Monday 23 September 2013

5 No-no's of Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a great way of reaching your audience. Sending our regular emails to your clients not only lets them about what's going on but also about upcoming promotions. This can work to you advantage, if done right. Here's 5 things to stay away from:

1. Not having permission.
There is only one way to add someone to your email list, and that is to have them opt-in .Your email list should not include names and emails from:
*   Purchased or rented lists
*   Personal contacts you have manually added (unless of course they have given express permission to do so)
*   Contacts you have acquired through another site, even if you own the other site
There's nothing wrong with manually adding emails you've gotten through trade shows, conferences or even through your personal or business address book, just be sure each person has given clear permission to be added, and has gone through the double opt-in process.

2. The hard sell. 
I can pretty much guarantee that no one has joined your email list to be constantly sold to.
Make your newsletter all about selling, and you're very likely to start seeing your unsubscribe rate go through the roof.
Instead, make your emails about informing, educating, and entertaining. Feel free to promote your products or services, but do it sparingly and in a low/no-pressure manner.
Some marketers keep to the 80/20 rule - 80% content, 20% pitch - but there are no hard and fast rules. If your marketing funnel ends at your website (with your website being your main tool for selling), you may not even pitch via email at all.


3. Not proofreading.
It can be tempting to hit that 'send' button without proofreading your email. I mean, who cares about a few typos, right?!
The problem is, there are greater dangers than just 'a few typos'! For instance,
  • Broken links
  • Skewed formatting
  • Incorrect merge fields
  • A garbled text version of your email (this MAY or MAY NOT have happened to me)
An email with formatting errors, poor grammar or obvious typos can seem unprofessional and can give the impression that you just don't care.
It's easy to avoid this by having someone else take a look at your emails before you send them, or by simply sending yourself a test version of the email (both HTML and text) before you send them to your subscribers.

4. Sending too often.
The tricky part is that what defines 'too often' will be different depending on your business and your niche.In some niches, subscribers expect an email every single day (think Groupon ), while in others, once or twice a month is quite sufficient.You probably already have a feel for how often your subscribers want to hear from you. If you don't, take a look at your email analytics and see if there are any correlations between unsubscribe rates and how often you've sent emails.
Had a month where you sent 3 emails each week, and notice you had an increase in unsubscribes? Maybe it's time to re-evaluate your sending frequency.
A good rule of thumb is 1-2x per week, unless your own research and analytics tell you otherwise.  Any more than this, and you may risk annoying or overwhelming your subscribers.

5. Coming across as a spammer.
There are unfortunately many ways you can come across as a spammer without even realizing it.
One of the best ways to make sure no one mistakes you as a spammer is to use a name people will immediately recognize in your 'reply to' email address and 'from' field. You could use your full name, your company or website name, or a combination of both.
Some other ways to avoid being labelled 'spam' include avoiding:
  • USING ALL CAPS
  • Using lots of exclamation points!!!!!
  • Overuse of words or phrases like free, 'click here!' (MailChimp mentions avoiding this one), credit, win, or guaranteed.
  • Overuse of images
  • Using numbers or characters in place of letters (like FR3E!)

Hopefully you are not committing any of these 5 deadly sins, but if you are, it's never too late to change your ways!



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Monday 16 September 2013

Selling with Social Media

Do you want to use Social Media to grow your business? Are you wondering how Social Media can help you sell more products and services?


Selling with Social Media

How the online world has changed the way we do business

The internet has given way to the fantastic feature of pre-purchase research. Buyers like the anonymity of not having to talk to a single sales person and having all the information they need at the touch of a button. Today’s buyer prefers this process, as it’s easier and more efficient. With this in mind, companies have to adjust. In the early days, the power was with the salesperson, it's easier to convince someone how great your product is if you speak to them in person, but with the knowledge available online today, the power is in the hands of the consumer.


You have to stop thinking about how you sell because you don’t really sell anymore. Instead you help buyers make a buying decision. When they make their decision, hopefully it will be in your favor. Although it won’t always be the case.
You’ll discover how your system needs to be set up properly and the approach you need to consider.
Why Social Agents are Important

a Social Agent is someone who doesn’t necessarily buy from you, but recommends you to a friend or colleague who might buy from you. A lot of the time, social agents can be your most valuable customers that you never do business with. They’re the best customers you’ll have.

You need to draw in your social agents through educational pieces. A relationship is formed with your brand or company when they see value in what you are doing.

In The Invisible Sale, Tom Martin discusses a process of how you can sell without cold-calling and advertising. He calls it "painless prospecting" The concept is a spin on inbound marketing. The core difference is that most content and inbound strategies leverage search and keyword optimization.
As more and more businesses discover and deploy keyword optimization and SEO strategies, Tom believes that only so many will win the battle. It’s going to get more competitive and much more difficult.
Whereas painless prospecting is built on the concept of propinquity.
Propinquity is a scientific theory that powers the formation of relationships. It says that if you bump into someone a lot, the higher the likelihood of you touching them more often, reading their content or meeting them in person, the more likely you are to like that person, providing you like them each time you meet.

If you pay attention to your industry or your prospects’ industry, you can usually sit down and list all the places that your prospective customers congregate online and offline. You’ll learn where these places might be. If you know your industry well enough, you will already know of 7-10 places without thinking. This is your first list.

Once you find these points, you can create more opportunities for people to stumble across you and your brand. It’s a great way to get a good positive impression.

What marketers should avoid when using content to try to get a sale
There are two things marketers should avoid. Most people produce content at the wrong level. It’s normally the same single unit of content across their blog and podcast. So most feel that one blog post a week is enough without writing for others.
First you have to think about content creation as an ecosystem. You should never create one piece of content once. You should look for ways to repurpose it or even rechannel it.

The first thing I would recommend is to make sure you listen to this particular podcast for some great ideas. Here are a few examples of what you could do with your business.
  • Create time-lapse videos that showcase your processes
  • Create educational pieces
  • Become the conduit to prospects
When you put yourself in the position of the resource person rather than the salesperson, every time you communicate with prospects, it’s a way to stay top of mind. If, and when, they are ready to buy, they are more likely to come back to you or pass your details on to another prospect. You need to have regular touch points.
You’ll hear an example of what I received from people in the voice talent industry when I was a prospect and how my realtor markets his business using social media.
I hope you find this helpful.





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2013-ITWWW-Odette Nieuwoudt

Tuesday 10 September 2013

New Facebook Contest and Promotion Rules: What You Need to Know

Facebook has made a huge shift in how they allow contests to be run.

Has Facebook ever stopped you from running a competition from your page wall? According to the guidelines, running a competition always needed to be done from a app on Facebook. Not any more.

  • What’s New

Facebook announced on August 27 that they’ve changed their Pages Terms to make it “easier for businesses of all sizes to create and administer promotions on Facebook.” They’re allowing pages to run contests and promotions on their own timelines (you cannot run contests on a personal timeline). Per Facebook, businesses can now:
  • Collect entries by having users post on the page or comment/like a page post
  • Collect entries by having users message the page
  • Utilize likes as a voting mechanism
Now businesses with a Facebook page have a lot more options and can run a contest very quickly and easily by posting text or a photo and asking people to comment and/or like it.


Here’s the complete list of rules for promotions and contests directly from their Page Guidelines under section E (as of August 28, 2013):
1. If you use Facebook to communicate or administer a promotion (ex: a contest or sweepstakes), you are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion, including:
  • The official rules;
  • Offer terms and eligibility requirements (ex: age and residency restrictions); and
  • Compliance with applicable rules and regulations governing the promotion and all prizes offered (ex: registration and obtaining necessary regulatory approvals).
2. Promotions on Facebook must include the following:
  • A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
  • Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
3. Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries” is not permitted).
4. We will not assist you in the administration of your promotion, and you agree that if you use our service to administer your promotion, you do so at your own risk.

So now businesses have the choice of running the contest through an app or through their timeline

Here's a link where Facebook explains their news rules:


What You Can Do:
  • Require people to like a post and/or comment on a post to be entered
  • Require that someone post something directly on your timeline to enter (could be a text post or a photo)
  • Use likes as a voting method (either liking a post or photo on your timeline)
  • Require that someone message your page to enter
  • Announce the winner of the contest on your page
  • Require that to win the prize, entrants come back to your page to see who has won the contest
  • Use a Like button plugin on a website as a voting mechanism
  • Use an app plugin to post an entry to your contest directly on your page
  • Run your contest through a Facebook app
What You Can’t Do:
  • Require that people share a post or photo to be entered
  • Require someone to post something on their own personal timeline or a friend’s timeline to enter
  • Require people to tag themselves in a photo to either vote or enter
  • Have anyone who likes your page be entered to win (contest does not take place on the timeline)

How the New Rules Can Work for You

If you’re wondering if your contest will work within the new rules, think about where the engagement on Facebook happens. If it’s directly on your timeline or through your Message button, then you’re probably ok. And you still can use third-party apps to run a contest.
Also note that you can “encourage” people to share your post or contest, but you can’t require it for entry. Many third-party apps have in the past given “extra” entries for sharing the contest and it looks like that practice will have to stop, according to the Promotion Guidelines.
With all of these new options, how do you choose what type of contest to run on Facebook? Let’s dive into that conundrum.

How to Choose What Type of Contest to Run on Facebook

Decisions, decisions! With more options always comes hand-wringing over which will be the best for you and your marketing goals.
You can break it down fairly simply into this:
  • Facebook timeline contest will give you more engagement fast.
  • Facebook app contest will give you a list of email addresses that you can connect with again.
But there are more considerations than those basic needs. You need to take into account the advantages and disadvantages of each type of contest.

Running a Timeline Contest

Advantages
  • Quick and easy to set up
  • Fun and easy to engage people to enter
  • Free to run
  • Works on mobile devices (many Facebook apps are not mobile-friendly)
  • Increased PTAT score
Disadvantages
  • Do not receive an email address with the entry
  • Can’t reshare the post easily to tell people about the contest multiple times
  • Need to post the rules of the contest and the required release of Facebook’s responsibility for the contest somewhere within the post (or a link to the terms and rules of your contest)
  • Contests may not increase fans as much as a like-gated app would
  • Could be harder to notify the winner if the winner is not paying attention
  • If you require both a like and a comment, it could be a pain to validate

Running a Facebook App Contest

Advantages
  • Gather email addresses to connect with those people again
  • More control over the look and feel of the contest
  • Can like-gate the entry so that you grow your fans
  • Easy resharing to promote the contest multiple times
  • Easy to have rules posted within the app
  • Many contest apps have metrics that show data about when people are entering and where they are coming from
Disadvantages
  • Barrier to entry is a little higher
  • Some contest apps do not work on mobile devices
  • Cost
More Options for Facebook Promotions
Timeline contests are ultimately good news for marketers. They offer more choices and flexibility in what you can do to engage your audience. Try running at least one to see what it does for your business.
And remember there are good reasons to use a third-party Facebook app for your contest.
It’s nice to have new tools for your Facebook marketing toolbox.



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2013-ITWWW-Odette Nieuwoudt



Monday 26 August 2013

The Importance of Having a Mobile Website

The amount of time and money people are spending on mobile devices is growing rapidly and yet many businesses don't have a website optimized for mobile — at what cost? Think back on your past 24 hours. How much time did you spend on your smartphone? Were you mostly texting, reading news, checking social media, or were you actually talking to another human?

Device vs Desktop traffic has risen over the past year, as shown in the graph below. Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014” was the big headline from the widely shared infographic summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. By June of this year, Device traffic had risen to 10% from last years' stats, and according to experts, it is still rising. 

Yet many businesses have not yet optimized their websites for mobile, frustrating visitors with tricky navigation and slow loading times (i.e Blackberry - which is still a major and affordable brand in many countries around the world). Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for GoogleMobile Ads, told Mashable that a survey of major advertisers in early 2011 showed only 21% had launched a mobile-friendly site. A 2012 L2 study of the top 100 fashion, beauty, retail, hospitality, and watch and jewelry brands found that only two-thirds had mobile-optimized sites, and yet a third of those did not allow consumers to shop from their sites.

If you're in the business of e-commerce, those figures should help you benchmark what you're already losing, but a recent survey from Google underlines the damage you might also be doing to your brand by not having your site optimized for mobile.
  • Mobile sites lead to mobile purchases. This is a no-brainer: Shoppers are more likely to buy a product or service if your site is optimized for mobile. Three-fourths said they are more likely to return to a site in the future if the experience on mobile is good.
  • If your site isn't optimized for mobile, shoppers will go elsewhere. The majority of participants in the survey said that if they can't find what they're looking for on your site, they'll sooner seek out a competitor's mobile-friendly site instead of switching to a PC to revisit yours.
  • A bad mobile experience can damage a company's brand. A bad mobile experience can create bad feelings about your company. Nearly half of participants in the survey said they feel frustrated and annoyed when they happen across a site that's not mobile-friendly, and that it makes them feel like a company doesn't care about their business. More than half said a poor mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company in the future.


    Here are the key reasons why your business should have a mobile website:
    1. Google indexes mobile content differently than regular search. Ranking on mobile is easier because Google has a much smaller index of content under mobile, as this segment is still in its infancy.
    2. According to a study on CNN this year, the average person spends an hour on mobile every day. As the percentage of mobile web users increases rapidly, you should not miss the opportunity to capture this audience and preempt the competition.
    3. 20% of all U.S. households are now “mobile-only” for their phone service. Even Google’s ex CEO Eric Schmidt has said “The Future is in Mobile Search”. The next frontier of the internet is the mobile web and some say it will even overtake the desktop. In the near future, most of the visitors to a website will be through mobile. Mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android have revolutionized web surfing, enhanced the experience dramatically, and continue to drive more consumers to use mobile devices for browsing the Internet.

    Red Hot Web Designs is running a special! If you do not have a mobisite yet, they will design one for free with every purchase of a new SEO website! www.redhotwebdesigns.co.za




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    2013-ITWWW-Odette Nieuwoudt

Monday 19 August 2013

Facebook Reveals Most Users Are Mobile


A new level of transparency from Facebook will help the world see whether its mobile growth is entirely propped up by international users that don’t earn the company as much money. Today Facebook announced it will start sharing country-by-country web and mobile monthly and daily user counts. Facebook’s 101 million US daily mobile users make up a whopping 78% of its 128 million daily US users.
Facebook’s global mobile daily active user count increased 10.3% from 425 million to 469 million from Q1 to Q2 2013. But how much of that growth was in its high-monetizing first-world markets? And how much was in its emerging international markets where more people are on feature phones and it earns less per user? Before we couldn’t tell. Soon we’ll be able to.
In a statement, Facebook said:
“We are doing this because we believe brands and businesses should think differently about how people engage with Facebook, especially on mobile. A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale. We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world. In this world, understanding who comes back at least once a month is only part of the picture. Instead, businesses should focus on people who come back online every single day.”
Facebook says it will soon start revealing user counts for other countries beyond the US and UK once teams in each country are ready. To be clear, total stats count each individual user as 1 regardless of whether they accessed from desktop, mobile, or both. Mobile stats count each user who accessed via mobile, whether or not they also accessed via desktop.
The data will certainly be helpful for advertisers trying to figure out which international markets they should be focusing their efforts on. Salesforce CMO and Buddy Media CEO until it was acquired) Michael Lazerow says “What we’re seeing in these numbers is Facebook’s ‘mobile first’ strategy has really paid dividends. This is an important update that should help advertisers to plan and target their campaigns more effectively.”
But for the rest of the world, this transparency provides a much better understanding of where Facebook’s business is headed.

HOW INTERNATIONAL IS FACEBOOK?

Previously, Facebook had only shared its combined web and mobile user counts by region, and its mobile user counts as global totals. This made it tough to tell where exactly its mobile growth was coming from. Here you’ll see the Facebook Q2 2013 total user counts at the top, which offered breakdowns by region but not by country. Below that you’ll see the daily mobile user counts, which aren’t broken down by geography at all.


The reason that’s a problem is that all users are not created equal when it comes to Facebook’s business. In Q2 2013, Facebook said it made $1.60 in average revenue per user (ARPU) per year as a global average. But in the Rest Of World region that includes its fast-growing developing markets like India and Brazil, it only makes $0.63 per user while it earns $4.32 ARPU per year in the US & Canada region. That means every user it added in the Rest Of World market was worth less than 1/6th of what it makes per North American user.
That’s why back in May during Q1 2013 earnings coverage and again last month I requested that Facebook provide mobile user counts by geography. Soon we’ll have the data, and the little released today is already enlightening. For example, 78.9% of Facebook’s daily American users are on mobile, and in the UK 83% of daily users are on mobile. We can also tell that 71.5% of monthly US Facebook users come back every day, while in the UK Facebook has a “stickiness” of 72.7%.
The real juicy insights will come once we’ve had this data for a few quarters. In the short term, stats on Facebook’s fastest growing international markets and most critical first-world markets will be eye-openers. They’ll reveal whether Facebook is still growing its mobile presence in developed countries, or if it’s reached saturation there.
If Facebook has run out of rich first-world people to sign up, it may need to concentrate more on squeezing dimes out of the developing world by increasing ad salesperson presence and getting more local game companies onboard.
For now, though, the social network should be proud that it’s surviving the shift to mobile that many thought would be its demise. The company swallowed its pride, admitted it had made mistakes designing for desktop first and building apps on HTML5, and righted the course. Now it’s not only surviving, but thriving on mobile. With 41% of ad revenue coming from small screens and more than 3/4ths of daily users in it homeland visiting via phones and tablets, Facebook’s “mobile-first” strategy seems to be a success.

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Monday 12 August 2013

Social Media Tools: How to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing

Are you looking for a better way to manage your social activities?
Are you wondering what tools can help your social media marketing?
To discover free or low-cost tools to simplify your social media marketing, Social Media Examiner interviewed Ian Cleary.

Social Media Tools

How did you become interested in social media tools?
Ian explains how his history working for software companies and his very strong technology background led him to social media.
When he started to look at all of the key influencers around social media, he soon realized the social media tools niche was perfect because nobody owned that space.
Why you should look beyond Google Analytics and Facebook Insights data:
Ian states that although Google Analytics is useful, it doesn't track things such as what’s happening on social media related to Twitter or LinkedIn, and the Facebook analytics tool is a little too complicated for many people.
One free tool that Ian recommends is LikeAlyzer, which is a very simple Facebook analytics tool.
It evaluates your Facebook Page and will give you a score out of 100. You’ll then receive some basic recommendations on what to improve.
Tools to help marketers keep up with news and content they may want to share:
Ian explains why there is a lot of activity in this area. The two tools that Ian likes to use on a day-to-day basis are Feedly and Scoop.it.
Feedly is a website that allows you to read a selection of posts from any blogs you subscribe to. When you log in, you will see the latest posts. It has a really nice user interface.
You can access the content through the web and your mobile device. It also integrates with Buffer app. You’ll discover how this can help you with your social media workflow.
Another advantage of Feedly is you can group the sites you subscribe to. The integration of Feedly and Buffer saves marketers a lot of time.
Another tool to help you discover content is Scoop.it. You can follow people on Scoop.it to find relevant content. You can then add this content to one of your boards.
It’s not only a great way to find content, but also for others to help create it for you.
Scoop.it is similar to Feedly in terms of the collection of content, except it’s based around people who pick the content for you. You’ll discover how to find the right people to follow and the most popular boards around your niche.
Ian uses a tool within Facebook called Post Planner. It shows you trending content and what’s been shared the most. You can then select content and add it to your Facebook Page.
What free or paid tools would you recommend to help marketers get a good feel for their overall social activities across all channels?
One of the tools that Ian uses is Mention.net. There is a free section and a paid section. Ian advises you to start off with the free section. Mention.net monitors the mentions of keywords across the web, which could be your brand name or product name.
It picks up mentions in blog posts, forums, Twitter and Facebook. When you go into this tool, you can see when someone mentioned your brand within a Facebook Page or blog. You can also get email alerts.
It’s a really powerful tool to have and essential for a marketer to be able to track what’s going on.
You’ll learn about what’s included for free and when you might need to upgrade.
You’ll discover the difference between Mention.net and Google Alerts and why you’ll have to replace your Google Alerts with something else.
You can replace Google Alerts with Talkwalker Alerts. It’s free, but it doesn’t do Facebook or Twitter alerts.
Tools that support sentiment analysis can be quite expensive.  You’ll hear about the social media management tool Viralheat that is not that expensive but it supports sentiment analysis.
Ian believes that although people don’t want to have a dozen tools on their desktop, at present they have no choice. However, there’s a tool to watch called SumAll which aims to bring all of the analytics under one platform.
Tips on how to make better use of Google Analytics 
Ian says that Google Analytics is brilliant and sometimes we forget how good it is. You need to set up goals and spend time with it. If you don’t have any goals within Google Analytics, you’re missing out.
For example, you could set up a goal to track when someone signs up to your email database through your website or when someone signs up for a trial of your product.
With Google Analytics, you can break it down further when you want to find out how many people came to your site and how many converted. Google Analytics shows you how many conversions came from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
It’s a great way to learn which is the most beneficial piece of social activity and what platform you should work on.
You’ll hear how we do this at Social Media Examiner and what social platform outperformed the others. It’s definitely worth a look, as traffic sources alone aren’t sufficient.
There’s a lot of data in Google Analytics and it can sometimes be too much. Ian recommends building custom dashboards to pick out the most interesting pieces of information relevant to your business.
There are sites online that have dashboards already created, that you can just add to your own analytics.


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