How to Increase Customer Engagement
How to Increase Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is one of the most important keys to running a successful business. Hence, you must create a strong and proper customer acquisition strategy in order to engage the customer. How do you improve your customer engagement?
The best way to improve customer engagement is by turning the business into a customer centered one. However, this can be a challenging undertaking and may take a little time to accomplish. But if you are patient, you can greatly improve on your customer engagement.
Here are 7 ways to increase customer engagement:
1. Put the customer at the center
Without the customer, your business cannot be. The customer is the most important person in your business. So placing the customer at the center of the business is the most logical thing to do. As you do so, you must ensure that you have a very clear focus on where, when and how you will interact with the customer.
2. Be honest with yourself when assessing your failures.
Things may go wrong, and often they will. However, if you are honest when it comes to assessing what is holding you back, you have a better chance of creating a better customer engagement or relationship. Then you need to make a strategy on how to tackle the problems. It is recommended that you start by setting achievable and quick goals before proceeding towards hard and long term goals.
3. Capture customer feedback
Customer feedback is an essential tool when you are in the process of creating great customer engagement. It ensures that you will learn customer behavior and get insights that will help you to fulfill your customer needs.
4. Understand value exchange
Understanding value exchange involves first understanding and then building the information exchange program. Identify which kind of information customers are normally happy to share and understand what your business and the customer can gain in exchange.
5. Take a broader picture
If you want to improve customer engagement, taking a broader picture is important instead of focusing on individual experiences. For instance, all areas in your company have a role to play when it comes to customer engagement and doesn’t apply to marketing or customer service alone; therefore, it is important that you focus on the whole picture.
6. It is not all about marketing
Marketing might be an important component of any successful business, but you have to go beyond marketing. You need to study various customer retention strategies. All successful businesses treat the customer as their most important person and design their strategies around retaining the customer. It involves everyone in the organization, not just those who interact directly with the customer.
7. Empowering business users
It is important to empower business users who keep you updated about your customer experiences instead of leaving all that responsibility to the IT department. You should align all the marketing, sales and customer service department around the customer. In order to achieve this, it is advisable that you develop a complete buy0in from the Chief Executive Officer including all the other executive team members of the organization.
Increase your email Open Rates using these strategies
Increase your email Open Rates using these strategies
Millions of emails hit inboxes every day. Many of those emails are either ignored or deleted straightaway without even opening them. That is why having a compelling email subject line is critical.
There is no point of having thousands and even tens of thousands in your email list when only handful of them actually open your emails. It does no good to you or to your business to have a mammoth email list, but microscopic open rate.
Getting your email to be opened and read in a crowded inbox is a big challenge, but a powerful subject line can make all the difference between being ignored and converting your leads.
Oh, subject lines. So challenging to write, yet so vital to the success of your email campaigns.Poor open rates is an issue that is confronting many internet marketers. There is both a science and an art to composing persuasive email subject lines that not only acts as baits for users to open your emails but to also take action once they open them.
In 2012, Epsilon’s fourth quarter email analysis showed that the average open rates was 27.4% and the average click through rate was 4.5%.
In other words, almost ¾ of people that you send emails don’t open them and when they open, only less than 5 in every 100 will bother to click any of the links.
That is a big problem for most internet marketers. This article explores powerful email newsletter subject lines strategies to win the email marketing war and tremendously increase your email’s open rates by as much as 203%.
This article is going to show you how to write irresistible email subject lines that get prospects to open the emails.
In a nutshell, here is what you are going to learn today:
- Calculating the Open Rate for Your E-Mail Marketing Campaign
- Best Practices for Email subject lines
- Case Studies: Best email subject lines for icreasing open rates
- How to time your emails to increase open rates
Calculating the Open Rate for Your E-Mail Marketing Campaign
If a five-year old came to you and asked, “What is email open rate?” what would you tell that kid?
Don’t scratch your head. Here is a simple graphic by Echogravity to explain it
Thus, email open rates measures the number of specific interactions with an email server after the e-mail is sent and it is expressed as a percentage of non-bounce rates. Your email is only counted as open when the recipient clicks a link in the email and enables the images in your email to display.
So email open rates is calculated by taking the number of emails opened and dividing it by the total non-bounced emails.
The good news is that you don’t need to scratch your head over this. All email marketing providers like Mail Chimp, Vertical Response, Benchmark Email etc provide email open rates metrics.
6-Steps to Improve Email Open Rates
You can improve your email open rates by following these six steps
Step 1: Be ultra-specific and useful—make sure the subject line is useful and relevant to your customer needs.
Step 2: Identify yourself: let them know who is sending the message
Step 3: be visually different: your subject line should standout visually. Use things like square brackets and don’t overcrowd the subject line.
Step 4: send timely emails: the timing is important. We’ll look at this in more details at the end of this article.
Step 5: Include a Call to Action *CTA*: ask questions to make your readers take action.
Step 6:Test your subject lines: Use A/B testing to test your emails to see which subject lines work best.
Best Practices for Email subject lines?
Now that you know what your email open rate is, it is time to improve it. According to Hubspot, having an open rate of lower than 15% should be a cause for alarm. Acquiring those emails isn’t easy, so you shouldn’t take open rates for granted.
According to MailChimp’s exhaustive recent study, using clever subject lines can tremendously increase your open rates. And beyond just a fancy subject line, you must offer an in-depth content for your subscribers to open through the links and even take action.
So the first step towards improving your email marketing is to learn how to write attention-grabbing email subject lines. This video by April Bowles-Olin will teach you how to write compelling email subject lines.
One of my favourite pieces of advice from April is when April urges marketers to send themselves a test email to see how the email compares to other emails in their inboxes and see whether they would click on that email. The idea is to be brutally honest with yourself so that you can wear the shoes of your subscribers.
Let us look at some of the best practices for good email subject lines that sell.
According to Mailchimp researchers, the best subject lines are unusually short, evocative, and descriptive and give recipients good reasons to open their emails. When writing best email subject lines, it is important to keep the audience in mind and to test the keywords and phrases so as to maximize subscriber engagement.
Tips for writing irresistible email Subject Lines
Enticing your audience to engage with your email is a struggle for many marketers and small business owners. Here are 5 tips to writing irresistible subject lines.
1. Cleverness vs. Clarity
In most cases, branding and marketing is about standing out, coming up with something catchy and being memorable. However, the email subject line is not the right place to practice this.
Your recipients don’t want unwanted surprises. They want to have a clear understanding of what to expect when they click on your message. So the subject line should have a worthwhile messages.
Look at the below examples.
Email A is not clear. The subject line doesn’t provide clarity and the message is ambiguous at first glance. Email B on the hand is short, precise and very clear.
AWeber Communications conducted a research in 2011 and discovered that an email subject line that is clear gets 541% more clicks than one that is ambiguous or one that is trying to be clever.
In other words, when it comes to email marketing, remember this simple statement: Clarity is GOOD; Cleverness is BAD
Just ensure the recipients clearly understand the content of the email by the subject line. That alone can great increase the number of customers who click your CTA.
People don’t actually want to try to figure out what you are trying to tell them. They simply do not have that time.
Here are examples of clever and clear email subject lines
Clever Subject Lines
- ABC Associates’ Always Awesome Amber Adams
- It’s finally here
- Look no further than your favourite site
- The early bird catches the worm
- Great gifts to stir you up
Clear Subject Lines
- 10 awesome gifts for her this valentine
- Increase your conversion rates by 200% using these strategies
- 5 ideas to improve your kitchen
- Why I paid $10,000 for my web design and how it has paid off
2. Use actionable language
One way to trigger action is to use actionable language. You don’t necessarily have to use verbs—though it certainly helps.
I received this email from edX. This is one way to use actionable language effectively.
Use actionable verbs like “download”, “take”, “enrol”, “Book”, “reserve”, “buy” etc.
However, you don’t have to rely on verbs to use actionable language. This give you more room to play with words. For example, “Don’t Miss This Season’s Thanksgiving Coupons.”
3. Personalize when possible
Email segmentation is the best strategy for personalizing your message. The following data from eMarketer shows the importance of email segmentation
You notice that highly segmented email and targeted subject lines have 39% higher open rates and lower unsubscribe rates. This in turn increases sales leads and greater customer retention.
Before sending that email, ask yourself the following questions:
· Who are the recipients?
· What are the likes and dislikes of the recipients?
· What excites my subscribers? What are their fears?
4. Embrace convention, be obvious
Emails need to be conventional. It may be boring but that is the only way to get people to open them. Every component of the email need to be clear to the recipient.
Ø Make your links obvious: creating, big, conspicuous and clickable (tappable) buttons is the way to go. Make them wide enough so that they can be tapped with a thumb for those on mobile devices. Ensure the texts are bold and links are in contrasting colors. Do not have too many links and let them be well spaced.
Ø Make the benefits of opening the email obvious: don’t bandy words. Go straight to the point. This brings us to the next point.
5. Align Your Subject Line Copy and Email Copy
It is crucial for your CTA and landing page to align. The same principle applies when crafting email subject lines and the message body. Readers should be able to read in the email message what the subject line promises. If there is a mismatch, you aren’t going to receive high click-through rates and at worst, most people will just unsubscribe.
6. Say less
Don’t write extra-long subject lines. Don’t write blocks of paragraphs. Be very specific and cut the extra wordings. Your email message and subject line should be scannable. Keep it short: 50 characters or less works best. In a study involving more than 200 emails, MailChimp found that email subject ines with 50 characters or less have higher clicks.
7. Don’t use urgency in every single email you send out
If every other email you send is urgent, then people eventually become used to your antics and you lose credibility. Say it is urgent only when it is truly urgent.
In any case, it is better to point out the importance of the message or offer rather than its urgency unless it is time-bound.
To wrap this section up, I found this interesting infographic by Unbounce and I think you should look at it.
Case studies: 10 Best Email Subject Lines that Increased Open Rates
Here are 101 best email subject lines that increase open rates by 203%. Study them and notice the patterns. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they have all the elements we have discussed so far.
Timing is everything
The time you send your email also affects its open and click-though-rates. Know your audience and use A/B testing to find the right time to send email. The time aspect is the final piece in the 203% puzzle. If you get your time right, you can experience as much as 60% higher open rates.
When Nathan Williams sent emails within 24 hours to new signups, he experienced 60% open rates. Having said that, you can’t be absolutely sure what the best time to send emails should be.
So it is just a matter of experimentation and trial and error
Here are some resources to help you get started:
- KISSmetrics infographic on the best time to send emails
- According to Rick Stamberger, the best time to send emails is when your audience is most likely to be online. This depends on industry and geographical locations.
- According to Kevin Gao, founder of comm100, Mondays are not the best days to send emails, as well as weekends. So your best bet is Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Ultimately, you are going to have to test it.
4 Clever Advertising Techniques You Should Be Using Today
4 Clever Advertising Techniques You Should Be Using Today
Companies are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars every year on advertising. The big boys even spend hundreds of thousands or millions in print and paid click advertisements. Unfortunately, that also means we get to be bombarded with endless amount of ads, that are lazily designed or misplaced.
So how do you stay clear of producing poor, boring and ineffective advertising?
Here are some techniques you can use to create amazing ads that will resonate with people.
Design Clever ads
There is a whole lot of difference between funny advertisements and effective ads that accomplish their jobs. When designing your ad, make sure that it is able to clearly deliver its message and make people enjoy it at the same time. It should not just be funny for the sake of it. In fact, you do not design an ad so that it is funny. You design an ad that people will be able to connect with.
Insightful
Your ad’s potential impact will be determined by how insightful it is. Does it make the audience think about their beliefs and actions? Does it result in that Eureka Moment? If you achieve this, you will do much better than your competition.
Feeling
Try to connect with your audience emotionally. As Maya Angelou once said, people will forget what you did or said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. You may spend a lot of time convincing your prospects to buy from you; you may even offer very competitive prices, but if you are not connecting with them emotionally, you are not going to create much impact. The fact of the matter is that people are not always rational when making buying decisions. Their emotions usually get the better of them.
Trustworthiness
People buy from companies they like. People will like you if they also trust in you. You see, it is impossible for people to like you if they don’t trust you. Every character you select to appear in your ad should sound and look trustworthy. Every message you deliver should be factual.
Whatever your advertisement goal is, whichever industry you are and now matter your size, it is important to advertise wisely. If you need help, seek the advice or services of a professional advertising agency.
6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop
6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop
Traffic generation is the holy grail of online marketing. Website traffic has been cited as the most effective content marketing metric, which is why brands must understand how to drive traffic without compromising quality of content. Unfortunately, as traffic generation and SEO have changed over the years, many mistakes continue to be made. As a result, many seemingly well-established SEO practices can greatly damage your brand’s credibility and harm your website traffic.
Here are six traffic generation practices you should avoid at all costs:
1. Stuffing content with keywords
Stuffing your content with keywords can drastically hurt your website traffic. Whether it is adding high volume of keywords or irrelevant phrases and words, these are harmful SEO practices that can cause irreparable damage to your traffic generation efforts. Doing so will attract Google penalties like marking your site as spam or lower your page ranking. It will also hurt your brand image because customers will feel betrayed by your use of misleading information.
Rather than stuff your content with many or irrelevant keywords, writing high quality content should be your goal. Remember, people don’t just come to your site just for the sake of it; they are looking for valuable resources and answers to their problems. One way to find out what your readers are looking for is to think about the questions your readers type into Google search and use those questions to create powerful content that will provide the answers. You can also visit platforms like Reddit and Quora to find out what people are discussing. This will help you determine the right keywords to use. Whatever the case, concentrate on writing high quality content.
2. Building as many backlinks as possible
When it comes to backlinks, it’s all about quality over quantity. Many people think that having thousands of links pointing to their website is the smartest traffic generation tactic. However, this practice can actually be detrimental to your SEO. It is better to have a dozen of quality backlinks instead of having thousands of spam links. Use tools like Buzzsumo to determine which backlinks are top quality in your industry. For instance, if you own a blog about entrepreneurship, your best bet for backlinks should come from sites like Entrepreneur, Fortune, Bizify, Quora and Inc, among others. By all means, avoid buying backlinks if you don’t want to land in trouble with Google.
3. Focusing only on page rankings
Page ranking is an important factor when it comes to making it to the top of Google’s search results. However, one should not put all eggs in one basket. Many elements contribute to page ranking. According to a 2015 study by Moz, 88% of marketers believe mobile-friendliness will influence page rankings. 81% believe that the perceived value of the website by the visitors also plays a critical role. Other factors that influence page rankings are speed of website and the quality and quantity of instant answers provided in SERPs. Therefore, instead of worrying about whether your website is ranked at the top, you need to look at different strategies that can drive results for your brand. For instance, you can produce more mobile optimized landing pages and produce quality content that provide instant answers in the SERPs. By taking care of these individual strategies, you will be able to tweak your website so that it appears in top results.
4. Writing low-value content
Gone are the days when quantity of content was the determining factor in driving traffic. Today, marketers are more concerned about producing quality content that provide value to the users. In fact, Google introduced an algorithm that penalizes sites that produce low-quality content. In that regards, any content you produce should provide value to the readers. That is to say quality content should be your most valuable SEO tactic. There are a number of elements you need to take into consideration when implementing your content creation strategy. The first element is your audience. Understanding your audience is crucial. Are your visitors male or female? What is their geographical locations? What is their age group? Do your visitors come to amuse themselves or to learn serious stuff? Understanding your audience will help you to structure your content according to their needs.
5. Duplicating content on different websites
Writing content and then duplicating it to different sites as guest post is definitely going to hurt your ranking. Although Google can differentiate between the first publisher of content and republished content, content duplications brings more harm than good. It might succeed in increase in the number of back links but it can also become difficult to know monitor the changes to your content. Your brand’s image also suffers in the process. So the only solution is to write original content and share it is social media. If you want to publish guest posts or syndicate your content, please write fresh content for every website you want to publish your content.
6. Including complex coding on your website and installing too many widgets
Widgets, tools, analytic software, surveys, forms etc can be great tools for any website; however, too much of something is bad. Having too many widgets and tools coupled with complex coding can slow down your website yet people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. This is likely to be the reason you are performing poorly in traffic generation department. The average user has no patience for a page that takes ages to load. Slow speeds in websites results to high bounce rates, a factor used by Google to rank websites.
The Porsche M Concept
I ran into the M concept surfing the web and I thought hey lets build something fun. yesterday we were on location filming a training video with green screen and were just sitting in the office waiting for the tiles to download (the things we do while we wait), Finding some reference images I pulled up maya and started drawing three hours later I came up with this.
Since hindsight is twenty twenty I don't think I should have colored it in white and maybe I added to much lens flare, this looks less real and more cartoony. That being said I will re render it out in the future to make it more realistic. For 3 hours of my time, it came out very cool.
The Porsche M concept was modeled on Maya Autodesk, color corrected with Adobe Lightroom and animated with Adobe Aftereffects and Adobe premiere pro.
GreenScreen Setup and Keying in Aftereffects.
GreenScreen setup and keying in Aftereffects.
Hey this is Malcholm Reese with mjrvisuals.com and today I’m going to talk about green screen and keying. Now I will be honest I have a print out of ninety nine percent of the editing stuff I do, its really just as a reference because how often in a day do you do everything. Not to often. So for things like particular, or form or even c4d and maya I have cheat sheets on how to get to where I’m going. You ask why don’t I just save the preset, well when new people come to work here and to get them up to speed quickly, it’s easier just to hand them the guide and there you go. It’s like instant experience. Now I say all this because I recommend that you do the same, keep a book or reference folder or something so you can always have something that doesn’t rely on electricity to review. Wow, that sounded old, now I sound like my father. Computers are taking over everything back in my day I did everything by hand! I digress.
So we are looking at my man Ben, on a green screen. Now the only things we are going to pull down to key him out, are Keylight and simple choker.
Pull in your video file into the composition, now duplicate that file.
Pull down key light into the top layer video file, next go to screen pre blur and adjust accordingly, the range I normally use is between 2 and 3. If you didn’t know Pre Blur adjust how much blur to apply to the matte before the key is pulled its good to use as it gets rid of weird edges.
Change the view to screen matte, in this view it’s easy to see what our matte is looking like. Adjust Clip Black and Clip White until the subject or object that is the focus is white and the area you want removed is black.
Next adjust screen shrink then change replace method to hard color and adjust the color. Pre compose the layers and place the simple choker on the pre comp and adjust again I use between .5 and 1.25, there you go export and your ready to use it in your video. Now I will be honest I like to color grade in premier pro with the rest of the files that way I can ensure a perfect balance in color, contrast, saturation with any files that will not have aftereffects in it. It just makes my finished work better.
ENG or Electronic News Gathering.
ENG or Electronic News Gathering. We recently won a contract to provide weekly ENG service for a international news channel. I always talk about our “workhorses”; the c100s show how truly versatile they are. We have filmed short films, features, commercials and now broadcast material. Amazing!
The first week it was stressful, as we shoot either breaking news or scheduled interviews. Just learning the flow of the production was interesting. We meet with the producers weekly, receive the schedule of interviews, go to location, film, edit and return a finished product (actually 3 products) same day.
Now when your a boutique video production company, boutique means small and understanding time is critical is extremely important. The news agency is a contract and we still shoot commercial, conferences, film, etc but this is truly an interesting experience and something that we will expand on in the future. See some of the photos below!
Malcholm - mjrvisuals.
