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Bernie J Mitchell

Bernie J Mitchell

Engaging People in coworking since 2010

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Zj Shing

8 Big Ways to Boost Your Email Marketing Strategy 

September 27, 2021 by Zj Shing

The first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions email marketing is spam.

But if you think about how much time people spend reading emails every day, then you might realize just how powerful this channel still is. 

And in spite of the pandemic bringing turbulence to businesses, emails have returned to the forefront of digital marketing.

In fact, they have become one of the most important marketing tools available today.

With more people shopping online, there is an even greater need to interact and connect digitally, and email marketing is a fantastic method for doing so. Using a combination of customization and automation, you can build a plan that can help you gain a high return on investment (ROI).

For digital marketers, keeping up with trends is critical so that shifting best practices don’t disrupt the rest of your marketing plan.

As the world continues to change at an unprecedented rate, so too does the way people use technology.

This means there are always going to be new ways to reach customers – whether through social media or mobile apps.
But with these changes also comes uncertainty.

So how can you plan your campaigns effectively?

Email has been around since the early days of computers and was one of the very first channels used by marketers. It’s also an incredibly effective way to communicate with customers because they expect to receive messages from brands at certain times throughout their day.

Here are some ways to optimize your email marketing strategy:

1. Personalized Email Marketing

Consumers love getting personalized content. People want relevant information tailored specifically to them. This means personalization is key. Personalized emails give recipients exactly what they’re looking for while saving businesses’ money through targeted messaging. 

The best way to get started with your own personalized email campaign?

Start by using a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact that can help you create and send custom messages based on the data you have about your customers.

You’ll be able to segment your list into different groups, so you know who’s interested in which topics. Then, use this knowledge to craft an effective message that will resonate with each group of people.

2. Using artificial intelligence to optimize your email strategy

Artificial intelligence is basically software or hardware which mimics human thinking.

This means that it learns from data and experiences over time. And as such, it can learn new skills very quickly.

For example, if an algorithm sees something similar before, then it knows what to expect next. If there was no previous experience with a certain situation, it would have to start learning all over again.

But because AI doesn’t forget anything, it remembers everything.

Which makes it perfect for solving problems.

Nowadays, AI is everywhere.

From self-driving cars to smart speakers, robots to virtual assistants – they’re becoming more common every day.

And when it comes to email marketing, AI could make a huge difference.

Because right now, many people still don’t understand why their emails aren’t getting opened or read.

They think that maybe their subject line isn’t good enough, or perhaps their content wasn’t interesting enough.

Or even worse, they might just assume that everyone hates them!

However, the truth is that not everybody likes receiving emails.

Some people prefer reading blogs instead.

Others want to watch videos on YouTube.

And others simply don’t care at all.

That’s where AI comes into play.

Because once you train an AI system to recognize patterns within your audience, it becomes much easier to send relevant messages.

3.  Adding interactive customer experience to email marketing

In the future, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) will revolutionize the way interactive emails are sent.

Without the need for a third-party provider, you may include interactive information in your marketing emails thanks to the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Instead of linking to a landing page, an email with a carousel and shopping choices may be added to present a number of different items at the same time without sending the recipient to a separate website.

Customers will be able to see goods, make purchases, and do other actions from the email you send out to them.

The number of clicks necessary to go to the appropriate page should be kept to a bare minimum before you can finish your purchase.

Reduced friction makes it easier for customers and subscribers to do business with you, and every time you do so, your business grows.

There are several straightforward methods to include it into your plan, such as:

  • Hover-over images and animated GIFs
  • CTAs that are easy to understand
  • There are several possibilities for the design mode (choice of dark mode or light mode)
  • surveys and polls
  • Product or service carousels with interactive elements
  • components of gamification

4. Setting up Privacy-Friendly Emails

Customers are becoming more conscious of the need to preserve their personal information and know-how their data is being used, and they are demanding greater transparency from businesses.

You must go above and above to ensure PCI and GDPR compliance if you want to earn their trust and maintain their loyalty.

Create a privacy-focused approach to every aspect of your email marketing strategy to ensure that you are meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

The following are some GDPR regulations applicable to email marketing campaigns: 

Obtain permission. There are several opt-in technologies available on the market that may assist you in increasing your subscriber base while being compliant with GDPR. The most essential thing to remember is that you must obtain consent before adding individuals to your email list.

Make a privacy policy for your organization. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, you must have a thorough privacy policy that provides full information about the data you gather from users and how you intend to use it.

Your privacy policy should be available on your website, and it should be linked to your opt-in form.

Keep a copy of your consent forms. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates that you keep a record of permission, which includes the name of the user, the date consent was granted, and the information that was consented to.

Allowing access without requiring an opt-in is encouraged.

Pay close attention if you are using lead magnets to increase your email marketing list.

If a person does not wish to receive your newsletter, you are unable to restrict access to your material.

You must clearly communicate to users that they may still access the lead magnet or other gated material even if they do not subscribe to your newsletter.

Allow users to quickly revoke their permission.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that consumers be able to quickly cancel consent. A clearly visible unsubscribe link in your newsletter will take care of the situation.

Stay away from misleading or deceptive messages.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides requirements for the content to safeguard consumers.

Essentially, you must clearly demonstrate your identity, including a physical address, accurately identify the material, and otherwise maintain the integrity of the transaction.

5. Optimizing Email Across All Platforms

While it may seem apparent, optimizing email for all platforms is vital.

Customers are increasingly adopting mobile devices. Therefore, you must guarantee they receive the same level of service.

Not simply email can nurture a lead.

Thus, omnichannel marketing is vital. Simply said, omnichannel marketing combines digital and traditional marketing channels to reach your target demographic.

Omnichannel marketing works because it goes where the customers are.

Customers won’t merely go to a website and buy.

Nowadays, shoppers do extensive research before making a purchase.

Omnichannel marketing helps businesses engage with customers and prospects across several media and platforms. As a result of this cross-channel contact, brands may remove barriers to purchase.

6. Email in plain-text: recognizing its value

Sending a text-only email to your readers might be a welcome change of pace for them.

Using text-only emails in combination with other, more visually appealing emails will give you the most bang for your buck.

You may still send emails with animated GIFs and other appealing graphics.

You don’t have to, it’s just a way of saying that. It’s probable that this sudden adoration for text-only emails is due to the hyper-personalization trend since they feel more personal, like an email you’d send to a friend also let’s face it, most people do not send images-heavy emails to their friends and family).

7.  Adding color to your email.

While sending a plain-text email can be refreshing for your readers, you can’t deny that adding colours to your email will make it more appealing to your readers.

Colour is an excellent tool for creating strong emotions and spurring behaviour.

Apart from the psychological effects of colour on people, email marketing campaigns employing bright and brilliant colours have been shown to increase both engagement and conversion levels.

Increased brand visibility and sales are all possible benefits of using colour.

8. Taking a team approach

It would be good to invest in the assistance of your team because email marketing is a process that is always developing (trends come and go, for example).

It is possible for different departments to collaborate on your 2021 strategy in order to ensure a diverse range of inputs and ideas are collected.

Remote work may be exhausting at times, so consider using productivity-enhancing technologies to help you function better from home.

Effective email marketing will maximize your conversions and return on investment, and combining your efforts with great workforce optimization will ensure that you achieve your objectives more quickly.

Those past few years have been odd, to say the least. COVID-19 has thrown the economy into disarray, and everyone is at the very least a little bit nervous about what’s to come next.

According to what we’ve observed thus far, marketers are up to the task.

Expect to see businesses paying even more attention to their consumers’ voices and demands in 2021, as well as reimagining their brands and business models to take a more sympathetic, human-centred approach.

Filed Under: BLOG

SE Ranking: 3 Reasons to love this SEO tracker.

May 22, 2021 by Zj Shing

I am using a variety of SEO tools and plugins to help me get a better grasp of well — SEO. One of these tools is SE Ranking. 

This app has made SEO tracking for me seem like a breeze. I only have to add my projects and click on the tools and features it has. 

This app provides comprehensive SEO tracking tools that helps me track and manage all the websites that I handle.  And it provides as accurate real-time data as it can. 

The fact that it is easy to sign up and add your projects in SE Ranking, manipulate the interface and track all your projects in one place is already a big thing for freelancers that need to track multiple websites at once. 

And here are the 3 main reasons why I love using SE Ranking: 

1. SE Ranking is a Cloud-Based Software.

You don’t have to download anything to use this SEO tool. All you have to do is sign-up and you can readily add your projects.

Which is really great since I don’t have to download and install this app whenever I switch from my PC to a laptop. I can access and track my projects as long as I have an internet connection. As a freelancer this is definitely a plus for me.

2. SE Ranking is an All inclusive SEO Tool

When I say that SE Ranking is an all-inclusive SEO tool, it actually is. It has a suite of tools that can help you rank better on your SERPs (search engine result pages). 

It also lets you see data across search engines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex and Bing! You can even choose which country you want to track your SEO performance in. 

– Website Audit

This is one of the tools in SE Ranking that’s exciting for me. I can finally track and check if the sites I manage in regards if it is optimized and what else I can do.

SE Ranking website Audit crawls your site pages and provides you an in depth report on how your website is doing in regard to SEO. It calculates the Health Score of your site based on how many issues there are like how many H1 tags you are using, identical titles, duplicate content, and the number of redirects you have. 

With this data, it enables you to see which approaches and strategies are effective, as well as the best steps you can take to boost your website. And you can download the report in PDF as well if you need it.

– Keyword Research and Suggestion

Are you looking for keywords that can increase the popularity of your website? If that’s the case, SE Ranking’s keyword suggestion feature is just what you need. 

Enter a keyword, domain, or URL into a text field. Then, watch as the tool generates a list of keywords for you to start ranking for right away.

Keyword research allows you to see what are the best keywords you can use for your sites to rank higher on SERPs.

Another feature of this tool is the keyword grouper. It basically makes keyword research easier for you. It also saves you time by providing you subsets of each keyword you are working on. 

– Backlink Checker

This is one of the features that SE Ranking has. It lets you track backlinks not just on your website but your competitors’ too.

Backlinks is an important SEO practice and having a way to monitor which links are working and not can affect your visibility as well. The higher the numbers of inbound links to your website are, the higher you can rank organically on search engines. 

And that is why I love SE Ranking because it lets me monitor every backlink, if they are working or broken. It helps me find them easier since it also shows the URLs with the broken links. 

– Competitive Research

This tool allows you to see how your competitor is doing. You can also see their paid and organic traffic, their keywords and 

3. Their Pricing.

According to SE Ranking Pricing list, you can avail this All-inclusive SEO tracker for as low as $18. But of course you can’t enjoy its full features. However, they also have a plan calculator where they charge you for only what you need. 

Even with the most basic plan, you can crawl as much as 25,000 pages using their website audits and as much as 250 keywords. And with that, you can build a solid strategy for your SEO. And that already gets you a long way, in my opinion. 

In my opinion, SE Ranking is one of the best keyword tracking tools that you can use for your website. It offers flexibility, provides you accurate data and analysis and costs less than your average SEO tracking tool that can only do half of SE Ranking on their basic pricing plans. 

They offer a free trial, take advantage of it, play around with it and see how it makes SEO easier for you. 

Filed Under: BLOG

SEO Plugin Match-Off: Yoast vs Rank Math

December 17, 2020 by Zj Shing

I’ve been writing on and off for years, professionally and personally. The thing is, I haven’t got a clue about Search Engine Optimization when I started. Being a content writer and copywriter, SEO is one of the important skills that you need to master when you really want to let the World Wide Web know your blog, your product or your service and get it out in the world. 

SEO ranking is kinda a big deal when you’re a business trying to get the people to know all about your products or services over the internet. After all, almost everything is digital nowadays.

The Importance of SEO.

“Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to understand what your content is about.

If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won’t appear in the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly so that they can maximize their search traffic.”

Not all of us can actually afford to pay SEO specialists. And I think that every copywriter or content writer should be able to at least know the basics of Search Engine Optimization in order to deliver a satisfactory and effective content. 

WordPress and SEO.

One of the most widely used website builders there is WordPress. And WordPress offers a wide variety of plug-ins that you can integrate with it and make it easier even for complete beginners to navigate and customize their websites. 

Which is really great. And what I love about these plugins are that — most of them are really easy to use, navigate and that you can always find something that works best with you.  

And what I know for sure that these SEO plugins are not supposed to do the job for you. It’s there to guide you and make the job easier for you. And these plugins are not at all going to be totally perfect. 

Disclaimer: I am not that adept at using both at the moment. Think of this as a beginner’s review of SEO plugins. I will definitely make another review of this when I get the hang of it!

Here we go!

The SEO Plugin Match-off: Yoast vs Rank Math.

Round One: WordPress Integration and Setup Configuration.

How easy it is to integrate these plugins to WordPress? And both of them provide a step-by-step process on how to integrate successfully to WordPress. 

Yoast: 

You might think that it’s a lot of steps, (I was intimidated at first) however, these steps are just questions for Yoast to determine how to optimize your website. They are not complicated and are easy to understand. 

And besides, 6 of these steps — Environment (published or not), Site Type (whether you’re online seller, offline business or blog), Organization or Person (the identity of your business, social media), Search Engine Visibility (which content you want to be visible over the search engines), Multiple Authors, and Title Setting (change your site title and which separator you want to use) — these lets Yoast determine how to optimize your site. 

The last steps are simple recommendations from Yoast for beginners by offering a training camp on how to use Yoast effectively and you’re done with the set-up.

Rank Math:

Rank Math has 4 steps! Now that’s a setup that beginners like me, love. It’s not intimidating and you get to choose the level of control on the SEO aspects of your website. Ain’t that neat?

These steps are: Getting Started — in which you choose your level of SEO control over your site, Your Site — wherein you answer a few questions about your site, Analytics — where you get to connect your site to Google and you’re all set.

Round Two: User Interface.

User Interface is one of the biggest factors that let me decide to keep or ditch an app. It’s a vital deciding factor for, well, most people. The aspects I look for are — is it user-friendly? Is it easy to navigate and understand for beginners? And how cluttered is it?

Yoast: 

Yoast dashboard is a bit confusing for a beginner. True, it is simple enough, however having to click the “?” button every time you don’t know what the feature is for, can be a bit taxing – it’s not very beginner-friendly in my opinion.  And I am not actually a fan of their colour scheme. 

Rank Math: 

 On Rank Math, as you can see, the interface is set in this nice grid pattern with a very short description on every aspect of Search Engine Optimization. It looks so neat. It has a minimalistic vibe with its simplistic icon designs and colour scheme that’s really easy on the eyes. You can easily see everything at the same time.

Round Three: SEO and Keyword Assigning

This is the part where I have to tell you about its main purpose – Keyword Assigning. So without further ado, here we go:

Yoast:

Yoast only allows you to assign one keyword on the free version and up to 5 keywords on its pro version. Although it also lets you add keyword synonyms. And on the content optimization part – Yoast tells you which parts or aspects of your content by suggesting what you need to do to make that sad little red emoji into a green smiley one. 

The one thing I like about this is that Yoast has this little eye thing where it shows you which parts need to be optimized on your content. Like on the length of your sentences, the passive voice usage and transition words amongst other components. It definitely helps you improve your content as much as possible.

Rank Math:

Rank Math on the other hand lets you put 5 keywords maximum on its free version. Also, on its content optimization, I am more partial to its scoring system (I love seeing that little number jump up from 0/100 to 75/100 when I’m done). 

It is also important to say that Yoast gives a specific set of instructions that can be frustrating to a beginner who’s very eager to perfect said set of suggestions – forgetting that it is actually just a suggestion. Rank Math gives you a more general idea of what you should do. Ease you a bit into it. 

The Judgement

On a beginner’s perspective, I can say that Rank Math definitely is appealing. It’s easier to use. It’s easier to understand. However, I’ve been using Yoast for months before I came across Rank Math. And on a personal opinion, I think that Yoast suits me more than Rank Math does. 

I have a little bit of a perfectionist mindset (not that extreme, more like a sliver). And by using Yoast, I appreciate a more focused approach than a general one. Remember that using either of them helps you improve your content and rank on searches by suggesting SEO friendly instructions. It still falls on the quality of your content that lets people stay on your site and generate conversion.

Filed Under: BLOG

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