Online Marketing Blog

Ready or not, 2010 is here. And according to eMarketer, 2010 is going to be a good year for email marketing. A December survey revealed that 69% of respondents plan to increase spending on email marketing efforts – more than any other marketing strategy.

To ring in the New Year, we’ve compiled 5 email marketing tactics that are likely to gain even more ground this year.

1. Integrating Email With Social Media.
This email marketing tactic – which picked up steam throughout 2009 as a way to boost customer reach – is likely to spread like wildfire throughout 2010. Consider the results of an early 2009 study by Exact Target, Ball State University and the Email Marketer’s club: 46% of marketers planned to incorporate the two marketing strategies in ‘09, compared to 13% in ‘08—a whopping 253% increase.

Both BtoB and Consumer Marketers are moving beyond simply including links to social profiles, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in email messages.  Some additional tactical ideas for integrating the two strategies include:

• Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, and inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page
• Conducting a timely poll on Twitter, and creating a visual representation of the results, in an e-newsletter
• Leveraging social media channels to offer email subscribers customized options (i.e., receiving a combination of a monthly newsletter, a Twitter feed with promotions and an RSS feed with daily news instead of receiving a generic bi-weekly e-newsletter)

2. Focusing on Engaging Subscribers.
In a December article from Direct magazine, writer Ken Magill reports that ISPs are now looking into using engagement as a factor to determine if emails get to inboxes. That would mean if subscribers aren’t interacting with email messages, the ISP may stop delivering the messages.

Of course, it’s not yet determined what exactly will constitute an “engaged” email subscriber. But potential measures of engagement we would recommend focusing on improving include:

Open Rates: Try increasing open rates by personalizing subject lines and including clear information in the “from” line indicating who is sending the email.

Click Rates: To improve CTR, analyze if the design of the email is guiding subscribers to the CTA. Web heat maps, for example, can be used to distinguish areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors. Also, give subscribers a reason to click, whether for additional content, a product coupon or a complimentary gift.

Number of Forwards: To increase the number of subscribers forwarding an email, make it as easy as possible to do so. Include the ability to forward the message via email, as well as the option to share on social networks.

3. Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers.
Building an email subscriber is one thing; building an active email subscriber base is another. Virtually every email marketing list contains a group of inactive subscribers, those who aren’t opening emails but haven’t yet unsubscribed.

To re-engage these sleepy subscribers, consider these email marketing tactics:

• Offer the inactive group a complimentary white paper or free trial of a product
• Create a sense of urgency with notifications that their subscription will end soon
• Segment the inactive subscribers and cut back on the frequency of email communications
• Send a series of opt-in engagement messages to the inactive group reminding them of the value of the emails

4. Creating Viral Campaigns.
Viral marketing isn’t a new concept. But today, with sites like Twitter, Digg, Flickr and Facebook, email messages have the potential to be shared like never before. Try out these email marketing tactics in 2010 to help extend your message to a maximum number of customers:

Tailor forward links to specific campaigns: In lieu of the typical “forward to a friend” link, customize the link for the individual campaign, content and audience. For instance, if an email message provides tips to help small business owners build credit, create a forward link with the text: “Forward these tips for building credit to a colleague.”

Don’t restrict access to content: In order for a message to spread to a maximum number of prospective customers, make content free and accessible to anyone. Plus, make all login processes as quick and painless as possible.

Experiment with placement of forward links: Avoid subscribers developing a “blindness” to forward links because the links are placed in the same location for every campaign. Instead, try varying placement, size and color of links.

5. A/B Testing and Optimizing Landing Pages.
Thanks to quickly advancing marketing automation technology, email marketers can more easily perfect landing pages to create a relevant experience and maximize conversions. Many email marketing tools now offer built-in A/B page-testing capabilities, enabling marketers to test multiple page variations and measure the performance of each.

In a recent post on Email Marketing Strategy Blog from Silverpop, CEO Bill Nussey suggests that advanced A/B testing and optimization can easily yield a 5% to 10% lift in conversion rates. Plus, because email solutions are automating what used to be a manual process, marketers can spend more time interpreting numbers and focusing on the creative.

There’s no better time than the New Year to set resolutions and make improvements. As we head into 2010, take some time to assess your email marketing tactics. Could any of these 5 ideas be incorporated into your marketing mix to improve results?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Top Email Marketing Tactics for 2010 | 6 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

You don’t have to look far to find social media roundup posts this time of year. But what about the most effective one-two marketing punch for building community AND delivering conversions and ROI?  Social Media and Search Engine Optimization – or “Social SEO” as we like to call it.

Out of the 300 or so posts published in 2009, I’ve picked the best of the year based on a mix of my own opinion and metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking, Twitter and similar services using PostRank.

Here are TopRank’s Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009. Enjoy!

#1. 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips – After interviewing some of the top social media and marketing experts in the industry (Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Scott Monty and many others) I decided to take the best questions and answers from each interview and aggregate them into one post. The result is a 360 degree view of how to plan, approach and measure social media.
(40 Comments, 1,617 Tweets, 896 Links, 38,528 Pageviews, PostRank 8.3)

#2. Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing – Knowing that social media is increasingly intertwined with search engine optimization, this post compares the dramatic increase in interest in the social side of marketing and offers a mix of best practices and worst practices for readers in need of some social media demystification.
(Comments: 54, Tweets: 379,  Links: 2,624, Pageviews: 20,810, PostRank: 5.0)

#3. 16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited – Three years ago, Rohit Bhargava coined the phrase, “social media optimization” and wrote a post with 5 rules for SMO. I joined 3 other bloggers to expand that list to 16. Fast forward to 2009 and Adam Singer from TopRank revisted those original 16 rules to see which were valid and which were outdated. You may be surprised at the result.
(Comments: 16, Tweets: 486, Links: 249, Pageviews: 8,059, PostRank: 8.8)

#4. Social Media Marketing Tops Digital Marketing Tactics for 2009 – One of the useful applications of growing a blog community is the opportunity to tap into their opinions and provide insight into industry trends. This poll revealed that 6 of the top digital marketing tactics readers would emphasize were social media. SEO ranked number 3.
(Comments: 32, Tweets: 227, Links: 310, Pageviews: 10,867, PostRank: 5.0)

#5. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success (Published on Mashable) – The intersection of search engine optimization and social media is often one sided. Social media practitioners see the relationship and community building benefits while many SEOs focus on promotion and link building benefits. This guest post on Mashable offers specific tips and examples of how to incorporate the best of both worlds: Social SEO.
(Comments: 56, Tweets: 784, Links: 1,094, Pageviews: , PostRank: 6.2)

#6. 50 Ways to FAIL On Twitter – This is pure and simple, linkbait. We fall more on the optimistic side of our editorial and content strategy, but I crowdsourced what NOT to do on Twitter via @leeodden and received some very strong opinions. Read this post as an optimist and reverse the tips and you have 50 things your SHOULD do to be more successful using Twitter.
(Comments: 53, Tweets: 698, Links: 381, Pageviews: 9,233, PostRank: 10.0)

#7. 10 Proven Applications For Social Media – With millions of self professed “social media experts” regurgitating a handful of original ideas, a vacuum exists for practical examples of what social media can mean to advance business goals. TopRank’s Adam Singer delivers in this post that includes end benefits ranging from PR to SEO to, well, I’ll let you read the post to find out.
(Comments: 22, Tweets: 839, Links: 214, Pageviews: 11,664, PostRank: 8.2)

#8. 5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – Effective social media and social SEO efforts begin and end (actually there is no “end” in social but you get the idea) with social media monitoring. Such tools can be difficult for marketing dollars strapped organizations to justify, so TopRank’ Michelle Bowles delivered with this review of 5 free and low cost tools. The stats on this post are amazing considering it ranks top ten for the year and was just published 2 weeks ago!
(Comments: 37, Tweets: 633, Links: 431, Pageviews: 4,246, PostRank: 9.1)

#9. 6 Social Search Engines to Start 2009 - What better way to start 2009 than to compare the top social search engines? At the time, there was no “real time search” or deals between Google and Bing with Twitter or Facebook. Several of the social media search engines reviewed in this post have expanded a great deal and some have withered away into notgoingtohappen land.
(Comments: 38, Tweets: 27, Links: 677, Pageviews: 14,563, PostRank: 8.9)

#10. Social Media Marketing Basics: Facebook & Blog Promotion – “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work with SEO and it certainly isn’t effective with marketing on the social web. Research, planning strategy and building a social presence is important. But without content distribution channels and promotion, it can take a very long time to build a community or reach an effective level of momentum. This post gives specific advice for two of the most popular social applications in use.
(Comments 33, Tweets: 199, Links: 137, Pageviews: 4,680, PostRank: 8.5)

What were your favorite Social SEO blog posts in 2009? What social web and search engine optimization topics would you like to see more of in 2010?

View all our posts about SEO or Social Media here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009 | 18 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Our recent reader poll of 14 books either focused on, or with significant content dedicated to, Search Engine Optimization has concluded with 174 votes. And the winner by one vote and 27% of the total votes is….

Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin and Jessie C. Stricchiola.

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Published by O’Reilly, this phone book sized bundle of SEO wisdom is chock-full of advice for marketers that want to leverage search engine optimization as a marketing channel. Congratulations on winning our Reader Poll!

Here are several reviews of Art of SEO to consider or you can take up O’Reilly’s offer to write one yourself.

Runners up for Best SEO book of 2009 were:

• Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing – Kristopher B. Jones (Published by Wiley)
• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day – Jennifer Grappone & Gradiva Couzin (Published by Wiley)

You can see all 14 books about SEO along with the voting distribution and non-affiliate links (in case that matters) to their pages on Amazon.com on the Best SEO Books Reader Poll.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Art of SEO: Best Search Engine Optimization Book in 2009 | 8 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

After a much deserved blogging vacation last week, I thought I’d start this final week of 2009 with wishes of appreciation for the readers of TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog and the fantastic team of writers we have. It was 6 years ago today, that TopRank started an agency blog as a way to publicly save and comment on industry news.

We’ve been through and observed many, many changes in the internet marketing industry over the past 6 years. Of course, Online Marketing Blog isn’t the only internet and SEO focused blog celebrating a 6 year birthday this year. There are several others listed here including a few that are still very active: Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal and SEO Book.

The most popular content in 2009 (by page views and unique visitors) continued to be resources such as the BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs (watch for a HUGE upgrade in 2010) as well as the managed list of Blog and RSS Directories, the RSS Button and Social Bookmarking tools created by Thomas McMahon, tips articles “25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips” and “25 Tips For Marketing Your Blog“.

One of the biggest changes for Online Marketing Blog in 2009 has been the addition of Adam Singer and Michelle Bowles as regular contributors. Adam and Michelle’s posts earn hundreds of ReTweets on average as well as numerous comments, links and off site citations by influential industry blogs and online publications.

Many companies have shifted attention towards other social media channels and some have postulated the death of blogging due to the increasing popularity of Twitter and Facebook. The reality is, blogs are a tool like any other digital asset and will remain as effective as ever according to their usefulness and ability to meet the needs of customers.

As the owner and editor, I admit a great degree of bias, but I’d wager that TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog is one of the most successful agency blogs published.  According to MajesticSEO we’ve attracted over 1,000,000 links from other web sites.  We’re mentioned on top industry web sites and major news web sites on a regular basis.

From a PR perspective, Online Marketing Blog generates 20+ unsolicited citations each month from influential industry blogs and publications. We’ve estimated those placements and industry coverage to be equal to about a $10,000 per month PR agency retainer. Plus, there’s no additional content creation or interviews necessary outside of what we’re already doing.  OMB also generates daily or weekly advertising requests, new consulting project requests, candidate inquiries and speaking opportunities.

The great work by TopRank’s blogging team has been recognized through inclusion in numerous “top” lists including:

• #1 Content Marketing Blog Junta42
• Top 10 marketing blog by Advertising Age
• #1 Small Business Blog by Technorati

An effective agency blog does not work in a vacuum though. By serving as a destination for our participation in other social channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Forums and other niche social sites, this blog provides a useful resource for the TopRank community of readers, fans, prospects and clients.

I sincerely appreciate the comments that our readers leave, the links that other blogs post to our articles and the opportunity to be a media sponsor for major Search Marketing Conferences like Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld Pubcon. The pre-show posts, interviews and promotions as well as the live blogging during those conferences has produced a tremendous amount of mutually beneficial content and exposure.

Our liveblogging efforts wouldn’t be as successful without TopRank team members like Jolina Pettice attending conferences and writing, taking photos and networking with other attendees.  Even though we’re not a news blog, there have been over 2,500 posts published. Here’s a breakdown of posts by contributor over the past 4 years we’ve been running WordPress (out of the 6 we’ve been publishing):

• Julie Brue – 3
• Michelle Bowles- 17
• Adam Singer- 27
• Mike Yanke- 31
• Jolina Pettice- 61
• Thomas McMahon- 115
• Lee Odden- 1916

The blog itself wouldn’t run as smoothly without the efforts of Thomas McMahon, who keeps the front end and the back end of Online Marketing Blog running smoothly.  Our dedicated server hosting is provided by VISI, a first rate internet services and web hosting company based in Minneapolis. We’ve had flawless hosting service from them for over 3 years and highly recommend them for high demand and availability blogs and web sites.

Online Marketing Blog in 2010:

For the upcoming year we have a number of improvements planned to make Online Marketing Blog even more useful for readers and our partners. Some we cannot discuss just yet, but a few upcoming changes include:

• All new BIGLIST – We’ve been developing a categorized, ranked list of the BIGLIST that will also offer additional information on each blog as well as regular content updates, sorting features and several new aggregation options.
• More active participation off the blog – We’ve recently added a Online Marketing Blog Facebook Fan page that was originally started in 2007 but will now provide Online Marketing Blog readers a venue for continuing conversations from the blog as well as an opportunity for updates. The TopRank Twitter account has over 3,000 followers and will continue to aggregate TopRank’s content publishing and bookmarking of useful resources on the web. LinkedIn is another area we’ll grow along with niche forum and social network participation.
• All new Online Marketing Blog design – We’ve been closely monitoring what our readers like on AND off the blog and will be updating both design and front end functionality to make it easier to find and interact with the content that interests you most.
• Limited Advertising Opportunities - In 2010 TopRank will be offering selective advertising and co-promotion opportunities that will be content based both on the site and in the RSS feed.  In the 6 years we’ve been blogging, TopRank has never taken on advertisers and the only ad displays we’ve ever had have been for media partners or for speaking events.  As one of the most popular marketing blogs on the internet, TopRankBlog provides a very high standard for quality exposure to an audience of client side and agency internet marketers. More details to come with the launch of the new design.

We have an editorial calendar of topics and content objectives as part of our own content strategy and would also like to know what enhancements our readers would like to see? What kinds of posts do you find most useful? Liveblogging, articles, interviews, tips, how to’s? What topics are of most interest? SEO, Social Media, Online PR, PPC, Email, Mobile, Local, Industry Specific?

Thank you again to our readers and to the TopRank blogging team for rounding out a fantastic year!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Happy Holidays & Happy 6th Birthday TopRankBlog | 17 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

When it comes to businesses leveraging the social web to communicate with customers and improve brand awareness, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news.

The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.

The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who’ve adopted social media don’t measure their social media programs.

Even worse: 40% weren’t even sure they could monitor social media ROI.

Thankfully, there are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these 5 social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working.

1. Trackur

This social media monitoring tool from ORM expert Andy Beal tracks nearly every element of online media, from blogs, RSS feeds and Tweets, to images and video. Trackur provides the ability to not only view conversations about a brand, but also view the increasing or decreasing volume of the conversation. That way, users can be alerted to any spikes in buzz from a product launch or a negative event. Plus, Trackur offers analysis of any website mentioning a term being monitored, allowing users to distinguish how influential that site is. Monthly subscriptions to Trackur start at $18 per month.

2. PostRank Analytics

PostRank provides engagement scores to gauge how well pieces of content (i.e., a blog post, a news article) convinced users to take action (i.e., re-Tweet, a blog post comment, an RSS view). But beyond that, this social media monitoring tool shows the messages and comments from other sites that are contributing to the engagement score. In addition to individual pieces of content, this free service also maps out engagement activity and number of page views for entire blogs or websites per day.   PostRank also offers integration with Google Analytics.  Cost is $9 per month to track 5 sites. The image below illustrates a single post analysis with both engagement metrics and pageviews.

3. Google Alerts

This free tool from Google provides email updates of the latest relevant Google search results. It’s as simple as choosing a search term, determining the type of search results to be tracked (news, blogs, web, video, etc.), selecting update frequency and entering an email address. Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to monitor brand mentions for both company and product names. Plus, the tool can be leveraged to monitor competitor mentions.

4. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention – a real-time search engine – aggregates search results from blogs, microblogs, videos, bookmarks and other social sites. But this free monitoring tool goes a step beyond that. Social Mention provides a social ranking score based on popularity for every search (i.e., how often the search term is mentioned, if the sentiment is positive/neutral/negative). All of this data can even be compiled into a CVS or Excel spreadsheet.

5. TechrigySM2

SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. The “freemium” version of this full featured social media monitoring service allows you to create up to 5 profiles and each query is limited to storing up to 1,000 search results. There are many features with setup and reports as you can see in the screen shot below. Along with standard help and FAQ resources, there’s a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users that you can tap into and share information.

Incidentally, we did an interview with Connie Bensen, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, the company that owns TechrigySM2 earlier this month.

Whether you leverage one of these low cost or free tools to get started or other tools like Collective Intellect, Cymphony, Converseon, ScoutLabs or Radian6, it’s critical to track social media efforts and tie results back to the goals of your business. Because the scary truth is this: When cut-backs rear their ugly heads, the first programs to go are those that can’t illustrate measurable results and link them back to organizational goals. Don’t find yourself in that 84% of Mzinga and Babson Executive Education survey respondents who don’t measure the effect of social media.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | 5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools | 47 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com