Social media networks are undoubtedly the next big boon to online advertisers. They serve as an individualized filters. Twitter in particular is personalized specifically to each and every one of its 200,000,000 different users. Smart marketers are developing strong social content strategies and implementing them across all different social media outlets. It's one of the most unique and relevant marketing tools around. Short 140 character messages can be used for everything from product launches to customer feedback. It’s a powerful device that today’s business owners need to understand. So to keep you in the know, we’ve put together some social media guidelines to help you traverse the treacherous Twitter waters.   Goal Setting Before becoming an expert Twitter fiend with thousands of followers and wielding vast amounts of internet influence, it’s important to set some reasonable and measurable goals for yourself. By reasonable, I mean realistic. Your brand won’t start off at the top of the heap and hit the ground running with a million twitter followers. Not unless you’re the lucky fella who gets to promote Taylor Swift’s Lonely Hearts Dating Service. Yeah, that’s totally a real thing. Go ahead look it up. Now that you’re done being gullible, and I’m finished being mean, let’s talk about some examples of measurable goals you can set for your social media strategy. Follower growth- You can try to increase your influence here. It’s akin to building brand awareness. This is an extremely easy metric to measure as your followers are prominently featured at the top of the Twitter dashboard. Follower Engagement- This is the amount of interactivity between you and your followers. Aim to increase this statistic to foster a friendship with your followers. That way you can quickly turn a follower to a lead, and a lead to a conversion. Site Traffic- Social media networks can be a significant source of traffic for your website. And through that you can actually attribute increased conversions to Twitter as well. So treat your Twitter account like the highly targeted sales funnel that it is. These are just a few of the "Twitter for business" metrics you can keep up with, and these three are actually very easy to track with Google Analytics. There are plenty more goals you can set that are more specified or ones that are only traceable using special software tools. Here is a link to Twitter’s official advice page on tracking different metrics. How to Market on Twitter Now that you’ve got some goals and you know how to track them, it’s time to learn how to use twitter for business advertising efforts. If you’re looking to increase conversion, (as you certainly should be) there are a few twitter marketing caveats that you’ll need to follow. Build Brand Awareness Twitter is an excellent method of bringing more attention to your company’s product or service. There are a few ways of going about this. There are some very simple starting points you can begin with, like adding a “Follow” button to your website or promoting your twitter account via your newsletter or a landing page. You can also embed a retweet button in all of the content you post on Twitter. Retweeting is immensely popular, and of the average 400,000,000 tweets that users make per day, a significant portion of them are retweets. Facilitate this process for your loyal users with an embedded retweet button in all of your content. It’s also a good idea to integrate similar functionality across all your social media platforms, e.g. post on Facebook, Tumblir, etc. In this way, you increase the chances of your content going viral.  Another reason to build brand awareness is so that you can add the social media data you gather on your customers to your database. The more you can learn about your customers, the easier you’ll find it to meet their needs with your products and services. Databases are a huge part of marketing a successful online business, and each of your Twitter followers is a potential lead. Create Community This goal sort of flows from building awareness naturally. It’s a very organic process. After building some buzz around your company and establishing an audience, it’s a good idea to actually interact with them. That means engaging individuals in conversations and interacting with them on a consistent basis. As your company grows, this can become a full time job in itself, but when you’re just starting out, you can set aside an hour or two each day to connect with your audience. Introverts need not apply. However, this attempt at online friendship begs a simple question: What should I tweet? The answer is plural and multifaceted. The simple response is: a lot. And often. But there are certain types of interactions you should aspire to create, and others that you should avoid. Here are some examples: Helpful content is better content. This can be applied in a variety of ways. Just like in our earlier post about targeted email campaigns, useful or informative industry related content is always a clear winner. So endeavor to find useful or interesting articles, infographics, videos, or educational materials and work on posting those. You can also be helpful in an active attempt to build a network of contacts that can all support one another. Look for other similar businesses in your niche, follow them and retweet there promotions. At the risk of sounding kinda new age-y, it’s just good karma. Within the Twittersphere, you’ll notice that spending your efforts on good will makes your company, (both personal and proprietary) an enviable commodity. You’ll build a network that runs on positive vibes and receive back many times over the helping hands that you’ve extended out over time. This might seem somewhat counter-intuitive according to traditional competitive strategy. However, that old-school way of thinking is quickly becoming obsolete. Instead of a rabid cutthroat economy crowded with marketers vying for the same piece of pie, we have a global network with no shortage of buyers for virtually any product or service. There’s enough pie for everyone. So pull up a chair and dig in, and don’t be afraid to invite anyone else to the table. Exclusive content is another good direction to walk in. You reward your Twitter followers by blasting out prizes, discounts, special offers, amazing deals, and what have you. Anything that adds value to being one of your followers. People love getting something for free, and ironically it makes them more willing to buy from you. The idea with this and every other tweeting strategy is to have good intentions guiding your actions. Come at your Twitter marketing efforts with the idea of actually being caring and you’ll see that the higher profits will flow out of being a helpful, educational, and entertaining resource for your Twitter followers. Inversely, if you spam them with disposable advertisements, and only talk about your business, (re: self-absorbed) you’ll be marked as uncaring and won’t be cared for in turn. To avoid this persona is as simple as practicing good business ethics. Simple things, like: don’t plagiarize other people’s content, give credit where it’s due. Never repost, it’s like repeating yourself in a conversation, when you’re certain that everyone already heard you. And NEVER give in to the urge to engage in petty argument. There are a lot of internet trolls who make it their life’s mission to get a reaction out of you. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Twitter is it’s own universe with tons of different nooks and crannies for marketers to explore. Check back next time for helpful and practical advice on how to properly target your niche within the vast expanse of this online interface.   

Picking right back up from where we left off in our last post about creating effective targeted advertising emails, you want your messages to amiably assail the senses. If you’ve followed the instructions in our last post, your target marketing content should already sound like music to your listener’s ears. Now it’s time to make it easy on the eyes. There are some rules of thumb you need to follow. So let’s get cracking. Consistency is Key Start by being consistent. It helps to build your brand if you can associate an image or color scheme with your company. It might be worthwhile to do some psychology and behavioral marketing research in this regard. There are some very well-known correlations between behavior and color. Red, for example is known to increase appetite as well as impulsiveness, whereas blue produces feelings of serenity, and helps put customer’s minds at ease. These are handy facts if you’re looking to sell something. You can also use this opportunity to visually complement your message. If you’re advertising a product, it’s a no-brainer that you would want an attractive image displaying its fine details. Or perhaps you could show a situation in which your product or service is being used and enjoyed by a family of smiling urbanites. However you decide to best highlight the utility of your products or services, but you must be careful to convey a message without simply being flashy. Flash without substance won’t create conversions nearly as well. It’s also important to remember that just like your text, image choices should be directly informed by the metric data that you’ve gathered, as well as the conclusions you’ve drawn about your clientele. Images Can Increase Clickthroughs Whatever images you decide to fill your email with, they should all be clickable. Remember that one of the main goals of any email is to drive traffic to your site. In terms of picture perfect propriety, having an image that directly links to a landing page just makes sense. Images are also an excellent opportunity to throw in some less intrusive calls to action. To do this, set your images up to display a pop up box directing the recipient to the desired course of action. For example, say you owned an ecommerce store, let’s say an online bait shop. You’ve theoretically sent an email with an image of a seasoned fisherman fitting a colorful plastic fish hook to his line. When the mouse scrolls over the image, it should link directly to the hook’s product page with a short and sweet CTA, implying that the reader should: “Prepare to haul in a big catch by purchasing the Acme Bass-o-matic fish lure.” If you’ve correctly targeted your angling aficionados, then they may go ahead to your site without bothering to read the rest of your message. This is your goal in the end anyway. A picture is worth a thousand words, so why not use your pictures as actionable items in your target marketing emails? Sticking to a Schedule Once you’ve developed an idea for the process behind putting together effective emails, it’s a good idea to decide on a time to send them. Being out of sight is directly connected to being out of mind, so it’s important to keep your brand consistently on your customer’s radar. There are a few ways to go about this. The most popular is to send them out on a schedule. Daily, weekly, or monthly emails are sure to keep your customer’s engaged, so long as they are well-crafted. However, you run the risk of bombarding your recipient with too many messages, and end up annoying them. This is especially true for the daily blasts. Yet you don’t want to spend too much time between messages either. Monthly is on the other end of the spectrum, and is probably the maximum time you would like to spend between emails. Any longer, and you risk being an unmemorable addition to your client’s inbox, and may end up being marked as spam. You can send out targeted advertising sporadically and still achieve commendable results, but this can lead to disorganization and confusion on either end of the relationship between you and your clients. It all depends on how you work best, but in general keeping to a schedule is a proven method of increasing sales. On the other hand, you could perform your content targeting with pinpoint precision, by automating email templates to go out whenever a client’s activity matches certain filters in the data that you’re tracking. Let’s say that the same customer has purchased 25 items in a month from your online store; you could have an email template set up to thank them for their loyal shopping habits. After all, it’s nice to be appreciated. Depending on the scenario, this kind of filtered automatic emailing would often require a user subscription. Hopefully, this comprehensive guide to crafting effective target marketing emails has helped you get a feel for the process. Though if you’re still not feeling ultra-confident, you can stay tuned for the next post. Part 3 of our series on targeted emails will examine some in-depth examples of successful campaigns that have been used to create conversions to great effect in the past. We’ll see you then, but while you’re waiting, you can examine the filtered emailing system we’ve discussed today by signing up for a free 10 day trial with Ashop. 

Welcome to the final installment of the Ashop blog series on target marketing email campaigns. In the last two posts we’ve discussed how to construct effective emails using text, images, and smart scheduling. Today we’ll be discussing the merits of famous targeted advertising email campaigns undertaken by affluent and recognizable companies. Let’s jump right in with our first example. British Airways As we discussed in our first post, tracking customer data and recognizing trends in their behavior is a vital part of accurate target marketing. British Airways did a spectacular job of illustrating this point with one of their email campaigns. To advertise an exclusive mobile application to their Loyalty club members, they tracked several different important sales metrics among their users in an effort to create the perfect customer profile. They built a very specific picture of the customer they were trying to target by doing the following: Discovering what loyalty club customers were using mobile devices. Determining which devices they were using. Developing 4 different emails optimized for each device individually. Detailed more consumer habits and further tailored the email content. With these metrics they gathered a list of highly specified loyalty club members who were most likely to open the emails from their mobile devices, and then clickthrough to the company landing page. The results of this campaign were astonishing. Android and iPhone users who received the email opened it more than 50% of the time. After opening the message clickthrough rate exceeded ¼ of the total users on iPhone and approximately a third of all Blackberry users.  These are by no means ordinary results. If nearly half of targeted customers are opening a company’s emails, that’s an incredible success. The emails advertising the Executive club mobile application directly resulted in over 250,000 downloads and over 70,000 clickthroughs to the British Airways website. The campaign was so successful that the company is now planning another multilingual campaign based on the same template. So to what do they owe their success? Attentive and intelligent analysis of their tracked metrics Individual optimization for specific devices Attractive and clickable imagery in the emails Here are a couple of screen shots for the email and its corresponding landing page:   Note the identical color schemes on the landing page, which complement the email perfectly. This harkens back to the importance of imagery we discussed in the last post. Everything in the email looks smooth and unhurried. There is also no wasted real estate on the iPhone email. Every inch is covered in either text describing the benefits of the application, or pictures illustrating the sleek and stylish imagery of the app itself.  All of which works in perfect harmony with the landing page. This email campaign is a perfect example of the power that goes along with paying attention to your customer’s browsing habits on an ecommerce site. The campaign nearly doubled its targeted rate of application downloads, offered its high value customers some advanced notice on useful content, and built for itself an entirely new base of advertising operations through its mobile application. As far as success stories go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more compelling than that. Expedia.com When travel website standout, Expedia, was looking to expand its business in the Pacific Asian region, the decided on an efficient and optimized targeted email campaign that drew upon some of the concepts we’ve already discussed, and at least one that we haven’t. They began by examining user data in that region to divine browsing habits, but where the novelty comes in is through their topographic efforts. They delivered weekly newsletters to their customers in different sub-regions with geographically specific offers. In other words, they examined which offers were getting more clickthroughs in certain areas, but still weren’t converting. So to incentivize these attractive offers that for whatever reason just weren't converting, they made special offers around those packages. In this way, they managed to turn user interest into profitable sales. These geographically inspired efforts were made more thoroughly effective by the use of intelligent scheduling. The weekly repetition of Expedia offers to these specific customers, who were already showing a lot of interest on Expedia’s website, served to reinforce the desire for travel, and ended up converting potential customers in high volumes. This smart strategic play bodes well for Expedia’s future. Any web service that pay attention to customer habits, and therefore customer wants and needs, stands an excellent chance of predicting their future behavior. Understanding your clients is the first step to providing them with a better product or service, which in turn leads to higher conversions, and more money in the company coffers. Hopefully, our look into big-time successful email campaigns has served as a window into the billionaire empire mindset. This is the final post in the Ashop series of blogs concerning targeted advertising using email campaigns. Follow the strategies outlined in this series to a “T” and you’re virtually guaranteed to have a successful campaign of your own.  So start paying attention to customer behavior and specify your targeted marketing messages and you can begin to create conversions for yourself. And if you’re in need of a quality metric tracking system for your online store, be sure to sign up for Ashop’s free 10 day trial.

Writing effective automated emails is an essential element in any behavioral marketing campaign. They carry a kind of quasi-intimate connotation with your clients. One that surmounts many of the usual obstacles one would encounter during such an entrepreneurial adventure. Content targeting is usually going to be many times more effective than many other advertising outlets. This is because of the already established level of trust between you and the recipient. They gave you their email addresses, and you must treat access to their inboxes as a great privilege. Your customer’s attention is the life blood of your business, and crowding it with anything inconsequential is bound to direct it elsewhere. So what can you do to keep from abusing this near-sacred trust that your contact list has afforded you? The Purpose of Emails in Target Marketing You have to understand your client’s interests, and how your business fits into them. What exactly brought them within the sphere of your influence? You need to determine this all-important information, and continue to provide content which matches those criteria. In the past, this kind of data would be available only through random sampling and surveys. Today however, metric tracking software, such as Ashop’s ecommerce interface, will allow you to learn a great deal about your clientele without having to use any such intrusive methods. So before you ever start crafting an email, it’s important to answer 2 questions: 1.       What does your mailing list want, expect, and gain from your business? 2.       What do you hope to accomplish with your email? The first question is the difficult one. Basically, you’ll need to analyze your metrics, hypothesize, test, and draw conclusions. Where is the traffic originating from? What devices are they using? How long are they spending on individual pages of your site? Which pages are they spending the most time on? The more specific you can get with your hypothesis, the better your testing will be. From there, you’ll be able to draw useful conclusions, and in turn paint a much more 3-dimensional your picture of the consumer. To conduct adequate tests, write a few different email drafts designed to check your hypotheses. Send different versions out to different contacts on your list, and record the results. This is called multivariate testing, and it’s an extremely useful tool in your content targeting arsenal. Learning about customer intent is not always an easy endeavor, but it is always a worthwhile investment of time. The second question should be far easier to answer. There are usually 3 major reasons for writing targeted advertising emails: 1.       To drive traffic to your site. More specifically, to your landing page, so that you can gain conversions. 2.       To advertise a new product or service. It makes sense to advertise to a client who’s seen fit to purchase from you in the past. To put it in old-school terms, it’s like using a solid sales lead, versus starting from scratch and cold calling. 3.       To build a business/client relationship. In an ideal world, all of your customers would be friends. So treat them in a neighborly manner, and you’ll see that affability pays big dividends. Once you’ve figured out why you’re doing what you’re doing, a course of action becomes much clearer. Crafting Target Marketing Email Text Now that you’ve got an idea of who you’re aiming for, it’s time to begin putting a persuasive and engaging message together. But before you pull out a pen and paper, it’s always a good idea to do some prewriting exercises. Begin as previously suggested, by defining the purpose of this message. Are you informing a trusted customer of a new product? Trying to increase your visibility?  Let the answers guide your drafting efforts. To put it succinctly: be informative, entertaining, agreeable, inspiring, and visually appealing. Informative-If a visitor to your site has handed you their email address, you can assume that they’re interested in your industry. Take advantage of that fact, by keeping them up to date with news or updates that are relevant to the field. Entertaining- This is another powerful tool used to create conversions. If you put the idea that your emails are fun or interesting into your client’s mind, they’re far more likely to open them up. Entertaining content is capable of building brand loyalty. Agreeable- Always try to speak in a conversational tone to your customers. Be conscious of how your message sounds. You’re neither a politician nor a salesman; you’re a friend offering useful information about a subject of interest. So write like you speak, unless you’re oratory isn’t up to par. If that’s the case, then write how someone else speaks. Someone charming. Think Neil Patrick Harris, but less overtly sexual. Just try to be amusing, approachable, and accommodating. Inspiring-This approach should be used sparingly. You don’t want to come off as a motivational speaker. Just be aware that using amazing or inspiring stories to illustrate a point about your industry, product, or service can give an impression of being genuine. It’s all part of building trust. Plus, being inspired is fun, why wouldn’t you want to share that with your customers? There’s obviously a lot more to creating conversions with email than just text. You’ve got to keep a schedule, incorporate effective imagery, and examine the campaigns of successful competitors as well. However, these are complex subjects that cover a lot of ground. In the interest of brevity, we’ll cover the rest of this material in our next two posts. In the meantime, take a look at how Ashop uses Google analytics to gain those coveted consumer insights, and learn how these can help you craft effective emails by signing up for a free 10 day trial of premium Ashop service.