Archives for March 2022

In a day and age when our Martech Stacks keep getting chubbier and new digital marketing tactics keep surfacing, it is easy to lose sight of the long-established strategies that have stood the test of time. Email marketing, to be specific, is one of the world’s oldest types of digital marketing and it is still kicking strong. According to Statista, around 300 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2020 and that number is projected to only go upwards not the other way around. This vast user base coupled with a high ROI makes email marketing one of the main marketing channels for most businesses.

However, we are not here to talk about how you can promote your products and services through promotional email messages. Rather, we are going to discuss how marketing companies at the level of King Kong leverage email marketing to boost another important digital marketing channel: search engine optimization. For the average reader, there may be no obvious connection between the two. But here is how email marketing can synergize with SEO to elevate digital marketing.

Email Marketing and Website Bounce Rates

With a proper email marketing strategy, you build an email list of highly loyal customers who look forward to engaging with the pieces of content you send their way. Because of that high level of engagement, these users are more likely to delve deep into your website and far less likely to bounce off. So, by incorporating some sort of call to action in your newsletter, you can drive highly targeted traffic to your site and improve its bounce rate.

Keyword Planning and Searcher Intent

Google (or any other search engine) is on an eternal quest to improve its search algorithm to provide users with the most relevant result for their search. It makes sense because there is nothing more frustrating than irrelevant and low-quality results to your queries which is bad business for a search engine.

So, if you want to rank high on the Google search engine result page to drive traffic to your website, you need to create content that contains information most relevant to the queries. But not just any query, only the ones from users that could be your potential customers. Queries that are relevant to you what you do as a business.

In order to create relevant content, you need to know the reason behind the query and the information your users are looking for. Email marketing can help you achieve that. By designing and emailing a survey that asks for your customers’ pain points, challenges, and desires, you gain invaluable insight into their problems. This information can help you plan your keywords more accurately and create content that directly addresses those issues.

Email Open Rate and Clickthrough Rate

Another way to tap into your email list to boost SEO is using email marketing benchmarks. When it comes to assessing the success of your email campaigns, there are quite a few KPIs you can track, of which two can be very useful for your SEO as well.

The open rate which shows the percentage of recipients who have opened a particular email can be used as a comparative metric to see what subject lines capture the interest of your target audience.

Clickthrough rate which is probably the most important email marketing metric indicates what percentage of the recipients have taken action and clicked on at least one link contained within an email. Similar to open rate, clickthrough rate provides insight into the type of content that your users engage with the most.

By analyzing the high-performing emails in your various email campaigns, you can infer areas of interest that are most helpful and relevant to your customers’ needs. These findings can serve you well in your subsequent SEO campaigns.

Brand Awareness and Social Engagement

Email marketing can be an effective tool to direct your most engaged audience (i.e., those who have subscribed to your newsletter) to your social media channels. While boosting social engagement does not have a direct impact on your SEO, it promotes brand awareness which positively influences it in the long run. People who engage with your content marketing through social media on a daily basis, typically make more queries on the search engines about you and your brand. They also tend to share your content more on their social media profiles which increases your reach.

To encourage such behavior in your users, it is important to make the process as effortless as possible by implementing social sharing buttons and other related call-to-actions.

You can also encourage the recipients to review your products or services online. Since search engines want to help people find the right products, getting positive reviews directly impacts your ranking. Positive reviews also increase clickthrough rates as people are more inclined to click on business profiles or websites that are rated well by others.

As a new student, you might not have any credit experience. College is the perfect opportunity to change that.

Credit experience can help you in the future when you want to purchase a vehicle, rent an apartment or start a business on your own. It can also help you increase your credit limits, lower interest rates and add rewards to your accounts. But, before you sign up for a credit card, read these five practical credit tips first:

1. Figure Out How to Qualify

Students under the age of 21 cannot qualify for their first credit card on their own. They will need a co-signer in order to open up their account. Why? This is one of the limitations imposed in The CARD Act (2009) to protect young consumers from financial missteps.

A student under the age of 21 can also be added to their parent or guardian’s account as an authorized user. As an authorized user, you will have a personal copy of the card and access to the shared account.

2. Look for Student Cards

When you go shopping for your first credit card, make sure to look for the issuer’s student options. Student credit cards require little to no previous credit history to apply and come with minimal fees. Some cards have benefits that can be particularly appealing to students, like offering cashback from transactions made at grocery stores and gas stations.

3. Use Credit for Important Expenses

Ideally, credit should be used for important expenses that you can’t handle with your budget immediately, but you can afford to pay down later on. For instance, credit is an excellent tool for handling emergency expenses, like car repairs and urgent dental appointments. When you don’t have enough savings to cover these pressing expenses, you can put the charge onto your credit card and then pay down the balance later.

Your credit card isn’t the only credit tool that can come in handy for emergency situations. If you don’t have enough savings on hand, you could apply for a personal line of credit and see whether you get approved. A personal line of credit is an open-end credit tool that allows approved users to request withdrawals within their limit, which can then be deposited into their bank accounts in a short amount of time. Users can take those borrowed funds to cover an emergency expense and then follow a steady repayment plan to replenish the balance in their line of credit.

4. Take Advantage of Protections

Credit cards can offer you additional protections during emergencies. For instance, some cards offer travel protections when you use them to purchase airline tickets. These protections can include trip cancellation insurance, trip delay insurance and baggage insurance. So, if your card has this feature, you should use it whenever you need to book flights for term breaks and holidays.

Certain cards also offer a feature called purchase protection. Purchase protection helps buyers recover the costs of repairs or replacements for items that are damaged or stolen within the first 90-120 days after purchase. This protection can be especially useful for essential electronics like laptops and smartphones.

Of course, the best protection that credit cards can offer users is protection against financial fraud. The Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) ensures that users are not responsible for any fraudulent activity done with their credit cards, whether it’s with unauthorized purchases or accounts. At the most, users will have to pay a maximum of $50. Many companies offer zero fraud liability — meaning that their users will pay nothing after becoming a victim of fraud.

5. Pay More Than the Minimum

When you receive your credit card bill, you will have an option to pay a “minimum.” A minimum is the smallest amount of money that your credit card issuer will accept as a form of payment each month without incurring a late penalty.

It’s tempting to only pay the minimum in order to save money, but it’s not a good habit to keep up with. Your outstanding balance will continue to grow with additional purchases and interest over time. Your minimum payments will not help you keep up with this growth and give you a higher debt load to manage. It could easily get out of your control.

So, if you can pay more than the minimum by your bill’s due date, pay more. If you don’t, pay the minimum by the deadline. Once you have more funds available, use them to shrink your balance and keep it from growing past your comfort zone.

Use these practical tips to build up your credit experience. You don’t want to skip them.

Getting behind the wheel while under the influence of alcohol is one of the most dangerous things someone can do. As vehicles become faster and more powerful, road safety is becoming a top priority for numerous countries worldwide, including the U.S. and the state of New York.

Aaron Black, one of the best Phoenix DUI Lawyers, claims that “stricter traffic laws across the U.S. have certainly made a big impact on the fewer number of traffic accidents and deaths.”

While we know that the more intoxicated a driver is, the more likely he or she will break traffic laws, the main question still stands — are stricter traffic laws in NY truly making a difference and keeping intoxicated drivers off the road?

DUI penalties in NY

According to the NY Department of Motor Vehicles, an offender loses his or her driving rights on the spot after taking a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) test and scoring a 0.08% or higher.
The same happens if a blood alcohol test is unavailable or the driver refuses to take one. But, these are not the only penalties related to driving under the influence of alcohol.

Namely, there are three different levels of DUI in NY, including DUI, extreme DUI, and aggravated DUI.

DUI

Drivers with 0.08% to 0.14% alcohol concentration.

• First offense: Jail time of 10 days and a fine of around $1,000. Drivers are also obliged to undergo alcohol screening or treatment, perform community service, and use a certified ignition interlock device.
• Second and subsequent offenses: Jail time of 90 days and a fine of around $2,000. Their driving license is revoked for 12 months. Drivers are also obliged to undergo alcohol screening or treatment, perform community service, and use a certified ignition interlock device.

Extreme DUI

Drivers with 0.15% alcohol concentration or higher.

• First offense: Jail time of 30 days and a fine of around $1,500. Drivers are also obliged to undergo alcohol screening or treatment, perform community service, and use a certified ignition interlock device.
• Second and subsequent offenses: Jail time of 120 days and a fine of around $2,500. Their driving license is revoked for 12 months. Drivers are also obliged to undergo alcohol screening or treatment, perform community service, and use a certified ignition interlock device.

Aggravated DUI

An aggravated DUI is when a driver commits a DUI offense while:

• Suspended from the road
• Driving with a revoked license
• Having a total of 3 DUIs within the last 84 months
• Driving with a person under 15 in the vehicle.

The penalties for an aggravated DUI include a minimum prison sentence of 2 years and having their driving license revoked for 12 months. Drivers are also obliged to undergo alcohol screening or treatment, perform community service, and use a certified ignition interlock device.

The role of strict traffic laws

If we take a look at these penalties, it is safe to say that NY has strict DUI policies and laws. However, the fatality rate in the state is near the national average, which questions the role and effectiveness of strict traffic laws across NY.

While the severity of the punishment certainly plays an important role in how people approach driving activities, other factors also influence the decisions of NY drivers.

For instance, more effective and responsive law enforcement leads to more DUI arrests, which can act as a deterrent to prevent drinking and driving.

Additionally, the time between the crime committed and the punishment also motivates intoxicated drivers to stay off the road. Slow prosecutions and long trials that drag on for months are not doing much to decrease the number of drunken drivers on the road, even if the penalties and fines are high.

So, having only harsh traffic laws is not enough to significantly reduce the number of DUIs and traffic accidents that occur as a consequence of reckless driving.

Conclusion

Although incorporating strict traffic rules is not enough to reduce the number of people driving under the influence of alcohol, combining this feature with several others can deliver impressive results.

Therefore, stricter traffic laws are essential when combined with responsive law enforcement and effective prosecution. Together, they contribute to the decreasing number of DUIs and car accidents not only in New York but in the entire U.S.