Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: July 2017

Monday 31 July 2017

Why Your Ads Should Look 100 Years Old

Think ‘lead magnet’ ads are new-age?

Think again.

Free opt-in ad campaigns like that have been around for almost a century.

Everyone’s looking for the hot new thing. A watch that counts your steps, takes notes, answers your calls, and oh yeah, also tells time. An iPhone that has a new update every time you turn it on. A car that is so smart it can drive itself.

But there’s something to be said for sticking with what works. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Even better, if it works well, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Here’s how today’s ad pros are still using copywriting techniques from old-school campaigns that ran decades ago.

What the 1960’s Taught Motorola About Influencer Marketing

When it was time for Motorola to promote its new line of smartphones and features, it took its campaign to YouTube.

The phones were marketed for a younger audience, and with 54% of 18-34 years olds using YouTube at least once a day, Motorola knew it was the place to be.

They used 13 influencers to each create create “partnership announcements” and “hero” videos to show them using the new Moto Mods, that allowed users to customize their phones just the way they wanted. One user strapped the phone to a rocket and launched in 16,000 feet in the air.

No joke.

The result? 11.6 million video views and more than 38 million social media impressions. Even more? 80,000 clicks to motomods.com from first time users.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Buyers are 92% more likely to trust the reviews and opinions of friends and peers over standard advertisements.

A recent Tomoson study found that this kind of influencer marketing is “the fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, beating organic search, paid search, and email marketing.”

But as hip and cool and successful as this turned out to be for Motorola, it wasn’t a new idea.

In fact, it was decades — even hundreds — of years old.

Companies have been using celebrities, real users, and even beloved, made-up characters for years to sell their products.

Remember how much Santa loved Coca Cola? This one’s from ‘64:

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And what about Babe Ruth and his love for Pinch-Hit?

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Yes, that’s Babe Ruth as spokesperson for a tobacco company. The same Babe Ruth who later died of cancer at the age of 53. Next level brand partnership, right there.

You see, this stuff is nothing new. It’s not that new and fancy and innovative and cutting edge.

It’s the same old playbook, just dusted off and revised with a new edition. One that takes into account how our constantly evolving consumer preferences keep shifting.

Here’s a few more ideas for how tried but true methods are still relevant today.

Start by Grabbing Their Attention

Remember when Old Spice used to literally mean old.

As in, the only people who wore it were your grandparents?

That all changed a few years ago with a little sex appeal and humor:

Sales jumped 107% in just one month. Old Spice became the number one body wash and deodorant brand in both sales and volume.

And they reached new demographics of people (which is important when yours historically is about to drop dead).

But even that ad campaign, now nearly seven years old, is just a first-cousin of marketing techniques from long ago.

David Ogilvy’s 1958 Rolls Royce ad uses the same shock and awe tactic by grabbing the reader’s attention with what’s essentially a one-word headline:

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$13,550 for a car in 1958 was a lot of money, and Ogilvy was hoping to hook customers with mystery, intrigue, and a little high-end appeal.

He also updated their tag line a bit, which was a simple and direct, “The Best Car in the World,” that now reads, “What makes Rolls-Royce the best card in the world?”.

By turning that statement into a question, and then answering it, he was able to produce their highest-performing marketing campaign to date.

Unsurprisingly, there’s data from today that backs this up.

For example, MarketingExperiments.com ran two basic AdWords headlines against each other. The Control was a question, while the Treatment was simple and straightforward. Can you guess which one won?

You got it. The question-based headline.

Last second copy changes in order to test headline variations ain’t new, either.

Even Ogilvy’s testing back in the ‘60s wasn’t a groundbreaking notion. Good ol Hopkins was doing that long before around 1900:

“Hopkins outlines an advertising approach based on testing and measuring. In this way losses from unsuccessful ads are kept to a safe level while gains from profitable ads are multiplied. Or, as Hopkins wrote, the advertiser is ‘playing on the safe side of a hundred to one shot’.”

Today we use content marketing to grab top of the funnel attention. Turns out that’s nothing new. Because storytelling is one of the best ways to develop the interest and intrigue required to keep people reading long enough to make a decision.

Storytelling Piques their Interest to Draw People Near

Today, marketers face unprecedented hurdles to get their name out there.

A New York Times article from a decade ago claimed the number of ads we saw each day was around 5,000. Keep in mind this was early for Facebook, YouTube, et. al. They hadn’t even hit critical mass yet.

Fast forward and nearly 200 million people worldwide are using ad-blocking software in order to take back control over their (albeit, limited) attention. A recent study found that only 14% of respondents could recall the banner ad on the page they just visited.

Couldn’t remember the company. Couldn’t remember the product.

All of this spells disaster for marketers when our prospects lack the attention span of a goldfish.

That’s where storytelling comes in.

Nike has been leading the pack for years.

Back in 1999, they put together a one minute spot for the retirement of Michael Jordan. Clips and photos of his career, telling the story of his journey and successes. They didn’t even put up the Nike logo until the very end. For a good reason.

“It understood that what would really make a lasting impression, and what would help build the brand and allow the company to sell more products in the long-term, was an authentic story,” said Sujan Patel.

Ross Jeffries told a story, albeit a slightly more seedy version, in 1998.

“The Amazing Seduction Secrets of a Skinny, Ugly, 6 Foot Geek from Culver City California That Could Get You All the Girls You Want.”

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(Yes. This actually happened.)

Nerdy guy trying to get the girl is a tale as old as time. Now every non-skinny, ugly, 6 foot geek from Culver City California is gonna be hooked to read more of this. (And trust me, there’s a lot of them.)

Taking a familiar story or something that a consumer can relate to helps them understand just how perfect your product is for them. Why they need it. The emotional aspect that tugs at our heart strings or appeals to our vanity.

Ad copywriting formulas, like AIDA, help us touch on all of these critical pressure points. And once again, AIDA wasn’t just invented by some growth hacking millennial. It’s been around the block a few times since the nineteenth century.

Ad exec Joseph Addison Richards was talking about it way back in 1893:

“How to attract attention to what is said in your advertisement; how to hold it until the news is told; how to inspire confidence in the truth of what you are saying; how to whet the appetite for further information; how to make that information reinforce the first impression and lead to a purchase; how to do all these, – Ah, that’s telling, business news telling, and that’s my business.”

Now Get Them to Take the Next Step

Nobody knows why they need anything.

I didn’t even know I needed a special bag just for my french bread until you showed me how lacking my life was before I bought one.

But this information sharing takes a little time and finesse. You have to walk the customer through their journey. Too much, too soon, and it backfires.

That’s the chief difference between running PPC ads on Facebook vs. Google AdWords. (And why the former doesn’t work like the latter.)

There’s not much seduction required when people type something into Google. They’re already at the end of their journey. But successful advertising on basically any other medium requires you to lay the groundwork (that we’ve already discussed).

Once again, classic ad copywriting formulas help you better explain why people need what you’re selling when they don’t always yet realize they need it.

Even the U.S. Military has gotten in on the PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution) game. Here’s an ad from 1967:

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This guy waited too long to sign up (problem). Now he can’t pick which branch he wants. That could happen to you, too (agitate). Fill out this form and we’ll get you what you want before it’s too late (solution).

Or what about this example from 1990 for a book to help readers with their grammar?

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Look around and you’ll see PAS ev-ry-where. Here’s a slightly modified version from Dollar Shave Club Australia. No commitment? Everyone’s trying it? Only a couple of dollars?

Sold.

Long, long ago (like more than a century), advertising pro Claude Hopkins encouraged advertisers to create work that essentially sold itself.

According to the most factual source on the internet*, Wikipedia, Hopkins: “Insisted copywriters research their clients’ products and produce ‘reason-why’ copy. He believed that a good product and the atmosphere around it was often its own best salesperson.”

(*Not true.)

In other words? The purchase (or more accurately, decision to purchase) should be an absolute no-brainer. The value should far exceed the mental, emotional, or physical costs.

But that action-step that happens once the solution is presented often takes place with a simple click-through or from an online ad.

How exactly? Tripwires.

Here’s info-marketing guru Ryan Deiss with a too-good-too-be-true offer for his latest book:

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The offer here is low-friction. It doesn’t require a lot of steps or a big commitment, and the customer gets a good return on their time and money. And, you get to sift out the people who really have some interest from those who are just stopping by.

But, once again, not a new concept. Here’s one from over fifty years ago in 1965.

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Conclusion

The latest shiny tactics are always fun.

But sometimes even what seems fresh and new has been around the block a time or two. Decades old marketing tricks and tactics still work today.

And more importantly, can still produce more consistent results, too.

A/B testing works some of the time. But storytelling, copywriting formulas, tripwires? They’ve been working for years and years and years and years.

The next time you’re stuck on an ad campaign or looking for inspiration, don’t just look at what’s hitting the top of Growth Hackers.

Because history tends to repeat itself. And that’s a good thing for bottom lines.

About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.

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The Customer Is Always Right: Email Marketing Spam Edition

As a member of the Deliverability Operations team, I can tell you that we spend a lot of time discussing the importance of list hygiene and good mailing practices with our senders.

Typically, this covers everything from ensuring recommended customer acquisition practices are in place, engagement-based segmentation is utilized to monitor for inactivity, and that customers are appropriately removed from mailing lists as activity lapses or unsubscribe requests are received.

The purpose behind these conversations is always the same: to highlight the importance of maintaining brand reputation in the eyes of ISPs, and ensuring that messages continue to get delivered to the inbox. A key component to achieving this is making sure customers themselves do not perceive the messages they receive as spam.

While there are official regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act in place that make clear determinations when it comes to spam, it is also important for senders to keep in mind that “spam” is increasingly in the eye of email recipients themselves. And as far as an ISP is concerned, the recipient is always right.

So What Counts As "Spam"?

If a customer receives emails that they feel do not apply to them, that they were not expecting to receive in the first place, or even that they simply do not wish to receive any more (regardless of being properly opted in), they may mark the message as “spam” in their inbox.

This triggers a spam complaint to the ISP hosting their mailbox, and can impact reputation to that entire network—even in very small values. This is yet another reason why maintaining best practices is critical to avoid negative customer engagements and maintain inbox placement.

How Do ISPs Use This Data?

Even more critical however, is that ISPs themselves use customer evaluations of the communications they receive to inform their own filtering mechanisms. Recently, Microsoft detailed this strategy within their own Spam Fighters program. For the uninitiated, Spam Fighters essentially works by surveying a randomly selected portion of Outlook users.

In order for Microsoft’s filters to work successfully, they need to identify both good, and bad mail. What better way to inform their machine learning than by asking their users themselves? The question placed to the selected users who volunteer to participate is simple:

Is this spam? Or non-spam?

This binary statement highlights the importance of customer perception to senders. While there are other factors that contribute to a message ultimately being flagged as spam (authentication, attachments, sending IP, etc.), how the message comes across in the inbox cannot be underestimated. So put yourself in the recipient’s shoes.

A positive customer experience with relevant content going only to engaged users is the best way to ensure you don’t become another example in the “spam” category.

While we're on the subject of email marketing, how confident are you that your emails are contributing to a positive customer experience on mobile? If your subscribers are dealing with poor formatting, long load times, and unresponsive links, you're losing their attention. Download our Mobile Email Guide to learn how to fix and prevent these problems.

Photo credit: Skley via Foter.com / CC BY-ND

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Boost the Relevance of Your Content with Benefits and Features

Quick Copy Tip

One cool thing about being a content marketer is that you tend to become an expert in your topic. You probably know an awful lot about your business, your project, or your subject matter.

In fact, you might actually know too much about it.

It’s called the curse of knowledge. Because we research our topics deeply and spend so much time writing about them, we tend to understand the technical specs inside and out. We have a great grasp of the under-the-hood details that make the thing work. And we think customers want to know all about those details.

But most of your potential buyers? They don’t care.

What have you done for me lately?

To be effective, marketing needs to show exactly what the offering does for the person buying it.

The features of your offer are what make it work. The benefits are the results it creates for the customer.

What transformation does your product or service empower? What does it allow the customer to become that she isn’t today?

Jimmy Choo high heels aren’t coveted because they’re comfortable or well-made. (Even though devotees believe they are.) Women buy them to feel confident and gorgeous.

Hybrid cars aren’t popular because they’re fuel-efficient, money-saving, or environmentally friendly. The real benefits are feeling virtuous and smart, with the warm, fuzzy glow that comes from believing you’re saving the world.

Your content and copy will never be truly relevant to your audience until you translate your features into customer-focused benefits.

The five-minute feature check

Quick, take a look through the last persuasive piece you wrote (blog post, sales page, podcast script) and take note of all of the features you talk about.

The process
Your qualifications
The patented mechanism
The policy
The dimensions
The speed
The materials

Copy and paste them all into a fresh document. Then, after each feature, add the words:

so you can …

The final results will be phrases like:

I have 10 years of experience helping clients exactly like you, so you can feel confident that together we can solve even your trickiest widget problems.
Our course is the most rigorous on the market, so you can leapfrog ahead of your competitors.
Our grape jam has 50% less sugar and no weird additives, so you can enjoy it guilt-free.

In about five minutes, you’ll uncover the weak spots in your persuasive content — the places where you were thinking about you and what you offer, and not about them and what they get out of it.

You might not use the words “so you can” over and over again in your final copy — but you will be writing with an understanding of your audience benefits.

Not all benefits are equal

The curse of knowledge can also lead you to focus too much on what some copywriters call fake benefits.

These are the benefits of your product or service that you think are important. And you might be absolutely right. They could be critical to delivering the results your audience wants.

The trouble is, the customer doesn’t particularly care.

These could be things like:

Stabilizing blood chemistry levels
Improving efficiency of project delivery and implementation
Mastering the ability to write a college entrance essay

But that doesn’t tell us what the buyer gets to have, do, be, feel, or become by moving forward with this purchase.

What those customers might actually want could be to:

Get slim without feeling hungry
Pull off a great project and look like a hero to their boss
Feel like brilliant parents because their teenager got into a great college

Features do matter

Features are the specific, convincing details that demonstrate why your solution is effective. As long as they’re tied directly to customer-focused benefits, your buyer will stay interested.

Here are some features that have been translated into benefits and presented as a set:

This nutritional program stabilizes your blood chemistry so you can finally lose weight … without getting hungry.

Our proven process makes you more efficient … and that makes you look like a hero when you deliver your next project in half the time and under budget.

This quick course teaches your teenager how to write a masterful college entrance essay … which could be the deciding factor in whether they get into their first-choice school.

Take another look at your five-minute benefit check. Any fake benefits in there?

Wants, not needs

You’ve got one more check to make before you call it good.

Are the benefits you’ve identified things your audience genuinely wants, or are they things you think they need?

Paying for things we need is boring. Spending money on things we want is a lot more fun. That’s why it’s easier to sell big-screen TVs than life insurance.

When you’re translating your features into benefits, make sure those benefits are driven by wants. Look for emotional drivers like pleasure, comfort, status, and self-image. You can also seek to put a stop to pain, either physical or emotional.

It’s not only hedonistic emotions that can drive behavior — values like patriotism, justice, and fairness can play powerful roles with the right audience. It’s still a pretty good idea, though, to pair them with a little self-interested hedonism if you can. Fair-trade coffee wouldn’t sell nearly as well if those arabica beans didn’t taste so good.

We like to think that logical drivers like efficiency, physical health, preventing future problems, and scientific evidence influence our decisions, but, they typically don’t have much impact. But those “rational” benefits are helpful when they’re used to justify an emotional decision that’s already been made.

The customer who already wants the beautiful high-heeled shoes tells herself that Jimmy Choos will last longer and feel better than a cheaper brand.

The customer who already wants to feel enlightened and virtuous tells himself that the fuel economy of the Prius clearly makes it a sensible choice.

Marketing vs. manipulation

There’s an important difference between putting your best foot forward and crossing the line into manipulation.

The key lies in making two promises:

Don’t say things that aren’t true.
Don’t omit significant things that are true.

The impression you create with your marketing needs to be realistic and truthful. If it isn’t, you’re a con artist and a creep — and your audience will rightly shun you when they figure that out.

If you liked this Quick Copy Tip, click here to read other posts in the series.

The post Boost the Relevance of Your Content with Benefits and Features appeared first on Copyblogger.

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Thursday 27 July 2017

How list management can help drive sales

Bigger means better when it comes to email lists, right? It makes intuitive sense that the more email addresses you have on a contact list, the greater the reach of your messaging. After all, more email recipients means more opens, clicks and conversions. In this case, however, conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, the opposite is often true.

While there’s certainly a place for widely distributed, generalized email content (such as newsletters), your readers often perk up at the specific information they can use. When they receive an email that looks like it contains something relevant to them in particular, they’re more likely to open it, read it and take the action you want them to.

Determine which groups of customers receive certain emails by segmenting your contact list into multiple smaller lists. These smaller contact lists can be based on various factors including geography, demographics (age, gender, etc.), purchase history and so on. Once you’ve created these segments, you can begin sending targeted emails designed to prompt action.

Increased engagement

When an email lands in their inbox and it looks relevant and interesting, a reader takes notice. Furniture and home decor retailer west elm boosts their email marketing program’s engagement by keeping track of when customers have most recently shopped with them. When a customer goes “missing” for a while, west elm sends a message taking note of the absence and offering a discount to woo them back.

West Elm shop now email

Instead of simply blasting out a discount to their entire list, west elm strategically targets only those readers who’ve been disengaged for a while and attempts to entice them back with something relevant to them: in this case, a personalized discount. If you have the ability to track your customers’ most recent purchases or interactions with your business, you can segment your contacts this way too.

1800Contacts elevates their customers’ engagement with a similar segmentation tactic. By keeping track of what customers order and when, they can automatically send reminder emails. These reminders are relevant – the reader only receives reminders when they should be running low on their previous contact lens order — and the online retailer makes it easy for the customer to replenish their supply without a lot of extra steps.

1800 Contacts customer engaging email

Even nonprofits can take advantage of email segmentation. The goal of any museum is to boost ticket sales generally, but the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) uses list management to segment its contacts into members and non-members. They send email newsletters and exhibition announcements to non-members, of course. For members, however, the museum appeals to a sense of exclusivity by prompting members to take advantage of special pre-sales, among other benefits.

San Franciso Museum of Modern Art Member email

The more you know about your customers and their habits, the better you can segment them into groups based on characteristics or behaviors. That makes your emails more relevant to your audience, which in turn makes them more likely to open, click and purchase. Start segmenting today.

Join 140,000 small business owners

Get expert tips and email inspiration biweekly. Subscribe today and download our FREE Guide to Email List Management eBook.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in January 2013 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy and relevance.

The post How list management can help drive sales appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.

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3 Ways to Integrate Account-Based Marketing Into Your Sales Practices

Now that you have discovered the benefits of using an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy to maximize your available marketing and sales resources by developing personalized campaigns for targeted accounts, it's time to focus on how you can further integrate ABM into your sales practices. Through the integration process with sales, you'll be able to develop a deeper understanding of each account in order to enhance how you personalize all marketing communications with those accounts going forward.

The result can be increased revenues and referrals from those accounts as their satisfaction with their experience rises.

Here are three ways that you can integrate ABM into your sales practices:

1. Technology

Available tools and platforms facilitate the integration process between ABM and your sales processes. This includes platforms that automate and update lead and contact information so everyone has the same current data on the accounts. Technology can also streamline marketing campaigns and provide a way to collaborate on the production of these campaigns. For example, this can include getting immediate feedback from sales on the visuals and content that marketing has developed, which is then shared across both teams.

Another area that technology can assist with in terms of integration would be the ability to deliver action-oriented insights from the data collected during the marketing and sales processes. The analytics can be divided and segmented into different metrics to understand the impact that certain ABM strategies had in assisting sales with lead generation as well as conversion.

This capability also includes customized reports on each account, drilling farther down to illustrate how the personalization efforts have impacted the results with that account. Having this information can serve as the map that both marketing and sales need to see how they can work together to improve the efforts that both make to winning new customers and keeping existing ones.

2. Training

Shortening the learning curve for your marketing and sales teams through training can speed up the integration process between ABM and your sales system. The introduction of the aforementioned new technology also precipitates the need for training. our teams need to understand how ABM works and what it can achieve for sales.

First, your teams need to understand how ABM works and what it can achieve for sales. This gives them the rationale they need to be willing to change habits and processes that they might have been using prior to this move to the ABM approach. Second, providing hands-on training of any new technology gives them the framework for what type of integration is possible that will save them time and reduce any redundancies across functions. It will also show them how the integration can produce more insights that will help them achieve better results.

The faster you can ramp up their understanding of what and how to integrate ABM and sales, the faster those results will come for the organization. Through their training, they may even realize other aspects of what they do that can be integrated to speed the personalization of marketing and sales for each account.

3. Communication and Collaboration

While technology and training can provide the pathway to integration between ABM and sales processes, it is up to the people within those functions to truly make it happen. To be successful requires communication and collaboration between those on both teams. This starts with regularly sharing what each team is doing in conjunction with each account to determine how they might combine efforts to improve the experience for that account.

This will also help to ensure that both marketing and sales are speaking the same language so the accounts don't become confused by interaction with both.

Scheduling meetings as well as checking in on a one-on-one basis helps everyone understand the latest information on that account and showcases the results of the integration efforts. Ideas and feedback can then be implemented based on the previous efforts to determine how to further integrate. Doing this in a stepwise fashion can ensure the integration process works and helps everyone on both teams get acclimated to the changes that result.

The sales staff can provide their insights to marketing about why and when an account wanted to buy, which enables marketing to more effectively plan their campaigns for specific times of the year based on that information. Making that information available through a collaborative platform furthers the integration of the processes that both teams enact, helping to get more results within less time and using fewer resources.

Continual Process

Integration doesn't happen overnight between sales and marketing, and it doesn't end at some point. Instead, consider integration as an ongoing evolution for your organization that will occur over time. Each step you take toward integrating ABM into your sales processes will incrementally change what your teams are doing and result in measurable performance improvements.

Be patient, thoughtful, and open to the integration process that requires technology, training, communication, and collaboration to optimize the benefits you'll get from doing so.

When asked, a third of marketing organizations say their biggest challenge is maintaining personalized and consistent interactions with their customers. Download the Argyle ABM Survey for more insights.

Image credit: StockSnap

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5 Truths About Email Marketing Your Boss Will Want to Know

An email marketing strategy always needs approval from the boss to ensure it is in line with the company's overall strategy, delivers on key objectives, and is in line with the marketing budget. While these are the obvious factors you have to address, there are some other key things that your boss will want to know about the email marketing campaign you have planned. You need consider and adopt these five necessary thing about your email marketing strategy:

1. The Audience is Correct

Nearly a third of all contacts on your email contact list or database will change every year in terms of their interest and contact information, so your boss will want to know how you ensured that the current email list is accurate. After all, resources are limited and should not be wasted on sending emails to the wrong person or email address. At the same time, your boss will also want to see that the list is growing with the best targets for what you offer.

To ensure your boss that your email marketing list is accurate and growing, you need to create frictionless signup opportunities through all channels so it's easy to join the list of prospects. This means keeping the signup form basic with just the minimal information you need to contact them with an email marketing campaign. You can also consider incentivizing them with a discount or something else that will convince them to sign up.

Consider using automated contact update software that integrates with your contact list so that if there is a change of information or someone unsubscribes this is automatically updated. MailChimp, Zapier, and Constant Contact are three examples of automation tools for ensuring a current email subscriber list.

2. The Format Must Be Engaging

Your boss will want to know why the email marketing format you selected will truly engage your audience so be prepared to offer the rationale. This may involve explaining why you have chosen a certain email format for the email campaign, including the need to create an authentic, trustworthy message for recipients in light of fake email marketing campaigns that some retailers have experienced.

The format needs to be easy to read on all devices as well as intuitive so it knows what device the recipient is using to read the email. You will also want the email marketing to reflect a consistent look, feel, and message to the rest of your marketing communications.

Other formatting aspects are important to note in case your boss is not sure why you are using the following: white space, text size, balance in color selection, and a CTA button for your call to action. You will also need to consider optimizing the email for those who might be viewing it with images turned off. While the use of images is typically one of the most engaging factors in an email, not everyone prefers to view them. If that's the case, your email marketing content will need to engage these audience members.

3. Optimization and Segmentation Are Crucial

While you are not optimizing the content for a search engine, your boss needs to know how you are creating the content in a way that works specifically for inbox delivery and the expectations of your segmented audience. To help your boss understand how you will achieve optimization and segmentation, you will need to provide specific examples that show how various content and different types of mediums look. For example, your content will be different for an email campaign that shares new video content. This might include an embedded clip versus an email that touts a newly published white paper with visuals of certain pages or charts.

Just like optimizing content for search engines, illustrate to your boss how you have addressed the details of an email that can also impact upon conversion rates, including the subject line, headlines in the content, preheader text, and the call to action (CTA) content. For example, an iPhone will only show 32 characters of a subject line so make sure those characters count. You'll also need to point out how you have personalized and segmented the email list and accompany email content for those groups to illustrate that you realize the value of doing this over just sending out the same content to everyone.

You'll also need to point out how you have personalized and segmented the email list and accompanied email content for those groups to illustrate that you realize the value of doing this rather than just sending out the same content to everyone. This segmentation can be done by age, location, purchase behavior, or place in the customer lifecycle. Just ensure that you have reasons as to why you have segmented the list this way and how the relevant content has been optimized for the needs and interests of that particular segment. Don't forget to also include optimizing the timing and frequency of the email campaigns also tied to the segmentation, that you have developed.

4. Focusing On the Bigger Picture Is Key

Your boss will always want to know how your work within the email marketing campaign relates to the bigger picture of the overall marketing strategy. Your cross-marketing efforts are vital to your company's leadership because they have to ensure that all the marketing tactics are working together to create a greater return on the investment that's being made.

You'll want to work with other members of your marketing team to see what they are doing and on what channel to see if you can coordinate efforts. You don't want to send out an email marketing campaign when every other channel has the same information being broadcast. It's better to spread out the messaging across channels at a designated time to create a flow rather than a flood.

5. Specific Metrics Prove the Return

Be prepared to give your boss specific metrics that illustrate how the email marketing program has done in providing that return. The best metrics to focus on for email marketing campaigns include a clickthrough rate, to see how many recipients clicked on a link within that email; the conversion rate, that shows how many recipients clicked on a link and completed a specific action like buying a product or filling in a form; and the bounce rate, to see how many emails did not make it to the intended inbox.

Other email marketing metrics that are good to share with your boss include email list growth, email sharing/forwarding rate, and the overall return on investment. All of these email marketing metrics deliver a picture of the effectiveness of the campaign and the ability to engage with recipients in a way that delivers on how many marketing dollars were spent to achieve those results.

Deliver the Goods

This information delivered to the boss can help you continue to get approval to generate more email marketing campaigns because you have proven your worth in developing and executing marketing tactics that engage and convert.

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37 Ways to Rock Your Content

Sometimes, content marketing is a numbers game. And this week on Copyblogger, we have lots of ideas for well-defined, specific actions you can take to improve your website and create some excellent content.

Specifically, we have 37 ideas.

On Monday, Stefanie kick-started our week with a nifty little process to turn one lonely content idea into four strong posts. (These could, of course, be blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, or whatever content form rocks your world.)

On Tuesday, Jerod contributed three steps you should take right away to improve your site’s SEO.

And on Wednesday, I added 10 ideas for bringing the sizzle back when you’ve lost that loving feeling for your content. Because it happens, my friends, it happens.

Over on Copyblogger FM, we published an encore presentation of my podcast episode on the 10 quality signals that search engines look for on your site. These not only make your site look better, they actually … make your site better.

Jerod wrapped up our list on the Sites podcast, with 10 goals that make content marketing meaningful.

There you have it: 37 specific steps you can take to have more fun, create better content, and reach more people. Which one are you going to try first?

That’s it for this week — have a great weekend, and we’ll see you Monday.