Category: Global

UA vs GA4 – What are the Key Differences

What are the fundamental differences between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 that can affect your day-to-day tracking strategies? We do acknowledge that anything related to data collection, integration, and analysis is in fact very complicated, so we here at Ematic Solutions are always open for any discussion

Introducing Ematic’s new GA4 service

Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA) in 2023 and will be replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Let us be your helping hand to accelerate your migration to GA4.

A holistic SEO checklist for 2022

SEO is far beyond just writing content with keywords we think our potential customers may fill in those little search bars in different search engines. It encompasses a whole range of different audits, analyses, and actionable plans. But not as complicated as it may sound, the process can be divided into 6 steps, each of which has a different set of checklists that we can easily follow.  Ematic has compiled those checklists below for you to have a quick look at your current SEO. In each of the steps, we also note some of the things (if any) that we do differently compared to other SEO agencies in the market. You can also contact us so that we can guide you through our own steps in a more in-depth session. Download the checklist here. Competitor Review In fact, prior to this step, the first thing we need to do is to look at ourselves in general. Some questions we may ask include: what our strategy towards SEO is, what our target market is, how we are doing with our website, whether or not some of the popular keywords related to our products/services show up in search engines, etc… Although detailed analyses of our own SEO performance will be incorporated into later steps, this quick check will probably give us a rough idea of our current state and hopefully help us set some expectations for the project. There is an old saying that goes: “He who sees through life and death will meet most success.” Indeed, when we can identify our competitors, what they have been doing, and where they are standing right now in the market, we can choose to follow best practices or decide to go our own way for differentiation.  Doing competitor analysis is one of the best ways to identify customer insights through keyword research. This also helps us figure out what functions on their websites may bring the most value to their (and our) customers. The more information we obtain, the more options we have when we think about our strategy to compete. All in all, there surely is a reason why our competitors showed up in the top search results, right? At Ematic, the first thing we do when it comes to SEO is to conduct thorough research on potential competitors. Below are some headings that you can choose to follow for your own quick competitor check. What to do Research product/service categories of the competitors Research competitors’ main keywords Identify their organic search volume in the latest months Identify their organic search volume growth history Research their customer insights Identify their useful website features Technical Audit A website is a place where we showcase our products/services, direct our customer journeys, pin featured offerings, display sale promotions, or collect customer info from sign-up forms. Needless to say, it is the single most important asset for those who rely on websites to sell. As a result, helping search engines understand our products/services and customers is crucial. Only then, search engines can know who our potential customers are and suggest our website to match with their searched keywords.   The list below suggests several aspects you can look into when it comes to optimizing your website for better search engine optimization. What to do Consolidate duplicate URLs URL structure Breadcrumb XML sitemap Robots.txt Robots meta tags Page 404 error Schema YMYL & EAT Core web vitals – page speed score Keyword & Content Planning Search engines were born for users to get answers to various problems in their lives. Therefore, we need to figure out exactly what problems our target audience is currently having; from that, create content that helps them identify and solve their problems through using or buying our products or services.  One important thing to note is that when building content, we must first focus on bringing the RIGHT and VALUABLE information to our customers, rather than the length of the article. Even though word count is one criterion Google uses to evaluate website content, this should be the last step for optimization and improvement to meet the guideline, rather than the initial focus when starting to draft our pieces of content.  Also, tactics to fool Google’s algorithm may bring short-term success. However, in the long run in case Google updates or changes its evaluation criteria (which is the thing Google does quite often), content that lacks insights into helping customers solve their problems will surely become useless and fall out of the top positions.  Besides the mentioned issues, below are the steps you can follow for your keyword & content planning phase: What to do Identify keywords gap with competitors Conduct content overview (pay attention to thin content and duplicate content) Prepare content guidelines & SERP insights Prepare keyword list & suggested topics Do content writing Conduct website content monitoring On-page Optimization “How much traffic does our website have?” – This is a very easy question since we can check it every day on Google Analytics. Now, let’s tweak it a little bit: “How many landing pages on our website bring in that amount of traffic?” – This is tough, right? On average, only 5% of the landing pages on our website bring in 80% of the total traffic. The other 20% is brought in through another 25% of the landing pages. This indicates that a noticeable number of landing pages (70%) contribute 0 traffic to the website! As a result, continuously conducting on-page optimization is a must to make sure we keep bringing a good amount of traffic to our ecosystem.  The principle of this phase is, therefore, to identify potential keywords and populate them in relevant articles. At Ematic, we have a special approach in this step for better management and optimization, but you can take the checklist below as the starting point.   What to do Optimize heading & outline Add keywords in the page title & meta description Add potential keywords & paragraph Add Internal links Add Images Off-page Optimization An

Ematic’s Approach to SEO: Technical and Marketing Overall Focused

Asia currently accounts for more than half of the global internet users while continuously leading the world in economic growth. This makes building a strong online presence a must for any business. However, gone are the days of the money game when more ad spending means more awareness and conversion. The immediate impact of the Covid-19 crisis has dramatically cut down marketing expenses (as a proportion of revenue), well from an average of 11% to 6.4% in 2021. Also, social media advertising is becoming more and more expensive with skyrocketing CPAs (cost per acquisition) that gradually draw marketers away from this used-to-be gold mine that once brought in a stable and profitable flow of online traffic. As a result, CMOs start paying serious attention to a more ROI-secured set of channels, one of which is SEO.

Introducing Ematic’s new SEO service

Does it occur to you that online competition is getting fierce, and it’s harder to sustain a good profit from just relying on ads to bring customers? Let us introduce you how Ematic’s new SEO service can help.

Are you making the most of your Marketing Automation Capabilities?

Everyone understands that the future of marketing is a personalized experience for every user, and that having the ability to understand the customer journey and map key marketing communications at precise moments in that journey can result in a massive uplift in customer acquisition and retention. That’s why many companies consider automation capabilities as one of the important criteria when choosing their marketing platforms. Some even purchase advanced marketing automation platforms in hope of delivering an omni-channel 1:1 personalization experience. Assessing your maturity in marketing automation Let’s say you purchased a platform, painted a promising vision and set goals akin to a new year’s resolution. After months spent on platform integration, you kicked off by automating one or two marketing campaigns, such as welcome emails or manually curating a few segmented messages. Although things seem to be up and running, you realize that most of the time you’re still sending batch and blast communication on the platform, and the automation capacities are greatly under-utilized. Does it all sound too familiar? Don’t get us wrong. We are not over-advocating marketing automation as if it should be the centerpiece. However, there are certain aspects in your long-term strategy, like personalization at scale or consistent inbound pipeline, that can only be achieved effectively through the help of marketing automation. To give another perspective – you’ve invested in the platforms and paid for the capabilities, and know that a good return is out there which you should be able to capture. Not trying to fully utilize your automation functionalities is like joining an expensive gym membership exclusively for a single dumbbell. For someone who cares about ROI, won’t you have the itch to use it to its full capacity? Consider the following table, which illustrates different levels of maturity in marketing automation, to give yourself an indication of where you are against your target. Accelerating your marketing automation If you noticed a discrepancy in your assessment, don’t worry. This is a commonly heard scenario. Let’s face it – marketing automation by its nature is vastly detailed and complex. It is not as simple as plug & play and suddenly everything autopilots itself. The reality is, marketing automation success has a cascade effect. It takes a lot of upfront knowledge to set things right. Done poorly, one small mistake could create a snowballing effect. Not only do you need the right knowledge, but you also need a wealth of different supporting resources – data engineering to feed in data, marketing to curate communication, platform specialists to ensure logic flow and deliverability, to name a few. In most cases, the various resources are borrowed from other teams, and the speed of progress can really be dependent on required teams’ availability and priority. Complexity holds people back. It’s all too tempting to stick with what you know when it’s too hard to know where to start. Yet, if you are looking for a way to change it, it is important to acknowledge that although marketing automation is set to reduce manual effort, the implementation is not effortless. Leveraging external expert services earlier helps you overcome the friction faster and delivers the return you desire more effectively. Let’s get you a hand! At Ematic, we’ve built years of experience on marketing automation across many platforms. We understand your pain points, and can bring essential expertises to help all parts of your marketing automation process, from strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whatever problems you are facing, Ematic is here to solve. <<Contact us>> to explore how we can improve your marketing automation, or learn more about our service offerings.    

Marketing Automation is Not “Set it and Forget it”

You can set it and forget it with marketing automation, but you really should not. There has been a lot of hype around marketing automation and it might easily come across as the shortcut to success. When thinking about marketing automation, many people tend to imagine that post-setup, they can go hands-free and the mechanism will autopilot itself. From our experience, this usually brings you more damage than benefit. Setting up your marketing automation and leaving it unmonitored is a waste of insights and potential opportunities. No matter how much research you’ve put into understanding your users and making a reasonable flow, your first few campaigns usually won’t be home runs as they are only built on hypotheses. We’ve heard many stories where a brand offered an attractive discount at route A but more customers took route B, or a complicated, well-curated user journey was set up but there was only a small audience drawn into the funnel. The behavior of customers is only one of the challenges. Even when you seem to set up a well-functioned program and your audience follows the path you lay, after a certain period of time, you might still encounter problems like outdated content, data discrepancy, logic conflict etc. Even a Ferrari needs to go to a pit stop regularly. So do your marketing automation campaigns. Contrary to the small effort put into post-launch optimization, some companies spend a disproportionate amount of time in the initial campaign setup. With ambition they architect a masterplan and spend a great amount of time assembling an army of marketing ideas, data and content. What happens next, is that in order to make everything function seamlessly, the scope of work becomes bigger than expected, months go by, and marketing automation still remains no more than a plan. The heavy initial investment results in low ROI, and the business starts to challenge if any of this is worthwhile. The Ematic Way How Ematic approaches marketing automation is vastly different. Our fundamental belief is that marketing automation requires long-term attention and continuous optimization. With that in mind, we apply an agile methodology and design a flexible service model to support it. What our agile methodology means – We don’t “set it and forget it”. We create a hypothesis-test-learn process and add / subtract elements in the automation program based on the feedback and insights from the actual data continuously to find the optimal setting for your campaign. Quick start and lower initial investment. Instead of a big bang launch, we start with identifying good opportunities which can be activated quickly. Once a few flows are verified and steadily brings in activation or revenue streams, we can then build on this foundation into a full program. We run a monthly scrum to deliver impact based on the given allocation of resources To strengthen this approach, we also make the following commitments: A team of experts always at your disposal : Making various domain expertise in marketing automation available at any time is important and truly helpful to accelerate your progress. This means you can quickly execute an idea, no matter how big or small it is. Service flexibility : You need resources ready at any time, but not all the time. That’s why we charge by credits based on required hours with roll-over flexibility to the next period, to give you the confidence that your investment doesn’t go to waste. With our expertise and our special service model, we are confident that we can add value to your marketing automation. Contact us to talk about your optimization plan.

Reimagine marketing automation with Ematic

We are excited to share some really good news – announcing Ematic’s new marketing automation services to help businesses implement, accelerate and optimize their customer journeys, workflows and cross-channel messaging capabilities. What is the service about? Although marketing automation is meant to help simplify the process, setting it up properly might be more complicated than one would expect. To deliver the right content to the right person at the right time requires a matrix of domain expertises from business, marketing, data, design to operation intersecting each other. For many businesses, it is a significant undertaking to get everything in place. Therefore we are offering a set of new services to complement your marketing automation needs. We bring essential expertises to all parts of the process, including strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whether you want to simply compliment in designated areas or require end-to-end support, we are sure we can tailor an action plan based on your business objectives and current settings. Who is this for? Ask yourself if you have been in need of : Specialist knowledge and/or skill – You want to activate marketing automation but you are short of necessary skills or expertises to design/ set up a journey and ensure everything is logically correct Resources – You have amazing automation ideas, but there’s always a missing piece from the puzzle – be it the data, the creatives or content support Optimization – You have long since implemented an automation flow but aren’t seeing the returns you expect Challenges can come from any part of the business, and we are not limited to a single dimension of problems. For example, it may be that the challenges have stemmed from the business strategy, or the technical implementation, but we’ve got your back. What’s special about our approach? We don’t treat marketing automation as “set it and forget it”. We believe marketing automation and customer journeys need constant attention to really benefit your business. At Ematic, we apply an agile marketing approach to deliver your business objectives – starting with fast activation of high ROI opportunities, and continuously develop your marketing automation roadmap over time. Followed with continuous analysis, testing and optimization, we create a process to turn your marketing automation into a spinning growth flywheel. Additionally, our methodology allows you to kickstart more easily without an overly expensive, lengthy initial setup investment. Not only do we have a time-based pricing structure, but we also roll-over any un-utilized hours to the next period, so that it gives you the flexibility of managing any given fluctuation during the engagement. Ending note At Ematic, our mission has always been to deliver real results for marketers. Since our humble beginnings of being “the Mailchimp guys”, over the past 10 years, we have expanded and helped numerous businesses adopt the right technologies for their marketing endeavors. Learning from our customers and the state of the market, our new services are designed to tackle the broader underlying challenges beyond technology to drive real impact. We are able to curate this service by marrying the learnings to the expertise we readily have in-house. With so much to unlock, we hope you are as excited as we are to begin the journey with our new services. Check out our marketing automation service to learn more about how we are able to help you, or contact us directly.

9 Inspiring Examples of B2C Marketing Automation

This content is provided by our partner Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor is the premium, best in class email marketing and automation tool. Content source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/9-inspiring-examples-b2c-marketing-automation/   Marketing automation is designed to simplify the email marketing process for your entire digital marketing team. These automated emails are highly effective and have the ability to drive massive revenue and results for businesses, as they achieve 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. With stats like that, marketers can’t deny the power of marketing automation.   What is B2B marketing automation? Marketing automation is the process of software automatically sending campaigns to your customers and prospects based on triggers you define. As opposed to one-off email campaigns that you create and send to a whole list of people, automated emails are set up once and then sent out each time a subscriber meets your pre-defined trigger.   What is marketing automation primarily used for? Marketing automation is an excellent and powerful way to engage with your customers, and is particularly useful for marketers who are looking to streamline email campaigns to reach the right subscribers at the right time.   What are marketing automation platforms? Marketing automation platforms are the providers of the automation software. These platforms provide marketing teams with various technologies to help them spread their marketing efforts across multiple channels, including email, social media, and websites.   What are the benefits of marketing automation? When it comes to marketing automation, there are simply too many benefits to list. However, there are a few that are worth noting: Reduces repetitive tasks: Freeing up the marketing team’s time. Personalization: Making the customers feel as if they’re more than another face in the crowd with unique messaging. List segmentation: Allows you to deliver relevant content to the right readers.   Even better, automation has reportedly resulted in 80% ROI, +46% growth, +26% more leads, and more productive marketers.   9 examples of B2C marketing automation 1. Welcome email series Welcome emails are your first chance to make a great impression on subscribers. Using marketing automation, you can create a stellar experience for your subscribers with a one-time welcome email or a series of emails that help onboard them. Broadway.com, the online retailer of tickets for Broadway shows, is a great example. They place a subscribe form at the bottom of their website to capture subscribers, and, when someone completes the form, they send them a welcome email with valuable discounts to incentivize their first purchase.     By sending the email immediately after someone subscribes, Broadway.com maximizes opens, clicks, and purchases by presenting the subscriber with discounts while their business is still top of mind. Sending a welcome email like Broadway.com is a simple way to drive revenue back to your business. Check out this next example from Topshop:   Right off the bat, Topshop engages their newest subscribers with an immediate offer to get them shopping and offers a small discount. You can also send a series of educational or onboarding emails like Birchbox does. Birchbox first sends a welcome email after subscribers have signed up. Then they follow up the welcome email with an automated series of messages, including beauty tricks, makeup tips, and special offers to keep their subscribers loyal and engaged.   2. Reminder emails Sending a reminder email based on a date is a great opportunity to not only deliver a timely message to your customer, but also keep them buying your products and services over time. Nissan collects relevant information about their customers, including the purchase date of their car.  They can then use the purchase date to automatically trigger a reminder email six months after the car was purchased to schedule the first service appointment. Maintenance fees after the car is sold account for a huge portion of Nissan’s overall revenue, so this is an important part of their strategy. 3. Birthday or anniversary Sending your customers, a special offer on their birthday or anniversary is another highly effective strategy to drive revenue while increasing customer happiness at the same time. The first step is to collect your customer’s birthdate and add it to your email list. Many companies, like jewelry retailer Monica Vinader, make this a required field through the online checkout process, while others ask for this information when someone signs up for their email list.   Once you have your customer’s birthdate in your email list, you can set up an email to automatically send on his or her birthday. While the leading message should be celebrating your customer’s birthday, this email is an excellent opportunity to generate revenue, so try including a special birthday discount to encourage recipients to make a purchase. You could also use this to recognize the birthday or anniversary of someone signing up for your product, making their first purchase, or other user or company milestones. Check out this example from Birchbox: 4. VIP It’s simple to set up a series of automated emails that can make your VIP customers feel special and keeps them engaged and spending. Sephora does an excellent job with their VIB (Very Important Beauty) Program, which offers early access to new products and special promotions for customers who spend a certain amount of money. Once someone spends the required amount, they’re entered into the VIB segment of the email list and automatically receive an email introducing them to the VIB program.     This email welcomes them to the program and provides an exclusive VIB-only offer that encourages them to make additional purchases. You can do something similar using data you have to trigger a customer journey based on someone entering a VIP segment. We even provide pre-built segments for this purpose. Check out this engaging example from Converse that similarly welcomes their VIPs and offers a discount: 5. Re-engagement You can encourage email subscribers who haven’t purchased in a while with an email-exclusive offer, “Save on your next order” discount, or abandoned cart deal like Nau does in the