Month: September 2020

This year, more than 300 billion emails have been sent and received each day, and sometimes it seems every one of them went through my inbox. The flood is unprecedented, annoying, overwhelming—but it may also be the simplest and most effective way for today’s businesses to communicate.

Email marketing and newsletter distribution are great assets because they can be personal, direct, inexpensive and, when executed right, hit the nail on the head with data, news and utility. The test of success is easy: are they read? To be read, they have to earn their keep, which is what a good campaign does.

The data shows that a carefully built email plan is worth the effort. The average ROI is $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing. Such campaigns are the primary customer acquisition channel for 80 percent of small businesses, and equally successful in customer retention.

With office buildings empty now and few handshake opportunities to meet customers and prospects, maintaining and building relationships poses a new challenge. Email newsletters allow us to close the gap, listen to feedback and extend a hand across the gap in our COVID lives.

Here’s a quick guide to fruitful email marketing:

• Choose your player: Web design platforms such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, Sendinblue and ActiveCampaign allow for beginners and experts alike to develop their email campaigns through style guides, sample templates, contact list building and newsletter distribution. These platforms guide users through a seamless process and build a content history, allowing your team to effortlessly access design ideas, campaign performance, reporting and monitoring.
• It’s all about who: The bottom line is this: everyone you know, have done business with and want to do business with should be part of your eNews network, which is the lifeblood of any enterprise. The “who” informs the content because an eNews should deliver value to them. Is the value ideas, detailed explanations or a bird’s-eye view? The list dictates the content. Keeping tabs on who’s reading the newsletter (and who’s not) allows you to tailor messaging to make sure words don’t fall into a void.
• Give, don’t sell: The purpose of a newsletter is to bring useful and fresh ideas that the reader can take in a sip or gulp. Think about what you know that others don’t and share your secret sauce. Yes, give away your best advice for free! Your newsletter should also include short behind-the-curtain looks at the organization, its values, people and customers offering industry insights, company milestones and social good activities.
• Commit to frequency: There’s a correlation between relevance and frequency. To stay top of mind, a monthly reminder is a minimum goal, and during COVID-19, many companies are upping frequency to address critical issues impacting business. An email campaign gives an in-house or a public relations team very few content limitations. Keep in mind that readers shouldn’t have to scroll down to get to the news. Brevity will be rewarded.
• Analyze impact: Platforms are going to provide the numbers for open rates, click-through, subscribers, the unsubscribe rate and bounce rates. Know your open rate. Try to make it better. Look at unsubscribers and examine, but don’t let it get you down. Sometimes we all need to clean up our inboxes and start fresh. Most important – is the newsletter generating any referrals, conversions or traffic to the website? Click here to view Mailchimp’s recorded average open rates per industry.

Value means connection and connection is success. Connection is what we do. Give us a call if you need help creating an eNewsletter that enriches your network and avoids the ominous spam folder.

Every savvy business leader knows that in this time of intentional distancing, social media is the best tool to bring the customer base closer. But the new stars of communication — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest — can only bridge the gap if it’s a two-way street. In social media terms, that means engagement.

The simplest test to finding out how engaged we are on social media is to check how many likes, followers and shared posts your business has today. Then, look back and see how much growth you’ve had since you started your profiles.

You don’t have to be an expert in Twitter feed analysis and YouTube audience retention. A busy leader needs somebody they can ask every week, because these numbers hit the bottom line of communications. There’s no trick to interpreting the results. If your team is following 100 media sources and nobody is following you, you’re invisible.

If sales are slipping, action is required. If your social media campaign isn’t working in the time of COVID, it’s a reputation emergency. Here’s what the team needs to do and fast:

• Focus on your audience and check out your competitor’s profiles. Take time to research what your competition is doing and who follows them. If your Twitter or Instagram only has 50 followers, look at who others in the industry are following and build your audience. One strategy of growth we deploy is following 100 people on Twitter/Instagram daily and then unfollowing the accounts that didn’t follow back at the end of the week. Posting regularly, at least 3-5 times per week, will also keep your profile active and encourage your audience to engage.
• Optimize your profiles. Every aspect of your social media profile can adjust for better visibility. Much like the algorithms for Google, SEO tactics enhance social media. To optimize SEO on your channels, you’ll need a photo with an identifiable company logo, a bio that includes the company website and a keyword-rich description with a straightforward call to action.
• Time your posts. Social media users often believe their posts are seen by all of their followers when in reality the algorithm only shows your post to about 10% of your followers (or less). Post at slower times of the day to get on the right side of the algorithm and show up on your followers’ timelines. One misconception is that you should be posting when your followers are all online, but if you wait until non-peak hours to post, you are less likely to be inundated in the sea of posts that are going live at that time.
• Balance your content between promotional and useful information. Social media platforms should promote a business, but too many promotional posts can drive users away and leave a bad taste in their mouths. Users like to see posts that are useful to them like how-to’s, attention-grabbing articles and surveys. Use vivid imagery to accompany posts. Videos tend to drive up engagement by 20-30%. Twitter and Instagram’s polls allow the audience to directly engage.
• Interact and engage with your followers. One of the biggest misconceptions companies have when creating a social media page is that if they post some content, the engagement will come, which is often not the case. You will build rapport and accelerate customer trust if you “like” or retweet posts and respond to comments. The measure of social media success is more than audience size — it’s an engaged one.

OWC’s clients have seen tremendous growth in social media, doubling in followers, engagement and impressions within one quarter of the steady activity outlined above.

We develop a full report of what is working and what isn’t, what your competitors are doing and track improvement each month to ensure growth and successful engagement.

Give us a call, and we’ll help you analyze and strategize.