Facebook’s Algorithm: 3 Must-Know Changes

Facebook is always tinkering with its algorithms and it can be challenging to keep track of everything. This summer, Facebook’s key updates included demoting spammers, screening out fake news, testing AI with a personal assistant “M,” as well as bringing emojis and new filters to Facebook Messenger.

The name of the game for Facebook advertising is quickly becoming Facebook Messenger. As Facebook’s newsfeed becomes more and more saturated with content, the platform will be expanding its options for how to reach your customers. It will deprioritize slow-loading pages and is giving you the tools to compete with deeper insights into your fans, non-fans, and closest followers.

In this blog, you’ll find the three things you need to know about the recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm.

1. Messenger Ads are now Available Worldwide

Initially tested in Australia and Thailand, brands can now reach Facebook users (all 2.01 billion of them!) directly through their Facebook messenger app. These ads will appear in a user’s inbox, according to Facebook, based on “how many threads a user has, the size of their phone’s physical screen and the pixel density of the display.” Messenger ads come with a “sponsored” label in the home tab of the Messenger app. They are formatted to look like a typical newsfeed ad, including the headline, copy, image, and calls to action. Users can then click through to any website or destination you select when setting up the promotion. If you’re on the receiving side of a Messenger ad, there’s no way to permanently turn off ads, but a user can tap the downward arrow in the bottom right of an ad and see options to report or hide it.

This has big implications for marketers looking to expand to a global audience. Start to think through your customer segmentation strategy. Be willing to branch out from your traditional Facebook strategy and beat the crowds sure to flock to this new tool in due time.

See Powerful New Ad Metrics and Page Insights

Facebook has unveiled some new, deep, and robust marketing analytics that will have big implications for your marketing strategy. Besides making your analytics page easier to read and digest, Facebook has some hot new data, fresh off the presses.

First, Facebook will break down reach between fans and non-fans. Now, you can see who shares your posts the most. Why is this important? With this information, you can measure the value of your current fans. If you’re getting more traction with non-fans, this should help you adjust your sales strategy: it’s possible that your so-called “fans” aren’t evangelists. How can you activate them to advocate on your behalf? If your non-fans are IRL ( in real life) your biggest fans, what can you do to entice them to convert as customers?

Next, Facebook is giving you a window into when your fans are online. Yes, there are plenty of tools that tell you your optimal posting time (and often these tools contradict themselves). Now, you can gauge optimal times for your page yourself. Using historical data, you can see the average amount of fans who saw posts in an hour on any given day, as well as the average number of people who saw any posts on Facebook at that hour.

Last but not least, Facebook has finally included official statistics for engagement rate with statuses, photos, videos, or links. Refine what content works best for your brand, and get the most lift from optimum posting times. Paired with your engagement platform and CRM system, your sales funnel has never looked brighter.  

Newsfeed Prioritizes Fast-Loading Web Pages

This summer, Facebook’s Newsfeed article has started to give a boost to faster loading web pages—and punish sites with long load times. What does this mean for marketers? It’s not enough to have the right image, compelling copy, and a smart targeting strategy. If you’re trying to funnel an audience to a sign-up page or to learn more about your product, your website must be optimized.

How does Facebook determine if the speed of a page is too slow? The algorithm will factor in the estimated load time of a web page when someone clicks a link on the Facebook mobile app, versus desktop. It will also account for the user’s current network speed and the general speed of the web page off of the Facebook platform. If a link loads more quickly, a post including that link will get a higher position in your newsfeed.

In part, this strategy is an effort to push marketers to use Facebook’s Instant Articles tool. Instant Articles launched in 2015 as a new way for publishers to optimize their content so readers can access it instantly. Instant Articles do link back to an article or website, but in terms of referral traffic, those who view your content as an instant article won’t actually visit your website—and you’ll lose track of how much impact Facebook has.

However, it seems like Instant Articles are here to stay. In the US and Canada, Facebook users click and read over 25% more than the mobile web version of that same article. Stats get even higher in Asia and the rest of the world. If you want your content to compete, make sure your web page is optimized to load quickly and rank highly.

What changes will impact your brand the most? What adaptations will you make to your social strategy? I’d love to hear what you’re doing in the comments!

The post Facebook’s Algorithm: 3 Must-Know Changes appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2017/09/facebooks-algorithm-3-must-know-changes.html

ABM Success: Plan, Execute, Evaluate, Breathe, Repeat

Every successful sales rep knows the best recipe for closing the deal has only two ingredients: exceptional products or services and exceptional customer service. The rise of account-based marketing (ABM) reflects this tenet. ABM is a new phrase for a long-standing approach to sales and marketing in which integrated teams prove they care about the needs and pain points of their most strategic accounts, and they speak specifically to those accounts in a tailored way.

It’s awesome and straightforward—in theory. ABM execution, however, can be challenging without the right relationships, strategy, and tools in place.

The longevity and customization involved in ABM mean that instead of speaking to one sector with company-agnostic messages, marketers must treat every key account as a sector unto itself. The marketer’s job as they practice ABM is no longer to capture and qualify a lead, then pass it off to sales. Instead, teams must sustain a dialogue throughout the entire customer lifecycle, stay aligned with sales, continually deliver assets that support account expansion—and do it all for multiple customers. ABM changes the challenge for marketers. We might have been the fraternal twin to our peers in sales before, but with ABM, we are conjoined.

In this blog, I’ll cover the steps necessary to set yourself up for success as you deploy an ABM strategy.

Marketing Fundamentals and New Approaches

The transformative results companies expect from ABM require two critical elements. First, marketers must have their timeless fundamentals in place. As with any marketing strategy, ABM-oriented teams need to determine their value propositions, optimize their websites, glean insights from their customers and have fundamental alignment with their sales teams. If you’re having challenges with these foundational building blocks, hit the pause button before you dive into ABM and start customizing programs for every strategic account.

Assuming the foundation is sound, the second critical element is how teams approach project management and execution. Endurance is crucial to ABM success, and marketers constantly need to reassess whether they’re targeting the right people and ensuring their needs are met. Most teams aren’t used to ABM-level intensity, especially for an extended period of time. The phrase, “feed the beast” comes to mind, and the beast is always hungry. It’s not realistic to expect marketing teams to “feed” customized, personalized campaigns to multiple strategic accounts without increasing headcount or sacrificing attention for higher-value work. Something has to give.

Save the Marketing Brain Trust for Strategic Work

As organizations consider the best ways to efficiently and economically handle the demands of ABM strategy, more of them are embracing marketing process outsourcing to meet their ABM deliverables and reap the benefits of strategic account selling. The strategic brain trust inside the organization is best suited for high-value tasks, like fostering one-on-one relationships with clients and devising segmenting and targeting strategies. Everything else—creative, research, and data-driven work—can be handled by ancillary parties.

Don’t distract your ABM team with tasks an outsourced partner can successfully execute. Things like daily competitive reports, asset library management, data visualizations, email design, and whiteboard animations can all be handled offsite. The same is true for CRM and database management, persona development, and print and digital asset creation. Whether through technology tools, external vendors, or both, account-based marketers need the resources and workflows to manage more constant, high-volume, personalized campaigns.

Moving Forward

There are plenty of challenges to making ABM work. Teams need senior-level advocates from sales, marketing, and finance to get on board. They need IT to help integrate and coordinate communication to clients. They need sales reps and marketers to stand in the same line and look at true north together, as partners. And they need to give the knowledge workers who understand the company DNA the bandwidth to do strategic-level work, without slowing the stream of customized outreach that makes ABM worthwhile. All of this is doable. To make ABM work, marketers need to plan, execute, evaluate, breathe, and repeat.

How have you incorporated ABM into your marketing strategy? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Tell me about it in the comments!

The post ABM Success: Plan, Execute, Evaluate, Breathe, Repeat appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2017/09/abm-success-plan-execute-evaluate-breathe-repeat.html

Your Content Strategy Needs More Consistency

If I told you that content creation is a vital part of every company’s marketing strategy, your response would probably be a sarcastic “Well, duh. Thanks for that cutting-edge insight, John.”

That’s because most of us know how important content is to our inbound marketing and our brands — both our respective company brands, as well as our personal brands as a thought leader. We understand that content is important, but it doesn’t seem like we always agree on how much content we need, or how to create it well enough to consistently engage our audience.

But how you address that might depend on what your goals are for your content and who your audience is. But there’s one rule that holds true no matter what: Content consistency is key.

Why Focus on Consistency?

If you’re not consistent, you’re not taking advantage of all the opportunities you have to connect with your audience. Creating a few pieces of content here and there might help someone understand a topic better, but they won’t help you hit all of those touch points between your brand and your audience -- and they won’t help you build a meaningful relationship with it. To do that, you need to be a consistent content creator. It’s that simple.

What’s not so simple is breaking down the nuances within your audience and your processes to deliver not just any old content consistently, but content that meets its needs in a way that attracts it to your brand.

Think of it this way: Picture your favorite actor. This person is probably in a few of your favorite movies, consistently delivering amazing performances, and you might find yourself interested in the projects he or she stars in, simply because you know and love his or her previous work. That’s powerful.

With consistent, engaging content, you can hit touch points on your audience members’ online journeys, build connections with them, and position your brand to be top-of-mind when they think of their most trusted and liked resources. (This approach to branding and relationship-building is one I go into in much more depth in my business book, Top of Mind.)

But if you want to get started creating effective content consistently now, here are five essential tips.

How to Create a Strategy That Works

1) Document an actionable content strategy.

While 89% of B2B organizations are actually utilizing content marketing, only 37% have put together a documented strategy around that content’s creation and distribution.

Creating this kind of strategy is similar to setting goals for yourself: You’re more likely to achieve them if you write them down and break them into actionable steps to hold yourself accountable than if you decide to wing it and hope for the best. The same applies to content -- you need to write down what you want to achieve and how you want to get there.

That last part -- how you want to get there -- is particularly important. You can spend all the time in the world documenting your strategy, but if it isn’t set up to make consistent execution feasible, it won’t help you very much. So set goals, like your overall mission, audience personas, content mix, and promotion tactics. Then, make them actionable by laying the foundation for your process that makes consistency simpler right in your document.

2) Make use of a knowledge bank.

One of the biggest challenges inherent in creating loads of content is keeping track of it all, and organizing all the insights you’ve learned about your customers and your industry -- and leveraging them to create more than just one piece of content.

Enter the knowledge bank, which allows you to store and organize key information about your company, your content, and your customers. It makes creating multiple pieces and types of content that speak directly to your audience’s wants and needs much easier -- not to mention, it helps with consistency, because the more seamless the process of creating, finding, and managing your content, the easier it will be to do so in a quicker and more consistent manner.

3) Build the best team you can find.

With an actionable strategy in place and a system for leveraging your company’s expertise, it’s time to start actually creating content — and for that, you’ll need a talented team.

Sure, you could possibly write and promote all your content yourself -- if you really wanted to that -- but it’s difficult to scale this way. You’re busy with dozens of other tasks on your plate, so you’ll likely end up sacrificing either quality, or consistency.

That's where a great content marketing team and a network of freelance writers come into play. My team at Influence & Co. has found a lot of success with this process, which starts with a thought leader’s expertise, a freelancer’s skills at turning that insight into a written piece, and our team’s ability to strategize, edit, publish, and promote that content. When every person focuses on his or her strengths, your content will shine, and you’ll find yourself publishing more consistently than if you tried to do it all yourself.

4) Get comfortable with your editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar can do so much more than set the schedule for your upcoming posts -- it can also be a place to brainstorm ideas, plan your social media campaigns, and organize everything you’ve got coming down the pike.

That can help streamline the entire content process because everything is in one place, allowing you to see where you have gaps, and where you have excess content. Once you settle into your schedule and process, you can get even more efficient, giving yourself more time to focus on creating content, rather than organizing it.

A content calendar can also help track your successes and shortcomings, so you can make more informed decisions in the future. If, for example, you find that content posted at a certain time of day -- or a particular day of the week -- tends to outperform the rest, you can make changes accordingly. That way, you’re consistently on schedule and maximizing your impact.

5) Make distribution a priority, not an afterthought.

Each of these steps will help you create content consistently, but you can’t stop there. If you’re not also distributing and amplifying your content consistently and strategically, then all you’ve really accomplished is improving your content production -- not your content marketing.

Don’t wait until an article is published, for example, before you start thinking about how you’ll use it as a tool to connect with your audience. Your content distribution plan should take as much priority as your content development process -- content that you sit on or passively distribute won’t accomplish much.

Content creation can be a chore -- if you don’t know where to start when it comes to developing or distributing your work. But it’s an essential component of your company’s marketing strategy. Consistent content is key to keeping your audience engaged, your brand top-of-mind, and your content investment worthwhile. With these five simple tactics, your path to consistency will become much clearer.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/create-content-strategy-that-works

How to Get More Done by Doing Less

Productivity is generally thought of in terms of, “How do I get more done?”

If we’re lucky, we work in teams and environments where that perspective is at least softened by combining it with a measure of efficiency or impact, but even then we don’t fully escape the rat-race-like pursuit of more.

In fact, we usually answer “How are you?” with “I’ve been very busy.” And we wear our 80-hour work weeks like a badge of honor.

Speaking on his upcoming book, The Calm Company, Basecamp cofounder Jason Fried digs into the dangers of this troubling trend:

“Long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity. Companies that force their crew into this bargain are cooking up dumb at their employee's expense.”

This was similar to the mindspace that I too occupied when I stumbled into mindfulness and meditation 18 months ago.

At the time, I had been working on my own startups for about nine hours a day, and even though I had the flexibility to work in any way that I wanted, I was in the mindset of doing more, working longer hours. I was chasing my own tail, and a proposal to sit still to meditate for 15 minutes a day, provoked a simple reaction: “Who has time for that?”

But through the evolution and expansion of my mindfulness practices since then, I’ve come to learn that an action geared towards less (like sitting, breathing, and not thinking) has the surprising effect of creating some more (calm, clarity and space).

If you've heard or read anything on meditation and mindfulness, that shouldn't sound too unfamiliar. But in this article I’d like to reveal a couple of tactics where I optimized for less, only to get an exponential more on the other side. These tactics span different areas of my life, and each has their individual, contextual goals -- but they are all intertwined and focused ultimately on my experience as I pursue various projects, goals and dreams in life.

I literally stumbled into mindfulness and meditation via a prompt from my therapist who had intervened as my monkey mind was running havoc and jeopardizing most good things in my life. I still work towards mindfulness today because I have experienced significant changes in my life and work as a result of my practice.

So here's how I have managed to gain more in my life as a result of pursuing less in some situations.

Plan Slower Mornings

Waking early in the mornings has always been one of the easier things for me to do. In fact, I used to believe that I personally needed very little sleep -- until I learned about the real effects of sleep debt over time.

In the past, I would use an early morning start as a way to get a headstart on the day ahead. I can remember during my time at WooThemes, I was at the office before 7am on most days. The rest of the team only arrived from 9am onwards, and most of our remote team would only sign on much later. Those first two hours were glorious though: I could just hack away at my to-do list for two hours straight without anyone or any notifications interrupting my flow.

And then I had kids.

For any parent reading this, you’ll know that babies and toddlers operate on their own schedule, which means that none of my mornings were as predictable or within my control as before. Initially, I completely resisted this change and tried to stick to my previously focused and productive morning routine. I also tried various iterations to this routine, from waking up even earlier to trying to get work done while giving Adii junior his morning bottle.

Suffice to say, by trying to multitask, I wasn’t being a great dad and I wasn’t doing great work either -- everyone was getting a compromised result.

Fast-forward to today, and my morning routine looks something like this: I wake up at 5am on weekdays. I immediately get a cup coffee and breakfast (the same every morning to avoid having to make a decision). The next hour or so I spend reading, and I then meditate for 15 to 20 minutes. Then from about 6am onwards, I get my two boys ready for school. This means on most mornings I only get to my desk (and work) at 8am.

With the benefit of hindsight and comparison, I can now see how singular and rushed my old morning routine was. Because my goal was to get to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, it meant that any friction or obstacles along the way had a major negative impact on my experience. And a crappy morning would eventually turn into an even crappier day on most occasions.

These days, by the time I get to work I have a sense of space and calm. No rush to do anything specific. No existential fear about not answering yesterday’s emails quickly enough.

Instead I find that I’m more aware of the whole day and week’s landscape, which has helped me prioritize the things I need to work on (versus the things I can delegate or allow to drop off my radar).

Curiously I have also found that the first hour or so in the morning has not become less productive at all, and I still often manage to do some of my best work in that time (especially when I manage to also prioritize the most important task for the day during this time). For example, it's currently just after 9am as I’m writing this article, and I find the words flowing easily.

In the past, I used to run out of steam later in the day due to being so rushed. This inevitably meant that I either felt that I hadn’t accomplished enough on that day, or that I would try working until late in the evening to make up for lost time. We should however all agree that our brains do get tired, and if we continue to push ourselves beyond the point of exhaustion, we end up merely sitting in front of our computers, not getting anything done.

Disconnect from Interruptions

Software makers use often use gamification, notifications, and a combination of instant gratification and FOMO to keep us as engaged with their products as possible.

I'd never given much thought to how the programs and apps I use on a daily basis impact my productivity -- until I read Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world” earlier this year and was introduced to the concept of attention residue.

To explain what attention residue is and how it impacts us, Newport references a 2009 paper titled Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?” from Sophie Leroy, a business school professor at the University of Minnesota. As Leroy explains in the paper:

“People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.”

I finished the book in a single sitting, and it prompted me to really investigate my work behaviors. I would like to tell you here that it has helped me to do more deep work, yet I don’t think I have a consistent workflow to do deep work often enough (even though, my awareness of pursuing deep work is more developed).

The book did however prompt me to do something more radical: I almost entirely switched off my phone without entirely switching it off. My iPhone is now permanently on silent, and has the “Do Not Disturb” feature switched on at all times.

I also disabled all notifications -- badges on my icons, popup notifications or notifications on my lock screen. The only notifications that makes it to my lock screen are from WhatsApp, which I only use for family and close friends. And yes -- I also disabled Slack notifications, which is the primary communication tool we use for Conversio, a team of 14 remote team members.

This has turned my phone into less of an attention-demanding force. I don’t get interrupted or distracted as often as I used to. This helped me read 22 books in about ten weeks because I picked up a book when I was bored instead of fiddling on my phone.

I also started writing more, which helped me get more thoughts out of my mind. And most importantly, limiting my phone time has without a doubt helped me sleep better (I have always struggled to fall asleep because I struggle to switch off my thinking mind).

The flipside of this is also true: whenever I now pick up my phone, I can pay attention to the possible interactions that it presents. If an old friend sent me a message on Facebook, I can invest in replying purposefully instead of both reading and replying in a fleeting moment (when the notification of the message popped up).

I don’t have any scientific evidence to determine how these decisions have impacted my attention residue. What I do know is that by allowing less external sources to demand my attention, I have been more purposeful to prioritise the most important things to me -- in a way that also brings more clarity to my life.

Change Your Reading Habits

Consider for a moment that much of your daily communication consists of reading emails, Slack messages, texts, tweets, or comments on your latest Instagram photo.

A big part of our communication is in written form, which means that we need to read in order to respond and interact. Beyond that you are likely reading articles (blog posts) like these, short rants your dad has posted on Facebook, or a firehose of 140 character opinions on Twitter.

Even if you aren't reading books everyday, you are reading a lot.

A couple of months ago, I hit a wall. I was consuming a lot of content, but not much of it really resonated with me. To link this back to my previous point about distractions, there was a particularly relevant quote from Cal Newport’s book that best represented my reading habits at the time:

“It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

So I made a simple change: I de-prioritized most shorter-form content, and started dedicating my reading time to full-length books. Mostly classic fiction -- nothing that had a direct tie back to work.

I have now read 40 books this year already. I’ve worked my way through older classics from authors like Viktor Frankl, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Herman Hesse, Marcus Aurelius, and Alain de Botton. By consuming less modern day content, I give my mind a much needed break from the usual written content I consume online.

Tackle a Big Non-Work Goal

On New Year’s day 2016, I set one goal: I wanted to complete my first marathon (and do it under four hours.)

When I started my training a month later, I also stumbled into mindfulness. The combination of these two things soon had an unexpected impact on the way I led our company.

Since my primary goal was not about work, it meant that the first priority each week was planning my daily runs. Work started to fill the spaces around these more rigid blocks. As a result, I starting giving myself more mental space from my work than ever before. Even catching up on work in the evening -- a usual habit of mine -- wasn’t an option after a three-hour long run -- I was just too tired to work.

Working less wasn't part of my plan or intention, but it had a profound impact on our journey at Conversio. For the first time in my entrepreneurial journey, it felt like I wasn’t tumbling up and down constantly on the proverbial rollercoaster anymore. And since I felt more grounded in my day-to-day, my leadership style started to reflect this attitude. As a result, the team was doing great work in a stable, safe environment.

The results in 2016 spoke for itself: we 3x’ed our revenue, reached profitability and celebrated with a major rebrand and product update. This was clearly a consequence of the team feeling more stable.

I then stepped into 2017 with the aim of applying all of my ambition towards really growing our business. I started pushing and pulling wherever I saw a gap. I started conversations that proposed new ideas that questioned previous decisions, and recommend brand new directions.

During the first quarter of 2017, I was focused on the wrong things, which made my behaviour erratic and meant that I lumped a lot of stress on our team. The team was confused, felt less secure, and wasn't collaborating at our previous levels.

As these things go, the team eventually managed to pierce my stubborn drive forward and I received the message: things were not as great as they were before.

Pretty much as soon as I started unraveling my own motivations underpinning my behaviour (primarily, seeking more and faster growth), the team got back to a calmer, more efficient collaborative flow once again. We once again found alignment on both our core values, as well as shared goals, which meant we were making progress again. For the first four months of the year, our revenue only increased by 8% and in the four months since we’re up 24%. (Naturally the change in our growth rate was a result of many different things, but this change was at the core of many of those.)

The only shift here was in my own focus. When I was narrowly focused on work and had no other person goals I was striving for, it created an unbalanced approach that was neither helpful nor healthy for our progress.

When I was working towards a goal outside of work that was just for myself, it gave me more clarity in our mission and helped me be a better leader.

Embrace Not Having All the Answers Right Now

I have an annoying tendency to feel like I need to answer every question in a group setting, simply because I'm the leader.

In many situations, this isn't an inherently bad attitude to have. Afterall, I am the leader, and in many situations I have the context, knowledge and experience to give a valuable answer.

But there's a downside. Many times individual team members will just ask me directly for the answer, which means not involving the team and possibly excluding different perspectives and opinions. Once I've addressed a question, I sometimes shut the conversation down because my answer is deemed as authoritative or final (even when that is not the intention). That's not great for inclusion and collaboration.

In recent months, I have been trying to avoid being the first to answer questions in meetings. Not only has this alleviated some of the demands on my time, but more importantly it means that the team is coming to more collaborative, creative answers on their own.

Get More Done By Doing Less

The truth -- even for startups -- is that most of the time it doesn’t really matter whether you finish something today or tomorrow, reach a goal this week or next month, or grow by 5% instead of 10%.

Yes, there are some exceptions to this. But for everything else, you can probably pursue the less obvious choice and route, while not compromising on your goal at all. In fact, you might be surprised that doing less actually helps you exceed your goals and expectations.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-get-more-done-by-doing-less

How LucidChart Used Kissmetrics to Drive Growth

LucidChart, a SaaS-based diagramming application with over 9 million users, wanted to make sure their site was more than just pretty to look at. They wanted to ensure that it was leading users down the path to purchase. This is how they used Kissmetrics to leverage the behavioral data their users were leaving behind and increased conversions by 30%.

The initial step LucidChart took was to dive deep into data to better understand and evaluate the customer journey across their site. They learned what users were doing, where they were going and where they were dropping off across their site. Using insights from Kissmetrics they found key areas in the journey where they could drive efficiency and which pages they wanted to test a redesign.

After creating the new pages LucidChart used the Kissmetrics Funnel Report in correlation with the A/B Test Report to determine the effectiveness variation of the new pages both as a stand alone and part of the customer journey. Until they locked in on the best performing pages and process to drive conversions.

Funnel Report

Our Funnel Report is used by growth and marketing teams to see where dropoffs occur before conversions. This report is entirely customizable and can be used to track any conversion path you’d like. Furthermore, you can segment the data based on lead source, location, referring links, etc.

Used for illustration purposes. This is not LucidChart’s data.

LucidChart was able to track different segment’s across the customer journey and compare one another as well as use the A/B Test report to test the new design against the old.

A/B Test Report

With this report, you’ll create your test in an A/B testing tool, such as Optimizely, and track the results in Kissmetrics.

All data is imported from A/B testing tool and stored in Kissmetrics. Note: this is not LucidChart’s data.

What makes this Kissmetrics report unique is that you’ll be able to see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see if a new headline on your homepage leads to more purchases? Or see how a test in the middle of the funnel impacts the bottom line? Get your answer in just a few clicks in Kissmetrics. Having both reports coordinated in the same tool allowed LucidChart to measure the effectiveness of the new pages’ impact on the customer funnel with the old pages.

The Results

The outcome? By combining the power of the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report with the Funnel Report, LucidChart discovered that 2 pages in particular, their new homepage and new product page, were driving a huge 30% increase in conversions.

“Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions. All of our key customer behavior data lives in Kissmetrics, for both our product and website, so we can quickly identify and take action on any roadblocks across our growth cycle. Kissmetrics is essential to Lucid Software’s growth efforts.”

Spencer Mann, VP of Growth at Lucid Software

Every time a prospect visits your site or uses your product they’re leaving a digital trail of their behavior – showing what they’re doing, where they get stuck, what they like, don’t like and why. There’s tremendous value in that data and it’s critical for driving growth.

Kissmetrics enables you to capture and leverage all that behavioral data to increase conversions, acquisitions and retention.

About Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics’ Customer Engagement Automation platform helps product and marketing teams turn insights into growth. Our software is comprised of 3 key features:

• Analyze: A set of behavioral reports and metrics. Monitor your growth KPI’s across the customer lifecycle. And dive deep to understand user behavior and discover key insights.
• Populations: Segment your users based on key growth initiatives and track their progress.
• Campaigns: Behavior based email automation. Fully customizable editor puts you in complete control of customer engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Get, keep and grow more customer with Kissmetrics. Request a demo below to learn more.

About the Author: Jonathan Cabin is a Growth Analyst at Kissmetrics focused on initiatives that create sustainable growth. His background covers sales, project management and marketing. In his free time you can find him surfing, golfing and asking his boss for time off to travel.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-lucidchart-used-kissmetrics/

How to Get E-Commerce Customers Coming Back After Their First Purchase

Getting prospects to convert to customers is one thing. But how do you get customers to buy again and again after the first purchase? This is where attentive, customer-focused emails come on. Despite some heralding the “death of email” over more modern platforms like texting and social media, good, old-fashioned email remains one of the best ways to seal the deal, engage customers and encourage repeat purchases.

So what kinds of emails should you send? How often should you send them, and what should they contain? Here are a few of the best examples of e-commerce follow-up emails and why they work so well.

The Repurchase Reminder

Oftentimes, when you make a purchase on a website, they email you immediately after encouraging you to buy again. This marketing strategy is rooted in the idea that customers are likely to come back and purchase while your brand is still fresh in their mind. But oftentimes, companies send emails out immediately and when the customer (naturally) doesn’t respond, they no longer follow up.

If your repeat purchase numbers are flat-lining and your emails are stale, why not wait until more time has passed (depending on how often the customer uses the product) to remind them? Here’s a great example from Sephora, which reminds the customer to restock based on how much time has passed since their first purchase:

Sephora reminds the user to restock based on their past purchase. (Image Source)

Another creative spin on the restock email comes from Clinique. Since their data likely shows that women tend to shop online for beauty products more than men, they wouldn’t have as much luck sending a shaving gel refill reminder to men — so they advertised a refill reminder for him, to her. See how they did it:

An advertisement for men’s shaving gel — targeted to women, who are likely the ones shopping for beauty products. (Image Source)

We Miss You!

One alternative on the restock/repurchase follow-up email is tailored to the bargain hunter, like this email from Starbucks. There’s no better way to stay top-of-mind than with a coupon, and many customers actively wait to purchase until they get a deal. Knowing this, why not reach out with a discount?

This reminder from the Starbucks Store gets right to the point with a discount for customers that haven’t shopped in awhile. (Image Source)

Bodybuilding.com sends customers an email if they haven’t repurchased after about 3 months:

Another common tactic is to follow up with customers asking them to review their recent purchase. Again, this is extremely common and almost expected — but customers don’t always have the time at that very moment to write up a lengthy review. So how do you get them clicking? Here are some creative ideas that take feedback to a new level.

Going Beyond “How Did We Do?”

For the customer who doesn’t have time to write up a huge review, but the company still needs their feedback data to work with, I present to you the Amazon 1-click review:

Amazon encourages busy customers to simply click to review the size of garments they’ve purchased online. (Image Source)

Of course, you’ve likely received plenty of emails asking for your feedback, and even some that go the extra mile by giving you a discount coupon, entering you into a contest and much more. But this one is noted for its pure simplicity plus its unobtrusive style. It doesn’t get in the way — one click and you’re done.

And speaking of Amazon, you already know that they’re the e-commerce leader simply because of how much they test, monitor, tweak and track everything about their site. One of the more famous changes was adding in the “Customers who bought X, also bought Y” feature. Now much more commonplace on e-commerce sites, this “Frequently purchased together” option often encourages greater purchase volume per customer.

But what happens when they don’t purchase all of the items together? Is emailing them about it a lost cause? Not exactly…

Frequently Purchased Together (But It’s Not What You Think!)

Not all “Frequently Purchased Together” emails have to be a sales pitch. And if the customer didn’t buy them when they were originally presented, there must have been a reason.

Of course, the reasons why customers choose not to buy could be a whole other blog post in itself, but knowing what you know, why not steer the customer more toward educating them about the product add-ons or accessories rather than simply presenting them?

An example of a Thank You follow-up email from BabyFirst. (Image Source)

Since, in the example above, the customer is shopping for baby-friendly TV shows, the company naturally recommends a couple of DVDs that a baby or toddler might like, as well as a coupon and directions on how to get it for free.

The Warranty Expiration Notice

This type of email normally applies in cases where you sell parts or electronics that are under warranty. When making a purchase, customers sometimes don’t opt for the extended warranty, preferring to rather stick with the original manufacturer’s timeframe. But reminding them that the original manufacturer’s warranty has almost expired, and inviting them to extend the protection on their purchase might be just the thing they need to keep their original purchase in good working order:

An official-looking email regarding a car warranty.

Here’s another example offering an enhanced warranty on a lamination machine:

A warranty announcement included on new products. (Image Source)

The “Just Looking” Reminder

With all of the email examples showcased so far, you’d need the appropriate data based on what the customer bought previously. But what if they haven’t bought yet, and are only looking? Are you out of luck? Not at all. Provided you have the prospect’s email address, you can still send them reminders, even if they haven’t added a product to their cart:

Recommendations on shirts and a reminder based on shirts and slacks previously looked at, from Calvin Klein. (Image Source)

Here’s another example that reminds the user of the products they browsed in case they want to take another look and don’t want to have to sift through their browser history:

An email reminding the user of the products they looked at. (Image Source)

Use Demographics to Sell

As opposed to many of our other example, these emails do not rely on previous purchases. They start fresh with new product recommendations based on the demographics.

For example – has it been raining in Minnesota for the past few days? Find all your prospects located in Minnesota and send them an email showcasing your umbrellas.

Many of your prospects are likely either searching for one because a) they don’t have one or b) the one they have is old, has holes, etc.

This can go beyond weather. Many political radio broadcasts will have “doomsday” meals when the inevitable apocalypse comes. When Barack Obama was president, Glenn Beck and many other conservative pundits advertised “4-week emergency food supplies”:

Image Source

Does this profit off irrational fears? Yes.

But it also means understanding your audience. If they’re afraid, what are they willing to buy? Sell it to them. If it’s snowing, what are they willing to buy? Offer it up for sale.

Marketing is all about targeting the right people, when they are most receptive to your product. What better product to advertise to those that fear end times are near?

New Product Recommendations Based on Past Purchases

Finally, we have the “new product recommendations” email. Rather than always notifying customers every time you have new items in stock (and hoping they might like some of them), why not segment the new product announcement emails based on what the customer has purchased previously? They’re much more likely to buy, and they’ll welcome the added personalized attention!

Despite the different products and industries, all of these emails have one major thing in common — and that is a dedicated — almost fanatical attention to customer orders, browsing habits and preferences. And although you may be doing a great deal of e-commerce by email, there are still, as these emails demonstrate, new ideas and approaches that can be capitalized on.

Do it all with Kissmetrics Campaigns

Kissmetrics Campaigns is a behaviorally-triggered email platform. Combining our behavioral analytics with Kissmetrics Campaigns makes it easy to find segments that need converting, and targeting them is done in a few steps. And best of all – it’s all done within Kissmetrics. There’s no need to export and import lists and mess around with APIs or databases. It’s all done in the same platform.

 

And if you are using these strategies in your email announcements and customer lists, how have they worked for you so far? We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments. Share them with us below!

About the Authors: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://blog.kissmetrics.com/e-commerce-customers-coming-back/

3 Ways to Turn Your Brand’s Supporters Into Fans

As a child, I was a huge fan of Australian Rugby League, and my favorite team has always been the Cronulla Sharks. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have turned my passion for my childhood sporting team into my job, as I now work on marketing and digital strategies to increase the fan experience at this terrific football club. It’s fun and challenging to see brands you’ve grown up with succeed in marketing and working from the inside to make the team and brand a relatable, engaging experience for customers.

As marketers, we face a constant battle to turn customers into loyal fans. We are tasked with finding new ways to engage customers or supporters and inspiring them on a deeper level to become brand advocates and true fans. This is especially important in sports, media, and retail, but there are lessons to be taken for marketers everywhere.

Here are three ways you can turn your brand’s fair-weather fans into lifelong ambassadors who live and breathe your company, team, or channel.

1. Achieve a Single View of Your Customers

Let’s face it, businesses have a lot of customers—and the majority of companies are out there every day trying to score more. With this massive number of customers comes the need to have a single customer view of each individual, but at scale.

At its base level, having a single customer view means that businesses are able to track customers and their communications across every channel. This holistic approach will drastically improve interactions with customers as well as moving data from useless silos, allowing it to be leveraged to engage with customers.

Having the capacity to monitor website visitors and capture insightful behavioral data, as well as leverage and learn from their transactional data, will give companies the opportunity to create more detailed and multidimensional customer profiles. At the Sharks, we were able to use this type of data to develop content and campaigns tailored to specific fans based on their interests, demographics, and the activities they participate in. We even took into account where fans typically watch games— be that the stadium, at home, or at a sports bar—and delivered personalized, fun content which made every game day feel more exciting than the last.

2. Kick Goals with Personalization

The customer journey is a long one. It doesn’t just begin with someone entering a shop and end with them leaving the store having purchased a product or service.

Customer bases are diverse and encompass a broad range of demographics, geo-location, interests, and activities. Due to the diversity of customers there needs to be an emphasis on personalization of content. Across all platforms, organizations should be striving to translate data into actionable insights as part of a wider personalization strategy.

Customer experience through the customer journey is king, and companies need to ensure the entire customer journey is measured to maximize engagement. The Sharks not only worked to improve the experience of our fans at live games, but we also turned our attention to our loyal members at home. On game days, we use Livestream videos on Facebook featuring players, coaches, and officials, encouraging fans to come to game day. We also increased the number of concession stands from 8 to 13 at our home stadium, meaning shorter lines, so people can get their food and drink faster—small details like that make a huge difference to creating a positive atmosphere. The Sharks’ CEO even personally responds to each fan email!

Leveraging data and taking the time to invest in understanding and creating a dialogue with customers always pays off, as it helps them feel like they are part of a community. Ambassadorship will become their default setting.

3. Evolve and innovate alongside customers

Implementing a technological solution, be it an engagement platform or a marketing automation software is not the whole answer. Constant growth is vital, and businesses should be adding innovative features to their program and always looking to new ways of winning their customer engagement strategy.

Using the Sharks example, after a year of leveraging data to turn customers into loyal fans, a survey conducted in late 2016 revealed the Club is now ranked first amongst all the teams in the National Rugby League (NRL) for overall member satisfaction—a significant increase from previous years. Also, there was a substantial increase in how our members felt recognized by the club, leading the club to be ranked first for digital media communications across the whole football code.

Success is hard earned on the field, and taking fans on that journey through a data-driven and highly customer-focused engagement marketing strategy will ensure they are fans for life. You too can tackle fan engagement head on through a smart and personalized approach, rolled out at scale, delivering benefits not just for fans and customers, but your company as well.

Our engagement strategy has helped us garner more fans and keep the ones we already had happy. What have you done to keep your biggest supporters happy? How have you been able to convert people into fans? I’d love to hear about your tactics in the comments.

 

The post 3 Ways to Turn Your Brand’s Supporters Into Fans appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2017/09/3-ways-turn-brands-supporters-fans.html

Finding the Best Search Terms for Your Business: 10 Tools and Tips

Despite the ever-present advice that long-tail keywords are king, many businesses still struggle to strategically use them to get content to the top of organic and paid search results.

The truth is, tackling these long-tail keywords feels hard when you know you're up against the giants. I know. I worked with many startups before I joined HubSpot, and scouring Google Keyword Planner every day for keywords to fuel my blog posts drove me close to insanity.

But -- it worked. When I skipped the keyword research, convinced that my blog post was just THAT epic, THAT viral … I was wrong. I was chasing an immeasurable goal (virality) with an unaccountable metric (my gut). That kind of strategy is really only a luxury restricted to those with pre-existing ample website traffic, sizable social media following, copious brand advocates, and a list of high-profile customers.

So if you're one of those companies without those luxuries, listen up. I'm going to show you how to uncover new keywords to target and assess if you're already targeting high-value phrases.

How to Find New Keywords

If you want to generate more organic traffic, it’s necessary to find the sweet spot between easy-to-target keywords and keywords relevant to your business.

A great (and familiar) place to start is to simply type some phrases into Google’s search bar, and watch how it pre-populates the rest of what you are typing.

Google’s search bar algorithm is built around a searcher’s intent. Beware, though: What is suggested is not just based on popularity or relevance, but it's also personalized to the searcher. This exercise is simply to get you started with some ideas for keywords to target, and is by no means sufficient step on its own to do comprehensive keyword research.

That's where the following tools come in handy -- they'll help you flesh out your keyword research. (And if you need a place to keep track of all of your research, download our free on-page SEO template.)

Below, we'll dive into the following search term and keyword research tools:

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool
• Google Trends
• Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand
• keywordtool.io
• Keyword.io
• Infinite Suggest

Top Keyword Research Tools to Try

1) Moz Keyword Explorer

This keyword explorer is one of the best free SEO Tools available, providing an all-in-one tool to both discover and prioritize the search terms you'll want to target.

2) Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool

Like many of the other tools on here, the Google AdWords Keyword Planner provides a great way to discover new keyword ideas, especially for paid search campaigns. Criteria can be based on your product or service, as well as your target customers. 

3) Google Trends

Google Trends, if nothing else, an incredibly cool resource for trending search data. Not only does it provide information on search trends, but it also provides great visualizations that represent the data in a highly consumable way. You can also narrow the information by location.

4) Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand

One of the best things about Wordtracker is that it helps users conduct keyword research across a variety of platforms. In addition to Google, for example, it helps marketers discover search term data for YouTube and Amazon, as well.

5) keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io is, as the name depicts, a keyword research tool. What’s awesome about this tool is that it includes not only Google.com, but also all Google localized search languages, as well as YouTube, Bing, and the App Store. Sweet! Type in the ideas you recorded from the previous step, and expand your list.

As you go, make sure to remove keywords you know deep down cannot be relevant to your website. This will save you time and money in the long run, and result in a far better experience for the web searcher. Trickery is a fool’s game!

6) Keyword.io

Keyword.io has the disadvantage of only using Google data, but it's handy in that it not only does keywords, but also looks at Google Trends information and lists the pages you have to beat for that keyword.

7) Infinite Suggest

You’ll need to have a long long list of keywords in order to boil it down to the golden nuggets. This tool will help you generate lots of terms (as it claims, “infinite”), and it's up to you to pick out the best ones.

How to Evaluate Your Existing Search Terms and Keywords

Not only do you need to explore new keywords for your future content, but you also need to pay attention to your current keywords. When deciding on prioritizing your phrases and pages you must consider three things:

1. How many extra clicks will I get if I move up in Google’s results?
2. How much money will I make if I move up?
3. How strong is the page I’m trying to outrank?

To find out how to answer these questions, we spoke with Dan Petrovic, one of Australia’s best-known name in SEO and the director of DEJAN marketing. Here's what he recommends:

1) How many extra clicks will I get on a keyword or phrase if I move up in Google’s results?

Export your keywords and work out your CTR averages.

This exercise is about predicting how many extra clicks an increase in rank would bring for a particular keyword. You may have seen clickthrough rate (CTR) studies such as this one in the past, but they’re anecdotal at best because every website is different.

We recommend you start by defining averages specific to your own website before working out click scenarios in different ranking positions. Once you know what your averages are for search queries, CTR, and position, you can start creating ranking scenarios for each keyword (e.g., if I move from position 10 to position 9 I will receive 12 extra clicks based on site CTR averages?). Be mindful though: If a keyword over- or under-performs compared to the site CTR average, you may need to adjust the expectation for its growth accordingly.

Here is how you can export your keywords and uncover these key metrics:

1) Log in to Google’s Search Console, navigate to the "Search Analytics" page under the "Search Traffic" header, and select the widest date range available on your website. This is typically 90 days.

2) If your website targets a specific geographic region, ensure you’ve got it selected before you export data:

3) It’s also wise to filter out any branded terms from the export. Branded terms tend to have very high CTR, which is not useful when calculating averages for non-branded keywords:

4) At the end of the report, click "Download" and select CSV. Now you have a file that contains:

1. Queries
2. Clicks
3. CTR
4. Position

Once you have these averages in hand, you can calculate which phrases will result in sufficiently more clicks for the effort put into moving up the rankings for that keyphrase.

2) How much money will I make if I move up in the rankings?

Add conversion rate and value to your CTR calculation.

The data gleaned from your keyword export can be enriched with your company's financial information, such as the average value of a conversion and the average conversion rate. That way, you can project how much of a bottom-line impact your rankings changes could have (e.g. if an order value is $200 and conversion rate is 3%, how much more money will I get if I get 100 extra clicks from moving to a top spot in Google?).

You can now prioritize the keywords that drive the highest potential revenue on your website.

3) How strong is the page I’m trying to outrank?

Find results above you and look up their strength metrics.

Finally, once you have growth potentials calculated, it’s recommended that you balance them out with a difficulty metric. I personally use Flow Metrics from Majestic, but you can also use Moz’s Page Authority or similar values. These providers provide API access, too, so you can automate your research as well.

Advanced users can also map all keywords to their corresponding URLs, sum up potential scores from all keywords that lead to a URL, and end up with a list of priority pages to work on.

I use this exact methodology for my own research, and if you’re curious as to how it works, you can check it out.

Always Be Keyword-ing

Getting your keyword strategy right is the recipe for a long-term return on investment in digital marketing. Unlike other types of promotions, organic traffic is the gift that keeps on giving. Even when you're not actively publishing new promotions, you're still receiving traffic to your website.

To properly use keywords in your marketing, don't just pepper them across meta descriptions, image alt tags, and H1s -- apply them appropriately across your marketing campaigns and overall content strategy. Your marketing software should make implementing and tracking this easy. (HubSpot customers, you can use the HubSpot software to easily brainstorm, implement, and track your keyword strategy across all the content on your website.)

Remember: SEO is about serving the searcher with the best possible result. There are people out there searching for your very business, and you need to get in front of them. As your authority grows based on less-searched long-tail keywords, you’ll be able to tackle the giants as good as anyone.

Want even more tips? Check out the video below. 

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-find-great-keywords

Gestalt Psychology and Why It's Essential for Good Design [Video]

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gestalt-psychology-and-why-its-essential-for-good-design

8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

• Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.
• Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

• Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.
• Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.
• Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.
• Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.
• JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://blog.kissmetrics.com/mobile-design-best-practices/