When done correctly, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies available to businesses today. Automated email marketing follows the principles of email marketing, but sends emails at specific times that are predetermined by your company. There are many things you need to know before you start, so let’s go over the ins and outs of automated email marketing.

Automated email marketing doesn’t include the confirmation emails sent to customers when they place an order. This is because most of the time, those emails aren’t trying to sell anything; they’re simply laying out information that the customer already knows. Emails intended for marketing, on the other hand, give customers new information and attempt to draw them in enough to make a purchase.

We’ll first look at trigger emails, which are sent when a member of your target audience completes a certain action. Trigger emails cover those sent when a customer leaves a full online shopping cart, purchases a product, passes an important date, or is close to ending a free trial period. This type of automated email marketing is ideal for companies that have many active customers.

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Here's how to always appear on the first page of Google search results -- the search engine ranking advice you need to hear!

To push your company up to the first Google search results page, you’ll need links. While many businesses focus on the quantity of those links, it’s quality that truly determines how you’ll rank. Use our simple tricks to give your company more online exposure.

When it comes to search engine ranking, look for pre-compiled blog lists that relate to your industry. This makes choosing the best ones much easier and hunting down individual links unnecessary. Click on an article with a list of 20 to 50 blogs so you have a good amount of selection. When you find a few sources that are relevant to your business, reach out with an email offering an appealing deal or special offer.

If you want to be more sure you’ve chosen a good blog, use Ahrefs to evaluate the site based on its domain and page authority. It’s best to create a master list or spreadsheet to store the data you find and compare your sources. When you eventually reach out to other bloggers, make sure you’re not being demanding. Allow for some back and forth communication before you ask for a favour, and consider offering something free or discounted in exchange for an honest review.

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If your target audience is smaller and more refined than those of other businesses, you may be struggling to gain results from regular online marketing strategies. You’re in luck, however - there are several ways to successfully advertise your products to your very specific audience.

Start in the Google search engine to discover what your customers are typing into the search bar. Narrow down the information and create Facebook ads that will directly target and attract potential buyers. These ads need to be shown repeatedly to your customers over a decent period of time to press the product into their subconscious, predisposing them to buy your product when they need something like it.

You can also opt for the Google ads or Google AdWords approach, in which you use relevant keywords in your ads to have them appear far up on the search results page and lead your audience members to a contest or giveaway your company is hosting. The more specific the keywords are, the less it will cost your company to run the ads.

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Money-saving tips every startup should follow

No businesses struggle to keep their cash the way startups do. Most companies cost around $30,000 just to get up and running, and thousands more for rent, salaries, materials, and advertising. The last of this list seems unnecessary, but not doing it could cost your business more money in the long run. You’ll want to focus on it without spending much, so here’s a handful of cheap and useful marketing strategies for your budding company.

Give referrals a try. Create a campaign that allows your current customers to refer a friend who might be interested in trying your product and receive a reward for doing so. Setting up a campaign like this comes at little to no cost, and the referred individuals that come your way are more willing to trust you having been told about your company by someone they like and respect.

Press releases can work as well. You’ll have your company mentioned in popular media this way, extending your reach far beyond your previous boundaries. If you take the time to find the journalists yourself, it can be a completely free option. For an alternate approach, content marketing is promising for most. This strategy includes text, photos, videos, and podcasts, all of which can up your site traffic and be used alongside other methods.

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In the waning age of simple print advertisements, companies are forced to focus on what 21st century consumers have come to enjoy: content marketing. Nowadays, it’s important to come across genuinely in your marketing, putting thought into the composition of each advertisement and promotion you create. This is made more difficult with the growing popularity of social media platforms and the staggering rate at which they’re used. There’s no need to stress, however - there are many tools available that make content marketing easier.

Defining and integrating your goals into all the marketing campaigns you run can prove challenging, but this challenge can be overcome with an all-inclusive strategy manual. Content marketing manuals help your company maintain consistency throughout your marketing campaign, adhering to your overarching message. Many websites offer both digital and print manuals that can be purchased or downloaded by those who need it.

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Gaining and keeping the trust of others has proven to be challenging, and when those others are skeptical consumers, the task becomes even more difficult. Fortunately, having some knowledge of consumer psychology can make relationship development a bit easier.

Loss aversion is a powerful psychological phenomena that causes people to put more effort into avoiding losses than aiming for gains. One study divided participants into two groups, the first of which could risk losing or gaining $50 and ultimately keep $30, and the second of which could do the same gamble and ultimately surrender $20. Despite the game being the same, 61% of participants in the second group were willing to take the chance, compared to 43% in the first group.

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The New Adwords Experience is almost here, and while it’s quite different from is predecessor, many of those differences appear to be improvements. As expected, they’re not all presented upfront - they take some time to discover. Here’s what we found when learning about the new Adwords user interface.

Several advertising agencies and advertisers have been given access to the new Adwords over the past several months, and by the end of 2017, all active online advertisers will be able to use it. The advertisers using the new Adwords can still use the older version if they so choose, and many might, simply due to the unfamiliar design of the most recent version. However, Adwords creators are hoping that the updated list of features will sway advertisers towards the new interface.

One of the most useful features of the new interface is the promotion extension option, which gives marketers the option to reveal an offer in text advertisements and insert a direct link to it. The feature is clearly indicated by a tag icon and makes it easier for customers to quickly reach the company’s website or social media l media pages.

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Now that so many companies have a significant online presence through their many social media accounts, it’s important for the heads of those companies to lay down some ground rules to protect workers, private information, and the company’s reputation. How should you go about creating those guidelines? We have a few suggestions.

You must first decide and clearly state who can speak for the company on any of its social media platforms. Many businesses disallow its everyday workers to respond to the questions and concerns of customers, opting for a specialized team to do it instead for the sake of consistency, privacy, and accurate representation.

Of course, it’s possible to create milder rules that allow dedicated workers to provide helpful input when necessary. If you opt for a more general policy, make sure that even the most experienced workers give customers advice that aligns with the company’s views. One way to do this is to teach your employees how to interact with customers in a helpful but company-approved manner. Consider selecting a handful of longtime employees to carry out such tasks and be clear about the rules.

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Getting conversions from your online content is becoming increasingly difficult as the online world changes. You’re now up against not only your industry competitors, but also any other companies looking for digital space to advertise. It’s not always easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard, either. If you want to succeed, you need to know what your target audience likes and offer those things to them.

With the growing mistrust of companies among consumers, customer testimonials make your business much more credible to outsiders. Consumers have begun to look to their close friends, loved ones, and even general social groups they fit into for advice, so showing a few highly positive and generally descriptive testimonials on your website and in marketing emails will intrigue them. You’ll gain more conversions soon after.

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Gone are the days when marketers would vaguely suggest to other parties what their customers may like based on the number of pages they visited on any given site. That method has been replaced by a much more thorough practice called behavioural marketing.

Showing consumers ads that may or may not be relevant to them can work, but it’s quite inefficient. Behavioural marketing compiles each user’s search history, cookies, and other related information to create a profile that can be advertised to. The more the user interacts with certain digital information, the better catered their offers will be.

Like most marketing frameworks, behavioural marketing isn’t as basic as it seems. The term is used to cover things like promotional emails, product suggestions, and retargeting. The third of these elements is exactly what it sounds like: a process that remembers which products a customer has seen and reintroduces those products to the customer at a later time. Retargeting is most often used on Google and Facebook.

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Every company that’s good at marketing knows that SEO, or search engine optimization, is essential to success. But not everyone understands what SEO entails and how it works. Whether you’re completely new to the concept or just need a refresher, we’re here to help.

The goal of SEO is to spread the word about your company, making sure it reaches to and draws in your target audience to your business website. To do that, you’re going to need a set of tools. The first of these tools is Ahrefs, an algorithm that searches the internet for good backlinks for your website. Its expansive database makes it possible to view related backlinks and the metrics regarding those backlinks in a matter of minutes.

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When Facebook first introduced ads to its platform, users didn’t recognize them as ads; they saw them as regular posts. Now that everyone is all too aware of the sponsored posts on their feed, marketers have to watch their step.

Before you create your ad, plan to be honest with your goals and present yourself in a way you know will stand out. Instead of modelling your Facebook ads after those of other companies without knowing if they’ll be effective, choose an unlikely marketing strategy that will increase your uniqueness. Once you’re aware of these tips and are ready to implement them, create and release your ad.

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Companies spent $6 billion more on mobile advertising this year than they did in 2015, and that jump managed to beat out the yearly total of desktop advertising. With mobile advertising securing its place as the new standard, it’s time to start looking at the newest ppc and marketing trends of 2017, featured on Google AdWords and Bing Ads.

The most prominent part of AdWords specifically is its artificial intelligence. Machines have begun to take in new information and learn from it, taking over most search marketing functions. When Google introduced smart display, not many people knew that most of the behind-the-scenes work was completed by autonomous machines, which saves the company time and energy.

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What the iPhone Did for the Tech World

Despite Apple not being the first to create and release a smartphone, the decade-old iPhone became wildly popular upon its introduction to cell phone users and managed to drown out the noise of its competitors surprisingly quickly. With this evolutionary new product on the market, many things in the social, marketing, and tech spheres changed.

The first iPhone had some similarities to other smartphones, but its greatest advantage was its ability to easily connect to the internet. These phones were miniature computers packed into communication platforms, which many customers liked. Mobile device users also seldom took pictures before the iPhone, and when they did, they never bothered to edit them much. Apple made it possible for regular people to take high-quality photos and with the help of easy-to-use editing tools and mobile apps, stylize them on a near-professional level. Many would agree that some photos even rival that of your local web design company or photographer. In fact, 85% of the 1.2 trillion photos taken will be taken on phones this year alone.

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Six months into the year is a great time to analyze your company’s marketing content to determine which strategies are helping, which ones are hurting, and which ones seem to be stagnant. If you’re wondering how to handle such a large task, keep a few of these key ideas in mind as you review your results.

Hire a professional writer to speak to internal experts and record the information they hear in a cohesive manner instead of having the internal experts writing content themselves. This way, proofreading and employee hours can be reduced to a reasonable length of time, and the finished product is much more pristine.

Businesses that team up with companies in other markets tend to spend less on marketing campaigns and extend their reach beyond their regular audience. Both companies benefit financially in the long-run, yet so few take advantage of such a strength.

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Certain business companies have a lot more control over search results than you may think. Some companies can manipulate these results to appear first on the list simply by buying over one thousand domain names to increase consumer interaction with the sites they own, and readers are directed to these sites through anchor text.

Private Blog Networks are often used by those who play dirty in the SEO world to boost their ratings, and although it can be effective, it’s rarely a good option. Sneaky companies will buy several outdated domains and connect them to each other, which seems like the perfect strategy until you realize that Google will punish whoever it catches using it.

Another downside to Private Blog Networks is their high cost and tendency to eat up time. They aren’t an ideal option for any company that wants to play it safe and put their time and money into a few other strategies that would be more beneficial on the whole.

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Creating a best fit offer can be tricky if you don’t know how to do it, but once you’ve learned the rules, it’s a breeze. A best fit offer is the optimum tool to combine with a blog post to intrigue customers and generate leads. By choosing a tool - such as a survey, quiz, or promotion - that strongly relates to your blog post, readers will more likely click on this extra content and become a lead for your company.

As expected, irrelevant offers are unlikely to create leads and should be swapped out for something your customers will click on. If your company is looking to multiply its leads by a factor two or more, consider collecting information about your company’s destination conversion rates with this simple process.

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If you’re strolling through NYC’s most happening spot, you can’t miss it! There now stands a seven-storey-tall Amazon Echo attached to a billboard in Times Square, built to advertise Amazon Music and the Echo, a voice-activated device that’s the latest service from the ecommerce giant.
This 24m tall model is decked out with LED lights and real song lyrics to give off the impression that it works, but while the gargantuan structure holds the record for the tallest ad in Times Square, it can’t be used like a regular Amazon Echo. This marketing campaign is mainly to promote the Echo’s new lyrics feature where a user can search for a song even if they only remember a few words from it. Haven’t we all tapped a friend on the shoulder and said, “Hey, what’s that song that goes…?” Now, there’s a digital way to do that and you don’t even have to remember many of the lyrics.

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The latest in ecommerce news - With Google Shopping, improving sales by less than 90% doesn’t cut it, and online businesses are beginning to see the effects of this unfortunate truth.
Why is this happening? Well, Google Shopping’s popularity skyrocketed in 2016, its SERP click rate increasing from just over one half to nearly three-quarters while its paid clicks increased by more than one-third. When added up and converted, the platform’s growth was 89% in one year alone.
Another reason this is happening is because the number of ads on Google’s search results page is steadily going up, and these aesthetically reliant ads take up more space, pushing the searched content down the page. Text-heavy ads are less common nowadays, as they don’t always give potential customers a clear idea of the product.
Although this ad push is good news for businesses overall, it’s bad news for any firm that doesn’t have a monopoly, which is most of them. If you want to get ahead without waiting for your popularity to naturally increase, there are a few things you can do.

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Firefox’s new Version 54 browser is finally here, and expectations are very high. Following the trend set by Google Chrome and then copied by many others, Firefox’s updated browser will run faster and more smoothly than ever before. Let’s take a look at the different features and improvements we’re supposed to be able to see:
Users can expect to experience better speed when having multiple tabs open. Users will finally be able to open multiple tabs on the internet browser without the loading speed of any one tab being affected by others, thanks to Version 54’s multiple processes. This upgrade will show on both desktop and mobile.
Firefox, created by the Mozilla Foundation in 2002, was close behind Internet Explorer in popularity until 2011, the year Google Chrome was released. Firefox’s technological advancements have been slow for the past six years, constantly trailing behind other browsers that upgrade their systems as soon as a functioning version comes out. This could be the company’s chance to catch up.

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If you have a blog for business, you may want to share your content on social media, or even make a social platform your new basis, to draw more attention to your products or services. But how exactly do you go about it? We have everything you need to know about marketing through blogging and social media posts.
Before you begin, decide what you want your goal to be. Choose an achievable goal that can be accomplished in a matter of months or years before you jump right into what you wish to accomplish decades from now. Goals based on reasonable audience growth, sales, or product manufacturing are good places to start. Track your success on the journey towards your goal.

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Because screen cracks are usually an inevitable part of owning an iPhone and fixing those screens is quite the task, Apple has developed a machine made specifically for replacing them.
Four hundred of these new machines have been created and will be distributed to twenty-five different countries, and while they do replace the glass of iPhone screens, they are also programmed to properly line up the sensors with the correct spots on the screen for optimum use. These Horizon Machines have been beta-tested in London store locations to minimize the Genius Bar crowd.

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We now know for sure that social media affects SEO, but few people know exactly how. We have to examine some information to gain a better understanding of the subject.
Because Google will likely never release its programming secrets to the public, we have to use the surrounding data to draw conclusions. The company doesn’t consider social signals to be an indication of ranking, but links from Facebook and Twitter once fell under that category. Currently, SEO isn’t symbolized by social activity for Google. Successful social media posts can, however, have major effects on ranking.
Content interaction increases as it gets passed around. While the number of shares a post has doesn’t indicate its SEO impact, those shares up the chances of gaining links from popular websites. This is true of almost every social media platform, so delivering good content can indirectly affect ranking.

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Many companies are choosing online advertising more and more for its wide reach and easy-to-track nature. Google has had great success with this tactic, using it with Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Search, but it’s had difficulty determining which brick-and-mortar stores customers visit and how much they spend at those stores. Recently, that’s become much easier.
The company plans to correlate digital advertisements with physical purchases in the near future by examining 70% of consumer credit and debit card information. Because 90% of sales occur in physical stores, it’s challenging to link those sales to digital marketing, which is problematic for the largely online presence of Google.

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Having watched America excel in the artificial intelligence sector for several years, China has finally begun to contribute to the industry, and their ideas could do powerful things when made reality.
In Beijing, researchers have received billions of dollars for developing artificial intelligence that will eventually control traffic, complete transactions, censor the internet, and infer national crime. The Chinese tech company Baidu has even employed professionals who have built military robots for the country.
Now that the US has slowed its research in the field after President Trump’s suggested budget cuts, China is catching up to its rival in terms of spending. The nation’s laboratories are dedicated to creating machines that can locate and store digital memories without human assistance. More importantly, China’s artificial intelligence machines will likely be able to predict terrorist attacks before they happen when they become more advanced.

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