CHANGING WEB HOSTING SERVICE PROVIDERS

There are many reasons why individuals or companies want to change to a new web hosting company. It could be as simple as not enough storage space or bandwidth, or it could be due to its customer service, or lack thereof.

Easier said than done? Changing to a new web hosting company may sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be that complex – there are just a few things to keep in mind.

  1. Keep your web hosting account with your existing host open

It is recommend that you keep your existing web hosting account active until you have completed the transition steps (ie. new account setup, file transfer, email creation and setup, DNS modification and propagation).This will ensure that your website and domain email accounts will be running during the transition.

  1. Choose a suitable new web hosting provider

Considerations include:

  1. a) Type of OS (Windows vs. Linux) – it depends on the technologies your website requires. For example, if your website requires ASP, MSSQL, MSACCESS or other Microsoft-specific technologies, then you will need to find a Windows-platform web hosting plan.
  2. b) Bandwidth and disk space requirements.
  3. Make a backup copy of your existing website: download old account files

Ideally, files should be downloaded in the same tree structure in which you want to upload it later. Also look for any file or chmod permissions that you might to set on any folder or file. This is a fairly easy task and can easily be accomplished by FTP.

However, some free web hosting providers do not offer FTP access. This is especially true if you’re currently using a free Flash/drag-and-drop website creation service (ie. Weebly.com, WIX.com).

If this is the case, you will not be able to download your existing web files and will have to re-create your new web files. You should check to see if your new web hosting provider offers a free website creator.

To avoid running into the same problem in the future, make sure your new web hosting provider offers FTP access.

  1. Setup new (same) email addresses

To ensure that emails are properly received, it is important to keep the same email addresses, including email aliases and forwarders.

  1. DNS changes and propagation

Once you have uploaded your web files to the new web hosting server and re-created your email accounts, you can go ahead and make the necessary domain name server (DNS) changes.

DNS is usually obtained once you have signed up with the new web hosting provider. You will need to replace your existing DNS settings with the new one – this is usually done via your domain management panel (your domain registrar).

The new DNS will take anywhere between 24-48 hours to propagate, therefore the old web host is responsible for website and email in the meantime. This is why cancelling the old service should be the very last thing to do.

  1. Cancel your old account.

Once your new account has been activated and your website and email services at your new web hosting provider are up and running, you can proceed to have your old account cancelled.

BASIC FEATURES OF FREE WEB HOSTING

Looking for a free web hosting solution is an imperative decision. Try to identify a reliable web host can be a daunting task especially with so many service providers and options available nowadays. Throw in the feature sheets and promises, the task can be that much more intimidating.

But it doesn’t have to be. Let’s take a look at some of the most common features a good free web hosting provider should offer:

DISK SPACE AND BANDWIDTH

Disk space refers to the amount of storage space assigned to you by the free web hosting provider. This space will be used to store your web site files, including text, images, audio, etc. files you use for your website.

Bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic that is allowed to access and leave your website. Access means every time a visitor types in your website name in their browser. Leave means every time a visitor receives something from your website, whether it be viewing a photo, listening to an audio clip or downloading a file.

For example, if your website has a lot of graphics (ie. photographs) then you will require higher storage and greater bandwidth.

WEBSITE CREATOR AND FTP

If this is your first website and you have limited or no scripting experience, then look for a free web hosting provider that offers a free website creating application where you can create your website simply by choosing a template and adding in your own text and images.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is the protocol for transferring your website files from your computer to your free web hosting server, or vice versa. This allows you to upload your finished website files (including images and other multimedia files) from your computer to your service provider’s server. It also allows you to download your files from your web hosting server back to your computer. A good free web hosting provider should offer 24/7 unrestricted FTP access.

EMAIL

Yes, your free web hosting provider should provide you with email services – so that you can setup @yourdomain.com email accounts. In addition to a webmail interface (so you can login and manage your emails using your web browser), the email service should also include POP3 and SMTP access so you can setup and access your @yourdomain.com emails using your mobile devices.

SUPPORT AND UPTIME

You should always choose a free web hosting service with free, reliable telephone and email support.

While no host can offer a 100% guaranteed uptime (think problems out of their control, ie. city power outage), they should provide “just-in-case” measures to limit website and email downtime to a minimal. These measures may include 24/7 server and network monitoring, redundant hardware and network configurations, and onsite backup power supply. While you might not completely understand the technicalities of these, look to see if your free web hosting provider has these listed somewhere on their website. If not, ask them about it.

PRICING

If you’re looking for a free web hosting provider, then you should expect to pay absolutely nothing for all the basic features listed above. You shoudn’t have to compromise pricing with banner ads. Any free web hosting providers that forces ads on your website is a no-no.

Web Hosting Features

Latest cPanel/WHM: Updated and improved cPanel and Web Host Manager for you. The fully secure method to upload and maintain your website’s information safely is available with us now. Try these methods to experience great success with your website.

Free instant setup: The best feature offered by us, is we provide an instant setup for your website. We are always there to make your site easy to use and maintain. You can contact us anytime on our customer executive numbers or you can just visit our website and mail us.

Free Weekly Backup: We are always there for your website whether it is about backup or security. We provide free weekly backups so that the data of your website will remain safe on our dedicated servers. It is a great feature which we offer as compared to other companies.

E-commerce Ready: Our professional team makes your website e-commerce friendly so that it could attract more visitors and convert them into permanent customers. You can contact us for free samples or tools for your website.

24/7 monitoring: We are there for your website to monitor it as it is our duty to protect it from any data theft and hacking. We constantly keep observation and perform tasks whenever required. We always keep it updated and user-friendly.

wordpress optimized: We have optimized our servers with word press friendly because better performance leads to good visitors and later turn them into great customers. WP runs extremely good on our servers, so that you don’t have to worry about anything.

Secure network: As it is about the professional and personal data about anything on your website. So there is a tight security on our servers with lot of safe and secure methods. We make your website threat free so that the visitors can roam around easily on it.

24/7 support: Our customer care executives are always available to help you out with any problem. We are always pleasure to hear from you about anything. So if you have any query regarding your website or coding, call us without any hesitation.

Trustworthy infrastructure: Infrastructure of a website is the base of all tools which must be powerful as to make it safe from any suspicious activities. Our all hosting plans are protected with responsive and easy to use cPanels on all of our servers.

Dominating cPanel: A good quality of cPanel is a gateway of all the information and data which you are going to upload on your website. So we do it in a proper and protective way. You can request for free samples on our website.

Applications optimization: We provide updated content management system which is much responsive as compared to other websites. We are always ready to deal with any difficulty for our customers to make their website more efficient.

Support system always available: We are always glad that we can assist our clients whenever they want. We always believe in full satisfaction or our customers which is also the motto of our company. If you have any query then it would be a pleasure to hear and solve it.

Reviews & Ratings

satisfaction survey

1. There are plenty of web related solutions out there, but what we really wanted is the support system to help us optimize our ecommerce website and provide the most consistent and best user experience. These people know what to do and what is right, recommended highly from my side!

2. I have been totally satisfied from WebDesignerVIP. I own 150+ websites now and all these are handled by WebDesignerVIP and no doubt in recommending them.

3. I am happy using their service. Appreciable work!

4. WebDesignerVIP is the best hosting provider I have ever used till now. They always know how to fulfill my expectations with prompt and polite way. Highly recommended!

5. My web developer suggested me to transfer my hosting to WebDesignerVIP and now I think it was a great decision. Very affordable prices, amazing customer services. A beautiful experience overall.

How NOT to Set Up Event Tracking

How NOT to Set Up Event Tracking

Marketers love data. We love numbers and information and getting inside the brains of consumers who view our websites. Event tracking, when properly applied, can be one of the most powerful tools for understanding exactly how people respond to your content and how other marketing efforts are affecting the top of your conversion funnel.

Unfortunately, in their haste to start collecting data, many marketers rush to put event tracking in place and come out weeks (or months) later with numbers that have no actionable meaning behind them and confuse more than they clarify. Following the few simple guidelines below will help you get your event tracking up and running in a way that will allow your entire team to see a site’s value as well as the potential that various optimizations could have.

Don’t: Track every single click

Not all clicks are created equal, and only a small portion of your site’s total clicks are actually necessary to track. If a click does not indicate a higher-than-average interest in your business, it is not going to give you any insights into how your top visitors operate. Clicks on navigation, pagination and in-text links are almost never worth tracking, except in rare and purposeful situations.

Do: Track meaningful interactions

Focus on clicks that showcase how a user interacts with your site, especially interactions which aren’t automatically captured elsewhere. For example, a contact form on the page /contact which generates a unique URL /contact/thank-you upon submission could be tracked by looking at unique pageviews of /contact/thank-you in the Analytics Content report. However, a contact widget shown dynamically on any number of pages and not triggering a unique thank you page cannot be tracked through default settings in Analytics.

Interactions are also worth applying event tracking to when they can be used to set up an Analytics Goal with an actual monetary value applied to them. An interaction such as submitting a request a quote form could easily be assigned an average value based on the company’s close rate and lifetime customer value. Having event tracking set up on the form will allow such tracking to take place.

In the example below, you can see a client who came to us with event tracking set up so broadly that 98.45% of visitors logged at least one event. After drastically refining their tracking, limiting events to only actions display conversion intent, only 2.86% of visitors now log events. Not only is this number more realistic (how many of your site visitors are actually potential clients/customers?), but it allows us to more intelligently act upon the data with a targeted audience.

Don’t: Take “Action” literally

Of Google’s three mandatory attributes, “Action” is what throws off well-intentioned marketers more than any other. When taken literally (as it too-often is), this results in an inordinate number of “Clicks” and “Submits” in Analytics. Since Event Tracking is used most frequently on a site’s buttons and links, “click” is quite possibly the most redundant and least insightful piece of information to track. Take the account above, for instance. Looking at this report lends zero insight into what interactions took place 62.89% of the time.

Do: Categorize Intelligently

Forget for a moment about the entire notion of a physical action, and instead use what we’ll call Event Tracking Attribute #2 as an opportunity to further describe the user interaction taking place. Consider the two examples below. Without needing any additional context, Example #1 clearly defines what type of interaction is happening on site while Example #2 gives a sense of what item on a page is being interacted with.

Example #1

Example #2

Don’t: Set up without a structure

Most event tracking newcomers I’ve seen approach the process somewhat like this:

1) Load website homepage, make list of all buttons on page
2) Create event tracking tags for each button
3) Click through to first main category or landing page, make list of all buttons on page
4) Create event tracking tags for each button
5) Repeat ad nauseum one page at a time

This “process” if it is even called such, is bound to be rife with irrelevant, mislabeled events along with serious data confusion. In event tracking, attributes must exactly match one another (meaning they are case-sensitive) in order to be aggregated under a common title. As errant labelers will quickly find out, “Contact” and “Contact Type” (and for that matter “contact,” “contacts” and “contact form”) are completely separate items which cannot be combined after the fact.

Do: Track with meaning

Start your event tracking endeavor by closing the website altogether and getting out a piece of pen and paper. Write down the top interactions a user can or should perform on the site. Most frequently, these will include:

  • Contact
  • Download
  • View
  • Register
  • Purchase

Notice that each of these tasks is completely unique from the others. These are your event tracking “categories.”

Next, you’ll apply an “action” to each category. Since you already know that “click” is an unacceptable action, look for something more insightful to contribute to your tracking. Typically an action should describe the type of content being interacted with. For example, under a “Download” category, you might have actions consisting of “white papers,” “case studies,” and “product overview.” After you expand all of your categories, you should have a list that looks something like this:

  • Contact
    • Help Form
    • Free Sample
  • Download
    • White Paper
    • Case Study
    • Product Overview
  • View
    • Testimonial
    • Webinar
  • Register
    • Newsletter
    • Account Signup
  • Purchase
    • Add to Cart
    • Add to Wishlist

Good so far? Great! Now all you need is a simple little label and you’re set. Labels should be used to identify the specific piece of content, product, or location on a page with which a user is interacting. When it comes to forms (such as a Help or Contact form), it can also be valuable to capture any drop down or radio button options your users have to fill out.

If you have a huge product catalog or huge archive of content that you’re dealing with, simply create a standardized template for your developers to apply site wide so you’re not left manually combing through thousands of pages.

Once you’ve gone back through your list a final time, you should wind up with an event tree that looks a bit like this:

  • Contact
    • Help Form
      • Sidebar
      • Footer link
    • Free Sample
      • For me
      • For a friend
  • Download
    • White Paper
      • [White-Paper-Title]
    • Case Study
      • [Case-Study-Title]
    • Product Specs
      • [Item-Number]
  • View
    • Testimonial
      • Client ABC
      • Client XYZ
    • Webinar
      • How To Make a Widget
  • Register
    • Newsletter
      • Footer link
      • Blog widget
    • Account Signup
      • Supernav link
      • Signup widget
  • Purchase
    • Add to Cart
      • [Product-Name]
    • Add to Wishlist
      • [Product-Name]

Once you’ve reached this point,you have satisfied Google’s required attributes for event tracking–pat yourself on the back! If you’re ready to be an overachiever, review your existing list and look for opportunities to incorporate Values where appropriate and determine whether or not you need to implement Non-interaction Events.

Don’t: Write code on your own

Granted, event tracking code is not the most complicated syntax most marketers will deal with on a regular basis. That said, manually writing this code is just asking for a slip-up that fractures your otherwise flawless data (see above: case-sensitivity).

Do: Use a tool to simplify your life

I’m a fan of the Google Analytics Configuration Tool from Raven. This user-friendly site allows you to easily populate code snippets for event tracking, as well as a few other handy Analytics items.

After selecting the general type of event you want to track from the drop-down menu, the tool prompts you to provide a Category, Action and Label, while providing helpful hints and suggestions. Once the three mandatory fields are populated, the tool generates your code snippet which simply needs to be placed into your webpage. Using this system reduces the chances that someone will create manual typing errors by enabling an easy copy and paste procedure.

Have more event tracking Do’s and Don’ts to share? Leave a comment below, tweet

 

How to Create Great Landing Pages That Convert

How to Create Landing Pages That Convert

How to Create Landing Pages That Convert

Building an effective landing page that features a form users need to fill out can help any online business skyrocket the amount of business they are able to generate. This makes it one of the most important parts of any website that is looking to create new leads and business from its website’s users. Understanding what goes into a great landing page where users convert can help your business take a good online presence and make it even better by focusing on improving just a single page.

Seeing as one form can be the difference between a successful website and one that is underperforming, a Reddit user wanted to know: “How do I create a landing page that actually converts?” This is a million dollar question that will vary depending on what kind of website you have and what your landing page form is trying to get from your audience. However, I try and discuss some of most important features of any good landing page and how you can help tailor your form fields so that your audience actually fills them out.

To view more of our videos answering questions from around the web and for more information about video marketing, you can check out our other work here. If you have a question that you would like answered, leave it in the comments section below or tweet it at us at @BFMweb.

Transcript

Hey, I’m Dan Morosi from Web Designer Vip. I’m a Senior Marketing Specialist and I’m responsible for the paid media, paid search and display efforts here. We had a question from Reddit – a user asked: “How do you go about making a landing page where people actually convert?”That’s a million dollar question (literally), and there are some obviously basic things that every landing page should have. If you’re using it for paid search and you know exactly which campaign and keywords are going there, obviously those keywords should be used and targeted on that landing page, it should be relevant to what

 

4 Tips to Increase Average Conversion Rate Using CRO

CRO Superhero Featured Image

Conversion rate optimization can be a huge addition to any company’s digital marketing efforts when done correctly. From increasing click through rates and decreasing bounce rates to increasing on site goal completions, conversion rate optimization (or CRO) can play an integral role for your business when it comes to creating a site that performs well.

With so many case studies around the web discussing how companies leveraged CRO to increase overall conversion rates to make more money than ever before, it can be tempting to jump in and test everything on a website without thinking about the goal of such tests. Not everything on a website that can be tested should be tested. Doing that can actually cause more issues for a website than it does to increase a company’s bottom line.

In an effort to make sure that you are testing the right elements of your website, here are 4 tips to correctly use CRO for your business in order to get the most ROI our of your tests:

1. Look at bounce rates

Out of all the metrics to take note of when deciding whether or not a CRO test on an individual page makes sense, bounce rate and exit rate are the most important. Take a look at the pages that have the highest exit rates and compare them with pages that have a low exit rate. It makes sense to leave pages with low exit and bounce rates alone as they are performing as they should be. However, pages with high bounce or exit rates are often the source of lost traffic (note that individual blog posts are clearly exempt from this general rule) and are sensible pages to test if they have large amounts of traffic coming to them.

When analyzing a page with a high bounce or exit rate, ask yourself why this is happening. Often there is content that is missing from the page that audiences were looking for and the page just doesn’t provide it, or they can’t find key navigation elements to take them where they want to go. This means taking a look at key CTAs to make sure they are clear to audiences both in terms of where they are on the page and what kind of copy is featured.

2. Test the Obvious

Headlines and CTAs are the best pieces of a website that you can test as they will ultimately have the biggest effect on user behavior on an individual page. Changing the messaging, color, or size of your headlines or CTA’s are also great ideas for A/B Testing as they are the main focus point for users who are trying to get to the ever-important RAQ or product pages.

By testing elements that your users are going to be using to get through to your key goal completion on a site, you will get to test the most helpful elements that affect your bottom line. Tweak these elements to the point of being blatantly obvious so that users don’t have to guess what they are supposed to do next.

3. Use User Surveys to Inform Your Tests

A great way to make sure that your CRO tests are going to have the biggest impact possible is to understand what users need or are looking for before you even start CRO. Using user surveys or user testing tools is a great way to understand why your website is not performing to its full potential. When using user surveys, make sure to use qualitative questions in order to get the most out of it! Don’t make your questions make the process seem like a net-promoter score survey for users. You want to avoid leading users into simple “yes” or “no” responses, and instead aim to ask open ended questions so that you get specific feedback about what you can do to make your website work better for your audience.

Dive into the responses you get and explore any potential trends in responses that users are giving about your website. If you notice patterns in terms of the feedback suggestions you get from your audience, it makes sense to test them in your CRO tests. This way, you’re sure to be testing things that your audience actually wants or needs instead of basic elements that users might not even be noticing in the current version of a page or website.

4. Don’t Micro Test

Testing little elements on your website one by one is often not beneficial enough for your website and testing timeline (especially if you have low traffic) to be worthwhile. Some websites, like Google, can get away with testing micro-elements because they have millions of people using their site, so it takes them less than a day to get statistical significance on their tests. However, for sites that only get a couple of hundred visitors a day, it could take months to reach statistical significance for tests that don’t provide that much ROI for a business. That’s why it is so important to test only the elements that are going to have a big impact.

The founder of Optimizely and author of A/B Testing, Dan Siroker, states that it’s better to make big drastic changes and test it, instead of small changes. Once you have found a big change that works, you can go back and analyze the next steps of how to optimize that change and understand what worked in order to get the most out of the new element that you’ve found.

Don’t Lose Sight of Your Goals

It can be tempting to wildly test a variety of different parts of your website and justify doing it by telling yourself that regardless of what happens you will have some interesting data that you can repurpose into case studies about what you’re doing or what you found. However, it is important to not lose sight of the whole point of a CRO study, which is to help increase your bottom line by testing elements that you or your users are having trouble using properly. Keep it in perspective and follow the tips I’ve outlined and you’re sure to find new, interesting ways to increase your website’s ROI.

Do you have tips I’ve missed or questions about CRO that you would like addressed? Let me know in the comments section below.

 

How to CRO and Look Good in The Process

CRO Process Featured Image

I was performing conversion rate optimization tests before I even knew what they were. Fresh out of college, I found myself mercilessly pounding the pavement in a quest for my first job. I went on dozens of interviews those first couple of months out of undergrad, all with conversion rates of less than zero.

Wanting success and finding none, I quickly started tweaking aspects of my interview experience to see if any of the changes netted a beneficial impact. Blue tie over red? Open suit jacket versus buttoned? Hair slicked back or parted?

Personal CRO Test
While I never actually wore a tank top and a baseball hat to an interview, I did quickly find that how I dressed to go to my interviews drastically changed my luck in the job market. Just like that – boom. CRO in action. I like to tell myself that eventually the reams of mini data I gathered were enough to land me my first job (or I just got lucky).

When performed correctly and efficiently, CRO tests on your website can net you a variety of benefits, but you’re going to want to make sure you know what you’re doing before you get started. Keeping the following points in mind before running your first tests will drastically help.

#1. Understand What a Conversion is for You

Knowing what constitutes a conversion is the first step, and it is not always as obvious as you might think. Are you tracking placed orders? Newsletter sign-ups? Booked appointments? Examine your site and take stock of every potential action you are asking of a site visitor. Ascertain which is the most important and set that as your main conversion to track.

Once you’ve figured out what a conversion means for your business, examine the steps that users have to take to convert. More often than not it is the buttons, fonts, and colors that users have to navigate with to achieve a conversion that you will want to tweak in order to increase your conversion rate.

#2 Test Multiple Variables at Once

Text color and size, message prominence, form placement, copy positioning and image use are all variables that can have subtle, yet measurable effects on how willing a person is to convert on your site. You’ll want to make sure you test all of these. There are three types of test you can perform:

  • Time-split
  • A/B Tests
  • Multivariate

Time-splits are generally regarded as not efficient, and A/B tests are solid, but don’t provide the wealth of insight multivariate testing offers. You’ll definitely want to test multiple variables at once if you want to make large changes to an entire page – particularly if each individual element you are testing is relatively minor on its own.

There are programs that are great for these types of tasks, namely Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely, and if you’re looking for a free option, Google offers Google Content Experiments as well.

#3 Know What to Do with Your Information

So you run a bunch of tests and gleam lots of useful data for your site. You’re seeing that your conversion rates are improving and your cost per acquisition has dropped, netting you extra budget. What to do now? Use the money you’re saving on other marketing channels or media. Perhaps you can partition off funds to promote yourself via Adwords campaigns, or invest into print or more traditional media. Partner your conversion data with site usability surveys to add a qualitative aspect to your quantitative data. Or, keep performing CRO tests on important variables of your website. There’s always room to improve.

Engaging in CRO tests forces you to take a very hard look at your website and understand exactly what it’s conveying to the world and how the world is responding to it. Whether you’re a start-up with a tiny budget or an established company with decades of experience, the knowledge you gain from these tests can make your website run smoother, provider a better user experience, and net you money!

 

How to Create Stellar Landing Page Copy that Converts

Landing Page Copy Featured Image

No matter how you’ve driven traffic to your landing page, whether through PPC, Social, or Email, it’s essential to create stellar copy that will make your traffic convert. It doesn’t matter what the end-goal conversion is: crisp, catchy, and minimal copy will drive your traffic down the funnel. If your traffic is coming through organically, that’s another story, and we’ll get to that in a bit.

All landing page copy is cobbled out of four distinct parts: the header, where your visitors will immediately learn what you’re offering; the summary, where they’ll learn more about your product; value propositions, where you’ll convince them that your product is better than your competition; and the call to action, or CTA, where they’ll convert.

In all cases, before writing your copy, you have to know who your audience is, which channel the traffic will come through, and what your audience is looking for. Understanding the demographic and expectations of your audience is essential in writing great copy that speaks directly to their intent, converting them quickly.

Your landing page will be the culmination of months of researching your audience through Google Analytics demographics and interests (below), surveying your audience through email or directly on the site, competitor research, and researching the audience specific to the industry you’re promoting.

Audience Interets
While you can still write great landing page copy without this information, it’s best practice to commit substantial time to establish your audience’s identity and needs to result in the highest number of conversions possible.

Our Example

For the sake of this blog post, let’s create an example. Let’s say that your business specializes in B2B payment solutions, providing call centers, mobile payments, and payment processing. Your audience consists of small business owners and utility companies looking to reduce the expense of paper bills and make payments easier. The specific product you’re promoting is a text-based payment system called Text2Pay that reminds customers when payments are due and allows them to pay their bills with a single message.

Let’s also say you’ve written an email blast announcing the new service, which you’ll send to customers who’ve previously requested additional product information. The call to action will have customers download a demo to learn more about the product. Your traffic will funnel through your email, and your landing page will be the conversion point, so we’ll tailor the page for this purpose.

What We Know

We know that the audience has already visited your site, and that they’re interested in payment solutions. Because they provided their email address, they’ve already shown intent, and possibly purchased products in the past. This means that they:

  • Are current or potential customers
  • Are small business or utility company managers
  • Know your brand
  • Have a need for payment solutions

Now that you’ve written your email, determined your audience, and know who will receive it, it’s time to write the page.

Landing Page Header Copy

It all starts with the header, which should tell your visitor immediately what the page is, what it does, and what you want them to do. Any savvy marketer knows that a visitor’s eye is drawn immediately toward the top left corner, making your header the most important part of the page.

We need to tell them immediately what your product does and what it can do for them:

Reduce late payments and paper costs with Text2Pay.

Here we’ve chosen the two most important value propositions for your customers. They’ll save money and reduce missed payments with this new service, and every company likes to save money. In addition, we’ve worked in two reasons why they should try your product as well as the product name in eight words. Because we’ve peaked their curiosity, the next question your customer will have is, “What is Text2Pay?” That’s where the summary will come in.

Landing Page Summary Copy

Here’s where you tell them a little bit more about your product. Generally consisting of 2-3 lines, it should fully encapsulate the product and make it sound like the only option for your customer’s needs. Our goal is to get them down the page, so we have to keep it short, simple, and catchy:

Text2Pay is a text-based payment solution that reduces payment delinquency, providing payment security and convenience for your customers. Remind subscribers when payments are due and receive their payments 24/7. Download your demo today to learn how Text2Pay works for your business.

In three short lines, we’ve repeated the name of the product, added two additional value propositions while underscoring the first, explained how the product works, and told them what the conversion will be. We’ve also worked in the word “subscribers,” cutting out the need for an explanation of the subscription process. We’ll get to that later, explaining the product in detail when the customer converts at the bottom of the page.

Most importantly, we’ve let the customer know what they’re expected to do before they read the value propositions. That way, your customer doesn’t have to decide immediately whether they want to convert. We have a little more time to convince them. Now let’s hammer home what makes this product unique.

Value Propositions

This is where your traffic will learn why your product is better than the competition. It will consist of 4-5 short and unique value propositions, leading the eye down a bulleted list and toward the conversion button. Your customer is now on step three of the process, so we need to get them excited about the opportunity and ready to press that button:

  • Eliminate the expenses of paper bills
  • SMS platform guarantees text message delivery
  • Adheres to FCC regulations for secure processing
  • Payments processed in real time

With these four value propositions, we’ve told them they’ll save money, the service is reliable and secure, and there’s no delay in processing. We’ve positioned this product as a safe and convenient way for customers to pay bills that will save money and result in fewer delinquencies, which is good for the company and the customer. Now we just have to convert them.

Call to Action

Your conversion button should tell your audience what to do next. There’s no need for additional copy here, just a few controlled words to take them to the next step and convert them. While it may be tempting to try something like “Save Money Now” or “Make Payments Easier,” there’s no need to add another value proposition. It not only sounds hokey, but by adding a specific value proposition to the button, you’re focusing the customer on one point in which he or she may not be interested, leading to fewer conversions. It’s best to go with something simple and elegant that tells the story, in this case something like:

Download Your Demo

By clicking the button, your customers will download a demo that gives an in-depth explanation of the product and features. Congratulations, you’ve begun converting your customers and selling more products.

A Note on Organic Landing Pages

Landing Page Optimization
While this post focuses specifically on paid and email traffic, the same rules apply for organic landing pages. The biggest difference is that these pages exist as an island outside of your website, and don’t need to conform to the standards and format of other pages. Generally, this is the only page your customer will see before they convert, so you’re able to optimize it for conversions however you wish.When writing organic landing pages, they must exist on your site as a natural extension of your content and theme. Generally, organic landing pages are longer and more in depth, as your customer will visit them by navigating through other pages. They haven’t yet displayed the intent of paid and email visitors, and will take additional time, copy, and value propositions to convert.

For more help with writing great copy for your business check out our copywriting page. If you have any questions or comments about creating great landing page copy, let us know

 

Expert Tips on How To Increase Click Through Rate on Emails

how-to-increase-click-through-rates

Nearly all industries and businesses use email marketing as a way to reach their audience. And it’s no wonder why–as email users, most of us are constantly connected, checking our inbox on desktops and mobile devices multiple times a day. By reaching users on devices that are just a touch or click away, marketers hold a major advantage if this initiative is properly utilized and appropriately implemented.

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Email allows you to draw attention to any specific asset of your business. Whether you’re trying to drive immediate sales, remind users of an event, or bring traffic to a distinct page on your website, email marketing is often the best way to do so.If you have significant value to offer users, then the advantages of email marketing may seem endless. However, as a platform it won’t be effective if the message isn’t being opened or clicked on. In order for email marketing to be a successful channel, and for your click-through-rate to be significant enough to produce results, apply as many best practices as you can to your efforts.

We’ve asked some top digital marketing experts at our digital agency for insights, and have looked to outside experts at some top organizations to find out what their best tips are for producing emails with high click-through-rates:

1. Customer Logic

Bryan Clayton, CEO at Greenpal, points out the worth of thinking about your audience when you’re crafting emails, and suggests asking people unfamiliar with the content for feedback on how it reads:

“The biggest mistake we were making when crafting our emails was that we were using company logic as opposed to customer logic. You really need to put yourself in the mind of your customer when crafting your emails. Run your email copy by friends, and strangers. Get feedback because it’s so challenging to get out of your own skin.”

-Bryan Clayton, CEO, Greenpal

2. Timing Matters

Finding the best time to send emails to individual users will provide the best results. Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager at Blue Fountain Media, explains the importance of segmenting contacts with consideration for timing:

“While there are some standard times that are widely considered the ‘best’ to send emails based on vertical and email type, you should try and go beyond just finding the best time to send for most of your users and aim to send at the best possible time for each individual on your contact list. For example, if you find that most people like to open emails at 9 am, it isn’t enough to just send an email at 9 am Eastern Standard Time and call it a day. Use the information you’ve gathered in your lists to try and segment your contacts down by time zone – that way you can send to each person at 9 am in their local time. Some mailing platforms will do this for you automatically as a final step before you send – but if your email service provider doesn’t include this it can be as simple as using phone numbers or city data to figure out what state a contact is in and then adding a new time zone field manually. It can be a lot of tiring manual work, but higher open rates and better results make it more than worth it.”

-Austin Paley, Corporate Marketing Communications Manager, Blue Fountain Media

3. Think About Individual Users

It’s important to have relevant messaging, and an understanding of your users at a 1-to-1 level explains Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing at Boomtrain. Then you can deliver only the most targeted content for that individual person:

“As email marketers, we must look to reaching the mythical segment of 1. No audiences, just individual people seeking more personal user experiences. But how do you do this? Previously thought a near impossible task, now, (thanks to machine intelligence), marketers have the opportunity to massively scale and automate not only the actual building of the emails, but the collection and processing of data that surfaces an understanding of the behavior of your subscribers/customers and a deep understanding of your content/products. This coupling of multiple layers of understanding with automation gives marketers tools that predictively populate emails with content most relevant to that individual person, and will deliver it to them at an optimal time. Powerful computers and algorithms have evolved so much that marketers are now able to distribute relevant emails as if sent by a close friend who has known that individual for years.”

-Shannon Johlic, Head of Marketing, Boomtrain

4. Quality over Quantity

Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing at Get Smart Marketing explains that sending emails to a ton of leads that aren’t necessarily qualified is far less effective than sending to a smaller, qualified group:

“As a marketer, it is your goal to influence a consumer’s purchase decisions. Email is a powerful tool that helps marketers connect with consumers, delivering them useful and relevant content right to their inbox. So, it seems logical that the more people you can contact, the better your chances are at sending qualified leads to sales. However, more doesn’t always mean better. Adding unqualified leads to your nurture campaigns, won’t help close more sales. Grow your email list the smarter way by serving personalized sign up forms only to visitors who haven’t opted in and that fit within one of your target audience personas.”

-Ashley Chavez, Director of Marketing, Get Smart Content

5. Code Images

Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate at Blue Fountain Media suggests always defining your image sizes in your coding, and labeling them with alt image tags for the best user-experience:

BFM_Email
“If your images don’t render in your clients’ email platform, your email will display as an assortment of random white boxes and could come across as spam. By having the image sizes defined with alt image tags in your coding, it ensures that the layout of your email will retain its shape without being jumbled together and your alt tag images will explain and help identify what each white box is. This does not seem like a huge difference to you, but putting in the extra effort can be the decisive factor that might sway your clients to load those images and actually read and react to your email.”

-Andrew Jung, Corporate Marketing Associate, Blue Fountain Media

6. Align Content with the Buyer Process

Aligning content with the buying cycle is crucial for every company and should be a focus of any successful email marketing campaign. Troy O’Bryan, CEO at Response Capture explains how organizations should consider where the user is in the buying process when crafting their emails:

ACT_Model

“Each stage of the A.C.T. (Awareness, Consideration, Transaction) Model represents a different part of their journey and the content should be reflective. For example, if a prospect visits the “request a demo” page on your website, they are already in the Consideration stage. A case study or expert guide would be great content for your follow-up email strategy. By tailoring the content to fit the wants and needs of the buyer, they will be more likely to respond because you are providing something of value.”-Troy O’Bryan, CEO, Response Capture

7. What’s the CTA?

Having a strong Call-To-Action allows marketers to encourage users to take a desired action that brings them further into the conversion funnel. Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder at Targeting Mantra suggests making the CTA of your email your core focus:

“Marketers should focus on the CTA that goes with the email. Whether it is a template or a simple HTML message, your email focus should be on the CTA you are including in the mail. This is because you have just 1-8 seconds to catch the attention of the reader and you should be able to direct the reader in split seconds what you want him/her to do.”

-Saurbah Nangia, CEO & Founder, Targeting Mantra

8. Testing

Like all other marketing tactics, in order to understand what’s going to resonate best with your users and what types of email messages they’re most likely to open and click through, you need to do some testing. Jeff Tomlin, CMO of Vendasta Technologies highlights the importance of this in his tip:

“Get them into the email. First, you’ve got to get people to open the email and they choose in milliseconds whether to do so or to delete based only on who sent it what the subject line is. So make both count. Remember, emails coming from a person usually perform better than those coming from an entity. And while there are plenty of guidelines on creating open-worthy subject lines, if you’re looking for the BEST subject line, you need to test. Test. Test. And, you got it, test.”

-Jeff Tomlin, CMO, Vendasta Technologies

9. Videos

Owner at The Media Captain says his team has had great success with embedding videos in their email marketing, and suggests using it as an opportunity to engage users in a way that many companies don’t:

“When you mention “video” in the title it typically has a higher open rate percentage. We will then embed the video within the email blast and when people click on it, it drives them to a landing page specific to the email marketing message that we’re delivering.”

-Jason Parks, Owner, The Media Captain

10. Build Consistent Confidence

If you’re not delivering in content, you likely will not be converting clicks. Owen Powis, Founder and CEO of Mailflow, stresses the importance of instilling confidence in your users:

“Focus on creating the best possible experience, and people will click when they have confidence that the email will contain something they want to see. If they know when you send them an offer it’s always a great offer they are far more likely to check it out. The more effort you put into creating a fantastic campaign that genuinely benefits your audience the better your CTR will become. This is a far healthier and longer term strategy than just looking at making the subject line stand out.”

-Owen Powis, Founder and CEO, Mailflow

Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best marketing tactics for reaching an audience, and boosting a brand’s ROI. To understand if your efforts are paving the way for your business, take a look at your key performance indicators and examine your open-rates and click-through-rates to identify areas of improvement. If you’d like to enhance the overall performance of your email marketing, and increase your click-through-rates, incorporate some of our experts’ ideas throughout your next campaign.

 

10 Advantages of Social Media Marketing for Your Business

Advantages of Social Media

Social media marketing is a highly valued element of any decent marketing strategy. The benefits of using social media marketing are so great, that anyone not implementing the cost-effective marketing resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity.

According to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers claim that social media marketing is important for their business, with another 80% stating that their efforts increased traffic to their websites. It’s easy to see that social media marketing is definitely making waves in the marketing field and many marketers report realizing the potential for business growth, however they are unsure of the best method.

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Social Media Examiner states that 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media, but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use. There seems to be some uncertainty when it comes to social media marketing. With our help, we will diminish the confusion by thoroughly explaining the best ways to use social media to market your business.

There are an immense amount of benefits of using social media to market your business. We’ve chosen 10 to highlight:

1. Increased Brand Recognition

Social media marketing is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods to syndicate your content and increase your business visibility. Implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition because your business will be reaching such a broad audience of consumers. To get started, create social media profiles for your business and begin networking. Have employees, partner businesses, sponsors, your mother, anyone “like” and “share” your business content on social media. Simply having content “liked” and “shared” makes your business more visible to new consumers which will lead to retaining customers. The more people who know about your business, the better – and social media is a fantastic outlet for showing people what your business is about. Social media marketing increases any businesses’ ROI (return on investment).

2. Improved Brand Loyalty

According to a report by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. Social media creates the perfect environment for brands to communicate with their consumers and create a bond of brand loyalty. The report proves that brands who communicate with their customers on social media obtain higher levels of customer loyalty.

The millennial consumer generation is known for being the most brand loyal generation of all. The millennial generation is the largest generation in US history – born between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s – and will soon completely consume the market. Studies show that the millennial consumer generation is 80% more likely to use a brand again if they are pleased with their first purchase. With these technology natives requiring communication between themselves and their brands, businesses must implement social media marketing to catch the eye of the most influential consumer.

3. More Opportunities for Conversion

The more visibility your business has, the better. Every blog post, image, video, or comment may lead viewers to your company website, providing the opportunity for traffic conversion. Social media marketing allows your business to give a positive impression. If a viewer comes across your content and has no need for your products or services, the consumer is more likely to think of your business when the need arises.

4. Higher Conversion Rates

There are several ways social media marketing results in higher conversion rates, the most prominent is its humanization factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it personifies a brand. People prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies.

Studies have also shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. When a brand is interactive on social media, consumers who follow your brand’s social media accounts often gain more trust for your brand and view your business as more credible. People use social media platforms to stay connected to their friends, family, and communities. Since people are already talking, why not throw your brand into the mix? More likely than not, they’ll mention your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed, overall providing your business with social proof of its quality. Putting your brand in an atmosphere where people are sharing, liking, and talking, can only improve the conversion rates on your existing traffic.

5. More Brand Authority

When consumers see your business posting on social media – a marketing strategy that only top businesses use – it makes your business appear more credible. Interacting with your customers frequently demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that customers might pose. When a satisfied customer wants to spread the word about a great product or service they received from your business, they often turn to social media (especially if social media is the platform where they heard about your business in the first place). Having authentic customers mentioning your business on social media will advertise your business to an even broader audience. The average person has over 300 friends on Facebook, that’s 300 more people that will hear about your business if they scroll through their news feed.

6. Increased Inbound Traffic

Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. The people familiar with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. You’ll have much more difficulty reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle (if you have loyal customers) without social media marketing. Every social media profile you add to your marketing mix (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc.) is a gateway to your website, and every piece of content you post is another opportunity to acquire a new customer. Social media is a melting pot of different types of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and no two people have the same profile. With different people come different needs and different ways of thinking. Perhaps someone in an older demographic of consumers will search your website for the same keywords, however a millennial generation consumer could think totally differently. By marketing on social media, you are opening your business to versatile consumers all over the world.

7. Cost-Effective

Social media marketing is the most cost-efficient advertising strategy. Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can sit back and let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.

According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found that as little as 6 hours a week spent on social media marketing efforts saw a benefit of reduced marketing expenses. Even paid advertising through Facebook and Twitter is the cheapest form of marketing compared to other methods. If paid advertising on social media is the way you decide to go, you can always start small and watch your conversion rates rise, which will pay off the money you initially put in.

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8. Better Search Engine Rankings (SEO)

Search engine ranking is very important for obtaining traffic to your business website. More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings. Ranking in the top positions in SEO for your keywords will revolutionize your traffic. Let’s face it, everyone uses Google to find information, and they likely won’t click “Next Page” because they don’t have to, they’ll find the answer within the first URLs they click on. If your business website isn’t ranked high in search engine results, you should probably adjust your marketing strategy.

Although posting on social media might get your business some site traffic, more is required to succeed at social media marketing. First, you must create high quality content. Content such as blogs, infographics, facts, advertising your products or services, employee photos and events, and much more will make your business’s social media profile intriguing and credible. Once you begin posting quality content, you’ll begin to build a social media community. Your followers will “like” and “share” your content, which will give your business more visibility, however it is about quality over quantity. An engaged community is more likely to link to you, which will make your website rank higher in search engine results. Social media can be used to publish your content in order to obtain more links to your webpages, which will rank you higher in search engine results.

9. Overall Better Customer Experience

Social media is a networking and communication platform. Every customer interaction with your business on social media is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your compassion for your customers. Whether a customer has a complaint you can address, or a compliment to give, social media allows you to address the matter in an interpersonal dialogue. A brand devoted to customer satisfaction that takes the time to compose personal messages will inherently be viewed in a positive light, even if responding to a customer complaint.

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10. Improved Customer Insights

Hubspot reported that 69% of marketers found social platforms provided market place insights. Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in. By monitoring comments, you can see customers’ blunt opinions of your business that you might not be aware of if your business didn’t have social media presence.

Another insightful aspect of social media marketing is the ability to segment your content syndication lists based on topic and identify what types of content generate the most interest and then produce more of that type of content. With social media marketing you have the ability to measure conversions based on different posts on various social media platforms to find the perfect combination to generate revenue.

Now Get Started

Still don’t know where to start? First, create your business’s social media profiles, next, post engaging content, gain some links to your webpages (which will improve your keyword search engine optimization), and boom: you’ve got yourself a functioning social media marketing strategy.

There are virtually no reasons not to implement social media marketing into your marketing strategy. Your competition is most likely already on social media. Don’t let your competitors hog the playing field. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see growth in your business. There is no reason not to market on social media when the potential losses are statistically insignificant.

The longer you wait, the more time you’re losing, the less traffic you’ll receive, and the less customers you will retain. Check out Web Designer Vip’s social media marketing strategy to get started right away.

 

Domain Migration Tips To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

SEO_website_redesign

Rebranding is one of the most common marketing initiatives for businesses, and can occur for many reasons. Whether it is an attempt to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand, this marketing tactic can be very effective if approached properly.

Some notable brands have undergone this process including Comcast’s rebranding to Xfinity, and the British Overseas Airway Corporation’s (BOAC) rebranding to British Airways. In the digital world, Quantum Computer Services successfully changed its name to America Online in 1991–and even Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

While rebrandings can be very profitable, it requires a very complex interplay of resources to be successful. One of those resources is search engines and the way they manage a change in domain. In some cases, the original brand has such a strong online presence that a Google search will still return several pages and results before the actual current page. BOAC returns several Wikipedia pages and YouTube video results before you start seeing the current brand’s site, British Airways. On the other hand, if you do a search for Comcast, you’ll find paid and organic results for Xfinity.com occupying the first two ranking positions and the Wikipedia page for Comcast down at position 5.

SEO Preservation

SEO Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

To highlight this, consider the following example. This company, started with 2,100 keywords ranking in the top 20 search results before the domain change and one month later saw a 40% drop to fewer than 1,400 terms in April.

Domain_Migration_Keyword_Drop
Another “nightmare scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.

To illustrate this, consider this example below. Average daily site visits dropped in half due to falling organic traffic when the site no longer ranked for terms that they dominated only weeks before.

Domain_Migration_Organic_Traffic

Rebrandings with SEO in Mind

What steps do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these drops impacting your business?

There are 6 critical components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these crucial elements if your preparing for a rebranding:

  1. Redirects
  2. Resubmit Sitemap
  3. Directory Listings
  4. Social Media
  5. Analytics and Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) Profiles
  6. Audit Redirects

Redirects

The most obvious first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.

In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special attention to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer, Google Search Console and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.

Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.

It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.

Resubmit Sitemap

Once the redirects have been implemented it’s important to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.

Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages.

Directory Listings

Along with inbound links, directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, YP.com, City Search, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.

In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From auto-dealers to law firms or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.

Social Media

There is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the rebranding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.

Analytics and Search Console Profiles

The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.

Google_Analytics_Property_Settings
In addition to Google Analytics it’s important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

1. On the Search Console homepage, click the name of the legacy site.
2. Click the gear icon; then click change of address.
3. Follow the instructions in the change of site address tool.
4. Monitor site traffic as indicated in move a site with URL changes.

Google_analytics_change_of_address

Audit Redirects

Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.

1. Upload: The legacy URL’s

Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.

Screaming_Frog_List_Mode
This is where the log that was saved from step 1, redirects comes back into play.

2. Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box

Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.

Screaming_Frog_Advanced_Tab
As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).

3. Start the crawl

Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.

4. Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’

Screaming_Frog_Redirect_Chains
This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.

This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.

Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, with preparation and a clearly outlined plan it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. Following the steps to update analytics packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.

Now, go forth and change that domain!

 

Instagram for Business: 5 Tips for Effective Advertising

Instagram_For_Business_Advertising

Social media advertising is on the rise, and more and more social media platforms are providing advertisers with the capability to advertise on each individual platform to best reach their target audience within a specific channel. Instagram has officially joined the game, and with an expected growth to hit over 100 million users by 2018, it’s an obvious decision for relevant businesses to utilize the new advertising options that have been made available.

instagram_users

So, what kind of businesses should consider advertising on Instagram?Instagram is an incredibly visual-centric social platform, ultimately providing users with appealing imagery that is highly engaging and shareable. With the capabilities to Like, Comment, and Share the content posted by other users, your content’s reach is organically extended to a large portion of the Instagram network.

Businesses with captivating imagery, product photos, and lifestyle-based content (think company events, flowers in the office, happy hour) are able to give their target audience a glimpse inside the brand on the Instagram platform. This “point-of-view” strategy allows users to better understand the background of the business, get to know their employees, how their products are made, and obtain a behind the scenes look at the company – building trust and forging brand loyalty in the process. Fashion companies, lifestyle brands, bloggers, magazines, and other businesses with strong imagery to share tend to be the most successful on the Instagram platform.

Instagram has made an atmosphere for marketers to create a close bond with consumers via mobile devices. With a less conventional content concept in comparison to other traditional advertisements, this form of social engagement can significantly increase digital visibility. The platform offers similar characteristics to Twitter and Facebook, yet the specific steps to connect with your audience are different. Follow these 5 tips to expand your brand reach and effectively advertise on Instagram:

1. Set Your Goals

For any social media advertising initiative, defining your goal should be the first step; followed by the strategy to reach these goals (targeting, content to be shared, brand voice, etc.), which should be built with these objectives top of mind.

Is your brand interested in advertising on Instagram to build out their following? Is the business launching in the US market and seeking to expand brand awareness throughout the country? Is the company launching a new line and seeking to leverage the existing audience of their current, well-established line? Once the goals for your advertising efforts are identified, your business can move towards the execution of the advertising campaign.

2. Establish Your Point of View

With a strong visual presence on the platform, Instagram uses imagery (and the use of some text and hashtags as well) to deliver messaging to users. Businesses must create a brand strategy unique to each social platform, and specifically on Instagram, decide what specific “point of view” they would like to convey to their target audience. Think sneak peek into the showroom, the latest celebrity look from the brand, or a look inside the factory where products are manufactured. Once a brand’s point of view strategy is established, the content strategy should be built to support it.

3. Create A Content Strategy

Instagram_advertising_ideas

Supporting the goals and point of view previously established by your business, your content strategy should go hand in hand with the two. Within the content strategy, you’ll want to tell a story to users on the platform. Keep in mind, users on each social media platform are unique, so the content strategy across social platforms should vary a bit, while aiming to maintain an overall consistent brand voice across all channels. By analyzing the success of each post, you will be able to best determine what works best in terms of content, and optimize your efforts accordingly.

4. Utilize Hashtags

Leverage the organic reach of your posts with the use of relevant and trending hashtags. Instagram’s resources provide inspiration for ways to best use hashtags to connect with the community and extend your brand’s reach.

hashtags_to_watch

5. Continue Improving

In both organic posts and advertising efforts, the success of each should be analyzed and reported on regularly to best determine what works best and what kind of posts don’t perform as well for your specific brand. Maybe the use of a specific hashtag resulted in 30% more engagement on two similar posts, or maybe a specific image type generated noticeably higher results. By analyzing and understanding the success of your efforts, your brand is able to optimize posts accordingly to help foster the best results possible.

Instagram for Business

Instagram is a highly visual social media platform, and it provides brands with the ability to share their point of view with the world. With advertising capabilities being extended to more businesses, we expect to see immense growth on the platform. By following these 5 tips for effective Instagram advertising, your brand’s content strategy and advertising efforts will boost the success of your social media efforts.

 

How Can Personalized Email Make An Impact on Your Users?

Personalized_Email_Impacts_User_Experience

Remember when you set up your first email account? You’ve probably been through countless email addresses since then for various reasons–a change in taste, or more likely, a need for an email address that sounded more professional. Your email addresses back then was essentially your username, so we had “dorky” IDs that we likely would be embarrassed to share as contact information today. Email has evolved into one of the most important forms of online identification, and nearly everything on the web that you create an account for now requires a valid email address.

So, if the basic concept behind naming email addresses has drastically changed, you can bet that the marketing aspect of email has transformed as well. Just as you would be embarrassed to have to explain your decades-old email address, you don’t want to be embarrassed when explaining during a company presentation how you lost potential leads and customers with outdated and ineffective email marketing tactics that didn’t include strategies like personalized email. In order to help make sure this never happens, here are three email marketing tips you should follow to get the most out of your email campaigns.

Focus on the Personalized Email Process

Repeat after me: “Not all emails are meant to generate an online sale.” Again. Not all emails are meant to generate an online sale. Users that visit your website and sign up for more content via email are all motivated by the different things that your website has to offer, and they are all at different points of the conversion funnel.

However, companies are often too distracted with sealing the deal and getting conversions or sales so they often send the same sales-oriented email newsletter to each and every user. While it certainly is easy to do things this way, this method is no longer as effective in the modern era. Users will get annoyed when you place priority on trying to foster a conversion through your emails and appearing overly concerned with driving sales without including messaging that is at all related to the overriding reason they signed up to receive emails from you in the first place. Find out how and why users decided to give you their email address, and present them with content, imagery, and links that they’ll find valuable based on why they signed up.

Email Drip
For example, if you have a fashion site that sells a myriad of designer clothing and you also have a blog that gives style tips, fashion advice, and information about what’s trending now, it is reasonable to assume that someone may visit your site interested in updating their wardrobe, while someone else may come to your site through your blog. If both sign up for your emails, they’re likely anticipating different things from your brand. As a result, sending the same mailer to both users will likely leave someone feeling as if you don’t understand who they are as a customer and that you aren’t interested in what they are actually to learn from your business.

Take a few moments to plan out the process of where users are in the conversion process as well as how they will read, interact, and click through to landing pages from your emails. By doing this instead of focusing on immediately converting all of your email recipients into sales, you should see a considerable bump in your end goal (often conversions) without being overly sales-centric with your email content.

Send One to Two Personalized Emails A Week

If this was a guide on how to get users to unsubscribe from your emails or marking your emails as spam, I would suggest that you send them an email every single day. However, this is a guide on how to use your email marketing more effectively, so I suggest that you send one to two emails a week at most, and don’t click that send button any more after that.

Email_User_Preferences

Do research on the most favorable time and day that your target demographic will check and respond to their email and schedule out your campaigns accordingly. Each email that you send to your users should offer interesting and fresh content that will intrigue them and encourage them to click on prominent calls to action. For example, if you are having a “BOGO” or “50% off everything” sale, and it’s is a week long, it will not create a sense of urgency if your users get an email for 7 days straight reminding them of your amazing sale. “Inbox fatigue” and “email fatigue” are real terms, and in my own email marketing experience, even some of the more well-known brands don’t realize that they are driving online users away with the constant reminder of their existence in their inbox. Do not be that company. Receiving an email from your business should be a pleasant surprise and should be something that users look forward to receiving, not a daily nuisance.

Timing is Key for Email Personalization

I flew to Atlanta this past weekend to catch up with old friends, and I bought my tickets through an online travel company. They emailed me the day before and a couple hours ahead of my flight to check in online so I could skip the line, and linked me to a webpage that I could scan as my boarding pass. I loved the email check-ups and reminders up until I landed and turned on my phone. While I was still on the runway, I received a “How was your flight?” email. This email didn’t come as I was going through baggage claim or after I had gotten home from the airport, it came as soon as I landed. It may sound like an overreaction, but this is a good example of NOT giving users their space when sending them a follow-up email. As soon as I hit the runway post-flight, the first thing I want to be able to do is call my friends and family to let them know I have landed safely and check for any missed personal emails, texts, or phone calls – not get bombarded with emails that should realistically arrive around the time I check in to my hotel.

Email_Users

Research has shown that follow-up emails, especially for abandoned shopping carts, are great at re-engaging users and influencing purchases. What’s often not included in this research is the timing of when those emails were sent out. As I’ve hinted at earlier, timing when it comes to email marketing is essential and you want to send your follow-up or reminder emails at the right time to retain customer lifetime value and foster positive user engagement.

Effective Email Marketing is Personalized

Ultimately, the most efficient way to confirm that your email marketing initiatives are proving beneficial to your organization is to do a thorough examination of whether or not they are driving increases in key metrics. Whatever you use as your email platform, be sure to take a look at things like click-through-rates and open-rates to discover areas for improvement, and see what types of emails are providing you with the best results. By following best practices and tweaking your messages so that they are tailored to each individual user’s wants and needs, you’ll find your organization will convert more customers, and produce a higher ROI from email marketing efforts.