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18 May 2015
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Seasonal Content Without the Cheese

Sticky Post By On May 18, 2015 With No Comments

While we love a good holiday pun as much as the next marketer, it can get a bit wearing to read the same old tropes over and over again. How do you keep your seasonal content fresh? Read on for 5 tips to keep your content from inspiring eye rolls and groans.

 

1. Keep the focus on your customers & their needs.

Regardless if the time of year, we need to speak to our customer’s needs. It can be tempting to let the tide of the holiday at hand carry us, but it won’t. As you’re planning your seasonal content strategy, look at how your products and services can enrich people’s experience of that season or how it can solve a problem related to the season.

Consider this example from Crate & Barrel:

Subject: 2 ways to set the perfect holiday table + Get it by Christmas.

Crate & Barrel Seasonal Email Content

Crate & Barrel Seasonal Email Content

Crate & Barrel Seasonal Email Content

This content is successful because it starts with the customer and their specific needs at this time of year. Needs change with the seasons. You can offer information, solutions and deals that revolve around your customers’ changing needs, such as costumes in October or the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy-for brother-in-law. What are your customer’s pain points at different times of year? Do they need tips for relieving holiday stress? A list of sugar-free stocking stuffers? A how-to video for dyeing super cool Easter eggs? Use the holiday as a context for framing your products and services.

Seasonal content isn’t all about the holidays, either. Different seasons bring different needs, too. Rain gear in spring, snow boots in winter. And don’t forget cool refreshing beverages in summer. Without overtly selling, Anthropologie speaks to this need with a weekly blog post series of fruity cocktail recipes.

Anthropologie Seasonal Blog Post

 

2. Stay true to your brand.

It’s fun to get all tinselly for the holidays, but if you do, make sure you’re keeping your message relevant to your brand. Your existing customers have a relationship with your brand, and you want to maintain that relationship by following through on their expectations. Part of those expectations include your content and the voice you speak with in that content. Keep your brand voice consistent no matter the season or holiday. If your guests expect you to be clever, give them what they’ve come to know and love from you. If not, don’t switch it up just because you’re all giddy with holiday magic.

Evergreen seasonal content can be a great way to keep your seasonal content out of the cheese zone and on-point for your brand. You can feel comfortable investing a little more time in it since you’ll be able to use it again and again.

 

3. Appeal to the emotions.

The holidays are full of emotions both joyful and challenging. Tap into them in an authentic way—not in a manipulative or smarmy way—but in a way that shows there’s an actual human being behind this content who wants to connect with other human beings. In other words, in a way that shows you can relate to what they’re experiencing. Connect to the warm fuzzy feelings, the nostalgia, the excitement. Here’s a good example from Apple that pulls at our heartstrings and makes us want to create a thoughtful, one-of-a-kind gift, too.

 

 

4. Tell a story.

And since we’re on the subject of emotions, here’s another tearjerker. It’s the John Lewis Christmas commercial from 2014 featuring Monty the Penguin, and it does an excellent job of telling a story that anyone with a pulse will get invested in.

 

On top of telling a great story, John Lewis created an online experience to continue the story with interactive media for kids, including a storytelling app.

John Lewis Web Content

 

5. Be original.

While plenty of puns and holiday songs get overused, we’re still tickled every time we see a pun made new in a surprising way, like in this example from a 2014 Target holiday email. Target is known for their clever content but also for great value. Here they’re speaking to both in a fun, original way.

Target Email Content

 

All of these strategies point to one thing: adding value. Each piece your content—from blog posts to email marketing—needs to add value to your customer’s experience. Add that seasonal flair only if it adds value.

Looking for fun ways to spice up your seasonal content? Get in touch with Filament. We’ll be happy to take a look at your content marketing strategy to see how we can help you find ways to tell the stories you want to tell and connect with your customers in an authentic way.

15 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Seasonal Social Media Planning: Making Snow While the Sun Shines

Sticky Post By On May 15, 2015 With 1 Comment

Have you heard the old saying suggesting that you should “make hay while the sun shines”? It refers to taking advantage of opportunities while they’re present. Not wanting to miss out on things is human nature. We want to take part in fun things – holidays, special events, VIP offers, and the like… We want to be included in the “in” crowd.

Because we don’t want to miss out, we’re constantly on the lookout for news and information. We talk to our friends, we scour social media pages, and we make notes on our calendars so we don’t forget when “it” is going to happen. And, if we’ve really got our stuff together, we plan – and we plan well – around particularly important events in effort to enjoy them completely when they happen.

Effective seasonal social media planning ensures that we – and our customers – enjoy everything as much as possible.

We’ve talked before about painting pictures for our customers. As a marketer, it’s your job to make sure your customers are aware of upcoming holidays and events so that it’s a win/win situation for everyone: They get what they want and they feel like they got a good deal, and you get increased sales, better brand recognition, and (hopefully) loftier sales goals for next year.

It all requires planning ahead. Similar to making hay while the sun shines, but on a different timeline. Your swimsuit sales won’t top the summer sales charts if you don’t start planting the seeds for your summer promotions in December. And, likewise, you can’t expect Santa to deliver stellar holiday sales figures if you weren’t “Rocking Around The Christmas Tree” while wearing one of the swimsuits you so masterfully created campaigns for two seasons earlier.

Santa may be able to see you when you’re sleeping, but your customers need Rudolph, with his nose so bright, to guide them to promotion night! (Ha! See how much fun this is?)

Holidays and seasons, and the seasonal social media planning that goes along with them, vary for different businesses and industries. Although some seasonal promotions require more planning time than others, the one thing that remains the same is that they ALL need to be promoted well in advance of the actual occasion in order to be successful.

Whether you’re dealing with time-based seasons like summer and winter, holiday-based seasons like the 4th of July and Christmas, or event-based seasons like Back-to-School, you’ve got have those seasons geared up well before they’re on the general public’s radar (or, calendar, per se).

To plan well means knowing your customer and knowing when they want to buy for a particular season. You may even have to consider segmenting your customers into two groups based on their buying habits: Those who plan forward and buy in advance so they don’t have to rush at the 11th hour, and those who think about it just as the store is closing so they dash in to grab whatever is left.

Be creative about how and when you “sell.” No one wants to be barraged with ads at every turn. Think about how it feels when you go to a website for information only to have blinking ads flashing across every corner of your screen and covering the very content you’re there to take in. That doesn’t create a very pleasant user experience, does it?

On the other hand, if your seasonal content is “well seasoned”, you’ll get your customers attention far more effectively. You’ll have their attention even before they need to start thinking seriously about the season, and when you unleash your biggest pitches, they’ll be ready to buy because you’ve created a mindset.

Don’t focus just on what you’re selling, either. Make sure to provide options and solutions for your customers. Create content that appeals to the problems they may have with a certain season. Appeal to the emotional aspects of a holiday. Show how your products and services can solve their problems, create opportunities, save them time, money, water, salt… Whatever! Just make sure what you’re selling makes your customers’ lives better in some way.

Speak personally to your customers – don’t just pontificate to the masses.

Inspire them, don’t tire them.

Provide a good balance of messaging that has absolutely no strings attached along with sales-related seasonal messages, and you’ll create much happier communities within your social media venues.

It can be hard to know how far ahead to start pre-campaigning for various seasons and holidays, but you’ll have a much easier time figuring it out if you involve, and listen to, your customers.

While it’s true, perhaps, that only Santa knows if your customers are being bad or good, you’ll be good (for goodness sake!) in their eyes if you’re there when they need you.

Wondering how on earth to plan for winter gloves while everyone else is searching for trendy tankinis? We won’t say it’s fast or easy, but the process of planning successful seasonal promotions is just a phone call away. You bring the sunscreen… We’ve got the cold-weather gear.

12 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

Pairing Everyday Marketing Strategies and Seasonal SEO

Sticky Post By On May 12, 2015 With No Comments

So you want to hit your seasonal audience with a great marketing and SEO approach, yet you don’t have the time, money or the inclination to constantly change your approach. What do you do? Actually, the answer is quite simple. Take your planned marketing strategies and implement a little good old-fashioned SEO with a focus on using informed keywords.

While you may already be planning a big marketing push for “Summer Product X,” ask yourself this: Are you as in touch with your audience as you should be? To be really effective you need to review your audience and determine their demographic, when they actually buy the product, what keywords they use to search for and describe the item. This is a great strategy all around as it helps you reach the group who really wants “Summer Product X.”

In addition to tailoring your strategy, you may want to think about creating a special place just for that product or for your seasonal line. Adding a webpage that is geared to a seasonal audience isn’t a bad idea. You don’t want to bog down your website with too many pages and make it impossible to navigate, but if your business has a few big seasons, why not take advantage of that? Of course each of these additional pages needs to contain great content that appeals to the right demographic in words and terms that they use and understand and with some solid on page seasonal Search Engine Optimization.

The field of SEO is constantly changing and shifting, as are marketing trends and strategies, but using a well-researched and thought out approach will always give you winning results. Contact Filament if you’re interested in adding Seasonal SEO approaches to your marketing plan.

06 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

What Not To Do With Your Next Seasonal Email Campaigns

Sticky Post By On May 6, 2015 With 1 Comment

Now is the perfect time to start thinking about your next seasonal email campaigns, looking at what worked with past campaigns and what didn’t. To help you get in the mood, we’ve put together a list of ten no-nos that you’ll want to avoid.

1. Fail to plan.

Effective seasonal email campaigns start with strategy. Start early to create a solid plan for any email campaign, seasonal or not. Look at what you want your email campaigns to do for your business and your subscribers. What content do you need for audiences, and why? How are you going to create that content, organize it, and deliver it? Defining your content strategy from the get-go will increase your reach and your revenue.

2. Fail to target your messages.

Winter’s coming up, and you’ve got this really great sale on parkas that you want to let your subscribers know about. All of your subscribers? Really? Even the ones who live in, say, Florida? Yeah, no. This is a time for segmentation, my friend. There are lots of ways to segment your email list. Not all buyers are the same, and they’re not all at the same point in your sales cycle. Targeted messages and personalization will help you get the right content in front of the right eyes at the right time.

3. Fail to make your emails mobile-friendly.

Almost 30% of all 2014 Black Friday purchases were made on a mobile device. And, as of January 2015, 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices. As a result, you need to make it as easy as possible for your users to get from your email to your website and all the way through the conversion process on any device.

4. Pay no attention to your subject lines.

Subject lines are the most important piece of text for any given email. This truism becomes even truer before a holiday since all marketers are ramping up and sending out more emails—more emails that will compete with yours for inbox attention. So don’t slack off with a generic subject line. Write subject lines that rock.

5. Overlook the preheader.

While it’s unbelievable to us that some marketers fail to make use of the preheader—that preview text that appears next to or near the subject line. This valuable email real estate can increase your open rates significantly if used well. You can use it to extend the message in your subject line, offering more details in a fun, clever way, as in this example from Express:

Subject line: Excuse me, which way to the beach? Preheader: The cutest suits in the brightest hues.

6. Not invest in great copy.

Since we’re talking about your email copy, let’s just include all of it, from the subject line all the way down to the fine print plus your CTAs. Content is a valuable opportunity to represent your brand, create a positive emotion in your subscribers, educate, inspire, solve problems. You want to create a connection with your subscribers, right? They’ll be turned off if your emails are hard to read, riddled with errors, or way too long.

7. Resort to clichés.

We know it’s tempting to use that seasonal or otherwise time-related pun in that headline. We get bowled over by our own cleverness at times, too. The problem is that no one thinks you’re as clever as you do (except maybe your mom). At best, your subscribers will read right past your email; at worst they’ll feel annoyed and unsubscribe immediately (and carry that feeling around toward your brand).

If you absolutely have to use a cliché, make it new in a surprising way:

  • Jingle deals, jingle deals. Savings all the way.
  • Up to 20% off patio? Get out.
  • Snug as a pug.

8. Not test.

How do you know how and where to improve your campaigns if you’re not measuring their success? Oh, that’s right. You don’t. Lucky for you, you can use A/B split testing to test everything from your design, colors, CTAs, timing, frequency, etc. Then, don’t forget to use the results of your testing to upgrade your strategies.

9. Forget about social.

Ah, social. How could one forget about social? It’s easy to forget other channels when you get so focused on something else, but you’ll be better off creating a strategy that integrates these channels. Coordinate your email marketing to go hand in hand with your social strategy. Folks who are getting your emails are, hopefully, also following you on social networks, and you don’t want to bludgeon them with the same information presented in the same way over and over again.

10. Forget to have fun.

Holidays are a time of excitement, togetherness, and laughter. Harness some of that energy and put it into your emails. Your subscribers will take notice. After all, they’ve subscribed to your emails in the first place because you offer something they want. You can continue to build that relationship with them by cultivating your own unique voice and telling interesting, relevant stories.

There you have it. Don’t do the above, and you’ll be on your way to a successful email marketing campaign for any season or holiday, from National Pancake Day to Fall Hat Month. Or contact Filament, and we’ll be more than happy to help your create strategies and content that make your subscribers smile.

04 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 2 Comments Permalink

How to Create Evergreen Seasonal Content

Sticky Post By On May 4, 2015 With 2 Comments

You might think at first that seasonal content and evergreen content are the antithesis of each other. Both are important parts of an effective content strategy. Evergreen content gives you a great return on your investment since it doesn’t go out of date, and seasonal content takes advantage of seasonal search increases that can deliver a lot of traffic. But can you create content that is both seasonal and evergreen? Yes, you can! We’re going to delve into a few ways that you can create evergreen seasonal content as well as ways to make your evergreen content work well with your seasonal content.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. . . Again

Seasonal content includes content that refers to holidays, like Christmas, National Pet Month, Halloween, and the seasons—spring, fall, and so on. Holidays and seasons recur year after year, so it’s possible to create evergreen content for these times of year.

First, let’s look at the different kinds of evergreen content:

  • Testimonials
  • Interviews
  • How-To Guides
  • Historical Posts
  • About Us Pages
  • User Tips
  • Curated Posts
  • Personal Biographies
  • Industry Resources
  • FAQs
  • Tutorials
  • Glossaries of terms & phrases
  • Yearly posts that can be updated (e.g. Ribbons & Bows 2017 Edition)

Just by looking at the above list, we can come up with some creative ways to create evergreen content that we can recycle year after year, such as how-to guides, tutorials, and user tips that relate to each holiday or season.

Evergreen content can take different forms, too:

  • Written posts
  • Memes
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Infographics

Consider the owner of a retail business that sells, among other things, wrapping paper and ribbons. Someone out there will always be interested in knowing how to tie the perfect bow. This hypothetical business owner could create a how-to guide with instructions for tying bows on presents. The guide could take the form of step-by-step photographs—perfect for Pinterest, where you can illustrate how to do or make things and where people are going to look for such info. Or you could make a how-to video—or several how-to videos, each with holiday- and season-specific ribbons and wrapping to keep it relevant and inspire your customers.

Baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie, styling the perfect (holiday/wedding/party) outfit, how to get your tires ready for winter weather—no matter your business, the possibilities are endless. Just be sure to let your business and your customers dictate what types and what forms of evergreen content will be most useful.

Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings

Emotions get a response, and the seasons and holidays definitely trigger people’s emotions. Funny seasonal images, the ones we can all relate to because we’ve been there, are an excellent opportunity to build your brand through a personal connection without direct selling. You might have a meme that you bring out for the holidays in which you only have to change the text to keep it fresh and surprising, and you keep your branding on-point by using a consistent font and colors and your logo. This kind of evergreen content would fall under the category of “yearly posts that can be updated.”

Tell Me What You Think, What You Really, Really Think

Product reviews are a super smart form of evergreen content that you don’t even have to produce. Your customers will do it for you—if you invite them to and/or give them incentive to do so. Product reviews never go out of date—unless you’re no longer selling that item. Plus, they play well with your seasonal content by supporting it. You can also use reviews to create top ten lists of the most popular items related to each season or holiday.

As an aside, product descriptions are another great way to create evergreen content. You can update it to give it a seasonal twist, or you can offer it as is to educate and inspire your guests, and help them learn how your products and services will help them.

I Like The Way You Promote It, No Diggity

Whether your content is evergreen or seasonal, you can make the most of all the content platforms available to you—or, more importantly, all of the platforms that your current and potential customers use.

Remember that how-to video on how to tie the perfect bow? Well, our ribbon entrepreneur can post it on Vimeo and YouTube, and then share and re-share that content on other social channels. Or that step-by-step image on Pinterest could be made into a slideshow and posted on SlideShare. People go to these platforms to find answers to their problems. You provide the solution to their problem, and they’ll find you, too.

Use all the content platforms at your disposal to extend your reach and get more search and shares. But don’t stop there, be sure to link to your evergreen content from other articles, promote it on your site, and add plenty of internal links.

You might be noticing that there’s a third type on content that we haven’t yet mentioned: time-sensitive content or news. News is a great way to show your customer’s that you’ve got your finger on the pulse and cultivate trust. Posts that link some aspect of your business and your customer’s concerns to events in the news can help traffic your way.

Fresh, well-timed content indicates authority and relevance to search engines, which is essential to your SEO. At the same time, content that isn’t time-sensitive accrues greater authority and value over time. Your best bet is to incorporate both. How much of each will depend on your industry, your business and your audience. B2C sites tend to move more quickly white B2B websites can afford slow-growing content. We usually recommend that folks start with roughly 60 percent evergreen, 20 percent seasonal and 20 percent newsy content. Testing and observing how people to respond to your content mix will tell you how and where to adjust your content marketing strategy.

Get in touch with Filament if you’d like to start working on those percentages and filling your website with quality content.

01 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

5 Tips for Great Seasonal Social Media Content

Sticky Post By On May 1, 2015 With 1 Comment

Your customers look to you for inspiration, ideas, and creative solutions to their needs. They want you to be their resource for the latest and greatest trends. They want you to keep them in the know. They want you to be all of these things to them throughout the year, but especially during holiday seasons.

Note: For this conversation, we’ll use the term “holiday,” but that definitely includes longer seasonal pushes like back-to-school campaigns.

The holidays are usually the busiest time of year for brands and businesses, individuals and families alike. Regardless of demographics, we all have longer To Do Lists during the holidays, so we need to prioritize and be better organized in order to accomplish everything we want to accomplish. Easier said than done, right?

We all know that planning ahead will get us where we need to be more efficiently. But, sometimes it’s hard to know where to start – especially when our minds are overflowing with more tasks and goals than usual.

We find that less is more at times like this. Rather than over complicating things with grand plans and lofty buzz words, let’s start with a few bite-sized tips that will help get your seasonal messaging off to a great start.

 .1. “SEASON” WELL

Whether you’re into cooking or not, you’ve probably heard that seasoning your ingredients well can dramatically improve the flavors of the finished dish. This same concept works with seasonal marketing.

We all know how time can get away from us, so “seasoning” your messaging with tidbits about the upcoming holiday – lightly at first, and more heavily as the date approaches – will help keep it on top of your customers’ minds.

As soon as you’ve finished reading this article, sit down with your calendar and pinpoint the dates of the holidays that you typically promote. Next, create “tiers” of dates relevant to the date of the holiday itself: One week out, three weeks out, five weeks out, etc.

Create excitement about the holiday with short, simple posts that remind your customers about the upcoming holiday: “Wow! XYZ Day is only a month away!” or, “Just three short weeks until…”. Studies show that people need to hear or see something seven times before it sticks with them, and pre-planning consistent holiday messaging will help make it stick.

.2. PAINT A PICTURE

Rather than messaging that sells, create messaging that suggests. Talk about the things that people think about when they think about the upcoming holiday. Provide ideas that inspire people to visualize how they will use your holiday products or services.

Engage your social media communities with questions and invite feedback that will help you design campaigns around their wants and needs. Show them ideas that will get them thinking about what they’re going to do for the holiday. Whether it’s housewares or attire, people are more inclined to remember visuals than words. So, if you show more than tell, you’ll be on your way to building a great bottom line.

.3. PROVIDE OPTIONS

There are those who prefer to do it all themselves from scratch, but for the most part, people want the brands they follow to make their lives easier by giving them quick, easy options to choose from.

Offer packages with catchy names like “The Big BBQ Party Package” that includes everything they need for that first big weekend deck party of the year. Or, create themed collections that evoke a certain feeling: “The Rustic Retreat Holiday Collection,” or “Spring Symphony Garden Collection”. Be very clear about what’s included in packages and collections so people can see the value of the offer and know – literally – what’s in it for them.

.4. DRIVE IT HOME

This is where all that pre-planning and preparation comes in. Because of the weeks or even months you’ve spent seasoning, painting and providing in your social messaging, your customer are ready to buy when the holiday is about to happen. They need to start getting ready for it, and you’ve shown them how to do it, so all they have to do is buy.

Pick the appropriate date tier in your plan when you begin offering the discounts, the VIP rewards, the special pricing, etc. Allow for varying levels of offers and don’t forget to include “Plan B” offers to push items that may not sell through as quickly as anticipated. Allowing some variability in your plan will make it easier to move things as needed throughout the season.

.5. MAKE IT EASY TO BUY

All the best laid plans in the world will fail if you don’t look through your customers’ eyes when setting up seasonal and featured displays. It should go without saying, but displays that are set according to the store’s priorities rather than the customers’ needs will not be successful.

Clear signage and pricing are key. You don’t want customers to be unpleasantly surprised because they aren’t getting the deal they thought they were.

Featured items should be displayed up front and center with related items right by their side. Don’t make people walk all over the store to “gather” the hot holiday items you’ve been promoting. If they want to shop for more, they will do so. But if they want to get in, get what they need, and get out, then make it easier for them to do that.

Creating effective seasonal social media content is a much easier concept when you include these five elements. Always begin with an end in mind and think through the holiday (and the process), and your seasonal campaigns will be much more successful.

 

If you’re looking for ways so spice up your seasonal social media campaigns, give us a call… We can help you cook up a storm!

28 Apr 2015
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Seasonal SEO 101 – The Basics That Matter Most When Driving Seasonal Sales

Sticky Post By On April 28, 2015 With No Comments

Businesses that thrive seasonally understand the importance of tailoring their marketing and advertising efforts to make the most of that season. It’s clear that a downhill ski resort in Minnesota is going to put their marketing efforts toward attracting customers during the winter season while a golf pro shop is going to focus on the summer business, even though both places may have some business in their down seasons. These are obvious examples of seasonal marketing and sales, but many industries have a seasonal curve that is not as clear or as easily defined. If you want to make the most of your online presence, it’s key that you not only look at your analytics but that you apply a seasonal filter too to see if there’s a way you can maximize your ROI.

Hopefully everything mentioned above makes sense and you realize the importance of looking at your business from a seasonal perspective. But let’s take that a step further and acknowledge that an online business may not reflect the same results that a brick and mortar business does. Take the local golf pro shop referenced above for example. We can assume that the brick and mortar business is selling a lot of equipment in the summer, but it may sell next to nothing during the winter months. What the potential of an online golf supply store? They could be raking in sales during the Holiday season in addition to the typical golf season. This additional sales “season” would not only increase the company’s annual revenue in general, but it would help bridge off-season financial gaps as well. By understanding their seasonal strengths and what items sell more during various seasons, they can tailor their SEO to attract the right audience in each season.

So let’s dive deeper into this online pro shop. It’s is very common for golfers to get small golf items as gifts for the holidays, i.e. golf balls, clothing, gift certificates, etc. It’s not as common for them to get golf clubs (if the golfer is a serious player) because those are personalized items and they can be quite expensive. The savvy online sales shop will tailor their holiday marketing for the smaller items. They’ll advertise holiday golf ball sales and emphasize the gift aspect to appeal to the gift giver. Then during high season, they’re going to target the serious golfer directly.

This means your seasonal SEO approach needs to have a keyword refocus. Your content probably needs a rewrite – or at the very least a refresh to appeal to seasonal specifics. You may also want to look into your placement. Your homepage may also need an entire seasonal rework to focus on the needs and interests of your target group at different times of the year. The cornerstone of all of this is your SEO analytics which will give you the data necessary to understand your online seasonality.

Maximize your seasonal marketing with Filament. We’ll help you craft content that reaches the right audience at the right time.

22 Apr 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Why Segmenting Your Email Lists Is More Important Than Ever

Sticky Post By On April 22, 2015 With 1 Comment

Despite the continuing debate, email marketing is here to stay as a viable form of inbound marketing. It has huge potential to not only help you turn leads into customers but also build a rapport with your target audience. That said, your time and your budget—it’s safe to assume—is limited, so you want to choose your strategies wisely. One smart way to get better results (and more revenue) from your email marketing campaigns is segmentation. Segmentation speaks to the fact that 1) your buyers aren’t all the same and 2) they aren’t all at the same point in the sales cycle. It’s one of those email marketing best practices that deserves a place toward the top your to-do list starting now, and here’s why:

1. Everyone else is doing it (or wishes they were).

While this reason didn’t work when we were kids, it stands now. You’re competing with others in your industry to get the attention of your email subscribers, and more and more marketers are using segmentation to send targeted messages to groups within their lists. And the fact is that non-segmented email sends just can’t compete with segmented email sends (and we’ve got the data to prove it—just keep on reading, friend).

2. Your subscribers expect it.

People expect messages that are tailored to them, and they’re savvy about cutting the clutter to receive the information that matters most to them. They want tailored content, and segmenting helps you give them what they want.

3. Relevance.

Because of all the choices available to your subscribers, it’s uber-important to center on relevance, and segmentation is all about relevance. It’s about delivering compelling content to your buyers at the right time. It helps narrow your focus and, as a result, cuts down on unsubscribe rates.

Relevance also affects the trust you build (or don’t build) with your subscribers. If they’re hitting delete every time they get one of your emails because your content doesn’t speak to them, they will quickly unsubscribe in order to pay attention to emails that are relevant to them. On the flip side, if you consistently deliver content that speaks to your subscribers in a specific way using segmentation, you’ll get a good reputation as a company that provides useful information that they need and soon they’ll be watching for your emails to hit their inbox.

4. Segmenting your list will increase your open & click rates.

This reason isn’t purely anecdotal. There’s a lot of research out there to back it up, including recent research by MailChimp on the effects of list segmentation on email marketing stats. They found that segmented email campaigns got 14.72% more opens and 62.84% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. Regardless of what you think of the previous three reasons, it’s clear that segmenting your email lists has a positive impact on subscriber engagement, and that’s a good enough reason for us.

Are you now convinced that you’ll get the most out of your email marketing campaign by segmenting your email marketing lists? Then, it’s time to check out some segmentation strategies. Not all segmentation yields the same results. There are numerous creative ways to segment your list and many things to consider when deciding which strategy will work best for your business.

Are you jazzed up to get started with email segmentation but feeling like you need a little help? Or maybe you’ve segmented your lists, but you’re not sure how to create compelling email messages for each of your segments. Get in touch with us to learn about our email marketing services and how we can help you meet your business’s goals.

If you have another reason for why segmentation is more important that ever that we haven’t included here, share it below in the comments section. We’d also love to hear about your successes with email marketing segmentation and what strategies you’ve found useful.

20 Apr 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With 7 Comments Permalink

14 Ways to Define and Refine Your Segmentation Strategy

Sticky Post By On April 20, 2015 With 7 Comments

A lot of people are thinking, talking, and writing about segmentation these days, and for good reason. Segmentation can increase engagement up to 50% or more. It’s a smarter way of delivering the most relevant content possible. However, defining market segments for your content depends highly on the type of business you run, if it’s B2B or B2C, and on what your goals are for your content. With the general goal of turning leads into customers, here are 14 strategies to get you beyond welcome emails and post-purchase emails.

Define

1. Natural Variation

Start by looking at your email list. Do you see any natural variations? One of the first things you might notice is the range of email providers (gmail, yahoo, etc.) on your list? You might be able to segment your prospects/customers by where they work right off the bat simply by looking at their email address.

2. Location

Location is another basic way to segment your audience. You can create segments by country, region, city, zip code and more and tailor your content to each segment. Do you have an event coming up in their city or in their neighborhood? If you have multiple brick-and-mortar stores, and one of your locations has a special event coming up, look for prospects with zip codes near that location.

If you run a retail store with a variety of products that may be weather related, consider the forecast in each of your geographic locations. Is a part of the country about to experience rain or snow? Do you sell rain boots? Use the opportunity to send a personalized email to folks you think might be in need of rain gear or snow pants very soon.

3. Gender

Face it. Men and women want different things. And if you have a wide array of products that appeal to both genders, such as beauty/grooming products, footwear, etc., segmenting by gender could be the way to go. Just don’t forget to adjust the text and images to match each segment.

Segmenting by gender also offers a way to segment by a single variable, which is a manageable way to get started with segmentation if you’re just beginning.

4. Age

Age can be another smart way to define segments because the way people respond to content can vary greatly depending on their age group. People of retiring age might not have as much use for that diaper deal as people aged 20–34 (the prime child-rearing years according to the Pew Research Group). You could target people of different ages as well as parents of children at different ages.

Along with age, consider getting personal by sending past and potential customers an email on their birthday. It’s a great way to say thanks and offer a special discount.

5. Job Title

If you’re a B2B marketer producing content, definitely consider segmenting your customers by job function. Folks with different duties will have different needs, and segmenting in this way gives you the opportunity to speak to those needs in a specific way while delivering that content to the people who need and want it in order to get the best click-through and conversion rates.

6. Buyer Personas

If you have buyer personas, this will be a no-brainer. It’s an easy and automatic way to segment your audience into groups that you’re already familiar with. If you don’t already have buyer personas, you can use your analytic data from your website to begin putting your customers into segments.

(We’ve spent the past couple weeks sharing knowledge about buyer personas on this blog. Check out our recent blog posts to learn more about using buyer personas to write smarter content and how to get social with buyer personas.)

7. Sales Funnel

Depending on where your prospects are in the sales funnel, you’ll want your content to meet different goals. Imagine if you owned a coffee shop. You’d have a completely different message for the person who walks in your store for the very first time than for the regular who shows up at the same time every morning for their daily dose. You can design a lead nurturing campaign around which categories your leads fall into: the top, middle, or bottom of your sales funnel.

8. Buyer Cycle Stage

Similar to the sales funnel option above, you can develop a lead nurturing track for those in each stage of the buyer cycle, such as general awareness/education, preference/interest, purchase, etc.

A quick-and-easy way to segment is to look at those people who’ve just made a purchase. If your goal is to get more product reviews for your site, targeting buyers with a request for a review right after they’ve made a purchase is a smart way to deliver the right content at the right time to the right people. You could also throw in a “buyers who bought X also liked Y” component to keep customers flowing through the cycle.

9. Interests

Using social listening, you can get a lot of information about your potential customers’ interests. Look at Facebook likes, downloads, past purchases, shopping cart wish lists, starred items and more. You can use in-email surveys to gather information about your subscribers’ interests. And you can also create email sign-up forms with check boxes, radio buttons, or drop-down menus so that subscribers can tell you from the start about their interests.

10. Behavior

You can gain a wealth of information—and ideas for defining segments—by looking at people’s behavior on your site, in emails and on social media. Consider segmenting by buying (or not-buying) behavior by looking at lapsed purchases, abandoned items in shopping cart, and frequency of purchases. If you happen to be offering a webinar in the coming weeks, target folks who downloaded e-Books on related subjects. You could also segment by those who actively engage with your emails and those who don’t.

Don’t forget to look at offline behavior too. Perhaps you gathered a list of folks with whom you recently chatted at a trade event. Even better, you might have had check boxes on that list with areas of interest that will allow you to further segment à la #9 above.

11. Brand preferences

Social media is another great place to get information on your potential customers’ brand preferences. You can also look at your past customers’ past purchases to see which brands they’ve purchased multiple times.

12. Transaction history

Transaction history easily segments your potential customers into different groups. Your list can be broken into groups of people who’ve made purchases in the past month, the past 6 months, the past year, etc. Then, tailor your content to each of these different audiences depending on what you want them to do. For folks who haven’t made a purchase in a long time, you may be back at the awareness and education stage. For those who’ve made more recent purchases, you may have a better idea about their interests and can use that strategy to segment them even further to send more one-on-one style emails based on what they might be likely to purchase again.

Another idea for segmenting within transaction history is to look at the frequency of certain purchases. Do customers purchase the same item on a yearly or even a monthly basis? You can use that information to hone your content and the timing of your delivery accordingly.

However you do it, make sure each segment has growth potential and is clearly definable, accessible, and actionable. Once you define your segments, you need to determine what you want the goal of the content for each segment is. What do you want your target prospect or customer to do once they interact with your content? Consider what information the people in your segments need and how they prefer to get that information (email, social media, etc.). Then, target your content to your segments, considering voice, format, length, timing, etc.

Refine

After you deliver your content, you want to make sure you measure the results and refine your segments and your content accordingly. The key to refining your segmentation strategy (or strategies) is getting good data and then listening to it. Your customers are telling you things about themselves through their interaction (or lack of interaction) with your content.

13. A/B Testing

For email marketing campaigns, test your segments for the following

  • delivery rate
  • view rate
  • open rate
  • click-through rate
  • sales conversion

Use the results to refine not only your segments but also your content for each segment.

14. Create a content map.

This strategy deals with looking at the content you’re currently creating. You want to map your content onto your sales funnel to see what areas you’re creating a lot of content for and where you need to create more. If, based on the segments you created in #7 above, you see that you’ve been creating content for a segment of your prospects/customers that’s underpopulated, you can move toward creating content for the areas in which you customers/prospects do appear with the goal of moving them down the funnel. You can apply this strategy to your buying cycle, by mapping your content onto your buying cycle stages. You can also map your content onto your buyer personas and adjust as needed.

When you measure well, the data gives you valuable insight into whether or not you’re reaching the goal of each content piece.

There you have it: 14 tips for defining and refining your segmentation strategy. One last reminder: as you’re defining segments and measuring engagement, always keep your ideal takeaways on top of mind for every single piece of content you’re producing.

17 Apr 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Social Segmentation: Learning More About Your Business From Your Customers

Sticky Post By On April 17, 2015 With 1 Comment

We’ve talked a lot about listening to our social media communities, and we’re beginning to understand more and more about the importance of that activity.

More specifically, we’re learning to redefine what social listening entails, how we go about it, and what we can (or, should) expect to do with what we learn from listening.

Of course, we can always expect that once we get to know something – particularly with regard to social media – the rules will promptly change. That said, we want to talk about segmentation.

Segmentation is the newer, more “powerful” version of what demographics [used to be] to marketers. Demographics suggested that we know, generally, who our customers are. Social segmentation suggests that we get to know our customers even better. After all, we can’t expect to sell to people if we don’t know what they like. Read more

Creative content from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

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