Email Marketing

Email blasts and bulk email campaigns are surely now a thing of the past. Hubspot posted the following with my comments. The way to market now is to attract prospective clients online, on social platforms, on Facebook groups and on forums. Email is a super communication tool once they are engaged. Learn more about our social management and social, SEO marketing packages here.

How to Prepare for the Apple’s iOS15 Privacy Changes [Checklist Included]

Apple recently began rolling out their new iOS 15 privacy features, including Mail Privacy Protection. This update is a big win for customer privacy, but may impact your marketing efforts and the metrics you see in our platform. In this post, we’ll walk you through everything we know so far, and provide a checklist to help you identify places in your HubSpot account that might be impacted.

Note: this post was last updated on January 6.

What’s the change?

Apple’s new mobile operating system (iOS15) launched on September 20 and will roll out over the next few months, and it includes several privacy-related changes. At a high level:

Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing if and when a recipient opens an email in Apple Mail. It also hides a recipient’s IP address, so senders can’t determine their location.
Hide My Email lets users share unique, random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox anytime they wish to keep their personal email address private.

These changes impact all email service providers that send emails to Apple Mail users.

What does this mean in the short term?

Open rates may decline with no change in actual engagement. As a part of the changes, Apple will load tracking pixels on behalf of their users. In essence, Apple will be “opening” emails on behalf of their users. These opens will be caught by HubSpot’s bot filtering technology. Due to the nature of Apple’s technology, the bot filtering will unlikely be able to tell the difference between an Apple-bot open and a human open. As a result, email open metrics in HubSpot may decrease when human opens are bundled with Apple-bot opens, and any other processes that rely on open tracking might be compromised, too. Users can continue to use the open rate metric in HubSpot, but we recommend against using it for critical processes and reports. You can turn off bot filtering if you’d like to manually judge which opens may be human and which may be bots
Realtime email tactics that rely on IP-based location will be less effective. For example, time zone sends that use IP addresses to identify location and align send times to each recipients’ unique location may no longer function for Apple Mail users.
Email open activity may be spread across multiple contact records — even though they represent the same person. With “Hide My Email,” users can create fake, random email addresses to shield their personal email addresses from senders. In practice, this means that there may be several different “contacts” opening an email, even though just one person exists.

What does this mean in the long term?

While the new feature may change your marketing tactics and cause some short-term heartburn, it’s designed to create better experiences for all of our customers, and that’s always a good thing. Putting your customers first is what inbound is all about, and it’s a concept HubSpot has been championing since our inception. Put simply, when your customers win, you win too.

What should I do about it?

From a high level, keep doing what you’re doing. Stay the course with your marketing. Focus on creating great content and engaging experiences for your audience. As it relates to Apple’s changes, be mindful of your open metrics for email, with the understanding that they might look different moving forward. Shift your focus to other, more reliable metrics that better reflect actual engagement, like clicks and replies. And do an audit of your downstream marketing processes (e.g. list segmentation, automation) that rely on open tracking. Not sure where to begin? We’ve created a checklist of HubSpot tools that might be impacted.

March 17, 2022May 9, 2022

Evolving Company Online Profile

Building reach and increasing the company profile.

Posting on social media has multi-benefits – overall you are building your online profile. Put simply; how your company looks online, when someone ‘Googles’ you. It’s really important, it’s your shop window.

Zedcomms promote clients’ company profile online mainly using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google along with website SEO. We focus on what a prospective customer sees online. Using creative targeted promotional text, and engaging photos with links to specific pages to impress and draw in prospective customers.

In addition, we can target where the customers live, what their interests are and what the potential spending may be. We do this with SEO, tags, categories, promotional text, hashtags and account handles.

Initially, we work to establish the brand online, adjust it to attract the preferred customers and build strong search terms. We have reached this point with BJU a reupholstery company in Darlington.

As we have reached a good online established profile for BJU we are adapting how we communicate with customers as follows.

The next stage is to enhance the brand online, develop the search terms and attract a very targeted customer. This means we change the focus of posts to be less ‘selling’ and more ‘promoting’ the ethos of the brand. An example of this is below:

Selling posts are to the point with a strong call to action – Save £500.

Brand posts are calm and confidently styled to demonstrate the brand ethos – BJU | Darlington.

The confidence of the brand posts may not produce immediate links to the site but rather demonstrate and build the brand that will attract the target customer when they are in the buying cycle – ready to buy.

I hope this is of use to you. Feel free to reach out with any specific questions.

September 17, 2021October 19, 2021

Three Prospective Customers

There are three customer sets you need to think about and talk to when communicating online.

Current | Customers who are active and buying from you.

Know You | Customers who know you but are not currently buying from you.

Dont Know You | Customers that don’t know you exist.

Bear in mind these three customer sets when communicating online. Here are the three customer sets are broken down with some tips on what to say.

1 – Customers who are currently active and buying from you:

It is nice when your company appears on social platforms even after a customer has purchased from you. If you are B2B, follow your customers and ask customers to follow you. Include in content helpful tips and news that will interest your customers.

2 – Customers who know of you but are not currently buying from you:

Post the latest work, products etc that you are producing. Reflect onto the Internet what is happening within your company. Examples; Completed bathroom installation, rendered wall, automated gate, upholstered chair etc. A lot of work produced by companies is only seen by the end-user, posting on the Internet lets prospective customers see all your good work.

3 – Customers that don’t know you exist.

They don’t know you or your company exist. They can benefit from your services or product. You are only of interest to this customer set when they need your service or product, they search for you on Google (other search engines too but Google is king), ask around, look on forums and social platforms. These places, you need to be. How best to do it; Optimise your website for your product and service. Be active on at least the top four social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google Business). Update your website often, think of it as changing the shop window. Encourage reviews from current customers online. Advertise your website on your van, car, cards, posters answerphone message, email signature etc to spread the word.

September 9, 2020September 14, 2020

What are Sitemaps?

A way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at.

Sitemaps are something most of our clients are not aware of. Sitemaps help search. Sitemaps are free and easy to add, they are simply a way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at to help make the search engine crawl (a robot clicking through your website) easy and accurate. They help produce a SERP Map too, a multi-link search engine result on Google and Bing.

A sitemap file is hidden from human visitors, but search engines like Google and Bing can see it. The sitemap helps search engines easily see all the content on your site in one place.

Why do you need a sitemap?

Without one, the only way for those bots to find all your content is by following links on your site. So, if you have any pages on your site that aren’t linked to often, or it takes a lot of links to reach a certain page, there’s a chance that Google won’t find those pages and they’ll never end up in search results.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemaps are something most of our clients are not aware of. Sitemaps help search. Sitemaps are free and easy to add, they are simply a way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at to help make the search engine crawl (a robot clicking through your website) easy and accurate. They help produce a ”SERP Map” too, a multi-link search engine result on Google and Bing.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters (the person who looks after your website) to inform search engines about pages on websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. So a more often updated website will be more attractive to search engines.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Using the XML Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides help for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It’s a markup language similar to HTML, but its main purpose is to organise data.

How to set up a site map

You can generate a site map from your host provider or admin panel. WordPress for example provide a site map automatically now. A site map link looks just like a website address with .xml on the end. Then submit it to a search engine.

WordPress provides a sitemap as standard now (5.5.1). If you already use an SEO tool to boost your website traffic, no action required.

August 17, 2020

Benefits of Upgrading to the New WordPress 5.5.

New with WordPress 5.5.

Speed. The speed of a website is important, Google prefers faster loading websites as a faster website provides a better experience for the visitor.

With WordPress 5.5 posts and pages feel faster, thanks to lazy-loaded images. Images give your company story a lot of impact, but they can sometimes make your site seem slow. So it advisable to make sure you optimise your images, size them about 1000 to 1500 pixels wide and reduce the resolution (they don’t have to be high-resolution images unless you are printing). In WordPress 5.5, images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading’.

On mobile, lazy loading can also keep browsers from loading files meant for other devices. That can save your readers money on data – and help preserve battery life.

Search. Add a sitemap for search.

WordPress sites work well with search engines, especially if fresh rich content is added. For example; updates from your company, case studies, answered FAQs etc. A site map is a way of letting Google and Bing etc to know which pages you want crawling and telling them your site has been updated. This can produce much better search results and in some cases, a multi-linked SERP map (search engine results page map).

We at Zedcomms always add a site map to our client’s sites using plugins such as Yoast or All in One SEO but now this feature is included with the latest WordPress software. WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap that helps search engines discover you’re most important pages from the very minute you go live.

So, more people will find your site sooner, giving you more time to engage, retain, and convert them to subscribers, customers, or whatever fits your definition of success.

This is a good move for WordPress.

Tip – Hit update just once; When updating your WordPress site to 5.5, click the update button only once. It looks like it has not responded, wait a while and it will do the job. Hit it a few times and the site may get – lest say confused.