TWP Publisher, Author at TotalWeb Partners • Page 10 of 32

November 4, 2021

How Spotify almost had its email marketing shut down because of spam traps

Spotify is one of the world’s largest online music streaming services and sends billions of marketing emails to its users every year. However, in December 2020 the team responsible for email campaigns was contacted by Twilio SendGrid – the platform it uses to manage email marketing – and was told that it was close to being shut down.

Why? Because Spotify didn’t realize that it was sending millions of emails to what are known as ‘spam traps’: bad actors that are looking to harm Spotify’s systems. Matt Gioe, Engineering Manager at Spotify, and the person heading up the email campaign office, was speaking at Twilio’s Signal event this week, where he warned other organizations that they need to get to grips with both the art and science of email, in order to avoid a similar situation.

The problem was brought to Spotify’s attention in December 2020, during the company’s largest campaign of the year, Holiday 2020. During this time Spotify sends approximately 1 billion emails to 170 email subscribers across 92 countries over roughly a 30 day period. It was in the middle of this huge campaign that Twilio SendGrid got in touch. Gioe said:

I received a series of pretty frantic emails, messages and phone calls from three Twilio employees, two of them who I’ve worked with before, and one that I’d actually never heard of.

It turns out this third person was Len Shneyder, who is the VP of Industry Relations at Twilio. Len wanted me to know…that if I don’t do something, I’m going to get shut down…and by me, he really meant Spotify, and by Spotify he meant all of Spotify’s emails. So this is pretty terrifying.

This kind of came out of the blue. This was actually my first marketing campaign that I’d ever worked on. But you can imagine that I was not having a great day.

November 2, 2021

by TWP Publisher

How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization

Normally, you can measure the return on an investment (ROI) by taking the gain generated by the investment and subtracting its cost. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, it’s a bit less straightforward.

That’s because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how much of your sales or leads are generated by SEO alone. It’s also hard to track exactly which costs have gone into designing and implementing your SEO strategy.

Given this difficulty, I’ve gone ahead and outlined my formula for calculating and monitoring the ROI of an SEO campaign. As the owner of two full-service digital marketing agencies, I’ve tracked SEO performance across countless client campaigns for over a decade. After years of success in the field, I thought I’d share my basic strategy for SEO analytics and monitoring.

Where ROI Meets SEO For E-Commerce

For those who specialize in e-commerce, there are specific ways you can track and manage your SEO performance. Thanks to Google Analytics (yes, including the free version), you can do this fairly simply. Below, I’ve outlined the basic steps involved.

First, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the “ADMIN” panel within the left-hand sidebar. From there, navigate to the “VIEW” tab and select “e-Commerce settings” and finally “Enable Enhanced e-Commerce Reporting.”

Whether you use Shopify or WooCommerce, your next step is to initialize tracking on these platforms so the data can be communicated to Google Analytics. Here’s a thorough guide on how to do that. Once complete, you’ll be able to view a variety of key metrics, such as:

October 30, 2021

by TWP Publisher

5 Simple Strategies to Update & Automate Your Email Marketing

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Utilizing the latest email marketing strategies is a great way to expand the reach of your business and help you connect with a wide range of customers. You also want to stay in touch with those prospects who didn’t purchase your offer…yet. They might need a little more convincing that you know your stuff and email marketing is an easy way to get inside their inbox and appeal to them. Looking at ways to improve your email marketing strategy is essential to your success.

Implement these simple strategies to improve your email marketing efforts.

#1 Tweak Your Messages

Many entrepreneurs use various types of email sequences to help them maximize sales during a live launch. However, you can reuse these messages by simply performing a few tweaks to the original email. Performing these tweaks is a great way for you to save time while also improving your marketing reach. Ultimately, tweaking your messages only requires a little bit of work to your existing emails.

#2 Check Out Your Email Marketing Metrics

Another way to improve your marketing strategy is to check your metrics consistently. This is also one area that many entrepreneurs overlook or just don’t take the time to do. This information can play a key role in helping you determine the highest performing emails. Metrics can include a variety of information, such as click-through rates, open rates, and purchases. You can use these metrics to learn effective marketing strategies to help you maximize your consumer base. If you never, or rarely, look at your numbers any tweaking you do could be the proverbial ‘shot in the dark.’

#3 Craft New Emails

Taking the additional time to craft new emails is well worth the effort in helping you to expand the reach of your business. Writing new emails is especially effective if you are running a special promotion or giving away a free item. You can also reuse older messages to help your business grow and reach many more customers with only a minimal amount of effort.

#4 Create a Sense of Urgency

One of the best ways to reach new customers is to create a sense of urgency within each email. For example, you can offer a limited special offer that is only available for a few days. You can also use various elements, like a countdown timer, or programs, like Deadline Funnel, to help you include urgency in your emails. This simple marketing technique is highly effective in improving your sales rate since subscribers won’t want to miss your deal.

October 29, 2021

by TWP Publisher

10 Essential Features Of Good Ergonomic Design Tech Developers Often Overlook

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design, Web Development

When tech designers are developing a new website, app or product, they usually focus closely on functionality, ease of use and, most importantly, the user experience. But there’s more to a good user experience than attractive graphics or fun interfaces. The best-designed tech will always be centered on ergonomics—the ways humans interact physically and mentally with the tools they use, particularly in the workplace.

Tech hardware and software, as well as websites and apps, should always be designed with the health and comfort of the user in mind if they’re to be fully effective and inclusive. Below, 10 tech experts from Forbes Technology Council share important aspects of good ergonomic design that tech developers sometimes overlook and why it’s so important to get these features right.

1. ADA Compliance

Making your website ADA-compliant is not only the right thing to do, but it also opens your doors to additional visitors. Many low-cost tools make this an easy and transparent thing to do. Ensuring your site is ADA-compliant is a no-brainer. – David Moise, Decide Consulting

2. Hand Size And Reach

Tech developers often forget that with the larger size of modern smartphones, one-handed operation gives a typical adult thumb comfortable access to only the bottom-right two-thirds of the screen. Interface elements in the upper left of the screen are only accessible through uncomfortable contortions, secret OS features or by using your second hand. – Sam Glassenberg, Level Ex

October 27, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Three Digital Marketing Industry Challenges That May Positively Impact Email Marketing

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Email and digital marketers can be excused if they have been feeling a bit stressed over the past year. Beyond the immense challenges presented by the pandemic, there have been ongoing developments in the data privacy landscape and changing technologies to deal with. But it’s good to remember that challenges also often provide opportunities. Let’s take a look at a few big changes that could impact email marketing in 2021 and in the future — and how marketers can adapt and identify new opportunities.

Evolving Consumer Engagement

Consumer behavior evolves constantly. Some changes can occur suddenly and require quick decisions, while others allow marketers the time to adapt more gradually. Over the past year, email marketers have been dealing with largely unprecedented and sudden changes in consumer behavior.

Just one example was the shift to working from home that impacted workers around the U.S. and the entire world. People who had previously never had the option of working remotely were now scrambling to set up home offices with no certainty about when or if they would return to a traditional office setting. While marketers had already seen a shift toward more remote work in years past, according to Global Workplace Analytics data (via Business 2 Community), the massive acceleration of the change was a game changer for many companies. Consumer needs for some products and services skyrocketed while the need for others plummeted, and many marketers found that all of their existing campaign performance forecasts and benchmarks needed to be reevaluated and potentially tossed aside as organizations pivoted on long-standing strategies.

More people working from home means more people spending more hours in front of their desktop or laptop in a home office setting. Marketers may be seeing this shift in the form of increased desktop email activity and decreased mobile email activity.

October 26, 2021

by TWP Publisher

4 ways to use local SEO to attract more patients

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization, SEO

The typical healthcare consumer’s journey often begins with extensive research. In fact, search engines drive 3 times more hospital visits than nonsearch visitors.1

Therefore, if you are not getting enough patients through your door, there is a good chance that your company has a poor local online presence. Not enough patients are coming—they are going to your competitors instead simply because they found them first while doing a local search.

But all is not lost.

With a well-designed health care search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you can improve your medical practice’s digital presence and attract more patients.

Below are some of the best ways to leverage local SEO and get more patients through your door.

1. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing

All local businesses, including health care providers, should claim their Google My Business (GMB) listing. Not only does GMB significantly influence search engine rankings, but it is also one of the first things that potential patients see (Google’s Local Pack) after conducting a local search query.

Fortunately, claiming your GMB account is easy and free.2 After signing up and claiming your listing, you will need to provide the following information:

• Name of practice

• Address

• Phone number

• Email address

• Hours of operation

• Photos of the practice

• Short description about the practice

The idea is to bring the GMB listing to life by providing complete information about the practice to potential patients. To optimize a GMB listing, make sure that you frequently update it and answer questions that people may have.

What about multiple locations?

Even if you have a main phone line for answering calls and booking patient appointments, all office locations should have their own Google My Business listing.

Otherwise, when a patient searches for your secondary locations (satellite offices), they are likely to end up finding the Google listing for the main location. This can result in patients

October 25, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Your 9-Step Guide to Website Planning

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design, Website Planning

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Planning a website or redesign is an enormous undertaking. At the enterprise level, a site redesign can take several months to more than a year to complete, cost hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars and span thousands of pages.

If you’re the one planning for the design, you’ll need to consider the time and cost, as well as messaging, site layout, brand identity, user experience and performance.

You’ll need to meet with key stakeholders to define business goals and figure out who your customers are and why they’re coming to your site.

You’ll also need to create content that engages your audience at key touchpoints and nudges them through your funnel.

And that’s just the beginning.

After you’ve conducted research with stakeholders and devised a path forward, you’ll actually need to build the thing. That could mean hiring a third-party web development agency or creating an entirely new codebase in-house. Either way, you’ll have to think about the architecture and SEO structure, third-party integrations and responsiveness across screen sizes and browsers.

Even after the launch, you won’t be done. You’ll need to continue to iterate and test how well the site is performing against benchmarks. (And considering the average lifespan of a website is just two years and seven months, you probably don’t want to spend years building it).

October 23, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Optimizing Your Email Marketing In 2021

E-Marketing, Marketing Email Marketing

Digital marketing has more than shown its worth for businesses of all industries over the past year, and one strategy that’s been particularly valuable has been email marketing.

Email marketing is arguably more important now than it ever was before. However, while email marketing is extremely important right now, it can also be difficult to do well. If you want to get all of the benefits of email marketing, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with all of the best practices and stay current with the latest trends.

Don’t miss the impact that good email marketing can have on your business going forward. Use these tips to optimize your email marketing in 2021 and start appealing more to your audience.

Give emails a personal touch.

You’re probably already aware of the overwhelming amount of emails that people get each day, as you likely deal with this yourself. We all get tons of emails from businesses, and many of them don’t even look like they were meant for us specifically.

Generic emails sent out to all your contacts that don’t apply to a particular group of people or an individual won’t have much of an impact and could end up just getting deleted.

In 2021, personalization is one of the most important things you can do for your marketing efforts, especially email marketing. The more relevant you can make something, the more potential it has to be effective.

No one wants to spend their time reading emails that weren’t intended for them, and they definitely won’t feel compelled to do whatever the email is asking of them.

Ensure that you’re creating emails with relevant information for certain groups so that it appeals to their needs and interests. To personalize even further, include the recipient’s name, so they know they’re getting an email meant for them, not just anyone.

Boost engagement with interactive features.

Personalization isn’t the only way for getting users to be more engaged when reading your emails. While you may be able to write engaging content to keep your audience interested, adding interactive features to some of your emails is a great way of boosting agreement. This gives them more than just text to read when they open your emails.

October 22, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Why Do Pillar Pages Matter For SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A pillar page is an organized piece of content on a website that can help search engines see its worth and connection with other pages on the site. If the page is structured well, it can impact the website’s rankings because of the high searched terms or additional highlighted useful information. Our agency has experienced good results with the value of pillar pages for SEO.

Let’s start with the basics.

What Is A Pillar Page?

A pillar page acts as an index of a particular subject that shows (and links to) related information that the reader might want or need. A pillar page cannot have all the information about a single topic, so it has to be spread on other pages.

For example, a blog post focuses on a topic with much information. For SEO, the blog post should include links that create a network for the search engines to crawl the content further. Even a homepage or product or service page can be tied to a pillar page.

Pillar pages are a valuable part of a content strategy. You can write about a topic and narrow down the post with relevant material. A pillar page surrounded by associated content can allow site visitors to dig deeper all in one place—your post.

How Do You Create A Pillar Page?

A pillar page should include a broad range of keywords, be useful to readers and promote taking action. Here are some important things to remember while creating a pillar page:

October 20, 2021

by TWP Publisher

How Minimalism leads to Effective Website Design

Website Content, Website Design Practices Website design

What Is Effective Web Design?

Everyone has their own definition of what effective website design and development is and it will vary from one individual to the next since people all have different preferences. Although personal preferences might differ, certain trends do emerge in artwork and design.

Web designers wanting to say ahead of their competitors will frequently just contact their users. When a website is being designed, a minimalist approach might be a highly effective way to connect with users. Designers will often focus on minimalism in order to ensure that the attention of users is focused on the aspects that are most important.

What Does Minimalist Web Design Mean?

Various design trends influence minimalism. Minimalism is about simplicity and staying focused on a design’s most important aspects. Using this approach can demonstrate a subject’s true form and draw out its uniqueness and elegance.

Minimalism in web design aims to avoid making web design mistakes by eliminating aspects that might cause users to lose their attention on the design. The strategy makes it possible for web designers to focus on a design’s most important elements. The user interface can be simplified and unnecessary elements can be eliminated

Minimalist Web Design Features

A design technique’s popularity does not necessarily translate into user needs being supported. The goal of minimalist web design is to create focused imagery in order to create an effective link between the website and the user.

All posts by TWP Publisher

Industries

Choose Your Language