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You must first understand your target users to create a successful paid marketing strategy. Target users can directly affect content creation, design, digital ads, and offline communication plans. Thus, with effective segmentation, your paid marketing strategy can be enhanced entirely, which leads your sales directly.
Key Takeaways
From lead generation campaigns to retention campaigns, segmentation is essential for all types of marketing campaign objectives since effective audience segmentation directly affects content creation, design and paid ads.
Knowing which communication channels your users prefer and how they respond to content about a product and service will help you create platform-specific content and ads.
Ad groups and messages tailored to specific segments can improve your Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) while preventing irrelevant traffic, which may result in lower funnel events.
What is Market Segmentation?
Market segmentation is the act of dividing a market into groups based on characteristics such as age, gender, location, income and education level. Doing so helps assess specific market needs, deliver more relevant messages to different segments and increase the probability of generating a response or conversion.
Segmentation is essential for all types of campaign objectives, from lead generation to retention campaigns. Effective market segmentation allows you to customise different marketing strategies and communicate with your customers more efficiently.
What are the Different Types of Marketing Segmentation?
Segmentation Types
Five common types of market segmentation you can use in your digital marketing strategy are:
Digital marketers should know who their potential customers are, as well as their interests, needs, behavioural patterns and purchasing power before the segmentation. Having a clear idea about your target audience leads to efficient segmentation. For instance, firmographic segmentation is crucial for B2B campaigns and businesses, while an eCommerce business prefers behavioural segmentation.
Why is Market Segmentation So Important for Digital Campaigns?
1. Increased Customer Satisfaction
First things first, effective segmentation in digital marketing campaigns leads to customer satisfaction. Creating a personal relationship with customers allows both potential and existing customers to see your dedicated involvement in the sales and marketing processes, affecting your engagement metrics and conversion rates immediately.
2. Omnichannel Communication Mix
Since each digital marketing channel has a different tone of voice and audience, knowing your customer is imperative to decide your channel mix. Knowing which communication channels your users prefer and how they respond to content about a product and service may help you create platform-specific content and ads.
3. Reduced Marketing Costs
Targeting specific ad groups and promoting specific messages for the segment allows you to get better Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and prevents irrelevant traffic, which may reduce your funnel events by increasing media buying costs.
4. Schedule Planning
Understanding different groups’ behaviours can help your communication plan. For example, if your target group prefers to spend time while commuting to work, you should target them within the given time interval.
5. Product Development
Researching each segment’s needs allows you to study which products might appeal most to each group — potentially opening up new markets for your business. You can develop new products that may be interesting for the main segment of your target audience, thus appealing to a large group of customers with a high buying potential.
6. Optimised Landing Page Design
Effective segmentation can play an essential role in gathering better landing page metrics and conversion rates (CR). Understanding the different needs and problems of different segments is the key to creating a unique landing page. Targeting the specific audience and landing them on a particular landing page where they can find personalised solutions and products will lead to better CR and website metrics.
Wrapping Up
From lead generation campaigns to retention campaigns, segmentation is essential. Segmenting your market allows you to tailor your marketing strategies and communicate more effectively with your customers, which will significantly enhance your paid marketing strategy, resulting in direct sales.
Seeing that you are acquiring a good amount of customers is great. But is it really that great if you spend more than you gain? If you do, that would mean you are acquiring customers at your business’s cost. Understanding your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and seeing how much a customer will cost you is vital to your business and your marketing decisions.
Key Takeaways
Customer acquisition cost is how much you spend to acquire a customer.
A lower CAC indicates higher revenue and higher profit for a business.
A simple formula to calculate CAC: CAC = Total of Marketing and Sales Expenses / Number of Acquired Customers
What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
Customer acquisition cost is simply the amount of how much you pay to acquire a customer. It’s not only about the advertising cost, though. This cost includes all marketing and sales expenses associated with the efforts of converting a prospect into a paying customer.
How to Calculate CAC?
It can be found by dividing the total costs by the number of acquired customers.
The most straightforward formula to find customer acquisition cost is as follows:
Note that there are some things to consider and not to exclude when calculating CAC. Ad spend, salaries of marketing and sales team, the cost of tools used, production costs and other things that are easy to overlook but actually add up to the overall cost, such as rental and equipment costs.
What Does Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Have to Do with CAC?
Another way of understanding if the money you spend on customer acquisition is worth it is knowing your customer lifetime value.
CLV is basically the total amount of revenue a customer has generated for a business. It itself is a crucial measurement to understand the success of a business. But together with CAC, you get a clearer result regarding the profit you get in the end.
The ideal ratio of CLV to CAC is 3:1, which means you get 3 times more for each dollar you spend. Any result above that ratio is considered to be a good result for a business. And, whatever the ratio you get is, it certainly tells you a lot about your business and what kind of road map you should draw.
Read this expansive guide to learn how to calculate customer lifetime value and why it is so important for any business: How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value
Benefits of Lower CAC
Lower CAC means you earn more than you spend to acquire a new customer. In other words, it indicates higher revenue and higher profit. Converting leads into customers with the lowest cost possible is one of the most beneficial outcomes of your marketing efforts.
How to Reduce Your CAC?
Before investing further into customer acquisition and optimising CAC, you first need to understand what you need and which strategy will work best for you. Fast growing? Growth in the long run? High revenue?
If you want fast growth, the advertisements will surely bring you many leads, but it is up to the quality of your service and your marketing program to convert prospects and retain customers.
Customer engagement is of high importance to provide a good conversion rate. Get in touch with your customers through multiple channels and determine the most effective. For example, you might attract more customers with your blogs rather than giving paid ads, or vice versa.
Having satisfied customers who will recommend and advocate for you is one of the best ways to acquire new customers. What’s better is that it won’t cost you anything!
How Can You Use the CAC Data?
As already mentioned, CAC gives you a number and an opportunity to have an insight into your current marketing strategies and profits. Then, CAC can be used to make better marketing decisions and increase profitability.
Would you want your visitors to find exactly what they are looking for on your website as easily and quickly as possible?
There comes the importance of user experience (UX). By providing the best search experience, you will have satisfied customers, they will find whatever they are looking for in a short time, and the website will be easily accessible. This may seem like a dream; however, it is possible to accomplish with UX optimisation.
Key Takeaways
Customers may abandon a website if they cannot find what they need due to poor search user experience.
Search volume, organic traffic levels, and on-site conversions can be used to determine user intent by UX professionals.
When a customer enters a physical store, there are salespeople helping them find what they are looking for. This can be translated into personalisation tools assisting visitors in finding what they need.
How Can UX Help with Search?
Understanding User Intent
Without a doubt, one of the most crucial qualities for a UX expert is understanding their visitors. However, there is a subtle but significant obstacle to incorporating empathy into the design, and it has to do with how we view the user.
UX professionals are able to understand user intent by checking rankings, search volumes, organic traffic levels, and on-site conversions. While exhaustive users may have a broader scope around a particular topic or theme, specialised people may have a narrower search intent and don’t stray from this.
Search engines are also improving their comprehension of the two types of search intent. Just two of these include Yandex’s Korolyov and Vega and Google’s Hummingbird.
Creating a Positive User Experience
With UX professionals, eCommerce websites can create a positive user experience. When potential customers enter a physical store, salespeople guide them and help them find what they are looking for. This can be translated into personalisation tools assisting visitors in finding what they need.
Personalisation of the search function helps create a better search experience with fast and easy results. Just like how people enjoy having personal treatment at physical stores, they enjoy having personalised products and content shown to them.
To summarise, personalising the search function depending on the previously gathered data from the visitors would increase customer satisfaction and, therefore, the conversation rates.
Improving the Findability of Content
Another point where UX helps websites is by improving the findability of content. The search tool on your website functions as a mini search engine like Google, allowing users to look up specific products.
Customers often quit your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for utilising the search function. For this reason, eCommerce search UX is a wonderful place to start if you want to enhance on-site findability.
Effective content organisation is the practice of information architecture. For eCommerce, this means that product categories and navigation should meet user expectations. When consumers encounter content, advertisements, and promotions unrelated to their interests, they become irritated. Following the UX design concepts to deliver pertinent content throughout would help increase customer satisfaction.
How to Optimise Your UX for Search?
1. Design for Discovery
Having a simple design for eCommerce websites is so underrated these days. The benefits of a basic, straightforward and to-the-point website are undeniable. Keeping the search function simple is the best way to satisfy your visitors with their search experience.
2. Use Typography and Whitespace to Your Advantage
Whitespace is one of the quickest and simplest methods to improve a website’s design. Whitespace, even in small amounts, will give your designs breathing room and a polished appearance.
It’s not required for the design background to always be white. It merely needs to be the white space between website items. Your web pages will look more elegant and simple with white space.
3. Use Visuals to Guide the Eye
A visually distinctive website layout is one of the most critical objectives for UX designers. It is a method for maintaining a flexible user experience and interesting user path.
In short, make it simple for users to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for on your pages. Straightforward navigation on the eCommerce website or app would increase customer engagement substantially.
The search area must stand out visually, ideally with the word search and a glass icon as the placeholder text. Many UX experts prefer having the search bar typically at the top right corner.
Furthermore, eye-friendly design and text legibility are key for website experience satisfaction. The colours you choose and the contrast between the colour of your text and the background significantly impact how easy it is to read the text.
4. Keep it Simple
A clean layout, a colour scheme of two or three, lots of white space, an average of two typefaces, and one additional font for your logo are all characteristics of simplicity. A picture says a thousand words; however, images should also be limited. Your graphics need to have a function to be clickable and valuable.
5. Consider the User’s Needs
The most crucial topic that eCommerce managers should study is their customers. It is necessary to know their target market, demographics and needs. Asking for your visitors’ feedback is a great way to improve your website. This can be done in several ways, including emailing them, having pop-up surveys or asking them to fill up a form at the end of their purchase or exit from the website.
Wrapping Up
Don’t forget that your eCommerce website is the middleman between the product and the customer. The website is there to make the customers’ lives easier. Why not provide them with the best customer experience?
Personalisation is the best way to increase customer satisfaction and give them special treatment. Of course, in addition to personalisation, there are many other factors that eCommerce specialists should consider. These include having a straightforward website, including the right amount of pictures, SEO and understanding customer needs and behaviour.
Contact Segmentify to learn more about making your search function fully personalised and increasing customer satisfaction!
Imagine a scorching summer’s day. You desperately want some ice cream, and there they are—two ice cream shops next to one another! However, one is completely empty, while the other has a big queue. Which one would you choose? The shop with the queue, right? Did you ever stop to think why?
The answer is simple: We care about the opinions of others. We can’t help it; it’s in our nature. You see those two ice cream shops, and your brain immediately goes, “If people are willing to wait extra minutes under the sun for two scopes of ice cream, that ice cream must be really worth it. I’ll get in line as well.”
This behavioural pattern is commonly referred to as “Social Proof” and is more of a subconscious decision. Social proof is sort of how we navigate life as well. When faced with situations where we’re not exactly sure what to do, we watch others and take our social cues from them.
So without further ado, meet Segmentify Social Proof. Segmentify Social Proof allows you to tap into one of the most significant marketing resources out there—your customers.
This article explains what social proof is, how it works and why you need social proof marketing in eCommerce. You will discover how Segmentify Social Proof triggers purchasing and increases conversion rates by creating Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
Key Takeaways
Social proof in marketing refers to the phenomenon that people are more likely to buy products they have seen others buying.
A beloved psychological tactic in marketing, social proof has been used by marketers for decades to make customers feel confident about their purchases.
A customer’s decision-making process can be simplified through social proof marketing. Plus, this real-time relevance appeals to people’s need for validation from others and induces FOMO, reassuring shoppers that they are following consensus.
What is Social Proof?
In marketing, social proof refers to people being more likely to purchase a product that others are already buying. If people are purchasing a particular product, it must be because they’ve found value in the product and the business.
Different forms of social proof marketing exist in eCommerce: Customer reviews, product ratings, quantifiable data (how many people have it in their favourites, for example), list features, etc.
Social proof is built on the basic human instinct to follow and imitate the actions of others, as explained above. The term, popularised by psychologist Robert Cialdini, explains that in situations where people don’t know the proper way to behave, they will observe and imitate others to avoid uncomfortable situations.
Social Proof Theory is sometimes referred to as “Social Influence Theory” since it highlights the effect others have on our own behaviour. Social proof shows its effects, especially when we have to make quick decisions because looking at what others are doing and imitating them saves us a lot of time and energy.
According to Robert Cialdini, social proof is one of the Six Key Principles of Persuasion: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. When combined with the five other principles of persuasion, social proof is a powerful tool to influence people’s actions.
Six Principles of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Digital marketers discovered the power of a solid social proof marketing strategy long ago. They have been using social proof to convince and assure customers that they are purchasing the right product, which leads to higher conversion rates.
Social Conformity
Basic human behaviour is shaped by social norms—generally accepted beliefs about what kind of behaviour is appropriate for a particular situation or community. Furthermore, in psychology, conformity refers to changing one’s behaviour to fit in with others.
Social Proof Marketing uses social conformity in terms of positive customer reviews, displaying the product’s popularity among customers.
The Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect, also called herd mentality, is a psychological phenomenon in which people do something primarily because others are doing it, regardless of their own beliefs.
The bandwagon effect is a very effective social proof marketing tool. If you think about it, it is why we love browsing through the most popular products in an online store and eventually end up purchasing something.
Authority
The use of accessories, such as titles (e.g. Dr.) and uniforms, conveys an air of authority, making people more inclined to accept what a person says. For example, ad campaigns that feature doctors are excellent examples of this.
However, you certainly don’t need a doctor to promote your kitchen supplies. You need an authority figure appealing to your target audience, such as a chef for our kitchen supplies example.
Scarcity
Products are deemed more appealing when their availability is limited due to scarcity. Generally speaking, we are more likely to buy something if we know it is the last one or that the “special offer” will soon expire due to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
4 Reasons Why eCommerce Needs Social Proof Marketing
As explained in the previous paragraphs, social proof is an excellent tool to influence people and trigger purchasing when combined with liking and scarcity. A good and reliable social proof solution lets you leverage people’s validation needs to convince hesitant shoppers.
Social proof increases conversion rates and improves the customer journey across all channels in real time.
1. Builds Trust and Conveys Credibility
People see purchasing as a form of commitment. That’s why they like to consult the opinions of other customers before finalising their decisions. These opinions may come in the form of actual reviews and scores, or it might be that 835 people have that product in their favourites. Hey, if 835 people have favourited it, it must be terrific, right?
Long story short, social proof marketing helps build trust. Objective opinions of satisfied customers reassure visitors about the quality of your products and services.
2. Gives Customers an Additional Reason to Purchase
What you’re doing with social proof marketing is giving additional information about the product without changing anything about the product itself. Displaying product ratings, how many times it was viewed, how many times it was bought, how many people have it in their carts, etc., helps make the product more desirable for the shopper.
Such information gives shoppers an additional reason to make a purchase by increasing the urgency. In the end, social proof helps increase conversion rates and decrease bounce rates.
3. Reduces Cart Abandonment
Cart Abandonment is one of the biggest problems eCommerce faces on a daily basis. Social proof marketing can be a vital tool in reducing cart abandonment rates.
Displaying information like “Previously Added to Basket Price”, which shows the customer the product’s price when it was added to the cart, will make the customer want not to miss this discount opportunity for products with lower prices.
Or if the product’s price increased since it was added to the cart, displaying such information will make the customer think maybe they should act faster when they like faster. Either way, last visit or basket prices will help you reduce cart abandonment rates.
4. Simplifies the Customer Journey
Consumers are faced with an incredible amount of choices—what to buy, where to buy from, etc. Since making a decision requires mental energy, people tend to give up completely to avoid making that mental effort when they feel overwhelmed.
This is where social proof comes in: Social proof marketing helps smooth out the shopping journey by simplifying the decision-making process for the customer. Plus, the real-time relevance plays into people’s need for validation from others and induces FOMO, reassuring the shoppers that they are following the consensus.
How Segmentify Helps with Social Proof Marketing
Social proof marketing is a delicate matter. You mustn’t overwhelm the shoppers with constant pop-ups and messages. But it’s also equally important that you deliver the right campaign messages to the right segments of shoppers at the right time.
And for all of this, you need a solution you can entirely rely on and control easily. In other words, you need Segmentify Social Proof. So let’s take a look at how this solution helps eCommerce boost conversion rates by increasing urgency:
1. Build Rule-Based Triggers for Increased Engagement
It has been repeatedly proven that using social proof marketing to induce FOMO and create urgency triggers purchasing and increases conversion rates. However, it’s best to remember that there’s a correct time and place to create that sense of urgency.
You can’t convince people to buy something by saying, “There are only 100 left!” The key to success here is to display the right messages at the right time. Segmentify Social Proof allows you to set trigger points and conditions for timely and meaningful campaigns.
2. Determine the Campaign Time and Frequency
It is an essential part of any digital marketing campaign that visitors and customers are not bombarded with the same messages over and over again. You know your customers better than anyone else, so the best way to ensure you don’t overwhelm your customers is to set the time and frequency of your campaigns yourself.
With its straightforward and elegant interface, Segmentify Social Proof lets you set your own conditions for when and how often the social proof pop-ups will appear so that you can select the best campaign intervals based on your goals and business strategy.
3. Customise the Styling
The looks aren’t everything, but they certainly do help! With Segmentify Social Proof, you can customise your social proof campaigns by changing the background and text colours, fonts, and pop-ups’ positions only with a few clicks.
Plus, social proof pop-ups come with icons as well. You can easily add a flame or clock icon to discount news to encourage customers to take action.
Of course, you get to preview your campaigns both for mobile and desktop devices before they go live. And if you have any additional customisation requests, the Segmentify Customer Success Team is always ready to help.
4. Create Targeted Campaigns
Another must-have for a successful marketing campaign is to engage with each visitor individually. Any digital marketer worth their salt knows that identifying behavioural patterns plays a central role in today’s eCommerce landscape.
Segmentify Social Proof ensures the consistency of your customer journeys across different segments. Using the segments created via Segmentify Rule-Based Segmentation or Dynamic Segmentation, you can build campaigns with higher relevancy and more precise targeting. Optimising your social proofing with targeted messages is a sure way to create highly personalised, seamless customer experiences.
5. Set Up a Campaign Library
There’s no need to prepare the same campaign over and over again from scratch. eCommerce marketing is all about efficiency and elegance!
You can archive your campaigns, go over your campaign history, and duplicate past campaigns as the needs arise with Segmentify Social Proof. You can also use Segmentify’s social proof campaign templates to save time and energy.
Wrapping Up
Social proof is all about psychological marketing tactics that can show customers that others have already had positive experiences with your business. It can help build trust and create a sense of urgency among prospective customers.
Let us be your guide if you’re considering getting started with social proof marketing. We’ll walk you through the process and show you how to make the most of it for your business.
Being scheduled for a Windows release in March 2023 and the soon-to-be-released TV adaptation by HBO put The Last of Us franchise on our radars once more. So, of course, we had to revisit Naughty Dog’s marketing strategy for The Last of Us Part II.
Key Takeaways
When it comes to existing intellectual property (IP), marketing is a tough job because of the risk of it seeming like a greedy corporate move.
Existing IP also comes with a dedicated fan group and their expectations about how the story will evolve.
Naughty Dog, however, handled these expectations beautifully by diverting the fans’ attention and manipulating them through the marketing material.
The result was a shocking twist to match the franchise’s emotional depth and a game release to be remembered years down the lane.
What’s The Last of Us About?
Allow me to explain for those of you who don’t know. The Last of Us is a 2013 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Players control Joel, a smuggler tasked with escorting a teenage girl, Ellie, across the post-apocalyptic United States.
One of the Most Anticipated Video Game Releases: The Last of Us Part II
Released in 2013, The Last of Us was an instant hit and received “universal acclaim” on Metacritic. The game received rave reviews for its character development, story, subtext, visuals, sound effects, and depiction of female and LGBT characters.
The Last of Us is recounted as one the greatest video games of all time, so naturally, upon its announcement in 2016, The Last of Us Part II became one of the most anticipated video game releases in recent history.
From now on, we are entering the spoiler territory of the article. Proceed at your own risk.
Marketing with a Twist
The first trailer from The Last of Us Part II was released at the PlayStation Experience event on December 3, 2016. In the trailer, we see an older Ellie play the guitar, which Joel promised to teach her in the first game, and sing about revenge: “I know I will kill my enemies when they come”. Minutes later, the game’s theme is confirmed when she promises to find and kill “every last one of them”.
Later, at the E3 2018 event, a gameplay trailer was released where we see Ellie dance with and kiss a woman named Dina. As a result, fans naturally drew conclusions about The Last of Us Part II based on these “clues”.
Let’s recap: We see Ellie talking to Joel about revenge in the announcement trailer. And it isn’t until after Ellie kisses Dina that the gameplay trailer shows her hunting and killing people in the woods.
The most logical conclusion players reached? Ellie wants to avenge Dina’s murder.
However, fans were in for a surprise when they finally got their hands on The Last of Us Part II: They were controlling a character named Abby, not Ellie, as Naughty Dog had them believe.
Abby seems to be seeking revenge on someone, who turns out to be Joel. She somehow charms Joel and Tammy while they’re on a patrol and lures them back to her friends, the Washington Liberation Front.
In a horrific burst of violence, Joel is beaten with a golf club. Abby brutally finishes him off just as Ellie arrives, finally revealing the punchline of Naughty Dog’s marketing strategy for The Last of Us Part II.
The Aftermath: Did Naughty Dog’s Marketing Strategy Work?
The critics were divided on the game’s narrative and themes. Nevertheless, The Last of Us Part II was praised for its improved gameplay, graphical fidelity, cast performances, characters, audio design and music. It also received “universal acclaim” from Metacritic, just like the first game.
In its release weekend, The Last of Us Part II sold over 4 million copies worldwide, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive, beating Marvel’s Spider-Man’s 3.3 million and God of War’s 3.1 million in the same period.
What Naughty Dog got right with The Last of Us Part II marketing strategy was that they built on the first game’s emotional depth and the complex nature of feelings. After all, marketing without substance is bound to be forgotten and become dust in the wind.
The oldest digital marketing channel, email, still retains a huge deal of influence on marketing. So, it is needless to say that you should set a good email marketing strategy. Not that we haven’t talked about email marketing and why it is so effective before.
To carry out those practices, however, you surely need an audience -an email list in this case. Let’s see how to build an email list, how to grow it and convert your subscribers into customers.
Key Takeaways
Defining your ideal reader is essential for creating content that will appeal to your target audience.
Provide value in your emails and emphasise the benefits they’ll gain if they keep reading you.
A/B test your emails for accurate results and use an email autoresponder series for convenience and conversion increase.
7 Reasons Why You Need an Email List
Email lists are crucial for your marketing because:
Foremost, it is highly cost effective and profitable as it brings you $36 on average for every $1 you spend.
Email is a place where you can utilise and customise your content all you want.
The email content is lasting unless subscribers delete your mails.
Email lists are traceable and modifiable. You can and should constantly update them for better results.
It is an excellent opportunity to bond with your customers and prospects.
It increases your visibility.
It is easier to get people’s email addresses than their numbers or convince them to follow your social media accounts.
How to Build an Email List from Scratch in 7 Steps
There are a few significant issues with buying an email list. Sending promotional emails to people without their consent might be illegal in some countries. Besides that, it wouldn’t be surprising if you took your place among the spam lists and got a bad reputation.
Instead, build one of your own and gradually grow that unique list as you enlarge your audience, which will actually read and engage with your content.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer or Reader.
Knowing who you are addressing will make it so much easier to generate and design your content. What kind of groups is your product or service appealing to? What type of content would help them and attract their attention the most? Is your message relevant to their problems at all?
Answering these questions will help you understand your target audience, find ways to reach them, and make them join your mailing list.
Step 2: Create Content That Appeals to Your Target Audience.
After getting to know your audience, think about how to pique their interest with your content. That can be writing about something that addresses a possible problem or a general subject they might be interested in.
Step 3: Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.
You must have already worked on getting a strong presence on social media. Being active and having a considerable amount of followers is important to promote your business and content. Ask for their emails to give them access to your content, to which you’ve redirected them through social media.
Step 4: Use Effective Lead Magnets.
There are many types of lead magnets that will bring you new email addresses. Address some particular problems with ebooks and case studies. Offer discounts and coupons, or create fun little quizzes that won’t take much time. It is easier to collect mail addresses when you offer some benefit in exchange.
Step 5: Use Opt-in Forms on Your Website.
When a visitor comes onto your website, use pop-ups or embedded opt-in forms to remind them to sign up for your newsletter. You can use them at the beginning, middle or end of your content, bring pop-ups after they spend a specific amount of time on your website, or redirect them to a landing page.
Step 6: Make it Easy for People to Subscribe to Your Email List.
The harder it is to fill out the subscription form, the less likely people will actually subscribe to your email list.
Make it less complicated: Place your subscription box somewhere visible and easy to find.
Keep it simple: Don’t bother the visitors with several questions. Their name and email address are enough at this point.
Step 7: Use Email Marketing to Build Relationships with Your Subscribers.
Welcome your subscribers who newly joined your list with a friendly mail. Maybe even offer them a little discount as a welcome gift. Inform them about their purchase and ask for feedback with a little survey. Adapt your content into newsletter form, promote your products and past content and encourage the subscribers to join your upcoming events.
How to Grow Your Email List Once You’ve Started It?
Step 1: Provide Value in Every Email You Send.
Email marketing is a great channel to promote your products, sure, but how do you do it? Do you just show off your brand and say they should buy from you? Or do you show what kind of value they will get from even merely reading your mails?
If you are doing the latter, you are on the right track. They already get a myriad of those kinds of emails from brands daily that they don’t even open. Show them that if they keep reading your newsletter, they will get free educational content, discounts and offers from you.
Step 2: Keep Your Emails Short and to the Point.
Convincing people to read your mails is already complicated as it is. Don’t make it more challenging with long emails that people won’t finish reading. Keep your sentences short and get to the point immediately. Don’t forget that your mail being opened among all the others means that you captured their attention. Don’t miss that opportunity!
Step 3: Send Emails Regularly, But Don’t Overdo It.
If you don’t send enough mails, subscribers may forget about you. And if you send too many, they will get annoyed —maybe to the point of unsubscribing. Once every two days is probably the best mail frequency. Enough to remind them of yourself, but not too much as to overwhelm them.
Step 4: Use Effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs) in Your Emails.
It is vital to maintain the reader’s interest and get them to engage with your content. You should use interesting and to-the-point CTAs to encourage them and find out the best placement and design for your audience.
Step 5: A/B Test Your Emails to Improve Results.
Monitoring and understanding the impact of your emails is critical to evaluate the success of your current email marketing campaigns. It allows you to decide whether you should make a change and helps to optimise open and click-through rates.
How to Convert Your Email Subscribers into Customers?
Step 1: Send a Series of Welcome Emails.
When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they are already inclined to buy from you. But they might still need to be motivated to do so. Show that you appreciate their interest and participation in your brand with a warm welcome.
Step 2: Offer a Discount or Special Deal to New Subscribers.
Another way of giving a warm welcome is by offering special discounts and deals. That can be a powerful motivator for them to go further and make their first purchase.
Step 3: Provide Valuable Content.
Understand your subscribers and, more importantly, show that you understand them. Segment your list and ensure you target your audience with accurate messaging. Find ways to help with environmental or social issues they care about, and create campaigns that they can also contribute by just being your customer.
Step 4: Include a CTA in Your Emails.
They might enjoy reading your mails but might as well get reminded about the actual products and services you are providing. Don’t forget to incorporate eye-catching calls to action to canalise their interest in your products and eCommerce website.
Step 5: Use an Email Autoresponder Series.
All those are great tips and necessary steps for successful email marketing. Doesn’t doing them all sound overwhelming, though? If you were to perform them manually, yes. But fortunately, there are autoresponders that will do the work for you and send a welcome mail to new subscribers and send them emails with product recommendations that could interest them at a reasonable frequency of time.
Wrapping Up
A unique email list of your own lays the basis for a successful email marketing strategy. You will still have a lot to do, but without it, you will fail from the start.
A/B testing and mail automation are also crucial for your emails’ current and future status. If you need a hand in this, Segmentify is here to talk to you about it. Just send a message or give us a call!
If you ever searched which generation type you belong to on Google, I think it is fair to say you are obviously not a Gen Zer. While Google is the world’s top search engine and is undeniably followed by YouTube, right now, we know that TikTok is not only an entertainment platform but also a search engine for Gen Zers.
For those still a few steps away from understanding the appeal of TikTok and willing to learn how this social media platform actually works and, again, HOW Gen Z is literally becoming the “TikTok generation,” let’s begin with the content strategy and algorithm behind it.
Key Takeaways
Gen Z will be the ones who will reshape social media, and right now, they are loving TikTok.
Other popular platforms – such as Instagram and Google – release updates by trying to copy TikTok’s features to win back Gen Z.
The experience on your feed and the experience when you search go hand in hand for Gen Z.Brands need to be up-to-date to benefit from the current dynamics of social media, especially on TikTok, if they believe that Gen Z is their top audience. And, of course, they should avoid plastic smiles and catch the soul of the app.
Why is TikTok So Popular?
This is the trillion-dollar question that needs to be answered to truly understand how TikTok beats out other social media platforms among Gen Z.
Let’s summarise why TikTok is so popular with Gen Z:
Need for a community: It’s no secret that Gen Z struggles to find a sense of community. Their own generation has been growing up in an age where smartphones and social media have become ubiquitous. Still, the bond that Gen Zers are looking for has been elusive. TikTok is providing them with a platform to develop that bond.
Entertainment is important: Gen Z is willing to listen to music they like, dance with a virtual stranger or record a video of themselves just to make someone laugh. These examples confirm that Gen Z is a highly entertaining generation.
Simple and sincere: Gen Z does not want forced content. TikTok is about sharing, catching trends, being authentic, enjoying where you are and showing what you want to show. And Gen Z simply loves that.
Gen Z will be the ones who will reshape the social media world we are used to—and we’ll let TikTok be the emblematic case study that will show us how.
TikTok’s Algorithm
TikTok is a social platform where video content is the queen and creators are the gold mine. But more importantly, among this non-stop content production and consumption, TikTok has a powerful algorithm that personalises your For You feed in a very successful way. And in today’s world, personalisation affects our perception, behaviour, and consumption more than ever.
According to TikTok, we can list three factors to understand how it recommends videos on For You feed: User interaction, video information and device & account settings.
User interaction includes accounts you follow, your comments, likes and shares, videos you add to your favourites, creators you’ve hidden or videos you mark as “Not Interested”, videos you watch to the end, content you create, your every interaction with ads as well as organic posts.
Video information focuses on the content you create and how you define it with captions and hashtags, which sounds, effects & filters you use.
Device & Account settings are mostly one-time decisions and less effective than the ones above. It includes the app language, device type, country setting and content categories users choose in the first place.
According to Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom, TikTok just does not sit back and wait for users to interact with the content they see to improve the experience. It also “pushes boundaries and seed in new videos” that it thinks may be entertaining, testing its own predictions and gauging the response.
We are not the only ones saying that TikTok’s algorithm is unlike other social media platforms. AI researcher Dinesh Raman told The New Yorker, “It’s data being transmitted at a scale I’ve never seen before. The system is doing billions of calculations per second.”
While the trends change really fast, at a place where all the creators are also consumers and all the consumers are potential creators, there is no stopping.
Content on TikTok
On the one hand, people are creating their own personal brands on TikTok. On the other hand, brands are trying to be a part of this Gen Z world by playing along. At this point, TikTok’s way of content production is also shaping the dynamics of content marketing.
TikTok runs short-form video content which is simple, authentic, and organic. Contrary to Instagram, users are not trying to look perfect with high-quality visuals or excessive production effort.
It is not always about giving useful information; you may just want to catch a trend when creating content on TikTok. However, there are great accounts that focus on sharing tips and tricks on specific topics, which’s why Gen Z searches on TikTok. They know what they want and how they want it: short, funny and in video format.
When a new Gen Z joins TikTok, that user is building an online experience based on what they see in their news feed and through their interactions with friends. Therefore, brands must learn how to effectively promote their products or services to Gen Zers on TikTok.
What Does This Mean for Google?
Let’s start with a few facts about the current situation.
According to Cloudflare’s Top Domains Ranking 2021 list, TikTok was the most visited site in 2021, jumping to the top from the 7th place in 2020 when Google was in first place.
Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president in charge of Google Search, said that their studies (based in the USA) show that young people, 40% to be precise, are using TikTok or Instagram when they are looking for somewhere for lunch. It is not Google maps or Google Search, as most of us expected.
A social media strategist also conducted a small research and shared the results on Twitter. According to this mini-survey, here are the results:
TikTok shows Gen Z relevant content faster than Google.
Gen Z is not concerned about misinformation on TikTok. They know it exists and will avoid content on the platform that can easily be false.
Gen Z doesn’t want to read to find information. They will if they have to. But if they can get a quick video with the answer, that’s what they prefer.
1) TikTok shows them relevant content FASTER than Google.
The algorithm knows them WELL, and they love that.
This situation not only affects Google but also forces the world’s most popular search engine to make changes and improvements to meet Gen Z’s needs and interests.
So, what has Google been working on?
Google is adapting its search and maps to feature more images and video in search results, including from TikTok.
Announced at the Search On’22 event, Google will add multi-search to 70 new languages in the near future. This feature allows users to search using both images and text combined.
The Shoppable search experience is becoming more and more at the centre of new features. In the US, when you search for the word “shop”, and if it is followed by the item, Google will show you visuals of products, tools, and inventory.
Google has added a new explore feature where users can view inspirational content beyond their original query.
Google will show if the search results are personalised according to your behaviour, also providing an option to turn off the settings.
So, what Google is prioritising: Search that will provide more visuals, an experience which is personalised and, of course, more shopping features that affect both users’ and brands’ way of benefiting from Google.
What Does This Mean for Businesses?
Where your audience spends time on social media is important. That is why brands should consider TikTok if they know there is potential for their branding and boosting sales. However, you may only know what outcome you can achieve by trying.
We know that Gez Z is on TikTok. But also we must acknowledge that Gen Y and Gen X are also becoming crowded on the app.
As a brand, you should consider being active on TikTok because:
Organic reach has massive potential on TikTok when it comes to branding. Consider that the average TikTok user spends 52 minutes daily on the app.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) for TikTok is also an essential topic for brands and is based on understanding the app’s algorithm. When you do it right and relevant, your content ranking on TikTok will be higher, which means you reach the right audience you target.
You can try TikTok ads according to your budget. There are in-feed and To View placements, while TopView placements can be really expensive, especially on specific days, as Bloomberg reports. In-feed placements with small budgets can be a good starting point to test out.
Influencer marketing is a huge industry right now, and we know Gen Z is taking their favourite social media accounts seriously – enough to follow what they follow and buy products they use. So, brands may consider working with popular creators on the platform. Savannah Sanchez, a paid social consultant and the founder of The Social Savannah, says that brands willing to work with a diverse group of content creators are definitely utilising the platform the best.
Wrapping Up
TikTok has been downloaded by over 3 billion people to date, and it has over 1.5 billion monthly active users in the third quarter of 2022 across 154 countries. In light of this information, using this app also as a search engine is not so surprising.
We cannot get tired of emphasising that Gen Z is taking its social media influence and using it as a tool to learn, buy, share, communicate and connect. And, Tiktok has plenty of room for brands to make their mark with Gen Z.
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