VIDEO IN DIGITAL MARKETING

The Role of Video Content in Marketing Activities

As the digital marketing industry becomes an important part of business, finding ways to differentiate yourself from the competition will need to be an increasing focus. Interestingly, one of the most powerful and important mediums to accomplish this is the use of video marketing (Ali, 2017).  


  Scroll through any Facebook feed today and you’ll see videos where static posts and images used to be. Video is quickly becoming the preferred medium of communication by businesses and consumers alike – and for good reason. Video is a quick, easy, and effective way to convey information in a way that is multi-dimensional, interactive, and entertaining. According to CBO.me, live action ads are also more likely to be shared through social media outlets versus text based information. It's been recently rumoured that Facebook has updated its algorithm to favor video posts above all other types of content. A business now has the ability to reach a larger viewing audience by creating or sharing memorable or funny videos. Video ads and promotions will entice a person to an emotional response. Most often, a person will share information they identify with the most, allowing your business free exposure to a potential clients friends, family, and followers. If you haven’t gotten on the video bandwagon and are wondering if producing videos are really worth the effort, here are a few benefits that might help you to make your decision.

Video Content Promotes Brand Awareness

The sheer multidimensional nature of video in combining images, text, and audio allows for the quicker and more impactful communication of a message. It is easier for consumers to recall a video they watched (versus just a static image or text) – and when they remember your video, they remember your brand. In addition, people are much more likely to share a video within their social circles, especially if you are able to present information in an entertaining and engaging way. This increases your brand reach and extends the ‘life’ of a video much further than an image or text. It is worth noting, however, that people are much less likely to share an overtly ‘branded’ video – an ideal balance would be to make your video content as memorable and relatable as possible, while adding in nuances of company identity through colours, fonts, logos, and subtle script messaging. Eric Vidal, CMO at BMG, points out how today’s buyer puts the level of connection they feel with a brand over the function of the product when making a purchasing decision. Your product or service might be amazing, but you won’t maximize your reach without giving customers a reason to choose your brand. Storytelling is another one of the latest marketing trends. The art of storytelling is as old as humanity, and online video is the latest medium. Use video to tell the story of how your company got started. Here are some questions to ask yourself to get the creative juices flowing:

• What was my state of mind when I first got the idea for my business?
• What problem was I trying to solve when I first thought of my business?
• Who helped me in turning my idea into an actual business?
• How do I think my business is different than other businesses in my niche?
• What about my company has a direct positive impact on society?

The goal with a brand origin story is to show your roots. It helps build a connection that primes leads for conversion. Wrap it up with a strong call-to-action and put it on a landing page. Also, studies have shown that videos generate more trust in customers than blocks of text or infographics. This makes sense intuitively, since the production costs of a video would discourage a spammer or fly-by-night website from creating them.

Video Can Boost Your Website’s SEO

Simply the act of placing a video on a page in your website can boost its SEO ranking, regardless of content, as Google gives preference to websites that contain videos. This is especially true if you first post your video on Youtube and embed the video onto your website. In a more roundabout (but still effective) way, videos also cause users to spend more time on your page, thus signaling to Google that your site has quality content. This also contributes to boosting your SEO ranking. A word of caution, however – make sure that your embedded videos are not causing your website to lag while loading, as that is a surefire way to increase your bounce rate and negatively affect your SEO!

Video Can Increase Sales

Research has shown that consumers are much more likely to make a purchase after watching a video about the product. It is unclear as to exactly what it is about videos that increase sales, but it is likely a combination of factors. After all, videos are more attention-grabbing and thus more consumers may be aware of your product. Videos are also a great way to show the product in action and provide enough information to convince the consumers of their need for your product. When creating product-focused videos to increase sales, a good tip would be to try to pre-empt (and answer) questions which consumers may have about the product. In other words, use your video to overcome the barrier to purchase that consumers may have – and you’ll find a sale much more likely. Product demonstrations, FAQs, and product reviews are all great ways to use your video to increase your sales.  


  Over 50 percent of consumers look up a product on the Internet before they make a purchase. Consumers want to see how your product works so they can visualize it solving one of their problems. Your personality matters just as much as the functionality of your product. The more passion you convey in your video, the higher your conversion rate.

Dominate the Social Media space

According to TheMarketingScope.com, video dominated the social media landscape in 2017, and it shows no signs of slowing down in 2018 and beyond. Conduct an audit of all the social media profiles for your business. Which platform do you get the most engagement with your community? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat all have video in some capacity. One great way to use video on social media is to give consumers a behind-scenes-look at your brand. Have your employees do account takeovers to showcase their role within your company. Show the production process in action.  


  Improving trust and humanizing your brand can Increasing sales with video marketing isn’t always about generating sales directly from a video. Sometimes the goal is to improve trust and humanize your brand through transparency, which indirectly increases sales.

Conclusion

Videos are also able to make a compelling pitch more quickly than reading would. Instead of allowing the visitor to read or skim whatever part of the page they choose to, a video can be hyper-focused to get the specific points you need to get across as quickly as possible. So if you haven’t already started producing videos, give it a try and see what they can do for you! And if you’ve already dabbled in video-making, try experimenting with different video ideas and formats to make sure the effort you’re putting into making your videos is paying off in the best way possible! Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing and develop a great landing pages for your website? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

Social Media for Your Business

5 main benefits of social media networks for your business

Did you know that 78% of businesses now have dedicated teams for their social media? This is up from 67% in 2012, demonstrating that increasingly, organizations are acknowledging the power of social media network marketing to attract and engage customers. Below we explain 5 key benefits of social media for your business:

Increased Brand Recognition

The use of various social media networks has a positive correlation with the number of users being aware of your business and their products or services. Businesses can utilize different ways of business advertising, including the creation of a business page and launching paid ad campaigns. If your potential customers will see your business on two or more networks, they will remember and recognize your business in the future, when looking for that particular product or service you offer. According to statistics, people spend on average 2 to 5 hours per day using social media networks, indicating that this is a great marketing channel.  By offering them a perfect combination of engaging information and branding content, you can achieve significant growth in your lead generation. One of the interesting examples of how social media has become the main contributor to brand awareness and brand recognition of the company is the Youtube campaign by BlendTec.


  The viral video efforts of manufacturer BlendTec gave the company a huge return-on-investment in terms of its worldwide brand recognition and sales. Blendtec founder, Tom Dickson, debuted on YouTube marketing channel in 2006 to promote his premier blender and prove that it could blend just about anything. Known as one of the most successful internet marketing campaigns in history, Will It Blend? garnered six million views in the first six days. Dickson has since uploaded over 150 videos blending marbles, Apple products, glow sticks, neodymium magnets, Bic lighters and many more. "I started Will It Blend? with just a $50 budget," said Tom Dickson, Founder, Blendtec. "The results have helped propel Blendtec onto an international stage where our blenders have been showcased for their powerfully advanced technology and premier blending ability."

Improved Customer Insights

Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in and how they behave, via social listening. For instance, you can monitor user comments to see what people think of your business directly. You can segment your content syndication lists based on topic and see which types of content generate the most interest—and then produce more of that type of content. You can measure conversions based on different promotions posted on various social media channels and eventually find a perfect combination to generate revenue. Bora says the unstructured data on social media contains countless insights that can help an organization to understand its customers. However, to engage with this information in a tangible way, it is essential to have the right methodology, technology, and expert assistance to provide the structure and insight.

Improved Customer Loyalty

According to a report published by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels with their audience enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. The report concludes “Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience. A strategic and open social media plan could prove influential in morphing consumers into being brand loyal.” Another study published by Convince & Convert has also found that 53% of American citizens who follow brands in social are more loyal to those brands. TVibes is a unique company that allows customers to create their own TV channels using their own mobile videos (stored in the cloud). They’ve come a long way since their humble beginnings back in 2014 (they launched a successful iOS app in 2015) and are best known for allowing users to choose their own audiences to view the channels.


  The main target is to establish loyal and engaged app users. The goal of the TVibes campaign was to encourage customers to use their app for mobile video storage. Since Facebook is an intuitive platform for lead generation, the founders of the company used the social media giant to try and gain more sign-ups and get more followers. Uri and Gilad - the founders of TVibes - instinctively knew they should integrate a social site like Facebook into their social app. This made it easy for followers to create accounts, log in and explore channels created by their acquaintances, all done conveniently from their Facebook home pages. To help encourage signups based on targeted audience groups, the founders made use of mobile app install ads. By sorting their audiences based on reactions to video ads and with the clever use of lookalike audiences, they had a brilliant strategy of optimizing their campaign. What were the results?

• 50% of new app installs driven by Facebook
• 10% higher loyalty and conversion from those Facebook-driven installs
• 20% higher engagement rates from Facebook user

Improved Search Engine Ranking

SEO is the best way to capture the relevant traffic from search engines, such as Google, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.

Richer Customer Experience

Social media, at its core, is a communication channel like email or phone calls. Every customer interaction you have on social media networks is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your customer service level and enrich your relationship with your customers. For example, if a customer complains about your product on Twitter, you can immediately address the comment, apologize publicly, and take action to make it right. Or, if a customer compliments you, you can thank them and recommend additional products. It’s a personal experience that lets customers know you care about them.


  With more than 4 million followers on Twitter, to say Nike has a huge social following is an understatement. The company recognizes just how important customer service is, especially on social media, which is why Nike created a separate Twitter account just for responding to customer inquiries and issues: @NikeSupport. Nike Support is dedicated to all things customer service, making it easier for customers to reach out when they have a problem or a question they want answered. And Nike Support is very active, and like other companies with great social media customer service, very quick to respond. If you look at the account's Twitter feed, you'll see replies every few minutes. This shows customers that they can trust Nike to provide them with the help they need, when they need it.

Conclusion                   

The importance of social media for business cannot be underestimated. Digital marketers all around the world are exploring new opportunities offered on social media arena on a daily basis. Despite the high competition in the modern business world, companies have a chance to stand out from the crowd by offering the highest possible level of engagement on social media. Do you remember the case of BlendTec? The company uses Youtube channel to promote their new products by showing how their blenders can destroy IPhone and other devices. Millions of views have been gained due to one key reason: this is something users have never seen before. Offer your audience something that they don’t expect, but will definitely fall in love in when see it. Use social media networks marketing as a basis for your creative marketing ideas and anticipate enormous amount of new customers! Do you want Blueninja.io to help you? We are waiting for your call! Our social media marketing (smm), search engine opitimization (seo), and search engine marketing (sem) services will help you to be on the first page of Google Search and social media network newsfeed! We are looking forward to meet you!

YOUR CUSTOMER PROFILE

Creating a Customer Profile For Your Business

What makes up a customer profile? It depends on whether your customers are businesses or consumers. In either case, you typically start with your own customer data (such as location, purchases, spending volume), append additional consumer or business data, then group into segments that share similar characteristics. Customer profiling provides much needed structure to a marketing plan. It helps you (and us) understand what the ideal customer is looking for, what matters to them most and how best to speak to them.  


  In one of our previous articles, ‘Marketing strategy defined success’, we have slightly touched the meaning and role of customer persona for business: The important element of any market research is to understand who is that person you are targeting. Male or female? Teenager or retiree? Single or Married? What does he/she like? And many more questions that you need to answer before starting your planning. In the world of marketing, this is known as ‘creating customer persona’. Below we provide an example of the customer persona created by Brightspark Social Media, a digital marketing agency:  


  One of the most common mistakes small businesses make as they try to grow is attempting to be everything to everyone. “Tapping into” a new market seems lucrative and exciting, and very often, the leap is made even before proper research is done into whether that market is suitable or even brand-aligned. To truly understand a consumer group (especially the one you already have), more effort needs to be put into diving deeper than the surface. At the end of the day, truly understanding and meeting your consumers’ needs is the key to a thriving business. So how do you go about getting to know your consumers in a deeper, more relatable way? And how do you put that information into a ‘consumer profile’ to benefit your business? By outlining all the details including age, job position, preferred communication methods and the main needs and wants with regards to digital services, Brightspark Social Media is a successful business, as they know everything about their clients! Sounds great, right? There is no fixed set of points that you have to include in your company’s customer persona. Are you opening a beauty saloon? Find out what beauty products your clients use; how often they go for haircut or manicure; what beauty pages they follow on Facebook. Are you starting a fast-food chain? Explore what the eating habits of your customers are: how often they eat; meat-lovers or vegetarians; prefer eat outside or order delivery? We can provide thousands example, but only you know your business better than anyone else! Take a piece of paper, describe your business in 5-6 points and start building your customer persona based on it. Surveys, interviews, and social media websites are also your best friends in this journey!

Start with the data you have

Look first to the data that is most readily available – usually, this will be the data that you obtain from Facebook, Google Analytics, and other platforms like Adwords. This will give you the basic demographic data of your consumer base, such as age, gender, and location. From here, you can identify your ‘typical’ customer by looking at the age range, gender, and location that comes up the most. You can then extend your hypothesis a little to include factors like spending power, disposable income, marital status, etc. After identifying your main consumer, you can also make note of smaller categories that you may be able to target in the future.

Look beyond demographics

Next, take your consumer profile a step further by filling out the details a little more. Consider the lifestyle that your typical consumer leads. Do they travel? Go to the gym? Shop online? Consider also their knowledge and skills – are they tech savvy? Are they mobile? Are they familiar with the product you are selling? Finally, consider the issues your consumers face, and how your product gives them a solution. Once you have this consumer profile set up, target your communications to match this profile to make yourself relatable and “pull” your consumers in (as opposed to “pushing” your product on people). According to ConsumerPsychologist. the study of consumers helps firms and organizations improve their marketing strategies by understanding issues such as how:

• The psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and select between different alternatives (e.g., brands, products, and retailers);
• The psychology of how the consumer is influenced by his or her environment (e.g., culture, family, signs, media);
• The behavior of consumers while shopping or making other marketing decisions;
• Limitations in consumer knowledge or information processing abilities influence decisions and marketing outcome;
• How consumer motivation and decision strategies differ between products that differ in their level of importance or interest that they entail for the consumer; and
• How marketers can adapt and improve their marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to more effectively reach the consumer.

 
 

Consider focus groups/surveys

Even after you set up your consumer profile and begin your marketing plan, it’s always a good idea to run regular focus groups and surveys to continuously check that you are on the right track. In your focus groups/surveys, try to resist focusing purely on ‘business’ – i.e., “What product should I launch?”, or “What price point should I set this at?” Instead, include questions that give you a clearer picture of who your consumer is, and how you can make their lives better. The better you understand your consumer, the more effective your marketing will be – above and beyond details like packaging and price point.

Impact of Digital Marketing on Consumer Behaviour

The digital era has and will continue to change consumer behavior. Consumers today are not following the traditional tunnel whilst social media has revolutionized the way people converse on a personal level. Brands need to adopt a radical new thinking when approaching digital to stay relevant and drive home their message with impact. According to Intelliassist, the biggest change in consumer behavior is that consumers expect a consistent and personalized experience. Consumers desire and expect personalized messaging from brands. Marketers should connect with them at the right places at right times, which involves increased real-time localization. Modern consumers are not loyal customers, they are more variety seekers. This has left previously logo-heavy companies struggling to assimilate their product to suit modern tastes.  


  The prime change in consumer behavior is that consumers increasingly turn away from anything they perceive as marketing. As consumers are becoming tech savvy they are becoming impatient towards intrusive or irrelevant content and messages. More than 25% smartphone users have installed ad blockers and this number is increasing rapidly. Instead, they look towards small groups of people who have a high level of credibility in their specific industry or category to influence their buying decisions. As consumers spend more time on these social media platforms, decisions about what to purchase often reflect interactions with friends and other influencers. In response, leading marketers are adapting their strategies to reach increasingly networked consumers and placing more stress on tactics such as word-of-mouth marketing and storytelling, which nowadays have a greater impact on marketing decisions of consumers.

Conclusion

Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

Marketing strategy defines success

Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Strategy

Regardless of whether you’re a new start-up or your company has been operating in the business arena for over twenty years, a solid plan is the basis lying behind any long-lasting success. In addition to careful financial planning and product development, it is crucial to create a detailed, comprehensive and thought-out marketing strategy. As regards to advertising, the lack of planning is not only costly, but also risky, leading to unpredictable circumstances. Below are the key potential outcomes that might happen to your company, if insufficient attention would be given to developing a marketing strategy.

Lack of market research leads to huge losses

Comprehensive industry research and market trends analysis are the cornerstones of any good marketing strategy. Without the in-depth research, you’ll just be wasting your ad budget on the wrong audience, using wrong marketing channels. Careful planning leads to the well-informed decisions, which are crucial for your business functioning. Strategy planning allows you to focus on your business goals: you can determine the best direction and avoid losing sight of your objectives. Apart from that, by outlining your objectives you can develop a timeline of tasks, milestones and deadlines you need to meet in order to fulfil your objectives. In that case, you and your team members will be held accountable for completing their tasks in a timely manner. The most famous example of the failure to implement sufficient market research is the Coca Cola’s commercial in Saudi Arabia. The company wanted to show how the drink helped people survive the hot weather common for that region:  
  However, the published advertisement turned out to be a real disaster, as Coca Cola did not take into account that Saudi Arabia is different from the rest of the world, as people there read from right to left. The wise advice for the businesses being in the midst of strategy planning process is to pay maximum attention to the accuracy and timeliness of the collected information prior to strategy implementation. Relying only on one source is not enough – 2-3 sources are the optimum amount to ensure the full reliability of obtained data. Market research plays a crucial role in marketing, as it allows to understand your customers better. By providing insights into clients’ behaviour, preferences, needs and wants, market research assists in developing the pathway of the future strategy planning and implementation. Understanding your audience makes the whole process easier, as you know who your customers are and what they prefer. Nowadays, it is a common trend for many start-ups to attempt to target as much customers as possible, paying little attention to audience segmentation. Is this a right strategy? Many businesses would say yes, as they believe – the more people you target, the more customers you can get. No, no, and again no! The important element of any market research is to understand who is that person you are targeting. Male or female? Teenager or retiree? Single or Married? What does he/she like? And many more questions that you need to answer before starting your planning. In the world of marketing, this is known as ‘creating customer persona’. Below we provide an example of the customer persona created by Brightspark Social Media, a digital marketing agency:  
  By outlining all the details including age, job position, preferred communication methods and the main needs and wants with regards to digital services, Brightspark Social Media is a successful business, as they know everything about their clients! Sounds great, right? Another interesting example of the detailed customer persona is presented by UX designer James Donovan. Just have a look at how real and holistic the customer persona is!  
  There is no fixed set of points that you have to include in your company’s customer persona. Are you opening a beauty saloon? Find out what beauty products your clients use; how often they go for haircut or manicure; what beauty pages they follow on Facebook. Are you starting a fast-food chain? Explore what the eating habits of your customers are: how often they eat; meat-lovers or vegetarians; prefer eat outside or order delivery? We can provide thousands example, but only you know your business better than anyone else! Take a piece of paper, describe your business in 5-6 points and start building your customer persona based on it. Surveys, interviews, and social media websites are also your best friends in this journey!

You can’t fix your mistakes if you don’t know what they are

Frequently, when you are in the process of implementing your marketing plan for a long time, the tasks become a daily routine and you go on auto-pilot without paying sufficient attention to your performance. Business in general, and marketing in particular, are the fast-changing environment, where the continuous updating of practices and methods used is vital for the company’s survival. This is particularly true for online marketing strategies, where trends that were popular just yesterday could be completely outdated for your audience tomorrow. The continuous evaluation of the performance is another important element of the marketing strategy implementation. Comparing the obtained results against set goals, milestones and competitors are necessary to ensure that work process is going according to the agreed plan. However, still keep in mind that making changes to the initial plan is acceptable and in some cases necessary, to ensure that only the best results will be achieved not only for marketing, but also beyond it. The famous example of the company that failed to keep up with the fast-paced technology trend is Kodak. Founded in 1988, the American technology company, Kodak, was built on the culture of innovation and change. Kodak held a dominant position in the photographic film at that time. Its tagline “Kodak Moments” was so popular that it was used for promoting various events.  
  Kodak's failure in 2000s was mainly due to their inability to recognize how powerful the threat of new technologies would be to their business. Although the company essentially invented the digital camera, it suppressed the technology out of fears it would threaten the revenues it made from traditional fil, however, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm took advantage of it. The wise advice for businesses is to always be aware of the current and changing trends in the industry and market. Ranging from reading news to conducting surveys, the wide variety of research methods allows companies to continuously keep up with changes occurring in the business arena.

Insufficient attention to the details can cost you your credibility

Nowadays, businesses face a wide variety of marketing channels that they can use for advertising purposes, ranging from traditional methods, such as magazines and newspapers, to internet and mobile marketing. Thus, it is difficult to find a company that utilizes only one of those channels. A cross-channel marketing campaign is like a big machine – if one component isn’t working, the entire machine will fall apart. Despite being a whole, the clear outline of goals for each channel is crucial in order to keep the work process organized. For instance, when using both Linkedin and Instagram for digital marketing, businesses need to be aware that while Linkedin is more suitable for B2B conversion purposes, Instagram aims at establishing deeper relationships with existing clients. The bright example of how the inappropriate promotion through one of the marketing channels has affected the entire company’s image is Bloomingdale’s case on Twitter. The picture, which shows a man side-eyeing a woman, eerily reads: “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” Understandably, the horrific suggestion -- which falls under the message calling for alcohol-fueled date rape – resulted into disgust and contempt across social media.  
  Later, Bloomingdale’s apologized in 140 characters on Twitter, however, the Internet post left a significant impact on the customers’ perception of Bloomingdale brand image even after that.  

Conclusion

Not having an online marketing strategy makes achieving your business goals significantly harder, because you’ll just be implementing random non-related activities. It is like walking through the desert without ha ving a map or a compass. However, a detailed plan of action ensures that all the efforts, time and money that you invest on marketing your business are well-spent to produce the best results.

Thorough Market Research. Performance Monitoring. Attention to Details.

Three simple rules to follow and you can be sure that your online marketing strategies have a strong foundation, a constant control and a quick response to meet the changing requirements of the fast-paced business environment. Consider your marketing tasks as your building blocks vital for achieving the company’s major goal. Best digital marketing is more than just advertising: digital marketing is a science revealing the success secrets for your company. As any science, it takes time to learn – thus, be judicious in your planning and actions. Careful preparation and planning determines half of success. Take a deep breath and … are you ready? So, let’s start!

EMAIL MARKETING

Maximizing Your Email Marketing Potential

Most companies have some sort of email system set up. Maybe it’s a welcome email to people who have newly signed up with you, or a weekly email to tell your consumer database about your latest promotion. But are you doing enough to maximize on the full benefits of email marketing? Research has repeatedly shown that email marketing has among the highest ROIs of all the digital marketing channels. All you have to do is make sure you’re staying updated with the latest developments in the world of email marketing. Email marketing involves collecting email addresses from those who have purchased your digital products or who have expressed interest in your business. After that, you need to segment those email addresses based on each individual consumer's position in the sales funnel.  
  Email is almost 42 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping businesses acquire new customers (McKinsey). As explained by Ciked, unlike many other marketing opportunities, email marketing can provide businesses with various ways to target specific customers. To do this, make sure that your email marketing software allows for lead scoring. This will allow you to define various milestones or actions that a user exhibits through interactions within emails or your website. Once a user has met the criteria you have defined, then you can follow up with them with targeted messaging to further drive them down the funnel.

History of Email Marketing

Email celebrates its 46th birthday this year, let’s explore a bit more about it. According to Autopilothq.com, in 1971, the first email was sent through a network set up by the Department of Defense called ARPANET. The network was basically the foundation of the internet as we know it, and this first email send was one small step for inboxes, and one giant leap for email kind. ;) There’s a large gap in the history after that, since the internet was being built and email was primarily being used for inter-organizational communication. Fast forward to the 1990s. The internet started to catch on with the general public and AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail were introduced to the world. “You’ve got mail” became a thing, and digital marketers started to pay attention.

Few Interesting Facts and Tips to remember…

It has been proven by studies that emails with a personalized subject line are opened 27% more than emails with generic subjects. Simply putting the name of the recipient in the subject increases the open rate by nearly 16%. You can easily do this if you use an email service like MailChimp.  This personalized approach to emails improves the click-through-rate (CTR) by 14% and your conversions by 10%. Also, Wordstream reports: Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders. 86% of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. CTRs are 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than B2C email campaigns. 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation. 56 percent of brands using emoji in their email subject lines had a higher open rate, according to a report by Experian. Tuesday is the best day of the week to send email (according to 10 email marketing studies). As stated by Arcalea, email marketing is extremely effective in generating customer interest. When implemented correctly, a newsletter is cost-effective, fast, and simple way to keep customers informed on (and excited about) new product launches or new promotions.  
  Email marketing has greater chances of being noticed, compared to the social media updates where they can miss out announcements and just scroll up their news feeds. With a few clicks, emails can be sent to the thousands of users. Those users are free to read at their own convenience- whether online or offline.

Make Sure Your Email System Has a Mind of Its Own

Automation, segmentation, and personalization are all current buzzwords in email marketing. As digital technology advances, email systems are programmed to predict consumer behavior based on actions they have taken or where they are on their consumer journey. They can then use that data to make sure that the right emails are sent to the right people, at the right times. Setting up these email systems does take time and effort, but mostly in the beginning as you teach your email system what you would like it to do. After that, you should theoretically be able to sit back as it does the work for you: automatically adding and moving your consumers into different segments based on their actions, and sending them emails that are personalized to their needs at any given time. This helps to build relationships with your consumers and keeps an open channel of communication going without a lot of manual effort on your part.

Make Your Emails Interactive

It used to be impossible to add elements other than text to emails without making them chunky in size and slow to load. However, that’s not true today. Images, GIFs, even videos, are all currently easily compressed and embedded into emails without compromising the user-friendliness of the email itself. Use this to your advantage and incorporate design elements, images, and movement to capture your readers’ attention and highlight the most important aspects of the email. Make sure to include clear call-to-action buttons to encourage further action after the email is opened.  
  It is also important to make sure that all your emails and visuals are mobile optimized, given how heavy mobile use is in the community today. The effort you put into copy and design would be wasted unless your consumers find it easy to access and use.

Make Your Emails Worth Opening

Ensuring you are sending quality emails that are giving people value – whether it be in the form of information, offers, or entertainment – is crucial to a long-term email marketing strategy. The more people are convinced that they are benefiting from opening your emails, the more likely they are to continue to open them, and to encourage their social circles to sign up and open your emails too. Be sure to study consumer data and take note of the types of emails that do the best for your business. Think also how best to tailor your email to what the consumer needs at any given point in their journey (e.g. a new buyer could benefit from an email giving suggestions about using your product, while a lapsed buyer might benefit from a discount coupon enticing them to return to make a purchase). You can then automate these emails using your email system. And lastly, don’t discount the value of a good subject line that is catchy but to-the-point! Use more interactive elements such as emoticons and language that is easy to understand at a glance.

Conclusion

Email is a big part of our lives as professionals and individuals, and, even consumers. Think about this, how many people do you know without an email address? Millions and millions. According to Radicati Group, more than 3.7 billion people worldwide use email. That’s almost 54% of the world’s population! Data from Pew Research also shows that 92% of adults use email, and 61% of these email users are checking and sending emails on an average day. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!