For the uninitiated, mobile advertising can seem daunting. From setting up and launching a mobile ad campaign, to optimising for performance and working through the various reporting hurdles, managing a mobile ad campaign is complex and, occasionally, inefficient. As noted in a recent article for PerformanceIN, the rise of mobile programmatic advertising is helping to remove many of the inefficiencies from the mobile ad marketplace. But one component of mobile advertising remains as true today as it did with the rise of digital advertising in the 1990s: companies still need to engage, acquire and retain new and existing users and customers. 

Customer acquisition (including digital direct response and inbound marketing) remains the one constant underpinning of much of digital advertising’s rapid growth, including mobile. Ultimately, if marketers are unable to acquire and retain customers through their digital ad campaigns, no amount of clever marketing techniques will keep them coming back to a brand. 

As mobile advertising continues to grow — reaching an estimated $45.4bn in 2016, according to ZenithOptimedia — it may be tempting for marketers to take their eyes off of the customer acquisition prize. But savvy marketers will remember that behind every flashy branding campaign comes the ultimate question from a boss or CEO: Where are the results? 

Marketers wishing to maximise the ROI of their mobile ad campaigns should pay attention to a few important customer acquisition best practices. Here’s a look at three that apply specifically to mobile: 

Design your emails for mobile

We now live in a mobile-first world. This is particularly true when examining how people open and interact with email. According to Experian, 53% of email opens occurred on a mobile phone or tablet in Q3 2014, up from 48% in Q2 2014. 
Your mobile customer acquisition campaigns should be designed and optimised so that all facets are mobile email-friendly. A clean, simple email design is more likely to produce an action from a consumer using a mobile device than a complex, multi-layered email that will eat up a smartphone’s battery life. 

Despite many pundits predicting the death of email, the rise of mobile has actually breathed new life into this old form of digital marketing. Successfully integrated into a brand’s mobile customer acquisition strategy, email can become the lifeblood of a mobile ad campaign, helping to bring in a steady stream of new leads while also re-engaging old customers who may have forgotten about your brand.  

Build lead flows that create user engagement

Mobile customer acquisition marketing performs best when marketers employ a somewhat counterintuitive principle: by making it more difficult for people to click on a phone number on your site you increase the chances that a prospect will convert to a new customer. The reason is rather simple: people will learn more about your products and services, which improves the quality of calls into your sales team. That in turn, should improve lead conversion. 

Resist the urge to flash a big ‘Call Now!’ button or to give a prospect the most obvious information on your landing page. Instead, direct the user’s eye to the key elements of your product or service. If you’re feeling particularly confident in your mobile customer acquisition campaign, have the user fill out a lead form before showing them the call centre phone number. You will be surprised at how much the simple act of filling out their name and contact information improves the quality of your inbound leads. 

Avoid the click-to-call functionality trap

Click-to-call buttons have their time and place in mobile customer acquisition campaigns, but are often overused and/or poorly implemented. Unless you want every random errant click to bog down your sale team’s time and energy, keep the click-to-call button off of your mobile landing page. Instead, make the user fill out a short, one-screen contact form and then provide the ability to click-to-call your business, but only after they have given you some basic information. That way, your sales team can quickly look up their profile when the call comes in and will immediately know whether it’s a qualified lead or not.   

Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in the online ad market. Its rapid growth and adoption as an advertising medium is following consumers’ changing media consumption habits. Increasingly, consumers choose mobile and tablet devices as their first engagement point with brands and advertising. This trend is propelling rapid developments and new advertising and publisher monetisation opportunities within mobile. Ultimately, though, a keen focus on customer acquisition will yield the best ROI for your brand’s mobile ad campaign. 

The post Focus on Customer Acquisition for Mobile Ad Success appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The annual holiday shopping extravaganzas known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are well established as two crucial points each year in which retailers and advertisers can finally get ahead of the competition. In 2013, holiday shoppers in the U.S. spent a record $2.29 billion during Cyber Monday, a 16% increase over 2012, a year that also saw Cyber Monday spending records broken.

What was once traditionally an American novelty of the annual holiday shopping calendar has become a truly global experience, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales taking place across Europe, Asia and Latin America, and everywhere in between.

Traditionally, shopping on these two days revolved around taking advantage of in-store deals (Black Friday) that a consumer finds in the Thanksgiving Day circulars from their hometown newspaper, or, in the case of Cyber Monday, from the ubiquitous display ads that start popping up immediately after Black Friday is over.

That’s all starting to change, as email, the little engine that could of digital marketing, is quickly emerging as one of advertisers’ preferred customer acquisition media channels in the smartphone era.

In order to take advantage of the huge opportunities available to savvy marketers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s important that you take the time now to ensure your email marketing activities are up to speed. Here are five things every marketer should be doing now to tap into Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing opportunities.

Timing is everything 

It’s important that marketers, especially those who will be appealing to American consumers, understand the unique timing that takes place in the week before and on the day of Black Friday. For many Americans, this has become a holiday unto itself and they spend a great deal of time preparing for it. Traditionally, most Americans would find out about Black Friday deals the day before from their Thanksgiving Day hometown newspaper. That’s starting to change, though. With many consumers now accessing email on their mobile devices, and a push towards ever-earlier holiday shopping (what some refer to as “Cyber Thursday” for the post-Thanksgiving dinner online shopping that occurs), people no longer have to wait until Monday to actually respond to your holiday offer emails. Therefore, it’s important that you time your emails to correspond, or be slightly ahead of, this media drop. Be ready to send your Black Friday email offers at least a week in advance of the big day, and have reminder emails going out Thanksgiving morning and Thanksgiving evening when consumers are looking for the best deals.   

Implement real-time replies.

Following the tip above, make sure your holiday email offer campaigns have real-time reply capabilities built into them. One of the great things about email marketing is that the data it yields can often be collected in real time to create segments. This typically follows one of three basic patterns:

Real time / real time: 

In this scenario, a subscriber’s real-time action elicits a real-time response. As soon as a subscriber takes some action with your email, say, by clicking on a “Learn More” button, a relevant follow-up email is auto-generated containing more information about your brand or offer.

Real time / trigger: 

In this situation, a user segment is developed based on real-time data; however, a response email is not sent until a pre-determined time. This method will allow you to refine your messaging and offer based on certain criteria of the subscriber and his or her action.

Real time / ad hoc: 

This is a highly manual, but very effective, form of real-time email marketing. In this scenario, a marketer watches his dashboard and uses the real-time data coming in from email actions to develop personalized messaging and offers for specific consumers.

Use mobile wisely

Mobile commerce will be the breakout star of the upcoming holiday shopping season. In the US alone, it is estimated that nearly $100 billion worth of goods will be purchased online in the final holiday quarter of 2014, a 16% increase over the same quarter last year, according research from Business Insider Intelligence.

One of the best ways to improve your lead generation and customer acquisition efforts during the busy holiday season is to mesh mobile and email. With so many consumers out shopping, they will be relying heavily on their mobile devices to prime them with the best and most timely email offers. Globally, nearly half of all emails are first read on a mobile device according to Litmus. Holiday marketers should take advantage of this device segmenting by sending mobile-friendly email offers that include  keywords, such as “Black Friday Sale!”, “Cyber Monday – 20% Off!” or “Early-Bird Special …”

Make your creatives festive

Let’s face it, your Black Friday / Cyber Monday offer email is going to be one of probably hundreds, if not thousands, that your customers will receive this holiday season. In order to be sure that your email offers don’t get deleted like your competitors, use smart, compelling seasonal creative and content. Involve your creative department in the campaign process. If you do not have creative in-house, it could be worthwhile to outsource creative from an agency specialising in multi-channel marketing approaches. Their familiarity with both advertising and creative best practices will help you sidestep technical issues that could negatively impact campaign performance. This is especially critical with time-sensitive holiday campaigns.

Add click-to-call to every email

Click-to-call should be in every holiday marketers’ email toolkit. It’s especially useful for direct marketers looking to sell a unique product or service during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This form of search marketing enables consumers to easily contact your business via a one-step dialing process. By implementing a click-to-call feature in every email, you ensure that consumers who want to take an action now with your business can do so and don’t have to find your phone number within the email and dial it themselves. Click-to-call does the hard work for them and will help you generate many more leads than emails that don’t contain this handy function.

By implementing the above strategies, holiday email marketers can ensure that their campaigns reach the right consumer at the right time with the right offer on what are two of the busiest and most lucrative shopping days of the year. Happy emailing (and Happy Holidays)!

The post How to Tap Into Black Friday and Cyber Monday with Email Marketing appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Today’s digital marketer has a lot of decisions to make. Which media channel is best for customer acquisition? Should its brand be active on Snapchat? What about Vine? And what happens if your closest competitor suddenly starts finding success with direct response campaigns on Facebook?

Another question marketers should ask themselves is whether to utilise cost-per-lead (CPL) or cost-per-impression (CPM) email campaigns.

The question is complicated due to a variety of factors. First and foremost, advertisers need to ask themselves what is their goal for email acquisition marketing. Is it to acquire as many customers as possible? Or is it to acquire as many quality customers as can be found for a given budget? How you answer these two questions largely determines whether you should pursue a CPM email campaign or a CPL email customer acquisition campaign.

Below we examine the pros and cons of CPL and CPM email campaigns, and also offer examples of what works and what does not when mailing CPL and CPM offers.

CPL Email Campaigns

Pros:

• Buying on a CPL more often than not ensures an ROI-positive marketing campaign. There is less risk if you pay on a CPL basis because you are paying for each lead (and each potential customer) much further down the marketing funnel. 
• The dating vertical works great with CPL email. Dating email campaigns perform best on the weekends when mailers are looking for high-performing deals. An insurance offer that is mailed on a Saturday on a CPL basis is not likely to attract a lot of sign-ups because most consumers do not want to think about buying a life insurance policy when they are relaxing on the weekend. But a dating CPL offer will often perform well on the weekend because many people are looking for this type of deal while in a more relaxed frame of mind. Often, mailers can meet and/or exceed their average weekday eCPM by mailing a dating offer on the weekend.

Cons:

• You are not guaranteed a specific drop date. At any point your campaign can get trumped by a CPM email buy or even a CPC email buy, which is preferred my many mailers. 
• Your lead flow, creative and landing page all have to be perfect. CPL email campaigns require smartly designed registration flows, great creative and performance-optimised landing pages in order to back out to the desired eCPM. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money, and that of your marketing partner, by trying to mail even a good offer using a bad landing page or email creative.

CPM Email Campaigns

Pros:

• Guaranteed drop date for the email. CPM emails will typically be sent by your marketing partner in early or mid-week when email campaigns often perform the best. 
• Time-sensitive verticals work very well with CPM. Verticals in which consumers often are deciding on a product or service to use based on a time-sensitive matter, such as health and beauty, insurance, finance and home services, perform particularly well with CPM email. Timing-wise, it is best to use a call centre that will call on the leads during set hours Monday through Friday, when consumers are most responsive. 
• Reach specific demographics. If you want to reach a specific demographic or consumer target, then CPM performs better than CPL email campaigns. An example of this is health and beauty advertisers, which often need to reach consumers located in a specific geographic region and that have self-identified as having a specific ailment. Achieving this type of targeted mailing can often lead to more profitable leads. Even if your effective CPL is high, judge the CPM email campaign by its overall ROI.

Cons:

• CPM email campaigns can be more expensive than CPL email campaigns. Often, you as the advertiser will be taking some upfront risk buying email on a CPM basis. Therefore, expect to pay more upfront for the leads (but, as noted, CPM email campaigns can back out to be more profitable than CPL email if they are highly targeted). It is best to shop around and get multiple references for CPM mailers. Ask them about their typical open rates, click-through stats and other pertinent metrics. Do the math and see if a small test makes sense to determine if a larger-scale campaign will be profitable.
• Book early for holiday email drops, or be ready to pay. CPM email drops are all the rage during holiday periods as many advertisers seek to reach as many consumers as possible in order to make up for revenue deficits during the rest of the year. It is important to secure your CPM email drops early in the calendar year in order to lock in the best rates and inventory, especially around the holidays.

The post CPL or CPM: What’s Best for Your Email Campaign? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Many brands concentrate much of their digital marketing efforts on driving traffic to their sites, yet neglect to focus their optimisation efforts on converting that traffic. On average, only 2% of visitors convert once they reach a landing page, according to TopRank. It’s necessary, therefore, to devote just as much time to understanding how your site traffic converts into paying customers, and how to optimise that traffic for improved conversion, as you do on targeting the right customer audiences.

The number one goal of every advertiser is to improve the ROI of their marketing efforts. In other words, get more bang for your buck. Five easy tweaks to your landing page can do just that.

Use the following tips to help translate your site-optimisation efforts into top-converting pages that elicit the desired consumer action.

1. Put a phone number atop every lead-gen form. Make sure the phone numbers on your lead-gen pages are clickable and trackable, especially when displayed on mobile and tablet devices. Not only does this increase the ways in which consumers can contact you, but studies have shown that placing a toll-free number on your landing page improves the credibility of your site and helps increase the amount of web visitors who complete the lead form.

2. Clearly define the features and benefits of the offer to the consumer. Hit them over the head with your unique value proposition. What are the three prime messages or benefits you want to communicate to potential customers via your website or landing page? More importantly, which benefits will compel a potential customer to provide their contact information for further discussion? Those are the key considerations you should make when building a landing page for optimal conversions.

3. Add video. According to studies, online video is 5.33 times more effective than text; consumers that view a company product video are up to 85% more likely to buy that product. Your customers want to watch a video about your product or service rather than read through a lengthy text description. Create a video that shows your product in action, but keep it short. Try to squeeze all the important information into a quick and easy to understand treat for your viewers.

4. Simplify your landing page and design a clear user flow. Design is key. According to eConsultancy, 96% of visitors notice the visual design first when looking at your landing page. First impressions last, so make your visual appeal simple and familiar. Your landing page creative should compel a visitor to take a specific action, hopefully one that the creative has specifically highlighted.

5. Optimise for mobile. Most marketers already know, or are quickly learning, that you cannot simply shrink your desktop landing page to fit on a mobile device. Conversion rates will suffer if you try to do so. It’s important to optimise your creative for both desktop and mobile devices. This includes limiting the number of lead-gen fields you’re collecting. Only collect the information that is absolutely necessary – no more than five fields on a mobile device.

No matter where your traffic is coming from, there is a way to make it convert and to do so more efficiently and profitably. Instead of focusing only on building traffic, invest a portion of your time in converting it. Be sure to always provide value and follow with strong calls to action that continue to move prospects through your flow.

The post Top Website Tweaks for Boosting Conversion appeared first on PerformanceIN.

For all of the cynics’ claims that email is dead or dying, the reality is that it’s never been a more relevant or valuable channel for online marketers. Unfortunately, much of what passes as email marketing in 2013 looks as though it is from the Y2K era. This is especially the case with email lead-generation tactics.

To improve their customer acquisition campaigns, brands need to give their email marketing a serious review. It’s time for marketers to step up and get their email lead generation up to speed with the rest of their digital and mobile marketing strategies.

Here are five strategies that will help you generate more leads and sales opportunities from your email marketing campaigns. These strategies are based on experiences advertisers have had after working with MediaWhiz.

1. Implement real-time replies

Your company’s email marketing campaigns will yield huge troves of data. Rather than being overwhelmed by all of that data, or do nothing with it, use it to your advantage and create real-time response and customer acquisition segments. This typically follows one of three basic patterns:

Real time/trigger

In this situation, a user segment is developed based on real-time data; however, a response email is not sent until a pre-determined time. This method will allow you to refine your messaging and offer based on certain criteria of the subscriber and his or her action.

Real time/real time

In this scenario, a subscriber’s real-time action elicits a real-time response. As soon as a subscriber takes some action with your email, say, by clicking on a “Learn More” button, a relevant follow-up email is auto-generated containing more information about your brand or offer.

Real time/ad hoc: This is a highly manual, but very effective, form of real-time email marketing. In this scenario, a marketer watches his dashboard and uses the real-time data coming in from email actions to develop personalized messaging and offers for specific consumers.

2. Add click-to-call to every email.

Click-to-call should be in every digital and direct marketer’s toolkit. This form of search marketing enables consumers to easily contact your business via a one-step dialing process. By implementing a click-to-call feature in every email, you ensure that consumers who want to take an action now with your business can do so and don’t have to find your phone number within the email and dial it themselves. Click-to-call does the hard work for them and will help you generate many more leads than emails that don’t contain this handy function.

3. Use mobile wisely

One of the best ways to improve your lead generation and customer acquisition efforts is to mesh mobile and email. Our internal analytics show that for many merchants, between 30%-60% of their marketing emails are now being read on a mobile or tablet device. Marketers should take advantage of this by segmenting their subscribers by device and operating system and send messages that include specific keywords to text that allows the consumer to take an action based on the email.

4. Design your emails for mobile

Seventy-six percent of consumers use their smartphones to sort emails before viewing on a computer, according to BlueHornet. Your email campaigns should be designed and optimized for mobile since more than 80% of non-optimized emails will be deleted without being read and 30% of consumers will take the additional step of unsubscribing entirely. A clean, simple email design is more likely to produce an action from a consumer using a mobile device than a complex, multi-layered email that will eat up the battery life of a consumers’ mobile device.

5. Use compelling creative

While too many images in your email is a recipe for disastrous click-through rates, having compelling email creative is a must. Inboxes are highly cluttered these days. It’s important to make sure your email stands out by employing creative that complements the “from” and “subject” lines. Email creative should compel a subscriber to take a specific action, hopefully one that the creative has highlighted for him or her. Once the consumer opens the email, make sure the creative follows what the “from” and “subject line” promised. Consumers will quickly delete your message, or unsubscribe to your offer/list, if you falsely advertise in the subject line.

The post Email is not Dead, it Needs More Focus on Lead Generation appeared first on PerformanceIN.