Lite1.8 Blog

One of the content marketing best forms is a blog on your website. Your company blog can serve as an online database for your customers. It gives you the privilege to demonstrate your experience and your knowledge in your industry. It also helps you in resonating with your audience members’ pain points and it shows why you are a legitimate solution that they just have to consider.

On top of that, the high-performing website content can also be shared on the social media (the online equivalent of the word-of-mouth marketing.) It can also help your website to rank higher in the organic search engine results.

Much more like a good digital marketing strategy, the building of a company blog or of a similar website resources can feel like a lot of work. However, the number of benefits that it can yield for you makes a blog well worth the effort.

Leverage Influencers
The digital marketing can atimes feel very lonely. It is easy for you to feel compartmentalized into your tiny corner of the internet. However, there are just a couple of ways that is possible for you to tap into an army of online partners to help you promote your brand.

This army is made up of the influencers. The Influencer marketing consists of getting the influential online personalities for the purpose of partnering with you and promoting your brand.

This form of digital marketing taps into the loyalty and trust that the influencers have with their followers. It also is very easy to scale all depending on your needs. For instance, you can spend some thousands of dollars going after a larger influencer that comes with millions of followers. If you are working with a smaller budget, you can still pursue a network of smaller nano-influencers — those who have the audiences of up to 10,000 followers or less.

Do not let the numbers fool you, either. The Nano-influencer marketing has proven beyond doubt to be an effective way to promoting brand. For instance, the nano-influencer accounts on the Instagram with less than 5,000 followers tend to boast an engagement rate between 5.3% and 7.2%. The percentage then drops to a measly 1.1% for the largest influencer accounts that is on the platform.

 

Research Your Target Audience Online
Being a successful small business, you may be feeling that you already understand your audience. However, if you want to be very effective online, then you should be willing to invest more in some additional customer research.

You can take some time to investigate how your core customer demographic engages with the online world. For example, the Pew Research reports states that:

 

1. Significantly more of women than the men use Facebook;
2. Over half of the college graduates have a presence on LinkedIn;
3. About 71% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 that use the Instagram.

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The cutthroat email inbox of your average consumer roils with the marketing messages. Some contain the competitive subject lines, whereas some others are more attention-seeking emails. Hundreds of different companies send hundreds of emails each and every day.

 

The Simple, powerful, and smart automation flows.
Think of the marketing automation as your silent salesforce. It will help you to identify your best prospects and to close more sales, by engaging the shoppers just at the right moments.

 

Hence, your chance to be seen in different hundreds of emails still remains thin. But it is very possible for you to change the game by adopting a new and an effective email marketing strategy. It does not only needs to be opened but also it needs readers to act on it.

Here are some effective email marketing strategies that will be of help to you and you can gain more traction.

Personalize Your Email

You need to step out of the “Dear Henry” game. Because it is no longer building a connection with the reader.

A significant part of the email marketing is now building a relationship. Do your readers trust you? Do they even know who you are? When an email drops the gun by just imposing familiarity soon, the personalization becomes kind-of skeevy. You will earn familiarity in the actual life, and the same is the case with the emails.

Remember, all sorts of personalization available are not off-limits. The correct form of personalization can pay off big time. For example, if you are sending an email, it acknowledges the reader’s individuality, such as the demographic or the purchase history.

The lesson here is for you to make use of personalization as a strategy but using it in a meaningful way. It takes little relationship and knowledge for you to put someone’s name when you greet. However, be very careful while you are sending your personalized emails specific to the reader’s history and their needs.

 

Consider Short And Long Subject Lines

When it comes to the aspect of making the ideal subject line, there is only one area for you to avoid. Unfortunately, that is just the 60-70 character subject line. Marketers call it the “dead zone.” When your subject line is 60-70 characters, the open rate or the clickthroughs doesn’t increase.

Consequently, subject lines that are containing 70 characters or more than that are beneficial because they are engaging to the readers and clickthrough the content. Whereas the subject lines containing 49 characters or less than that have more open rate.

So the question here is: Are you looking for the boost clicks or boost opens? Make long subject lines for the clickthroughs and make shorter ones for the opens.

Either way, a good email strategy is simply to push out more words or just to decrease some to avoid the dead zone.

When these updates are finally rolled out, it will now open up a whole new realm of possibilities for creators, which, will in turn, affects the influencer marketing strategies and the briefs alike. To stay front of your mind, brands must adapt their approach to start utilising the new features which allow creators to carry out experiment and keep their audiences engaged and entertained.

One of the trends that we are seeing as a result of these new features is an increase in the social commerce – and brands have to seriously consider engaging and integrating the influencers for their social commerce campaigns.

 

The rise of social commerce
Social commerce has been around for a long time, it has been around for nearly 20 years, but it is right now that we are witnessing its true potential, that is accelerated by the increased use of social media as a result of the pandemic. From the Facebook Marketplace, to the Instagram Shop, the social media giants have realised the success of an in-app shopping for brands. Users want to be activated in spending their money in one click, without being taken away from the content that they are browsing.

Live shoppable events have really exploded in the popularity recently, with the brands been able to see the direct ROI as the shoppers can easily purchase the signposted products. Just recently, the Clarks hosted a live shopping event, and they were working alongside creator Nià 0Pettit (@niathelight) to showcase some of its Spring/Summer collection. Something Clarks did very successfully was to integrate influencer and the brand content, which is a really effective way to reach audiences.

As the social commerce continues to grow in popularity, brands will need to create shoppable moments that will intrigue and will also inspire followers. They should look towards the live shopping campaigns, be those branded events or the integration into a creator’s proprietary Live. Hosting these in-store means that the brands are right down at the consumer level, and it can help to bridge the gap between online and the offline shopping experiences.

As the world is looking to open up more with restrictions easing and the lockdown lifting, brands should now start to think about how these events might eventually translate into the non-virtual life. Having practiced virtually, the creators will be even much more confident in hosting the real-life live events and are more cost-effective than the traditional celebrity talent.

It is really going to be an exciting six months, but as the past year has proven already, brands will need to be very flexible and adaptable. One constant though it is an influencer marketing. It is only growing and the brands marketers who are not already, need to start incorporating the creators into their strategies right from the get-go.

How the different brands will be shaping their Influencer Marketing Strategy after the lifting of the lockdown finally arrives.

The Influencer marketing was worth about $1.7 billion in the year 2016. This year, it is expected to reach about $13.8 billion. That is a considerable growth.

We have witnessed a seismic shift in the marketing capabilities when the pandemic first hit. The physical stores were simply shut down, and all of a sudden the brand marketers were unable to execute their pre-planned above the line campaigns the way that they thought they would be able to do, so, many of them had to turn to creators. Capable of producing creative and very innovative content at a high production value right from their own homes, creators proved themselves to be an invaluable marketing tool while we were all spending the large parts of the day on the social media.

Unsurprisingly, the influencer marketing campaigns has increased in the year 2020, and that momentum has carried through to this year 2021. According to a recent report, about 75% of brands intend to dedicate a standalone budget so to the influencer marketing in 2021.

But still, a lot of brands are just missing a trick as they are not taking the industry seriously. For you realising the power of influence is a surefire way to drive success. Take a look at Gymshark – a brand that has nailed the influencer engagement right from the beginning and has curated a successful ambassador programme to reach an engaged and an active audience. It is a case of a disruptive brand investing that is in a strategy and sticking by it. Now, the Gymshark has taken the mantle from legacy brands in the space. Its founder, whose name is Ben Francis, has created a billion dollar brand and recently has made The Sunday Times Rich List.

Maintaining strategy relevance
In a digital-first world, it is very difficult to imagine the possibility of gettling a further digital boom. But the impact of the Covid-19 forced all of us to take to the social media to connect with one another. And it was not just the Gen Z and millennials – take Grandad Joe, for example. In the year 2020 he became one of the TikTok’s most popular UK creators and he featured in the platform’s first TV ad.

As TikTok has now exploded in the popularity over the last year, different platforms have realised that they need to compete for consumer and also for creator attention. Just recently, Instagram has announced a host of new functionalities now, focused on putting the creator first, including its normal native affiliate programme, putting a marker in the ground to become the platform of choice.

Review your sales and your marketing strategy so that it will boost your profits and gain ground on your competitors. A good way for you to start is by simply breaking down the process into the discrete, the manageable elements. You will end up with a checklist that can be reviewed to prioritize areas that are needing improvement and also serve as the groundwork for an effective marketing strategy.

Some sales strategies come and go with some of the best book of the week, or the advent of the new tools & technologies. Yet others are firmly here to stay and are rooted in hard psychological principles that explain what is really motivating people to buy or not buy.

1. Customer Service

The first step to providing a good customer service is to understand the kind of service that your customers want. If you are running a convenience store where people stop in quickly just to grab a soft drink or a power bar, they are simply looking for a friendly cashier that will take care of their transaction very quickly and without hassle.

However, something like a full-service restaurant or something like a retail establishment that sells specialty products will draw people who are looking to be waited on or people who have their questions answered.

It is also very important for you to seek for feedback. You need to provide ways for your customers to review your business. If you have a customer loyalty program, you can regularly contact those customers who have not made purchases in a while to offer discounts or to inquire about why they have not visited your business recently.

2. Financing

Reviewing your capital structure regularly or you can have a CPA do it for you to make sure you are handling your assets and your liabilities in the most cost-effective way. If you have achieved some success, are viewed as a stable business in the community, and having a solid reputation also, you may be able to attract the angel investors or the venture capitalists to assist with the expansion of your business.

3. Consistent Strategies

You have to building customer loyalty and increasing sales to existing customers, it should be a constant focus of your operation. Bringing people in the door sometimes it requires different approaches all based on your needs at the time. For example, if the spring months of March, of April also, and May typically are slow for your business, it is a good idea for you to schedule events during those months that are designed to bring potential customers in the door.

Do not limit yourself to the strategies that are built around sales. Consider holding workshops or even training sessions centered around the products or services you provide so to draw attention to your brand. Let the sales just come naturally from that boost of attention.

That is not to say that Google’s private alternatives are without hurdles of their own. Most of them are still far and a long way from reaching the feature parity with products like the Google Docs or the Google Drive, and in some cases their aversion to the data collection puts them at a disadvantage.

With the web version of the ProtonMail, for instance, users can not search for text in the body of an email because the data is encrypted. (Only subject lines, that are unencrypted, are searchable.) Proton also allows full search only for the downloaded emails, either through its mobile app or through a “Bridge” the application that connects to the desktop email clients like your Microsoft Outlook or the Apple Mail. Even in those cases, Proton does not support the kind of email intelligence that the Google offers, like the ability to poses recognize a flight confirmation email and then add it to your calendar.

ProtonMail

Proton’s Yen believes that those limitations will fade away as the devices become more powerful, allowing them to process more of the data offline. He also notes that the ability to add calendar appointments based on the email content will be coming later this year.

The Vivaldi has some similar limitations with its mail client, as the company is collecting no data on how people are making use of the product. While this service has some good ability to filter emails from the mailing lists into their own folder, it is far less accurate than the Google’s “Categories” system, which automatically hides the social and the promotional emails from your inbox. The interface is also kind-of pretty dense compared to what you would get from other modern email apps.

Still, the CEO von Tetzchner says that Vivaldi built its products to be opinionated and does not care about catering to everyone. “What you will later end up with when you have collected information about how the people are making use of software, you’ll end up with some of the indecision, because it is just the average, and then you can optimize for the average yourself,” he says. “Remember that the average is not a person.”

There is also the nagging issue of those business models. Both the Skiff’s Milich and the Proton’s Yen say they are focused on the freemium business models, though their free versions will likely never match that of what Google offers at no charge. The ProtonMail provides only about 500 MB of storage space on its free plan, and the Skiff may ultimately have some storage limits as well. Even the Proton’s paid subscribers get only about 5 GB of storage, less than what the Google offers for free.

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. Yen also says that for those customers, the Proton’s storage plans will scale over time to become somehow closer to what the Google offers, while also being a sustainable business for the Proton.

 

 

 

According to the Wired, the DuckDuckGo plans to launch its own desktop web browser sometimes later this year to complement its existing search engine and the mobile browser. It is also working to achieve an anti-tracking app for Android and a way to possibly block trackers in email.

The private-browser maker Brave, meanwhile, is now moving in the opposite direction with its own search engine.
Proton’s Yen says that all of these companies are still having the same revelation: To truly take on the likes of the Google, they would need to build ecosystems instead of just buiding one unique service.

Skiff dark mode

The building of more private web services is also now becoming pretty easier as more companies are creating encrypted products and also publicly sharing the technical details of their work. To support the end-to-end encryption in the Skiff, for instance, Milich says that the startup drew heavily on the existing white papers and the technical documentation from other of the encrypted services, including the WhatsApp, the Signal, the 1Password, and even the Proton.

 

The Skiff document lock

“Most of those things just make it even more better to build products like ours,” he says.

Milich also had to also point out that the end-to-end encrypted products can be faster now than they used to be then. Skiff, for instance, make use of a concept that is called the conflict-free replicated data type, or the CRDT, to encrypt documents even when multiple people are just collaborating in real time. The CDRT used to be “outrageously slow” for something like a document editor, Milich says, but that is not the case anymore now.

SOLVING THE TRUST PROBLEM
Some of the privacy concerns around the services like the Gmail and the Google Docs can get overblown. While the Google used to mine the content of your emails for some targeted advertising, it had abandoned that practice for all users in the year 2017.

The company also promises not to data mine other of your apps where you store personal content, such as the Google Drive and the Google Photos, and users can even delete the data that the company does collect at any time.

But the Google’s privacy-conscious competitors say that those promises are not enough. Both the Skiff’s Milich and the Proton’s Yen point to the WhatsApp as a cautionary example of how the Big Tech companies can easily go back on their word: The service’s new privacy policy forces their users to share metadata with the Facebook proper, and the service also made it possible for businesses to chat with users without using encryption.

 

Vivaldi reader

And while those companies could possibly pivot toward more private products, Milich says that it won’t be easy at all unless they start from the scratch. Facebook, for instance, made an announcement back in 2019 that it was working on an end-to-end encryption for the Facebook Messenger, but had to acknowledge in April that it won’t do so until the year 2022 at the earliest.

 

 

The Skiff, the Proton, and others are planning to rebuild Workspace’s productivity tools of the Google without them collecting any of your data, but for them matching the tech giant’s features could be a slog.
These alternatives to the Gmail, the Google Docs, and the Drive that they are working on will have the ability to protect your privacy

Although the ProtonMail has been around for some time now, since 2014, lately the company has started to set its sights more broadly. In April, Proton had to launch its own calendar as a public beta, and earlier in the month it expanded the beta version of its cloud storage service, which is called the Proton Drive, to all paid subscribers. A recent redesign helped to tie all those products together into one interface.

Squint hard enough, and then you can see the beginnings of a more private alternative to the Big Tech productivity tools, most notably the Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite). Yen says that is the ultimate goal, hinting at other services like the video chat on the horizon.

Proton Calendar

“Everything that the Google has done so far has not been done uniformly in the most privacy protecting way,” he says. “Over the long term, I would like to start inventing and i’ll start making a better plan, doing everything that they do, but i will not only do so, but I’ll be doing it properly, with privacy first instead of doing it as an afterthought.”

Yen is not alone in this. Other companies like the Skiff, the Vivaldi, the Brave, and the DuckDuckGo are all trying in their capacity to pick away at the kind of all-encompassing tools that the Google offers, but makiing the privacy as a core value. In doing so, they are taking advantage of both a broader privacy awakening in the tech industry and the improvements in the technology that is protecting user data.

But while their set goals seem noble, they are also facing the same fundamental challenge: Beating the likes of the Google on features other than the privacy is harder than it looks.

THE PRIVATE SOFTWARE BOOM

Considering these other examples of the privacy-centric upstarts broadening their horizons:

The Skiff, which is an online document editor that is featuring the end-to-end encryption, has launched in the private beta and has raised about $3.7 million seed round in the month of May. CEO and cofounder of the firm Andrew Milich says that the startup is already prototyping other elements of the Google Workspace, such as the spreadsheets. (It is sounding like the company wants to support the kind of dynamic, the interlinked documents popularized by the Notion, which Google itself is trying now to replicate.)

The web browser Vivaldi has recently launched its own mail client, the calendar, the translation tool, and also the news feed reader to complement its existing notes service. The CEO Jon von Tetzchner says that the company collects no usage data on these products, and he hopes they will help users transition away from the Big Tech. (The mail client, for instance, allow users to easily toggle among email providers, including the Vivaldi’s own offering.)

Researchers recently now warning that hackers can snoop on the email messages by just exploiting a bug in the underlying technology that is used by the majority of the email servers that are now running the Internet Message Access Protocol, which is commonly referred to as the IMAP. The bug, first reported in the month of August 2020 and patched Monday, is tied to the email server software Dovecot, and is used by over three-quarters of IMAP servers, according to the Open Email Survey.

The vulnerability has really now opened the door to what is called the ‘meddle in the middle’ (the MITM) attack, according to a report that was carried out by the researchers Fabian Ising and Damian Poddebniak, also with the Münster University of Applied Sciences, that is based in Germany.

“The vulnerability has allowed the MITM attacker that is why they now have the chance yo operate with a mail client and the Dovecot injecting unencrypted commands into the encrypted TLS context, which will now begin redirecting the user credentials and the users mails to the attacker,” according to the research that was linked to from a bug bounty page and dated the month of August 2020.

Bypassing TLS and Certificates
The flaw experienced centers around the implementation of the email instruction that is called START-TLS, a command that is issued between an email program and the server that is designed to secure the delivery of email messages, according to a technical description by the Anubisnetworks.

This bug gives room to [an attacker] so they will be able to bypass security features of SMTP such as the blocking of plaintext logins. Furthermore, it also allows [an attacker] to mount a session fixation attack, which may possibly results in the stealing of credentials such as the SMTP username and the password,” researchers wrote.

A session fixation attack gives room for an adversary to hijack a client-server connection after the user have logged in, according to an OWASP description.

“For a possible attacks to be conducted, they will need to first have an account created, an account that is legit on the Dovecot server. The attacker will now wait for and [intercept] an encrypted connection on the (port 465) from a victim’s email client,” the researchers wrote. “Immediately the client just attempt to connect (unknowingly), the attacker will just initiate a separate “START-TLS” connection to the Dovecot and then they will injects their own malicious prefix, e.g. a login command.”

Researchers say that, due to the implementation flaw with the START-TLS in the Dovecot, the attacker can possibly login to the session and then forward the full TSL traffic from the targeted victim’s SMTP server as a part of its own session (initiated plan).

“The attacker will have an access and obtain the full credentials from its inbox. At no point was the TLS broken or certificates compromised,” the researchers wrote. The pair also have outlined the bug in a proof of the concept attack.

 

Patches Available

There is a fix for the vulnerability, tracked as the CVE-2021-33515, and is available for the Dovecot running on the Ubuntu, the Linux distribution based on the Debian. The Dovecot version v2.3.14.1 and later mitigates the issue.

 

 

Once you have gotten the tools that you want to select, you will to need to focus now on building your email subscriber list.

The first step for you to build your email list is to start identify your target audience.

As a refresher: Know that your target audience is the ideal customer you want to attract to your product or service through the marketing efforts you offer.

How can you find your target audience?

First, just ponder on the answers to the following questions:

1. Who are our current best customers?
2. What qualities do they have in common?
3. What problem are they experiencing that has our customers search for a solution, like our product or service?
4. Why did they purchase our product or service?
5. What did we provide for our customers that our competition didn’t?
6. Is your email marketing strategy focused on your target audience?

Using those answers, and then format your target audience statement with the following template:

1. {Insert your company} creates content that will attract {insert target audience} so they can {insert desired outcome} better.

2. Record your target audience demographics and statement in your template.

 

Creating Tactics to Get Your Audience to Opt Into Your Email List

Now that you are aware of who your target audience is, you can now start to brainstorm the tactics that will attract them and convince them to sign up and join your email list.

Here we have just listed some few ideas for you to get started with.

1. Give Them Something Valuable in Return
2. One amongst the most common ways to get your audience to join your email subscriber list is for you to gate content upgrades behind an opt-in form.

What is valuable to your customers?

This question is very vital for progress. The answer to this is a downloadable template or an ebook that shows them how to solve a problem or answer a question they might be having.

If you gate something that does not provide value, you might end up losing that your subscriber.

Example of an opt-in form.

Go For the Direct Ask
Another way for you to gain your subscribers is for you to go for the direct ask. Explain to them and make them see reasons why they should opt into your email list and also entice them with personalized information, like the pop-up from Fargo 3D Printing.

Gathering information like this will also be helpful to you segmenting your list.

Second example of an opt-in form

Here is another pop-up example from the Nanit, encouraging the visitors to sign up for their newsletter. The company will asks for the ages of the visitor’s children, which would indicate that the company does some segmenting based on the developmental stages of the child’s age.