The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about AMP pages right from your own domain, what’s working with email outreach, and how Yoast is helping with Schema markup. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Instant-loading AMP pages from your own domain
Google Webmasters Blog
Google announced a few days ago that they would be rolling out a way to connect your very own domain to AMP web result pages through signed exchanges. Signed exchanges basically enable webpages to still be treated and perform like an AMP page while “still keeping the content’s integrity and attribution.” Your content will be provided to the user without having to be from a specific server which is what makes it super fast.
A signed exchange is a file format, defined in the web packaging specification, that allows the browser to trust a document as if it belongs to your origin. This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration. Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL.
Key Takeaways:
- If you are already utilizing AMP pages, you will now be able to take credit for it because the traditional “google.com/amp” will be missing from your URL.
- This will create a better user experience and resonate with users.
What’s working in the world of email outreach right now?
Brian Dean for Backlinko
Backlinko analyzed millions of outreach emails and uncovered some interesting takeaways that you may want to weave into your next email campaign. They took a look at subject lines, personalization, follow-up sequences, and even when to send. Specifically, they looked at the effect of personalized vs non-personalized emails, whether people are more likely to respond after more outreach attempts, how the length of a subject line leads to more responses and a few others.
To compare subject line response rates, we placed them into 5 buckets: short, medium, long, very long and extremely long.
And we found that long subject lines outperformed short subject lines by 32.7%.
Key Takeaways:
- Longer subject lines lead to increased responses
- Don’t be afraid to create an email marketing campaign that sends out multiple outreach attempts. It’s likely that some people are interested in what you have to offer but just miss the first or second email.
- Give your email some personalization, people are more likely to respond when they feel like they are given a personal email rather than a mass-send generic email.
Schema.org is hard; we’re making it easy
Joost de Valk for Yoast.com
Schema is one of the most important tools that the modern marketer has at their disposal, allowing them to help search engines like Google understand exactly what is on the page. While it’s important, though, it can also lack a certain amount of context which a search engine needs in order to really understand what’s on the page. That’s a problem that Yoast has set out to fix with their latest update:
In our implementation … all of the pieces [of schema] “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.
Key Takeaways:
- Implementing proper schema on your site is, and remains, an important consideration to help search engines understand your content, potentially increasing your chances of various rich results.
App Of The Week
Playbuzz
Playbuzz is an online tool that allows you to create a number of interactive content formats which you can embed on your website. You can create quizzes, interactive polls, flip cards, videos and more. You can create a lot of different types of content and drive interaction between you and your users. This tool is really simple for those who are not technically inclined.
“It’s so easy. It took me 30 minutes to make a quiz, a poll, and a video.”
Use Cases
- Polls are a nice way to add activity to your content and get insight from users.
- Creating engaging activities can be a nice new way to experiment with new types of content and uncover new ways to get you users more comfortable with your website and brand.
- Playbuzz comes with stock footage to help you make interesting videos to inform and lead your users down a possible buying path.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Facebook Tests Integrating Stories into the News Feed
- Facebook and Instagram May Be Forced to Remove Likes for Users Under 18
- Facebook says it ‘unintentionally uploaded’ 1.5 million people’s email contacts without their consent
- Twitter’s ‘Hide Replies’ Feature is set to Roll Out In June
- Event Spam SEO
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
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