Welcome Back to Sunday Links with Social Media ReInvention

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Today’s Sunday Links summaries revolve around a specific storyline — Personalization.

• Summary 1 — Email Marketing: 1. If You’re Automating Your Emails, Please Personalize Them
• Summary 2 — Inbound Marketing: 2. Personalized Blog Posts are the New Unique
• Summary 3 — Strategy: 3. Amazon HQ2 Selection Is Personal for the Cities Who Lost

Please join me. Right now.

If you don’t, I will take it personally …

… let’s get to work.

1. If You’re Automating Your Emails, Please Personalize Them

4 Emails You Should Be Automating by Miles Price

First, these are the four types of automated emails Miles suggests personalizing:

1. Welcome (Trigger: Subscriber action)
2. Birthday and Holiday (Trigger: Date-specific)
3. Personalized Product Offers (Trigger: Web browsing history)
4. Promotional Reminders (Trigger: Email activity)

There’s a Right Way To Automate and Personalize Emails. Here are quick tidbits on doing personalization the right way for the “Welcome” and “Birthday and Holiday,” emails.

For, The Welcome Email:

• Show your appreciation for the sign-up because it makes a great 1st impression.
• Be fast in sending it out (i.e., within hours of when your subscriber signs up).
• You’ll earn around a 50% response rate: Subscribers open these emails. Additional marketing automation data from Emma proves they like them.

For The Birthday and Holiday Email:

• Use “mystery birthday gift emails” because your subscribers love them. Check out the chart in Miles’ article — it’s pretty self-explanatory.
• This MarketingProfs data says relative to the usual promotional emails, you’ll earn three times higher open rates and acquire click-through rates (CTRs) five times higher

Second, is email personalization going to be a recurring theme in my writing? Is personalizing an email really that important? Yes!

You Build Trust by Being Different and Going The Extra Mile. According to Miles’ article, these statistics reveal that prioritizing email personalization differentiates your customer relationships and builds buyer trust:

• 39% of marketers say they “almost never” personalize their emails (Source: Emma Marketing Blog)
• When a company knows the buyer’s name, there’s a 56% higher chance we’ll buy something from them (Source: Evergage Blog)
• 58% of buyers say they’re more likely to buy from companies who suggest relevant products when a buyer pokes around their website (aka Amazon’s famous prompt of “Customers who bought this item also bought …”)

Wow, 39% Seems High With “Almost Never?” Then, I started thinking about how much time I put into the quality assurance (QA) process with my clients’ email lists to max out first-name personalization opportunities.

It’s Time-Consuming. Making sure the “first name” column in your spreadsheet is error-free BEFORE you upload it into your email platform is critical. I use the following Microsoft Excel text cleansing functions to speed up the process and double-check that “first name” column:

• TRIM: This function guarantees you have zero (0) spaces before the first name by removing the extra spaces. Zero spaces are vital in preventing first name personalization problems.
• PROPER: When you want to convert “TONY” to “Tony,” this is your ticket.
• LEN: A lot of times the “first name” column may contain only one or two letters. That’s a dead giveaway the column holds entries with only a one letter initial (or two). The LEN function identifies those entries.
• PASTE SPECIAL -> VALUES: When using many of these text cleansing functions, you need to create an additional column next to your original “first name” column. After copying the “cleansed” first names, use PASTE SPECIAL -> VALUES to remove any cell references and formulas before pasting the cleansed names into your original “first name” column.

Show Someone She/He Matters. Doesn’t it feel good when someone remembers you and knows your name? I know it makes me feel good. It matters.

In a more technology-driven and social media polarizing world, it’s more important than ever to show respect and caring. People matter.

Acknowledging someone by her/his first name is a great start. It’s important in our emails and in good old-fashioned, in-real-life (IRL) conversations.

2. Personalized Blog Posts Are The New Unique

The Future of Content Marketing: It’s Not What You Think by Neil Patel @neilpatel

Long-term subscribers to this community know I write lengthy and detailed posts. I strive to deliver substance.

The blog post length also serves an important search engine optimization (SEO) purpose. Here’s a direct quote from Search Engine Journal about how blog post length impacts our Google rankings:

Google wants substance, evidence, and facts from authority entities on whatever the topic may be. Turns out, longer content typically has these elements baked into it.

That’s a big reason why long-form content ranks better in organic search than short content.

Average content length for Page 1 results is around 1,900 words, according to a 2016 study. That’s a lot longer than the 200- or 500-word blog posts most writers or webmasters think is ideal.

Is Longer Really Better? If You Know What I Mean. Brian Dean’s comprehensive study on Google rankings revealed the 1,900 words golden rule. Blog post length is an important Google Ranking Factor. So, the best solution is to grind out in-depth and detailed posts. That’s the speedy path to Position 1 on Google SERPs (search engine results pages). Right?

Not So Fast Sparky. Neil questions and refutes this argument with twelve months of his own data. First, he provides great data and context (or maybe it’s depressing) on the insane competition and deafening noise in the blogosphere:

• 440 million blogs hope to attract readers …
• … that number climbs higher when you consider other long-form platforms like Medium and Tumblr because Tumblr contains over 400 million blogs.
• Let’s make the math easier and assume there are almost 1 billion blogs on Earth.
• So if The World Bank says about 7.5 billion people live on planet Earth …
• … then, you have 1 blog available to be read for every 7.5 people.

Where and How Does Anyone Find Time To Read? Yeah. The phrase running through my head now rhymes with “Holy Crap!” Okay, for our readers who know me personally, I’m really saying something else. I’m attempting to be more family-friendly.

When we consider the other forms of media thrashing around for our attention such as news media websites, social media, advertisements, television, music streaming services, radio, and books (or is that too old school nowadays), and news notifications flashing on our smartphone screens, etc., it makes you wonder how does anyone find time to read?

So What’s The Solution Online Marketing Boy? Neil arrived at similar conclusions. He reviewed his site’s data for its most popular posts in the last 12 months and learned:

• It wasn’t the usual “How-To Top Insert A Really Big Number Here List To Skyrocket Your Google Rankings” type of post
• These popular posts didn’t expound upon the usual “copycat” advice
• His personal experiences or personal context drove the storyline

Personal Context Becomes The New Unique. Why is this important? I somehow tripped over a similar insight when deciding to re-boot this blog. At least this time, I wasn’t data-driven. I didn’t run the numbers.

Here’s a screenshot of the Evernote note I scribbled to myself on October 27th:

It’s Better To Be Lucky Than Good. Next time, I’ll back up my theories with hard data. For now, I’m relieved my gut instincts remain in tune with:

• What I should write and …
• … How I should express it

Most of all, it is time to release the self-doubt. When those anxious feelings bubble up, it’ time to Trust The Force.

P.S. This post’s length is 1899 words.

3. Amazon HQ2 Selection Is Personal for the Cities Who Lost

Has Amazon Selected Its Next Headquarters? by Paul Solman, @paulsolman

Yes, Virginia, They Did — In Crystal City. And, Queens, New York too. Here’s what they said on PBS News Hour a few days ago:

238 Cities Submitted Proposals To Amazon During the Competitive Bidding Process. Twenty cities made the finalist’s cut for Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters. What was at stake?

• 50,000 high paying technology sector jobs with average salaries of $150,000
• A $5 billion investment infusion into the winning city’s economy
• The intangible branding effects attached to tech hub street credibility

So Was This Ever A Fair Fight? Or, Was It A Hustle? Richard Florida of the University of Toronto and Editor-At-Large of The Atlantic’s City Lab publication argues the game was a rigged “bait and switch” from the start.

This PBS News Hour interview between John Yang and Florida is worth your time (the full transcript is here). Their conversation starts at the 44:50 timestamp.

If you want to skip ahead, read the bullet points below this embedded video.

A Process That Opens Up Old Wounds. The way Amazon solicited competitive bids from these 238 cities reminds me of the miserable request for proposal (RFP) and deadline-driven fire engine drills I endured during my stints in management consulting and business development:

• Amazon held the upper hand. They were “Client Procurement.”
• The bidding cities bowed before Amazon and worked around-the-clock to submit their proposals before deadlines. They were “The Vendors.”
• Amazon extracted tons of data points about each city to guide their decision making on the attractiveness of future Amazon sites (i.e., fulfillment and logistic centers, R&D, etc.).
• Florida also points out how Amazon uploaded this big data into a massive database so its cloud computing resources can transform it the data into business intelligence for those same future negotiations

To The Fine Citizens of Jersey City, NJ, and Dallas, TX, I Know (and Felt) Your Pain.  I still remember the pain of losing. I still remember the tortuous hours staying up all night. I still remember the heartbreak. I still remember the depression that plagued me for weeks.

I’m not surprised by the reactions of the cities and the good people who poured their hearts and souls into the proposals that didn’t win.

From Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings:

“We don’t like to lose. This does not make us happy,” Rawlings said at a press conference on Tuesday. “I like to win, so my heart’s broken today.”

New Jersey Mayor Steven Fulop tweeted the following on November 12th:

But, As An Amazon Shareholder, I Agree With How Jeff Bezos Executed The Competitive Bidding Process. Bezos did what he was supposed to do. He served the interests of his Amazon shareholders and his company.

Here’s what I tweeted on November 13th:

I’m Confident Bezos Sleeps Well at Night. Here’s a quote from Jeff Bezos on how he deals with criticism:

“If you’re going to do anything new or different in the world, it is going to be misunderstood, sometimes by well-meaning critics, sometimes by self-interested critics. It’s okay, it’s all part of the process.”

Plus, there are an additional 2.4 billion reasons why he’s already focused on the next task-at-hand.

Full Disclosure Note: I am an Amazon shareholder. I don’t own a lot of the company’s stock, but I do invest in it (and intend to buy more shares in the future).

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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