simple marketing tactics to grow and thrive
DESCRIPTION
Simple Marketing Tactics for Independent Business Owners! In this webinar, Dean Levitt covered tactics that small businesses can use to grow their subscribers, compete with the big brands for search engine visibility and send effective email newsletter. The first section tackles the perfect placement of email sign up forms. Second, Dean tackles SEO with semantic markdown, schema and review sites. Included are some great techniques for local search engine visibility. Finally, Dean looks at effective goal setting for emails, compelling subject lines, link placement and more.TRANSCRIPT
Simple Marketing Tactics To Grow and Thrive
Presented By Dean Levitt of Mad Mimi
About Mad Mimi• Mad Mimi is an email marketing and newsletter platform that makes
creating, sending and tracking email newsletters easy. !
• Our core product is a beautifully easy email newsletter composer that guides the creation of readable and cross-platform ready emails. !
• Every day about 40 million permission based emails are sent from our service on behalf of over 200,000 customers. !
• Mad Mimi integrates with over 70 other web applications. !
• Features include sign up forms, auto-responders, email analytics, RSS to Email, social media integration and more.
What we’ll be talking about:
• 1. Getting subscribers • 2. Competing locally • 3. Engaging customer through email
Part 1: Getting Subscribers
• Creating an effective sign up form • Sign up form placement on your site, blog and social media
Creating An Effective Sign Up Form !• Keep your sign up form simple. !
• Don’t ask for any info you don’t intend on using. !
• Avoid barriers like captchas but stay safe in other ways like double opt in. !
• Understand double opt in vs single opt in. When you require confirmation, you can increase steps but with landing pages and monitoring you can keep this to a minimum. !
• Single opt in tends to have a higher sign up rate but leaves you at risk of lower engagement.
Effective Placement of Sign Up Forms: !
• Place your sign up form in the navigation bar or similarly “above the fold.” !
• Don’t hide your sign up form in the footer! !
• If you use a sidebar on your site, that’s fine but do make sure that your sign up form is obvious immediately. !
• Utilize cool tools like Many Contacts to add sign up forms in an attention grabbing and engaging manner.
Adding Sign Up Forms in Social Media and Blogs !
• Add sign up forms in Twitter and Facebook and anywhere else you’re active. !
• Post links to your subscribe landing page. !
• Utilize the profile “about me” to share the sign up form URL. !
• Each page on your blog should have the sign up form in the sidebar or navigation bar.
Other tools to grow your subscribers and customers:• Get the slides here: www.slideshare.net/MadMimiEmail/
tools-to-growyoursubscribersmadmimi • Download the presentation for clickable links :)
Part 2: Compete Locally with
SEO • SEO and local SEO • Optimizing your site with Semantic HTML and Schema • Review Sites • Get Found Online
How SEO Works - Basically !• SEO is the way potential customers find their way to you. Google,
Bing, Yahoo and other search engines have “bots” or “spiders” that “crawl” the web indexing web pages. !
• When someone searches, the search engine calculates the relevance and importance of possible results and presents them to the searcher. !
• The more popular the site or document, the more importance the search engine gives to the result. !
• The higher the importance and relevancy, the higher it’s ranking and thus the higher it appears in the search results. !
• Moz is a leader in SEO and they’ve got awesome resources. Here’s their explanation on how search engines work.
Optimize Your Site For SEO !• It all starts with HTML. If you’re not familiar with the basics of HTML, ask
someone who is, and review your site. !
• Your site should have a clear hierarchy of headings as <h1> or <h2> tags, subheadings as <h3> tags and so on. !
• Make sure that your HTML describes the content with title attributes and and alt attributes. !
• Use keywords strategically. Words and phrases that describe you and your product should be mentioned high up on your pages and high up in the hierarchy. !
• Your links should be descriptive. !
• Have links inbound and outbound to relevant and similar content on your site and outside sites.
Going Local with SEO !• Get full, easy-to-understand details at https://schema.org
!• Schemas help search engines understand your content better. This
helps your content be indexed correctly and you’ll show up higher in searches. !
• “Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!” !
• Schemas and microdata go deeper than semantic HTML and allow you to define your site and content as local. !
• Now search engines know that you’re more relevant to a local buyer than a big box store!
Review Sites Are Awesome !• Review sites are like SEO optimized websites without the hard
work. !
• Yelp, TripAdvisor and many more review sites have huge site authority and could even appear higher than your own site in many searches. !
• Check your reviews and make sure to respond where appropriate. If you don’t have any reviews, ask customers, friends and family to post for you. !
• Here’s a list of review sites for small businesses.
Get Found Online !• A GoDaddy Product that publishes your business information,
menus and services list across the web !
• Update to sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, YP and OpenTable, which are viewed by millions of people every day. !
• Boosts search engine results dramatically. !
• https://locu.com/ !
• Disclosure: Locu is a GoDaddy company. Mad Mimi was also acquired by GoDaddy recently.
Part 3: Engage Customers
Through Email • Why Email matters • Setting goals and good content • Subject lines drive open rates!
Why Email Newsletters Matter !
• We want emails: We receive more B2C emails than Person 2 Person emails! !
• Low cost, high ROI: For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. !
• 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email !
• 8 in 10 people say the marketing emails they receive go mainly into their primary personal email account, displayed alongside their personal emails.
Good Content Needs Good Goals !
• Set a goal! !
• The goal could be a purchase, a click to your site or blog post, a follow on social media or it could simply be a view. !
• Craft your email around this goal but keeping it simple. !
• Always have a call to action! !
• Link placement of your call to action should be high. Keep it above the fold! !
• Use images to compel more clicks. !
• Seriously… set a goal and let it guide your email content and design.
Subject Lines Drive View Rates! !
• 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. (Chadwick Martin Bailey) !
• CTR is higher when using the recipient’s company name in the subject line over no company mention !
• Clarity over hilarity !
• Preview the email in the subject line - keep it short! !
• Grab attention without being ridiculous !
• Content drives good subject lines !
• Include your name
Some Great Subject Lines: !
37% Open Rate:!Only Three Days Left for this Great Offer for [Company Name] Readers! !!
30% Open Rate:!Boeing expanding footprint of S.C. facilities !!
32% Open Rate:!This Deal’s a Crime! The Murder Mystery Repeat Offender Deal! !!
44% Open Rate:!Nursery Flannel from Cloud 9 Organics is Now Available at [Company]
Any Questions?
Thanks for listening! I hope you’ll take at least one new idea with you out into the world and grow a little each day. !Love, Dean and Mimi