Whether that’s their first name or generic fallback terms (e.g. “tech-head”), these tags automatically fill in the relevant data in your email subject lines.
When recipients see their name or other personalized detail in your emails, they’ll more inclined to open them.
Even if you are not going to use the person’s name, mention something that is relevant to them.
For example, you could use dates that matter to them, like their birthday or anniversary.
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Growth Hack #1 – 2X More Sign-ups by Predicting Customer Objections:
CrazyEgg tested the following modifications to their signup process. As a result, they got twice as many people to give them credit card info:
1. Added an FAQ entry, “Why do you need my credit card for a free trial?” – (to prevent multiple free trials for one person).
2. Added an explanation: “Nothing will be billed for 30 days. You can cancel at any time.”
3. Added a list of companies that use their product.
4. Order total: Changed from “$49 per month” to “$0 for 30 days” + small text “after 30 days: $49 per month”.
Crazy Egg installed a survey tool on the checkout page so they could understand what objections were on the minds of visitors right there. This helped to create the FAQ box and subsequent steps to counter those objections and get people to convert.
Growth Hack #3 – 3 Steps to Earn 192% More Google Shopping Ads Revenue:
With just a few steps, you can make more from your Google Shopping Ads. Here’s how:
1. Analyze your query data and pick out long tail (more than 3 words long) search terms that are product-specific and generate the highest volume and revenue. Raise your bids on those terms.
2. Set up remarketing ads to those who:
– Viewed basket, didn’t commit to purchase
– Viewed a high ‘detail-view’ to checkout-rate product
– Viewed website for over 4 minutes in one session
– Viewed site in the past 5, 10 and 15 days
– Viewed site from high converting location
– Viewed site from high converting device
– Viewed site and in top lifetime value segment
3. Segment your data by mobile devices, gender, age, geography and find who generates the highest ROI. Then focus your ads specifically on the most valuable segment.
What messaging app is the most popular in the world, with over 1.5 billion users across 180 countries and 60 billion messages sent daily?
All together now: WhatsApp!
Image source: https://www.recode.net/
Yes, WhatsApp seems in every way to be Facebook’s newest darling acquisition and the platform for marketers to watch in the near future.
The introduction of the WhatsApp Business API was just one step in the right direction for those looking to advertise on WhatsApp.
Then in August, Facebook introduced ads that open up a pre-loaded message on WhatsApp.
Similar to their Messenger ads, these let users communicate directly with businesses from Facebook to WhatsApp.
Now it’s your turn to reach the massive audience on WhatsApp with your Facebook ads.
We’re explaining why you should care about WhatsApp advertising.
We’ll also describe how to connect Facebook with WhatsApp and launch these types of Facebook ads.
When you’re able to expand your reach to the engaged and international user base on WhatsApp through direct communication, you’ll see a boost to your bottom line.
Additionally, you’ll be better prepared when even more opportunities for advertising on WhatsApp inevitably emerge.
Why WhatsApp Matters for Businesses
WhatsApp is the leading messaging platform in all but 25 countries in the world.
This makes it an excellent tool for reaching international customers and any that are not already using other popular apps like WeChat and Messenger.
Image source: https://www.messengerpeople.com/
Some major markets that prefer WhatsApp include India, the UK, and the APAC region.
In India alone, WhatsApp is the first choice for messaging for 96% of people that own a smartphone (an impressive 97% of the total population).
Though the U.S. still hasn’t adopted WhatsApp to the same extent, Facebook’s acquisition of the app in 2014 is helping to change that.
In the meantime, it’s clear that the messaging platform has an impressive international audience.
These users have also proven to be engaged.
Image source: https://blog.whatsapp.com/
For marketers considering Facebook WhatsApp advertising, these engagement statistics matter:
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Growth Hack #1 – Find Your Website’s Worst Performing Posts:
Most of the time, we like to look for the most popular pages on our website. This is especially helpful for coming up with new blog post ideas.
But opportunity also lies in identifying your worst performing pages. This process is how you find holes in your content and search engine marketing strategy.
Ideally, you want to keep prospects on your site long enough to convert them from lead or customer. For this reason, you need to do the following:
– Go to the Behavior tab in the Google Analytics menu.
– Click Exit Pages under the Site Content menu.
This process will show you the pages where prospects most often exit your website. With that information, you can then analyze these pages and look for ways to keep prospects engaged with your website.
You can then decide the right strategy to make these pages more engaging: change the design or re-write the content. Which you choose will depend on how important the page is.
Growth Hack # 2 – Boost Performance 680% by Using One Column For Your Landing Pages:
Marketing Experiments did a test where they compared two variants of a landing page.: One with a main column and a column to the right, and one with a single column.
The single column variant outperformed the two column design by a stunning 680.6%!
And with predictions of holiday sales set to increase between 4.3% and 4.8%, it really does seem like it’s actually the most wonderful time of year.
However, all of those sales and the huge amounts of potential this time of year means holiday marketing can become a hassle.
The stress of keeping up with the competition while optimizing your own holiday marketing campaigns can make even the most zen marketer want to tear their hair out.
There’s social media to monitor.
Email marketing newsletters that need to go out.
Promotions and associated materials need to be confirmed and scheduled.
With all this going on with your holiday marketing, it helps to have something extra at your disposal.
So, we’re taking a look at the three best marketing tools you can use this season.
With these platforms at your disposal, your holiday marketing campaigns can be both more successful and easier to manage.
It’s time to stop pulling your hair out and start enjoying this time of year.
1. Use Chatbots for Holiday Social Media Marketing and Monitoring
Self-serve chatbot tools like Snaps let you create a branded chatbot and deploy it on the messaging platform your customers are using.
Here are just a few ways you can use a chatbot during the holidays as a social media marketing tool:
Answer customer service questions.
Have a personalized conversation with users and suggest products they can purchase right from the message app to boost conversion.
Direct ads to open a chat with your bot to generate new leads.
Image source: https://snaps.io/
Chatbots automate your holiday social media marketing campaigns so you can spend less time monitoring your platforms and more time focusing on higher-priority tasks.
2. Automate Your Holiday Email Marketing
No holiday marketing campaign is complete without email.
You can use holiday email marketing for running promotions or contests, re-engaging customers, and winning back abandoned carts – just to name a few ideas.
However, holiday email marketing can often be time-consuming and tedious.
There’s the need to create an eye-catching newsletter design, fill it with engaging content, and then schedule it at the right time.
Take some of the stress out of the process by automating your holiday email marketing.
Email marketing platforms like MailChimp have a feature that lets you schedule an email message based on a certain trigger or time.
For example, Live Love Polish used MailChimp email automation to re-engage the 9% of their customers that enter their email but don’t complete check out.
Image source: https://emailmonks.com/
During the holidays, messages like this can be the key to winning back customers, getting new leads, and upselling.
And, thanks to automation, getting the right content delivered at the right time is even easier.
3. Social Media Scheduling Tools Can Save the Day
Some of the best social media marketing tools are those that assist with scheduling.
You can rely on these social media scheduling tools to make your holiday marketing campaigns less stressful with a simple, set-it-and-forget-it approach.
Image source: https://hootsuite.com/
HootSuite is considered by many to be the best social media marketing tool for managing and scheduling across accounts.
You can create your content then input it into the platform as far ahead as you want.
No more scrambling to throw together a last-minute Facebook post or forgetting to Tweet one day.
Social media scheduling tools like HootSuite can maintain your presence on these accounts during the hectic holiday time period.
Not only does this let you focus less on the nitty-gritty logistics, but it also makes holiday social media marketing campaigns more efficient and optimized.
You can spot any gaps in your content while ensuring you’re reaching customers consistently throughout this important season.
With a social media scheduling tool at their disposal, they organized their strategy to boost engagement and reach.
Here are the results they saw:
Tripled their social media following in two years
Engaged in important customer interactions that shaped policy and emphasized the organization’s mission
Increased digital reach by 85%
Sure, your organization may not have nearly that many accounts.
However, you can still enjoy similar benefits that the NYC Government enjoyed.
Consider using a scheduling tool for holiday marketing campaigns involving a countdown, for example.
Each day, you can have a post that counts down to New Years.
Some of these could be promotional offers, while others could just be a funny or unique message.
This campaign becomes far easier to manage when you’re able to set it up ahead of time with a social media scheduling tool.
Your Best Holiday Marketing Awaits
The holiday season is a busy time for everyone personally.
You have to deal with family in town, planning your holiday trip, and getting the perfect gifts for friends and relatives.
Don’t add even more stress to the holidays professionally.
With the best marketing tools by your side, you can enhance campaigns while making your own life easier.
From automated email marketing to the best social media marketing tools, the above are just three ways to have your best holiday season.
You know what can make your life even easier next year?
Leaving your holiday marketing to the professionals.
Working with a digital marketing agency can be the ultimate way to sit back and finally understand why everyone calls this the most wonderful time of year.
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Growth Hack #1 – Timing is Everything:
The Taktical team usually sends cold emails at 9:00-9:30 AM. The average email open rate was 55%.
Then we thought, what if we sent emails a bit earlier so that when a person wakes up, an email is already in the inbox? The email’s subject, body, and everything else stayed the same. Only the send time changed.
Result:
Open rate dropped down by 30%. We switched back to 9:00-9:30 AM. The average email open rate got back to 55%.
Lesson learned: Just because you send an email earlier does not mean your prospect will open it.
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Growth Hack # 2 – SEO Rich Snippet Hack for E-Commerce Sites:
We all know that urgency increases conversion rates.
People are more inclined to make a purchase if they see a limited stock level, or something that says “Buy now – the offer will expire soon!”
The Limited Availability JSON-LD Code will help inform the search engines that you are running a time-limited sale, so they could include this info into your rich snippets.
Growth Hack #3 – Add WhatsApp to Your Social Share Buttons:
BuzzFeed tested WhatsApp’s share button and found that 38% more people share via WhatsApp than via Twitter! In fact, WhatsApp shares were almost the same level as Facebook and Instagram.
Maybe that`s because WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users(vs Twitter`s 335M), plus the open rate is over 90%.
Growth Hack # 2 – How Negative Headlines Lead to +63% CTR:
Outbrain is the leading native content advertiser. They compared 65,000 paid blog article advertisement titles that contained positive (“always” or “best”) superlatives, negative (“never” or “worst”) superlatives and no superlatives.
The result?
Headlines with negative superlatives performed 30% better than ones without superlatives.
And the average click-through rate on headlines with negative superlatives was a staggering 63% higher than that of their positive counterparts.
Growth Hack #3 – Copy the Onboarding Flows of Famous Apps:
Don’t copy brand name onboarding/activation flows because they’re famous; copy them because THEY WORK.
Major apps with massive user bases have already trained people to follow a set activation flow. Your new users are probably already their existing users!
So, let them do what they’re used to and set up your onboarding to be similar to the major players’.
Whether it comes down to companies with bad marketing strategies or just bad ideas, these mistakes are the ones we’ll never forget from 2018.
This round-up isn’t just to bring attention to exceptionally poor advertising.
Use these examples of companies with bad marketing to also improve your own strategy.
Getting acquainted with the worst marketing campaigns of 2018 puts you in a position to do better.
With a combination of marketing best practices and an understanding of what bad marketing ideas are made of, you can make sure to never end up on a list like this one.
In the meantime, though, read on to see what made our picks for the unbelievably bad marketing campaigns of this year.
1. Heineken Accused of Racism After Their Bad Marketing Campaign
Image source: https://www.marketwatch.com
In their “Lighter is Better” campaign, Heineken created an ad in which a bartender slides a beer past three African-American people at a bar.
It comes to a stop in front of a lighter-skinned woman, and the words “Sometimes, lighter is better” appear on the screen.
It’s pretty easy to tell just from that summary that this was going to a pretty bad marketing idea.
Reactions on Twitter came from both customers and well-known celebrities, like hip-hop star Chance the Rapper.
In response, Heineken pulled the ad and released a public apology.
However, this could not undo the damage already done to the beer company’s reputation thanks to their bad marketing campaign.
So what could they have done to avoid the fiasco?
Well, you would think playing the ad in front of almost anyone before release would’ve been enough to prevent it from launching.
Image source: https://www.dailyedge.ie
However, companies with bad marketing moments like these do help uncover a few marketing best practices.
Consider screening your ad to an outside group that has no stake in your company or to a department that did not play a role in its creation.
When those charged with critiquing an ad can approach it from an objective standpoint, you’re better positioned to catch mistakes or negative implications.
It takes more than one set of eyes to catch the mistakes that could lead to a bad marketing campaign.
2. Bad Timing Led to the Milwaukee Bucks’ Marketing Campaign Fail
Image source: https://www.businessinsider.com
The Milwaukee Bucks were celebrating their 50th anniversary when the news broke that head coach Jason Kidd was fired.
As a result, anyone visiting the team’s Twitter page was greeted with balloons that appeared over headlines like “The Bucks have relieved Jason Kidd of Head Coaching Duties”.
With it appearing like the Milwaukee Bucks were celebrating the firing of Kidd, it’s no wonder this goes down as one of the worst marketing campaigns of the year.
The marketing team quickly pulled the birthday announcement from their page.
Image source: https://twitter.com/
However, it wasn’t quick enough to stop tons of fans and followers from voicing their incredulous responses publicly.
Make sure you manage the timing of your marketing campaigns wisely.
Communication among department and teams is crucial here so you don’t end up missing a major announcement or update that could affect your marketing strategy.
3. Domino’s Pizza Took a Tattoo Marketing Campaign Too Far
Image source: https://www.bbc.com
Usually, a marketing campaign over-performing is a good thing.
But, in the case of Domino’s, their tattoo initiative quickly became one of the worst marketing campaigns of the year because of an overwhelming number of entries.
When the campaign first launched in Russia, it promised fans 100 free pizzas per year for 100 years.
The only condition was that they had to get the company’s logo tattooed on their body and share it on social media.
What Domino’s didn’t anticipate was the flood of participants.
This level of engagement threatened both the profitability of the campaign and the bottom line of the business.
Domino’s couldn’t risk giving out so many free pizzas for life to so many customers so had to cancel the campaign.
They earned a spot among companies with bad marketing strategies because of their lack of foresight.
By underestimating the popularity of their deal, Domino’s took a hit to their reputation and their revenue.
Anticipate high engagement when you’re launching a marketing campaign that includes a coupon or incentive.
And, make sure that whatever you’re offering is scalable enough so as to not hurt your bottom line no matter how popular your campaign becomes.
4. The Worst Marketing Campaign on Snapchat Cost the Platform $800 Million
Image source: https://eastwind.es
When the mobile game app “Would You Rather?” launched an ad campaign on Snapchat, they made one of the worst marketing campaign mistakes.
One of the ads featured Rihanna and Chris Brown, asking users if they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown.
It was a clear reference to the 2009 incident in which Chris Brown was convicted of assaulting Rihanna.
At the time, it was one of the most high-profile cases of domestic violence.
Seven years later, this Snapchat campaign seemed to be making light of it for their own gain.
Image source: https://www.marketwatch.com
Rihanna reacted on social media, saying:
“Now SNAPCHAT I know you already know you ain’t my fav app out there! But I’m just trying to figure out what the point was with this mess!. . .I’d love to call it ignorance but I know you ain’t that dumb. You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims and made a joke of it.”
Immediately following this blast, Snapchat shares dropped 4%, costing the company $800 million.
Though the platform apologized for what was clearly a bad marketing idea from the get-go, the damage was done.
The reactions that continued to roll in after the ad was deleted cost the platform even more.
As a result, shares dropped again for a total loss of over $1.2 billion.
Basically the biggest lesson to learn here is to be respectful of your audience.
Avoid inflammatory or offensive language that could not only damage your reputation, but also severely upset customers.
5. H&M’s Monkey Sweatshirt Was a Bad Marketing Idea From the Start
Image source: https://www.washingtonpost.com
At the beginning of 2018, H&M launched a new collection of child sweatshirts on its UK website.
Where they went wrong during this campaign was with the choice of imagery.
The retailer chose a product image that featured an African-American boy wearing a sweatshirt with the words, “Coolest Monkey In the Jungle”.
Instead, it caused massive fan reaction across Twitter.
Additionally, both the Weeknd and G-Eazy pulled their support from the retailer and issued public statements condemning the ad.
The insensitivity and lack of thought that went into this idea places it among the bad marketing campaigns that defined 2018.
This is another instance in which sharing a marketing idea among objective viewers can help avoid major mistakes.
It doesn’t take a discerning eye to spot the concerns that can lead to the worst marketing campaigns.
How to Not Suffer from Bad Marketing Like These Companies
Every example listed above of the worst marketing campaigns of 2018 could’ve been avoided.
Maybe it comes down to getting an outside opinion before launch.
Or perhaps it’s ensuring that a campaign can scale without damaging both a brand’s reputation and bottom line.
It may even be worth it to discuss your options with a professional marketing agency that has the track record of success.
Keeping in mind marketing best practices definitely helps avoid bad marketing ideas.
Having examples of companies with bad marketing strategies also lets you learn from their mistakes.
Just don’t do what these guys did, employ some common sense, and you can make sure to never land on a list of the worst marketing campaigns of the year.
