APPLE
More people are updating to iOS 15
Alex Bauer of Branch, a mobile measurement company, recently shared the most recent statistics on iOS 15 adoption.
An upward trend: iOS 15 is currently installed on just under 48% of iPhone/iPad users’ phones or tablets. The adoption rate is increasing quickly, as Apple begins to be more aggressive with its update notification system.
Why we care: Email open rates. iOS 15 added a new “Mail Privacy Protection” feature that allows users to prevent senders from seeing when they open an email.
If the user selects “do not track,” the sender will see all sent messages as opened, resulting in inflated open rates.
If you do email marketing, keep an eye on your open rate from Apple users.
E-COMMERCE
Microsoft will add a ‘buy now pay later’ option to its browser
BNPL is coming to your (not-so-favorite) browser, Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft announced last week that they have partnered with a company called Zip to provide a BNPL option at the browser level.
How it will work: When Edge users are on a checkout page, they will notice a “buy now, pay later” option with Zip. Users can then choose to pay in four installments over the course of six weeks. The BNPL option will only appear for purchases ranging from $35 to $1000.
The buy-now-pay-later option will be available by default to all users in Microsoft Edge release 96.
What to expect after this gets released: We wouldn’t be surprised if Shopify/WooCommerce plugins emerge soon that detect Microsoft Edge browsers and prompt users to pay in installments.
BNPL works: Allowing people the option to “buy-now-pay-later,” on your website can boost conversion rates by 20-30%. And we all know in e-commerce that anything with a double-digit effect is definitely worth paying attention to.
SPONSORED BY #PAID
Learn to create unforgettable content with this free TikTok Masterclass
With almost 1M followers on her @growithjessie account and 25M likes, Jessie Jacobson has mastered the art of content creation for TikTok.
And that’s just one of her accounts.
Join Jessie for this free TikTok Masterclass where she will teach you:
- The basics of TikTok. You can’t just throw your Facebook videos on TikTok and hope for the best. You have to create for TikTok. Jessie will explain how.
- How brands are building community and increasing engagement on TikTok.
- How to reach new audiences organically and build a following.
- What is changing in 2022 on TikTok.
Jessie will also share insights and tactics that helped her score RunGum 7,000 followers in just 6 hours.
We’ve been a broken record about how TikTok is a must for marketers. Now’s your chance to learn it for free!
SEO
Image optimization for SEO
When talking SEO, most of the attention goes to written content. However, you can and should optimize your images to boost your ranking in the SERP.
Itamar Blauer created a complete guide to optimize your images for SEO. And this is a summary of the steps.
1) Audit: Like any other SEO activity, the first step is to identify areas of improvement. These are some tools and practices that Itamar suggests:
- Screaming Frog free version allows you to crawl the images on your website. It will show you the images with the largest size and where an image is being displayed.
- Google Lighthouse or PageSpeed insights: These both provide an audit for your page experience and suggest the images you could provide in next-gen formats (WebP and AVIF) for less data consumption.
- Cloudinary provides a free tool that lets you identify optimization opportunities for images.
2) Image resizing: Once you identify the images that need resizing or compression, go ahead and optimize them. You can use a tool like BeFunky to resize them. Cloudinary shows you the suggested size to use to optimize the images for SEO.
3) Compression: Once you define the right size of the image, it’s time to compress them. You can use different tools, but Squoosh allows you to have control over how much quality you lose when compressing the image.
4) Image renaming: Include relevant keywords in the name of the image.
5) Alt text: When you add the optimized images to your CMS, you’ll need to add an alt text as well. This is used to describe the content of the image. Use relevant keywords to provide context to search engines, as long as these keywords make sense.
This is the basic optimization process, but there are further steps you can take:
- Lazy loading
- CDN for images
- Image sitemaps
- Images redirect in a site migration
You can deepen these practices in Itamar Blauer’s post.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Keys to a celebrity marketing campaign for DTC
A common tactic for brands who go from $10M in sales towards $100M+ in sales in a year seems to be a big celebrity marketing campaign. If you are at that stage (or aiming for it), here are a few things you should know:
1.The traffic the celebrity sends will not give you a positive ROI. Yes, when the celebrity makes a post, the traffic they send will certainly not make up for the cost you pay them. Plan with that in mind.
2. Make sure you have the right to use their creatives for as long as possible. You will probably create a wide variety of videos and images. Make sure you have the rights to use these for a long time, hopefully in perpetuity. Both for organic and for paid ads.
3. Get an actual endorsement from them. One important asset in such a campaign is to get a clear endorsement from the celebrity. Don’t have them just be the actor in a skit, make sure they outright say “I love this product, you should check it out” in some way.
4. Make sure they have the right audience. A more obvious one but please make sure the celebrity you are planning to work with is a good fit for your product. Imagine how legit it would look if Cristiano Ronaldo advertised McDonald’s – or Coca Cola ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
With these 4 points in mind, you are starting off on the right track.
If you like what you read, feel free to check us out on Twitter.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
EMAIL MARKETING: Using Magazine Gold you can give a one-year subscription to magazines like InStyle, Men’s Health, Eating Well, in exchange for a visitor’s email, or to nudge them to buy more, to share your product, and more endless possibilities! Try Magazine Gold to supercharge your list growth.*
FACEBOOK: According to Facebook, you’ll soon be able to exclude your ads from appearing alongside political topics.
GOOGLE: The Google Ads mobile app is getting superpowers, you’ll now be able to do things on the mobile app that you could only do on the desktop app.
BUSINESS: The majority of your favorite AI copywriting tools are powered by one thing, GPT-3. The company behind this technology, OpenAI, has announced that there will no longer be a waiting list for access to this cool technology.
ADVERTISING: DuckDuckGo is trying to create “App Tracking Transparency” for Android. Will it work?
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
A man leaves home and makes three left turns, only to return home facing two men wearing masks.
Who are those two men?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Crawley
Did you know: Google has a cute Googlebot mascot? It resembles a spider (but not the kind you’d be afraid of).
There was only one problem…The spider lacked a name.
However, it appears that Google (secretly) named its adorable spider: Crawley.
This name was discovered in the HTML source code of Google’s page by a person named Myriam, and Google’s Lizzi Harvey confirmed the name.
Our only question: When will the naming ceremony take place?