by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 21, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
To truly gauge the effect of variations in frequency of marketing emails, evaluate the cumulative metrics as well as per-message statistics.
How often does your company send marketing emails? Perhaps you’ve wondered if ramping up the number of messages you send to your database may generate more purchases. But you don’t want to cross the line of bothering people to the point where they unsubscribe or become annoyed with your business.
IBM Marketing Cloud recently released the 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, which aggregates data from messages sent by nearly 750 companies representing 3,000 brands in 40 countries. It offers interesting insight on metrics like open rates, click-throughs, and mobile metrics.
Marketing emails and the frequency math effect
One key finding from this year’s study involves something called the “frequency math effect.” It first became evident for businesses in the retail and ecommerce sector during the holidays but applies across verticals.
During periods of heavy email volume, certain metrics that determine the effectiveness of marketing emails — i.e., opens and clicks per message — may drop off drastically. But this is not necessarily cause for panic. If you look over the entire sending period, you are likely to see the number of total opens and clicks go up.
Because your subscribers are receiving more emails from you, they tend to open fewer of those messages. But because you are touching your subscribers more often, engagement increases, likely dramatically. This could lead to more conversions and higher revenue.
But there’s more to consider here. List churn metrics — e.g., hard bounces, unsubscribe rates, spam complaints — are also subject to the frequency math effect.
When you are sending marketing emails more frequently, you’ll likely see a drop in your unsubscribe rates, reports of abuse, etc. But don’t celebrate too soon. Again, the cumulative number of these actions will increase.
To better gauge the impact of marketing email frequency, it’s important to look at both per-message statistics and total open, click-through, and list churn metrics for an entire period. By doing so, you’ll be able to more accurately determine whether a change in marketing email frequency has driven an overall net positive or negative impact.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 20, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain, Warehousing & Materials Handling
A content marketing strategy helped one organization generate leads, increase web traffic, and drive sales and new business.
Why would my company blog? Do we really need to be on social media? What is a white paper, and who would read one that I wrote?
These are questions that many businesses in the manufacturing and warehousing space might ask. They don’t see or understand how they might benefit from content marketing.
TotalTrax might have asked the same sorts of questions several years ago. The company, which provides tracking technologies for manufacturing and warehouse operations, had experienced positive year-over-year growth for a decade. The website got decent traffic. Yet, there was a sense that there were many untapped opportunities for growth.
TotalTrax hired Fronetics Strategic Advisors to create and implement a content marketing plan to maximize the company’s digital presence. TotalTrax wanted to see results in the form of increased web traffic, new and better leads, and revenue. Fast forward 24 months, and that’s exactly what happened.
Content helped TotalTrax to achieve:
- 19% increase in overall web traffic
- 500% increase in traffic from social media
- 244 high-quality leads
- 30% net increase in new customers
- 10% growth in sales revenue
To learn more about how Fronetics helped TotalTrax maximize results from a digital and content marketing program, download our case study below.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 19, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
Twitter is changing its rules on the 140-character limit for your tweets.
In May, Twitter announced that it planned to make changes to the types of content that count toward the platform’s 140-character limit. The social network provided no firm timeline as to when the changes would take place, but The Verge reports that September 19th is the big day.
What are the changes? And what do they mean to you?
Media attachments including photos, GIFs, videos, polls, and Quote Tweets will no longer count toward your 140-character limit. Also no longer counting toward the character limit: @names in replies.
Other changes:
- The ability to retweet and quote yourself so that you can share new insight on one of your Tweets, or share it again if you feel like it went unnoticed.
- Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. This means that you will no longer need to use the awkward ”.@” convention.
Together these changes mean that you will have more flexibility in communicating via Twitter.
It isn’t clear if all the announced changes will occur simultaneously, or if they will be rolled out separately.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 15, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy, Talent
Content marketing is significantly more effective when a designated leader is driving your strategy.
Who is leading your content marketing strategy? If you don’t have an immediate answer, your content marketing program probably will not be as effective as it could be.
Research shows that companies who designate someone to drive the execution of their content marketing strategy have greater success than those that do not. So your strategy should account for leadership, specifically naming a person or position that will be in charge of implementation, problem-solving, and measuring results.
Who could take on this role for your business? Here are a few ideas.
An executive
Curata reports that, by 2017, 51% of companies will have an executive in their organization who is directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy. That’s how important it is to have someone leading your strategy: More than half of organizations will create or designate positions like chief content officer, VP of content, or director of content. If your company is large enough to support this human resource, you’ll likely reap great benefit from your content marketing efforts.
A marketing director
Is there a senior person on your marketing team with experience using content as a marketing tool? Having a marketing director lead your content strategy is a great option for companies who can afford to delegate some of that person’s responsibilities elsewhere to make room for this work. Marketing directors are generally organized and capable of leading a diverse team, and they are used to reporting on KPIs as they relate to marketing efforts.
Whoever produces most of your content
Many smaller or mid-sized companies don’t have large marketing teams, and instead rely on several people to take on content-production responsibilities in addition to their everyday tasks. These are the people who will be most familiar with your company’s content and strategy, and how they align with your business goals. Do any of these people have leadership abilities or experience running a cross-functional team? It could be worth outsourcing some content writing or production in order to allow that person to drive your content marketing strategy.
An advisory firm
Sometimes you don’t have the internal resources or expertise to execute your business’ content marketing on your own. Hiring a firm or professional to create and/or execute your strategy can take enormous pressure off of your employees. They are left to do their jobs, while an experienced team shoulders the burden of planning, producing, and reporting on the progress of your content marketing program. Such a partnership can be very beneficial to companies of all shapes and sizes.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 14, 2016 | Blog, Strategy, Supply Chain
If your customer experiences a break in service due to your company’s mistake, use this three-step approach to help save the relationship.
It can happen to good companies: Your organization makes a “relationship-defining” mistake with a new customer or, even worse, one of your best customers. How do you handle it?
On a recent client engagement where we were retained to increase sales force effectiveness, we got to see firsthand our client’s company reaction to an operational mistake in one of their aftermarket spare-parts service engagements. It wasn’t pretty.
Once the service break came to light, their first reaction was to go into “denial mode,” as they disputed the customer claim. After that didn’t work, they moved on to “shirk mode,” where they cited other factors that may have caused them to miss their service obligations. Lastly they entered “apology mode,” where they went overboard apologizing profusely instead of solving the problem in the first place. At that point, it got pretty ugly with their longstanding client.
What could they have done differently to remedy the situation and save the customer relationship? This is the advice I give my clients. It’s a pretty simple three-step formula that everyone in your organization should follow when there is a service disconnect of any proportion.
1) Get to the heart of the matter immediately.
Don’t look for back doors or contributors to help share the blame. If you make a mistake, own it outright and clearly. Don’t be wishy-washy. Be strong in your admission and stronger in your statements of reparation.
2) Contain and problem-solve.
Put your company’s energy here instead of trying to distance yourself from the problem. It will show your customer that your organization has core values and that your intent is to limit their exposure. Then fix the service break. You don’t need to be superheroes here. Be focused, listen, and act decisively.
3) Map the path to long-term resolution.
After the smoke has cleared and tempers have subsided, reaffirm your company’s commitment to your customer. Reiterate the steps you took to solve the problem — both the short-term fixes, as well as how you’ll ensure that the issue will not reoccur in the future. Very important: do it in writing. Conversations fade, as well as memories. Everyone will remember the pain of the service issue — make sure they remember the short-term and longer-term solution. One note of caution here: This is not the time to be patting yourself on the back. You screwed up, but you made it right. That’s why your customer chose you in the first place.
Customers don’t like mistakes, and they have a bigger dislike for mistakes that come with a lack of ownership and path to resolution. Follow these simple steps above to keep more customers for the long term.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 13, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Considering outsourcing some or all of your content marketing? Check out these statistics.
Companies turn to content marketing to build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. But the constant creation and distribution of original content can drain an organization’s resources. That’s why many choose to outsource all or some of their content marketing efforts to content partners or marketing firms.
If your business is exploring outsourcing as an option, here are some statistics that you might find interesting.
13 stats about outsourcing content marketing
51% of B2B marketers list lack of time/bandwidth to create content as one of their top content marketing challenges, and 50% list producing enough content variety/volume as well. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
30% of B2B marketers say an external agency/consultant is one of the top resources for content creation for their organizations. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
The two most outsourced content marketing activities:
- Writing (44%)
- Design (41%)
(LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
Marketers are outsourcing 18% of their content, with the remaining content being created in-house, curated or syndicated. (Curata)
Only 25% of marketers don’t outsource any content creation. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
About two-thirds of marketers outsource less than one-third of their content creation. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
Business bloggers outsource 14% of their blog posts. The best practitioners outsource 24%. (Curata)
What are the most effective resources for video marketing content creation?
- Combination of outsourced and in-house resources (70%)
- Outsource to a specialist (22%)
- In-house resources only (8%)
(Ascend2 2015 Study)
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