October marks the unofficial kickoff to the holiday season with half of all marketers launching a holiday marketing campaign by Halloween. Are you sweating yet?

As I sit here with fresh flip-flop tan lines, it’s hard to believe that we’ve just barely exited summer and it’s already time to think about the holidays.

Yet, here we are.

As marketers, we can’t escape the fact that the major holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Weekend and Christmas are only months away.

So, let the holiday planning begin!

Enhance Your Email, Holiday Style

There is no shortage of articles and resources regarding digital marketing planning for the holidays. Today, we’re going to keep it simple and inch into holiday readiness by talking about holistic email approaches to consider for the 2019 holiday season.

And while there is still some breathing room for planning, here are the five things you should be considering for a successful holiday email campaign:

Quick: What are the key success metrics for your email marketing campaigns this holiday?

Did you hesitate?

As we all know, ambiguous metrics like “sales” fail to offer a defined and actionable path to optimize your campaigns.  A better answer is “revenue per emails delivered”, and an even better approach, if you can get there, is “gross profit per thousand emails delivered”.  These types of metrics provide you with a more straightforward way to rate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Of course, you can have different metrics for each campaign. Your Black Friday campaign might be geared towards sales, while an after-purchase/thank you campaign might be focused on refer-a-friend.  But the most important factor is to choose just one metric that forms the basis for optimizing your campaigns. Multiple metrics, while tempting given all the available data, will just muddy the program. Choose one (the right one) and set your campaign tracking accordingly.

One of the most impactful things you can do to plan for a successful campaign this year, is to take a peek back at campaigns you’ve run in the past years. Look at the data and glean insights around what worked and what didn’t.  Do a comprehensive audit looking at the following key elements:

• Offer Type – Which offers created engagement and ultimately sales? Consider whether a discount, an incentive, free shipping, etc. generated results. Hopefully, following the metric-setting above, you factor in the total cost of the offer to get an accurate comparison (i.e. “gross profit per emails delivered”).
• Creative – Which email designs worked best? This is a broad category, so break it down accordingly.  Single product versus multiple products versus no products?  Offer versus no offer? Image versus no image?  Static versus video?  There are several ways to split and score email creative. Task your team to develop the most relevant comparisons.
• Holiday Timing – How did timing affect your email blasts? When were your metrics achieved?  Example analysis might center around pre-black Friday, day-of, or post-black Friday when you’re in a less cluttered period.

Focusing on these three strategic elements will set your holiday email campaign program up for maximum success and allow you and your team to focus on the tactical optimization opportunities.

It’s great to recreate strategies that were effective for you, but remember: the sky’s the limit! Avoid the plateaus and stagnation by testing at least one new approach that you may not have considered.

For example:

• Offer a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’ rather than just basic product presentment.
• Sync your email blasts with social remarketing.
• Give your customer a gift for referring a friend.
• A/B test different offers
• Customize your blasts to different personas
• Customize your blasts based on previous buying behavior

Test at least one new idea per season to continuously re-charge your holiday email program. And who knows, maybe you’ll discover a tactic that was even more effective than the original!

The value of optimizing your holiday email program starts at the strategic versus the tactical level. Still, you will do well to split test the many tactical elements of an email campaign, such as:

• Subject Lines
• Degrees of Personalization
• Offer Types
• Calls to Action
• Design
• Day and Time
• Frequency and Sequencing

You could go A/B crazy thinking about all the elements you could test!  Rather than obsessing about endlessly testing everything, you need to consider the return you’ll get on your testing efforts as well.

First, you’ll need to set up a testing architecture to guide your testing program.  Arguably, the process is as important as the elements you’re testing. Three things to keep in mind for effective testing:

• Stick to the Plan – Avoid random, off-the-cuff testing which is not part of the plan.
• Stick to What’s Significant – Ensure that the tests are yielding statistically significant differences. Otherwise, what’s the point?
• Stick to What You Can Readily Implement – Make sure that you can quickly integrate the test results into your holiday email program. It will require an agile team, but rapid optimization based on data can really maximize your holiday conversions.

The email industry is quickly transforming with the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which gives an email marketer super-human power.  With email artificial intelligence, you don’t need to guess what type of offers might work best, what creative will convert, or what time of day you should send. Consider testing an AI vendor with a sample of your holiday email campaign around the following areas:

• Segmentation – AI gives you the ability to micro-segment, going beyond traditional demo and geo breakouts. Now, you can drill down to language and emotion within the copy at the recipient level.  Dell used AI marketing provider, Persado, to segment their holiday emails by language, which led to a 50% increase in email CTR as well as a 46% average increase in email conversations.

• Email timing – AI data can also tell you the ideal time that each customer is expected to open and engage with your email. Setting up and deploying these ‘rules’ will maximize your open rates and ultimately your conversions.
• Test subject lines – You already know that a powerful subject line is critical to email that converts. These snippets of copy will determine whether your holiday email is opened or is sent to the trash bin. AI is capable of not only analyzing effective subject lines, but also creating them.

Talk to Us 

Effective email marketing during the holidays is a must for most businesses. Whether you have a new or already-established plan in place, using these key strategies will help garner more positive results from your holiday email program.

But if you need help, you know where to find us!

When it comes to increasing visibility on the search engines, it can sometimes feel like you’re told the same tactics over and over again.

Just use the keywords you want to rank for and then hope they gain traction.

But how do you incorporate keywords in a meaningful way? And how do you know which keywords to choose?

Well there’s a ‘new’ keyword optimization method on the block that optimizes for keywords in a much more actionable and scalable way. Introducing the Keyword Multiplier Technique.

We say ‘new’ because although the technique itself is just now picking up in popularity, it’s something our agency has been doing for a long time.  And now that the secret is out, we’re going to show you how to do it as well!

How it Works

When most businesses think about rankings, they vie to rank for the most competitive, high search volume terms. While ranking for those terms is a good goal, it’s not typically a good starting point.

The keyword multiplier technique capitalizes on keywords that your brand is already ranking for on the search engines and then strategically boosts and multiplies them. This allows the page to grow organically and ‘multiply’ your rankings until you build enough authority to rank for your goal terms.

We’ll break down how to do this keyword multiplier technique in a few simple steps.

1. Use Google Search Console to find a page from your website that is already ranking in Google.

• Head over to the performance report and select the URL of that page.
• Click into the URL and select ‘Queries’ to see the keywords that are ranking and associated with that URL.
• This will give you analytics that show you the word, number of impressions, click through rate, and how many clicks you’re getting.

2. From that list of terms, find the words that are ranking well, but not in the first 3-5 positions. We call these striking distance terms and are the low-hanging fruit you can tackle first.

• Analyze your striking distance terms and look for high impression keywords that are receiving some clicks.

3. Optimize your page for the striking distance terms you are now tracking.

• Incorporate these terms into your on-page SEO strategy, working them strategically into your content, title tags, internal links, etc.

4. Track these pages in Google analytics by creating a shortcut and watch them grow on a month to month basis.

• By isolating pages in your reports, you will have a clearer understanding of what techniques are working so you can further customize your SEO strategy

5. Rinse and repeat.

• This is a multiplication process, which means that it can be done repeatedly. Do it with every page on your website and then maintain the pages and keep them up to date, constantly adding new keywords. When you write or add new pages, you can use your keyword knowledge to preemptively add in stronger keywords.

Why it Works

The keyword multiplier technique provides you with an opportunity to see what’s working on your website currently and expand upon it, and this technique is scalable as well. Once you understand which terms are most effective, it will also assist you in creating more content that will be equally, if not more, successful on your site.

Begin building your keyword foundation, and soon, you’ll be able to optimize for more competitive terms. Your goal keywords don’t seem so elusive now, do they?

Questions on this system, or on-page SEO techniques? We’d love to chat!

HubSpot is a pretty notorious name in the marketing world. Over the years, we’ve worked with plenty of clients who have leveraged the capabilities of HubSpot, as well as used it for our own sales and marketing efforts. And today, we’re going to let you in on a few trade secrets on how companies can leverage HubSpot to improve their inbound game.

Prospects

While data with Google Analytics can be limited, HubSpot offers more insights that can help your sales and marketing team work and nurture leads. The prospects tool, for example, gives your team insight into the companies that are viewing and engaging with your website. An additional lead stream? Yes please!

How to Up Your HubSpot Game:

• Create and leverage saved filters to refine your prospect lists to match your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona)
• Send these daily prospect reports to your sales team
• Send your sales team revisit notifications for ICP prospects who re-engage with the site for follow up

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal. HubSpot’s lead scoring system allows you to assign value to your leads based on qualifying characteristics and/or actions. Coupled with lists and workflows (more on those tools later), lead scoring offers a powerful way to personalize the user experience and customize messaging across to leads based on where they are in the buying journey.

How to Up Your Game:

Lead scoring in general is a great way to up your HubSpot inbound game.

• Use fit and engagement as the basis for your scoring mechanism and assign values to leads based on sales qualifications as well as marketing triggers. Connect your sales CRM if applicable to assign sales value.

Lists

HubSpot’s list feature may be simple, but it’s a serious game-changer. The tool enables you to segment your audiences in more meaningful ways, which you can then create workflows or reports around. Lists can also be dynamic, so once you set the criteria, any new contact that meets the criteria will be added to the list.

How to Up Your Game:

There are so many possibilities when building lists, far too many to count! But here are a few of our favorite applications:

• Segment your leads by score
• Segment your leads by campaign
• Create dynamic (smart) lists that trigger each time a user fills out a certain form
• Create dynamic (smart) lists that trigger each time a user opts into or out of an email campaign
• So much more!

Forms

We’ve used many different form tools in the past, as well as created custom forms on our own site. What we love about HubSpot forms is their ease of use and the ability to make quick changes and deploy them across your site. HubSpot allows you to take advantage of your biggest online asset (your website) by making lead capture simple and seamless.

How to Up Your Game:

The best use you’ll get out of forms is by personalizing and customizing the user experience and finding ways to make your forms do the work for you. Think beyond your typical form or pop-up and investigate ways you can tailor your forms to users.

• Create pop-ups on your high traffic content pieces that offer a related e-book, whitepaper or upcoming webinar.
• Create pop-ups on long articles and offer the article in PDF format to email to them to read later.
• Create form fields that help qualify your leads for you, so your sales team doesn’t have to. Add in fields for estimated budget and company size to get more information about your leads.

Workflows

There aren’t enough words in our vocabulary to describe how much we love workflows. Again, a simple but very effective HubSpot tool. Workflows allow you to automate tasks, so you can work on marketing strategy and know that HubSpot is working hard in the background. There are so many ways to use workflows, and we are constantly finding new and unconventional ways to use it.

How to Up Your Game:

At the heart of HubSpot lies workflows, which connects all HubSpot features and fuels your sales and marketing efforts. Here are some of our favorite ways to utilize workflows for each of the features above.

Prospects

Use workflows to:

• Send notifications or create tasks within your sales team when qualified prospects visit or engage with your website.
• Send notifications or create tasks when a qualified prospect re-engages with your website or engages multiple times.

Lists

Use workflows to:

• Automate email campaigns based on list membership.
• Send notifications to your sales team when someone is added to a list.
• Create tasks based on list membership.

Lead Scoring

Use workflows to:

• Send notifications to lead owners when a lead score changes.
• Create tasks when a lead score changes.
• Initiate an email drip when a lead score changes.
• Send a lead a resource, reminder or follow up email when a score changes.

Forms

Use workflows to:

• Initiate an email sequence based on a form fill out.
• Create notifications when a user fills out a form.
• Automate thank you emails or short sequences based on form fill outs or downloads.

Want more marketing tips like these? Sign up for our weekly newsletter, to get fresh marketing insights, straight to your inbox.