Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Chase a Silver Bullet Strategy
Too many marketers chase a “silver bullet” strategy, in which a single tactic will address all their challenges. Here’s what to do instead.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
It’s worth repeating – focusing on a single tactic to market your business is not the way to go. B2B marketers need to take a holistic view of the buyer’s journey and apply the right marketing tactics (plural) at the right times.
For example, since it’s been shown that B2B buyers complete over 60 percent of the buying journey before contacting a business. That means that your content marketing shouldn’t be all about selling prospects on your products, but rather helping them locate valuable information while they’re in the research phase-or better yet, helping them self-educate about solutions to their key challenges.
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Is “SEO” the Right Term Anymore?
SEO today is a complex role – one that goes far beyond simply ensuring that search engine crawlers can access and parse your website. Doing the job well requires a working knowledge of many different online marketing channels, along with an understanding of how these various channels work together to enhance search engine visibility and create a great user experience.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
It’s not suffice to conduct a technical audit, optimize your web pages, and focus on ranking for individual keywords. And if your SEO firm’s capabilities stop there, it’s time to consider another option.
Sales Renewal’s SEO services include all of the above, of course, but also focus on content, social media, the customer journey – in other words, SEO cannot be “done” in a vacuum.
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Five ways to improve your organic reach on Facebook
Organic reach on Facebook is abysmal and getting worse, according to the latest announcement from the social network that’s visited by more than a billion users.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
What do unicorns and donkeys have to do with Facebook? Let’s just say that if you’re interested in increasing your organic Facebook reach, you want to have more unicorns in you content stable. Read on for some useful ways to amplify your Facebook reach.
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Ecommerce Email Marketing: 10 Tips to Boost Product Sales
Email marketing accounts for over 7% of all ecommerce transactions, making it the second most effective ecommerce marketing channel behind search.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Ignore email marketing at your peril! This article reinforces the importance of supporting your e-commerce efforts with email marketing and can be used as a helpful checklist of things you can put into action today.
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Engagement Is a B.S. Metric and Your Ad Agency Knows It
There’s a better way to measure ad effectiveness than clicks, impressions and viewability, writes Justin Adler.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
It’s interesting to see Ad Age finally coming around to the perspective Sales Renewal has had since its founding 7+ years ago: only real-world performance metrics should count when you’re benchmarking marketing. They haven’t, however, yet adopted our belief that the most important performance metric of all should be sales (as this is the one we rely on).
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2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study
This 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark will allow you to discover how you measure up across 25 open, click-through, list churn and mobile metrics, plus get insights on:
- Industry-specific comparisons and geographic breakouts from across the world
- Device usage, holiday trends, transactional emails and engagement rates
- Benchmarks beyond “average, ” including median and top-performing quartiles
- Using this data and related best practices to improve your email program
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Email marketing – it’s measurable, flexible, and affordable, making it one of the most effective digital marketing tactics and one Sales Renewal recommends for all our clients.
And like any marketing tactic, reviewing your email marketing on a regular basis is important to be sure your emails are working the best they can. This annual report of email marketing benchmarks from IBM is a helpful resource that offers 25 open, click- through, list churn and mobile metrics that you can use to help you see where you rank.
Here are some of the top highlights; download the report for more details.
Open Rates
Open rates can signal progress or problems with engagement. It’s not a completely accurate metric because it doesn’t capture all opens due to image blocking and other factors. In the US, average unique open rates are 21.3%. When comparing message types, unique open rates for transactional messages are 47.1% vs non-transactional at 21.6%.
Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate (CTR) is measures recipient action on an email message, measured as a percentage of messages opened. In the US, average click through rate is 3.3%. When comparing message types, unique click-through rates for transactional messages are 8.8% vs non-transactional at 3.3%.
List Churn Metrics Overview
One of the biggest concerns our clients have is unsubscribes. All businesses can expect some list turnover (churn), but it’s quite often difficult to determine if this is a natural rate or if there is some problem with your email communications. Rising unsubscribe rates might tell you your email messaging doesn’t match what subscribers expected when they signed up. Higher-than- average hard-bounce rates can indicate you don’t practice good, ongoing list maintenance.
According to the IBM study, the unsubscribe rate is most useful as a trend indicator. Even the lowest performers generate unsubscribe rates well below 1 percent. However, is that rate going up or down? If your unsubscribe rate rises over time or remains constant while spam complaints increase, you might have an unclear unsubscribe process or be losing subscriber trust.
In the US, the mean hard bounce rate is 0.467%; the mean unsubscribe rate is 0.122%.
Download the study to read about Holiday Retail and Ecommerce Metrics and Device and Email Client Usage. And if you have questions about how you can make your email program work for your business, contact Sales Renewal today.
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Brands Need to Focus on Content or Risk Failure
It is important to focus on the right inputs if you want content to truly transform business performance.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Ever stopped and wondered why you were ______… Fill in the blank with any marketing tactic: blogging, emailing, interacting on social media, “doing” SEO, advertising, sending direct mail.
We continually review our clients’ marketing programs, from quarterly plans to monthly reviews to day-to-day changes, to be sure we are addressing the clients’ needs in the most effective manner.
Content marketing can be one of your biggest investments and yet one of the more fluid, changing programs to manage. This article brings it back to the basics: Understand your audiences; have a plan; create quality content; and focus on integration, not silos.
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10 Tips for Making Popups Go the Extra Mile for Your Business
Web Sites – Popups were once the bane of the Web; today, they are an excellent way to capture visitors’ attention and improve conversion rates. But they need to be done properly.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Popups – if you are still from the school of “pop ups on my website? never!,” it may be time to rethink your position.
We admit, they used to annoy us so much that we would never recommend them to a client. But today, when it comes to growing mailing lists, Sales Renewal has evolved to a new best practice for e-commerce clients and any service client with an active content marketing program. So rather than counting on visitors noticing a “join our list” link somewhere on a page, we proactively pop up a dialog asking if they want to join. And subscriptions have skyrocketed.
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How to Get Past the Dreaded SEO Plateau
Progress starts slowing down, and organic traffic stops growing.
That “SEO plateau” affects almost every business that uses search engine marketing as part of its marketing strategy. Getting past the plateau is one of the greatest challenges of online businesses.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
You’re not alone if, even with strong content and high ranking through SEO, you’ve started to notice diminishing returns. Your organic traffic may not be growing at the same rate, or your keyword rankings are stagnant.
This plateau is actually a good sign that your SEO program is working. But, you can take various steps to improve your SEO performance.
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48 Instagram Stats That’ll Help You Improve Your Posting Strategy
Instagram’s more than 400 million active users place it well ahead of Twitter (310 million active users) Snapchat (200 million active users), and Pinterest (100 million active users).
Sales Renewal’s insight:
To reach Instagram’s users, businesses need to be smart about what they post, when they post, how often they post, and whom they’re targeting. Find out more about the site’s skyrocketing growth and then get in touch if you’d like some help integrating Instagram into your social media marketing plan.
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