Marcy Ansley, Author at Cloud Control Media

Connecting Across Campuses: Higher Education Social Media Marketing

Marcy Ansley on October 9, 2024

Social media is all about connectivity – building interactions among people who share a common interest. If your school has multiple campuses, your common interest can be a little fractured; people want to engage with your institution, but even more so with the people and places they know and love at their individual campus. So, you need to adopt a social media strategy with two prongs: a global and a local approach.

Higher Ed Social Media Marketing: Why Both Global and Local?

Your school has been graduating students to new careers for years and you’ve developed a recognized name in higher education, so you want to make the most out of it. That name, through web searches, your website, email, and all other marketing collateral, will direct traffic to your central, or main, social media account. This account sets the tone and message for your school; it highlights all campuses and all programs and showcases the wonderful actions you take for your students and the greater community. But what about your local campus markets?

Maintaining local campus accounts is important for a multitude of reasons. First, you probably have a lot to share about what’s happening on campus. You have so many inspiring students at each campus, it’s impossible to highlight them all using a single social media account. Each campus account can spotlight all that happens on the individual campus and encourage engagement among their students. The account also offers an avenue for graduates to easily stay in touch with their former instructors and classmates.

The campus accounts are also valuable outlets to disseminate important information to students such as campus closures or other campus specific announcements that would not be relative to the wider school community.

Additionally, the campus accounts represent a physical location, which pinpoints the campus to the local community and helps expand your reach. By adding the location to each of your campus accounts, you will increase visibility in the platform’s local search. This allows users to add the campus location to their own posts and increases the visibility of your school to that user’s following.

Another noteworthy point is that some social media platforms, for example, Facebook, automatically generate places pages to allow users to connect a location to their post. As a school, you do not have control over these autogenerated places pages. However, if the address is linked to your campus page, you’ll have control over your school’s name and branding. Plus, clicks will direct back to your page and your content.

Local campus pages allow students, graduates and prospective students to easily connect with their local campus team and each other. They do not need to start on the main page and have their questions rerouted to someone at the local level. This will speed up the customer service aspect of social media.

How Can Schools Manage Different Social Media Accounts?

These different accounts can be managed with organization, teamwork – and a little creativity!

The first step, as with any marketing endeavor, is to have a clear goal and plan. For most schools, goals will likely be threefold:

Enroll new students
Retain current students
Develop graduates who champion your school

These goals can be met through thoughtful content curation and diligent community engagement. Once your goals are set, it’s time to work out a plan.

If you’re starting from scratch, you need to decide what platforms are best for your school and your students. Regardless of what platforms you decide are right for your school, the most important part of your social media efforts is the development of a social media plan including school guidelines and policies that govern all aspects of the school’s social presence encompassing the main page and campus accounts. This document will foster a cohesive brand and voice.

Your social media guidelines should include a very clear outline of who is responsible for each aspect of your school’s social media accounts. A point person at each campus needs to have a clearly defined role and responsibilities. There should be a social media manager responsible for the main page who also oversees the campus accounts to ensure they are adhering to the school’s plan and meeting its objectives.

Your social media guidelines should also set expectations regarding posting cadence, brand representation, content directives, and expected timetables for responses and engagement. Include recommendations on how and when to tag other campuses, pages, or community partners in posts. Along with maintaining your brand across accounts and platforms, the document must also delineate legal and privacy liabilities such as the safe use of student or staff images and other compliance concerns. The misuse of copyrighted materials such as images, videos, and sounds must be mentioned in this section as well.

Other useful tools to include in your planning are a library of compliance-approved answers to frequently asked questions which can be quickly referenced when monitoring and engaging with follower comments and messages. Also, a repository of content development suggestions and creative templates can help campuses create their own campus-specific content while adhering to brand expectations.

It’s also important to remember that social media can be a very fluid medium; features, trends and strategies constantly evolve and change, so your plan and your team must do the same. Schedule regular touchpoints to discuss goals, approaches and content development.

Higher Education Social Media Marketing Is a Team Event

As powerful as local campus pages can be to boost your engagement and community impact, they could also negatively impact a school’s appeal. For example, if three of your five campuses are crushing their content development and fan engagement but the other two campus accounts have fallen silent, the laggards may find their enrollments lagging. The stagnant pages give the impression that those campuses aren’t as good or aren’t as caring. Plus, the students and graduates of those lackluster campuses may feel left out or forgotten.

The whole school needs to be supportive and engaged for higher ed social media marketing to be truly impactful. Even if the team managing your main school account is amazing with great vision, ideas and aptitude, without people at each individual campus helping to provide content, the main school account will feel the impact. They may wind up relying on stock imagery instead of vibrant campus photos. While stock images work in a pinch, they can make your marketing materials look tired and generic. And campuses can help each other by developing new ideas and tactics that can be shared across the school. Everyone needs to work as a team in order to thrive.

Do you need help getting your school’s social media marketing initiatives in order? Contact our team of experts today!

– Marcy J. Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

4 A/B Tests for Email Marketing in Higher Education

Marcy Ansley on March 20, 2024

Just because something works well for another university doesn’t mean it’s going to work for your school’s email campaign. To really get to know what will appeal to your prospects you need to run A/B tests. What can you test? Well, you can test just about anything in an email campaign from the subject line to calls to action, but here are 4 of the top email marketing variables to A/B test:

A/B Test for Email Subject Line

Email subject lines are probably one of the most common variables to test. This is the first thing that a prospect will see when the email is delivered and can have a big impact on an email’s performance. Some components to consider A/B testing are subject line length and action-oriented words that create urgency. Also, if classes are starting soon, test using a start date against not using one and gather data.

However, with recent mail privacy changes, determining a clear subject line test winner can be tricky. Open rates in today’s email world are inflated with many emails only being opened via a proxy server and not always in a contact’s inbox. Subject line tests still offer valuable data, but make sure to not focus solely on Open Rates. When determining results consider overall email engagement and when looking at the Open Rate weigh the impact off suspected mail privacy opens.

Email Deployment Date

If you’ve always deployed all your emails on the same day consider why you chose that day. Did you pick it because some survey noted it as the best day? Try different days and see what works best for your prospective students. Just because a retail giant has seen success deploying email campaigns bright and early on a Monday morning, it doesn’t mean that’s what’s best for your institution.

A/B Test for Email Calls to Action (CTA)

Once your prospects open your email, you now need to get them to take action – click through to your landing page. A/B testing your CTA can be as straight forward as trying different verbiage such as “Enroll Now” versus “Discover More”, button color, or it can also be location of the CTA within the email. Another consideration can be whether to use a text link or a button. Whichever CTA you opt for make sure it’s compelling and persuasive.

Email Personalization

Who doesn’t like to feel like an email was written specifically with them in mind? Try testing out adding a personalized greeting as straightforward as “Hi Jane!” or dig a little more deeply into your data and include details about a specific campus or program. The more relevant the email is to the prospect the more likely they are to take the action you’re looking for in your email campaign.

The variables you can test in an email are practically limitless. Your prospect list is constantly changing and so should your email initiatives. However, make sure to have a purpose in place for each test and don’t forget to analyze your results so you can adjust your email strategy appropriately.

If you’re ready to implement testing into your email marketing strategy, contact the CloudControlMedia experts today.

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Ready, Set, CRO: How to Improve Website Conversion Rates

Marcy Ansley on August 30, 2023

Today most marketers know it’s not enough to just drive traffic to your website. You also need visitors to convert—to do what you want them to do once on your website such as purchase a product or fill out a request for information form. When more visitors convert, you achieve a better conversion rate, and great website conversion rates are a smart marketer’s dream.

How to Achieve Great Conversion Rates on Your Website

Marketers love to run A/B tests in pursuit of higher conversions. But how do you decide what to test and how do you achieve your conversion rate goals? The answer: Conversion Rate Optimization! (Or CRO for short.)

CRO is the methodological process of improving conversions—or any desired action—of visitors on your website. Running carefully planned A/B or multivariant tests is a large part of the process. However, it’s not the only responsibility of a CRO team.

A/B Test is a bit of a marketing buzz term. Most marketers know that testing is important, but the problem is, for some people, that’s the extent of their knowledge. They know it needs to be done, they have a hunch what might work better, so they order their web design team to run a test. But at the end, they don’t have any real answers or improvements to make because their process was not data based.

Get Started with CRO on Your Website

So, how do you do it correctly? You follow a process! And you don’t solely rely on hunches. Hunches can be a great kicking off point, especially if you’re a seasoned marketer with lots of institutional knowledge about what usually works best. However, it’s best to back that hunch up with data—data don’t have preconceived notions about what website visitors should do or what looks pretty. Data are fact-based and verifiable.

The first step to implement CRO is to make sure your analytics tools are all squared away. There are a lot of tools available to help improve your website and a great place to start is with Google. GA4 is free and powerful. You can follow your visitors throughout their website journey, see where they fall off or get distracted. You can get a deeper understanding by setting up custom events to track actions that are specific to your website and customer journey.

Next you might want to consider behavior tracking tools that can provide heat maps and session recordings. There are dozens upon dozens of these tools available with price points varying from free to thousands of dollars. Find one that fits your needs and you’ll be armed with even more data and visitor information to power your CRO strategy.

Once you have GA4 set up and any other behavior tracking tools, you’ll want to take a deep dive into your website. Explore the paths that visitors take through your site. Where do they start and where do they exit? Are they finding the information they need? How do they interact with your website? After you’ve answered some valuable questions, you’ll be able to pinpoint the places that need improvement—the places you can test.

For example, analysis might show one page has a higher exit rate than average, so you take a look at the heatmap for the page and session recordings. These empirical data show that users are clicking on the title text to download your ebook but many are not scrolling down to the actual ebook download button. This suggests that visitors might find it frustrating that the title text doesn’t actually download the ebook and then they abandon the page. This is a test opportunity! Consider a test that would add an anchor link from the title text to the CTA button or move the button higher on the page.

Time to Test Your CRO Website Updates

The moment you’ve been waiting for, well, almost. Before flipping the switch on your test it’s important to have it properly outlined, starting with your overall hypothesis. Your hypothesis should clearly state what you expect to happen. For example, if we change the location of the download button, then we expect to see an increase in download conversions. In addition to a hypothesis be sure to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as your goals. For the test to truly be successful, you need to decide what it means to be a success.

Another important consideration for your test is the schedule. How long will you run it—a week, a month? How many visitors will need to visit your test to reach statistical significance?

Finally, it’s time to contact your design team and get that test running! (If your team doesn’t have a system in place to run a split test there are oodles of tools to help.)

Remember, once you’re done with the test and confirmed the accuracy of your hypothesis and set the winning design in place, you’re still not done. CRO is a continuous process. Take the results from your test, learn more from it, continue to analyze your website and find the next focus area—the next test to run.

Need help getting your CRO program off the ground? Contact the experts at CloudControlMedia.

Marcy Ansley is the Director of Email and Social Engagement at CloudControlMedia. She has more than a decade of experience working within marketing agencies where she has overseen email and social media strategies, and helped to improve website performance.

All Hail Email Marketing: June 12-18 is National Email Week

Marcy Ansley on June 13, 2023

It’s Email Marketing Week! And at CloudControlMedia we love email – we love to use it to connect our team, communicate with our partners, market on behalf of our clients, and reach new customers. And we especially love the high ROI on our email marketing efforts, both for our clients and ourselves. So, to celebrate this week, we want to take a look at the importance and history of this valuable digital tool.

A Little Email History Lesson

Did you know email marketing is one of the oldest and greatest digital marketing mediums? Email can be traced back to the 1970s. The very first newsletter, Electronic Mail and Message Systems (EMMS), was launched in December of 1977 using Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) – a precursor to the Internet as we know it today. The following year, the first mass marketing email was sent by Gary Thurek; he asserts to have gained $13 million in sales from that email. Thurek was also later crowed, “The Father of Spam.”

While Thurek didn’t exactly use a permission-based email strategy when he messaged hundreds of unsuspecting ARPANET users, we now know he was onto something big. However, it would be more than a decade before the term Digital Marketing would gain wide use and email marketing would rocket to the forefront of business.

During the 1990s, more households gained access to the internet – and their own email accounts – sparking digital marketing’s arrival into our everyday lives. The decade that brought us grunge and hip-hop also gave birth to AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail” and the emergence of webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo. By 1999 over 400 million people jumped online.

Marketers quickly realized that sending an email to hundreds of thousands of people was exponentially cheaper than paying for printing and postage of direct mail campaigns. Unfortunately, this ease of use quickly led to some marketers abusing the power of digital marketing and the term spam was officially introduced into the New Oxford dictionary in 1998.

In the following 25 years several laws have been established to help keep bad actors in line and allow for the continued growth of email marketing. The most famous American legislation is the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM Act, that was signed into law in 2003. If you’re a seasoned digital marketer, you know the basics of this law, which sets rules for commercial email including opt-out regulations and transparent identity information like requiring a physical address in emails.

Technology continues to evolve, and more privacy concerns rise, which means email marketing and digital marketing as a whole will continue to advance including laws and regulations. As a digital marketer it’s important to understand the rules that surround running an email marketing campaign so you can fully realize the value.

The Power of Email

A lot has changed in the digital landscape in the last 45 years since Thuerk sent his mass mailing. Thuerk’s simple text only message inviting recipients to participate in a product demo achieved a 10% conversion rate and, as previously mentioned, an approximate $13 million return on his very small investment!

While achieving that level of ROI might be a tall order, research shows that email marketing today boasts an average of $38 earned on every dollar spent. In comparison, SEO efforts report having a 22 to 1 ROI while pay-per-click advertising is 2 to 1. With numbers like that, why wouldn’t you jump into the email world? After all, it’s what people want.

More than half of the world’s population is on email and most – 55% – prefer to receive information in their inboxes. And they engage with it! On average email marketing campaigns have an open rate of more than 21%, with some industries as high as 27%, and a click-through-rate (CTR) of 2.6%. Some industries report average CTRs over 5%. Depending on the type of campaign and the segmentation and personalization implemented, you have the potential to blow these average statistics out of the water.

At CloudControlMedia, with the right messaging, triggered at the right time, we’ve successfully gained open rates of 70% and CTRs as high as 17%. While admittedly these impressive results may not be the norm for every campaign, the potential for gains for any business, school, or organization exist. Email isn’t going away. In fact, projections show a 13% increase in email marketing revenue in the coming years with a forecasted value of $17.9 billion by 2027!

If you’re ready to make the most out of your email marketing campaigns, reach out to the experts at CloudControlMedia for help.

Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

What is BIMI?

Marcy Ansley on February 8, 2023

All you need to know about Brand Indicators for Message Identification

If you’re deep in the world of email or if you paid close attention to the iOS16 launch last year, you may have heard of BIMI or Brand Indicators for Message Identification. Even if neither of those things apply to you, you’ve met BIMI—even if you don’t realize it.

Have you noticed that some of your emails have logos next to the sender’s name in your inbox? Well then, you’ve noticed BIMI!

Having logos next to your email looks cool and helps you stand out in the inbox. Just look at how TikTok and Just Women’s Sports standout in my inbox with BIMI:

BIMI offers a layer of authentication for brands, email clients, and subscribers; it confirms emails are not being sent by fraudulent senders trying to impersonate a brand. Plus, it supports greater brand recognition and ultimately improves email performance—more emails noticed and recognized in the inbox equals more emails opened. But don’t be fooled by the focus on the pretty logos. Implementing it isn’t as easy as uploading your logo to a server like you would for the logo inside the body of the email.

Since the primary focus of BIMI is to authenticate emails, it requires a bit of IT setup. BIMI is connected to a domain’s DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) record. What you have published in your domain’s DMARC helps email services determine if an email message is coming from the true domain, and should be allowed in the inbox, or if it’s an email spoof.

How BIMI Prevents Email Spoof

So, what is an email spoof? It’s a form of cyberattack where a hacker attempts to trick someone into believing their email is from a trusted sender—a brand or an individual—but it’s actually a tool for a phishing scam. And it has become more and more of a problem; with everyone home and relying on technology, the pandemic only increased chances of receiving a spoofed email. Data shows that email spoofing and phishing soared by 220% last year.

If you already send marketing emails, you should have your DMARC set up—hopefully correctly, and to the specifications BIMI requires. With the correct specs, you should already be protected against email spoofing. However, some organizations have a more relaxed DMARC policy, which won’t work with the BIMI implementation. You must set your policy to either “quarantine” or “reject.”

You can learn more about how to implement BIMI on your own or ask our team of experts! You’ll need to upload a TXT record to the DNS server, so you’ll likely need to call your IT Department for help.

Not All Email Box Providers Support BIMI

It’s important to note that not all email box providers support BIMI, but one of the big players in the game—Apple—just hopped on the bandwagon. With the iOS16 release this fall, Apple’s native email app began supporting BIMI. Apple was preceded by the most used email service provider, Gmail, which started supporting a BIMI pilot program in 2020 (it became widely available last year in Gmail). Yahoo, another major email provider, also supports BIMI.

Get a list of supported email providers here.

Supported email clients will likely increase in the coming years. BIMI is equally as advantageous for them as it is for marketers. It encourages senders to improve their authentication tools and as a result makes it easier for email clients to determine if an email should be blocked, sent to spam, or allowed in the inbox.

Implementing BIMI and utilizing all the best practice tools to authenticate your email is an important piece to a successful email marketing campaign. However, it’s not the only piece. If you need help putting the pieces together, reach out to our team of email marketing experts!

By: Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Marcy has over a decade of experience working at marketing agencies, managing email and social media campaigns. She is the head of the CCM email marketing, responsible for overseeing everything from strategy to implementation.

What Social Medial Platforms Should Your Business Be On?

Marcy Ansley on October 13, 2022

The number of social media platforms has boomed since the turn of the century and the launch of Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and the almighty Facebook in the early aughts. With so many choices and such a huge, connected online audience the question is: on which social platforms should you put your time, effort, and marketing dollars? The answer is – it depends.

Know Yourself

Each social media platform brings its own specific audience and purpose. First evaluate your business. What are your goals? Who is your audience? What is your brand personality? Not every social platform is ideal for who you are as a business and what you want to achieve.

Know Your Competition

After you take a good hard look your own business, take a peek at your top competitors. Find out what sites your competitors are on, what their customers engage with and what might be falling flat. This is a great opportunity to kick start some of your own ideas and maybe even see what your business might want to steer clear of.

Know the Media

Let’s take a look at what social media platforms are out there, because there are a lot! There are over 100 different sites that are considered social media platforms, but let’s just look at the big 10:

Facebook
YouTube
WhatsApp
Instagram
TikTok
Snapchat
Pinterest
Reddit
LinkedIn
Twitter

Are you familiar with all ten? If so, you’re off to a great start. If not, don’t worry – we’re here to help. Here’s a short breakdown of some of the more popular sites among marketers:

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest name in the game. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, it’s the site where you can connect with your grandparents, your high school sweetheart, and your teenager all while keeping up with the latest roast at your downtown coffee shop or the biggest news from The New York Times – nearly everyone is on the site in some fashion.

The platform offers some wonderful tools to connect with your audience including news feed posts of photos, links, video and more, as well as stories, Live streaming capabilities and so much more. However, the site is also increasingly suppressing business posts from users’ News Feeds and making it a pay-to-play environment.

Facebook wants your marketing dollars. And they have a powerful tool for you to spend them on – Facebook ads can help you drive engagement, sales, web traffic – whatever your goal. The Meta Business Suite (home of Facebook Ads) is one of the more robust paid social media tools.

(Facebook, under the newly re-named parent company, Meta, also owns two of our other top 10 platforms: Instagram and WhatsApp.)

YouTube

At a close second is YouTube with over 2.5 billion monthly active users. Generation Z seems to practically live on YouTube with 95% using the platform to some extent and 56% discovering new products while using it. Furthermore, a huge number of all adults across generations (81%!) watch content on this behemoth of a site.

YouTube is a very different kind of social media platform than Facebook. If you’re not ready to create video content, cross it off your list – it’s all video. Your organic content, your paid content – all video. However, if you’re up for the content creation there are a lot of upsides.

If you’re not a Millennial or a Gen Zer you might not be too familiar with WhatsApp. It’s less of a platform to share content targeting large audiences and more of a one-to-one tool. WhatsApp is a messaging app that could be leveraged similarly to SMS. WhatsApp Business is relatively new compared to Facebook and YouTube, but there’s a lot of potential with 2 billion monthly active users on the app – many of whom are in countries outside of the US.

Instagram

Instagram is creeping up on 1.5 billion monthly active users, but lately it’s been irritating some of its users with changes aimed to keep ahead of the increasingly popular TikTok. Nevertheless, Instagram is a much-loved visual social media platform, especially with young adults (just over 60% of their users are 18-34). Meta Business Suite is also home to advertising on Instagram, providing similarly robust features and reach as Facebook.

TikTok

TikTok is the most recent craze among the social media marketing community. The platform itself has been around since 2016 but in the last few years it’s gained popularity with mainstream audience, boasting a billion monthly active users. In fact, it recently eclipsed Instagram for popularity among Generation Z users. In 2020 the platform started to cater to early adopters in the marketing community with the launch of TikTok Business, providing businesses tools to better measure results and connect with their audiences – and offer advertising options.

TikTok is another video specific platform, but unlike YouTube these videos are short; TikTok reports that the top performing videos are between 21 and 34 seconds, on average. Creativity can really go a long way with this social media community.

SnapChat

While not nearly as big as the previous social media platforms, SnapChat still has an impressive 550+ million monthly active users. Another entirely visual platform, friends share snaps (short videos or photos), locate users on maps, and more. The truly unique feature of this platform is the fleetingness of the content – it’s deleted after the recipient views the snap.

SnapChat also pioneered the use of augmented reality filters (those silly little faces that are superimposed over your own in the app), which have become popular in many social platforms.

Like, TikTok, the demographics for SnapChat skew young with 18–24-year-olds as their largest age group.

Pinterest is more of a visual search engine than a social media platform. It can be great for driving traffic and building your brand. However, it’s worth noting that many of its users are not logging in every day. Users tend to come looking for inspiration or information about specific topics like recipes, room designs, etc. Those users are still plentiful, with monthly active users just south of half a billion, and they tend to be more female and a bit older than some of the other social media platforms (median age of 40).

Pinterest recently launched several new ad tools in their business suite to give marketers additional opportunities to find users.

Reddit is more akin to a forum than a social media site like Facebook or Instagram. It’s comprised of more than 130,000 communities (subreddits), or discussion forums for specific topics, and 430 million monthly users who are active in those communities each month.

Reddit requires a very delicate approach as users will likely be quick to reprimand a brand for a hard sell or an attempt to commandeer any discussions.

With a strong focus on business and professional networking, if you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn should certainly be part of your marketing mix. The platform boasts that 4 out of 5 members drive business decisions with over 65 million decisions makers in all.

Twitter

The microblogging social media site Twitter is a busy place with more than 500 million Tweets (short posts capped at 280 characters) sent per day! The audience, which skews slightly male and heavily towards Millennials, is more apt to consume news on Twitter than any other social platform – but they’re consuming ads! Statistics show people spend more time viewing ads on twitter than other platforms and has the lowest CPM of all the major platforms.

These are only the biggest social sites (in the US), so you might find that your business would benefit by being on a platform not even listed in the big 10. Perhaps Twitch or Tumblr better fit your business’s needs. While the vast number of social media sites and online communities can be overwhelming the positive thing is that it means there’s at least one place perfect for you and your business online!

Know What’s Next

Once you’ve decided what your overall social media objectives are and where you want to be, it’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts of building your strategy. No matter if you’re starting from scratch or revamping your social media presence, you’ll want a clear strategy, including platform differentiators, dedicated resources and defined KPIs.

Social media marketing can soak up a lot of time – especially as your communities’ blossom – but it’s worth it! And if you need help developing your strategy, generating content, or managing your community, our experts are here to help.

By: Marcy Ansley, Director of Email and Social Engagement

Marcy has over a decade of experience working at marketing agencies, managing email and social media campaigns. She is the head of the CCM social media, responsible for overseeing everything from strategy to implementation.

How to Improve User Experience for More Conversions

Marcy Ansley on March 10, 2022

Reducing User Friction through UI/UX Improvement on Form Flows and Shopping Result

Optimization is a keyword very much used in the digital space. Everything is measurable on the internet, which facilitates the creation of enhancement processes to improve user experience, yield, revenue, margins, and quality. All these points will directly influence the business’s bottom line.

If you want to increase that bottom line, build an optimization pipeline, prioritize actions, and always strive to incrementally improve conversions and engagement.

How to Build a Pipeline of Optimizations

Identify Potential Issues

Before building your optimization strategy, you’ll need to follow three critical steps to identify the problems you are trying to solve. It seems an obvious statement, but it’s not a simple exercise. That’s why breaking down your issues into different boxes can help you build a systematic problem-solving approach in your organization.

Identify your business digital goals and barriers. Start by defining a significant goal, such as increase form completion rate and then dissect it by adding the obstacles, such as: (1) my form is too long with many steps (generates too much friction), (2) the engagement with my landing page varies in function of the traffic source, (3) the step-by-step drop-off rate is too high on pages/questions that request personal information (user trust issue). Once this is done, you’ll have sub-problems that are easier to address and tackle
Mine your data to help you detect issues that haven’t been recognized yet. An analytical approach can support your problem definition process by pointing quantitively where engagement is weak and where you are losing your users. The data will also help you prioritize issues that must be solved first given the high impact on your results.
Map all touchpoints that generate friction either caused by high time-consuming or user irritation to complete actions on your site; thus, you must use technology to help you find solutions that facilitate the user’s journey. Simple plug-ins for autofill or usage of Facebook/Google log in are good examples, as well as integrations with any 3rd party data. For instance, if you have a home improvement company and need details regarding a property to budget a project, you can get integrate your site to look up via home address all required information like square feet, the number of beds and bathrooms, and type of property. The same ideas can be applied for vehicle information lookup only by asking VIN to pull information and decrease user friction.

Define Your Roadmap

Your next step now is to prioritize the issues you’ll need to work on and build a roadmap taking into consideration the complexity of the project (creative, development and QA) and the potential impact of your incremental and strategic initiatives. Have a good balance between your initiatives and use agile methodology to manage your pipeline more efficiently and effectively.

Roadmap Execution

Finally, the fun part: idealization, and execution. Break this final step into six actions, and some of them can happen concomitantly:

Competitive analysis: check what your competitors are doing, see how they handle similar problems that you have identified on your digital product, and strive for an even better implementation. Build a table with all your top competitors and identify how they addressed solutions for common problems.
Consumer survey: surveying your audience will help calibrate and validate your hypothesis, and you’ll be able to collect people’s opinions and behaviors that can be used in decision-making. One piece of advice on how you’ll build it – if it’s not a focus group, avoid open questions that are hard to make a table out of it; make direct questions and offer options for users to select or rank.
Leverage your creative team: if you have an internal creative agency at your company, involve them in the ideation and solution of problems you have mapped before. Designers have a good understanding of usability and user experience and can strongly contribute.
Build hypothesis: this is the best way to make sure you know why you are testing, what’s being changed, and what you can expect as an outcome. The test will prove if your hypothesis was right or wrong and that’s why it must be a statement. Use three magical words to help you “by”, “I believe” and “because.” Here’s an example: By switching CTA copy from “Apply’ to “Continue,” I believe users will feel less intimidated to click because the word “Continue” brings a feeling of less commitment and may result in increasing click-through on the button.
KPI definition: the primary KPI should come from the hypothesis you’ve built. That’s what will guide the analysis and decision-making. It must be quantifiable over a particular time for a specific objective. You’ll probably need to consider some secondary KPIs that will change in function of your primary one and will help you determine which variable was most affected. For example, with the CTA test (Appy vs. Continue), if your users still need to complete another action on the step ahead, you’ll need to measure if the test does not negatively impact it, affecting the end-to-end journey.
Documentation: not the most fun part, but essential so you can keep track of how the tests performed and what hypotheses were tested to make your roadmap very efficient.

Ideas to Test

Now that you know how to build a more effective pipeline, let’s dive into some ideas and options for testing. We’ve been running multiple tests on our form flows and result pages (listings) in the past years. Here are eight of them for you to check:

1. Form Flow: Progress Tracker

Test Hypothesis: by changing our progress tracker to a wheel format, we believe users will have a more tangible notion of how close they are to reaching the final goal because it’s a numerical approach, leading to higher form completion.

Test Results: increase of 6% on Desktop and 4% on Mobile form completion

Landing Page: Featuring Call Outs

Test Hypothesis: by featuring different sub-products on the landing page, we believe users will better understand we can fulfill their specific needs because they are clearly outlined, leading to a lower bounce rate and thus a higher form completion

Test Results: decreased bounce rate by 6% on Desktop and 2% on Mobile

Landing Page: Featuring Call Outs

Test Hypothesis: by featuring different sub-products on the landing page, we believe users will better understand we can fulfill their specific needs because they are clearly outlined, leading to a lower bounce rate and thus a higher form completion

Test results: decreased bounce rate by 6% on Desktop and 2% on Mobile

2. Landing Page: Featuring Call Outs

Test results: decreased bounce rate by 6% on Desktop and 2% on Mobile

3. Listings Results: Hover-Over Animation

Test Hypothesis: by enticing users with a lively user interface, we believe it will better grab their attention, increasing engagement and leading to a higher click-through rate

Test results: increased click-through rate by 3%

4. Landing Page: Sticky Banner

Test Hypothesis: by sticking “an actionable banner” when the user scrolls past the main CTA button, we believe users will be encouraged to freely scroll through the page and browse, having an easy way to start the shopping process, leading to a lower bounce rate.

Test Results: decreased bounce rate by 5%

5. Listings Results: Featuring Position on the Results Page

Test Hypothesis: by featuring the 1st listings at the bottom of the page, we believe we’ll increase attention and click concentration to the top position because we are evidencing the recommended advertiser leading to a higher yield.

Test Results: increased number of clicks on top position by 4%.

6. Listings Results: Ribbons

Test Hypothesis: by adding a call out in a shape of a ribbon on the listings results, we believe users will better engage with the offer because a new visual element adds value, leading to a higher click-through rate.

Test Results: increased CTR by 5%-8%

7. Form Flow: Adding Tips to Guide Users Throughout the Questionnaire

Test Hypothesis: by adding a virtual advisor in each flow question, we believe users will better engage because it will be easier to understand how to answer more complex questions and their purpose, leading to a lower step drop-off rate.

Test Results: drop-off rate reduction varied depending on step/question, ranging from 0.3%-1.2%

8. Form Flow: Combining Binary Questions

Test Hypothesis: by combining binary questions in one step, we believe usability will improve because users can repeat the same action (choose and click one out of 2 options) in sequence, leading to a lower step drop-off rate.

Test Results: combined drop-off for grouped questions decreased by 50% leading to a 2.2% higher form completion

Conclusion

Building an optimization process is essential for any business with a digital presence. Some key steps must be followed to guarantee efficiency and efficacy, such as (1) identifying problems to be solved by setting your digital business goals, (2) using data and analytics to support, and (3) mapping touchpoints of friction with your audience. Once the key steps are completed, you should define your roadmap considering execution time and complexity, resourcing, and impact; these are all fundamental points to ensure the prioritization was done correctly. When it comes to execution, remember to do a thorough competitive analysis, bring your creative team in the idealization process, survey your consumers, build your hypotheses, define KPIs in function of the hypotheses, and document everything. Get inspiration from some of the tests mentioned in this article and get you’re a/b testing process in place.

Are you ready to get better results from all your digital marketing? Let the experts at CloudControlMedia help. Learn more today.

Guilherme Montanini, Director of Product Management, Monetization at QuinStreet

Apple Takes a Bite out of Email Marketing

Marcy Ansley on July 27, 2021

Over the last few months Apple has been making big waves in the digital marketing world. First with the iOS14 updates and most recently with the announcement of iOS15. While the iOS14 update caused headaches for online advertisers, iOS15 is causing some email marketers’ heads to explode.

What Is the iOS15 Email Update?

The update, slated to launch this fall, will offer a Mail Privacy Protection feature, which will prompt users to either opt-in or opt-out to email protection. Now, based on the results Apple announced with the iOS14 ad tracking opt-in feature, we’re likely to see nearly every Apple Mail app user opt-in to email privacy.

So, why does this feature have email marketers’ brains going boom? This new feature will load all email marketing content—including tracking pixels—via a proxy server before sending the email content to the Apple user. Essentially, each email sent through apple’s proxy servers will render as an open – regardless if the user actually reads the email.

Congratulations. In an iOS15 world, you have a nearly 100% open rate! (Well at least a near 50% based on Apple’s nearly 50% email market share.)

While it sure seems great to be able to boast big numbers for the metric some marketers consider a vanity metric (which, by the way, we don’t) there are some ramifications to consider:

Email List Hygiene

First, and arguably the most impactful, is list hygiene. Effective email campaigns usually utilize engagement, or the lack there off, to kick of re-engagement campaigns to keep their lists clean. Clean lists help improve overall campaign performance by making sure only those who actually want to receive your emails are getting them. It can also help with sender domain reputation and overall deliverability. If you can’t accurately determine who is opening emails and how recently they’ve done so, it’s difficulty to gauge the success of your campaigns.

While re-engagement campaigns are a larger concern, any segments that rely on open rates will be impacted.

Real-Time Email Content

Another area of concern is the use of real-time content. With this new feature a more accurate term might be somewhat-recent content because the content will be called for and cached at time of send when the proxy server renders the content. So, for example, if you use a countdown clock in your email, that content will be pulled by the proxy server around the time of deployment. If the email recipient opens the email a day after deployment, the clock will show the countdown as if it was the day prior – making all the content a day off. A slight hiccup in the attended messaging.

Subject Line Testing for Emails

Do you like doing A/B subject line tests? Kiss those goodbye. With Apple Mail accounting for such a large portion of email usage, the results from any tests that rely on open rates would be irrelevant.

However, don’t completely discount the value of the open rate metric; it can still be useful, just a bit noisier than ever before. (With image caching and image blocking, open rates have never been exact performance indicators.) Open rates can just no longer be used as the sole KPI.

An additional downside of the new iOS is IP and location blocking, which further complicates personalization by putting an end to location-based features like showing content based on local weather or displaying the closest store location.

The irony is that this new Apple feature which is intended to protect and improve the user’s email experience could ultimately lead to added, unwanted emails with less personalization. Research shows that consumers want personalized email messages, yet the push for data privacy, while understandable, does make it harder for marketers to give consumers what they want.

These changes are certainly going to be a headache, yet there’s no cause for outright panic. It simply means it’s time to reevaluate.

As long as you produce quality content and adhere to best practices, your messages will still get to your recipients and produce results. iOS15 is still a couple months away which gives you some time to fine tune your email marketing efforts. Or, maybe these upcoming changes are just the catalyst you need for a complete overall? Either way – we’re here to help! Give our email experts a call 888.706.6286.

Why Bother with an Email Re-Engagement Campaign?

Marcy Ansley on December 11, 2020

No matter how great you think your marketing campaign is, it’s not worth much unless your prospects do what you want them to do—read, click, respond, or show some kind of engagement. When it comes to email campaigns, this is particularly true. That’s because inactive or unengaged subscribers could hurt your whole campaign, damage your sender reputation, and set your efforts back to start.

What’s Wrong with an Unengaged Email List?

Those unengaged subscribers make your results look terrible (low open and click through rates, etc.) and they could pull your numbers down even farther as your unengaged subscribers grow. Email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo pay attention to how your subscribers interact with your emails. If users don’t interact, the email service provider will start to assume your emails are irrelevant, or even worse – SPAM! Once that happens your sender reputation starts to drop and your whole email list could suffer as a result.

How to Reengage with Your Email Subscribers

Now, that all sounds a bit doom-and-gloom so it’s best to avoid it at all costs. But how? You could just cut out a big part of your list and wash your hands of all those seemingly uninterested recipients. Does the idea of such a broad scale dump of possible prospects sound a little terrifying? It should. After all, a couple of those prospects may still be interested.

The solution? Don’t just abruptly remove a huge chunk of your list. Instead move them into a new campaign: a re-engagement campaign. Give those prospects another chance to engage and give them due warning that they’ll be removed from your list if they don’t take action.

These subscribers may have gone deaf to your usual email messaging or maybe they forgot what made them sign up for your email in the first place. Remind them. With a re-engagement campaign, you can reintroduce yourself, get heard in a new way, and remind your subscribers how great your products and services are.

Steps to an Email Reengagement Campaign

The first step in a re-engagement campaign is to determine whom you’ll target. This will be largely determined by your sales cycle. If your successful sales happen a month or two after initial contact then perhaps a subscriber would be deemed inactive or unengaged after 4 or 5 months. At the very least, anyone who has not engaged in a year should be lumped into the unengaged category.

Now for the fun part!

The second step allows you to try something different, think out of the box. Consider this re-engagement campaign as an opportunity to do something new and exciting. Create a whole new messaging from your usual emails and use a fresh new design that still speaks to your brand. The campaign should consist of two to three emails with the final email acting as a goodbye note, telling users if they don’t take action they will be unsubscribed.  And don’t be afraid to be funny or tongue-in-cheek. Take a chance and turn some heads and bring in some new customers.

In all likelihood the re-engagement campaign will not immediately draw in droves of sales. However, that is not the ultimate goal (although on occasion it can be a great byproduct!); the goal is to add to your active subscribers and clean your list. A clean and active list equals better deliverability and better deliverability means your emails will reach the inbox of more of your prospects who could then convert into sales, brand loyalists, and lifelong advocates.

If you’re ready to improve your email deliverability and launch a re-engagement campaign contact the email experts at CloudControlMedia today.

~Marcy Ansley