Category: Digital Marketing

Email automation is oftentimes overlooked, but it needs to be a part of the foundation of your eCommerce brand if you’re looking to increase your revenue and be as profitable as possible. Here are 4 simple to set up email sequences you can use to maximize your marketing efforts this year –

Here’s a link to a more in-depth article I wrote on the 4 automation sequences.

Also if you aren’t using Klaviyo, we highly recommend them – here’s a link to sign up.

Learn to be a Better Marketer

It seems that after the whole Cambridge Analytica situation Facebook is starting to be more transparent in regards to how their algorithm works. Which is good for both the users of the platform and all of us marketers. The better we understand how the algorithm works the better we can create ads that resonate with our intended audience.

Facebook’s goal is to make ads as relevant as possible to their users. As much as some users don’t like seeing ads, they would rather see ads that are relevant to them than ones that aren’t. So let’s dig into the 3 big fundamentals that play into who sees what on Facebook.

1. Bidding

There are several different optimization options for Facebook ads, you can do landing page views, engagement, conversions, etc. The one that I’ve consistently found to provide the best ROI is conversions. (Shocking, I know…) So this bidding info is specifically for Conversion Optimized campaigns.

Bidding options: You can do auto-bid (what FB calls Lowest Cost), Target Cost, or Max Bid (what they now call Lowest Cost w/bid cap).

a. Auto Bid/Lowest Cost Bidding: really allows you to leverage Facebook’s algorithm. This bidding style will come shooting out of the gate targeting those in your audience that the algo thinks will buy for the cheapest rate. This is why you may notice when you launch campaigns that they will often times perform really well in the beginning then fall off after a couple of days. This is because the audience exhausted itself of the low hanging fruit and is now focusing on people that aren’t as likely to buy. This is why duplicating an ad after a few days will often give you good results again after the original stopped working.

Summary – Auto Bid/Lowest Cost bidding is still the best option.

b. Target Cost Bidding: in this strategy, you can tell FB that you want to have a CPA of $20. What they do is take out all of the people that they think will be significantly higher than $20 and significantly lower than $20. This causes your impressions to be SUPER low and your ads won’t go after the lowing hanging fruit because you told the algo “No I don’t want those people.” I know, it sounds silly that it would do that, but the word on the street is that it does. After testing out this method on various campaigns I’ve noticed that indeed impressions are way lower than campaigns that are using Lowest Cost bidding. Conversions are also really hit or miss with Target Cost campaigns. I wouldn’t do them again until someone says they algo changed.

Summary – don’t use Target Cost bidding.

c. Max Bid/Lowest Cost with Bid Cap: this bid strategy is somewhat useful if you’re on a budget. It tells FB “Hey go after the low hanging fruit, but I don’t want to spend more than X to get a customer” which is good. What this does though, is it limits your impressions after a certain point because someone that is using Auto Bid/Lowest Cost bidding without a bid cap is outbidding you for impressions.

Summary – Max Bid/Lowest Cost with a bid cap is great for those on a budget. Your ads won’t scale as much as those without a bid cap but this gives you a good chance at being profitable.

Bidding Summary – Your best bet to create scalable campaigns is to just let Facebook’s algorithm work and use Auto Bid/Lowest Cost (the default bid). This allows you to continue to win the bidding auctions which makes your ads keep showing up. To extend the shelf life of your ads start using FB’s dynamic creative function. This will show ads to the people Facebook thinks are most likely to buy from you more often as the creative will keep switching dynamically.

2. Estimated Action Rate

The 2nd big part of the algo is the estimated action rate. Things that play into it:

• Recent ad activity
  • What type of people clicked, engaged, purchased in the past
• Page activity – how healthy and active is the page? Does it benefit FB/IG users?
  • Is the page actively posting
  • Age of the page
  • Does the page get a lot of engagement with their posts
  • Does the page reply to comments quickly
  • Has the page been hacked recently? (If so, you’ll have higher CPMs for a bit)

Your past ad activity plays a big role in who your ads show up too – the more purchases and webstie events the FB pixel sees the better. Your organic page itself also plays a big role, so the more active and healthy your page is the lower your advertising costs will be. Facebook is about giving users the best experience possible so if you’re adding to that experience they will reward you.

3. User Value

Facebook has recently said that they have an Ad Quality Panel. This is a 3rd party, outside of Facebook, that looks at and reviews ads giving them a score. These people aren’t digital marketers, they are actual users of the platform giving out the grades. Think of people in there 30’s – 50’s that aren’t too tech savvy. So it is really important that when you make an ad you look at it and ask yourself if you truly think the campaign is going to resonate, will your audience actually be interested in what you’re promoting? Make ads that resonate and you will get a higher grade which means more impressions at a cheaper rate, giving you better performance.

Another thing the algorithm looks at now is the post-click experience. The biggest factor I was told was the bounce rate, if someone clicks your ad, gets to your landing page and instantly leaves your website Facebook is going start docking you impressions (and most likely raise your CPM) because it thinks by users doing this the page you are sending them too isn’t relevant. This means, now more than ever, it’s time to have a good site experience that makes people want to stay, click around, and eventually make a purchase. As marketers, we often care so much about the creative, copy, and targeting we use in ads that we push our site experience off to the side. Our ads could be perfect (creative, targeting, copy) but if we’re sending them to a shit landing page we’re gonna be wasting money. This was true in the past but now we know Facebook is taking notice, so if your landing pages suck, fix them.

Summary

Optimize your ads for conversions (unless you don’t get many sales, then landing page views) and use the default Auto Bid/Lowest cost bidding without a bid cap. You can use a bid cap if you’re on a budget. Never use Target Cost bidding, unless you’re a fearless bastard that likes to gamble. Constantly be creating new ads and use the dynamic creative feature. Keep your organic pages active and engaging, respond to customer comments; give people a good experience and Facebook will reward you for it with better ad performance (lower CPM’s). After every ad you make ask yourself “Will this actually resonate with my intended audience? Is this something they’ll want to see?” If not, make a new ad. Also, make sure your landing pages are good and people don’t bounce/leave right away. The longer they stay on your site and the more they engage with it the better you’ll look to Facebook. That’s what I know about the algorithm from the horses mouth. If you know anything else that I should add let me know!

Cheers,

Jacob

Learn to be a Better Marketer

Email marketing campaigns have become synonymous with digital marketing success over the past 10 years. Though, recently it has been talked about less and less as the rise of social media marketing along with SEM has stolen the spotlight away from it. Is this justified? Well, the new kids on the block may be getting all of the attention, though it is email that is still the undisputed champion (statistically) of the digital marketing world!

Picture- ROI of marketing by channel per $1 spenthttp://blog.fusionfarm.com/blog/email-marketing-for-business-is-not-dead-find-out-why

As important as email marketing is for digital marketers, many simply miss the mark and never reach the full potential ROI of their marketing campaigns. Building an effective email campaign is an imperfect science. One will always need to take into account the subscriber’s receiving the mail, the ISP they are sending to and the message they are sending. With so many factors coming into play email marketing can get tricky.

Being able to step back and understand the message that you are delivering from the end users point of view is of the utmost importance. You will soon realize that blasting out self-promotional messages is going to do nothing but hurt your reputation over the long run. All of the short term profits from constant promotion will pale in comparison to the possible long term revenue you could bring in by providing useful information to the end user consistently. Providing useful, relevant and consistent messages to your subscriber’s is the key to the long term profits.

Here are 6 key areas that you need to focus on to increase the ROI of your email efforts-

1.The Message
Imagine if you were looking into buying a magazine, you would not choose the one that is all advertisements, would you? No, you wouldn’t. So why would you try to email out your messages with constant sales requests without providing them any value of being on your list. You need to make yourself the industry expert in your field and gain the trust of your subscribers; this is something that you cannot attain by blasting out’ buy now’ messages every day. Provide them value and they will become a valuable customer of yours.

2.The Call to action
The advice to “always ask them” has been turned into a heroic-sounding marketing term called the call to action as if trumpets were sounding and prospects were marching off to war just because you inserted a couple of words at the end of your copy.
The term might sound a little old fashioned. But the simple fact is, once you’ve gained your reader’s attention and presented all the benefits they will get by taking the action you want, you still have one more hoop to jump through.You need to tell your reader exactly what to do, how to do it, and that you want them to do it right now!

3.Staying Top of Mind
Engagement is your goal and top-of-mind awareness is your reward. It’s important to remember that engagement is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The real value derived from engaging your subscriber base between transactions is maintaining top-of-mind awareness for your brand. This is a phrase often used to support ongoing advertising campaigns.

The marketer wants his brand of soup to be the first one that a shopper thinks of when browsing the soup aisle at the grocery store. While the Soup company won’t get many if any online conversions for their soup, next time the shopper goes down the aisle they’ll be more likely to pick a can up when they see it because they engaged with them recently.

Email marketing may not be the best converting ads for a soup marketer (techncally since there isn’t much of a direct return per se), but it has real value for something like a hotel chain. A subscriber might only travel for leisure a couple of times a year, but if she regularly engages with emails from Wyndham hotels — even if it’s no more than noticing an email in the inbox — she’s more likely to check Wyndham’s website for rooms and prices when it’s time to travel.

4.Force an answer, Present a Deadline
A deadline forces action. There are plenty of mental justifications you can give yourself for not doing something, especially if there is no compelling reason to decide right now. When you force a decision with a deadline, people have to do something; it’s either a yes or a no. It’s just like eating out at a restaurant when you can’t decide what to order and you need the pressure of a waitress standing over your shoulder waiting to take your order to force you into a decision.
A deadline is a form of scarcity, similar to producing a limited quantity of stock or taking a certain number of members into a membership site. This creates exclusivity, a perception that your customers are part of something unique that only a privileged few get access to (which is true). You have to act fast in order to ensure you are one of the “lucky ones.”

5.Test, test, test

Like most things in life, learning how to run effective email campaigns for your list takes time. You have to constantly be testing out different subject lines, post lengths, the time you send out the campaign, how you segment your list, etc… You will consistently need to test and assess what you are doing to maximize the ROI of your campaigns.

A good way to find out what works out best for your audience is to run an A/B test. An A/B test is a way to test out 2 different email messages to figure out what your list truly likes to engage with. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when running an email A/B test:
• Always test simultaneously to reduce the chance your results will be skewed by time-based factors.
• Test as large a sample as you can for more accurate results.
• Listen the empirical data collected, not your gut instinct.
• Use the tools available to you for quicker and easier A/B testing.
• Test early and test often for the best results.
• Only test one variable at a time for best results. (If you want to test more than one, look into multivariate testing instead of A/B testing.)

6.Improving your Email Deliverability-

What good would the best email marketing campaigns be if no one received the message you so meticulously typed up? That is like having the best car in the world ready for race day and not having any fuel, you don’t stand a chance. This is why improving your deliverability is paramount to your campaigns success.

Here are 7 tips to increase the likelihood of your email reaching the inbox-

• Warm up your IP
Gone are the days where you can upload your list into an ESP right away and start blasting out emails. You are going to need to warm up your sending IP. What this means is that you slowly add in subscribers from your list, maybe only send to 20% of your subscribers on your first send then slowly add the rest to your mailing list.

• Check your sender reputation and score
Not knowing your sender score as an email marketer is a lot like not knowing your credit score when you are looking to buy a new car or a house. This important number can tell you what percentage your emails are making it to the inbox and what percentage is instantly going to the spam folder.

• Check and Monitor feedback loops
By monitoring your emails feedback loops you can understand which customers are marking your messages as spam and change your sending habits to these people as the more the mark you as spam the lower your sender score will be.

• Stick to a consistent send schedule
The ISP god’s frown upon those that send out 4 mass emails in a week then wait a month to send out another. In their eyes it makes you appear as a spammer so stick to email out your messages on a consistent basis.

• Engage your customers with relevant content
Engagement is king in terms of deliverability. The more you can get your subscribers to actively open, click and respond to your messages the better your email deliverability will be.

• Ask for permission
Email only to subscribers that have actively subscribed to your email list, they know you and why you are sending to them therefore are more than happy to engage with your messages while not seeing your mail as spam.

• Scrub your list
You should remove bounces from your list before you mail to them. The higher the percentage of bounces your list has the more you will tarnish your IP reputation, removing bounces before you send them is a must if you want to make it to your subscribers inbox.