Sam Lin’s Course blog

1. Which certification did you complete? Ans: Email Marketing Certification

2. How long did it take to complete? Ans: Around 8 hours, including the video, taking notes, and review. If this question contain the exam, it should be between 9 ~ 10 hours.

3. What did you like best/least? Ans: I think this certification helps me a lot of the concept of how email marketing works. In many videos, the speaker emphasis when, what, how many times. Moreover, there is one thing that I love in this certification which is that it provides cc subtitle, and it does help me when I am taking notes and review the video. The least point I like should be that there is no cc subtitle in the last video, and the last video is around 16 minutes, so I spend too much time on it.

4. Were there any disappointments or frustrations? Ans: I think the disappointment is that this course doesn’t teach me how to write an attractive email with attractive topic and content. As the result of my simulation, my email campaign is not profitable because of the low open rate and CTR. I expected this course could help me to improve my email marketing skill, but it does not offer this training.

5. What did you learn? Ans: I think this course help me to discover deeper area of email marketing, such as how to ask a permission before you send email to the contacts. For example, I didn’t know that some emails are sent to trash can directly because the filter system recognizes these emails are spams. Moreover, I think the most important point of this course is to teach you how to avoid to be recognized as a spam.

6. Do you believe this certification program is useful for other marketers? Ans: There is no doubt that this certification can help other marketers because email is still used by most people around the world. Furthermore, as the real world situation that email is still used widely, then there is no reason to not take this certification course if you are a professional marketer.

7. On a scale of 1-5, how likely are you to recommend this certification program to a friend? Why? Ans: I would give 4 because it is free, and it can also help them to understand the real situation in our daily life that we have never known.

I would like to ask a question before you read the following content because I believe that it can help you to reflect to be a visitor who left comment would like the company to do. What would you like a company to response when you post a negative comment?

As a professional digital marketer, you have a responsibility to monitor the activities about your company, including positive comments, negative comments, and defamation. There are many tools to monitor, such as Google Alert and Moz.com, but I will discuss Google Alert only.

First of all, you need to search Google Alert and you will find the first result on the SERP which is the tool we will use to monitor the online activities. Secondly, please set a brand that you are interested in to practice or you can set your company directly. Third, once you set your brand/company, you could also set up other setting, such as language, region, frequency, and sources. These setting can help you to filter unnecessary information preliminary. For example, if your company is located in the United State, you might want to choose the language with English and Spanish because these two language have high percentage in the population in the United State. Furthermore, if your company is a local business, there is no doubt that you should set a specific geographic information. Fourth, you should start to think about what keywords have the high relevant with your business, such as XXX (your company’s name), XXX comments, and XXX services. You might have question about why we choose these keywords. We choose these keywords because these keywords are general to include a wide range activities, but if you want negative comments, you can also set your keywords with the keywords, like scandal.

Here, I will provide some tips for managing your reputation after you have set up your Google Alert. First of all, you must realize what you should do once you have receive the activities about your company. For example, a visitor leaves a comment about your bad service, you should either response the comment immediately or contact with the visitor offline. Personally, I believe a marketer should do both. I would like to post a comment to make apology of our service, and contact with the visitor offline because it can avoid the back-and-forth situation.

On the other hand, there is no reason to communicate with the visitor directly on platform because you might make many mistakes during the communication. The best way to establish an efficient system of monitoring which is to create a contact names list after you receive the activities, and you should do whatever it takes to solve the problems offline through email or phone call.

Reference: Digital Marketing Essentials May 2019 Larson & Draper Chapter 11

A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience. –Ardth Albee

The main purpose of personas is to simulate the different customer segments in the real world. Before we start to discuss personas, I would like you to image how many types of customer are in your imagination. Here, I would like to provide some categories for you to create personas, such as gender, job title, age, and fear. So, your job is to create four to five people with different categories and names, such as Sam was an IT guy before he was 24 years old, but he is currently studying in Oregon State University for his master degree.

Why personas are so important for a company?

If you are responsible of email marketing in a company, but you have know idea what content will be suitable for every customer on your contact list. This is the exactly time you should create personas and classify each of them with specific features. The biggest problem for email marketers is how to get into in-box. As CAN-SPAM Act, any corporation is not allowed to promote to email users, unless they agree to receive any information from it. Usually, the legal way to collect email address which is opt-in. Opt-in is a method to collect consumers’ or visitors’ email when they visit a website. There is a small box with sentence to ask “Do you want to subscribe to receive and update?” or a box has been clicked with sentence like “Keep it blank if you don’t want to receive any update?” Indeed, your email content will be very important once you have visitors’ email. You will try your best to keep them engaging with the business, and that is the reason why personas are important. For example, your company is an online retailer of computer equipment (screen, mouse, chips, and charger). There are three people on your contact list, Sam, as what I have mentioned earlier and Kevin, which is a manager in the grocery store, and Wei, which is an amateur gamer. According to the content marketing principles, the content in email must be valuable for each receiver. In addition, you should send an email about special deals and special event with discount because Sam is a student, so he might not have enough budget for the new arrival products. In contrast, you should send Wei an email with new arrival products or feature products because Wei might concern effect more than price.

How to connect customer relationship and personas?

Basically, the customer relationship depends on many factors, such as email content, time, device, and etc. Some of them are relevant to personas because each email user needs different content, different active time, and different device. To maintain the relationship with them, you need to send them the right content, at the right time; otherwise, they could not be able to communicate with you.

Reference: https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/email-marketing

• The potential hazards that the current model of online advertising presents for society?

After read the assigned readings and videos, I had more cognition about the current model of online advertising presents for society. First of all, many sources provide trustable information that visitors’ privacy right are being challenge because of the current online advertising, especially retargeting. In textbook chapter 7-4, introduces how retargeting works. Personally, cookie is like your footprint in the online world. Some people could do something bad by collecting your personal information, such as preference, record, age, gender to achieve what they want. There is a great example from the real world and our textbook also uses which is Cambridge Analytica. This company did do its corporation responsibility well because it should collect the data from Facebook’s users and report to Facebook, instead of sell users’ personal information. I didn’t notice how serious this problem is until this year because I am a Taiwanese, and we will have the president election in 2020 January. We all have known that some specific groups might use the data from social media to manipulate people’s will from Cambridge Analytica case. To be a professional marketer, I believe these example are valuable in your mind.

• How dangerous the current model of online advertising is?

According to these assigned readings, we know that there are many ways to set ads online. Personally, I would like to rate the current model of online advertising with level 4. To defend my decision, I will use a Taiwanese position to give some examples. 2020 will be an extremely important year for Taiwan because the election of president will be held in January. As far as what I have known, there is a country trying to manipulate the result. This country has invested much money into many organizations and media, and spreads ads in everywhere, such as news, newspaper, and social media. You might want to say what the relationship between online marketing and society issue. The reason why I mention this because every website or product that I have searched could be used by some bad people. Furthermore, have you ever had the experience that you are being monitored? This week, many ads about digital cameras show on my youtube, facebook, and Instagram. I think these information show on these platform because I did many research about camera features these days on Google. As the retargeting principle, this should happen frequently, but I still feel being monitored.

• The ethics you should have if you are the marketer.

1. Keep customers’ information safe. (Personal information: age, address, phone number, etc.)

2. Make sure the ads on your website are safe.

3. Contact with customers when their data are unsecured.

4. You should always check the security of your website.

5. Make sure the content match with the ads.

6. Set the age limit if the ads are sensitive.

7. Should have third-party certification.

8. Make sure the ads show on the right time and right place (rank).

Reference: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2019/taiwan-2019/ https://medium.com/swlh/why-ethics-pays-a-reflection-on-current-marketing-practises-d39554ca8538

To verify why your webpage doesn’t rank, there are some aspects that you might need to check: relevance, target search phrase (key words), and creating high-quality web pages.

How relevance influence your ranking on searching engine? This is a great question to ask yourself before you make any change. Uniform Resource Locator is an address of worldwide web page. If you are an online retailer (Sam’s Premium Coffee Bean), sells coffee beans from different areas. You must make sure that your brand name and products both shows on the URL; otherwise, searchers are not able to visit your web pages by URL. Here is the example, if your URL of the landing page is www.SamPremiumCoffeeBean.com. You need to add different categories for your web pages, such as natural beans, washed beans, Arabica, Colombia, Blue mountain, and Mandheling in your main title and sub-title. The reasons why this method can improve your ranking because this method can build your website logically and simplify the searching process for your visitors.

Target search phrase (key word) is another important factor why your web page doesn’t rank. Basically, the direct impact for target search phrase are competition and relevance. The competition of target search phrase means how popular the key word is. Unfortunately, coffee bean is number twelve ranking which means that coffee bean is a high competitive key word in the searching engine. To diversify the key words, there are some key words might be valuable to be added, such as homemade roast beans and featured beans. Moreover, I would like to suggest you to design your web page as following strategy. First of all, set your URL with key words which can direct the visitors to your landing page or web page. Secondly, build connections between your landing page and web pages. For example, landing page must have many categories about coffee beans, such as place of origin, honey process, fair trade, level of roast, and flavor (sour, bitter, and aroma).

The last reason why your web page does not rank is your web page’s quality. There are some index to determine how good your web page is: loading time, content, and bounce rate. First of all, loading time is an important factor that influence the conversion rate and ranking. Nowadays, people live in high speed environment. We have already gotten 4G cellular, and 5G cellular will be launched next year. These appearances make people be impatient. You have responsibility to minimize loading time as many as possible. Here are some helpful information: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/speed-up-your-website/. Secondly, you should treat content more carefully because this will have direct impact to your rank. In online coffee bean shop case, you can have many categories as what I mentioned earlier; however, “you might need to check your content is not duplicate because Google has a algorithm to punish it”. Moreover, simplifying the web page is also your responsibility because people don’t have enough patient and focus to find the valuable information.

Reference: https://seo.co/why-isnt-my-website-ranking/ https://www.mondovo.com/keywords/coffee-keywords

A great place to master how to create the conversion rates!

As a good web designer, you have a responsibility to inspire potential customers’ awareness, interest, desire, and to let them take action.

We need to understand what conversion rates is before we start to design our own blog. Conversion rates is a method to calculate how many people visit your website or landing page. Here is the formula: Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%

• First Step: Follow the “NBALPWACG” description, which is the abbreviation of “Never build a landing page without a campaign goal.” To implement this rule, we need to define what your goal is, and this goal should be accomplished as possible as it could. For example, the website I reviewed which is a third-party platform. It is so clear that the website is selling sport gears, such as braces. Better Braces website: https://www.betterbraces.com/

• Second Step: Well, we have already known what our campaign goal is. Next step is to define our target market (audience). Our target market (audience) might be professional athletes or part-time athletes. How can we attract their attention? As an athlete, he/she must find the gear belong to the sports they work for. So, the landing page can have many blocks with images and words to tell people what content you will see after you click it. Tip in second step is to let people search the website easily and fast by setting obvious categories and key words.

• Third Step: After we settled our website down, we can start to classify our customers and potential customers. As the concept of SEO, we can roughly classify our customers to two different types: old members and new potential customers who have not yet register the membership. Based on SEO principle, we know that there are three different traffic types: direct, referral, and search. SEO is like a funnel with filter, our server can recognize who visit our website first time. So, our plan is to divide them to the new visitor page, which has the guideline of how to become our member and policy (discount). If they register for our memberships, they become our members which means that they have already passed the filter (fallen to our trap?).

• Fourth Step: What are we going to do next after the potential customers become our members? Well then, you need to do your best to keep them and to make them purchase more items!!! A few ways might be useful to keep them, such as sending they emails or DM about the discount information. Furthermore, BetterBraces is a company which sells sport gears. So, a better idea is to provide a discount when you purchase over a number, instead of purchase five times, then you get the discount because nobody wants to hurt their body in different parts frequently.

• Final Step: Finally, we probably have done the jobs we need to do, but let me remind you that nothing is perfect. So you need to keep asking yourself three question: What are you offering? Why should I pick you? What do you want me to do next? To optimize your website searching, these question will be helpful when your conversion rates decline because we need to find the internal issue first. Remember, website is like a funnel, so the true customers are who have passed the filter. Keep them and discover the new potential customers!

Reference: https://www.learnworlds.com/customer-education/ https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/conversion-rate-optimization/conversion-rate/ https://www.quicksprout.com/blog-design/

Welcome to blogs.oregonstate.edu. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!