Creating an email campaign? 5 tools to check out

Sending out an email campaign is a task that can be accomplished easily and quickly by following a few simple steps: creating content, choosing a simple design and clicking the “Send” button. But if you want to make the most out of your campaigns, that won’t be enough for you.

At ActiveTrail we want to help you produce a campaign that is not only easy to create, but also takes your marketing to a more advanced level and gives you an edge over the competition. We accomplish these goals by providing an array of tools, free of charge, via our system which will take any “okay” campaign and turn it into an inspiring one that you can take pride in.

1. Triggers system

Internet marketing doesn’t have to be a passive marketing approach that constantly relies on your input. Our triggers system creates an active campaign that responds automatically to your users’ actions, thereby providing a continuous campaign that doesn’t require your input on a daily basis. Create triggers that react to your clients’ actions by sending them addition content or moving them from one recipient list to another.

For example, use a trigger that reacts to any client making a purchase on your website by sending out a “Thank You” email or by moving that client to a VIP recipient list. Create triggers that acknowledge a user’s interest in a certain product on your site by sending him information about that product to his inbox.

Triggers offer endless possibilities and your imagination is the only limit. Forrester Research discovered that an internet campaign based on triggers will create 4 times as much revenue and up to 18 times as much income.

A good example of an actual use of the triggers system is brought to us by okcupid, an online dating website. They specified that when one user is checking out another, the system automatically sends out a message letting him/her know that someone has shown interest.

Advantages of the trigger system:

• Trust – getting your customers to trust you is the key to successful online marketing. By responding to their actions and sending content that is relevant specifically to them, you are establishing that desired trust with your clients.

• Relevance – if you want to stand out you have to make sure your content is always relevant to your clients or they’ll lose interest in you. Trigger responsive marketing gives your users the feeling that each email was created especially for them.

• Competition – your competition may not have access to a triggers system. use the system to your advantage and give yourself an edge over your competitors.

• Boost your profits – using a triggers system you can follow up on any action your clients make, integrating multiple campaigns, to make sure no selling opportunity goes unexploited.

Think of the triggers system as a dialogue between your clients and your business that happens automatically and doesn’t require any work from you.

Read more about the triggers system

2. AB testing

Few people have the advantage of being born with the ability to always know what will catch their clients’ attention and which designs will have the best success. For the rest of us – there’s AB testing.

AB testing is a tool that allows you to send out similar campaigns that differ only in one or two parameters. By analyzing the results from these campaigns you can tell which design got the job done and go with that one in the future.

For example this website, marketing closets, came up with these two designs:

Experts will tell you that version B is better, but AB testing gets us the facts and the facts are that version A did the job better, increasing the click rate by 115%.

Advantages of AB testing:

• No additional expenses – although you need to create two different campaigns, the modifications are minor so they don’t require much work. To save time, just divide your recipient list into two equal lists and start marketing.

• Easy analysis – our system does the hard work for you and displays the results of your AB testing in an easy to understand presentation. Compare click percentage, unsubscribes and opening percentages to decide which design works best.

• Get to know your clients – AB testing may not actually let you know what your customers are thinking but it will get you pretty close. By carefully analyzing the results, you can get a pretty clear idea of what your recipients find to their liking and contrarily, which designs will increase the unsubscribe rate.

Remember: the most important factor in any campaign is the client’s satisfaction so no matter how much time you spend on your campaign, the customer’s reaction is always what dictates the results.

Read more about AB testing

3. Google Analytics integration

The most important set of tools when creating a new internet campaign is the analytical tools set. Analytical tools help you learn everything you can from your past campaigns so you can study your mistakes and optimize every aspect of your campaign.

There are many analytical tools available on the market, but Google Analytics is without a doubt the leader in the field. The email marketing system allows you to follow up on various statistics such as click rates, unsubscribe rates and the number of new users, but why not use a simple system which gathers all that information together and also provides a thorough analysis?

Advantages of Google Analytics integration:

• Centralization – using Google Analytics means having all your data and statistics in one place. You can easily access any piece of information you need and instantly compare it to any other statistic from any period of time.

• Optimization – using top-notch analytical tools gives you the best idea of which campaigns got the job done, giving you all the information you need to create your next campaign. Each campaign you create will be a little better than the previous one, as you keep gathering more information about your clients.

• Big brother – use the system’s capabilities to your advantage. The system constantly gathers information about your clients which can be used to improve your services and increase your profits. Only by using analytical tools can you process so much information and get the best out of your internet marketing.

Read more about Google Analytics integration

4. Active management of recipient lists

Different clients have different interests, so why should they get the same content from you? Create different recipient lists to make sure each customer gets only the content that is relevant to him/her by analyzing past behavior such as purchases and clicks.

Marketing a family vacation? Send the campaign only to customers who have specified that they have a family. Don’t waste your resources on singles who have no reason to be interested. On the other hand, if you’re trying to advertise an online dating service, make sure to only send it out to your “singles” recipient list.

Each client can appear on a number of different recipient lists so that you can divide your clients up in any method that fits your marketing needs. Use questions on the sign up form to automatically sort your clients as they sign up and waste no time.

Advantages of active management of recipient lists:

• Individual attention – make sure each recipient only gets the content that is relevant to him/her to keep your customers thinking you care about each and every one of them individually and that the services and products that you have to offer are always relevant to them.

• Remove unreactive recipients – many recipients don’t bother to click the unsubscribe button but just stop opening emails that they find irrelevant. Email providers will mark your emails as spam if a recipient hasn’t opened a few of them and this can hurt your reputation.

• Special events – use special dates and events to focus your internet marketing and increase your income. Holidays are best if you know how to use them to your advantage.

Read more about list managing

5. Social network integration

Social networks are great platforms for marketing, especially when used in combination with a good email marketing plan. Direct your clients to your pages in the various social networks to increase their exposure to your products and services.

You can design the links any way you like and don’t have to stick to the designs offered by the social networks themselves.

For example, “New Look” sent out an email campaign inviting users to visit its various social networking channels:

Advantages of social network integration:

• Community – you know your clients and they know you so why shouldn’t they know each other? By directing them to social networks you’re giving your clients a chance to share their experiences with each other.

• Sharing – adding a “Share” button to your content opens up opportunities for new leads. Use your existing clients to acquire new ones.

• Connect with your clients – using social networks is the best way to connect with your clients and give them the feeling that they can reach you if they have an issue.

Almost all the information on the internet is somehow connected to a social network. Using social networks alongside an email marketing system will take your internet marketing to a whole new level.

To sum things up

You can choose to see internet marketing as a job that you just have to get done, or you can make the best out of it and you might find that you also had some fun on the way. These five tools will make your job easier and more effective while taking your internet marketing to a whole new level
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Social Media Code

Social commerce has been the latest buzzword over the last few months. With Facebook testing its ‘Buy’ button and Twitter planning to follow suit; the social media platforms have turned serious about growing their share of their e-commerce pie.

As per current estimates, social commerce accounts for between 5 – 20% of sales for nearly 60% of all businesses that market themselves on social media. However this number is about to take a sharp upturn, with social commerce set to account for $30 billion in sales in the US alone, by next year according to Booz & Company.

Social media has been all about reaching out to users, engaging with them and having conversations with them. But the bottom line of every business is sales. How do we move beyond the likes, shares and retweets to getting people to actually buy from us?

Here’s what four of the smartest brands in the business have pulled off to secure their social media revenue streams.

1.  ‘Brick and Click’ goes social in-store

When one thinks of social commerce, it’s usually a combination of social media and the e-commerce arm of a brand. Very rarely is social commerce taken out of the digital context, a fact that is reaffirmed by the results of the Retail Touchpoints’ Social Commerce Survey. According to this report, “only 24% of retailers said they promoted their social presence in-store at the POS, and even fewer said they used in-store digital signage (21%).”

That’s a huge missed opportunity, as Nordstrom has demonstrated very masterfully.

Nordstrom’s Pinterest Integration

Catching on to the fact that Pinterest is a fabulous social network for retail curation and user wishlists, Nordstrom started highlighting items that were popular on Pinterest with a “Popular on Pinterest” tag on the physical item in stores.

Launched as a pilot activity in January 2013, the experiment has been so successful that today every Nordstrom outlet across the US showcases its most popular items on Pinterest with a ‘Top Pinned’ section inside physical stores. Shop assistants are equipped with an in-house iPad app that shows trending items for the day and helps them tag these items appropriately in-store.

 2. Social-based mass media campaigns

Social integration and multi-channel marketing for most brands is equivalent to posting their TV commercials on Facebook and YouTube or creating hashtags with their campaign line on Twitter and promoting it using paid advertising for a while. Smart multi-channel campaigns make every channel an integral part of every user experience.

The core campaign idea does not belong to just one platform. Instead each platform works as a key piece in the overall puzzle, thus making every platform contribute to the company’s bottom line in equal measure. Using project management and collaboration tools like WorkZone or Asana is a great way of keeping track of all the various channels and their interdependencies in such campaigns. Still confused? Read on.

Coca Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign

Coke started the first step of its campaign with product personalization. For the first time in history, 250 of the most popular first names in each country were shortlisted and printed on the iconic red and white Coke labels, instead of the Coke logo. Coke then used mass media channels like television, outdoors and radio to communicate to users that their favorite drink just might have their name on it. Each bottle also carried a hashtag #ShareACoke to remind users to post pictures of their personalized Coke bottles on social media using the hashtag.

The experience of seeing one’s own name on Coke bottles was so novel and addictive that people actually paid premium prices just to lay their hands on their ‘own’ bottles of Coke and shared them on social media like wildfire. Images of Coke bottles shared on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with the #ShareACoke hashtag were then plastered across digital billboards, across the country.

Coke also created a microsite – www.shareacoke.com – where users could go and create virtual Coke bottles with the names of their friends and family on them to be shared on social media. The results? Millions of pictures posted on social media, thousands of virtual Coke cans shared online, nearly three times as many Coke bottles sold in the UK as compared to Pepsi during the campaign period!

 3. Social first, retail next

Most businesses look at social media a cheap and must-have marketing tool. However, some enterprising businesses, use social media not just as a marketing platform but as the online home for their business. These businesses are set up, operated, promoted and serviced wholly through social media. Many of these businesses eventually step out of their social media ‘stores’ and set up e-commerce stores online or physical outlets offline.

Lolly Wolly Doodle

A clothing brand targeted at women and little girls, Lolly Wolly Doodle did away with complicated websites with laborious navigation to make their whole business model simple as pie. See a pattern you like? Comment on the post with the size you want, any personalization needs and your email ID. Voila, fastest fingers first and you bought the item! Lolly Wolly Doodle leverages the most fundamental aspect of social media – one on one connections with users. It offered its fans on Facebook a chance to design their own clothing and delivered the bespoke products to users’ doorsteps all through their Facebook brand page.

The popularity of this custom designed clothing brand soared to such heights that they went from a home based business to exactly $11 million in sales in 2013, and founder Brandi Temple was featured on the cover of Inc. magazine’s June 2014 edition. To top it all, AOL founder Steve Case invested $20 million into the company in 2013.

4. Location based marketing

SoLoMo has been the catchphrase for digital marketers for a while now. One of the forerunners of the SoLoMo craze has been Foursquare that combines each aspect of the social-local-mobile mantra beautifully. Brick and mortar retailers can tap into this fantastic piece of social media to drive footfalls to their retail stores by tracking user check-ins on Foursquare and offering location specific and time bound deals.

Starbucks and Foursquare

As early as 2010, Starbucks tried its hand at social commerce by making Foursquare users unlock ‘Mayor’ badges (this happens by sharing more and more on Foursquare and earning incrementally higher points) which would offer them a $1 discount on a Frappucino purchase made at Starbucks outlets.

While this was a one-off campaign, Starbucks offers users rewards for checking in at their local Starbucks outlets and adding tips about what makes these outlets a must-visit.

Viral Content Marketing Tactic

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It was a grey, cold and dreary day when I flew into London. It had been a long flight. I was tired and needed to shower because 20 hours of plane travel was pushing the boundaries for other humans within adjacent nostril range!

But I needed to check traffic and approve comments on my blog, as a blogger’s journey requires keeping up with the daily tasks, habits and rituals of online publishing. Being always on in a connected 24/7 world is often relentless.

It was a surprise to find when I checked my traffic that the blog post I had published 24 hours earlier had “gone”viral”. The article was titled, “30 Things You Should Not Share On Social Media“. It received over 122,000 views, was retweeted over 6,000 times and was shared on Facebook over 3,500 times.

A week later I posted it’s positive alternative, “20 Things you Should Share on Social Media“. The question in the back of my mind was”Would it receive the same viral traffic?”

The simple analysis after posting revealed that the positive version received only 16,000 views. Good but not great. And there lies a lesson that I have not forgotten.

Negative headlines work!

That was my first experience of viral content on my blog.

So what is viral content marketing?

Viral content marketing is often seen as “the” Holy Grail for marketers. It’s exciting as the views go into the millions and it often gets picked up by the mass media channels. It’s content marketing on steroids.

The term “viral” stems from the concept of an idea (content) infecting a user who then spreads it to another. The social web makes this process easier than ever before with sharing buttons now being ever present on blogs, articles and content.

Exploding viral content has some common characteristics that often are the driving forces behind capturing global attention online at speed. This doesn’t mean that they always include all these elements but they do need some to supercharge the online sharing.

Here are some of the key elements for fast viral content.

• Humorous
• Surprising
• Short
• Attracts mass media attention
• Picked up by online influencers with large social networks
• A YouTube Video or an image that can be quickly viewed and shared

One example is the Ellen DeGeneres “selfie” taken at the Oscars.

But populist viral mythology says that success should be all about “fast” viral.  It’s considered a “home run” where you hit it out of the park! That reality is that the fast viral event almost never happens and if it does it’s more good luck than good management. It’s rare.

But there is another type of viral traffic it’s called “slow viral”. Viral content marketing can be successful even if it spreads more slowly. It’s also easier to predict its success but it takes time and effort to execute.

What is slow viral content?

Slow viral content is often forgotten. It not as exciting as the “selfies” and the viral YouTube videos phenomenons.

It is typically characterised by some of these elements.

• Long form – Typically 1,000 words plus (and often is 2,000-3,000 words in length)
• Evergreen content – It doesn’t date very easily and is often relevant years after it is published. It has endurance.
• Educational – It often is an in depth guide
• Include a large numbers of tips in a list format

One example is a blog post I created..It was titled “The Ultimate Guide on How to Get More Blog Traffic“. It’s not 1,000 or even 2,000 words but over 3,000 words in length.

Some of the bloggers that include this type of content on a regular basis include:

• Tim Ferriss on his FourhourworkWeek.com blog
• Neil Patel with his Quick Sprout Blog
• Buffer Blog

Take the time to look at this type of slow burning viral content and how it is done.

Why is this content important?

So why should you be creating this type of content? Here are some tips and insights into why.

• It builds inbound links organically as people link from their websites and blogs to the “resource”. Shorter posts typically aren’t linked to as much but are read, discarded and forgotten
• It positions you as an authority. An in depth article (post) tells your reader you know what you are talking about.
• It builds online trust and credibility
• It can help position your brand as the “go to portal” and resource for your industry and niche
• It improves long tail and SEO performance. Long tail search results are phrases that don’t have large keyword search volume but they are easier to rank high because there is less competition.

So what evidence is there for long form content performance for ranking high in search engines?

Serpiq.com decided to do some analysis on the top 10 search results for twenty thousand keywords and phrases. It showed that the average content length for the top 10 results (page one on Google) was at least 2,000 words.

So just putting out 500-700 word articles all the time is not going to be an optimal tactic. Long form content is something that you will need to seriously consider in your viral content

Social Media Images: The absolute Everything Guide

We usually digest visual information better than text-based content. We can make use of this when optimizing our social media marketing campaigns to give ourselves an edge over competitors who push out written content via social media.

When it comes to social media, there is no denying the fact that the images we use in our content can have a huge impact on how the content is perceived by the community. See #3, #7, #3, all of which emphasize the same thing.

Whether you are a social media expert, or a newbie in charge of managing content, you will always have to double-check the height and width of every image you post on your favourite channels. Making sure these images look good in all possible formats is a time-consuming and frustrating process, especially since the content is accessible from a variety of devices. Today we’ll show you how to tackle this issue.

In this post we will take a look at some of the most popular social media sites, and give you all the information you need on selecting the best sizes and dimensions for the images that you want to use there. I’ll also try to cover various tips for optimizing these images for your brand strategy and improving CTR.

Interested in tips for a certain social network? Jump right there. Below is the ultimate guide to using images in social media.

      

Facebook Images Size Guide

Cover photos on Facebook are prime real estate for showcasing your brand. I’ve seen some creative ways in which individuals and brands makes use of this space. The official recommendation is to use an image 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall.

Profile photos

are advised to be 180×180 images which will be displayed as a 160×160.

Twitter Images Size Guide

Twitter allows us to use post images as long as they’re hosted on pic.twitter.com and are shown inline on users’ feeds. They’ve also just announced their support for GIFs, which is a great way to engage with your audience. There are many ways to do this, and we’ll take a look at some of them in the tips and tricks section.

Google+ Images Size Guide

You can use animated GIFs on G+, which is awesome. And they’re not just limited to post images—you can use them in you cover pics or as your profile pic. Use the PSD file from hughbriss.com as a starting point for your cover pic.

Pro Tip:

If you’re an active G+ user, you’ll love this Chrome plugin by Paul Spoerry, that allows you to add text formatting to your G+ posts.

LinkedIn Images Size Guide

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 300 million members. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is one of the most essential social networking platforms to generate leads.

LinkedIn does not play nice with long visuals like infographics, which anyone can easily create using our infographics templates. So I would recommend using a small portion of the infographic for your LinkedIn update instead of posting the whole thing.

Also, company posts on LinkedIn have the option of a custom photo, so you don’t have to use the one LinkedIn pulls in automatically.

YouTube Images Size Guide

Six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. That’s almost an hour for every person on Earth! Statistics like that make YouTube the go-to place for video content.

Instagram Images Size Guide

Instagram, one of the top photo sharing social networks, is becoming quite popular with small businesses. It’s helping them drive sales and develop their brand. If you have a business that sells an item that can photograph well, then by all means look at Instagram as a potential marketing channel.

Pinterest Images Size Guide

This social networking site with a virtual pinboard interface is certainly picking up steam, and is a great marketing channel, particularly among women. This gives Pinterest an edge over the others, especially if your target audience is largely female.

There are two main ways for images to appear in Pinterest. The first is as a pin on the pinboard, and the second is an image that is opened when the pin is clicked.

Tips and Tricks for using Images in Social Media

Now that we’ve seen which sizes to go for on some of the most popular social networking sites, let’s take a look at some tools and tricks we can use to make sure the content looks awesome.

1. Images: There are quite a few stock photo sites out there, and it’s a good idea to browse through a few of them to find the perfect image to goes along with the content you publish.

2. Personalize: Don’t use the stock image as-is. Add some color, badges, personalized text or other CTA to get more people interested in your visuals. You don’t need Photoshop to do all that—freeware tools like Paint.NET, fotor or PicMonkey can be used effectively to do a lot of image customization.

Two of my favorite tools for customizing and personalizing images are Recite and Canva. There are also a lot of online tools that can help, like those from Internet Marketing Ninjas, Autre planète, and Timeline Slicer.

3. Use images in creative ways: Some interesting tactics I’ve seen include using images with a poll and cutting out answers, as shown below. (This works on the Twitter app and Twitter home feed.)

You can also use the ability to include up to four photos in a tweet. This is available on both the iPhone and Android App, and should be coming to the web app soon.