Guide to SEO, Social Media, and Email Marketing

2013 GuideBy Josh Hamit to SEO, Social Media, and

Email marketing

Digital Marketing How-To-Guide

Written by Josh Hamit Curve Interactive Limited

Contents

1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ...... 2 2.0 INTRODUCTION ...... 3 3.0 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) ...... 4

WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT? ...... 4 HOW SEO WORKS ...... 5 SEO BASICS ...... 7 SITE ARCHITECTURE – ON-PAGE SEO ...... 10 OFF-PAGE SEO ...... 13 LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES ...... 15 SEO HOUSE-KEEPING ...... 19 TRACKING THE EFFECTS OF YOUR SEO EFFORTS – GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND WEBMASTER TOOLS ...... 20 SEO SUMMARY ...... 22 4.0 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SEM) ...... 23

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING? ...... 23 FACEBOOK AND THE POWER OF LIKE ...... 27 HOW SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS ...... 28 INCREASING ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION ...... 31 FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ...... 32 HOW TO RUN A BEST PRACTICE CAMPAIGN ...... 33 CASE STUDY – AJ BOMBERS, USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO CREATE 1-2-1 RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS ...... 36 EXAMPLE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FOR A SMALL BUSINESS ...... 38 SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMARY ...... 40 5.0 E-NEWSLETTER AND EMAIL MARKETING ...... 41

HOW TO START YOUR EMAIL LIST ...... 42 EMAIL CONTENT ...... 46 EMAIL BEST PRACTICES ...... 46 EMAIL DESIGN ...... 48 EMAIL SUMMARY ...... 55 6.0 CONCLUSION ...... 56

1.0 Executive summary Over the course of reading this book on digital marketing you will learn the theories and best practices used by the world’s top digital marketing experts to generate untold amounts of sales for themselves and their respective clients. Moreover, you will personally come to learn how to use these theories in practice to transform the ability of your own business’s website to generate huge amounts of prospects and leads.

The fundamental strategies included in this marketing system come from the three highly complex fields of search engine optimisation (SEO), social media marketing and email marketing. Used together, in a ‘system of systems’ you will be able to build a fantastic web presence that will allow you to capture the attention of consumers who are already eagerly seeking out products and services in your industry. Each of the three digital marketing strategies will be broken down into simple steps and everyone from a complete novice to seasoned pro can learn a few things by taking in and implementing the lessons in this book.

Firstly, you will learn the fundamentals of SEO. You will come to understand how search engines make their decisions and what factors play a role in ranking websites in search engine results pages. From here you will learn how you can edit your website to give the search engines exactly what they need to rank your website on the first page. This includes numerous tips on both on-page and off-page SEO, from simple edits to your individual webpage titles to more complicated link building strategies. Furthermore, SEO housekeeping will be discussed as well as how to track the effects of your work through Google Analytics.

In part two of the guide you will learn what social media marketing is and how you can use it to influence your target market. This section is laden with tips as to how you can leverage social media effectively while spending less time on it in the long run. From this section you will ultimately learn what drives a successful social media channel, how to increase engagement and participation from your fans and how to run a best practise social media campaign. Through several case studies and strategies you will see exactly how you can implement a strategy of your own.

Finally, in section three you will become accustom to the art of email marketing newsletters. Email subject lines, how to build an email list, email content and email design will be the discussion of this chapter, each of which is looked at individually. You will come to learn how you can leverage the power of email marketing to generate huge amounts of leads and make sure your brand name is on the tip of every one of your email subscribers’ tongue come the time they need your services.

2.0 Introduction It has long been believed that the best way to find new business is through using traditional advertising methods such as cold calling, print and television marketing. These ‘interruption-based’ marketing techniques have been proven to be extremely effective in the 1960s all the way through to the late 1990s.

Marketers had found that if they spent ‘x’ amount of money bombarding the public with television, billboard, print and radio adverts enough people would get their message and they would eventually return a profit. However, with every business left, right and centre coming to learn this fact, the marketplace has now become inundated and overcrowded with advertisements and we as consumers have learnt to ignore these attempts to capture our attention. This type of advertising is no longer cost effective, and any return is hard to measure.

To add to the decline in effectiveness of interruption based marketing a monumental shift in consumer behaviour has transformed the way we as marketers should promote our products and services; people now have the power to be in control of what information they receive and how. This behavioural shift can be attributed to the growth of the social media, email and the internet and its ever increasing integration in our everyday lives.

Are interruption based methods of marketing dead and a waste of your time? We believe so - Consumers do not value being force-fed information. Instead they prefer to find out the information they need online, through mediums they can control. Staggeringly, 80% of all online transactions start with a query in a search engine and 90% of those searchers never look past the first page of results. However, the good news is the online fact finding mission consumers go on to search for what they want, can be manipulated to your business’s advantage with the inbound marketing system highlighted in this book.

This marketing system highlights and explains in great detail less intrusive methods of marketing which are proving to be many times more effective in generating qualified leads when compared to more traditional marketing and selling concepts.

These powerful marketing methods when used together will generate so many leads that before long you will only have to accept the best, high paying jobs!

3.0 Search engine optimisation (SEO)

What is SEO and why it is important?

We start off our online lead generation system with Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO is the practice of improving the position of a website within search engines results pages. Its ultimate aim is to get a website or webpage placed in position #1 for the keywords and keyword phrases being targeted. For example, Nestle will want to appear in the #1 position for the search query ‘chocolate bar’.

The reasons for making sure your business’s website appear in position #1, or at least on the first page of the search engine results are plentiful. First are foremost, as we discussed in the introduction, almost all consumers surf the internet on fact finding missions before they make a purchase. Browsing paper directories has become something of the past and we now make all enquiries for products and services through search engines.

Looking at the habits of people using search engines it has been found that 90% of people will actually never look past the first page of search results. Moreover, staggeringly 42% of people searching on Google always click on the #1 ranking page. Figure 1 below shows how the rest of people click.

Can you afford to miss out on consumers who are willingly searching for your product or service online?

If your business’s website does not appear on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) but your competitors are, then imagine how many potential consumers you could be missing out on. You need to be ranking on page 1 to be making the most of the demand in your industry. Figure 1

You will notice that results that appear on the third page of Google do not even merit a single percentage point. If your website is not present on at least the first two pages of Google, to some extent your website is invisible. Liken it to your physical shop-front being down a back lane where no one goes!

A powerful SEO campaign will increase the amount of targeted traffic and potential customers to your website dramatically. The ‘State of Digital Marketing’ 2012 survey showed that SEO is the #1 channel for developing leads online with almost 60% of digital marketing companies surveyed saying that it makes the biggest impact on their lead generation efforts. Imagine the sort of money you could be making if you were ranked #1 on Google for your targeted keywords.

Having your business’s website appearing on the first page also creates a feeling in the consumers mind that your business is a well-respected brand that is highly authoritative in its industry.

It is often thought that applying SEO best practices to a website is a highly technical skill that only a trained expert can implement. Over the course of this chapter I will show you exactly how easy it is to implement the most important SEO best practices to your own business’s website, dramatically increasing its position in the search engine result pages in the process.

How SEO works

Before we delve into too much detail I will first explain how the position of a website is calculated in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The performance a website has in the search results is dependent on three main factors, or as Johnson and McGee like to describe it in their 2009 classic 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website: “The Tripod of Love”. These are; Visibility, Relevance and Reputation. Google uses these factors to determine the likely usefulness of your website.

Figure 2

Visibility First and foremost let’s deal with visibility, for your website to be present on Google’s search results it first must be visible to the “GoogleBots”. These bots “crawl” the worldwide web and add new pages and their information to the “Google Index” alongside their corresponding URL. When a Google user makes a search, the most relevant information related to it is retrieved from the index and the URL is pulled out the database and shown to the user.

When designing your website it is important it is built in a specific way to make sure it is visible to the GoogleBots. When these bots crawl across the web they do not experience the site in the same way we

do. Google will experience your site in what is referred to as the “source code” view of a webpage. It has great significance as to how this source code is written and structured to how visible your site and its content is to Google.

For example, if your website is designed in such a manner that images or JavaScript make up the navigation buttons on your site the GoogleBots will be unable to ‘see’ them and therefore will not be able to add the pages to its index. Considering this, make sure all links on your website are done in a simple HTML fashion.

Always consider the visibility of your web pages to the search engine robots.

Relevance You must make sure your website is relevant to people’s searches! The solution to making your site relevant is simple, but not as easy to implement - unless you know what you are doing of course. It comes through the concept of the “Wisdom of Crowds” and is connected with ‘links’. Basically the premise of this concept is that the more links that exist from other webpages to one particular webpage indicate that particular page’s quality, relevance and usefulness. It is also highly important that that page has keyword and keyword phrases used throughout its site architecture (a term explained later on) and other on-page best practice SEO principles are implemented.

“So if my website has loads of links to it and lots of keywords, it will rank highly on Google in terms of relevance?… What I’ll do then is create hundreds of sites myself that all link to my main one and I’ll be top of the rankings! Easy!”

Unfortunately no; Google knows you’ll think of doing this and therefore have added a few complexities to the relevance formula! Each link to your site is scored on two scales of quality:

1. The relevance to the target of the link, and 2. Its authority within its particular pocket of relevance, known together as Reputation.

Reputation Reputation is the third and final leg of “The Tripod of Love” and perhaps the most important. Faced with millions of sources of apparently meaningful and useful information Google has to decide which of these sites are most useful and trustworthy. Looking at the number and the quality of links connected to a webpage allows Google to assess the reputation of it in relation to all the other webpages that include similar information.

The position of your website in the results pages of search engines is therefore completely dependent on building and continually supporting the three legs of the “Tripod of Love”. In short, if your website is built soundly, has relevant information and is linked to from numerous other reputable sources then you will rank well.

SEO basics

Now you understand the factors Search Engines take into consideration when ranking your website in their results pages, we will show you how you can give the search engines exactly what they want.

Selecting Keywords We start off with selecting the relevant keywords and keyword phrases. In other words you want to identify exactly what people are typing in the search box for products or services that you sell. Google’s keyword tool and traffic estimator (Search online for ‘Google Keyword tool’) is a free tool which allows you to find out exactly what those words or phrases are. Simply type in a keyword or a phrase related to your product or service and see how many times a month that term is searched for. I will work through an example with you to show how it works.

Figure 3 below shows the Google AdWords Keyword Tool home page. You do not need an account. However if you do have a Google account, then ‘sign in’ with the link in the top right hand corner – this will bypass the annoying ‘Type the characters that appear in the picture below’ security barrier.

Figure 3

Start off by typing in one word related to your business and hit the search button. Make sure you are viewing the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab and that you have selected the correct location. In this example I have searched for ‘chocolate’.

As shown in figure 4 an estimated 30,400,000 global searches are made a month for ‘chocolate’, with 2,740,000 of those being made locally in the United Kingdom. You will notice that the results are automatically sorted by relevance, and according to Google the most relevant keywords relating to chocolate are ‘luxury chocolate’, ‘chocolate gifts’ and ‘homemade chocolate’.

Figure 4

From this search we have found out the most searched for words in relation to ‘chocolate’. If I was running a website about chocolate the first thing I would do is edit or create new content in relation to this data. I will explain how best to do this later.

By refining the search further we can find even more important data to help improve the relevance and visibility of our site in Google.

Selecting the ‘Columns’ drop-down in the top right corner we can select ‘Local search trends’.

From here we can understand if specific keywords or phrases are searched for more at certain times of the year. The graph displays the last 12 months of searches and shows as expected for ‘chocolate easter eggs’ a two month period where the term is searched for a lot. Using this we can gear up our website for certain times of the year by releasing content related to those searches.

Figure 5

The trends can also be used to spot up-and-coming niches within your industry. For example ‘wonka chocolate bars’ seem to be having a steady increase in the amount of searches per month over the last year. In preparation for the continued growth of this product it is important specific pages are set up to accommodate this product, perhaps a product page and several blog articles should be written about it.

Figure 6

Using this tool find out exactly what people are searching for in your industry and compile a comprehensive list of keywords you wish to target. You will need these for the next section! If you are a business that can only serve the local community and surrounding areas add the name of your city in your keyword search; e.g. ‘chocolate london’ or ‘chocolate in london’ etc., etc.

Site architecture – On-page SEO

Now you have your list of well researched keywords it is time to make them work for you. Here you will have to access the back-end of your website or prepare some simple instructions for your web developer to implement. Alternatively, if your site is built in WordPress you can use its built in features plus a specific SEO plug-in to do most of the work for you. I would recommend the free plugin WordPress SEO By Yoast.

First of all let’s define on-page SEO. On-page SEO relates to everything that can be done on the pages of your website to maximize the potential performance it has in search engines for your selected keywords. This includes all the text, pictures and code that make up your site.

To make sure search engine robots know exactly what your website is about and exactly what keywords you are targeting it is important they are present in the ‘website architecture’. The information below explains how you should edit your sites architecture according to SEO best practice.

1. Title structure The title that appears in the browser bar should contain the keyword(s) you are targeting for that page. This can be changed in the tag in the HTML source code of each page, or more easily in WordPress with the simple interface SEO Yoast give you. Each individual page should have an optimized title tag showing the search engine robots what the main focus of that page is. For example, returning to the chocolate website instance, the title structure for a particular product should be: ‘Product Name | Any Keywords Relating To It | Company Name’. Notice that each word in the title should also start with a capital letter. 2. URL structure It is also a good idea to use the keywords in the actual URL address. For example http://www.curve-interactive.com/inbound-marketing instead of something akin to www.curve- interactive.com/Article3php12433. As well as looking a whole lot nicer and being easier to remember it also adds SEO value to your page because the keywords are used. This also encourages people who link to your pages to use the URL name as anchor text – and as we will find out later anchor text is of extreme importance. 3. Internal anchor text Instead of using “click here” or “read more” use keywords to link to your internal pages, it helps Google better understand the content of the linking page. 4. Individual page metadata In the <head> of your page make sure you have metadata and make sure for every page it is different and of course relevant! Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 10 The text written here isn’t actually used by search engines to rank your website, but it is very important for the human reader. Let’s remember you should be building your website for people, not just for search engine robots. Having a compelling description here which includes your targeted keywords will really help with click-through rates. 5. Heading tags When building each page ensure you use the html heading tags <h1>, <h2>, etc. By using these you are making it easier for search engine robots to understand and determine what your page is about, what is the main topic (<h1>) and what are sub-topics (<h2>). Include the targeted keywords and phrases within the heading tags, with the most important keywords appearing in the h1 tag. 6. Alt text + file names As search engine robots cannot ‘see’ images the alt text html tag is used to tell them what the image is of. The alt text for each image should contain the keyword that page is trying to target and should be a maximum of one sentence. To add to this further, when uploading images to your website make sure they are named something relevant. For example if you were uploading an image of a chocolate bar to your website make sure the file is named ‘chocolate- bar.jpg’ or something similar, rather than image1.jpeg. Once again, doing this will help the search engine robots understand exactly what content your website contains which allows it to gauge its relevance. 7. Website navigation Make sure the main navigation on your website is built in simple HTML and doesn’t incorporate Flash or JavaScript. Search engine robots have difficultly crawling these types of content so it is best not to use them. The “Perfectly” optimized page This example of a perfectly optimized page is taken from SEOmoz.com, a fantastic SEO resource which I recommend you becoming a member of. Figure 7 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 11 Other on-page optimisation tips If you haven’t already, make sure you have signed up for Google Analytics and inserted the tracking code on your website. Doing so will allow you to find out invaluable information about your website visitors and how they use the site. This free software from Google allows you to track exactly how many visitors you have and exactly what route these users take through your website – highlighting the most popular pages and potential drop-out pages. It also provides valuable data on where your site’s visits are coming from, whether that be from search engines, referrals from other sites or direct traffic. There is a quick how to guide on Google Analytics further on in this book, it also goes into detail as to how you can use it to track the effects of your SEO activities. Create a Site map and upload it to your domain. Type ‘create a site map’ into Google and use one of the free site map builders. A sitemap is basically a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Most websites are missing a 301 redirect. To a search engine, “example.co.uk" and "www.example.co.uk" are not the same thing. You need to set up a permanent redirect (also known as a "301 redirect") so that you get full credit for what's on your site, no matter how it's accessed. To do so search ‘301 redirect’ in Google. Note: this can be quite complex for a non- technical expert! Make sure you research this thoroughly before you implement it. If you need any help with this email me @ josh@curve-interactive.com. Include your business telephone number and address on every page. The footer of your site would be the best position for this. Including this information on your site is important for local SEO reasons - and also the First Company Law Amendment Directive states that Company Registration number, Place of Registration and Registered Office address needs to be present on your website as it does on your Company headed paper. Do not use Flash on your website! Flash content is not readable by search engine robots and therefore it provides no SEO value to your website. Although it may look good in some cases try and find an alternative way to showcase your content, with simple text being the easiest thing for search engine robots to read. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 12 Off-Page SEO Building best practice SEO principles into a website is arguably the most important facet of a website build. Having a website that ranks highly for the keywords potential customers are searching for will give your website a huge advantage over its competitors. According to Hubspot (2012), on-page SEO only accounts for 30% of a website’s position in the search engine results pages. The other 70% is down to off-page SEO, also called link building. The basic premise of link building is as follows; every inbound link to your website can be classed as a “vote” in the giant popularity contest that is the internet. The more sites that link to yours, the higher yours will rank in search engine results pages. However, not all links are equal. Having a link to your site from one high quality, authoritative website is much more effective in driving your site up the SERPs compared to having a link from 20 random websites with low authority. Search online now for your selected keywords and click on the #1 listing on the first page of results. Copy the URL address and go to www.opensiteexplorer.org and paste the address in. Figure 8 Figure 9 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 13 In this example you will notice that a BBC website has come top of the SERPs. This probably is not the best example as this specific page has a very small amount of ‘total links’ and ‘linking root domains’. But, it does perfectly point out that statement I made earlier about having a single link from an authoritative site compared to having many from low quality sites. Figure 10 After you have pasted in the address and clicked ‘Search’ you will see a page similar to Figure 10, it shows the ‘link profile’ for that particular page. In this example you can see this page about ‘chocolate cake’ only has 2 domains linking to it and 27 total links. 26 of these links are from other BBC webpages. The BBC homepage has a domain authority of 100/100 and therefore whenever it links to another page on the internet it passes on a huge amount of ‘SEO juice’. Having been linked to from such an authoritative page has propelled this page up the SERPs dramatically. Another key reason this particular page is ranked #1 for ‘chocolate cake’ is due to the anchor text linking to this page from other pages on the internet. Anchor text by definition is the words that link one page to another. ‘Click here’ is an example we see a lot. Although ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are probably the most common anchor text we see it is not SEO best practise to utilise this HTML function in this way. Figure 11 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 14 Instead, the words linking to your site/specific page should include the keywords that page is trying to rank for. Using Open Site Explorer and clicking on the ‘Anchor Text’ tab we can see that in this example the anchor text linking to this page are ‘chocolate’, ‘chocolate cake recipes’, ‘(img) chocolate cake (this is the alt text we talked about in the previous section) and finally, ‘chocolate cake’. You will notice as you research your industry that the websites ranked #1 tend to have a large amount of sites linking to them (often 1,000s!), all with high quality page and domain authority plus anchor text including the keywords they are seeking to rank for. It is now your job to make sure your website has a better link profile! There are numerous strategies to build links and we will now go through several in detail. Link building strategies Listing your website in relevant, highly authoritative directories. Research online and find specific directories related to your industry and the keywords you are trying to rank for. If your business is restricted to a small area where you sell your product or service also look for local online business directories and get listed there too. It is important to remember anchor text when you are putting your business’s information in these web directories, often the ‘title’ or ‘name’ field ends up being the anchor text linking from their website to yours. I would not recommend buying links from online directories. You will notice as you start to search online for directories that many will ask for a small amount of cash to get listed, do not do this! Google is against this method of link building as it sees it as businesses trying to manipulate its search results. Paid links are a no-no! Moreover, some directories ask for a reciprocal link in return for listing your site on theirs. Do not take them up on this offer either as we are looking for quality one-way links which are much more effective. If you do chose to maximise the number of links to your website by buying some - make sure the sites have a good Google Page Rank and a mozRank score of over 5 (research these terms online for free tools that calculate a score for you). Doing so should lower the possibility of being penalized by Google. To start off with I recommend getting your website listed and a profile set up on; Google Maps business directory, Bing/Nokia directory, Yahoo! business directory, DMoz, Foursquare, Yelp and LinkedIN. For a list of 50 directories to start off you link building campaign go to; http://www.curve-interactive.com/link-building-business-directories/. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 15 Create a company blog Two-thirds of marketers say their company blog is ‘critical’ or ‘important’ to their business. Each individual page on a website has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Whether a page draws traffic depends on whether it's optimised and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. Blogging is a great way to add interesting content to your site so you can earn high quality links doing so! When blogging it is ideal to include your selected keywords within the blog post copy. Increasing the density of keywords on your site will make it slightly easier to find through search engines as it helps the crawling robots understand what subject your pages are about. Using the keywords you know people are searching for, create a blog that will be of interest to those people. Doing so you will create a limitless supply of link opportunities! Post at least one well thought-out and researched article a week, and if you can - try and post 6 or 7 articles a month. An honest, insightful blog about your industry will be rare, so creating remarkable content that will be useful will generate a large amount of quality links. Turn your blog articles in to presentations and videos An online resource that is currently being underused as a link building and lead generation technique is the use of presentation sites such as Slideshare.net, AuthorStream, Powershow, Brainshark and SlideBoom. Create a simple template with your branding in Powerpoint and then convert your blog articles into short presentations. As well as the advantage of adding a backlink back to your website, for each presentation you upload this idea will also create the impression that you are an authority figure in your industry. Once you have made your presentation record a short video of you presenting it. You could either point a camera on you presenting it or use a screen capture program and a microphone and just talk through the main points. Upload your new video to YouTube and also create another blog post on your site with the new video. This content once again will help you be seen as an authoritative person in your industry and increase the likelihood of people linking to your useful content. Make it easier for people to link to you If you want people to link to your site, make it easy for them! At the end of each of your blog articles you could include a simple HTML snippet that will show a link to your website when posted on their site. Once again make sure the anchor text here is chosen correctly! For example you could have something like this: If you enjoyed the content in this article on chocolate cake recipes why not link to it from your blog? Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 16 <a href="http://www.my-chocolate-website.com/chocolate-cake- recipes">Chocolate cake recipes</a> If you don’t ask you don’t get! Also make sure you have social sharing buttons enabled at the end of each article. If your website is built in WordPress there are several free plug-ins that allow you to quickly and easily add these in. Make sure people are seeing your content so they can link to it – use Social Media If you have recently launched your website and you do not have much traffic coming in make sure you are using social media to its full effect to bring in visitors. The Social Media chapter goes into great detail as to how you can run a successful campaign, but as a start make sure your business is set up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN. Write down 50 messages with a link to a page on your website in less than 140 characters. Use a URL shortener such as bitly or Google’s URL shortener to reduce character length of links. Use # hashtags to tag your keywords in your messages. Sign up to Hootsuite.com and spend an hour or two scheduling at least 7 messages a day for the next month to be sent out automatically through your social profiles. This very simple technique will bring you in hundreds of relevant, targeted viewers. The people who have now seen your content can rate whether it is shareable or not. Repeat this every month and until you feel your messages are becoming boring and repetitive. When you do, come up with some more. Find out where your competitors are getting links from Using the Open Site Explorer website tool mentioned earlier research the ‘link profiles’ of the top performing websites for your keywords. Write down a list of these sites and try securing links from the same places. You will notice they may have numerous links from blogs and forums which brings me on to my next point…. Participate in online forums and blogs related to your industry with Google Alerts Research your selected keywords and find online forums, websites and blogs related to your industry. Start participating and creating conversations with the other readers and where applicable leave a link back to your website. A fantastic way to find relevant sites is to use Google Alerts. Create an individual alert for each of your keywords at http://www.google.com/alerts. Now, according to the preferences you selected when creating your alert you will receive an email from Google showing the latest pages on the web that include those keywords. These will often be new blog articles which will Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 17 allow you to comment and leave a link back to your website. Remember, each of these articles you comment on should be relevant to your keywords. Write articles for content aggregators and Social Bookmarking websites You can submit the blog articles you have already written to article syndication sites such as Ezinearticles, About.com and iSnare. Although they don't pass on much ‘SEO juice’, they're still worth submitting to. In return, you'll get a link in your author bio back to your site. Similarly, Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Pinterest allow you to build links to your website. The effect of these on your search engine ranking position is once again minimal, but every little helps! If the content you are bookmarking is somehow remarkable this particular link building technique could also build a tremendous amount of traffic to your site from the social bookmark (rather than the search engines). These sites in many cases have helped thousands and thousands of pages go ‘viral’. This happens because people search for fantastic content on these sites and then share what they find with the rest of the web. Write guest blog posts Find bloggers who have a high level of authority in your industry and pitch to them an interesting blog idea which you will write for them. Professional bloggers always feel the need to post regular, quality content so many times they will be willing to listen. The key here is in actually building a relationship with the blog owner by commenting intelligently on their blog posts for several months. After you have built rapport with the owner they may be more inclined to allow you to write a guest post. Create how-to guides, ebooks and videos With your hopefully expert knowledge in your particular field create an in-depth tutorial or guide in to a specific aspect of it. Offer good advice and you will find your website becoming a hub of information that people will willingly link to. Be creative here! There must be something of value you can offer your customers. Aggregate useful/helpful content Create a page or several pages on your website that bring together numerous useful resources. Alternatively, if you found you couldn’t find a solution online to a certain problem you faced in the past, create a page based on that issue and explain how you overcame it! Ask business partners, family, friends and customers! Finally (and most simply), just ask your business partners, friends and family if they would mind sharing a link to your website on theirs somewhere. Many of their sites will have a ‘links’ page. Once again, if you don’t ask you don’t get! Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 18 SEO house-keeping After your website is fully optimised in terms of on-page SEO you should be spending a minimum of 5-8 hours a week on link building and its surrounding activities. Your blog should be the cornerstone of your SEO campaign and by uploading remarkable content as often as possible soon you should build up a permanent readership that will in turn start promoting your blog for you. Seeing the effects of your SEO efforts often takes 3 or 4 months so checking your link profile everyday on Open Site Explorer will not be beneficial! Keep a list of everywhere you have submitted your link to and check back in a couple months to see if your link is still there. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 19 Tracking the effects of your SEO efforts – Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools To track the efforts of your SEO campaign ensure you install Google Analytics (GA) on your website as soon as possible. To do so go to www.google.com/analytics and begin the signing up process. After you’ve signed up it will ask you which website you want to track, add in your website URL and hit the ‘Get Tracking ID’ button. On the next page copy the tracking ID code and paste it into the code of every page of your website. Most WordPress themes allow you to add this code once and it will replicate it across the rest of the site for you. Once you have successfully installed the tracking code on your website you will be able to track a variety of statistics about your website and its users. To determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign click on the Traffic Sources button on the left navigation bar of the GA, then Search Engine Optimization and then Queries. You will then be presented with the following page (as long as you haven’t installed Google Webmaster Tools already). Figure 12 Figure 13 Follow the on screen instructions to set up and link Google Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics. After you have completed this, in Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries you will be able to Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 20 see exactly what queries people are searching in Google to find your website. Moreover, you will be able to see the number of impressions your site is getting, its position in the SERPs for each of the keywords, the number of clicks generated and the click-through rate amongst other things. Using Google Analytics you will also be able to track the amount of traffic being brought in through social media. This can be viewed via the Traffic Sources > Sources > and then Referral traffic. Direct traffic is traffic to your website where a user has directly typed in your URL, e.g. www.example.com, and came to your site without the need of social media, a search engine or another website. Figure 14 Figure 14 above shows the standard report you will see when you log in to you GA dashboard. I find it very useful to compare the amount of traffic you are getting month on month compared to the effort being put in trying to targeted increase traffic. In the above example, taken from a client of ours site in April 2012, we have seen a tremendous increase in unique visitors since our best practise digital marketing campaign was put in to action. Figure 15 below shows the stats for the same website 4 months later. Figure 15 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 21 There are plenty of other fantastic statistics generated in GA which can be used to fine tune your digital marketing campaign and track the progress of your SEO work. I recommend spending half an hour a day getting to grips with the ins and outs of it. SEO Summary We have now come to the conclusion of our search engine optimisation section. You now understand exactly how search engines operate and how they decide which websites appear in the search engine results pages. We have learnt both how to implement best practice on-page SEO techniques and numerous link building strategies. Using this knowledge you can now look at the link profile of the most successful websites in your industry and formulate a plan to oust them from the #1 position. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 22 4.0 Social Media Marketing (SEM) What is Social Media Marketing? Social media marketing can be referred to as the creation of traffic and attention through the use of social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube, etc.. The successful use of these websites allow a business to receive highly targeted traffic in great numbers. Social media is also of extreme importance in building profitable, long-term relationships with consumers and potential consumers. When consumers come across your social media channels and decide to become a ‘fan’ or ‘follower’ they are essentially opting-in for future updates from you. This is an example of permission marketing in action. In contrast to traditional interruption marketing such as cold calling, through social media a consumer will discover your business and then give you permission to market to them in the future. You can see how this is more powerful than more traditional marketing methods! Figure 16 The Web is changing As you well know, the internet is evolving at a terrific pace. And no doubt the way it works and the way we interact with it today will be very different to how it will be in a few years’ time. The internet is now being rebuilt around people rather than documents and pages. Social media is the latest and most important step in the development of the internet and is here for the long haul. The reason is simple; humans are social animals. We have been social animals for hundreds of thousands of years; the internet is simply catching up. Consumers using the web are now using it differently. Less time is spent interacting with static content and a larger percentage of time is spent interacting with people and brands. Influencing the right people with social media In order for a business to successfully sell a product or service it should look to structure its marketing message in a way that will easily influence people and encourage them to share it with their closest friends via word of mouth or ‘word of mouse’. A business should look to plant its message in easily influenced, interconnected groups of friends. Successfully doing so will see a message reach a number of people through people they trust. Receiving a message via a friend rather than a stranger on the end of a cold call is far more convincing. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 23 Using social media Now we understand the importance of social media we can think about the strategies we can use to increase the amount of attention our brand gets online. First things first, if you haven’t already get your business set up on Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Facebook. Make sure when you sign your business up on Facebook you create a ‘Page’ rather than a new personal profile. To do this sign in to Facebook with your normal log in credentials. Then go to this URL www.facebook.com/pages. Figure 17 Click the green button ‘Create a Page’ in the top right hand corner and then follow the simple steps to set your page up. Make sure you add your address, phone number, and website and accurately describe the product/service you offer in the relevant fields. Next set up your business’s profile on Twitter. Twitter does not differentiate between personal profiles and business profiles so go right ahead to www.twitter.com and set up a new profile. You must use an email address that is not associated with any other Twitter account. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 24 When signing up make sure you your ‘name’ is the name of your business and that your ‘username’ is as close to your brand name as possible. I highly recommend setting up Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google Plus accounts too, and possibly YouTube/Vimeo should you have any video content. Google Plus is particularly useful for SEO purposes as Google looks to integrate its social channel and search together. Figure 18 Using Hootsuite Now you have set up each of your business profiles go to www.hootsuite.com and set up an account. Hootsuite is a fantastic website that allows you to log in to all your social networks at the same time. The Hootsuite dashboard allows you with one click to send a single message out once across each of your social networks at the same time. The benefit here being that you do not have to log into each individual site and then post the same message over and over again. However this is not the best part! The main benefit comes in the ‘scheduling’ feature. This feature allows you to schedule future status updates so that you don’t even need to be at your computer for your business to update its social network channels. The amount of time this saves is monumental! I suggest that you create a document full of messages less than 140 characters (so the whole message can be read on Twitter) that can be sent out over and over again. At Curve Interactive we have a 25 page Word document with 100s of different status updates. Once a month 2 hours are spent on a Tuesday morning scheduling messages for the next 4 weeks. The results of our social media efforts account for almost 35% of all our traffic this year. We have found the most effective messages we send out via Hootsuite are usually between 90 and 130 characters long, have a link to a landing page on our website and also use a hashtag # linking the message to a certain subject. For example, here are a few messages we send out on a regular basis; “How Kit Kat's latest marketing campaign has improved the brands reach online http://ow.ly/f1k55 #InboundMarketing” “4 of the greatest Twitter Hashtag campaigns of all time http://ow.ly/d5jZP #SocialMedia” Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 25 “Learn how one business used Social Media to double their revenue! http://ow.ly/cZuyG #SocialMedia” Each of the messages we send out are worded in a style that entices people into clicking a link to our website. Through our social networks we send out messages that are useful for our customers and this is where having a company blog can really come into its own. As well as helping your business’ SEO campaign tremendously your individual blog posts can act as bait for social network users to click- through on to your website. As per the examples above, write messages using snippets of text from your blog articles or a short summary of a whole articles content, use a URL shortener (Hootsuite has one inbuilt for you to use) to make the web address as few characters as possible and include a hashtag. How many messages should I schedule a day and at what time? I suggest that you send a maximum of 1 message every other hour via Twitter (12 a day) and limit messages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus to a maximum of 3 a day. However, it is really dependant on what is most effective for your business. Use Google Analytics judge when the best time to send your messages out is. Pay attention to which messages are performing best in terms of click- through. You can access this information by signing into your Google Analytics account, clicking Traffic Sources then Referrals. For us here at Curve, I have found the optimum time to send out our messages is between 2pm and 4pm during the working week. Early in the morning between 8am and 9.30am and in the evenings between 6.30pm and 7.30pm also tend to get a good response. Quick tips for increasing Twitter followers and click-through When you first start off on Twitter use the advanced search function (search.twitter.com) to find people and businesses related to your brand. Follow each of these people and also send them a message. According to Mashable (2012) almost 35% of all the people you follow will follow you back within 1 week (this is often called a ‘courtesy’ follow). Two thirds of everyone you follow will at least click on your profile which then gives them the opportunity to click-through to your website via one of your creatively worded tweets. Perform keyword searches on Twitter for keywords related to what you do. Also start following 100 to 200 of those people each day. Start tweeting about topics related to your industry (don't just tweet about things on your website). Start un-following the people who don't follow you back or if you don't have the time you can use a service like Tweet Adder which can do this for you in an automated fashion. Who.unfollowed.me is a free tool that allows you to see who you follow and if they follow you back. Start participating on Twitter by tweeting at people in your industry and re-tweeting some of their tweets. If anyone tweets to you make sure you send them a friendly, helpful reply. Make sure your messages are not trying to hard sell. Remember, you are using Twitter to give potential customers useful information and hopefully starting new relationships. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 26 With these quick tips you should dramatically increase the number of followers you have and in turn increase the number of targeted traffic to your site. The next two sections ‘Facebook and the Power of Like’ and ‘Increasing engagement and participation’ go in to great detail on the ins and outs of social media marketing. They are a bit more technical so if you do have any questions feel free to email me at josh@curve-interactive.com. Facebook and the Power of Like Now we have covered Twitter in some detail we will move onto Facebook. This part of the book is based on the ‘Power of Like’ research series conducted by comScore and Facebook on the effectiveness of social media marketing. This section will summarise the key findings from the research study, primarily focusing on the impact of earned (organic) and paid media exposure. The research focuses on how social marketing works and enables business to understand useful frameworks for quantifying and evaluating their social marketing efforts. The key findings of the research are listed below: Businesses can maximise the impact of their social media marketing efforts on Facebook by moving beyond the idea of just trying to increase the number of fans ‘liking’ their pages. Instead metrics such as reach, impact, sharing and engagement should be what’s looked at. Some brands on Facebook achieve a monthly increase in ‘Reach Ratio’ of between 0.5 and 2.0. Meaning a brand can increase the number of people it reaches through promoting content to ‘friends of current fans’ through both earned and paid means increasing exposure by 50 to 200%. Facebook represents a unique marketing platform that enables a business to leverage Paid, Earned and Owned Media to maximise brand reach, awareness and resonance. Brands can use Display Ads, Promoted Page Posts and Sponsored Stories (Paid) to attract fans to a Brand Page (Owned) and then leverage that channel to market communications that then reach ‘fans’ and ‘friends of current fans’ (Earned). Starbucks noticed that through the effects of increased earned media exposure through Facebook a significant lift in in-store purchases for the four weeks they ran a special social media campaign. With the birth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook businesses now have a new way to reach and connect with their brand ‘fans’ and the friends of those fans. Paul Adams book ‘Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web’ explains how reaching ‘fans’ and then them influencing their friends is the key to getting a marketing message across to the critical mass of people to make an idea spread. Sociological and psychological studies have proven that word of mouth, reaching individual interlinked groups of friends and social proofing are all essential for Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 27 marketing campaigns to work to their full potential. With the birth of the social web this has all become possible through the internet. Social Media as a Marketing Channel The emergence of branded social media channels and pages has revolutionized the communication between customers and businesses online. Branded channels now act as the first touch-point between buyer and seller, but this isn’t to say the usefulness of branded websites is coming to an end. They still retain their importance in capturing leads and transactions. A piece of research by comScore’s explained, by using the confectionery brand Skittles as an example, how important branded social media channels are. The Skittles website attracted 23,000 unique visitors in March 2012, while it’s branded Facebook page attracted 14 times more (320,000). With this information it is clear the importance of creating content and engaging with ‘fans’ via social media. The study goes on to prove that many branded social media channels/pages now routinely gain more visitors in comparison to traditional branded websites. How Social Media Marketing Works Fan reach, engagement and amplification While the vast majority of businesses now have a Facebook presence most business owners still focus on fan acquisition as the most important metric. comScore argue that given a brand has acquired a certain number of ‘fans’ its target should be to deliver maximum reach, engagement and amplification in order to achieve brand resonance and influence consumers to purchase the brands products or services. Fan acquisition therefore should not be focused on as the sole metric of success. The following framework outlines how a brands message should be delivered through a social media channel: Fan reach The first step after getting fans to ‘like’ your business’s Facebook is to communicate directly to them through messages that will appear on their News Feed, where 40% of the average Facebook user’s time is spent. After someone has ‘liked’ your page you may think each and every message sent through your Facebook page will then appear in a fans News Feed. However, this is not the case as Facebook uses a complex algorithm to work out which content to show to each user. This is based numerous factors, but is known to include how often that fan engages through comment, share, like and check-in. This highlights the importance of creating highly engaging content that will encourage participation and sharing. If you fail to make great content the messages sent from your business’s social media channels will not appear in fans News Feeds’. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 28 Figure 19 Engagement A recent study by Adage concluded that only around 1% of fans actually engage with a given brand message. This seems alarmingly low, however when compared to the click-through rates for banner ads, which is 0.1% (DoubleClick 2012), it is proven that social media messages are 10 times greater at creating click-through. Moreover, social media messages also help expand the reach of a brand throughout a fan’s network after being clicked on. This phenomenon is referred to as amplification. Amplification Amplification is perhaps the most important, yet least understood, element of achieving brand reach and resonance on Facebook. The concept is defined as the way existing fans of the brand whom are exposed to a message can act as medium between the brand and all of their friends. Because the average Facebook user has around 150 friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of their friends with earned impressions through engagement with brand message. This is because every time a friend of yours ‘likes’ or engages with a brand that interaction will be broadcast on that friends page as well as potentially showing up in your News Feed (It is dependant once again on an algorithm, if you interact more with a friend it is more likely that branded message they interacted with appear on your News Feed). Due to factors like Fan Reach a brand is able amplify its messages by several 100 times their effort. Starbucks test Starbucks conducted an 8 week test to measure the efforts of their social media marketing on Facebook. The test was conducted using a test group vs. a control group. The test group was exposed to Starbucks social media campaign after 4 weeks. The results illustrated in the chart below show the increase in Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 29 purchase incidence among the exposed group compared to the control group. In the 4 week pre- exposed period both groups nearly had identical rates of purchase incidence. Figure 20 Within 4 weeks of exposure via social media there was a 38% increase in purchase incidence among the exposed group. Each and every week of the experiment the exposed test group purchased more from Starbucks. With the potential for earned media to drive such increases in desired consumer behaviour clearly brands can realize superb benefits by implementing a social media campaign. Summary A brand should look to use a mix of Paid, Owned and Earned media through Facebook to deliver its business objectives. Less time is being spent on traditional corporate websites, with a brands social media channel now being the first touch-point between customer and businesses. Businesses should not focus on the number of ‘fans’ they have but instead look at engagement, reach and sharing metrics. Doing so, through ‘friends of current fans’ a brand can reach more potential customers. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 30 Increasing engagement and participation Before we move onto the social media best practise case studies we will take a look at how you can improve the performance of your Facebook page’s engagement and participation metrics. As we learnt in the previous section just being present on the main social media platforms is not going to help your business sell more of its products. Focusing on how many ‘likes’ you have is pointless, your brand needs to interact, create value and produce engaging content for its users to help reach your business objectives. Having said that you need to get at least 30 ‘likes’ on your Facebook page as soon as possible. After you reach this number you’ll gain access to the Facebook Insights dashboard that is exclusive to brands with over 30 ‘likes’. This dashboard allows you to see how engaged your fans are by highlighting exactly how many people saw each message you posted, how many clicked on it, how many created a ‘Story’ in their News Feed, the virality of each message, etc., etc.. Moreover, this tool also breaks down the demographics of each one of your pages users, from exactly where they are in the world to their age, sex and what language they speak. All very useful data! Figure 21 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 31 Facebook applications One of the best ways to increase your brands reach and engagement levels is to create an engaging app for your Facebook page. These can be developed for free (and at low cost) from websites such as Pagemondo, WildFire and Shortstack. A recent study compiled by Wildfire looked into 7 standard types of applications businesses can create for their Facebook page. Firstly, let’s define each of the 7 types: 1. Sweepstake: Sweepstakes are similar to a lottery whereby the winner of the prize is selected randomly. A user would enter their name and any other information required in return for a chance of winning. 2. Giveaway: Similar to the above, a giveaway application works by users inputting their information via a ‘signing up’ form in order for a brand sponsored giveaway. 3. Pick-your-favourite: This app allows a user to pick their favourite from a selection of pre- determined items e.g. a selection of photos depicting different holiday destinations. 4. Trivia: A trivia application gives users multiple choice answers to users to test their knowledge on a subject area. 5. Quiz: A quiz app, much like a trivia app, gets users to answer a series of multiple choice questions. Results display an image and a statement e.g. “I took the ‘Which Movie Star Are You’ Quiz and found out I’m Brad Pitt” 6. Coupon: Just like the paper form, this app would allow users to print off vouchers to use in- store. 7. Video, essay and photo contest: These three apps function identically except for the type of media the user is called upon to upload. Winners of the contest can be determined either by an administrator at the company or by a public vote, or by a combination of the two. What App generates the most engagement? Wildfire’s study looked at the results from over 10,000 Facebook campaigns over the last 9 months and concluded that ‘sweepstakes’, ‘giveaways’ and ‘coupons’ made for the most engaging applications. More users interacted and engaged with these types of apps than any other. The reasons behind this include the perceived value of the sweepstake prize and the chance of winning something for minimal effort (low barrier to entry). However, Wildfire’s study also identified another interesting trend: the most entered campaigns are not the campaigns which generate the most sharing. When focusing on the ‘earned media’ campaigns can generate it was found some applications are inherently more shareable and therefore more likely to go viral than others. The campaigns that saw the most sharing were ‘pick your favourites’, ‘quizzes’ and ‘trivia contests’. What’s the reasoning behind this you may be thinking? Well, these apps publicly display a user’s personality, characteristics, style, aptitude or thoughts on a specific subject area. Users enjoy sharing this sort of information about themselves as they believe it will make them look good in front of the rest of their social network. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 32 Wildfire concluded that the most shared campaign applications were designed to either: Allow the user to discover an aspect of their personality of which they were previously unaware, or Display facets of their personality that they know about and want to share with their friend list. Users who post the results of their favourite image/their score in a quiz are actually showing off. When designing a quiz it is therefore important to look at the results the quiz will generate. Astonishingly, when a Facebook user clicks on a News Feed post from a friend participating in a quiz then a massive 82% of them were found to have taken the quiz too! This is an extraordinary large figure and should indicate to all page owners that they need to work a quiz application into their social media strategy. How to run a best practice campaign When designing your business’ social media application it is important to understand and consider the behaviors and interactions that will inspire the end user to enter and share your brand’s content. Wildfire’s study proved that if an interaction with a brands page will show off an individual’s style, aptitude or personality they will be more likely to share the results on their newsfeed and to the rest of their friends. Therefore, if you chose to design an app that allows a user to express themselves, first of all make sure the results of the quiz make an individual feel proud to share their results. For example you may have a quiz that asks a number of questions intended to find out a user’s personality type. How a user answers each question will help categorize individuals into 4 different personality groups. Make sure, whatever result a user gets, that description the application allows a user to share on their newsfeed is one a user will actually want to share! Make each result sound interesting. The marketing team behind the launch of the recent Dark Shadows movie has used this ‘best practice’ to great effect by creating a beautifully designed quiz app for their Facebook page. The quiz asks a series of comical questions related to themes around the movie which then determine which character from the movie a user is most like. The results a user receives from the quiz are compelling and humorous and show off a user’s personality in a creative way. This resulted in large amounts of sharing which could have only helped more people learn about the existence of the movie. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 33 Figure 22 Incentivizing sharing A further best practice Wildfire’s study uncovered was the importance of incentivizing sharing behaviours. Consider building into your app some elements that rewards users for sharing and posting. Mountain Dew’s recent “Dew Crew” campaign does just that with its intuitive sharing options that encourage users to use the applications features and share it with friends to score points which can be used to redeem branded merchandise. I would encourage everyone to take a closer look at the following Facebook application as I believe it is the benchmark for every future social media campaign to come. The Mountain Dew application includes quizzes and multiple incentives to share. Moreover, it incorporates the benefits of ‘sweepstakes’ and ‘giveaways’ with the ease of entry and the ability to earn a valued reward for little effort. The application is highly interactive, is branded superbly and is simple to use. It gives users a reason to come back (earn more points, unlock more free goodies) and also uses a small part of the screen to earn money through selling advertising. You can view the Mountain Dew app in action by clicking here. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 34 Figure 23 Summary A strong social media marketing strategy is one that approaches the creation of branded applications and content for users from different angles. A social media campaign should be broken down in to different parts; one part of the overall campaign should be designed to achieve high participation rates to capture user information (email addresses, names) for future marketing. Other aspects of the campaign should focus on getting users to share the application with as many people as possible to enhance brand reach. This can be done by creating several different applications that sit of your brands Facebook page or by creating one application that covers both aspects at the same time. I would recommend building one application that covers both aspects, but would also encourage creating several other smaller apps that focus on each of the individual objectives. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 35 Case study – AJ Bombers, using social media to create 1-2-1 relationships with customers How one restaurant used Social Media to double their revenue AJ Bombers burger bar was founded in March 2009 by Joe and Angie Sorge. With massive franchises such as Burger King and McDonalds in the local vicinity to compete against AJ Bombers knew they had to have a unique selling point – a differentiation strategy to survive. Local social media strategy They made it their mission “to keep the conversation going”. Joe and Angie understood the importance of building relationships and how social medial could help them do that. As explained earlier on, traditional methods of ‘push’ marketing such as TV, radio, print and cold calling are becoming less effective and there is no denying that fact. New less intrusive methods such as social media marketing and SEO are gaining momentum by providing added value to consumers whilst also not being pushed in their faces. Instead of information being force-fed to consumers, people now have the power to be in control of what information they receive and how. The world is changing as we know it, businesses now have to react locally and look after each customer as a valued individual. Big multi-national franchises like McDonalds and Burger King are unable to build strong one-on-one relationships with customers, but small, flexible businesses such as AJ Bombers and other local organisations are in a position to give each of its customers a more rewarding experience. AJ Bombers realised they could harness the power of social media to build relationships and emotional equity with each of its customers. The power of building relationships They figured the best way to build up relationships with their client base was to let them have a say in how the business was run. The customers have input over almost every aspect of the restaurant. They help design menu items, determine price structures, opening hours and even suggest promotions. These conversations are going on right now on their Twitter page – take a look yourself @AJBombers. From the outset social media was used to reach out and build connections with burger lovers in the local area, finding out exactly what they like and what they don’t, and generally finding out how they could better serve the needs of their clientele. Joe and Angie started hosting events at the burger bar offering free beer and food to their followers and this in turn created real buzz online. Using Foursquare It was at this point Joe Sorge discovered Foursquare, the geo-social networking platform that lets people earn points and badges by checking in at locations and sharing their movements with others via their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Foursquare enabled him to offer incentives for customers to visit the restaurant and spend money. He started off by offering free peanuts to anyone who checked-in to AJ Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 36 Bombers and a free burger to anyone who checked in enough times in one month to become the “major” of the shop. This really got people coming back and buying more burgers. Seeing the future importance of online reviews he also launched a “tips and to-do” page on Foursquare which enabled customers to post messages about what their favourite meal is, how to get the best deal, what to avoid and just their general thoughts on the experience they had at AJ Bombers. The incentive for a user to write a review? A free cookie on their next visit. And thirdly, for what would become the first of a series of special events Joe made a Foursquare event which enabled highly coveted “Swarm badges” (given by Foursquare when more than 30 people check in to a place at the same time) to be won by those checking-in. He would also donate a percentage of each meal sold to charity. 161 Foursquare users (25% of the local population that had Foursquare) showed up and more than doubled that days usual takings. Other than the increased revenue that day the customers tweeted, posted updates and videos about the experience they had. All great for brand perception and reach. An average Facebook user has 150 friends, with Foursquare check-in updates posting directly to a person’s Facebook wall this one event could have potentially reached 24,000 people! And what did it cost? Just a small percentage of profits to charity. 7 months after adding Foursquare to their social media strategy AJ Bombers doubled the revenue they made the 12 months before! So where and how do you begin? Any local business that hasn’t considered social media as part of their overall marketing plan is seriously missing out. I can guarantee if you don’t adopt a social media plan in the next year or so then you run the risk of being overtaken by your competitors. This is not scaremongering; you only have to look back over the last few years and remember what happened when people were saying the same about e- commerce and websites… well social media is the next evolutional stage of the wonderful world of the internet. Jump on board now and get first mover advantage over your competitors. I will now go in to some detail as to how you can implement a start a simple social media strategy yourself. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 37 Example social media strategy for a small business Three social media platforms form the basis of this very simple, but very effective, social media strategy that will see increased foot-fall to your shop floor and improve your business’s bottom line. This strategy will also help build lasting relationships with customers and enhance awareness of your brand in the local area. How it works First things first, we need to direct your current customers to your online presence. Advertise in store with posters and QR codes. (Of course the other SEO and social media learning’s in this book will help too) Encourage customers to “Check-in” to your business’s shop with the Foursquare app or via Facebook Places. Incentivise customers to do so by offering; a discount with purchase (“spend £50 and get £10 off”). Something for free (“enjoy a free dessert if you buy a starter and main course”). Special treatment (“Check-in on foursquare for private access to the penguin feeding”). Reward your best customers (the classic special offer is, “free coffee on your fifth visit’). Like a digital punchcard. This starter social media strategy will create buzz within the local area and draw attention to you brand. Buzz will be created fundamentally by customers “Checking-in” to your business. Customers doing so in essence will be leaving a free advert for your business on their Facebook timeline (See images below). Figure 24 Every time someone “checks-in” to your business, the message posted on Facebook has the potential to reach each of that customer’s friends (on average 150 people). Giving a customer a special deal in exchange for an advert? Why not? It is a fact of human nature, proved in psychological studies, that if your friend does something you will be more inclined to do it too. It’s called peer pressure, or social proofing if you like. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 38 The most trusted source of marketing is that very old fashioned stuff; word of mouth. Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising study (April 2012) found that 92% of us trust messages from our friends and family about brands against 47% of us trusting direct messages from companies. Figure 25 Facebook’s (2012) own research concludes that if Friend x “likes” a brand on Facebook. There is a 65% chance of Friend X’s close friends liking it too! By getting your customers to “like” your business’s Facebook or Foursquare page you are opening up the possibility of more and more people finding out about your company and what it does. This coupled with offering incentives for people to actually come in to your shop and buy things will see a direct increase in sales. This is a very cheap and effective means of advertising that is targeted at your current customers and their similar friends. Incorporating Twitter Many people have never heard of search.twitter.com (although I did mention it earlier!) and that to me is a great shame. This advanced search tool allows you to search for people talking about your brand Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 39 quickly and easily. It gives you the opportunity to see what your customers are saying about you. It gives you the opportunity to interact with these people and start a relationship with them. By being so direct with customers you will enhance your customer service, understand in real-time how to improve your business and build emotional equity with people through relationship building. Search.Twitter is also useful to see what’s going on locally in your area. The functionality of the search tool allows you to search for tweets via city, town or postcode. If you are a local merchant think how useful this could be… when Johnny Smith tweets “I’m soooo hungry, I’ve been walking through XYZ Park all day and I’m ravished!”. You, as a local bakery see this tweet by searching for “hungry” people in the local vicinity and hey presto you have a potential lead. You can now directly engage with this person and perhaps offer him a little incentive to come and buy from you. Social Media Summary The web has changed. It is now built around people and the interactions between them and this is why social media has begun to thrive. In this section you have learnt how to use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to find and influence your target market. You should now understand that social media isn’t just about getting a lot of fans and ‘likes’ it’s about engagement and participation from those individuals. It’s about building relationships with these potential customers and building emotional equity. The key to social media marketing is to be remarkable. Be remarkable in the content you provide and the service you offer. Use this information to devise and start a social media campaign for your business now. With the information provided I am sure you will increase the amount of targeted traffic to your businesses web presence tremendously. Use Google Analytics to track the progress of your social media campaigns, you should notice a huge increase in the amount of ‘referral’ traffic you receive. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 40 5.0 E-Newsletter and email marketing In the final chapter of this Digital Marketing Lead Generation System we will be focusing on the art of email marketing and e-newsletters. Starting an email newsletter and incorporating it into your businesses’ marketing plan will allow you to build upon the relationship you have started with your new prospects via SEO and social media. By incorporating all three digital marketing systems at once and creating a ‘system of systems’ you will be generating potential new leads all the time. Moreover, you will also be hitting those prospects from multiple angels. This is beneficial because as you know, prospects are not always in ‘buying mode’. Before purchasing the full version of this book you may well have read a couple of the Curve blog posts, perhaps downloaded the teaser version of this e-book and maybe subscribed to our digital marketing updates, while you were in ‘interested mode’. Hopefully, as a result of the regular and relevant messages you received from us, you eventually reached a position and state of mind to purchase or make contact. This type of marketing can be applied to any business sector to vastly increase bottom-line sales. An email newsletter lets you leverage extreme power with little effort. Signing up for and using websites such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, AWeber or Infusion Soft will allow you to easily create and send out your own email newsletter. These websites allow you to load pre-written <a href="/tags/Email/" rel="tag">emails</a> into a system which can then be scheduled and sent out in a particular order at a certain time every week (or whatever time interval you decide) to your email list with no input from you, apart from the time spent setting up the system and writing the emails. It should take you a week or two to come up with enough email content for a year. For example you may have 52 short emails set up. You can program AWeber to send out your 52 emails in order, 1 a week, to each of your prospects. Moreover, these email systems are so intelligent you can program them to send out pre-scheduled messages to your leads in a specific order from the moment they sign-up. This means different leads will be receiving different emails from you every week depending on when they signed-up for your updates. Someone who signed-up 8 weeks ago will be receiving email 8 of 52 from you this week. Someone who signed-up yesterday will be receiving email 1 of 52 from you. The content of your newsletter should contain something that is legitimately beneficial to your prospect in exchange for giving away their email address. At Curve Interactive we provide great value in return for a user’s email address by giving away free marketing advice every week. Moreover, additional value is provided through the free teaser version of the Digital Marketing ‘How-to’ Guide e-book. Providing great value will increase the likelihood of prospects providing you their email address and ‘opting in’ for future communications. Think of something of value your business can provide potential customers for little no or cost. Use this incentive in conjunction with a daily, weekly or monthly information packed e-Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 41 newsletter and before long you will have a long list of leads that have opted-in to sign up for your business’ updates. The consistent communication you will be having with these leads will build trust and create brand resonance, eventually leading to a sale for your business. How to start your email list Before you start your list you will need to have a way to capture your lead’s email address and other details. To do so get yourself over to www.mailchimp.com and sign up now. Alternatively, you can use Infustionsoft or AWeber, but I find Mailchimp to be the simplest to use (note: you cannot pre-schedule a batch of emails in Mailchimp, AWeber is best for this) When you log-in you will be greeted by the following page: Figure 26 Ignore step 1 for now and click on step 2 ‘Design a Form’. The simple instructions allow you to design and create quite wonderful sign-up forms. These will be used to capture information about your users so you can market to them in the future. I recommend creating a form with just a first name and email address fields. Numerous studies have reported that the simpler your form is the more likely people will be to sign-up. Keeping the required fields to a minimum will speed up the process and the likelihood of large amounts of people signing-up. After you have created your webform Mailchimp will give you the HTML code to paste on to your website. If you would prefer a very simple webform or would like to edit the HTML code yourself Mailchimp also gives you the option to create a ‘simple form’ and a ‘naked form’. If none of these options meet your design requirements, and if you are using WordPress to manage your website think about buying the Optin Skin plug-in by ViperChill. This plug-in provides you with around 20 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 42 beautifully designed forms for your website which can easily be edited to suit your sites colour scheme. Optin Skin is also easily integrated with email marketing systems such as Mailchimp, AWeber and the like. The screenshot below shows one example of a form that comes free with this plug-in. Each aspect of the form is editable from the colours of the text, buttons and background to the font style. These can all be changed easily with the built in plug-in interface. Figure 27 Further advantages of using the Optin Skin plug-in include that it allows you to split-test different forms to see which one works most effectively. The plug-in can automatically work out which form is best and show your web visitors the most effective one. Moreover, with the ‘fade’ feature you can grab the attention of your leads by making your form fade-in after a certain amount of time, or when a user reaches a particular part of the page. On some websites this has increased conversation rate by over 5%! After you have created your sign-up form the Optin Skin plug-in generates you a line of code to insert the form on your site. Now we have created our lead generation form we need to learn to place it tactically throughout our website. I recommend placing it somewhere on every page at least once and almost always ‘above the fold’. ‘Above the fold’ means the area of your website that is visible when a user first lands on your site. Obviously different screen sizes affect this. I have highlighted a few good examples over the page. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 43 Marie Farloe.com Figure 28 In this example the opt-in form is present at the top of each page and always above the fold. In the second example below, Viperchill.com, an opt-in form is placed on every page at the top of the right side bar. Additionally I would recommend you adding the email sign-up form to the bottom of every blog article you write and in the footer of your site. Both these example websites offer great value in return for a users email, thus giving the user a good reason to part with it. Make sure you are doing this too! Viper Chill.com Figure 29 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 44 Landing pages Another effective way to increase the number of leads your website is generating is to create landing pages that are specifically designed and optimised to capture email addresses and names. This is best done by creating a page without a main navigation, a small bit of text, an image and the email sign-up form. The simplicity and lack of distraction on these pages result in a far greater conversation rates compared to that of other pages on your site. The purpose of these pages is one thing; to capture as many email addresses as possible, so test and measure different formats varying the position of the sign-up form, text and imagery. In the example below from the Curve Interactive website the sign-up form is placed below an introductory blurb and image. Studies from Hubspot and various other inbound marketing agencies have claimed placing the sign-up form on the right hand side of the page usually has the most success. However, on this particular page on our site we didn’t find this to be true, proving the importance of testing. Figure 30 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 45 Link to your landing pages from your social media channels and other pages on your website. We have found the best way to generate visits to these landing pages is to include them as a link in a related blog article. Driving views via social media channels has also proven to be successful. In store and at events and your current contact list On your shop/office counter have a form people can write their names and email addresses on to receive updates from you. Once again make sure there is a good reason for customers to sign up, perhaps a future discount, the amazing content of your newsletter or some sort of ‘free prize’ could act as the incentive. Whenever you go to any trade events, do any networking, visit or hold a seminar etc., try to get other peoples email addresses and add them to your mailing list. Go through your current email contacts and create an invitational email asking them whether they would like to be added to your newsletters email list. Email content Now we have our email system set-up and a way for people to sign-up for our messages we need to get down to the nitty-gritty and get all our email content sorted! I cannot come up with the content for you as you know each business offers its own unique produce. So sit down and brain storm what great value you can provide your customers and potential customers. As explained earlier make sure you are coming up with ideas that actually provide VALUE. Once you have come up with several ideas, split each of these ideas into sub-categories and further into sub-topics. Think about how you can link all these words together, piece by piece interlink the ideas and then hey-presto you now have a list of topics you can write emails on, each building on the last. Months and months and months of content! For example, here at Curve Interactive we send emails out about digital marketing, this can broken down into several sub-categories; SEO, social media, website design, website development, branding, email, film and video, display, etc. etc. Each individual category can be broken down into sub-headings; SEO – on-page SEO, off-page SEO. And then even further; on-page SEO; URL structure, heading tags, alt text, internal anchor text, title tags and so on and so forth. Each of these sub-topics easily contain enough information to warrant a short email of their own. Email best practices Email ‘subject lines’ and ‘from line’ (also useful for writing tweets!) The most important part of an email is making sure it gets opened! And as they say, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression so you have to make sure your ‘from line’ and ‘subject line’ are in good order. These are the first things subscribers will see in their inbox so you need to make sure they are compelling, and make the subscriber want to open it. A bad subject line and from line can cause Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 46 your email to get caught in spam filters, make your leads unsubscribe and stop people opening it. The ‘from line’ is very simple to make perfect; it should just be your brand name, simple as that. The following guidelines give several ideas as to how to optimise your subject line; 1. An email subject line should be like a call to action and should start with a verb such as ‘learn’. ‘download’, or ‘sign up’. 2. Subject lines must relate to the content inside the email! This may sound obvious, but it is often the case that the actual content of the email ends up have nothing to do with the subject line! This is usually because the sender is trying to write such an attractive subject line that what is actually in the email is forgotten! 3. The call to action used in the email subject line should be repeated in the email copy. 4. Use your brand name in the subject line. A recent study from Mailchimp found that emails were more likely to be opened if they included the company’s name in it. 5. Make sure you include the email’s offer in the subject line, so people know the value the email will provide them e.g. “Discover how one business doubles their revenue using social media” 6. Creating a sense of urgency is a good tactic to use in conjunction with a compelling offer. One way to do this is to use brackets in the subject line. For example, you might be promoting an upcoming webinar and you want to make sure recipients realise this right away. Your subject line could be, “Learn to Become an Efficient Blogger with Curve Interactive [Webinar in 2 Days]”. 7. As mentioned earlier you cannot afford to have your emails get caught up in spam filters. To give yourself the best chance do not use spammy words like ‘free’, ‘act now’ and ‘offer’. Also do not have all your words in capital letters or over use exclamation marks!!!!! 8. I recommend keeping your subject line under 50 characters if possible. Having anything longer you run the risk of words being cut off. Each email client shows a different number of characters varying from 30 to over 80 but most show around the 45-50 character mark. If your email system allows it then try to do a split-test on a subject line. Test 2 very different subject lines against each other on a subset of the database and then set the main bulk of emails to be sent using the better performing subject line – usually based on Open rate. Take on board the learnings and then test again the next time around. 9. Make sure the first few lines of your email copy are highly related to the subject line. Most email clients have a preview function which pulls out the first couple of lines of text, if this is consistent to what the email says and reinforces its points readers will have more reason to open it. . Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 47 Email design If you are using one of the email systems pointed out earlier in this section you will have probably come across the free email templates they offer. Most, like Mailchimp, have an easy to use drag-and-drop system that allows you to easily add images, text, social media icons and other widgets into a custom made email design. These free templates will have been tested across all major email clients (e.g. Outlook, <a href="/tags/Gmail/" rel="tag">Gmail</a>) and will render without fault. I would recommend keeping your emails very simple in terms of design and focus mainly on the copy and the value it provides. Seth Godin is the world’s most subscribed to blogger and an example of his blog is shown below. As you can see there is no design element to his emails whatsoever! He sends out a new email everyday just a few paragraphs long. But, it is always full of quality content. With the simple formula of providing great content (with no design) Seth has grown his blog into the biggest in the world. His blog is the building block as to which he has built his career as a bestselling marketing author. Through his blog, everyday he builds more trust with his customer base and everyday his subscribers gain more value from his emails. In return, in the fore-front of every one of these readers’ mind are Seth’s marketing and self-improvement books (related products). Figure 31 Having said that, if you want to add a little extra personality to your email that’s perfectly fine, but just don’t over complicate it. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 48 A good example of a simply designed, well worked email can be seen below from Frank Rumbauskas Figure 32 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 49 Email design best practises There are a few great email best practises Frank implements in the design of his email. Firstly, when he sends an email with more than one topic he clearly states what is being covered in the email at the very top. I would recommend improving this further by adding a line of text explaining what the email is about at the very top, above any images. As you may well know, when you open an email images are switched off and require the user to download them before they can be seen. It is often the case that the undownloaded images cover the preview section in an email client and therefore restrict a subscriber’s view of the email contents. This often causes people to overlook the email and not read it. Having a compelling line of text at the top of the email will result in more people opening the email. The second best practice Frank takes advantage of is the use of a mixture of graphical (buttons) and text call to action links. This is a point not to be over looked! The example email could be improved further by changing the call to action text from ‘Continue Reading’ to something more compelling and related to the contents of the linked to landing page. Frank has aligned the most important aspect of the email (the contents!) on the left hand side. Curve’s own studies have proven emails that include the body copy on the left have a higher percentage click- through rate and this is attributed to the fact that we are trained to read from this position. If you place an image here instead it will distract users from what’s most important. Put all your most important copy and calls to action on the left hand side. You will notice that the right hand side of the email has been used to promote his related product and provide customer testimonials. The 30 day free trial panel is in an ideal position for an advertisement because 1. it is not on the left and 2. the design makes in stand out to a reader who is looking carefully through the email. The testimonials below the advertisement and the use of client logos at the bottom of the email give readers the impression that Frank and his business are highly reputable and worth using. Furthermore, each week there is 100% consistency in the design of the email. Readers become accustom to receiving an email from him and they can anticipate what it is going to look like. Things like social media sharing icons, unsubscribe and foreword to a friend buttons are easily added in via Mailchimp’s email builder and are essential. Finally, Frank uses images of himself in his email marketing making his messages that much more personable. When designing your own template take these points into consideration, but remember at the end of the day an email is about the quality of the content, not how fancy the design is! Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 50 Email client usage trend analysis As a specialist digital marketing agency we send out custom HTML emails every month for our clients. Along with measuring the standard statistics such as open rates and click-through we pay particular attention to what email client (e.g Hotmail, Gmail) our emails are being opened in. Each email client renders a HTML email in a different fashion and therefore it is important for us to understand where emails are being opened so we can make sure the design renders correctly in each one. However, there is one more important reason we pay attention to which client our emails are being opened in. We want to see how the open rate on mobile devices increases over time. And it has come as no surprise that the number of opens on iOS devices (iPhones, iPad and iTouch) more than doubled from the beginning of 2012 to August 2012. 80.00% Outlook 70.00% iOS Devices 60.00% Android 50.00% Hotmail Yahoo 40.00% AOL <a href="/tags/Mail_(Windows)/" rel="tag">mail</a> 30.00% Gmail 20.00% Windows Live Desktop 10.00% <a href="/tags/Apple_Mail/" rel="tag">Apple mail</a> Other email clients 0.00% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Figure 33 Percentage of emails opened in each email client As you can see the number of opens in Microsoft’s all dominating Outlook email client has fallen by over 10%. In January this year the number of total emails opened it Outlook was 69.7% and as of this August this figure has dropped to 57.3%. The % of emails opened in iOS on the other hand has more than doubled in the same time period. As of January 2012 the average number of emails opened in iOS was 10.1%. 8.3% of these opens can be attributed to iPhone opens, 1.7% to iPad opens and 0.1% to iPod Touch opens. As of August 2012, the total number of opens on iOS devices had risen to 20.9%. iOS Device January 2012 May 2012 August 2012 iPhone 8.3% 12.1% 12.9% iPad 1.7% 5.7% 7.9% iTouch 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% Total 10.1% 17.9% 20.9% Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 51 Breakdown of emails opened in iOS devices Figure 34 If the current rate of opens were to continue as they are now by August 2013 emails opened on iOS devices could outnumber those opened on Microsoft Outlook. Predicted trend for 2013 Figure 35 Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 52 We expect as we progress through the year the number of emails opened on mobile to increase further, but not as much as the trend on the previous page suggests. We expect the rate at which Outlook opens are falling and iOS devices open rates are rising to slow and reach a plateau at 54% and 28% respectively. What we are seeing is that more and more of our clients are adopting mobile strategies in terms of their email and websites. We can only recommend this behavior as the late majority of the population pick up their smart phones and start browsing the web and opening emails on their mobile devices. Emails opened on mobiles without a responsive design are seeing very poor click-through rates so if this is something your business has not addressed yet, now is the perfect time to take action. What you need to consider when developing emails for mobile Although for some time now consideration has been given to how websites are viewed on mobiles and indeed in many cases websites are built specifically for the channel, this has not always been the case with emails. Receive an HTML email today on your iPhone for instance, and even now it’s usually hard to read the text after it has been rescaled to fit the small screen. As a result you very often you find yourself zooming in and then scrolling not just up and down, but from left to right just to read the content. Even if your eyesight is good you may still need to zoom in to be able to click on a link or ‘Call to Action’. If you created an email template that does not works on mobile devices you may have already lost subscribers due to how bad your emails render on them. Some companies are recognising the issues and are designing and building emails with mobile devices in mind. For example RAC and PruHealth have both taken this into consideration and we now deliver emails for them that render differently to the desktop version if viewed on a smartphone. To put it into context 21% of the ‘opens’ on a recent PruProtect newsletter broadcast to brokers and agents was on a mobile device, predominantly iPhone, and the resultant ‘click through’ was as good as for the desktop version of the same email. We found that emails that are optimised for mobile way outperform standard emails, so it is definitely worth keeping this in mind. So how do we go about it? The first job is to get the balance right between a ‘creative’ design and one that can work well on mobile. The first thing to remember is that the optimum design width that we should work to is 600 pixels wide and if possible we design the email so that it is just a single column wide. However as mentioned earlier we often have to balance creative design with functionality and therefore often we are asked to design using two columns of 300 pixels wide instead. For mobile then this would be split exactly in half showing the left hand column of 300 pixels in the screen only. By using style sheets we can prioritise content by hiding or even moving elements from the right hand column and positioning them on the left if viewed on a mobile device. The desktop version remains as you have Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 53 designed it, 2 columns. But for mobile, although a longer email, you can at least read the text without having to scroll around and zoom in. So the next time that you email your customers give a thought on when they are most likely to receive and open the email. If you think that mobile is the where they will be viewing it then make sure that what they will see can be read easily, and links can be clicked on easily. Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 54 Email summary You should now understand how best to design an email, how you should structure subject lines and how to come up with content. You have also learned how to build your email list and most importantly focus on creating quality content. Keeping these best practises in mind, over time you should build a large number of email subscribers who are highly interested in what you do. A welcome advantage email subscribers give you and your business is the high interaction they will have with your online content. Online marketing expert Neil Patel has been following this pattern for years and has recently stated that 41% of all blog comments on his website are made by email subscribers. Furthermore, his research has found that they are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web versus people who came to the site from another traffic source! Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: info@curve-interactive.com P a g e | 55 6.0 Conclusion Using the marketing methods in this book you will develop an integrated system of systems which will help you leverage your time set aside for marketing effectively. As we’ve learnt, outbound based methods of marketing are now less effective than their less intrusive inbound counterparts. You will find when implemented correctly, each of the strategies in this book will work together to create a constant stream of leads through your business’s now highly effective web presence. By making best use of the advice on offer in this book your web presence will now be providing high quality content to your customers and potential customers. The great value you are now providing via your optimised webpages, email marketing and social media content will increase your business’s brand perception. Moreover, the combination of techniques will increase your brands reach and the chance of brand resonance. You will be hitting people interested in your business’s line of work through multiple channels on a regular basis, and when these people come to the conclusion they are ready to buy, your business will be on the forefront of their mind. Search engine optimisation, social media marketing and email marketing will continue to grow in importance to your business over the coming years. Take action now and get started on your own digital marketing campaign. We hope you will use each of the techniques explained to their full effect and that in turn, over the course of time that your business will generate vastly increased sales. If you require any further information on any of the subject matters mentioned please get in touch with us directly and we will be more than happy to help. To keep up to speed on the latest developments in SEO, social media and email marketing make sure you are subscribed to our e-newsletter and that you follow your blog. I wish you all the best! 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