Tag: Quick Digital

The key to deliverability and the importance of a successful email marketing campaign

The key to deliverability and the importance of a successful email marketing campaign by Tom Corbett.  Available from <http://www.fourthsource.com/email-marketing/key-deliverability-importance-successful-email-marketing-campaign-21495>. [October 19, 2016]

In the marketing industry today, it is not enough to simply have great email content. Marketers need to ensure it reaches the right inboxes at the right time. Tom Corbett, Experian, offers a guide to getting the most out of email deliverability.

The most powerful tool of a marketer is email marketing. Both highly measurable and capable of producing impressive ROI, it is not uncommon to hear people boast about high deliverability as one of these metrics that truly matter.

But what does ‘deliverability’ actually mean? Statistics suggest that 1 in every 5 emails fail to land in the inbox which means 20% of opportunities to connect with customers are regularly being missed.

Deliverability

Marketers are often (incorrectly) under the assumption that a measurement of their deliverability is simply the proportion of emails that were ‘accepted’. An email is considered to be delivered if it does not bounce or doesn’t get returned to the mail server. Delivery rate is a calculation of mail sent minus the volume that bounced. But to really be able to consider campaigns to be successful, marketers need to ensure that what they’re sending is not becoming stuck in spam – or ignored. Overall, deliverability is making sure you are doing what you can to put yourself in the best position to be actually seen by your subscribers. Taking this into account, it is important to understand exactly what happens after you click send and to understand what has happened when it doesn’t go to plan.

All Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have developed different filtering methods as a way of offering unique customer inbox experiences. They all offer a form of global level blocking which makes a big difference in the world of email spam.

Spam is often a word that is synonymous with annoying people. It is universally hated, and marketers shouldn’t be sending it because, quite simply, no-one likes receiving irrelevant mail.

However, not only is it annoying and damaging to the customer experience on an individual level, it is also potentially quite dangerous, because not all spam is the result of ‘innocent’ unsophisticated marketing.

Spam and blocking

70 per cent of mail sent globally is considered spam and these filters drastically reduce the volume coming to an inbox. However, the interpretation of spam differs from person to person, hence the saying ‘one person’s spam is another man’s ham’. As a result, local level blocking has given the recipient the power to take control of their inbox.

Make the grade: Be wanted

What is becoming increasingly important is humanisation in email communication; making your email wanted is the key to a successful mail programme.

With the recent update of Google’s Gmail Android app, customers were given greater control of their mailbox on their personal devices. Blocking a sender means all future mailings are instantly moved to the spam folder.

It is essential to ensure that your participants actually want to receive your messages. Personalisation and relevance are crucial. There is nothing to lose. By putting your consumer at the centre of your marketing strategy, you’re providing a more relevant and positive customer experience, which will reap the rewards in receiving both their time and attention.

The key to deliverability and the importance of a successful email marketing campaign by Tom Corbett.  Available from <http://www.fourthsource.com/email-marketing/key-deliverability-importance-successful-email-marketing-campaign-21495>. [October 19, 2016]

Get sophisticated! Top tips to take your email marketing to the next level

Get sophisticated! Top tips to take your email marketing to the next level by Jenna Tiffany.  Available from <http://www.fourthsource.com/email-marketing/get-sophisticated-top-tips-take-email-marketing-next-level-21516>. [October 25, 2016]

Your marketing strategy might be delivering results today but if you’re not planning for the future and the possibility of potential disruptors shaking up your industry, you could be putting your business at risk of failing, and losing out to other players in the market that are ahead of the curve. Comet, Woolworth’s and Blockbuster have something in common – they closed down because they failed to adapt to customer expectations and adapt to modern day times. Blockbuster didn’t invest in digital and fell behind when the likes of Netflix came on the scene. Many customers were dissatisfied with Blockbuster failing to understand their needs including their return and late fee policies. Companies such as Netflix came along and addressed the issues consumers faced when it came to renting films. You must identify what areas of your marketing strategy are working and the areas that need improving. If you don’t, another company could come along at any moment and take your customers. 

Almost 90 per cent of adults regularly use the internet, according to the Office for National Statistics, and this change in consumer behaviour means marketers need to adapt to reflect consumer’s daily habits. People expect a real-time, personalised experience and companies such as Amazon are constantly raising the bar for what is expected, especially with the recent launch of Amazon Dash. Technology is enabling personalisation that cuts through the noise when so many brands continue to send mass market messages.

The way people consume and filter emails is changing in response to consumer expectations. Year on year email sends are increasing by 28 per cent, according to our recent Benchmark Report. The inbox is getting busier, so your emails need to stand out amongst your competitors to engage current and future customers.

For many businesses, their email marketing is basic or, more worryingly, non-existent. Email is one of the biggest drivers of ROI in the marketing mix and as a result it can’t be ignored. Personalisation is very important for engagement, but many brands are failing to implement a tailored approach with their email marketing strategy. We know that emails with personalisation get opened 23% more than emails with none. Further to this, emails with multiple pieces of personalisation get opened 31% more than those with one. You can’t deny the power of personalisation!

It’s important to understand that challenges and limitations exist around developing a more strategic approach to email marketing. Data is the greatest challenge to email marketers, closely followed by ‘limited internal resource’, according to the DMA. Having a framework in place to map-out your journey to sophistication can help you to deal with these challenges and provide a timeline for success.

Adapting your email marketing strategy to increase sophistication could place you steps ahead of your competition. But, where do you start? Our sophistication scale and supporting guide can help you out:

  1. Where are you now and where do you want to be?

How much ROI is your email marketing strategy delivering? 54% of TFM attendees this year didn’t know the ROI of their strategy! Identify how effective your email marketing strategy is and the results you are generating at present. Is it what you thought? If not, are you lacking key elements such as personalisation and sending emails for the sake of it with no considered plan or strategy? Once you know where you sit, you can identify your ambitions and define your next steps.

  1. Engage your stakeholders from the start

When altering your email marketing strategy, you may find that you need to change some mind-sets within your business, such as an approach of ‘blasting out’ as many emails as possible. Getting buy-in from all stakeholders at the very beginning will mean you can set strong foundations for the new strategy from the get-go.

  1. Identify your goals and objectives

Determining your email strategy from the start is really important. Map out your goals, analyse your performance in terms of what works well, identify opportunities and areas for improvement and set goals and objectives so you have something to strive for.

  1. Place your customers at the heart of your strategy

Your customers (whether they’re prospective or current) should always sit at the centre of your email marketing strategy. Before you put your email marketing strategy in place, stop and think about what the benefit is for your recipient. Consider how your email journey adds value to your customer’s experience with your brand, service and product. If it’s not delivering the experience consumers expect and require, change it to reflect your customer’s needs.

  1. Analyse and evaluate

Regularly ask yourself what’s working really well and what could be improved? Benchmark your performance against competitors in the industry to see where the opportunities are and to ensure you are always applying context to your activity.

Get sophisticated! Top tips to take your email marketing to the next level by Jenna Tiffany.  Available from <http://www.fourthsource.com/email-marketing/get-sophisticated-top-tips-take-email-marketing-next-level-21516>. [October 25, 2016]

Download Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors

Download Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors Posted by  

The Internet undoubtedly is the best place to stay updated with the latest news and information, to connect with old friends or making new. And not to be surprised, the benefits of the internet are now enticing the senior citizens also. Latest researches and surveys show that there is a significant increase in the number of senior internet adopters lately, over 80% of older adults now have a smartphone. May it be the online shopping, banking, reading news and updates or dating, seniors are the new technology hopefuls.

There are however two types of senior internet users, one who want to play safe and remain in the shallow end of the internet and the other category includes the seniors who are largely connected to the latest gadgets and the digital world and want to dig deep into the internet and its benefits.

While it is certainly good to see the seniors getting into the internet, it is also worrisome when it is about their online safety. The internet sure is a bliss but can turn into a curse if you are not careful with your privacy settings. While it can never be 100% safe but we can certainly minimize the risk by being watchful. If you are one of those new internet adopters or if you have some seniors in your family who are new to the internet, download this Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors for them

Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors

Written in simple and readable English, this guide includes almost every aspect of internet safety. Also, the guide gives simple and effective tips to stay away from the phishing email attacks, cyber bullying, and spammers. This Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors also highlights the ways seniors use the internet and the kind of risks linked. Detailed information about online banking, social networking and dating etc.

There is also a detailed explanation of Identity Theft and the protection against it. You can also learn how to monitor and manage your online finance account without getting into any risk. Charity Scams is another very important topic covered in this safety guide.

Safe Social Networking

Social networking is the best way to stay connected with your old friends worldwide, to make the new ones and to stay in touch with your family living far away. Facebook is one of the most popularly used social networking websites today with all age group users.

Adjust your privacy settings- you can use it to share your pictures, videos, locations with your friends and relatives worldwide and the Facebook messenger lets you chat or have a video call with your loved ones. But the fact is, the more you open up, higher is the risk. While Facebook has its own privacy settings, you always have to adjust those settings to stay safe. Adjust your settings and limit your audience on Facebook. Make sure you know what you are doing. With a few changes in your settings, you can restrict access to your pictures, locations and other personal details on Facebook.

Strong passwords– intruders are everywhere and only strong passwords can keep your online account and other details safe. May it be your email id or an account on some social networking website, strong and unique passwords are very important to stay safe.

Always report the issues- report the cyberbullying issues if any. If ever you get a threatening or harassing message on any of your social networking account or email, no need to react or respond, just report the issue immediately and stay safe.

Beware of spam– You may get an email asking for your contact details to win some hundred thousand US dollars, a link to get wonder weight loss medicine or a link masked with some hot and sexy girl’s profile, think twice before you click on any link. Such links masked with attractive text are often dangerous. Beware of the spam and phishing mail attacks and make sure you know what you are clicking.

Health and well-being

Seniors often use the internet to solve their queries of health and medical issues. There are thousands of websites offering free medical help and suggestions but not all of them are legitimated and trustworthy. This Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors helps you understand which websites to visit for medical help. Also, you get to know about tips on dealing with Medicare, Social Security, and the IRS. TurboTax.com and IRS.gov are two recommended websites for seniors to deal with their Medicare issues.

The guide also enlists the risk associated with the online taxation, scams, and protection against it and the legitimate software and websites to file your taxes. The guide also includes the official contact details of Medicare.

Furthermore, the guide also shows the important reference links off government websites, legitimate health, fitness and food websites, links to support pages of popular web portals like Yahoo, Google, AOI and links to adjust your spam filter settings.

Overall, this Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors by ConnectSafely.Org is one stop for all your queries and doubts regarding the internet and its usage.

Download Online Safety Tips Guide for Seniors Posted by  

How SMBs Can Deploy Hybrid Clouds Successfully

How SMBs Can Deploy Hybrid Clouds Successfully by Phil Goldstein.  Available from <http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2016/10/how-smbs-can-deploy-hybrid-clouds-successfully> [October 17, 2016]

More small businesses are embracing hybrid cloud environments. These tips can help make those migrations smoother.

Small and medium-sized businesses are turning to hybrid clouds — mixtures of public clouds like Microsoft Azure and private, on-premises cloud infrastructure — but doing so isn’t always a simple task.

How can SMBs make hybrid cloud deployments easier? A recently published book from analysts at the Hurwitz Group, Hybrid Cloud for Dummies, dives into the best practices for businesses looking to deploy hybrid clouds.

How Hybrid Clouds Are Used

Carbonite, which offers cloud and hybrid backup software for small and medium-sized businesses, cited a survey earlier this year from cloud services provider RightScale. The firm surveyed 1,060 technical professionals (433 enterprise and 627 SMB respondents) and found that they are adopting more private cloud environments. When combined with existing public cloud deployments, that has led to a jump in SMB’s using hybrid environments.

RightScale found that private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent from 2015 to 2016, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

As ZDNet reports, the authors of Hybrid Cloud for Dummies — Judith Hurwitz, Marcia Kaufman, and Daniel Kirsch — observe that “there are a number of enabling technologies that have to be put in place in order to enable a hybrid cloud to operate to support changing business requirements.”

The authors note that companies might use in-house data centers to manage customer transactions, which are often connected to the public cloud, where the company has created customer-facing web-based and mobile interfaces to allow consumers to buy its products online.

Companies use public cloud services for a variety of tasks, the authors note. “The same company may use a third-party managed service that checks credit for anyone paying on an installment plan,” the authors write. “There may also be a series of public cloud-based applications that control customer service details. The company may need to use extra compute capabilities from a public cloud provider during peak holiday periods. In addition, the company will use a public cloud to experiment with prototype business models.”

Best Practices for Deploying Public Clouds

As ZDNet reports, the authors note that there are many best practices businesses should follow to make hybrid cloud deployments successful.

Integrate data. In terms of integration, IT leaders should not only integrate applications but also think through which services need data integration and which need processing in a hybrid environment. They add that firms need to integrate data across their own company and with partner data and public data sources, including social media data, third-party data and internal corporate data.

Store data locally. Companies also need to store and maintain data in on-premises facilities to meet regulatory requirements or potentially boost performance.

Gain operational visibility and management.  IT managers and administrators need to be able to see how all of their cloud services — both on-premises and in public clouds — are operating. To do so, the authors note, they need “a platform that’s able to discover the underlying services and infrastructure.”

Such a platform “must be able to monitor those services so there’s clear visibility and so the entire environment can be controlled in a predictable manner. This means being able to monitor and control not just internal services but those services that are owned and controlled by third-party public cloud vendors or managed services providers.”

Employ workload management tools. Businesses need to use such tools when relying on cloud computing and storage resources from both public and private clouds, the authors note. SMBs also need to ensure they have policies and rules in place to monitor cloud workloads and determine whether certain ones should be placed in public or private cloud environments.

Ensure security. Cybersecurity is always a concern and a necessity, especially in hybrid environments. “The increase in connection points adds a multitude of vulnerabilities to the applications and overall IT environment,” the authors say. “It is hard for many companies to keep abreast of changing security risks. Even the most experienced security expert is always playing catch up with the last security threats.”

As a result, according to ZDNet, the authors argue that companies should deploy a consistent and comprehensive security strategy, which may include “using a cloud-based development platform with built-in security services” that practically anyone on the IT team can use.

Use DevOps. IT teams need to manage the development and deployment of applications, whether they are in private or public clouds. The authors argue that companies need to have a “unified way to manage and synchronize applications and data” in hybrid environments. For example, companies should have a “single federated catalog and operations console for public and private” Platform as a Service deployments.

Flexibility to move apps. Finally, businesses need to have the freedom and agility to shift apps and services between public and private cloud environments as they see fit, something that is becoming easier thanks to containerization and microservices architectures.

“With emerging standards and open technologies, you become less dependent on one implementation of a cloud and gain interoperability no matter which vendor’s services you use,” the authors argue.

How SMBs Can Deploy Hybrid Clouds Successfully by Phil Goldstein.  Available from <http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article/2016/10/how-smbs-can-deploy-hybrid-clouds-successfully> [October 17, 2016]

5 powerful SEO tips to stay ahead of your competition

5 powerful SEO tips to stay ahead of your competition by Sonal Mishra.  Available from <https://yourstory.com/2016/10/seo-tips-beat-competition/> [October 18, 2016]

SEO can easily be assumed as one of the most competitive domains available today. Even if you are a big organization with enough money to burn on marketing and online promotions, staying ahead and sustaining yourself in the current eco-system can be a tad challenging.

Fortunately, it is not tough to decipher the paradigm of SEO. SEO is dynamic, but once you start getting a hang of it, all you need is an effective strategy to stay ahead of the curve and emerge victorious. So dive in and beat your competitors at their game with the help of these tips:

Know the other side of the bush

The first step in order to reach anywhere in this race is to study your competition thoroughly. You need to know the tactics they employ and the strategies they swear by. Take a deep analytical look at their on-site SEO. Pay attention to how their overall SEO activity looks. Has your competitor made a major change in their strategy recently? Be on the lookout for that. Rather, have a dedicated person in your team to do that.

Also, keep an eye on what they are not doing. For instance, SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer will show you how your company stacks up against others. Look at where your competitors are not listed and leverage on those spots. Imagine your top 10 competitors are having more than 100 pages of quality content and 10,000 high authority backlinks. How long would you need to reach that benchmark? Perhaps you need more time to tank your business if it’s just entering the eco-system. Ranking keywords, increasing referral traffic, reducing bounce rate and creating high quality content is a part of the SEO.

Content is the King

Your content can make or break the overall existence of your online business. No matter how much you deny it, content is still the KING, and it is here to stay. Websites like Inch, Forbes, and even YourStory for that matter, get thousands of article submission requests every day, but only high-quality articles are published. The math is simple: the better the quality, the better are the chances of getting tanked on popular search engines. You need to be consistent with content quality. Make sure it is relevant to your site or business. It is highly advised to utilise other mediums, such as videos, podcasts, and infographics, to make your content look more attractive to your target audience. This will instantly boost your SEO ranking.

The idea is to churn out fresh content on a regular basis. The engines have to keep moving – if they become stagnant, your competitors will get an edge over you. In the internet-savvy world of today, when we eat and breathe social media, make your content crafty and creative enough that it has the potential to go viral. One such move and you are right on the map.

Monitor backlinks

Link Mining is an important backlink strategy whereby you see backlinks of your competitors, get in touch with the owner of these websites and put up a review or a guest post of your own. You should maintain a constant log of your company’s backlinks. You can shield yourself from any impending negative SEO attacks and ensure that all the links that lead to your website are relevant sources. Keep an eye out for your competitor’s link strategy. Tools like MajesticSEO can be used for assistance.

Keyword selection is the key

Your keyword selection and execution is the key to unlocking the success. If you have targeted a few keywords and they aren’t doing much to your business’ revenue or traffic, chances are that your current selection is totally wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to rely on top-ranking keywords. If you find a combo that’s landing in the top spot, don’t assume that’ll help your business as well. You need to focus on search queries that yield the highest traffic for businesses in your category and industry.

Tools like Google Analytics help you monitor different keyword combinations and their related traffic correlations, while tools like Open Site Explorer can help you remain in the limelight.

SEO is an organic domain that changes and evolves by the day. Stay current and have the courage to try new trends as they emerge. Explore the unexplored and you will tend to grow as a company and manage to beat the competition, too. Create an SEO strategy that is ironclad with consistent commitment to your content, competitor research, on-site metrics and current news. Combine the real world results and the future trends to attain high rankings.

5 powerful SEO tips to stay ahead of your competition by Sonal Mishra.  Available from <https://yourstory.com/2016/10/seo-tips-beat-competition/> [October 18, 2016]