Blog - FILAMENT CONTENT

05 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 3 Comments Permalink

Web Analytics: Where to Start

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On October 5, 2015 With 3 Comments

Over the years, you’ve heard us advocate for tracking your marketing efforts in order to understand how your target audience is using your content and to optimize your content for different segments of that target audience. Web analytics is an essential tool for measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting your web data. It’s important for any testing you do, such as A/B split testing. But it’s not only for assessing and improving the effectiveness of your website. You can also use it for business and market research to help you make better business and marketing decisions.

While web analytics is key to successful digital marketing, it can be daunting to begin. You don’t want to get lost in a flood of data that you don’t know what to do with (and may not even need). What should you track? What web analytics tools should you use? In this post, we’ll provide some guidance to help you get your website tracking off to a smart start.

Identify your business goals.

Ask yourself: Why does my website exist? What are my three top priorities for the site? Then, translate those goals into concrete business objectives that are measurable, realistic, action oriented and time based.

Stated another way, your goals are the dreams you have for your company. They are subsets of your company’s vision or mission statement. Objectives, on the other hand, quantify your goals to make them measurable and set a target so that marketing strategies can be set around them. They are subsets of a business goal.

Let’s say your business goal is to develop a new market. One of your objectives for that goal might be to create and deliver content for a specific geographic region. Or perhaps your business goal is to raise brand awareness. One of your concrete objectives might be to drive more traffic to your website.

Defining your objectives and goals clearly will be invaluable in the process of determining what you need to measure and what metrics you need to pay close attention to.

Identify meaningful metrics, KPIs & dimensions.

As digital marketer Avinash Kaushik says, metrics are numbers. KPIs are the metrics that help you see how you’re doing meeting your objectives. Your KPIs depend largely on your business objectives.

A few examples:

Conversion rate

How many people are taking the action you specified when identifying your goals?

Average order size
Number of clicks

Dimensions are aspects of your visitors, such as where they came from and what they interacted with while visiting your site.

Traffic sources: How are visitors finding you? This can help you figure out where your findability is lacking.

· Search traffic, i.e. traffic from search engines like Google or Bing

· Referral traffic, i.e. traffic from your emails, social media, other websites or promotional links

Are you trying to drive more traffic to your site from the emails you send? You can use this dimension to find out how you’re doing. Same for your social media posts to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social channel.

· Direct navigation, i.e. people who get to your site by typing in your URL

• Search engine keywords and terms

What words do your customers use when they’re searching for your products and services in Google or Bing?

Exit pages

The page from which a visitor leaves your site is called the “exit page.” These pages can indicate that your visitor was searching for information they needed in order to convert, but not being able to find it, left the site. Identifying your exit pages helps you look into why visitors may be leaving your site before converting.

Internal site searches

What words do your customers use when they’re searching for your products and services while on your site?

To start, focus on one metric—preferably a KPI—to make tracking more manageable. Then, create a target for that metric, some numerical value that will easily indicate whether or not you’re accomplishing your objective. As you get to know your web analytics, you can add more metrics (and targets) on to your analytics program. You can also segment your website traffic to better understand its performance.

Geographical segments
Length of time on site
Visitors from specific sources or devices

Identify the right tools.

Once you know the metrics and dimensions you want to track, you’re ready to choose your web analytics tools. Google Analytics is a great (and free) website tracking tool.

For a helpful list of a range of web analytics tools, check out this blog post by content strategist Gregory Ciotti and or this one at Search Engine Land. If you’re thinking of going beyond Google Analytics, just be sure you’re not collecting data that’s of no use to you. You’ll only be swimming in data that doesn’t answer to your business objectives. Let the data you need to help make business decisions—or data that’s missing from your current analytics—be your guide.

Need help determining your business goals or translating them into concrete objectives? Get in touch with Filament. We can also help you with anything from setting up your web analytics tools to figuring out what changes need to be made with your marketing strategies and tactics in order to achieve your business goals.

02 Oct 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Analyze This: Social Media Monitoring That Matters

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On October 2, 2015 With 1 Comment

There’s a fine line between art and science when it comes to social media monitoring. There are dozens of services – both free and paid – that will tell you just about anything you want to know about the activities on your social media sites. They’ll count clicks, track shares, and show you how many people Like your brand this week versus last, and so on.

And, just like our audiences will ideally do, social media monitoring options increase as our brand gets bigger because now we need to know more than we did last year… Now we need to have more detailed stats to show that our efforts are actually worth it.

Or do we?

The problem with analytical tools is that we can become too dependent on them. Focusing on analytics tools themselves – and the need to constantly collect bigger, better data – doesn’t really do us any good. We are better served by defining and focusing on the things we want to analyze or measure.

Determining specifically what information or activities is most useful for our marketing purposes is top priority. Define which of your business goals will be met by which social media activities and then focus on the items that provide the most effective and measureable feedback. Just as it isn’t necessary to participate in every single social media platform, it’s not necessary to follow every metric outlined by every available analytical tool.

Vanity metrics like followers and Likes can fluctuate wildly on different platforms. Bot activity and “harvesters” – who follow and unfollow wildly with the goal of garnering return follows for their own site – will always impact your numbers negatively. They may (temporarily) increase the numbers, but they’re not active or valid followers.

• How are people interacting with your brand?

• What sources are driving more visitors to your website?

• Do visitors from some sources spend more time on your website than visitors from other sources?

• What are your online communities saying about your products and services?

• What do you need to do to help direct those conversations more effectively?

• Which activities link directly or indirectly to sales?

• What seasons are busier or slower, and how can you use social media to better balance the ebb and flow?

These are just some of the questions you need to be asking to help define what you want to analyze or measure. Being as specific as possible will be far more helpful than just randomly “measuring” everything.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be talking more about the process of improving our social strategies with analytics and how to determine which tools are the best for your brand or business. With a well-defined list of goals and priorities, you’ll be amazed at how much more effective your analytics will be!

29 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

Using SEO to Drive Online Sales

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On September 29, 2015 With No Comments

Let’s get down to the brass tacks of why a quality search engine optimization (SEO) plan needs to be a part of any e-commerce or online sales website. Because it will lead to more sales. It’s actually that simple and straightforward. SEO doesn’t have to involve confusing metrics, high-priced outside agencies or a new website. There are different levels of commitment in any SEO plan but a well thought out, on-page approach is something every single e-commerce website should be doing to boost their visibility and increase sales.

Start with your product descriptions. Your product descriptions will be the one place you can really shine to your customers and to Google. Or, it’s where you can fall flat on your face. Copying the descriptions from the manufacturer is super easy, but it’s also the biggest mistake you can make. You’re not only not differentiating yourself from your competition with this method, but you’re also getting on Google’s bad side. They hate copycat sites.

Hire professional writers who use effective SEO approaches. Writing compelling copy with thoughtful keywords will not only get your website noticed, but it’ll speak directly to your target audience.

Title tags are what we like to refer to as the “lake front property” of your webpage. Not only does the product title pack a powerful punch with the search engines but it’s what your viewer typically sees first and how they’ll perceive the product. While cute and clever titles were once highly desired, it’s been found that succinct and descriptive titles do a much better job of SEO and informing your future customer. Take advantage of your “lake front property” and use it to your benefit.

Use optimized images. Never underestimate the value of product images, but take it a step further and make them images that people want to share. Social media is a wonderful influencer, you want to reap the rewards with images that get shared. Beyond that, you need to optimize your pictures. This means providing an effective file name, alt text and captions that use keywords that describe the product in a way that pulls in potential customers.

Not only will these well-written keyword-enhanced pieces help your website, you can make them work even harder. Get your web design team involved in automating the URL, title tags and the meta descriptions based on the content. You’ve just doubled your SEO reach without much extra effort.

Filament is a strong proponent of creating great product descriptions and ad copy that gets noticed and creates conversions. Contact Filament if you’d like to start selling more and creating loyal customers.

23 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 2 Comments Permalink

Make Your Email & Social Media Marketing Work Smarter… Together

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On September 23, 2015 With 2 Comments

Let’s say you have both an email marketing program and a social media marketing program. (We sure hope you do!) How do you make your email & social media both more successful by having them work together? Here a few tips & tricks we’ve collected to do just that:

How Social Media Can Help Your Email Program:

Social media is valuable for several reasons. It can be successful in both B2C and B2B companies. You can amass large numbers of followers by providing valuable content. Plus, it’s more common to reach potential buyers earlier in the sales process with social media than with email.

Learning about your target audience

Social media platforms are full of little nuggets of information about your target audience that can help you figure out how they tick, what they’re most interested in, and the challenges they face day to day. All of these golden nuggets are helpful in creating relevant content that adds value, grabs attention and cuts through the email inbox clutter. Plus, they are invaluable for better segmentation of your email list and personalization of your email messages.

Building your email list

Social media also gives you another avenue for building your email list. If you don’t already have an email sign-up form integrated into your Facebook page, you’ll want to add one stat. Next, send out tweets inviting people to sign up and reach out to followers and fans on any other platforms on which you’re active. You can also use social media to promote your email sign-ups via landing page sign-up forms, contests, sweepstakes and giveaways. Consider hosting a webinar that requires people to sign up with their email address. Or make signing up for your emails irresistible by previewing the type of content you’ll be sending out in your emails via your social media channels.

How Email Can Help your Social Media Program:

Last year, eMarketer cited email marketing as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention in the U.S. Email is considered an effective channel for lead generation too, producing on average 13% of all leads. And it’s personal. It’s the first thing a lot of people look at first thing in the morning. Plus, you own your email list. You won’t ever lose it—unlike when scads of people decide to move over to the hot, new social media platform.

Building fans & followers

Just like you can use social media to build your email list, you can use your email list to build your base of fans and followers. Start by uploading your subscriber list to your social media platforms. Once you find your subscribers there, follow them and start building relationships by listening, responding, and creating and sharing valuable content. Be an authentic part of their community with regular contributions of value.

Getting more social shares

Your emails are a great way to garner more social shares for your content. (This trick will also help your SEO efforts, so it’s a double win.) You might send out email notifications about new blog posts, new products, new sales, new news, etc. Give your subscribers an easy way to share this information. You can put social sharing buttons right in your emails to make this process easier.

Your potential customers subscribe to your email list because they expect valuable information from you. It’s not a huge leap to think that they’ll be interested in other content you provide via other channels. Be sure you have all the various ways that potential customers can connect with you in your emails.

Put It to the Test

Once you get started with a few of the above best practices, make sure you track meaningful metrics (opens, clicks, shares, comments, views, downloads, purchases, etc.) in order to see what works and what doesn’t and then adjust each channel to the behaviors of your target audience. You’ll also want to test multiple calls to action to see what works best in driving traffic from your emails to your social media pages and vice versa.

Do you have a story of a smart way you made your email and social media programs work well together? Or email or social media and some other marketing channel? Share your success stories in the comments section below.

If you’re hesitant to dive in, we understand. Reach out to Filament, and we’ll happily help you choose the marketing strategies that will best suit your business and your target audience. We’re here to help companies work smarter, not harder.

21 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 2 Comments Permalink

Customizing Content for Each Stage of the Buying Cycle

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On September 21, 2015 With 2 Comments

We all know that part of a great content strategy is getting the right content to our target audiences at the right time. That means we need to define and identify the right time for our target audiences. We’re not just talking about what time of day they’re on their devices and different channels (though that’s important, too). What we’re considering today is the right time in terms of the buying cycle, i.e. how close members of your target audiences are to converting.

You can use the buying cycle to create targeted content that will be useful to your potential customers at each stage. The content you deliver to a person who’s completely unfamiliar with your products and services needs to be very different from the content you deliver to advocates of your brand—because their needs are different. Mapping your content onto the different stages of the buying cycle helps you get strategic about nurturing potential customers toward conversion.

So let’s look at the buying cycle and what kinds of content would be most useful at each point to help move your leads through the lifecycle stages:

Awareness

At the awareness stage, people have—that’s right—become aware of a potential problem or opportunity. The goal of your content at this stage is to attract potential customers via search engines and social media. You can reach that goal by creating shareable, memorable, and optimized content. What types of content are we thinking here? Here’s a list to consider:

beginners’ guides
eBooks
blog posts (guides, tips, & lists)
social media posts, tweets, etc.
white paper
article
podcasts
infographics
memes
press release
curated articles
competitions
videos

Remember as you’re creating this content what it is you want your customers to do, i.e. what is the concrete action they need to take in order to move to the next stage. You might want follows, shares, comments or email subscriptions. This stage is not the place for overly salesy or product-focused content, but rather content that informs people about the problem in general.

Consideration

When people are in the consideration stage, they’ve clearly defined and given a name to the problem or opportunity ahead of them. Your goal then becomes to help them find a solution to their problem with the right product or service. You do that by creating content that highlights how your product or service could potentially solve that problem and further educate them about the problem and its solution.

It’s in this stage that you want to deliver your product descriptions. Your product descriptions need to speak to that specific pain point that your target audience has, explaining how your product or service addresses that pain point. Other types of useful content for this stage include the following:

product reviews
customer testimonials
case studies
buyer guides
video demonstrations
webinars
tutorials
guided tour

What’s the desired action you want potential customers to take? At the consideration stage, perhaps you want them to watch a video, attend a webinar or download a resource that showcases what you have to offer.

Decision

At the decision stage, your potential customer has defined the solution to their problem or opportunity. Your goal is to convince and convert. You do that providing evidence that shows why your product or service is the best choice and make it easy for them to understand the value you provide. It’s time for your sales pitch. A few types of content to consider:

estimates
free trials
case studies
testimonials
consultation
chat
contact info

Advocacy

Your job doesn’t stop after a conversion. Oh, no. This is where you start the cycle over again by working to get returning customers and spread awareness about your brand. How? By creating shareable, memorable, optimized content. (Sound familiar?) Consider the following types of content for this objective:

surveys
email marketing
newsletters
feedback forms
promotions, discounts & giveaways
product recommendations

In the end, you want your customers to tell others about the great service or product they received from you and share your content.

You might have noticed that some types of content show up on more than one of the above lists. Some types on content can do double duty. Just make sure each piece of content addresses the needs your potential customers have at each of the stages its mapped onto.

In addition, mapping content onto your buying cycle is only half the picture. You’ll want to be sure you’re also targeting content according to specific characteristics of your target audiences. Use buyer personas to make that task simpler.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you visualize your content maps. We like this content mapping template from HubSpot. And don’t forget that a content mapping needs to go hand in hand with compelling user-focused content.

Check out Filament’s website for more information about how we can help you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

18 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Selling on Pinterest: Tips for Product Pins That Win

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On September 18, 2015 With No Comments

Pinterest is the social media powerhouse that many of us appreciate as a source of inspiration for our personal lives, but it’s also becoming known for its powerful selling potential.

Data analyzed from over 529,000 Shopify store orders indicated that:

Pinterest was identified as the 2^nd largest social source of traffic.
Pinterest-directed website visits had the 3^rd highest average order value.
Sales and traffic can occur long after an item is pinned; 50% of visits happen after 3½ months.

What does this mean for brands who want to get on board and sell their products on Pinterest?

Details. Details. Details.

To begin with, brands need to be smart about creating Pinterest board categories. The cover images, the board title and the board description itself must all cohesively “sell” what the board and its pins are all about.

Get the Picture

As the saying goes, we eat first with our eyes. The same holds true for purchasing decisions. We see things first with our eyes, and if we like what we see, we buy. It’s as simple as that. (Sort of.)

It’s obvious that images are important because we have truly become a society that judges books by [the images on] their cover. Consumers are accustomed to seeing beautiful pictures that entice, romance, inspire, and motivate and lead them. Images are, in fact, one of the most effective calls to action.

Images should visually tell customers what a pin is all about and what they can expect to find when they click on it.

Color also impacts the effectiveness of pins. Make sure you’re focusing on the colors that best associate your brand and products with customers’ interests.

Even the layout of your images matters. For example, tall images show better and generally receive better pin rates.

And – aside from your product – what should successful images contain? That’s answer is different for each industry, but many brands have created successful campaigns by “branding” the look of their pins and boards. In other words, they make sure every pin in each of their categories has a theme: A look or similar elements that reinforce the purpose and concept of the board and its messaging.

Here’s an interesting statistic to consider when planning your next campaign:

“Images Without Faces Receive 23% More Repins” –SproutSocial

Although we often assume that “personalizing” a product image with the presence of a model using or interacting with the product, a smarter strategy might be to provide images that do and do not have people in them. Let your customers tell you which they prefer based on the data provided by your analytics.

You also need to make sure you’re uploading correctly sized images. SproutSocial provides a helpful Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes that outlines the best dimensions and details for profile pictures, Pin sizes, and board displays on Pinterest and other social media platforms.

Tell A GOOD Story

Create copy for your pins that clearly defines and confirms the image and content within it, sets expectations for customers, and inspires them to click on the pin to get more information and make a purchase.

Because the life of a pin is “forever,” content should be evergreen. Make sure it doesn’t include information that will be outdated or inaccurate for long term pin-ability.

Aside from the images themselves, descriptions are quite possibly the most important part of a pin. They don’t happen automatically, and it shouldn’t be assumed that pinners will “fill in the blanks” on everything they pin. If you don’t pre-populate your images with accurate and usable information, it’s likely that they’ll go without.

And don’t forget about SEO! Use terms that will make your pins more searchable.

How much should you say? To achieve the most re-pins (which are, indeed, Pinterest “gold”), Dan Zarella’s study indicates that descriptions that are about 200 characters long are the most repinnable.

http://danzarrella.com/infographic-how-to-get-more-pins-and-repins-on-pinterest.html#

And speaking of gold… Make sure your Pins are rich!

Only Pinterest Business accounts can qualify for Rich Pins. Pinterest for business defines Rich Pins as “Pins that include extra information right on the Pin itself. There are 6 types of Rich Pins: app, movie, recipe, article, product and place.”

Rich product pins offer even more information for consumers and help direct purchases even more effectively:

They offer real time pricing.
They indicate whether or not an item is in stock and available for purchase
Rich pins offer the additional benefit of making products eligible for Pinterest’s curated feeds.
Price notifications: New price information is provided to anyone who pins a rich pin. In other words, if an item goes on sale, customers are alerted to the new/special pricing which, in turn, positively impacts purchasing decisions.

Pinners are becoming accustomed to the fact that “Blue Means Buy” on Pinterest.

The blue “price tags” indicate that items can be purchased.

Share and Share Alike

It’s important to note that Pinners can now share pins amongst themselves. This is a good thing for sellers because Pinner A might something that she thinks Pinner B might really like, so A can now send the pin directly to B thereby increasing reach and viability.

See that little “Send” arrow in the upper right corner of the box? That’s how you share pins with anyone that is following your boards.

Get Technical!

Don’t forget to include UTM Tracking Codes in your URLs so you can track your marketing initiatives and determine which sources are bringing you the most traffic.

Verify!

Whenever possible, brands should verify their domain to protect their customers and communities. However, it’s important to note that “Pinterest only supports top-level domains right now…” because “…blogging platforms (like Blogger and WordPress) and e-commerce sites (like Etsy and eBay) don’t allow you to upload HTML files.”

Verified sites are easily identified by the little red checkmark that appears to the right of the business name. It instantly tells visitors that they’re on the “official” brand’s site versus one-off or imposter brands.

Pinterest’s new and ever-increasing functionality will be a valuable selling tool for brands that play their cards right.

Is your brand in the Pinterest selling game yet?

If you’re interested in getting in when the time is right, Filament can create a strategy that will help your brand win with pins

15 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

Internal and External Links: How to Win at Both

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On September 15, 2015 With No Comments

The first step in learning how to have a winning website with both internal and external links is defining what these terms actually mean.

In the world of SEO or search engine optimization, winning can be defined in a number of ways and you’ll have to determine what definition works specifically for you. In some situations, winning can be simply mean drawing a lot of new and returning visitors to your website. In other situations, such as retail websites, winning means earning the loyalty and repeat business of valuable, target-defined customers. That definition is pretty nebulous but it’s actually an important one for you to define or you’ll never know what you’re striving to achieve.

Internal links versus external links is more specific and can easily be defined. An internal link is a way to easily connect pages WITHIN the website. Let’s say you’re reading about topic X and the website actually sells a t-shirt with a cute X slogan on it. But clicking on the internal link you can move from your article to the product page and buy that t-shirt. In fact, there is even a “purchase now” link that again takes you to the transaction page which is another internal link inside that website.

External links, on the other hand, take you outside of the website. We’ll use the same example above but let’s imagine that this time your website only sells t-shirts. You realize that topic X is a hot button topic today and people really like reading about it, so you include an external link to a leading authority on topic X so your visitors can learn more.

So where does the winning part come in? Consider the external link example above. In this situation a really smart SEO specialist would reach out to the leading authority and let them know you’re going to be linking to them and ask them if they’d consider doing the same to promote your topic X t-shirts to people who are clearly interested in topic X. This is called “link juice,” which is connecting to relevant websites in a friendly, cooperative way that benefits everyone involved. It’s the ideal external link situation and can do a lot to boost both websites. While this situation is ideal, it doesn’t always happen. But thoughtful, accurate and well-planned external links can build loyalty by enhancing your authority, validity and usefulness.

With internal links the “win” is a little different as it centers around the user experience. Have you ever been on a website where you want to buy something and they seem to almost make it difficult to do so? These are horrible internal links and can destroy the reputation and success of a website that would actually be very useful if it had good internal links. On the other hand, some websites keep bopping you around to places you don’t want to go because their internal links are so bad. It’s up to you and your web designer to look at the design objectively and create a favorable user experience.

Let Filament guide you through external links and internal links with best SEO practices.

09 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

3 Keys to Un-Creepifying Your Triggered Emails

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On September 9, 2015 With No Comments

It’s standard practice in digital marketing to use triggered emails to stay in touch with your customers. It’s one of the easiest ways to nurture them down the sales funnel at relatively little cost. But how do you keep your emails from having that big-brother feel? Here are 3 key pointers to help keep your triggered emails from feeling creepy:

Timing

Send your messages at the right time dependent on the trigger you’re working with (welcome, birthday, post purchase, abandoned shopping cart, etc.). This practice not only keeps your emails relevant, but it can also have a big impact on conversions. eMarketer found that 54% of shoppers buy an abandoned item within 24 hours, but only 10% within 48 hours.

Consider also the overall frequency of your triggered emails, whether you’re sending on a single email or a series of triggered emails, in the context of your other email sends. You don’t want to overwhelm their inbox, but you don’t want to underwhelm either. We suggest prioritizing triggered emails over other emails.

Personalization

Useful personalization makes your emails more relevant. For personalization to work, you need to keep your email segmentation on point, so your subscribers are getting useful information. You also need to take a close look at your email content, making sure you’re also personalizing the tone and language of your email to your target audience. Buyer personas are an excellent tool for just that.

You can go beyond using the recipient name and company name by including the right type of offer for where the recipient is in the buying cycle (welcome vs. abandoned shopping cart, for example), product recommendations and reviews or ratings using preview purchase history, and other dynamic content.

Testing

Timing, personalization, dynamic content, subject lines and creative—these should all be tested to find the perfect mix for your target audience. You can use A/B testing to find what works best for different segments in your target audience and for different types of triggered emails.

Not sure where to get started? Check out some excellent examples below of a few triggered emails:

Williams-Sonoma does a great job of creating a fun subject line and a sincere thank-you email that outlines the perks of being a subscriber—along with gorgeous creative.

Michael’s engagement campaign promotes their classes and events with inspiring images while also letting its subscribers know other ways they can connect.

It’s always nice to get an unexpected birthday surprise. Don’t underestimate the value of a simple triggered birthday email with a deal.

This email is the second in a series of cart abandonment emails. It uses Litmus’s cart abandonment email sandwich strategy, in which you lead with a straightforward email notification, follow up with a more service-oriented browse abandonment message, and then finish with another more direct cart abandonment email.

And, last but not least, a re-engagement email from one of our favorites, ModCloth. It contains the perfect combination of personalized tone, language and product (albeit with an embarrassing miss in the address line in this example) with an added dose of urgency.

Armed with the above tips and examples, you’re off to a great start. Feel free to get in touch with Filament for some extra help creating email campaigns that strike the perfect note for your target audience.

08 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

5 Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Product Description Pages

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On September 8, 2015 With No Comments

So you’ve created (or curated) amazing products you want to share with world and now you need to help your customers to find them. How do you do that? Well, it’s your lucky day. We’re going to give you 5 proven strategies for driving traffic to your product description pages (PDPs). Grab a cup of your favorite bev, get comfy, and read on.

1. Social

Human beings are social creatures that want social experiences. So why not add a social element to your product page? At a minimum, you ought to include social sharing buttons on your PDPs. You can kick it up a notch by following Target’s lead. They recently added a cool feature in which Target customers can post Instagram pics of themselves wearing Target’s products with the hashtag #TargetStyle for a chance to have their pics featured on Target’s product description pages.

So-and-so shared another great idea in a recent post, too. They suggested providing free samples to instagrammers with lots of followers in the hopes that they’ll link to the product. Providing free samples has been one way businesses have used to get user-generated content line customer reviews, so it’s a natural fit for helping drive traffic to your product page.

Plus, be active on your own pages—Facebook, Twitter, Vine—to promote new items and curated collections with links to your PDPs. You can make your product descriptions a Facebook status. Or post that informational video about your product to Vine or YouTube and link back to your PDP. Tweet, post, and share away. And don’t forget to interact with comments and shares on your pages. Social media isn’t about broadcasting, it’s about interacting and communicating.

2. Email

Email marketing gives you great return on investment, so it’s a smart way to educate potential leads about your products and drive traffic directly to your product pages. You can use segmentation to target emails featuring products that may appeal to your distinct groups based on previous purchase history or other data you’ve collected. Use automation to send emails for products similar to those recently purchased, abandoned in carts or items that go well with recent purchases.

3. SEO

Good SEO is key to ranking well on search engines. Here’s a quick breakdown to get you started with some SEO basics for your PDPs:

DO:

Write unique product descriptions with the right keywords
Write unique titles
Include customer reviews
Put keywords in title tags and header tags
Fill out your alt image tag info
Use keyword-friendly URLs
Focus on usability by making your page easy to navigate with a search box, links to other pages on your site (e.g. home, cart), breadcrumbs (i.e. previous & next buttons), and a clear site structure.

DON’T:

Don’t use duplicate content
Don’t use manufacturer’s content
Don’t stuff keywords.

You can learn about even more SEO best practices right here on our blog.

4. Mobile

Google has started ranking pages on the basis of their mobile-friendliness, so that’s probably enough of a reason to make your PDPs mobile-friendly. Further more, if your product description page is easy to read on the mobile devices your customers use most (or all mobile devices if it’s within your resources to do), they’ll be more likely to share your PDPs on social sites from mobile devices or bookmark the page as something to come back to on a desktop. If they can’t view your PDP on a mobile device, they’re likely to go to a site that they can read (i.e. your competitor’s web site.)

5. Content

Product descriptions, how-to videos, customer reviews—trick out your PDPs with whatever it takes to help your target audience make that purchase decision. Product descriptions are a key part of this strategy since they help with SEO (provided you do the keyword research), give your customers vital information, and are relatively easy to produce. Make them quotable and easily shareable to encourage interaction. You might include links to other products that complement the item you’re describing, too.

At Filament we pride ourselves on product descriptions that sound like they’re written by humans and not robots. You can check out a few of our stellar product descriptions here. You’ll find more excellent examples of product descriptions with some great tips here.

And there you have it. Put these 5 marketing strategies into practice and you’ll be well on your way to lighting up your online presence and getting your products into the hands (and hearts) of happy customers.

Need help implementing these steps? Get in touch with Filament. We’re happy to help with anything from creating a strategy around your target audience’s needs and interests, your business goals, and your available resources to writing the best darn product descriptions ever.

04 Sep 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Buyable Pins: The New Pinterest Frontier

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On September 4, 2015 With No Comments

Have you noticed? Pinterest has been ramping up functions and customizations in a big way over the past few months.

“Picked for you” Pins began showing up in high-volume users’ feeds.

It’s now easier for pinners to Pin from optimized sites, and Pinterest has even begun “guessing” which category board Pinners may want to place their Pins on based on the copy within the Pin itself. (Nothing like increased convenience to make a Pinner smile!)

The information available to Pinners has increased, too. Pin “producers” are getting hip to the fact that they now have to label their images and Pins more effectively to be competitive. (There are actual “formulas” involved in Pin descriptions that we’ll talk about in upcoming articles!)

Pretty cool, right?

Well, there’s a reason for everything.

In early June, we began hearing about something that would take one of the most popular social media sites to a whole new level. Rather than just passively appreciating something on Pinterest by Pinning it and setting it aside for future inspiration, this new functionality allows users to actively acquire things on the spot.

As of the early June announcements, this functionality will initially only be available for U.S. iPhone and iPad users. Android and Desktop versions are promised at a later date. (As you can imagine, this has Android users – which by some accounts actually outnumber Apple users – up in arms.)

This selective availability is presumably tied to the new purchasing platform’s payment processors: Apple Pay.

Buyable Pins – Apple Pay

Pinterest set out to quiet any concerns about personal information use by informing users that they (Pinterest) will not store users’ information in any way. Instead of using credit card numbers for transactions, Apple Pay provides an “account number” specific to the device a user/purchaser signs up with. Sellers never receive a purchasers’ credit card number – only a “code” representing the transaction information.

For businesses, this is all a huge opportunity. Pinterest is currently working with select “major” brands to test the waters. We can only assume that the brands not currently working with Pinterest in the first stages of this initiative are furiously formulating their own online store strategies behind the scenes so they don’t miss out. Analysts are suggesting that the earliest players in the Buyable Pin game will be the winners.

We don’t doubt it a bit. Pinterest is – without question – a shopper’s paradise.

“Pinners are shoppers. A full 87 percent of Pinterest users admit to making a purchase because of Pinterest. And for the few Pinterest users who haven’t made a purchase, they are planning on it. Ninety-three percent of Pinterest members use Pinterest as their de facto shopping list.” –Neil Patel

As can be expected in the early stages of a new initiative, feedback from users Pinterest has been divided.

There are the fashion hounds, the trinket hunters, and the online shopping fanatics in general who love the fact that they now have the option to instantly acquire the objects of their desire with a simple tap of the new little blue “Buy it” button.

But Pinterest purists are calling foul. They’re a little miffed that their favorite place “…to discover ideas for all your projects and interests,” is no longer “…hand-picked by people like you.”

Pinterest Tag Line 2015

Many long-time users are flat-out opposed to Pinterest’s big move. The seemingly non-commercialized platform that initially drew users by the millions is losing popularity with things like promoted Pins (equivalent to Facebook’s sponsored posts). And the aforementioned, “Picked for you” Pins? While some users enjoy having their feed infused with new and different things, not everyone likes to have decisions made for them.

People know that those posts are not “organic” in nature. They’re not there based on a user’s Pin history, but rather, based on criterion purchased by the Pin’s originator.

Fortunately there’s a choice. Users can [still] get just what they signed up for. Simply clicking on the small box to the far right of the Pinterest search bar and choosing “Home Feed,” or another topic of specific interest, allows users to manually override those pesky “Picked for you” Pins.

Filament on Pinterest

Still others are comparing Pinterest’s massive retail leap to other big online sellers, suggesting that they’ll quit Pinterest altogether to avoid the aggressive marketing tactics.

Sellers in every niche – not just the big brands that Pinterest is currently courting – would be wise to put their followers first when developing buyable pin strategies. In addition to analytics and A/B testing, etc., on the most basic but all-important levels, they need to closely monitor customer comments. That’s where the gold is.

Interested in selling your stuff on Pinterest? We can help create a strategy that will attract purchasers without offending ending purists!

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