Ian Dyer - Bayshore Solutions Vice President
By: Ian Dyer – Bayshore Solutions Management Team
Kind of sad, last day in the big apple… but I need to get home in time for my Gators take the court at 10 pm tonight – it’s going to be a great day! Krista found an awesome little deli located just down the road from our Hotel for Breakfast. Hot coffee, Smoked Salmon on a toasted Everything Bagel – boom! Let’s do this!
Ready for my first session of the day – ‘Email can drive Search, Social, and Mobile!’
Sundeep Kapur – Digital Evangelist NCR Corporation
Sundeep pointed us to his blog and referenced much of this content through his presentation… check it out here: http://www.emailyogi.com I’ve listed 10 best practices to follow for every email marketer. Try to include these as part of your strategy and keep integrating email, mobile, and social as your digital interactive channels.
1 – I will redo my Welcome messaging - by creating a compelling must have message that engages the consumer from day one. I will make sure that this message is updated regularly and will include real consumer input as part of this message.
2 – I will create transactional triggers – think about specific messages for specific transactions. Create these messages and automate the sending process. Review your results weekly.
3 – I will work hard on growing my digital list – you need to set realistic goals and involve your team in growing your email, mobile, & social media lists across all channels. Remember the transactional triggers – enable them for your non-web channels as well.
4 – I will watch the frequency of my campaigns – so as not to startle, or numb the recipient from the excessive barrage (or the out of the blue email) of messaging. You can make this effective by tracking your open rates per consumer across multiple campaigns and not just one.
5 – I will keep surveying the consumer - include a survey link in every email to solicit recipient opinion. Leverage other channels into collecting user preferences. Think hard about the questions too – don’t use the survey to score how well you are doing. Use the survey to connect with the recipient.
6 – I will survey the non-buyer – reach out to people that don’t buy from you and try to get their opinion. Make them a priority – you will learn something good about your program, get an opportunity to try new things on people that don’t seem to respond, & perhaps convert someone.
7 – I will test before I launch – test each campaign before you put it out. Have three types of tests – first – a sanity test on what the campaign should do, second involve your team to see what they think will work (and let them find errors), third – test it out on a sub-section of your recipients before you send it out to your entire list.
8 – I will work on subject lines – these drive open rates and engagement. A good subject line can also be leveraged into Facebook or Twitter. Take some time to come up with them rather than just slapping them on last minute. In fact, set a goal to solicit subject lines from your peers and narrow them down with testing.
9 – I will integrate social media into my email. Social media is an effective way to engage the consumer. Integrating social into your email will help you build relationships, increase engagement, & drive some very powerful results.
10 – I will create an inner circle! Try your best to engage your best consumers into an inner circle. An interactive dialogue with them will provide effective guidance for your marketing program.
After all, marketing is all about creating interactive conversations.
Jeanniey Mullen – CMO Zinio (world’s largest digital newsstand with 50% audience outside of US)
Five things you should be doing
- Aligning with larger efforts/themes (think goal of company no shorter than 90 days in advance)
- Rebuilding the workflow to include mobile (changes every 9 months dramatically, expected to continue through 2018 at this fast pace)
- Integrating ways to make your email more useful
- Sending email to those who want email
- Creating a content calendar
Check out this tool – Visual.ly- it creates an infographic on your brands social experience (for FREE)
- Do this for your next client report… amazingly vivid opportunity
Woorank – good SEO tool (analyzes your entire website), analyzes the content and the keywords you are using
Next Session – In-House vs. (and partnering with) Agencies
It’s all about the partnership
- Agencies goal should be to make the internal Marketing group “shine”
- Speaker went from agency to client side and felt the In-House is much more tactical, lacked edginess and ability to push people to their limits… agencies allow growth levels beyond traditional comfort zones and is typically the inspiration for the majority of us!
- Agencies are about idea-generation, when the ideas stop so do the budgets
- The most typical difficulty that in-house marketers experience is bureaucracy and IT, agencies must appreciate this and build bridges where possible
Enterprise Link Building
Based on risk, cost, scale
- Make these tools part of your daily repertoires: MajesticSEO, Open Site Explorer, Google WebMasterTools
- Export your links
- Sort by rank (page rank, moz rank…)
- Sort by anchor text
- Have google alerts and make this a normal practice
- Blog Outreach – The New PR (for Enterprise Clients)
- Most says yes
- Get link(s) with the exact anchor you want
- Get link(s) to the exact url you want
- Build links by the masses
- Infographics
- Interactive Infographics (w/ HTML5 and/or JS) checkout
- Pinterest – easy to get into and really hot at this time (how to, diy, etc) … all pinterest is do-follow
- Google “hates” Twitter and Facebook, they love Google+ (lot of do-follow)… spend your time here
Lee Moore – with IBM concluded the sessions speaking to his challenges within a Fortune 500 business
- Link building is not easy the bigger the company you are…
- 5 common link building failures and how to correct:
- Email for links
- Wrong way – send out 3k emails, 1k no responses, 995 want money, 5 want link to homepage
- Right way – find some specific active sites/bloggers, join conversation, build relationship (give it to a blogger before it goes “public”)… offer something, than ask for a link
- Press Releases
- Every time PR sends out a message; it needs to be viewed as link bait.
- Links to ibm.com or investor relations is not success; unless you sell stock.
- Business Partners
- They link to you (a plus), if they link to a product they use or support (plus plus)
- Media Buy
- Spend $$ to distribute content; rarely will they link back, result is they rank for your content. Secret – make them link back or place link in asset
- Social Media
- Agency starts conversation, but are not experts to manage the conversation
- Email for links
Heading to the airport on another fun cab ride (albeit I’m feeling a little nauseous from the stop, go, jerk left, jerk right, avoid crash here and there) … here we come Tampa – look forward to being home… c’mon Gators!
Ian Dyer is a Vice President at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.