Odez Designs

Author: odezadmin

  • Data-informed posts: What you should be doing to generate leads and sales with your social media posts

    Data-informed posts: What you should be doing to generate leads and sales with your social media posts

    If you post on social media with the goal of generating leads or sales, you should be tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of your posts. Go beyond the number
    of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and start looking at which posts drive traffic, engagement, and conversion on your website. The insights you gain will help you understand
    and prioritize specific tactics that speak to your audience and lead to sales opportunities. The best way to get these insights is through analytics. Read on to
    learn what you can do now to start creating data-informed posts.

    With the growing number of social analytics tools, it can be confusing to choose a tool that is optimal for your business. Most likely, you will need a combination of
    tools for a comprehensive view of your social media performance. In this post, I will focus on two types of analytics tools that every business should start with:

    • Platform Analytics – Social media platforms provide their own analytics tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. These tools provide a good starting point for high level statistics such as follower growth, likes/favorites, reach, and post engagement. These tools are free and require little to no setup. Plus, you will be getting data directly from the source.
    • Web Analytics – A web analytics platform such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics enables you to measure and understand what happens on your website after a post gets clicked. This is done through the use of campaign tracking, which is a unique tracking string that gets appended to each link in a post. The wealth of data you get from using campaign tracking will help you see which posts are the most effective at generating traffic, engagement, and opportunities. In addition, it will help you contextualize your data and see how your social media channels perform against other inbound and outbound marketing tactics.
    • Traffic – If you post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any social media site, you will see how many and what percentage of your website traffic comes from each post. Depending on how you set up your campaign tracking, you can also view data for a set of posts specific to a campaign or posts from a particular social media site. To get a bigger picture, you can also view all of your traffic sources to understand what percentage comes from your social media channels.
    • Engagement – If you posted about a product or service, you will want to know if your followers viewed the product or service web page. Once they are on that web page, did they engage with the content…download a file, watch a video, etc.? The answers to these questions help you understand which posts lead to interest and action. To get a bigger picture, you can also see how your social media channels stack up against other marketing channels in generating engagement.
    • Leads and Sales – With a web analytics tool, you can close the loop and track all the way from a post click-through to a form conversion or online order. Whether the conversion happened directly after the post click or a few website visits later, the conversion will still be tracked back to the post. To get a bigger picture, you can see how the conversion rates for your social media channel compare with your other marketing channels.

    Like platform analytics, Google Analytics is also free. Adobe Analytics comes at a price, but is much more flexible for tracking campaigns.

    With the combination of social media platform analytics and web analytics, the data and insights you get are extremely valuable to your business. A fine-tuned
    view of your posts’ effectiveness to a big picture view of social media performance will help you understand your target audience better and enable you to form a more effective social media strategy. If you are going to post anyway, post smarter with data-informed posts.

     

    kees-analyticsThis insightful post was written by Natalie Kees, Kees Analytics. Odez Designs recommends a professional analytics consultant like Kees Analytics to give your business maximum potential on the web.

  • E-Commerce Customer Loyalty

    E-Commerce Customer Loyalty

    We’re a loyal supporter of WooCommerce as our favorite shopping cart with LOTS of add-ons that make life easier. Just about all our websites use WooCommerce. An interesting article was written by Nicole Kohler regarding customer loyalty, you can read the full article here. Some good points we pulled from the article are below.

     

    It made some important statements that are worth repeating….and how to get those repeating customers.

     

    A study on eCommerce buying behavior by RJMetrics found that about 32% of first-time customers came back for a second purchase. Bring a customer back just once and you’re more likely to count them among your most loyal shoppers. But how do you even begin to establish that kind of “I’ll only shop with you” loyalty, anyway?

     

    One of the best ways you can create longtime loyalty is with smart pricing strategies. We aren’t talking about offering coupons nonstop — we’re talking about rewarding shoppers for consistently choosing your store, or offering discounts they can’t find anywhere else.

     

    Instead of offering a discount on a new customer’s very first order, try drawing them in with a reward for making that first purchase. For example, rather than offering $5 off an order, you could advertise a coupon code good for $10 off a customer’s next order being sent via email once a purchase is completed.

     

    Create different membership tiers and increase the discounts as the tiers go up — for example, Bronze members might get 5% off all items, Silver 10% off, and Gold 15% off.

  • Landing the Email

    Landing the Email

    We’ve been using SendGrid lately and have found it extremely useful. Their SMTP relay setup and flexible Web and SMTP APIs provide a simple integration approach for sending email. We have used SendGrid to solve a client’s frustrations with lost emails through their website. By sending email through two-factor authentication, multi-user credentials, API key permissions, IP Access Management, and more, we have made the email headaches go away.

     

    If you’re looking for a helpful tool to solve your email problems, it’s worth looking into.

  • New way to manage members

    New way to manage members

    Recently we came across a very helpful member registration plugin. It gives the ability to create different member registration forms and goes beyond the simple name and contact info. It’s so smart it even allows you to create detailed forms for members to fill out and then the same plugin allows you to create a directory page showcasing all the members and the exact content you want to show. For example, we had a client who wanted to show products that each member sold but wanted to hide the number of years they were a member. This plugin has solved a lot of member registration issues and organized the process in one simple plugin.

    [ut_btn button_size=”bklyn-btn-normal” button_align=”bklyn-btn-left” font_weight=”” button_text=”You can download a trial version or purchase the pro version HERE ” button_link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cozmoslabs.com%2Fwordpress-profile-builder%2F||target:%20_blank|” button_text_color=”#ffffff” button_background=”#025dfc” button_text_color_hover=”#ffffff” button_background_hover=”#fd7e00″]
    [ut_animated_image image=”6928″]
  • Don’t put people to sleep…

    Don’t put people to sleep…

    It’s very rare that you don’t need some sort of graphic to help get the point across.  Most people are more engaged and interested if you incorporate graphics into your communications. Graphic elements such as icons, logos, direction symbols can help explain your ideas with using less words. For example, the slider below shows a before and after of a one page flyer that suggests the best method for email workflow. I’m sure you will agree the more colorful version with graphic elements looks much more interesting.

     

    So take the time to add color, graphics and images to your communications to keep their interests.

    [ut_gallery_slider lightbox=”no” autoplay=”true” slides=”6930,6931″]
  • 43rd Annual Annie Awards

    43rd Annual Annie Awards

    The Annie Awards is always an exciting time of year. We work so hard throughout the year to breathe new life into the annual event with new logo design, new website skin, new program book design and all the little things along the way. The actual event is a celebration of a job well done! We work with very talented people in the public relations field, creative writers, savvy developers and of course the funny comedians who draw cartoons. The Annie Award is animation’s highest honor and we’re very proud to be part of this night celebrating such extraordinary individuals.

  • Adobe MAX 2016

    Adobe MAX 2016

    Join over 7,000 like-minded creatives from around the world for a week of sessions, labs, speakers, events, inspiration and fun — everything you need to keep you creative for the rest of the year.

    Preregister now and save.

  • The Balancing Act

    The Balancing Act

    It’s that time of year again, where the holidays consume more of your time than daily life. Even work takes a backseat to the holiday office party or the holiday gift exchange. It’s impossible to get all your work done and feel comfortable to enjoy the actual holiday time. Luckily we dug up some helpful advice from a previous blog post By US News: On Careers blog.

     

    4 Ways to Find Work-Life Balance During the Holidays

     

    1. Schedule a walking meeting. Exercise is a proven stress buster, yet it’s often the first thing to go during the holiday season, edged out by festivities and obligations. Maren Kate Donovan, CEO of Zirtual, notes that if you’re feeling stressed from the pressures, it’s a fair assumption that many of your clients and colleagues will be in the same boat.

     

    2. Think of alternatives to travel. While many people equate the holidays with cross-country flights packed like sardines, the rigmarole of holiday travel often infuses us with the spirit of bah humbug. While many people feel they have to travel during the holidays to get together with extended family they don’t often see, the holidays may be better spent limiting travel or calling it off completely, according to author April Masini.

     

    3. Don’t power through it. Perfectionist personalities may fall back on all-or-nothing thinking during the holidays, which transforms potentially fun times into misery. With so much to do in only a few short weeks (or sometimes days), you’ll have to make decisions about which priorities really matter and what you need to let go.

     

    4. Say “no” more often. In the spirit of the holidays and giving back to others, it can be even more difficult than usual to decline requests. But Charlie Harary, professor of management and entrepreneurship at Yeshiva University’s Syms School of Business in New York, notes that everything you take on when you’re too busy at this time of year has a cost.