Posts in October 2021

How to share a Video with Loyalistic

Monday, October 11, 2021

This guide shows how to share a video in Loyalistic.

Scenario: You have a canned video, e.g. recorded webinar, you want to share with leads, but only after they have filled contact information form.

The video will be streamed from YouTube.

Uploading video to YouTube

YouTube is great way to stream the video as most devices have a YouTube app for optimum viewing experience.

  1. Upload video to YouTube
  2. Change privacy setting to Unlisted video (instructions)
  3. Copy the URL
Unlisted Video means the video is accessible only with the special URL. It's cannot be searched or is not listed in your YouTube profile.

Create a Honey Pot
  • Select URL -option, paste Video URL as the bait URL.
  • Write Landing Page copy
  • Select field for Lead Capture Form
  • Edit Submit-button text to something like "Watch webinar now"
  • Write Thank You -page copy
  • Use Promote-tools to promote your video to your social media followers, email lists and create a Call-To-Action button to market the event at your web site.

You are now done.

Remember to create Lead Nurturing Program to remind viewers about your company and other content that might interest them.

Where do I find images for my blog post or paper, and can I use anything I find from the internet?

Monday, October 11, 2021
Every picture (or other intellectual property like a piece of text) is practically copyrighted by default. There are certain exceptions and variations by country, but for someone who needs pictures for a business blog post, e-book or similar widely distributed content, it's better assume everything is copyrighted and act accordingly. You cannot just go to Google and use any image that feels right for your purpose. You need a permission to use it.  As it's usually too much hassle to ask the photographer directly, you are likely to select photos which are already licensed so, that you can use them for your purpose, or you can easily buy a license from a stock photo web site for few coins.

To say it again, never use a photo in a business blog or paper unless you are sure you have a right to use it in the intended purpose. Either it's released with an open license such as Creative Commons (CC-logo), or you have bought a license. And not just any Creative Commons or stock photo license, but one that allows you to use it the way you want to use it. Some Creative Commons licenses allow non-commercial use for free, but not commercial. Many stock photo licenses allow use only once!

But luckily there are more and more free images available every day. See e.g. https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list for a good list of free image sources. And paid images are mostly quite inexpensive nowadays. The price of an image is often small compared to the search costs, that is your time, which for your business is not free.

Finding the right image may be quite time consuming. You have a vision of what you are looking for, but never seems to find anything suitable. 10 minutes turn into 2 hours of frustration. It's kind of like shopping really. You start with high hopes, but come back exhausted and empty handed. This is especially true on business-to-business context where markets are quite niche from photographers' point of view, so there is not much supply.

It's usually easier to approach the imaging needs from different perspective. Rather than trying to find a descriptive image that suites your title, it might be better approach to have something that just sets the right feeling. Add some texts and graphics on top of it, let say, make a image with title for the post. Canva.com is a great tool for that. And you can also buy images from Canva for 1 USD each.

The best approach for long term is to build your own collection. You have a smartphone with camera that is perfectly ok for all content marketing needs. And so does all your team members. Get your team use that camera to shoot pictures in everyday business situations. It takes bit of effort to develop eye to spot the opportunities, and it's always bit of an hassle to stop for that 30 sec to shoot the picture. But that's a way to build your business a internal stock photo collection that will make everybody's life so much easier when creating content for blog posts, papers or presentations. These photos are unique, nobody else is using them. They are perfect fit for your business and industry, as they have been taken in day-to-day business. But remember to ask everybody to give your company the appropriate rights when they submit anything for the collection unless you have appropriate intellectual property clauses in employment contracts. You may also collect great images you find online, but be sure not to collect anything you don't have a license to use. 

Arrange an Marketing Event with Loyalistic

Monday, October 11, 2021

Arranging an marketing event, like breakfast seminar, can be a quite a lot of work.

  1. Create a Program Page online
  2. Create Registration Form
  3. Create Thank You page for those who register
  4. Create Thank You email for those who register
  5. Promote Your Seminar or Event to Social Media
  6. Promote Your Seminar or Event by Email
  7. Remind those who have registered

Luckily you can complete all these in a few minutes with Loyalistic. Here's how:

Create a Honey Pot

  • Select no bait -option
  • Write program to the landing page
  • Select field to require for registration
  • Add event details to thank you page and email as a reference.
  • Use Promote-tools to promote your event to your social media followers, email lists and create a Call-To-Action button to market the event at your web site.

You are now done for a while. Remember to log in freqently to check how many have registered, so you know whether you need to promote your event more. If so, use the Promote-tools to do just that.

Reminding Attendees

To minimize no-shows, smart organisers remind attandees few days before the event. This is also a good place to provide practical information about the event, like how to arrive to the event (address, public transport, map, parking). Attendees may have not been at the venue location earlier, so you might also give instructions of how to find your way once you have arrived to the right address.

To create reminder email, select Email-tab.

Recipients: Select your event's attendee list

How email tracking works and why open count is unreliable

Monday, October 11, 2021
Email tracking is different to how web tracking works because of the technical limitations email applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail (yes, even when used with a browser, it is still an application) pose.

So it's good to know what your figures actually tells you. All email marketing software, including Loyalistic, track emails fundamentally the same way.

Open rate: You would think open rates tells you how many have opened your email, right? Not really. And this applies to any email marketing software. It tells how many have theoretically seen images of that email. And that could be way off from actual open to either direction.

Every recipient receives a personalised email where all links have been personalised for click tracking and a small invisible image, or so called tracking pixel, has been added for open tracking. This tracking pixel is actually not delivered with the email itself, rather the email contains a place for that image where the image is hosted online. When recipient's email program shows an email, or in technical terms renders an email, it requests the images from Loyalistic. However every email have different tracking pixel, thus Loyalistic knows which recipient have requested the image and thus considers the email opened.

This is how email tracking supposed to work. However many email programs are configured not to show online content including images automatically, and many uses email programs in such a way that your email is rendered and considered opened, when the user is actually doing something else. Let's dig a bit deeper.

Image suppression lowers the tracked open rate: Many email programs nowadays do not show online images automatically, thus do not track open. This is called image suppression, and whether it's on or off by default may have been set at the program, installation or user level. That is, by the software vendor, IT department or the user herself. If images are suppressed by default, the user may override it and show images for that particular email or for all emails from the same sender. The user may not click "show images" if she does not think she needs them.

Considering most email programs (or installs) do not show images automatically, but only if the user has allowed for that email or that sender, how many of your recipients will actually be tracked "opened" depends heavily on if they have read your emails earlier, find need to "show images" and trusts you to "show images for this sender". 

  • If you don't use images, recipients do not have any need to "show images" and thus allow open tracking.
  • On the other hand, if you overdo images they might not understand why they should "show images" and instead click "archive" immediatelly.
  • If you have many new or recently added recipients, they are likely to suppress images, while over time they might find something worth reading to "show images" and thus allow tracking.
  • If they trust you, they will allow images to be automatically loaded.
  • If your recipients are in big corporations where IT departments sets default settings, image suppression is likely higher and open rates lower than for smaller organizations or individuals where usability is more important than security.

Because of image suppression, open rate is much lower than it really is and the difference depends on so many things.

Preview increases the open rate: Some prefer to use email program with a preview pane, and some don't. Some like to navigate between emails with keyboard, and some don't. If the recipient uses preview (and has set "show images"), you are likely to register a open when she navigates back and forth of her inbox, or when she deletes or archives your email without actually reading it. If she has the email program open, as many do, it might register open even if they are actively working in another window.

So your open rates are affected by how your recients in general use their email software.

Click Tracking

Click tracking itself is reliable metric for campaing performance. Every link is personalised to allow tracking, so if a recipient clicks a link, they open up a invisible page that registers the click and immediatelly redirects to the final destination.

However if the original recipient forwards the email to another person, this person might register clicks you may thing are done by the original recipient, when in fact, she hasn't. 

Sometimes you see someone has clicked all the links in your email. This might not be the real story. It's unlikely, yet possible a person will click every single link in your email. However, it's more likely this has been done by a security software that is trying to check if the links leads to safe content.

Bounces

Finally some of your recipients could not be reached for various reasons, and the email bounces. Some bounce back to Loyalistic and you'll see it in the statistics, and some bounce to your inbox without being registered to Loyalistic.

For example, if a recipient have left the company, they might have closed her email account and it bounces back to Loyalistic. Or they might have set up an autoreply whereas you'll get an email telling the person is not working there anymore.

When Loyalistic receives the bounce, it analyses the reason and determines whether to try sending that email again later or not. 

Sometimes recipients have their inbox full, mail server is offline or name server not responding.

Fixing your DNS's SPF-records to avoid your email being marked as spam

Monday, October 11, 2021

If your nurture or campaign emails are getting marked as Spam, there might be a problem with your company's DNS-server.

Many spam filters use Sender Policy Framework or SPF as one check in the process of deciding if your mail is spam or not. When receiving your mail, they compare IP address of the sending mail server to those listed in your DNS. If your DNS has a SPF-record and Loyalistic is not listed there, your mail is likely to be marked as Spam. And in cases where you don't have a SPF and your mail is marked as spam, adding SPF record might solve the problem.

You can check whether your domain has a SPF-record with this tool. Just type your domainname e.g. yourdomain.com to the first field and click "Get SPF-record".

Your SPF record is published as TXT record type, although some still use the now deprecated SPF-record type.

If you have a SPF record you need to add include:smtp.loyalistic.com within that record.

Contact your DNS admin or service provider and ask to add "include:smtp.loyalistic.com" (without quotation marks) to your SPF record.

If your DNS does NOT yet have SPF record, adding one may be a good idea. But before you rush to do it, remember to survey and include all your mail servers and other services that send email with your domain name.

Warning: Do not exceed 10 DNS lookups with your SPF-record!

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