Enlightened Owl Digital

If you're collecting email addresses from your customers and leads (and you SHOULD BE), then something that is frequently overlooked is the importance of cleansing those lists those inactive subscribers.

When you don't routinely cleanse your list, it not only needlessly costs you more money whenever you send out email communications, but it can have a HUGE negative effect on deliverability across the board. When you send emails out to users that don't exist, it can cause spam filters to stop delivering your emails to the users it protects. Even if you are sending emails to valid addresses, if the people you're sending them to aren't opening them, then you're basically poking them with a stick until they mark one of your emails as spam or junk. If this happens with more than 1% of your emails, spam filters will give you a smack and you can have a VERY tough time getting your email messages through to ANYONE.

Here is a great discussion on the topic by the super smart folks at MarketingSherpa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7WEMIp-cb0

Clearing Your List of Inactive Subscribers In this interview from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Reporter, MarketingSherpa, discussed with Jeffrey Anderson, Digital Marketing Man...

This is an interesting piece on CNN about the incredible impact web testing has had on recent successful presidential campaigns. You'll see how something as simple as changing the text on a button from "Sign Up" to "Learn More", and using a black and white photo, increased email subscribers by 40%. What would that sort of increase in leads do for YOUR business? If you need help getting starting with this type of website and marketing optimization, just let us know.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/29/technology/optimizely-presidential-candidates/index.html

Optimizely: The secret to winning a presidential campaign Candidates are using Optimizely to personalize their websites and messages -- helping to maximize donations and volunteers.

Back in March, Google made this announcement which threw people with outdated crummy websites into an understandable panic:

"Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

Was there really cause for alarm over what is now being called “Mobilegeddon”, or was it all just a big overreaction? Now that things have shaken out a bit, we can analyze what the impact truly has been, and the bottom line is that if your website still isn't "mobile-friendly" by Google's defined standards, you're not going to enjoy the next few minutes…

Marketing Land found websites losing up to 35% of their mobile search rankings http://marketingland.com/mobilegeddon-hits-misses-130480

Another study found that HALF of the websites that didn't meet the mobile standards dropped in rank https://www.stonetemple.com/mobilegeddon-may-have-been-bigger-than-we-thought/

Researchers who analyzed 1,000 popular keyword terms said, "We found that 83% of the time, the top result is tagged as mobile-friendly by Google. 81% of the time the top 3 results are mobile-friendly. And when you consider all ten of the spots on Google’s first page, 77% of the search results are “mobile-friendly."
http://moovweb.com/blog/mobile-friendly-sites-dominate-google-search-results/

If your website is outdated or hasn't been optimized for mobile users, the message from Google is clear - the time to change and start taking your website seriously is NOW.

Finding more mobile-friendly search results When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’v…