Should I use a script? It’s one of the most common questions The Showrunner hosts Jerod Morris and Jonny Nastor get from aspiring first-time Showrunners.

In this week’s episode, they analyze when it’s right to use a script … and when it’s not.

But they start with a fun question that was posed in their Showrunner Course forum … based on a dream someone had: if your house was being flooded, and you could only save what you could carry, what items would you grab?

Jerod and Jonny share what happened in the dream and what their answers are. And they’d love to know yours. Tweet them to: @ShowrunnerFM, @JerodMorris, @JonNastor.

Then they hop into script talk and discuss the following:

• Which formats work with scripts, and which ones do not
• The long-term drawbacks to using scripts
• Why it’s perfectly fine to use scripts when you’re first starting out (Jerod and Jonny did!) … but why your goal should be weaning yourself off needing scripts before too long
• What they mean when they say “use scripts as a tool, not a crutch”
• How Jerod and Jonny still make use of scripts to this day
• Why writing is an important preparation tool before you record, even if you’re not scripting exactly what you’re going to say

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post To Script or Not to Script (That Is the Question) appeared first on Copyblogger.

It’s no secret that Brian Clark is not a fan of Facebook when it comes to so-called “social media marketing.” He’s even less of a fan of those who think of it as a “website substitute.”

That said, Facebook groups are popular for their apparent ease of use. But is it a good idea to build a valuable business community on someone else’s property?

Today on Unemployable with Brian Clark, Brian will tackle that issue based on a listener question.

Plus, Brian answers another question about the credible use of affiliate offers as both a revenue source and valuable market research, and discusses an online/offline hybrid marketing strategy for real estate agents.

Listen to Unemployable with Brian Clark …

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Tyranny of Facebook appeared first on Copyblogger.

This is the third part of The Mainframe’s series on membership sites.

Hosts Tony Clark and Chris Garrett define the key parts and decisions involved in getting started with building a membership site that works.

In this episode:

• How memberships are built, starting with the minimum components you need in place in order to get started
• Which membership options could have a far bigger impact than you might think
• What you should automate in order to make your life easier while managing a membership program

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Minimum Viable Membership-Based Business appeared first on Copyblogger.

Demian Farnworth and Jerod Morris join The Missing Link for some real-time fun and expertise about content syndication on LinkedIn.

Sean Jackson and Mica Gadhia welcome two of their favorite people from Rainmaker Digital (formerly Copyblogger Media), Demian Farnworth and Jerod Morris. These excellent writers and content marketers share the ins and outs of content syndication and some real-time tricks of the trade to getting it done right on LinkedIn.

Learn from their experiences and definitely check out Gregory Ciotti’s 30-day experience going from 0 – 255,262 article views on LinkedIn; it’s amazing information you can read, understand, and learn from right now.

Join them to learn best practices for content syndication and how you’ll want to up your game right now.

Listen in to understand:

• Why consistency is so important
• What you can learn from Gregory Ciotti (incredible)
• The advantages of short articles
• Why you want to say a big Yes to re-syndication
• More expert writing tips
• One little-known trick for writing catchy headlines

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post So, Jesus and Wolverine Login to LinkedIn appeared first on Copyblogger.

Let’s do a little thought experiment for a minute.

Imagine a life without The Awl, The Huffington Post, the New York Times, Drudge Report, The Onion, The Toast, The Verge, or Vox.

Without Brain Pickings, Slate, FiveThirtyEight, Pitchfork, The Paris Review, Mental Floss, Vice, xoJane, ProPublica, Quartz, Marc and Angel, or Grantland.

You get the idea; I want you to imagine a life without your favorite online publications. A digital content ghost town. Got it?

Now my question for you is this: would your life be better or worse without these publications?

And be honest …

It’s a question you have to answer since a future without these publications is quite possible. Let me explain.

What’s going to kill your favorite publication?

Some are calling it a mere “reckoning,” while others like Nilay Patel at The Verge think, “It is going to be a bloodbath of independent media.”

The issue at hand? The rapid adoption of ad blocking software.

This parochial issue became a national — even international — one when Apple announced this summer that for their iOS 9 update “app developers will be able to create ad blocking software for Safari’s mobile browser.”

And, at the time I wrote this article, the number one downloaded app was for ad blocking.

But could ad blocking software really sink the publishing ship? Let’s look at some numbers.

According to an often-quoted Adobe and PageFair study, ad blocking software is estimated to cost publishers $22 billion in revenue during 2015.

But the startling stats don’t end there:

• 198-million active ad blocking users around the world
• Ad blocking grew by 41 percent in the last 12 months
• In the U.S., that number grew to 48 percent (45-million active users) in the 12 months leading up to June 2015
• In the UK, that number grew to 82 percent (12-million active users) in the 12 months leading up to June 2015

In other words, it’s only going to get worse.

I guess if I was a publisher and my revenue model was dependent upon ads, those numbers might keep me up at night and keep me near a bottle of Wild Turkey and Tums by day.

Particularly since the mobile market trend is on a ferocious upward swing. On MondayNote, Frédéric Filloux wrote:

The second trend is the rise of mobile surfing that accounts for half of pageviews in mature markets. And, in emerging countries, users leapfrog desktops and access the web en masse through mobile.

And I think it’s safe to say this growing group of mobile users will use ad blockers.

The problem with online ads

But why such a backlash against ads? Ads really aren’t that bad, are they? And isn’t there an implicit contract between publishers and readers that says you can view free content if you tolerate these ads?

That seems to be the case. On the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo writes, “Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.”

But it’s not really that simple because ads disrupt the user experience.

Here’s something you must understand about the current nature of online ads: They are obtrusive, drain your device’s battery when transferring data, and significantly slow down page loads.

Let me show you what I see when using an ad blocking tool called Ghostery.

This is from programmer and writer Marco Arment:

As you can see, there is just one piece of ad software sitting on the site.

This is from The Awl:

There are 29 different types of ad software working behind the scenes on The Awl.

Finally, let’s look at the New York Times:

Forty-three different ones here — and the page continued to load after I snapped that shot.

This shouldn’t surprise us, Jean-Louis Gassée says on MondayNote:

You can’t blame the browser, it’s the way the system has evolved in the Web advertising race to the bottom. Back when physical newspapers were still vital, advertising space was limited and thus prices were well-behaved and constant. No such thing on the Web, where the ‘ad inventory’ tends to infinity. As a result, prices fall, sites need more ads to stay afloat, and they must consent to exploitative practices.

Here’s the funny thing: the current online ad model is based upon interruption. In fact, we’ve come full circle.

Instead of commercials interrupting our favorite television shows and telemarketers calling us during dinner time, videos expand and automatically start playing without warning and products we viewed just minutes ago are stalking us everywhere.

It’s like the advertising industry needs another lesson in permission marketing. Haven’t we learned anything? Clearly not.

If advertising is going to co-exist with readers and publishers, then at least, as John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote, “Advertising should have minimal effect on page load times and device battery life. Advertising should be respectful of the user’s time, attention, and battery life. The industry has gluttonously gone the other way.”

Now, some publishers have fought back by refusing to allow people who are using ad blockers to see their content. It’s been reported that The Washington Post has been directing users to either disable ad blockers or sign up for a subscription newsletter to access their content.

Others like The Atlantic and NFL display a banner that says some variation of: “We noticed that you’ve got ad blockers enabled. Please be aware that our site is best experienced with ad blockers turned off.”

As if turning on ad blocking software was a mistake. No. It was intentional.

We don’t need better ads — we need a better model

What’s interesting in this discussion is how people are suggesting that this will be good for publishers and advertisers because they’ll have to come up with better ads — ads that don’t interrupt our experiences and bloat our machines.

The sad thing about this is the small, limited thinking behind it.

Here’s Jeff Jarvis taking pro-ad-blocking journalist Charles Arthur to task on Twitter:

You see it when Nilay Patel says, “But taking money and attention away from the web means that the pace of web innovation will slow to a crawl.”

Or, as he says in another article, “That’s a recipe for stagnation, and stagnation is what we have. It’s leading powerful players like Apple and Facebook to create ersatz copies of the web inside their walled gardens, when what we really need is a more powerful, more robust web.”

But we don’t need better ads. We need a better revenue model. And we don’t have to wait long for these models to appear. They already exist.

Let’s explore five possibilities.

1. Subscriptions

Probably the most common revenue model after selling ads is selling subscriptions. Readers pay you a fee to consume your content.

Ben Thompson does it with Stratechery and Matter did it through a Kickstarter campaign/subscription model (before they were bought out by Medium).

But this model has its own problems.

According to this Reuters report, Casey Johnson reported in The Awl, “despite the rise of paywalls over the last few years, only eleven percent of respondents in the US and six percent in the UK say that they have paid for online news in any capacity.”

For instance, you see the influence this type of behavior has had on our favorite bloggers. The ones who are hanging up their cleats because selling ads or the subscription model are not paying the bills.

Figuring out how to monetize a popular blog seems to be the perennial challenge, doesn’t it? How do you make a living from a popular blog?

Dooce, Gigaom, and the food blogger The Amateur Gourmet had to close their doors or focus on more lucrative ventures.

2. Native ads

Native advertising is paid content that matches a publication’s editorial standards while meeting the audience’s expectations.

Furthermore, a native ad can’t be blocked. That’s because it’s viewed as content. It shows up in the publishers stream, typically labeled “sponsored content.”

But a native ad doesn’t eat up your battery life or slow down page load speed.

It’s a normal-sized file. And, if done well, it blends in with the rest of the publication’s content. With native ads, advertisers are back to having to entice readers to consume their content.

In fact, the demand for native advertising has grown so much, a lot of publishers have actually opened up in-house agencies to create these ads and fulfill the demand.

But native advertising also tends to require more resources to create, so it may be out of reach for smaller publications.

To learn more about native advertising opportunities, work your way through this list of resources:

• Copyblogger’s 2014 State of Native Advertising Report
• 5 Ways to Rankle an Old-School Journalist
• 12 Examples of Native Ads (And Why They Work)
• The 14 Keys to Writing Advertorials That Sell
• Is Native Advertising Even Profitable for Brands?
• Is Native Advertising Ethical? (It Depends On Who You Ask)
• Don’t Waste Your Time with Native Advertising

3. Affiliate sales

Next in line is affiliate marketing, one of the most reliable ways to earn an income online.

Maria Popova keeps the beloved Brain Pickings afloat through affiliate marketing. If done right, affiliate marketing is a tough model to beat.

The problem is, there’s a lot of bad (and unethical) advice out there on how to approach it, so here are three resources to help you get started:

• 5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners
• Affiliate Programs: Why You Should Build a “Second Audience” for Your Business
• Building Your Evergreen Sales Machine

4. Membership sites

Next is the membership site as revenue model. It’s really more than just a private club; it’s an experience.

And the experience that any smart marketer must create is powered by content, first and foremost, because that’s what people are looking for. But what they really crave is something much deeper and meaningful.

That’s exactly why membership truly has its privileges — for both you and your prospects, customers, and clients.

Here are three podcast episodes that will help you understand membership sites and what you need to build one:

• Why You Need a Membership Site
• The Key Types of Membership Sites for Building Your Digital Business
• Why Every Great Website is a Membership Site

5. Build a business around it

Finally, build a business around your publication. That’s what we’ve done here at Rainmaker Digital with the Copyblogger blog.

The content you read here on the blog comes from salaries paid through the sales of our own products — not ads.

And the types of products and services you can create are endless. You could:

• Build software your audience needs.
• Turn your content into books.
• Create training courses to help your audience meet their goals.
• Become a consultant.

The writer still runs the show

Ad blocking isn’t going to end great writing.

Sure, some publications will fail to adapt and sadly die.

But as journalist Charles Arthur noted, “Good journalism, and worthwhile sites, will survive. Or good journalists will.”

In other words, the writer still runs the show. But if you run a publication and want it to thrive, you are going to have to find a way to monetize it without ads.

Explore the different monetization ideas in this article, and then join the discussion on LinkedIn …

About the author

Demian Farnworth

Demian Farnworth is Chief Content Writer for Rainmaker Digital. Subscribe to his podcast Rough Draft. 

The post Why the Ad Blocking Panic Shouldn’t Scare Smart Publishers appeared first on Copyblogger.

In einer Zeit, in der immer mehr Nutzer mit ihren mobilen Endgeräten auf Webseiten zugreifen, versteht es sich von selbst, eine möglichst gute User Experience zu ermöglichen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird meistens eine für die Endgeräte ausgerichtete Darstellung in Verbindung gebracht. Was dabei leider häufig vernachlässigt wird, ist die Geschwindigkeit der Seiten. Denn mit mobilen Daten wird das Laden von zu vielen oder zu großen Inhalten zum Conversion Killer. Aber auch bei Desktop spielt die Ladezeit nach wie vor eine große Rolle. Nicht nur, dass pro Sekunde Ladezeit die Conversion Rate um bis zu 7% abnimmt. Spätestens seit Suchmaschinen wie Google, die die Ladezeit als Rankingfaktor aufgenommen haben, sollte klar sein, dass die Ladezeit einer Webseite sehr wichtig ist.

Die Ladezeit als Wettbewerbsvorteil

Wie sich die Ladezeit im Vergleich mit anderen Anbietern darstellt, zeigt dieser visuelle Vergleich (Das Tool webpagetest ist unten nochmal genannt). Wer seine eigene Seite/Shop mal mit einem Wettbewerber vergleicht, wird erkennen, wie sich 1-2 Sekunden längere Ladezeit tatsächlich auswirken.

Wer eine langsame Seite hat, läuft Gefahr, dass die Besucher gar nicht erst das Ende des Ladevorgangs abwarten, weil es ihnen einfach zu lange dauert. Der Kunde ist weg und fühlt sich womöglich beim Wettbewerber besser aufgehoben.

Das Beispiel zeigt, dass erst nach 2,5 Sek. überhaupt etwas zu sehen ist. Während Beispiel 1 nach nach 3,7 Sek. bereits fertig ist, sieht man bei Beispiel 2 noch nicht mal Inhalt. Dort werden erst nach 6,0 Sek. die ersten Inhalte angezeigt und nach 9,9 Sek. ist die Seite fertig geladen. Die Logik bzw. Reihenfolge des Seitenaufbaus ist daher aus Nutzersicht, wie auch unter Markengesichtspunkten wichtig. Wie schafft man in kurzer Zeit Relevanz für den Besucher und welche Elemente können getrost etwas später geladen werden?

15 Mio Euro liegen auf der Straße

Diese Zahl stellt den Durchschnitt der deutschen Top 100 Shops dar und ist sicherlich beeindruckend. Die Frage lautet aber: Welches Potenzial hat die eigene Seite und wie kann man es heben? Fakt ist auch, dass Shops mit einer langen Ladezeit (größer 12-15 Sekunden) kein Potenzial von 7% Uplift erzielen, wenn die Ladezeit um eine Sekunde verbessert wird. Da muss schon mehr passieren. Welche Maßnahmen Wirkung zeigen, ist in der Infografik aufbereitet.

Wie sieht die Ladezeit der deutschen Top 100 Shops aus?

Wir haben 100 deutsche Onlineshops analysiert und die Ergebnisse in einer Infografik zusammengefasst. Die Ergebnisse sind erschreckend: Deutsche Onlineshops haben viel Potenzial, um sich vom Wettbewerb abzuheben. So lassen sich einige Seiten über 20 Sekunden Zeit, sind bis zu 1.115 kb groß und laden zusätzlich 9.384 kb Inhalte. Die meisten Shops bewegen sich sowohl im Google, Pingdom als auch Yslow PageSpeed Index eher im Mittelfeld. Die Infografik zeigt wo Potenziale liegen und wie diese genutzt werden können.

Wichtiger Hinweis:

Sie können die Infografik herunterladen, ausdrucken und gerne verteilen. Sie können auch gerne selbst einen Beitrag über die Grafik schreiben und eine Preview veröffentlichen. Ich bitte Sie jedoch darum, die Original-Datei zum Download anzubieten.

Download als hochauflösendes PNG: http://kKrft.ly/ugU
Download als DIN A4 PDF: http://kKrft.ly/ey2

Praxis Tipp: Wo stehen Sie?

Hier die verwendeten Tools zum selbst testen:

• Yslow - Das bekannteste Browser Plugin gibt es für alle gängigen Browser und Unix
• Google PageSpeed Tools - Je niedriger der Score desto höher das Risiko einer Abwertung im Suchergebnis
• Pingdom Website Speed Test - Unabhängiger Test mit der Auswahl unterschiedlicher Standorte und Bandbreiten
• webpagetest.org - Vergleichen Sie visuell das Laden Ihrer Seite mit der Konkurrenz

Sie suchen konkrete Tipps zur Verbesserung der Ladezeit?

Hier meine Artikel-Serie zum Thema Performance-Optimierung

• Hebel 1: Reduktion - Wie kann der Umfang der Inhalte reduziert werden?
• Hebel 2: Grafiken - Wie können Grafiken optimiert werden?
• Hebel 3: Ladeverhalten - Wie kann das Ladeverhalten verbessert werden?

Vorgehensweise zur Erhebung der Daten

Ergebnis der Datenerhebung: Excel-Tabelle mit allen Kennzahlen. Bedingte Formatierungen stellen farblich gute und schlechte Werte hervor.

Um eine hohe Vergleichbarkeit zu erreichen, haben wir die Messungen zu gleichen Zeitpunkten durchgeführt, wiederholt und gemittelt. Alle Anfragen wurden von identischen Geräten mit gleicher Bandbreite durchgeführt. Der Browsercache wurde bei jedem Durchlauf geleert.

Fazit - Ladezeit als strategischer Wettbewerbsvorteil

Ladezeit ist mehr als nur eine Kennzahl von vielen für den eigenen Shop. Diese Zahl ist in Zeiten von einer nicht aufzuhaltenden Verbreitung von mobilen Endgeräten zu einem Wettbewerbsvorteil geworden. Wer den visuellen Vergleich mit dem Wettbewerb macht, wird dies schnell erkennen.

Ein besonderer Dank geht an Thomas Kraus für die Erhebung der Daten und Patrick Castronovo für die Gestaltung der Infografik.

Wie sehen Ihre Potenziale aus? Ist der Wettbewerb schneller? Und wenn ja, sind es ganze Sekunden?

Lassen Sie es mich wissen. Ich freue mich auf Ihr Feedback.

The post Deutscher E-Commerce verbrennt 15 Mio € pro Sekunde Ladezeit (Infografik) appeared first on Conversion Optimierung, Landingpage Optimierung | konversionsKRAFT.

It takes more than coupon clippings and reward points to win over today’s consumers — they’re looking for value that goes beyond monetary incentive. Businesses that know how to engage their customers and provide unconditional value will be the ones that foster a long-term relationship with their community.

This makes the pairing of content marketing and customer retention a powerful match that can’t be ignored.

The growth team I lead at Outbrain, the world’s largest content discovery platform, provides a real-life case study for content and retention coming together to produce results.

I’d like to share five specific content-based customer retention tactics we’re employing to grow our customer base and revenue at Outbrain – tactics you can steal for your own customer retention strategy.

1. Get new customers trained up fast with educational emails

The sooner you educate customers about using your product, the faster they can derive value from you and become sticky.

According to a survey conducted by SaaS metrics company Preact, 23% of customers churn due to poor onboarding. Especially when you have a fairly complex service, frontloading the delivery of educational content and learning from how new signups interact with this content is critical.

We’ve certainly seen a direct correlation between reducing our churn and improving our onboarding process. To help our customers get acquainted with our platform and understand how our system works, we created a bootcamp training series.

As soon as a customer’s first campaign is launched, an automated email campaign (which we call our Brainiac Bootcamp) is triggered for them. It sends four daily emails that walk the customer through campaign optimization tips, our dashboard and other resources. Here’s a screenshot of the first of four emails:

When we first launched our Bootcamp series, we did a test and control experiment by sending 90% of first-time customers the email program and keeping a 10% control group. For customers who received the bootcamp emails, we saw a direct correlation between content and retention.

We dug even deeper by being strategic about which features required more education than others.

For example, we knew from analyzing the overall behavior of our customers that the more headlines they are testing per individual piece of content, the better chance they have of receiving a higher click-through rate (CTR) when their content is recommended in our publisher network.

Knowing this, we made sure our bootcamp content helped customers understand the importance of testing more headlines. As a result, those customers received higher click-through rates – and stayed active 1.5x longer than people who did not receive the bootcamp emails.

Takeaway for your campaigns:

Make sure your onboarding process is laser-focused on educating users on the importance of certain product behaviors you know will result in their success.

Through testing, determine which features lead to a higher retention rate – and then be sure to frontload that education. If customers do well, they’re more likely to stick around longer. It’s mutually beneficial.

2. Use live webinars to step up customer training

Webinars are often discussed as an acquisition tactic, but they’re also a great way of engaging more personally with customers at scale. Nothing beats real face-time when explaining a complex product.

We run bi-monthly webinars conducted by our Account Strategists. The content has evolved over time, and it’s always driven by feedback from our customers, as well as questions fielded by our Customer Support team.

We put a lot of time into adapting the content we present in these webinars, but also closely measure the webinars’ impact on our bottom line.

Our Business Intelligence team built a report to compare customers’ campaign performance a week before and a week after they attend the webinar. We also look at their metrics two weeks and a month later to see if they’re continuing to optimize their performance based on webinar learnings.

On average, we’ve seen a 50% increase in average spend and 38% increase in cost-per-click (CPC) as a result of these webinars.

You may be thinking that increase in spend and CPC does not necessarily equal success for our customers, who are optimizing for leads and pages per visit. But due to the competitive nature of our content marketplace, a campaign that starts with a higher CPC has a much better chance of receiving any traffic at all.

It’s another win-win scenario – if we can effectively explain this to customers on a webinar, they’re more likely to see results from their campaigns and they’re more likely to stick around.

Use webinars to demystify your product. If you help customers succeed, they’ll help you succeed too.
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3. Always be adding content to your help center

Not nearly enough content marketers are focused on making their help center and FAQs as useful as possible – but help centers should be a vital part of the customer journey.

At Outbrain, we’ve structured our Help Center to reflect our customers’ needs from the pre-signup stage to first-time campaign creation to more advanced optimizations and reporting.

Just like webinars and bootcamp emails, help centers should be works in progress that you’re constantly striving to improve. You can use a combination of sources to help determine what content needs to be developed, refined or updated. These could include:

• New product developments that require more training and FAQs: Product releases are exciting, but the platform and its features are only as good as your ability to communicate them to your customers. It’s important to educate customers on how to get the most out of new features — create new training content and FAQs to guide them!
• Commonly asked questions sent to your Customer Support team: If your customer support team notices a trend in a particular topic of enquiry, that’s great fodder for new Help Center content.
• Google Analytics reports for the top Help Center search terms, search refinements made by customers and most commonly visited FAQs: For example, have a look at the chart below which shows our most commonly searched terms from 2014 and the percentage of search refinements users were making when trying to find relevant content.
  

  Customers searching for FAQs on cancelling accounts or languages were having to further refine their terms to find the content they were after, whereas customers looking for FAQs on UTMs, mobile, tracking or adding content were finding what they needed right away.

  We used this report to create more relevant and obvious FAQs to address these trickier searches and saw an improvement in search refinements and a reduction in questions on these topics sent to Customer Support.

All of these measures help customers feel supported the entire way through their journey, and allow them to better understand your product and derive more value. And that keeps customers coming back for more.

Use your search box data to understand what content your customers want but can’t find.
Click To Tweet

4. Communicate product improvements and new features with great content

Collaboration between content and product marketing is essential to bringing new features to customers in the most efficient way. The more educational content created around each release, the more customers will continue to engage with and provide feedback on the new feature.

For us, email and our blog are our two most effective channels for sharing product updates with our customers. Our email updates are designed to alert customers to the latest developments, and then we drive them to the blog to learn more.

When we created the ability for customers to upload content in bulk and test multiple headlines and images per URL, we sent out an email announcing the feature:

The goal of adding this feature was to make it easier to add more headlines; a process that had been manual and very time consuming.

By tracking the feature as an event in Kissmetrics, we were able to see that the average number of headlines and images per content increased significantly after our blog post and email explaining the new feature.

The concept here is pretty straightforward: the more customers are aware of new tools and features, the more likely they are to use them.

5. Use lifecycle email marketing to segment customers

Email campaigns are still the bread and butter of many a retention marketer’s efforts. With today’s overloaded inbox, personalization of the content based on individual product usage data is now more important than ever.

This is where lifecycle email marketing comes in: reaching your customers at each stage of their journey with you and tailoring relevant content to their needs and experience at each stage.

For lifecycle email marketing to our customers, we use a customer retention automation platform called Optimove to measure the impact of every campaign on revenue and customer lifetime value across five major customer segments:

• New customers
• Non-spending customers
• Engaged customers
• Churned customers
• Reactivated customers

Our seasonal performance email campaign is a great example of this. Historically, we’ve seen that the end of each quarter is a competitive time on the Outbrain network; more buyers and higher cost-per-click. It’s especially important to communicate that to customers so they understand how to optimize their campaigns accordingly.

When we ran an educational email campaign for our most active customer segment about the importance of adding more headlines to increase your click-through rate (CTR), we saw a 10% increase in the average number of headlines per content campaign among those who received the email – along with an increased CTR in the most active customer segment.

Put your content to work

If you plan to prioritize customer retention as a major driver of growth and revenue for your business, investing in content will be critical to your success.

Here’s a quick recap of the five ways content underpins our entire customer retention strategy:

1. Get new customers trained up fast with educational emails
2. Use live webinars to step up customer training
3. Always be adding content to your help center based on customer feedback and user behavior
4. Communicate product improvements and new features with great content
5. Use lifecycle email marketing to segment customers

Over to you — how are you using content marketing to drive your customer retention strategy?

Speaker, coach, and author Matthew Kimberley of How to Get a Grip talks with Youpreneur.FM host Chris Ducker about selling, marketing, and the critical importance of speaking your audience’s language.

Why do so many small business owners struggle with sales? Chris invited his good friend and fellow Brit Matthew Kimberley to share his thoughts on the subject in today’s podcast.

Matthew is a masterful salesman, a renowned author of the self-help book How to Get a Grip, and the head of the Book Yourself Solid coaches training program.

On this show, Matthew shares his candid and often hilarious anecdotes on how to be more confident when making a sales pitch (and why it matters), two ways to build your sales muscle, and whether sales people are born or made.

There’s a lot of deep and beneficial insights from Matthew and Chris in this episode of The Youpreneur.FM Podcast, so sit back, grab your favorite beverage, and listen in!

Essential Learning Points From This Episode:

• Why we must understand our audience
• When do people need to be told what to do?
• Where do 90 percent of business problems stem from?
• Why repetition is so important to being great at sales
• What is Kimberley’s kid’s kidney concept, and how does it help sales?
• Much, much more!

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Why (and How) Selling Ourselves Makes a Difference, with Matthew Kimberley appeared first on Copyblogger.

Creating a remarkable experience for an audience starts with authenticity, which should never be confused with transparency.

In this week’s episode of The Lede, Jerod Morris and Demian Farnworth (Hey! They’re back together again!) tackle the topic of authenticity to give you a better understanding of how to create an authentic connection with your audience, no matter what type of content you’re creating.

Jerod has discussed authenticity a lot in relation to podcasts. He wanted to hear Demian’s thoughts on how developing an authentic connection may differ depending on the medium.

Among the topics discussed:

• Why authenticity is one of the essential elements of a remarkable audience experience
• How authenticity differs (or does it?) between audio and written content
• What Erika Napoletano taught Demian about being authentic
• Why Erika’s version of authenticity and your version are surely different

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Revisiting Authenticity: What It Is, What It’s Not, and Why It Matters appeared first on Copyblogger.

Today’s guest on Hack the Entrepreneur is the Founder, Publisher, and CEO of Momtrends.com. She left her role as an executive at Ralph Lauren to launch the Momtrends blog in 2007.

Momtrends has grown massively since then and is now a boutique media brand, which provides moms with the latest news on all things trendy and cool. It has an ever-growing mom community with more than 150,000 visitors to the site and its social media channels each month.

On top of this (and with the help of her team), she has created a successful events business that connects top-tier brands with influential bloggers, and she has hosted nearly 100 events so far.

Now, let’s hack …

Nicole Feliciano.

In this 35-minute episode of Hack the Entrepreneur, host Jon Nastor and Nicole Feliciano discuss:

• The pros of being a connector of people
• Packaging things in a way that’s unique to your brand
• Knowing what you’re not good at and letting better people handle it
• Failing quickly, picking yourself up, and working harder the next time

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Extraordinary Value of Sharing and Being a Connector appeared first on Copyblogger.

Back in 2004, the heat was on for me and my little marketing and design studio.

In those days, I was a single mom with a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, and I desperately needed my business to produce.

And by that, I mean produce profit. I needed money, honey — to support my family, run my household, and build my business.

I knew it was time to ramp up my efforts. My business was successful, but it was time to take it to another level.

Around that time, I started hearing about mastermind groups.

And now, when I look back, I recognize that joining a mastermind group profoundly changed my business for the better, especially because of one specific exercise these groups do.

That’s what I’m going to share today. Because earlier this month, we began doing something similar inside one of our communities at Rainmaker Digital.

Mastermind groups around every corner

You know that thing that happens when you’re interested in something and all of the sudden you start seeing mentions of it everywhere?

It’s called frequency illusion, and that’s what happened to me with mastermind groups. Everywhere I looked, I saw mentions of them.

But every mastermind group I found met in person, either early in the morning or later in the evening. And those were both times of the day when I had to be on Mom Duty. Attending a meeting outside the home wasn’t an option.

And yet, I was convinced that a mastermind group was what I needed. I knew I would benefit from the experience and viewpoints of other business owners, and it would help me position my business where it needed to be.

So, I continued to search and finally found a “virtual” mastermind group that met by phone. I applied, was accepted, and prepared myself for our first meeting.

Group therapy for my business?

I was a little nervous going into the first meeting. Was it going to be like a confessional? More like group therapy? Would I feel comfortable talking to these strangers about my business?

Every scenario I imagined had some level of discomfort baked in.

At the start of the meeting, the group leader explained that we would take turns sitting in the “hot seat” talking about our businesses.

We’d start by reporting successes — what had gone well in the past month. Then we’d move to sharing our biggest challenges — what we needed help with. The group would listen and contribute ideas to help the person in the hot seat.

Here’s where I was wrong

This is embarrassing to admit, but here’s what I thought:

“When it’s someone else’s turn, I’ll listen politely, provide the best feedback I can, and count the minutes until it’s my turn. And when it’s my turn, I’ll get a lot out of sharing my successes and challenges, and hearing the feedback from the group. The real value will come from taking my turn in the hot seat.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I learned a lesson that day and relearned it every single time we met as a group.

All the different businesses that exist in the world share many common problems.

When I look back on my mastermind meetings, I got as much or more from listening to other business owners talk about their triumphs and tragedies as I did when I shared my own.

Here’s what happened:

• The mindset tips shared with the chiropractor? I was able to use them to improve my own mindset.
• The negotiation techniques offered to the professional organizer? I used those the next time I needed to negotiate something.
• The website advice that went out to the voice coach? It made me look at my own site in a new light.

The funny thing about calling your time in the spotlight a “hot seat” is that the name is only partly accurate.

Instead of feeling like you’re under interrogation, you feel like you’re being warmly embraced by a community of professionals who support and encourage your efforts.

Maybe they should be called “warm seats.”

New: Authority Business Coaching calls

Last month, we began offering Authority Business Coaching calls inside our private site for advanced content marketing training.

We’ve brought a taste of this “warm seat” style of education to Authority, and the results so far have been pretty amazing.

The main challenge our first guest brought to the session was a need to improve cash flow in his business.

Here’s what we heard from our webinar attendees:

Money is so hard! And talking about it is even harder. This conversation is great.

And this:

I absolutely relate to this conversation. This is a great session.

And from the person sitting in the hot seat? Here’s what he said after it was over:

The session reinforced my ideas about what needs to happen, but it also gave me a sense of direction and more clarity. I feel a bit overwhelmed at times, and the coaching call left me with a sense of ‘I can do this.’

As a member, I think it is a highly appealing format for a show. It helps build a sense of community, while at the same time having a chance to be informative and valuable. All of us are in different stages of growth and success, but the problems we face are very similar.

Exactly. The problems we face are very similar.

And you’ll find that you can learn a tremendous amount by listening and sharing with people who own businesses that are quite different from yours.

About the author

Pamela Wilson

Pamela Wilson is Executive Vice President of Educational Content at Rainmaker Digital. Follow her on Twitter, see her Copyblogger images on Instagram, and find more from her at BigBrandSystem.com.

The post Why a Hot Seat Is Shockingly Good for Business appeared first on Copyblogger.

For many, Facebook advertising is an untamable beast.

Not only is it super competitive and constantly evolving, but it can also be flat our intimidating. With all those switches and levers, it can be hard to laser in on the tactics you need to optimize your advertising campaigns.

But in this episode of the Call to Action podcast, we’ll deconstruct a proven strategy that Matchnode, a Chicago agency, used to dramatically increase the ROI of their client’s marketing campaign.

You will learn:

• How using dedicated landing pages for their client’s Facebook ads allowed them to optimize for conversions instead of clicks – and why that ultimately lead to greater ROI.
• The magic word that boosted conversions on their landing page by 16% in an A/B test.
• A bird’s-eye view of what running a campaign looks like for Matchnode, from idea to execution to client approval.

Listen to the podcast

Listen on iTunes.
Prefer Stitcher? We got your back.

Mentioned in the podcast

• How New Balance Drove 200% More Sales at Half the Cost by Dan Levy via Unbounce.
• Theme music brought to you by the great folks at Wistia.

Read the transcript

In this episode: Dan Levy, Unbounce’s Content Strategist, interviews Brian Davidson, Co-founder of Matchnode.

Stephanie Saretsky: Hey everyone, it’s Stephanie Saretsky here from Unbounce and you’re listening to Call to Action, the podcast about creating better marketing experiences. For many, Facebook advertising is an untamable beast. Not only is it super competitive and constantly evolving, but it’s not great for lead gen and it can be hard to track conversions, especially if you’re a retail brand trying to get people to make a purchase in an actual real-world store. With all those switches and levers, it can be hard to laser in on the tactics you need to optimize your advertising campaigns.

Unbounce’s Content Strategist, Dan Levy, asked Brian Davidson, Co-founder of Chicago agency Matchnode, to deconstruct a proven strategy that they used to dramatically increase the ROI of a New Balance PPC campaign.

Dan Levy: So New Balance is an international brand, and you guys are a local marketing agency. Can you take me back to when you started working with New Balance Chicago as a client? How did you connect and what were the challenges that they came to you with?

Brian Davidson: The biggest challenge that we had when we first connected with New Balance especially in Chicago is their marketing tactics weren’t really brought into the digital age as of yet. They did a lot of things like radio broadcast advertising and they were focused on reach, a lot about coupons stuff coming in the mail. Digital really wasn’t on their plate. And the primary reason for that is that the New Balance Chicago shop didn’t actually have an ecommerce portal. Their primary marketing mission was to drive people to in-store visits, so as a result digital marketing didn’t really seem very obvious to them. But at the same time they’re pretty tech savvy people, and they knew that was the next wave coming down the pipe, and they had to jump onboard, but they weren’t totally sure of how they should get back onboard. So as a result there’s a little bit of apprehension in making that leap.

Dan Levy: So the first campaign that you ran with them was very Chicago. It involved using Facebook to offer discount clothes to people when the weather dropped below a certain temperature, right?

Brian Davidson: Below zero and below freezing and we had plenty of below zero days.

Dan Levy: Right. We’re based in Canada so I can definitely sympathize.

Brian Davidson: We can relate.

Dan Levy: How did you go about targeting those initial Facebook offers and what were the results of that first campaign?

Brian Davidson: Sure. Some of our initial targeting techniques were looking at the city of Chicago and targeting the city of Chicago plus ten miles and then crossing that with people that like the New Balance brand. We took a look at things like the customer list that they built up over time and looked at the exact zip codes of all their different customers. And there’s a surprising amount of zip codes of different buyers from all over the Chicago area that had been loyal customers throughout years. So targeting those specific zip codes within Facebook and also interested in New Balance. Then we started to look at things like competitive brands, people that were interested in different activities like running, different sort of exercise, cross-training.

And then we also started to look at different things within Facebook like uploading emails and creating similar audiences, looking at their web traffic and creating similar audiences to tell Facebook to go find more people like their existing buyers. And the initial results were that revenue numbers more than doubled the ad spend within the first month.

Dan Levy: Those are really solid results. But I know that you ran into some limitations with those Facebook campaigns, right?

Brian Davidson: Definitely limitations in some ways, but more from using the Facebook platform, and what could we expand from just using the Facebook platform. So initially what we did is we used Facebook offers, which are really great ad units offered by Facebook. But it doesn’t necessarily give all of the control to the marketer. When you claim an offer on Facebook – so I want ten percent from J. Crew or 20 percent off from New Balance, or from whatever brand I’m finding a Facebook offer for – when I claim that offer, the actual brand never receives my email as a customer. So as a result there’s a disconnect between being able to track who actually claimed offers and who actually then eventually redeemed them for in-store purposes.

Dan Levy: So Facebook keeps those email address to themselves in other words.

Brian Davidson: Exactly.

Dan Levy: Right.

Brian Davidson: Which obviously that brand and that store would definitely love to have those email addresses, and as a result, we weren’t really able to see a long tail to the campaign. Obviously New Balance, like a lot of brands, is gonna collect your email address, and they’re gonna point you to different drip campaigns. But there’s no difference – they weren’t able to do that with these types of campaigns even though we’d see hundreds and hundreds of people claiming the offers. Obviously only a portion of them are gonna eventually end up in-store, but it would be very, very helpful for them to have the emails of those that didn’t redeem the offer. So that was a big limitation.

Dan Levy: You said sending that ad traffic to mobile responsive landing pages was the game changer for you guys. How so?

Brian Davidson: The biggest thing we’re able to do now is instead of just using an offer, we’re able to send them to a landing page. And the majority of Facebook traffic right now — especially cheap traffic — is within that mobile news feed. The majority of users are mobile as opposed to desktops. So as a result it’s much, much easier to reach them. However, the best way to make a very effective Facebook ad is to optimize that ad for website conversion (using a pixel) rather than a website click. And once you’re sending someone to an actual web page, you’re able to then pop-up a thank you page and fire that pixel. And that allowed us to optimize the ads for conversion rather than just a click, which was a huge game changer for us. And then at the same time we were able to grab that email address, and there’s definitely a tangible value to that email address in long-term.

Dan Levy: Right. And just to be clear, we usually make the distinction between normal web pages and landing pages, but when Facebook says a website conversion that can mean a landing page conversion as well, right? It just means a conversion on a page that’s not native to Facebook itself.

Brian Davidson: Correct – it’s just a way to fire that pixel, but you’re not able to do so obviously within a Facebook offer.

New Balance is a nationally if not near nationally-known brand, so it was very, very important for us to take advantage of that, and the brand equity that they’ve built up over years. Their national branch has obviously spent thousands upon thousands upon probably millions to their overall websites and optimized those throughout the years. So it was very important for us to keep that look and feel of that brand. The New Balance brand here in Chicago has been here for over 20 years, so it was very important to continue that brand that has been penetrating these markets for years and not seeing a very different page from what their existing customers were used to seeing.

So what we did is we took the overall branding from New Balance’s national site that obviously had a lot of brand equity built up within both the area as well as internationally. And we took that shell as far as its header, its colors, its feel, its look, and then we replaced its main banner image with different campaign-specific imagery. For instance, one of the really cool things that New Balance in Chicago does that we didn’t know is that full-time they always have a military and servicemen discount at any of their stores. So we’re able to leverage both that discount as well as the New Balance “made in America” angle to brand the specific landing pages in the basic overall shell of New Balance’s national brand within an American and military branding and imagery within the actual landing page. And we advertised it specifically to Veterans on Facebook, and when they entered their email they received a discount code specifically to go to a store and redeem that code for their discount.

Dan Levy: You mentioned that there was a value put on that email itself. Can you talk about this campaign and what it meant from a lead gen perspective?

Brian Davidson: Sure. From a lead gen perspective, we were able to generate leads about three or four times from what we were doing previously, as well as their actual email newsletter — just a Constant Contact email newsletter — going out to all their buyers, driving thousands of dollars of in-store purchases every single month. So we saw about a three to one ROI in real-time collecting in email versus just sending them to a Facebook offer. But just to unpack the Facebook ad advertising platform and how it works and how we were able to sync it with Unbounce — there’s a couple of main levers that you’re pulling within the Facebook ad manager/network. And you need an objective, whether it be offer claims, website clicks, page likes, video views, conversion, etc.

And then aligning that properly with an audience, and then proper creative and a budget, and when you’re able to align these four different levers as well with a landing page, you’re getting very, very effective advertising and very, very cheap clicks as far as your bidding for actual conversions. Your audience is very clearly defined within a zip code that their creative on your Facebook ad is very, very well-aligned with your creative on your landing page, and you’re again firing that conversion on that landing page, and it’s tying the whole thing together. And when you get that mix just right — and again, I can’t stress enough how important it is for that mix to work right on mobile or it’s just gonna be too expensive to run on desktop — you really set yourself up for success and the results really can start to snowball.

And then the second big piece to that is we took a look at all of their links to various ecommerce channels that the majority of people are probably looking for online. And we replaced those with offline conversion type of imagery, so maps to stores, phone numbers, customers talking about in-store visits, talking about the advantages of going in-store (as far as free fittings and different things that the New Balance brand offers in-store), the staff, the location, the history in Chicago. So a great mix of that national brand imagery and the look and feel of the website but all the conversions based on brick and mortar, local walk-in, talk to your friendly New Balance retailer.

Unbounce makes it incredibly easy to — essentially what we tell our designer is we want to clone this – and then I’m not a designer. I jump in and I start moving buttons and start saying bullet point here, rewriting headlines, and then we enter it right back to her and she tells us, “Oh this looks pretty and it looks great.” And we do it overnight and we send it over to the client, they say, “This perfectly fits our brand nationally, fits all of our brand guidelines. You’re good to go.”

Dan Levy: You actually do it overnight?

Brian Davidson: We turn around our home landing pages shockingly fast. We do turn around a lot of pages overnight. As a team, we put them up on our Chromecast and start hacking at them ourselves, and then a lot of our designers that we work with are overseas. So we send them a messy version and we come back to the office in the morning and it is ready to go.

Dan Levy: Oh cool, so you actually when you say you put on your Chromecast you’ll have like the page on the big screen and they’ll all be working on it together.

Brian Davidson: We all huddle around it and we’re pointing at different parts of the page and “What about this over here?” and “My eye is drawn to this corner of the page. What if we tried changing this color here?” And then of course we’ll disagree at times. So we just quickly clone that and launch a B version.

Dan Levy: Very cool. So you guys have been able to replicate the success of that original veterans campaign by tweaking your landing page for other New Balance promotions like — I know one was for health awareness month and different products like kids’ apparel and clothing. Can you talk about how you’ve optimized the formula along the way using both Facebook’s algorithm and some optimization on the landing page site?

Brian Davidson: So constant tweaks on both sides — changing our audience within Facebook. The more emails we collect, the better our lookalike audiences are gonna look within Facebook. Obviously then we’re able to retarget those people as well with their actual email addresses and send them to future campaigns. It’s very, very easy to reach those people, so our audiences continue to get better and better. And the other thing we’re doing within Unbounce is our landing pages are becoming more and more specific. For instance, we recently just launched new landing pages for each store, so we’re looking at Facebook and looking at specific zip codes around each store using their new interface to quickly just highlight miles radius around the actual store and dropping pins to target specific zip codes.

And then we’re directing them directly to a landing page for that specific store. For instance, Hyde Park is their newest store, so we launched a campaign specifically for Hyde Park residents — specifically with a Hyde Park landing page. And as a result the cost of conversion, the cost of grabbing that email has gone down 25 percent.

Dan Levy: Okay, wow. One cool A/B test that you guys ran in Unbounce that caught my eye involved boosting conversions by I think it was around 16 percent by testing that ever powerful word free. Can you talk about that test and why you think it was so successful?

Brian Davidson: Sure. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, one of the advantages you have going in-store for New Balance is New Balance is one of the few stores and few brands left that carry actually athletic shoes in different widths. And they’ll actually measure your width in-store. They’ll take a look how you walk in-store, and they offer basically a free fitting. It’s not very well known nationally. It’s definitely not as well known locally as we’d like it to be, but they do offer that. So we created a landing page talking about “Come in for your fitting!” and immediately we started to get feedback both in-store as well as people commenting on our Facebook threads and on our Facebook ads with, “How much does this cost?” So that led us immediately to change that they offer prominently that this is free, and immediately we started to see a huge boost in conversion — as you mentioned, 16 percent.

Dan Levy: It’s funny, we see that on our end as well when it comes to promoting ebooks and stuff. We think it’s obvious that this is a free ebook but it’s not necessarily, and just by emphasizing that in your landing page copy you could really boost conversions by quite a bit.

Brian Davidson: Sure. And it’s obviously really important to pay attention to that offline feedback in some ways.

Dan Levy: I’m always interested in what the process of landing page optimization looks like between marketers like you and designers and of course the clients you’re serving. We’ve already talked about the design aspect a little bit, but can you take me through what running a campaign like these looks like from the idea to the execution to the clients getting onboard and approving it?

Brian Davidson: Well, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, these guys are very tech savvy, so they really have a good idea of tactics they’d like to try, so they’re always coming to us with new ideas — and they have a lot of legacy campaigns that have performed very well for them over time. The trick has always been adapting these legacy ideas as well as possibly new ideas in thinking, “What’s the hook to get this to work on Facebook, and how does this align with an audience on Facebook, how does this align with Facebook’s targeting?” And once we have a pretty good idea of how to reach a specific target with a specific message, it’s really easy to design a landing page at that point because you have such a good idea of the audience and what you want them to see when they hit that landing page. So as I mentioned earlier, it’s very collaborative for our agency in getting literally around an Unbounce page and pointing out how we want things to look on page.

Dan Levy: Yeah, I mean a lot of boutique agencies out there I think would love to include landing page creation and optimization as part of their services but might have trouble selling the idea to their clients who might be maybe a little bit less tech savvy, not know the difference between a landing page and a website, which they might have already paid you to build as an agency.

Brian Davidson: Sure.

Dan Levy: How would you go about communicating the value of landing pages to a skeptical client?

Brian Davidson: Well, I think the first challenge you have to explain to a client is what a landing page is. I’ve been in meetings where I’m talking about landing pages and I see eyes gloss over because they don’t know what it is. But they don’t want to interrupt a meeting and ask you that. So it’s really important I found to actually show them an example of a landing page. So when we were getting started with New Balance, we actually mocked up a landing page. It wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but we pointed out the advantages of taking away ecommerce links and put a map in that place and they started understanding.

And we also just had them Google any product out there. Google people’s services and you’re gonna come to a landing page, and when you click on that paid ad, and they immediately start to understand that in their personal lives they’re always clicking on different ads from the search campaigns, and they’re always ending up on landing pages. And they start to connect the dots — of course, every brand does it this way because we want them to convert and we want that path to conversion to be so simple. And then it really starts to click once they understand what a landing page is. They start to say, “I want a landing page,” and you say, “Hey we’ve got a great tool — it’s easy to create them for you.”

Dan Levy: Very cool. This is the Call to Action podcast, so we like to give our guest a chance to include a bit of a CTA of their own. What advice would you give to agencies and the end brands out there when it comes to running great social campaigns using landing pages?

Brian Davidson: Like I mentioned a little bit earlier, alignment is so important — aligning the campaign objective with a great audience with great creative with a landing page that is mobile responsive and can be tweaked on a constant basis – is really the most important thing. Your campaign doesn’t need to be huge. It doesn’t need to be thousands of dollars in ad spend. You’re able to reach a lot of people very cheaply, and creating a landing page isn’t some magic trick or very, very dev-intensive project. In fact, I built literally our first website for our business using Unbounce because it was so simple that we needed to get our homepage up basically at that point for our company. And again I’m not a designer, but I jumped in there, and I was able to hack it Unbounce and get something live. So there’s really no reason why any company should be running ads to their homepage of their website when there are tools out there that are available to create your own landing pages cheaply and very quickly.

Dan Levy: You said it better than I ever can. Thank you so much, Brian, for taking the time to chat and for running us through this strategy that I think a lot of other marketers can learn from.

Brian Davidson: I had a great time and anyone listening to this has any questions feel free to give me a call. We’re happy to chat.

Stephanie Saretsky: That was Brian Davidson, co-founder of Matchnode.

Thanks for listening!

Transcript by GMR Transcription.

Wie kann ich bei Aldi mobil bezahlen?

Beim Start meiner Recherche konnte ich keine genauen Informationen auf der Aldi Webseite finden. Ich habe dann eine ausführliche Online-Suche betrieben und mich durch Informationen aus einigen Artikeln gewühlt. Allerdings sind viele der Informationen, die man im Web findet nicht eindeutig. So fand ich in einem Artikel die Information, dass man eine NFC-fähige SIM-Karte für sein Handy und einen Mobilfunkvertrag bei Vodafone, Base oder der Telekom braucht. In einem anderen Artikel wurde mir mitgeteilt, dass ich für das mobile Bezahlverfahren bei Aldi eine „Wallett-App“ entweder von „mpass“ (o2, Telekom, Vodafone), “SmartPass” (Vodafone), “MyWallet” (Telekom) oder “Base Wallet” (Base) brauche. Ganz schön kompliziert! Da ich bei keinem dieser Telefonanbieter bin, habe ich mich gefragt, welche „Wallet“ App jetzt für mich in Frage kommt für meinen Mobile Payment-Test?

Registrierung für mpass

Als erstes habe ich bei der Telekom Webseite vorbeigeschaut und mich über die MyWallet App informiert. Um MyWallet zu nutzen, muss ich allerdings eine neue NFC-Fähige SIM Karte beantragen und brauche einen Vertrag bei der Telekom. Da ich den nicht hatte, schied diese Alternative aus. In einem vorherigen Blogbeitrag zum Thema Mobile Payment hatte ich mich schon mit verschiedenen Wallet-Apps beschäftigt und daher war mir mpass bekannt. Über die mpass Homepage erfuhr ich, dass ich mich für den Service anmelden kann, unabhängig davon, welchen Mobilfunkanbieter oder welches Handymodell ich besitze. Das klang schon mal vielversprechend. Also registrierte ich mich für diesen Service.

Der Registrierungsprozess ist relativ einfach und schnell durchgeführt. Auf der Webseite müssen persönliche Daten und Kontoinformationen angegeben werden. Ich erhielt daraufhin eine Bestätigungs-E-Mail, die mir mitteilte, dass ich meinen Sticker in den nächsten Tagen in der Post finden würde. Fristgerecht erhielt ich tatsächlich meinen Sticker die Woche darauf. Abschließend musste ich meinen Sticker nur noch über die Online-Registrierung aktivieren. Dann stehen einem mehrere Optionen zur Verfügung, das mpass Konto aufzuladen. Zum einen kann per Überweisung oder Sofort-Überweisung Geld vom eigenen Girokonto überwiesen werden. Zum anderen gibt es die Option, dass alle Beträge automatisch von einem hinterlegten Girokonto abgebucht werden. Aus Sicherheitsgründen entschied ich mich dafür, mein mpass Konto per Überweisung aufzuladen.

Praxistest: Mobile Payment bei Aldi

Den Selbstversuch startete ich mittags: Ich fuhr zu Aldi, um mir dort etwas zum Mittag zu kaufen. Ich lief durch den Laden, suchte mir meine Einkäufe zusammen und begab mich zur Kasse. Hinter mir war niemand, das war schon mal gut, denn ich zweifelte daran, dass alles reibungslos funktionieren würde. Vorne an der Kasse klebte ein Sticker, der auf das kontaktlose Bezahlen hinwies. Als ich der Kassiererin mitteilte, dass ich kontaktlos bezahlen möchte, wusste sie (ich gebe zu, zu meiner Überraschung) was gemeint ist. Sie gab etwas in die Kasse ein und wies mich an, ich solle mein Smartphone an den Terminal halten. Ich folgte ihren Anweisungen und es passierte… nichts. Ich probierte es noch einmal, aber es passierte immer noch nichts. Hinter mir hatte sich schon eine kleine Schlange von etwa 5 bis 6 Leuten gebildet, die ungeduldig warteten. Normalerweise hätte ich an diesem Punkt einfach mit meiner Karte oder bar bezahlt, aber ich war ja zu einem Selbstversuch hier.

Die freundliche Dame an der Kasse bat mich nicht ein anderes Zahlungsmittel zu verwenden, sondern rief ihren Chef. Hinter mir merkte ich, dass es in der immer länger werdenden Schlage anfing zu rumoren. Da der Vorgang nicht mehr abgebrochen werden konnte, konnte ich zu meinem Unglück nicht mal jemanden vorlassen. Die Lösung des Problems war dann doch einfacher als gedacht: Eigentlich hatte ich meine Handyhülle mit Absicht um mein Handy gelassen, da auf der mpass Webseite ausdrücklich steht, dass man seine Handyhülle über den Sticker ziehen kann. Nur mit Hülle kann man leider nicht bezahlen, sofern sie Metall enthält. Ich entfernte meine Handyhülle und siehe da, es funktionierte! Ein kurzes Biepen signalisierte, dass der Bezahlvorgang abgeschlossen war, ich erhielt meinen Kassenbon und das war‘s! Da ich nur einen kleinen Betrag von 2,66 zu zahlen hatte, musste ich den Vorgang auch nicht mit einer PIN bestätigen. Dies ist erst ab Beträgen von 25 Euro nötig.

Screenshot mpass App: Verfügbarer Betrag nach Einkauf bei Aldi

Eigentlich alles ganz einfach! Beim nächsten Mal weiß ich nun sofort was zu tun ist und dass ich mein Handy aus der Hülle nehmen muss. Allerdings finde ich das auch schon wieder umständlich, wenn ich jedes Mal mein Handy aus der Hülle friemeln muss. Das kostet Zeit! Dann ist die Zeitersparnis durch das kontaktlose Zahlen mit dem Handy eigentlich sofort wieder hinfällig und man ist schneller mit Bargeld oder EC-Karte. Ohne Hülle hätte ich Angst, dass der Sticker sich über kurz oder lang von meinem Handy löst, ich ihn verliere und es unter Umständen nicht sofort bemerke! Insgesamt war ich positiv überrascht, dass alles funktioniert hat und auch die Verkäufer wissen was zu tun ist. Allerdings nur so lange keine Probleme auftauchen! Hier fehlt es offensichtlich noch an Schulung des Personals, denn es kann nicht immer der Chef kommen, wenn es ein Problem gibt.

Als Ergänzung zu dem Sticker gibt es von mpass auch eine App. Diese ist für das Mobile Bezahlen allerdings nicht notwendig, sondern soll das Mobile Bezahlen mittels Sticker lediglich durch zusätzliche Services ergänzen. Die App ist mit einer von mir festgelegten PIN gesichert und ich muss mich jedes Mal neu einloggen. Vor und nach meinem Einkauf habe ich mich in meine mpass App eingeloggt und meinen Kontostand bzw. verfügbaren Betrag kontrolliert. Unter Transaktionen kann ich mir alle meine Buchungen und weiteren Details wie Datum, Uhrzeit und Ort anzeigen lassen. Dies ist durchaus ein nettes Feature und erleichtert das Nachvollziehen von Ausgaben.

Screenshot mpass account: Übersicht der letzten Transaktionen

Fazit

Mittlerweile findet man, wenn man „Aldi Mobile Payment“ eingibt auf der Seite von Aldi genauere Informationen zu den Voraussetzungen vom Mobile Payment in den Aldi Filialen. Dass beispielsweise MyWallet unabhängig vom Mobilfunkanbieter nutzbar ist, wird dort weiterhin verschwiegen. Aldi verweist seine Kunden lediglich darauf, sich an den eigenen Telefonanbieter zu wenden. Als Prepaid-Kunde oder Kunde bei einem der Anbieter, die nicht auf der Seite genannt werden, bleibt weiterhin nur eine Online-Suche, um weitere Informationen zu finden.

Eine kürzlich von eResult durchgeführte Online-Umfrage zeigt die Skepsis der deutschen Smartphone-Nutzer gegenüber mobiler Bezahlverfahren und kam zu dem Ergebnis, dass diese noch eher selten im Vergleich zu anderen Bezahlverfahren genutzt werden. Nach diesem Praxistest mit Hindernissen wurde mir nochmals bewusst, warum Mobile Payment in Deutschland noch in den Kinderschuhen steckt. Informationen sind häufig schwer zugänglich und es gibt aktuell zu viele unterschiedliche Verfahren, die miteinander konkurrieren. Die meisten Nutzer werden sich vermutlich auch nur für einen Service entscheiden und es bleibt die Frage: Wo kann ich damit überhaupt bezahlen? Denn die Möglichkeiten für Mobile Payment sind weiterhin begrenzt. Langfristig gesehen wird Mobile Payment nur eine Chance haben, wenn sich einige wenige Services durchsetzen, die an vielen Orten einsetzbar sind.

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