It’s only getting more and more crowded in the eCommerce industry out there. Online shopping has always been popular — but since the pandemic strike, now it’s become people’s favorite way to buy things they need.
Today, at least 2.14 billion people shop online (equivalent to 27.2% of the world’s population). And more than 24 million eCommerce sites are leaving no stone unturned to attract more customers and make them spend their money on the products.
Now that the competition is getting bigger and your potential customers are getting pickier, how can you make your online store stand out from the crowd?
One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to optimize your online store. Yes, Your eCommerce business needs to take an SEO-friendly approach to sit on the top pages of search engine results pages.
It might sound daunting. But, there is one SEO-friendly, engaging medium that can help you improve your eCommerce search rankings hassle-free: video content.
So, how can you use videos to optimize your eCommerce website? Here are all the basics you need to know.
E-Commerce Video: Why Do You Need It?
Not only are videos well-known for their power to convey messages succinctly, but they are also a powerful tool to boost a website’s rank on search engines. According to the stats, a website with a video is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google.
The reason?
Because Google itself thinks that video is a unique multimedia format, it should come as no surprise that the world’s largest search engine loves this format and is much quicker to index it than the 1000-word text you write on your eCommerce website.
Of course, the perk of using videos for your eCommerce marketing and optimization is so much more than that. Here are some other reasons why you should incorporate videos into your eCommerce website:
Set the Customers Expectations
Simply looking at product images and reading the text-heavy product descriptions are not enough to help them understand what to expect. In this case, videos can show your potential customers what your products look like in real life, making it easier for you to educate them about your product.
Videos allow the potential customer to take a closer look at your products from different angles. Therefore, they should have a better knowledge of what your product is all about and avoid any surprises (or potential disappointment) in the future.
Show the Products’ Fullest Potential
Videos are an ideal medium to show how your products work and how potential customers can benefit from them. You can create explainer videos or product videos for your products to guide them using your product to its fullest potential.
No more plain, underwhelming text-based descriptions. You can rely on videos to convey the essence of the products you sell on your eCommerce website.
Make the Customers Stay Longer
You can also use videos to make your potential customers spend more time on your online store. It helps you increase dwell time. And the higher dwell time you have, the higher your chances you will get to boost your eCommerce website ranking.
Videos are so much more engaging and entertaining compared to other types of content. All the potential customers need to do is to click on the play button, and the video will deliver snackable messages to them effortlessly.
Address Any Product-Related Concerns
Videos also offer you a light-hearted way to generate more trust. It shows off the products in a typical box and demonstrates your value proposition. Therefore, the potential customers can be more convinced to purchase from you.
By watching a video, potential customers can find the most answers to their questions. Therefore, they can have reasons why they need your product.
How to Boost Your eCommerce Rank with Videos?
Not all eCommerce videos bring and help you reap all the benefits mentioned above. You need to invest more time and effort to optimize the videos.
Here are some handy and actionable ways to boost your eCommerce website rank with videos. This way, it would be much easier for potential customers to find your online stores.
Do an In-Depth Keyword Research
Just like a regular SEO practice, you will need keyword-based titles and descriptions for your eCommerce videos. Many eCommerce websites embed their videos from social media platforms like YouTube or other video hosting sites. This is where keyword-based titles and descriptions are needed.
Make sure to choose the keyword that has low competition and a quite decent amount of volume. You can also opt for long-tail keywords to reach more specific, highly-targeted potential customers.
Here’s an example of a keyword-based eCommerce video from Love Hair. They use “pure coconut oil” as a target keyword.
Keep Them Short and Crispy
Make sure you keep your eCommerce videos short and straightforward. Long-duration videos can only make your potential overwhelmed and lose interest in watching it.
After all, no one wants to see a 10-minute video of a brand bragging about their products, right? This will lead to a higher bounce rate and harm your eCommerce SEO ranking.
Eight seconds. That’s the time you have to grab your potential customer’s attention with your videos before you can engage them. That is why it’s crucial to include only information that brings value to your target customers.
The sweet spot for eCommerce videos is around 2 minutes. After two minutes, potential customers tend to get distracted and move on to the next thing.
See how Essie can give their potential customers a 1-minute how-to video to encourage them to buy their products:
Optimize Videos for Mobile Users
Do you know that younger generations (i.e., Generation X and Millennials shop online more often than older generations? Millennials make at least 60% of their purchases online. And that group age now makes more than 36% of their total purchases using mobile devices.
Those staggering numbers are quite obvious since younger generations are mostly digital natives. In this situation, you need to make sure that your eCommerce videos are accessible for hand-held users.
Mobile-friendly videos will help you expand your reach as it caters to mobile users. The more people click on your eCommerce website, the more likely you will gain more authority in your industry. And you know that Google will prioritize a website with high authority.
See how Nine Line Apparel nailed their mobile responsive eCommerce video on their About Us page.
Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails
The thumbnail is the first thing your potential customers see when they find your video on your eCommerce website or search engine results. It’s a big deciding factor whether or not they click on your video. So, the more you create them eye-catchingly, the more people will click them.
Video thumbnails have a direct impact on your eCommerce organic search visibility and click-through. It helps you to spark potential customers’ curiosity and even may transform their expectations of what the target URL is about.
This key here is to give a more professional look to your video and make it more appealing to click. Make sure to make it clear and convey the content in the most effective way.
You don’t have to go all fancy just to create catchy thumbnails. You can simply use your professionally-taken product photos just like what Bliss did for all of their product videos.
Make the Content Engaging
SEO can only get your eCommerce video to appear on your potential customers’ screen. But, it’s actually up to you to keep them engaged with your brand and move them through to the sales funnel.
You need good, related content for this. The best way to do this is to put yourself in your potential customers’ shoes so you can think and behave like them towards the eCommerce website.
Ask yourself, “what kind of content do I want to watch and make me spend money on the products?”
For instance, if you want to create a product video, always make sure to highlight the benefits instead of bragging about your awesome features. And if you aim to make a brand history video for your About Us page, it’s always better to include your beginning and where you are now — avoid including any fluff and any unnecessary moments whenever possible.
Not only will an engaging eCommerce video optimize your online store, but it will also make those potential customers come back for your content.
See the eye-capturing and engaging video from ESQIDO. It demonstrates the easiest way of applying false lashes to get visitors’ attention and engage them right off the bat.
Final Thoughts
Video can be a powerful addition to your eCommerce website. One of the perks of having them on your online store is that it can boost your website presence, making it much easier for target customers to find you through the organic search for relevant keyword searches.
When you optimize your online store, it would be much easier for you to drive more traffic to your website. This, as a result, will lead to an increase in conversion rate and revenue. After all, the more traffic you drive, the more chances you will get to convert them into paying customers, right?
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Lead generation is a top priority for every organization. Cold emails have been an excellent avenue for lead generation for several brands.
Using the right cold emailing formula, this form of lead generation can generate desired results.
Are you someone hoping to find the right formula to generate leads through cold emailing?
When you craft the perfect message and include all the elements needed, a successful cold email campaign will be your result. From warm to hot leads, results are almost guaranteed when cold emailing is undertaken in the right manner!
What is cold emailing?
The act of ‘cold emailing’ is best described as contacting a recipient without having any prior contact with the intent of converting them into paying customers.
Cold emailing has been around for decades and has proven to generate beneficial results for several reasons. While some might argue, cold emails are a shot in the dark; when done right, cold emailing can result in qualified leads and eventually conversions.
But how does one guarantee cold emails will land in the prospects’ inbox? How can one say with assurance that the email won’t get lost in a sea of existing emails?
Marketers and salespeople need to keep in mind that their prospects are individuals with feelings and their own set of challenges in life. If they view their prospects as more than just mere numbers, the results of cold emailing can be magnificent. Introducing empathy in your cold email outreach campaign is essentially what it all boils down to.
Writing the perfect cold email with the right structure and an effective subject line can in fact aid your organization in locking in on a prospect.
Despite its intrusive nature, cold emailing holds a number of benefits. Here are 5 reasons why you should absolutely invest your time and efforts in cold emailing:
Cold Emails Reach Prospects At Favorable Timings: Everyone checks their emails daily, especially working individuals. With advanced email tracking tools, you can get notified as soon as someone opens your email. This can help you formulate a plan to send emails at the right time to recipients thus increasing your chances of visibility.
Personalized Reach: Cold emails are highly targeted and can be tailored to each and every individual. When recipients read emails crafted specifically for them (various tools are available that allow mass personalization), the chance of a conversion is far greater than an impersonal email.
Scalability: This is probably the most important advantage cold emails have to offer. While cold calling is effective for creating immediate, personal connections, cold emailing stands out in its ability to scale outreach efficiently across large prospect lists. You can reach a large number of prospects in one go as compared to cold calling. Various email tools are available to help you reach mass recipients all in one go.
Cold Emails Are Persistent: Some folks probably don’t view this as an advantage. But from the POV of a sales or marketing manager, persistency is advantageous. With several follow-ups beyond the primary email, prospects can be persuaded a number of times.
Brand Awareness: Every email sent out to a prospect is an opportunity for potential conversion. Cold emails act as an avenue for brand awareness. Even if the prospect does not require the product/service you are offering at the time they will still be made aware of your brand and will remember it for the future.
According to Clearbit, the average cold email response rate is as low as 1%. It makes one question the effectiveness of cold emailing. As mentioned earlier, if cold emailing is undertaken meticulously, it can achieve wonderful results.
Lead generation is the first step in any kind of sales form. Using the art of cold emailing, sales managers and marketers can secure leads using this low-cost marketing tool and achieve highly favourable conversion rates.
Keep these 5 tips in mind when drafting your cold email campaign and you will be guaranteed to secure leads:
5 Tips to generate leads through cold emailing
1. Personalization Needs To Be Your Mantra!
Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient for a moment. You are sitting in front of your laptop, browsing through your inbox. Suddenly, you come across an email with the subject line that reads ‘{Your_Name}, this is just for you!’. Now, won’t that pique your interest? It will!
Uplandsoftware found that open rates can be increased by 22% if the recipient’s name is included in the subject line.
Additionally, adding custom snippets like {First_Name} or {Company Name} can ensure a higher level of personalization that will speak to the email recipients directly.
In this regard, these emails will work because the recipient will feel that you personally took the time out of your day to compose the email specially for them with some interest.
Researching your prospects and gaining valuable information that can amp up the personalization process will go a long way.
What is the first thing your prospects will see before they even consider opening your email? The subject line!
The subject line is often overlooked and more emphasis is placed on the content of the email. Your subject line is the one that catches the attention of the prospect first, and then it is the content.
Attention-grabbing subject lines are a must when cold emailing. Adding a question, their name, promo, call to action directly in the subject line may very well increase your open rates.
Experts recommend that subject lines be below 60 characters and ten words in length. A great subject line should work in any environment the recipient receives the email in.
Before you craft the perfect subject line, consider asking yourself the following 3 questions:
Is my intent clear?
Is the message I am trying to convey relevant currently?
Has a sense of urgency been established?
Testing out different subject lines is another beneficial practice to add to your strategy. Some individuals prefer receiving emails with enticing offers upfront. Others could probably want to know what you are offering before considering your services. There is a 26% increased likelihood of readers opening your email with personalized subject lines.
Additional tip: Creating a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) will invoke a sense of curiosity in the recipient.
Here are a few examples of subject lines that work:
“{First Name}, we have found exactly what you are looking for”
“{First Name}, do you want some time off?”
“What would you do if you had [number] more hours per week?”
“Why {Company_Name}?”
“You missed it!”
3. Using Social Proof To Your Advantage
Social proofing is one of the oldest techniques used in the sales industry. Think about it for a second, if you hear that person X increased their revenue by 30% in under 6 months after using a particular product; would you not be intrigued? You would.
Thus, using social proofing techniques to bolster your email pitch can help you achieve your desired results. Of course, we don’t recommend embellishing your content with white lies.
Having more credibility will increase the chances of your prospects trusting you. Mentioning actual statistics and facts from existing or previous clients who have succeeded after using your services will strengthen your pitch. You can share customer success stories and achievements to convince recipients to opt for your services.
For example:
“Hey {First Name},
We have worked with over [500+] clients in the past, providing them with state-of-the-art [email marketing services].
Recently, we worked with [ABC corp], and were able to increase their lead generation by 18%. They were having trouble generating leads through conventional methods and felt they needed to opt for professional email marketing services”
Social proofing will make your cold emails a lot more compelling. As it is well known that people are more likely to adopt the opinions of trusted individuals.
Beyond mentioning organization names and quantifiable data, you can also include mutual connections and your professional credentials.
4. Follow-Ups Are Pivotal To The Success Of Your Campaign
Follow-ups are extremely important when cold emailing. Some would even go as far as to say that follow-ups are more critical in securing a reply than the initial email.
70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. No response in the first email does not necessarily mean the prospect is not interested. 70% of email chains generally stop sending emails after the initial attempt. The primary email is a part of a much bigger picture in the process of cold emailing.
The initial email is only to grease the wheels; the follow-ups are the ones that do the heavy lifting. Also, persistency is key, remember?
Your cold email outreach should be an ongoing conversation. 80% of deals require an average of at least 5 touches before closing.
The graph below shows at which point a recipient is more likely to reply to your email. The more emails one sends out, the more they are likely to get noticed. If your prospect keeps seeing your name in their inbox, in some sense they will have been familiarized with your existence.
Eventually, they will want to know what you have to say. If you use the correct verbiage in your follow-ups, prospects won’t feel like they are just another name on a mass emailing list.
Additionally, by sending follow-ups, prospects actually feel like you care about their response or lack thereof. Thus, a humanizing element comes into play and that increases your chances of a reply.
It is entirely up to you, how many follow-up emails you want to include in your outreach. Experts recommend sending out at least 5 follow-up emails at timely intervals.
Here is a rough sequence you can follow:
Follow up 1 (After 3 days)
Follow up 2 (After 7 days)
Follow up 3 (After 14 days)
Follow up 4 (After 30 days)
Follow up 5 (After 60 days)
5. Ensuring The Prospect Is The Right Fit With Actual Intent
Sending out cold emails to recipients that are not interested in your services would be a pure waste of time and resources. Marketers and salespeople often use intent data to skip ahead of the line and identify individuals that require the solution you are offering.
Intent data highlights behavioural signals that show the intention of your prospect to purchase a product or service. Recent studies have found that an average B2B prospect is already 67% into the purchasing journey. This data helps organizations jump ahead and use it to their advantage in securing prospects and qualified leads.
This technique is helpful for cold emailing, as you can reach out to prospects before they contact you; and this is especially effective since you are reaching out to them at the right time.
There are several other ways to find prospects besides this, these include:
Social Media
Referrals
Networking
Online Forums (Quora, StackExchange, Reddit, etc)
Google Analytics Data
Website Visitation
Now that you have locked in on a prospect, how do you ensure they are the right fit? If you already have a buyer persona in mind, that would be a great place to evaluate the fit.
Besides that, with data enrichment and predictive lead scoring technologies on the rise, evaluating fit can be assessed with a microscopic lens.
Below are 3 questions to consider when evaluating if a prospect is a right fit for your organization:
What technologies are they currently using?
How many employees do they have?
How much funding do they have? (i.e. can they afford your services?)
Additional Tips For Lead Generation Through Cold Emailing
Use Conversational Language: A successful email outreach program involves using language and verbiage that is conversational in nature. It is recommended that cliche or overused phrases be avoided altogether. Sticking to the basics is the best way to get your message across.
For example, “Hey there! John, are you ready for the weekend?”, “Hope you have a splendid week ahead”, “I am ready for the weekend” “Hope you aren’t having a bad case of the Monday Blues!”
Ensure All Your Contact Information Is In Your Signature: This is an often-overlooked tip but is one that is quite important. All of your contact information should be included in your email signature, including your phone number, office address, LinkedIn, and website URL. An email signature acts as a digital card and shows professionalism.Through your email signature, you can provide extra resources. If someone were sceptical about your credentials, checking your LinkedIn account can help put their mind at ease. Additionally, if a prospect wanted to get in touch with you directly, they could contact you through the phone number provided and perhaps speed up the process of closing a deal.
Use Cold Emailing Software: Using cold emailing software, you will be able to automate several time-consuming processes if undertaken manually. Cold emailing software also provides users with real-time data and analytics that can be used to your advantage to refine your campaign. You should also be using software to help create the template for your email marketing campaigns. A good email template builder software can save you hours of your time which would otherwise be required to set up email campaigns.With email software, you can segment lists into different target audiences with specific preferences. Each mass email sent out can be personalized for each prospect as if you were having a one-on-one conversation with them.
Avoid Long-Form Content: If you intend to capture and retain your prospect’s attention, then avoiding long-form content is advisable. Keep your emails short, not more than two paragraphs.When people check their inboxes, they do it with the intention of clearing it out; if they come across a long-winded email, especially when they’re short on time, they will not read it. Remember that emails are not books, they are meant to be short.
Ensure Your Timing Is Right: Timing is indeed everything and plays a huge role in the success of your cold email campaign. Familiarize yourself with your prospects before reaching out to them. Look at their social profiles to gain relevant insights into their professional life.You want to avoid being labelled as ‘spam’, so decide upon the perfect timing best suited for your prospect. Conduct A/B split testing to see which timings and days have recorded the highest open rates. This will tell you the best time to send an email.
Canned Content Is A No Go: If there’s one thing people dislike it is impersonal and canned content. Canned content is pre-made generic content that is used to speed up the email writing process.This content is generated with general ideas and assumptions of the customer’s needs and preferences. Personalize your content to the specific needs and preferences of your prospect. Try to make it as personal as possible, adding minor details can do wonders to your reply rate.
Don’t Beat Around The Bush: People are busy! If they do open your email, then you want to capture their attention as soon as possible. Be direct and get to the point in the second line. Keep your opening line/paragraph short. Building up to a point, with irrelevant details about yourself and the organization will impersonalize the content of the email.Get to the point directly, and present your value proposition within the first two lines. Show them the problem you aim to solve through your product or service.
Add Call-To-Actions (CTAs): Adding a CTA at the end of your email will help you measure the success rate of your campaign. The real success metric is not open rates, but rather the number of people who actually undertook the desired action in the form of a CTA. Not all CTAs have to be too salesy. Emails with a single CTA have been known to increase clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%.Some CTA examples include, provide a specific day or time, learn more, read more, watch now, get the app, schedule a call, etc. Aesthetically appealing CTAs are also on the rise, so design your CTA in a way that prompts the user to click on it.
Conclusion
Cold email outreach is a great opportunity to find qualified leads and increase your conversion rate. This method works amazingly when undertaken in the right manner. It is a great way to start conversations with prospects and help them become aware of your brand.
The most effective method to date is in fact personalization. Instead of sending out generic messages that would instantly cause a prospect to turn away, offer tailor-made solutions. Hone in on their specific needs and then craft the perfect cold email.
Improved targeting can help you achieve desired results. A high open rate does not signify much if you are receiving no replies. Undelivered emails also affect your open rates thus it is best you re-verify your email marketing database using email verifier tools.
Trying out A/B split testing is another way of analyzing the effectiveness of your campaign. LeadGenius tried A/B split testing for their subject lines and concluded that they saw a 49% increase in open rates.
Cold emailing requires patience and persistence. It can be tricky and even feel monotonous but it is rewarding if you take the time to do it right. Use sales prospecting tools, CRM platforms, email marketing tools, and email tracking software to track, analyze, measure, and improve your results to maximize your efforts.
Happy Cold Emailing!
Author Bio:
Dhruv is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Saleshandy, a sales engagement platform that helps sales professionals close more deals. He is an empathetic marketer, people person, SaaS enthusiast, hustler, and growth hacker. He is passionate about identifying customer needs, measuring success and delight. He loves to write on customer-centric problem solving and growth, enabling customers and businesses to make better decisions.
You’re reading about building a successful e-commerce website. Maybe, you want to venture into the e-commerce business. Who doesn’t know that e-commerce is a lucrative B2C business model?
However, you’ve got to have a proper plan in place because launching an e-commerce business isn’t that simple. You must know that it does sound like fun when you’re working a 9-to-5 job and want to start something on the side (or even quit your job to go all in).
But, of course, you’re in luck. I’ve got you covered.
This isn’t the first time I’m helping people to build an e-commerce website. I have had several talks with friends and relatives who wanted to get into this business. Most of them were afraid to “jump off the cliff”.
Maybe, there were two reasons why most people don’t start their these businesses:
1. They lack the right skills
They don’t have any idea where to begin when starting an e-commerce site. They think that launching an e-commerce website might cost them thousands of dollars just because they have no idea where to get started. Let me correct you right off the bat, it won’t cost you thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce business.
Have you ever heard of a tool called WooCommerce? You might not need to spend a dollar because it’s an e-commerce tool that installs merchandise features to your self-hosted WordPress website. However, there are several paid tools for launching e-commerce sites that are even better; you’ll learn more about them in this article.or a more dynamic and seamless user experience, consider integrating Angular Spreadsheet Controls into your website development. These tools streamline data management and enhance functionality, ultimately contributing to a user-friendly interface. This can be particularly advantageous if you’re using platforms like WooCommerce, making it easier for customers to interact with your digital storefront effectively.
2. They’re afraid of failing
One of the biggest reasons why most people don’t take that leap of faith is that they’re afraid of failing. Most of them overthink the whole thing, but some of them can’t take risks at all. In other words, they’re afraid of failing so they never take action.
If you’re planning on starting an e-commerce website in 2022 or beyond, then don’t let the fear of failing stop you. Gary Vaynerchuk often says to his fans and followers that pay attention to who’s giving the advice. The point is that if you’re asking about starting an e-commerce venture with someone who hasn’t done any business before, you need to rethink your strategy.
As far as my experience with e-commerce websites is concerned, I don’t consider myself an expert in this genre, but I’ve been running a personal online store for the past 15 months.
Plus, I have had some experience selling e-products via 2checkout and Fastspring.
Let’s just say I won’t hire an e-commerce guy if I ever want to scale my e-commerce business because I might not need one.
You’re about to learn:
What an e-commerce website is, and why it is important
3 W’s of building an e-commerce website
The steps involved in building an e-commerce website
The tools that are used for creating e-commerce websites
How to market your e-commerce business in today’s world
So before we dig deeper into building such websites in 2022 or even after that, it’s important to take care of the basics. For those who’re slightly unsure about an e-commerce website, here’s some explanation:
What’s an E-commerce Website?
It’s a website that sells products online and provides a facility for customers to shop on the internet without having to visit a brick-and-mortar store for shopping. It is also known as an e-store or online shop.
Furthermore, some e-commerce websites sell softwares, printables, and digital content, whereas others also sell tangible items. However, for tangible goods, the e-store may ask for freight charges and address of the recipient.
We’re living through a time of Technology and the Internet. Therefore, buying stuff online is no mystery, especially for millennials. Most e-commerce websites accept PayPal, debit cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Play, and other payment options.
The best part about the e-commerce business is that anyone with a certain set of skills can venture into it and start their entrepreneurial journey without a ton of investment. You’ll learn about the e-commerce website building tools that make the launching process a whole lot easier.
3 W’s of Building an E-commerce Website: Who, Why, and What
This might seem like a section that most of you would want to skip so that you can get to the cream of this piece. However, this brief section might turn things around for you. The following three W’s could be crucial to your e-commerce business success:
1. Who is the target audience of the e-commerce business?
The understanding of the target audience means you know who you want to reach out to for selling your products. For instance, if you only sell products in the US, you might not need to run Facebook ads for Canada. It shows that you’re well aware of your target audience.
2. Why did you choose the e-commerce business model?
It’s essential to get the basics right. If you aren’t sure why you entered the e-commerce market, then you should rethink your whole strategy before investing your hard-earned money into this business. You must choose the e-commerce business model if you’re passionate about selling online or you’ve got some experience in sales and marketing.
3. What is your brand’s value proposition?
A brand’s value proposition is the ability to stand out from the crowd. It could be anything from efficient customer support, quick free delivery, to low prices. Make sure that you develop your e-commerce company’s value proposition that sticks with your sales and marketing. Using a strategic clarity canvas, you can visually outline your business objectives and ensure alignment across teams.
That’s pretty much it.
Let’s jump right into the cream of this article.
Five Step Guide on Building an E-commerce Website
Let’s take a look:
1. Understand the E-commerce Business Model Inside-out
The stepping stone of building an e-commerce website is understanding the e-commerce business model. Starting an e-commerce store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jump straight to choosing the e-store’s name and go for it.
Instead, the groundwork includes several things to be taken care of before you go ahead and launch your e-commerce business. You must first figure out what to sell, where to sell, and who you should sell to before taking any further steps.
So here are some essentials of starting an e-commerce business that you should work on:
1. Business Model
Decide the business model of your e-commerce website whether it’s going to be B2B or B2C. It may vary from business to business. For instance, AliExpress is a popular e-commerce website that caters to both B2B and B2C consumers. However, it’s mainly a B2B business portal that connects wholesalers/manufacturers with retailers.
2. Products Selection
Product selection is one of the fundamental steps of starting an e-commerce website. It’s highly unlikely that you want to start an e-commerce website but you don’t have any products in mind. Choosing the right product requires knowing the products’ categories inside-out. A lot of entrepreneurs either work for others before they venture into the e-commerce industry or they create their own products to sell online.
3. Stock Management
Stock management is managing your product inventory. You don’t need a fancy POS or stock management software in the beginning. However, the first thing you might want to figure out is how you’re going to keep your stock. Do you have a warehouse to store it in or will you buy the product when an order comes?
4. Fulfillment/Shipment
Once you’re done with the product selection and stock management, the next step is the fulfilment or shipment. When you opt for the 3PL fulfillment company it usually means you don’t have to ship the product, but instead, a third-party online store ships your product from their warehouse. On the other hand, when you don’t work with any major e-commerce platform and, instead, sell products through your website, you’d have to manage the shipment yourself. You would be better off striking a deal with a courier company that offers lower charges to you as compared to walk-in customers. In such cases, using a courier invoice template can help streamline the invoicing process, ensuring all details are captured clearly for both the customer and your records. You can also strike a deal.
5. Website Development
E-commerce website development is one of the pillars of launching an e-commerce business. You may want to hire a full-time developer to launch your website or work with a freelance web developer if you have some know-hows of website development. You may also want to check out e-commerce platforms that help you launch your online store within minutes.
These were some fundamental areas to think through before you hop on the e-commerce train and journey ahead. You might also want to consider incorporating some of the latest web design trends before you set out full swing with your web development projects. To ensure a smooth and efficient development process, it’s highly recommended to consult with ecommerce website development services that can guide you through the complexities of creating a site that meets both your business goals and user experience expectations. Building a successful online store requires a strategic approach, from choosing the right platform to optimizing user experience. Investing in ecommerce web development ensures that your website is not only visually appealing but also functional, secure, and scalable for future growth.
2. Choose the Type of E-commerce Business
Step no. 2 might clear things up for many of you. The launch of an e-commerce website isn’t as simple as it seems. Sure, you may have figured out the advanced logistics management such as products, stock management, and shipment, but next up is choosing the type of e-commerce business.
When we hear about an e-commerce store, we simply think of a website that sells products online. You might be intrigued to know that there are several types of e-commerce stores, and choosing the right type of e-commerce business is crucial to your success.When starting an e-commerce store, it’s essential to formalize your business structure. Registering your business or forming a legal entity, such as an LLC (Limited Liability Company), will not only protect your personal assets but also add credibility to your brand. An LLC is particularly popular among e-commerce entrepreneurs because it provides limited liability protection, tax flexibility, and straightforward management options. To further enhance your business presence, consider using a virtual address for LLCs, which offers privacy, professionalism, and flexibility for remote operations.
At this step, you don’t need to jump right into the product creation process, but instead, take your time to decide what e-commerce website type is most likely to work out for you.
Let’s take a look at the different types of e-commerce stores to choose the most suitable one:
Types of E-commerce Stores
Here we go:
1. Online Retail Stores
These are the e-commerce websites that only retail, meaning they buy the products from the wholesale market and resell to the customers. It’s by far the most common e-commerce business model. The best part about choosing this sort of store is that you could sell a million types of products on your e-store.
B&H is an online retail store that sells cameras, lenses, and microphones. They’re an e-commerce website, but they’re different from the others I’m going to share with you.
2. Dropshipping Websites
Dropshipping is rather different from an ordinary online retail store. If you haven’t had a chance to learn dropshipping, then let me briefly explain how it works. When the customer places the order on your website and completes the checkout process. You go to the wholesaler or manufacturer for order fulfillment and complete the purchase. The only difference is that you use the customer’s name and address so that the manufacturer/wholesaler ships the product directly to the customer.
PopLyfe is a dropshipping store that sells t-shirts related to fatherhood. They aren’t just a niche store, but what makes them stand out is that they dropship the merchandise.
3. Online Storefronts
Online storefronts are e-commerce stores, but they aren’t widely popular. A storefront is a website page that an e-commerce website provides to a seller or brand. Such storefronts are often offered to sellers or brands that bring huge sales to the platform. So basically storefronts are e-commerce platforms, but they’re limited to a fewer number of brands and sellers.
You must have heard about the Amazon FBA program. It stands for fulfillment by Amazon. When a merchant signs up to the Amazon FBA program, the platform provides the storefront to the merchant.
Here’s the example of Amazon storefront:
Petcube is an e-commerce store based on the Amazon storefront feature. There are hundreds of thousands of brands on Amazon that have storefronts. Similarly, there are thousands of giant e-commerce platforms out there that have millions of storefronts.
4. Merch Stores
Merch stores are online stores for selling merchandise. Normally, celebs, sports personalities, and famous YouTubers launch their merch stores where they sell their merchandise directly to fans. Not only is it a great way to make money, but it’s also used for donating to a noble cause. Since there is a selling activity that happens on these websites, it’s safe to say that merch stores are e-commerce websites.
Marques Brownlee is a popular tech YouTuber; he has a merch store just like other top YouTubers in the world. He sells his merchandise on his online store.
That’s it.
Choosing a type of e-commerce business is inevitable; you can’t get away from it. The good news is that you now know there are several types of e-commerce businesses. Some of you might have heard about merch stores but may not have any idea about dropshipping and storefronts.
Anyway, the most common one is setting up a retail store for selling your own products or reselling (wholesalers’ or manufacturers’) products.
3. Create/Buy the Products to Sell on the Online Store
You must have some idea about what you want to sell because that’s why you have been doing your research on how to build an e-commerce store. Well, it’s time to discuss whatever you want to sell online.
Step #3 is all about streamlining the product purchase or creation to put it out on your e-commerce website. Therefore, it’s necessary to finalize the product (or products if you have multiple items).
The point is that if you’re planning on buying the products from different wholesalers, then go ahead and order some samples. On the other hand, if you’re creating your products, then speed up the creation process.
For instance, when fashion designers want to establish an e-commerce website to sell clothes online, they don’t launch their site out of the blue. Instead, they spend time creating clothes to display on the website.
Since your online store hasn’t been established just yet, you’d be better off laying the groundwork that could lead to building a successful e-commerce business.
There might be a dozen things required for building any business from the ground up and starting an e-commerce store is no different.
Here’s the checklist for coming up with the products to sell on your e-commerce website:
1. Prepare Your Products
You have to have some products in your stock before the launch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling handmade crafts or camera equipment online. You need to prepare some products to put up on the online store. Once you have some products in hand, you could move ahead to the next step in the checklist.
2. Take Product Pictures
Pictures are vital to any e-commerce website. It’s almost impossible to sell a product without a proper picture. In most cases, e-commerce websites use multiple photos of the same product to convince the buyer or to better explain the product. So take your time in taking loads of good photos of your products.
3. Write Product Descriptions
When you’re adding products to your e-commerce website, you won’t just write the product name and add its pictures. Instead, you’d also have a descriptive text that explains every bit of detail about the product. Not only does this description help buyers in picking the product, but it also helps search engines understand your website better. So don’t run away from writing in-depth, meaty product descriptions.
4. Set the Pricing
Pricing is an essential part of the process. Even though the online store hasn’t launched yet, you have time to fix all the loopholes. Use this opportunity to decide the prices of your products and note them down. You may not want to get confused about pricing when the e-commerce website is about to go live.
The gist of step #3 is to be fully prepared for the launch. You might not want to switch the e-store name to a different one or change the product catalog after the launch. Therefore, preparing ahead of time is the way to go.
4. Build Your Store with the Right E-commerce Tool
It all comes down to this step. Choose the right e-commerce tool to get started with building your e-commerce website. You might wonder why I didn’t mention choosing the right e-commerce tool at the beginning. Well, had I started straight away with that, I would have missed so many essential steps that are key to success.
I’m going to briefly discuss a few e-commerce website-building tools that are widely popular among website developers and entrepreneurs. I have tested a few of them, but you shouldn’t blindly take my word for it. Instead, do your research before choosing the e-commerce tool.
Without any further ado, let’s get right to it:
1. Shopify (Recommended)
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce tools for creating online stores. Some might say it’s a bit pricey, but they have everything you need to set up and grow your website. Shopify isn’t a self-hosted platform, meaning it doesn’t require a web hosting space. Instead, the platform hosts your online store on its own servers.
However, you could register your domain with Shopify or use your already existing domain with another registrar. As far as the plugins/modules are concerned, there are several third-party Shopify plugins available on the market to fine-tune your Shopify online store.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial and no credit card required
Price: $29 per month
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that allows you to build a blog, business websites, and e-commerce stores. Its users don’t need any third-party services such as domain registrar, web hosting, SSL certificate service, or website templates because Squarespace takes care of everything.
It’s safe to say that Squarespace is a main competitor of Shopify. Both these services are popular for e-commerce website building. However, Squarespace might have a slight edge over Shopify because their service caters to all types of website builders, whereas Shopify only attracts e-commerce website builders.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial with no credit card required
Price: The commerce plans start at $35 per month
3. Wix
Wix is yet another popular website builder that serves both website owners and e-commerce customers. Just like most website builders, Wix offers templates, domain registration, SSL, business emails, web hosting, and e-commerce solutions.
Besides the basic attributes, there are certain features such as analytics, advanced SEO configurations, mobile-friendliness, unlimited fonts, media galleries, and app market that make this tool stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, Wix also offers a mailbox, Wix chat, social media tools, and contact management to take your e-commerce store to the next level.
Free Trial: No free trial, but there is a 14-day full refund policy
Price: The business & eCommerce plans start at $17 per month
4. Weebly
Weebly is one of the website builders on the market that allows you to set up your website in minutes. The best thing about such online website builders is that you don’t have to be an expert to create websites with them.
Weebly does have an e-commerce feature that lets you create e-commerce websites with it. So this is why Weebly has made it to the list of e-commerce tools. It’s affordable, easy-to-use, and effective.
Free Trial: N/A
Price: $12 per month
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free e-commerce WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to a WordPress website. It’s an open-source tool owned by WordPress parent company Automattic. It is a fantastic tool for WordPress users and bloggers who want to sell products online without switching to any other e-commerce tool. Even though this plugin is free, you may want to buy other third-party plugins that connect with WooCommerce for better functionality.
Furthermore, the WooCommerce plugin integrates with several payment processors to manage your income. There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress users that are using this plugin for selling products and services online.
Free Trial: N/A
Price: Free
I’ve shared a bunch of e-commerce website building options that you can check out, but if I were you, I’d launch my e-commerce website with Shopify.
The reason for this is that it is the best e-commerce website tool out there and it offers everything you need to run your e-commerce business.
Though it may seem costly at first, if you start making money from your online store you’d see its worth.
Building a professional ecommerce website is more than just launching an online store; it’s about creating a seamless shopping experience that builds trust and encourages repeat business. A professional ecommerce website features intuitive navigation, fast load times, and secure payment options, all of which are essential for converting visitors into loyal customers. Investing in quality design and development ensures your business is ready to compete in today’s digital marketplace.
Here are five crucial steps of launching an e-commerce store:
1. Register a Domain
You can always register a domain for your online store through your e-commerce tool, but I’d highly recommend registering your domain separately. The reason for that is if you ever want to switch to a different e-commerce tool, you won’t have to deal with customer care which may cause a delay in the process.
Register your domain with your favorite domain registrars such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. All you need is to select the option that you already have a domain name while launching your e-commerce store. You will find the instructions for pointing your domain to the e-commerce tool’s web hosting servers afterwards.
2. Setup Your E-commerce Store
The next step is setting up your e-commerce store. Pick the best e-commerce site builder to create your e-commerce store and get started with it. You’ll fare well if you opt for a recommended e-commerce tool.
A lot of beginners choose free tools such as WooCommerce, but end up frustrated at some point. It doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your goal with it. The point is that if you don’t want to spend money on your e-commerce store setup, you’re going to miss out on some opportunities along the way.
3. Add Products to the Store
Once you have set up your online store, the next most important step is adding the products. Adding the products doesn’t mean just adding the products. You must know how to properly do it.
To make things easier for you, let me mention some key things to consider while adding the products to your online store: use clear names for the products, add pictures, write its functions, its details, etc.
4. Optimize the E-commerce Website
Every website needs to be optimized for better user experience and search engine crawling, so an e-commerce website is no exception. If you’re using an e-commerce tool such as Shopify or Squarespace, reach out to these companies to find out how you can optimize your e-commerce websites.
Besides speeding up the website using caching and hosting on a high-end web server, you might have to use compressed yet high-quality product pictures. Furthermore, try to optimize the URLs for the products, so that it becomes easier for search engines to discover pages and drive traffic to the site.
5. Add Multiple Payment Methods
Try adding multiple payment methods to your online store. The more payment methods you offer, the easier it gets for the customers to buy from you. Check out payment processors such as FastSpring, 2Checkout, and Stripe.
Now you know a handful of e-commerce tools to build an online store. Plus, I shared some crucial steps that could help you make the process smoother.
I reckon you’re all set to build your store. Once you’ve built it with one of the tools I mentioned, the next thing you might want to do is establish a marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.
5. Design a Marketing Campaign for the E-commerce website
Hopefully, your e-commerce website is up and running, but the job isn’t done yet. In fact, it’s just the beginning.
The next thing you might want to do is to come up with a marketing plan for your e-commerce business. A marketing campaign means there would be a handful of strategies to test out. A lot of them might not work for everyone, but you must try them out.
There is a misconception about marketing for e-commerce businesses. A lot of people think the it means running social media and Google search ads.
It’s true that online advertising is a major marketing strategy. However, there are various other tactics that are equally important to achieve the goal.
I’ll give you a quick rundown on designing a marketing campaign for your e-commerce website.
Here are the top-notch marketing tactics to try out:
1. Use Content Marketing
Content marketing strategy my comprise of using content to attract, engage, and convert your audience into subscribers, leads, or paying customers. In other words, it’s an art to sugar-coat your value proposition or offering with impeccable information that becomes irresistible for the prospective audience.
One can use various types of content such as written, audio, images, and videos to fuel their content marketing campaign. Similarly, an e-commerce website could also leverage content marketing techniques by putting out useful articles on its official blog, attractive pins on Pinterest, and uploading helpful videos to YouTube. You can even create infographics, which are awesome for sharing lots of information without overwhelming people.
2. Run Facebook Ads
Online advertising is an integral part of any e-commerce business development strategy. Some businesses prefer Google search ads, whereas others opt for Facebook ads. You don’t have to stick to just one platform for that matter, but instead, test out different ad platforms to see what brings the most attention.
Since people like to stumble upon new products and services through Facebook, a lot of e-commerce websites run Facebook ads. Try the ‘A/B test’ for different types of campaigns in Facebook ads to see which ones work best for you.
3. Retarget the Audience
Retargeting the audience refers to a marketing tactic that allows advertisers to target website visitors that have previously landed on your page. The advertisers use a piece of code that goes into the website, which lets the advertising platform recognize the person who has previously visited. You can now retarget your audience through Google ads, Facebook ads, and Quora ads.
4. Try Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing marketing trend. Brands offer lucrative deals to top bloggers, social media experts, Instagrammers, and YouTubers to help spread the word about their brand or product.
An e-commerce website could also use an influencer marketing strategy to attract audience. Make sure that you’re working with influencers from the region you’re doing business in. Otherwise, it won’t make much of a difference.
5. Build an Email List
Establishing an active email list is imperative to creating a successful marketing strategy in today’s world. If you put out an opt-in form and expect people to subscribe to your email list, it might not work very well. Instead, try publishing useful content and write a compelling message on your opt-in forms to entice people to interact with it. Furthermore, don’t overlook the psychology of colors in your emails because that matters too.
The point is that email marketing is an essential part of the modern-day digital marketing strategy. The biggest perk of building an email list is that you can always reach out to your customers or subscribers through it without hesitation.
You’ve got to use every single way to attract, engage, and convert your audience into paying customers. Most successful e-commerce stores pay close attention to cart abandonment, and they use email marketing to communicate their offers, discounts, and whatnot.
That’s it.
It’s difficult to succeed just by focusing on a single source. Make sure to create a mix of several top-notch marketing tactics to make an impact.
Introducing Replug: Why it’s beneficial for your e-commerce website
Replug is a state-of-the-art URL shortening tool that enables you to shorten the long and clunky URLs into short and sweet ones. Additionally, it flawlessly integrates your short branded URL and helps you take your social media marketing to the next level.
Basically, it’s a one-stop-shop for shortening your URLs, tracking the clickability, adding the UTMs, retargeting the visitors, and driving social media followers over to your website.
Simply put, it’s not just a URL shortener, but instead, it comes with a whole package to take your social media engagement and website visitors to the next level.
Key Features of Replug
Here are the features of Replug you shouldn’t overlook:
1. URL Shortener
It could save you from the embarrassment of sharing messy and lengthy URLs on social media. It’s the best URL shortener tool out there. So turn your long URLs short to give it a professional look.
2. UTM Parameters
Replug allows users to add a UTM parameter to their short URLs, which is an optional feature for users to use. However, if you’re trying to track the performance of your social media sharing campaign, you should create and insert a UTM parameter to your short link.
3. Branded URLs
A branded URL is a short URL that is easy to remember and use on the internet. You must have seen some companies use short URLs for their social media posts or otherwise. For instance, YouTube uses youtu.be and Amazon has the amzn.to domain.
4. Social Media Bio Links
One of the perks of the Replug tool is that it lets you create an all-in-one social media bio link that takes visitors to a landing page displaying all of your social media profile links.
5. Retargeting the Audience
One of the benefits of using Replug is that you can retarget the people who clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks that support retargeting.
6. Call-to-Action to Social Media Links
One of the features that make Replug stand out from the rest of the URL shorteners is that it has a call-to-action feature. What it does is that it lets you add a CTA snippet to the URLs you’re shortening. So whenever you shorten someone else’s article to share on your social media, your CTA snippet shows up on the screen, and it could bring traffic back to your website.
How to Use Replug for Your E-commerce Store
Here’s how e-commerce website makers can use Replug to make the most of this tool:
1. Shorten the Long Product Page URLs
Have you ever noticed that e-commerce websites have very lengthy URLs, especially for product pages?
Well, who would want to share those long URLs that look spammy? That is where Replug comes to your rescue; you can always shorten your product page links with Replug and make them look beautiful on social media.
2. Use a Branded URL for Social Media
Since Replug does allow you to add a custom branded URL to your account, you could use its short branded URL for your social media campaign. Make the most of this opportunity for your e-commerce website. It’ll eventually shorten your product page links to some extent.
3. Drive Social Media Traffic Back to the Store
The call-to-action feature of Replug lets you create CTA snippets that could be added to the short URLs, for instance, when sharing influencers’ content on your social media for engagement and interaction, you could add a CTA to your website in the blog post URL. As a result, when people click-through the short link of the influencers’ article, they’d land on their website and also see your CTA snippet on the page.
4. Retarget the Audience through Ads
When you’re shortening the URLs with Replug and people are clicking through your clicks, you can retarget the audience that clicked on the short URLs through various ad networks.
Replug allows you to add a retargeting pixel for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora, and custom websites. The impact wouldn’t only be limited to social media marketing, but in fact, you might see a little spike in conversion as well.
So these were some of the ways to use Replug for your e-commerce business.
What Else Would You Do for Building an E-commerce Website?
I dug deep into the details of establishing an e-commerce website.
Some of you would be excited not just to launch your e-commerce store but also to make it a success story.
I have this temptation to ask you a question: What else would you do if you were to build an e-commerce website?
Some of you might be social media experts, serial entrepreneurs, and e-commerce professionals.
So I’d like to pick an experts’ brains on building an e-commerce website. Feel free to leave your answer in the comments section.
If you are a marketer and running an online business, then you are probably spending more money, resource, energy, and time on email marketing to build a connective relationship with the audience.
Right?
In 2022, attracting more customers to your website or business is not a cup of cake anymore. Why is that?
Causes, there are 4.88 billion internet users in the world who accumulate information, looking for the solution to their problems and receive promotional emails.
If you genuinely want to capture the audience’s attention and give a powerful brand impact on the audience’s mind, then all you need to do is to find the best day and time to send emails.
Makes sense?
I have another intriguing question for you:
Is it important to email at a time that certainly works for your targeted audience?
Absolutely yes, It’s incredibly essential to email at the right time to the right audience, it not only influences your outcome but also sustains you to improve click-through rate (CTR), open rate, and boost your ROI.
Are you aware of email marketing challenges in 2021?
I’m sure you all do. For the past decade, people used to interact with the other business partners and teams in the same office, but now we all prefer to connect through Zoom, Microsoft team, Slack, and more. Things constantly change, but it doesn’t mean email marketing lost its worth.
Even with all these fancy apps, Email marketing is still one of the best and most competent strategies to communicate with customers and others. The study forecast the number of active email users to reach 4.3 billion in 2023 and 4.6 billion in 2025. So that means Email is not dead, it is still alive and more hard-hitting.
In this article, I’ll introduce the five most reliable studies that reveal the best time and date to send emails to your audience after having sent billions of emails.
Read on and find out to make the biggest splash through it.
What’s the best day of the week and time to send emails to your audience?
Let’s dive into some relevant studies:
Yesware
The first study, conducted by Yesware, discovers hundreds of thousands of email activity over the last quarter to analyze the best timing for cold emailing, email campaigns, and follow-ups.
Yesware studying based on the replies rate they have received. According to their data, there are two best times for sending emails that are:
One best time to send an email is: 1 pm
The second best time to send an email is: 11 am
They found sending emails around these frequencies increases the reply rate that assists you to prompt the potential customers into sales customers. On the other hand, the best days to send emails are:
The best day to send an email: Monday and Tuesday
The worst day to send an email: Friday
All marketers want their audience to give some time and importance to emails, newsletter and for that, marketers have to put themselves in the audience’s shoes and select a perfect period to send an email.
Mailerlite
There is another study ofMailerlite, as opposed to Yesware data, Mailerlite reveals Tuesday is the best day to send out the emails, but Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays can also be convenient to send an email. It certainly enhances the highest open rates and click-through rates rapidly.
The Best day and time to send an email: Tuesday at 11 am
The Worst day to send an email: Saturday and Sunday
GetResponse
GetResponse found in its studies that Tuesday is the best day to get the most emails opened compared to any other day of the week and accomplish a click-through rate of 2.33%. The second peak day is Friday in order to attain an open rate of 20.58%.
The Best time to send emails for open rate: 4 am
The second-best time to send an email for click-through rate (CTR): 6 am
WordStream
In another study from WordStream, they advise email marketers to avoid Monday anxiety and Friday’s itchy feet.
Because on Monday; people usually march into the office and are flooded in the barrage of emails, and on Friday, people are trying to wind up the thing rather than replying to emails.
So, they also found the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are traditionally the favorite:
The best day and time to send email is: Thursday 8–9 am
The Worst Time to Send Emails: Tuesday & Wednesday 8–10 am
Coschedule
Data from Coschedule reveals Tuesday is one of the most effective days to send an email. In any case, you want to send two emails in a week, then go on Tuesday and Thursday.
The Best time to send email is: 6:00 am, 10 am, 8 pm, and 2 pm
So what is the best day and time to send an email?
What factors should we consider while selecting the time and data?
No doubt, sending emails at the best time is important, but there are some other factors we have to look into before creating an email campaign:
#1. Understand the customer’s behavior and demographic segmentation
Knowing your audience’s behavior and demographic is the most pivotal factor in email marketing efforts. Think about how your audience’s day goes. You wouldn’t want to send your email in the middle of their busy schedules. Doing this might cause them to overlook your message unintentionally. Understanding customers’ needs and wants are the effective approach to sending your email at the right to the right audience and also assists you to improve your ROI, click-through rate, and response rate.
Here we take an example:
Let’s say you have a large no of the audience doing their jobs at night like bartenders or barista, then you are more likely to send your email at night, which gets a more open rate. We have different studies that reveal sending emails at the night is not a good option to increase the click-through rate, but in this case; it is.
#2. Identify your niche
You want to send emails to the audience, but there is the thing that holds your back is: Who is your market niche?
To answer this question, you have to find the audience’s problem, interests and what do you have for them. Let us say you are targeting B2B and B2C marketers, then weekdays are the best days to send emails for you and Tuesday is the peak day to send an email.
#3. Frequency Emails
After identifying the niche and customer demographic segmentation the next step, you need to focus on the frequency of email and the subject line with an intriguing title. If you are looking to enhance your open rate, click-through rate, collect lead and sales then you should send one email per week, and sending one or two bulk emails a week is the ideal situation to enhance your brand visibility and improve ROI.
#4 Identify the Products and Service Offerings
The best time to send your emails is also determined by the type of business you are in. Are your products and services fit under the B2B model or the B2C model?Based on your solutions and offerings, your time and data can vary accordingly. For example, if you are sending B2B emails then the beginning of the week such as Monday or Tuesday first half usually works the best. Even if you are sending B2B emails, segment your audience to accommodate different modes of working and behaviours. Are you sending to employees? Or entrepreneurs? Or executives?However, if you are sending B2C emails there are other factors that contribute as well. Such as, is it a retargeting email? If there is an event coming up? For example, if you are promoting fun entertainment activities with family or the hospitality industry, then Friday evening or the weekend will work best.
#5 Test Different Subject Lines
The first thing your reader will notice about your email is the subject line. It is the first and only determining factor whether your reader will open the mail or not.Based on your niche you can test which subject line will work the best. You can experiment with subject lines to build curiosity, offer value or highlight time sensitivity and the value the email will provide.Your subject line will determine the open rate of your emails which will eventually lead your reader to take the action you want them to take.
#6 Make the Best Use of Seasonal Consumer Behavior
According toCampaign Monitor, Black Friday emails had the highest open rate and highest link click rate. Another insight about consumer behaviour during holidays shows that 20% of online holiday shopping happen because of emails sent during this season. Therefore, it is important that you have a good strategy of email marketing in place to capitalize on seasonal consumer behaviour.
If you are sending the promotional email about Sales or the New Arrivals, you can schedule the emails for weekends or during lunch hours because they are most likely to take action from your emails during these hours.
#7 Design Mobile-Friendly Emails
More than 47% of your consumers check their emails on their mobile devices. This shows the significance to design mobile-friendly emails. For designing user-friendly emails, you can work on good graphics, flow of content, copy and personalization. These elements will also determine if your user will take any action from the email or not such as clicking on the link.
6 Email Marketing tools to save your time and money
Marketing trends change with time, but email marketing still has its place in the market. Choosing the best email app to send the right email is another important factor that not only affects your email marketing efforts but also assists you to grow your business smartly with the help of valuable analytics against your email campaign.
Do you need email marketing software, which is cost-effective, easy to use, time and money-saving?
We have listed the 5 most effective email marketing tools which help you to hit the targeted mark every time.
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the most cost-effective and popular email marketing with over 130k customers.
It allies you to reach the target audience, captures their attention with an interesting message, builds relationships, and aids them to address solutions to their problems. It makes it easy for their customers to run email marketing campaigns. A CRM that includes email and sales automation holds all the customer details in one place. Manage the pipelines, keep transactions up to date, and follow up at the right time.
2. Benchmark
Benchmark is another fascinating email marketing tool for agencies that help to create easy professional emails rapidly to keep customers stay and engage.
It is a cost-effective tool and simplifies the assets you need so you can focus on developing connections, growing your market, and raising the bar.
It allows efficient leverage of your most valuable marketing assets, setup and customizes email without spending hours, builds stronger relationships with your contacts, gets access to a robust email marketing tool, and reaches out your goals faster.
3. eSputnik
eSputnik is a marketing automation tool that offers extensive functionality for customer data management and processing. It provides no-code solutions meaning you don’t need code knowledge to implement them for your business.
The platform helps create and send mass and transactional emails, SMS, app notifications and browser notifications. Such features as advanced contact segmentation, support of multilingual messaging, the substitution of dynamic content and product recommendations allow to automate message personalization and deliver each subscriber and customer only relevant content.
Aside from messaging, eSputnik offers solutions for personalized website marketing such as forms and site recommendations. It integrates with numerous tools, for example, Tilda, Zapier, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, which enables you to run multiple marketing activities within one platform.
4. Zoho Campaign
Zoho Campaign is an email marketing platform that allows you to develop, deliver, and monitor emails using permission-based email marketing. Through a real-time analytics platform, it assists you in building a large and future client base.
It assists you in creating visually appealing emails with your brand name, automating your emails, and forming personal relationships with customized emails. It is a malleable and budget-friendly email marketing plan for marketers.
To help you deliver customized messages to your audience, Zoho Campaigns includes features such as interactive content, email surveys, and automatic list segmentation.
5. Sendinblue
Sendinblue helps companies create and develop relationships by using marketing automation, email promotions, transactional communications, SMS messages, chat, CRM, Facebook ads, and retargeting ads.
It is more than just email marketing software for a marketer, offers a wide range of resources for marketing your product or service. So, no need to go anywhere; find anything relevant to digital marketing without leaving your couch.
One of the latest reviews expound upon its features including Email marketing, SMS marketing, and live chat applications will help you reach your target audience on social media, build a good bond with your consumers by using CRM while saving time and energy with email automation.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is the most leading tool for bloggers and small businesses because it was one of the first major email providers to have a fully free package forever.
It let you generate emails, develop a website, register a domain, and design landing pages. It is a top-rated and well-trusted email marketing software that will assist you in growing your company by creating automated emails at critical points in the buyer journey, so you can send out welcoming emails, order confirmations abandoned cart updates, and more with ease.
3 Email Metrics to Calculate the Impact of Your Email Marketing:
It is important to understand the impact of your email marketing after you have identified the best time to send emails.
We have listed down the 3 most important metrics of email marketing to differentiate the best time for people to open emails and the best time for people to take the action (for example, buy a product, complete registration, download an item).
These metrics are:
Open Rate
Click-through Rate
Click-to-open Rate
Open Rate:
Open Rate tells you about how many people from your subscribers opened your email. For a better open rate, have short, crisp and value-added headlines, and add pre-header text.
Click-through Rate:
The Click-through rate tells you about how many people engaged with the email content after opening it. The Click-through rate is usually lesser than the open rate since readers abandon emails without reading completely and taking action. To make your emails more engaging, use the elements of personalization, improve the copy and mention CTA clearly.
Click-to-Open Rate:
Click-to-open Rate is determined by comparing the open rate and the number of people who clicked on any link in the mail. This metric is helpful to understand which content is relevant to your audience.
You can calculate the Click-to-Open Rate by using this formula:
Click-to-Open Rate = (Click through rate / Open Rate) x 100
Conclusion
Now, I’m sure you have learned how to get more traffic to your website through email marketing.
Email marketing is the cost-effective approach that takes your business to the next level and assists you to improve sales and ROI. Send an email on Tuesday at 10 am with an engaging subject line aids you to stand out in the market.
When will you send your promotional email to the audience?
B2B email marketing focuses on businesses ratfiher than individuals, and the purchase decisions are made on value transfer instead of impulsion. The sales cycle is considerably longer, and it may involve multiple decision-makers, making B2B email marketing significantly different from B2C. A lot of email marketers apply the same strategies for B2B email communication, which they use for B2C, thus never achieving the true potential of B2B email marketing. Today, I will discuss the top 5 B2B email marketing tips that will help you unlock the true potential of your mailing lists. Read on for a deep dive into the topic.
What makes B2B email marketing different from B2C and how to approach it
B2C is more focused on driving sales on almost every message, and it contains little to no educational content. Moreover, the purchase won’t have a long-term impact on consumers. However, B2B purchases have lasting effects on an organization, and one needs to invest in educational content spread over multiple emails before prospects start engaging truly. You will also have to optimize the messages to deliver value for each stakeholder who takes part in the buying processes. Thus, the B2C approach of generating revenue from single emails isn’t going to work out. We can consider that their identical objectives are the reason behind many email marketers applying similar strategies:
Now that we know about the differences between the two, let us understand how to approach B2B email marketing. Firstly, you will need to curate your content for a rational buyer and focus on lead warming. You also need to understand your prospect’s requirements and satisfy multiple employees’ concerns before your message reaches the actual decision-maker. You can find the subtle differences in the approach in the below table:
Emails have the best ROI as a digital marketing channel, and B2B emails have 47% higher CTR when compared to B2C messages. Also, checking work emails daily is still a part of every organization, and there’s no reason you should miss on B2B email marketing.
That’s enough of polishing the basics. Let us explore those five B2B email marketing tips that will help you need to try without fail:
5 best B2B email marketing tips
#1 Use Personalization + Dynamic Segmentation Simultaneously
Just because you are going to communicate with different professionals from different levels of hierarchy, it doesn’t mean that you should give up on personalization efforts. You should segment your mailing lists in a way that helps you address different hierarchy levels and then run personalization efforts to make your messages relevant to the job profile. Focus on your prospect organization’s needs and send content as per the powers and understanding level of the concerned job profile.
Dynamic segmentation comes in handy in filtering your mailing list proactively. It aids in targeting the contacts based on their recent activity on your website and response rates to your ongoing email campaigns. Thus, you will be able to get the benefit of staying relevant to the current phase of their buying processes instead of sending messages in a generic fashion.
Personalization coupled with dynamic segmentation is one of the highly effective ways to achieve the right send times. For instance, if your prospect viewed a certain FAQ on your website, sending them a relevant resource on the topic within a few hours can significantly help the customer journey.
#2 Develop content for multiple stakeholders and offer cascading value propositions
As I mentioned above, B2B email marketing relies on delivering value and establishing reliability. This will require you to create extensive content that complements all phases of the buyer journey. You should start by knowing which stakeholders are going to take part in the purchasing process. A finance manager’s concerns are always going to differ from that of a production or sales manager. Yet, all of them come into the picture at different times and even stay in the loop. You can use the below chart to create email content development guidelines for addressing them:
Also, optimize the subject lines, preheader text, and CTAs for various stakeholders when creating resources. Once you develop the basic framework for your email content, you should use different formats to distribute it. This makes content consumption easier. Drip email campaigns are the best solution for offering cascading value propositions. They help you deliver the right content via emails based on engagement and timing. Instead of bombarding the readers with huge amounts of information that either doesn’t connect with their job role or is irrelevant to their buyer journey only discourages further engagement. Below is a schematic diagram of how drip emails deliver meaningful resources using cascading send rules:
I find that using self-nurturing landing pages is a great way when you don’t know the exact profile of your recipient. You can use customized URLs from Replug to track their activity and improve your database.
#3 Leverage newsletters to project thought leadership
Newsletters are a multi-purpose tool for B2B marketers. They help establish thought leadership by engaging the readers consistently over information that aids their business. They give you an opportunity to send insights on various aspects of your customer’s business and place your product/service as a facilitator of the benefits you mention. In many cases, it takes weeks to go through various offers, terms and conditions, technicalities, and discussions before they approach you again. You can use newsletters to keep your prospective clients engaged during those ‘colder’ phases, and it generally acts in your favour as opposed to brief periods of staying out of touch. No doubt, email is the hot favourite of B2B email marketers when it comes to content distribution:
Sharing industry-level research, opinion pieces, and inputs from technical experts are some time-tested ways of projecting thought leadership. You can use tools like ContentStudio to keep your subscribers engaged through highly refined content pieces from third-party sources. The below email from Smartsheet helps it take an authoritative pose, and it will surely increase its trustworthiness among the readers:
Similarly, if you are a SaaS company, you can send product-specific tips and tricks within your newsletter during the trial period. Here’s an example of doing so from Miro:
Having the right B2B HTML email templates matters! Content plays a decisive role, but curation is another aspect that impacts your campaign’s overall performance. The number of B2B buyers remains less when compared to the B2C buyers, but the ticket size is considerably huge. Thus, you should invest in beautiful email marketing templates that provide dynamic content blocks as it helps your personalization efforts apart from improving aesthetics. It also saves you from degrading your brand value in situations like sending an email with wrong images or URLs, as you can change them even after sending it.
This is how Crowd Writer UK works when they email other businesses. Having personalized subject lines and simple and authentic content has boosted their email marketing campaigns. When curating your content blocks, use visual hierarchy rules for getting the best aesthetic appeal. Keeping the paragraphs and lines shorter is a must, but your email typefaces, branding elements, colour palette, the separation between adjacent elements, font size, and colour play a huge role in determining your message’s readability. Mobile optimization is also necessary as 51% of the total email opens come from smartphones. Here’s a great example of curating a B2B email template in the right manner coming from none other than Campaign Monitor:
#5 Constantly track your success rates and redesign your efforts
Lastly, I would like to tell the readers that tracking your campaign results is 10x more important in B2B email marketing. The reason? Right from the decision-makers to the purchase cycle, everything keeps shifting while your competitors are going to target your leads far more aggressively than the B2C sector. Keeping a tab of how your email copies perform, the subject lines that get maximum opens, most coveted gated content, and CTAs apart from the regular email metrics will pave your way to success. You can learn from successful conversions and replicate the model that helped you convert in your ongoing efforts.
Most businesses run an email audit on a yearly basis, but it is advisable for B2B firms to use real-time insights and constantly tweak their email marketing strategy as per the latest performance results. As the businesses continue to evolve with technological advancements and shifts in end-customer perception, B2B marketers will have to constantly evolve their processes through consistent evaluations.
Putting it together
Coming towards the end, I will draw your attention to one common trait among all of these five B2B email marketing tips: Cater to the needs of the buyer journey on a real-time basis and follow a flexible approach. No doubts that running email campaigns for business-to-business interactions is complicated but following these email marketing tips will help you focus on getting results through coordinated efforts. I hope these tips help you get greater success in your next B2B email marketing campaign.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing company that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative monetization method for bloggers and marketers. However, affiliate marketing isn’t just for bloggers and marketers. YouTubers, podcasters, and live streamers also make money off of affiliate marketing. If you’re looking for affiliate marketing guidelines, you’re at the right place as I’m about to spill the beans.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular money-making strategies in the online marketing world. However, most blogging beginners start their blog monetization through Google AdSense or a similar ad network, but later on, transit towards affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing comes in handy for beginners who can’t make a ton of money on ad networks due to fewer monthly page views on their blogs. Therefore, the majority of them pursue affiliate marketing to find a better ad alternative.
You don’t always need a blog or website to make money with affiliate marketing. Instead, you can use multiple platforms to promote products and make money. I have a bunch of ideas in mind to share with you so that you could make the most of your affiliate marketing campaign.
Let me tell you a fact right off the bat: it doesn’t work out for every blogger or content creator. You’d find some affiliate marketers complain about the conversion. On the flip side, some affiliate marketers go gaga over this money-making strategy. It all comes down to finding the secret sauce that works for you.
Don’t worry, I’ll try to my level best to help you understand how to develop a perfect synergy between your affiliate offers and content to make the most of this monetization opportunity.
Some of you might be beginners in affiliate marketing, so the chances are, you don’t have a clear idea of affiliate marketing. Don’t panic as I’ll dig deeper into the topic and share some fundamental steps that would take your affiliate marketing to the next level.
But first things first, you should know the basics.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
It’s a process of promoting the products and earning commissions when people buy through affiliate links. The majority of affiliate programs don’t have strict requirements and pretty much anyone can join them. However, a website or blog or social media account is mandatory in some programs. They make sure that only legitimate and serious marketers join in.
Furthermore, some companies have an affiliate program limited to their paid customers, which means you can’t get access to their affiliate program unless you buy their product. In most cases, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for someone to join the affiliate marketing program.
Moreover, all brands define their own terms of use that affiliate marketers must agree and oblige to for being a part of the program. There are several clauses in the terms of use, but one of the most important ones is that the brand has the right to terminate the affiliate marketer’s participation over any suspicious activity or violation of the terms of use.
That’s it.
Keep reading because you’re about to find out:
How a beginner can get started with affiliate marketing
Where you can promote affiliate products to earn commissions
How much affiliate marketers can earn from a single affiliate sale
How to choose the best affiliate product to promote
How to get more clicks and sales in affiliate marketing
So if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing initiative, then don’t miss out on the steps I’m going to share with you.
Without any further ado, let’s get right into it.
A Step-by-Step Guide on Starting Affiliate Marketing
Here we go:
#1: Choose Your Niche
To make sure you’re off to a good start, choose your niche wisely. It’s a prerequisite not just for starting successful niche websites, but it’s also for authority blogs.
The niche is a category or genre of the blog or website, which determines the type of content a reader can expect on the blog or website.
A niche website or blog caters to a specific audience by solving their problems through their content.
A website’s niche and affiliate marketing success go hand in hand. It’s essential to choose the right niche. Otherwise, it’s highly unlikely that you’d rank on the first page in the SERP as it’s impossible to dominate the niche without having know-how on the subject.
Some multiple factors and metrics influence the search engine ranking. Nobody exactly knows what all of those factors and metrics are, so most bloggers and digital marketers kept on testing different techniques.
The more you bring the right audience to your website, the easier it would become to make money from your affiliate website. However, delivering value through your content makes a lot of difference.
Affiliate marketing works on trust, authority, and reputation. People usually don’t buy recommended products quickly. Instead, they do their due diligence before opting for the product. Therefore, if your emphasis is selling, you might end up suffering in the long run.
There are two parameters of choosing the right niche:
Exposure
It’s impossible to randomly choose a niche and grow a website. Bloggers and affiliate marketers get their hands dirty before they start to make money with affiliate marketing. You can’t promote a product if you haven’t had some experience with it. The experience gives you the exposure which differentiates an expert user and a rookie. Always try to get familiar with the product you’re going to promote. I’m a big fan of the ContentStudio tool; it’s my go-to software for scheduling social media posts. When I wanted to write the ContentStudio review on my blog, I started using it so that I could write the review with an authoritative voice. I didn’t want to write a review right off the bat. After using it for a while, I sat down to write the review. I’m not subscribed to the mentality of writing content just for the sake of publishing it. I always put my heart and soul into every piece of content. You can’t sign up for a new tool and instantly write a review.
So make yourself familiar with the niche before you jump into it. Don’t hesitate to invest a little bit of money into trying out the stuff before you talk about it on the blog. It’ll give you the exposure that might turn things around for you.
Strength
The strength means you have an interest in something or it’s your skill. It’s essential to choose a niche that’s your strength. If you play soccer and you have the basic knowledge of the game, and you start a blog about ice skating, which you haven’t done in your life, then it won’t be a wise decision.
Anyway, my niche is freelancing; I mostly write about freelancing on and off the platforms:
You can see most of the articles on my blog revolve around the freelancing niche. It didn’t happen on a whim, but instead, I discovered my blogging niche along the way. I kept on publishing content on the blog and freelancing-related content took off.
Plus, people reach out to me to ask freelancing questions all the time, so I decided to pay close attention to what people want from me. And, that’s how I choose my blog’s niche.
Hence, it’s vital to choose the blog niche based on the exposure or strength to earn money from affiliate marketing.
#2: Handpick online platforms
Affiliate marketing success isn’t possible without a bunch of tools and platforms. You got to be careful with the selection of tools and platforms. Presumably, you’re an affiliate marketing beginner and trying to hone in on your online money-making craft.
The most important tool for affiliate marketing is the primary platform. In most cases, bloggers and affiliate marketers choose a blog. So I’ll stick to the blog as our main tool for publishing, but I’d shed some light on other options too.
Once you’ve chosen your niche and you’re crystal clear on the audience targeting, the next move should be handpicking the online platforms to put out content and build an audience.
It’s the most crucial part of the process. You might find affiliate marketers solely rely on the YouTube or Facebook page, but you must future-proof your affiliate marketing business.
There are different ways to go about it, but most of you might be first-timers. I’d highly recommend setting up a publishing platform as well as a social media platform to start on the right foot.
Let’s take a look at the publishing and social media platforms:
Publishing platforms
There are various publishing platforms out there, but here are three of the most common ones:
WordPress [Recommended]
You can either choose the wordpress.com platform or self-hosted wordpress.org to launch your website. WordPress is by far the most popular content management system out there. According to an SEJ’s article, the data revealed by W3Techs showed that WordPress powers 39.5% of overall websites.
Squarespace
It’s an online website builder which allows users to create websites without having any coding knowledge whatsoever. It’s a drag and drop-based tool for businesses, e-commerce stores, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.
Medium
Medium has a publication feature that lets you set up your blog on the Medium platform. Affiliate marketers and bloggers could use the Medium publication for putting out content.
Jeff Bullas is a popular blogger and marketer. He publishes content and promotes products on the blog as well:
There are hundreds of thousands of such examples of beginner and expert-level bloggers who primarily use blogs to earn money from affiliate marketing.
Social media platforms
Affiliate marketers drive traffic and attract a new audience through social media. Not only do they run social media ads, but also engage the audience through sharing content. Let’s take a look at three wildly popular social media platforms among affiliate marketers:
YouTube
YouTube is famous for bringing a lot of eyeballs to the business. The secret to winning at YouTube is making videos that the prospective audience might be interested in and then use the description box to further engage the audience. Affiliate marketers put the landing pages and affiliate product links in the YouTube description and earn a lot of money from affiliate marketing.
Quora
Quora is one of the most underrated social media platforms that could bring website traffic to your platform. It’s a questioning and answering platform that allows you to put links into your answers. Make sure that you aren’t misusing the links feature as its spam detection is quite effective. Your account could get banned over spamming. Affiliate marketers don’t share direct affiliate links on Quora, but instead, they occasionally add content links that may contain affiliate products.
Facebook
Facebook is a major social media player on the market. Affiliate marketers tend to build communities mostly in Facebook groups. They don’t focus much on getting sales by sharing links, but instead, they nurture the audience and drive them to the website from time to time. So don’t underestimate the power of Facebook groups; they’re very much relevant, active, and effective.
There are several other publishing and social media platforms out there which you should explore, but the above-mentioned are quite popular among pro-bloggers and expert affiliate marketers.
Here’s an example of creating a community on social media.
Problogger is a popular blogging tips blog founded by Darren Rowse. He is an Australian blogger, author, and public speaker.
Problogger has an active Facebook group of over 29k members. It’s a community where bloggers communicate, interact, and help each other out:
You won’t essentially find a team of Problogger pushing ProBlogger content or products all the time, but instead, they rarely share offers or announcements from Problogger. It’s mostly fans and readers that interact.
The point is that choose your platforms and stick with them. You’ll eventually start to see traction over time. And once the traction happens, it starts to drive affiliate sales as well.
#3: Do keyword research
Keywords have a significant role in establishing an effective affiliate marketing strategy whether you’re a blogger or YouTuber. However, the caveat is that it’s nearly impossible to find the exact keywords data. According to SEO experts, even the most popular keyword tools aren’t accurate when it comes to the number of searches against keywords. Don’t worry, you can still do keyword research. Here’s how:
Once you’re done with the niche and platform selection, the next up is keyword research. I’m not a fan of traditional keyword research through keyword tools. However, I’ll share some top-notch keywords tools that SEOs and content marketers use for finding the keywords.
On the flip side, I’m more into search analysis through different ways, which I’ll uncover shortly. Before I mention the popular keyword research tool, I want to shed some light on the idea of doing keyword research.
Most SEOs put in the keyword in the keyword research tool and look at the competition and number of searches. It’s also a fact that the number of searchers can’t be accurate since only Google holds that information.
Therefore, I follow a different approach called search analysis. The way how it works is that we analyze the search query through certain ways and create content around that.
A)Autocomplete
Autocomplete is Google’s intelligent search feature which provides recommendations upon typing in half of the search query. It usually recommends the search terms that are popular among the searchers, meaning people are using those search terms.
Analyzing what Google Autocomplete is suggesting gives you a good idea of what people need to know. Using those search terms in the content or writing content around those topics could bring a lot of search traffic.
Tip: the same autocomplete strategy also works for YouTube search.
B)Google Trends
The second most important part of the search analysis is looking at Google Trends. Go to Google Trends and type in your search term or keyword. If you’re using an upward trend or numbers are taking off, then it means there is a demand for this topic or keyword, and you can focus on this.
If Google Trends analysis doesn’t show any traction whatsoever, then you should think twice before covering that topic or keyword in your content.
C)Popular Content
Thirdly, analyze your popular content in Google Analytics or any other tracking software you use for your analytics. I use Google Analytics for analyzing the site performance as well as finding the top pages of my website in terms of page views. It helps me focus on the right topics and understanding the popularity of my content.
You can double-down on the popular content, meaning create similar content of what already working and gain momentum. Not only would it increase your page views, but it would also increase your ads and affiliate revenues.
That’s my search analysis approach. I know a lot of bloggers and affiliate marketers follow the same approach.
However, you can try out the typical keyword research tools, but I won’t recommend relying only on the keyword research tools:
Here are three popular keyword research and SEO tools:
Ahrefs
Long Tail Pro
MarketMuse
SEMRUSH
Once you find a bunch of keywords through keyword research tools and search analysis, get down to writing some top-notch articles and publish them along the way.
#4: Select affiliate products
Affiliate marketers and bloggers have mixed opinions about the timing of selecting affiliate products. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it.
Some expert bloggers and affiliate marketers think it’s wise to focus completely on finding the right topics/keyword and rank the articles in the SERP. On the other hand, a lot of bloggers teach and preach to choose the affiliate products beforehand. I tend to focus on the latter.
It’s good to have a list of products in mind before getting down to writing articles in bulk. I have done the mistake of writing articles in bulk without keeping the affiliate products in mind. So I have learned this lesson the hard way.
One of my blogs has 81 blog posts published so far, and more than 80% of the blog posts get fewer visitors every month. The good thing is that I realized my mistake a while ago and started focusing on the right topics, and it’s changing the trajectory of this blog.
So here are three recommendations on selecting the affiliate products:
Relevance:
Keep the relevance factor in mind while selecting the affiliate products for your blog or another platform. It means the product must have coherence with the content. You can’t promote a juicer machine on a mortgage blog.
Personal Experience:
A personal experience with the products goes a long way. You can’t talk about a product with confidence if you haven’t had a chance to try it out. On the contrary, when you have experience of using the product, you can share the details with authority because you know the product inside out.
Affordability:
Pricing matters in the affiliate products’ conversion rate. If you’re targeting beginners through your content, but promoting $500 to $800 products, it won’t work out. You have to keep the price affordability factor in mind while choosing the affiliate products.
Here are some of the popular affiliate marketing networks to find the affiliates:
ShareASale
Impact
FlexOffers
DigiStore24
JVZOO
ClickBank
#5: Put out content
Putting out content means publishing content online to attract, engage, and convert the audience. It’s nearly impossible to generate affiliate sales without putting out content.
Some affiliate marketing gurus create email marketing funnels and use online advertising to drive traffic. It could work as much as any other strategy, but the problem is that the majority of us won’t be able to spend a thousand dollars right off the bat. Therefore, putting out content essential becomes a viable option to pursue.
Once you have done some due diligence on the keywords and topic clusters to target, it means you’re all set for creating content. You’d primarily be using written content, but you’d also need to use other types of content along the way.
Let me breakdown different articles you should be writing on the blog to boost your affiliate marketing sales:
Informational content:
These are types of articles that would purely be providing information to the audience. For instance, if you have a furniture blog, then an article like “how to clean your sofa without hiring an expert” could be an informational piece of content.
Buyer guides:
Buyer guides are typically product guidelines that explain to buyers about the products and help them make a buying decision. Such articles could focus on both single or multiple products. Furthermore, these articles are intended for generating affiliate sales.
Response posts:
Response posts are published to cater to audience questions that are discovered through search analysis, keyword research, and audience feedback.
The story doesn’t end here, but instead, you shouldn’t just rely on the text content. Stretch your content plan further towards other types of content such as videos and images.
Use the power of image platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms are massive from an attention standpoint. A lot of bloggers use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blogs and websites.
Similarly, YouTube is the second most popular search engine. Use the videos to drive traffic to your website as well as generate affiliate sales.
Income School once revealed a brand new YouTube channel in their video that they started around shooting sport:
The channel took off fairly nicely; they were able to get 9k subscribers in just four months. It didn’t end here because they also shared that they were able to generate a lot of affiliate sales through that YouTube channel. So it just validates my point of using a platform like YouTube to build a brand and generate affiliate sales.
#6: Run SEO and outreach campaigns
Affiliate marketing seems easy on the outside, but it’s quite tricky on the inside. If you ever come across someone who is making a good income from blogs or niche websites through affiliate marketing, then investigate what else that marketer is doing to stay ahead of others.
There are competition analysis and spying software such as Semrush and Spyfu that marketers and companies use to dominate search ranking.
What I mean is that most affiliate marketers whether they’re running authority blogs or niche websites build links from time to time even if link building isn’t an important part of their strategy.
Many bloggers believe that some niches are competitive enough that it’s becoming harder to outsmart the competition without building a few quality backlinks.
For instance, Carl Broadbent is a British blogger who asked an SEO company to analyze his niche website and report back on ranking against a search term. The SEO company revealed that top-ranking sites against that search term have 60 DA on average and his site needs 250 backlinks to compete with them.
What I’m saying is that I’m a big advocate of getting backlinks naturally, but in some cases, you need a little push to leap. Most affiliate marketers I know take link building very seriously, but they never compromise on the quality of the content.
You don’t need to spend money on outreach for SEO if you’re just a beginner, but if your site is taking off rather slowly due to fierce competition, then you could try out an outreach marketing strategy to see how it works out for you.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you should completely ignore on-page SEO. I’d highly recommend paying close attention to the following on-page SEO elements:
Page loading speed
Keywords targeting
Topic clusters
Page caching
Images compression
In-depth content
#7: Add social media shareability
You have to have a social media sharing strategy in your mix. What I mean by adding social media shareability is that you should create a system of maximizing social media.
You might not be aware of the power of social media posts when it comes to readers’ engagement. Have you ever heard of the phrase “social proof”?
Social proof is a public validation from the audience which puts any product or brand in the good books. People don’t share bad content because nobody cares about it. Plus, if you keep pushing hard bad content, people consider it spam and may start to unfollow you.
It’s vital to know for affiliate marketers how to leverage social media to their advantage. Clearly, shoving low-quality content down the followers’ throat doesn’t work out for anyone.
Here are four things you can do to make the most of social media:
Create compelling yet useful content:
To make sure that your content gets shared by followers, you must create helpful and effective content for the audience. A high-quality content works like a charm, for instance, you never know who comes across your content and shares it to hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Similarly, when good-quality content gets ranked or goes viral on social media, it also brings backlinks, which plays a vital role in building site authority.
Engagement matters a lot on social media. What happens is that when someone engages with your content, their followers or friends get notified on the social media platform. Thus, it exposes your content to more people. That’s how engagement brings in more eyeballs and attention.
Make sharing easier for the readers:
Adding social media sharing buttons that are visible on both desktop and mobile versions of the site goes a long way. When a blog doesn’t have social media sharing buttons, it’s highly unlikely that most readers would go the extra mile to share the content. Sharing a piece of content through a sharing button is much easier than copying the link and title manually and then pasting it onto the social media platform. So add social media sharing buttons to your blog.
Share others’ content for more attention
Everyone shares their own content, but sharing others’ content puts you on the pedestal. When you share others’ content on social media, not only does it bring value to the followers, but it also helps the original creator of the content.
Replug URL shortener provides click tracking to the users. It’s an excellent tool for bringing the audience back to your website. When you shorten an article’s link and share it on your social media, and the followers start to click-through and land on the article. Furthermore, they’ll see a small pop-up of yours that could take them to your website or profile.
So the takeaway from this step is that it’s good to focus on the keywords selection and putting out valuable content that people like to share, but it shouldn’t end here. Instead, making it easier for the audience to share your content does the trick.
Affiliate marketing success doesn’t only achieve by putting out content. Otherwise, every single affiliate marketer would have been a millionaire. One of the secrets of affiliate marketing success is assisting the audience whether it’s through a free ebook or by recommending a suitable product. Once you start doing that, you won’t be an affiliate marketing failure.
#8: Analyze site performance
No matter what approach of content creation, SEO, and affiliate marketing you adopt, you would ultimately need to analyze your campaign’s performance at some point. Otherwise, you won’t be able to find conclusive evidence of what’s working and what’s not working on your website.
So it’s important to do a little bit of sniff testing after deploying the strategies, but don’t start analyzing the performance of your website after a week or so. Give a good one month before you start examining the performance.
Here are three key indicators that you should look out for in your affiliate site performance analysis:
Clickability:
Analyze the number of overall clicks on your links; you can use the heatmap tools as well as check out the clicks on your in-content affiliate links. If the number of clicks is rising every month, then it’s a good sign.
Conversion Rate:
The conversion rate is the most important indicator to see whether or not your site is performing well. If your affiliate sales are increasing, then it means your tactics are working. In some cases, clicks increase but conversion doesn’t go up, it usually indicates that there is a problem with the audience targeting. Simply put, the right visitors aren’t landing on your website, so you need to fix your content strategy.
Total Pageviews
The number of pageviews is also an essential indicator of how well or poor your search analysis, SEO strategies, and audience engagement are on the site. When page views increase and you’re bringing the right audience to your site, you’d surely see an increase in clickability and conversion rate.
Affiliate marketing beginners must know when and how to analyze their affiliate marketing strategies. I don’t want to indulge you in the analysis paralysis, but you should analyze your blog monetization strategies once every quarter.
Did you learn something about affiliate marketing?
I have shared the lessons I learned over the course of 10 years. Had I known all these things a decade ago, a lot would have been different for me today.
That’s why I shared all these affiliate marketing strategies for beginners so passionately because I know it could turn the table around for anyone who is getting started.
I’m curious to know whether or not you’re taking away something valuable from this blog post.
Please do me a favor and let me know in the comments section.
Did this blog post on affiliate marketing help you in some way?
Video marketing has become a popular tool to generate conversion in such a short time. What makes it different from other marketing strategies is that it turns the art of old copy into an engaging video.
But, there’s another distinct feature that only video marketing has. It is the personal touch of visual storytelling. Unlike any other online videos, this type of marketing video focuses on the audience’s perspective. As a result, the video will act as a great representation of them.
But why must it be a video?
If you’re an avid internet user, you won’t be surprised that most content is video. In reality, video has become a staple content in the online world.
It’s nothing new, really.
In fact, a statistic says that people consumed one billion gigabytes (56 exabytes) of online video monthly. And that’s in 2017 alone. The current stats predict that over 240 exabytes will be consumed monthly in 2022.
In conclusion, the future of online video is bright. If you’re an entrepreneur, you must’ve taken this information into account. Promote your business with video marketing as soon as possible.
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is the practice of turning textual copy into an entertaining and informative visual with the touch of powerful storytelling. That’s what we call video marketing.
Video marketing itself covers many types that are aimed for a different purpose – for example, educational videos, product videos, brand videos, and tutorial videos. These are the four major types of video marketing nowadays.
Each type also divides into a more specific video; for example, an explainer video is inside the educational type video. It is the introduction of a company or product to establish a new relationship with the audience.
In short, it’s best to implement video marketing when you begin your entrepreneurial journey and hook the audience’s attention. Video marketing can also act as an educational video since you explain who you are to the public’s eyes.
Video marketing’s benefits don’t come overnight. In contrast, it is a compilation of teeny-tiny steps that lead to your conversion goals. Here are the benefits (in order) that show you how video marketing can bring you more conversion rates.
1. Capture The Audience Attention
Video marketing is an excellent tool for grabbing the audience’s attention. Since it centres around the audience’s point of view, it’s essential to incorporate a unique approach.
For example, a tutorial video aims to solve the pain point of the audience. Most of the time, the audience doesn’t pay attention to what a product can be used for many possible usages. Your tutorial video will come in handy to help them understand better.
Suppose you’re running an Italian Parmesan business. We all know what we can do with the cheese. It’s a basic complement dish that enhances pasta and pizza into a mouth-watering delicacy. Even without your tutorial, the audience knows how to incorporate parmesan into their meal.
They will come up with the idea of making cheesy pizza or cheese fondue or something ‘normal’ thing to do with the cheese. But if you get your audience a tutorial video to try out something different, you can benefit the most from it.
You can make a fantastic tutorial video by incorporating new recipes for your authentic Italian cheese. For example, cheese tends to be an expensive ingredient in some parts of the world. To tap into an audience of students or people who are tight on a budget, you decide to make a budget-friendly recipe with cheese.
Engaging audiences through visually compelling content can drive remarkable conversion rates. One effective strategy includes leveraging platforms like Idomoo, which specializes in personalized video solutions that capture attention and resonate with viewers instantly. Exploring these advanced video marketing approaches enables brands to deepen connections with their audience.
Doing so helps you reach a new market and provide insight for your existing audience. In the end, you get the best of both worlds.
2. Improve Brand’s Awareness
Video marketing can help you spread more awareness by incorporating an effective strategy. This is where explainer videos play a big part in the game.
First off, an explainer video has the ability to convey a message about your brand and product concisely. If you’re new to the business, it’s an excellent way to apply this method sooner. For an entrepreneur looking to leverage powerful storytelling effectively, utilizing a video presentation maker with advanced capabilities such as text-to-speech, auto-generated subtitles, and AI script writing can revolutionize your marketing approach. Such tools not only simplify the process of turning ideas into compelling videos but also ensure scalability and consistency across different projects.
Let’s get back to the cheese business.
To begin with, there are tons of cheese companies in this world. They aren’t just cheese producers but also dairy companies that supply all dairy-derived products worldwide.
Does it mean you lose the battle as a local cheese producer? No, you still have a chance to acquire markets, at least in your local area.
This is where video marketing comes to the rescue. It enables you to spread out the words about your local-authentic Italian cheese. It also allows the audience to know better about your brand in an amusing way- not too promotional.
3. Boost SEO
Every business needs to have a website to level-up its attention. Often, the audience looks up the website first to judge whether your company is credible or not. Basically, your website is an exceptional online presence that you should nurture in the long run.
Besides, people rely heavily on the search engine to look for anything in today’s internet age. The chance of your business to appear on the search engine will be super low if you don’t incorporate a digital marketing tactic.
A digital marketing tactic includes having video marketing as one of the plans. As mentioned above, video marketing won’t only act better to attract the audience but also the search engine. Including a video on your site will help the search engine rank your site.
A good marketing video on your site allows visitors to get an in-depth explanation within minutes. The presence of video can also attract the eyes first when a user visits your site. It leads them to click and watch without spending time reading a bulky text inside the website.
The relevancy of your marketing video enables the search engine to track your page better. This way, you can improve your site’s appearance on the search engine result page (SERP).
Now that you have a fundamental knowledge of websites and SEO, let’s dive into how a better SEO score can bring you more traffic.
When you finally reach page one on the search engine result page, the chance is you generate massive visitors to your site. Although it’s apparent, our ‘local cheese business’ doesn’t even know this strategy.
A small business mostly relies on the classic word of mouth without giving a chance of online presence. Although the former method is still effective today, the online representation can fuel up the businesses’ expansion.
An embedded video marketing on your site isn’t the only source where your enormous traffic comes from. Thanks to social media platforms, people can share your video marketing multiple times. Also, don’t forget about the number of views and impressions. Those are the vital analytic tools to measure your video marketing success.
If you succeed in delivering useful video marketing, the chance of getting overnight popular is very much likely. The audience will be curious as to what your brand is all about. They will dive into more information by visiting the only complete source of you: your website.
Therefore, the more shared your video marketing is, the higher opportunity of you getting more traffic to your website.
5. Increase Conversion Rates
Video marketing is designed to generate leads in the first place. So, there’s no debate on it. But how does it work?
Firstly, in every video marketing, the narrative or storytelling guides the viewers to pay more attention to it. Without the audience realizing it, each video infuses marketing information, leading them to feel attached.
This is where powerful storytelling works. It enchants the audience to stay within the video until it ends. Although many implement an urgency narration, some companies prefer to have it in the end.
We call this actionable narration a call-to-action (CTA). It can be a text, button, banner, or even a story in the narration that gives the audience a sense of urgency to take action. CTA is the gate for every potential lead to embark on your brand’s journey.
CTA works like a magic word. It doesn’t push anyone to click on something or visit your website. Rather, it beautifully persuades the audience to get an experience with you.
That’s why it’s crucial to understand how CTA works for generating the audience. Placing CTAs can also be tricky as it needs some strategies without making your audience feel objectified.
In brief, every video marketing needs CTA to generate leads and measure the conversion rates. That’s a must-have. If not, then what’s the point of your video marketing?
Now that you have a knowledge of video marketing, you may think it’s hard to make one, especially when you’re a novice in this practice. Although you can give it all to the social media video production company to handle, you should know the science behind it. Only then can you work together to receive the best outcome you desire.
Here are some tips for you to create a compelling video marketing script that helps increase conversion rates.
1. Write as you talk
Sometimes scriptwriters don’t put this as equally important as giving the real conversation with the audience. They concentrate more on delivering whatever in their mind into words, which is terrible.
Your writing text doesn’t automatically turn into an engaging story if you ignore this element. That’s why there’s this statement amongst writers, “Write as if you’re speaking.” It means that when you sound your writing, and it comes out great, you have succeeded in your writing hustle. This becomes even more important when using text to video AI tools, which turn your scripts into visual content because if the writing doesn’t feel authentic, no tool can save it.
Writing for video marketing can be challenging, but that doesn’t mean impossible to tackle down. Continuously writing your script, or leveraging an AI video generator, can enhance your skill in the future to get a better hold of what’s enticing to the audience and what’s not.
2. Educate the audience
Video marketing isn’t that salesy video where you push people into buying your product. It’s never like that, to begin with. There’s a reason why it’s called marketing, not sales. It aims to penetrate the market and acquire leads.
Therefore, your video marketing should be informative and educational for the audience. If they find it helpful, you don’t need to worry much about the upcoming event. A broad audience will be right in your hand.
Your video marketing script must be the first introduction of the following promotional video. In other words, you must create a solid audience that ‘understands’ your brand and your product. And, you can achieve this state by educating them properly.
3. Accentuate your words and tones
If you understand what it means to have a hidden agenda, well, then you can incorporate that method in your scriptwriting. It’s not about the wrong and misleading information to cruelly achieve your goal. It’s about focusing on the thing you want to deliver by accentuating your words.
Words and tones can sometimes be complex to understand fully. People from diverse backgrounds can interpret the words differently too. That’s why a video marketing scriptwriter should emphasize it to give a concise message.
Tones are also vital to leave an impression on the audience. It differs from every business or niche. You can’t apply a happy tone for a product that solves an emotionally dreading situation. That’s inappropriate in the first place, and secondly, it will leave a terrible impression of your brand.
4. Incorporate narrative structure
The thing about storytelling is the beauty of its structure, how it enchants the viewers to feel ‘something.’ Crafting exceptional storytelling needs a lot of practice. But to start on, try implementing the narrative structure in your scriptwriting.
Well, storytelling itself is already in the form of narration. But, most marketers ignore this part as they may straightly think of the words to gain leads. Because, no- you can’t incorporate a brand-centred story if you target a different subject: the audience.
It’s not about telling your features and so on (well, yes, you should put this into the writing), but it’s not the main thing. When you implement a narrative structure about your audience and make it all about them, they sure feel attached.
5. Use illustrative words
Lastly, don’t forget to use illustrative words in your video marketing script. Most scriptwriters forget to put this as they focus more on crafting the big words. The thing is, your heavy words are hard to translate into a video.
Keep in mind that a video needs illustrative words to be acted upon. Your words must be visually friendly so that the production engineer knows what you mean or the message you want to deliver.
Illustrative words also allow the audience to visualize better, albeit there’s a video representing it. But still, it’s a crucial element that every scriptwriter should take notes of.
Conclusion
Video marketing is one of the most popular strategies every marketer has reverted to s in the past decades. Thanks to the growing world of the Internet, people are now relying on it to look up almost everything.
The content itself has shifted from visual to video as the latter has more information included than the former. This is where businesses take an opportunity from. They implement a marketing scheme into an online video that reaches out to a broader audience, in the hope of having more conversion rates and it’s true. Video marketing is now used by many businesses to elevate their performance.
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order). Twitter.Linkedin Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com
Garnering traffic to your website, regardless of the niche, is always an uphill battle. And whether social media has an impact on your SEO is up for debate, one thing’s for sure ― social media can be a major source of referral traffic to your website.
In fact, social media users have grown by over 10% in the past year, taking the global total to nearly 4 billion, or more than half the world’s population. Clearly, it doesn’t lack the potential to explosively boost your website traffic.8.79% of the global social media segment is controlled by Twitter, compared to Facebook’s 72.04% or Instagram’s 2.92%
Now, whether you’re posting on social media to earn more readers for your business blog, to get your followers to check out a newly launched product, or win sign-ups for your newsletter, your goal is to get people to engage with your content and visit your website.
However, getting people off the social platform and on to your website can be a tall order, with your audience being constantly flooded with endless other engaging posts in their feed.
So, here are seven powerful ways to help you capture your audience’s attention and make them click through to your website.
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1. Determine the Right Social Media Channels
Your very first step is to do your homework about your target audience ― on which platforms do they spend most of their time and what kind of content do they engage with the most.
There’s no need for you to be active on every channel. For example, if you wish to drive traffic to a food review blog, investing all your efforts in posting quality content on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will likely fill the bill. Conversely, if you wish to drive traffic to your B2B SaaS blog, focusing on LinkedIn and Twitter makes more sense.
The last thing you want is to waste your efforts by focusing on the wrong channels where you’ll find little-to-no engagement and thus, a negligible bump in traffic at best.
So, if you have a customer base, ask them what social networks they prefer or use the most. Analyze your top competitors’ strategy. Which platforms are your competitors leveraging? Rather than guessing, use data to determine the right channels for successful social media marketing.
2.Craft Persuasive Titles for Your Social Posts
Headlines can make or break your click-through rate. Whether you’re posting an Instagram story or sharing a quick tweet, always keep in mind the three C’s of great social copy: creative, concise, and conversational.
The title of your post is your audience’s first taste of the actual content, so don’t shoo them away with an unexciting or “clickbaity” title.
While it’s a good idea to keep the headline as crisp as you can, crafting a narrative title typically boosts click-through rates. You can include a couple of benefits of clicking-through to your website, some surprising statistics, or an intriguing question the answer to which they’ll find by clicking on your link.
For instance, if you’re posting an article titled “How to Improve Your Customer Retention”, instead of copy-pasting the same title in your tweet, write something like “Want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers? Here are five battle-tested customer retention strategies!”. Clearly, the latter one invites more traffic as it’s conversational and leads with a gripping question.
Pro tip: if you’re using a tool like Missinglettr, which can write social posts for you, it’s worth it to go in and change the post’s titles to make them more human-friendly and appealing compared to what an AI tool can do.
3.Go All Out With Visual Content
Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, effective social media marketing is all about posting visually stunning content ― high-res photos, illustrations, infographics, GIFs, and videos ― consistently.
You may not think of Twitter as a visual-first platform, but Twitter’s internal data shows people are three times more likely to engage with tweets that include visual content.
Modern social media users prefer and can’t get enough visual content. Even if you’re not redirecting followers to mouth-watering pizzas or ravishing undergarments on your website, uploading high-quality images with a caption is always better than plain text.
In short, if your content doesn’t catch your audience’s eye, they won’t bother to stop scrolling and click through to your website. So, strive to post striking visuals that people can’t help but pay attention to.
Also, don’t use images that are clearly free stock photos. Create original high-quality visuals or if you’ve transitioned to a remote working company (thanks to the pandemic), then hire a remote designer to help you create visually appealing social content ― don’t cut corners when it comes to quality and originality.
4. Use Custom Branded Links
Your website’s URL you link to can often be long and convoluted, making it visually uninviting for your followers. To make your links more inviting and clickable, customize them to make them shorter and also branded.
That is, use a custom URL shortener to create short links (an abbreviated version of the page domain) as it’s an excellent way to keep your branding consistent, boost link trust, and consequently, increase click-throughs and website traffic.
What’s more, a shorter link takes up fewer characters in tweets (where you’re limited to 280 characters), leaving you with more room to craft persuasive titles and exciting captions.
5. Have a Clear Call to Action
What do you want your followers to do when they stop scrolling to check out your post? Make it clear as to what action you want them to take.
If you want them to check out your latest product catalog, tell them that with a direct phrase like “check out our latest fall collection”, and include a link to your catalog page.
Likewise, if you want your audience’s opinion on something, just ask them to drop a quick comment. In essence, a clear call to action (CTA) is a tried-and-true way to boost content engagement and drive click-throughs to your website.
6. Post at the Right Times of the Day
Once you have great content to post, it makes sense to determine the ideal time to pull the trigger. After all, what’s the point of great content if your followers aren’t around to see it?
Sure, you’ll get some impressions and click-through if you post without thinking about the time, but that’s not how you’ll extract the most juice out of every post.
Timing your posts on social media does have an impact on the traffic you generate, and you must try to get your message across when the bulk of your audience is active.
Source: TrackMaven
To work out the best times to post on each channel, start by looking at what times and days you get the most engagement presently.
For Twitter, head over to ‘Twitter Analytics’ and sort by ‘Top Tweets’ to determine your best-performing tweets. Analyze the time and days when you get the most engagement. Use a free tool like Followerwonk to quickly figure out what time of day your audience is most active.
Likewise, for Facebook, head over to the ‘Insights’ tab to understand when you get the most reach and likes. It’s also a good idea to run some tests to see when your audience is most engaged and likely to click through to your website. Once you find a pattern, schedule your content accordingly on each channel.
Moreover, by sharing your content multiple times across each platform, you allow each post to get the maximum possible engagement from your audience. So feel free to post the same link twice or thrice, spacing the posts apart a week or two.
However, don’t risk annoying your audience by posting too frequently, or by posting the same piece of content more than thrice.
7.Deliver What You Promised
Finally, don’t let your audience down when they land on your website. Your post ― with its compelling title, stunning visuals, and inviting CTA ― should lead your followers to a landing page on your website that truly delivers on your post’s promise.
For example, if you share a link to your blog post on Facebook that’s captioned “How to bake an eggless dutch truffle in less than 60 minutes”, then your followers should be able to do that once they click-through to your website and read the post.
Because if you don’t deliver on your promise, you can’t expect people to trust your brand and click-through to your website again. So, make sure to meet your audience’s expectations with quality content that leaves them satisfied and helps you achieve your marketing goals.
To conclude, all the seven ways outlined above have the overarching theme of building trust and adding value to your followers’ social media experience. The more effectively you get it in front of your audience’s eyes (with stellar visuals, branded links, etc.), the more credible you’ll appear, which, in turn, will result in more click-throughs to your website.
Over 10 years of blogging has taught me a million things about launching, optimizing, growing, increasing CTR and selling websites. What if I told you figuring out two things that could turn things around for you? The first is “how to bring visitors to your site” and the second is “how to push them to click on your website.”
If you have been running a website, you’d know that clickability is a massive factor of engagement and conversion. You can’t sell your product or convert a reader into a subscriber if visitors aren’t clicking. It does look so simple on the outside, but it’s a game-changer in conversion optimization.
What if your website visitors don’t know where to click? Or what if they know what exactly you’re offering but they don’t want it?
Wait. No need to feel depressed.
I’ll walk you through the whole process that will surely help you maximize the website conversion. All you need is to be ready to churn the information I’ll throw at you as I’ve got several ways to increase CTR to improve your website conversion.
You should know that every e-commerce store, website owner, and blogger wants more conversion on the website. Some improve their website designs, while others internally link their website pages. The goal remains the same; they want prospects to convert into paying customers.
But when visitors aren’t clicking anywhere on the website, then it got to be something wrong with the website. The primary suspects could be the website speed that may be affecting the ranking, the quality of content that isn’t impressing the readers, or the wrong audience targeting that result in producing irrelevant content.
If you’re wondering why it would matter so much, then you should know that less or no clickability affects a lot of things, such as:
Total page views
Email list growth
Affiliate commissions
Product sales
Since we’re discussing how we can improve the click-through rate for better conversion, it’s imperative to know where website visitors are clicking and where you want them to click. Placing a banner ad on the sidebar or installing an exit-intent won’t make a difference unless you aren’t getting the right traffic to your blog or website.
In the online marketing world, click-through rate (CTR) is crucial to understand various factors that indicate whether or not the content strategy is working, and those factors include but limited to:
The intent of the publisher mirrors in the way content is presented
The interest of the visitors in your content is determined by the engagement
Relevance to the audience reflects in the bounce rate report
Quality of the content can be judged through the conversion
So we’ve established that it’s necessary to have clickability on our website or blog. Therefore, now you need to know is how you can increase clickability on your site.
Let’s head over to the cream of this article.
7 Ways to Increase CTR for Better Conversion on the Website
Let’s change the way website visitors respond to your websites and blogs for the better. Take a look at the methods to increase CTR on your website:
Link to sales page multiple times
One of the common mistakes website owners and bloggers make is that they add a single call-to-action button or link once to their sales page in the article. They should know that it isn’t going to cut it. On the other side, what smart marketers do is that they use psychology to push visitors to click-through by adding multiple call-to-actions.
It’s human nature that when something appears frequently, it goes into our subconscious mind and influences our behaviours. Brands know this very well. They’d spend millions of dollars on TV commercials, social media ads, and influencer marketing to build brand recognition.
The point I’m trying to make is that you need to link to your sales pages more often. This linking shouldn’t be limited to the blog posts, but instead, you can do this in other content mediums as well. Here’s how you can link to sales pages on various platforms:
Since our goal here is to improve the website conversion, so the first thing you should do is start linking to your sales page more often.
When I promote products, I tend to link to those affiliate products more often.
Take a look at the example:
Ever since I started linking to the affiliate promotes multiple times in the blog post, my conversion rate needle has started to move. So don’t waste this opportunity to improve your CTR on the site.
Add various call-to-action buttons on the website. You can try out multiple CTA variations such as buy now, free trial, sign-up now, get access, et cetera. It increases the clickability when the call-to-action button appears in multiple places on the website pages. Link to money pages multiple times in the articles. One of the underrated engagement techniques that bloggers and digital marketers don’t capitalize on is linking to money pages. Income School once revealed that they increased their conversion just by adding links multiple times in the blog posts. Mention CTA at least twice in a podcast so that the listeners could remember your brand or offer once they finish listening to the podcast. I’m a big fan of podcasts, and I know how much attention listeners pay to their favourite content. Almost every podcaster has a specific call-to-action, whether it’s a freebie or a discount coupon. Highlight the product at the beginning and at the end of the video. Video is a popular content type on social media. So when you put out a video on YouTube or Facebook, try to plug in the call-to-action at the beginning as well as at the end of the video.
Add a comparison table
You got to be on your toes when you’re trying to increase your website click-through rate. There are several factors that determine how good or bad your clickability is going to be on the website. One of the key factors is “stopping people from leaving your site.”
So when you essentially stop people from leaving your website, then it means they’re either enjoying your content or interested in your product. Therefore, you have to try out every single method to stop people from hopping to another website.
Adding a comparison table is a fantastic way to retain the visitors on the page and engage them further on your website. What comparison tables do is that they provide data, statistics, or specs, which essentially help the website to keep the visitors engaged.
It’s easier to engage the website visitors when they’re digging deeper into the information you’ve provided in the content. There are various comparison tables you can create to make this engagement happen:
i) Products comparison
ii) Pros and cons of a product
iii) Head-to-Head brands analysis
iv) Different variants of a product
It reminded me of the Wirecutter website; it’s a product review website that puts out a lot of content related to IT, tech, and gaming. They’re so good at using comparison tables.
Take a look at the comparison table from Wirecutter:
The point is that sometimes when you need compelling information or data to tie readers to your content. The longer they stay on your website, the higher the chance of clickability.
However, in some cases, you need some call-to-action in your tables, for instance, read more or buy now to make sure that the engaged visitors take action. So don’t let go of any chance you get to retain the audience on your website.
Use attractive call-to-action buttons
The attractive call-to-action buttons have a lot to do with the click-through rate on the sign-up pages and online forms. Besides building a narrative, it also sends out a psychological message to the viewer. Digital marketers, web developers, and bloggers know how important the text, colour, and size of the call-to-action buttons are. Therefore, they pay close attention to testing out various versions of the call-to-action buttons.
The importance of building attractive CTA buttons isn’t limited to websites, but they also matter in online ads and mobile app interfaces. Have you ever wondered what makes good CTA buttons better than the average CTA buttons? Here are three key factors that differentiate good and bad CTA buttons: i) Intent The CTAs must align with the intent of the publisher. Suppose a blog is about making money online, and the CTA button is about health and fitness, then it won’t work. There has to be coherence between the content and the text of the CTA button. ii) Clarity It’s true that mundane and regular CTA buttons go unnoticed, for instance, “get updates” and “subscribe” are the most common ones. Sometimes, websites and blogs try to fashion CTA buttons and end up writing a word or phrase that doesn’t give out a clear sign of what to expect from the sign-up process. So try creating a clear CTA button that helps the visitor in moving forward. iii) Message A core element of the CTA button is the message it carries. Not only it matters in understanding the context but also influences the clicks. The clearer the message, the better the CTA.
Call-to-action buttons are essential everywhere on your online real estate whether it’s a website, newsletter, landing page, or article copy.
The team at Elegant Themes understands the importance of attractive call-to-action buttons.
Look at the CTA button in one of their newsletters:
They used a rather large CTA button and clearly hinted “read the full blog post” on the call-to-action button, which explains the point.
Similarly, Appsumo also has an interesting call-to-action button on a popup option box:
Not only did they use the discount offer in the CTA button, but they’re also using a contrast colour for their call-to-action button.
Both of these examples sum up what I’m trying to tell you, which is to make attractive call-to-action buttons for more clickability and better conversion.
Maximize internal linking in the content
Internal linking is a vital SEO tactic to keep visitors engaged and tell search engine bots about the relevance of your content pages. SEO experts and bloggers internally link their content or pages because it transfers link juice to other pages as well as keeps visitors and bots remain on the site.
If you have done SEO before, you might have an idea of what internal linking does to any blog or site. On the contrary, if SEO isn’t your cup of tea, then you might not have paid much attention to it.
Anyway, I’ll be keeping it digestible for you. The reason I’m discussing internal linking is simple: it increases click-through rate and engagement on the site.
Does this mean you should internally link your pages even if they aren’t relevant?
The answer is no. You shouldn’t do internal linking of the pages that aren’t relevant or won’t be helping the readers.
When your website visitors get engaged on the site, they either convert into a lead or buy the product. The key here is to somehow keep the visitors busy on your site.
The internal linking doesn’t matter if you aren’t linking to the relevant content. If you’re connecting two pages for the sake of internal linking, and there is no justification whatsoever, then the reader who would end up clicking on the link might not feel clicking on any other link. So keep the content relevant in mind.
ii)Problem-solving Info
Your blog posts must be solving the problem. It does look so simple, but in reality, it’s not that easy. First, you’d have to identify a problem, and then you’d have to come up with a solution. Internal linking comes naturally in the content curation and creation process when you’re absolutely sure about the resources you’re linking out to in your content. Remember that the mission is to solve a problem, not to link out to other pages or resources. Once you keep this mindset, you’d succeed in internal linking.
iii)Clean Page Layout
Some of you might not agree with this, but I do believe that a clean page layout is worth it. If your blog post or website page is cluttered with ads, popups, and opt-in forms, then visitors might leave the site without clicking on any link. Don’t underestimate the power of having a clean layout on your site.
I have been noticing their internal linking strategy for a long time. Often they hyperlink a full phrase, while sometimes they hyperlink a single word.
Hubspot is a popular inbound software services company. If you want to learn the basics of content marketing, you should follow their editorial techniques.
They nail it with their internal linking as well.
So what I’m trying to say is that internal link your pages and blog post wisely. Remember that the core reason behind internal linking is the delivery of value, not just drag the reader from one page to another. Once the readers start to discover helpful and meaningful resources through your internal linking, they’re likely to trust your content more than ever.
Reduce banner ads on the page
Most beginner bloggers don’t realize that adding more banner ads on the page could drastically reduce the clickability on the website, let alone reduce conversion. Understandably, they want to make quick bucks, so they put a lot of banner ads on the site.
As a result, they may end up getting a few clicks on their ads, but they could potentially lose the visitors they’d leave the site and land on the advertiser’s website.
One of the disadvantages of having a bunch of banner ads on a site is that visitors’ attention gets diverted towards the banner ads. Seemingly, it could reduce clicks on the internal links.
Furthermore, having more banner ads on your website means your page loading speed would increase, and that doesn’t just affect the user experience, but it could also affect your SEO.
It’s one of those blogs that have a minimalistic approach when it comes to their website designs. What I like about the Millennial Money blog is that they don’t have a single opt-in box or a banner ad on the sidebar of the blog posts. There are so many other blogs out there who follow the same approach.
So what we take away from this example is that sometimes having less number of banner ads could also lead to getting more clicks or higher conversion through internal links.
Make your text links standout
It’s fascinating to understand that users’ behaviour changes when our strategies to engage them to change. Plus, how small changes make a huge difference in the conversion rate and clickability. So I’m about to share another element of content marketing that would help you increase your website CTR, and therefore, impact the conversion.
You’re putting out great content on the blog and you have a fantastic internal linking strategy, but if your links aren’t prominent enough, then it’s a problem.
I’ve seen several blogs that don’t have a distinctive colour for their in-text hyperlinks, which prohibits the links from standing out from the rest of the content.
It’s necessary to know why we need to make our text links stand out in the first place. The reason is that we want clickability on the website and blog. Therefore, we add a bunch of internal links along with affiliate links and outbound links. The goal is to push readers to click on all types of clicks so that they go ahead and complete a specific action.
When a website gets more clicks, the following things happen as a result:
i) The website or blog gets more page views
ii) The engagement increases on the site
iii) More chances of affiliate conversion get created
iv)Display ads generate more money due to page views
So to make your text links stand, you need to choose the right combination of the following things:
Font: The font of the blog or website must be clean and decent. The font style and size play a vital role in pushing readers to read the blog or leave the page early on without finishing the blog post.
Text colour: After the website’s font, the next thing is the text colour, which should be prominent and in contrast to the body of the website body. It’s usually black in most of the blogs and websites.
Link colour: The link colour is a big decider of how clear and appealing a hyperlink appears in the content. If the link colour is the same as the colour of the text, it might hurt the clickability on the links.
Site template: The blog or website templates have settings where you can change the font size, colour, and hyperlink settings. You can adjust the text link colour if it doesn’t seem appropriate to you.
It seems like they know about this so well. When I was going through their blog content, their hyperlinks were looking so catchy and clickable. The reason is clear, which is they’re standing out.
Try experimenting with your text link colours. If you have no idea where to change the colour of your hyperlinks in your site’s CSS, consult a website developer for this task. It’ll only take a few minutes to change it.
Use a Short Branded URL
Most of you would think, how come a short branded URL would bring website visitors or increase click-through rate? Well, all I can say is that you should keep reading.
First things first, what’s the short branded URL? If you have no idea what exactly a short branded URL is, then let me tell you. It’s a short version of the same domain with a different extension. Companies use short branded URL versions to reduce the length of the links as well as record different statistics.
If you’re into affiliate marketing, you might have noticed that Amazon and ShareASale allow users to generate the short URL of the affiliate products to promote.
The exciting part is that any company or blog can use a short branded URL. Now you’d think, why would someone want to use a short branded URL?
The answer is that a short branded URL could increase your CTR as well as land more website visitors on your website.
Well, Replug is a fantastic URL shortener that does so much more than just URL shortening. Not only does it allow users to use branded URL, but it also helps users drive visitors to their websites.
If you’re a social media expert or a pro-blogger, you might want to get your hands on this tool. Here’s why: when users shorten the article URLs with Replug and share on social media, and their followers click on the short links and land on the articles, they also see a small snippet of the users that could bring those random visitors to their websites.
What it means is that you’re sharing others’ valuable content with your followers after shortening the article URLs with Replug, and those articles could bring people to your website as well.
As a result, you could increase CTR on your website and end up improving your website conversion.
Did You Learn Something New About Increasing CTR on the Website?
I’ve shared seven ways to increase CTR on your website for better conversion. The goal was to help you out by sharing tactics that push visitors to click-through on your website.
I’m sure you’re going to take away a couple of strategies from this blog post. I’ll be thrilled to know what strategies you liked the most. Feel free to share what else readers should do to increase CTR on the website.
Furthermore, if you learned something good from this blog post, do let us know in the comments below.
When it comes to promoting your offerings or communicating about your brand, email marketing has proven to be one of the most effective channels online. Businesses, large and small, use email marketing as one of their primary tactics to connect with customers and get more business. The reason email is so popular is that it generates the highest ROI and is 40x more effective than social media marketing.
With so many businesses sending out emails to promote their business, the customers’ inbox is always cluttered. To break through the clutter and stand out in the inbox, it is important to send emails that can create an impact. And, having pitch-perfect emails is not enough; you also need to execute the entire marketing strategy efficiently to make the most out of your efforts.
So, if you are looking at utilizing the potential of email marketing to grow your business, here are a few must-haves to create an effective email marketing strategy.
Set Clear Goals
The first and foremost thing to do before planning your email marketing strategy is to define your goals. Determining what you want to achieve out of your email marketing campaigns is crucial. Your marketing goals may include acquiring new customers, increasing sales, improving brand visibility and brand loyalty, building connections with existing customers, or just increasing your website traffic. Having clear objectives and setting achievable goals will steer your strategy in the right direction and help you stay focused throughout the entire campaign.
Build your Email List Organically
A clean and organic email list plays a pivotal role in the success of email marketing. Although there is a shortcut option to buy email lists, it is never advisable, because scrapped and borrowed email lists can endanger your brand reputation. Email addresses in the purchased email lists are usually fake or include people who might not be interested in your brand’s offerings. So, sending emails to such contacts will result in lower click-through rates or worse, an increased spam rate. Hence, it is a good practice to get people to opt-in to your email list via subscription forms or lead generation forms, and this way you will have a list of people who are interested in your brand and its niche. Alternatively, you can use GDPR-compliant tools like an email finder to find email addresses of your target prospects, making sure you reach the right contacts without compromising your list’s quality.
Check out this email from Zapier that confirms subscriptions by asking the users to update preferences.
Segmenting your subscriber list and making your emails more relevant to specific segments can help you in creating a well-organized and efficient campaign. Break down your email list into specific segments based on the demographics, lifecycle stage, buying behavior, and buying frequency of the users. Email list segmentation will help you create more targeted and tailored email campaigns that will perform better and engage more users than generic emails. Hire Mailchimp experts or other ESP-specific experts who can help you with effective list segmentation.
This email from Bespoke Posts asks the subscribers to fill out preferences in order to customize the content better. Getting to know about the subscribers’ interests and preferences will help you to divide them into various segments and create targeted emails.
The subject line is the first thing that a user notices about your email. It can make or break your email campaign, as it determines whether or not a user will open and read your email. It is therefore important to focus on creating effective, eye-catchy subject lines that will entice the users to open your emails. Make your subject lines short, crisp, engaging, and personalized. Mention attractive offers or include emojis and engaging copy to enthrall email recipients and motivate them to click.
Focus on the Content and Timing
Once you get people to open your email, the next step is to get them to click through and make a purchase. The content is at the core of the email and a deciding factor for the success of your email campaign. Hence, creating quality content that resonates with your audience and prompts users to take action is vital for your email marketing strategy. It is also necessary to have a CTA that stands out and encourages the readers to click through. Apart from this, make sure you send your emails at the best time to get maximum engagement.
Make the Design Attractive
A well-designed email is a key driving factor for conversions. To design top-notch, engaging emails, make sure you have a clean layout, use the right colors, keep the content short, use interactive design elements such as images, GIFs, and videos, use ample white space, and include a prominent call-to-action. To begin with, you can make use of custom Mailchimp email templates, Pardot email templates, or Salesforce email templates that follow email design best practices and help you create emails that click.
Here’s a simple, yet attractive email design by Great Jones.
Before you hit the send button, it is essential to test if all elements are correctly placed and your email is all set to render perfectly. A/B testing will enable you to test your emails, get valuable insights, and optimize it for better performance. Use various combinations of the subject line, design elements, copy, placement of CTA, etc. to thoroughly test your emails and see what works best and gets the desired results.
Make them Mobile-Friendly
85% of users check their emails on mobile phones. Keep this in mind while designing your emails. Optimize your email design for mobile screens by using a responsive layout, resizing images to fit smaller screens, using prominent and easy to click CTA buttons, and including shorter texts and longer links. Use responsive Mailchimp templates to make your emails mobile-friendly and get maximum conversions.
Add an Option to Unsubscribe
Make it easy for the uninterested subscribers to opt-out from your email list whenever they want by adding an unsubscribe button in all your emails. This is an essential step because, if you keep sending emails to people who do not want to hear from you, it will lead to your emails being ignored or marked as spam, which will hamper your brand credibility. It is, therefore, better to let them choose to unsubscribe in case they do not want to receive your emails.
Track and Analyze Performance
In order to know if you are moving in the right direction and getting the desired results from your email marketing campaigns, you need to analyze the performance of every email that you send out. Track metrics such as the email deliverability rate, open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, social sharing rate, unsubscribe rate, etc. to see what works for your brand, and based on the analysis, make necessary changes to your campaign to improve its performance.
All Set to Create a Winning Email Strategy?
A well-executed email strategy will get you more customers, boost engagement, and improve overall ROI. Incorporate all the above best practices while devising your email marketing strategy, and it is sure to make positive impacts on your business.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, and HTML email templates coding services. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
