It looks like Twitter’s finally had enough of US President Donald Trump‘s abuse of its platform. Today, keen observers may have noticed the president‘s @realDonaldTrump Twitter account has been splashed with a couple of fact-checking embeds on tweets where he’s attempted to misinform the US voting public by lying about the mail-in ballot process. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time Twitter’s embedded links in the president’s tweets. The result comes after a Memorial Day weekend where the platform saw Trump spend a significant amount of time lashing out at his perceived enemies, including a critic…
Are you looking for a faster way to sell products online and launch an email marketing strategy that's customized to your ecommerce business?
Look no further! At AWeber, we've done 90% of the work for you, so you can quickly start using email marketing to sell more products.
AWeber provides a complete solution — landing pages, email templates, pre-built cart abandonment campaigns — specifically designed for businesses that sell products online.
Ecommerce landing pages
Ecommerce websites have grown increasingly complex. And that complexity has come with a cost: What was once a simple, straightforward way to show what your store offers has become a tangled web of upsells, blogs, and information about the company.
An ecommerce landing page, in contrast, drives visitors to take one specific action. It removes all other distractions and intentionally limits where visitors can navigate. An effective landing page eliminates anything that could be distracting — like navigation menus and other unrelated or distracting content.
It is built with one specific purpose: to get people to take a single action — like downloading a lead magnet, subscribing to your email list, buying your product, or thanking them for a recent purchase.
How AWeber helps you sell with landing pages
The AWeber Landing Page Builder is the powerfully-simple way to create awesome-looking landing pages that will grow your audience while making your business look great.
AWeber allows you to create as many landing pages as you need, and there is no additional charge for hosting. You can create:
Lead generation pages to convince people to join your email list.
Sales pages to sell products to your audience.
Thank you or confirmation pages to display to people after they subscribe or purchase.
The AWeber Landing Page Builder seamlessly integrates with your AWeber account. Anyone who completes your landing page joins your AWeber email list automatically — no extra setup required.
You don't need coding or technical skills. Use the drag & drop builder to add images, update text, and customize your design.
The AWeber Landing Page Builder even includes suggested copy in each landing page template and access to the AWeber image library of free stock images.
AWeber landing page templates
AWeber’s landing page template gallery includes email templates specifically designed to help you sell products online.
Online course sales landing page
The online course landing page helps visitors understand what your course is all about. You can add what visitors will learn, the cost, and testimonials from happy customers.
Product sales landing page
Product landing pages have one goal: To convince visitors to take a particular action — like purchasing or downloading more information.
Gated or exclusive content sales landing page
Landing pages give content creators the option to sell memberships to gated or exclusive content.
12 ecommerce email templates to send one-time or automated emails
Want to promote your sales landing pages or follow up with subscribers after they join your email list? Send one-time or automated emails to them using one of AWeber’s email templates.
AWeber includes over 700 pre-built professionally templates to choose from to connect to your audience — including email templates specifically designed to help grow ecommerce sales.
Use one — or all — of the 12 email templates below to sell your ecommerce products, offer a sale to subscribers, deliver coupons, and more!
Turn a visitor into a loyal customer with cart abandonment campaigns
What is a cart abandonment email campaign?
A cart abandonment campaign is an email or set of emails that reminds users to finish purchasing the items they left in their shopping cart.
Three out of 4 shoppers abandon their cart before checking out. With a cart abandonment campaign, you can connect with a visitor that abandoned their cart and motivate them to complete the sale.
People who have added your product to their shopping cart but don't finish the purchase have incredibly high potential to become customers.
Cart abandonment emails represent small business owners' best opportunity to continue the conversation with valuable audience shoppers. Cart abandonment emails can generate conversion rates 3x higher than average automated flows.
How to import a pre-built cart abandonment campaign into your AWeber account
AWeber has pre-built automated email campaigns — including cart abandonment campaigns — so you can automate your email marketing in a matter of minutes. To import the campaign into your AWeber account, simply go to the AWeber Marketplace and:
Import the pre-built campaign by copying the sharing code.
Then, go into campaigns. Click the green "Create a Campaign" button and select "Import a Campaign."
Paste the sharing code you copied into the pop-up window. The cart abandonment campaign will then be added to your account.
Within the Campaign Options menu, you'll be able to specify if a contact can enter a campaign once or multiple times. The multiple entries option is particularly important if you have a product that someone may purchase more than once.
AWeber is an ecommerce company's best friend!
AWeber makes selling ecommerce products powerfully-simple and easy. By instantly providing you the ability to integrate your email marketing with your ecommerce store, you can communicate with your audience in the time and space they choose to sell both products and services.
AWeber works with all of the leading ecommerce platforms to help level the playing field for small and middle-sized businesses — including WooCommerce, Shopify, Paypal, Etsy, SAMCart, JVZoo, Warrior Plus, Clickbank, 3dcart, Stripe, and many others.
Use email marketing to grow your ecommerce business!
Whether you're starting a new business, need to grow your audience, or you run an established ecommerce business, AWeber provides a powerfully simple email marketing solution for any small business.
AWeber's email marketing platform includes unlimited landing pages with every plan, unlimited emails, email automation, sign up forms, and email analytics.
With 2 billion unique users watching 1 billion hours of video every day, YouTube offers an excellent platform to market your business. Add that to the compelling nature of video in marketing and you have a winning combination. In fact, video marketing has helped marketers to increase traffic, generate leads and reduce the number of support calls.
So there’s no doubt that leveraging YouTube will help you achieve all of these goals and more. This post shows you some of the most essential steps for YouTube marketing and how you can get the most out of the network.
1. Create and brand your YouTube channel
If you haven’t already, make sure you start by creating a Brand Account on Google. When you create a Brand Account, you can authorize members of your team t0 manage your YouTube channel; something you won’t be able to do on a personal account.
Ideally, pick a channel name that’s either similar or consistent to your business name so it’s easy to recognize. And don’t forget to upload channel art that aligns with your brand’s visual identity.
2. Understand your audience
Marketing on YouTube is mainly about creating content to reach and engage a target audience. And for that, you need to know what that audience likes. What kind of content do they want from you? When are they most active? Where is your audience mostly based? How often do they expect to get new videos from you? All of this and more will help you craft a winning YouTube marketing strategy.
The YouTube Analytics tab will provide you with valuable insights into your subscriber demographics and watch time. This will help you identify which regions of the world your videos are reaching, what time people are viewing your videos, how old your viewers are and what gender you mostly reach. Use these insights to plan your YouTube content strategy.
You could also take a YouTube survey asking your viewers what they’d like to see from you as Cut did in the following post on their Community tab. They sourced a poll to their audience asking which mother-daughter pair they’d like to see in an upcoming episode. It’s a clever way to use your audience’s input in your content. Additionally, the comments on your videos can also help you understand your audience and further inform your YouTube marketing strategy.
3. Learn from the best
While understanding your audience will give you an idea of what content to create, it won’t necessarily help you get ahead of the competition. For that, you should look directly at your competitors and learn from their YouTube marketing strategies. What are they doing right and how can you replicate that? What mistakes are they making and how can you capitalize on that?
Find your competitors’ channels and watch their most popular and least popular videos. Try to identify what resonates with the audience and what complaints they have about those videos. Beyond judging the content for yourself, you could even go through the comments to see what people are saying. Also, think about the content that you find interesting and informative. Would you watch your competitor’s videos and find the content valuable? Use these insights to inform your YouTube content strategy.
For example, let’s say you’re competing with the following video on designing an abandoned cart email. You can see that there’s no video description, which you can capitalize on by creating a compelling description for your video. Plus, the comment shows someone complaining that there’s no proper intro in the video. Capitalize on this as well by creating intriguing intros on all your videos that call out the real life problem you’re solving for your viewers.
Additionally, go through your competitors’ video descriptions (if any) to identify the keywords they’re using. If you find any that could be relevant to your channel, use them for your YouTube SEO. You could apply the same research strategy on your favorite YouTube channels as well.
4. Nail your YouTube SEO
While marketing on YouTube is mostly about creating quality content, optimizing your videos for visibility is equally important. It won’t matter how entertaining your videos are if people can’t find them in relevant search results. That’s exactly why you should invest your time and effort into YouTube SEO.
At the least, your YouTube marketing efforts should include the basics of YouTube SEO, such as:
Optimizing your titles and descriptions with keywords
In many ways, the YouTube search engine works similar to the Google search engine. It will prioritize high-quality content that’s relevant to the search term. And one of the ways it will determine the content’s relevance in a search is through the terms and phrases in your video titles and descriptions.
For example, see how the top search result for “juggling football” is a video titled “soccer/football juggling tutorial.” It specifies that the tutorial is about juggling in soccer specifically and not about juggling in general, making it relevant to the search. A brief look at the description also shows that they’ve used multiple variations of the keyword there as well.
Use your competitor research from earlier and conduct keyword research to discover the most relevant search terms your target audience is using. Then use these terms seamlessly into your titles and descriptions for a better chance at showing up in the right search results.
Creating eye-catching thumbnails
It’s not enough that your videos show up in relevant searches; you also need people to click on them so YouTube can further determine your content’s relevance. That’s where your video thumbnails enter the picture. Your title may give people an idea of what your video is about, but your thumbnails give them a glimpse of your video quality.
So make sure you use customized thumbnails that instantly catch the eye and compel people to watch your videos. Select an appealing image from your video as the thumbnail, then add graphics, text overlays and filters as needed to make the image pop.
Cross-promoting your videos
Since the number of video views plays a role in YouTube SEO, you should also get viewers to watch as many of your videos as possible. So try cross-promoting relevant and related videos by displaying end screen recommendations at the end of your videos. Here’s an example of Great Big Story recommending related videos within their Around the World playlist series. Make sure the recommended videos lead to a logical progression of content that your user will be interested in, such as a playlist.
Also, you should cross-promote your videos using other social media platforms to get as many views as possible. In some cases, you might even find opportunities to embed your YouTube videos on relevant blog posts. Here’s the same Great Big Story video posted on their Twitter profile:
Great Big Story senior producer Beryl Shereshewsky checks in with seven people in seven different countries who show us how they prepare their perfect cuppa. ☕️
Consistency is the key to YouTube marketing success. Creating and editing quality content takes time, so you may not necessarily be able to publish a video every day. But make sure you have a posting schedule and follow it religiously.
This will give your audience an idea of when they should expect your content and help you engage them more effectively. The more content you publish, the more opportunities for engagement you’re opening up. This could eventually help you gain more visibility in people’s feeds. Plus, having a proper publishing schedule makes it easier for you to plan your content and schedule videos ahead of time.
In fact, you could use the calendar view option on Sprout Social’s YouTube publishing tool to better plan your video content alongside your social content. This will help you visualize your overall or single-network content schedule and understand your post volume across the week or month, so you can seamlessly make necessary adjustments.
6. Offer captions and subtitles in multiple languages
According to YouTube, about two-thirds of a channel’s views will come from outside the home country of the content creator. So even if you hadn’t intended to build an international audience, there’s a good chance your channel already has viewers who speak other languages besides English.
Effective YouTube marketing involves catering to this existing audience and enhancing their experience as well as attracting more viewers who share similar characteristics. This makes it crucial to provide closed captioning and translations of your content. Based on the insights from your YouTube demographics data, find out which countries your viewers come from and prioritize English and other languages accordingly. Also, adding closed captioning assists with making your videos accessible to all viewers.
If you’re worried about the cost of translating your content, note that you don’t necessarily have to spend a dime. YouTube lets you crowdsource translated captions from your fans for free. For this, go to the Creator Studio and turn on community contributions under “Subtitles.”
Keep in mind, you can always provide subtitles or closed captioning with or without timestamps yourself. Just upload a supported transcript file in the Advanced settings of your video options.
7. Partner with influential creators
With hundreds of thousands of loyal fans, influential YouTubers have the power to effectively market your channel and products. Consider partnering with them to amplify your YouTube marketing efforts. Collaborating with YouTube influencers gives you an opportunity to reach a new audience as well as provide some credibility or endorsement behind your products.
The actual approach and campaign type may vary depending on your end goal and your product. Is it brand awareness? Newsletter signups? Or farther down the marketing funnel?
For example, TruAudio partnered with What’s Inside?–an influential YouTube channel with over 6.8 million subscribers–to promote their products. The channel provided viewers with an in-depth look at how the product works and linked to the product homepage in the description.
But if your plan is to promote your YouTube channel or a specific video on your channel, you could also get the influencer to share those relevant links in the description box as well. You might even co-create a video with the influencer and publish it to your channel instead, depending on your goal and approach to YouTube influencer marketing campaigns.
8. Invest in YouTube ads
While proper YouTube SEO can go a long way, solely relying on organic reach won’t get you scalable results. For that, you need paid advertising to reach a highly relevant audience through means other than YouTube search results. Invest in YouTube ads to promote your content and products through other channels and drive more viewers to your channel.
You have the option of running a few different YouTube ad types and expand your reach by keyword or audience. Run a few different paid ad promotions to test which is successful for your goals.
Perfecting your YouTube marketing
The steps outlined in this guide show you some of the essential steps to get started with YouTube marketing. But note that to perfect your efforts, you should consider YouTube marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy instead of a standalone initiative.
For instance, include videos into your overall content strategy to create a perfect balance with other content formats. And add YouTube into your overall social media strategy so you can seamlessly manage it with other platforms.
Learn how to easily integrate YouTube into your existing social social media strategy with our free social media toolkit.
Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, you have most likely come across a political hashtag in an article, a tweet or a personal story shared on Facebook. A hashtag is a functional tag widely used in search engines and social networking services that allow people to search for content that falls under the word or phrase, followed by the # sign. First popularized by Twitter in 2009, the use of hashtags has become widespread. Nearly anything political with the intent of attracting a wide audience is now branded with a catchy hashtag. Take for example, election campaigns (#MAGA), social…
The world has changed. The way we interact, communicate, and exist with one another shifted rapidly over the past few months..
But one thing has never — and will never — change for AWeber: our commitment to our team and the customers we serve.
As we adapt to our new reality, we continue to look for ways to support our customers and team members as best we can.
That’s why we made the decision to become a remote first team.
Below is the email I sent to our entire team this afternoon to announce our plans for the remote first future of AWeber:
The world is collectively dealing with the new realities that COVID-19 brings to daily life. Counties around us are turning to the yellow phase allowing businesses to reopen with new daily realities requiring masks and continued social distancing. Faced with this we must first think of the safety of our team, our families, and our customers.
Effective immediately, all team member travel is cancelled until at least September. There will be no in person team events until 2021.
We must now grapple with how these changes impact our normal office activities. Lunches together don’t work, all hands doesn’t work, most conference rooms wouldn’t be big enough for a group, workstations must be spread out more, everyone must wear a mask all day long, even walking past each other in hallways too close together is an issue. Much of the interaction that makes being in the office beneficial puts our collective health at risk.
I’ve long said that remote work where part of the team is in an office and part of a team is remote doesn’t work. I still believe that. Teams in offices collaborate differently than those that are fully remote. Remote members get left out of communications that are necessary for them to be successful. If I was starting a software company in 2020, it would be a remote first company for a variety of reasons. With fewer geographical limitations we can find talented candidates wherever they reside, which also provides greater opportunity for success in diversity efforts. That geographic spread also affords greater diversity against weather, political, and other business interrupting phenomenon. Different cultures and ideas mix together to curate better ideas and more inclusive implementations that are representative of the diverse makeup of our customer base.
AWeber’s future starts today, as a remote first company in what is our biggest organizational change in 21 years. There won’t be a date for going back to the office, as we have no intention of going back and will from this point forward be working and hiring remotely.
None of us can pretend that the remote work we’ve been doing for the past 2 months is the same remote work we’ll be doing in 1-2 years as the world returns to a new normal. I think that most would say we’ve been pretty successful over the last 2 months as we made the switch relatively seamlessly. I believe that most people find collaboration and communication easier in person, but I believe it can be better when done fully remote. The easier collaboration of in person communication breeds bad habits with lack of documentation, word of mouth standards, mushy agendaless meetings, and undocumented decisions or next steps. A recent post by Matt Mullenweg of Automattic/Wordpress describing a remote team's 5 levels of autonomy struck me. Right now our team exhibits many positive traits of these 5 levels, but with effort and more deliberate communication I believe we can rise to even higher levels.
This challenge excites me, and I hope it excites you as well. I ask that you approach this with an open mind and realize that this will require change within all of us. We must break old habits, form new ones, be transparent with each other about what’s working, what’s not, what we need, and what we don’t need. Say what you see, suggest improvements, and we’ll figure out together what works best.
How you show up to impact the world is not changing. What you’ve been doing for the past 2 months is what we need to do to keep moving forward. The only thing that’s changing is that there’s no longer a timeline for going back, as we’re already “back”. It’s important to remember that while we may not be in our building anymore, our building is not our culture. Our culture is defined by our core values and how we make decisions and behave as individuals, as a team, and as a force for change with our customers.
Use this change and the turmoil going on in the world around us as an opportunity to look at the world with a new perspective and new ideas of how we can make an impact.
Our collective efforts in the past 30 days alone have put billions of opt-in permission based emails in inboxes around the world. Those messages during this pandemic connect teachers to their students, governments to their citizens, families to necessities, businesses to their customers and so much more. People around the world can be educated, be informed, be safe, be entertained, be fit, and be happy as a result of each of your daily efforts.
Cheers,
Tom Kulzer
CEO & Founder
Our mission has never wavered. We remain dedicated to connecting people in remarkable ways by delivering powerfully-simple email marketing software for small businesses — so they can continue living their dreams, executing on their passions, and growing their businesses.
We’re excited to propel AWeber into the future, and can’t wait to continue creating remarkable experiences for our customers and team members.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Using images in your marketing campaigns can communicate a lot about what types of emotions you’re trying to convey. These days, you can deliver that same level of emotion with a single keyboard click.
We’re talking about emoji.
Whether your audience is young and hip to the latest internet trends, or are take a more traditional approach, emoji have a place on a variety of marketing channels.
Let’s talk about what emoji are, where they came from, and how to use them in every aspect of your marketing campaigns.
What are emojis?
Even though they gained mainstream popularity within the last decade, Emoji were first created in the 1990s by a Japanese marketing agency. Originally, they were used as a derivation of standard typographic emoticons that were popular on the internet at the time. These images gave personality to the emoticons and added another level of self-expression to online communications. In 2011, Apple made the emoji a permanent part of their iOS 5 keyboard, launching the little faces into the spotlight.
Today there are 1,620 emoji in the iOS keyboard with new ones joining the lineup every year.
Emoji vs. emoticons
The emoticons of the ’90s inspired the idea for emoji but the two words still represent two different sets of characters. You create emoticons by using certain keyboard characters to create a face that adds emotion to the text. Emoticons look like this:
Emoji are small images made up of pixels used to depict a variety of faces, activities and objects. New emoji are designed every year and added to the keyboards of your favorite smartphones.
Emoji add more depth and realism to the emoticons that came before them. Popular emoji range from everything from a kissy face, a slice of pizza, airplanes and more. Emoji can be customized to feature a variety of skin tones, hair colors, and textures.
Why use emoji in marketing?
If you follow a lot of brands on social media, you’ve noticed that more and more of them are using emoji in their messaging and branding. According to a study by WordStream, using an emoji in a Tweet can increase engagement by 25% compared to messages without emoji. Using an emoji in your Facebook posts can increase shares by 33% and interactions with your post by 57%.
Beyond these statistics, emoji can also help to make your brand more relatable, add context to your messaging, and appeal to the emotions of your audience on a deeper level.
Humanize your brand
When your audience trusts your brand, they’re more likely to recommend you to others and become long-term supporters.
Using emoji in your messaging can add an extra level of personality and relatability to your brand. You can humanize your brand and relate to your audience by speaking their language with the emoji they use daily in text messaging, chat and personal social posts..
As an investment bank, Goldman Sachs is not known for having a youthful vibe. But that didn’t stop them from showing off another side of their personality and appealing to a younger audience by sending out a tweet made up almost solely of emoji that tell a narrative on their own.
On more professional platforms like LinkedIn, using emoji can help your brand stand out in a sea of text posts.
Rather than using them to communicate, you can create more eye-catching lists, or emphasize your posts and headlines with symbols.
Before sticking a bunch of emoji in your messaging, get to know your key demographic and who it is you’re targeting. While emoji can be a great way to humanize your brand, overdoing it or using emoji that don’t appeal to your audience can also alienate them when you don’t do the proper research.
Better engage your audience
Why do people use emoji to communicate with their friends and family? They’re fun and engaging! Emoji can create a massive boost in engagement for your brand when used correctly.
It’s clear that something about an emoji makes people want to engage–they stand out among text posts and have a friendly, casual appearance. Plus, many social platforms now support searching by emoji so they’re more universal than images and video and let both users and marketers tap into themed conversations, similar to hashtags. Sprout’s own filtering options also let you search by emoji in your Inbox or social listening.
Push notifications that incorporate emoji can get up to 85% more opens and 9% more conversions than text-only notifications. No matter what channel you’re using, adding the right emoji can boost engagement and lead to a higher conversion rate.
Add context to your content
Using emoji in your marketing copy can also add extra context to your messaging. In the same way that an exclamation point can change the tone communicated by your message, adding an emoji can convey emotions that you can’t do with text alone. Social media emojis won’t replace good copy, but the two can work together to add more depth and meaning to your words.
On platforms like Twitter, where you have a limited character count, using emoji can add extra context and emotion to your message when you can’t use extra words.
Tips for using emoji effectively in marketing
You might be eager to rewrite all of your messaging to include emoji, but it’s important to understand your audience to make sure you’re approaching emoji use in the right way. Your audience demographics will play a huge role in how and when you should use marketing emoji in your campaigns. Demographics will also impact the types of emoji that perform well with your target audience. Get to know your target audience through research and analytics and be sure your emoji-enhanced message matches up with what they like to see on social before using emoji for their own sake.
The marketing channels you use will also impact your use of emoji. Formatting like spacing or line returns can create variation in how posts display between mobile and desktop. Plus, different mobile families have their own display style for emoji, meaning the same emoji could have different connotations when viewed on different devices. Test and preview to be sure your message comes across the way you want and without display errors on every device and platform.
Emoji on social media
Emoji and social media complement each other perfectly. People use emoji every day to spice up their social media content and interact with their friends’ posts. There’s no reason your brand can’t do the same thing. When incorporating emoji in your social media posts, do so intentionally and with engagement in mind.
Use emoji as a way to add extra context to your messaging, or to add emphasis to the text in your post.
Asking your followers to interact with your post using an emoji is an easy way to encourage engagement. It can be as simple as asking your followers to agree or disagree with a statement using the 👍🏼 or 👎🏼 emoji. You can also ask a more open-ended question, like “what’s your favorite animal? 🐶🐱🐸🐴🦉” and let them use emoji to get creative with their response.
This works exceptionally well on apps that have predominantly mobile use like Facebook and Instagram, where users have quick access to their emoji keyboard.
Facebook believes in the power of emoji so much that it created its own emoji system, called reactions, to promote engagement. These are even quicker for your audience than typing in an emoji, since you can react with these custom icon with one tap or click, just as you would to Like a post.
Using emoji in your social media posts will drive engagement on its own. Asking your followers to interact with your post in a fun and creative way will boost that engagement even more.
Emoji in email marketing
Emoji aren’t exclusively reserved for public-facing channels like social media, even though it’s more prevalent on those channels. Incorporating emoji into your email marketing campaigns has shown an increase in engagement and open rates as well.
When using emoji in your email marketing, use them to emphasize a particular point, but don’t use emoji to replace text. Different email providers might display emoji differently so it’s important not to rely on emoji to get your message across. Some subscribers might be using an email provider that doesn’t support emoji as well as others. Your message may end up lost in translation if it relies too heavily on the emoji. Always test your emails to see how they look in different browsers and with providers to be on the safe side.
Emoji in paid social advertising
Just as with your social media posts, using emoji in your paid ads can increase engagement for your ads.
Adespresso wanted to test the theory that Facebook Ads with emoji received a higher click-through rate than those without. To test this, it created two ads. Everything about the ads was identical except that one ad featured an emoji in the headline.
After A/B testing these two ads, it found that the ad with the emoji in the headline saw a 241% higher click-through rate than the non-emoji ad.
At Sprout, we also saw positive results for using emoji in our own LinkedIn advertising. Out of two ad variations using similar copy, the one using emoji brought in 84% of all downloads on the linked content, and it had a 400% lower cost per lead than the variation without emoji.
Using emoji in your paid advertising campaigns should support your message and align with your brand voice. If you don’t use emoji anywhere else in your marketing message, then it might not be the right time to start using them in your paid advertising. Instead, start by weaving them into your organic message so that your paid posts feel natural and fit with your brand voice.
Conclusion
Before adding emoji to your marketing strategy, ask yourself if it aligns with the tone of your brand. Also, make sure that you do the research to find out the meanings of different emoji before you use them. The last thing you want is to advertise healthy produce only to find out the emoji you chose has an entirely different meaning on the internet.
It’s important to understand who your audience is, to know how they’ll respond to emoji marketing. Just because you see other brands using emoji doesn’t mean that the same strategy will work for you. Learn about where your audience is most active, and how they engage with your existing posts. That information can help you figure out an emoji marketing strategy that makes sense for you. Check out our free social media toolkit to learn more about how you can engage with your audience on social media and which platforms will work best for your brand.
Dogwood Adventure Play is a magical place for Dogs. Founder Katie Guastapaglia offers dog training, walking services, and private secure fields that include adventure play equipment and a sensory garden with dog-friendly plants.
Due to social distancing rules, Dogwood Adventure Play had to pivot their business when they could no longer offer their dog training services in person.
While other businesses transitioned to paid online programs, Dogwood Adventure Play didn’t feel this was a good option. They had a small, disengaged email list, which would make it difficult to sell an online program.
Guastapaglia knew she needed to come up with a creative solution to stand out in the inbox and build her list. So she decided to create a 30 Days of Dogwood Challenge to help her audience train their dogs and keep them active during COVID-19.
Her new email challenge was a huge success, growing her email list by 110% and earning average open rates of 70%. Armed with a highly engaged, larger email list, her business now sells an online experience package — Scentventure a new online dog training program.
Learn the simple steps she took to create her email challenge and see the strategies she used to get an average open rate on her emails of over 70%.
9 strategies to grow your email list and increase email engagement.
Strategy 1: Test out a concept by focusing on your audience's pain point.
Dogwood Adventure Play has two customers: dogs and their owners. During the lockdown, Guastapaglia realized that dogs needed to keep moving despite being in a limited space, and their owners needed a structure to provide activities for their canine.
So she focused on the pain points her customers were experiencing and created a free 30 Days of Dogwood Challenge to help her customers and grow her list.
She used an AWeber sign up form on her blog to promote the free challenge and collect email subscribers.
Strategy 2: Consider creating a theme to make it entertaining.
To make her content more entertaining for humans, Guastapaglia creates a new theme every month for her email challenge. For April, she used an Easter egg hunt theme.
Strategy 3: Include additional valuable content with your emails.
For the 30 Days of Dogwood Challenge, each email contains links to content hosted on Guastapaglia’s website for users to complete their challenge.
If you create your own email challenge, your content doesn't need to be elaborate. In her challenge, Guastapaglia includes simple PDFs her audience can download, shares video on YouTube, and connects with her audience on Facebook Live and webinars. All of these tools are inexpensive and easy to use.
Strategy 4: Create a reward system for engagement.
In the 30 Days of Dogwood Challenge, participants are encouraged to share their challenge successes for a reward.
To make it easy for users to post their successes, Gustopaglia created a private Facebook group.
Strategy 5: Add bonuses that allow you to connect directly with your audience.
Consider adding a bonus that lets your audience connect with you. For the 30 Days of Dogwood Challenge, Guastapaglia invites her audience to join her on a webinar so participants can ask her questions directly and discuss the training and challenges in greater detail. She even includes a pop quiz on the theme of the month to keep the event entertaining.
Strategy 6: Give subscribers multiple opportunities to engage with your content by sharing it more than once.
At the bottom of her challenge emails, Guastapaglia includes links to her previous YouTube video challenges to remind subscribers of past content and to give them another opportunity to participate if they missed a challenge.
AWeber allows you to structure your emails however you feel will most benefit your audience.
Guastapaglia has found that a roundup at the bottom of the email works well for her and her audience.
Strategy 7: Cater your email content to your audience’s unique needs.
Everyone learns differently, so Guastapaglia includes multimedia options in her emails: written content, videos, and tasks to do off-line.
"I think it's the best way for people to learn. To give them options based on their learning style. There's hopefully something for everybody," says Guastapaglia.
Strategy 8: Personalize your email content.
Another strategy Guastapaglia uses to get high open rates is adding subscribers’ first names to the emails they receive. She alternates between personalizing the subject line and the body of the email. She only uses personalization in emails that are particularly important so as not to dilute the impact.
"I love using the customizable field to drop somebody's name in the email. I have found my open rates are better when you can do that. it really makes a difference," says Guastapaglia.
Strategy 9: Vary frequency based on the circumstance.
During the height of COVID-19 and when Guastapaglia was testing out her free 30-day Challenge product, she emailed her contacts daily. She felt people needed her support a lot more, and she was trying to help everyone through the crisis.
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