9 Reasons Your Emails Get Rejected

It’s email dating 101: there’s nothing worse than waking up, checking your email, and find that annoying email from last night – trying to get back into your inbox for a second round.

As with dating, a lot can go right in an email. The person you’re currently sharing your message with might just be the perfect customer for your brand. Your email might appeal to their needs and build a lifelong relationship. Or your recipient may discover that while you two have no chemistry, your product would be a perfect match for one of their friends.

But (also like dating) a lot can go wrong. If you’re striking out in your email campaigns, you’ve got to tweak your pitch. Here are nine reasons that marketing emails get rejected – any of these sound familiar?

1. Your subject lines made a bad first impression.

Your recipient’s experience with your email starts before it’s ever opened – with the subject line. A lot is riding on these 50 characters or less. Some classic subject line “don’ts” include boring copy, ALL CAPS, excessive exclamation points, and – of course – deceiving messages. The subject line “Warning” or “Re:” might earn you opens, but it won’t earn you customers.

What to do:  A/B test all your subject lines. Make sure they reflect your email’s intent.

2. You bored them to death.

Are your emails dry, long, and/or monotonous? Imagine that the recipient is looking for her shoes, her dog is barking to be let out, and she’s late for a meeting. She does not have a year to spend on decoding and analyzing your jargon. This is your chance. Don’t waste it.

What to do: Don’t be afraid of a little “edge,” a human touch, or even a fun, unusual inclusion. And don’t write a novel – the faster you get to your CTA (when you ask for a second date), the better.

3. You forgot to test your display.

You wouldn’t show up to a date in a stained shirt, or with toilet paper stuck to your shoe – which is why you check out your appearance before you arrive. Email is similar. Don’t show up in your buyer’s inbox without testing your display.

What to do: Before you send out an email, test it on all email clients – and don’t forget mobile.

4. You advertised a bigger, better, or cheaper version of yourself.

Don’t exaggerate your height in your online dating profile, and don’t make false promises in your emails. Are you a car dealership? Splendid – I’m in the market for a car! But don’t claim your deals are “once in a lifetime” if you’ll be holding the exact same sale next weekend.

What to do: You’re looking for a long-term relationship, not a one night stand. There’s no need to advertise your challenges, but if you highlight qualities you don’t really have, your customer will eventually find out.

5. You forgot his/her name.

During my worst date in college, the girl admitted she’d forgotten my name. She explained that she’d gone on a lot of dates recently, but the damage was done. Guys and girls, you need to personalize your emails – at the very least, don’t use the wrong name.

What to do: When you email your database, use first names if you’ve got them.  This is easy if your marketing automation allows you to use “tokens” in your emails.

6. You brought up money too soon.

Email is not the place to ask for a sale – it’s like asking your date to buy your dinner while you’re still eating appetizers. Many people read emails while they’re rushed, busy, or waiting in line for coffee, which is why an email is a great place to build relationships with your customers or to educate them on your product or deals. Don’t address your greed – address their needs.

What to do: Don’t mention pricing in your email. Mentioning a free trial or referral program is fine, but don’t overdo it.

7. You overshared. Again.

Your audience doesn’t need emails about how you’re remodeling your building, or how your company recently celebrated its fourteenth month in business. Save these kind of updates for your blog or social…or for a phone call with your mom.

What to do: Keep your emails about the reader. They should be interesting and entertaining to people who aren’t already 100% invested in your brand.

8. You came off as insecure.

Making fun of the competition just makes you look insecure. And if you’re saying this to customers of your competitor, it’s even worse – they hear, “Everything you own is terrible, and ours is better.”

What to do: Take the high road. If you are truly better than your competitors, the proof will be in the results.

 9. You didn’t listen.

Email marketing is about conversations. Don’t send multiple emails on a topic your audience isn't interested in; don’t send the same email twice; and – if you have the technology – don’t offer them content they’ve already viewed on your website or on social.

What To Do: Use marketing automation to listen and respond to your audience’s preferences and behaviors. Set up a subscription center. Run a survey. Listen.

Ok, supernova: you are now prepped and ready to make it past the spam filters, past your audience’s apprehensions, and into their hearts. Still wondering why your emails are getting rejected? Drop me a line in the comments below. 

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How to Make Your Email Campaign More Clickable

The makeup of an email newsletter can vary tremendously. Some businesses include entire articles in their emails, others send a list of headlines with a teaser paragraph and thumbnail and some just list out headlines.

What works best, in terms of engaging recipients and getting people to click? We asked Stephanie Miller, vice president of member relations at the Direct Marketing Association. As a digital marketing expert, she helps businesses connect with the people, resources, and ideas they need to optimize their response and revenue.

Her first message: there’s no magic bullet that solves this question. However, here are five strategies that will help you arrive at an email campaign that works for best your audience.

Think about your users

It may seem counterintuitive, but putting an entire article in a newsletter can create a better experience for your readers. They can open your email on their computer or mobile device, read your content and then delete or forward it when they’re done. Most businesses want to strike a balance between the user experience and the needs of the business. “It can be a really good experience but, of course, you don’t have any clicks to be sure that they’re reading anything,” Miller says.

Listing a series of articles and links instead of entire posts seems like a solution, but it’s not always the user-friendly option. “You risk people skimming and not clicking on more than one article or not clicking on any articles because they’re on their device and maybe it’s just kind of clunky. Then they miss the content,” says Miller.

Sending too much content can also be stressful for some audiences, especially if they’re busy and don’t have time to read everything.

Explains Miller: “You really have to think about the experience and think about, ‘Is my objective to get the content and create a good experience that’s content-driven, or is my goal to drive them to a website?'”

Test everything

The best layout for your specific email newsletter depends on your audience, and the best way to determine an ideal format for yours is to test several options. “You don’t know what’s going to work best, so you test it,” says Miller. “You can certainly gather ideas and try some best practices, but you never know for your particular audience what’s going to resonate.”

Tracking the rate at which recipients click on the links in your emails over time is one way to test how changes affect audience reaction. Running split tests—where half of your readers get one format and the rest get another—is another way. Talking to your readers, via surveys, on the phone during support calls or in person at events is also key: ask them whether or not they find value in what you’re sending them and why. Use that feedback to guide your decisions and modify your newsletter layout, if needed.

Be relevant and consistent

Email subscribers like to know what they’re getting. If a reader finds a subject line intriguing they expect to be able to find that content easily when they open your email. Make it difficult for them, or worse yet, create a misleading subject line, and you’ll leave readers frustrated or annoyed.

Smartly segmenting your list, or targeting specific groups in your list with highly relevant content, is another way to make sure the recipients of a particular message are interested in the content, which will boost the rate at which they click.

Make links visible

“You want to make sure that your content is visible with images turned off,” Miller points out. Making sure that you have links within the text of your email for your readers to click even if the images, such as a call-to-action button, don’t load is essential.

Have any advice of your own to add? Share away in the comments.

This post contributed by guest author, Yael Grauer. Grauer is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor. Find her online at Yaelwrites.com.

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How to Run Social Media Marketing Experiments (with 73 Ideas)

Running social media marketing can be hard when you have no idea where to begin. Social media is vast and the abundance of social media marketing options leaves social media managers undecided on which is the best strategy to follow. Fortunately, there exists a way to identify top performing social media strategies. You can identify top performing strategies with maximum ROI by running social media marketing experiments.

So, how do you run a social media marketing experiment?

Here’s a clean, 6-step process.

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize goals
3. Design the experiment
4. Test ideas
5. Analyze tests & glean insights
6. Automate top-performing ideas

Before we proceed with details on every step, here are a few characteristics of social media that you should consider before designing social media marketing experiments.

1. On social media, there are controllable (content quality, target audience and impact) and uncontrollable factors (organic reach).

2. Every experiment can have different outcomes based on different inputs. For instance, the experiment when boosted by say employee advocacy will show different results when not.

The 6-step process to setting-up, running and measuring a social media marketing experiment

1. Set goals

Social media needn’t be only a marketing tool. Social media can be used to impact every aspect of a business, from its inception to revenue-generation and customer support. In 2018, social media managers are aware of this fact, which is why it’s important to question ourselves how much value we’re getting from the time and resources spent on social media.

Goal-setting is one way to answer this question. In fact, goal-setting may also have a direct impact on an individual’s performance and happiness, according to a Harvard study.

The following is a list of social media goals that you can consider when planning your social media marketing experiments.

13 social media goals you could consider chasing

1. Product/company branding

2. Increasing brand awareness

3. Driving social media traffic

4. Lead generation

5. Revenue generation

6. Increasing brand engagement

7. Building communities

8. Providing customer support

9. Multiplying press mentions

10. Growing co-marketing opportunities

11. Acquiring brand advocates

12. Collecting UGC, reviews and testimonials

13. Launching products

Broad or narrow, these goals provide context to your social media marketing activities and help you measure them accurately. It’s best to create experiments that have no more than one goal, so your efforts are focused and easier to measure.

Consider, for instance, that you have created two social media posts – Post A and Post B. Post A has performed better in terms of social media engagement but Post B has performed better in terms of social media traffic. Which post would you consider a success?

Having goals in place prevents this kind of ambiguity.

2. Prioritize goals

Every business has multiple goals that can be reached via social media marketing. But every business also has to deal with limited resources and budgets. That’s where priorities become important. Priorities help you decide where and what to focus your resources on.

There are tons of systems that you can use to effectively prioritize goals. The trick is prioritizing what will give you most important results. How do you identify those goals?

At DrumUp, we use the Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort system. Here’s how it works.

1. List all of your goals on sheets.

2. Score every goal on Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 implying most and 1 implying least.

3. Calculate an average rounded off score that you can refer to for decision-making.

4. Work on the easiest goals first and make your way up to the harder goals, or prioritize but whatever is most necessary.

This process may eat-up your time in the beginning, but once you get used to it, using this process will save you tons of invaluable time.

3. Design the experiment

Once you have prioritized goals, it’s time to design an experiment. Doing this is simple. You need a bucket of ideas and hypotheses on how those ideas will help you achieve your goal. When connecting the idea-hypothesis-outcome, ask yourself what you’ll do and how it’ll lead to achieving your goal and why that will be the outcome.

For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, you can accomplish this outcome in so many different ways. You can create a social media contest or you can run social media ads. It’s best to conceptualize the experiment in detail at this stage so you can set expectations and predict the outcome accordingly.

Here are different ways in which you can get inspiration to conceptualize experiments –

1. Follow top social media marketers and read their blogs for ideas

2. Identify prevailing social media trends and follow them

3. Conduct competitive research and see what industry leaders are doing

Once you have a concrete idea, decide on what the task will entail and how you’ll measure the results with respect to the goal. If website traffic or conversions are the goal, you’ll need to create custom URLs using URL builders to ensure conversion-tracking.

4. Test the experiment

Now you’re ready to test your social media experiments. When testing social media experiments, you need to bear some basics in mind.

1. Never test more than one thing at a time. If you want to be sure of what’s moving the needle for a particular goal, it’s critical to ensure that you don’t have conflicting readings. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your website, any social media posts that is clickable can contribute to the effort. That’s why it’s essential to know which posts/theme of posts you want to focus on.

2. Refer to the right metrics to measure posts. Typically, goals decide which metrics you should monitor. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness on social media you would choose impressions as the key metric instead of choosing clicks or something that’s less representative.

3. Run each experiment for a sufficient period of time. If the experiment is minor, you can run it for shorter time intervals such as a week or two weeks. If the experiment is major, for instance, if it involves a re-haul of your entire social media marketing strategy, then it’s best to run it at least for a month or two months.

4. Use A/B testing on every set of posts. The content you create for your social media experiment should ideally be A/B tested for the best results. That’s because you won’t know the full potential of your social media posts unless they are in their best forms. For A/B testing, you need to be able to track each version of a post, so you’ll need custom URLs.

5. Ensure that the experiments are all closed-loop. You don’t need any loose ends or blind spots in an experiment. If you have any, try and fill them in. For instance, if you want to measure the effect of your content on revenue, you need to be able to see the actual purchase and that might need some development effort on your website. Don’t shy away from collaborating with developers when needed.

5. Analyze tests & glean insights

After an experiment is run, you’ll need to analyze results and learn from what you’ve done. While you’ll want to know if the experiment worked, you’ll also want to know to what extent it worked and what exactly made it work. It’s also useful to know what didn’t work and why, so you can apply those learnings to future social media campaigns.

Social media experiment tracking is an exact science, with numbers. When running experiments it’s important to process the statistical significance of the results. You’ll want to ensure that the results aren’t because of chance factors and don’t include false positives and exclude false negatives.

One way to ensure that your data is clean and that your experiments are actually worth investing in, you could repeat the experiment a couple of times and see if the results stay consistent. You can also repeat experiments by changing factors and understanding how you can future amplify results.

6. Automate top-performing ideas

Once you have consistent results stemming from particular experiments, you can make the most of those ideas by automating them. For instance, if you know that your blog posts bring a ton of traffic to your website and convert new users, you can set-up your blog on an RSS feed and set it on an auto-posting schedule.

When automating top-performing ideas, you’ll need the help of automation tools. Even if you can’t automate entire processes, you can definitely automate large portions of the process. Once the process is automated, you can save a ton of time and be more productive.

Here are different ways in which you can automate your social media marketing –

1. Save social media posts of different campaigns in different libraries on a social media management tool such as DrumUp, from where you can set-up an extensive publishing schedule.

2. Add RSS feeds of your blog and top news agencies or blogs and set them up on an automatic publishing schedule, so you never have to publish a post manually.

3. Follow influencers on Twitter and add them to Twitter lists, from where you can follow their work and retweet/engage with posts when required.

73 social media marketing experiments to try today

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find potential clients
• Try social media ads and native content promotion
• Try employee advocacy for social media
• Activate social media follow and social media share plugins on your webpages
• Test different positions for social media plugins (consider mobile placement)
• Publish content when your followers are online and active
• Publish content when your followers and offline and inactive
• Publish content during lunch break, on the weekends, during commute times and on public holidays
• Publish content late nights and early mornings
• Publish more frequently
• Publish less frequently
• Craft short and punchy post content
• Craft long and descriptive post content
• Use popular hashtags
• Use less popular or similar to popular hashtags
• Include testimonials or social proof in social media posts
• Add emojis to social posts
• Create the same post for all social media platforms (cross-post)
• Create custom posts for each social media platform
• Post questions and quizzes
• Run contests
• Conduct QnAs and AMAs
• Create interview sessions on text and video
• Publish and curate infographics
• Share GIFs and short videos

  

• Post behind the scenes content
• Work with disappearing content (statuses and stories)
• Run promotional campaigns (discount campaigns)
• Host live giveaways clubbed with planned rant sessions
• Create Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories
• Share SlideShares via social media posts
• Post audio clippings and podcasts
• Livestream events
• Experiments with music on videos and podcasts
• Leverage social media analytics dashboards to gain insights
• Create short and long social media videos
• Use photographs of your team, clients and partners
• Conduct events to collect UGC

 

• Co-host live events
• Run co-marketing activities on social media
• Try Twitter chats
• Join and work within LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Build a presence in LinkedIn communities
• Get C-suite executives involved on social media
• Run campaigns for brand advocacy on social media
• Pin important posts
• Comment on active social media posts and conversations
• Use Facebook for remarketing
• Build a Facebook Messenger bot
• Use LinkedIn inMail for marketing
• Follow top customers’ Life Events
• Add CTAs to all links and content you share
• Add Click-to-tweets within blog posts
• Experiment with graphic design to pull attention to parts of posts
• Use social media tools to find the right times to share content
• Work with evergreen content to get more social media referrals
• A/B test types of social media content
• Play around with colors and typography
• Test images with people vs objects
• Optimize landing pages to convert social media referrals
• Build an email list with gated social media contests
• Use humorous social media content
• Create a band persona/character to endear customers
• Connect with customers on social media and activate them to be advocates
• Experiment with tone
• Try different types of copy
• Target different groups of people
• Work with different time zones

Wrap

There are infinite possibilities in social media marketing if you consider all the variables in content, publishing and advertising. To develop the best formula for your brand, you need to run social media experiments. Remember social media trends are always changing and it’s always a good idea to test new ideas every year or so. Keep an eye on your social media analytics and be open to making changes when required, this mindset will help you make the most of your social media efforts.



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7 Things to Consider When Planning Promotional Email Campaigns

Whether you are jumping into your first promotional email campaign or are a long-time veteran of email marketing strategy, there are factors you have to consider every time you begin planning a new email campaign.

Ignore one of these factors and you’re likely missing out on customers, conversions, and revenue. That would be a shame, since — done well — email marketing has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. Before diving into your next promotional campaign, make sure you’ve closely examined each of the following.

Warning: This blog will leave you with more questions than answers. And that’s perfect. Because you’ll be asking the right questions.

1.  Who is your audience?

Developing promotional campaigns that drive ROI requires knowing your audience beyond vague demographic personas. That’s a good place to start, but the factors that really influence the success of an email campaign are less cut-and-dried.

They involve answers to questions such as: When do my customers want to hear from me? What content and messaging inspires my customers to act? How can I segment my lists so that I’m always talking to the right customers at the right time about the right thing?

2.  What is your offer?

Your offer isn’t the “20% off” coupon or a “BOGO” discount. Your real offer is what your customer stands to gain. In fact, when your offer becomes the “20% off” in the minds of customers, you can run the serious risk of cheapening your product or brand.

With some savvy, brands can effectively use discounts to get customers in the door, especially in B2C, but the real incentive for buyers should be more meaningful than that.

What will they be able to accomplish that they couldn’t before? How will their life be easier or more enjoyable? It should be on their terms. In other words, the messaging you choose should identify the pain point or benefit your customer feels or wants and how your product or service will help them. It should not be a list of product features.

3.  What do you want customers to do?

Or, put another way, what — after engaging with your email content — do you hope your customers will want to do?

Every email you send throughout your campaign should guide your customer toward a single, clear action. As you plan your promotional campaign, determining exactly what that specific action should be is key.

Use precise, descriptive language when writing your calls to action. “Shop more products,” for example, communicates an action more clearly than “See more.”  Also, be aware of how much you’re asking your customer to do. “Shop now” requires a lower threshold of action than “Buy now” and feels like less of commitment to the user.

4.  Is there an opportunity to get interactive?

Emails that encourage interaction right off the bat get a customer to start engaging with your content and brand. For example, Casper tested a new interactive email review form against its standard static form and saw double the response rate.

Like email personalization and automation, interactive content in email is growing more sophisticated all the time. Brands today are sending emails that allow customers to shop products and fill their carts without ever leaving the email. Even including a simple interactive element like an animated gif could boost your conversions. A/B testing can help you discover what works for your audience.

5.  How does this campaign integrate with your other marketing efforts?

Chances are, a number of your email subscribers engage with you in other channels. How can you use these overlaps to maximize engagement and develop fuller customer journeys?

Anymore, people expect omni-channel experiences from brands. Your email marketing efforts should not happen in a silo. Think about how they integrate with your social media, website, and in-store experiences (if applicable.) Tools like Journey Builder help you create integrated cross-channel experiences that strengthen your customer relationships.

6.  What will you measure?

Benchmarking for promotional campaigns is crucial to honing your email marketing strategy. First, ask “What does success look like?” Is it increased conversions, new leads, revenue, and so on? From there, determine what KPIs will best illustrate how well you achieved success. Then set benchmarks to measure against throughout your campaign.

This will help you understand what worked — and what didn’t — for your campaign and lead you to insights for improving your next one. Tools like Email Studio make this easier by helping you track and optimize your email journeys.

7.  Is your customer at the center?

This goes back to #1. Ask yourself, “Does this campaign serve my customers? Does it invite them to engage with my brand on their own terms?" This final gut check will ensure that your campaign will be relevant and meaningful to the people who matter most — your customers. This, more than anything else, will determine the success of your promotional campaign.

Running any successful email campaign requires careful thought and planning, whether it’s your first or your hundredth. In the end, though, it’s time well spent.

Check out these 5 Proven Email Campaigns No Customer Can Resist for more winning ideas to inspire your next email campaign.

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5 Ways To Funnel Hack Winning Lead Magnets In Your Industry To Build Irresistible Opt In Offers

Is the content on your blog not producing the leads you expect of it?
Have your lead magnet efforts dried up and aren’t generating opt-ins?
If you’re looking for a bit of a refresh in your opt-in strategy, then these 5 steps should help get you on the right path.

Back in the day (just to make myself feel old) most websites and blogs would have an opt-in box either at the side of the blog or the bottom of the website.
This was enough back then, people landing on your blog or website would willingly subscribe to your newsletter.
While this was best practice back in the day, as ever, strategies started to evolve, and it has now become extremely popular for businesses to create lead magnets to entice opt-ins.
These lead magnets most commonly come in the form of downloadable guides and whitepapers.
Because it has become common practice for businesses to use downloadable guides and whitepapers to generate opt-ins, people have started to grow immune from it.
It is now time to evolve again and look at different ways to opt-ins.
To do this, you can follow 5 simple steps to funnel hack winning lead magnets in your industry.
Here are those 5 steps to create winning lead magnets to build irresistible opt-in offers:

1. Look At The Kindle Marketplace

To create winning lead magnet ideas, you need to understand exactly what it is people really want and not what you think they want or what you want them to know.
Fully understanding what it is your users want will help you improve you’re the opt-in rate.
But how do you find out what your target audience want?
One of the best places to look and one of the most unused places to look is in the Kindle marketplace.
It may sound a little strange right now, but you will soon come to realize why this is such a good place to look.
Go to the Kindle marketplace and browse the category listing for your niche.
Once you have found this, sort the eBooks by top sellers.
You now have a whole list of content ideas that are not only good but are what your target audience is clearly interested in because they have bought it.
You can use these ideas to repurpose your eBook for a funnel hack winning lead magnet.
This is a great tool to use to look for content ideas that very few marketers and businesses are using.
As you can see from the screenshot below, there are plenty of categories and sub-categories, so you are sure to find books that are relevant to your niche.

2. Find Out What Your Competitors Sell

Another place you can discover ways to increase your opt-in rate is to look at what your competitors are selling.
While I always say it is important to stay ahead of the competition, it is even more important not to fall behind which is why analysing what they are doing is important.
You specifically want to look at competitors who have the majority share of your target audience.
Browse their website and reviews what products they are selling.
Are there any products that are under $20?
Does that product have some positive reviews?
Is that product mentioned on social channels?
Have a look for a product of theirs that fits all or most of these things and use it or your website but to offer it is a free lead magnet rather a product customers can buy.
For example, a website that sells bicycle has a video guide that they sell for $5 that shows their customers how to do stunts.
You see that it is well received from the comments and social mentions which are a clear sign that this is something your target audience wants.
You can repurpose this to create your video with the difference being you offer it free as a lead magnet.
It doesn’t just have to stop there; you can use different product ideas from competitor websites for your lead magnets and split test which work best.

3. Browse Udemy For Course Ideas

Why do people come to read the content on your blog?
Why do they submit their contact details to download your eBook?
Because they want information and learn about what you know.
Think of your lead magnets as offering your target audience mini-courses on something you are an expert in.
What you might not know is that online are becoming more and more popular than ever before thanks to the likes of Udemy, which is a website where universities and individuals can publish their courses.
If there is ever a place to find what it is your target audience wants to learn about, it is on the Udemy website.
All you need to do is go to the Udemy website, enter a relevant search term and browse through the relevant online courses.
For example, I used the search term “landing page” and found that people are paying up to £259 for content to help them improve their landing pages and ads which you can see from the list below.



If people are paying for these courses, surely they would want them for free?
This is a great way to create some winning lead magnet ideas.

4. Simply Ask The Contacts In Your Email List

If you want to know what you target audience wants to learn about and what goals and challenges they face then there is no better place to go than to your customer base.
Why not make the most of your existing customers by sending them survey style emails to find out what makes them tick, what they want more of and what they want less of.
Using the power of your existing customer base will help you attract new customers.
As well as survey style posts, you can also send them finished content that you have not published yet and ask their opinion.
Is there anything they would change? Is there information that they feel could have more explaining? Is it valuable to them?
These are questions you can ask them when sending them your unpublished content, but I wouldn’t bombard them with too many questions.
Make it easy for them to respond.
Not only will this help you refine your led magnet ideas but it will also help to build your relationships with your customers and keep them loyal.
It is a win-win situation for you, your target audience and your customers.

5. Use BuzzSumo To Find What Is Trending

Many marketers will always tell you to look at your Google Analytics to find which content on your blog is most popular to understand what works.
While there is nothing wrong with this advice, it is hard to do when you haven’t got much content on your blog or not enough data.
If this is you, then there is another tool you can use to help determine what content is working… BuzzSumo.
This very clever and useful online tool will tell you what topics are trending as well what key influencers are sharing that content.
If you discover a trending topic that is relevant to your niche, then it makes sense also to talk about that topic to join the trend.
All you need to do is go to the BuzzSumo website and enter a search term that is relevant to your niche.
This will then bring up a list of all relevant topics that are trending.
In the left-hand side of the BuzzSumo search results page, you will see that you can filter the results by the age of content.
If you want to find topics that are trending right now, then you can filter to only show posts that are published in the last 24 hours.
If you want to find a topic that has just generally worked no matter the timeframe then leave the results as it is or extend the dates.
As well filtering by the age of posts, you can also filter by the language, country and post type.
As you can see in the screenshot below, each post will provide you with how many times it was shared on each of the popular social networks as well as the total amounts of shares.
This is a clear indication of how well your target audience engages with content.

Conclusion

These 5 tips should give you plenty to get started on evolving your lead magnet strategy to give your opt-in rate a much-needed boost.
The more effort you put into your lead magnet strategy, the more you will reap the rewards.
If you put content up for the sake of it, then it isn’t going to get you the opt-in results you want.

What different lead magnet strategies and ideas have you tried?

Let me know by leaving your comments below.

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4 Email Marketing Integration Tactics

Email marketing remains one of the key communication tools for business. Eighty-two percent of companies today are leveraging email marketing. The ability to segment lists plus personalize and tailor messages to any part of your audience has wide appeal. But with so many companies leveraging this channel, how can you differentiate your email marketing campaigns? One effective way is to integrate other marketing channels into your email marketing.

Integration can actually help take your email marketing efforts to the next level and provide added usability and connectivity benefits for your customers. These are four key areas to consider as you begin email marketing integration.

Email and Social Media

Leveraging social media platforms within your email marketing can drastically impact the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Emails that include social media sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate than emails sent without them. Most email marketing service providers make it very easy to add social sharing buttons within email campaigns. You can also segment your email lists by social media network to better target specific types of users, offering them a more personalized experience.

You can also use social media to drive email sign-ups. The pin tweet feature of Twitter enables users to leave a Twitter card at the top of a profile, urging people to sign up for an email list. Tactics like this can be effective in growing your email list.

Email and Mobile

Today, 64% of decision-makers read their email on their mobile device. And this number is only going to grow. Integrating your email efforts with mobile optimization is a natural progression. When you craft email marketing campaigns, it's important to test them on different mobile devices. Since many of these devices have different screen sizes, testing compatibility is key.

Email optimization doesn't end with testing for mobile devices. If your email contains links sending customers to landing pages or web pages, you need to ensure that these spages are optimized for mobile. You worked really hard to get them to click through to your landing page; you'd hate to ruin your success by taking them to a non-optimized piece of content.

Email and Search Marketing

Integrating email and search marketing can have a positive effect on your website search engine optimization (SEO). When you create email marketing campaigns, you can also generate HTML versions of emails and host them on your domain. Inside most emails, there will be header text that reads "not viewing properly, view email in web browser." This will take you to the HTML version of the email. Since you're creating a webpage with the email content, your domain will become more relevant to Google for the search terms associated inside of the email text. Doing this allows for an extra boost in usability for your customers plus it can help your site's SEO.

Email and Marketing Analytics

Tracking your marketing initiatives is as important as implementing them. Only 22% of mid-sized companies use analytics to manage their marketing campaigns. Without analytics, you can't gather any data to decide if the campaign was a success or failure.

Your email marketing platform should provide you with specific data around your email list. Items like open and click-through rates should be studied and used to enhance the content and how you communicate it.

Another easy way to track success is by implementing Google Analytics into your email campaigns. You can accomplish this by creating unique URLs for your landing page using Google's URL builder. These will show up in Google Analytics and allow you to easily track visitors and conversions. With this type of tracking, you can also A/B test your email marketing campaigns to understand what type of messaging, imagery, and content your users like best.

Integration of email marketing initiatives with other marketing channels will create a more streamlined and pleasing customer experience, plus enabling you to consistently build a unique marketing experience for your customers.

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