A new user-friendly tool can help small businesses get a little love from Google. Using the new Google My Business, you can increase your visibility online, provide valuable business information to your customers and interact with your fans from your cell phone.
When a customer searches your business name, wouldn’t it be nice if a map of your business popped up followed by store hours and customer reviews? That’s just a few of the things you can accomplish with Google My Business. Let’s go over some of the most important features.
Getting started
This new tool brings together several other Google business platforms including Places for Business and the previous Google+ dashboard. If you were using either of these interfaces, you’ll be redirected to Google My Business.
“Before Google My Business, the interface was a bit clunky, but this new version is impressive,” says Todd Bailey, founder of online search marketing company pushStar Digital.
If you haven’t used the previous models, just go to Google My Business and click “Get on Google” to get started.
Create or claim your business listing
Whether your business is an actual brick-and-mortar store or an online business, you’ll be able to manage your business listing. If you’ve worked with the previous Google platforms, you’ll claim a business listing. If you’re new or have a business that’s online, you can create a listing.
Build a profile page
As you work your way through the prompted screens, you’ll create a Google+ profile for your business.
Here you can enter important business information like store hours, your phone number, a link to your business website and photos of your shop. Here’s a look at the profile page, which also serves as a dashboard.
Share content via Google+
From that same dashboard, you can share and engage with customers via Google+. If you look at the image above, you’ll see the G+ icon with “Share” under it. That’s where you can create a post. You can even post a message from your phone.
Not familiar with Google+? It’s another social media tool similar to Facebook. You add friends to your circle just as you’d add friends to your Facebook page. Sharing works the same way, too.
Access to metrics
As you can see from the image above, the dashboard also has an “Insights” section. This is where you can get all of your metrics. You can see how well posts are doing, get a look at the demographics of your followers and see helpful charts about your engagement rates.
“You’ll even be able to see how many people got directions to your business and see where they were when they requested the directions,” Bailey says. “This information will help owners see how far their reach is.”
Access to customer reviews
Word of mouth is a powerful thing. Now your customers can leave reviews right on your Google+ page.
“This is a key element for small businesses because now they have the ability to maintain their online reputation,” Bailey says.
If you take another look at the dashboard picture above, you’ll see the reviews section. As the business owner, you can read and respond to these reviews as needed.
Have you started using Google My Business yet? If so, what do you think of this new tool? Tell us in the comment section below.
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The post What’s All the Buzz about ‘Google My Business’? appeared first on VR Marketing Blog.
The report identifies trends in mobile marketing among small, mid-size and large companies.
The report also features a Quick Start Action Plan that gives you nine steps to get the most from your mobile marketing campaigns.
Is mobile marketing right for you? How do you get started with it? This Mobile Marketing Decision Tree, courtesy of my friends at 60 Second Marketer, can help you choose which mobile marketing tactics are best for your business.
I invite you to join AWeber’s monthly #AWeberHour Twitter Chat on Wednesday, July 2, 2014 from 2-3 p.m. EDT with Jamie Turner, founder of 60 Second Marketer.
Jamie will be sharing tips on how to run a winning mobile marketing campaign for your business, siting insights from the Mobile Marketing Research Report. You’ll learn tips and techniques for getting the most out of your mobile marketing campaigns.
Sign up to receive a reminder below.
Canada’s new spam law, better known as CASL, is set to take effect on July 1, 2014. Similar to CAN-SPAM here in the U.S., Canada’s upcoming legislation is a way for regulators to help consumers dodge unwanted and unsolicited emails. The good news is AWeber customers need not worry. Here’s a quick overview.
CASL is a Canadian anti-spam law that protects Canadian email subscribers (those who have a “.ca” email address). The law is broken down into three parts that will require email marketers to have:
Pretty much anyone who has no user consent or does not track or store this data. Likewise, those who purchase subscribers through other entities will be affected. Marketers who don’t clearly identify who they are or don’t use unsubscribe links should also take caution.
Nothing, we’ve got you covered! CASL will not affect you since AWeber never adds subscribers who haven’t opted in. Even pre-existing lists that are imported into our system are checked and never make it onto our platform if subscriber consent has been bypassed. AWeber also uses unsubscribe links on all of your mailings.
At any time you can log in to your AWeber account to show when and where a subscriber opted in. From your account homepage:
Although it is not required by CASL or CAN-SPAM, industry best practice says marketers should re-engage their email subscribers every six months to confirm they want to continue receiving content. This can be scary for fear of jumpstarting an influx of unsubscribes. But what better way to ensure you’re giving subscribers what they want than by asking?
There’s an entire website dedicated to Canada’s new anti-spam ruling. To read more about it, visit the official Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation site.
What is your reason for sending emails? To get subscribers, to get customers, to make sales to previous customers? Whatever your goal is, you’re always looking for your recipients to DO something.
So you include a call to action (CTA). Your CTA is what drives someone to do what you want them to do. If you’re not confident in your CTA, there is a quick fix for you!
That’s right… a split test.
CTA, like sign up forms and subject lines, are awesome to split test. The right call to action can drastically affect your email campaign and truly drive your business up. Split testing is the perfect way to make sure you’re putting the best call to action out there.
When it comes to a call to action, the smallest change can have a huge impact. And there are a lot of things you can change.
The Daily Egg, a blog for conversion optimization, design and copywriting tips, highlights six variables to consider when designing a call to action.
We’ve tested some of these variables ourselves over the years.
In our early days of sending out broadcasts that linked to our blog, we were trying to build our following. We wanted to know if people were more likely to click on a noticeable button, or if they would respond better to a text link. So we ran some tests.
At first, the button was getting significantly more attention. It was bigger, it stood out from the rest of the page, and the call to action really jumped off the screen.
But within the first few tests, the text link beat the button once by a significant amount. We couldn’t let this go unexplored, so we continued to test.
Eventually, over about 40 tests, we determined the text links to be a better call to action for us. Once the novelty of the button wore off, our subscribers seemed to be more comfortable with the less glaring link.
The phrasing of the CTA can also have the enormous impact on it’s success. Copyblogger explored the impact of the words “Click here” in opposition to more creative link text that could help search engine optimization, using data from Marketing Sherpa.
Their findings brought us back to our roots: “Click here” is the most effective way to get someone to… well, click there. Marketing Sherpa tested their initial call to action (“Continue here…”) against three other options. This was the impact on their clickthroughs:
Here were the differences in clickthroughs:
“Click to continue” was the clear winner, and they quickly changed their call to action.
ConversionXL compiled a the findings of tests that pitted red buttons against green buttons.
Red, as a color, can signify both dominance or danger. So what does that mean for a call to action?
Over the course of three case studies, where the only difference between buttons was the color, red beat out green 3 out of 3 times.
Get testing! Just because text links work better for AWeber and red buttons beat green buttons in a few tests, doesn’t mean that either of these findings are what’s best for you.
Consider your audience, your objective, and your strategy to build your business. Make your call to action work for you!
We have a few more tests we can share with you on our blog here, to give you more ideas for your tests.
We also have an awesome guide to give you some more information about calls to action.
We’ve discussed the numerous possibilities of split testing subject lines and sign up forms earlier this month.
Make sure you’re getting all our tips and tricks by subscribing to the blog!
Marketing Sherpa caught up with James Koons at IRCE and interviewed him about online privacy.
Recently, I received an interesting email from J.Crew. It’s in some ways unconventional and goes against one common best practice. Best practice would tell you the call-to-action should be “above the fold”. “The fold”, however, is an antiquated term and hard to define in today’s email universe. You can basically translate this to saying that the call-to-action should be visible without scrolling. This is a bit tricky considering the various monitor resolutions, tablets, and smart phones people view their email on. As a designer, this can be frustrating because if you truly stick to this best practice it can cause some limitations in your design. What I like about this email is the fact that it doesn’t follow best practice. There’s no clear call-to-action initially — you have to scroll down to see it. What this email did was make me curious. Not only did curiosity make me scroll down, it made me click to “find out why”. Now, I’m not saying throw caution to the wind and ignore best practices. They’ve been established for a reason. What I am saying is its ok to shake things up and break the rules now and then.
Are your email open rates struggling? You might be making mistakes you don’t even know you’re making. You can find out with a split test.
Last week, we explained the power of a good split test and showed how it can be done with sign up forms and lightboxes. But split tests don’t end once your list has taken shape. You can also test different elements of your emails to see what makes for more successful emails.
One of the easiest things to test is your subject line. Subject lines are crucial because they are the very first thing people see in their inbox. If it doesn’t intrigue them, it could also be the last thing they see of that email.
ClickZ, a marketing blog, did a test (and a retest) of a consistent subject line for a newsletter vs. a subject that indicated the topic of that edition of the newsletter. The consistent subject was “Subscriber Newsletter,” and the test ensured that the key theme of the newsletter was in the first 25 characters (ie “Prime Real Estate”).
Despite common advice that a consistent subject line helps open rates, ClickZ found the opposite:
When people knew ahead of time that they would be interested in what the email had to say, they engaged more with the content as well.
Here at AWeber, we tested direct, relevant subjects against creative, sometimes ambiguous subject lines.
The more direct subject lines were the clear winners. Though the creative subjects could be intriguing in the inbox, if people weren’t sure what they were going to gain from opening it, they were less likely to do so.
These are the subject lines we tested, organized by style:
The clear subject lines outperformed the creative ones in every metric. These were the numbers:
| Comments | Tweets | Facebook Likes | Traffic | Email Subscriptions |
| 1107% | 315% | 331% | 617% | 366% |
The split tests above give just a small snapshot of what’s possible when it comes to testing your subject lines. There are so many variables that go into the subject that it’s important to take them all into consideration, then test them one at a time.
Some variables to consider, courtesy of The WordStream Blog:
As always, even if you think you know what your subscribers like best – it’s worth the test.
There is a lot of research out there about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to headlines. Though these aren’t hard and fast rules, we want to give you some of the highlights to make your tests more effective.
In short, the spam filter. A few things to steer clear of:
Though these tactics might catch someone’s eye in their inbox, if they’re coupled with other spam concerns, they’ll be caught in the spam filter first.
Convince your reader, through the subject line, that your content is worth their time and won’t take up too much of it.
According to Copyblogger, there are a few key things that accomplish this:
Use these tips, consider your variables and run some tests! We’d love to hear your findings in the comments section.
Check out Split Testing Sign Up Forms For More Subscribers to learn more about building your list with split tested sign up forms.
And make sure you subscribe to our blog for the final installment of the split test series: email formatting.
If you’re like most business owners, you’ve seen the influence of mobile devices on your website’s ability to retain and convert visitors.
As a result, many websites and content management systems have moved to introduce mobile responsive designs that look great on smartphones and other mobile devices.
I’m happy to announce that we recently made a change that makes it easier for people visiting your site from mobile devices to interact with your site, and to join your email list.
When you create sign up forms in AWeber, they’ll now automatically resize themselves to be usable for visitors who come to your site from a mobile device.
To create a sign up form, go to the Sign Up Forms page in your account.
It’s pretty common for websites to publish an email sign up form on their site.
And typically that form looks just fine for all visitors coming to the site from their computers.
However, those forms often look horrible on mobile devices.
If you’ve ever been to a site that offered a mostly great-looking mobile experience, but with a sign up form that wasn’t responsive, you may have seen something like this:
Notice how disruptive that is? Not what you want visitors to see.
A much better experience for visitors is one where the form adjusts to the smaller mobile screen, like so:
See how that form is more user-friendly and likely to get filled out? (Not to mention the fact that if you don’t want to fill it out, you can actually see and press the X to close it?)
Good news: all of the hundreds of sign up form templates available to you in your AWeber account are now ready to look great on mobile.
So any new form you create will automatically be mobile responsive.
If you already have an existing form, you’ll need to do one of two things to update it to a responsive one. And they’re both easy:
If you’re using a hosted web form, you’ll want to re-save the form (but you don’t need to re-publish any links to it).
To create a new sign up form, go to the Sign Up Forms page in your account.
If you’re not using AWeber, you can still take our sign up forms for a spin. Check out the interactive sign up form gallery.
Yesterday, Ross had the opportunity to chat with Tim Parry of MultiChannel Merchant about trends in email marketing, including back in stock alerts, welcome series messages, personalization and shopping cart abandonment.
