Leverage Your Personal Style for Improved Digital Marketing Content

Every trainer, consultant, and professional coach has their own style.  That style can run the gamut from academic to entertaining and anything in between.  Unfortunately, when digital marketing material is being compiled, much of the personality is sterilized to make communications sound “professional”. Personal style can and should co-exist with professional communications to make them more authentic and engaging.

Personal style can come across in any media but none are as obvious as video. The default presentation seems to be a talking head offering a tactic or strategy on a watered down topic in a very serious manner.  If that’s the presenter’s natural style, it can be pulled off but that’s often not a genuine delivery.

It’s advantageous to be yourself in digital marketing messages. Sit down or insert your own brand of humor in a video if that’s your natural style.  It’s OK to use your own sayings or analogies in your writing as long as it’s clearly described in an article.  Even the images that you use can help reflect and reinforce you or your firm’s style.

Leveraging your own style in digital marketing communications will be interpreted as more genuine and allows the audience to get a glimpse of who they could potentially work with.  While your style won’t sync up with everyone, at least it will attract the type of person more likely to buy from you.  And it will help differentiate your messages from the sterilized content that seems to be so prevalent.

Set Your Digital Marketing Priorities

Getting spread too thin is a common way for digital marketing performance to plummet.  For most trainers, consultant, and professional coaches, it’s unrealistic to have a marketing presence in all channels for all people. It’s critical that digital marketers set a marketing priority hierarchy so that top producing activities aren’t left undone.

The width (and maybe the breadth) of the digital marketing discipline is expanding.  However, it’s not uncommon to find that time and money dedicated to digital marketing activities are not expanding with it.  This means that digital marketers often experience a bandwidth issue in trying to leverage their available resources to communicate effectively on their chosen channels. 

The beginning of the year is a great time to review your campaigns from the year before.  Analyze which activities were most effective and place those at the top of your priorities for this year.  The lower ranked activities might still be worth doing but if time or resources grow thin, those can be targeted for elimination or postponement rather than sacrificing a more productive activity.

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Digital Marketing Technology Might be Smart but it has No Common Sense

Digital marketing technology continues to get more refined from year to year.  Sophisticated algorithms and stream lined tools help digital marketers cover more channels than they ever could in the past.  However, the sheer bandwidth that digital marketing allows a marketer to take on, often prevents them from reviewing how smart the technology really is.  Unfortunately, when an analysis is undertaken, it’s not uncommon for digital marketers to find that digital marketing technology is really smart about delivering on its intended purpose, but applies its capabilities without any common sense.

It’s no secret that this is the busiest time of year for retailers.  Retail digital marketers do extensive planning to set channels, calendars, and targets that all get executed between Thanksgiving (or before) and Christmas.  It’s also the best time of year to witness digital marketing systems under stress tests as they deliver these aggressive marketing strategies.

Here are two examples of “smart” technology behaving densely.

Email Overload

Every year, I buy a sampler pack of cigars for a family member.  In the last several years, I’ve bought this gift from the same retailer.  Like any good smart technology system, my purchases and preferences were saved to my profile and undoubtedly assigned to a particular communication plan. 

My assumption is that purchasing sampler packs assigned me to several marketing profiles because the individual products in those packs were all likely tagged separately to populate the companies CMS.  The result was that I received five emails from this company in about an hour.  Two of the offers contradicted one another and none of the offers could be used in conjunction.   

The obvious lack of common sense is sending that many emails in such a short time frame.  But even the purchasing proposition was absurd. I would need to make four separate purchases with separate shipping costs within a day to take advantage of the Calls to Action.

Ads for What I just Bought

Search engines and social media platforms allow marketers to pay for ads that are specifically served to people that have past buying behavior or profile setting indicating they are interested in a particular product or service.  It’s a brilliant way to use general demographic information to narrow down to an individual who likely wants a particular offer rather than making the ad available to a general population where the majority of the audience has no interest. That is, until the ad system misses critical information like recent purchases. 

Every gift I’ve bought online has had ads served up to me for at least a week after buying it.  In some cases, even the retailer I bought from continues to serve up ads as they are using a third party system or don’t include purchased items as a filter for removing ads Consumable items might make sense to continue advertising but most of my items are toys purchased for my children, nieces, or nephews. A smart system that tries to sell an item to someone who just bought it shows a real lack of common sense.

These systems will continue to improve. In the case of purchase history, there are already platforms that are leveraging completed buying data to stop serving ads for a period of time until the person is likely to need to buy it again.  No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, digital marketers need to review the processes carefully to identify these bone-headed gaps.  Even if a digital marketer doesn’t have an immediate solution to the problem, simply being aware of it can help you factor in the cost and counter-measures for the systems lack of common sense.

Digital Marketers Need to Have an Eye on Cyber Security

What good is a website that is constantly having outages? How useful is a hijacked social media account publishing questionable offers? What about an email marketing platform loaded with stolen email addresses blasting out SPAM?  Digital marketing channels infected with malware or compromised in some way not only undermine the time, energy, and money invested in that campaign, but it can also cause lasting damage to your company’s reputation.

Cyber security is a fast paced and technically complex topic.  Digital marketers will have a difficult time being experts on all the nuances involved.  However, they can be a first line of defense by proactively recognizing signs of trouble and raising a warning.

Diligence is key to preventing the worst aspects of a security breach in your digital marketing. Here are two examples of how we’ve correctly and incorrectly approached security breaches in digital marketing.

Diligent Behavior

Several years ago a client’s email marketing account more than doubled its contact list overnight. While they regularly added contacts, it was an uncommonly large import so we reviewed the contact information and found only email addresses with no contact info.  It was also uncommon for contacts to be added without at least a name in addition to the email address.

While we contacted the client to see if the names were legitimate, we also requested that the email platform put a hold on any scheduled emails until we verified the contacts.  It turned out that the account had been compromised from an employee traveling internationally and several SPAM emails were already loaded to be sent to the list from that account.  Thankfully we were able to re-secure the site and remove the contacts before any communications were delivered.

Lack of Diligent Behavior

Recently our site experienced several outages.  We investigated the problem, repaired it, and did some basic security steps like password resets. But we were not as diligent as we should have been.  After the third outage within a month and speaking with our web host on the technical details, we realized that there must be a malware infection.  That’s when we got fully committed to resolving the issue with a fresh installation of wordfence to review our WordPress site.

Wordfence found several compromised files and was able to remove those.  Thankfully that stabilized the site and we’ve had no recurrences of the problem.  Our issue was simple enough that it didn’t require a more in-depth or expensive repair process. However, our lack of diligence on our own site unnecessarily led to additional outages.

Cybersecurity isn’t often top of mind in digital marketing like anti-virus programs for computers or mobile devices. But servers and digital marketing accounts can be compromised just like any personal device.  Security plugins like wordfence, list reviews on email marketing platforms, and password management applications are valuable tools to prevent security breaches but they aren’t fool proof.  It’s important for digital marketers to keep an eye out for vulnerabilities. More importantly digital marketers need to raise a warning to any suspicious activity and be diligent in quickly and thoroughly resolving the problem so that it doesn’t undermine their marketing gains.

Email Delivery

Email Marketing Whitelisting Activities

If you find that your email marketing platform is not whitelisting your communications then it’s imperative to set a review process.  Reviews can largely be done by the digital marketer but having a few trusted recipients on your email marketing list from outside your company is a valuable resource so that they can report their own experience with your email deliverability.

Once you have a review process and core group of recipients there are three tiers of deliverability that you’ll want to cover.  Starting from the smallest to the largest (or easiest to hardest):

Individual

The individuals receiving your email can greatly help deliverability by adding you as a trusted sender.  Most email systems allow them to do that by simply adding your email address to their contact list.  Sending a periodic email or an automated email on sign-up asking recipients to save your email as a contact can help keep your communications out of their SPAM box.

Company or Organization

Any company or organization that has their own URL likely have administrative settings set up on the email service to block SPAM.  Server administrators for that organization can whitelist your email address on their servers to ensure its delivered to individual email addresses that they host.  The biggest challenge in getting an organization to whitelist your emails is identifying the most suitable person.  Sending a request to individuals within the organization even if it’s from a personal email to whitelist your emails is often the simplest way to find the server admin that can whitelist your email marketing address.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

This is the most technically complex and potentially most damaging category. ISPs monitor complaints and if your email address receives too many complaints (rightly or wrongly) ISPs might begin to block your email messages.  This can happen on ISP email platforms (gmail, outlook.com, yahoo, etc.) but it can also filter downstream to organization servers or individual settings that receive your IP address as a problem sender.

The best advice is to be proactive and only send marketing communications to those that opt-in.  It’s also beneficial to minimize bounced emails by removing bad addresses from your list. If you still find that your communications are being blocked then you’ll need to identify which ISPs are blocking your messages and contact that individual service. This list is a little dated but provides a thorough listing of ISPs.

It’s best to have a proactive monitoring process but sometimes deliverability problems pop up without warning.  Be sure to review any reports of deliverability problems which often come from loyal recipients inquiring on why they are no longer receiving emails.

Immediately take action on these problems as your reputation scores will get shared across servers.  That means if one ISP or server lists you as a problem sender then any small flag on other servers will block your emails. Ignoring small deliverability problems can easily snowball to more widespread deliverability problems as your IP or URL is blacklisted.

Whitelisting can be a complex issue to monitor and time consuming to resolve but email marketing that doesn’t reach it’s intended recipient is a waste of time, money, and energy.  If your email marketing service is not taking these steps on your behalf then it’s critical to monitor your deliverability to ensure that the communications you craft will actually be seen by your intended audience.

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Is Your Email Marketing Platform Whitelisting Your Emails . . . or Making it Your Responsibility?

Email marketing can only be as good as its deliverability.  Whitelisting is a process of verifying with ISP’s, organizations, and individuals that your emails are valid communications to keep them out of SPAM folders and easily visible for your recipients. However, some email marketing platforms handle whitelisting deliverability where others place that responsibility on the digital marketers running the email campaign. It’s important to evaluate where the whitelisting responsibility falls so that your email marketing delivery rates remain high.

The first obvious step in avoiding SPAM folders is to truly run a permission based email campaign with valuable content that honors unsubscribes and filters out bouncing or inactive email addresses.  It’s impossible to be whitelisted if your recipients don’t want or don’t value the communications that you are sending. If permission-based campaign criteria aren’t being met, then it’s only a matter of time until your deliverability suffers.

Assuming you are running a responsible campaign, the question of whether your email marketing platform handles whitelisting for you or not comes down to a technical question: Are emails being sent from their servers or from yours? Platforms that send from their own servers almost always have a team dedicated to monitoring and improving delivery rates.  In fact, they have to because if their deliverability is not high they don’t have a product to sell. Platforms that integrate or embed on your website are probably using your server to send email.  In that case, it’s likely that they are not doing any whitelisting activity to maintain your deliverability other than processes to ensure CAN-SPAM law compliance.

When selecting an email marketing platform, technical questions like which server is sending the email are often way down the list of criteria or not present on it at all.  Platforms tend to focus more on contact management or message templating features rather than the nuts and bolts.  However, this is a technical element that digital marketers need to address and understand. 

How would a digital marketer know how a platform handles email deliverability?  The simple answer is to ask before migrating to a platform.  Unfortunately, email marketing platforms that don’t offer whitelisting sometimes give unclear or misleading answers to the question.   So here is a couple flags to watch for that might suggest you will be responsible for doing your own email whitelisting:

  • Registrar updates – Any requests from the platform to update your website’s registrar settings is a strong indication that your server will be processing the email sends.
  • Email Installation – Any software or significant email client (like outlook) changes often signifies that the platform will link to your email client which will then process emails though your server.

So, if the platform you want to use requires setup like this it’s a strong indicator that you will need to be executing your own whitelisting activities.  Does that mean it’s best to avoid these platforms? Not necessarily.

Typically it’s more robust platforms that integrate with your site that will use your email server as well.  They aren’t setting it up this way to make digital marketers life more difficult but rather to consolidate their marketing automation that is integrating with databases, websites, and/or email services. While maintaining whitelisting activities will take time and effort, the automation tools that become available can more than offset the added effort.

Our next post will cover whitelisting activities that digital marketers can execute if their email marketing platform does not do it for them.  Whether the platform handles it or not, it’s important to have a clear understanding of where the responsibility lies to ensure that your deliverability rates remain high.

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Allow Extra Time for Downstream Marketing Channels

Setting a realistic calendar for digital marketing promotion is always a concern.  Most digital marketers have a handle on the necessary time frames for the marketing channels they own directly. However, it’s fairly common that digital marketers need to interface with partners, affiliates, or advertisers for specific campaigns but accounting for these external marketing channels’ own timeframes is often overlooked.

Wider or more intensive promotion with partners means that a more complex digital marketing plan that integrates downstream partner calendars is required.

Building a digital marketing calendar is naturally self-centric as marketers have direct control over the communication channels.  Working with partners requires a shift in attitude to be less self-centered and work within the confines of other’s promotion calendars.  There’s one simple solution for doing that, allow for additional time and give advance notice on how you hope to partner on the digital marketing initiative.

I saw a recent example with a company that wanted to launch a research survey.  The plan was to announce the survey on their digital marketing channels, make it live for a month, and then compile the results into an industry report.  People that responded to the survey got a customized report based on their self-identified demographics.

As a standalone promotion plan that makes a lot of sense.  However, the company had an extensive partner network that they also wanted to promote the survey.  The problem was that they failed to alert the partners to the initiative or provide relevant resources until the day the initiative launched.  So the partners were left with three options:

  1. Scramble to integrate the offer into their pre-existing digital marketing calendars for the immediate 30 days.
  2. Do some simple promotions as an add-on to pre-planned communications.
  3. Skip the promotion entirely.

Almost none chose the first option as there was insufficient time or because thoroughly adding the offer would disrupt their pre-planned calendar. So, at best, the offer was included in partner communications as a haphazard add-on to an email or hastily crafted social media post.

Engaging partners in your digital marketing promotion is a powerful tool that can exponentially improve your reach.  But digital marketers need to allow additional time to inform partners that will be promoting it further downstream.  Failing to do so appears as procrastination to the downstream partners.  Those digital marketers are unlikely to make procrastinator’s initiatives a priority when they weren’t consulted or forewarned about the plan.

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Intermixing Email Segmentation and Drip Marketing

We had several questions to our last post making inquiries along the lines of, “What’s an example of intermixing email segmentation and drip marketing?” This typically happens as trainers, consultants, and professional coaches strive to evolve their marketing into more sophisticated communications.  Keeping the two separate will simplify processes and help ensure that they are technically simple enough to operate properly.

Here’s an example of the processes remaining separated:

An email message is sent to a segment, a list of sales managers that are not clients. The email offers a Managing Your Team Through Change whitepaper that is customized for sales managers. This whole process falls under list segmentation.

The whitepaper landing page has three follow up emails after someone completes the form.  The first email delivers the whitepaper document, the second email follows up with an offer to buy a book that relates to the whitepaper, and the third email offers the submitter a chance to attend a sales leadership class as a guest.  This entire process would be drip marketing because it triggers for anyone that completes the form, whether they arrived there from the email or not.

 The email pointing to the landing page does not actually intermix.  It’s more of a hand off with clear definitions on what segmentation is doing and what drip is doing.

This process can also work in reverse.  A person that takes an action that triggers a drip marketing sequence could then be added into a particular email segment for future communications.

Here’s an example of problems arising when the two processes start overlapping:

A marketer wants to run this same campaign but wants to change the second or third email in the drip campaign based on whether a recipient had already bought the book or attended a training session as a guest.  This level of complexity would require a database tracking past visitor interactions. That database would need to be queried by the drip campaign and also reference the email segments to match the recipients to their data. There’s a complex process going back and forth between the two campaigns to deliver accurate customization.

It gets more complex when we consider people that are outside the segment.  If we restrict the offer only to those on the email list to ensure our customizations are accurate, then we limit the audience for the offer.  If we open it up to a wider audience then we are forced to assign people to a customized process that may or may not be suitable for them.

Only the most sophisticated marketing platforms will even offer such fine tuning and even in those cases it’s worth questioning whether it will improve effectiveness enough to warrant that level of sophistication.  Even if such detailed customization is suitable, it’s often better to segment the list into categories before sending the initial email and linking to a custom landing page that will deliver the appropriate drip campaign rather than having them cross reference one another.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches over complicate segmentation and drip campaigns. This wastes a lot of time and energy before realizing that level of complexity is cumbersome and not necessarily more effective.

Rather than wasting resources trying to execute a needlessly complex process, clearly map out how the two processes will work with a hand off from one to another.

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Email Segmentation vs. Drip Marketing

It’s no secret that customizing your marketing emails to an appropriate audience is a powerful way to improve effectiveness.  There are two distinct ways of delivering customized emails, email segmentation and drip marketing. Clearly defining your list segmentation and drip campaigns helps assign a purpose for each strategy and creates clarity for both you and your audience.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches either confuse or intermix elements from the two in an inefficient way. This is often a result of trying to include too much into a single communication or over complicating the relationship between a segmented list and a drip campaign.

For clarity’s sake, there is one element that differentiates segmentation from drip marketing, communication assignment vs. triggered event.

List segmentation is achieved through communication assignment.  That can be done by the digital marketer breaking their list into categories based on data in their database.  For instance many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have separate communication for clients and prospects. List segmentation can also be determined by the user.  For instance, many opt in forms let a user pick communication preferences or select industry topics they want to receive.  Whether determined by the digital marketer or the user, segmentation is pre-determined by the assigned category.

Drip marketing is a workflow determined by a triggering event.  That event is typically an action on a website or via the email marketing platform.  It can be as simple as a confirmation email after someone opts in to an email list or as sophisticated as a series of emails to someone that started a purchase but did not complete it.

Confusing or intermixing the two strategies often results in a breakdown in the campaign.  This happens either because the parameters become so restricted that the communications don’t launch or the technical requirements are so complex that they frequently run into errors.

 

Photo via Good Free Photos

Next Steps After a Mystery Unsubscribe Request

After identifying how a person requesting an unsubscribe that is absent from your email marketing list is receiving your email marketing messages, what should you do about it?  Typically a digital marketer will simply unsubscribe the uncovered email address and consider the matter settled. But savvier digital marketers can leverage the opportunity to minimize loss and potentially re-engage a subscriber.

Email Forwarding

If the email was forwarded from a subscriber’s old address, you should unsubscribe both the old and the new address from your email marketing list.  This will ensure that the unsubscribe request is honored for all of the individual’s email addresses and won’t result in any SPAM complaints from the unsubscriber in the future.

Former Email Address

If the message was redistributed from an old address at an organization to a new one, check your list to see if a subscriber from the same URL can provide a more suitable contact.  Sometimes, an email address is set to forward to the wrong or unsuitable person. In other cases, an email address was intended to be temporarily forwarded to a co-workers email until a replacement for the old employee was hired but never gets redirected to replacement hire.  In either of these cases, it’s possible to update your list with a new subscriber that is likely to be engaged with your content by inquiring if there is a more suitable contact.

Group Mailbox

Group mailboxes are the biggest risk of missing an opportunity because unsubscribing that address might remove an entire organization from your communications. If most of the group wants to receive your emails, it’s a disservice to remove them all.  At minimum, you can send a final email to the group email box alerting the group that the email address has been unsubscribed and provide a link to your subscription form for those that want to opt-in to continue receiving your email communications.

Once you track down how someone apparently not on your email marketing list that wants to subscribe is receiving your communications, it’s paramount to honor the unsubscribe.  But that doesn’t mean you have to cut your losses.  Analyze the situation to see if similar contacts or group recipients would like to freshly opt in to your email communications.

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