News — Digital

The Concept

Drip Email Campaigns are an automated set of emails that will be sent out at specific timings or based on actions the recipient takes. The main functions of Drip Campaigns that help your Email Marketing plans are: nurturing leads, welcoming/onboarding new users, reminding users about abandoned shopping carts or to renew their subscription, giving recommendations from data, confirming receipts or unsubscriptions, and engaging users with exciting/educational content!

The magic of Drip Email Campaigns is that the whole process is automated, with options to personalize their names, company info, domains and more! These series of emails can be written beforehand, and be queued into any email marketing platforms out there. Some examples include MailChimp, Drip, Reply.io, etc.

At RageOn, we have set a robust Email Marketing protocol and would love to share some tips with you for efficient Drip Email Campaigns!

The Guide

1. Knowing your Customers

Identifying the Target Audience to know which type of drip to send is highly important! Some target segments to consider include user characteristics (visit frequency), length of membership (whether they're new users or longtime users), and even demographics like age, gender, location. 

Always make sure to deploy A/B testing with a small pool of leads to prepare you for that huge campaign in the future!

2. Setting Goals

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is an excellent framework to use when setting goals. A clear and result-driven aim is important in your Email Marketing planning, so you would know the success of your campaign. Some examples of goal-setting include the number of replies, the number of drips it takes to get a reply, etc. These are usually coupled with OKRs like reply rates, clickthrough rates, and open rates.

3. Planning, Content, and Writing 

Use consistent tones by writing each drip campaign in 1 sitting, but make sure your voice reflects that of your company's branding. You should also devote sufficient time to planning the email marketing strategy and readjust writing styles constantly when your OKRs are not hit. Quality over Quantity. 

The length of your body is dependent on your audience (use short emails for new users, and long emails for longtime users). A cool tip is that using P.S. at the end of each email will increase conversion rates due to the recency effect!

The most important factor is to have an obvious Call-To-Action (subscribing, scheduling a meeting, purchasing a product, etc.)

4. Try Different Types of Subject Line Tones

From industry experts, the best subject line tones to use are:

Fear of Missing Out: Use words that imply time-sensitivity (“urgent”, “breaking”, “important”).
Curiosity: Use words that make subscribers curious (asking a question (and answering it in your email) or expecting a reward (surprise gift).
Humour: Make them laugh (include a joke, or just be quirky)!
Greed: Offer discounts, gift cards, coupons!
Sloth: Offer a shortcut or resources to save time (useful blogs, tips, explainer videos).
Pain Points: Solve problems!
Personal: Treat them like friends! Use casual speech patterns, or share something personal.
Straightforward: Be honest about what you're trying to promote. 

The Next Step

Now that you've learned the basics for Email Drip Campaigns, it's time to put it into good use! But first, you need to generate a list of leads. This can be done by using Email Marketing tactics like giving discount codes on your site, doing giveaway contests, or even cold calling!

Wishing you all the best in your adventures down the consumer funnel, and please share any tips you have in the comments below!

1. Instagram is not just a social media platform; it is your second home page

2. Instagram Stories - Highlights and Call-to-Actions

Instagram Stories have officially dominated the social media industry, with twice as many daily users as their closest competitor, SnapChat. These stories are viewed more often as compared to Instagram Posts. Widely regarded to have the highest click-through rate, it is important to include call-to-actions that link to your e-commerce store with Instagram. There are also free GIFs and design tools for to add in that "Swipe Up" in your stories. Unfortunately, this feature is only available for verified accounts or, if you have more than 10,000 followers.

Lasting for only 24 hours, another neat trick is to plan out stories with a theme or a series, to store them in your story highlights! (See below)

Story highlights last forever! This feature allows your followers to rewatch their favorite stories, or those that they missed out on. Make sure you remember to play around with the wide range of fun tools Instagram has for their stories (Boomerang, GIFs, Face Filters, Polls, Sliders, etc.)!

3. Instagram Shop - Setting up and Stickers

All Instagram business account owners can set up Instagram Shop easily by following this guide. They can tag up to 5 products per post, or 20 per carousel. You can also edit product details and prices! Followers that love your products will be taken directly to your shop once they click the tag, which would generate more revenue for you! An important factor to take note is to set up a comprehensive product catalog through Facebook Business Manager or Shopify. 

Riding on the wave of this cool feature, Instagram has also replicated it on Stories. Yes, you can now tag products in your stories!

In Summary

Promoting your e-commerce store with Instagram has never been simpler! However, you have to put in the due diligence in creating your own social media strategies. Identifying what works and what doesn't through analytics is necessary for you to triumph over your competitors and produce the best social media for ecommerce. 

Comment about your Instagram experience below! 

1. Canva

2. Pablo by Buffer

Created by Buffer, the Social Media Management Software, Pablo by Buffer is a graphic design tool that specializes in creating engaging images for Social Media purposes. However, you can use it to 'kill 2 birds with 1 stone', by creating a design that is optimized to print on products, as well as post on social media. Similar to Canva, Pablo has over 600k images/templates to pick from, and a Text Generator.

3. Typorama (App for iOS)

Typorama makes it easy to design products whenever and wherever. This iOS App offers a variety of complex design layouts and over 40 different typographic styles used by world-famous designers. It also provides fancy photo filters and overlays for you to easily edit your backgrounds with a professional flair. Exclusive to Typorama, there are 3D text distortion and color gradient tools installed in the app to help make your imagination become a reality.

4. RageOn!

RageOn! has its own custom builder, available online and on iOS! If you're looking to create simple designs, or even just upload a favorite photo of your loved ones, then the RageOn! builder is perfect for you. It gives you the unique experience of envisioning your designs on the products themselves. RageOn! also offers a wide range of product templates (T Shirt, Tank Tops, Hoodies, Sweatshirts, Swim Shorts, etc.), a text generator, and hundreds of digital stickers!

In Summary 

Before you dive into these awesome tools, always remember to optimize your designs for products. At RageOn!, we want to empower the creators of the world! You can now turn your designing hobby into passive income by selling on our Platform.

What are you waiting for? Create a Store on RageOn! today.

Know any other FREE tools to create designs? Share them down below to help everyone have the best designs for their products!

It is no surprise that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a big part in a customer's journey to purchase a product. In 2018, 34.6% of customers started their search through Google! Learning how to use SEO for your E-Commerce Store might appear to be difficult, but it is actually REALLY SIMPLE. 

You don't need to have incredible tech knowledge or hire a digital marketing expert to enable your online business to rank higher in Google Search, because we will show you how.

This article will cover the 4 basic elements of SEO:

1. Link building

2. Content Optimization

3. Metadata

4. Mobile-friendly

Google will constantly update their SEO algorithms, but we are up-to-date with the current versions. Don't worry!

1. Link Building - Backlinks

(Backlinko)

Link Building refers to "building up" the quality and quantity of inbound links (backlinks) to help your online business rank higher in Google searches.

From the above study, it can be seen that link building is extremely crucial. The higher the amount of backlinks, the higher your ranking! However, you should not be spamming backlinks everywhere, as Google will take into account referencing from unique sources and the reputation of the sources.

Setting up backlinks require time and effort, but getting started is a simple process. If you’re not sure where to begin, you should do extensive research on other players in the same industry. Commenting your blog/website on other related pages/forums (that are reputable!) would work wonders for you. This performs best for pages that utilize the same keywords that you want to rank higher on. 

Fun Fact: Link Building for 1 page would also improve traffic to ALL OTHER PAGES on the same website!

2. Content Optimization - Content Quality and Images

Finding the right keywords to use in your website/blog is the first step to improve SEO for your E-Commerce Store. The rule of thumb is to plan ahead and identify which keywords you want to rank for. With that in mind, the next step is to include these keywords in the Header, and also the first 100 words of your site!

Moving on to the Body, research from SEMRush has shown that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. This means that: Content is king. Instead of doing multiple pages/blogs on your site every week, you should do an in-depth study on a certain topic and drive out a solid and impactful page.

Finally, image content and quality plays an important role too. As your images are indexed by Google, they help in letting the search engine know more about your site. Images without human-readable file names (e.g. x17p31.jpg) or proper alt text (small texts that appear in case the image fails to load) would not value-add to your ranking at all, especially on Google Images!

Here is an Example of Alt Text!

3. MetaData - Title, Meta Desc., and Tags

Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Basically, you need to summarize your content to be simple enough for Google to get a grasp of your site.

The important metadata are:

Title Tag - The Title of your page is as important as the title of a novel or journal; it summarizes the whole story into a few simple words. Your Title Tag will be seen in the Search Result and Browser Tab.

Meta Description - The short description shown underneath a title in Google searches. It's main use is to entice customers to click the link, so make sure you spend time to craft it out!

URL - The web address should be optimized with your keywords, and try to keep it short! After the 5th word in the URL, Google's algorithms will put less weight on the other words.

Here is an example from RageOn:

If you're using Shopify, you're in luck! Implementing SEO elements in Shopify is super easy. You can just scroll down on any product/blog page and find a useful section at the bottom for you to edit any Metadata specifically!

4. Mobile-Friendly - Testing

According to Statista, 52.2% of website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones in 2018 (up from 50.3% in 2017)! This would mean that there are huge opportunity costs if you did not optimize your site for mobile.

It is also critical to make sure your ads do not cover the majority of content on a mobile screen, as they would be considered "intrusive" and be penalized in SEO (according to Google).

But how would I know if my site is mobile-friendly? Test it Here.

Baby Steps

As you may expect, you won't see results overnight! Everyone starts somewhere, so let these 4 basic elements guide you as baby steps, while you gradually work your way to building the best E-Commerce Store around!

We hope these 4 effective steps were useful in improving SEO for your E-Commerce Store. If you know any other tips that helped your online business rank higher, comment them down below!

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