TikTok could be facing a ban in the United States after a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) raised concerns over national security.
The app’s growing popularity in the US is concerning because it’sByteDance, a Chinese company, owns it.
That means there’s potential for data on US citizens to flow back to China.
At 200 million downloads in the US alone, there’s also a risk of a state actor using TikTok to influence American citizens.
One of five FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr, tells Axios: “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.”
Carr doesn’t believe it’s possible to sufficiently protect user data in a way that ensures it can’t get into the wrong hands.
Creators on TikTok may find themselves without a platform if US lawmakers echo the FCC’s concerns.
Here’s more about the situation and what may happen due to the proposed ban.
Is TikTok Getting Banned In The US?
The short answer is — we don’t know yet.
The FCC has no authority to regulate TikTok, though it wields considerable influence over those who do.
For example, Congress previously acted on Carr’s concerns about Chinese telecom companies, which resulted in Huawei getting banned.
Whether lawmakers will take action this time remains to be seen. US politicians have mixed opinions on TikTok, with some using it as a platform to reach voters and others outright condemning it.
TikTok is currently negotiating a way forward with the Council on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), proposing to divest part of its business to an American company.
Carr has little faith in the parties agreeing, however. Carr tells CNN in an interview:
“Perhaps the deal CFIUS ends up cutting is an amazing, airtight deal, but at this point I have a very, very difficult time looking at TikTok’s conduct thinking we’re going to cut a technical construct that they’re not going to find a way around.”
What Does TikTok Have To Say About This?
A TikTok spokesperson tells CNN the company is confident it will reach an agreement with the US government:
“Commissioner Carr has no role in or direct knowledge of the confidential discussions with the US government related to TikTok and is not in a position to discuss what those negotiations entail. We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the US government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns.”
For now, it’s still business as usual for TikTok in the US, though it may be a good idea for creators to have a backup plan in case of a ban. YouTube Shorts is always an option, and it pays better too.
Facebook’s professional profile mode is now available to users worldwide, allowing everyone to showcase their skills and abilities in new ways.
First rolled out last December to US-based individuals only, Facebook’s “Professional Mode” is a profile setting that grants access to features that were once exclusive to Pages.
Professional mode removes the need to create a Facebook Page to get your content in front of a larger audience.
Professional Mode includes various features, ranging from monetization opportunities to creative tools and educational resources.
Let’s look at what you get when activating this free addition to Facebook.
What Do You Get With Facebook Professional Mode?
New Ways To Earn Money
Professional Mode offers new ways for users to earn money as content creators.
Reels Play on Facebook: A bonus program that allows US creators to earn money from Reels.
Stars: Similar to Twitch’s ‘bits’ and TikTok’s virtual gifts, Stars allow eligible creators in professional mode to earn money directly from fans.
In-stream ads: Earn money by enabling ads before, during, and after longer videos. Facebook is also testing ads in Reels.
Subscriptions: Allows fans to increase their support for creators with a monthly subscription and allows creators to share subscriber-only content.
New Ways To Build An Audience
Professional Mode helps creators expand their audience in the following ways:
Recommendations: Facebook may recommend your content in the “Suggested for You” section.
Top Fans: Highlights your most engaged followers with a special badge next to their name.
Invites: You can send direct invites for people to follow your profile.
Notifications: Get alerted to popular posts so you can jump in and engage with commenters.
Collabs: You can work with other creators to co-author a Reel.
Boosts: Facebook is testing the ability to boost eligible content as ads.
New Ways To Create & Learn
Professional Mode grants access to the following creative tools and educational resources:
Professional dashboard: Get all your performance data in one place, including Reels analytics and monetization insights.
Profile categories: You’ll have the option to add a professional category to your profile, which shows up when people search for you by name.
Post composer: Schedule your posts in advance and view recommended times for optimal post scheduling.
Creator support hub: Access to support and education materials to get help on common issues creators have to deal with.
Availability
Facebook’s Professional Mode is available now to all users. Follow these steps to activate it:
Here’s how you can turn on professional mode:
Go to your Facebook profile.
Below your profile header, click or tap the menu button on the right side.
Have you heard the news? WordPress 6.1 is out! Welcome to the third and last major WordPress release of 2022. This release continues to build, iterate and refine the full-site editing experience introduced in WordPress 5.9 earlier this year. It brings us new possibilities to easily change up the styling of our website, spice up our page design, and other improvements to our favorite open-source platform. Let’s take a closer look at what 6.1 brings to the table!
This release is a step in the right direction for full-site editing. Full-site editing and block themes arrived to WordPress with the promise to put more control in the hand of users, allowing them to do more with creating and designing a website. Version 6.1 is on track to deliver this promise. We’re seeing a release that focuses quite heavily on providing customization options and enhancing the site-editing experience.
WordPress 6.1 introduces more than 2,000 updates since the release of WordPress 6.0 in May 2022. All the gains, enhancements, and improvements from version 13.1 to 14.1 of the Gutenberg plugin were committed to core. Since we can’t possibly cover all the updates in a single article, we’ll focus on several notable changes instead.
More control over your global style preset
The global style interface was first introduced in WordPress 5.9 and received a lot of attention and praise. It allows you to easily switch up the look and feel of your website. In just a few clicks, you can change the color palette of your entire site or change the default font, size, and color of your text and links. WordPress 6.1 brings even more customization to the global style interface. You can now determine presets for:
The default appearance of typography for headings and buttons
The default colors of headings and buttons
The width of the main content area and block spacing in the global layout
All of this is great for design consistency. And that’s not all. You can even configure the default appearance for specific blocks, which allows for even more creativity in designing websites. Let’s say you want texts in the ‘list’ block to always be in the color green, you can easily do that now.
It’s good to note that the global style feature is only available on block themes, so you won’t see this option if you’re running a theme that doesn’t support full-site editing.
WordPress is determined to provide more design controls to users, which is reflected in the new Twenty Twenty-Three (TT3) default block theme. The new theme is designed to leverage all the new design tools introduced in 6.1. When you first install this theme, it may look a bit underwhelming with the default style, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye.
Going into customizing TT3, you’ll find that it actually comes with 10 style variations for you to play around with. These variations were selected from a wide range of entries from the community. What’s impressive is that each of these variations is totally distinct from one another. Each variation has its own color palette, typography, layout,…. and they all look amazing.
Previously, the default WordPress themes were a bit underwhelming when talking about their appearances. Many people would choose a third-party theme because they look better and offer more customization possibilities. TT3 may change that. The new 10 style variations may just satisfy the needs of many, especially bloggers and small website owners. Not to mention, this theme may set an example for other themes, paving the way for more style variations in non-default themes and making it a standard to have multiple variations.
The design tools in the post editor are getting lots of improvements and enhancements, allowing you to get finer control of your page’s design and layout. WordPress 6.1 also brings consistency to the availability of design tools for different blocks. And it’s good to know that you can also override any global settings with adjustments made in the design tools in the post editor.
Dimension control in more blocks
WordPress 6.1 brings dimension control to blocks like paragraph, list, table, and more. In the sidebar of the post editor, you’ll find a section called “dimensions” where you can leverage this new enhancement. Don’t forget to check the 3-dot menu to see if any settings are hidden. For instance, you can now control the padding of the paragraph and group block. For the column and gallery block, it’s possible to control the spacing between elements in these blocks.
Border control improvements
This release also adds border support for more blocks and allows users to adjust the top, bottom, left, and right border separately. For instance, when using the gallery block, you can determine the border and its radius for each image in the gallery. And you can add actual borders to images, which was unavailable previously.
Featured image in cover block
You can now easily add your featured image to the cover block, allowing you to conveniently use the featured image anywhere on a page. When you add a cover block, there will be an option in the toolbar that lets you grab the featured image.
Visualizer for padding and spacing
There’s a real-time visualizer to help users with adjusting dimensions. It conveniently shows you how changes affect your page layout as you’re making the change. Pretty handy for retaining layout and design consistency.
Fluid typography
Another design improvement coming in this release is fluid typography. This feature allows theme makers to configure text to automatically scale depending on the screen where it’s viewed. Of course, websites nowadays are responsive so text does scale and resize according to screen sizes. But the problem is that it only scales to specific screen sizes, so text on anything outside of those pre-determined sizes won’t scale properly.
On the other hand, fluid typography lets you resize text smoothly to match any device’s width. However, this feature is opt-in, so it only works if theme makers decide to implement the feature. It also works on blocks that support typography control, of which list you can find here.
New templates in the site editor
With full-site editing, you get a new editing experience with the “site editor” instead of working with the theme customizer tool. In the site editor, you can create templates for various pages, including your homepage, single post, 404 page, and search result page. The template creation experience has been expanded in WordPress 6.1, allowing you to create custom templates to use on any type of post or page. In addition to that, you get finer control over some of the templates that you can create, including:
Post: You can choose to create a single template for all posts or for a specific one.
Page: You can now create a template for pages and determine which page will use this template.
Author: You can create a template to use for all authors or for a specific one.
Category: Similar to the post template, you can create a template for all categories or for a single category.
The template creation experience in the site editor has been expanded
Inner block editing capability
Inner block editing is a new feature coming to the quote and list block. As the name suggests, it’s now much easier to separately edit elements within the quote and list block. This is a quality-of-life improvement, especially for those who often work with the list block.
For instance, let’s say you want to move an entry up or down in your list. All you need to do is click on that entry, which prompts the toolbar to appear, and click on the arrow to move it up or down the list. Another way is to use the list view. Entries in a list block will also be displayed as separate elements in the list view instead of aggregated into a single element.
Content-only block editing
WordPress 6.1 introduces an experimental feature called content-only editing for blocks, patterns, and templates. When this feature is enabled, users can only change the content inside a group of blocks, patterns, or templates. The idea is to prevent users from accidentally breaking the page layout or changing the styles.
At the time of this release, content-only editing is not accessible from the Visual editor interface. You would need to use the Code editor interface to enable it. You can do this by navigating to the 3-dot menu at the top right of your post editor and selecting “Code editor”. The next step is to set the templateLock attribute to contentOnly like in our example below.
You can enable the content-only editing feature in the code editor interface
You’ll notice that when content-only editing is enabled on a group of blocks, the sidebar changes as well. You won’t see the usual controls but a list of blocks included in the group. You can select any of those blocks by clicking on the block in the editor or on the corresponding item in the sidebar. If you have the list view open, clicking on this group of blocks in the list view will prompt the toolbar to appear. Clicking on the “Modify” button will temporarily disable content-only editing and bring back all the design tools.
Other small improvements and enhancements
Cross-device preference in the post editor
In the sidebar of the post editor, you can select preferences for how your editor should look when you’re working in this environment. For example, some people like to focus on the block they’re working with, so they select the “spotlight mode” in the view setting. Unfortunately, these preferences are only saved locally in previous WordPress versions. A bit inconvenient for those who use multiple devices, if you ask us. WordPress 6.1 enables cross-device preferences so your settings are saved and you’ll have the same editing experience on other devices.
Small changes and additions to the post editor
The UI of the post editor gets a small update in this release. The following changes and additions won’t have a big impact on your workflow, but you might take some time to get used to them:
The Preview button becomes “View“
There’s a new “time to read” feature in the “Details” section of the top bar
The previous “Status & Visibility” section is now “Summary“
The new “Summary” section now contains the post’s URL, post format, and template
Block parts to use in classic theme
The post editor of WordPress 6.1 gets a new section called “Template parts”. Basically, you can create templates for parts of a page, export those templates, and use them in a classic theme. WordPress 6.1 lets you create template parts for the comment section, header, footer, post meta, and general templates that are not tied to any area.
Though this new feature seems useful, it’s quite cumbersome in practice. You would need to do a bunch of things to make the template parts work on a classic theme. Should you want to test this feature out, you can find instructions and resources in this thread.
Time to update your WordPress to get the latest features, improvements, and security updates! To ensure the update works as intended, make sure to test it on your staging site to see if there are any conflicts with your themes or plugins. Happy updating!
Amy is a content manager at Yoast. She enjoys writing about SEO and digital marketing, and she is particularly interested in how content can create trust.
According to a statement from the company, Google has finally ended Hangouts for good. The app, which has been Google’s primary messaging platform since 2013, will redirect users to Google Chat.
A text, video, and voice chat app built into Gmail, Hangouts has been sunsetted since July, when the Chrome extension and mobile apps in Google Play and the Apple App Store were removed.
The messaging web app, which had been the lone Hangouts offering still available to users, was retired today. Hangouts users can access the app through November 1, 2022, when they will have to use Chat.
Chat Will Assume Many Of Hangouts’ Features
Hangouts’ replacement Chat is an instant messenger platform in the mold of Slack or Microsoft Teams. It integrates across Google Work Space and offers additional features like group chats, security tools, and the ability to collaborate on files in the Google Docs Editors suite.
Chats also allow users to send GIFs, use rich text features, notify other users with @mentions and use emojis with skin-tone selection.
Google began allowing Hangouts users to move to Chats in July 2021. The search engine company started prompting users to switch in June of this year.
According to the statement, most users’ contacts and messages will be automatically migrated over, but some data will require manual relocation. With this in mind, Hangouts data will be available for download via Google Takeout until January 1, 2023.
“We have big ambitions for the future of Chat, and over the coming months, you’ll see even more features like direct calling, in-line threading in Spaces, and the ability to share and view multiple images,” Ravi Kanneganti, product manager for Google Chat said in a blog post earlier this year.
Move Marks Next Chapter In Google Messaging
In August 2005, Google launched Google Talk, its first attempt at creating an instant messaging platform. Since then, the search engine company has made numerous efforts to develop a successful messenger with mixed but often underwhelming results.
The past 17 years have seen more than a dozen attempts at capitalizing on a market dominated by competitors like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage.
Some of the more notable projects included Google+ Hangouts, the app’s initial iteration on the short-lived social media site Allo, which suffered from severe privacy issues, and Duo, which will be merged into Meet by the end of this year.
In a world of ever-evolving social networks and platforms, can engagement on one social network over another help you get better visibility in Google search engine results?
Let’s explore social signals as a Google ranking factor to determine their effect on search rankings.
“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.
Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”
Later, when referring to website promotion, Google suggests knowing about social media sites because:
“Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content.”
Inside Google Analytics, there is a section for Social reports. According to Google Analytics:
“Social analytics provides you with the tools to measure the impact of social. You can identify high value networks and content, track on-site and off-site user interaction with your content, and tie it all back to your bottom line revenue through goals and conversions.”
Google believes social profiles are important, especially to local businesses. Google Business Profiles gathers information from various sources – including social profiles – to give potential consumers a complete view of the local business.
Google also offers advice for anyone with a Knowledge Graph panel on updating their information, including social profiles.
While Google does seem to place importance on social profiles, it doesn’t necessarily mean that social signals can lead to better rankings.
In 2010, Matt Cutts, former head of the Webspam team, received a question asking how Google rates links from sites like Twitter and Facebook to a new website. He responded that Google treats links the same, and it doesn’t matter if they come from a .gov or .edu, or Twitter or Facebook.
The only catch would be links shared on profiles that aren’t public. If Google can’t fetch or crawl the profile page, it can’t see the link.
Later, in December 2010, Cutts received a similar question, referring to an article that suggested Google used links from Twitter and Facebook in search.
Cutts answered that although they didn’t use social signals for rankings in the past, Google had implemented social links as ranking signals at the time of the video. The link to the article was included with the video from Google Search Central for more details.
In 2013, Google filed a patent that references searching content of prominent users of social networks. In one section, the patent mentions how interactions by members of a user’s social graph can be used as social signals.
“Interactions performed by members of the user’s social graph can be used as social signals to adjust rankings of corresponding search results. For example, if a search query identifies results that include a resource that has been so identified by a member of the user’s social graph, this result can be boosted relative to other general search results responsive to the user’s query.
The boosting factor could be based on, for example, the number of friends who endorsed the identified resource or a top affinity to a friend who endorsed the identified resource.
Boosting can also be based on authorship (e.g., what is the relationship or affinity with the individual that endorsed the resource), or the type of endorsement did the member of the user’s social graph provide (e.g., an explicit endorsement by starring a result or page or an implicit endorsement by visiting the resource or commenting on a posting).”
While the patent shows Google’s interest in boosting resources in search results based on social signals, it doesn’t mean they applied it to the algorithm.
Fast forward to 2014, when someone again asked Cutts if Facebook and Twitter signals are part of Google’s algorithm. He responded that Google did not include signals such as the number of followers or likes in the algorithm. You can’t assume that because a signal exists on Twitter or Facebook, Google picks it up.
The Evidence Against Social Signals As A Ranking Factor
“As Google continues to add social signals to the algorithm, how do you separate simple popularity from true authority?”
In his response, he says there is an “assumption” in the first part of his question, adding social signals to the algorithm, which he dismisses.
In 2015, John Mueller, a search advocate at Google, said that social signals do not directly help in organic rankings.
Links in most social posts are nofollowed. They won’t help with organic rankings. However, the social posts that link to your website could appear in search results.
In 2016, Mueller received a tweet asking if social media tags do any good for on-page SEO. His response:
“No, I’d use links to social media as a way to add value to users, not in the hope that they improve rankings.”
In 2017, Gary Illyes, Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google, mentioned social media twice in a link discussion. First:
“And that’s where social media comes handy. It’s not because SEs will rank you better, that’s BS, but because you market your content”
“Also, for the record, PageRank wise most social media links count as much as a single drop in an ocean.”
In 2019, Mueller joked in response to a guide on TikTok:
“Do people put links in Tiktok videos? #seo #numberoneranking #follow #growthhacking”
In 2021, Mueller joked in response to the number of likes a particular tweet was receiving:
“Sorry, we don’t use likes as a ranking factor.”
Later in August 2021, Mueller was asked if clicks via emails could impact rankings. He replied:
“No effect on SEO. Like ads, like social media. It’s good to have multiple separate sources of traffic to your website, and not everything needs to have an SEO effect.”
A few months later, Mueller was asked if social media directly or indirectly affected SEO. He answered:
“If I give you advice on Twitter which helps improve your website’s visibility in search, would that be an indirect effect of social signals on SEO?”
The joking response is a clue to their sentiment about social signals. They don’t put much stock in them.
It’s a bit confusing whether social signals affect organic search rankings. Between 2010 and 2014, Google may have experimented with social signals in search results.
Plus, there are scenarios where social media can help your SEO efforts. While social signals may not be a ranking factor, social profiles and links can affect your brand’s appearance in search results.
Ultimately, it seems that Google may have used social signals in the past to create better results for users. But now, social signals seem to be a thing of Google’s past.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are just around the corner.
It’s a bargain hunter’s dream, and dedicated shoppers are already prepping their wallets.
For Shopify stores, it’s the most important time of the year to position your offer right and make the most of the spending spree.
As an ecommerce brand, you’ve been sowing all year. Your brand has pumped iron, studied opposition movements, put hundreds of hours on the field fine-tuning movements, and now you’re ready.
Q4 is the time to reap your harvest. Don’t be shy about it.
In 2021, stores on the Shopify platform generated $6.3 billion in sales.
Image from Shopify, October 2022
These are not numbers to balk at. It’s not uncommon for some brands to generate more revenue in November than they have all year. Don’t you want your share?
Shoppers are looking for a bargain, and it’s your chance to get your brand in front of them and drive some impressive sales numbers.
Here are some final Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) tips to help skyrocket your sales.
1. Make Your Offer Simple
Don’t make it a complicated math project for customers to work out their discount. Make a clear and simple offer that’s irresistible.
Use automatic discounts rather than requiring customers to enter a coupon code.
Here are the pricing strategies that are most effective:
Flat Percentage Discounts
This is the most common discount offer, and for good reason.
Customers are well-accustomed to, and even expect, this kind of sales offer. It’s predictable and leaves no room for nuance.
Image from Height Dynamics, October 2022
Flat Dollar Discounts
Some brands may do better to stagger their dollar discounts based on total spend amounts.
The more you spend, the more you save. For example, “Spend $50, Save $10” or “Spend $100, Save $20.”
It can entice customers to spend more in order to save more.
Set A Minimum Order Value To Qualify For Free Delivery
Rather than offering free delivery on every order, which quickly erodes your profit margins, set a minimum order value.
This is a great way to increase your average order value.
It encourages customers to spend just a little bit more to qualify.
Offer A Free Gift With Orders Over A Certain Amount
If you have a low-cost product that complements another product (like shoe polish for leather shoes or an ink refill for a fountain pen), offering a free gift with certain products or minimum order values is a great way to increase conversions.
Sonoran Spice used the offer of a free gift in one of their previous Black Friday sales:
Image from Sonoran Spice, October 2022
Buy One, Get One Free Or Half Price
A Buy One, Get One Free (BOGO) offer is a marketing strategy that attracts customers by offering them an incentive to buy two or more items.
The price of the second item is usually discounted or offered free.
Only use this offer for items of equal or lesser value. You do not want to cut into your profit margins on higher-value goods and only offer when inventory levels can be guaranteed.
It’s a great way to move stagnant or out-of-season stock.
2. Create A Landing Page To Attract Email Subscribers
While this tactic is a must for every Shopify store, it works particularly well if you have a large following on your social media channels but are lacking in numbers on your email list.
Email remains one of the most powerful tools to leverage during the BFCM weekend.
You have complete control over the messaging, timing, and who gets to see your emails.
Several weeks before BFCM, create a landing page with an email sign-up form suggesting people subscribe if they want to be notified about your BFCM sales.
Then, share this on your social channels and drive those sign-ups.
Sweeten the offer by offering exclusive offers to email subscribers or access first to sales before the wild rush so they don’t risk missing out when stock levels dwindle.
This will ensure your sale offer lands directly in the lap of those who want to see it.
3. Create A New Sales Collection Targeting Keywords
One handy SEO tip is to keep a generic collection or landing page URL slug that can be reused from year to year.
That is to say, do not use the year in the slug. This will allow you to re-use the collection for each BFCM and capitalize on any hard-earned backlinks you may gain over time.
Over the years, the SEO performance of the page will only compound.
Each year, you can then simply edit and update the collection or page name to coincide with the year.
When the sales period is active, add a nice big sales banner to your homepage and a link from your navigation menu, linking to this collection page.
When BFCM ends, remove the navigation link and take down any homepage banners.
Leave the collection indexed, but remove products from the collection. You can then reuse it for next year.
4. Promote Your Sale To Affiliates
If you have an affiliate program, now is the time to give your loyal affiliate partners the heads-up on your BFCM sales.
It’s a chance for them to cash in on the sales period while promoting your offers.
You can take it one step further and give them exclusive first access to sales. Some VIP treatment never goes astray.
Sweeten the deal by offering an additional commission for hitting sales milestones or prizes for top affiliate sales.
5. Get In First Before The Rush
Consider using the same BFCM strategies but launching your sales early.
The intent behind this is to get in before the rush. It’s a ninja strategy to attract customers waiting in anticipation of the sales.
A preliminary sale also has the benefit of beating the postal rush.
6. Be Bold In Your Messaging
Now for a little pep talk.
Too many brands are passive. They don’t want to announce their sales on their social channels for fear of saturating feeds or being too overbearing.
They don’t want to email their list for fear of annoying people.
They might send out one email announcing the sale, but it comes across as lacking confidence and sounds like, “Hey, customer, maybe you want to buy from us. Here’s our offer, but don’t worry, we won’t be offended if you don’t. Maybe you’ll opt to buy from my competitor instead. That’s okay. Can we still be friends?”
Those emails may convert some, but you’re leaving so much potential on the table.
Don’t be that kind of brand. Plan, be bold in your messaging, and execute as if your life depends on it.
You’re in business to keep your brand alive with people who want to buy from you.
An important distinction needs to be made here. Being bold does not mean being sleazy or manipulative. Be sincere and earnest in your communication.
There’s a lot of noise around sales at this time of year, and you’re competing against the big guys who have near-infinite marketing budgets.
But there’s a high chance people follow you because they already like your brand and what you stand for.
Be bold in that.
There are customers who are genuinely interested in you, your brand, and what you have to offer, and are seriously just waiting to hear from you and spend their money with you or support your cause!
Don’t take their loyalty for granted, but also don’t underestimate it.
7. Email, Email, Email
Email is still one of the highest-converting sales channels.
When done right, your email list can be a goldmine. But don’t wait until the eve before Black Friday to email your list.
If you haven’t been emailing your list consistently over the course of the last several months, now is the time to warm it up.
Tell your subscribers and customers what’s to come.
If you’re worried about overwhelming your existing email list with too many emails, send an email so they can opt-in for sales updates. This will then tag them for incoming emails and save spamming those customers who aren’t interested.
Your email schedule should have, at minimum, one pre-launch email in the week leading up to BFCM. Two is optimal.
Share a story about your brand, recent news, and new product updates – and get your list excited. Don’t leave them to guess.
Be different by being transparent. Give your customers the opportunity to fill their carts and have their credit cards ready.
Over the course of the BFCM weekend, send emails both in the morning, afternoon, and evening.
This is to capture and remind people what’s on offer, so your emails don’t get overlooked. Be clear in your communication about your sales start and finish times.
Final countdown emails work well to announce when the sale will end.
Make sure you adjust the timing of your abandoned cart reminder emails.
It’s crucial to give customers the opportunity to finalize their purchase before the sale period ends.
8. Make Your Email Subject Lines Stand-Out
Ask yourself the question, “Would you open this email?”
It’s all too easy to do what everyone expects.
Don’t follow the crowd and pepper your email subject lines with “30% off Black Friday!” Sure, you’ll get some clicks and sales, but inboxes will be flooded with dozens of the same offers.
Make your emails stand out and use subject lines that snatch attention.
“Sorry, we sold out,” “I can’t believe we’re doing this…” or, “If you miss this, you can’t blame us” are some examples.
9. Have Your Marketing Material Ready
It’s time to shout your graphic design team (or person) to a few coffees – they should be at their busiest right now!
Website banners, social media posts, email campaigns – there’s a lot of marketing material that needs to be ready to go.
Create consistent marketing material that can easily be reworked and reused according to the channel.
Update your main lead generators like website pop-ups and announcement banners.
Rather than push your standard 10% discount on the first purchase, which will be ignored, the wording can be changed to “Unlock Holiday Sales.”
Australian fashion retailer Blue Bungalow does a great job of this every year, displaying unique sales banners to advertise its deals.
Image from Blue Bungalow, October 2022
10. Pre-Schedule Everything
The fewer decisions you have to make on the day, the smoother things will go, and the more time you will free up for the unexpected (and inevitable) challenges that might arise.
Check and double-check that your discounts and markdowns are scheduled to go live exactly when you want them to. Get your emails lined up.
If it’s not already too late, make sure your stock levels are topped up.
It’s frustrating for customers to have their credit card ready to buy, only to find an “out of stock” notification.
Strike while the iron is hot and capture their eagerness to buy by making sure you have adequate inventory in stock. Use past data to help forecast sales.
Lan Ong, owner of 3rd Story, a women’s wholesale fashion brand, provides this insight,
“As a wholesaler, this is also our busiest time of year and it’s no surprise when retailers are desperate for last-minute top-ups for their inventory.
It takes a combined effort along the supply chain to be prepared and to be mutually respectful of each other’s timelines, expectations and limitations.”
It’s not possible to always get it perfect, so be gracious to yourself and your team.
12. Prioritise Mobile And Optimize Site Speed
Mobile is still king. Shopify reported that 71% of BFCM sales in 2021 were done on mobile.
If you don’t have a mobile-responsive site or images optimized for mobile, then now is the time to get it sorted.
Imagine, as a customer, shopping on a website that takes ten seconds to load a single product page, viewing product images that don’t resize properly for your mobile device, and then finally making it to the checkout only to have the site crash on you.
Following on from this, make sure your servers have the bandwidth to support the surge in traffic.
The last thing you want is for your online store to crash mid-sales.
13. Share Live Updates On Social
Over the weekend, share live sold-out, low stock, and restock updates.
Publicly share answers to common customer questions.
Stories and Reels work great for sharing unique behind-the-scenes footage and live updates.
By doing so, you bring customers along on the exciting roller-coaster ride with you.
Urgency and scarcity are your best friends.
14. Track Everything And Double-Down On High Performing Channels
It’s crucial to have the appropriate URL tracking parameters set up for things like your email marketing, SMS, and paid ads, so you can extract clean data and reports once sales have ended.
Find out what sales channels are your high performers and double-down your strategies for those.
Focus on one or two that you can smash.
Geek out over the data, fine-tune your ads, and remove the guesswork from campaigns.
For ad accounts, know your marketing effectiveness ratio (MER), then compare it in real-time in Shopify to throttle ad spend.
15. Fine Tune Your Customer Service
Following the big weekend, take a moment to pat yourself and your team on the back.
It may seem like the hard part is over, but the weeks to follow with fulfillment and customer service are crucial. This will set the tone for your customer relationships moving forward.
Refine your order fulfillment processes to minimize errors.
Make sure customer service emails and socials are being closely monitored. Get your systems ready and in place to assist with returns, order issues, or complaints.
16. Do A Post-BFCM Analysis
Congratulations! You’ve survived the highs and lows of what is the busiest time of year for most Shopify stores.
Take a moment to celebrate and take a deep breath.
Then peel yourself off the couch and get yourself back in front of the computer to crunch some numbers.
Now is the time to run a profit/loss analysis to understand your financial position.
Do it while the high is fresh, so you have all the numbers ready and lined up for next year.
This is the optimal time to review what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved on.
Conclusion
The Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales weekend is one of the most exciting yet daunting times of the year for Shopify stores.
As the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Get your store and team organized now, and don’t delay in fine-tuning your sales strategies.
Even though we’re nearing the end of the year, it’s not too late to still make this your brand’s best year yet.
Search advertisers are accustomed to change – but even as innovation, evolution, and new features attract many of us to this industry, it’s a challenge to keep up and keep adapting.
Advancements in automation, coupled with evolving privacy expectations and regulations, make this the biggest time of change since I started working in search marketing in 2005.
While we can probably all agree that user trust is imperative for a healthy digital advertising ecosystem, this refocusing often upends how we analyze and activate campaign data.
In many ways, changes to search terms reporting are emblematic of these shifts and of ways to help solve some of the challenges they present. Let’s dig in.
For background, two years ago, Google policy teams raised the privacy threshold for search term reporting in Google Ads.
This meant advertisers had less information about the terms customers use to find and engage with their businesses, and those in sectors with lower global search interest saw the greatest impact.
This change happened roughly six months before I joined Google in a new ads product liaison role in 2021. It was one of the first things I wanted to understand better.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Why did the change happen? We updated the thresholds to further ensure user privacy and help prevent an individual’s search from being tied to a specific conversion. From an advertiser’s perspective, that possibility might seem fairly benign, but if we look at it from the user and policy perspective, it’s not.
Why now? Higher consumer privacy expectations and an evolving regulatory landscape require looking at data usage through an even sharper user trust and safety lens – and these shifts mean broader changes to data usage and reporting across the industry. The search term report is just one example.
Now what? This move was positive for user safety but undoubtedly disruptive for advertisers. The product team knows search terms reporting is an integral part of monitoring the performance of Search campaigns.
Advertisers use it to understand how people are searching for their products or services, how their ads and landing pages are resonating with those users, and to identify queries that triggered their ads but may not be relevant or efficient based on the budget and goals.
By the time I joined Google, that team was already looking at more privacy-safe ways to surface query insights.
Search Terms Insights
The first new approach the team took was to rebuild the existing search terms reporting system to be able to show terms that didn’t lead to an ad click, but had enough global search volume to be included in the report.
This data allows you to see relevant demand you may be missing out on and use that to inform your creative optimizations.
This was a good step, but it didn’t give advertisers more information about search terms that were already driving clicks and conversions.
This new reporting, located on the Insights page at the account and campaign level, is a helpful complement to the search terms report.
It’s also an example of how reporting is evolving with privacy changes and advancements in automation.
How It Works
Search terms insights cover Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns and use automation to increase transparency into search terms driving traffic to your site in privacy-safe ways.
It does this by automatically aggregating and grouping search terms into themed categories and subcategories. The groupings take all search terms into account, including those that aren’t shown in the search terms report due to the privacy thresholds.
You will need to give new campaigns some time to run to collect search term data. You can also adjust the date range from 7 days to 28 days and look at the account level to see more data.
How To Use It
You can get a high-level view of the themes driving traffic to your site and see performance metrics such as conversions, conversion value, clicks, and search volume across all targeted countries.
There are also filters to see search term themes by search category, conversions growth, or search volume growth.
For example, you could look at all categories that have had greater (or less than) 15% search volume growth. From there, you can click on the themes to see details on the subcategories and search terms, and review your performance.
These insights are designed to help advertisers focus on broader, intent-based themes rather than having to pour over individual queries.
If you’re used to downloading search terms reports to a spreadsheet in order to group and filter individual search terms on your own to understand themes, these insights can be a big time saver. Quickly identify your top search categories and use that to inform your strategy to capture more of that demand.
Additionally, search terms insights reflect the ways that reporting is evolving to focus on the factors that can help you steer automation to deliver on your campaign goals, and to help avoid constraining the system in ways that can negatively impact performance.
Advertisers, including me, had long been accustomed to mining search reports for keywords to add to negative keyword lists.
Adding hundreds or thousands of individual negative keywords is an inefficient use of time, and even if you’re using a script to aid this work, huge lists can add complexity and impact performance.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still use negative keywords, of course, but if you’re using Smart Bidding, your process can change to take a looser approach since the model will be optimizing to our goal.
Search terms insights can help free you up to focus on higher-impact changes, such as testing new ad creatives around trending search categories.
It can take a bit to familiarize yourself with this newer reporting and to adjust to the mindset of zooming out and analyzing at the theme level to start before digging into the details.
Search terms insights are recently out of beta, and the team is currently incorporating advertiser feedback and will continue to make the feature more helpful, so stay tuned for updates.
Reimagining To Ensure Future Success
As the industry responds to privacy shifts, automation will play a key role in helping fill in the measurement gaps to provide more transparency for advertisers in ways that respect and protect user privacy.
Conversion modeling is another example. It uses machine learning to give advertisers a more complete understanding of campaign performance when ad attribution is not observable due to privacy or technical limitations.
Modeled conversions can then inform your automated bidding strategies and make them more efficient by reducing bias where performance data is incomplete.
The evolving landscape requires reimagining.
New solutions will be different from the status quo and will take time to get used to. They’ll also keep improving.
Think back to when Google introduced its first Smart Bidding model, maximize conversions, five years ago and the market’s reaction in those early days (there was a lot of room for improvement).
Machine learning has advanced exponentially since then, and today the vast majority of advertisers use automated bidding.
The changes to search terms reporting highlight the key shifts the industry is experiencing in this new time and underscores that new approaches will continue to evolve with ongoing advancements – and advertiser feedback.
Looking to outrank your competition in 2023? Then it’s time to discover how to properly analyze your content for optimum performance in the new year.
It’s one thing to simply find writers and produce content, but are you creating the right content to hit your business KPIs?
The key to ranking higher in search engines and turning leads into conversions is well-optimized, high-quality content. And with an effective content strategy as your foundation, your digital marketing goals can be all within reach.
So, how do you do it? Let us help answer that.
Join me for this upcoming webinar (Nov. 16) as we discuss how you can craft a winning content strategy for 2023.
How To Optimize Your Content For Success
Content creation is a crucial component of your wider digital marketing strategy.
Not only does it help you better connect with your target audience, but it also builds your authority as a brand, and converts more leads into paying customers.
While you want your content to perform well in search results, that doesn’t mean you should optimize your content specifically for search engines.
Instead, when you tailor your content towards humans, it automatically becomes more search engine friendly.
As seen in its latest algorithm updates, Google is becoming increasingly user-focused, and the more value you bring to searchers, the more likely you are to rank higher on SERPs.
In this live session, you’ll gain critical insights, practical knowledge, and hands-on techniques – all of which are fully compliant with Google’s policies and highly relevant to their recent Helpful Content and Core algorithm updates.
Sabrina Hipps, VP of Client Success at CopyPress, and Jeremy Rivera, Director of Content Analysis at CopyPress, will share practical examples of how to analyze your content to help create a successful content strategy.
Don’t miss out! Register now and discover how developing a strong content strategy can take your business to new heights in 2023.
Can’t make the webinar? We’ve got you covered. Sign up now and we’ll send you a recording after the event.
![Ranking Factors: Fact Or Fiction? Let’s Bust Some Myths! [Ebook]](https://ecommerceedu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/rf-ebook-download-banner-62e8c6126ffe8-sej.jpg)
