Audience Development Strategy posts focus on how to drive more website traffic through organic and paid sources, including search and social. You’ll also learn how to convert website visitors into email subscribers.
In the past, we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing.
We shared a story about one of our publishing partners who launched a high-frequency Six Sigma email spotlight program focused on selling more magazine subscriptions. We increased the number of
Are you utilizing this one important part of your email marketing program?
Have you ever heard that timing is extremely important to the success of email marketing programs? Sometimes this timing relates to the days, time of day, and frequency in which you send emails. Other times it relates to the specific activities an audience member
Is it somehow improper for email newsletter editors to support audience development efforts? Is it wrong for bloggers to promote a product from an advertiser, or from themselves?
The best email marketing campaigns don’t hit the snooze button on engagement – they wake up early and go to work every single day
The worst thing you can do to stop people from unsubscribing from your emails is to hide the unsubscribe link. Hiding it only increases the likeliness of someone getting frustrated and clicking
In the world of email marketing, testing is king. The subject line is your first chance to get your subscribers to read your message. It may be the deciding factor between whether the email is opened, or moved immediately to the trash bin.
One of the most important email marketing guidelines you’ll encounter is how to confirm subscribers to your email list, and there’s always time to change your mind.
When you think of email marketing guidelines, you probably think of headlines, subject lines, calls to action, and button colors.
At Mequoda, we currently operate membership marketing systems in partnership
You may be sitting on four significant hidden assets that you can use to build your email marketing lists quickly
Do you realize that you might be sitting on a few opportunities to increase your email marketing lists? In the investment world, hidden assets are considered those that don’t show up on a balance sheet. Real
The best email marketing practices encourage responsive design, endless testing, and customer retention strategies
If you didn’t already know, the Mequoda Method is a compilation of best practices derived from publishers who are making money online. They tell us what’s working for them, and when we see a trend that’s working for other publishers, it becomes
When an article publishes on your website, how do you go about promoting it in social media?
When I pose this question to a room full of magazine editors from different publications, their answer is typically that they wait for the post to be published and then they promote it. If they’re super savvy, they might
I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on March 16 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, Giving Life to Your New Digital Magazine Idea. This is your only chance to get these best practices for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro
It’s hard to determine how to spend both your time, and your resources within a business. The way we look at every decision you make is this:
Is whatever you’re thinking about doing, going to help you build an audience, improve capture rates, increase engagement rates, or monetize more visitors?
Your audience development efforts fall into three
The true audience development definition requires maximum outreach while retaining results for future sales
Just like “inbound marketing” was the buzzword of the online marketing industry last year, “audience development” begins to grow in popularity. HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing”, which basically means bringing customers to you.
Last week we asked what is audience development?
Our primary goal at Mequoda is to build the best subscription website marketing systems for publishers. We want publishers to have a system that attracts visitors, captures their email address, engages them with great content, and monetizes them through subscriptions. A simple website may not do all of the above, but a subscription website marketing
We developed the Email Newsletter Scorecard with our friend and email marketing expert Jeanne Jennings. Let’s look today at #9: the all-important footer. In addition to abiding by CAN SPAM laws, having a footer resonates with the email recipient because it gives them a way to communicate with your brand, manage their subscription or opt
Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is what we call the process of optimizing your content and your business, for social media.
Typically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes first. This is the process of creating content that has been optimized for some set of keywords that our target audience is looking for.
For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.
You may not know it, but there are things you could be doing on Facebook right now that are against their rules, or are strongly suggested against.
You may have been violating these rules in the past, too. Did you know that for a long time, you weren’t allowed to hold a contest on Facebook without
If you could, you’d hire a professional email subject line writer. You would, because you depend on your email list to sell magazine subscriptions or ads to advertisers, so smashing together 50-100 characters on the fly every day is a stinky approach to accomplishing those goals.
At Mequoda, we call any promotional email that features a single product or membership a Spotlight. When you’re designing a promotional email, it’s best to ask yourself: “how can I get the visitor out of this email and onto a purchase page as quickly, and as informed, as possible?”
The idea behind the Spotlight email template
PR is so different now than it was even five years ago, nevermind ten or twenty years ago. Because major news outlets still require press releases, we still publish them, however there are secondary efforts too. After publishing, you may contact a few journalists that typically cover your niche. At Mequoda, we also keep track
Discover the carefully guarded source of the world’s most effective email subject lines that most professional copywriters don’t like to share
I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on December 8 at 1:00 PM ET for a FREE webinar, 7 Subscription Landing Page Tests You Can Do Now. This is your only chance to get these test ideas for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in
If you’re experienced in online copywriting, you know that “you” is generally considered to be one of the most effective copywriting power words, ranking right up there with free, new and save.
As direct marketing legend Herschell Gordon Lewis says in The Art of Writing Copy, “Unless the reader regards himself as the target of your
If your magazine doesn’t have a consistent social media presence by now, then you’re light years behind the competition. It used to be a struggle to get buy-in from the higher-ups and prove the value of social media marketing for magazines (heck, any industry), but all of that has changed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest—they’re
Email subject lines are just one part of the email delivery equation. Emails are delivered to inboxes based on subject lines, content, and reputation. In some cases, engagement is even applied to this filter.
Everything we’ve read as observers of social media and publishing communities tells us that most marketers don’t get a click rate on a Tweet of more than one percent, and in fact most marketers get less than that.
Meanwhile, publishers on Facebook are most often reaching less than 10% of their fans due to Facebook’s algorithm
Audience development personnel have a very specific, and incredibly important job, within an organization. Writing an audience development job description and then finding the right audience development staff can mean the difference between thousands of email subscribers and tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue.
After decades of training and supporting audience development editors at our
On content-driven, information-rich websites we use press releases for more than the basic announcement. We also use them to release free white papers because we know they offer more opportunities for inbound links and the SEO benefits required to get a landing page ranked well in Google.
Since Google now holds us responsible for the inbound
“Hello, sailor. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Do you come here often?”
Of course these silly pick-up lines are good for a laugh, but do you know how to really introduce yourself to new prospects? When you’re about to launch a relationship with new customers, the subject line for introduction email is the first time you
Before we get into content marketing podcasts, let’s talk about podcasting in general. Podcasting has had a culture that has been behind the scenes lurking in the background for well over a decade. When media organizations were brushing the platform off as a fad, independent podcasters were happy to stand in and take millions in
When website users are asked whether they like pop-ups, they say no. They’ll say they hate them. They’ll tell you they’re the most annoying things on the Internet. They might even tell you they never fill them out.
Our clients publish in many different niches: food, investing, archaeology, environmental infrastructure, natural health and clinical pathology among many others. When they first come to us, they have nothing in common with one another, but after working with us for six months to a year, they all have one thing in common: a Google Visibility
How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication
We’re all about the mighty freemium around here. Create content and give it away for free so that people know how good your premium content is – and they’ll buy it later, or subscribe. And they do. But do you know how to create a freemium that does the job?
We’re in for the long haul
It’s been reported that the average email users spends at average of 51 seconds on each email newsletter they read. If this average pertains to your market, you need to develop a way to maximize your email’s ability to connect with your audience.
Little-known fact: If you send out an equal number of (1) content-rich email newsletters and (2) straight product spotlight promotions versus sending only promotions, email engagement improves. In fact, the length of time you’ll retain an active email name will almost double.
Again: The active lifetime of an email name almost doubles when you email an equal number
Words matter. Imagery matters, too. But, the purpose of imagery in direct marketing is not to please or entertain—the purpose of graphics in direct marketing is to get your audience to read the accompanying words!
The art of crafting compelling words for email is known as email copywriting—it’s really an art and a science. Artful in
Earlier this year, I read with something between amusement and dismay a recent piece about how the Wall Street Journal, one of my favorite news sources, is trying to do a better job addressing newspaper SEO (search engine optimization).
In an article from Business Insider, Steven Perlberg explains how WSJ is asking staffers to focus more on
I continue to read with interest how free email newsletters are the hot new thing. A recent Digiday article shared that The New York Times, who has 15 million email subscribers “debuted a deck of 18 new and existing subscriber-only newsletters to readers” this month. Additionally, Quartz, who has 1.3 million newsletter subscribers and 11
I’ll make this quick because I know you’re busy. You’re invited to join us on October 13 at 1pm ET for a FREE webinar, The 7 Email Marketing Templates You Need to Succeed. This is your only chance to get these templates for FREE, before this webinar becomes a premium training program in Mequoda Pro for $49/mo.
If you want to build a magazine audience, the foundational principles of Buddhism teach you that life is suffering, and that to live a better life, you must learn how to be content with that. No sugar-coating, just “yes, you’re right, life is hard, now let’s get on with it, shall we?” By starting with the
When you go responsive, it makes you focus on your top one to three primary goals. I can’t tell you what your goals are, but I can tell you how to make them clear in your next daily email newsletter design.
For a long time, the best email newsletters had a sidebar. We and all our
Do you know what your freemium conversion rate is? Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list (or at least it should be.)
At Mequoda, we’ve been singing this song long
Do you know how to get people to open email? In a presentation called The Science of Email Marketing that we attended a while back, analytics nerd Dan Zarella said bluntly, “I would rather have an email subscriber than a Twitter follower.” We’d like to think it’s because email subscribers respond better to promotions, but according to
Twitter isn’t just about the here and now. In social media, you could post the same article ten times a day, but your traffic would only be driving traffic to that one page. That’s why it’s always a smart idea to recycle your articles on Twitter using our 12x12x12 method, so that blog posts from
Recently a publisher came to us interested in our email marketing services, in which we develop, test, manage, monitor, and react to a series of email marketing campaigns developed using the Six Sigma method.
They told us that copywriter after copywriter had failed to convert free email subscribers into paying subscribers. They asked us to take
The best email subject lines provoke open rates and persuade subscribers to read your email newsletters
There are dozens of methods, tricks and tips for writing great headlines. Unfortunately, this isn’t direct mail, and we have spam filters to adhere to, and character counts to abide by when it comes to writing great email subject lines.
By far the most lucrative source of website traffic you can acquire as a website publisher is the traffic that comes from search engine optimization. But to get to the point of constant incoming traffic through organic search, you need some form of SEO mastery at your helm in the form of SEO writers. The
Do you feel like working at home more than usual has made you want to gather more than ever? We miss attending events and meeting new people who love working in this industry as much as we do. Normally, this time of year we’d be meeting in Boston with our publishing partners for a powerful
