Saturday, 30 June 2018

Fake news tools helped us unravel a viral infidelity video


Viral videos are a funny thing. Thousands are uploaded every day, yet one good one has the ability to unravel your entire day’s work and take over your life. That’s what happened to me this week when my colleague sent me along the following video: In the clip, a woman gets busted on her birthday for cheating on her boyfriend. He packs her belongings like presents. It’s pretty sad, until he delivers the punchline: Hubert. You’ve been cheating on me with Hubert… You’ve been cheating on me with a dude named Hubert. I don’t know what hooked us most. It…

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Thursday, 21 June 2018

Sorry Instagram, I don’t want a vertical YouTube


At first glance, a YouTube competitor that lives within Instagram seems like a smart idea. It’s not. Or, it might be. I don’t know. The move makes a lot of sense. Facebook-owned Instagram, according to a recent Pew Research survey, is trailing only YouTube in use among teens. Some 85 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 say they use YouTube, with Instagram coming in second at 72 percent. Snapchat is hot on Instagram’s heels at 69 percent. To win the arms race for teen attention, Facebook knows it has to capture those who leave the platform to do other…

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Wednesday, 20 June 2018

This Art Director Reviewed 50 of the Most Popular Emails. Here are the Top Design Trends You Must Know

Email templates are great. They do most of the design work for you. But there’s one problem with templates: Many are just plain boring. They’re like the monotone voice of your high school physics teacher. The content may be important, but you can’t help but snooze. So I decided to take a look at the 50 most recent emails on Really Good Emails — a website that showcases the best email designs on the web — to find some of the top design trends in the industry right now. And you know what I found? You don’t have to be a digital Picasso to create eye-catching emails. In fact, you can easily incorporate these trends into any template via a drag-and-drop editor like AWeber’s. Here’s how. (Want an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor? Try a free 30-day trial with AWeber. We just updated our message editor so it's even more awesome and user-friendly.)

Email Design Trend #1: BIG Headlines

You may have the world’s best headline, but if it drowns in a sea of text, no one will notice it. That’s where “visual hierarchy” comes in. You want the most important information in your message to get noticed first. Visual hierarchy can be achieved through color or placement or artwork, but in the examples above, you can see it’s done through a headline with an increased font size and bolded text. It makes the main message stand out right away. How to do this in AWeber: Using any of the AWeber templates, increase your headline font size in the text editing bar (pictured below). Most of the examples above are using font sizes of at least 36px. So don’t be afraid to size wayyyy up! (Need a custom email template created that matches your brand's style? AWeber's design team can make it for you. Request a consultation today.)

Email Design Trend #2: Bold Header Images

This trend goes hand-in-hand with big headlines, but it has a different design intent than just getting noticed: It evokes emotion. With large header images, you’re attempting to make an emotional connection with the viewer in the first few seconds after they open your message. The image sets a mood (happy! sad! angry!) or conveys a state of mind (hunger! relaxation!). Don’t have a big budget or an in-house photographer? Use a site like unsplash.com, where you can access royalty-free images. Above are three drastically different emails that give each individual brand a unique feel, predominately through their use of photographic header images. How to do this in AWeber: Use the Breve or Wane template to get started with a large header image.

Email Design Trend #3: Zigzag Patterns

In an effort to break up chunks of text, many designers use a zigzag or “z” pattern. This design arrangement helps readers continue to move their way down an email, engaging with the imagery and content along the way. Think of it like a path for your reader to go down. It helps them make it to the end! The zigzag pattern is also a nice way use imagery to convey your brand's personality. How to do this in AWeber: Use the Flat-white and Gibson templates, which have alternating sections built in.

Email Design Trend #4: Button and Link Balance

Want your readers to take an action, like clicking a link or replying to your email? If everything in your message has equal importance, they won’t know where to focus their attention. Each element will scream for the reader to “look here!” And too many choices can kill conversion. Your reader will feel overwhelmed and won’t click anywhere. Instead, use a mix of buttons and text links to call importance to the items you really want subscribers to focus on. Get your reader to take an action by pointing them to one button. It’s OK to add other hypertext links along the way, as long as your main call-to-action is most prominent. Here are a few examples of emails that do this well. How to do this in AWeber: The drag-and-drop editor has a button element you can pull into your content. You can change its color and size, depending on how prominent you want to the call-to-action to be. 

Email Design Trend #5: Videos

Wellllll kinda. You can’t include an actual video in emails yet, unfortunately. Most email clients — like Gmail and Outlook — won’t play video within a message, so you have to link to a hosted video outside of your email. But one of the newest design trends is to include links to videos that also look like you could play them within the email. It’s a creative way to deliver motion pictures and get your readers to click and watch. How to do this in AWeber: I recommend hosting your video on YouTube or Vimeo. Then, use the draggable video element that automatically overlays a play button on a freeze frame and links it out to the hosted version of your video.

Put It All Together

Spice up your go-to email template by incorporating one or two of these design trends into your next email. Now that you have the design aspect covered, how is your content? Are you struggling with what to write in your emails? Then try our free email writing course. It comes with 45+ downloadable email templates to get you started. And if you ever have a question or get stuck along the way, call, email, or chat AWeber's Customer Solutions team. They're available 24/7 — because email never sleeps. Not an AWeber customer? Join our crew, and test out our industry-leading deliverability. Start your free 30-day trial today.

The post This Art Director Reviewed 50 of the Most Popular Emails. Here are the Top Design Trends You Must Know appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.



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Social Media in Healthcare: A Surgical Guide for Marketing Professionals

Sprout Social’s Justyn Howard Named a Glassdoor Top CEO for Second Year in a Row

We’re proud to announce that Sprout Social founder and CEO, Justyn Howard, has been recognized as a Glassdoor Top CEO for U.S. companies with 1,000 employees or less in 2018. This is the second year in a row that Glassdoor has named Justyn to the list and it is especially exciting as the honor is based entirely on reviews from Sprout employees, who awarded him a 99% approval rating.

Justyn is a leader whose vision not only drives the growth of our business, but also inspires our team to do and be better each day. He is committed to a culture of openness and has worked tirelessly alongside our executives to create a workplace where team members are empowered to share their ideas, work collaboratively and embrace the diverse qualities and characteristics that make each employee unique. This has helped Sprout to maintain a close-knit, yet scalable culture that has developed organically over time.

“Being named to this list for a second year is a true honor and I am grateful to the team for their steadfast belief in our vision for the business and product,” Howard said. “I’m as excited about Sprout’s future as I was eight years ago when we started, and that is due in no small part to the nearly 500 team members that show up ready to tackle the toughest problems in the industry each day, while continuing to provide great value for our customers.”

So, what are employees saying on Glassdoor about leadership at Sprout?

“I have never worked with a more hard working, talented group of people! I look forward to coming to work every morning. It all starts with the leaders at the top who have been a consistent group from the very beginning.”

Anonymous Employee

“Sprout continues to foster a collaborative workplace. There’s tremendous opportunity to make an impact as leadership encourages feedback to shape company goals and processes. Sprout is routinely recognized as a best place to work for good reason.”

Account Manager

CEO approval ratings are gathered through Glassdoor’s online company review survey, which gathers current and former employee sentiment about job and company satisfaction, the work environment and the culture. Among the 770,000 companies reviewed on Glassdoor, the average CEO approval rating is 69%.

We are thankful to our team members who have taken the time to share their experiences on Glassdoor. And more than ever, we are proud to have a leader who is fiercely dedicated to team and customer success.

Want to join Team Sprout? We’re hiring.

This post Sprout Social’s Justyn Howard Named a Glassdoor Top CEO for Second Year in a Row originally appeared on Sprout Social.



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The evolution of ‘woke’ emoji


Some eight years ago, a collection of expressive little icons — emoji 😎 — showed up in our smart devices and now it’s hard to imagine life without them. Everyone uses them — teenagers, adults, corporations and even large institutions like the EU. Emoji aren’t just silly icons for adding flair to our online conversations. Some argue that emoji is a “lingua franca” — a bridging language that allows us to communicate across spoken language barriers and cultural differences. Emoji saw their virtual light of day in the year of 2010 when they became available globally. In the beginning, they might have seemed overwhelming, with…

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Tuesday, 19 June 2018

15 Tips to Building a Better Social Media Presence

Developing Interview Skills Through Practice

The EU’s disastrous Copyright Reform, explained by its lovers and haters


The EU’s extremely controversial Copyright Reform — which might introduce upload filters, ancillary copyright, and restrictions on text and data mining — will finally go to a vote on June 20. It’s not certain how the vote will go as members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are still split on key articles of the reform, but whatever the conclusion will be, it’s certain that it’ll greatly affect the future of the internet in the EU and beyond. The result will form the EU Parliament’s stance on copyright and will have huge implications for the final stage of the law making…

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Monday, 18 June 2018

How to Master Facebook Ad Targeting & Zero-In on Your Audience

You’re wrong about how the internet fuels conspiracy theories


Conspiracy theories are popular and there is no doubt that the internet has fuelled them on. From the theory that 9/11 was an inside job to the idea that reptilian humanoids rule the world, conspiracy theories have found a natural home online. But the extent to which we can actually attribute their popularity to the internet is a question that has concerned scholars for many years. And the answer is not very straightforward. While some argue that conspiracy theories flourish on the internet and social media, there is not yet any evidence that this is true. Conspiracy theories have always been with us. But today the internet…

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Wednesday, 13 June 2018

Facebook’s data should be a public resource


Vess Popov, an expert in big data and psychometrics, spoke at Brain Bar in Budapest on the future of data. In his talk he shared his concern that platforms like Facebook are becoming more closed off. Their research is more secretive than ever and less of it is making its way to the scientific community and the general public than ever before. Popov’s concern is understandable as he works for the Psychometrics Center at the University of Cambridge, a research institution that pioneered the study of psychology through big data analysis. They’re basically the ‘good guy’ version of Cambridge Analytica,…

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Dear social media companies: Here are some ideas for your next products


Snap’s second-gen line of its Spectacles – which were launched in April of this year – are now on Amazon. Joy! The decision to do another iteration of the Spectacles is strange, especially as the product’s first run didn’t do that well, losing the company around $40 million. Despite this, I don’t actually think the Spectacles are a particularly bad idea. A pair of glasses that let you quickly capture and share what’s going on fits well with Snapchat’s approach to social media. And from there, I couldn’t help but wonder… If other social media brands decided to release their own hardware,…

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Monday, 11 June 2018

What Are Twitter Impressions & Why Are They So Important to Twitter?

Snapchat now lets you clear chats to save face


Ever said something really horrible in an online chat? Like, I’m talking a statement so lip curlingly uncomfortable that, as soon as you pressed ‘send,’ you felt shame dribble down your neck like a raw egg made of pure parental disappointment? Luckily for some of us, Snapchat now lets you delete messages you’ve sent directly to friends or in a group chat. It’s a pretty intuitive system. You press and hold on the message, at which point an option menu comes up and you can select ‘delete.’ See it in action here:   This new feature – which is rolling…

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Friday, 8 June 2018

A bunch of ‘art bots’ got swept up in Twitter’s political crackdown


The ‘art bot’ community on Twitter is still recovering from a platform ban that saw dozens of bot-powered accounts go silent for approximately 11 hours on Wednesday. What happened: The bots, including popular accounts like @infinite_scream (which has 43.3k followers) and @tinycarebot (which boasts 125k), went down after Twitter banned the platform they run on. save the art bots!!!!!!! — jomny sun (@jonnysun) June 7, 2018 ah… pic.twitter.com/vDnFqMGNzp — v (@v21) June 6, 2018 The owner of the platform, George Buckenham, had no idea the ban was coming. According to a report from Slate he wasn’t initially given a reason…

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Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Be Prepared When It Matters With Message Spike Alerts

How to Get Verified on Instagram in 5 Helpful Steps

#SproutChat Calendar: Upcoming Topics for June 2018

Summer is just around the corner and we’re getting ready by brushing up on our strategic chops. This June #SproutChat is bringing you insight on industry topics ranging from knowing which analytics you should be focusing on, different ways to use social to appeal to millennial audiences and we’ll cap it all off by celebrating #SocialMediaDay together.

See a topic that interests you? Use the “add to event” button to ensure a calendar reminder.

Wednesday, June 6: Metrics That Matter With #SproutAllStar Elite, Steph Nissen

Without looking at metrics, there is no way to tell if a marketing campaign is working. As a marketer, uncovering which metrics correlate with your overall business goals will help you tell a complete story to your clients or stakeholders. But before you can measure your social ROI, you need find out which social metrics matter. This #SproutChat, Sprout All Star and Director of Digital at Atomic Revenue, Steph Nissen, will provide tips on pinpointing the most valuable data and presenting it in a way that impacts.

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Wednesday, June 13: Marketing to Millennials With #SproutAllStar Elite, Mandy Edwards

Millennials are not going away, they are the next generation of customers, advocates, and prospects. Learning how to market to millennials effectively can be tricky but with the power of social, businesses can finally reach this special target demographic. During this #SproutChat, Sprout All Star Mandy Edwards of Me Marketing Services, will join us to talk about the tactics you need to speak directly to the new age!

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Wednesday, June 20: Launching Your Own Social Media Consulting Firm With #SproutAllStar Elite, Jen Kirk

Do you have what it takes to be a social media consultant? Being a consultant isn’t easy and specializing in social media doesn’t make you unique in the marketplace. Join us, and take notes as Sprout All Star Jennifer Kirk provides her inside view on what it takes to launch your own consulting practice and helps us answer our burning questions along the way.

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Wednesday, June 27: The History of Social on Social Media Day

Social Media Day was launched back in 2010 and still sees social pros meeting up to celebrate today. We want to celebrate with you, our loyal and amazing social community! Join us for a fun #SproutChat where we will talk all about the origins of social in modern marketing, and reminisce about our journeys in the digital space!

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This post #SproutChat Calendar: Upcoming Topics for June 2018 originally appeared on Sprout Social.



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3 Simple Ways to Get Started with Action-Based Email Automation

action-based automation 101

A few weeks ago, I polled more than 2,500 of our subscribers to find out if they were using automation tools in their email marketing. Sixty-two percent said, "nope." That got me wondering, “Why the heck not?” After all, automation can increase leads, conversions, and revenue, and it can save you time. The stats prove it: Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than other marketing messages, according to Epsilon Email Institute. So I did some digging. Turns out, most people told me email automation is overwhelming and they're not sure where to get started. But it’s actually pretty easy to get started with email automation . . .

What is email automation?

Simply put, email automation is when you set up a series of emails to send automatically to subscribers at a specific time. With it, you can connect with a person at every stage of their buyer journey (a.k.a. the marketing funnel) — from lead to customer to brand advocate. You can build a relationship with an individual over the long term. And the best part? It runs on autopilot, creating connections and increasing revenue while you work on other aspects of your business. You can set up a single series automation — where a person subscribes to your list and is automatically sent email 1, then email 2, then email 3, etc. in a sequence. Or you can set up a series with action-based automation.

What is action-based automation?

I like to think of action-based automation as letting your subscribers “choose their own adventure” as they’re taken through your email sequence. Instead of automatically sending everyone on your list the same series (email 1, email 2, email 3, etc.), each individual subscriber gets to pick which emails they’re sent through various actions they take. While it’s more advanced than a single automation series, action-based automation can skyrocket engagement and sales. That's because you are able to target segments of our audience with the exact content they needed. It's an amazing feeling when you can put a solution right in the hands of your subscribers. So how do you implement action-based automation?

3 ways to get started with action-based automation

when subscribers sign up for your list

Subscribers can receive different automation series based off the selections they make on your sign up form. For instance, you could let the subscriber choose if they want to hear from you weekly, monthly, or bimonthly. We did frequency-based preferences for our most recent action-based automation campaign, and we saw a 47% increase in open rates and a 150% increase in click-through rates. Check it out below. You can see a dropdown menu. The subscriber chooses how often they receive our emails. They're in control of the frequency. email sign up form Here’s another example: A personal trainer asks his subscriber to choose her level of strength training — beginner, intermediate, or advanced — on his sign up form. Once the subscriber makes her selection, she’s instantly dropped into an automated series that aligns with her training experience. The language and work out tips in each message are tailored to her personal workout level. For instance, a beginner subscriber who is new to strength training may receive fundamental tips like how many reps are best for building muscle, how much they should rest between sets, or which shoes they should wear while lifting. Whereas an intermediate may get an email series that focuses on variations of standard strength exercises to challenge their muscles in an all-new way or mobility movements to keep their joints healthy between lifting sessions. And an advanced subscriber may learn the ins-and-outs of a cutting-edge technique called Blood Flow Restriction training to shock the muscles into new growth. If each flow is tailored to a person’s level, you can send them more personalized messaging to promote your product as opposed to a one-size-fits-all plan like a single automated series that's sent to everyone on your list. After all, it's tough to write to an entire crowd. By accommodating everyone, you're not catering to anyone. Think about it: an advanced strength trainer would be bored to death with beginner content. And a beginner would be overwhelmed with advanced techniques. That's why action-based automation can help you send content appropriate for each group. Pro tip: Your email marketing platform will launch your automated campaign based off tages or custom fields determined by your sign up form. That means you should stay away from fill-in-the-blank responses. Instead, go with pre-populated field that your subscribers can choose from. (It’s easy to create a sign up dropdown menu in an ESP like AWeber, or there are many signup form platforms that integrate with your ESP. Some options are OptinMonster or Privy. No website? Here's how to create a hosted sign up form in less than 5 minutes.)

when a subscriber clicks a link in your email

Action is often an indicator of interest. That’s why we recommend sending segmented, highly-targeted content to subscribers who open your message and/or clicked on a link within that message. ESPs have different names for these features, but within AWeber’s platform, we call them Open and Click Automations. Here’s how Click Automations work: Let’s say you have a food blog and your primary source of revenue is your digital meal plan. With Click Automations, you can tag subscribers with “gluten-free” or “vegetarian,” based on the links they click in the first email you send — your Welcome email . You can then use these tagged segments to deliver one-time, targeted broadcast emails or even launch contextual automation series by these tags. So what happens after a subscriber clicks? If the subscriber clicks “gluten-free,” your ESP will "tag" or label them as such. This will redirect them to a relevant landing page. (For example, it could be a page that explains you’ve updated their subscription preferences or a page that contains content about gluten-free restaurants.) Now that the subscriber is tagged in your ESP, you can automatically deliver an email series just about gluten-free foods to only that tagged segment, and pitch them relevant gluten-free meal plans.

Many times, you’ll plan to send all of your subscribers the same welcome series. By sending the same content, you can educate your prospects on a specific topic or the value of your services and products. Not all subscribers are ready to be segmented from the first email.

If you do that, you can implement Click Automations at the end of the course or sequence of emails. Rather than present your audience with a dead-end, use Click Automations to let subscribers self-select their next step in their customer journey. By presenting options, your audience can choose their own adventure, and enter into a new campaign that meets their needs. 

when subscribers open (or don't open) your email

Tracking who opens your emails can help you optimize your campaign. You can send your subscribers reminders to check certain messages if they still haven’t opened it. Or you can remind them that they should take advantage of specific offers within a message. Or you can use the data to see where people fall off from one email to the next. For instance, if you have fantastic open rates for emails 1 through 3 of your 5-email automated series, but you get a sudden decrease in email 4, you may want to experiment with your subject line. Make your reader want to open it! We've also seen customers take advantage of open rates when they are emailing a course. If they have 6 lessons in total, they may send reminders to a cohort of customers who haven't opened a specific lesson. They may also send a followup email to a cohort who have opened a specific lesson. For instance, a followup email may say: "Hey! Checking in. I see you finished lesson 2. Can I answer any questions? Did you find any portion of the lesson challenging?" It's a fantastic way to gather feedback throughout the course. It’s also important to know who is not opening or clicking your emails. A smaller list of engaged subscribers — people who actively read and interact with your content — are more valuable than a larger list of subscribers who never open your content. In fact, lists with numerous inactive email addresses typically have higher rates of bounces, spam complaints and unsubscribes than ones that don’t. So delete, delete, delete! When you continue to send emails to people who don’t open them, internet service providers — like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! — penalize you. Do this often enough, and your emails may consistently end up in their spam folders, which decreases deliverability to people who actually want to read your content. That’s why we recommend purging your list every 6 months. In order to do this, you’ll want to search in your ESP for subscribers who have not opened your emails in the last year. Then, you’ll send an email to that segment of subscribers asking them if they’re still interested in hearing from you. We like to call this a “win back” email. Fourteen percent of subscribers who receive win-back emails open them, according to a survey conducted by ReturnPath, an email deliverability company. That number jumps up to 45 percent for subsequent messages. If they don’t want to hear from you anymore? That’s OK. Remember, in your pursuit of providing relevant content to your audience, getting an unsubscribe is far less damaging to your deliverability than receiving a spam complaint. So it’s important to purge your list every so often to make sure your subscribers are still interested in your content.

Put action-based automation into action!

Give it a shot. Use one of these 3 techniques to segment your audience so you can send highly-targeted, highly-relevant content to your subscribers. This will help you treat your subscribers as individuals — not a nameless, faceless list. In the long run, you'll see engagement and sales increase, and you'll create a base of fans who can't wait to read your messages. Need help with one of these techniques, or have a question about email automation? Call AWeber's Customer Solutions team. They're the best. Seriously. They won two Stevie Awards in 2017 (a.k.a. the Oscars of the customer service industry). They can help you out with any aspect of your email marketing. Not an AWeber customer? Join our tribe! We'd love for you to try our easy-to-use automation platform for $0. Start your 30-day FREE trial today!

The post 3 Simple Ways to Get Started with Action-Based Email Automation appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.



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Tuesday, 5 June 2018

How to Master Instagram for Business in 7 Simple Steps

What Full-Funnel Social Analytics Actually Means

DOJ to appeal court’s ruling that Trump can’t block people on Twitter


The Department of Justice will appeal a Federal court ruling stating president Donald Trump cannot block people on Twitter. You read that right: A couple weeks back federal Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled in favor of seven plaintiffs seeking to have their Twitter accounts unblocked by the president. The president apparently complied with the court’s request, as several of the plaintiffs have already tweeted they’d been unblocked: We whined. We complained. We sued. We won our First Amendment lawsuit in federal court. And now @realDonaldTrump has unblocked me.…

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