Today in Digital Marketing - What Top-Performing Email Marketers Are Doing (That You're Not)

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Be protected. Be Zen. online holiday sales, what you should be doing to increase your email campaigns open rates, and Google's big update not affecting you, better check because your reporting tools may be leading you astray. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. All right, so I am a little jaded. I know I think we all are when we become marketers. But Facebook's announcement yesterday that it is moving into the medical space has me a little weirded out. Facebook says it will try to predict when users need certain medical tests or procedures based on their age and gender.

Starting point is 00:01:15 It can remind them to visit a doctor and then market is done when they have visited said doctor. They say the goal is, of course, to help people take steps to stay healthy. And sure, it's that. But, of course, to help people take steps to stay healthy. And sure, it's that. But, of course, I mean, let's face facts here. They are now building out a massive database of people who are, by the act of checking off a suggested medical reminder appointment, confirming their medical issues. And this is where, as marketers,

Starting point is 00:01:44 I think we feel the split personality of our occupation the most. As the consumer, like, holy crap, that's invasive, and no thanks, Facebook. But as marketers, maybe in the pharma space, maybe for a clinic, yeah, this could be huge. Except, sorry, dear digital marketers, it won't be for us. Facebook says it will not use the information it gets from this as ad targeting criteria that we can use. So, whew, and damn it. This is a clever idea. Etsy, the online e-commerce platform that focuses on handmade crafts, they are planning to set up a phone bank next week, staffed by people who will recommend gift ideas

Starting point is 00:02:30 for people who don't know what to get their spouses or friends or colleagues. Phone line will be open only for three hours. They say they expect to take their time with people up to 20 minutes per call. This isn't a new idea, of course. Media posts notes that Butterball has been doing this for years now, how they even have an Alexa skill for it. And I suspect if it's popular, you can expect others to adopt it as well. Incidentally, Etsy says it spent more than 25% of their revenues in the last quarter on marketing. If you are like many digital marketers, email campaigns are an important

Starting point is 00:03:06 part of your programs. And you, like many, may be disappointed at your open rates. A new study says companies with higher than average open rates do three things differently than the others. First, email delivery optimization. That's a lot of things, but one of the most important is testing to make sure that you are not triggering high spam scores. The second is A-B testing. And third, reactivation campaigns. The study was from Validity and Demand Metric and came from a survey of 293 email marketers. You will find a direct link to the survey in the show notes. Some good news for Google. They reported a 17% jump in ad revenue in Q3 when compared to the previous Q3. More than half of that ad revenue came from automated bidding.

Starting point is 00:03:54 In their earnings call this week, they said local advertising will be a stronger focus for them going forward. No real surprise there if you've been watching their changes to Google My Business. And while revenue overall for Google was up, profits were down 23%. So this is crazy. 42% of holiday shop surprising, to me at least, 32% of holiday buyers will start searching on Amazon. Only 18% will start looking around on Google. And what do they expect you to have if you are selling? More than two-thirds expect free shipping. And 61% want to be able to track their shipped products. The study says of all traffic sources, paid search has the highest conversion rate at 2.9%. There is a link to download the full study in the notes.

Starting point is 00:04:58 The data came from a survey of 4,500 consumers. Last week, Google rolled out a big change to its algorithm. They named it BERT, and they say about 10% of searches are impacted by this new core engine. There's an interesting post over at seroundtable.com that explains why you may not have noticed it on searches for your brand, even though it may be affecting you. Quoting the site, BERT is more about understanding more longer tail natural language queries. These longer tail queries are queries that SEOs, that's people, don't target as much in a heavy way. In addition to that, many keyword tracking tools like Moz track shorter keywords. And since BertERT was focused on longer queries,

Starting point is 00:05:46 these tools didn't really pick up on it as much. So maybe worth popping open your Google Search Console and seeing if there is any change to your hit after BERT. If you're in the U.S. and market a restaurant or restaurant chain, you may already know that Google is highlighting top-rated restaurants in a handful of big cities. This so-called local favorite spot was introduced this past summer, but there wasn't a lot of information on how to become a local favorite. Do you get more stars? Do you buy ads? Do you

Starting point is 00:06:16 post more frequently to Google My Business? How, Obi-Wan? Well, Google has now given us some details. Quoting Google, Every day, people visit business profiles on Google to look at reviews, menus, or photos and use that information to make decisions about where to eat or what new places to try. The local favorites lists use these ratings, reviews, and actions people take on business profiles, like calling a business, clicking on the website, or requesting directions to identify what restaurants to highlight. Google has a couple of other designations. Rising Stars are restaurants which are trending in terms of popularity,

Starting point is 00:06:54 and Hidden Gem is for places with a small number of reviews, but the reviews are glowing. Also, if you get knighted as a local favorite, Google will mail you some window stickers. So, there's that. We are getting more information about the big ad platform bug at Twitter that was at least partly responsible for disappointing investors. Turns out the glitch was an issue with targeting ads to people who had opted out of targeting. We're not talking about opting out of seeing advertising here. You can't do that,

Starting point is 00:07:25 of course. But you can tell most social platforms to not take your online behavior into account when picking which ad you'll see. The folks at the Inside Social Newsletter say they think that's what is behind Twitter's decision to show more ads to people with high follower counts, except the ads getting out there aren't really targeted at all. Business people are seeing ads for tractors. Others are seeing ads for something called ministry insurance. Quoting Inside Social, now Twitter appears to just be showing way more ads to way more people to make up for that revenue, no matter how random the ad. Okay, lightning round, this time featuring the four S's. Spotify. Looks like they will be pulling out all the stops to dominate in the podcast space.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Researcher Jane Wong found a create podcast button in their code. This, of course, came from their acquisition of Anchor. Shopify. They seem to be doing well. They just reported a 45% jump in revenues, and they've just passed one million merchants on the platform. Snapchat, they're launching two new in-app shows, both of which about boxing. Snapchat has also struck content deals with NBC and the NFL. And sources. Someone on Twitter asked me to include links to more information about the stories I cover, so they are there now in the show notes. Enjoy. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com.

Starting point is 00:08:52 Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first.

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Today in Digital Marketing - What Top-Performing Email Marketers Are Doing (That You're Not)

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