E-COMMERCE
The biggest Cyber Monday yet?
Customers keep shopping, records keep breaking. Yep, sounds like the holiday season.
According to Adobe, this year’s Cyber Monday recorded $11.3B in revenue in the US – 5.8% more than the year before, totalling an estimated $210B this season.
All about the discounts: Considering last year’s Black Friday was weaker than the one before, and the current economic situation is… you know, sketchy, the result may be surprising.
But it seems that retailers were able to drive demand and raise confidence with deep discounts.
Electronics prices were reduced by up to 25% and toys by 34% on average, driving more transactions per minute than the previous year, according to TechCrunch.
A Shopifytastic week: Shopify also continued the positive trend from Black Friday, with merchants racking up $7.5B in revenue during Cyber Week—a 19% increase from last year.
Shopify reports 52M shoppers worldwide bought from stores powered by their platform, with a staggering 73% of online sales made on mobile devices!
Why we care: It’s still too early to say how much of the record smashing is due to high inflation prices and unusually big discounts… but it is encouraging that shoppers are still willing to buy if the offer is attractive enough.
All you can do is wait for the holiday dust to settle and see if the positive trend spills into the next year. Fingers crossed!
Native post scheduling rolls into LinkedIn
It’s official.
You won’t need third-party tools to schedule your posts on LinkedIn for much longer, because the platform is finally launching its own scheduling app.
How it works: When creating a post, you can tap the clock icon, which will take you to the scheduling screen. From there, you can choose the exact date and time to post, based on 30 minute intervals, and up to 3 months in advance.
You can also view, manage, and edit all scheduled posts from the app. Nice.
When it will be available: LinkedIn is gradually rolling out the feature on desktop and Android first, and then on iOS, so it won’t be available to everyone at the same time.
Also, post scheduling for Groups, Company Pages, and more should come soon.
Why we care: The feature can help you streamline post scheduling while offering you better support than third-party tools.
It also provides a mobile-friendly way to manage your content – and your presence. That’s always good, right?
SPONSORED BY SNAP
Amplify your campaigns with Snapchat
Just because you’re not on Snapchat doesn’t mean your customers aren’t there!
Snap has quietly grown its user base (+18% last year1) and is now reaching more than 600M people2. Just in North America, 99M people are on Snapchat every day!3
90% of Gen Zers and 75% of all 13-34 years old in the U.S are on Snapchat now.4 And even better – many of them aren’t on other platforms. Check it out.
Snap helps you create emotional impact: Snap has 250MM people on average2 engaging with AR every day. And why does that matter? Augmented reality (AR) technology allows for users to become immersed in your content. It’s engaging and memorable, it builds emotional connections, and users share that experience with friends and family.
This leads to a higher response and effectiveness to your ads…
… And higher ROI: Across consumer packaged products (CPG), Snap drove an average ROI 1.78X higher than total media averages.5
Simply add Snapchat to your campaigns and create immersive experiences that spike an emotional connection… and drive results.
Dope marketing. Great ROI. Snapchat.
APP STORE OPTIMIZATION
Rank your app higher on the App Store with this simple trick
Quick, grab a ladder.
According to Adam from Appfigures, you can lift your app to the top of App Store rankings, regardless of its popularity score and effectiveness.
And all it takes is knowing where to place your keyword. Here’s what we mean…
Adam analyzed how apps rank depending on their keywords. In this case, his example was “gif maker.” And he noticed something interesting:
- Top-ranking apps aren’t necessarily the most popular, best ranked, or most recently updated.
- They are mostly brandless.
- They duplicate keywords in their subtitles.
So, nothing that should make them rank that well, and yet, here they are. This is why.
Adam noticed one common denominator: every app had the main keyword placed before the name of the app.
So instead of listing the app as ImgPlay – Gif Maker, an app was listed as Gif Maker – ImgPlay, emphasizing the keyword before the actual brand.
It’s the same for the top 5 apps except Giphy, which ranked fourth.
According to Adam, Giphy would definitely be ranked first if it had put “gif maker” first. Instead, Apple sees it listed as Giphy – the GIF search engine, and deems it less relevant.
The same goes for new apps.
The fifth app on the list “is brandless, duplicated, and without new ratings in the last month.” However, Apple wants to give new apps a chance to stick, so its algorithm boosts them for a while to see how they’ll perform.
That’s your chance to climb as well.
In a nutshell, you can win even popular or competitive words if you optimize them well. Also, new apps also get a boost in the rankings when they’re first released, so use that time.
Happy climbing!
SPONSORED BY THE JUICE
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- Paid advertising strategies in a world of rising cost
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
The three-step hiring process we use for this newsletter
If you read this newsletter often enough, you’ve probably noticed that we post job listings from time to time, usually for writers and growth marketers.
Ever wondered how we actually decide who to hire?
It’s a simple process that’s worked pretty well for us—we’re proud of our team.
Here’s our hiring process:
Step 1: Check their resume and portfolio for basic skills. You won’t learn everything from a resume, but you can get the gist of someone’s experience.
It also helps you immediately sort out the candidates that aren’t a good fit.
Step 2: Do a test project to see skills in action. Lots of people talk a big game, but can’t make magic happen when it’s showtime.
To combat this, we send promising applicants a short test project to get a feel for their overall quality of work, knowing full well that they have little context and would likely improve over time.
Step 3: Have a call to determine culture fit. Some things you just have to get on a call for. Once someone’s done well on the test project, we’ll have a video call to get a sense of their overall vibe.
From here, we make our decision.
There ya go. If you found this helpful, feel free to steal our process and use it for your own hiring process, or file it away in case you ever apply to one of our jobs and want to know how it all works.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
MARKETERS ANALYSIS: Loyalty programs, creating personalized experiences, the value of real-time data access, and more. Salesforce surveyed 2500+ marketing analysts, strategists, managers, directors, VPs, and CMOs and their answers paint a fascinating future for our industry. Get a report with all their answers here.*
SOCIAL MEDIA: BeReal has won the hearts and screens of iPhone users. The most talked-about new app this year—and the one TikTok already tried to copy with TikTok Now—has won Apple’s official iPhone App of the Year for 2022. Are you using it yet?
GOOGLE: A small study suggests that 100+ word reviews tend to stay at the top of a listing for longer. There’s one problem, though – most wordy reviews are negative. Time to encourage customers to get wordy with their praise!
PRIVACY: Social media sites will no longer have to take down “legal but harmful material,” since the UK government is amending its proposed Online Safety Bill. Can you say “online privacy is complicated” five times fast?
*This is a sponsored post
BRAIN TEASER
I weaken all men for hours each day.
I show you strange visions while you are away.
I take you by night, by day take you back,
None suffer to have me, but do from my lack.
What am I?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The great cat escape
Guess who doesn’t need Google Maps…
After her family moved to a new home, Cocci—an adventurous cat—traveled 280 miles back to her old home in France, braving fleas and infections along the way.
Apparently Cocci missed her old surroundings so much, she decided to go back to the place she felt comfortable. And she almost made it!
By the time her owners had found her, Cocci was just five minutes away from her old home.
The furball is now back in her new home—and likely plotting her next escape.