile engagement with your brand continue to grow.

When developing your next marketing campaign don’t forget to think about the mobile aspect as the user experience will likely be very different on a mobile device than a desktop.

Making the Most of Seasonal Events

Rick — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:16:57 +0000

Marketing campaigns are great! When used right, they present opportunities for a business to build relationships, educate customers and sell products. For many businesses, their yearly marketing campaign schedule is driven by internal business factors such as having a new product offering or placing an item on sale. Campaigns such as these are fine, but run the risk of leading to customer attrition or brand distaste if they happen too frequently and or lack relevancy in they eyes of your customer.

Avoiding marketing campaign disaster

When developing the yearly marketing campaign schedule for your business you should put each idea up against the following criteria (think of it as the marketing
campaign success formula):

Is the message or offer relevant to the target audience?
Is it something new?
Is it timely?

If you’re unable to answer “Yes” to all three of these questions for a particular campaign idea, scratch it off the list and move on to the next. Once you complete this exercise you may find your campaign schedule light for the year. Never fear, this is where seasonal campaigns based on external factors will come in to play.

Developing campaigns based on seasonal events

A seasonal campaign based on something happening in the world, like the Super Bowl, is a great way to show your customers that your brand is dynamic and aware of what’s happening in it’s customer’s world.

Sticking with the Super Bowl theme, a successful marketing campaign for your business around the time of the Super Bowl will NOT consist of your standard product discount messaging and some football imagery. To create a truly effective campaign you need to think about how your brand will play a role in the life of your customer during the Super Bowl.

Here are some ideas based broken down by industry:

Restaurant

Communicate reasons why your restaurant would be the best place to catch the big game (great food, big screen TV and no cleanup).
Recognize the stress your customers are likely under to host the best Super Bowl party possible and offer to elevate that stress with your no hassle order in advance carry-out service.

Retail

Take the angle that your store is the perfect place to escape the Super Bowl.
Find a correlation between your products and how they’re essential to any football fan.

Conclusion

While marketing campaigns are a must to support the success of any business, each campaign idea should be put to the success formula test before you execute (relevancy + freshness + timing = marketing campaign success). In addition, your marketing campaign schedule should include touch-points that relate to trends in the outside world and not just within your business. Think about all the events that impact your customers (tax time, Valentine’s Day, back-to-school, etc.) and if your brand can play a role in your customers’ life during this event or season, this is an opportunity for your business to create a meaningful seasonal campaign that will resonate with your customers and support business objectives.

How to Get What You Want

Rick — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:57:43 +0000

Goals are great. They’re something that most everyone has, we just all go about them in a different way. For me, professionally, my goals are pretty short-term (1-5 years out). Why? Because I really don’t know much about what I want to be when I ‘grow up.’ I know what I enjoy and what I’m good at, so I guess I could really say that my long-term goal is to have the ability to continue pursuing my passions and growing my skills. This goal doesn’t have a job title or name per say, but it works for me (so far).

So, how to get what you want. There’s an infinite number of ways to go about this (some legal and some not), but I suggest a strategy that encompasses the following three tactics:

Tell others what you want.
Find someone who has what you want and get to know them.
Find a correlation between what you’re doing and what you want.

1. Tell others what you want

Independence is good, but never loose sight of the value in others. By sharing your goals with your family, friends or even a stranger you open the door to their knowledge base and networks, which exponentially increases your odds of achieving your goal.

2. Find someone who has what you want and get to know them

History is a valuable learning tool. There’s a plethora of biographies and autobiographies on successful folks. If one of them fits your mold of what you’re looking for, than take some time to read and get to know them.

It’s possible you can do better than a book and maybe there’s a person within your network that has what you want or something similar. Your company’s CEO, a local entrepreneur or your doctor. If you know they’ve achieved something that you aspire to, then by all means reach out to them and form a relationship. Learn about their journey, ask for feedback on your ideas, and don’t be afraid to make your intentions known; one of the worst things we can do in any relationship is to form it on false pretenses.

3. Find a correlation between what you’re doing and what you want

With only 24 hours in each day, it’s vital that you cut any superfluous stuff. Do what you need to in support of your family and other responsibilities and make sure everything else you do ties back to a goal of yours. Yes, we all need some fun in our life, but don’t let ‘fun’ get in your way.

Easy to consume resources I find helpful in my personal quest to achieve my goals…

Harvard Business Review- Robust presentation of content ranging from research articles to self help tips. They also have a handy free iPhone App.
LinkedIn Today- In addition to being a great way to connect with colleagues and like minded professionals, LinkedIn is also a great aggregator of new and articles relevant to me.
Google Alerts- Email alerts with news and other content pertaining to information of interest to you. A great way to keep up-to-date with the happenings of the company you work for, one your interviewing with or one you just admire.

Managing Your Social Media Pages

Rick — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:53:36 +0000

Ever feel like the internet or your brand’s presence on the internet is turning into your notebook? You know, the fancy one you purchased from Target (with some new pens of course) to mark the start of your new beginning. That is, the beginning in which you take better notes, organize all your to-dos and just become more “put together.”

For the first few days or weeks things go as planned, but then things slowly begin to unravel. You start to notice a trend in missed days of note taking and the notes you do take appear to be written by someone else (we’ll blame them, since clearly you’d be able to understand your own writing). Eventually, your fancy new notebook becomes the new notebook that’s lost somewhere, but your bag, or is your kid’s new doodle book.

Well, my (and likely yours) online brand presence notebook had a fancy new page added to it today. A Twitter brand page. This new Twitter brand page has the pleasure of lying next to your company website, blog, Facebook page, Google+ page and GetSatisfaction page and marks another opportunity for us to enhance our customers’ experience with our brand.

Features of the Twitter brand page include:

a larger more customizable header
added tweet control, so we can choose to keep a tweet at the top of our time line
auto-expanding tweets, so we can display embedded items such as a photo or video without requiring the user to take action
and the ability to separate our @ replies from mentions.

All of these features are great, but we now have another platform in which we must think about visual design, a communication strategy, calculating ROI and who’s going to be managing the effort. It’s overwhelming and while an online brand presence may have similarities to our fancy new notebook from Target, it’s just not the same. How a brand preforms online is mission critical to a business. It’s what keeps the lights on and cannot be lost or left to the management of anyone. EEK!

If you’re tactful and keep calm, a new page can represent another great learning experience and opportunity to connect with customers that is managed with the same ease as your company blog.

Here are (3) things to remember when determining your strategy for your new Twitter brand page:

Remember your audience- The audience for your Twitter brand page will be the same folks currently engaging with your tweets, Google+ and Facebook page. This means you do not need to create new content or new campaigns. You simply need to thoughtfully organize your existing content in a manner that leverages the new platform to the benefit of your business and customers. Also, if you have not already taken note of this, it’s likely that you’ll find the type of engagement (questions asked, top clicked content, etc.) seen from your customers across various platforms/pages is the same. The primary driver of what makes one person use Facebook versus Twitter to engage with a brand is personal preference for one platform over another, assuming your brand presence/content offering is similar on both platforms.
Keep your content interesting and relevant- When determining interesting look to your customers, not you or your employees, as you’re likely not your target audience. For small business owners think about positioning yourself as an industry expert. While we should all take time to promote our product, also dedicate a decent chunk of energy to education and support. Consider answering questions such as how to find the best product to fit a particular need, how to get the most out of a product or service and what’s new in the industry (even if your company isn’t on the bandwagon).
You have time plan and devise a strategy- The Twitter brand page is currently only available to select large brands, with no exact date yet on when they will be made available to the masses. While you wait explore and learn from the brands that are now using the enhanced profile pages: @AmericanExpress, @BestBuy, @bing, @chevrolet, @CocaCola, @Dell, @DisneyPixar, @generalelectric, @Heineken, @HP, @intel, @JetBlue, @Kia, @McDonalds, @nikebasketball, @NYSE_Euronext, Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible – @GhostProtocol, @pepsi, @Staples, @subwayfreshbuzz, and @VerizonWireless. Note- you’ll need to use the new version of Twitter to see these enhanced pages.

Respect Your Customers’ Inbox

Rick — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:33:36 +0000

For today’s top brands the number one tool for customer retention remains email. An enabler of both active and passive engagement and an integral part of any successful cross channel campaign; email informs customers of product enhancements, communicates valuable offers and shows your customers that you’re listening to them (or at least paying attention to their actions).

All of this is happening within your customers’ home away from home, their inbox.

With them every waking hour (or sleepless night) and on every device, your customers’ inbox is a sacred place and it’s our responsibility as email marketers, business owners and communication managers to respect this sacrament.

How do we honor this sacrament you ask? EASY.

Practice the Art of Communication.

Send relevant content- Use your data and your common sense to ensure the content your sending each customer is a right fit.
Be timely- If you’re offering a 24-hour sale, don’t send the promo email at 10 pm; two hours before the sale ends.
Be accurate- This covers everything from not having spelling errors and broken links to ensuring the content of the email matches what your customer will find on your website, social media page, catalog, etc.

Stay Within the CAN-SPAM Act Lines.

This does not mean you must have a double opt-in process for your email subscriber list, but you definitely need to abide by CAN-SPAM’s main requirements, including:

Don’t use deceptive subject lines- Using a subject line that reads “Free iPad today,” and an email body that talks about a new store opening is a definite no no.
Tell recipients where you’re located- If you’re a small business owner just starting out, consider getting a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service. Up to you, but you probably don’t want your customers to know your home address.
Tell recipients how to opt-out and honor opt-out requests promptly- Hoops are great for circus folk, but you definitely don’t want your customers to have to jump through them in order to opt-out from your email list, so consider a one click unsubscribe process from within your emails. Also, be sure to check your unsubscribe process frequently to ensure it works.

For a complete list of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements visit the Bureau of Consumer Protection or check out The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business.