Five on Friday: Digital Media, Manicures and Monica Louie

Featuring: Facebook, Deloitte, Stripe and Iterable

Five on Friday: Digital Media

Source: Bigstock Photo

TGIF, right? It’s been quite a week, but we made it. To help you ease into the weekend, we’ve got some great topics to help you manage your subscription business. In this week’s Five on Friday, Facebook ads coach Monica Louie talks about the changes to Facebook’s newsfeed, The Daily Edge makes us wish we lived in Dublin where customers can get regular manicures, with or without cocktails, via subscription, Deloitte shares its prediction for digital media subscriptions for 2018, Stripe ditches Bitcoin as a payment method, and Iterable offers strategies for dealing with shopping cart abandonment. 

 

 

Facebook Ads Coach Monica Louie: Newsfeed Dos and Don’ts

 Manicures and Monica Louie

Source: Bigstock Photo

Last week we wrote about Facebook’s newsfeed changes and how they will adversely affect Pages. Facebook is now prioritizing personal posts from friends and family over business pages. Facebook warns that traffic is likely to drop, along with reach, referral traffic and video views.

Why? Mark Zuckerberg and company believe that being connected to each other is important, but passive reading of our newsfeeds may be detrimental. In other words, the Facebook folks are presuming that we are reading passively and that the information from business pages, including news outlets, isn’t valuable to us. But enough about how I feel about this!

Facebook ads coach Monica Louie wrote an article about the change and how page owners can combat this change. Here are her suggestions for reworking your Facebook marketing strategy:

  1. Thoughtfully consider what you are posting before you post it. Is it a timely topic of relevance to your audience? Will the post engage readers? [Engaging posts will be ranked higher than less engaging posts, Facebook says.]
  2. Avoid engagement bait such as vote baiting, react baiting, share baiting, tag baiting and comment baiting. Pages that repeatedly use these tactics will see big drops in traffic.
  3. Be strategic with your posts. This goes hand in hand with #1. Monica says stop sharing quotes, publishing inspirational images, link to multiple articles or using schedulers like HootSuite.
  4. DO start a Facebook group, do more Facebook Live videos, sharing breaking news.

Read more of Monica’s advice, ‘How Facebook’s News Feed Update Affects You (And What To Do About It,’ on her blog.

Manicures and Cocktails – by Subscription in Dublin

Five on Friday: Digital Media

Source: Bigstock Photo

Chipped, a nail salon in Dublin, Ireland, has found a way to keep clients coming back for more. This salon not only has charging ports for your phone and laptop, late hours, and a live Instagram feed on the wall but it also offers – wait for it – manicures with or without cocktails via subscription! The Daily Edge reports that Chipped offers three subscription plans.

  • The Basic Bitch for €29 (approximately $35 U.S.) gets you four manicures with filing and nail polish, a free monthly gift and a free manicure voucher for a friend annually.
  • Slicker Than Your Average for €49 (about $61 U.S.) gets you 4 three-week polish treatments on your hands, a free monthly gift and a free manicure voucher for a friend annually.
  • So Extra for €79 (about $98 U.S.) gets you four hand treatments each month as well as one Nails & Cocktails session, a free monthly gift and you can bring a friend free each month.

I can tell you if a nail salon near me started a subscription service like this, I’d subscribe in a heartbeat. Learn more about Chipped and its nail salon subscription at The Daily Edge.

Deloitte Global’s Prediction for Digital Media Subscriptions for 2018

 Manicures and Monica Louie

Source: Deloitte Global

What can we expect from digital media subscriptions in 2018? Deloitte Global made a series of global predictions for the year, including this one. The company predicts that, by the end of this year, 50 percent of adults in developed countries will have at least two digital media subscriptions, and by the end of 2020, that number will double. Why? Because online-only subscriptions are easy to use, thanks to the portability of our devices. Also, publishers are either making mobile-friendly apps for easy reading of news articles, or they have an app designed specifically for mobile reading. Learn more about Deloitte Global’s prediction here

Stripe Is Ditching Bitcoin as a Payment Option 

Five on Friday: Digital Media

Source: Bigstock Photo

If you use Stripe as an online payments processor, don’t expect to use Bitcoin as a payment option. According to Business Insider, the cryptocurrency is no longer being accepted because of expensive transaction fees and long wait times.

Mining fees which are the costs paid by the people who provide the computing infrastructure that supports Bitcoin rose to $37 per transaction in December. Business Insider reports that fees have dropped to just over $6 per transaction, but on small transactions, that’s a big percentage of the total amount processed. Read more about Stripe’s decision on Business Insider.

Iterable: 3 Email Strategies to Address Shopping Cart Abandonment

 Manicures and Monica Louie

Source: Bigstock Photo

Letting a customer’s shopping cart remain abandoned is a lost opportunity to convert a prospect into a buyer. Many companies use emails to reach out to those customers. In a recent article for Iterable, Karen Talavera five email strategies for successful conversion. We’re sharing three of them here:

  1. Timing is everything. Don’t delay your follow-up. Talavera suggests sending the first email after an hour of abandonment and possibly sending one more reminder.
  2. Create a sense of urgency by emphasizing why a customer should act now rather than waiting to complete a purchase (sale ends tonight!) and offering assistance. Compelling subject lines can help create this sense of urgency.
  3. Take advantage of omni-channel marketing. Sometimes abandonment occurs because the customer has trouble using one of your channels (mobile shopping, for example), but moves to another (desktop PC) because it is easier to use. For this to be effective, however, the transition must be seamless.

Read more strategies in ‘Shopping Cart Abandonment Email Strategies (For the Rest of Us)‘ on Iterable. 


Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

 

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