SendPulse – the ultimate digital marketing solution
Hello friends,
Today we are going to be discussing one solution that will help you achieve optimal results for your digital marketing campaigns. We will be focusing on its core functionalities and of course its WordPress integration.
This solution is called SendPulse and it is every marketeer’s best friend!
What does SendPulse do?
A lot! SendPulse is a full featured suite that offers you the possibility to create and optimize your newsletter campaigns with ease, then send them via SMTP which is again provided by the suite. Then you can target users with push notifications. But that’s not all! You can also send SMS messages so that your customers will always be notified about your discounts and offers. There is also an API that can be used by the engineers for full control and endless managing capabilities.
But what is most important about SendPulse is that this solution relies on artificial intelligence, hyper personalization and predictive analysis. By using it you can be one step ahead of your competition!
I want to know more about SendPulse.
I am sure that you do! If you visit the official website of SendPulse you will find out everything that you need to know. However let’s focus on the key features of this solution, shall we?
SendPulse is the choice of over 320,000 users for a reason! It simply works as intended. With this solution your digital marketing campaigns will benefit from extremely high delivery rate worldwide. Also SendPulse provides you with speed service (again extremely high).
One of the most important parts of every digital marketing campaign are newsletters. If they are created properly and sent in an appropriate time, then they can result in great ROI. Many users will return to your website and a great amount of them will purchase your products or services. In order for this to happen you will need a solution that will allow you to focus on the most important part – the creation of the newsletter and its sending when intended. So here comes SendPulse with its ability to allow you to create different types of mailings and send them all from one single platform.
Remember that I mentioned that this solution allows you to focus on the important parts of your newsletter campaigns? Well after you create and send them it’s time to start communicating with your customers. And when using SendPulse you can also focus on this extremely important part and leave everything technical to the great team behind the solution.
Sending a newsletter campaign must be done from servers that are known to have good reputation. Period! Everything else can be compared to trying to shoot birds with flak guns. You might hit some but most will simply fly away! But you can relax! With SendPulse not only that no birds will receive any harm, but your emails will just arrive to every subscriber! Nothing is lost!
This solution also allows you to create split tests so that you can achieve higher number of website conversions. There is also support for mobile devices. This means that your newsletters will be responsive and will allow your subscribers to read them with ease on their mobile devices.
SendPulse provides automation features. Using this suite you will be able to create hybrid series of communications and target your users with SMS, newsletters, webpush notifications. There is also an integration with third party systems that will ease the process even more. There are additional features like resend to unopened which is known to increase the original open rate of your newsletters campaign by up-to 80% (industry dependent).
Last but not least – you get an analytics functionality that will allow you to receive detailed reports so that you will know what is the status of your campaigns and how to improve them.
How to integrate SendPulse with WordPress?
There is a plugin that will activate Web Push notifications on your WordPress website. You may get it from WordPress.org or by using the plugin installer in your dashboard. There is also an excellent guide created by the SendPulse team that will show you exactly how you can integrate your website with the suite. Make sure that you read it (click here).
There is also another plugin from SendPulse that allows you to generate subscribers from your own WordPress website. There is a vast amount of benefits of having this plugin installed and activated. For example you can make list segmentation. Make sure that you read more about this plugin from here. And you can also download it from WordPress.org as well.
So what do you think friends? If you are still uncertain about whether to use SendPulse or not, then you need to know that you are able to try it for free. 15,000 emails can be sent monthly when using this solution and without any costs!
If you want to find out more about SendPulse, you can have a look at the official YouTube channel of SendPulse. There you can find great videos that explain how to work with the solution.
Here is an example for one of them which shows how you can create newsletters using SendPulse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24YOlnB0fU8
See you soon, friends!
Facebook for business explained
Facebook is a great way to promote your content but you have to know how to do it the right way.
The first major thing you have to consider is that Facebook is constantly changing. What works for you this month can prove useless the next one. You have to learn to adapt and know this –Facebook are playing the game for the money. When you create a Facebook page you don’t have direct access to the people who liked your page. Facebook is just renting them to you. This means you can be kicked out any time without any warning and you can’t do anything about it.
How Facebook ticks?
Every time when you write with one of your friends, Facebook counts this as an interaction called edge.
The more you interact with your friends– send messages to them, like or comment their posts – the bigger your edge rank with them gets. Basically it means that if Friend A with whom you interact frequently and Friend B with whom you interact rarely post a picture in the same time, you are going to see first the picture of Friend A. Because you interact more with Friend A, Facebook considers him more important to you. So we can say that this is some kind of a competition.
Most of the people using Facebook constantly like pages, photos, statuses and etc. This means that the competition for their Facebook feed is greater.
Facebook gives priority to your friends. Very little of the Facebook pages that the users had liked are showing in their feed. We have to consider as well that the edge rank decays over time. So you can’t rely on old and frequently circulated content.
The same rules as the ones mentioned above are applicable for Facebook pages with one tiny annoying exception- you are actually outgunned in this game. Your Facebook page posts are not equal to the posts from the Facebook users. This means that if displayed at all your content will be displayed in the end of the feed of the people who liked your page.
So if you want your content to be seen by users who have liked your page you have two choices: providing good quality content and Facebook advertising.
Does high quality content matter?
There is one really annoying advice that you have been constantly given. Post original and high quality content. With great regret I have to agree with that one. If you want people to like your content and to interact with it by giving likes, writing comments and etc., it has to be very good. This way you can achieve an organic engagement. And more importantly you can form a group of passionate followers.
Sadly, in most cases great content is not the only precondition for success. In most cases you have to combine good quality content content with Facebook advertisement.
Facebook’s advertisement and promotion options
Facebook advertising is the way of Facebook saying “we own these people and you have to pay in order to have access to them”. So yes, in a way Facebook own us. Maybe someday they will become too greedy for their own good but we will see what the future holds. Although you have to pay for it, Facebook advertising is relatively cheap and offers great ways for targeting. After all, Facebook knows your interests just like Google stores every search query you make. This way you can target your audience more precisely according to their interests and hobbies.
Paying for Facebook likes?
Let’s say you write a blog or you own an E-commerce website. You can target users interested in the things you offer. My advice to you is: choose your audience carefully and don’t ever buy Facebook likes. Facebook has an inbuilt option for promoting your website. With great regret I have to inform you that it’s a waste of money. – Why? Because there are thousands of people from some Third World countries receiving payment for simply hitting the like button. As a consequence you get people who don’t care for your content and they are lowering your engagement and reach. Facebook considers these metrics when you post something on your page. The lower they scores the fewer people your content is being shown to.
There are websites offering real likes but you have to consider that they are affected by the same “fake like plague”. The results are the same and even worse as if you were using Facebook’s promoting option. You are paying more for something you can do yourself.
In summary, we need high quality content for great engagement, as well as determination and a budget for Facebook advertisement.
A piece of advice: Facebook is a great tool for advertisement but you need to develop all your marketing channels at the same time: Google, Google+, Twitter, Youtube etc. This way if you lose one of your networks you can still remain in the game – shaken but still alive.
Understanding Facebook and promoting your content on it
Understanding Facebook
As the world’s largest social media network, Facebook is being subject to a lot of competition. The news feed is limited and it isn’t possible to display every post from every page a user follows. Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what content to make visible in a user’s news feed. It’s a complicated process and not all of the elements that form the algorithm are being brought to public knowledge. The elements already known include the following:
· The post type (text, photo, status, link, etc.) the user finds the most interesting
· How much engaging is the post to the audience
· Posts being reported as spam or being hidden by the user
· A user’s interaction with Facebook ads
· The Internet speed and the device of the user
EdgeRank
EdgeRank, the original news feed ranking system, used by Facebook is still a part of the present news feed algorithm.
Every friend’s action on Facebook appears in the newsfeed. Facebook calls these actions Edges.
EdgeRank is the algorithm that ranks the Edges and displays the ones scoring well.
Why should I care?
Facebook ranks all stories according to their EdgeRank score. The stories with the highest score appear at the top of the user’s newsfeed. If according to the algorithm a status update is boring to a particular user, that status update will never be even shown to him.
How does EdgeRank work?
The EdgeRank is unique to each user. The algorithm was revealed at Facebook’s 2010 F8 conference. It consists of the following 3 elements:
1. Affinity score
2. Edge Weight
3. Time Decay
Affinity Score
The Affinity Score calculates how connected a particular user is to the Edge( the action). It takes into account 3 things:
1) The strength of the action
2) How close is a particular user to the one who took the action
3) How long ago did the action take place
Two users, interacting with each other on Facebook have different affinity scores relative to one another.
EdgeWeight
Each action has a different weight, reflecting the efforts required for the action. The actions include liking, clicking, commenting, sharing, tagging and friending. Apart from clicking, every action creates a potential story. The principle of the EdgeWeight is simple: the more interested in the content a user is, the more effort he or she puts into a specific action, connected to that content. That is why commenting is worth more than liking and liking is worth more than clicking and posting photos and videos, instead of links scores your story higher. Simply viewing a status update in your newsfeed does not include any form of interaction and does not count toward the affinity score.
New Facebook features usually have a higher EdgeWeight. The intent behind that is to promote the features to the users.
Time Decay
The time of the interaction is another key component of the algorithm. If a user interacts with someone a lot, but not so much lately, the influence of the user’s affinity score starts to decline. In short: the older the story gets, the more it loses points. Facebook measures this by multiplying each action by 1/x, where “x” is the amount of time since the action took place.
When a user logs into Facebook and visits his newsfeed, among the stories posted most recently, the ones with the highest score appear. So, a status update made by a user will show up on the newsfeed only if it has a higher score compared to other newsfeed stories that happened at the same moment.
How do I check my EdgeRank score?
Facebook keeps this algorithm a secret. Instead a user can measure the effects of EdgeRank by checking how many people he reached. Since the engagement impacts the EdgeRank, the user can also measure the engagement that he or she gets with the help of a Facebook analytics tool.
Since there is no such thing as general EdgeRank score, each user has a different affinity score with a page.
Facebook Changes
Last June Facebook announced they would be limiting organic news feed impressions for brands, so as to provide users with a “higher quality content” in the news feed. The social media believes that users don’t want to see this promotional content in the news feed. This applies to organic content only, not ads. Facebook defines any of the following as being promotional:
1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
Manipulative practices such as like-bating (posts that ask fans to complete specific actions) and posting spam and frequently circulated content are subject to restrictions, as Facebook updated their news feed spam algorithm. Another tactic that Facebook banned in 2014 is the like-gating. Many pages like-gate their content by requiring users to like pages before they can gain access to special content.
How to promote my content
Many marketers rely on Facebook reach to measure whether their efforts are paying-off. Reach is the number of Facebook users who see a page’s published post – and it’s been steadily declining in 2014 due to Facebook algorithm changes. Business that are new to Facebook assume that the majority of fans see their posts and it comes as a shock when they realise that’s not the case.
Things you have to avoid:
Buying fans is not a good business tactic. First, they don’t add real value and second, a little or no engagement to a page with numerous fans is a signal to consumers that they are fake. The less of engagement also means that Facebook will be less likely to display your content by making it visible to/ for the real fans.
- Avoid “click-bait” text.This refers to post that are heavy in words like “Click here”. This may reduce your reach.
- Avoid posts containing appeals encouraging people to take a specific action or purchase something.
- Don’t overpost or underpost. Content should be posted on a regular basis and not more than 2 or 3 times a day.
Things that will help you:
- Post content that leads to high engagement. Businesses should post as much original content as possible. Low-quality posts diminish the overall organic traffic. When you’re posting content with low engagement rate, it serves as a signal to Facebook, saying “My fans don’t find that interesting enough.”
- Include an image, link or video with your post. Do so in order to make the post more interactive. It is proven that 40% of users will respond better to visual images.
- Post at non-peak times. At times of the day when little content is being shared, your posts will be more visible.
- Add a call to action for increased likes or shares. If you want more likes and shares encourage fans to like and to share your content.
- Engage your community with questions
Facebook Insights
Using Facebook Insights can help you learn more about your audience. It’s a proprietary analytics platform with different data sets. Facebook Insights consists of five metrics: Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts and People.
Likes show how many people have liked your page within a given time frame. It also provides information on the number of people who “unliked” your page, as well as on the proportion of paid versus organic likes.
Reach is indicative for the number of people who have seen your posts. It also displays metrics like comments, likes and shares, indicative for the engagement of the audience.
Visits gives you a breakdown of which pages (tabs) were visited (i.e. timeline, likes tab, custom tabs, etc.) and also which referring sites (external) brought people to your Facebook page.
Posts provides an analysis of your content by using indicators (metrics) such as post type, engagement of the audience, total reach and time of the day.
People gives information on the demographics of your audience according to their gender, spoken language or location. It also compares people reached versus people engaged.
Facebook Insights gives brands a complete picture on the performance of their page.
It is important for brands to create online communities and to connect with their target audience through social media. However Facebook does not foster free promotion regardless of the quality of the content or the level of engagement of the audience. Paid ads and sponsored posts are a good option for promoting your content. With Facebook advertisement you can target your ads specifically to the audience that is interested in your content and services.