Landing pages are the heart of any inbound marketing campaign, mainly because they have the unique ability to convert complete strangers into qualified leads. Surprisingly, 44% of B2B companies direct visitors to their website's homepage rather than to a specific landing page.

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Perhaps this can explain why according to the latest State of Inbound 2017 report, the majority of marketers still struggle with generating new leads for their businesses.

Building a well-designed and optimized landing page is one viable way to help your SaaS business overcome this marketing challenge.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a specially designed page where you direct your visitors to collect their information in exchange for an offer like an ebook, free trial, online course, or even ROI calculators. It is one of the pillar components of inbound marketing because this is where you can generate new leads for your business.

Landing page optimization tips

No matter how beautiful your landing page may be, if it is not optimized correctly, you will not fully benefit from its lead generation capability for your SaaS business.

Here are ten simple landing age optimization tips you can do on your site's landing pages to increase your lead generation ratio.

If you want more tips and examples of perfect landing pages, check out Dave Chaffey's perfect landing page examples.

1. Understand your customer

Inbound marketing focuses on your customer. So it follows that you need to make sure that the layout design, content, and offer on your landing page is something that your customer will find educational, engaging, and helpful. Some ways that you can do this include:

• Developing a clear buyer persona.
• Using surveys and feedback forms.
• Studying your competitors' landing pages.

2. Have a compelling headline

According to Kissmetrics, you only have 8 seconds to make a lasting impression, and convince a visitor to enter their information in your lead capture form.

Some ways to craft your headline so that it catches your visitor's attention in time:

• Answer the question, “What will visitors who convert receive?”
• Highlight the most significant benefit your visitor will get.
• Perform the Blink Test on your heading

3. KISS your copy

KISS stands for "Keep It Short and Simple." Make sure your visitors can skim and scan the copy of your landing page. Some ways to do that are:

• Highlight key takeaways with bullet points.
• Add white space.
• Use short, simple words.

GrapeVine Logic's landing page offering a whitepaper is an excellent example of this:

4. Make your landing page SEO-friendly

While Google and other search engines are now giving more preference to quality, SEO still plays a huge role regarding page ranking. If you want your target audience to find your landing page, you need to apply some SEO best practices:

• Research long-tail keywords to use for your landing page.
• Make sure to include your keyword in your landing page’s title, headers, URL path, and content.
• Include alt tags for your images.
• Google and search engines love pages that are shared a lot, so don't forget to add social share buttons.

5. Stay ‘above-the-fold’

Above-the-fold is a term first used back in the day to refer to content found on the top half of newspapers. Today, this term is used to refer to content that is located above the bottom of your browser window as soon as the page loads.

People do not scroll down a page unless you give them a good reason. That is why it is essential to put all of the valuable information above the fold, specifically:

• Landing page copy
• Lead capture form
• Call-to-Action button

Invest Feed does a great job in keeping all the essential details of the landing page above the fold as we can see below:

6. Ask the right questions in your lead capture form

Keep in mind that your visitors are very protective when it comes to giving out their personal information, especially if they are first-time visitors. You can ease the apprehension by:

• Evaluate the value of your offer. The more valuable it is, the more information you can ask.
• Ask your sales team to find out what information they need to guide your leads through the funnel.
• Avoid asking for sensitive information.
• Include a link to your privacy policy to put them at ease.

7. Create a compelling offer

Your lead capture form may be the most critical part of your landing page when it comes to generating new leads. However, if you are not offering something that will catch your audience's attention, it will not do you any good.

Before you create the offer for your landing page, ask the following questions:

• What problem do you want to solve?
• What stage of the buyer’s journey is this for?
• How will this benefit my target audience?
• What format should be used for the offer? (e.g., Ebook, webinar, audio recording, email course)

8. Tapping into the Power of One

An optimized landing page is laser focused. It contains only one offer, one headline, one solid message, and one call-to-action. Giving your visitors options will just distract and confuse your visitors, and there's a very good chance that your visitor will end up not choosing either one.

9. Test your landing page

Believe it or not, 61% of companies run less than five tests on their websites each month

Even though you are using a landing page layout and design that worked well for you in the past, that does not mean that you will get the same results the second time around. The fact is that there is no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to inbound marketing because buying behaviours change.

Running an A/B test (otherwise known as a Split Test) on your landing page is, by far, the best way help you optimize your landing page so that it generates the highest number of leads possible. Among the things you need to test are:

• Layout design
• Landing page color scheme
• Headline
• Lead capture form
• Size, color, and text of your CTA button

When doing a Split Test, make sure that you only change one variable each time you run the test. Doing this will help you come up with a landing page design that’s eye-catching, aesthetically-pleasing, and above all, converting.

10. Don’t forget the ‘Thank You’ Page

As its name suggests, a ‘Thank You’ page is where you thank your new leads for giving you their information. At the same time, it gives them the next steps to get the offer that you promised.

Some things to remember when creating your ‘Thank You’ page:

• Provide specific details how your new leads can get the offer you promised.
• Add social sharing links and buttons.
• Invite your new leads to follow you in social media by adding social follow links.

Landing page optimization is just one of the many lead generation strategies you can use for your SaaS business. Apply any one or all of these tips will help you get more qualified leads that you can now hand over to your sales team to slowly convert into customers.

The dreaded word

With Halloween on its way, you naturally start thinking about all things spooky. Things like clowns, vampires or toddlers who won't go to sleep.

For email marketers, there is something far scarier that strikes fear deep in our hearts ... poor deliverability.

Calm down my little email geeks. Finding out your inbox placement is a good thing. Once you find out your own, you can start strategizing how to improve it. And the chart below can let you know if you are within your industry benchmarks.

How does email get into the inbox?

"Email that is deemed malicious or untrustworthy is often blocked at the gateway, never reaching either the inbox or the spam folder. For messages that make it past the gateway, spam filters look at the reputation of the sender, subscriber engagement, and content to decide if they should be placed in the inbox or the spam folder for each subscriber. Emails that make it past both gateway and spam filters are the only ones that reach the inbox."
~ Return Path 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report

Best and worst of inbox placements

In the chart, we can see the best performers in previous 12 months are banking and finance at 94%. While the lowest performing is education/nonprofit/government at 76%.

The overall average across all industries is 85%.

Final thought

This Halloween, my little email geeks, don't fear deliverability - create a strategy for it. Be brave!

• Source: 2017 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report
• Sample Size: Sample of more than 2 billion promotional email messages sent to consumers around the world between July 2016 and June 2017
• Recommended Resource: Email deliverability hub page

With everyone shouting about the same thing, its hard to get your voice heard. Black Friday is no exception. Nearly every major retailer will promote Black Friday. Black Friday has become increasingly popular in the UK over the last few years, after originating in the US. Although it's a day hated by many, it has become a great way for retailers to increase profits.

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Last year 154 million consumers made purchases, that’s about 3 million more than the previous year. Last year Black Friday surpassed the $3 billion mark for the first time, setting a new sales record. It was found that 76% of retailers will be taking part in Black Friday this year.

There is so much noise around Black Friday and brands competing to be heard, but often you need to do more than just drop your prices to see a good ROI. If you're looking for inspiration for your next Black Friday campaign use one of these tactics.

Social Media

Social Media plays a massive part around Black Friday. Consumers are most likely to share news of deals with friends than at any other time of year. According to one survey, social media is the most important channel for Black Friday promotion.

Chubbies decided to offer a new gift with purchase every hour for 12 hours. This campaign creates an incentive to buy and gets their followers to keep checking back in with Chubbies each hour to see what the latest gift is. They also created a trailer to accompany the offer.

Sometimes using humor can be a great way to get through the noise and make your Black Friday messaging stand out. Amazon used humor in their last their campaign. They had clearly done their research to find a passionate group within their community and used humor to sell to them.

Amazon received a great response from their community.

One of the biggest reasons people avoid shopping online is because of high shipping costs. This Black Friday why not advertize free shipping or discounted shipping to help boost your ecommerce sales this year

Before you dive into a social media campaign start by considering your messaging and how you want to push your offers. Start by looking at which platform works best for your business. Then choose a strategy, this might be using humor to attract attention, sharing your offers, running a contest or using social advertising. Whatever it is, make sure you know your audience, your message is suitable and your content looks good.

Choose to not take part

There are some well-known retailers who have decided to sit it out the chaos of Black Friday, while their rivals offer discounts. In 2016 Asda choose not to take part, and has instead released a ‘mannequin challenge’ video spoofing the mayhem which hit its stores back in 2014.

C

The clothing retailer, Fat Face didn't take part but instead donated almost £200,000 of its profits to charity instead of discounting.

Instead of Black Friday discounting, we're donating to charities & giving back to communities around us! #thanksforgiving #sharethehappiness pic.twitter.com/mSMGq0dDbh

— Fat Face (@FatFace) November 21, 2016

In 2015 REI closed its offices on Black Friday and paid its 12,000 Employees not to work that day. They said this was "so they can do what they love most—be outside." This was part of their campaign, called #OptOutside. They also decided to close all 143 retail locations, headquarters and two distribution centers as an attack on consumerism.

Although some brands will opt out of Black Friday many will capitalize on high levels of online traffic and to acquire new customers from their campaigns. There could be a massive missed opportunity for extra revenue. One survey by Sale Cycle reported that brands see a significant increase in spending on Black Friday compared to a normal day, making near 7k per hour.

Use email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to pre-warn your database of your upcoming offers and draw them into discounts. MailChimp reported that their users sent a record-breaking 1.5 billion emails on Black Friday.

But sending the email isn't the hard part, the aim of every Black Friday email is to get customers to click through and purchase.

Email marketing in 2014 was responsible for 27% of holiday sales. But, coming up with an amazing email campaign that will stand out from all of the other emails that your customers are receiving can be a challenge. You may want to consider trying one of Shopify's email marketing suggestion for this Black Friday:

• Keep things simple and get right to the point, such as a discount and clear CTA
• Use quirky animation like GIFs
• Offer a free gift with every purchase
• Extend your sale
• Run a contest or giveaway
• Use humor
• Create urgency, such as scarcity in your inventory
• Raise awareness for a cause, a charity, or your customer

Julep used last-minute extended deals to push their Black Friday campaign. Extending the sale last-second gives customers another chance to purchase from your store.

Sometimes less is better - why not use a simple offer email, this email clearly explains the offer and has a focused call to action. If you use this approach make sure you have a clear subject line with the sale or discount and include a call to action that brings customers to your discount landing page.

Email marketing is the second most popular way to promote your Black Friday campaign, therefore can be hugely valuable to your business. With the right amount of engaged subscribers and well-crafted emails, your business can have a very profitable Black Friday.

Target millennials

As many marketers will already know millennials are most likely to spend more compared to any other demographic. It was reported that 48% of 18- to 24-year-olds expected to spend more on gifts than the previous year. Brands who already target this group are in a strong position and will find it easier to reach out to this tech-savvy demographic on Black Friday. If you would like to expand your reach to this demographic consider the following methods.

Focus more on valuable written content instead of traditional ads. Millenials are the most tech-savvy generation and see hundreds of ads every day. To catch their attention use ads that offer something new or unique.

Millenials value authenticity and honesty. Be upfront with your offers and discounts. Don't promote misleading discounts or offers.

You could reach out to influencers, who would work alongside you to promote upcoming offers on black Friday. Millenials listen to influencers and value their opinion. Just ensure you are collaborating with the right ones. For more inspiration use this article on how to win over Millennials.

What not to do

We don't always get it right when it comes to Black Friday. Sometimes we are too aggressive with our messaging or just get it wrong.

Unfortunately, the Singapore-based fashion brand SuperGurl got it very wrong. On their website, they featured a Black Friday sale button labeled 'Rape Us Now,' which apparently was a reference to how low the prices were.

Make sure your message is right and not misleading. If you are offering a discount or offer make sure you see that offer through.

Offer something different

For some retailers, Black Friday just doesn’t work for them. Many luxury brands feel that discounting doesn't sit well with the brand values. Likewise, it has been found that travel brands tend to focus on different times of year which have proven to be more effective for them. If you want to use Black Friday as part of your strategy but don't want to encourage mass consumerism or feel it doesn't fit with your values, what's the alternative?

Consider donating some of your Black Friday sales to charity. Whether its 50%, 10% or 1%  why not use your profits for the greater good.

Uber is another good example of this, instead of taking part in Black Friday they looked to offer something unique. They offered discounts on 5 products over 5 days but don’t unveil what the gifts are until the day of. This keeps the reader coming back for more, creating engagement over a period of days.

Whatever strategy you plan to take, make sure you have a clear message and have a detailed plan in place to ensure you have a successful Black Friday. Why not start with our FREE Digital Marketing plan template, helping you build an effective, integrated strategy around the Smart Insights RACE planning system.

Email marketing continues to be a vital communications channel with the DMAs latest Email tracker showing that email receives 30 times return on investment on average. 95% of respondents rated it as 'important' or 'very important' to their organization.

Yet competition in the inbox for attention from email subscribers remains fierce as social media remains important and competitors optimise their approach.

So, it's important to review the success factors to improving email ROI, which we summarise in this article with the help of the email specialists who kindly contributed their views and predictions on the trends which will be important in 2018. While some of these are not 'new' techniques, they are increasing in adoption since they are vital to keeping up with your competition and engaging your audience further in the customer lifecycle.

Our lifecycle marketing model shows you the potential customer touchpoints and how email marketing aids in increasing relevance and response of communications. Marketing activities such as personalization, loyalty programs, and re-engagement email programs are vital to your email marketing strategy. Whilst SEO, PPC, social media, and advertising may contribute to getting your customer into the top of your sales funnel, it is essentially your email marketers that keep them there, increase repeat purchase and increase customer-brand engagement.

For a broader overview of the biggest digital trends, including the integration of customer journeys into your engagement strategy, check our Dr Dave Chaffey's 10 marketing trends to act on in 2018.

With the end of 2017 drawing near, the trends in this article reflect on our free resource, Email Trends 2017 - a visual guide, (soon to be updated) to see if our predictions matched up to what the landscape of email looked like this past year.

Which techniques are already part of current email marketing activities?

The Email Marketing Industry Census 2017, by Econsultancy in association with Adestra, shows that segmentation (80%) remains the highest priority and technique used in email marketing campaigns in 2017. However, this is only a 1% increase from 2016 showing very little businesses are adopting this technique further than what they were in 2016.

Optimizing emails for mobile had the highest increase (9%) showing adoption of this technique is becoming increasingly popular and important for retention, UX and engagement on on-the-go devices for quicker and more convenient consumption of content. Other techniques with an increase in importance were:

• Encouraging social sharing (2% increase)
• Transactional Emails (2% increase)
• Location-based emails (4% increase)
• Dynamic content and dynamic social feeds (4% and 3% increase)

I will be addressing the importance of mobile-responsive emails, amongst other important trending features:

• Respecting personal data will change your email marketing strategy
• Mailable 'Microsites' are adopted by more companies to increase customer research, engagement, and retention
• Conversion tones are adopted to increase genuine human interaction with customers
• Rending is addressed to improve UX across email clients
• Personalization and segmentation remain a priority to share dynamic content

However, it is interesting to note that personalization is a technique that has decreased in popularity by 4% (beyond adding in the user's name). Whereas this was a rising email trend a couple of years ago, it is hard to show how it has progressed further. More is needed than customizing the email to include the users' names. This has become the standard practice and is no longer considered 'personal', users now expect to see their name, anything less is offputting and risks low engagement.

Whilst email competes with organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC), it can drive a higher volume of sales than other channels and is important for customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. In our Essential Digital Marketing Tools framework, we outline the insight and management tools to help you engage users via marketing automation and optimization tools.

Expert prediction

Jordie van Rijn - Email Marketing and eCRM Consultant, Author, and Founder of Email Vendors Selection

Instead of trying to employ email at every twist and turn of the customer journey, it is often more effective to focus on the well performing campaigns. We need to learn to “Carpe Conversion”, tune to their mindset and deepen the personalized contact at those moments that matter.

One way that is up and coming in 2018, will be the combination of email and on-site interactions. Interactions with chatbots, guided tours, and next best action slide-ins. You know the little dialog boxes and circles bottom-right to click on? We will see a shift, as companies are starting to use them to guide the customer into (opt-in) and from (after click through) email and continue the flow on the site.

Improving landing page conversions and lead-to-deal ratio is also important. 

Trend 1. Respecting personal data will change your email marketing strategy

This isn't a 'trend' as such that marketers are voluntarily adopting but instead enforced by the European Commission May 25, 2018. It's vital to comply with or risk hefty fines.

The way data is collected, stored and used for email campaigns has previously and continuously had a bad reputation due to the negative handling of personal data - often viewed as spam by the recipient. However, as GDPR comes into effect, we will see other counties tightening their data handling procedures, including America's CAN-SPAM.

We recently asked our members 'Is your company GDPR ready?' and found that the majority (94%) were 'aware but haven't started' preparations or didn't know what GDPR is!

General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) changes will be enforced in 6 months, affecting all businesses that market to customers in all 28 European counties. This is the biggest change happening that affects email marketing strategies in 2018. For many years obtaining email addresses, phone numbers and other personal contact details via competitions and promotion of free whitepapers has been a technique to increase contact databases, used afterward for email re-engagement campaigns that the user had not originally and explicitly consented to. Reconsent needs to be given to store and use personal data.

With this change, we will see companies tightening up their use of personal data. This change will hopefully decrease the negative stigma that has built up around company email campaigns and the amount of spam users receive.

Our email marketing manager has produced a practical guide, with checklists, to help inform you about GDPR, what needs to be done and how / if this affects you.

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Our round-up of the best guidance on the latest European Union data protection and privacy legislation and how it affects you and your business Are you ready for the GDPR? The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) comes into force in all 28 countries in Europe on 25th May 2018. It has been agreed by the EU in this directive and how it must be implemented to remain compliant differs according to interpretation in different countries.

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What do marketers need to do in 2018 to comply with GDPR changes?

1. Processing of data is done lawfully and fairly,
2. data is collected for explicit legitimate purposes
3. making sure the data is adequate, accurate, and
4. retained for only as long as necessary.
5. processed in a manner that maintains the integrity and confidentiality of the personal data.

In conclusion, GDPR is all about transparency and individual rights - use of personal data will be handled with more respect and this will have a positive effect on email campaigns.

Expert prediction

Tim Watson, Email Marketing consultant at Zettasphere

Trend 2. Mailable 'Microsites' are adopted by more companies to increase customer research, engagement, and retention

A mailable 'microsite' is an interactive email, which allows the user to interact with the email interface within the inbox. The adoption of this technique will help retain customers and give a more engaging approach to content. Interactive emails keep the inbox interesting and unique.

Features of an interactive email may include, but not limited to:

• Integrated forms and surveys: done 'in the inbox' without directing them to a separate online landing page
• Social sharing: this makes it easier for your user to share content on their social platforms
• Gifs, videos, and animations: this can engage users, but can sometimes lead to inconsistent experiences across email clients (large files will mean a slower download)
• Search in email
• Menu options / navigation bars: integrating these into your emails can increase clicks leading to higher conversions
• Rotational banners / carousels: this encourages interaction with the content, increasing the chances of positive engagement and conversion
• Countdowns: adding in a countdown clock for sales and promotions will alert the recipient of the urgency to take action - this can help give the audience a little nudge to convert, rather than the standard 'offer ends soon' text

Interactive email essentially hands your audience everything they need on a plate - with minimal effort form them. They do not need to divert out of the inbox to view content, interact with video or complete surveys - making it more likely they will interact due to less effort needed to complete a task.

It surprises me that this technique isn't already dominating users' inboxes from the already dull, boring and flat static emails that are sent in surplus. However, until some email clients such as Outlook support these features, it will be hard to fully adopt this technique.

Check out this email sent by Feel Unique, who used gifs in their emails to showcase their new app, how to use it and entice the user to download it.

Collecting data from your customers is important in constructing an accurate and detailed customer persona. Asking your audience to fill out surveys and questionnaires is the best way to find out. However, this can be time-consuming to your audience as CTAs direct them to an online landing page to fill out surveys and forms.

But integrated survey and forms will help increase engagement, as users can fill out the form without leaving their inbox. Applications of email surveys include asking your customers to fill out a review of your product or service, what your customers currently like or is trending to personalize content to their needs, promotional emails after purchase to gain consented subscribers etc.

For this to be fully adopted by more companies, email clients will have to have full compatibility with this type of technology. Clients like mobile third-party email apps like Gmail and yahoo) have fallback support. Plus, some email clients are still not compatible with integrated email forms and surveys and still have a long way to go.

EmailMonks built their first ever horror email, influenced by the film Annabelle: Creation (view online). However, it was not built for Outlook as Outlook does not support certain interactive features.

Creating interactive mailable microsites is the future of email marketing. I do believe that when email clients support the use of interactive features, companies that start adopting this technique will see a higher rate of engagement. But for now, it is important to use the technology already available to engage to make sure all your customers receive a professionally created, designed and written email.

Expert prediction

Jaymin Bhuptani - Director, EmailMonks

Interactivity in email is all set to continue its winning spree in 2018. This is evident from the promising trend identified from the steady surge in demand for interactive emails we built for our clients in 2017 – approx. 50% rise than the previous year.

Noticeably, we have seen a major rise of just less than 200% in the use of drop-down navigation in email design.

Moreover, as the need for relevant, personalized content becomes stronger than ever, expect campaigns to become more data-driven. Machine learning will thus play a vital role in the creation of email campaigns in 2018.

Constantine Rozenshtraus-Makarov, Co-Founder and CEO of SendPulse

2018 of emails will be about interaction, gamification, and AI.

In 2018 interactive content based on gamification principles will incentivize users to click and become more involved with the brands. Static emails are no longer enough to catch the eye of the ones who want to play, and so marketers will offer them play.

Email automation AI will not conquer the human race yet, but will continue its expansion to creating attractive subject lines for better open rates and will learn from users' behaviour when is the best time to send emails to them. Follow up to unopened emails will be taken off the human shoulders too.

Growing customer-centric approach in marketing will inspire email marketers to take a deeper dive into user-generated content and to use any data (big data) they possess about customers for generating personalized email content.

Trend 3. Conversational tone is adopted for more personal interaction with audience

The tone you chose to use in your emails affects the way your customers will respond. A conversational tone may not be the best tone to use across all sectors, but it does give a more personal and genuine interaction between the customer and brand.

A conversational tone will ask your users questions, get them thinking and then give them the answer they need - through your CTA directing them to your content that helps / educates them.

Whereas a more formal approach may be better for B2B sectors, asking questions and starting a conversation with your audience is important for engagement.  It will feel more personal show that the content you have produced has had them in mind, feeding their needs for answers, content, products etc.

Trend 4. More businesses push for mobile-friendly design

As shown in the Econsultancy chart, 73% of respondents are prioritizing optimizing email for mobile devices, a 95% increase from 2017 and the biggest for any email trend in the last year. This is only going to increase as the year progresses into 2018.

We now live in a mobile-first society, where content is consumed on the go, in the early morning or late at night via mobile. I myself, check my social notifications and emails on a morning to catch up on the day ahead. It is now more important than ever to make your emails mobile-friendly, after all, why should this medium of marketing be neglected from other mobile-optimized content?

Mobile optimized sites increase loading time, and this counts as an important ranking factor on SEPRs and gives an overall excellent UX for your audience. This is also true for email - slow loading emails that aren't optimized risk low engagement rates and poor clickthroughs, especially if the CTAs have been cut off from the mobile design.

A recent report by Litmus shows what 2017 has taught us about the use of email clients in the past year. Whilst there is a rise in webmail, mainly driven by Gmail, mobile has consistently had the highest market share (50% an over).

However, it is important to know how, when and where your target audience consumes their information. Knowing whether your audience prefers desktop experience or a mobile experience is vital!

For instance, in a recent research study published by Global Web Index, mobile and desktop both engage 16-24-year-olds with the same amount of time spent online. However, as the age of users increases the time spent on mobile decreases. But, don't forget, as time progresses more and more people will adopt a mobile-first approach, and soon it will be a huge competitor for desktop consumed content as millennials start aging through different age boundaries.

Take a look at Smart Insights' member enewsletter sent out bi-weekly on desktop and how this is optimized for mobile.

For mobile:

The design is responsive to space it has to fill, easy to read and more importantly easy to scan for those busy marketers on the go.

Trend 5. Testing and deliverability need addressing further

Ultimately, this comes down to the background work your email marketers do to make sure the emails are opened with the correct design and delivered to the correct email folder. Without doing the background work, all the extra effort for design and copy are lost and your customer engagement rate decreases.

Rendering your emails is important to make sure your emails are viewable across all email clients. Taking the time to create a great design and engaging copy is a wasted time when your customer cannot see your amazing work. Rending gives your customer a customized experience, regardless of the email client they use.

Test your emails to make sure the design is perfective, the images load and the copy is exactly where you want / need it for engagement.

For a long time, deliverability of emails has also been important - going into 2018, our expert commentator, Chad White explains the importance of deliverability in the upcoming year.

Expert prediction

Chad White - Research Director at Litmus and Author of Email Marketing Rules

The new thing for email marketing in 2018 will be an old thing: email authentication. The standards for SPF and DKIM authentication are more than a decade old, while DMARC is newer. Despite boosting brands’ deliverability and protecting brands from being accessories to phishing attempts, all three standards see relatively low adoption. Only 69.4% of marketers have adopted SPF; 66.6% DKIM; and 46.5% DMARC, according to Litmus’ State of Email Deliverability report.

Adoption of authentication will surge in 2018 because of the emerging Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard, which will display brand logos next to properly authenticated messages. The carrot of that additional branding in the inbox will spur more brands to finally adopt SPF, DKIM, and DMARC—and reap the other benefits of authentication in the process.

Trend 6. Personalization and segmentation remain a high priority to continue sharing dynamic and engaging content

Dynamic content remains important year-on-year, to create a personalized experience for your customer with more relevant communications. Dynamic content refers to the HTML within your content which changes based on the recipient. This goes hand in hand with segmentation (list / location based emails). Together they provide the user with an email that is customized to them.

This is important creating a unique experience which makes the user feel valued by the company. The most basic and widely used form of personalization is inserting the name of the user into the email, rather than a standard 'dear customer' or a simple 'hi'. But this is no longer enough.

Our machine learning customer lifecycle shows the importance of dynamic content email - it contributes to engagement with loyal customers and lapsed customers. Without dynamic content, you aren't telling your customers why they need to come back or keep buying / interacting with your brand.

One rising trend we notice email specialists are excited about is the rise in using machine learning to achieve the highest level of personalization for the customer.

Expert Prediction

Kath Pay, CEO - Holistic Email Marketing 

I believe that achieving personalization using machine learning/AI will achieve an uptake in 2018. Email Marketers have struggled for years with manually segmenting lists – mainly because of the time it took, the inaccuracy of doing so (only achieving a one-to-many result) and the ROI being diminished for their efforts the more granular (and therefore the more personalized) they segmented. Likewise, dynamic content never really took off because of the effort required to set it up. Enter machine learning personalization. By using a third-party system, such as Jetlore and other similar solutions which plug into their existing ESP, that are capable of reading, and using web-based descriptions, marketers will not only be able to provide a 1:1 experience for their customers, but also gain valuable insights and predictions of their customer’s behaviour. For a small investment, significant increased conversions can be gained and a superior customer experience can be provided, contributing to increased CLTV.

Lee Davies - Online Marketing Manager, Pure360 (email marketing software)

For me, the key trend in 2018 will around personalization. Not simply ‘Hi {FirstName}’, that doesn’t cut it anymore. Consumers are becoming more clued up with the emails they receive and the content contained within them.

While the classic first name personalization in the subject line or opening line of an email was once a delighter, it’s now become commonplace, and expected, to the point where if you’re not addressing the recipient by their name they may lose trust.

Consumers know that as a brand you’re sending out tens, if not hundreds of thousands of emails in a campaign, but they are also aware that you should now know enough about them to ensure that the content you’re including is relative to them.

If you’re able to recommend products to them based on their purchase history, use social proof to back up suggested purchases, or send them a discount code for their birthday, that’s where you’ll begin to see increased engagement and reap the benefits.

The likely challenges around this that brands will encounter is not having enough information to provide these hyper-personalized email campaigns, but having the means to make sense of that data and ensure that with each campaign, every email is timely, relevant, and above all, useful to the recipient.

Guy Hanson, Senior Director, Professional Services Internation - Return Path

Chairman of the DMA Email Council

Email thinking in 2018 is going to be all about optimization—incremental program improvements to boost subscriber engagement and program revenue. In the short term, marketers will continue to remain highly focused on getting better at personalization and relevance—with 52 percent of marketers believing that improving email personalization is the most important goal of an email marketing strategy. However, it’s also an email tactic that is easy to get wrong and subscribers can respond very negatively when their names are misspelled, offer fails to match interest/season/location, the product has already been purchased, etc.

Other short-term areas of focus include marketing automation, better integration with CRM, better integration with other channels, and increased use of live/dynamic content.

In the longer term the big focus will be on machine learning/artificial intelligence—creating email programs that learn from past events, and then automatically adapt their approach to apply new strategies that are optimized to best serve customer needs.

April Mullen, Director of customer-first Marketing - Selligent

AI will become more prominent in 2018 for email marketing.

Just as what’s contained within a message is dynamic, the journey will begin to develop a dynamic path based on an individual consumer’s needs. Journeys won’t be a mapped and static experience with pathing. It’s analogous to building the sidewalk where the beaten down path has developed. Following the consumer and delivering on what s/he needs will begin to be possible as a result of AI.

Jen Capstraw - Consultant and strategist, Adobe, and President and Co-Founder, Women of Email

Email marketing is the fine wine of digital channels: It’s been around for ages, and its complexity evolves with time. The most sophisticated email technologies can be likened to your grand reserves—a limited selection of enterprise solutions that enable the most mature marketing strategies. Until recently, those without ample budgets have been getting the job done with the technology equivalent of Wild Irish Rose. But now some players in the ESP and cross-channel space are offering up very cool personalization and campaign orchestration options at affordable price points. And that’s a real game-changer for smaller companies with champagne tastes on a beer budget.

My passion is to approach brand as the most valuable asset of an organization. In working with board members around the world, I’ve learned what’s of interest to them. It’s not merely the creative aspect of brand, but much more the business administration side of branding that resonates at C-level. Boring? Yes! Getting a mandate to implement brand change. Challenging? Yes! Let me describe the relevance and ways to go about it – for change and for ongoing brand performance.

The most valuable intangible asset

Brands are an organization’s most important intangible asset, and their management is absolutely critical. According to Brand Finance, brands account for 18% of the top 500 global brands’ market-value (2017). Traditionally, brands have been created by agencies, and brand management has been undervalued. Fortunately, that mindset is now shifting, and I’m pleased to have been part of the effort to build awareness about the value of brands over the last 21 years.

Brand Performance Strategy for the C-suite

In our book, we’ve addressed 14 topics that are most common in our conversations around brands with board members. Let’s briefly mention 2 here.

1. How Brand Licensing and Brand Valuation Affects the C-Level Debate: When talking with board members, they want to understand how the financial value of brands can be grasped, and how it relates to the necessary investments over time. They do understand brand is their most valuable intangible asset. The conversation is never about the cost and hardly ever about the creative idea, it’s about maximising the impact over time and across scenarios, enabling them to make educated decisions. The concept of brand licensing works brilliantly for this purpose, as it demonstrates the direct connection between impact on turnover, profit and the value of branding.
2. Brand Governance and Management Return on Investment (ROI): How brands are being orchestrated over time, has the attention of senior management, much more than the creation of a brand. Branding is moving at a rapid pace. Organisations and consumers expect consistency and coherence. For brand governance, how you organize the branding, this means that re-assessment is needed from simply policing the brand to community thinking, and what this implies for an organization at strategic, tactical and operational level.

Example – Brand governance best practice models – from rigid control to community thinking.

Brand Management and Change Process That Drives ROI

The Brand Life Cycle Model translates our vision of the way you can organize your brand manifestation. Over the years, we’ve developed two proprietary processes that have achieved results for hundreds of organizations around the globe:

• Brand Performance Improvement
• Brand Change Delivery

Brand Life Cycle Model:

A closer look at the overarching Approach for Brand Performance Improvement

The way you organize your brand directly influences the brand manifestation. Our straightforward process facilitates decisions that impact your employees, customers, and prospects. Our process has been derived from our Brand Life Cycle Model. Within the model, brand organization has a central role. It then fans out through Brand Management and Brand Manifestation into Brand Performance across all touch points and channels. Continuous measurement across all dimensions provides the right insight for an optimised Brand Performance with all stakeholder groups.

Brand Performance Improvement process:

In assessing the current and desired situation, what we call the status quo, we use the Brand Performance Scan. We’ve benchmarked brand management at approximately 50 organizations, and created a scoring based on 5 dimensions of brand management – versus the benchmark.

The dimensions are:

• Internal organisation
• Brand strategy
• Brand development
• Brand implementation
• Brand evaluation

With the results of the Brand Performance Scan, an organization obtains the insights and actions to improve brand performance over time, which are then detailed in steps 2 to 4. A very specific insight we’ve obtained is that most brands have data on branding, the problem is they have so much they often don’t know where to start in order to translate that data into insights. This is where the development of a Brand Dashboard delivers a solution – which is step 4 in the Brand Performance Improvement process.

Example – Brand Dashboard

To summarise

Boards regard brand as their most valuable intangible asset and treat it as such. The top concerns of board and C-suite are usually questions about investments and associated spend over time along with risk, timing, and Return On Investment (ROI). Increasingly, they regard brand as one of their most valuable assets and hence start treating it as such.

Where traditionally branding started with an agency, to develop great ideas and design, we see that the value-impact versus spend, and the orchestration and delivery of the asset over time, have become crucial for boards. Brand managers have to find ways to navigate in this space, by speaking the same language and providing the instruments to facilitate the decision-making process. This is where the development of a comprehensive brand dashboard becomes instrumental, as boards understand KPI’s, ROI, facts and figures better than the beautiful creativity that surrounds the branding space, even though this is still important too.

This is where the development of a comprehensive brand dashboard becomes instrumental, as boards understand KPI’s, ROI, facts and figures better than the beautiful creativity that surrounds the branding space, even though this is still important too.

To find out more on brand performance, join Dr Dave Chaffey and Marc Cloostermann of VIM Group for their FREE webinar 'Future proof your brand' on November 1st. 

During the webinar you will learn:

• Which are the 4 main technology trends influence branding
• How these trends impact branding and brand management, and beyond
• What topics are board-room issues on brand management today
• About the data-driven insights from Brand Performance Scan and how this can be deployed in your daily practice
• About the shift from managing brands by policing, to community-orchestration

You can sign up for the webinar here.

Thanks to Marc Cloosterman for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Marc is CEO of VIM Group, a global (digital) brand implementation, and management consultancy. He is passionate about unleashing the value of brands, blogger and co-author of Future Proof Your Brand. You can connect on LinkedIn.

The B2B buying cycle is a long, arduous process. It includes multiple stakeholders with different agendas and an aversion to risk lingering from the last decade’s financial difficulties. Couple the aversion to risk with the new trend of buyers researching extensively before contacting the seller and you get today’s B2B selling environment. It demands a change in strategy from your marketing and sales teams.

Inbound marketing, a method of “pull” marketing, replaces traditional marketing's practice of appealing to the broadest possible audience in the hopes of capturing a single sale. Inbound marketing is more effective and substantially less costly than traditional marketing, and it meshes with new buying trends.

Inbound Marketing: The Definition

Inbound marketing leverages content marketing, email marketing, and marketing automation to build rapport and trust. Sellers nurture a relationship with prospects by offering valuable content that answers the most pressing questions from a specific target audience. Sales and marketing must work closely together to achieve the best results.

The objective of inbound is to attract potential buyers to your solution early in the buyer journey without “selling” to them. Instead, you tailor highly relevant content to your ideal buyer and continue to provide additional information during the lead nurturing and qualification process. You earn the attention of your potential customers rather than demand it.

• No selling or overt promotion.
• Don’t talk about yourself, talk about solutions to the prospect’s pain points.
• Inbound is not the same as advertising.

Inbound marketing lets you keep the momentum of the sale going. Its effectiveness is the result of your deep understanding of your audience that informs the relevance of your content.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is better than traditional outbound marketing and cold calling. Period. Companies that use inbound techniques generate three times the number of leads at 62% lower cost.

• A well-designed inbound campaign provides measurable, repeatable results.
• You obtain more qualified leads that are closer to the end of the sales cycle.
• You have many fewer unqualified leads for sales to waste time on.

Marketing automation easily tracks a variety of metrics that tell you how well your content is performing. Because it is so simple to set up and make changes to an online campaign, you can perform A/B testing; publish two different versions of almost any content to see which generates more leads and results in more sales.

Inbound marketing fits with the online research trend that has been growing for years. Over 70% of B2B buyers begin gathering information on their problem and potential solutions through general internet research. Their research may be 90% complete before they ever contact you. To build awareness, you need to generate content for them to find.

More advantages:

• You have continuous lead generation to your website.
• You receive insight into the ROI of your marketing budget.
• You can optimize your lead acquisition based on data.
• You learn more about your leads during their buyer’s journey.

In 2012, the average cost per lead for traditional marketing was $346 while the average cost per lead for inbound was $135, an impressive reduction that may be even larger now.

Inbound marketing increases your visibility online through the power of SEO and keyword research tied to your content. When you regularly publish new content, your search engine ranking improves even faster and you are found more easily and more often by prospective buyers.

It’s All About the Funnel

Inbound marketing uses the sales funnel to segment prospects and provide the right content. The buyer’s journey through the funnel is typically broken into three segments:

• Top of Funnel - TOFU
• Middle of Funnel - MOFU
• Bottom of Funnel - BOFU

Different types of content work best for each segment. For example, at the top of the funnel (TOFU) these types of free content work best:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Social posting
• Short videos
• Website pages

During their journey through the top of the funnel, you may begin gathering a small amount of information from prospects, enough to allow you to begin a nurturing campaign through email.

As they receive your nurturing sequence emails, you can begin to provide premium content in exchange for more information to help you understand the prospect’s business and pain points. Content for the middle of the funnel (MOFU) provides value. Prospects at this stage are willing to trade information to obtain:

• Ebooks
• White papers
• Case studies
• Webinars

As prospects reach the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), they have defined their problem and identified a short list of solutions. At this point, you want to provide content that verifies their choice. They need product specific information that overcomes any objections and helps them reach a decision.

• Testimonials
• Free trials
• Demos
• Product videos
• Competitor matrices

On the way through the funnel, you have gone from providing thought leadership and educational content to more specific content that helps prospects define their problems and educates them on potential solutions. Finally, you get the chance to “sell” and promote your offering as the best solution for their problems.

Getting Started with Inbound Marketing

Are you ready to do some inbound marketing?

1. Determine what questions your content needs to answer and develop a buyer persona, which is a well-researched example of your ideal customer.
2. Perform an audit of your existing content and identify any gaps.
3. Develop content to fill the gaps and repurpose old content in new ways.
4. Determine the best social media networks to share your content.
5. Identify the proper metrics to measure how well your content performs.

Content can come from anywhere.

Put several related blog posts together into an ebook. Create a webinar or video out of a white paper. If you have a page of FAQs, write a blog post or produce a podcast for each to provide a deeper answer.

Each piece of content can be shared on social media and premium content placed behind a form.  Create a landing page and link to it from your social media accounts or nurturing emails to give your prospect a chance to give you more information.

Use an analytics suite like Google Analytics to monitor and track the performance of your content and website. Use the results to fine-tune the content and measure the ROI on your marketing budget.

There is over a decade of statistics and evidence substantiating inbound marketing’s outperformance of traditional marketing. Inbound costs less, is more effective, reduces your time to close, and provides metrics to show you how well you spent your money.

The question isn’t “Why would your B2B company implement inbound marketing?”

The question is:  “Why wouldn’t you?”

Research by On Device found increased brand awareness, increased recall and increased "top of mind" awareness when the ad creatives were exposed to users across multiple devices.

This is very positive for advertisers, as the increases when customers saw the ads across multiple devices are large, even if it's overall not surprising that seeing an ad multiple times increases awareness. The scale of the increase is higher than expected, specifically for brand awareness, going from 12% on a single device to 21% on multiple devices.

The research has also found that ad fatigue is increasing in on-demand tv.

Over two in five respondents said that seeing fewer ads on paid tv and on-demand services, compared to watching "normal" TV, encourages them to pay for on-demand TV services.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Your ads should be shown across laptops/ computers, mobile devices and tablets when you're setting them up in Google AdWords, Facebook Ads (or other platform and providers) if you want to increase brand awareness and engagement, which should also help if you're pushing a special offer. It's not just the amount they see the ad, it's seeing the ad across devices that helps.

• Source: On Device Path-to-Purchase tracker 
• Sample: 500 smartphone users per market
• Recommended resource:

Implementing SEO Services for clients in a wide array of industries, I’ve learned to utilize some amazing tools for on-page SEO – and how much of a difference on-page SEO can make in helping your website rank high on search engines.

Why On-Page SEO Matters

On-Page SEO is critical because it influences the way in which Google and other search engines interpret the content on your page. Your goal is to ensure that your content is fully optimized for your chosen keywords so that the search engine is encouraged to rank you higher.

Without proper on-page SEO, it’s likely that your competitors who have optimized their pages will sail past you in the SERP’s, even with worse content and a less powerful backlink profile.

What Are The Most Important Parts of On-Page SEO?

Some elements of your on-page SEO are more important than others. Arguably the most important part is the actual keywords that you choose to target, if they are too competitive then you’ll never rank no matter how well you optimize your page.

Performing thorough keyword research is crucial, this will help you to identify the phrases with the most search volume and also the correct level of difficulty for your website to target.

Once you’ve picked out the keywords that you’re going to target, your on-page SEO should be centered around optimizing your page for those keywords and semantic alternatives. Critically, you’ll need to care for your title tag, header tags, image alts and optimization in the content itself.

1. SEOCrawler

SEOCrawler is one of the industries leading on-page tools and is trusted by over 5,000 businesses to help them optimize for their chosen keywords.

Their Site Auditor tool allows you to analyze your page with just a single click, showing you the page speed, duplicate tags, duplicate content, keyword optimization and broken links. Work that would have taken you hours of manual work now only takes a few seconds.

That’s the true value of a tool like SEOCrawler - you can automate a process that would have otherwise taken hours of manual work. You save yourself time, and therefore you save yourself money each month.

The Site Auditor will essentially give you a checklist of improvements that you can make to each page on your website; it’s like having your in-house SEO consultant. Once you do make those changes, you can track the results in their Rank Tracker, to see how the rankings for your main keywords change over the coming days and weeks.

2. Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer

I’ve already explained why keywords are critical to any SEO campaign, they give you a target to aim for, and they allow you to optimize your on-page SEO for that goal. But keyword research can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you only have the Google AdWords tool.

That’s why tools like Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer have come to the market. It allows you to find new keywords for you to target, it shows you all of the backlink data for the ranking pages, and it even gives you a single score so you can easily compare keywords.

But the magic of the Ahrefs’ KW tool is in the way that you can find new keywords. Most KW tools work by requiring you first to submit a list of seed keywords which the tool will use to find similar phrases that you could rank for.

However, Ahrefs’ has this and much more. Most importantly, they allow you to find keywords that your competitors or other websites rank for. So, you can input a domain rather than a seed keyword and see a report of different keywords that they rank for.

This is ideal if your website or business covers a range of topics or services. They also have another great option which is to see similar keywords that existing pages rank for. With this, you submit a single seed keyword and can see other keywords that the ranking pages also rank for.

3. Copyscape

If you’re ordering content from a writer or a content creation company, then it’s critical that you use a tool like Copyscape to check if that content is unique. Nowadays you can’t get away with publishing duplicate content; Google cracked down on that game a long time ago.

Instead, you need to ensure that your writers are creating truly unique content that hasn’t been copied from another source. Copyscape allows you to copy and paste your content into their system and it will check it against all of their records to see if it’s unique.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is one of the oldest and most important SEO tools that our industry has ever seen. This innovative little tool is a crawler that will through all of your URL’s and fetch onsite elements so that you can analyze them.

This allows you to find broken links, ensure redirects were properly created, analyze your page titles, generate XML sitemaps and even discover duplicate content. It’s one of the most powerful on-page SEO tools simply because it has so many features and the amount of data that it can give you is mind-blowing.

5. Google Developers PageSpeed Insight

More and more users are using the internet through their phones and with that often comes a slower connection and a different screen size. Google knows this, and that’s why they use page speed as one of their key ranking factors.

Nobody wants to visit a page that loads slowly, especially if you’re on a mobile connection. Therefore, you need to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to optimize your pages to load as quickly as possible.

The Google PageSpeed Insight tool will analyze your page and point out key areas where you can improve your page so that it will load faster and therefore rank higher in the SERP’s.

6. Moz On-Page Grader

Finally, we have the Moz On-Page Grader, a tool which analyzes your page and compares it to their existing checklist of SEO factors. This tool will output a result that grades your page overall and also on a more granular level so that you can make improvements.

The great thing about all of Moz’s tools is that they are incredibly simple to use and have an intuitive and clean design that makes them ideal for beginners. If you’re looking for an easy to understand the on-page report, then this is a good start.

Thanks to Tim Brown for sharing their advice and opinion in this post. Tim is a Web Designer and SEO Specialist who runs a small agency Tim B Design - and loves helping small to mid-size businesses with their website design and driving traffic.

China: it's the market everyone wants a piece of.  With over 1.5 billion people, your target market is here, even if you aren’t. But, entering the market doesn’t make it just start raining money.

Download our Bussiness Member Resource – China Digital Marketing Strategy Guide

Our China Marketing Strategy Guide is a complete guide to help you understand China’s digital marketing landscape. This guide will give you a better understanding of China’s biggest online marketing channels and how they operate.

Access the China digital marketing strategy guide

Chinese consumers are bombarded by businesses that want them, both homegrown and foreign.  For your business to get a piece of the pie, you need to come in with a well thought out, meticulously researched plan.

No one is saying it's easy.  But any demographics report will tell you how much your bottom line could benefit.

These 8 tips will get you heading in the right direction and ready for marketing to a Chinese audience.

Do Your Research:

The analytics tools at your disposal in this market are the things you could only dream of in the rest of the world.  Want a cross section of any brand's TMall/Taobao search volume, customer spending, location, etc, etc., etc.?  You can have it with a personal account.  You can even share what you find on social media platforms. Imagine your ability to strategize with the options for businesses.

Plus, if your target market shops on marketplaces like TMall and JD.com, why take the time to develop an eCommerce app? Focus your efforts and optimize your store there instead.

Use the information available about hobbies, spending level, and geographic location to understand your shoppers and craft brand stories that will entertain and engage them. That’s how your company will come out ahead of other entrants.

Dior consumers’ age & gender on TMall/Taobao: 2011-2015

Be Mobile

Mobile use in China, particularly in terms of eCommerce and social media, makes a lot of other markets look like they're trapped in the 1990's.

Double 11, the major e-shopping holiday in the country, did over US $9 billion GMV in 24 hours.  Over 40% of that was mobile.

WeChat, the major player in the social scene, had 600 million active accounts in Q2 2015.  25% of those people check the app over 30 times a day. (source) Even in B2B, the app’s penetration rate (north of 95%) makes it an easy way to do repeat sales and CRM.

In short, if you're not mobile-friendly or ready to jump into the wide world of WeChat, make it a priority.

A screenshot of the Starbucks Official WeChat page, where they take advantage of the built-in pinned menu options, which can support multiple languages.

Baidu is not Google.  WeChat is not Whatsapp.

It's a mistake to try and think of these platforms as "the Chinese Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp" or "the Chinese Google".  Perhaps at one point it was true, but now they have come into their own.

WeChat is a messaging platform that is completely private.  If you see a photo or video shared by a friend and comment, only people friends with both of you will see that interaction.  Everyone else sees just the photo.  For businesses, official accounts can send out photos, articles, videos, games, audio messages, and chat with followers--all through a private conversation with each person. Businesses can also accept payment and do customer service directly through the app.

With Baidu, SEO is a completely different beast.  The way the first page is structured is so unnatural that a heat map of will show users habitually clicking next page to find organically high-ranking content.  What shows up instead?  Baidu Answers, Baidu Baike (an encyclopedia), Baidu Shopping, paid ads, etc. Very un-Google.

A screenshot of Baidu, highlighting the Brand Zone. Both the top results and the right sidebar are in the zone

Email is dead.  Long live video.

While we're at it, apps are dead too.  Long live stories.

The only kind of companies that see any kind of open rate for email campaigns are B2B, and even then it is far lower than what you get elsewhere.  And Chinese users don't often download a company-specific app, especially if that company can be found on TMall or WeChat.  You have to find new ways to engage.

Chinese consumers want content-driven campaigns.  Baidu wants content-driven search.  When you come to China, expect to devote resources not just to translating what you have, but creating new content with extra emphasis on your company's story.  Spend time crafting a story that sets you apart and expressing it both verbally and visually.

Video is the new king.  Everywhere from WeChat to TMall, pages with video are not only getting more clicks, they get more conversions. Why? The story drives brand recognition which helps page viewers engage the first time they see it and remember the next time they get to a product search engine like TMall.

Screenshot of a video on a Tmall Global store selling baby formula

Learn to swing the B.A.T.

It stands for Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent--the big three.  And it also has a lot to with with why apps are dead.  Each of those companies has a widely used app and in some cases, an app store, with Baidu's being the biggest.  None list the apps of the others in their stores, which means most mobile users have more than one app store downloaded.  Second, Baidu doesn't index WeChat content or Alibaba shopping results.  Third, WeChat (the app that's always had a built-in QR scanner) won't scan Alibaba QR codes (or vice versa).

They don't interact with each other, but consumers interact with them all, which means you have to too.

In order to successfully market in this environment, you have to get content on all three and manage them all independently.  It also includes their different payment methods.

The Alibaba QR code from the Starbucks TMall homepage

Don't be afraid to take things offline

We are all digital marketers, but the O2O sector in China is growing.  In services, travel in particular, it's an obvious solution. Buy online, claim later. Other services, like B2B service providers, event managers, and educational professionals can implement similar systems and reap the rewards of creating convenience for their clients.

As a digital marketer, think of this option as an extension of your social media presence.  Because, on WeChat, it is.  There is no difference for your followers between the account that advertises the deal, the account they pay, and the account that shares the event photos afterwards.

You can use the same ideas on a standard eCommmerce site, like censh.com. They offer real-time chat with employees, categorized by store.

Communicate

We've talked about the need to create content to drive your marketing in China.  This tip is a little different, but not following it will definitely cost you sales.

Make sure you have a team available to chat with customers.  Contact forms?  You'll get almost no responses.  Chat buttons and callback systems?  Customers will call and chat, asking questions sometimes for 20 minutes or more before committing to a purchase.  Your customer care team is the difference between them buying and walking away.  It's vital.

Not as vital, but still important, are KOL's.  They're often frowned upon, if not downright abandoned, by a lot of marketers outside this country.  In China, they matter.  Take uber-famous actress Fan Bing Bing.  According to Ad Age, at one point Xinhua news estimated she had over 50 endorsement deals.  With numbers that high, she has to be making a difference for the brands she represents.

The homepage of L'Oreal's TMall store, September 2015

Get help if you need it

There's a reason people spend their lives studying and working in China.  It's got a steep learning curve and success requires a depth and breadth of knowledge that is unparalleled in other global regions.

If your company doesn't have the capabilities to research, understand, plan, and execute a marketing strategy in China, get help.  Not just with finding the numbers, often in tools that only have a Mandarin language UI, but with converting them into coherent strategies.

Let’s go through an in-depth strategic example. Every year, online sales drop across industries in February because of Chinese New Year, when people return home and see their families. Gifts aren’t a typical part of this tradition, with the exception of hongbao, red envelopes filled with cash. So, it isn’t an ideal month to open a store. It may, however, be a good time to try and capitalize on the electronic hongbao trend and WeChat usage by offering electronic gift cards you can get through an in-app game or a lottery. That’s what Tencent and Alibaba did this year.

Ahead of Digistrategy - London World Forum 2017 in December, we interviewed Rachel Cooper, Director of Global Content Strategy at GlaxoSmithKline, to find out how she manages effective content on a global scale and how she assesses ROI.

Rachel one of many senior keynote speakers at Digistrategy 2017, London on December 14th. 

Effective content on a global scale

1. As the Director of Global Content Strategy & Editorial at GSK, how do you ensure the quality and effectiveness of different types of content at a business with your global scale?

The primary aim of our global content and editorial team is to simplify and strengthen our storytelling. We do this through building relationships and providing guidance on storylines and editorial development.

Our global content flatplan – held by our team – outlines content priorities, themes and campaigns by week and month; and maps out the content we’ll share to support those priorities. This is shared with communications colleagues so they can align content behind these themes.

We have developed editorial principles for our key channels which provide guidance on the type of story for each channel; and the tone of voice, style and visuals which you should consider for each channel. These principles are designed to drive consistency and quality.

Each content manager is aligned to one of our three businesses. They collaborate with communications colleagues to co-develop and deliver content. Content managers effectively act like editors by crafting and refining content so it is right for the channel and audience.

Beyond our global channels, there is a network of regional and country channels. Through forums such as regional content hubs, we support our local communicators on their content development and delivery.

Marketing communications plans

2. What is your view on the value of having a content marketing or audience engagement strategy and plan for each business area. Should this be defined as a separate document to achieve focus, or integrated into other communications plans?

Content development, content marketing and audience engagement strategy should absolutely be integrated into other communications plans. Digital is only one part of the story so it’s vital to consider it in parallel with other channels. This integrated approach is also essential to ensuring consistency and coherence of message across your communications. At GSK, we collaborate with communications colleagues to co-create and deliver content – rather than the digital team developing content end to end. So it’s vital that everyone with a comms objective considers how digital can help to achieve it – and has the support to do so.

The power of storytelling

3. I believe you’re a strong believer (that’s a lot of belief) in the power of using digital media for storytelling by brands. How do you empower your staff to use this technique?

Digital channels offer an unparalleled opportunity for businesses like GSK to take our message direct to patients, consumers, healthcare professionals, current and prospective employees, and the wider public. We can tell our story in our own words.

And there are so many brilliant stories at a healthcare company like GSK – from the scientist who spent 30 years researching a potential malaria vaccine to how we put the stripes in toothpaste. Our digital channels give us a fantastic platform for bringing these stories to life and taking audiences ‘behind the science’. It’s our job to make sure that other communications colleagues feel as excited about this as we do.

There are processes we have put in place to achieve this. Monthly content hubs with communications colleagues from each of our three businesses are a forum in which we can co-develop and plan content campaigns. They are a chance for us to brainstorm the stories we want to tell and how we will source and develop them.

Data also helps. By sharing insights which show that powerful storytelling generates stronger engagement, we can encourage and empower people to use this technique. And the more we create great stories, the more other people want to get involved. For example, our #FacesOfGSK series – which profiles the amazing people around our company – has prompted people to get in touch with their fascinating tales.

Content Marketing ROI

4. As the focus on Content Marketing has increased there has been more discussion on how to achieve ROI from Content Marketing. What guidance do you give your teams at GSK as to how to assess Content Marketing ROI?

Within communications at GSK, given we operate in a highly regulated industry, ROI is about reputation and perception, not about driving sales. This is challenging to measure but a combination of global stakeholder surveys, campaign measurement and digital KPIs can help.

Our insights colleagues have developed a framework which encourages communicators and content managers to set clear objectives for a content campaign and KPIs for each piece of content. There are four measures – familiarity, engagement, conversion, and advocacy – which are built into our content plan templates. This compels people to analyse why they are developing a content campaign and to interrogate what each piece of content is designed to achieve.

By aligning content and insights this way, we are gradually encouraging our communications colleagues to consider the value of what they are creating – and the return on investment. Hopefully, this moves us away from “developing content for content’s sake” and towards developing content that brings value to our audience and our business.

Digital Centre of Excellence

5. How do decide which digital marketing activities are best to centralise (for example in a Digital (Content) Marketing Centre of Excellence and which are best for skills to be developed in brand and product marketers?

Our global digital communications team operates like a ‘centre of excellence’. We set direction on content strategy; we govern the channels and ensure they incorporate the latest technological advances; we gather and analyze data, and we champion digital skills development.

The skills which we look to develop in communications and marketing colleagues are those attributes which will help them to deliver compelling content. So we look to strengthen their skills in copywriting and visual development for digital; as well as building their understanding in how to capture and use metrics. We also encourage communications colleagues to get more audience-led in their planning, and to plan further ahead.

Disruptive technologies

6.Which disruptive technologies are you evaluating which you are most excited about applying to content marketing across GSK in the future?

I’m not so much of a content marketer – I’m a journalist by training and trade! But, I am excited by the potential of immersive technologies which enable audiences to participate in and shape a story. It would be fascinating to see how this could be applied in a healthcare context.  The increasing sophistication of targeting is also exciting. Behavioural targeting enables us to be more efficient in our targeting, and drive breadth and depth of content engagement.

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