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.
Category: Audience Development Strategy
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.
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
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.
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
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?
For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
Discover the carefully guarded source of the world’s most effective email subject lines that most professional copywriters don’t like to share
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
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
You’re invited to join us on June 9 at 1:00 PM ET for a FREE webinar, 17 Ways to Sell More All-Access Magazine Subscriptions. If you run a subscription website, you’ll definitely want to attend, so register now and get on the list, because it’s filling up quickly.
If you’re not quite sure if this webinar
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
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
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
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.
An easy fix for the top five SEO mistakes
These innocent mistakes may be costing you the highest price of all – better search engine ranking. If you want to move up the ranks double check these five points:
Search Engine Optimization Tip #1 – Think like your customer. Search for keywords and phrases your customers
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
The paywall model isn’t an SEO-killer, even though it’s been billed as one. Technology has advanced a long way since the days when content was either locked, or unlocked. Firstly, there are two types, a hard paywall, and a soft paywall (and varying degrees in between):
Typically we find that content falls into three buckets: news, evergreen, and blockbuster. Most Mequoda partners publish these three content types daily because each type serves a different purpose.
News content keeps your readers up to date on current events in your industry, and also fares well in social media.
Evergreen content allows you to create content
One time I wrote a great post that drove 5,000 unique visitors per month to a site. Then the publisher broke the link during a yearly upgrade and Google dropped it from their search rankings. Oh wait, no, they decided to update the title to something “more catchy” and Google dropped it from their search
I’ve always adored SEO when it comes to content creation. After all, don’t you want to write about the things people are searching for? Why would you write about anything else? A blockbuster post, which we consider any post that drives a considerable percentage of your website traffic every month, is usually in your top
Our digital marketing teams at Mequoda have tons of fun managing comprehensive email and web marketing programs for our publishing partners. Our services range from being strategic advisors to being hands-on executors of all aspects of these comprehensive digital marketing programs for more than a dozen publishing systems.
Each of our digital marketing teams include a
Every month, if you’re great at SEO, the majority of your website traffic comes from search through blockbuster posts. That’s great because it means you can spend less on paid traffic, like PPC. It also means you’re likely to have some key players driving all that free traffic.
For example, our publishing partners enjoy the majority
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
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.
Improving email revenue? I certainly didn’t learn that one in school, and you probably didn’t either. In fact, in four years of journalism school, I never even had a single lesson in newspaper economics.
My professors were experienced reporters and editors, but none had ever figured out the business of publishing a newspaper. And none had
If you want to improve email capture rates, you have to know three things: What it is, and the many ways you can test to improve it. But it’s always helpful to see what other publishers are doing in order to get their best conversion rates, so today we’ll review all of the above, including
At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After