BUSINESS
Buy-now-pay-later will become a payment method for recurring subscriptions
It seems like buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) is becoming a de facto method of paying for everything.
Afterpay, one of the top three buy-now-pay-later providers in the United States, announced that customers in the United States will soon be able to pay in installments for subscriptions. You know, stuff like gym memberships, entertainment subscriptions, or online services.
Why this is a big deal: Most BNPL providers only support one-time purchases. This change will shake things up, allowing you to accept payments in installments for recurring purchases as well as for digital items. And the best thing: as long as people pay on time, they will not be charged interest fees. Win-win-win.
Timeframe: These features will roll out in the U.S. and Australia in early 2022. It will also be free for customers who pay on time.
What this means for you: If you sell monthly subscriptions for physical or digital items, this can be a big deal. Adding a BNPL payment option can increase your conversion rates anywhere from 5% to 99.9999%.
Exciting times ahead.
TIKTOK
Teens now use TikTok more than Instagram, according to Forrester
Apparently, infinitely scrolling videos are really addictive.
Forrester, a research company you’ve probably heard of, has conducted a social media survey among US Gen Z youth aged 12 to 17 to find out what social media platforms teens use the most.
The findings: TikTok saw a 13% year-over-year increase in weekly usage (from 50% to 63%) among this age group. Instagram weekly usage has actually decreased by 4% year on year, from 61% in 2020 to 57% in 2021.
Snapchat usage, on the other hand, remained unchanged at 54%.
TikTok isn’t the most popular app among teens: According to Forrester’s survey, YouTube continues to reign supreme among teens aged 12 to 17, with 72 percent using the platform at least once weekly. If you’ve been wondering why so many kids want to become YouTubers, here’s your answer.
Why teens prefer TikTok to Instagram: Three reasons, according to the survey, TikTok is more fun/ funny, has more short-form variety, and it promotes positive self-expression (think: dancing). Instagram is trying to improve in #1 and #2, but we are not sure if they will ever catch up with TikTok in positive self-expression.
Why you should care: When it comes to younger demographics, the “next best social media app” is always changing. These are the most recent figures, with YouTube topping the list, followed by TikTok and Instagram. As for Facebook…what was that again? 🙂
SPONSORED BY PROPELLERADS
This new traffic type works like a whitelist that requires no optimization!
The leading advertising network, PropellerAds, announced a new traffic type — Direct Click!
It works like a whitelist PropellerAds has already collected for you. Imagine skipping the optimization stage and going straight to the highly converting ad zones… and yes, “direct” stands for direct visit to your offer! No creatives needed.
Tests showed the conversion rate growing by 20-40% with direct traffic compared to classic popunder ads. Plus, PropellerAds internal tests show that, on some slices, Direct Click might bring 120 times higher conversion rate than any other traffic type!
We don’t blame you if you thought they are the same as popunder… To understand the difference between Direct Click and classic Popunder (and see the power of Direct Click) you must read these case studies:
First:
- Offer type: Pin submit
- Period: 11 days
- GEO: NG + targeting by cities and mobile operators
Second:
- Offer type: Sweepstakes
- Period: 27 days
- GEO: ID
Read and draw your own conclusions!
Then register and test Direct Click traffic.
SEO
How Buffer doubled their organic traffic by deleting their blog
If you’re an SEO, this bad practice that Buffer follows will make you cringe.
They have two blogs. One is built on the /Library subdirectory and the other is built on the /Resources subdirectory.
However, this is a successful strategy and Ryan McCready showed why in this FoundationInc blog post.
Until 2015, the buffer(.)com domain was owned by another company. Therefore, Buffer had two websites: blog(.)bufferapp(.)com and bufferapp(.)com.
When they shifted to buffer(.)com, they didn’t shut down the blog(.)bufferapp(.)com website. Despite having two websites, it was confusing for both users and search engines.
Why? Because blog.bufferapp.com was a traffic beast. At its peak in 2018, this subdomain was driving around 650k sessions a month, ranking on about 735k keywords, and bringing in about $1M in traffic value per month.
The removal of the old blog:
By the beginning of 2019, the blog(.)bufferapp(.)com website was gone.
Kinda… Buffer moved all of the content to both the /Library and /Resources subdirectories.
Thanks to a smooth 301 redirect, Buffer deleted their old blog without losing much organic traffic. As a matter of fact, the traffic of the new blog doubled.
The /Library redirect became an SEO moat:
The /Library subdirectory drives almost 14x as much organic traffic, ranks on 4x as many keywords, and has a traffic value that is around 18x higher!
How come?
Buffer redirected the old posts that were optimized for search engines to the /Library subdomain. Whereas all articles that likely didn’t meet certain search-driven criteria were shifted to /Resources.
But the /Resources directory is a backlink juggernaut: It has 532k backlinks, compared to 277k backlinks on the /Library subdirectory.
What can you learn from this? Even if your content production is heavily focused on SEO, you can still produce other types of content that contribute to marketing goals that are different from SEO.
It might just have to live on another subdomain or subdirectory.
SPONSORED BY INSIGHTS
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We’ve put over 100 pages of those deep dives out for free here.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Use personal images in your marketing emails
You can get a higher CTR on your marketing emails by simply changing the header image. It works because, like with anything else, people aren’t going to read every word of your emails. So the first impression is important.
Mathias von Appen Schroder tested this with a welcome email. In one, he included a professional image of a product. In another, he included a picture of him and his mom.
The results? The email with him and his mom received a roughly 27% CTR, about 3 percent higher than the email with the product image.
And it’s not just welcome emails and family images. People like unique images everywhere.
In our deep dive on SIMULATE, we discovered that some of their best emails had crazy imagery. One featured an image of a chicken nugget crashing through the earth’s atmosphere, on fire like an asteroid.
The bottom line: Don’t drag-and-drop for your marketing emails. Be conscious about what will get the customers to interrupt their normal flow and take a minute to look deeper.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: How can you get the content you need, and the links you need right when you need them? With on-demand content and link-building services with 26% off? Can be white-labeled and is completely scalable? Yes, please. Check out FATJOE’s Black Friday sale.*
INSTAGRAM: 60-second videos are coming to Instagram Stories.
GOOGLE: No more sport betting ads in Florida, according to a recent Google Ads announcement.
ADVERTISING: Telegram is getting serious about advertising. The app now mandates developers to include “sponsored messages” functionality in their apps.
SNAPCHAT: It’s all about (AR) shopping. Snapchat will test an augmented reality showcase this holiday season.
FACEBOOK: They’ve been caught yet again, according to the MIT Technology Review, Facebook has funded misinformation and clickbait.
TWITTER: Someone just created the biggest Twitter Space of all time. The topic: karaoke with a twist.
BUSINESS: It’s not just GoDaddy. Brands that resell GoDaddy hosting services have also been breached.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees.
Up, up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
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.
Don’t mess with web developers
Especially not with their mail packages.
Peter Cooper, a software developer, has ordered a Christmas present for his wife. The only problem is that the present arrived at the wrong house. The postal company sent Cooper a photo of the package, but not its actual location. Ouch.
Game on: Peter was determined to find out where his package was. So he did what he does best. He fired up Google Chrome’s Dev Tools. Peter tried to see whether the actual location was “hidden” somewhere in those pesky Javascript files that the postal provider website had sent him.
Bingo! Peter found a JSON file which listed the coordinates of the package. He then entered them into Google maps, and voila, the package’s actual location appeared.
It was at his neighbor’s house.
Being the good guy that he is, Peter left a (friendly) note and had his package delivered fairly quickly. The postal provider also called Peter up and handled the situation fairly well.
Lesson learned. Don’t mess with developer’s mail packages.