This Week in Digital Marketing - February 25, 2022

We’re back with another week of digital marketing updates! This week, there’s a lot of Google info with a dash of the Metaverse. How do these changes affect your business?

Google Confirms Standard Shopping Campaigns Will Remain Available
Standard Shopping campaigns offer a set of capabilities, controls and data that many advertisers rely on, and knowing that they’ll continue to be available will come as a relief, especially since Google has been taking away manual controls in so many areas.

Don’t Let Innovation Overcome Email Common Sense
Over-Segmentation
We know that email programs drive more value when you build them on segmented, targeted and triggered messaging. Every customer in your segments or triggers gets a message with content that reflects their behavior, preferences and interests.

This comes as close to an email best practice as insisting on getting subscriber consent and permission before sending emails.

But if you send only triggered or highly segmented campaigns, what do the customers or subscribers who don’t fit into your segments or meet your trigger criteria receive? What if they don’t open/click/buy that often or leave a data trail from browsing? If they don’t get your emails, they can’t generate opens, clicks or conversions. 

Creating “Best of Breed” Emails
These are emails that showcase the latest advanced email features – allowing email to accomplish feats no one could ever envision and making your emails the envy of your industry friends.

These often get expressed as trends or a “must-do” list of tactics intended to help you build engagement.

Google Page Experience Update for Desktop Rolling Out
This update will slowly roll out over the next several weeks and be completed by the end of March 2022. It will include all the current signals of the mobile version of the page experience update, outside of the page needing to be mobile-friendly. Google said all of the page experience factors for mobile will be included with the exception of the mobile-friendliness requirement, which is kind of obvious.

What Does the Metaverse Mean to Consumers and Marketers?
Talk of the metaverse came almost out of nowhere last year when Facebook’s parent company changed its name to Meta. Since highs in September 2021, the company’s stock valuation has been cut nearly in half.

But there is more to this meta-talk than just saving an ailing tech giant. Marketers are always looking for new ways to connect with consumers meaningfully and deeply. Here’s a look at where marketing opportunities exist now, or in the near future.

Shoppers May Soon Be Able to Message Merchants via Google Shopping
Google is testing a new messaging feature that would allow customers to send messages to the customer service email address provided in your Google Merchant Center account. Google has invited a small subset of merchants to participate in this pilot via email.

Some of this information is relevant to your business, and some of it might not be. This is where we can help. We’re able to break down these updates and figure out which ones are most important for you and your business. Contact us for a consultation!