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Inspiration to write your email copies
Do you know that feeling when you are trying to come up with a copy for your email list or need to reply to your customer in a tricky situation and you just can’t seem to find the right angle?
Sounds familiar? Maybe, all you need is some inspiration to get started.
We came across this awesome looking tool where you can find email copies written by some of the top brands.
Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Pinterest, Zendesk, Wordstream and Evernote to name a few.
Just search for a topic or pick a tag and bam… you will find dozens of email examples.
Some of the topics we found were:
- Welcome emails
- Thank you emails
- Product feedback
- Account update
- New features
- Privacy policy
- Terms & conditions
- Invitation emails
- Confirmation emails
- Cancelled subscription
- Subscription renewal
- Trial ending
Go ahead and give it a shot. Here’s to awesome customer service and killer email campaigns.
Instagram releases a new Ad format
Do you work with influencers? Yes? Well, here is a nice update for you:
To help brands and creators work together, Instagram has released a new ad format: Branded Content Ads.
What is it all about? This format will let brands sponsor posts created by celebrities and publishers, and then promote them as they would with usual ads.
What changes? So far, brands could hire influencers to work on campaigns and promote their products. However, However, the posts would only reach the influencer’s audience.
With Branded Content Ads, advertisers will be able to promote the branded post just like any other ad and reach a wider audience than the influencer’s current following
Of course, brands could always use influencer posts as ads via their own profiles, but this new offering formalizes that technique.
Influencer marketing is expected to be a $2B market in 2019, and with this update, Instagram aims to connect advertisers and creators in more formal partnerships.
A new privacy-focused FB world
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision about Facebook, how he thinks it will change in the future and the challenges it will face.
Unsurprisingly, the post immediately went viral and if you haven’t read it yet, here are the key takeaways from his statement:
He starts by addressing the fact that Facebook and Instagram have been an equivalent of a digital town square until now. Where people used to gather and connect with one another. But the digital landscape has changed, and now users want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of a living room. More privacy, and more control on who they interact with.
Therefore, he believes that privacy-focused platforms will become more important than current open platforms. In fact, private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are already the fastest growing areas of online communication.
The future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services.
So, are they planning to build a platform for smaller groups which are focused on privacy?
Here is Mark’s response:
“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services,[…]. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.“
Ambitious but humble. He knows they aren’t the paladins of privacy, yet they’ll rise to the challenge, and adapt to users’ preferred ways of interacting online.
How will they build these privacy-focused platforms? Mark says they’ll do it based on the following fundamentals:
- Private interactions: People will have intimate places where they can control who they communicate with. And make sure that nobody else has access to what they share.
- Encryption: End-to-end encryption prevents anyone, including FB itself, from seeing what people share on our services.
- Reducing Permanence: People should not have to worry that what they share will come back to haunt them. Therefore, they won’t keep messages or stories around for any longer than absolutely necessary.
- Safety: FB will do everything in its power to keep people and their data safe on its platforms.
- Interoperability: People should be able to use any of FB’s apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.
- Secure data storage: In order to protect data from being illegitimately accessed, FB won’t store sensitive data in countries with poor records on rights like privacy and freedom of expression.
The Crew Thoughts
The idea that Mark wants to adapt Facebook to its users’ changes is nice. It’s something we appreciate too, especially if this idea is focused on privacy and security.
However, considering what has happened in the past, and after going through public reactions about it, there are a few things that keep us speculative:
- Mark Zuckerberg didn’t say how they will benefit financially from this. If he wants to talk about a privacy-focused world, he should be transparent on how they will use users’ data to run ads etc.
- He didn’t talk about content moderations: It’s a no brainer that people with bad intentions have used FB and other platforms to gather and change info in the past. If FB won’t be able to read our messages, how will they keep the platform safe?
Talking from a marketers perspective, if people start using encrypted services, how will FB provide advertisers with that powerful ad targeting they are used to? What about all that data-based machine learning power?
If Facebook wants to stay in the business, it must find the right balance between keeping users safe and advertisers happy. Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg is well aware of that, but
why didn’t he talk about this? We don’t know, but we hope that he will address these issues soon…
SPONSORED
Andrew Payne reveals 7+ figures lessons running push for >12 months
It’s the most talked about traffic source of the past 6 months. Yes, we mean push notification traffic. That’s why we brought someone who has been crushing it for over 12 months!
Andrew Payne has been featured in our newsletter before and it seemed fitting for him to be the first guest on our new Stacked Marketing Show. Why?
- Early adopter of push traffic
- Generated over 7 figures in the past 12 months
- Build his own massive subscriber list, growing by millions of users monthly
- Tends to spill the beans in front of the camera
Andrew sits down with Manu to talk about:
- Pros and cons of push networks vs building your own list
- LTV and churn rate for push
- The threats to push traffic
- The brightside for push traffic
- What offers go well with this traffic type
Check it out on our YouTube channel right here!
PS: All episodes will get released early in our WHAT THE AFF Insiders group. If you want to join, all you have to do is tell 5 of your friends to subscribe to our newsletter! Details at the bottom of this email.
Google Ad Manager offers first price auction
In order to bring more transparency and simplicity to its programmatic advertising, Google has decided to adopt first-price auction format for its publisher inventory.
What does this mean?
In a first price auction, all programmatic buyers will compete in one auction, alongside direct-sold advertisers. Bids will not be shared with other buyers before the auction or set the price for another buyer.
In simple words, first price auction allows media buyers to pay the actual amount they bid. Whereas with second price auction, media buyers pay the amount bid by the second highest bidder.
Google is not the first programmatic company to adopt first price auction format. However, its Google Ads Manager business (formerly known as DoubleClick) is the industry’s largest programmatic platform for publishers. This means it will make a huge wave throughout the ecosystem as sell-side and demand-side platforms respond to this change.
“Since the change from second to first price will require both buyers and sellers to make changes in their programmatic strategies, we’ll give everyone time to prepare over the next few months before we start testing. During this time, publishers and app developers will need to rethink how they use price floors. Technology partners will need also to adjust how they bid for Google Ad Manager Inventory.”
Here’s some more scoop on this:
- Programmatic media buying is expected to account for 86% of digital display media buying in the US by 2020.
- Google is aiming to move its publisher inventory to the unified first price model in the coming month and expects the transition to complete by year-end.
- This will only affect display and video inventory sold through Google Ad Manager. It does not impact auctions for Search, YouTube, AdSense for Search or other Google property.
- No action is needed on behalf of its Display and Video 360 advertisers.
LinkedIn released Pages Toolkit
How proactively are you using LinkedIn? Do you find it’s reporting and analysis tools easier to use and understand?
LinkedIn offers a range of analytical and data features within your LinkedIn business page admin tools. These tools can help you understand if you’re posting the right content, at the right times, and catering to your audience demand.
There are additional tools that provide in-depth data on the performance of each individual update you post, and insights into your page audience such as their location, job functions etc.
To guide you further LinkedIn released this guide “LinkedIn Toolkit” to using your page analytics to optimize your LinkedIn presence.
Along with Page Analytics, this guide also covers 3 more marketing focused elements:
- Visitor Analytics – Who is visiting your Page.
- Update Analytics – How is the community engaging with your content.
- Follower Analytics – Are you building the right follower community.
What else is included?
- 10 examples of exceptional LinkedIn Pages.
- How to write the perfect update.
- Campaign optimisation guide.
- LinkedIn Pages: Know the basics.
- Get inspired by Content Suggestions.
Download the guide and start getting the most out of your LinkedIn Page.
PPC
Third auto-bidding strategy released by Bing: Maximise Clicks
Yesterday, Bing Ads announced roll out of Maximise Clicks bidding strategy for all accounts globally. This will be the 3rd addition to Bing’s auto-bidding strategy, with the other two being Maximize Conversions and Target CPA.
Just like in Google Search campaigns, it will automatically set the bids to get you the most clicks within your daily budget. Though, there are two manual controls available too:
- The option to set a maximum CPC at the campaign level. This allows you to tell Bing how high you want the system to bid.
- For high performing keywords or ad groups, you can manually select “Use the bid I set” at the keyword or ad group level.
Bing recommends letting the automated bidding strategy to run for at least a month before analyzing its results.
However, if you are using any 3rd-party bid management tools you will not be able to use this auto bidding strategy. In that case, Bing would overwrite any bids set by a third-party bid management tool.
Zoom In
Remember that the objective of this bidding strategy is to bring in the maximum number of clicks to your site within your budget. It has nothing to do with the quality of the traffic or how well it will convert.
Hence, if you are looking to generate qualified leads or sales, keep a close eye on the performance of the traffic.
SNAPCHAT
Evan Spiegel changed his mind
For those of you taking advantage of the not-so-regulated Snapchat Ads platform, have a look at this:
They launched a beta test of their app in eight different languages: Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjab, Filipino, Vietnamese, Urdu, Malay.
This certainly looks like they’re planning an expansion into South East Asia, and in particular India. Many of these languages are spoken in India, so this definitely looks like a move on the huge market available there
Interestingly, it wasn’t too long ago that Evan claimed that India is too poor to consider expanding its user base. However, considering the above factors and that India is the second most populous nation, it’s surely a logical move from the Snapchat CEO.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
A world without passwords
Passwords might soon be a thing of the past. Yep, you read that correctly.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has just approved a new authentication standard called WebAuthn that aims to replace the password as a way of securing your online accounts.
WebAuthn is already supported by most browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. So, soon you might see a lot of websites adopting this feature and they could eventually replace passwords.
WebAuthn is more secure than the weak passwords most people end up using for multiple websites. It’s also much simpler than having to remember a string of characters in the first place.
It’s basically an API that allows websites to communicate with a security device, which then lets a user log into their service.
This security device can be a FIDO security key that you simply plug into a USB port on your computer or a more complex biometric device that allows for an additional level of verification.
Dropbox and Microsoft already tested it out last year. Is password authentication really going to disappear anytime soon? No, but with WebAuthn receiving W3C approach it is one significant step towards being a viable alternative.
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