Today in Digital Marketing - When Lawyers Try to Write Marketing Emails

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Podcasts borrow inspiration from programmatic ad technology... Yes, that was a scary email you got from YouTube. No, you don’t have to worry about it. How to reposition your brand’s content to be more friendly to voice assistants… and the final word from Google: Does having lots of words on all your brand’s web pages help or hurt your company’s search engine ranking? JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links are in the transcript (visit TodayInDigital.com and click today’s episode). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, podcasts borrow inspiration from programmatic ad technology. Yes, that was a very scary email you got from YouTube. No, you don't have to worry about it. How to reposition your brand's content to be more friendly to voice assistants. And the final word from Google. Does having lots of words on all your brand's webpages help or hurt your company's search engine ranking? It's Friday, September 11th, 2020. Happy Ethiopian New Year!

I'm Todd Mathin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. You probably get lots of email newsletters. Hell, you probably write them for your company. And if that is you, one of the most important decisions you make is what to put in the subject line. Do you try to squeeze the whole offer in? Or do you go minimal and try to sound like a friend just sliding into your inbox? One of Barack Obama's best performing campaign emails was literally just the word, hey. But there's another factor at play. More than how long to make it or what words to put there,

digital marketers now need to consider emojis. Do you use them in a subject line? Well, now there's data that could guide you. Earlier in the summer, the folks at searchenginejournal.com tested emojis in their daily newsletter, their monthly newsletter, emails about webinars, pretty much all their email lists.

In total, nearly 4 million emails across 17 different campaigns. Every campaign, A-B tested. One with an emoji at the start of the line, one at the end, and one without any emoji at all. And what did they learn? I'll tell you at the end of today's episode. Some marketing news from the podcast world now. NPR has made what it says is the first automated hybrid regional news podcast.

This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It is Tuesday. It's actually a rebrand of their former daily coronavirus update show. And they're using digital content insertion, the same technology that powers programmatic advertising in podcasts, to drop in news that's local to the person downloading the show. There are 12 regions in the U.S. participating. If you're in one of those, it'll sound like they made a special local show just for you.

Everyone else here is the regular national version. Also, more big brands are jumping into the digital audio space. ViacomCBS just inked a three-year deal with iHeartMedia, which will produce dozens of original branded podcasts from Viacom networks like MTV and Comedy Central. And if you're one of those people like me

who listened to a Wondery show, heard them say, check out our app, and you tried, but you couldn't find it, well, now the Wondery app is available in more countries, specifically Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia.

Some brand managers who are responsible for their company's YouTube channels got a scary-sounding email from the platform this week. It said, quote, At some point, you signed contract terms with YouTube regarding the YouTube Partner Program. Previously, we allowed creators to pre-sign YPP terms before reaching the minimal eligibility thresholds. We have since redesigned this process. Our records show that your channel hasn't yet met the existing thresholds for program eligibility. In 30 days, if your channel is still not eligible for YPP, we will invalidate your contract. Yikes. YouTube, geez, stop letting your lawyers write your marketing emails. Anyway, not to worry. Your company's channel is safe. Your videos will stay put. Literally nothing changes on the public facing

side. Apparently what they were trying to say is when you do reach the thresholds needed for monetization and you want to collect some of that sweet, sweet ad money, you just have to accept their terms and conditions again. Everything else just stays the same. But holy, what an email to get. Hey, I'm Sean. And I'm Jordan. If you're looking to scale your brand, have we got a show for you. It's called Secrets to Scaling Your Ecommerce Brand.

We talk in-depth about what's working and what's not in ecommerce. Again, that's Secrets to Scaling Your Ecommerce Brand. Found on every major podcast platform. You've heard the advice, right? Google prefers long content. So put lots of words on each of your webpages so Google can rank more keywords. No, sorry, wait a minute. That's not it. Google likes short content, punchy stuff they can put in those knowledge boxes. So keep your brand's webpages short and you'll rank better. Which is it anyway? And is word count even a ranking factor at all?

We've talked about this quite a lot. Martin Split from Google addressed this in a recent SEO myth-busting video on their channel. And it's not a ranking factor. If you can say what the user needs to know in 50 words, that is fantastic. If you need 100 words, that's cool. If you need 2,000 words, that's also absolutely acceptable. It's, again, about trying to figure out what's the intention. If you see yourself repeating yourself multiple times and saying the same things over and over again in the same document or on the same page, what's the point? Yeah. Well, let's say you're in a situation where you've written 500 words for a specific topic

or keyword that you're trying to rank for and you see all your competitors have 4,000 words or something like that. Even though word count's not technically a ranking factor, that's probably a good indication that you need longer content, right? I mean, it depends. Just because other people are doing it doesn't mean that they're doing it right. So if you see them rank high, that might not continue to be that way just because they have a high word count.

Again, try to understand what is it that the users need. Maybe the larger word count just accidentally hits the right bits of information that people are looking for and actually fits the query intention of the user better than what you're writing. In this case, if you can reformulate it so that your 500 words are better, then go with that. Don't be the school kid that goes like, Furthermore, as I was seeing, just like to fill in. Unnecessary language, yeah. The full video is definitely worth a watch if you're responsible for your brand's SEO.

They cover how to update older content and not lose ranking and how exactly Google determines what is duplicate content and what isn't. There is a link to it in the transcript of today's episode, which you'll find at todayindigital.com. Regardless of how much time you spend working on the SEO of your website, there's probably a portion of that space you're not working in at all, and that's voice SEO. What is that? It's making sure that your brand, your products, come up first when recommended by one of the voice assistants, like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, or Microsoft's Cortana. SEMrush has done a pretty solid in-depth study of the voice SEO space and found the best way to get your brand noticed by these new bots, in the case of Google Speakers,

the study says the local SEO work you're hopefully doing already should cover most of what you need. You may need to tweak the content of your site to match the more natural language of voice search queries. And to be surfaced more frequently by Apple's Siri, improve your Yelp ratings. SEMrush says, quote, having a four and a half or five star Yelp rating with the biggest number of reviews will turn any business into the most popular local spot in Siri's eyes. Unquote.

A link to the full study, as always, in the episode of today's show. Just click on today's episode at todayindigital.com. Oh, and for emojis in the subject lines, Search Engine Journal tested this with nearly 4 million emails and found that putting an emoji in their subject lines earned them actually a slightly lower open rate than emails without emojis. Not going to lie, that surprised me. Again, the keyword here is slightly lower. So as always, your mileage may vary. There is good news for you emoji happy digital marketers, and that is regardless of

the open rate, emails with emojis in the subject line had a higher click-through rate of links inside the newsletter. But more people unsubscribed from emails with subject line emojis, and more people even made abuse reports for those. I guess there are a lot of emoji haters out there. If you must put an emoji in the subject line of your next brand's newsletter, the study found that putting it at the end of the subject line earns better results than putting it at the beginning. Well, if you are new around here, maybe saw the ad on today's pod news site, or maybe you're over here from the tech meme ride home, welcome.

I'm Todd. I run a digital marketing agency in Canada. My team does most of the client work so that every day I can do this. Yes, every weekday. It's short, just like this, punchy, maybe a little bit of snark, but everything you need to know about what happened in the world of digital marketing, social media, podcast marketing, SEO, and online advertising, and not a bit more. I hope you'll subscribe. Our theme is by Mark Levis, music licensing by Source Audio. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. Stronger every day. Stronger every day. 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.

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