4 Tips to Improve your Marketing Automation

10 Things You Should Nix in Your Email Newsletters

1) Generic Subject Lines A few weeks ago, I received an email with the subject line “June Newsletter.” What do you think happened with that email? Do you think I clicked it? Nope — I clicked the “delete” button and sent it right to my trashcan without opening it. Okay, I’m not normally that ruthless, but this particular email sent me off the deep end. As an inbound marketer, it’s brutal to see a subject line with absolutely no value proposition. Why would I want to click on an email titled, “June Newsletter?” I have no idea what the topic of the newsletter is, what content I’ll find inside, or why I should even care. And with a lame subject line, the only thing I have to go by is the company or sender name — so that brand or person better be something I genuinely adore, or it’s going in the trash. Instead, try adding value before the email is even opened with killer, specific, personalized subject line. If you want to keep something standard for consistency like “June Newsletter,” make sure you also add a topic edition such as “The Donut Edition” or “The Photography Issue” so people know what they’re getting before clicking through. 2) Multiple Topics Yes, email newsletters are designed to include several links and calls-to-action. But that doesn’t mean your content should be a jumbled mess of unrelated topics. If you include links to every topic under the sun, readers are likely to get confused or annoyed by your newsletter and unsubscribe. As an alternative, take a page from BuzzFeed’s email newsletter subscribe page. Try creating multiple email newsletters, each with one very specific topic: If I really care about cats, but I don’t care so much about sports, I have the opportunity to tailor what BuzzFeed sends me based on my specific interests. That means fewer unsubscribes for BuzzFeed and more relevant content in my inbox. Sounds like a win-win to me! 3) Multiple Goals Before you send your newsletter, remember to ask yourself, “what’s the goal here?” Do you want to get more views on your blog posts? More donations for a specific cause? More ticket sales for your events? General awareness for issues in your industry? Pick one overall goal, and stick to it. Of course it’s okay to have secondary calls-to-action such as social sharing buttons and the obligatory unsubscribe link, but it’s good to stick to one overarching goal. For example, Skillshare sends a newsletter that notifies readers about upcoming classes: Instead of their calls-to-action screaming “view this post!” and “donate now!” and “buy tickets!” and “learn more about our company!”, Skillshare’s overarching goal is to get people to sign up for classes. Simple as that. For your next email newsletter, try sticking to one goal and see if you can get more bang for your buck. 4) Multiple Audiences The number two reason U.S. email users unsubscribe from a business or non-profit email subscription is that the content that is no longer relevant, yet more than 80% of email marketers send the same content to all subscribers. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Segmenting your email list can actually make or break the success of your email newsletter. I’ll go back to the BuzzFeed example above. If I have a cat, but never play or watch sports, I would much rather be put on a list for cat-only people instead of a catch-all newsletter meant for everyone (cat and sports lovers alike). It’s inevitable that you’re going to have contrasting types of people on your list if you use only one list. To avoid unsubscribes from people deeming your content as “irrelevant,” start divvying up your list by persona. If you sell products to small, midsize, and enterprise businesses, for example, you could try creating three separate newsletters for each one. For each email newsletter you send, stick to one specific audience, one topic, and one goal. If you find yourself sending conflicting emails, take a step back and try breaking your newsletters up into smaller chunks. Sure, you’ll be sending more email, but it’ll be way more tailored to the audiences you’re sending it to (which could spell even more success for you). 5) Unnecessary Links and Calls-to-Action Email newsletters are already prone to chaos due to featuring lots of different pieces of content, so reducing the number of links and calls-to-action is crucial. You don’t need to include a list of links throughout the main body of your email, and then also throughout a header, sidebar, or footer. With every link or call-to-action you include, think long and hard about why someone would click that particular link over another link in your newsletter. Narrow your list down to the most important ones, and nix the rest. Once you go through your newsletter and scan for multiple topics and goals, it’ll be a lot easier to identify which links and calls-to-action should stay … and which should go. 6) Unwarranted Self Promotion The content of your email newsletter should be 90% educational and 10% promotional. If you’re exceeding that 10% limit, it’s time to reevaluate your newsletter strategy. Think about it. What types of branded content do you like to read on the internet? Chances are, it’s helpful, educational, entertaining, or relevant to your life in some way. It’s probably not overly promotional or self-serving, screaming “Me! Me! Me!” So don’t let your branded content be that way — it’s simply not worth risking the unsubscribes. Instead, start putting more ungated content in your email newsletters and see if it helps to improve your subscriptions, forward rates, and website or blog visits. 7) Newsless Newsletter Content You can identify what “newsless” means by asking yourself one question: “so what?” As you’re going through every link, every headline, every feature, try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and question whether or not someone would care. Is it timely? Is it relevant to the audience at hand? If you’re noticing a huge number of […]

What Are The Guidelines For Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is a website design strategy use to create websites that provide an optimum viewing experience for visitors using a wide variety of devices. These innovative techniques involve a fluid approach to design that makes websites easy to navigate and read content with a minimum amount of panning, scrolling and resizing on various devices from smartphones to desktop computers. Responsive website design isn’t just about resizing images and adjusting screen sizes either, it’s actually an entirely new design process that involves three primary principles that together form a responsive design; Responsive grids, images and media queries, the guidelines for responsive web design. Responsive Grids As a rule, websites have been characterized in terms of pixels, a concept that has been carried over from the print industry where everything was the same fixed size. Responsive websites are designed using relative units similar to percentages, instead of using fixed units (pixels), giving it the ability to smoothly transition to fit various device sizes. Responsive Images We have seen a lot of developments in responsive images, however the main concept is that the images need to be able to reduce in size within the confines of a responsive grid. This is an effect that can be accomplished very easily using a singular line of CSS code. This line of code tells the browser that images should only be as large as their pixel value, ensuring that the image isn’t pixelated or stretched. Having said that, if the images are nested inside of a parent area that is smaller than their pixel value, the image needs to shrink. So as an example, if an image that’s 800 pixels wide is placed inside of an area that’s only 600 pixels wide, the image will shrink to become 600 pixels wide. The height of the images are automatically calculated to maintain the initial aspect ratio. Media Queries Responsive web design shouldn’t just be about how to develop an adaptable design on a wide variety of screen sizes and platforms. It also needs to be about the end user having the ability to pick and choose the presented content. CSS coding makes it possible to easily display as well as hide content and has for years. If you take a two column layout and attempt to shrink it down to a smartphone screen size, it can be a little challenging. Because smartphones are widely used in portrait mode, its screen is taller than it’s wide. This suits websites that are designed to scroll vertically, however it’s not suitable for wide layouts that have several columns. This is where media queries come into play. Media queries make it possible for the CSS technology to only be employed when specific conditions are met. Today this innovative technology is the key component of responsive web design. Responsive web design has developed into a massive umbrella that encompasses several different, ever changing techniques, tools and resources, so it’s not possible to provide a comprehensive guideline, however the information provided here will give you an idea of its core concepts.

3 Steps to Find the Best SEO Keywords

Next week, we’ll be hosting a live training about how to get free traffic from Google, and as I was preparing the training, we surveyed our audience to see what questions people have about SEO. I received a lot of questions about keyword research, so in today’s article, I’m going to walk through some of the steps we take to identify the best SEO keywords for any type of business. Step 1. Brainstorm the Obvious Keywords SEO keyword research is sort of like using a thesaurus. You need to start with a list of keywords, which we call a “seed” list. I recommend you start by brainstorming the most obvious phrases that your prospect would search to find your product or service. For example, if you are a dentist in New York, most likely, people are going to search ‘New York City dentist’ or ‘NYC dentist’. Those are what I would call the obvious keywords. Once you’ve brainstormed some obvious keywords, you’ll want to plug them into Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool will give you more keyword ideas, as well as search volume. Step 2. Sort By Search Intent Google’s keyword tool will spit back a bunch of keyword ideas, and these keyword ideas will generally fall into 2 categories… Keywords with purchase intent – where it’s obvious that prospects are looking to buy a product or hire a service provider. Keywords with research intent – where the prospect is most likely just doing research, and not ready to buy. In our example above, “NYC Dentist” is a classic example of a purchase intent keyword. You’d search that if you were looking to make an appointment with a dentist. However, “dentistry” would be an example of a research intent keyword. If somebody is searching “dentistry,” they’re probably not ready to go to a dentist quite yet. In fact, they may not be interested in going to a dentist at all. They could be researching the field of dentistry and considering becoming a dentist. Your first priority when optimizing your website for SEO should be to optimize your homepage and product/service pages for “purchase intent” keywords. Note: It’s important to optimize your website for “research intent” keywords too… typically that’s where you can find some really nice “low hanging fruit” opportunities to drive traffic in the short-term. But we recommend that as Phase 2 after optimizing your core pages for “purchase intent” keywords. Step 3. Prioritize By Search Volume As I mentioned, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool will also show you the search volume. By “search volume,” I mean how many times that particular keyword phrase is searched in Google every month. You’ll see that some keywords are only searched ten times a month, some are searched thousands of times per month, and some are actually not searched at all. Of course, you want to avoid optimizing for keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for. If you start with obvious keywords, and then sort by search intent, and prioritize by search volume, you’ll be well on your way to finding the best SEO keywords in your market.   By Phil Frost