editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOUR E-COMMERCE MIGRATION

July 15, 2020 No Comments

There are a number of reasons a business might undergo an e-commerce migration, such as if your business’s needs are changing or if you simply want to upgrade your e-commerce services. In other instances, however, your platform might simply be out of date. For many websites using Magento 1, this is the case.

After June, users will no longer receive support for Magento 1, according to Adobe. Website owners will be on their own for customer service, upgrades and developments unless they upgrade to Magento 2 (or another platform entirely).

The question then becomes, “How do you choose a new platform?” Many factors go into this decision, and because my company specializes in e-commerce marketing and migrations, I have ample experience with making such choices. There are a few aspects you need to consider, especially in order to comply with new regulations.

Data security

A business cannot have data breaches. From a customer standpoint, data breaches can cause a loss of trust. From the business’s standpoint, you can get in trouble with the law. The payment card industry data security standard (commonly referred to as PSI DDS) requires that systems are updated with security patches to protect from vulnerabilities. Approved scanning vendors (ASVs) can help you determine if your company is compliant with PSI DDS requirements. A sensible owner won’t stick with a platform that a credit card vendor will be forced to refuse.

When it comes to choosing a platform, research how successful the platform is at preserving customer data, and look at any history of breaches. That way you can ensure you’re compliant with data security requirements, especially with changes to the GDPR in the European Union.

Cost of your investment versus the return

While free platforms exist for your e-commerce store, and there are platforms that run on a tiered pricing schedule, you ought to figure out how high of a monetary and time return you want on the monthly fees and startup costs. The hard part is that no single platform is a cookie-cutter solution; businesses differ in terms of their needs.

Many e-commerce platforms are either software as a service or open source. SaaS provides prepared business solutions so that the owner or marketing team in charge of the site doesn’t have to implement any coding. They do have a recurring fee and allow for less control, but it’s better for those who want a high-quality site that’s standard. You don’t need a team of specialists for it or a web host to ensure that your business stays online.

Open source does require coding, but it gives you more control over your individual website and customization. You also have more freedom to scale.

Tiered pricing varies widely depending on the platform you choose. You might be able to choose a basic plan for less than $50, while a more advanced plan could cost you more than $200 within the same time frame. If you opt for a tiered pricing platform provider, remember that the difference lies in API support, product filtering, price lists and other additional filters. Not every business needs to necessarily receive unlimited API calls, but one that does can take advantage of the feature for a price.

User experience

My clients want to manage their storefronts and optimize shopping for their customers. The learning curve should be minimal, even if they are delegating the services to a marketing team. That way, if they want to handle the back end, complicated steps won’t hinder them.

Take add-ons, for example: They can customize and improve your storefront. Some platforms require separate file transfer protocols and modules to install these add-ons, which can become laborious. Others make it very easy for a user to conduct an installation.

Ideally, you also want a platform that will cross-manage the multiple processes that e-commerce requires. You are not just covering inventory or distribution of goods and services; an online platform needs to wear all the hats in the business. This includes marketing, keyword optimization and SEO.

Management of opportunity costs

By opportunity costs, I am referring to the price of making a selection and missing out on the other alternative platforms. A business owner needs to give up on a benefit after they make that choice and remain aware of it. Managing opportunity costs means that you take full advantage of the choices you make.

I have seen this time and time again: A client starts a business on a platform, and they are pleased to see revenue and improved shopping experience. But then they plateau and become stagnant, unable to grow. The owner knows that they should start to migrate.

Sometimes, a platform can limit your potential to optimize revenue or to increase conversions. What’s more, a new storefront could unify all of the processes and save you the time of having to monitor each one for efficiency. You simply need to figure out which one is right for you.

Users might also miss out on automatic updates to platforms if they choose to stay on the same one. It might not seem like much, but automatic updates mean that you have access to the same resources that other owners on the same platform do. What’s more, in the case of breaches, you receive updated security patches without having to handle it proactively.

Regarding migration, some users worry about losing valuable customer orders. If this is something you don’t feel equipped to migrate yourself, you can consider asking a professional web developer for help. They will know how to migrate those orders. Any losses should only be for the short term.

Know how to protect yourself and stay updated. That means assessing what you want out of an e-commerce storefront. The right store platform online can help you level up and allow you to grow in the long run.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Duran Inci.

Duran Inci is an internet technology executive with 15+ years of experience and the CEO of Optimum7.

Sourced from AdAge

In News

Ad market ‘surprisingly’ resilient despite 13% slump this year

July 14, 2020 No Comments

By Sarah Vizard

While UK ad spend is expected to decline by 13% this year, this is only slightly worse than during the last recession despite the much worse economic outlook for 2020.

The UK advertising market is forecast to decline by 13% year on year in 2020, according to media agency GroupM, but it is expecting the sector to bounce back next year with growth of 13%.

While the figure shows a steep fall this year, GroupM believes the extent of the decline is “potentially surprising” given the economic outlook for the year. EY’s chief economist forecasts that UK GDP growth will fall by 8% this year, compared to the 4.2% drop experienced during the 2009 recession.

Yet the decline in UK ad spend is not expected to be commensurately worse, with this year’s decline only one percentage point below the 12% decline experienced in 2009.

GroupM global president of business intelligence, Brian Wieser, believes the main reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, many of the sectors that have been worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic are light advertisers.

“The consequences of the pandemic are narrowly felt, meaning the sectors which have been hit the hardest may very well have been lower intensity advertisers relative to other sectors,” he explains.

“Restaurants are among the hardest hit sectors, but restaurants are low intensity advertisers. That is bad for society on many levels, but it doesn’t necessarily impact the ad market as much.”

Secondly, ad spend among small and medium-sized businesses has held up relatively well. Wieser points to the fact the revenues of digital advertising companies such as Google and Facebook, which have a longtail of advertisers, have held up reasonably well as evidence for this.

“Small businesses that might have been in a desperate fight for survival looked to operate in a digital world and shifted resources towards digital advertising as a result,” he says.

“If we think most large advertisers cut spend everywhere they could, then implicitly the rest of the advertising base held up. We hear anecdotes of this or that small business that people used to go to, they are now getting online. That is among factors of why the advertising downturn was not more severe.”

This is not just about digital advertising, although it has felt the knock-on impact, but about the digital transformation of small businesses. Even five years ago, it would have been very difficult for many to transition to digital, especially in just a few months. But new technology and social media platforms have made this much easier.

“It is not just that [small businesses] can advertise online, it is the digital transformation of their business operations,” says Wieser.

“Five years ago, they could have advertised online, but it would have been harder to transition consumers to buy certain categories of goods through digital means, or to implement management platform software with their website. That is where the change has been more profound, advertising is the knock-on effect of that.”

The impact on media

This is part of the reason why digital advertising is forecast to see the slowest decline this year, with GroupM expecting an 8% fall in 2020 followed by an 11% rebound in 2020 – meaning total spend will be higher than 2019.

Within digital, some sub-sectors are expected to still experience growth, including a 45% increase in ecommerce-related advertising this year. Search, however, will be hit by the negative impact from travel brands cutting spend and decline by 8% this year, followed by a 6% gain in 2021.

The ‘digital extensions’ category, which consists of digital ad revenue from traditional properties, will underperform this year with a decline of 13%, although it will bounce back to 20% growth in 2021.

TV will be hit hard by the ad pullback from big brands, with GroupM forecasting a 15% decline this year and then 13% growth in 2021 as deferred spend is spent. However, this growth next year could be curtailed should professional sport not return in a meaningful way as GroupM currently assumes will happen.

Print is forecast to experience a 24% decline in 2020, followed by an 18% gain in 2021, while outdoor ad spend will decline by more than a third (35%) this year but increase 23% in 2021.

If you have assumptions about how people do things, how they want to engage with brands, how they want to consume brands – challenge those now.

Brian Wieser, GroupM

Finally, audio ad revenues are predicted to fall 16% this year, followed by 14% growth next, while cinema will experience the worst decline of any sector this year at 50% and a relatively slower bounceback of just 25% growth in 2021.

Wieser says the forecasts show that while the impact of coronavirus has been rapid, a return to near 2019-levels for most media sectors is expected in 2021 if key assumptions around coronavirus (such as when a vaccine might be available and the avoidance of a second wave) are met.

“We made some big assumptions, change those and we change the numbers. But if assumption holds up our report is optimistic about a relatively quick rebound next year due to pent up demand,” he says.

“People who speak about a V-shaped recovery usually talk about it in a shorter sense – that in a few months things will be back to normal. That is absolutely not going to happen. But decades from now we’ll look back, see things are better by the middle of next year and describe it as a V-shaped recovery.”

Wieser also urges marketers not to waste this period by using it as a “time to rethink”, particularly as the pandemic has shown consumers are “open-minded” to doing things differently.

“If you have assumptions about how people do things, how they want to engage with brands, how they want to consume brands – challenge those now. We have already seen there are different ways of operating, people are more open-minded to doing things differently, buying different combinations and packages because we’ve had to do such a major reset to habits,” he concludes.

“Questioning the things we assume we think we know about how and why people do what they do is important. As is figuring out the best way to organise a business for a world that is less dependent on physical retail and what that means for a brand.”

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Sarah Vizard

Sourced from Marketing Week

In Uncategorized

Pandemic Exacts Toll: Digital Strategies Pay Off And Marketers Expect Them To Pay Forward

July 14, 2020 No Comments

By Christine Moorman

Optimism among marketers plummets to levels last witnessed during the Great Recession. Optimism about the economy is 50.9 (out of 100) compared to just three months ago when it was 62.7. In February 2009, following the Great Recession of 2008, this rating was 47.7. B2C companies are more pessimistic than their B2B counterparts, as are larger revenue companies (>$10B) compared to their smaller counterparts (<$25M).

Against this backdrop, The CMO Survey conducted a Special Covid-19 Edition survey, asking marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies to share their survival strategies, KPIs, and predictions about the future. Here are the top results.

1. Marketing jobs lost: Although 62% of marketing leaders reported no job losses in their companies, 9% of marketing jobs have been lost, on average, due the pandemic. The largest percentage of marketers (24%) anticipate these jobs will never return. Planned marketing hiring drops to the lowest point in CMO Survey history, going negative for the first time ever with average hiring predicted to be -3.5% in the next year.

2. Customer prioritize digital experiences: Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85%), increased value placed on digital experiences (84%), and greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to “do good” (79%). Marketers expect this increased focus on digital to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.

3. Marketers pivot digital: Given customer shifts, marketers are, in turn, adjusting their offerings and pivoting their businesses. Some 60.8% indicate they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% are “transforming their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” Consistent with this, CMO Survey results show the largest single drop in traditional advertising spending (-5.3% expected over the next year), further solidifying the shift toward digital.

4. Marketing budgets hold: Despite headcount loss, 30.3% of marketers—the largest segment—have experienced no change in their overall marketing budgets during the pandemic with 41.3% reporting gains and 28.4% reporting losses. On average, marketers report they have gained about 5% in their budgets during the pandemic and expect an 8.4% increase in digital marketing spending over the next year.

5. Marketing objectives remain modest: When asked what objectives they are focused on during the pandemic, the #1 and #2 responses from marketers are “building brand value that connects with customers” and “retaining current customers.” Consistent with this, marketing employees were leveraged more for “getting active online to promote the company and its offerings” (69%) and “reaching out to current customers with information” (65%) compared to growth objectives such as “generating new products and service ideas” (44%) or “building partnerships” (41%).

6. Marketing leadership promoted: 62.3% of marketers report that the marketing function has increased in importance during the pandemic. Building brand and customer retention through digital, mobile, and social strategies are reported to be key to that heightened role. This importance is striking given 9% marketing job losses—marketers are doing more with fewer people.

Chart: How has the role of marketing in your company changed during the Covid-19 pandemic? — THE CMO SURVEY

7. Social media shines bright: 84.2% of marketers say they have used social media for brand building and 54.3% say they have used it for customer retention during the pandemic. Given this focus, marketers have increased investment social media budgets 74% since February—an increase as a percent of marketing budgets from 13.3% to 23.2%. This strategy appears to have worked: For the first time in CMO Survey history, the rated contributions of social media to company performance rose—up 24% since February. This is an important finding because social media contributions have previously remained flat and at average levels since 2016 despite rising investments.

8. Online sales performance increases: Online sales have grown to the highest level in The CMO Survey history. They now constitute 19.3% of sales—a 43% increase over just three months ago. Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) are taking advantage of selling online, with ecommerce accounting for 26.1% of sales.

What percentage of your firm's sales is through the iI — THE CMO SURVEY

9. Overall sales revenue drop 17%: Despite online sales gains, marketers report major losses across sales revenue, profits, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Biggest reductions are to sales revenue, which dropped 17.8% on average, with 16.9% of marketers reporting the loss of over 50% of their revenues. Considering winners and losers, 64% of marketers report sales losses compared to 30.3% that report gains and 5.2% reporting no change. Marketers expect these sales revenues to increase 4.2% in the next year driven by the view that consumers’ current lower likelihood to purchase (67%) and unwillingness to pay full price (43%) will return to pre-pandemic levels within 6-12 months.

10. Pandemic weakens environmental focus: Covid-19 has also dampened marketers’ likelihood to make changes to reduce their offerings’ negative impact on the ecological environment. The number of marketers indicating a willingness to change their products or services to reduce their negative environmental impact has dropped from 72.9% to 52.7% with attention shifting to easier-to-implement marketing promotions (58%). More marketers report that Covid-19 makes sustainability efforts seem “like a luxury” than it “created opportunities to increase sustainability efforts” in their companies.

11. Use of influencers expected to rise: Marketers report that 7.5% of their marketing budgets is focused on online influencers, mostly on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, and that they anticipate large gains in the use of influencers in the next three years (up to 12.7%).

Detailed analysis of these and other results are available here. I hope these findings from our Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey are useful as you navigate these next few months and beyond. I will be taking a deeper dive into these findings during a webinar on June 25^th at 1PM Eastern sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. You can register by following this link. I look forward answering your questions and taking your comments.

THE CMO SURVEYSurvey Results Archive – The CMO Survey

By Christine Moorman

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How to fix Twitter and other websites that won’t load in Safari

July 14, 2020 No Comments

By KILLIAN BELL

Do you ever find that websites sometimes refuse to load in Safari on your Mac, no matter how long you wait? The problem has been plaguing Twitter users in recent months, and can occur with other sites, too.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix.

You may have already resorted to using another browser. When this problem surfaces, switching to Chrome or Edge (or anything other than Safari) can be an easy fix. But who wants to swap browsers because one website won’t load?

Another extreme solution is to clear all your Safari data. That’s quick and effective, but it means losing all your open tabs, having to log in to all your favourites sites again, and other little annoyances.

Instead, you can efficiently target only the site that isn’t loading. Here’s how to clear Safari data for just one website when it isn’t loading.

Fix websites that won’t load in Safari

Before following these steps, ensure that the problem really is just with Safari. Obviously, you should make sure your Mac is connected to the internet. Then try loading the problematic site in another browser — maybe on your iPhone or iPad — or checking its status on Downdetector.

If your connection is fine and dandy, and the site loads on another device, follow the steps below to clear its Safari data:

Open Safari.
Click Safari in the menu bar, then click Preferences…
Click Privacy, then select Manage Website Data…
Use the search bar in the top-right corner to find saved data for the website that won’t load.
Select the saved data, then click Remove.
Click Done.

Once that’s finished, you can visit the site again, and it should load without any issues … at least for now. Some users find that the problem reoccurs every few weeks with certain sites, such as Twitter. So you might need to repeat these steps later, unfortunately.

If this fix doesn’t work for you, there could be other things that are preventing the site from loading. If you use a content blocker, ensure that the site you want to visit hasn’t become inadvertently blacklisted, and try restarting Safari.

By KILLIAN BELL

Sourced from Cult of Mac

In News

Facebook Just Took a Huge Step Toward Monetizing WhatsApp

July 13, 2020 No Comments

By Adam Levy

After numerous delays, it’s rolling out a key feature in the messaging app.

Facebook‘s (NASDAQ:FB) efforts to monetize WhatsApp — the messaging app it paid $19 billion for in 2014 — have been delayed and rethought several times over by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his management team. Plans to place advertisements in WhatsApp Status were suspended earlier this year and efforts to launch a payments platform in India have hit a roadblock.

But WhatsApp payments is finally launching. Not in India, but Brazil, WhatsApp’s second-largest market by users. The service is built on Facebook Pay, which the company plans to use as the foundation to support payments across all of its apps. As e-commerce becomes a bigger part of Facebook’s business, WhatsApp payments represents a major step toward monetizing WhatsApp’s 2 billion users.

How payments will make money in WhatsApp

Facebook will charge fees in line with industry standards for payments made in WhatsApp. That means peer-to-peer payments won’t cost users anything, while businesses will pay a fee to receive payments from customers. In Brazil, that fee is 3.99%.

It’s worth noting Facebook uses a similar fee structure for payments in Messenger, which it rolled out in 2015. But Messenger payments haven’t become a major source of revenue, because most users don’t use the app to communicate with businesses, and when they do, they’re not using it to transact.

It’s far more common to use WhatsApp for business interactions, especially in countries like Brazil or India. In fact, WhatsApp rolled out an app just for businesses in 2018. It amassed over 5 million users within a year. There’s still a lot of room to grow that number, as Facebook boasts 140 million Pages on its flagship platform. What’s more, its investment in and partnership with Reliance Jio could bring millions of businesses onto the platform.

At the end of last year, WhatsApp introduced the ability to add a product catalog in the business app. And it offers a paid API for businesses to more easily handle communication with customers. The addition of a payments platform within the app will support both.

Supporting the full ecosystem of Facebook apps

Payments in WhatsApp cannot be considered in a vacuum. Supporting commerce in the messaging app will make click-to-message advertisements on Facebook or Instagram more valuable. That’s because they increase the ability to convert a message into a sale, and Facebook could have additional user data about their payments behavior in its messaging app.

Moreover, Facebook is using the Facebook Pay platform it started rolling out last year in order to support payments in WhatsApp. The unified platform allows users to enter their payment information once, and use it across Facebook’s family of apps.

Facebook has made several efforts to increase commerce on Facebook and Instagram over the past year. It introduced Checkout on Instagram and Shops on Facebook. Both aim to reduce the friction customers experience when clicking through advertisements on its platforms, as well as make it easier for retailers to establish an online presence. Adding payments in WhatsApp could help increase conversions for its other e-commerce products and vice versa.

Looking at the WhatsApp payments rollout as part of the larger ecosystem of services from Facebook points to the real potential of the service. While commerce within WhatsApp could be a nice source of revenue, commerce across all of its apps could add up to something truly meaningful for the FAANG stock, which generated over $70 billion in revenue last year.

WhatsApp payments in Brazil is just the first step for Facebook, but it’s extremely meaningful. The country represents a sizable portion of its market, and a fast-growing economy. Increasing the number of users with payment information connected to Facebook Pay should support much broader applications than just sending some cash to a friend, and that’s where the real opportunity lies for Facebook to finally make some money from WhatsApp.

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By Adam Levy

Sourced from The Motley Fool

In News

Now You Can Opt Out of Seeing Political Ads on Facebook

July 13, 2020 No Comments

By Mike Isaac

The change lets Facebook play both sides of the debate about political advertising on social media.

SAN FRANCISCO — For months, Facebook has weathered criticism for its willingness to show all types of political advertising to its billions of users, even if those ads contained lies.

Now the company is changing tack — sort of.

The social network said it would allow people in the United States to opt out of seeing social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates or political action committees in their Facebook or Instagram feeds. The ability to hide those ads will begin with a small group of users, before rolling out in the coming weeks to the rest of the United States and later to several other countries.

“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, wrote in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Tuesday. “For those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we’re also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We’ll still remind you to vote.”

The move allows Facebook to play both sides of a complicated debate about the role of political advertising on social media ahead of the November presidential election. With the change, Facebook can continue allowing political ads to flow across its network, while also finding a way to reduce the reach of those ads and to offer a concession to critics who have said the company should do more to moderate noxious speech on its platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg has long said that Facebook would not police and moderate political ads. That’s because the company does not want to limit the speech of candidates, he has said, especially in smaller elections and those candidates who do not have the deep pockets of the major campaigns.

But critics, including the Biden presidential campaign, have argued that Facebook’s laissez-faire approach has dangerous consequences, with untruthful political ads leading to the spreading of disinformation and potential voter disenfranchisement. Some Republicans have argued that Facebook should not act as an arbiter of what can and cannot be posted in ads, and that the company’s intervention amounts to censorship.

The Biden presidential campaign lashed out at Facebook over its hands-off policy on political ads last October after the Trump campaign released ads on the social network that falsely claimed that Mr. Biden had offered to bribe Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into his son. Since then, the Biden campaign has called for the company to fact-check ads from candidates and their campaigns.

Last week, Mr. Biden’s campaign also began an online petition and letter to Mr. Zuckerberg to demand changes to its speech policies ahead of the 2020 presidential contest. At the same time, the Biden campaign also spent $5 million in advertising on Facebook, surging past political ad spending by Mr. Trump on the platform.

By Mike Isaac

Sourced from The New York Times

In News

How to Avoid Email Blacklists

July 13, 2020 No Comments

By Jimmy Rodela

Understand what email blacklists are, and learn the strategies to avoid them. The Blueprint covers the nitty-gritty of email blacklists in this guide.

Building your email list takes time and effort, but all the hard work you put into it can go down the drain if you get blacklisted.

An email blacklist and other spam filters prevent your emails from reaching your target audience, hindering you from getting optimal results. Understand email blacklists and how they work so you can avoid them.

Overview: What is an email blacklist?

Email blacklists are real-time lists that identify domains or IP addresses known for sending spam emails.

Free mailbox providers, anti-spam vendors, internet service providers (ISP), and email service providers (ESP) use blacklists to stop spam emails from entering their systems.

Getting flagged by blacklist operators will add you to the list and block your content, preventing your emails from reaching your audience’s inboxes. If your business becomes blacklisted, your small business email marketing suffers, negatively affecting your email marketing ROI.

Factors that can get you blacklisted include:

Spam complaints. Complaints about your emails exceeding the acceptable threshold can prompt ISPs to add you to the blacklist.
Bad email content. Some ISPs filter emails by using keywords as a basis. Expressions such as “money-back guarantee,” and “free,” as well as using multiple exclamation marks and all caps can get you blacklisted.
Poor email list management. Poorly managed email lists lead to unnoticed unsubscribe requests, which can get you flagged and blacklisted. If you don’t check your email list, for instance, you might keep sending subscribers emails even if they unsubscribe, leading to them tagging you as spam.

How to find out if your company is on an email blacklist

The quickest way to check if your email is blacklisted is to use publicly available tools. Perform a blacklist check using popular databases, such as MXToolBox, to see if your IP address or domain is blacklisted.

Perform a blacklist check using MxToolBox.

Another approach is to check your email campaign stats, including your clicks and domain opens. Sharp open drop-offs, for example, could indicate you’ve been blacklisted from an ISP.

Implement good email sourcing practices, manage and monitor your email campaigns, and follow reliable email marketing tips to prevent getting blacklisted.

How to avoid email blacklists

Follow these tips to avoid getting blacklisted.

1. Use double opt-in for your email subscribers

Double opt-ins require a two-step verification where users sign up for your mailing list, then receive an email with a link to confirm their subscription.

This creates an additional security measure to prevent fake emails, ensuring your subscribers are real people and not bots. The additional signup step also ensures your subscribers want to receive your emails, whether you’re creating a newsletter, sending promotional offers, or alerting them to new offerings.

This reduces potential complaints against your business for email spamming and lowers the chances of people unsubscribing from your email list. Use double opt-ins to acquire more qualified leads, build strong relationships with new subscribers, and improve your email deliverability.

2. Include an unsubscribe link

Violating anti-spam laws can get your company’s domain blacklisted, so be sure to include an unsubscribe link to your email messages. This will keep you in adherence with legislation and regulations while improving your subscribers’ experience, too.

Add an unsubscribe link to your emails to ensure you send your messages only to people interested in receiving them.

Tips for including an unsubscribe link in your emails:

Implement newsletter best practices. Display your unsubscribe link so your contacts find them easily, reducing the chances of them tagging your email as spam. Learn from various newsletter examples, such as this one from PlayStation.

Include the unsubscribe link in your email newsletter. | Image source: Sendinblue

Learn anti-spam laws. Familiarize yourself with the anti-spam rules in your market, state, and country to ensure you follow proper practices and avoid getting blacklisted.

3. Clean your email lists regularly

Implement proper list management and assess your email lists to detect potential spam traps to avoid getting placed on a blacklist.

Tips for cleaning your email list and avoiding spam traps:

Update your email list. Send re-engagement emails to subscribers who have not engaged with you for over six months. Then, remove unresponsive contacts to filter out potential spam traps.
Avoid list contamination. Check the correct spelling of your subscribers’ emails to prevent invalid email addresses and potential spam traps from contaminating your list. Use email validation in your sign-up forms to prevent typos, and use email checker tools to verify the legitimacy of the email addresses. Maintain a healthy contact list to avoid spam traps and improve the deliverability of your campaigns.

4. Optimize your email content

Avoid sending email blasts with generic messages to reduce spam complaints and prevent being added to an email blacklist, including a URL blacklist. Work with top-notch email marketing software, such as Zoho Campaigns, to create highly customized emails to personalize your content.

Use the software’s drag-and-drop email editor to customize email layout and design, plus add text, buttons, images, HTML snippets, calendar invites, and polls.

Its advanced option also lets you add dynamic content, allowing you to display different kinds of content based on conditions, such as a specific segment or a list.

Add dynamic content to your email newsletter with the Zoho Campaigns editor.

Build personalized, valuable content your subscribers can relate with so they don’t flag your email as spam and get you added to a blacklist.

5. Secure your server

Set proper security measures and use tools to check IP addresses to protect your email server from bots or malware that can hijack your IP address and email domain.

These harmful programs can send you fake emails, getting you blacklisted even if you’re following proper email marketing practices. Use an IP lookup tool to assess if someone else is using your IP address, which can mean your network server has been hacked.

Prevent malware infections and potential blacklisting of your business by setting up and updating email server security protocols.

6. Avoid manually entering email addresses into your database

Steer clear of manually adding your contacts to your database to avoid typos in their email addresses. This helps prevent you from sending your messages to non-existent emails that bounce and get your business blacklisted.

Also, avoid adding contacts obtained physically, such as printed business cards, to your email list if they didn’t consent to receiving your marketing emails. People who haven’t given permission will most likely report your emails as spam and could get you added to a blacklist.

Connect with prospects via their personal inbox instead, and lead them to a form or landing page, allowing them to opt in to your email list.

What should you do if your company is on an email blacklist? Consider these tips if you do end up on an email blacklist.

Learn the unlisting process. Every blacklist is different, so contact the particular blacklist operator to understand the necessary steps to take you off the list. Some blacklists will unlist you after a few days once they confirm the absence of suspicious activities from your emails.
Know the factors for blacklisting. Assess the activities, email content elements, etc., that got your emails flagged as spam or added to a blacklist, and improve your strategies.
Prove the credibility of your email marketing efforts. Work with blacklist operators and prove you’re a trustworthy sender by following email marketing best practices.

Know the right strategies and keep your business off email blacklists

As long as you know the factors that can get you flagged as spam and avoid them, you’ll be able to avoid being added to a blacklist.

Maintain excellent email hygiene, follow anti-spam regulations, and implement best email marketing practices to keep your business from getting blacklisted.

By Jimmy Rodela

Sourced from the blueprint

In News

Why You Should Focus on Brand Reputation Rather Than Marketing

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Samuel Thimothy,

When you’re building a business, your reputation is all you have. While flashy marketing campaigns or persuasive sales materials can help you close a deal, they’re not going to be strong enough to keep your customers coming back to purchase again.

As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to separate these two ideas. If you’re putting all your energy into attracting new customers, you might forget to give a customer who has purchased from you your best work.

Unfortunately, if the customer isn’t happy with what you’ve done for them, they’ll not only move on to a competitor, but they might tell their friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances about their bad experience. If that happens too often, you develop a bad reputation — the kiss of death in the business world.

On the other hand, a great reputation can bring in new business like a marketing campaign can’t. Here’s why.

Customers remember a great experience and strong reputation.

If you have a reputation for going above and beyond your customers’ expectations, they’ll never forget. What they will forget, however, is the marketing campaign you invested in so heavily. When the ads stop running and the campaign is over, your customers will stop thinking about it.

A brand reputation is emotional. If you were there to help a customer through a difficult time or you were able to brighten their day, they’ll keep that feeling with them long after the transaction is over. They’ll also keep that feeling in mind as they continue to make purchasing decisions, extending the relationship with your business and giving you repeat purchases.

To improve your brand reputation, focus on giving each and every customer a positive, unique experience. Solve their problems. Listen to their needs, and find a solution that works well for them — even if it involves a little extra work. You won’t be disappointed in the results.

A strong brand reputation also means you can invest less in marketing overall. When you’re able to create solid connections with customers who want to keep working with you, you don’t need to attract as many new customers.

Better yet, as your positive brand reputation starts to spread, you’ll get more referrals from the customers you’ve left happy for so long.

Customers share positive and negative experiences with their friends (and online).

You’ve probably encountered it before — you’re about to order a pizza to be delivered when a friend stops you. They tell you how a few months ago, they ordered a pizza from that same restaurant and had a horrible experience. You take their word of warning and choose to order from another place.

While you didn’t experience the bad experience directly, you were influenced by the reputation of the business. Because your friend didn’t believe the business was worth purchasing from again, you decided to purchase somewhere else.

If you’re providing a bad experience to your customers, you could be creating the same negative brand reputation for your business — causing you to lose business to competitors, even if you’ve never interacted with that potential client yourself.

Now, in this same example, let’s say your friend offered an alternative pizza shop for you to order from. They claim to order from this location all the time, and they always have a positive experience.

If you choose to listen to your friend, you’re again letting a brand’s reputation sway your decisions, this time on a positive note. Since you’ve heard good things from someone you can trust, you’re more likely to choose the pizza shop that has glowing reviews.

The same goes for online reviews. If a potential customer is considering working with you, they might jump online and see that your business doesn’t have great reviews. This is a problem that no amount of marketing is going to fix. On the other hand, a number of positive reviews could be just the thing the customer needs to pick up the phone and call you or finally make an online purchase.

Build a reputation– don’t sell a product.

It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers, especially when you’re growing a business. But your number of new business deals or customers acquired isn’t always a true indication of your success.

Instead, focus on the brand reputation you’re building. Because customers tend to remember experiences (both their own and their friends’) longer, your reputation will be harder to change than any marketing campaign. If you’re not building a positive one from the start, it could mean your business is dead before it ever really gets started.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Samuel Thimothy,

VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, a digital marketing intelligence platform

Sourced from Inc.

In News

SAS launches tech and talent partnerships to focus on what it does best: data analytics

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Veronica Combs

SAS is working with KPMG to open Cloud Acceleration Centers and with Handshake to recruit young data scientists.

SAS is using partnerships to define and drive the company’s latest cloud strategy with new alliances with Microsoft, KPMG, and Handshake. SAS will use these new collaborations to expand its product line, help current customers manage cloud projects, and find new employees.

At the SAS Global Forum 2020, executives from the company explained these new partnerships and gave an update on how the company is weathering the coronavirus pandemic.

Oliver Schabenberger, COO at SAS, said the company is financially stable, and although the pandemic might end the company’s 44 straight years of profitability, SAS has announced that it won’t lay off or furlough employees during the pandemic.

The goal of the Microsoft partnership is to build smart, automated, reliable, and explainable decision systems that can work at scale, Schabenberger said.

“As data moves to the cloud, analytics follow and businesses processes become more data-driven and analytics led,” Schabenberger said.

Jay Upchurch, the CIO at SAS, said discussions about the Microsoft partnership started a year ago. The two companies realized they had many of the same key customers, including global banking companies, which sparked the initial conversation. The partnership also was driven by similar corporate cultures, complementary tech, and commercial opportunities, he added.

“There also was overwhelming customer demand for SAS services on Azure, so we listened to the market,” Upchurch said.

David Macdonald, an EVP and chief sales officer at SAS, said these customer collaborations will be more than just moving existing customer workloads to Azure.

“It’s not just lift and shift but taking advantage of the collaboration to leverage cloud services and microservices as well,” he said.

Upchurch said there will be three phases in the SAS and Microsoft partnership:

Now: Migrate customers to Azure to optimize software and hardware
Near-term: Next release of SAS Viya on Azure Marketplace using cloud-native services and optimizations
Long-term: Launch SAS solutions and industry offerings running on top of Viya on Azure

SAS will migrate its internal operations to Azure as well. The company will continue to support all cloud platforms that its customers are using.

Macdonald said the Microsoft partnership will help customers speed up their digital transformation projects.

“Decision-making support is almost a prerequisite for these changes, and cloud services like APIs and microservices are becoming table stakes for improving agility,” he said.

Macdonald said SAS has been helping cities and countries respond to new business demands caused by the coronavirus. This has included helping banks define new baselines for stress testing and helping hospitals forecast bed capacity and ventilator availability. The company posted these models on GitHub.

Two more partnerships focus on students and digital transformation

At the virtual event, SAS announced two other partnerships with KPMG and Handshake. SAS will work with KPMG cloud consultants to open Cloud Acceleration Centers. The centers will support SAS clients who have their own cloud environment as well as those who are employing other cloud-based managed services. KPMG has a network of more than 400 practitioners around the world to support SAS clients with digital transformation projects and cloud migration.

At the start of the pandemic, SAS offered access to its online training resources for free for 30 days and recently extended this access indefinitely.

SAS will be working with Handshake to find students who are interested in data science as a career. Handshake is a career website for college students in the US, which helps students filter job opportunities based on career state. The site helps large companies including the Fortune 500 find early-career talent.

Feature Image Credit: SAS and Microsoft announced a new cloud technology partnership to integrate SAS analytics tools with Microsoft’s Azure platform. Image: SAS

By Veronica Combs

Sourced from TechRepublic

In Uncategorized

Google Again: We Don’t Look At Analytics Bounce Rates For Ranking

July 10, 2020 No Comments

By Barry Schwartz

Again, Google has said that it does not look at [Google] Analytics bounce rate data for ranking web sites.

John Mueller of Google said in a webmaster hangout video at the 25 minute mark, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”

Here is the video embed at the time he said this:

Google said this in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Google said bounce rates are not good signals, in 2008 Google said it is a noisy signal and also in 2008 said click data is not used for rankings. This is a myth Google said but then you have people at Google misspeaking causing more confusion.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.

By Barry Schwartz

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable