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Ho ho ho… Holiday subject lines!
Christmas is near and you’re are probably preparing holiday email campaigns to send out!
Well, the Christmas spirit is already spreading because Joshua Chin shared some hacks to optimize your subject lines during the holidays and make sure that people will open your Christmas specials!
The first tip is about length: For the longest time, people believed that shorter subject lines lead to higher CTRs. However, subject lines that are around 61-70 characters long have higher chances of getting read!
So, for these holidays, try to be more generous with words and test longer subject lines
Then, Joshua suggests you choose the right combination of words in order to get more attention. According to their nature, here are some example of tricky keywords with their average read rate:
Urgency : “still time” (33.73%), “last chance” (16.71%), “limited time” (14.93%)
Sales-driven: “offer” (19.14%), “sale” (17.77%), “save” (16.16%)
Benefit : “cheapest” (25.14%), “easiest” (19.39%), “prettiest” (32.50%)
What can you do more? Ever tried to ask questions? Do you know that questions engage more with the reader? Do you like us asking questions while talking about asking questions? Is it boring? Probably…
Yet, it can work with subject lines. And here are some examples for the holidays:
“Running out of gift ideas?”
“Need your gifts to be wrapped and delivered to your doorstep?”
“Are you ready for this huge Christmas sale?”
Another way to craft holiday subject lines is by using appropriate emojis! For instance, for Christmas email campaigns, emojis like a snowman, a Christmas tree, or Santa Claus are a great way to add much needed holiday flair to your subject lines!
The last advice by Joshua, that we always encourage you to do is: test everything! When it comes to email, A/B testing is a non-negotiable requirement.
By testing your subject lines, you get a better idea of what resonates the best with your subscribers, making it easier to craft click-worthy emails in the future.
Let’s craft a unique subject line to shine in an inbox full of noisy holiday emails! If you’re wondering where Joshua got this data and stats from, have a look here.
Mark’s goal: Ads everywhere!
Facebook Newsfeed saturated with ads? No problem! Mark got your back. And his bet on videos is working out.
The expansion of Facebook’s video Ad Breaks, and by extension of the global roll-out of Watch, gives us advertisers a new channel to reach audiences.
According to Facebook, more than 75M daily visitors spend, on average, 20 minutes on Watch. Not yet like the YouTube numbers, but still, a good number, considering that Facebook Watch is just one year old.
As we previously said, Facebook Watch is a good channel to place our ads: It combines the TV format (ads on Television worked for decades) with the power of the Facebook algo and its data.
And the Ad Breaks expansion to 14 more countries is just the latest sign. It means that these ads are working. Now, the list of countries with Ad Breaks includes US, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, most of the EU countries, South America, Central America, UAE and many SEA nations.
Besides, Facebook will continue to introduce new ways for publishers and creators to earn more on its platform in 2019, with plans to launch Ad Breaks in even more countries. It also says it will begin testing new Ad Break placements, such as live-streams from its gaming community.
OK, let’s be honest. Mark is not doing this for the benefit of advertisers. He is doing it to get more revenue for Facebook, after a tough 2018. But we don’t mind, as long as the ads convert.
Google serving you a tasty meal!
In a huge market where Amazon and Flipkart battle for e-commerce dominance, Google is giving you the chance to join the battle.
We are talking about India. And about Google launching the Shopping tab to Google Search and a new separate Shopping homepage in India, setting its eyes on bringing more merchants and hundreds of millions of Indian consumers into its ecosystem.
A sweet chance to join this growing massive market!
With the launch, announced this Thursday, Google is also expanding Merchant Center to support Hindi, in addition to English.
Sellers will be able to upload their product feeds to Merchant Center in Hindi and promote their products on Google Shopping to users who search in that language. Mind you, 44% of the country primarily speaks Hindi.
If Amazon and Flipkart (an Indian native Walmart subsidiary) are making an effort to gain market share in India, this means one thing: it’s a juicy market and you should take your seat at this table.
After the 44% market share of Flipkart and 40% of Amazon, there is still a nice 16% market share to take on!
Google just served us a good meal! Let’s eat it all!
Learnings from 2018 – Think with Google
So, what have marketers been reading and talking about the most in 2018? To uncover this, we dug into the data to uncover Think with Google’s most-read articles of 2018. Here are some of the high ranking topics you can find in detail in the article.
1. Mobile Page Speed: If your website doesn’t load in 3s, your users will bounce off. 3 secs is the max someone will wait for a website to load on mobile. 11M websites pinged globally still take more than 15s to load. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
2. A World Beyond Funnels: Every marketers’ first and favourite thing! Google analysed thousands of users’ clickstream data from a third-party opt-in panel. And guess what? The customer journeys don’t resemble funnels at all. They look more like pyramids, diamonds, hourglasses, and more.
3. Customer Journey Mapping: Each user journey is unique. So, how can you learn and track your funnels better? Enter customer journey mapping! A 5-step process to help you understand how users engage with your website/content, leaving a huge impact on your business.
4. Video and Search Marketing: So, you find video ads work better for cold traffic and search ads on Google for hot/warm traffic or for retargeting? Well, it doesn’t have to be that way and Hawaiian Airlines is a proof of that. Using search ads to raise awareness and retargeting them with YouTube videos drove flight bookings up by 185% while reducing costs by 69%.
5. Story-Building, not just Storytelling: Developing audience insights to craft your ads to create those stories is great, however, we are now into personalization era – a critical component in today’s noisy media ecosystem.
6. Personalization: The phone is everybody’s best friend. Search queries like “How can I”, “Should I…” are growing because people understand they are able to find information more quickly if they are very specific with their questions.
7. 4-Step Video Marketing: Get more out of those video ads than just carpet bombing. Learn how Yoox Net-A-Porter, an online fashion retailer, used gamification in videos to enhance conversions and sales.
8. Customer Experience: Learn how HomeAway, a vacation rental company looked at what wasn’t working to determine what would. 3 essentials? Get rid of all irrelevant landing pages, annoying ads and cumbersome checkout processes.
9. Human vs Machine to Human AND Machine: Think of machines or automation as partners rather than just sidekicks. We aren’t going to be in a faceoff with AI anytime soon. Machines are partners that can help us accelerate our creativity and explore its possibilities more deeply than ever before.
10. Data-Driven Marketing: You have researched well on your audience, their pain points and desires, however knowing to deliver the right message/experience at the right time is what the research at Bain & Company suggests. Brands that show up with the right message in just the right moment are the ones finding pathways to growth and revenue.
Here’s how this company became GDPR compliant OFFICIALLY!
Have website visitors from the EU? Well, you almost certainly do, so this goes out to everyone out there… GDPR, consent, data, privacy. We talked about it before. However, what really is genuine consent as a valid basis for processing personal data under GDPR? How to be fully GDPR compliant?
Last month, French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, announced the closure of a formal warning it issued this summer, against drive-to-store ad-tech firm, Fidzup – saying it was satisfied it was now GDPR compliant.
Fidzup, while not-being a tech giant like FB or Google, still makes up for a great example of how they were crossing the consent line, and how they were able to fix it and be fully GDPR compliant.
They were tracking the geolocation, advertising and Wi-Fi ID of its users, which under GDPR is classified as personal data. This data was used to push ads to these users, directly or by sharing their data with their partners.
Fidzup was under the impression that its partners were responsible for seeking consent from their users. However, that’s not the case. Each new use of the data and each of the partners including Fidzup required opt-in consent.
Confusing and/or incomplete consent flows aren’t yet extinct. But it’s fair to say those that don’t offer full opt-in choice are on borrowed time. If your website/app relies on using EU users’ data, then the GDPR states that consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous.
That means you can’t bundle multiple uses for personal data under a single opt-in. You also can’t use confusing or unclear information using skewed words to gain user consent. You have to clearly classify the ways in which you are going to use users’ data for clearly specified purposes.
Whether you intend to use the data just for remarketing ads or even for analytics, A/B testing and personalization, marketing automation, conversion tracking. Each usage point has to mentioned separately, allowing users to opt-in for each of them separately. You can’t bundle this consent together in just one step. Users should be able to select and unselect each one separately.
You also have to offer users the choice to not opt-in. So, you cannot pre-tick all the consent boxes that you really wish your users would freely choose. You have to actually let them do that.
Also, you have to provide the same service to the user even if they don’t opt-in or don’t want their data to be tracked/shared. And this last point is certainly tricky for some companies, especially those that block EU visitors…
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The WTAFF Crew’s take on the state of cryptos
OK, ladies and gents… We’re glad you want our opinion on other things besides marketing. So because you asked for it, we’re gonna deliver.
Before we get into the content, we have to just be blunt about this. We’re not any sort of experts on crypto. We just like to stay informed on trends and technology as you might have noticed. Take everything we say with a grain of salt!
We usually try to apply some common sense to the hype. We sometimes fail. Mostly it works out for us. Oh, and we don’t have any significant stake in crypto.
Alright, then! Let’s start with the obvious – year over year, the price of all coins is down and many people have lost a good portion of their funds, for sure.
Why did the price go down so much? We don’t know for sure. The biggest reason we see is that there was no big development that made the tech significantly easier for mainstream use, while at the same time, speculative ICOs dried up. Why? They dried up because most ended up being quick money grabs that can’t deliver an MVP.
Future of crypto? Not so different for the long term compared to 2016 and most of 2017. In other words, still unproven but with many people seeing it as extremely promising.
What we think you should do? Keep an eye on it, don’t get greedy and only risk what you can afford to lose. Think about how to provide the picks and shovels for the industry, not just buying coins and hoping for the best. If you like crypto and want to be involved, build a real business in the space!
And no, we have no idea what the right price is for BTC or any other coin. We’re not in the business of predicting the future…
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