This has been a difficult week in America, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on. Setting aside unfortunate tragedies and politics for a few minutes, we bring you five short reads to start your weekend. In this week’s Five on Friday, Julian Hayes II suggests four morning habits that will start your day out right, PYMNTS talks about the growing popularity of subscription boxes, Janet Driscoll Miller shares SEO tips for SaaS companies for Search Engine Land, Tribute Media tells us what four things our websites must do to capture the attention of readers, and Hubspot tells us about the five hottest message apps to use for marketing.  

• Start Your Day Off Right With These 4 Morning Habits
• The Subscription Box Industry Continues to Soar
• Address SEO for SaaS Challenges with These 6 Tips
• Your Website Should Do These 4 Things in 7 Seconds or Less
• Hubspot: The 5 Best Messaging Apps for Marketing

Start Your Day Off Right with These 4 Morning Habits

Raise your hand if you have ever hit the snooze button on a weekday, hoping to catch a few more ZZZs before heading into the office – or across the hall – to start your day. [Yes, I’m guilty too.] Julian Hayes II, founder of The Art of Fitness & Life, says we should skip the snooze button and, instead, start our day with these 4 simple habits. Hayes says each one only takes 5 minutes, so those 20 minutes could really improve your day.

1. Exercise for 5 minutes. Hayes says that motion generates emotion and energy throughout your body, kickstarting your day. Walk to the mailbox, do some stretches, try a few pushups or squats, or do a couple of yoga poses to wake up your body and your mind.
2. Hydrate and express gratitude for 5 minutes. Start your day off with an abundant mindset by considering what you are grateful for (e.g., your family, sunshine, a good job, health), followed by a tall glass of water or two. We lose hydration when we sleep, so it is important to hydrate first thing to remove toxins and improve mental and physical functioning.
3. Meditate for 5 minutes. Now that you’ve exercised, hydrated and expressing gratitude, take 5 minutes to meditate and be still. This helps you focus your thinking and, when practiced regularly, it can help with insomnia, anxiety, stress and other challenges.
4. Review your vision, daily affirmation and objectives for the day in 5 minutes. The last part of your morning ritual should include reviewing your vision for yourself along with a few objectives you can accomplish today to help you achieve that vision. And, finally, wrap things up with an affirmation, a positive statement to set the tone for the day. Hayes likes this one: “All things contribute to my advancement.”

Get more insights into your morning routine in Hayes’s original post for Inc. here: 4 Simple Morning Habits That Will Improve Your Day.

The Subscription Box Industry Continues to Soar

In an article earlier this week, PYMNTS.com quoted data by Hitwise that shows in April 2017, subscription company box websites had about 37 million visitors, an 800 percent increase from 2014. The top two categories visited were grocery box/food delivery at 33 percent and beauty boxes at 35 percent. Apparel was also a popular category at 16 percent. In the U.S., 5.7 million consumers subscribe to subscription boxes, and our discussion with My Subscription Addiction last year tells us that many consumers subscribe to more than one subscription box service.

So why are subscription boxes so popular? Consumers can try before they buy, particularly in the case of beauty boxes. They can try sample sizes of beauty products (e.g., makeup, hair styling products, skin care, etc.) before spending money on a full size for a product they’ve never used before. Consumers also get exposed to products they may not have otherwise heard about, so there is the joy of discovery.

Convenience is another reason subscription boxes continue to grow in popularity. Some people simply don’t like shopping, or don’t have the time, so they purchase items they use regularly like razors or coffee via subscription to alleviate the hassle of having to find the right brand at the right price or of running out of the item altogether.

Read more about subscription box trends in ‘Direct to Consumer: Subscription Boxes for All’ on PYMNTS.com.

Address SEO for SaaS Challenges with These 6 Tips

In ‘Top 6 Tips for SEO for SaaS‘ for Search Engine Land, columnist and founder of Marketing Mojo Janet Driscoll Miller discusses ways to address some of the unique challenges SaaS companies face when trying to raise their online profiles. She offers these 6 top tips:

1. Consider your purpose – lead generation or SEO? Is the purpose of your content for lead generation or to optimize your website for search engines? For example, you may want to block search engines from accessing content directly that is used for lead generation purposes. Content that is used primarily for SEO, however, you want to be sure is indexed.
2. Do you want password-protected content indexed by search engines? If you have SaaS has customer-only info. but it is currently being indexed for SEO. You may not want that content indexed, so mark the content as “noindex” with a meta tag on the page or using the robots.txt file, says Driscoll Miller.
3. Do you want to index customer information? Do you want customer surveys to be indexed and listed in search engine results? Probably not, because surveys meant for a specific purpose may then be accessible to the public. You can fix with the method used in #2 above.
4. Customer segmentation via custom dimensions. Driscoll Miller points out that sometimes customers will login to your site using a Google search link instead of going directly to your login page. Some customers will still access your site through the home page. Driscoll Miller suggests that, using Google Analytics custom dimensions, you segment current customers from prospective ones.
5. Free trial conversion. Use conversion rate optimization techniques and A/B testing to convert website visitors into users with a free trial offer.
6. Measure ROI to lifetime value. It is always important to measure how effective our marketing efforts are, including measuring SEO. It is important to go beyond the initial conversation to measure ROI though. What you really want to know when calculating the true value of your SEO efforts is the lifetime value of a particular customer. Driscoll Miller gives a simple example. Let’s say your SaaS subscription is $15 a month, and visitor found your site and converted into a paying customer from an organic search. The ROI isn’t $15; it is $15 x the number of months you retained the customer minus your SEO costs.

For more detailed info. on these 6 top tips for SEO for SaaS companies, read the original article here.

Your Website Should Do These 4 Things in 7 Seconds or Less

According to Tribute Media, a web marketing agency, the human attention span is only 6 to 8 seconds long. That’s 1 to 3 seconds shorter than the attention span of a goldfish! Why is that important? Because you only have 7 seconds to get a website visitor’s attention, or you’ll lose them forever. In those 7 seconds, your website must do the following:

–      Tell website visitors what the site is about through text or images.

–      Capture the interest of website visitors with a well-organized website with an up-to-date design.

–      Show website visitors what they should do with a clear Call to Action, like signing up for an email newsletter, registering for a free account, etc.

–      Be worthy of sharing. When looking at your company’s website, would you share it with a friend or colleague? If not, why isn’t it shareable?

For more on grabbing the attention of your website visitors to turn them into paying customers, read the original post on Tribute Media.

Hubspot: The 5 Best Messaging Apps for Marketing

Remember when texting was the shiny, new toy? Me neither. It seems texting has been around forever. Texting has its place, but messaging apps have evolved way beyond simple text messages. They are not only great for personal conversations with friends, but they are becoming more popular as marketing tools too. Hubspot says these are the 5 best messaging apps for marketing. Which is your favorite?

1. WhatsApp. WhatsApp has 1.3 billion monthly active users and it targets users between the ages of 25 and 44. It doesn’t sell ads, it prohibits third-party bots, and marketers are limited to sending messages to 256 people at a time. However, marketers can use it for one-on-one message with targeted, personalized campaigns.
2. Facebook Messenger. Facebook Messenger has 1.2 billion monthly active users and it targets users between the ages of 16 and 44. [Note: I don’t fall in that age range, and I use Messenger every day. It is my ‘go to’ messaging app.] Messenger has lots of marketing options, including destination ads, sponsored messages, chatbots and other tools.
3. WeChat. WeChat has 938 million monthly active users, and it is most popular in China. It’s target age range is 18 to 50. There are a lot of restrictions for using WeChat to market to potential customers in China, but once you’re in, you can send broadcast messages (one per day per subscriber), broadcast four messages per month to subscribers in their friend session list, publish content, use bots and more.
4. Line. Used primarily in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia by 10- to 49-year-olds, Line has 217 million monthly active users. Savvy marketers can set up profile pages, send chat messages to subscribers, use chatbots with keywords, target ads based on demographics and interests, reward customers with stickers and more. Not convinced? Paul McCartney has 12.5 million Line followers, more follower than he has on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined, says Hubspot.
5. Slack. Oh, how we love Slack! Slack has 5 million daily users, and it is most popular in the U.S. among 25- to 54-year-olds. It is used as an internal communications platform for businesses and organizations, and it can be used as a B2B marketing tool. Hubspot, for example, says users can subscriber to Hubspot’s blog and get weekly updates of new posts.

Learn more about these messaging apps and how they can be used for marketing on Hubspot: ‘The 5 Best Messaging Apps for Marketing in 2017‘ by Clifford Chi.

From all of us at Subscription Insider, we hope you have a safe, fun, peaceful weekend. We’ll see you here next Friday.