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Introducing Buffer + Shopify: Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

February 12, 2020

One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?

Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…

but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.

That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business. 

(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)

Realize the full potential of your brand

Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.

To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:

• More data to provide a more complete picture of your brand
• Data that are easy to understand and share
• Strategies and tactics to achieve your goals

Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.

Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!

When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.

Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:

Social + sales

Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”

When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.

With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.

At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.

One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.

You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.

Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?

Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?

Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?

This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.

To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.

Connecting social media and sales

For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.

Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.

(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)

You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.

Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.

Gain a better understanding of your brand

Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.

This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:

• Per-post sales: Find out how much sales each social media post has generated
• Campaign sales: Know how much sales your campaign has generated
• Customer insights: Learn more about the social media users who are buying your products
• Customer lifetime value: Calculate customer lifetime value for different segments
• Product buzz: Get insights into who’s talking about your products on social

For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.

Give yourself an advantage today.

Try Analyze for free.

Uncategorized

7 Email Cadence Best Practices for Better Email Marketing Campaigns

February 12, 2020

By 2022, an estimated 330 billion emails will be sent and received each day — making it one of the largest digital communication channels.

Emails can include everything from details about pressing, work-related crises to e-cards from your aunt on random holidays like Arbor Day.

But email’s practical use extends beyond the personal — it can also be one of the most effective ways for businesses to convert leads into buyers. An email campaign is an effective strategy for turning a prospect’s interest into hard sales.

These campaigns can be massive assets, but they shouldn’t be structured arbitrarily. In all likelihood, you can’t send single, catch-all email blasts to your contacts whenever you feel like and expect your prospects and customers to be receptive to them. There’s much more to the email campaign process than drafting up an email and hitting send.

One of the most crucial components of the email campaign process is email cadence: the pulse, pace, and playbook of a successful email campaign. Let’s take a deeper dive into what an email cadence is and establish the fundamental principles of structuring a successful one.

The success of an email campaign can hinge upon the effectiveness of its cadence. If you can get the right emails to the right customers at the right time, you can get a lot of mileage out of your email marketing efforts.

That being said, if your cadence is too intrusive, obnoxious, or directionless, you can lose out on opportunities to guide leads through their buyers’ journeys. If potential customers feel pestered or confused by constant, irrelevant newsletters and promotions, they probably won’t stick around to hear what you have to say.

Here are some best practices to employ to ensure your next campaign’s email cadence is the best it can be.

1. Understand your goals.

What do you want out of your email cadence? You need to understand where you’re trying to lead your prospects and customers. Are you looking to improve traffic to your blog? Drive ecommerce sales? Schedule meetings? Close deals?

An email cadence is designed to guide buyers from point A to point B. You can’t do that if you have no idea what “point B” is. Your ultimate goal will dictate the strategy behind your cadence. If you’re trying to do something like increase traffic to your blog, you can stand to lose more subscribers than you would if you were trying to court a group of sales leads into scheduling demos.

If you’re sending emails purely for the sake of sending emails, your cadence is going to be aimless and haphazard. And you’ll waste a lot of time and resources on email campaigns that go nowhere.

2. Try to understand each customer’s mindset.

The whole point of having an email cadence is to hone in on messaging that’s going to resonate most with a specific customer at a given point in time. That means one-size-fits-all, “throw everything at everyone,” impersonal emails won’t cut it. You need to send your recipients something relevant to who they are as a customer. That often means understanding where they are in their buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and ultimately decide to purchase a new product or service. It’s divided into three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

You can’t expect to target buyers in all three of those stages with the same message and have it immediately register with them, across the board. Different stages — and engagement levels within those stages — warrant different messages.

Additionally, through the wonders of automation, coordinating this kind of strategy is possible. Several kinds of email and marketing automation software allow you to set up the proper infrastructure to tailor email content and timing to suit different leads’ behavior and interests.

3. Personalize when you can.

Think back on all the targeted emails companies have sent you over the years. How inclined have you been to click through ones addressed to “valued customer,” or “to whom it may concern?” I don’t think it’s outrageous to assume the answer is “not often.”

Why would your customers be any different? A successful cadence relies on your leads clicking through your emails and progressing through their buyer’s journey. If you’re sending impersonal mass-email blasts, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best, your prospects may wind up suspended in buyer’s limbo.

Fortunately, there’s a variety of email software that allows you to personalize your subject lines and email content to cater to specific leads.

4. Don’t be too shy.

When planning an email cadence, you shouldn’t err too much on the side of “I don’t want to bother you.” It’s easy to get anxiety about losing leads by coming off as obnoxious or intrusive, but you have to understand there’s a difference between being pushy and being professionally persistent.

If you’re not consistently sending out emails, you’re missing out on sales opportunities. A big part of email marketing is keeping your prospects and customers engaged. If a lead only gets an email from you once every two months, you might become an afterthought.

Email cadences are a matter of strategically striking while the iron’s hot. You can’t do that if you’re too reluctant to strike at all.

5. Don’t be too aggressive.

Even though you shouldn’t be too passive, you don’t want to be overly aggressive. There’s a movie from the 80’s called Say Anything. It has an iconic scene where the main character stands outside his love interest’s window and serenades her by blaring a song called “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel from a boombox he’s holding over his head. She swoons over it, and they ride off into the sunset together on a lawnmower ( … for some reason).

It’s romantic and compelling. But, if he did that twice a day, every day — playing similar, anthemic 80’s rock songs on her front lawn — she’d be over it pretty quickly. He’d have to take his lawnmower and Peter Gabriel cassettes somewhere else.

That’s essentially what sending emails too frequently in your cadence is like. If your leads are receiving obtrusive, daily reminders and promotions from you, they’ll unsubscribe from your mailing list.

6. Hone in on the right frequency for your business.

There’s no magic figure when it comes to email frequency. It’s going to vary from business to business. It may take some time to get the right feel for how often you should be sending your emails.

Studying your industry averages for email frequency can provide a solid place to start. A prominent fashion brand routinely sending out new promotions and coupons probably isn’t going to have the same email frequency as a midsize B2B SaaS company looking to set meetings with decision-makers.

Email frequency isn’t an exact science. It’s probably going to take some trial-and-error before you find one that best fits both your business and customers’ interests.

7. Give your subscribers autonomy.

Always give your subscribers the option to control their own email frequency. Giving them this kind of autonomy can keep them from unsubscribing from your mailing list outright if your email frequency seems like a bit too much for them. Include a link to allow them to update their email preferences as they see fit at the end of your emails.

Customers don’t always approach email frequencies in absolutes. Even if they’re overwhelmed by how many emails you’re sending them, they still might want to keep hearing from you. Give them the freedom to pump the brakes. If they don’t have the flexibility to do that, they’ll probably just cut you off.

You should always be putting the customer first. Their personal interests take precedence over what you might believe to be your preferred email cadence.

Finding your ideal email cadence might not happen with your first series of automated emails. Still, there are certain actions you can take to take to put yourself in the best position to find the one that works best for your business.

Your main priority should always be your prospects and customers’ interests. Try to understand where they’re coming from, where they stand in terms of buying your product or service, and what they might want out of you and your business, and cater your email cadence around that.

Uncategorized

Introducing Buffer + Shopify: Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

February 12, 2020

One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?

Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…

but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.

That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business. 

(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)

Realize the full potential of your brand

Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.

To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:

• More data to provide a more complete picture of your brand
• Data that are easy to understand and share
• Strategies and tactics to achieve your goals

Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.

Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!

When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.

Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:

Social + sales

Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”

When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.

With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.

At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.

One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.

You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.

Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?

Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?

Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?

This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.

To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.

Connecting social media and sales

For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.

Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.

(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)

You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.

Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.

Gain a better understanding of your brand

Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.

This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:

• Per-post sales: Find out how much sales each social media post has generated
• Campaign sales: Know how much sales your campaign has generated
• Customer insights: Learn more about the social media users who are buying your products
• Customer lifetime value: Calculate customer lifetime value for different segments
• Product buzz: Get insights into who’s talking about your products on social

For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.

Give yourself an advantage today.

Try Analyze for free.

Uncategorized

#386: Billboards for Creative Professionals? with Bart Bradshaw

February 12, 2020

Is a billboard an affordable marketing tool for a design firm or copywriter? Don’t laugh it off. I spoke with Bart Bradshaw, host of the Built to Stay podcast, who educated me all about the latest in outdoor advertising. It’s not as expensive as you think and depending on your niche, it could definitely make you stand out. Listen to our companion interview on choosing a niche.

Uncategorized

How to Advertise on Quora

February 12, 2020

Looking for a new online source of leads and customers? Have you considered advertising on Quora? In this article, you’ll learn how to discover if your audience is on Quora and how to run Quora ads to reach them. Why Marketers Should Consider Quora Ads Depending on your company’s sales cycle, you may need to […]

The post How to Advertise on Quora appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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How to Advertise on Quora

February 12, 2020

Looking for a new online source of leads and customers? Have you considered advertising on Quora? In this article, you’ll learn how to discover if your audience is on Quora and how to run Quora ads to reach them. Why Marketers Should Consider Quora Ads Depending on your company’s sales cycle, you may need to […]

The post How to Advertise on Quora appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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2020 Valentine’s Day GIF Guide

February 12, 2020

This Valentine’s Day, forget a dozen roses. You need a dozen GIFs.

The reason: Eye-catching visuals like GIFs in emails can increase click-through rates by 42% and conversion rates by 103%, and may positively impact your sales.

Go ahead and add GIFs to your February email campaigns. The AWeber design team has already done the work for you and created 12 downloadable Valentine’s Day GIFs!

Just download them and add them to your emails using AWeber’s ridiculously easy-to-use Drag and Drop message editor. These GIFs will be a sweet treat for your subscribers — and your bottom line.

Not an AWeber customer yet? Create your FREE account right now, and see how easy it is to use one of these GIFs in our Drag-and-Drop message editor.

Download Your Valentine’s Day GIFs

Step 1: Find the animated Valentine’s Day GIF below that you want to use in your email.

Step 2: Save it to your computer by either right clicking the GIF and selecting “Save Image,” or by dragging the GIF to your desktop.

Step 3: Upload the GIF into your email template inside AWeber. Under image size, choose “original.” That’s it!

Related: Everything You Need to Know about Using GIFs in Email

2020 Valentine’s Day GIFs

Spinning Heart GIF

You spin me right round, baby.
Right round like a record, baby.

It’s almost like the 80s band “Dead or Alive” is performing in your subscribers’ inboxes.

Handwritten Love Note GIF

This is the email version of a hand-written love note to your crush. Your subscribers will LUV the middle-school nostalgia.

Cupid’s Arrow GIF:

Like Cupid, you won’t miss the mark with this heart and arrow GIF in your email.

Best Valentine’s Day GIFs

Here are some of our readers’ all-time favorite GIFs from past V-Days.

Popping Balloons GIF

Want to make your emails “pop”? Use this fun balloon GIF.

Valentine’s Day Sale GIF

Glow bright in the inbox with this neon sale sign.

Happy Valentine’s Day GIF

Make your subscribers’ hearts burst with this GIF.

Candy Hearts GIF

What’s almost as good as candy falling right into your mouth? This GIF.

Love You GIF

Knock Knock.

Who’s there?

Olive.

Olive who?

Olive you. 

Tell your subscribers how much you love them with this GIF.

Heart GIF 

What do you call a very small Valentine?

A Valen-tiny. Just like this small heart GIF!

Happy Valentine’s Day GIFs

“You must be a keyboard, because you’re just my type.” No cheesy pick up lines required. Get the message across with these two GIFs.

Candy Heart “Hugs” GIF

Give your subscribers a hearty hug this V-Day.

Show your appreciation year round

Want to show your love for your customers the other 364 days of the year? Here are some clever ways to deliver awesome experiences.

1. Send personalized notes.

Have you ever received a tweet from your favorite company? Or a lightning-fast response from tech support when you’re having an issue? It feels good to be acknowledged, doesn’t it?

Do the same for your customers and send a bunch of individualized emails. You can say “thank you for your business” to a new or interesting customer. You can send a quick note of thanks to your subscribers who gave your product, service, or program great reviews. Or maybe you can send followup emails to the ones who didn’t gave you good reviews — and ask what you can do better.

Include your contact info and tell them to get in touch with you if they ever have any questions.

2. Deliver seasonal content.

Get creative and think outside the traditional holiday seasons. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner, you could send your subscribers a special coupon that they can use for a pick-me-up during tax season.

Related: Email Marketing Statistics: We Analyzed 1,000 Emails from Today’s Top Experts

3. Reward your customers.

First-time customers could use a push to buy again and return customers deserve to be recognized. Give them a little something — like free shipping on their next order, a free consultation, or a downloadable resource that can help them make a buying decision.

4. Turn your 404 page into an opportunity.

A 404 doesn’t have to be a dead end. Instead,  use it as a chance to delight.

One quick example: If you stumble upon a 404 page on the site Flooring Supplies — the UK’s largest online flooring company — it says “Floor…Oh … Floor!” Here are some more awesome 404 ideas.

5. Respond to questions and comments.

Join in on your customers’ conversation. Forums, Twitter chats, and your own social profiles are great places to start. When someone gives you a digital shoutout, respond! It’s a fantastic way to retain customers and maintain stellar customer service.

If a customer has an issue, give them your undivided attention. By simply listening and working with them to solve it, you can turn a negative situation into a position one. Check out these ideas for turning customers into raving fans.

Have more ideas for delighting your customers? Tell us in the comments!

Additional reporting by Kristen Dunleavy. 

The post 2020 Valentine’s Day GIF Guide appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Uncategorized

Google: Use (relevant) keywords in your Google My Business description

February 12, 2020

An update to the help page ends the debate over whether keywords can impact your visibility in local search results.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Uncategorized

#386: Billboards for Creative Professionals? with Bart Bradshaw

February 12, 2020

Is a billboard an affordable marketing tool for a design firm or copywriter? Don’t laugh it off. I spoke with Bart Bradshaw, host of the Built to Stay podcast, who educated me all about the latest in outdoor advertising. It’s not as expensive as you think and depending on your niche, it could definitely make you stand out. Listen to our companion interview on choosing a niche.

Uncategorized

Soapbox: Does the demise of third-party cookies mean we’re back to the future?

February 12, 2020

Buying media has an opportunity to be a creative profession again when blindly buying low-cost inventory on low-rent sites comes to an end.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.