email marketing lead generation
Surprisingly, I run across many salespeople that are still using Excel spreadsheets to manage sales leads, calls, and meetings. In their minds, the spreadsheet is their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The simple truth is, there's a better way to manage leads, and it's far more efficient.
Youtobe
email marketing health insurance
9-to-5 jobs are never truly 9-5.
There’s always something that comes up that needs to get done. ASAP. No questions asked.
Thank your boss for that one. Actually, don’t. That’s probably not a good idea.
But running a business is a whole new level of busy. Being a business owner in today’s world is damn near impossible.
Want to have a normal work-life balance? Good joke.
Need to take a vacation to refresh your brain? Sure. If you’re okay with a business-level apocalypse.
Family asking you to go apple picking this weekend? It isn’t happening.
As a small business owner, you’ve got to run every single department, constantly making sure everything’s running smoothly.
That means creating new content, generating big ideas, speaking with clients, landing sales, checking emails, and running marketing reports.
The list goes on.
You simply don’t have enough time in the day to complete all of these tasks.
You can’t scale your business to new heights if you ignore any of them though.
They need to get done. Your business and livelihood literally depend on it.
So what do you do?
You need to automate. Put boring, tedious, time-consuming tasks on autopilot to save yourself hours every week.
Marketing automation isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if you want to scale your business without dying from sleep deprivation.
Here are the reasons why you need marketing automation and three tips for small business owners to automate and scale.
Marketing automation is just what it sounds like: automating marketing-based tasks.
If you’re not too familiar with marketing automation, here’s a simple definition from Google:
The goal is to save you time and increase your ROI.
Automation does this by cutting out time spent on tedious processes. Meaning you’re using less labor. And less labor means less overhead.
But here’s the biggest benefit of all:
Less time spent working means more time looking at pugs.
Yes, it’s a real addiction that affects thousands every year (source: N/A).
The more you can automate, the better.
According to the latest data, the vast majority of marketers using marketing automation strategies are successful in achieving their objectives:
Another study discovered that 50% of marketers using automation tools found either some increases or massive increases in leads:
But effectively gaining leads isn’t all that comes with marketing automation.
It shouldn’t even be the main focus.
Sure, it’s great that marketing automation can increase leads; don’t get me wrong.
That’s amazing.
But the goal here is to reduce time spent working without reducing profit.
If you don’t see a massive spike in leads, but you’re cutting out 10 hours of marketing work each week with automation, you’re effectively increasing profit by reducing labor.
See what I mean?
Even if the process doesn’t generate 10x the amount of leads, you’re spending less on labor.
Less labor = less overhead = more profit.
This is where people tend to go wrong. When you only focus on lead increases, you lose sight of profit and business growth.
There are dozens of ways to achieve profit and growth that don’t include landing more clients.
And according to Aberdeen, companies using marketing automation can reduce their marketing-to-close time by 49%.
That potentially means completing your work in half the time.
If you’re strapped for time and haven’t slept in weeks, it’s time to implement marketing automation.
It will not only cut down on your working hours, but it’ll also reduce your labor costs and help you generate more leads.
Here are three great ways you can automate your growth today.
Content promotion is critical to business growth.
When it comes to driving new organic traffic and leads, nothing competes with top-notch content.
But having good content alone won’t always drive traffic.
So most marketers turn to promotion on social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
All of these platforms are an easy way to generate more leads.
But it takes time. And lot’s of it.
In fact, Statista found that the majority of marketers are spending anywhere from one to 10 hours per week on social media.
By scheduling content and loading it into your Buffer queue, you can quickly waste a few hours every week.
Coming up with tweets and trying to squeeze your content into 140 characters sucks.
Especially when you’re re-sharing that post five different ways.
Content sharing is a necessary process that’s tedious and often time-consuming.
On top of that, it doesn’t always equate to a perfect return on investment.
So it’s sometimes thrown on the backburner.
But that’s not an option in today’s world that’s obsessed with social media.
Thanks to marketing automation, it doesn’t have to be.
You can automatically share content from your blog to social media without lifting a finger.
Here’s how.
Start by creating an account with Zapier.
It’s a popular automation tool that connects thousands of different SaaS tools that you use daily.
Once you make an account, click on the explore tab and head to the “Marketers” section:
Next, you should be able to locate the following “Zap,” or automation process:
This is legitimately a lifesaver.
If social media is the bane of your existence, you will save hours every week from trying to post and come up with new ideas.
Click “Use This Zap” to start a new automation workflow.
Next, you’ll have to link your public blog RSS feed.
If you’re not sure what that is, you can set up an RSS feed in just a few minutes with this Google tutorial.
After plugging in your feed URL, you can head to the “Action” step, which is where your social post will happen:
All you have to do here is link your account, and you’re good to go.
So next time you publish a blog post on your site, Zapier will trigger this automation process and craft a tweet for you instantly.
You can use this automation technique for all of your social channels. If you don’t want to use an RSS feed, Zapier allows you to connect WordPress too:
Ditch the hours spent crafting tweets and social posts. Automate it instead.
If you’re like me, you spend too much time checking your email.
It’s obviously not because you want to, but simply because your inbox is jammed with emails.
HubSpot’s latest research shows us that marketers spend an average of nearly four hours just sending emails every week.
That doesn’t include checking your email. That’s just typing and sending emails.
Brutal.
Email sucks. It’s boring and often filled with junk.
Yet, your iPhone is blowing up every two minutes from new emails, distracting you from the task at hand and killing your productivity.
So, how do you only get notifications for the important stuff? How do you cut out those nearly 4 hours of sending emails each week?
By automating your email process.
In Zapier, you can set up an automation workflow that allows you to get notified only when specific people email you:
Do you have important clients that email you frequently?
Or even employees that ask time-sensitive questions?
Then you need this. It’s extremely easy to set up, too.
Click “Use This Zap” to get started. Be sure to connect your Gmail account to Zapier and select your work email as the inbox.
Next, you need to type in the search string that will trigger this process.
For example, you can enter a few different search strings:
Try using direct email addresses from clients, employees, or even another boss (like your significant other).
You can also set up simple subject lines like “from:client name.”
Once you save this automation workflow, you’ll get pinged on Slack whenever an important email comes in.
Meaning you can respond instantly and only spend time on the most important emails.
So silence your email notifications, get some work done, and respond to the big-ticket clients.
Stop spending four hours weekly on email with this automation tip.
Collecting leads is awesome.
You just drove some quality traffic to your site and converted a few of them.
Great. Now what?
Do you download the data and upload it into a CRM? Or into your favorite email campaign platform?
Lead flow processes can quickly become tedious and time-consuming.
From downloading, formatting, and uploading lists, you could be spending hours on it weekly.
Plus, if you don’t follow up with a lead fast, you risk losing them.
Automation is critical when it comes to perfecting a lead flow.
From automatically sending nurturing emails to uploading lists without doing the work, you can quickly cut down your hours.
One of my favorite Zapier integrations is adding new sales leads directly to a CRM or email platform without doing the actual work.
You have much more important things to do besides uploading lists and creating new campaigns.
With Zapier, you can actually automatically upload new leads from your site or social media ads directly into a CRM or email campaign.
Zapier is great for this simply because of the integrations they offer.
You can connect it with the top services like MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.
If you use it, they most likely have it.
This is one of my favorite Zaps:
If you don’t use Constant Contact or Gravity Forms, don’t fret.
You can connect nearly anything with Zapier.
This is just an example of two integrations that are amazing.
If you set up this Zap, you are automating the process of lead gen to nurturing without ever having to worry about it.
With your favorite email platform, you can usually turn on settings to send newly-added leads a welcome email, too.
Meaning you are virtually skipping these steps:
Checking your leads, downloading the lead list, formatting it for your platform, uploading it, creating and sending a new campaign.
That’s potentially hours of work every week.
If you’re a lazy business owner like me, you can get tons of value from automating lead flows.
Running a small business is one of the toughest ventures you can embark on. Besides kids.
Don’t get me started.
From sleepless nights (or weeks) to chasing the ever elusive “work-life balance,” you’re always strapped for time. Your plate is constantly full to the point where nothing gets done.
Your workload exceeds human capabilities. And unless you’ve got the hookup on some new age brain transplant technology, you’ve only got one option:
Automation.
If you notice that tasks are piling up and taking up your time, you need to automate.
Do you want your business to have any shot at scaling and achieving new growth? If so, you’ve gotta cut out the junk that, though necessary, doesn’t directly contribute to growth.
But you can’t ignore it full scale. You just need to automate it, filter it out, or delete it entirely.
Freeing up time doesn’t just save you time. It can also help make you a lot more money in the long run.
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.
Youtobe
The e-commerce revolution was built on the back of digital advances and automation, but is the next generation of machine learning and AI friend or foe?
Machine learning is the method today’s systems use to learn about you and the fundamental things that make you who you are. It looks beyond generalizations and characterizations on your age or gender and realizes that you’re a huge fan of cartoon dogs and emojis, but only the ones that have the same hair as you.
In the e-commerce space, machine learning is being used to slowly learn what customers prefer and how they want to see information to get them to make a purchase. It tests and adapts, using new options and information to slowly refine the best way to reach your customers.
It’s an amazing tool with plenty of opportunities, but hiding within that potential are some risks if you’re not paying attention. Let’s look at what can help or hurt.
One of the more exciting applications of machine learning is going to be the ability for you to search for the things you want and need. Right now, to find a product on an e-commerce store, you have to search for it using the words you prefer and the e-commerce store owner must hope they used the same words for the search results to match what you want and what they offer.
Machine learning cranks that up by providing support for a broader set of synonyms at the most basic level. Smart machine learning looks for synonyms in the nouns you provide as well as similar phrases people use for the same type of problem. A leaking faucet and a dripping sink should pull the same results, but they don’t always in today’s search.
The extra layer that machine learning adds on top of all this comes from its capability to learn your site and metrics. So, smarter search engines can prioritize click rates and existing conversions, put products with higher customer ratings at the top, or even restrict results based on what’s currently in stock.
It’s possible to deliver dynamically different page content using search results and even display items and containers, from ads to sections on what customers also liked, based on each individual customer. The downside, or potential threat to your business, is that systems that are not closely monitored could limit the display of some products and search results.
If you let your system fine-tune continually without checking, it could stop promoting a product that isn’t selling, and the continued lack of sales would push any promotions or links down even further. Don’t let a runaway search hide any products.
Recall any of the times you’ve recently had to call your bank, credit agency, or someone’s whose robot voice told you to pay attention because the menu options may have changed. On the Internet, whether it’s your e-commerce product pages, FAQs, carts, or any other location customer’s visit, you can ensure your customers never have to go through that frustration thanks to smart chatbots.
By understanding unstructured data — answers to questions like “how was your day?” instead of “what’s ten minus two?” — chatbots are now able to provide a realistic conversation that doesn’t feel fake or frustrate people with non-answers. Your customer service representative can now answer questions 24/7 with a wide range of data thanks to smart chatbots.
Chatbots mean small and mid-sized companies can provide round-the-clock support without needing to pay someone those hours. Machine learning comes into play because it allows a chatbot to be programmed with general information and respond to customer queries. As it interacts with more people, machine learning will enable your chatbot to learn the specifics of your online store and service.
Initially, chatbots can empower you to direct customers to basic information like shipping options, colors, size charts, and other formulaic options. Eventually, as you employ more sophisticated machine learning, you can have chatbots that identify potential upsells, ask customers questions to deliver coupons, or address long-term needs of your customers.
Unless you work in customer service, it’s hard to imagine chatbots being a threat. The tricky issue here is the system that learns your customers and their preferences. A significant amount of chatbots come from third-party services and they may be collecting or using some of your customer data for the purpose of answering questions or generating social media posts automatically.
Make agreements airtight when it comes to how data can be used and ensure that it is anonymized, or you may have upset customers who realize that they got an email for a service or one that includes their address after they’ve been on your site.
Beyond chatbots, machine learning creates opportunities for a variety of virtual buying assistances that can do anything from email you when airfare drops below a certain price or reminds you to re-order your water filter every 30 days. E-commerce brands can take this data review a step further to look for opportunities such as coupons to drive down prices to a certain point or for savings ahead of a specific holiday or holiday season where your goods are purchased in order to encourage increased spending this year.
If I know that you buy t-shirts online when you can get two for under $25, I can send you a deal that gets shirts to that threshold right now. And next month, I can try with an offer that gets the price down to $27 and see if you’ll bite.
Machine learning removes a lot of the guesswork and manual labor required to identify those thresholds and send offers accordingly. Using profiles and purchasing habit data, systems can teach themselves to create a potential sale that meets a variety of threshold criteria around margins, existing inventory, and repeat business.
Higher levels of personalization require more customer avatars or marketing personas and ultimately this could be a large set that because it is hard to generalize new customers. So, there’s a need to balance cost ranges on products as well as how long an offer lasts. Customers may be upset if they see one price, don’t immediately click and then cannot find the reduced price again.
Machine learning has a significant potential to provide customers with something a little extra. We believe that shipping often makes the biggest difference and machine learning can not only determine preferred shipping options but test when a free bump to something faster will increase your sales.
Plus, smart systems can use your existing data to ensure that those promises match inventory levels and shipping time based on what your suppliers or distributors can match. You also have the opportunity to build in scarcity and promote sales — you might’ve seen something like this when an e-commerce giant says that if you order in the next 20 minutes you can get it tomorrow.
Bots also can provide consistent updates on package status and do trend analysis to help show the commerce brand when those messages are received, desired, and effective.
The true value-add of machine learning is that it can prevent over-promising and ensure you’re working on what best delivers an improvement for your website and the shopping experience you offer. Smart use of data and machine learning can improve your operations at every point of delivery, from when customers arrive and search your site to prompting them for purchase decisions and following up with reliable service and information.
Now that you’ve seen the possibilities of machine learning, you’re ready to sign up and get it rolling for your company. Great! That’s the easy part. Adding it to your site is the hard part. There’s a lot to learn and review so that you can make your products, services, and site smarter.
Your IT team or partner will need a few things to get started on a machine learning implementation for you:
Creating a list of definitions, goals, needs, and uses will help you build a plan to bring to a developer or to give to your internal team to figure out next steps.
The good news in all that is more and more companies are lowering the bar to entry thanks to APIs you can start using immediately. So, there’s a chance someone has put together a package that you can use to achieve the results you want.
For example, Google offers a Mobile Vision API that allows an Android app to use the device’s camera to scan barcodes, recognize text, and detect faces as well as basic emotions or attributes.
There are also a variety of machine learning programs that have broader uses and you can define them as you go. Choosing an engine that operates like a decision tree will support A/B testing because you can feed it the ads or emails you’re using, information about the interactions or audience, and what you consider successful or unsuccessful results.
In this use case, an engine that works like a decision tree will eventually be able to learn what ads get people to click. By varying the coupon in your ad, for example, it can learn what dollar amounts or percentage off deals are more likely to lead to a complete sale. Eventually, you can use it to learn which deals are most likely to generate the highest relative sales value, and the engine can be used to set parameters for your marketing campaigns while adjusting coupons based on real-time results.
That’s a long road, but it is doable with technology available to you today.
If you want to wade into machine learning slowly, we’d recommend you begin with chat options on your website because there are a variety of existing projects you can build on for a more immediate turnaround.
Head over to GitHub and you can find a host of chat bot engines that you can quickly power up and train. Training data is also available for free and purchase in order to assist you. Use a training walkthrough to see how you can generate responses based on what are essentially collections of known word strings and conversations.
By using or purchasing training and a language basis, you can have someone program the chatbot to answer common questions and then slowly begin to learn more about your customers. Your team or your development partner can also provide the chatbot with information on what to share and promote.
Chatbots with a machine learning basis are written in languages like Python so you’ll be hiring someone to help you unless you’re familiar with the language and code. Your professional partner will also be able to make recommendations on technologies like Google’s TensorFlow, which is useful if you’re building from scratch.
Today’s data world involves a variety of complex systems, and machine learning is one possible catalyst that will propel some e-commerce brands farther into the technology realm than they initially expected, while boosting their profitability too.
Realizing your potential will boil down to choosing the right technology and the right partner or team.
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Jake Rheude is the Director of Business Development for Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.
email marketing ideas for 2017
The team here at Waypost Marketing is always ready for food. There are days we're plotting where to head out for lunch before most workplaces have even finished the first pot of coffee, and we've been known to stand outside staring forlornly in while waiting for a restaurant to finally open up... at eleven.
Whether you're searching for the perfect cup of coffee in Greenville or for a bowl of Vietnamese pho for a rainy day, we've got you covered.
While Woodruff Road and Downtown Greenville tend to get all the press for new restaurants, some of our favorites are located off the beaten path or even out of town. Today, we're taking a look at everyone's favorite place to grab lunch in Greenville, but with a catch - it can't be on Woodruff Road, and it can't be downtown.
Let's see what everyone had to say.
Have you ever noticed that it seems like every single company seems to send their email newsletter at the same time?
Usually they’re sent very late at night or extra early in the morning.
Which is, funny enough, when most of their audience is sleeping, so we wake up with an overstuffed inbox each morning.
I am guessing that you have also run into this somewhat minor annoyance.
But it literally is one of my biggest pet peeves.
If you are like me, the deleting of most of these newsletters has become part of your morning ritual.
It is pretty refreshing to send them all to your trash folder and get back to inbox zero.
I mean I love reading about data driven marketing tips but not at 7 in the morning.
We are constantly plugged into our email accounts with those supercomputers we call phones.
The days when you would check your email once in the morning and once at night is over.
But, alas, some companies still seem to be sticking to that email schedule.
This strategy is as outdated as that jewel colored iMac or Gateway computer sitting in your basement.
And all the effort you put into great content will be wasted if you pick the wrong time to send.
So I set out to find when the best time to send an email newsletter is, in the most scientific way ever, by signing up for 100 different newsletters and recording all of their send times.
If you were looking for the best time to send an email I would recommend selecting a time where there is little competition.
Like a time when almost no emails are being sent.
I mean why would you want your newsletter competing for your audience’s attention with a bunch of other emails?
That is just a recipe for low open rates and a drop in subscribers.
So to avoid that I would shoot for a period when no other emails are sent.
In fact, from 11-12PM, 1-2PM and 2-3PM not a single email was sent in our study.
Like not a single one:
Now you may be asking what is the best chunk of time out of those three periods?
And I would have to say that 2-3PM has the most potential.
From 11-12PM and 1-2PM are too close to the lunch hour and could get lost in the shuffle.
Unless your newsletter deals with a fun topic that they would want to read about on that break, I would avoid those two.
Instead try from 2-3PM.
Your audience will most likely be back from lunch by then and feeling a bit recharged.
They have already cleared their emails from the morning and are maybe looking for a little procrastination opportunity.
And boom, your email newsletter is there to help them out.
Now if you don’t want to be the only one sending an email during a certain time period, I have a perfect time for you.
This is another period where almost zero email newsletters were sent out in our study. In fact there were only one email sent out in that whole time period.
And I think that your email can handle a little competition.
This period happens to be from 10-11AM.
As you can see in the graph above there were a few other periods when only a few emails were sent.
But I do not think that they will be as fruitful as from 10-11AM.
For example, from 9-10AM is when a lot of people’s workday starts and 4-5PM is when it usually ends.
That means you are going to be fighting a lot more for their attention than just a few emails.
So to avoid these outside distractions I would choose from 10-11AM.
By then your readers will be settled into their desk, the coffee has kicked in and they are probably at inbox zero.
It is almost a perfect time for an interesting newsletter to pop up in their mailbox.
Additionally, I do find it a little odd that from 10-11AM has been pushed by experts and thought leaders.
But exactly one email was sent.
It really does not make sense, but it does present a new opportunity for your email newsletter to shine.
After carefully counting on both of my hands I was able to determine the worst time to send an email.
This time period was so crowded that more than 10% of all the emails in the study were sent during this hour chunk each day.
That is almost triple what an average hour should have received.
If you have read the graphs above you saw that 6-7 PM got the most emails of any period.
As you can see in the graph above if you decide to send your newsletter in this time period you are going to have some competition.
So I would avoid sending your newsletters during this period based on the jump in competition.
When you compare it to the times we already highlighted above there are 50x more emails during this period.
Even some of the times that got 5x more emails are looking pretty good to me right now.
Unless you want your open rates to plummet from that increased competition I would avoid sending from 6-7PM.
It does kind of make sense why brands would decide to send their weekly email at this time.
Their audience has made it home from their jobs and starting to relax. They should be pretty open to receiving a newsletter about their hobby, interest or activity.
But again, you are brawling in their inbox with a ton of other well-crafted emails for their attention.
Or it will be ignored and rolled into the next morning’s inbox clearing.
One of the easiest ways to fall into that morning deleting spree is to send your email late at night.
Like when your audience is sleeping, so they will see it in the morning.
I never really got the idea behind this practice.
Other than that brands think we want to read about the newest social media marketing tip at 6am.
I know that is the last thing on my mind at that time.
Now if it was an email about coffee being delivered to my bed that would be a different story.
But alas, I saw a ton of companies using this somewhat outdated topic.
We can access our emails at literally any time, the novelty of waking up to news or a newsletter no longer exists.
Or it is so far down the list in their inbox, they will never even see it.
Between 9PM and 7PM more than 60% of all emails in the study were sent.
With nearly 40% of them were sent between 9PM and 2AM. Or about double of what should have been sent if all things were equal.
That is a lot of emails your newsletter is going to be fighting.
Plus your audience is most likely not even awake, and the people who are up at that time probably don’t want to read your newsletter at that moment.
That means, you guessed it, that it will be put off until the next morning.
From there it goes right into the morning delete spree or simply forgotten about.
And all your hard work on the newsletter goes ignored.
Do not let your content be wasted because you chose the wrong time to send a great email.
Just like in the previous sections you are going to want to pick a day that has the least competition.
By sending your email on a day like this it is going to stand out like a beacon of good content.
The best day to send your email is Wednesday, with Saturday coming in at a close second.
As you can see they were some of the days to receive the least emails overall.
In our own tests we have seen Wednesday perform well, with some newsletters getting double the open rate of previous days.
I think that Wednesday is the perfect day to send your email newsletter.
Especially if your newsletter is related to their job or work.
They will feel a lot less guilty about losing themselves in your content for a few minutes.
Plus if it is really amazing they will want to share it with their coworkers!
And that means that if your topic deals with a fun hobby or interest I would send it on a Saturday.
Your audience will a lot more receptive to reading about something they could do later that day.
Or they will have a lot more time to absorb all of your fantastic content.
Either way both of these days are a great point to start testing to find what your own best day!
Before we go on I think it is important to highlight why I did not select Sunday as the best day.
I really think that it is too much of a wildcard day and the email could be lost in the shuffle of that day.
Then it gets pushed into the Monday morning mass inbox cleaning.
And although you may have loved to read the content you just don’t have time to.
This has happened to me too many times to count and I am guessing many people can relate.
Finding the best day to send an email was a little difficult and not very straightforward.
Thankfully the worst day was a lot easier to find.
And that day was Thursday.
It received more than double the amount of emails when compared to Wednesday and Saturday.
Exactly 25% of all the emails were sent on a Thursday, with no other days really coming close.
That put it well above the 70 or so emails I received per day on average.
Some experts proclaiming that Tuesday and Thursday are the best days to send a newsletter probably cause this.
I am guessing that people have been blindly following this advice for the past few years.
And now we are in a situation where the best day to send an email has actually become the worst day.
So there you have it, the best and worst times for you to send an email newsletter!
I now need to go click unsubscribe on about 100 different emails.
Or I may just cut my losses with that email address from now on.
But that sacrifice of an email address was definitely worth it because I was able to get some interesting findings.
Those findings will hopefully keep you from sending an email newsletter at the wrong time or day.
Just remember:
And finally, it is important to remember to test all of these findings with your audience first. These tips should always be used a testing points for your new emails, not set in stone facts.
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Ryan McCready went to the University of Arkansas and graduated with a degree in economics and international business. Now instead of studying the economy he writes about everything and enjoys stirring the pot.
Youtobe
That latest post took days to develop.
It’s instructive and inspiring and educational and entertaining.
Easily, one of your best yet.
But you come to check your traffic data only to find that you’re ranking 70th in the SERPs.
In other words, you ain’t gettin no traffic anytime soon. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Unless some crazy person is actually clicking seven pages deep on Google. Which they aren’t.
All of that hard work, research, and effort got you almost nothing in return.
Meanwhile, your competitors are ranking in the top ten results, even though their content isn’t as long or thorough.
Why? Because of Google.
But really, the most likely answer is time and links.
Your post is new, so it’s going to take some time.
Knowing this, that doesn’t mean you can sit around and expect it to be on the first page without doing work.
Thinking that your new post will gain thousands of links on its own is foolish.
Outperforming your competitors on search engines isn’t an easy, one-off task. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
In fact, if you implement a few of these tactics, it’s likely that (in time) you will.
Why? Because your competitors are comfortable. They think the rankings won’t ever change.
You, on the other hand, are grinding to get ahead.
Here’s how you can outperform sites ranking above you on search engines.
When Google RankBrain was announced in 2015 on Bloomberg, it was made known that RankBrain was the third most important ranking factor.
But that was all they said.
What about the first and second ranking factors?
We got almost nothing for an entire year.
In 2016, we got some clear information (for once) from Google.
In a Q&A with Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, we found out the two most important ranking factors:
Links and content. In no particular order of importance.
But that’s pretty much all we got.
It is something, though. It’s a start. And it was straight from the mouth of a high-level strategist.
It also makes sense when you look at recent studies and data sets.
For example, Backlinko recently analyzed one million search engine results pages and found that the top-ranking content had a significantly larger number of links:
The disparity between the #1 position and the #10 position is massive.
Meaning if you’re looking to take over the SERPs, you need links. You simply can’t rank high without them.
And according to Google, it’s one of the top two ranking factors. So ignoring it is not an option.
Don’t believe the data?
I don’t blame you. Healthy skepticism makes the world go round.
I didn’t at first either. But do a simple Google search for a desired keyword, and you’ll instantly see that it’s very true.
Searching for “SEO Guide” on Google will return this as the first result:
The next few results are from Kissmetrics and Search Engine Land:
So, let’s put this to the test. Open up Moz’s Open Site Explorer and toss the links in.
Start with the first post by Moz. Here’s what the backlink profile looks like:
Yes, that’s real. This post has over 23 freaking thousand links pointing to it.
That’s more than most people will get on their entire site in their entire career. By far.
Now plug in the second result from Kissmetrics and here’s what you see:
The results are pretty clear.
Both sites have incredibly high domain authorities and page authorities.
They’ve both been around for years and years.
The content is pretty similar. It’s in-depth, informative, and optimized for the user experience.
But one is outranking the other, and the most likely reason (according to Google) is simply that it has more links.
23,000 more. Meaning Google is being told over 23,000 more times how relevant and informative that content is.
So, what about content?
It’s the same thing. It’s about the numbers. Word count matters:
The longer the content, the higher chance it has to rank.
But not in the way that you think.
You know, the college essays where you inserted block quotes to add 500 words (yes, admit it, you did it too).
Yeah, that doesn’t work.
Word count for the sake of word count isn’t going to get you higher rankings.
That tactic died with keyword stuffing and will never return.
Long-form content wins on search engines because it’s designed to solve the entire user problem in one go.
Meaning that the content is designed to answer all questions, provide solutions, and then show the user how to fix it.
If your content accomplishes this, people won’t bounce back to Google to click on the next result.
To sum it up, links and content quality are the top two ranking factors.
If you want to outperform sites above you, focus on these two factors over anything else.
It’s just like a workout plan.
Want to lose weight? Don’t waste time doing isolation bicep curls.
Take the most effective route and target the top ways to accomplish your goal.
Here’s how to get more links and write better content to outrank your competitors.
Now that you know how important links are for rankings, you need more of them.
But not just any backlinks. Directory links won’t do it. Paying for low-level, spammy links from the dude who cold emailed you is a recipe for disaster.
Most people get caught up in the total quantity and forget to focus on quality too.
Quantity isn’t enough. Let me explain:
When a website (like a directory) links over and over to thousands of sites, Google starts to notice that these links are easy to acquire.
So Google puts less importance on them. Why? They’re easy to get!
So stop buying links. Stop spamming forums and Pinterest (what even is Pinterest??).
Backlinko data agrees with this notion, too:
The graph above essentially says that the top-ranking content has links from diverse websites.
Meaning you need many websites to link to you, not just one spamming your link over and over.
But that’s not all. You need links from high DA sites:
So the real recipe is:
Total amount of links + large amount of diverse sites + all high DA = rankings boost.
Take that, Gordon Ramsay!
Now that you know, how do you do it?
There are a few proven ways to get more high-quality links on your site.
One of the best is by creating round-up style content. This is content that mentions multiple popular influencers in your niche.
For example, check out this post from Bill Widmer that took the opinions of 30+ experts on their favorite marketing channels:
(That cool dude is me, by the way, in case you were wondering.)
But the point is, these types of posts get links.
I’ll prove it to you.
Here’s the backlink profile for this exact blog post:
Nearly 70 links to a single post that was recently uploaded. Pretty impressive.
And not just any links. Notice the top linking sites? They were all mentioned influencers in his post.
Getting the input of trusted influencers and showcasing them in your post is one of the best ways to get great links.
People are more likely to share it when you mention and show them in an informative light.
Getting the highest-quality links isn’t enough.
Remember that another top ranking factor is content.
Quality and frequency play a huge role in content that drives rankings.
According to HubSpot, companies that post more blog posts more often get more traffic:
And that’s not all. The more you blog, the more inbound leads you get:
Why? Because you’re effectively giving yourself more chances to rank higher on Google.
And when you rank higher on Google, you get more traffic.
If sites are ranking above you on search engines and you don’t have enough links to overtake them, post more often.
It’s one of the easiest ways to generate more traffic to compensate for a lower ranking.
The more often you post, the more indexed pages you have.
The more indexed pages, the more traffic.
Once you develop content, you can campaign for links to boost that content.
You can outperform sites with multiple approaches. It doesn’t always have to be outranking them for a single post.
Would you rather outrank them for one post or write five new ones that get more total traffic?
The answer is clear: more traffic.
Google has one goal in mind when it comes to their search engine (besides profit):
Creating the fastest, best user experience possible.
This is evident by conducting any Google search and seeing how quickly they deliver results:
They even tell you about it.
It’s a subtle brag.
But it tells us some instant data on how much they care about delivering content fast and effectively.
It’s their top priority because if they don’t, people will jump ship to Bing or Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves (wait, does that still exist?).
This has larger implications than just result delivery speed though.
When Google delivers results, they still want users to be satisfied.
If someone searches for “seo” and doesn’t click, but instead modifies their search for “seo guide,” Google takes note.
They understand that “seo” search results weren’t what they were looking for.
Similarly, if someone finds your post on Google but bounces fast and clicks on the next, Google notices.
They notice that your content isn’t solving user problems. And if it’s not, you can kiss those rankings goodbye.
So, what does this mean for SEOs and optimizing content?
It means you’ve gotta stop worrying about how search engines view your content and start caring about the user experience.
That means putting real emotion into your writing to trigger a response.
Or telling a story that people can’t resist reading.
Keywords are great, but stuffing “seo guide best 2017 content” into your title makes you look stupid.
Trust me – I’ve been there.
A searcher and reader are going to take one look at that title and never come back.
A great way to optimize your content for a real user is by taking advantage of Google’s free data mining.
It’s easy.
What’s the next blog post you want to write about?
For example, let’s say it’s about content marketing.
Conduct a simple Google search for that basic term and scroll to the bottom of the page:
You’ve got instant, real keywords that people are searching.
You could easily compile several of these into a single long-form piece of content that is a one-stop-shop when it comes to solving a problem.
For example, write a content marketing strategy guide and include examples and types of content marketing.
Now you’ve effectively hit three real searches with a single post. That’s relevancy.
If you want to outrank the sites above you, you’ve gotta improve your content.
It has to be tailored to fit the user, not the search engine.
Search engines are getting smarter and more realistic. Rankings will follow if you focus on real people.
When you’ve written a new blog post, you can’t risk it slipping into the oblivion of the SERPs.
Anything beyond the first page isn’t going to get you any noticeable traffic.
And you can’t just expect a post to generate traffic and links on its own.
You’ve gotta put in the work to get real results.
If you want to outrank your competition, you need better links, real keywords, and better content.
Plain and simple:
You need to produce better content for the end user than the person above you.
Once you’ve done that, campaign for links.
The more high-quality links you land, the better shot you’ve got at ranking higher.
Outperforming sites ranking above you in the SERPs will drive more traffic to your site fast.
Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.
About the Author: Brad Smith is the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company. Frequent contributor to Kissmetrics, Unbounce, WordStream, AdEspresso, Search Engine Journal, Autopilot, and more.
