Why Email Marketing Is Still A Powerful Tool.

Email is still a great way for your small business to stay top-of-mind with their clients, and to reach out to your prospects.

With email marketing you can reach your customers where they are, without spending a lot of money.

Email Tips:

• Send content they want to read and that is of interest to your audience.
• Consider segmenting your email lists so the right type of message reaches the right target audience.
• Make sure its mobile responsive. If it doesn’t display properly on their mobile device, they’re not going to read it.
• Keep your emails short and easy to read.

Email Facts:

• 72% of U.S. adults say they prefer companies to communicate with them via email.
• 91% say they’d like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. 
• 73% of companies agree email marketing is a core part of their business efforts.
• 25% rate email as their top channel in terms of return on investment.

5 Tips To Creating a Great Mobile Landing Page.

Mobile Landing Pages are More Important Than Ever! 

2015 is a tipping point for business to stay competitive online. For the first time, mobile phones will outnumber people. The number of Americans shopping online will top 150 million. So in addition to your website, make sure your landing pages are mobile ready!

It's all about conversion...whether you want them to call, complete a form, 
buy a product or join your email list, mobile landing pages are an important marketing element to include in your online arsenal. When done right they encourage the user to take the intended action, and I like that they're easy to test and analyze success and ROI.

Here are some things to consider when developing your mobile-friendly landing page:

1. When including a form, make sure your different input fields automatically switch the mobile keyboards to alphabetical vs numeric depending on if it’s name (alphabetical), phone (numerical), email (alphabetical), zip code (numerical), etc. 
2. Consider using social logins instead of form fill out.
3. Add a Click to Call CTA button to ensure it's easy for the user to call your company.
4. Cut down your copy as much as possible without sacrificing your message. People have even less of an attention span on a mobile device, so get to the point as soon as possible.
5. Keep it engaging but simple, creative but to-the-point. But most of all make sure it gets the user to take action! 

Part 9 of my series:

Lisa's Website Insights for creating websites that Impress & Engage

Please Don't Leave! 5 Tips to Reduce the Bounce Rate on your Website.

What does Bounce Rate mean and why is it important? 
It's the number of visitors who leave your website after visiting a single page.

 The bounce rate of a website helps you analyze your site's performance. There are certain actions taken by visitors that determine this rate. Ultimately, this causes a steep fall in user engagement and subsequently impacting the conversion rate 
in a negative way.
Consider the tips below. After all, the whole point of your website is the opportunity to market your products or services to visitors, not have them leave right away.

PLEASE DON'T LEAVE!5 tips to reducing the bounce rate on your website:

1. KEEP IT READABLE
A lot of images and text elements fighting for the viewers attention, hard to read content due to bad color choices and poor overall site design are a few elements that affect the readability of your website. Visitors get frustrated so they give up and leave. 
To keep visitors engaged and reading your content, use the right color palette, select readable fonts, craft good headlines that draw attention, use bulleted lists when appropriate, and place CTA (call to action) buttons in the right locations. These also add to your website’s usability and will increase user engagement. 

2. TOO MUCH INFO ON A PAGE
Don't say everything on the home page. Spread out important content to engage your visitor and lead them through the site. If you want to improve your conversion rates, then put useful and important information on every page of your website. 

3. PROVIDE EASY NAVIGATION
Build an intuitive and user friendly navigation system that's easy for your visitor to use. Consider how you can make it easy for them to find what their looking for, not frustrate them. Using Breadcrumb Navigation and internal linking techniques are a few ways to accomplish this.

4. MAKE 404 ERROR MESSAGES INTERESTING
Broken links are one of the major causes that contribute to an increased bounce rate on a website. For broken or invalid links redirect visitors to a 404 Error Page. By developing a 404 Error Page with creative messaging, you'll keep them engaged and give your visitors a reason to keep exploring other pages on your website.

5. PLACE IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOVE THE FOLD
Another tip to reduce bounce rates is to place important information above the fold. Most visitors have short attention spans, they want to get the information they came for as soon as possible. Keeping that important messaging above the fold makes it visible to them as soon as they visit any page on your site.

These are 5 of many tips to reducing bounce rates on your website. I look forward to sharing additional tips in a future post.

Part 8 of my series:
Lisa's Website Insights for creating websites that Impress & Engage

You need a new website when...

You realize your business deserves to look better than your competitors! 
Why? Because you are better than them. A new website says a lot about your business: it's a window into your company; it's an advertisement of your products and services; it's the first point of contact for many of your future customers.

You know your site should keep up with modern browsing trends. 
A huge number of internet traffic is via mobile devices. (And this figure is increasing.) You need to make sure that your content, your design, and your user experience is optimized for all types of devices. You don't just need a new website, you need a new mobile-responsive website.

Potential customers can’t find you when they do a search. 
Having an informative, good website is only half the battle. 90% of people looking for a product or service start their search online using a search engine. If your website is not optimized for search engine crawlers, you’re missing out on significant traffic and sales opportunities. Sites need to be built with search engines in mind – if you built your site even just three years ago, Google has made numerous algorithm updates that your site needs to optimize for.

Your website uses outdated, visually unappealing graphics and images. 
You do fantastic work, much better than your competition, but your website doesn't show it...therefore your prospects don't know it!

You want to ensure that you're making the most of social media. 
Your present website doesn't have links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ pages. The pages on your website don't have buttons to allow users to share your news and blogs on their own social media channels. You don't even have a news section on your website for users to share. Other people sharing your posts and pages is free advertising. You need a new website because you want free advertising.

You’re not getting enough inbound leads from your website. 
Your website should do more for you than be an online business card. It should act as a tool to introduce new clients to your business, your products/services, and further opportunities down the sales funnel. Consider the opportunities for inbound leads on your website. Are your forms easy to find and fill out? Do they require a minimal amount of information? Are there multiple ways to request quotes? Is your contact information clearly listed and easy to find? Are there multiple calls-to-action depending on the content on the webpage? The easier you make it for website visitors to contact you, the more contacts you will receive.

Part 7 of my series:

Lisa's Website Insights for creating websites that Impress & Engage

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? Google's Next Algorithm Update!

What Is the Mobile Algorithm Update?

Think back to the last time you landed on a site that wasn't optimized for mobile. Chances are, you needed to zoom and then swipe side-to-size to even read what was on the page. And when you went to go click on something, your fingers could barely select the tiny links. I'm going to bet good money that you just bounced from that page -- with all the information on the internet, you didn't need to waste your time on a website with a really poor user experience.

Google's realized how frustrating this whole experience is and decided to change their algorithm accordingly. Soon, when someone's searching on a mobile device, Google will serve up sites that are easy to read, make navigations and links easy to tap, have images appropriately sized for the device, and more generally, make information easy to find.

Back to the algorithm update. At the moment, Google denotes which sites are mobile-friendly in their mobile search results (below is an example of what that looks like). They'll be actually rewarding and penalizing websites for their mobile experience.

We tested all of our sites, see the image above for what the results look like!

TEST YOUR SITE HERE:

Enter your website's URL into Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and it will let you know if you've got a mobile-friendly page on your hands. If the website you entered passes Google's test, you will see a green banner indicating the website is mobile-friendly. If the website does not pass, Google will let you know the page is not mobile-friendly and give some reasons why.

Many of the common reasons why a website isn't mobile-friendly is because:

• The content is wider than the screen: This requires users to scroll side-to-side to read the page.
• The text too small: This means the user must zoom to read text on the page.
• The links are too close together: On a smartphone, links should be easy to tap with your fingers -- this means that the links should be big enough and in natural location to tap. Most smartphone users hold their phone in their right hand and tap links with their thumb.
• The mobile viewport isn't set: This is a little more on the technical side of things, but the mobile viewport controls the width of the page for the device. If your website displays a desktop landscape when smartphone visitors land on your page, then the viewport is not set for mobile on that page. This is an extra special case where responsive design comes in handy - responsive design will automatically adjust the viewport based on the device.

This is part of an article written by HubSpot. To see complete article, visit here.

Part 6 of my series:

Lisa's Website Insights for creating websites that Impress & Engage