Therefore setting up email alerts is helpful: You will be notified of what really matters via email which is hard to miss.
Here are a few digital marketing platforms that allow you to set up useful email alerts to be always on top of important events and changes:
1. Reputation Alerts
As your brand grows, you are going to see your brand name mentioned more and more. It is not easy to keep up with brand mentions even for a medium-sized business.
Most social listening platforms create email digests of brand mentions which are ok to use but I find myself having a hard time reading those diligently on a daily basis.
Awario is a social listening platform that offers a more actionable approach to alerting you of what really matters. The platform does it by using two metrics:
- Reach: This shows how many people may be involved in any public discussion of your brand
- Sentiment analysis: This allows you to prioritize mentions that are included into the negative context
Image source: Awario
Awario is not the only social listening platform out there, but it definitely wins when it comes to prioritized email alerts. Its starter package costs $24 a month.
You can use Awario in the same way to monitor positive mentions and turn them into your reviews and testimonials.
Naturally, this method is only useful if you have a unique company name no one else is using.
Similarly to Awario, Buzzsumo is another tool that allows you to easily filter through your brand’s mentions without being distracted by fluff. Buzzsumo alerts you of web mentions (articles and blog posts) that generated some social media signals.
You can set the desired traction of a mention you want delivered to your inbox:
Buzzsumo allows you to set up 5 alerts within its $99 monthly package.
2. Social Media Alerts
What are your competitors doing on social media?
Your competitors’ social media activity shows their current priorities: You can get notified of their new posts, creative activities and interactions with clients.
This is a great learning curve and can give you and your social media team a lot of ideas on how to engage your customers on social media, but only if you pick your competitors well.
To save time, pick competitors that are really doing something creative on their social media accounts.
Visualping.io is a web monitoring platform that can be used to track just about anything on social media. You can use it to monitor new posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. To set up an alert, copy-paste your competitor’s profile URL and set the tool to monitor the whole page.
Image source: Visualping
Visualping will send you email notifications of new posts on that page as well as bio changes on that profile page. This is especially useful for account-based marketing when you know exactly which companies you want to become your clients and need to time your outreach better.
Visualping will monitor two pages for free. If you pay $13 a month, you will be able to monitor 40 pages.
Using Visualping, you can also monitor special sections in Google’s search result pages like video carousels and People Also Ask.
There are many more monitoring solutions for you to try, so experiment with a few of those!
3. Change in Rankings Alert
Have you suddenly lost rankings?
Or have your competitor quickly gained a few positions?
This is information you need to be aware of.
WebCEO offers all kinds of email alerts for your SEO needs including flexible notifications letting you know about important ranking changes.
Image source: WebCEO
You can customize WebCEO so you will be instantly notified if a project faces negative ranking changes, more than usual social media engagement, technical issues like broken links and more.
4. New Link Alerts
A new link means a new supporter or a new friend. Whether that would be a single link or many is up to you. I’ve always been an advocate of relationship-building-driven link building. Turning each link into a connection is how you stop building links and see them coming organically.
Keep an eye on new links to find people behind those links, follow them, thank them, and become your friends.
SEO PowerSuite allows you to create all kinds of email alerts, including new link alerts. My two favorite alerts here are:
- Ranking change alerts
- New link alerts
Image source: Link-Assistant
It is a good idea to set up both of these alerts for yourself and your closest competitor.
SEO PowerSuite costs $299 a year, and it includes many more SEO reports and monitoring features apart from link alerts for that price.
Other backlink checking tools like Ahrefs and Semrush also offer email alerts, so check those out!
In Closing
Too many email alerts can clutter up your email inbox and negatively impact your productivity.
It is a good idea to keep this archive separate from your business emails. You can set up several business email addresses to keep things separated. Don’t forget to add that inbox to your smart phone mail app to be able to keep an eye while on the go.
This will also come useful if you are actively using email marketing because you can use that extra email for your newsletter.
Getting notified is important if you want to stay on top of your digital marketing strategy and be able to quickly react to anything going on. I hope the above tools will come in handy and keep you informed!
Image Credit: Lakeland Bank
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of Viral Content Bee. Smarty has been into internet marketing for over a decade, she is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Smarty is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz
