Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts. Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot’s research, 81% of consumers trust the […]
Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts. Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot’s research, 81% of consumers trust the […]
The new year is right around the corner. And I know you are already prepared because you read this blog and tons of other marketing blogs, right?
But here is the thing: I also read most of the popular marketing blogs, follow all of the marketing YouTube channels, and listen to the same podcasts you do.
And I’ve noticed that very few people are talking about what’s really going to happen in 2020.
Sure, they will tell you things like voice search is going to account for over 50% of the search queries next year but all of that stuff has already been talked about.
And there are actually more interesting trends that will
affect your marketing that no one is really talking about.
So, what are these trends? What’s going to happen in 2020?
Alright, here goes…
Trend #1: Companies who rely on Google Analytics will get
beat by their competition
Heck, I love it so much I log in at least 3 or 4 times a day. And here is the kicker: I get so much traffic that my Google Analytics only updates once a day.
I really need to break that habit but that’s for another day.
You are probably wondering, what’s wrong with Google Analytics?
There actually isn’t much wrong with it. It’s a great tool,
especially considering that it’s free.
But here is the thing… marketing has been changing. New channels are being constantly introduced, such as voice search.
And transactions no longer are as simple as someone coming and buying from you and that’s it.
These days there are things like upsells, down sells, repeat purchases, and even checkout bumps. On top of that, there are so many different ways you can generate revenue for your online business, such as partnerships, affiliate marketing, and even webinars.
This has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that tie into their database better, such as Amplitude. Or better yet, you are seeing a big push into business intelligence.
A central place where you can tie in all of your data and make better-informed decisions so you can optimize for your lifetime value instead of your short-term income.
In 2020, you will see more companies adopting business intelligence solutions… from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.
If you haven’t checked out Data Studio, you’ll want to start now because it is easy to pass in all of your business and marketing data into one place. For example, you can pass in more granular data from your Facebook ad campaigns into Data Studio while that would be a bit difficult to do with Google Analytics.
Trend #2: Companies will optimize for voice search, but not
for revenue
Optimizing for voice search is a great way to get your brand
out more, but how is that going to convert into sales?
I haven’t seen too many solutions so far when it comes to
capitalizing on your voice search traffic, but so far there is Jetson.ai.
If you aren’t familiar with Jetson.ai, it makes it so people can buy from your site using voice search. It doesn’t matter if it is Alexa or Google Home, they work with most of the popular devices.
What’s cool about Jetson.ai is that it can learn from each customer and customize the interactions.
For example, if I keep ordering the same toothpaste from a specific store using voice search, Jetson.ai keeps track of that so you can easily keep ordering the same product over and over again with little to no friction.
Heck, it’s easier than logging into your computer or pulling
out your phone to make a purchase.
Trend #3: Your lists won’t convert as well, so you’ll
have to look for alternative communication channels
Email, it’s something we all use in the corporate world.
But here is something interesting when it comes to marketing
emails… I’m in a group with a bit over 109 email marketers across different
industries in different parts of the world.
And can you guess what we are all noticing?
Our open rates are staying roughly the same and that’s
largely because we all know how to clean and optimizing for deliverability.
But our click rates are going down.
So far as a group we have seen our click rates drop by
9.4% in 2019.
That’s crazy considering as a group we have over 146 million email addresses.
Now does this mean email is dead?
Of course not!!!
Email is here to stay and will be here for a very long time.
But what companies will have to do in 2020 is to leverage more communication channels.
Chatbots will take off drastically. Not necessarily the Intercom’s or Drift’s of the world but more so the solutions like ManyChat and MobileMonkey.
ManyChat and MobileMonkey leverage Facebook Messenger and as they connect it with Instagram and WhatsApp it will get even more popular.
In addition to chatbots, you’ll see more people leveraging
tools that allow push notifications like Subscribers.
It’s so powerful, here is the impact I’ve been able to
generate from push notifications so far using Subscribers.
You can wait till next year to lever chatbots and push
notifications, but I’d recommend you start sooner than later. 😉
Trend #4: Moats will almost be non-existent, other than
brands
You’ve probably heard the word “moat” before. If you
haven’t, just think about water around a castle.
Back in the day, they had water all around the castle and
they used a drawbridge to get in and out of the castle, so it would protect
them from invaders.
With your business, you may have a moat. It could be a feature, your cost structure, a technological advantage, or even a marketing advantage.
Over the years, moats in the online world have slowly been disappearing.
It’s easy for anyone to copy these days. So, what’s separating you from your competition?
Something could work right now, but it won’t last forever…
But do you know what will still be a strong moat in 2020 and
even a stronger one in the future?
It’s branding.
People buy Jordan shoes because they love Michael Jordan.
His brand is stronger than ever even though he hasn’t played in the NBA for
roughly 16 years.
His shoes are so popular, it’s helped him boost his net worth to over a billion dollars. Plus owning a basketball team doesn’t hurt either. 😉
But what’s interesting is he’s made more money after
retirement than he did as a basketball player.
And it’s not just Jordan who built a strong brand… so
have the Kardashians.
Just look at my agency NP Digital. It’s literally one of the fastest-growing ad agencies out there. And when I look at all of my competitors’ numbers, we are growing at a much faster pace because of my brand.
Yes, we have a great team, but again, that really isn’t a moat as a lot of agencies have great teams. It’s my brand that gave us a really fast kick start and continues to hopefully push us up.
You’ll want to build a brand in 2020. Whether it is personal
or corporate, it’s the best moat you can build in marketing. Plus, it will help
you with Google’s EAT.
Trend #5: Marketing will become a more even playing
field, you’ll have no choice but to use automation
When I first started off as an entrepreneur, I turned to SEO because I couldn’t afford the big ad budgets as my competitors.
Heck, I couldn’t even afford to run any paid ads.
Over the years, the playing field has become more level.
There are credit card companies like Brex that make it easier for startups to
get approved for larger limits and you may not have to pay them back right
away.
There are financing companies that will give you cash to
spend on marketing, so non-venture funded companies can more easily compete.
There are even companies like Lighter Capital that will give you loans without all of the headaches based on your existing revenue.
And to top it off, software solutions are now starting to integrate AI to give better recommendations. From Clickflow and RankScience to Distilled ODN… everyone is trying to use AI to make SEO and other forms of marketing.
Heck, BrightEdge can even automate your SEO (or at least a large portion of it). According to them, their automated SEO solution increases page views per visit by 60% as well as provides 21% more keywords on page one.
Keep in mind their clients are really big (their software starts in the thousands of dollars per month) so they would probably see better results than most companies, but still, you will start seeing many more software companies leverage AI.
Even with Ubersuggest, I’m working on creating AI that does the SEO for you so you no longer have to spend endless hours while, at the same time, saving you thousands of dollars.
In other words, the marketing playing field is getting more
even. And if you want to do well, you are going to have to leverage AI and
automation.
If everyone else is using it and you aren’t, you are going to get crushed because it will make changes faster and more accurately than a human. Again, it’s the only option you’ll have if you want to continually compete.
But don’t worry, there will be affordable/free solutions that exist, it’s just a matter of time. 😉
If everyone is leveraging the same AI marketing technology, how can you beat your competitors?
Well, it will come down to everything else… price, customer
service, upselling, operations, sales… All of the small stuff is what’s going
to help you win.
Trend #6: There will be no more silver bullets, we will
all have to optimize for marginal gains
A lot of businesses were built off of one marketing channel.
Dropbox grew through referral marketing. Invite more
friends, get more free space.
Facebook was built off your email address book. Facebook used to tap into it and invite all of your contacts to use Facebook on your behalf.
Companies like Quora and Yelp were built off of SEO. All of those rankings really help drive their businesses.
But you no longer can build a business through just one
marketing channel. Good channels now get saturated extremely fast.
Even if they work and cause explosive growth, it will only last for a short while before your competitors jump on board and make it harder.
Marketing is now heading in the direction of being about “marginal gains.”
There’s a British cycling coach named Dave Brailsford. His
belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1
percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
And he’s right, that’s how you win a race.
The same will be with your marketing. There will be a big shift from people focusing on one channel and trying to find the “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing.
From split testing your title tags to get a few ranking improvements to adding checkout bumps to your order page so you can spend a little bit more on your paid ads to using Google Data Studio so you can better optimize for your lifetime value…
It’s all about the little things. That’s what is going to
add up to winning.
That’s what you’ll have to shift your mindset to in order to win in 2020 and beyond.
Trend #7: Personalization is the new marketing
The problem with marketing as it exists today is that 95% of your visitors will never convert into a customer. And that’s if you are lucky.
Chances are you are more likely looking at 97% plus of your
visitors never converting.
The big reason isn’t that your marketing sucks or that all
of those visitors are junk and unqualified.
It’s that your message doesn’t fit every single one of your
visitors.
But through personalization, you can convert more of your visitors into customers.
A basic example of this is Amazon. When you go to Amazon, they know your patterns and what you typically buy so they show you what they think you want to see in order to boost their conversions.
And it works! When I log into Amazon I see tons of household supplies because that is what I buy the most often. I never buy dog food (which is smart because I don’t have a dog,) so I’ll never see ads for dog food.
Businesses are also trying to personalize each and every single experience both online and offline.
Companies like Amperity are trying to create a customer relationship engine so you can better serve each of your customers, whether it is online or offline.
Marketing is going to become a game of personalization. With
ad costs and even general marketing costs rising, you have no choice but to
figure out how to convert the 97% of your traffic that just never comes back.
You’ll see a big push for this in 2020.
Conclusion
I know a lot of the stuff I mentioned above isn’t talked about a lot and they aren’t popular marketing topics that everyone wants to hear… but it is the future.
These are trends that will come true, some already are, and
you have to adapt for them.
Here’s the beautiful part, though. You just read this, and now have a chance to act on the information before your competition. So, make sure you go and do so.
I want to see you not only succeed but I want you to beat
your competition. And I believe you can, whether you are a big company, or just
starting off with very little to no money.
So, what do you think of the trends above? Do you see any
marketing trends that will come true in 2020 that few people talk about?
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.–Alaska Airlines is in the holiday spirit. Travelers waiting to board any of its flights between Nov. 7 and Nov. 10 who happen to be holding Starbucks’ signature holiday cups will get priority boarding, though they’ll still have to wait behind Alaska’s first-class passengers. The offer is an extension of Alaska’s marketing approach…
Has a marketing “expert” told you plain-text emails hit the inbox more often than HTML emails? Or that plain-text emails have a 100% deliverability rate?
If so, they’re lying or misinformed.
In this post, I’ll debunk the common myth that plain-text emails reach the inbox more than HTML emails.
Plain-text emails are NOT more likely to reach the inbox.
I interviewed email marketing and anti-spam expert Laura Atkins to get her take on this myth.
Laura is a founding partner of the anti-spam consultancy and software firm Word to the Wise, and she has over 20 years of experience tracing internet abuse. At Word to the Wise, she advises businesses on how to reach the inbox and respond to spam complaints.
I asked Atkins if plain-text emails are more likely to reach the inbox.
“Anybody who tells you that does not understand how email filtering actually works,” she says.
Are simple emails with fewer images and links more likely to reach the inbox?
I asked Atkins this question as well. She says the amount of images and links in your emails does not impact inbox placement. However, the reputation of the domain (URL) you’re linking to and the domain where you host images that are within your email does matter.
“Every link that you put in an email, every domain you link to in an email, every image that you link to in an email has its own reputation. If that image happens to be something that a lot of spammers use, it’s going to have a bad reputation,” Atkins says.
If you use the same links and images that spammers use, your email is more likely to go to the spam folder. To avoid this, don’t like to sites with a bad reputation or include images hosted on a site with a bad reputation within your email content.
Not sure if a site has a bad reputation? You can use tools like Cisco’s Talos to check. Just paste the domain you’d like to check in their reputation lookup field. If it’s blacklisted, don’t include it in your email content.
Pro tip: Don’t use link shorteners, such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com, in your emails. They can hurt your chances of reaching the inbox, too.
How do you reach the inbox?
Some people will tell you there are simple tricks to reaching the inbox, like not using the word “free” in your subject lines. This isn’t true, says Atkins. They don’t understand how delivering emails works.
“Anybody who tells you, ‘if you do X your email won’t go to spam,’ doesn’t know how filters work,” Atkins says.
Atkins went on to explain that internet service providers (ISPs), like Gmail and Yahoo, use an algorithm which decides whether or not to deliver an email to the inbox or the spam folder.
These algorithms are complex and use machine learning. There are no easy tricks to deceive the algorithms. They are designed so that spammers can’t trick them.
Their number one goal? To deliver emails their users want and expect.
“This is their sole reason for existence … to identify what mail users want and to give it to them,” Atkins says.
Atkins says the best way to reach the inbox is to,
“Send mail your recipients want and expect.”
At AWeber, we recommend following this 4-step strategy to make sure your subscribers want and expect your emails:
Set expectations on your email sign up form. Explain how often you will send emails and what kind of content you’ll send.
The main takeaway? Whether your email is an HTML or plain-text email has nothing to do with landing in the inbox or the spam folder.
In fact, people often confuse simple HTML emails with plain-text emails. They think they’re sending plain-text emails when they’re really sending HTML emails. Let’s dive into the difference between the two types.
What’s the difference between plain-text and HTML emails?
An HTML email contains HTML code that impacts the appearance of an email. Here are some examples of common HTML elements that might be inside an email:
images
bullets
hyperlinked text
columns
headlines
call-to-action buttons
bolded or italicized text
AWeber’s weekly newsletter FWD: Thinking is an HTML email.
But this message from fitness expert BJ Gaddour is also an HTML email.
It doesn’t have images. It doesn’t use a fancy template. But it is an HTML email, because it contains bolded text and hyperlinked sentences — both HTML elements.
Most people think this email is a plain-text email, because it looks simple. But it’s not.
What does a plain-text email look like then?
It looks like this.
This email from Matt Chauvin of 20sJazz.com contains no images and no formatting. And notice that a full link is displayed in the email. With plain-text emails, you can’t hyperlink text. (For instance, Matt couldn’t hyperlink the word “Video” in the above email.)
In fact, a plain-text email contains only text, no formatting. But many people incorrectly label HTML emails with limited formatting as “plain-text emails.”
To illustrate the difference between a plain-text and HTML email, here is an HTML email from health food blogger Gina Homolka of Skinnytaste.
You can see there is a logo, italicized font, hyperlinked text (Spaghetti Carbonara), and an image.
Here is the plain-text version of the exact same email:
Big difference, right? The HTML version is much more visually appealing than the plain-text email. It’s also much more likely that subscribers will want to engage with the HTML version, because they can visualize the food from the recipe.
Spread the word.
Know a marketer or business owner who only sends plain-text or simple emails because they believe it will get them into the inbox? Send them this article.
Has a marketing “expert” told you plain-text emails hit the inbox more often than HTML emails? Or that plain-text emails have a 100% deliverability rate?
If so, they’re lying or misinformed.
In this post, I’ll debunk the common myth that plain-text emails reach the inbox more than HTML emails.
Plain-text emails are NOT more likely to reach the inbox.
I interviewed email marketing and anti-spam expert Laura Atkins to get her take on this myth.
Laura is a founding partner of the anti-spam consultancy and software firm Word to the Wise, and she has over 20 years of experience tracing internet abuse. At Word to the Wise, she advises businesses on how to reach the inbox and respond to spam complaints.
I asked Atkins if plain-text emails are more likely to reach the inbox.
“Anybody who tells you that does not understand how email filtering actually works,” she says.
Are simple emails with fewer images and links more likely to reach the inbox?
I asked Atkins this question as well. She says the amount of images and links in your emails does not impact inbox placement. However, the reputation of the domain (URL) you’re linking to and the domain where you host images that are within your email does matter.
“Every link that you put in an email, every domain you link to in an email, every image that you link to in an email has its own reputation. If that image happens to be something that a lot of spammers use, it’s going to have a bad reputation,” Atkins says.
If you use the same links and images that spammers use, your email is more likely to go to the spam folder. To avoid this, don’t like to sites with a bad reputation or include images hosted on a site with a bad reputation within your email content.
Not sure if a site has a bad reputation? You can use tools like Cisco’s Talos to check. Just paste the domain you’d like to check in their reputation lookup field. If it’s blacklisted, don’t include it in your email content.
Pro tip: Don’t use link shorteners, such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com, in your emails. They can hurt your chances of reaching the inbox, too.
How do you reach the inbox?
Some people will tell you there are simple tricks to reaching the inbox, like not using the word “free” in your subject lines. This isn’t true, says Atkins. They don’t understand how delivering emails works.
“Anybody who tells you, ‘if you do X your email won’t go to spam,’ doesn’t know how filters work,” Atkins says.
Atkins went on to explain that internet service providers (ISPs), like Gmail and Yahoo, use an algorithm which decides whether or not to deliver an email to the inbox or the spam folder.
These algorithms are complex and use machine learning. There are no easy tricks to deceive the algorithms. They are designed so that spammers can’t trick them.
Their number one goal? To deliver emails their users want and expect.
“This is their sole reason for existence … to identify what mail users want and to give it to them,” Atkins says.
Atkins says the best way to reach the inbox is to,
“Send mail your recipients want and expect.”
At AWeber, we recommend following this 4-step strategy to make sure your subscribers want and expect your emails:
Set expectations on your email sign up form. Explain how often you will send emails and what kind of content you’ll send.
The main takeaway? Whether your email is an HTML or plain-text email has nothing to do with landing in the inbox or the spam folder.
In fact, people often confuse simple HTML emails with plain-text emails. They think they’re sending plain-text emails when they’re really sending HTML emails. Let’s dive into the difference between the two types.
What’s the difference between plain-text and HTML emails?
An HTML email contains HTML code that impacts the appearance of an email. Here are some examples of common HTML elements that might be inside an email:
images
bullets
hyperlinked text
columns
headlines
call-to-action buttons
bolded or italicized text
AWeber’s weekly newsletter FWD: Thinking is an HTML email.
But this message from fitness expert BJ Gaddour is also an HTML email.
It doesn’t have images. It doesn’t use a fancy template. But it is an HTML email, because it contains bolded text and hyperlinked sentences — both HTML elements.
Most people think this email is a plain-text email, because it looks simple. But it’s not.
What does a plain-text email look like then?
It looks like this.
This email from Matt Chauvin of 20sJazz.com contains no images and no formatting. And notice that a full link is displayed in the email. With plain-text emails, you can’t hyperlink text. (For instance, Matt couldn’t hyperlink the word “Video” in the above email.)
In fact, a plain-text email contains only text, no formatting. But many people incorrectly label HTML emails with limited formatting as “plain-text emails.”
To illustrate the difference between a plain-text and HTML email, here is an HTML email from health food blogger Gina Homolka of Skinnytaste.
You can see there is a logo, italicized font, hyperlinked text (Spaghetti Carbonara), and an image.
Here is the plain-text version of the exact same email:
Big difference, right? The HTML version is much more visually appealing than the plain-text email. It’s also much more likely that subscribers will want to engage with the HTML version, because they can visualize the food from the recipe.
Spread the word.
Know a marketer or business owner who only sends plain-text or simple emails because they believe it will get them into the inbox? Send them this article.
