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Complete guide to email automation
It’s 2019, and while 58% of companies make use of email automation (EA) for sending out standard newsletters, only 11% of them use EA to actually create rule-based segmented campaigns.
This is low-hanging fruit at its finest, and you can pluck it off the branch and use it to take advantage of the statistically proven growth it offers.
Here are some stats to back it up:
- Businesses implementing automation experience a 4-5x increase in qualified leads.
- 63% of companies are outperforming competitors with help from Automation.
- Automated emails get 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails.
Clearly, EA is one of the fastest ways to grow and scale your business without you having to add hours of work to your calendar.
If you are looking to learn more and implement this in your business, an interesting eBook has been released by Paperform.
The 60-page eBook talks about:
- What EA looks like in 2019.
- Growing your subscriber list using a 3-step process.
- Automating different types of transactional emails with examples.
- Automating drip email sequences with behavioral and demographic criteria.
- Setting up automated newsletters.
- Automated cold outreach.
The eBook even contains ready-to-use templates and tips on copywriting with examples from top brands out there.
It’s definitely a mine of valuable information and worth a good read.
How to leverage Pinterest according to this ecomm expert
Have you been looking to add Pinterest to your marketing mix?
Depesh Mandalia has been using the platform for running top of the funnel campaigns and has scaled it to $4k/day. He’s shared his initial observations in his FB group.
Let’s have a quick look at what he recommends:
- Pinterest is not Facebook. It works differently, so set your expectations accordingly.
- Ads on Pinterest have an organic shelf-life, so you need to measure the impact over a period of time.
- Just like Instagram, it’s all about the visual content.
- Keywords and context are also hugely important. You can use Google Keyword Planner to find new ideas.
- Use the platform to send traffic to a non sales page such as a blog post or a third party review, especially if the ticket value is more than $50.
- Use UTM tracking parameters or Wicked Reports to measure the true value of the sales coming in from the platform.
- You can also use this UTM tracking to build audiences for retargeting and lookalikes in FB.
- Pinterest’s targeting and Pixel effectiveness is still way behind FB, so don’t expect too much from it.
- Export your data for faster and easier analysis.
- Test CPA bidding out, but CPC bidding works well too.
Have your own suggestions or want to jump in on the discussion? Check out his post here.
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FB executives worried about new transparency tool. Going from $1.50 to $50k?
FB rolled out its Off-Facebook Activity tool and everybody is getting worried. Justin Woll shares a strategy to give more longevity to your ads while scaling to 5 figures.
Facebook releases the transparency tool
It was announced over a year ago by Facebook. And now, it’s finally rolling out. We are talking about the transparency tool that allows users to delete their data.
Let’s see how it works.
First of all, the name is Off-Facebook Activity, and it allows users to:
- See a summary of the information other apps and websites have sent Facebook through their online business tools, like Facebook Pixel or Facebook Login.
- Disconnect this information from their account.
- Choose to disconnect future off-Facebook activity from their account. Users can do this for all off-Facebook activities, or just for specific apps and websites.
At the time of writing, the Off-Facebook Activity tool is available to people in Ireland, South Korea and Spain. Facebook will continue to roll it out everywhere over the coming months though.
Our Take
This looks quite worrying for us advertisers, eh? If too many users adopt this tool, a lot of the data we take advantage of won’t be available anymore.
It could be one of the biggest changes to happen to Facebook in years.
Let’s not forget that this move is a risk for Facebook itself. There’s a chance this could make its advertising less accurate, and therefore less valuable, for marketers. The result? Advertising revenues plummet.
David Baser, the executive leading the project, said that Facebook expects it to “decrease top-line revenue to some degree.”
For now, all this is just hypothetical. Millions of users will need to find the new feature and activate it before it’s clear if it even makes a difference.
But in the end, we think that it will also make users’ experience poorer: They will still see ads, they just won’t be relevant to them. So, it’s a kind of disservice. Isn’t it better to see stuff you’re already looking for?
Are you asking why Facebook built this tool? The social media giant hopes to change perceptions with Off-Facebook Activity. So, it’s all about their reputation.
Not worried enough? Read this: The company says it will run an advertising campaign both on Facebook and in print to tell people about the tool. Please Mark, don’t do that, pleaaase!
Well, only time will tell what impact this tool has on Facebook and advertisers. We’ll also have to wait at least a year before actually understanding how this might change Facebook advertising.
However, as we always do, we will adapt. Ultimately, our ability to adapt is one of our most valued and vital skills. We are not being apocalyptic, but it’s always useful to think about new channels and strategies to diversify.
Scaling to $50k/day from a $1.50 budget?
Pretty bold headline, huh? Let’s see what it’s all about before judging! It’s a post shared by Justin Woll, and it’s about a strategy that he calls micro-budgeting.
The basic premise is to run 100-300 ad sets with a $1.50 daily budget. Why? According to Justin, it will give more longevity to ads. Plus, it will build an infrastructure that is crucial for branding.
That’s not all, though. This 100-300 ad sets infrastructure will enable you to stay consistent for months on end. So you can stop worrying about waking up to ad sets that are suddenly performing poorly.
This strategy helped him scale en ecomm to 50k per day, so let’s see how he implemented it.
- Create all the custom audiences you can from the data of the past 180 days.
- Create different percentage Lookalikes Audiences from all the CA you made.The LALs should be like this: A 1-5% LAL and 5 more LALs, break it down in this way: 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-9, 9-10%.
- Launch an ad set for every LAL with a $1.50 budget and make it slow cook for 7-10 days.
- On day 5-ish, go through the KPI and kill the poor performing ad sets.
At this point you should move to Manual Bidding.
- Identify the best performing ad sets.
- Gather into an ad set the audiences that have similar ROAS (for example, all ad set audiences with ROAS of 2-2.9 go in one ad set. All ad sets with ROAS of 3-3.9 go in one ad set and so on)
- Go for a $1k budget and bid 1.5 your average CPP you get on automatic bidding.
- Monitor the spend every 5-30 minutes and adjust the bid by $1 – $3 depending on how fast budget is being spent.
- If it works, rinse and repeat.
That is all. The idea itself looks interesting. Using a small budget allows you to have a ton of ad sets to test, so there’s more chance of you hitting gold with one of them. However, you still need a big budget to scale.
Maybe this will help you scale to $50k/day like Justin did! Good luck!
Managing SKAGs after recent match-type update
Recently, Google announced that, in addition to close match type, same-meaning close variants will now apply to phrase match and modified broad match keywords.
Does this mean that SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) are no longer effective?
As Frederick explains in his post here, control with the advertisers has surely been reduced, but SKAGs still help indicate advertiser preferences and hence still boost Quality Score and reduce PPC costs.
What remains the same?
In the ad serving priority, an exact match keyword will still be given preference over a same-meaning close variant match of a search term.
This means that if you want to show a specific ad for a specific search term, you can still use an exact match keyword in a SKAG and it will most likely trigger the ad that you intend to show for that search term.
Yes, the ad prioritization algorithm is complex and can’t be entirely relied upon. However, the introduction of close variants hasn’t changed the way Google picks the keyword that enters the auction when there are multiple possibilities.
What has changed?
Your exact match keywords can now trigger ads for more search terms than before. You could say that SKAGs now need to be managed like non-SKAGs.
You can still control which ad shows for a particular search term by using an exact match keyword in a SKAG, but you can’t stop that ad showing up for additional close variants without adding a lot of negative keywords.
Why did Google implement this change?
As per Google, on any given day 15% of queries happen just once. This means that these search queries are unique, dependant on how users actually formulate their search terms. Providing only exact match keywords would lead to many missed advertising chances.
What else can you do?
As per Frederick, these are the 3 most important things you can do ahead of this round of changes:
- Automate your bid management.
- Enable a non last-click attribution model.
- Set up an automated monitoring system that checks close variants.
To help you automate the monitoring process to an extent, you can use this script here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Never mess with De Niro
You talkin’ to me?
Do you remember Robert De Niro saying those famous words in Taxi Driver? Pretty tough, eh?
Well, after finding out that Robert De Niro sued one of his company’s employees for $6M, we imagine him using the same tone but with different words:
You chargin’ to me?
Only this time, he won’t have been talking to a mirror, but to Chase Robinson. Who? An employee of Robert’s company Canal Production, who is currently being sued for $6M by De Niro.
She purportedly binged Friends episodes while on the clock, put exorbitant restaurant and hotel charges on the firm’s tab, and used lots of De Niro’s frequent flyer points for personal trips.
You chargin’ to me?
Robinson started in De Niro’s company back in 2008 as an assistant and worked her way up to the role of vice president of production. A position that came with a $300k wage packet.
But according to Canal Production, Robinson was hardly doing any work. She rarely bothered to show up at the office and spent “astronomical amounts of time” watching shows on Netflix when she did bother showing her face.
The lawyers stated that during a four-day period in January, the former employee binged through 55 episodes of Friends. Is this some sort of record?
Even more indulgent, Robinson allegedly ordered lunch from Caviar San Francisco during this Friends marathon before heading off for dinner at Paola’s Restaurant. Obviously, both were charged to the company’s credit card.
Now there’s a $6M action on her head. She should count herself lucky that this isn’t a gangster movie with De Niro, otherwise she might’ve ended up sleeping with the fishes…