🎉 Clicks to Conversions Report: The ‘Year in Review’ edition

Happy New Year!

The craziest year in history is finally over, and it’s time to look ahead to 2021.

Fortunately, as crazy as it’s been, 2020 has been extremely kind to most of the businesses in our industry. In fact, Strikepoint Media had its best year ever this past year. But even though everyone is seeing record highs just about everywhere we look, it’s still critical to properly prepare for next year.

For Strikepoint Media, we’ve got a few New Year’s resolutions for the year ahead:

🔥 What’s Hot

Since we’re wrapping up 2020, this month’s What’s Hot section focuses on some of the most important aspects of marketing that your business must focus on in the coming year. And when it comes to that, nothing is more important for your marketing than email.

Improving Your Email Marketing

According to Statista, there were 3.9 billion active email users across the planet. That’s half the world’s population! And those email users received 293.6 billion emails every day — more than 73 emails per user on a daily basis. To stand out in a crowded inbox, make sure you invest time and energy (not just dollars) into your email marketing. But for some reason, people keep saying “email is dead…”

Email is most definitely not dead. In fact, when done right, email marketing can yield a 4,200% ROI. That’s why email is one of the linchpins of Strikepoint Media’s success.

Strikepoint Media is releasing an in-depth guide to improving your email marketing in the coming months, but since the guide is so effective, we thought we’d give it away before it’s released as our holiday gift to you.

Download Strikepoint Media’s Ultimate Guide To Email Deliverability Now

Trust me, this guide is pure value.

We have a goal to establish ourselves as an educational leader in digital marketing, not just an industry leader in full funnel marketing services.

This playbook is the first in a series of high level, high quality, marketing guides that SPM is releasing next year.

Our Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability will add some serious fuel to your email marketing machine. But to help a little more, we analyzed our email sends from 2020, and are sharing the top-performing subject lines and why each performed so well.

Brand Awareness

One reason SPM is putting such a huge emphasis on providing the highest quality content possible in the coming year is to build trust with our readers so that they look forward to those emails. This newsletter is a perfect example of that. Another great example of that kind of powerful brand awareness is the Daily Scoop newsletter from our internal Trade Stocks list.

These subject lines all saw open rates of more than 30%, 99%+ deliverability, and CTRs of 4.6% and up (with our best clickthrough rate coming in at 12.62%). That’s the power of brand awareness.

The lesson here? If you deliver quality recurring content with a consistent subject line, that newsletter can be a powerful tool for your email marketing.

Greed

We can’t help wanting more. Whether that’s more success, more money, or more time to pursue our passions, this desire makes greed a powerful motivator. That’s why these subject lines all performed so well.

Just keep in mind that while greed can be a powerful motivator, it’s also a sensitive one. As Spiderman says, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Don’t be pushy, don’t be too good to be true, and don’t mislead anyone. That’s how you get unsubscribes, spam complaints, or worse.

Curiosity

If there’s one thing that drives us crazy, it’s not knowing how something ends. That need for closure is what makes open loops so incredibly effective. And why these subject lines got so many opens

So create an open loop in that subject line and make them open that email to find that answer!

Our Top Social Media Ads From 2020

Ad dollars are flowing into Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and all the others at record high numbers. And it’s not just for lead generation or to promote offers. Now more than ever it’s important to focus on brand recognition and relationship building.

Here are a handful of our favorite ads from the year that performed well:

As with all things not hot, it’s about updates and compliance. And the start of a new year brings plenty of those.

Google Updates

In January 2021, Google will update the editorial requirements policy for unidentified businesses to clarify that app ads must disclose the app name and their download source in the creative and/or landing page. The update rejects any ads or destinations that do not name the product, service, or entity they are promoting.

Facebook Updates

Speaking of updates, Facebook is also rolling out an update in early 2021 that requires verifying your domain to link to your Business Manager. This domain verification establishes which Business Manager account has the authority to configure the conversion events for a domain.

You can use only one domain per Business Manager. So if you have multiple Business Managers, our Facebook rep recommends you consolidate everything into one lead Business Manager. Facebook is verifying that the Business Manager name matches the domain, which should reduce fake/spammy companies setting up accounts and running bad ads.

The process can be time consuming, and you could run into technical issues transferring everything, so get this done ASAP. Because if you don’t get it done before the update in early 2021, you may not be able to run ads on Facebook.

Apple iOS 14 Updates

Apple’s long awaited update is coming in early 2021, and it will have a significant impact on Facebook ads and advertisers.

Obviously iOS14 affects only Apple devices, but given how many Apple users we target, that’s a concern because the update will limit the pixel tracking capability since people will have a clear option to opt out of pixel tracking.

Advertisers are restricted to configuring up to 8 unique conversion events per website domain, and ad sets optimizing for a conversion event that’s no longer available will be paused.

Facebook will initially configure the conversion events we believe are the most relevant to your business based on your activity. All other events will be made inactive for campaign optimization and reporting.

That’s why Facebook is requiring domain verification for all Business Managers.

Here’s how it affects your reporting:

• Real-time reporting will not be supported, and data may be delayed up to 3 days.
• For web conversion events, statistical modeling may be used to account for conversions on devices that have opted out of tracking.
• Delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region, and placement will not be supported (This likely means no DCT creative breakdowns, which would remove our ability to see which variants in our DCTs are performing)
• The attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns will be set at the ad set level, rather than at the account level
• Going forward, 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows will not be supported for active campaigns

Here’s how the update affects your targeting:

• As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences, and website Custom Audiences may decrease.
• This also goes for Retargeting… a lot of businesses rely on Retargeting to make their media buying efforts work. People don’t always buy from the first touch point. This may cause an exodus from Facebook ads as a whole (which is why Facebook is working hard to come up with solutions).

For now, focus on Conversion Tracking using offline conversion events to track sales rather than the pixel. The downside is that it’s not real time data.

We’ll keep you posted as we come up with solutions, but that’s what we’ve got for now.