Rat Race Armaggeddon

Monday, July 3, 2017

How to inject urgency into your product pages

Hurry! Act now! Contributor Ben Jacobson shares five ways to instill a sense of urgency into your content to increase your conversion rate.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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AppsFlyer makes its attribution data more transparent

This Agency Transparency solution, the company says, is the first to offer easy access to this kind of detailed data for brands.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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How video ad quality affects campaign performance on Facebook

How much time and money should you put into a video to get results? Contributor Aden Andrus looks at the relationship between video ad quality and campaign performance on Facebook.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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Why Is It So Complex?

Corporate complexity operates in stealth mode. It is born as simplicity, something initiated with the purest of intent. Its goal is to solve a small, straightforward, departmental problem through the implementation of a solution with just a few basic steps. It achieves that modest goal and is deemed by its developers and internal customers to be a success. Its success triggers ideas for how it might evolve and grow from that base. It gains confidence as people make requests for it to add more steps to accomplish more tasks. More people take notice of its developing scope and it is granted the right to expand and consume even more adjacent problems and challenges. It meets with more success but with some mediocre results too. The latter are dismissed by decision-makers as likely meaning the plan was slightly off-target, the requirements poorly assembled. Nothing to worry about. No need to throw unnecessary shade. So, most people hear only of the successes and begin to think of it as being the right way to do things. Various leaders meet to plan strategy and being eager to solve problems they attach their ideas to it and adopt the ways of it too. Its tentacles now reach across teams and its effects are felt across organizations. Like a centrifuge, people’s careers revolve now around how well they can work with it. They need it and it needs them. Before long it becomes arrogant. It looks around, sees no serious challengers, and declares itself the modus operandi for the entire company. There is very little disagreement. Sometime later, quite a way down the road of time, after the company has struggled through 19 consecutive quarters of disappointing results, when buyers and customers no longer react to the efforts of marketing, when the sales cycle takes exceedingly long to get to a point of no decision or worse, loss, when product teams strangle themselves to create features and functionality for only the highest revenue customers, and when post-sales teams spend all their time focused only on fixing problems and zero time on enablement and driving product adoption… in that environment no one in the company knows the answer when a newly-hired and eager employee asks a very simple question, “Why is it so complex?"

Setting aside the dangerous implications buried within the mind of the questioner (How does it even work? Is there any empirical proof that it does? No wonder their Glassdoor reviews are spotty. I can’t believe I accepted this job offer), the question of why something is so complex is actually a good one.

It’s also one that has no answer because the truth is, companies grow, problems arise, problems get resolved, more problems arise, leaders come and go, employees get hired, they move around the organization, they leave, shareholders grow impatient, and Boards of Directors become more demanding. Processes pile up and rarely ever get stripped back to a state of simplicity. Why? The Boston Consulting Group discussed this topic in this article titled, The Twelve Forces that will Radically Change how Organizations Work. Their research shows that 75% of executives believe complexity is making it harder for them to reach their business goals. Worse, only 17% of them believe that their company’s efforts to reduce complexity will resolve the issue. Ouch.

We see it that way too. One of the inhibitors to success we discuss with our marketing clients, who are seeking guidance around digital transformation, is unnecessary, or obsolete, complexity in the way their processes operate. Sclerotic processes gum up the machinery of modern corporations and make them vulnerable to more nimble competitors who suffer less from a history of process enlargement. McKinsey has touched on this subject a number of times and in this article there is one sentence that sums up the perfect prescription:

Successful digitization efforts start by designing the future state for each process without regard for current constraints...

I inserted those italics to emphasize the criticality of shedding a historical context when designing a process. It’s the end that’s important and if a corporation is to be truly and authentically customer-centric, then the process, all processes, will be designed to achieve an improvement for the customer with the results.

Back to our clients, it helps when we begin by asking a few questions to surface some critical information. Our intention is that the information will improve our understanding of the client’s maturity with respect to process, customers, organizational agility, and creativity.

Are you optimally sharing data across the marketing eco-system?
How well are you tracking the customer across their journey with your company?
Where does their journey start and end, from your POV?
Who owns the customer?
What does innovation mean to you?

Steering clear of discussions of Lean Principles and Six Sigma, what we’re hoping to achieve through our conversations is self-realization by the client that a) their environment is needlessly complex, b) it’s mostly due to organizational barriers that inhibit communication, collaboration, and the development of coherent and consistent customer engagement strategies, c) the environment, despite the purest of original intent, is not actually focused on creating customer value, and finally, d) hope grows from despair but only when it is first seeded by honesty.

Do you know which questions to ask in order to yield relevant customer data? Once you have that data, you need to know what to do with it. Download this guide to Maximize Your Marketing to learn how to get what you need and how to make it work for you.

Image credit: StockSnap

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2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The July Prompts

2017 Content Excellence Challenge: July Prompts

Happy July! Here are the Copyblogger Content Excellence prompts for this month.

For those of you who haven’t joined us yet, each month in 2017 we’re providing a pair of prompts: one to make you more productive and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.

Feel free to try one prompt or both. You can join the fun anytime you like. And let us know about your experiences in the comments!

The July Creativity Prompt

Create two new types of content

Producing content, like any creative work, has its own set of rhythms.

At first, you have to work really hard to make anything you’re proud of.

As you continue to put in the hours, stretch your creative boundaries, and focus on deliberate practice, you start to get pretty good. Maybe even very good.

Then … maybe you get a tiny bit bored. You quit putting so much time in, and the cycle starts to move in the other direction.

The way to keep improving lies in changing things up. Keep changing the game for yourself. Not because you’re chasing some illusory time when you’ll be “good enough,” but because it’s fun to keep pushing toward the next level.

To that end, this month, I suggest you try two content types that are new to you.

You can vary the medium (text, infographic, audio, video) or you can vary the structure (storytelling, teaching, analogy, review).

If you’re stuck for ideas, Stefanie put a post together about 16 different approaches for a blog post. I’ll bet there are one or two in there that might spark some ideas.

Why two? Well … you might hate the first one. Trying two new ideas gives you more chances to find something new to fall in love with. And if you find some joy in the experiment, try two more new ideas next month.

The July Productivity Prompt

Find two more half hours

Now that (in my hemisphere) we’re squarely into summer, the days are noticeably longer. The sun gets up early and goes to bed late.

All that sun is energizing — and I’ll bet you can use that extra daylight to find an extra half hour in the morning and an extra half hour at the end of the day. You can use that time to work on your two new ideas or any creative work you’ve been wanting to pursue.

Seven extra hours a week is enough to launch the blog you’ve been meaning to get to, finally get that book started (and finished), or just establish a solid process and create one excellent piece of content every week.

Now — for those of you in the southern hemisphere, let’s frame it a little differently. Winter is here, and that means shorter days and fewer temptations to go out and goof off. Cozy up and, instead of retreating into binge-watching Netflix or eating your bodyweight in carbs, nurture a new creative ritual to take advantage of the quieter time.

The common thread?

Make excuses to do your work.

Not “more of the same” — that’s hard to get excited about. Instead, use your creative brain to figure out how to sneak in 60 additional minutes a day to work on a creative project that fulfills you.

Let us know what you’re up to …

Going to try some new content types this month?

Looking for some minutes you can add together for creative work?

Let us know about it in the comments.

The post 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The July Prompts appeared first on Copyblogger.

What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing

How many of your current marketing tactics are over five years old? Marketing is a fast-paced profession; even if you’re still using the same channels, odds are your strategy has changed. How about ten years old? Twenty? Thirty?

It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Email marketing has been a steadily effective channel for decades, and advances in technology only make it easier to track, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.

Ever-increasing mobile device use has helped keep email marketing relevant, too. One study suggests 20-75% of your email opens will be on mobile. The younger your target audience, the more likely they are to use their phone as a primary email-reading device. Combine a self-selected audience with new ways to deliver the content they opted into, and it’s easy to see why email remains popular. How popular? A recent study from Salesforce found that email marketing has grown 83% in the last two years, across B2B and B2C.

However, the more valuable a marketing channel is, the more crowded it will become. More brands sending emails means more competition for your audience’s limited attention span.

Your email has to do more than provide value—it has to compel a click within a very limited character count. Here’s how to write subject lines and preview text that make your email more likely to get read.

Subject Lines – Every Character Counts

Counting up characters for email subject lines wouldn’t have made sense in a desktop-only world. There’s a virtual acre of screen real estate for your beautiful subject line to sprawl across. On mobile, though, there’s precious little space to make your case.

The exact character count varies by device, and whether it’s held in portrait or landscape mode. You could have as little as 33 characters – or about a quarter of a tweet.

You don’t have to completely limit your subject line to that short, of course. Just put your most persuasive language at the beginning. Which of the following truncated subject lines is more enticing?

Happy 4^th of July! Enjoy the weath…
We miss you! Are you ready to get…
Free shipping today only + disco…

Personally, I’m only clicking on the last one. Even if only to find out if it’s “discounts” or an actual disco.

Basically, skip the pleasantries, the cutesiness, and the bizarre assertion that your brand “misses” someone. You can include all that in your preview text (more on that later). Instead, get down to:

The Offer: “50% off sock puppets this Friday!”
The Mystery: “Why do CEOs hate sock puppets?”
The Thought Provoker: “How do you feel about sock puppets?”
The Joke: “Every sock can be a sock puppet.”

Keep it all about the reader, and you’re far more likely to get an open.

Preview Text – Undervalued Real Estate

A great deal of marketing emails start with “housekeeping” stuff – a standard header that doesn’t have much to do with the subject at hand. That means the preview text displayed on a mobile device won’t give the reader more reasons to read it.

For example:

“How do you feel about sock puppets? Download this message as a pdf. Check out our sock puppet YouTube Channel.”

Versus:

“How do you feel about sock puppets? Senator Kelly wants to outlaw sock puppets.”

If your email starts with “click here to view on the website,” “view plain text version,” or a set of hyperlinks to navigate your site, you’re missing an opportunity for engagement.

Generally, you have about 90 characters for your preview text. So make your first couple of sentence irresistible. If you’re personalizing your emails (and you should be), make sure the preview text will demonstrate that personalization.

A Personal Email Marketing Success Story

I have an email subscription that sends daily emails. It’s pretty much the only one left that I still allow that frequency of access. And I open every single one and click through.

The email comes from online store meh.com. They have a different deal every day, and the email is just to let me know what’s on sale. But they don’t just say “Hi Josh, we have sock puppets today. Click to buy one.”

Here’s a screenshot of the email in my Gmail app:

I didn’t censor the subject line—meh are masters at introducing mystery in their subject line. They don’t tell me what’s for sale. They invite me to guess. The email body includes a few similarly redacted comments, inviting me to play along before clicking the link to see if I guessed right.

Mysterious subject line, compelling preview text, and an interactive element, delivered to my inbox daily. For me, that earns a 100% open rate (and several purchases).

Keep Them in the Know on the Go

It’s possible (though unlikely) that you have been sending marketing emails for forty years now. But you likely have a few years of experience. While email is more relevant than ever, it’s time for us to refresh our approach to grab the attention of mobile users. Keep your subject lines short and hyper-relevant, make your case in the preview text, and you can earn a tap on your message.

Just make sure that email leads to a mobile-optimized website, too.

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The post What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Saturday, July 1, 2017

Weekend Favs July 1

Weekend Favs July 1 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

MBO Partners – Maximize your billable time and earnings potential with expert guidance and back-office support.
Landbot – Turn a landing page into a chatbot.
Anchor – Broadcast your voice, music, and conversations, all for free. Share it anywhere you want, or turn it into a podcast with one tap.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape