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

Monday, 10 September 2018

35 great B2B subject lines

Business-to-business emails can be used to get customers to sign up for a free trial, encourage them to attend a webinar or teach them to use your products or services better. But if your subject lines don’t grab their attention, your messages might never get read. If you could use some help creating subject lines that stand out and inspire clicks, then this post is for you.

Here are 25 examples of some great B2B subject lines that you can test out for your business today.

How to Leverage [your product] in Your Business
Save Money and Look Like a Star to Your Boss
How to Impress Your CFO — Save $1000
Increase Your ROI by 30%, Guaranteed
How to make it onto your buyer’s shortlist
Free Webinar: [insert webinar name]
Now you can do even more with your [xxxx]
Should your company outsource [insert thing to outsource here]?
Breakfast & Secrets for How to [insert the problem you solve or the product you sell]
Success Tip: 5 Ways to a Better [xxxx]
Register Today: [insert name of event] Sept. 10!
Entry deadline fast approaching
New White Paper: Best Practices for [Insert problem and solution here]
Success Tip #1: [Insert Tip Headline Here]
A gift employees and clients will love: [Insert gift name here]
Extended for a Day: Get Free Shipping Through Friday
Your Weekly Alert: [insert topic here]
Hear Exclusive Research Presented on [insert what your event is about] — Register Now!
Inside: [hot topic in your newsletter you think will get the most opens]
Save $200: [insert event here] Early Bird Registration Ends [insert date here]
It’s a pleasure doing business with you, [insert name]
Busy? Let us take something off your plate.
Nothing personal, it’s just good business, [insert name]
The ultimate guide to [your service or product]
Last day to register for our free webinar!

And here are 10 more B2B subject lines to inspire you.

EXPIRES AT MIDNIGHT: 50% off certifications that prove you know | Hootsuite
Quickly collaborate on PDFs with Acrobat | Adobe
Find Out How the Best Companies Are Using Salesforce | Bluewolf
Migrate to all flash storage but do it right | HP
Want to come to Conex? Name your price! | Conex
The Day After: 11 Things to Do After You Publish a Post | Quicksprout
Discover why 100,000+ customers are using Zendesk | Zendesk
If you have a website, you need this tool | Sumo
Ends Today: 62 Premium WordPress Themes at One Crazy Low Price | CopyBlogger
We’d loooooove your feedback, [customer name] | Flywheel

Don’t let lackluster subject lines be the reason your important emails are ignored. Feel free to use the examples and inspiration above to create subject lines that get your emails opened and read.

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published in November 2009. It has been rewritten for accuracy and relevance.

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What Smartphone Users’ Mobile Mindset Means for Brands

Feel naked without your smartphone? You’re not alone. That phenomena — and the move to smaller and smaller screens — has pushed marketers to adapt their practices and technologies to provide a mobile-optimized experience. That much isn’t new. But as consumers have grown more and more reliant on their smartphones, a mobile-optimized site isn’t enough. You have to reshape the experience to fit the new mobile-only behavior.

When consumers pick up and unlock their phone, they enter a distinct mobile mindset, where whatever purpose they’re looking to fulfill, they expect comfort and escapism. This new mobile mindset affects the content they’re like to consume on their mobile device, and subsequently, has a huge impact on their buying behavior.

That is the main conclusion of The Truth Behind Smartphone Behavior, Clicktale’s latest research with The Wharton School. Our in-depth analysis of mobile taps, scrolls, zooms, and user journeys of more than a million consumers will bring you up-to-scratch on what guides smartphone buying behavior.

Entertain Me

When users are in their mobile mindset, they don’t want challenging content or want to think too much. Which means that consumers are less likely to engage with scientific content or anything that is simply factual. Instead, they seek entertainment and relaxation. Our research found that, on a mobile device, consumers are 35 percent more likely to engage with feature articles and sports than hard news.

The Need for Speed

Most marketers know that the mobile experience needs to be slick in terms of speed. Google research recently found that 53 percent of visits are abandoned by users if the page doesn’t load within three seconds. Three seconds!

And our research found that the need for speed extends to user journeys and the content itself. The journey needs to be as short as possible. Also keep in mind that fast and functional content on brand websites or apps, including clearance items, coupons, and store locators tended to fare much better in terms of engagement than long-form content, such as Q&As or long features, for example.

Convenience, Convenience, Convenience

Because consumers are in a relaxed (borderline lazy) mobile mindset when they interact with their smartphones, convenience is everything. In fact, it’s so important that nearly a third (31 percent) of consumers admit they are happy to pay more for a product or service if the mobile shopping experience is better. Millennials especially place great importance on mobile experience, with 43 percent saying they would pay more for something provided brands give them a five-star shopping experience. Mobile users are even happy to pay more in shipping fees than desktop users ($3.5 vs $3.3 respectively).

Building the Mobile Marketing Mindset

So, the three key takeaways from the research for marketers looking to improve the customer experience on mobile are: Make it entertaining, make it easy, and make it quick. But more than that, the research shows the importance of understanding the intent behind consumer decisions on mobile devices. In my experience, marketers are far too focused on metrics such as conversion rate and cart abandonment to notice what really makes their customers tick.

Technology is partly to blame for that trend. Analytics on conversion rates, page clicks, social media impressions, and the like have been around for years now. The opportunity today is to move to experience analytics — where it’s possible to gain a much deeper understanding of customer intent through the capture of app taps, scrolls, zooms, pinches, and more — and then use data science to interpret the data’s meaning. Turn the pixelated view you have of your customers into crystal clarity.

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What’s the One Skill that Separates Well-Paid Freelance Writers from Those Who Struggle?

Everyone loves the part of the hero’s journey where our protagonist accepts the “call to adventure” and “crosses the threshold”...

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Thursday, 6 September 2018

Email marketing tips for educational institutions

Any school — from preschools all the way up through colleges and universities — can benefit from the power of email. Not only is email marketing a great way to attract new students, but it’s also one of the best ways to stay in touch with students, parents, faculty and staff. You can use it to alert students and parents about upcoming events, to drive interest in fundraisers, and generally to keep students, their parents and the wider community informed about what’s happening at your school.

But how can educational institutions get the most out of their email campaigns? Here are some best practices and tips for elementary, secondary and higher education email marketing — including the benefits of segmenting your email lists and how to create effective emails that drive action.

Why schools should be using email marketing

In the world of digital communication, email may be one of the oldest ways to spread your message, but it’s also one of the most effective. If you haven’t been investing much thought or time into developing an email marketing strategy for your school, here’s why you should get started:

Low cost: Email is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available. In 2017, the median return on investment for email marketing was 122 percent. Put another way, emails are easy and relatively inexpensive to send, and the return you can get is well worth the time and money.
Good fundraising tool: Schools with overflowing coffers are few and far between. Email is a great way to raise funds because it’s less intrusive than an out-of-the-blue phone call and gives the institution an opportunity to appeal to community members on why funds are needed. You can also embed links or buttons in your emails that make it easy for recipients to quickly donate online.
Builds interest among prospective students: Students and their parents won’t make a decision on your school based on email alone, as that calls for more personal interaction, such as a tour or a face-to-face meeting. That said, email is an effective way to get them through the door in the first place by promoting the advantages your school offers.
Event invitations and reminders: Long gone are the days when students would arrive home with piles of flyers promoting various school events and functions (though some would argue we’re not quite there yet). Email is an effective way to invite students, parents and community members to events. Further, if space is limited, you can include a link in the body of your email that recipients can use to quickly and easily RSVP.

Separate your email lists into groups

Dividing your master email list into segments ensures you’re sending emails only to those who will find them relevant. For example, you might not want to send an email about all of your great new fall classes to alumni. That type of email will likely perform better with contacts who are currently enrolled or preparing to enroll in your academic program. Consider segmenting your email list into the following groups:

Students: You may also consider focusing on specific groups of students, such as seniors or new students.
Parents: Similar to above, you may want to target your sights on parents of specific students.
Teachers and school leaders: This can be further broken down by administrative staff or teachers within specific departments.
Wider school community: This may include extended family members, such as grandparents or aunts and uncles, as well as alumni and even residents of your school’s geographic location.
All of the above: Send messages to all of the groups previously mentioned when the message is relevant to everyone involved in your institution’s community.

Tips for effective emails

Just like almost any type of marketing, the more attractive your message, the more likely you’ll get the response you’re looking for. Here are three quick tips on how to format your emails for best results.

Create mobile-friendly emails. Many people today, particularly young people (students), read emails on their mobile device. This means you should format your messages so they’re readable on smaller screens.
Use visuals beyond text. Text-only emails are largely a thing of the past. Incorporate strong photography or eye-catching graphics into your emails to make them as visually appealing as possible. That said, avoid overdoing it on design elements to keep things from getting crowded.
Make use of creative fonts. Test modern and clean-looking fonts that are attractive to the eye. On the flip side, avoid fonts that are so artistic that they become hard to read.

One tip that’s always recommended when it comes to email design is to pick out a few emails you’ve received that you think were particularly effective. Ask yourself what it was about those messages that got your attention, and try to incorporate those elements into your own emails.

Measuring email marketing success

Another important benefit of primary, secondary and higher education email marketing is the ability to easily measure the results of a given campaign. This allows you to see what works well and what doesn’t, and then tweak your email marketing strategy moving forward.

There are a number of useful email marketing metrics, but here are some of the basics:

Delivery rate: This is the percentage of emails that are actually delivered to recipients compared to those that bounce back.
Open rate: As the name suggests, this is the percentage of recipients who open the emails you send.
Clickthrough rate: This metric is the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link contained in your message.
Conversion rate: This metric varies based on your email marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to get prospective students to schedule a visit, then the percentage of email recipients who do so is your conversion rate for that campaign.
Subscriber growth rate: Fairly straightforward, this metric tracks how much your email subscriber list grows over a specific period of time, such as a month, quarter or year.

While these are some of the basic metrics you need to be concerned with, there are many others that allow you to dig in deeper based on your specific goals or needs. These five metrics are a good place to begin, but you may want to investigate others as your email campaigns become more sophisticated.

Email has been around for roughly 40 years, but it’s just as viable and cost-effective as ever. No matter which tactics you choose, email marketing should be an integral part of any educational institution’s marketing strategy.

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Are You a Writer Looking for Recognition and Clients? Copyblogger Certification Is Re-Opening Soon

First things first: We’re re-opening our Content Marketing Certification this month! It’s a four-week educational program on content strategy (taught...

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Wednesday, 5 September 2018

NEW! Fizzle membership now with premium managed WordPress hosting by Flywheel

I’ve been wanting to share this with you for sooooo long…

We’ve been working incredibly hard behind the scenes at Fizzle to put together an incredible new benefit for members.

A while back, we asked ourselves this question: “What could we add to Fizzle that would make it an even more incredible, ridiculous, no-brainer kind of value to indie entrepreneurs?”

We thought about a bunch of things, and kept coming back to things that all of our members need.

We all have or need a website, right? And web hosting is kind of a pain in the butt. Not just finding a good host, but getting the kind of support you need to sleep soundly at night knowing your site is safe, secure and won’t go down right when you get your big break.

So, what if we offered premium managed WordPress hosting to all Fizzle members, included with membership at no additional charge?

Ha, right! Like how could we possibly pull that off? Managed WordPress hosting usually costs at least $30 a month, and Fizzle is only $39.

Plus, we’re not hosting experts. How could our service compete with the best in the biz?

Well, we found a way.

By partnering with Flywheel, literally one of the best in the hosting biz, we found a way to offer premium managed WordPress hosting to all Fizzle members, at no additional charge.

You heard me right. Starting now, every current and new Fizzle member will not only get our courses, roadmap, coaching, community and support, but you’ll also get amazing managed WordPress hosting from Flywheel.

Here’s what the Fizzle + Flywheel hosting program offers:

Hacker-proof security + free site cleanup if there’s ever an issue
Blazing fast speeds – we’ve seen a 42% improvement migrating our own sites to Flywheel
Automatic nightly backups and one-click restore for peace of mind
Incredible support from real WordPress experts
Advanced features like SSL, CDN, local development and more, for free

Plus: Flywheel will migrate your existing site for free in just 1-3 days!

Oh, and did I mention that we have a brand new course inside Fizzle that shows you step-by-step exactly how to get the most out of your Flywheel hosting?

And of course, Fizzle membership still includes:

35+ in-depth video courses taught by real business owners
23+ founder stories interviews on what makes real businesses succeed
The 9-stage Fizzle Small Biz Roadmap to guide your journey
Vibrant discussions with our active community of business builders just like you
Live weekly group coaching and support from the Fizzle team

Sound like an offer you can’t refuse? We hope so.

You probably have questions about the new Fizzle + Flywheel hosting partnership. We have answers.

Ge the full details here: https://fizzle.co/hosting

Now with premium managed WordPress hosting, we think Fizzle is a complete no-brainer for anyone who wants to build a business around something they love.

We hope to see you inside!

Sincerely,

-Corbett Barr & The Fizzle Team

P.S. We also just released an entire new podcast episode about our hosting benefit, in case you want to learn even more before signing up.