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Email Marketing Essentials for every small business

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Sourced from MARKETBL

Email marketing provides the most direct line of communication to your target market. Your email database is full of potential and current customers as well as possible future customers; or at least it should be, especially in light of GDPR. This database should then essentially be warm leads, providing an ever-growing pool of warm leads which should be easier to convert in in the future and provide a cost-effective source of sales as your small business grows. So the question is, what do you need to know for your business to benefit from all of the best outcomes of an effective email marketing campaign?

Image result for email marketing
Build Your Email Lists

The first port of call is to build and develop your email list, after all the basis of a successful email marketing campaign or strategy, are the recipients. However, it’s not enough to blindly build up the number of email addresses on your list; you need to ensure the quality also.

You can do this by segmenting your lists or splitting out into separate lists the email addresses you collect. Segmenting your lists will allow you to keep track of the sources of emails, whether they’ve come through an ebook campaign or are past customers. By segmenting these lists out, you’re able to ensure members only get emails that are targeted and relevant to them.

Above all ensure you receive Opt-in consent from all members of any lists if you’d like to avoid a potential 20 million euro fine when the EU GDPR kicks in. Seeking Opt-in, which is essentially informed consent of joining an emailing list also helps to improve the quality of your list, as your campaigns will be viewed by only those who are actively interested in your business and what you offer.

Software

Pick the software you use for your email marketing wisely as switching can be a hassle and can damage your brand consistency, as well as leading to errors such as duplication.

The best option for small businesses would be MailChimp as it offers an easy interface and has a very shallow learning curve. Of course, the main reason many small businesses use MailChimp for their email marketing is the cost. MailChimp is free for up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails a month.

The downside is however once you start to grow your email lists the costs can begin to jump quite rapidly; though this may not be so much of an issue for you at that point. The other aspect to consider is appearance. Many MailChimp templates can look repetitive and can be recognised as a MailChimp template, even by the casual reader. The monotonous look is something of a casualty of MailChimp’s success; so many businesses use the service that it’s now highly recognisable. Consider opting for custom HTML templates that you can have designed for your business.

Auto-Responses

When users opt-in for your email lists, they should receive an email notification. Auto-responses can help to reduce your unsubscribe rate as users have a reference point. Within the auto-response, you should detail the reason they subscribed and what they can expect. These automated emails help them to remember and reference why they signed up, and the fact that they did sign up.

Sticking to the activities you outline in this opt-in is also very important as you do not shock your audience with your emails or their regularity. This avoids situations in which recipients of your emails feel they have been misleading.

Image result for email design
Email Design

Good visuals keep readers engaged with the content and message of your emails. People naturally respond more positively to well-designed pieces of content. So nailing down a quality design for your email campaign that sells your brand as reliable and well-put-together as well as making clear what’s on offer.

Think about the flow of information and the logic of the order in which data you deliver. Consider the story you’re attempting to telling with each email and the best way of doing so. The visual design has a large part to play in setting the tone of the message that is received.

Also, Make sure Calls to action are clearly discernible. Within most emails, you’ll have multiple ‘calls to action’, some of which will be softer conversions. Making this evident in the design is essential. Conversions that will offer your business the most value need highlighting the most provided this makes sense in the context of the campaign.

Email content

Providing value should be the foundation of every email campaign. Recipients need an incentive to review the email and ideally convert into a sale. You can offer value by sharing your content, providing discounts and free or exclusive services. The key here is making membership to your businesses email list seem worthwhile and desirable. This keeps recipients opening future emails and paying attention to the contents of them as a pose to unsubscribing.

The primary goal of most email marketing campaigns will be to sell your product or service, so by all means, do so, sell!  Selling is to some degree expected by most users, but don’t be too forceful with this. Make it clear as to why readers need what you’re selling but don’t be repetitive. If you convey your message well enough, readers will recognise if they need what you are offering.

Timing (Frequency)

Scheduling is also crucial to email marketing. Setting out what day of the week or month you launch your email campaigns will help with regulating the frequency of them. You will be walking a fine line between staying in regular contact with your mailing list to nurture them as leads, and not saturating their inboxes, which often leads to poor feedback and unsubscriptions.

A default frequency of weekly tends to be touted to small businesses but keep in consideration how much content you currently have and your capacity. It is vital to avoid being repetitive, and at times to keep up with a weekly newsletter message and material can get reused to the point where they become monotonous and mediocre.

Image result for a/b testing
A/B Testing

The best way to improve your email marketing campaigns is to test them. And where conversions are at stake, testing every element of your emails to find out what works and what doesn’t can help to transform a poorly performing campaign into a successful one.

Test everything from the Subject line of your emails to the mobile responsiveness. Remember 61% of emails get viewed on mobile devices.

Try A/B testing some of these components of your emails:

  • The Subject Line
  • The Offer/promotion or Call-to-action
  • The Layout of the email
  • The Design of the mailer including the images or colours used
  • The Level of personalisation. E.g. Using generics Vs First name’s.
  • The Content formats; e.g. written or visual content
  • The Headline of the mailer

Consistently testing all of these aspects of your email campaigns will allow you to pull together a better campaign in future; resulting in what will be your ultimate format and campaign. This feeds directly into the final essential aspect of email marketing.

Analytics and Measuring

There’s no use tinkering and testing your email marketing campaigns if you’re not gathering and measuring the analytics. These key indicators, like the number of opens or click-throughs, will help to benchmark and assess the success of each campaign. Making changes and testing needs to be based on the analytics collected and measured purely.

Do not underestimate how important it is to measure every action and change in your email marketing campaigns, these activities are numbers based at their core after all, so keeping this in mind will be the deciding factor in making your email marketing campaigns a success.

Final Thoughts

You’re now equipped with everything you need to know to run effective email marketing campaigns for your small business. Like anything in business remember to keep up to date with the latest new tools and methods to keep at the forefront. We highly recommend you review the General Data Protection Regulations to ensure you avoid any potential fines and keep your email marketing activities completely compliant.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!

 

Sourced from MARKETBL

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24 Email Marketing Stats Every Business Owner Should Know (Infographic)

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By Kimberly de Silva

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs. It can make engaging with and retaining customers much easier with high-powered tools like automation and personalization. And using mobile-friendly email templates ensures that no matter what device your customer uses to view them, your emails will always look great.

Campaign Monitor has created an infographic, “24 Email Marketing Stats You Need to Know” to help you understand just what value email marketing brings to a small business. For example, for every $1 spent, email marketing brings in $44; for one of the highest ROIs of any marketing tactic.

Personalized messages bring results

A high ROI is fantastic, of course, but with a powerful marketing tool like this, there are even better reasons for email marketing. By using an email service provider, you can create emails that are personalized for each customer, helping them to connect with your business.

The more your customers engage with your business and emails, the more likely they are to purchase from you. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened. And personalization doesn’t stop at the subject line.

You can add images and content that are specific to each reader to keep them interested in what your business offers. The more you can send emails that your customers want to see, with information that they’re looking for, the more likely they’ll stay your customer. Using data you already have about them can help you to personalize emails a little bit more. Keeping your data updated, by using signup forms or surveys, can help you collect the information you need to do this.

Automation saves time and engages customers

Automation, creating a series of emails once and sending them out automatically when certain criteria are met, can help keep customers coming back for more. Sending out welcome emails, reminder emails, VIP emails or even birthday emails can help to hold your customer’s attention, and lead to sales.

As a matter of fact, automated emails can generate 320 percent more revenue than non-automated ones. Using automation and personalization together can make marketers’ lives a little easier since they need to only create an email once to have each person get the version they need, and sent when they need it.

Since email open rates increased to 68 percent on mobile devices in 2016, it’s important to make sure your email can be read on any device. Just about everyone has a mobile phone and reads their emails on it these days. The easiest way to do this is to use a template that’s already set up to work on mobile devices. This way no special coding is needed and your customers will have an easy-to-read and useful email. Plus, you’ll still be able to use personalization and automation, the end device won’t change how they work.

Email marketing stats worth knowing

From personalization and automation to a high ROI, email marketing can make staying in touch with customers a breeze. And, it will help to not only convert leads to customers but help retain the customers you already have. For more useful and fun email marketing stats and tips, check out the infographic below.

Feature Image credit: juststock | Getty Images 

This story originally appeared on Bizness Apps

By Kimberly de Silva

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Importance of Email Marketing in Mobile App Development

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By Harnil Oza.

Email marketing creates awareness for your app leading to downloads

You’re reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

There is no doubt you have created a mobile app with fascinating features! But what is the essence of such app if it fails in the market? Truth is; you saw a need and created an app to provide solutions to such need. There is no way you can meet this need without app downloads by its supposed users. Hence, the need for result-oriented strategies targeted at driving app downloads and use. To do this, you must include these strategies right into the app development process. This is a key strategy for most top app development companies in the world.

Many factors are responsible for the failure of an app in the highly competitive app market. With these result-oriented strategies, you can surmount the challenges posed by these factors. The right audience and ad campaigns are some factors that promote app downloads and use. The truth is; even with the right audience and robust marketing campaign, you can end up with a failed app.

An amazing result-oriented strategy that can drive app success is email marketing. With the internet, email marketing has become an important tool in mobile app development. For most top app development companies, it is a key tool used during app development to drive app success.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a unique type of direct marketing. Here, you communicate with potential app users via electronic mail. The truth is; any email you send to your existing or potential app users is email marketing. It is sending emails to potential app users to convince them to download and use your app. More so, it entails sending emails with the aim to building relationships between your app and its users. Thus, it encourages continuous app use which leads to app user’s loyalty. Today, most top app development companies use email marketing in driving app downloads. This has helped such developers churn successful apps into the market.

Today, beliefs are that email is on the verge of collapse due to social media. This is far from the truth as it is one of the most used marketing tools in the world. Here are a few advantages email marketing offers your app over conventional marketing:

-Trackability of the exact ROI of your email campaigns

-Ability to reach massive potential app users from all over the world

-Opportunity to segment your mail list and emails

-Reach out to current and potential app users via personalized and self-motivated content

With email marketing, you can be creative in churning relevant content at the right time.

Why Email Marketing in Mobile App Development?

Email marketing should be a key component of your app development process. Today, with the rapid increase in using mobile phones, you can reach a wide audience via emails. Here are few reasons to integrate email marketing into your app development process.

1. Low-cost With Huge ROI

It does not cost you much to use email marketing in app development to raise awareness. The truth is; email marketing is cheap. There are printing costs, advertising or postage fees. Whether you do it or you hire an agency to do it, it cost nearly nothing. Hence, the need to use email marketing during your app’s pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. With this, you can reach thousands of potential app users at low-cost with outstanding results. Studies show that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get about $40 equivalence of ROI.

2. Has Immediacy

Email marketing has immediacy. It produces meaningful results within minutes once sent to potential app users. An app pre-launch mail is a unique marketing strategy you can use for the awareness of your app. More so, a launch mail is an excellent marketing tactic you can use to drive app downloads and use. A post-launch mail is relevant to keep app users updated about changes in your app. Such emails will create a massive sense of urgency for both current and potential app users. Thus, convinces them on the need to take immediate actions to download and use your app. This is why most top app development companies cannot do away with email marketing.

3. Easily Targeted

Email marketing creates awareness for your app leading to downloads. The truth is; this unique marketing strategy solves all the intrinsic troubles of non-target campaigns. With email marketing, you can send emails to your chosen audience. In fact, by segmenting your email contact, you have control over who sees your mail. You can easily target potential app users using relevant demographics. With this, your messages get across to the right potential app users with ease. The truth is; you can send personalized messages to a target audience for app downloads and use. Thus, results in a higher conversion rate in form of app downloads and use by your target audience.

4. Highly Easy to Share

Emails are highly easy to share. Using email marketing gives you the privilege to send messages that can be shared with ease. With emails, app users can share your emails to convince loved ones to download and use your app. All this can happen at the click of a button by app users. Today, most top app development companies use email marketing because it’s easily shared.

5. Global Access

Email marketing gives your app campaigns access to a global audience. With emails, you can reach thousands of potential app users across the globe in seconds. Although social media can help you reach a global audience, it does not show who reads your content. Most top app development companies fancy email marketing because it gives access to a global audience.

6. Ease to Measure Results

You cannot ignore the role of analytics in measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. Unlike email marketing, conventional marketing tools give uncertain and estimated results. With email marketing, you get accurate and helpful metrics. It gives metrics such as open rates, retention rates, and click-rates. This gives you insights into the interests and behaviors of app users. Email marketing helps you to monitor and fine-tune information derived from app users. This is why it is an integral part of app development for most top app development companies.

How to Maximize Email Marketing for Mobile App Downloads and Use

It is possible to maximize the performance of email marketing for your app. To achieve this, you should do the following;

1. Fine-tune your email so it gets delivered to and opened by potential app users.

2. Fine-tune your email so potential app users can read and act upon it.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock 

By Harnil Oza

CEO, Hyperlink Infosystem

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

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Conversations and Email Marketing: What’s the Relationship?

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By Courtney Sembler

As humans, we’re always having conversations: with our co-worker, friend, partner, or even with our leads and customers. The conversations we have shape our professional and personal lives.

Having great conversations is what inbound marketing is all about: attracting the right visitors to your site, engaging with them, and nurturing them through their customer lifecycle. Your emails shouldn’t be any different. Having a great conversation is as much a part of email marketing as your subject line. So how do you create a relationship between your email marketing and your conversations?

What Are Conversations?

Conversations are everywhere. Think about the last conversation you had and where that conversation took place. There aren’t many places in our world today where we don’t have conversations. We communicate through multiple channels, such as phone, email, Facebook Messenger, and text.

So what exactly is a conversation? Generally, a conversation is defined as an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas between two or more parties.

But as technology is evolving, there are more ways we are communicating. So the conversation definition needs somewhat of an expansion. A conversation is an interactive communication between two or more parties.

You might think conversations only occur in newer technology such as messenger and chatbots. But never leave email out of the equation. To send highly engaging emails your contacts want to interact with, those emails need to be human. There is no better way to be human than to have a conversation.

So what are the ways you can create great conversations with your contacts through email?

Want to learn more about conversations? Check them out here.

conversation_popup.jpg

How Do You Create Conversations in Emails?

Two ways to have great conversations in your emails include:

  1. Send email based off behavior.
  2. Create conversational email copy.

Send email based off behavior

Behavioral email means sending targeted emails to your contacts based on their actions and behaviors.

Behavioral email focuses on the idea that every interaction a user has with your company should have an expected and appropriate reaction.

By looking at all the interactions and your prospects’ responses, you can start to develop a sense of your contacts’ behavior. Each person in your contact database will tell you, by their actions, how often you should send them email.

Create conversational email copy

The biggest piece of advice I can give for creating conversational emails is to be human. This means keeping it real and sometimes uncomfortably honest, using words you’d use in everyday language. Write copy that sounds like it came from a human.

Remember that your email is going to a human, so the language you use should reflect that.

Instead of trying to sell your products or services (which you know are great), spend time in your emails giving recommendations, interviews around subject areas that you have, or tips and tricks of how to do something you know your contacts will love (based on their behavior).

Sign your email with a name that your contact might recognize. It doesn’t have to be “xoxo,” but a simple “Thanks, Court” will go a long way.

Want more tips on writing email copy? Check it out here.

What Are HubSpot Conversations?

So how can you organize your conversations in HubSpot? One of the most important aspects of email marketing is understanding that your emails don’t live in a bubble.

Your contacts engage with all types of content you create on every channel you use. It can become overwhelming to keep track of and understand all the types of conversations you are having.

And because email marketing continues to be a powerhouse in your inbound marketing strategy and continues to evolve, understanding where your emails fit into the conversations will be extremely important. A well-positioned conversation will be more engaging than a well- designed email with tons of bells and whistles.

This is where HubSpot comes in.

HubSpot Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah states:

“With Conversations, we’re going beyond a single solution, like site chat, to build something that centralizes all of a business’ communications with customers and prospects into one collaborative environment.”

He is referring to the new HubSpot conversations tool. The tool is designed to help you organize and keep track of all the conversations you’re having across multiple channels.

What can you expect from the product? Conversations will be different from the other conversation tools on the market today. The key difference is that you’re going to be able to tie all of these conversations directly to your CRM.

  1. Multi-channel: Conversations unifies conversations from Facebook Messenger, onsite chat, social media, email, and other messaging outlets into one shared inbox.
  2. Tied into a CRM: Rooting messaging into a CRM enables companies to have the full context of past interactions wherever and whenever they may have taken place.
  3. Scaleable with chatbots: Conversations will enable companies to build chatbots without needing technical skill and scale responses to match high- volume inquiries.

conversations-001-1.png

 

Your inbound marketing strategy should focus on being human, helpful, and holistic. There is nothing more human than having a great, contextual and timely conversation.

Want to learn more about HubSpot Conversations?

Check it out here.

By Courtney Sembler

Sourced from HubSpot

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How Can Your E-Commerce Business Leverage The AI Trend?

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By Stankevicius MGM

AI-powered email marketing tools are revolutionizing the way email is built.

Business owners would agree: email still holds the crown as one of the most valuable ways to connect to customers. And rightfully so, as, according to the Direct Marketing Association UK, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $30 in revenue. However, approaches to email campaigns remain largely outdated. The result: the more emails users receive, the more they are ignored, which has led to a decline in email use, at least among millenials.

Thus, AI has emerged as an increasingly important part of email marketing for businesses across the globe. And thanks to AI, email marketing is getting a revamp which solves many challenges that e-commerce business owners have been facing.

In today’s era of micro-personalization and increasing data protection demands, e-commerce business owners find it difficult to adapt to the ever-changing rules of email marketing. Too often, in order to maintain the competitive edge, entrepreneurs face the need to hire additional help such as marketing assistants or agencies. Now, with a new generation of smart and simple AI tools that support most e-commerce platforms, an e-commerce business owner can supercharge their email marketing campaign single-handedly. Instead of learning new rules or bringing on board new hires, AI does the work for the e-commerce business owner.

Here’s how AI raises the bar for e-commerce email marketing.

Predictive Personalization

Personalization means to email marketers what the Holy Grail would be to Indiana Jones — rare, elusive, seemingly unattainable. Not anymore, thanks to AI.

AI helps the business owner to identify the behaviors and events that should trigger email-based marketing communications, determining which offers will produce the desired results.

This level of personalization would be all but impossible to achieve without AI.  “Machine learning helps AI-based email tools to understand what is most meaningful for a specific audience,” says Igor Solovyov, founder and CEO of Triggmine, an intelligent AI-powered email marketing platform.

Powerful Ambition

Triggmine’s goal, among others, is for the platform to segment and target audiences using “natural language technology to select the words for subject lines, body copy and calls-to-action. This way, the message not only sounds like it has been written by a human, but is also consistent with the language generally used by the e-commerce business”. While that ambition is certainly powerful, it is not unwarranted. When tech research firm Gartner gave its predictions for tech in 2018, its first was that machines would play a role in writing copy because of the unique insights big data can provide. Intelligent AI-powered email marketing platforms like Triggmine’s are paving the way for a revolution in the way E-Commerce is practiced.

Seeing the potential of AI for the E-Commerce business owners that they work with daily, Triggmine made the decision to switch to AI due to the speed, precision and specificity that an AI platform can provide its customers. For small and medium business owners who don’t have time to handle their marketing activities, this allows business owners to focus on running their business whilst optimizing their marketing campaigns, for minimal effort.

AI tailors messages for various segments of an email list and delivers suggestions precisely for a particular niche or person. AI-powered email applications use big data to suggest the type of content that complements each stage of the buyer’s journey. By analyzing behavior and clickstream, AI essentially replaces the function of not just the copywriter, but the marketer too.

Time It Right

For years, marketers have recognized that when they send emails has meaningful impact on open rates and click-through rates.

For example, an email recipient in Paris might be less likely to open an email that is delivered in the dead of night because the send time was optimized for subscribers in the U.S. Central Standard Time zone. For this reason, some email marketers segment their subscribers in an effort to ensure that their emails are delivered to each segment at a good time.

Besides, the attention span of customers is so short that if the message arrives in customer’s inbox at the wrong time, it gets buried or even deleted straight away. AI combats this peculiarity in a certain way. By determining when a particular customer is most active online, AI can judge when there is a higher chance of the customer reading and acting on the message. The AI-powered marketing tool then acts even more intelligently: instead of emailing large segments of email list, it optimizes send time on a per-subscriber basis. Doing this manually would be nearly impossible, but it’s easy work for AI.

Historically, email marketing has been mostly manual, strongly oriented towards campaigns. With the arrival of AI, email is laser-focused and single user-oriented. This of course begs the question, what‘s the next frontier for e-commerce email marketing? The answer is clear: optimizing the mobile experience. According to recent studies, by 2020 there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users worldwide. That’s nearly as much as the current population of the earth!

For this transformation, marketers need a helping hand and what will be better than a smart robot? Artificial Intelligence tools such as Triggmine are fundamentally reshaping different marketing channels such as email marketing — and there’s more to come.

Feature Image Credit: Courtesy of Stankevicius MGM 

By Stankevicius MGM

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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24 Email Marketing Stats Every Business Owner Should Know (Infographic)

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By Kimberly de Silva.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs.

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many marketing programs. It can make engaging with and retaining customers much easier with high-powered tools like automation and personalization. And using mobile-friendly email templates ensures that no matter what device your customer uses to view them, your emails will always look great.

Campaign Monitor has created an infographic, “24 Email Marketing Stats You Need to Know” to help you understand just what value email marketing brings to a small business. For example, for every $1 spent, email marketing brings in $44; for one of the highest ROIs of any marketing tactic.

Personalized messages bring results

A high ROI is fantastic, of course, but with a powerful marketing tool like this, there are even better reasons for email marketing. By using an email service provider, you can create emails that are personalized for each customer, helping them to connect with your business.

The more your customers engage with your business and emails, the more likely they are to purchase from you. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened. And personalization doesn’t stop at the subject line.

You can add images and content that are specific to each reader to keep them interested in what your business offers. The more you can send emails that your customers want to see, with information that they’re looking for, the more likely they’ll stay your customer. Using data you already have about them can help you to personalize emails a little bit more. Keeping your data updated, by using signup forms or surveys, can help you collect the information you need to do this.

Automation saves time and engages customers

Automation, creating a series of emails once and sending them out automatically when certain criteria are met, can help keep customers coming back for more. Sending out welcome emails, reminder emails, VIP emails or even birthday emails can help to hold your customer’s attention, and lead to sales.

As a matter of fact, automated emails can generate 320 percent more revenue than non-automated ones. Using automation and personalization together can make marketers’ lives a little easier since they need to only create an email once to have each person get the version they need, and sent when they need it.

Since email open rates increased to 68 percent on mobile devices in 2016, it’s important to make sure your email can be read on any device. Just about everyone has a mobile phone and reads their emails on it these days. The easiest way to do this is to use a template that’s already set up to work on mobile devices. This way no special coding is needed and your customers will have an easy-to-read and useful email. Plus, you’ll still be able to use personalization and automation, the end device won’t change how they work.

Email marketing stats worth knowing

From personalization and automation to a high ROI, email marketing can make staying in touch with customers a breeze. And, it will help to not only convert leads to customers but help retain the customers you already have. For more useful and fun email marketing stats and tips, check out the infographic below.

This story originally appeared on Bizness Apps

Feature Image Credit: juststock | Getty Images 

By Kimberly de Silva.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

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Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

 

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Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

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Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here. 

 

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How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

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A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

 

 

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

 

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Advertising Product Results? Put Images Closer Together

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Consumers believe a product is more effective when images of the product and its desired outcome are placed closer together in advertisements, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

“Merely changing the spatial proximity between the image of a product and its desired effect in an advertisement influences judgment of product effectiveness. Consumers tend to judge the product to be more effective when the two images are closer versus farther apart,” write authors Boyoun Chae (University of British Columbia), Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore), and Rui (Juliet) Zhu (University of British Columbia).

Advertising done right: The “problem” (wrinkles) and the solution (Wrinkle cream effectiveness) in very close proximity.

Many advertisements promoting the effectiveness of a product show both a product image (anti-wrinkle cream) and an image of the promised results (a face without wrinkles). Objectively, the distance between the two images should not affect how consumers judge the product’s quality.

This advertisement is done so well, the text about the product’s effectiveness is actually touching the face of the model.

In a series of studies, consumers were asked to judge the effectiveness of a variety of products promising specific results (acne cream, pain reliever, nasal allergy spray, bug spray, fabric softener). Consumers tended to assume a product was more effective when its image was placed closer to that of its promised effect. The proximity of the images was more influential when consumers were less knowledgeable about a product category or when the results were expected sooner rather than later.

Here we see there is some distance between the product (a razor that gives a perfect shave) and the outcome (Mourinho’s perfectly shaven face).

Companies should understand the subtle effect that spatial proximity between images has on consumer judgment of product effectiveness. When companies want to promote the immediate effects of their products, images of the product and its desired effect should be put closer to each other in an advertisement.

“The spatial proximity between visual representations of cause and effect in an advertisement can influence consumer judgments of product effectiveness. The closer the distance between an image of a product (an acne treatment) and that of its potential effect (a smooth face), the more effective consumers will judge the product to be,” the authors conclude.

 

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