A Reboot To Sunday Links With Social Media Reinvention

I’m rebooting my life. I won’t bore you with the details.

Starting over is a painful process. Changes occur in our lives whether we are ready or not. I am re-grouping and re-prioritizing what’s important in my personal and professional life.

Time heals all wounds (well at least some of them). Most of all, it became clear why I started this marketing strategy blog in the first place:

• I LOVE to write. It EXERCISES my brain.
• I write for ME.
• That’s WHY I love it.

I’m also back to regularly working out my body too. It hurts when you’ve haven’t done something consistently for a long time.

Something tells me committing to writing regularly will bring many of the same aches and pains. That’s okay. I can live with that. Baby steps.

So, it’s time to write. But, what do I write about? I’ll figure that out as I go. And, I hope to have fun along the way.

To kickstart things, I’ll curate links from my favorite news sites and marketing strategy blogs and summarize key points from the articles.

The goal: Publish at least two Sunday posts per month. 

These posts will focus on:

• Email Marketing: Tips and insights on using marketing’s most measurable channel.
• Inbound Marketing: Writing, writing tools, content marketing topics/trends/tools,  search engine optimization (SEO), and buyer personas.
• Strategy: Summaries of my favorite strategy articles peppered with commentary from yours truly.

Here are the three topics I will cover in today’s post:

Summary 1 — Email Marketing: Email Personalization Separates You From The Herd

Summary 2 — Inbound Marketing: How To Earn Inbound Links (Especially When People Aren’t Linking To You)

Summary 3 — Strategy: Amazon Knows We Live In A Hardware Ecosystem World

If you’ve made it this far, come read some more. Let’s get to work …

1. Email Personalization Separates You From The Herd

5 Ways Segmentation and Personalization Can Supercharge Your Emails by Isaac Moche, @isaacmoche

Here are the five ways to personalize your emails from Isaac’s article:

1. Segment Your Send List
2. Contextualize Your Copy Using Smart Content
3. Personalize The From Name and Email address
4. Personalize The Subject Line
5. Personalize Your Email Copy

Email Personalization Matters. Here’s the data:

• Segmenting your send list drives 14% more opens, 63% higher clicks and 8% fewer unsubscribes versus when you don’t (Source: MailChimp).
• Personalizing the subject line with your prospect’s name increased open rates by 29% (Source: MarketingSherpa). Campaign Monitor’s data says there’s a 26% greater likelihood of getting your email opened with a personalized email subject line.
• Seeding personalization tokens in strategic points within your email copy increases click rates by 41% (Source: Experian).

But, I Don’t Want To Look Spammy. I know #4 stirs a lot of debate. Here are words of wisdom from Isaac’s article. He makes a strong case why the email subject line is prime personalization real estate:

Personalizing a subject line can go beyond the first name, however. Anything from a person’s location to the number of times they’ve been a customer is an opportunity to add context to a subject line.

Think about the subject line as the teaser and the hook that entices someone to read your email. People are more interested in things that are contextually relevant to them.

Here’s my personal experience with subject line personalization:

• Personalized subject lines drove my open rates to as close to 40%. This particular campaign revealed the Western Region of the U.S. opened more of the emails.
• In other campaigns, personalized subject lines made little impact in open rates or click rates.

A/B Tests Will Guide Your Decisions. That’s why you need to A/B test! Here’s what’s great if email marketing is an important outbound marketing channel for your business. Most email platforms automate the A/B testing process. But, that’s a different subject for a future post.

If you use Constant Contact and/or MailChimp, the personalization process becomes even easier (particularly when personalizing subject lines):

• For Constant Contact, follow these steps.
• For MailChimp, use this merge tag cheat sheet.

2. How To Earn Inbound Links (Especially When People Aren’t Linking To You)

How to Build Links When No One Will Link to You by Neil Patel, @neilpatel

I love this article. I also envy Neil Patel’s conversational yet thoughtful writing style. His unique ability “to write like he talks” is why I find his work so engaging.

But a HUGE reason for Neil’s SEO success is this cold, hard fact: his websites earn coveted inbound links from other authoritative and high ranking websites (aka Google PageRank is an important Google Search Ranking Factor).

Neil Patel Knows Our Pain. Before he became THE Neil Patel, “trusted marketing advisor to Google and other big-time brands (scroll through this page),” Neil was another small business owner fighting and scrapping to build his brand just like the rest of us (direct quote from article’s conclusion):

I know link building is hard. I’ve been where you are today. You spend countless hours trying to build links, but for some reason, you just can’t convince anyone to link to you.

The Six Link Building Tactics. They’re battle-tested and proven from years of Neil’s data-driven experimentation, creativity, and perseverance:

• Tactic #1: Link Intersect
• Tactic #2: Image link building
• Tactic #3: Link reclamation
• Tactic #4: Performance-based press
• Tactic #5: Infographics
• Tactic #6: Moving Man Method (a creative SEO tactic by SEO guru Brian Dean)

Which Tactics Should I Try First? His advice is to try these tactics depending on how many inbound links your site already generates:

• Tactic #1: Start with this one especially if you’re struggling. It’s also one of the easier ones to scale.
• Tactics #2 and #5: Require more effort than Tactic #1 but also work well.
• Tactics #3 and #4: Be patient here. They take time and won’t generate high-volume backlinks.
• Tactic #6: Depends on the timing when a company shuts down its business (or is in the process of closing down its operations)

Great Picture Examples of Tools and Email Asks in Action. Plus, there are other great bonuses and knowledge you’ll receive by investing time in this article:

• Seeing how a master like Neil uses important SEO and content marketing tools to organically grow his inbound links (Ahrefs Link Intersect, Buzzsumo Content Alerts, Ahrefs Content Explorer)
• Learning from the actual emails he writes to other sites when making “the ask” for inbound links

What Inbound Marketing Is All About. Most of all, I see someone who teaches how to:

• Create remarkable content
• Help his audience (which makes his work share-worthy)
• Stay the course with hard work and a long-term attitude

3. Amazon Knows We Live In A Hardware Ecosystem World

The Battle For The Home by Ben Thompson, @benthompson

How am I just now learning about Ben and his blog? Better late than never.

I started reading his blog about a month ago. He writes about marketing strategy trends that he sees developing in the technology industry.

This guy is ultra-smart. Wow.

I thought to myself: “this guy writes like Mitch Joel and delivers gut-punching insights.” That’s how I want to write and express my thoughts!

Ah, what the hell. Nobody’s perfect.

I’m raising my game by learning from Ben’s writing style, studying his analysis, and “stealing like an artist.”

The Home Is The New Battleground. Here’s the short version on how our homes are the new hardware ecosystem battleground:

• The Players: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple
• Who’s Leading The Game (for now): Amazon due to its first mover advantage. But, Google is closing.
• Who’s Lagging Behind: Facebook. Why? Their go-to-market strategy is unclear. In other words, how does The Facebook Portal feed into, complement, or grow its current business?

Amazon Enters The Hardware Ecosystem Game with Alexa/Echo. Here’s my favorite part of Ben’s article — his analysis on The Amazon Alexa/Echo Ecosystem:

• Echo powers The Amazon Alexa/Echo Ecosystem
• Amazon creates a brand new product category (i.e., virtual assistant speakers) as the ecosystem anchor
• Unlike Apple and Google, smartphones anchor their ecosystems

Remember when Amazon failed to establish the Amazon Fire smartphone? I forgot about it.

Amazon Is Competing On Integrating Hardware and Service. Check out how Ben explains how Amazon Echo allows Amazon to compete from a position of strength. The company learned from its “Fire Failure.” Amazon’s loss in the smartphone wars became a blessing in disguise:

… the Echo was everything the failed Fire phone was not: its success depended not on the integration of hardware and software, the refinement of which a service company like Amazon is fundamentally unsuited for, but rather the integration of hardware and service.

(Note: I edited the beginning of this direct quote).

Amazon’s Hardware Ecosystem Incentivizes Us To Buy More Stuff (Especially Amazon-Branded Stuff). Amazon’s September 2018 product launches with Amazon Alexa Ecosystem consumer devices are just the beginning (i.e., AmazonBasics Microwave, EchoShow, Echo Auto, Echo Wall Clock, Echo Sub, and Amazon Smart Plug).

The Amazon Alexa Ecosystem expands Amazon’s embedded influence in “consumer stuff” we do and buy from home:

1. Echo makes it even easier for us to do daily stuff and to buy more stuff from Amazon
2. Amazon’s Branded Alexa Ecosystem incentivizes us to buy Amazon’s Brands (just like Apple does with its hardware ecosystem)
3. Point 1 + Point 2 = Amazon is now an important player in The Technology and Hardware Ecosystem Game

Okay, maybe I should switch around the order of each point, but you catch my drift.

This strategy is a brilliant “share of wallet” play. It micro-targets their highest customer lifetime value customers (aka Prime Members).

Full Disclosure: I own Amazon stock (not a lot), but I do invest in their company. Plus, I research everything I can to gain clues about Amazon’s corporate strategy.

Your Turn

Please let me know if you agree or disagree with my thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear from you. I’m here to read, listen, and learn from YOUR PERSPECTIVE.   Comments are open. So let’er rip!

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