9 Email Marketing Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

We’ve all been there. It’s the day before Cyber Monday: you’ve crafted the perfect marketing email – it’s sophisticated yet straightforward, creative yet factual, and guaranteed to inspire customers to open, click, and convert in one seamless motion.
With a slightly self-satisfied smile, you hit “send” before you realize…
… that the link to your site was broken. Or one of the images is missing. And unfortunately, there is no “Undo” button for email (yet).
We’ve collected a list of common email marketing blunders and tips for avoiding them. We’ve also included a cheatsheet at the end, which you can use to verify that each email you send is truly good to go.
1) A subject line that is unrelated to the email – sometimes intentionally designed to tempt recipients to open the email (“subject line bait”).
How to avoid it: Make sure the subject line conveys the punchline of the email. If the email contains multiple messages, it’s best to have the subject line match the message in the first section of the email (the one your recipient reads first).
2) Broken links or links that don’t work as intended – including links that don’t work or send readers to the wrong place.
How to avoid it: Click every link in your email to make sure they function appropriately. Better yet, have someone else click them (in general, having someone else checking your mail is an essential part of the cheatsheet we included at the end of this post).
3) Incorrect spelllling – enough said.
How to avoid it: Some browsers and online editors offer inline tools that will show a squiggly red line to indicate a spelling mistake. Those are good as a first pass. However, for better reliability, we would recommend that you copy / paste the body of the email into a word processor and run a full spelling and grammar check.
4) Funky layout when images are not displayed - an email that is reliant on images and doesn’t render correctly when images are disabled. Some email clients and browsers don’t have images enabled by default, so a lot of people will not see the images you’ve included in your email.
How to avoid it: Test your email in image-disabled mode and make sure it displays well. Always include an alt-text for each image so some of the images’ meaning is still presented.
5) Breaking the law – according to the CAN-SPAM law, you must include your physical mailing address and a link for unsubscribing from your mailing list in each email you send.
How to avoid it: Include these two elements in your email template so you don’t need to worry about them in every email you send.
6) Poor mobile layout - not optimizing your email for mobile devices (or at least making sure they look reasonable). Considering the ever-increasing percentage of recipients engaging with email on mobile devices, this one is important.
How to avoid it: To start, check how your email looks on a few mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, android). It might be that you only need to make some cosmetic changes; it might be that you need to replace your template to a mobile-friendly or responsive template. Even after finding the right template, it’s probably a good idea to continue testing any new emails you create on a mobile device.
7) Incompatibility with certain email clients – your recipients read your emails on many different platform combinations: different hardware (Mac vs PC vs Mobile), operating systems (Windows vs Mac vs Linux), email clients (gmail vs outlook), browsers (Explorer vs Firefox vs Chrome). They all display the same email slightly differently – or very differently. You don’t want your email to look bad on any of them.
How to avoid it: It will be near-impossible to manually test your email on every platform combination. However, when starting to use a new template, it’s a good idea to test it on a few popular combinations. There are also online services that will do the testing for you.
8) Excessive or insufficient length – your email is so long that people either don’t get to the end, or – worse- feel overwhelmed and unsubscribe. Alternatively, your email is so short that you don’t make full use of the attention your readers have offered you.
How to avoid it: The best way to determine your readers’ length preference is to A/B test. Send two versions of the email – one with 10 product images, one with 20. Or one with 5 content items and one with 8, and look at differences in clickthru rates, unsubscribe rates and conversion. Optimize and continue testing.
9) No personalization or segmentation – sending the same email about the children’s socks sale you’re running this weekend to customers who only ever buy women’s lingerie, or football merchandise, or dorm room accessories.
How to avoid it: This one isn’t a quick “fix”, but there are initial steps you can take: Start thinking about segmenting your customers by their shopping behavior, demographics, site engagement or other attributes. If you need some help kickstarting your segmentation thinking, check out the Segmentation course on Custora U and the Segmentation cheatsheet with plenty of examples of ways to segment.
10) And finally, as part of our ‘read 9, get one free’ promotion, here is a bonus mistake to guard against: Being boring. For example, your email is so boring this happens:


 
How to avoid it: Personalizing your messages and ensuring your emails are timely and relevant are a good start. If all else fails, here’s a collection of funny animal videos, the funniest Amazon product reviews, and a meme generator to ensure you have all the tools you need to spruce up any email.

How to Build a Social Brand That’s a Sweet Orange in a World of Bitter Apples!

How do you build a brand that is a sweet orange in an online social world of bitter apples?

How do the brands that leave lasting imprints in your head do it? Why is that jingle you hear one time on the radio or TV in the morning stuck in your head all day? Why do you consistently buy one brand over another?

Standing out in a crowd of noise, confusion, spammers and fakes online is not easy. It takes hard work, research, knowledge of people, knowledge of tools, knowledge of best practices and more. There are some days you may just want to throw in the towel and go back to your old spammy ways? Don’t do it!

There is a reason that the brands, jingles are stuck in your head. They are compelling, the words resonate with you, they are easy to understand and they probably spark an emotion inside of you.

Good marketers know how to do these things with their eyes closed. Yet many business leaders and small or medium size business owners find themselves in an online world without a staff to help them or the knowledge themselves to guide their team in creating a compelling brand that people will remember and want to engage with.

I like to stick things in a nutshell and make it as easy as possible for you to understand. There is a way you can build a compelling brand without a million dollar budget. However, there are some strategic and tactical things you are going to need to do and focus on to achieve success. Below are a 23 tips to help you build a brand that will be remembered, sung, tweeted, and virally shared.

23 Tips to Build a Brand that is a Sweet Orange in a World of Bitter Apples

1. Know your goals! I’ll say it in one blog post and I’ll say it in 1,000,000 more! Know why you are doing what you do! What does success look like to you on Friday, Monday, next week? Next month? Next year? Five years from now? You must set goals and objectives for your business first. Who do you want to be when you grow up?

2. Know your audience. You should know what your audience likes, wants, needs, desires and wants to be when they grow up. How are you going to help them do all of the above? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, this better be your first and top priority (right after you write down your goals, objectives and build your plan!

3. Know your value. What value do you offer your audience, partners, clients, employees? Why should anyone care you exist? Why should they talk to you, listen to you, tweet you, like your Facebook page, follow you or give a rip that your business exists on this planet?

4. A logo does not equal a brand. Many small business leaders think  they are done with brand when they receive the logo and business card set from the local print shop designer. They think they’ve went all out if they have a website with two or three selected colors.  Sorry folks, this is not brand. My first question to you will be why did you choose such colors? What do the colors say about you? What does your logo mean? Not just what does it look like.

5. Be your brand. Know your brand, share your brand, be your brand. Every employee in your organization is a representation of you and your brand. They better know the core brand attributes, brand promise, differentiators, value offered to your audiences. From the receptionist to the CEO to the tweet stream of your corporate Twitter account, each touch is a brand impression. Accept it, deal with it and make them count!

6. Brand development doesn’t happen in a day. If any agency or consultant tells you they can develop your brand in a couple days and after a one hour session with you, run the other direction.  A good brand consultant or agency will want to spend time with you to understand your business.  They will want to know what it is you do and why. What markets do you serve? How are you different? Why are you different? Do your customers think you’re different? How do you want to make anyone who comes into contact with your brand feel?

7. Align your social media and marketing efforts to your goals. Facebook should fit into your business. Do NOT spend the next year fitting your business into Facebook. You’d be surprised how many businesses are doing just this! Don’t be one of them!

8. Consistency. Did you know it takes 6-7 brand impressions for someone to remember your brand at all? Yup, so that means every impression must count. The more consistent you can be the more easily each and every brand impression is going to leave a memorable imprint in their brain. Even if budgets are tight, find a way to build consistency across the various platforms. Focus on consistent avatars, logo placement, colors, value proposition messages, company and product descriptions, bios, titles, fonts. Basically anything that is seen or heard should be consistent.

9.  Know where and how you are positioned in the market. Be realistic. If you’re currently seen as the low dollar, bargain solution then you are not going to overnight turn into the midnight sensation worth premium membership. You can over time evolve your products, services and move the mindset perception of your audience. However, it is going to take focused time, effort and work.

10. Connect with your audience via emotions and feelings. Determine the feelings you want your audience to have when they come in contact with your brand.  Write down the top 10 words that describe how you want them to feel as they come in contact with your brand.  Do you want to be the family room, kitchen or sales floor? Choose colors, textures, words and engagement based on such. Then narrow it down to three words. Those three words should be the foundation for how your brand looks, smells and tastes to your audiences and community.

11. Be unique. Focus on compelling, relevant value and content that inspires, enriches their life and makes them better. Say good-bye to status quo and dare to be different! Don’t build your brand and your content based upon your competition’s website and social presence. You have no idea what their goals are, what audiences they are really targeting. Their strategy could be completely different than yours and you may find yourself in a year further behind than where you started!

12. Create a quick message house. The longer term goal is to obviously create a comprehensive message house in coordination with your broader brand and identity development.  However, for now at minimum create a one to two page document which at minimum includes your vision, mission, elevator pitch, description, value proposition, benefits, features and unique differentiators.  This document will also be very useful if you hire a consultant or agency.  It will provide them with something to start with and a better understanding of where your heart and head is in regard to your brand and identity.

13. Share yourself. The more you share of yourself the better your audience will connect with you.

14. Be you. There is only one you so be that person. Be that brand. Be who you are, what you are, period!

15. Use a variety of mediums. Everyone learns differently. Some people like written word. Some like audio. Some like video. Some need all three before it sinks in. Don’t be afraid to try something different you have never done before.

16. Engage your audience. Talk to them and inspire them after the Facebook like, not just before. Ask them questions. Speak in language they can understand to enable them to understand and connect with you.

17. Take your game up a level. Acknowledge you have competitors and simply doing what everyone else is doing is not going to be enough.

18.  Humanize yourself and your brand. Treat your audience as humans. Let them know you are human too. Talk in words they understand and want to hear, not the corporate speak of your 1999 printed collateral.

19. Be relevant. If your audience doesn’t care what you have to say or do, it’s all for nothin’! Focus on developing content that enables you to have a conversation with your audience that they view as relevant and can resonate with their thinking and needs.

20. Integrate to reinvigorate! Integration is the key to success with successful social brands. The better you can integrate your efforts including marketing, social media, brand, and communications the more consistent, compelling and relevant your brand is going to be perceived by your audience. Integration doesn’t take necessarily more money or time. It takes more focus and usually a shift of focus from random acts of marketing to an integrated plan that requires accountability and measurable results.

21. Stop the Random Acts of Marketing! If it’s not in the plan, not in the budget or integrated, then chances are it is a Random Act of Marketing (RAM,) RAMs will eat your every last morsel of positive return on investment (ROI.) Don’t get stuck in the RAM rut. Instead focus on the list of tactics and approaches in this post and they will help you stay away from those nasty RAMs!

22. Ask your audience what they think. Don’t be afraid to ask your clients, partners, stakeholders, board members and employees what they think about you and your brand. Ask them to describe the three words they would use to describe you and your brand. You might be surprised to learn they are not the same as the three words you want them to think. The only way you can fix this is if you first know it’s a problem. Communication with your audiences will inspire them to talk with you, share their same issues, and you will as a result be better able to help them solve their problems as well!

23. Don’t give up! Even though this may seem like a lot of work (and it is), don’t give up. Develop a plan that enables you to bite it off piece by piece. You can’t build your brand or your business overnight. If you fall down, then just wipe off your knees, grab a friend and have them help you up. Learn from your mistakes and remember we all make them. Yesterday you probably worried about today. Today turned out alright. So why worry about tomorrow?

What is pagination in SEO ?

Many websites  (mostly ecommerce) are promoting such a variety of products that they´re ultimately forced to divide them into multiple pages. This process is called pagination, as shown in the following images:

In these two cases the great range of products available obligates the website owners to divide them in many pages. The difference between the two cases is that in the first case we can only see the products listed by page while in the second case we have the option of seeing the full list of products in a single page. This is what we call a “view-all” page. We will discuss the 2 websites / cases in more detail further on but if you wish you can observe them in the following URLs:

1.  http://eshop.toiles-du-soleil.com/fr/toiles-au-metre
2.  http://goo.gl/80YUhR

Issues that result from pagination

There are two main issues that need to be addressed when using pagination. These are:

1. Duplicate content issues

Usually when we are using pagination most of the pages tend to have identical or similar content and often the meta title and meta description are also similar between the pages. When this happens Googlebot may be traversing about the pages that should return to the search queries.

2. Crawling issues

Google (Googlebot) is “crawling” each site depending on the authority it has. So especially if your site is new and contains many pages that are not so important there is the danger that Google won’t index them all, especially if the depth (level of the clicks) is too “deep”. In this case you could lose important pages from being indexed in Google search queries.

Solution for pagination issues

1. Use of the command “rel = prev” and “rel = next”.  In the first case discussed in the beginning of the article (without a “view all” page) we ought to use this command. This way we create a connection between all pages and Google is verifying them as one entry, therefore avoiding duplicate and crawling problems.
Important note: In the first page there’s only rel=”next”, while in the last page there’s only markup for rel=”prev”.

(Source:www.ecreativeim.com)

(Source:http://www.ayima.com/)

In case you are using this application this is how the HTML code should look like:

Page 1:
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/page2.html”>
Page 2:
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/page1.html”>
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/page3.html”>
Page 3:
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/page2.html”>
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/page4.html”>
Page 4:
<link rel=”prev” href=” http://www.exmlmoza.com/page3.html”>

2. Use of the “rel=canonical”. We should only use this command in cases like the second one we discussed in the beginning of the article where there is a “view all” page. This way Google understands that there is a preferred page the “view all” page representing all of our pages to the search queries.

(Source:www.ecreativeim.com)

For using this application just add a rel=”canonical” tag within the <head> section of each page, pointing to the View-All Page. (e.g. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.exmlmoza.com/view-all-page”/>).

(Source: http://www.ayima.com/)

According to Google this is considered a user-friendly method, thus promoted as being the best one available.

Extreme caution is needed when using this method that should only be used when necessary and when:

• The loading time of View-All pages is fast enough and the navigation relatively easy

• You can add the Keyword Combinations of all other pages for optimization purposes in the “view all” page

3.  According to Google there is also the option of not doing anything at all since pagination is a very common application not necessarily needed since the algorithms used can easily detect and return to the search queries the most relevant result without the need of using any commands like “rel=prev / rel=next” or “rel=canonical”.

4.  Another solution is the use of the noindex command. This way we are keeping Google from indexing all the pages and we are permitting only the first page to be indexed. This method is really easy to be implemented but, on the other hand, it hides the full content of our website from Google’s index.

(Source: http://www.ayima.com/)

Plugins for pagination and simple CMS

There are some plugins that can be used when dealing with pagination issues if you are using WordPress or Magento as CMS.  Two of them are:

• Yoast  for wordpress
• Seo – pagination  for magento.

This way you manage to automatically input the “rel = next” “rel = prev’’.

When to use pagination

• Only when necessary

• When displaying a list of products (like ecommerce)

• When there’s a “view all” page… or not?

• Not for an article (if possible)

After all, pagination is not only affecting the SEO but the user experience as well.
It is very important especially for ecommerce sites, as it helps the website to be better indexed and allows you to also increase your targeted keywords in a single page if you are using the rel=”canonical” for a “view all page”.

As for the user experience, you have to investigate each time which solution is more helpful for your users, pagination with a view all page, pagination without a view all page or just a view all page? The best way to investigate this is to implement some A/B tests, examine a real life senario and figure out the way that is bringing you better revenue.

If you have any more suggestions, please do not hesitate to add a comment. You just have to register!

Social Media Case Study

The Social Campaigns should be designed according to the organization’s objectives. In this article we will share with you the actions and the goals of a real life example that can help you understand how social media can be used in order to promote your brand. The subject of this case study is the social media campaign of a luxury hotel.

The hotel’s marketing department had both communication and commercial objectives. Nevertheless this campaign’s main goal was to affect the online reputation of the hotel. The 2 main objectives were: To increase the brand awareness by focusing on the internet users and to build an e-mail database that could be used on the future for Email campaigns. Secondary objectives were to increase the online bookings, the twitter followers, the Facebook fans and the views of the videos on YouTube.

Due to the limited time that we had available, we were forced to plan a short campaign that lasted for few days. Generally even if it is not advised to plan such a short term campaigns, this case study clearly shows that even under these circumstances a social media campaign can be successful if it is well planned and well executed.

The Hotel and the Concept of the Campaign

As mentioned above the client was a luxury 5-start hotel in Mykonos. Mykonos is a Greek island and a top tourist destination, renowned for its cosmopolitan character and its intense nightlife. Due to the above the people that can be reached through social media are the ideal target audience.

In this campaign we organized a photo contest where the participants could win free nights at the hotel during summer. In order to win the contest, one should become a fan of the Facebook page of the hotel, upload a specific themed photo and then promote it in order to get as many “likes” as possible before the end of the contest.

Crowd sourcing is fun and effective

Crowd sourcing describes the practice in which the objective is to motivate people in order to proceed on actions that finally serve promotional needs.  Even if this is not something new, it is a hot topic mainly due to the increasing number of social media users.

Photo contests and other types of contests in general are less aggressive forms of advertising that can be very effective on social media and that can bring results in a short period of time.

Launching the campaign

First of all, a year earlier, we had created social media profiles for the particular brand on the most popular social media (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). During the last year we have made sure that those accounts were active and we regularly posted interesting messages, videos and news for the travelers. By using both ours and client’s online channels, we had the change to promote the contest to a large target audience.

The first thing we did was to produce the material that was needed for the campaign (texts, messages, images, videos etc) and in the Facebook Fan page we created a special tab that was dedicated to the contest. Then we started to promote the contest though our channels and at the same time we usedFacebook and Google Ads.

After the launch, people’s response was impressive and the results were remarkable.  The fans of the hotel’s Facebook page were significantly increased and the wall was filled with photos, likes and comments.

All these actions along with the long-term SEO campaigns that we launched in the past for the website of the hotel, lead to successful results in terms of generated buzz, visits and bookings.

The results of the campaign

As expected, during the days that we launched the contest, the visits of on the website were increasedand there was a lot of buzz around the brand name of the hotel. Here are few statistics:

• The website visits were increased by 187%
• The visits on the booking engine were increased by 227%
• The Facebook fans were increased by 150%
• The Twitter followers were increased by 80%
• The views of the videos on YouTube were increased by 100%
• A big Email Database was created since lots of people subscribed to the hotel`s newsletter

Additionally the traffic on the website of the hotel and the bookings remained high for a long period after the end of the contest.

The Main Tasks of a Social Media Campaign

Account Setup

The creation of the social media profiles should be done very carefully. Their designs, their texts and their concept should be aligned with the corporate philosophy and they should reflect the image of the organization.

Community Development

Developing and managing a community within the social media is one of the most important parts of the campaign. The person behind the social media accounts (also called community manager or social media spokesperson) should be a part of the organization or at least, should be trained to carry the corporate philosophy, ethics, mission, brand claim and all the relative objectives.

In practice, the dedicated person is responsible for:

• Posting messages, news, images or videos on social media
• Replying to the users
• Starting discussions
• Participating in the community

Have in mind that all the above should come naturally in order to reach and interact with your audience and not to force it by artificially increasing your members, fans or followers.

Moderating

Some people will use your social media embassies to post comments or messages that are abusive or that can be considered as spam. The moderating task ensures the fair play within your social media places.

Monitoring

The online monitoring focuses on finding what people say about you or your brand. It can be done by using the search tools of the various social media or by using other external services/search engines.

For example you can use Facebook search to see what people write about your brand name and Topsy search engine in order to trace what people say about your website on Twitter. Even Google can be a handy tool since it gives you the chance to filter the results on social media based on target and time.

Tracking

Tracking the performance of the social media campaign can be done with various tools (Google Analytics, Tweetmeme, Tweetstats, etc) and it is a very important part of the campaign since it allows you to measure your effectiveness. Even if the objectives of each campaign can vary a lot depending on the goals of the client, one of the most common things that we monitor is the traffic that is generated by the social media campaigns and the conversion rates.

Social Media campaigns are a way to promote your business and increase your brand awareness. Nevertheless in order to be successful you need to plan them carefully and invest the time and the resources that are needed. After all, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.