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E-COMMERCE
Using emails to grow your ecomm
Are you using emails as part of your marketing strategy to drive more sales for your e-commerce store? Are they helping or hurting your store’s reputation?
Joshua Chin shared some insights on the above questions, and told us how he helped his client boost email sales from just 16% all the way up to 47%.
Setting up an email cmpaign isn’t easy though, and using a spray and pray approach can severly damage your store’s reputation.
This tends to happen when all email sequences are sent to all recipients of all your campaigns, without any segmentation and personalization in place.
Not all buyers are the same. Therefore, sending out generic emails to everyone will result in a loss of interest from most of your subscribers and eventually you’ll find yourself heading straight to the spam folder.
Having segmented lists can stop this from happening though, allowing you to only send recipients content that they’re actually interested in.
Here’s what Joshua recommends:
- Segment your list according to demographics, product choice, behaviours, and other categories. This will increase your chances of landing in their Inboxes. The higher your open rates are, the higher your chances of increasing your revenue.
- Consider A/B Testing to get a feel of what your subscribers respond to.Know which CTAs they respond to, which layouts convert more, and which copies sell more.
Using these simple, ground level steps, Joshua was able to increase their open rates from only 6% to 25% and the revenue jumped from 16% to 47%.
Check out Joshua’s post here.
Search results getting a makeover
Google has announced a new look for its search results with a new presentation of text ads and organic listings on mobile devices.
Changes to Organic Listings
Brand icons (favicons) will now appear on organic search results, allowing you to add an element of branding on SERPs.
The site name and bread crumbs appear in black text next to these icons. This textual content will show up above the title link, making it look similar to text ads.
The gray line below the organic titles and ad headlines has also been removed, making each result look more like a single unit.
How is this helpful?
Since your brand icon shows up right within search results, viewers who recognize your logo will be more inclined to click on it even if you don’t rank for the top spots. This could also reduce the relevance of top search results in some cases.
“With this new design, a website’s branding can be front and center, helping you better understand where the information is coming from and what pages have what you’re looking for.
How to make Google fetch your Favicon?
You’ll need to add a <link> tag to the header with specific syntax, which you can find on the help page here. When Google crawls your homepage, it will look for and update your favicon.
PS: Your favicon should be a multiple of 48px square and any valid favicon format is supported.
PPS: Google says that your favicon won’t necessarily show even if it’s set up correctly.
Changes to Text Ads
The black “Ad” labels that Google has been testing for months are now being officially rolled out, replacing the green outlined labels.
The label now appears at the top of the ad along with the display URL in black text, just above the ad headline for the first time.
“When you search for a product or service and we have a useful ad to show, you’ll see a bolded ad label at the top of the card alongside the web address so you can quickly identify where the information is coming from.”
How is this helpful?
The “Ad” label will mimic the look, feel and placement of the new brand icons, giving it a more similar look to the rest of the search results than ever before.
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How to keep your ROAS steady. FB’s Regulation report. Angry advertisers
How to keep your ROAS steady. FB’s Regulation report. Angry advertisers
Which aspect of advertising is most important? There has been an ongoing debate about it, but today we might finally have the answer. Facebook cracked 3.4B of fake accounts. Advertiser lost $600k on Mother’s Day.
Copy, visuals, brand… What matters most?
When you advertise on Facebook, you know that creatives play a big role. If you have a high enough budget, keeping a flow of new creatives rolling out is important to avoid ad fatigue and keep the ROAS stable.
Depesh Mandalia says that if you run $10k/day campaigns, you need new angles and assets every 2 weeks if you want to avoid banner blindness.
This is what they did for one of their campaigns, and it helped his team scale and maintain a 3X ROAS.
But to understand the importance of creative assets better, Depesh decided to run a survey asking around 1k of his customers the following question: “What made you click the Facebook ad and purchase today?”
Here are the results from the survey:
- 67% voted for the Visuals.
- 19% for the Copy.
- 8% for the Brand/Page recognition.
- 6% – Others (mainly, referral from a friend).
So, the image, thumbnail and video mattered the most for 67% of all clicks and purchases.
Depesh gave this survey to a bunch of marketers too, and strangely the results were almost the same.
So, if you are scaling on FB and spending big money, bear in mind that you could hugely benefit from having a proven process to ensure a flow of new creatives. If you don’t, ad fatigue will stop you from achieving those skyrocketing results.
Also, when setting up this process, remember that the visual assets are the ones that matter most.
Update on enforcing community standards
Yesterday, FB shared its third Community Standards Enforcement Report, which explains all the actions Facebook took in order to regulate the users’ activity on the social network.
The period covered goes from October 2018 to March 2019.
The report covers metrics regarding adult activity, bullying and harassment, fake accounts, hate speech, regulated goods, violence and many others.
Let’s have a look at the main stats:
- For every 10k times people viewed content on Facebook, 11 to 14 views contained content that violated adult nudity and sexual activity policy.
- For every 10k times people viewed content on Facebook, 25 views contained content that violated its violence and graphic content policy.
- Facebook estimates that 5% of monthly active accounts are fake.
- Between October 2018 and March 2019, Facebook removed 3.4B fake accounts.
- In this six month period, FB blocked over 7M pieces of content containing hate speech
- Facebook acted on 3.6M pieces of spam content.
These are just some numbers, but they still show the amount of work Facebook has been doing at the backend to keep its platform safe and sound.
If you want to know more, you can head to the report here.
Never ending issues with Ads Manager
This article shared by MarketingLand shows that, after the Black Friday Ads Manager breakdown, many advertisers continued to experience a steady decline in the platform’s performance.
Everything, from not being able to publish ads to not being able to turn off campaigns to significant inconsistencies in campaign results.
Many advertisers have complained about these performance swings on a daily basis. We shared one such example of this in yesterday’s post.
Strangely, it seems that the issues are cropping up more frequently for businesses spending less than $25k per month.
David Herman, who has been running Facebook campaigns since 2012, said that one of his clients was unable to run ads during Mother’s Day. It ended up costing them upwards of $600k in revenue.
A group of Facebook and Instagram ad buyers also sent a letter to FB regarding this issue and they’ve been able to schedule a meeting with the relevant team at Facebook.
It’s not just outages, either. Marketers have also raised concerns about miscommunication at FB’s end, with the main issues being a lack of communication about when updates and new features are being released.
Usually, a Facebook rep can help marketers address some problems. However, as stated by John Bolling, advertising is a 24/7 business. So, the working times of Facebook reps doesn’t necessarily correspond with when marketers need an issue resolving.
Countless advertisers are asking Facebook to fix their platform. However, it’s Facebook sitting in the dominant position here: You might simply kiss goodbye to its platform, but unfortunately that isn’t an option.
You can start putting your eggs in other baskets, but you won’t find a traffic source as hot as Facebook. Facebook knows that, and that’s probably why they are a bit laid back when it comes to fixing these issues.
SEO
Communities’ favourite tools
We just came across a huge thread on Twitter, where SEOs from all different walks of life are sharing their favourite, must-have, and free SEO tools.
Have a look at the thread, where you can find out about the most popular tools, share your thoughts with the community, network, or do whatever you like really.
We just thought we should let you know!
SECURITY
Keeping your email accounts secure
Our Security section mostly features stories about hacks, leaks and data exposure. Not because we prefer to talk about that, but because these breaches happen so frequently and at such a vast scale.
Not even the upper echelon of the tech giants have been spared when it comes to data hacks and mismanagement. Just yesterday, we talked about how 5M of enterprise Gmail users’ passwords were stored, completely unprotected, on Google’s servers.
There are “Hack for hire” groups that purport to break into a single account for a fee around $750.
We can’t stop things like this from happening. But, as users, it’s our responsibility to do everything within our means to keep our own data safe and secure.
What can we do?
Get started with 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) to safeguard your emails.
As per latest Google research, simply adding a recovery phone number to your Google Account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks, and 66% of targeted attacks.
2FA is all about using an extra layer of security to prove the person logging into an account or device is really you.
Even if someone steals or guesses your password, they won’t be able to access your information without another authenticator.
Sometimes that means typing in a code sent to your smartphone or tapping on a prompt on a separate device. If you need more security, you could even get a physical device that connects to your computer in order to verify your identity.
If you don’t have a recovery phone number established, then Google falls back on other weaker, knowledge-based challenges, such as recalling your last sign-in location.
Here’s how the performance of these authentication factors fare when it comes to account takeovers:
So, whatever you are doing, take a moment out and follow these five tips to help keep your account secure.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
What “making it rain” really means
Student debt in the United States has reached $1.5 trillion. It’s the #1 stressor for Millennials, and is one of the leading causes of lower income households.
However, the graduating class of Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia have absolutely nothing to worry about. They’ll be free from the eternal stress of student debt!
Why? Robert Smith, the wealthiest black American (ahead of Oprah Winfrey), is the reason. He just donated $40M to the 400 graduating students of the Georgian College, paying off the student debt of the entire graduating class.
Mr Smith is a tech investor and founder of Vista Equity Partners, and unsurprisingly his donation caused a lot of excitement among the students.
Almost like when you find the right angle to scale a campaign… Some parents couldn’t believe the good deed made by Mr Smith.
“Between doubt and destiny is action. Between our community and the American Dream is leadership.” Said the philanthropist.
Well, we really hope they all make it count and work hard for a better future ahead!
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