Real Email Marketers Measure Forwards

Editor’s Note: Week 2 of Red Bridge’s Training Course. The featured image of my car going through the car wash because just as I polish my car, I polish my skillz. 

Another good week in the world of Red Bridge trainings!

Here’s what happened:

Digital Marketer (EP) – Use LinkedIn Ads to Get New Leads and Sales

Here’s the outline of the EP for your reference of the topics covered:

Start Here:

• How to Get the Most Out of your Execution Plan
• Understand CVO
• Understanding LinkedIn Advertising

Prepare Campaign:

• Set Up Your LinkedIn Advertising Account
• Prepare Your Website to Track Goals

Create LinkedIn Ad:

• Create a Conversion Focused Ad + Variations
• Target Your Advertisement to the Right Audience
• Set the Budget for Your Advertisement

Track Results:

• Track Your Analytics in LinkedIn
• Track Your Conversions in Google Analytics
• Optimize Your LinkedIn Advertisement Using Variations

Create LinkedIn Sponsored Updates:

• Understanding LinkedIn Sponsored Updates
• Craft a Conversion-Focused Sponsored Update
• Target Your Sponsored Update to the Right Audience
• Set the Budget for Your Sponsored Update
• Track Your Conversions in Google Analytics

BONUS:

• Advertise to Your LinkedIn Network on Facebook Ads

Conclusion:

• Takeaways

Notes And Key Learnings

LinkedIn will track the impressions your ads receive and the number of clicks to your website. But unless you are using their Lead Collection bar, their analytics will not be able to track whether clicks from an ad lead to a conversion. Use Google Analytics goal conversions and UTM Parameters!

The ad format on LinkedIn allows you to have the following:

• A link to your website OR a link to your company page on LinkedIn.
• A headline of up to 25 characters, including spaces.
• A description of up to 75 characters spanning two lines.
• An image in PNG, JPEG, or GIF format with a max file size of 2 MB that will be resized to a 50×50 pixel square OR
• A video linked from YouTube that is a maximum of 120 seconds.

LinkedIn provides the following tips to help you create an ad that will lead to results:

• An image can help your Ad draw more interest among your target audience. Ads with images get up to 20% more clicks.
• Want to draw more attention to your Ad? Try making your headline into a question.
• Keep it relevant. Make sure your ad destination makes sense with your ad copy.
• Find what resonates best with your audience by testing multiple variations of your Ad campaign – try different images or headlines.

You can create up to 15 different variations of your ad to do some serious A/B testing.

LinkedIn will show different versions of your ad to your target audience and give you the click-through rate for each, allowing you to determine which ad variation gets the best results. This allows you to try different headlines, descriptions, images, and videos to see which combination leads to the most conversions.

You can choose to target your ads to:

• Specific companies
• Companies in specific industries
• People with a specific job title
• People with a specific job function
• People with a specific seniority level
• People who are alumni of specific schools
• People with specific skills
• People in specific groups
• People by gender and age

Sponsored Updates Instead of Ads

I really like this, BUT since sponsored updates do not come with variation options, you will just want to monitor how much you are spending for your sponsored update ad campaign in the LinkedIn Ads Campaign Manager and how many actual conversions you are receiving through Google Analytics.

Code – CodeAcademy HTML & CSS (100%)

Read – 1 eBook from Litmus.com

The Viral Email Report: Benchmarks, Tactics, and Topics of the Most Forwarded Emails

1. Forwards expand the reach of your messages and generate additional conversions, but they have significant meaning beyond that. Forwards are a powerful indication of the overall health of your email program, because they are a sign that you’re fulfilling your subscribers’ needs at the highest level.
2. Being direct with subscribers tends to be the best way to drive action. So when you want them to register for an event, include a “Register” call-to-action button. The sameappears to hold true for email sharing. If you want them to share the email, ask them to share the email.
3. Emails in the top 1% of viral emails were 13 times more likely than the typical email to include a prominent “share with your network” call-to-action.

Watch – 3 to 5 Videos on Wistia.com about Marketing, Community Building, etc

Casual Content Marketing: IMImpact’s Weekly Video Series

Love this idea. Is basically a way to quickly update people about your company and what you’re doing. I could probably start doing this about nomading ;O

4 Branding Lessons from Asking MailChimp Anything

Meh.

Surviving Without Snippets: Your New Video SEO Strategy

YouTube & self-hosting, together. Building an effective video SEO strategy is a long term game now that video snippets have been removed for most websites. Creating great content with amazing media will build links and social shares to build your site’s authority with the search engines. This will help all of your content rank higher.

From Conversions to Connections: 3 Levels of Video Strategy

This is awesome. We could definitely use some of this. I really like each type of video.

1. Conversion
2. Teaching
3. Feel Something

We could use the first one. And the second one, a lot. The third one relates back to the first video I put in here about the weekly video series.

Should You Embed Video in Email?

The verdict: embed your video on your site.

Just like when we do email marketing to promote written content, we should always include a small preview of the content in the email and link to the full content on the site.

Overall Thoughts

Great week. Learned a lot.

• Email Forwards is an important KPI
• VLOG-ing could be a good idea for content
• You can get really granular with your LinkedIn Ads and test a shit load of things

Burk

Alex is probably thinking about food right now.