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Day: November 13, 2019

The 5 Emails You Should Send This Cyber Monday to Skyrocket Sales

cyber monday email examples

Cyber Monday’s online sales hit an all-time high in 2018, capping out at a record $7.9 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. That’s an increase of 19.3% from the previous year — and sales are only expected to go up this December.

Are you ready to hit “go” on your Cyber Monday email campaign? Here’s a content calendar you can use to make sure you’re maximizing your promotion. 

Your 5-Email Campaign for Cyber Monday 2019

November 29: Send your “teaser” email. Tease your promotion with a “preview” email sent out three days* before Cyber Monday. Let your subscribers know something big is coming on December 2 — but don’t tell them what. Get them excited for the announcement.

*You don’t want this email to go out more than three days in advance or you might cannibalize your sales leading up to the promotion going live. People may be hesitant to purchase if they know a better deal is just a few days away.

December 1: Send a countdown email. The night before your promotion goes live, send a 12-hour countdown email to your audience. (The anticipation!) You can schedule this ahead of time inside your AWeber account.

Don’t have an AWeber account yet? Sign up for a 30-day free trial, and get your Cyber Monday emails scheduled!

December 2 (morning): Launch your promotion. Send your promotion — whether it’s a coupon code that gives your subscribers a certain percentage off their purchase, a free gift with their purchase, or a special giveaway for the first 200 customers who purchase — on Cyber Monday.

Related: Automatically Create Your Own Beautiful, Branded Email Template in Seconds!

December 2 (afternoon): Resend your promotion. Not all your subscribers will engage with your email. That’s okay: Their inboxes are flooded on Cyber Monday with deals. That’s why I recommend resending your message to anyone on your list who didn’t open or click later in the day. It’s another opportunity for you to reach them. 

December 3: Post-promotion email. With AWeber, you can “tag” subscribers that go from your promotion emails and hit a certain page of your website. The next day, send that group of subscribers that made it to a certain product page or the checkout — but never ended up making a purchase — a followup email. Let them know the product is still available, reiterate the benefits of purchasing, and tell them that you’ll extend the promotion another few hours just for them!

Creative Cyber Monday Email Examples 

Below are a few of our favorite Cyber Monday email marketing ideas from years past. Use them as fodder to create and launch your own email marketing campaign with AWeber this Cyber Monday. 

Cyber Monday Email: Chubbies 

Chubbies, the brand that’s known for short shorts (think: “Larry Byrd” short shorts…i.e. lots of skin), had fun with their Cyber Monday email campaign. They called it Thighber Monday, and turned it into an event.

A new free gift — like duffle bags, blankets, hats, and more — was revealed every hour of Thighber Monday via email. If you bought a product on their site, you would receive that hour’s free gift along with your purchase. 

The campaign kept people coming back to their inbox hour after hour to check out which free gift would be unveiled next.

Cyber Monday Email Chubbies

Cyber Monday Email: Melyssa Griffin

Digital marketer and coach Melyssa Griffin helps bloggers and entrepreneurs grow their audiences and incomes. For Cyber Monday, Melyssa bundled all her online courses together for a fantastic deal. Bundling or packaging certain products can make the promotion feel larger and more impactful than giving a discount for each separate item.  

Cyber Monday Email Melyssa Griffin

Cyber Monday Email: Taco Bell

Taco Bell didn’t offer a Cyber Monday promotion. Instead, they banked on how hungry you’d be after a long day of online shopping. Taco ‘bout a novel idea. 

Cyber Monday Email Taco Bell
Photo courtesy of Really Good Emails

Related: 5 Powerful Ways to Drive More Sales Through Email

Cyber Monday Email: Everlane

Remind your customers of how good they always have it! That’s what Everlane did with their “No sale here” email. They called out the fact that their prices are already 50%  lower than most retailers, day in and day out. 

Cyber Monday Email Everlane
Photo courtesy of Really Good Emails

Cyber Monday Email: Lewis Howes

Motivational speaker and coach, Lewis Howes, focused on “exclusivity” for his Cyber Monday deal. He played up all the benefits of being part of the elite, members-only program and offered a significant discount on his monthly coaching program. 

Cyber Monday Email Lewis Howes

Quickly launch your Cyber Monday email campaign

Try AWeber for free for 30 days, and get access to all of our powerfully-simple email marketing solutions. You can set up an effective, beautiful, branded email campaign for Cyber Monday in minutes!

The post The 5 Emails You Should Send This Cyber Monday to Skyrocket Sales appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

How to Calculate Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketers & Consultants

Let’s say you’re hiring a freelancer or two to help improve the marketing effort of a campaign. You’ve identified the project they’ll be working on, about how many hours it should take, and the context they’ll need to be successful — but you still haven’t decided on the hourly rate.

Instead of spending hours figuring out how much you should pay your marketing freelancer, take a look at the data we’ll pull for you. We’ve rounded up the national freelance hourly rates of marketing consultants, PR professionals, and SEO specialists.

But, before getting into the details, here’s a basic formula to calculate the hourly rate of freelancers.

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

To calculate an hourly rate, start with an estimate of yearly income and divide that by how many hours you typically work in a year. Though the number of hours worked might change depending on industry and job functions, it’s safe to assume that most professionals work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks.

The other two weeks are likely spent on a vacation or sick days. With that in mind, the average full-time professional works about 2,000 hours in any given year.

This makes the basic formula:

Rate = Annual income / Hours worked in the year

This is illustrated in the graphic below:

Total hourly rate calculator

If your goal is to make $58,000 a year, here is how you’d use the formula to find an hourly rate:

$58,000 / 2,000 = $29/hour

We will continue to use this formula for different industries and professions within the freelance industry.

Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants are professionals in the marketing industry who act upon strategies built by market research and the professional’s experience. Their primary goal is to drive sales by delivering fresh marketing campaigns and expertise.

Businesses hire a marketing consultant if they need a new outlook on a current project or an entirely different project that’s being taken in a direction that’s usually foreign to the business. Hiring a marketing consultant is a more cost-effective way to bring on more help, since it’s freelance consultants aren’t full-time staff.

The industry standard for a marketing consultant is $47,682/yr in the US, according to Glassdoor. This is illustrated by the graphic below.

glassdoor marketer salaryImage Source

If you were to use the formula above to find an hourly rate for this salary, you would divide $47,682 / 2,000 for an hourly rate of $23.84.

Let’s say you’re looking for a marketing consultant with years of professional industry experience to work on a project that will take several months. For these levels of experience, you might find hourly rates to range from $125-$150 an hour.

It all depends on your budget, your reasons for hiring, and what’s best for your business. All of these factors come into play again when calculating the hourly rate for public relations freelancers.

Freelance Public Relations Hourly Rate

Freelance public relations professionals help coordinate and define the image of a brand. They also have a hand in managing public perception of their clients’ products and can serve as a point of contact for press inquiries about those clients as well.

Businesses might hire a freelance public relations professional if they are looking for an outside perspective to gain insight into brand building or garner press about their company. Freelance public relations professionals also are a cost-effective way of hiring more help, like marketing consultants.

The national average for a freelance PR professional’s yearly salary is $54,114/yr, according to ZipRecruiter. This is illustrated by the graph below.

ziprecruiter pr salary graphImage Source

To use the formula from above, taking $54,114 / 2,000 = $27.05/hr.

Next, we’re going to look at calculating the hourly rate for an SEO specialist.

Freelance SEO hourly rate

Ahrefs is a marketing tool driven by data and powered by backlinks and keywords. Last year, they surveyed over 300 freelance SEO specialists about their hourly rates.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes sure a business’s online content ranks highly on search engines to gain organic engagement. Typically, marketers use websites like Ahrefs to run data reports on where content is being ranked on Google, which words are garnering traction, and where a business falls on search engines.

A business might want to hire a freelance SEO specialist to gain insight into how people are finding their business (or how they aren’t). They also might look into hiring a specialist in this field to gain valuable online data that previously hadn’t been calculated. Ahrefs found that the most popular hourly rate is $100-$150 for SEO specialists.

ahrefs hourly rate graph seoImage Source

It also provided a graph on how much specialists tend to charge based on years of experience. For example, a specialist with less than two years’ experience is more likely to charge $75 per hour, while someone with over ten years’ experience is more likely to charge $150 per hour.

All it takes is a simple formula to find the hourly rate for freelancers. By using some industry benchmarks, you can easily find a freelancer that fits your budget and goals. And, for freelancers and businesses looking to hire freelancers alike, we have the ultimate guide on that very subject. For more information about the ins and outs of freelancing, check out our post here.

My 6-Step Content Marketing Formula That Drives 3,549 Visitors

Writing a blog post is easy.

If you don’t write often, you may feel otherwise, but just follow this
and you’ll be good to go when it comes to writing. Or, you can just watch the
video below.

But still, you write a blog post and then what do you do?

Well, I’ll tell you this… most people forget the “marketing” in content marketing. Most people write content but don’t do a great job of promoting it.

Here’s the thing: I figured out the perfect formula to promoting content.

Best of all, it’s not complex. Heck, it doesn’t even take 30 minutes. It’s so easy that I broke it down into 6 steps.

And just to give you an idea before we dive into the formula, it’s so effective here is the traffic to my latest blog post.

35,492 visits in a week isn’t too shabby. The post didn’t do exceptionally well and it didn’t tank. It was just an average post.

Now you probably won’t see the same results as me as I’ve
been doing this for a long time, but your results will be much better than what
you are currently getting. Hence, I used the number of 3,549 in the title as
you should be able to drive 1/10th of what I am generating.

So, let’s dive right into the formula.

Step #1: Optimize your headline

8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 people will click through on your headline to read the rest of your article.

No matter how well written your content is, promoting it won’t
be effective if no one likes your headline.

Now I know what you are thinking… I’ve already published my
article, is it too late to change my headline?

Nope, you can always change your headline, just try not
to change the URL of the article once it is already published.
And if you decide
to change the URL, use a
301 redirect
.

There’s a really simple way to come up with headlines that work. Heck, it doesn’t even take more than a minute or two.

Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in the main keyword or phrase your article is about.

You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

Now I want you to click on “Content Ideas” in the left-hand navigation.

You should now see a report that looks like this:

This report shows you all of the blog posts around the web
that contain your keyword or phrase within their title. And it breaks it down
by social shares, backlinks, and search traffic.

You can use this to see what is working in your space.

Ideally, you want to look for headlines that have thousands of social shares (or hundreds if you aren’t in a popular industry), at least 10 backlinks, and more than 100 estimated visits. Just like the example below.

Making your headlines similar to ones that meet those 3 criteria
will increase your odds of getting more traffic.

Step #2: Add 3 internal links

The easiest way to get your new content more love is to
build links.

Yes, links are hard to build, but internal links are not…
plus they are still effective.

I rank for competitive terms like “digital marketing”…

A lot of it has to do with internal links. I link to my main
digital marketing page within my sidebar and within my content.

Every time you publish a new blog post, I want you to go into your older content that is relevant to your newly published blog post and add a link to it. Do this to 3 of your older blog posts.

This helps with indexing and it also helps your new
content rank higher on Google.

Step 3: Share your content on the social web carefully

The problem with social media marketing is that people think they can just share their content on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn and it will automatically do well.

Sadly, it won’t because billions of URLs have been shared
already.

In other words, we just tend to ignore most of the links
people share.

But there is a simple way to stand out and get thousands of visitors from the social web, just like I get.

So, what’s my secret?

Well, I will give you a hint. Just look at one of my most
recent posts on LinkedIn:

And here is one from Facebook:

Do you notice a pattern?

I’m evoking curiosity. In other words, I am piquing your
interest and if you want to know the “solution” you have to click through to my
site.

With the LinkedIn post, I tell you that marketing is going
to change next year. I also make a point to say how it is going to change in a
way that nobody is talking about.

I do this because we all can assume marketing will change. But
by saying it is in a way nobody is talking about, it evokes curiosity. And if
you want to know how it will change you have no choice but to click through
over to my site to read the rest.

With my Facebook post, I also evoke curiosity. I talk about a Google algorithm update, but I hint that I have an answer to leveraging Google’s latest algorithm update. And if you want to know what it is, you have to click through over to my site.

Whenever you post on the social web, evoke curiosity if you want people to head over to your site.

The easiest way to do this is that every time you share one of your articles on the social web, add a few sentences above the link that helps pique peoples’ interest.

Step #4: Message everyone you link out to

It’s common to link out to other sites within your blog
posts.

Heck, sometimes I even link out to my competition.

If you don’t ever link out to other sites, you are making a
big mistake. It helps with authority and trust.

If you are using stats and data within your article, you
want to cite your sources. This brings credibility to you and it helps brand
yourself as an expert which can help with Google’s medic
update
.

Now, when you link out to a site, go and search their email
address. You can typically find their email address on their website.

Or if you can’t find their email address, look for a contact
page on their site, you’ll typically see a form that you can fill out.

Whether you find an email address or contact form, I want
you to message each and every single site you link out to with a message that
goes like this:

Hi [insert their first name],

I just wanted to say, I love your content. Especially your article on [insert the name of the article you linked out to].

I linked to it from my latest blog post [insert URL of your blog post]. It would make my day if you checked it out and even shared it on your favorite social network if you enjoyed it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

When I send out these emails, I am getting 50 to 60% of the people to respond and share my content. But of course, my blog is popular, so for me, it isn’t too hard. But it hasn’t always been that way, and I’ve been leveraging this tactic for ages.

On the flip side, I also use this tactic on a few of my
blogs that are in other niches and don’t use my name (no one knows I own them)
and I am seeing success rates around 20%.

Just make sure you don’t use this tactic to ask for a link back.
Your success rate will be slim.

Step #5: Send an email blast

These last two tactics produce a large portion of my
results, and you shouldn’t take them for granted, no matter how basic they may
seem.

If you already haven’t, start collecting emails from your
site. You can use free tools like Hello Bar
to create popups or sliders.

Hello Bar will plug into whatever email provider you are
currently using.

Once you are up and running, every time you release a new
blog post, send out an email blast.

Here’s an example of one of my email blasts.

It’s so effective it generated 13,544 clicks.

I’ve found that you can drive good traffic from emails as
long as you do the following:

  1. Scrub your list – if someone doesn’t open your emails over the last 30 or 60 days, remove them from your list. It helps keep your emails in people’s inboxes.
  2. Send text-based emails – if you look at the email I sent, I keep it simple. No images, nothing fancy, just text and a link back to my site. It’s that simple.
  3. Evoke curiosity – just like how I explained with the social media posts, your emails won’t do well unless you evoke curiosity.

As you write more content you will get more traffic, which will cause your email list to grow. That will also cause you to get more traffic. 🙂

Step #6: Send a push notification

I don’t know why so few sites are leverage push notifications. It’s so effective I believe I will get more traffic from push notifications in 2020 than I will from email marketing.

To give you an idea, when I analyze my competitors in the
marketing arena, only 3 out of 19 use push notifications.

In other industries, the percentage is far worse, which means there is more opportunity for you.

Here’s how push notifications work….

Someone comes to your site and through their browser, they get a message if they want to subscribe to your site.

A portion of your visitors will click “allow”. With NeilPatel.com, roughly 5.4% of visitors are currently clicking “allow”.

You can send push notifications and get subscribers using a
free tool like Subscribers.com.

And then when you write a new blog post, you log into Subscribers.com and click on the “Create Notification” button. From there you will see a screen where you can enter the title and description of your latest post.

As you can see from the image above, you’ll notice that I use an “icon” image, a “large” image, and I show “custom buttons.”

Using those 3 elements is the key to getting the most
traffic from push notifications. Here are some of my stats from using
Subscribers.

I’m getting roughly 6,000 visits from every push notification
I send. That’s not too bad.

And if you are curious about what a push notification looks like, here’s what people get when I send it out.

What’s cool about push notification is no matter what
website someone is on, they will see a message similar to the one above, which
will bring people back to your site.

No dealing with spam filters or messages not going through. Plus, if someone isn’t online when you send a push notification, the next time they use their web browser they will see your message.

Conclusion

Promoting your content doesn’t have to be hard.

You don’t need “advanced” tactics or anything that is out of
the box. The basics work well, and I have been using the above formula for
years… literally.

Now, I know there are other things you can do to promote your content, but let’s be realistic: we are all strapped for time. And I’ve found the ones I’ve mentioned above to produce the biggest bang for the buck.

So, what other simple ways do you promote your content?

The post My 6-Step Content Marketing Formula That Drives 3,549 Visitors appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Calculate Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketers & Consultants

Let’s say you’re hiring a freelancer or two to help improve the marketing effort of a campaign. You’ve identified the project they’ll be working on, about how many hours it should take, and the context they’ll need to be successful — but you still haven’t decided on the hourly rate.

Instead of spending hours figuring out how much you should pay your marketing freelancer, take a look at the data we’ll pull for you. We’ve rounded up the national freelance hourly rates of marketing consultants, PR professionals, and SEO specialists.

But, before getting into the details, here’s a basic formula to calculate the hourly rate of freelancers.

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

To calculate an hourly rate, start with an estimate of yearly income and divide that by how many hours you typically work in a year. Though the number of hours worked might change depending on industry and job functions, it’s safe to assume that most professionals work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks.

The other two weeks are likely spent on a vacation or sick days. With that in mind, the average full-time professional works about 2,000 hours in any given year.

This makes the basic formula:

Rate = Annual income / Hours worked in the year

This is illustrated in the graphic below:

Total hourly rate calculator

If your goal is to make $58,000 a year, here is how you’d use the formula to find an hourly rate:

$58,000 / 2,000 = $29/hour

We will continue to use this formula for different industries and professions within the freelance industry.

Hourly Rate for Freelance Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants are professionals in the marketing industry who act upon strategies built by market research and the professional’s experience. Their primary goal is to drive sales by delivering fresh marketing campaigns and expertise.

Businesses hire a marketing consultant if they need a new outlook on a current project or an entirely different project that’s being taken in a direction that’s usually foreign to the business. Hiring a marketing consultant is a more cost-effective way to bring on more help, since it’s freelance consultants aren’t full-time staff.

The industry standard for a marketing consultant is $47,682/yr in the US, according to Glassdoor. This is illustrated by the graphic below.

glassdoor marketer salaryImage Source

If you were to use the formula above to find an hourly rate for this salary, you would divide $47,682 / 2,000 for an hourly rate of $23.84.

Let’s say you’re looking for a marketing consultant with years of professional industry experience to work on a project that will take several months. For these levels of experience, you might find hourly rates to range from $125-$150 an hour.

It all depends on your budget, your reasons for hiring, and what’s best for your business. All of these factors come into play again when calculating the hourly rate for public relations freelancers.

Freelance Public Relations Hourly Rate

Freelance public relations professionals help coordinate and define the image of a brand. They also have a hand in managing public perception of their clients’ products and can serve as a point of contact for press inquiries about those clients as well.

Businesses might hire a freelance public relations professional if they are looking for an outside perspective to gain insight into brand building or garner press about their company. Freelance public relations professionals also are a cost-effective way of hiring more help, like marketing consultants.

The national average for a freelance PR professional’s yearly salary is $54,114/yr, according to ZipRecruiter. This is illustrated by the graph below.

ziprecruiter pr salary graphImage Source

To use the formula from above, taking $54,114 / 2,000 = $27.05/hr.

Next, we’re going to look at calculating the hourly rate for an SEO specialist.

Freelance SEO hourly rate

Ahrefs is a marketing tool driven by data and powered by backlinks and keywords. Last year, they surveyed over 300 freelance SEO specialists about their hourly rates.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes sure a business’s online content ranks highly on search engines to gain organic engagement. Typically, marketers use websites like Ahrefs to run data reports on where content is being ranked on Google, which words are garnering traction, and where a business falls on search engines.

A business might want to hire a freelance SEO specialist to gain insight into how people are finding their business (or how they aren’t). They also might look into hiring a specialist in this field to gain valuable online data that previously hadn’t been calculated. Ahrefs found that the most popular hourly rate is $100-$150 for SEO specialists.

ahrefs hourly rate graph seoImage Source

It also provided a graph on how much specialists tend to charge based on years of experience. For example, a specialist with less than two years’ experience is more likely to charge $75 per hour, while someone with over ten years’ experience is more likely to charge $150 per hour.

All it takes is a simple formula to find the hourly rate for freelancers. By using some industry benchmarks, you can easily find a freelancer that fits your budget and goals. And, for freelancers and businesses looking to hire freelancers alike, we have the ultimate guide on that very subject. For more information about the ins and outs of freelancing, check out our post here.

A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads


When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn? 

More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers

In this post, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use.

Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!


An introduction to custom audiences

There’s a huge amount to cover with social media ads.

Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let’s start there. In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we’ll get to in a minute. 

A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users. 

Types of custom audiences you can build within Facebook

And then you have lookalike audiences, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.

How to create a lookalike audience for Facebook / Instagram

As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences. 

So let’s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks … Facebook and Instagram. 

How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads

Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences. 

Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build. This list includes: 

1. A customer list — also known as a standard custom audiences.

This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you’ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list. 

2. You can create a website custom audience.

With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period. 

3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity

If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product. 

4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.

This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet. 

5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement

These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you’re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year. 

Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences

Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk — like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance. 

As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!

Let’s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance:
With the robust filtering of Facebook’s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile, messaged you, or saved a post or an ad.

When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today:Building “warm” audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group. 

The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:

  • People who have engaged in any way with your brand on Instagram in the past seven days, the past 20 days, and the past 90 days.
  • People who have visited your Instagram profile in the past 30 days but who are not customers
  • and People who have viewed your Instagram Stories videos in the past seven days 

Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.

This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website / profile visits. 

We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.

Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”

Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.

We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out.

How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads

As you’ll find with all of these social networks, they’re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that’s okay! There’s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.

You can build audiences

  • Based on visitors who went to your site
  • Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
  • Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
  • With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created
Pinterest audience options

The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.

The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this. 

Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed. 

One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories — people who click on certain links or certain Pins. 

How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter

With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on

  • An uploaded list of contacts or customers
  • A collection of website visitors based on data you get from using a Twitter website tag
  • A list of  your mobile app users
  • A flexible audience.
Twitter audience options

The flexible audiences feature is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we’ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.

How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn

You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag. 

LinkedIn audience options

One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences. Let’s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies. 

Yes, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you’re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.

That’s right, and before we go, we’d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways. 

More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences

I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.

Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it’s been awhile since they returned — a “sleepy” audience of sorts.

And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there’s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.


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