Your potential web customers will take the first step to use Google to search what they want. In the search bar they will type in keywords that correspond to what they are looking for, and these keywords are what you need to discover to maximise traffic coming into your website. This is why keyword research is important.

Using Google’s keyword planner

The keyword planner made by Google is a powerful tool that you can use to discover keywords that matter to your online store. A basic requirement for using it is to have a Google account to sign into AdWords. You probably already have a Google account but if you don’t you’ll have to create one before you can proceed to https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner.

Once you’re on the keyword planner, you’ll be seeing a screen very similar to the one above. There are 3 methods to finding new keywords but we’ll be using the first option which is to “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”.

Upon clicking on it will present a form that you can enter your product or service that you are selling (or want to sell). For this example, let’s use ‘yoga pants’. Hit ‘Get ideas’ to move on to the next step.

Because you’re searching for yoga pants as a product, you can start to see which keywords are relevant towards it. For example, here are some keyword strings that people use on Google to look for yoga pants.

• yoga shorts
• yoga clothes
• yoga pants for women
• yoga tops

You can start clicking on keywords that you can capitalise on and it’ll be moved to the side-menu on the right. Don’t worry about bidding for the keyword, all we’re doing is creating a list of keyword strings that you can use for new product ideas, meta-tagging, content writing, etc.

Next thing to do is to copy that list into a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Spreadsheets and list it down like the above. What you can do now is, determine what you want to do with these newfound keywords. Are you going to retag some of your pages? Are you going to create a new product line? How about a consolidated category list?

To recap, the motive to keyword research is to find out what users are searching for, in order to get to the products they want. For more e-commerce related content, do check out our other posts.

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From “me, me, me” to “I care about you”

There used to be a time when brands used to be implementing “me, me, me” approach in the email marketing campaigns. Some email marketing mistakes as ran through by Don Sadler, which rang true as early as 2004:

“It’s all about me.”

Many companies still don’t get the fact that it’s not all about them. E-newsletters that get bogged down in how great the company is, how many products they have, how long they’ve been in business, etc., etc., are doomed to failure, because people just don’t care about that. Readers want to know what’s in it for them.

No clear target audience.

You simply can’t be everything to everybody. As noted above, the tighter and more narrow your niche and content, the better.

Way too long.

With e-newsletters, people want to quickly get to the information that’s going to help them, digest this and then move on. If they know they can read your e-newsletter and get something of value in a couple of minutes, rather than having to slog through page after page, they’re much more likely to add you to their “must read” list.

The “me, me, me” approach sure  works after a while, but as according to Dale Carnegie:

To be interesting, be interested.

Today’s email marketing campaigns seem to move more than just a ‘campaign’. Most of the products and brands send weekly email newsletters detailing on their opinions, their work culture and things they find interesting enough to share – something very personalised and with a more human touch.

This gets customers to warm up more to them, knowing that there are real people behind these products working hard to give the best for them, and in return, they would appreciate it more.

Email newsletters for everyone

Recently I have been noticing an increase of individuals creating personal, curated email newsletters. To be honest, some of them are really, really good. Again, with easy-to-use platforms such as Mailchimp and Tinyletter (I have been contemplating on creating my own, but could not find great topics to share). It is really interesting to see this evolution, of how some methods that were once accessible to companies are now open to interesting individuals ready to share their valued opinions.

I love the Internet.

Lists of list

Here are some of the e-newsletters I have been subscribing and they are all my favourites. Feel free to add your recommendations in the comments!

UI/UX

• UX Design Weekly
• UX Thought of the Day
• Mailchimp UX
• Interaction Design Foundation

Web Design and Development

• WDRL

Companies and Brands

• Asana
• BigCommerce
• Buffer
• Basecamp – Signal v. Noise
• Invision
• The Great Discontent

Technology, Culture, Music etc.

• Real Future
• Meanwhile
• Experience Innovation
• JK Glei
• Good Reads

Miscellaneous (Writing, Ideas, Productivity, Cats!)

• A Working Letter
• The Modern Desk
• The Thread
• Weightshifting
• Buzzfeed
• Think Clearly

In the meantime, be sure to also subscribe to our Stampede Weekly to receive latest and curated web topics, from best practices and UX ideas to design inspirations & productivity tips!

(Thank you Wired for the photo.)

The post The Evolution of E-Newsletters appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Here’s what happened.

Valentine’s Day social media campaign

Background, goals and duration

Recently we ran a Valentine’s Day marketing campaign for a good client at Stampede, which includes promoting their beauty products via websites as well as various social media channels.  The goal is to increase conversion rate and ultimately bring in as many sales as possible during the 11-day duration of the campaign. The campaign was designed around Valentine’s Day and the romance of giving – from the product selection, to the design treatment of the websites, as well as social media channels. It was a huge campaign to take on but more so, it was exciting!

Channels

For this campaign, the channels involved were:

• 3 websites
• 3 Facebook pages
• 6 Facebook ads
• 2 Google+ pages
• 2 Twitter accounts
• E-mail campaigns across 10 mailing lists

Results

Over the course of 11 days running the campaign ending on 20th February, we garnered close to increase of 42% of sales across these channels. We watched in real time how people engage with the brand on Facebook, browsing products on the website, adding items into their carts and subsequently completing their purchase. It was an absolute delight to receive every new order notification came rolling into our inboxes!

Things we learned

Be well-prepared ahead of time

Running a campaign this size is no easy task. Have a cut-off date of when to finalise the product offers, to do the pricing change in the backend of the e-commerce CMS (and when they should end as well), be clear of things that might be a showstopper, and so on so forth.

Which brings us to…

Have an extensive checklist for everything

And I mean, everything. Because, Murphy (the law).

But in all seriousness, proper preparation increases the chance of a successful social media campaign, or any work in general. So have a checklist in place for every task in the campaign and do spend some time going through them before getting them out of the door.

Get the word out as much as possible

While ads – whether they are from Facebook, Google Adwords or Twitter Ads – might be able to serve audience that we might have organically missed, 75% of campaign success is said to originate from constant promotion. Start by designing the campaign items – from website updates to email campaigns to social media headers – to make it easy for those interested to share through their various platforms these days. We normally use AddThis and we love it a lot, so if you have some other suggestions, feel free to let us know!

Content is still king

While it is good to rely on ads once in a while, it is actually a better practice to build content overtime before, during and after the campaign runs to drive more loyal traffic to our website and build their interest towards products. These content can range from blog posts, blogger reviews, tips and tricks and many more. Furthermore, content in websites are indexable by Google which is good for your search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking.

Invest in responsive

Websites that look great on mobile aren’t a luxury anymore—they’re a requirement. One of the most important findings in this campaign is that close to 40% of customers browse through the website online, and of course, a majority of them purchase and/or attempt to purchase online via their mobile devices. So if you are asking if this is about time you invest in having your website responsive, we say, YES!

Inject human element

It is easy to be carried away into thinking you always want to increase numbers, but data is nothing without emotions. Carve a really good copy, one that sounds like a handwritten letter you want to read from a good friend – while at the same time not losing out the essence of the campaign. Design a header that draws people to act towards our goals. Put yourself in the audience’s shoes – what do they want? How will this benefit them?

Rome wasn’t built in a day

With that being said, a lot of guidelines posted officially as well as on the Web serve just as that – guidelines. They may help us to automate most tasks and increase the chance of running a successful campaign. In my experience, successful campaigns are born through a collection of preparation, tight team collaboration as well as experiments.

Yes, experiments. An example from this campaign: Over the 11 days, we continue to monitor the Facebook ads obsessively on a daily basis. When we discovered an ad wasn’t exactly working, we tried changing the headlines, fixing the images, running two ads with the same image but two different headlines, or two ads with the same headlines but with the same image (basically A/B testing) just to see which one works better. We recorded the findings and presented to the client.

There are no surefire ways to confirm that a campaign is going to be success all the way without this combination.

As always, with the campaign data in hand, be ready to justify and let client know what the actions can be taken to improve the numbers in the next campaign. Also, go the extra mile that even if the numbers are already good, still look for ways to improve 🙂

Comments? Tips? Candies?

Have you ever ran a social media campaign before? Do you have any tips for a successful campaign? Do let us know in the comments!

(Image credits: Windfarm Marketing)

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