If you are implementing some or all of the best practices of inbound marketing for your business, but still can’t understand how do some companies reach much higher success than you do, keep on reading.

If you type “inbound marketing” in Google, you will find a lot of great content about which inbound marketing practices are the best ones, which you should implement if you are new in a business, which can help you create more profit, which are the most suitable ones for getting your potential customers’ attention and so on. However, besides these “top” and “best” tips, there are also some other important practices that are often taken for granted or just overlooked, since people think that they may be insignificant. But life is just like that: all of the small things add up and eventually you get something big out of those small things, be it benefits or problems.

Today, our focus will be on introducing the best 5 inbound marketing practices that are often overlooked and underestimated, but which you should surely implement in your inbound marketing strategy, in order to get desired results.

1. Removing social sharing buttons

If you agree that social sharing buttons are considered to be a good practice for all companies, both small and big, then get ready to decimate your beliefs. Here is a great case study that shows why adding social sharing buttons is not always a good idea.

Taloon.com is a hardware eCommerce store which is selling plumbing, electrical, gardening and other construction materials. One of the main goals of inbound marketing strategy of that company was to increase the clicks on their product pages’ main CTA buttons.

Jani Uusi-Pantti, who is the CIO of Taloon.com went against the popular notion of using social sharing buttons and removed Facbeook, Google+ and Pin it buttons from its product pages. He implement A/B testing to see whether this will have any impact on main CTA buttons. According to the test results, it was found that there was about 12 % increase in CTA click rates. Are you surprised? So was Taloon.

So, the main reason why social sharing buttons worked against this company was the negative social proof. According to Jani Uusi-Pantti, the number of shares on most of the product pages were zero. Of course, a lot of shares and likes can act as a positive reinforcement, but low number of shares create a negative image in the minds of consumers about the company and the quality of products/services that it offers.

2. Providing sufficient information in your emails

Email marketing has always been more inexpensive and effective way of communication with current and potential customers. However, one of the best practices that is often overlooked in email marketing is providing enough information for customers. Here are some of the things you should include in your emails:

• Forward-to-a-friend link: It is just better to provide a link to your subscribers for sending your marketing emails to their friends, than just asking them to pass your messages. Create a action and include all of the links you would like to be passed.
• Contact number: Of course, no one can ignore the fact that email is a fast way of communication, but a phone call is much faster. If you want to create deeper and most trustworthy relationship with your customers, be open to them and provide them with your contact information.
• Navigation links: Using navigation links at the top of your email letters, which include several departments and articles is a great practice that is often overlooked. Doing so will help your readers find information about your company and your products/services more quickly and efficiently.

3. “The Blink Test” for landing pages

“The Blink Test” is a great way to find out whether your landing pages are good enough or not, however this practice is sometimes underestimated. This test refers to the first three seconds that a visitor spends on your landing pages, before they understand what they are expected to do on that page. It is your responsibility to create  clear headlines, CTAs or right forms to catch attention.

So, have you passed this test? You can practice it by printing some of your landing pages and showing it to your colleagues to find out whether they get a full understanding of your page in three seconds. If they fail to pass this test, it is better to cut down on some text, add more bullet points or re-word your value proposition to make it clearer.

4. Removing “Noindex/nofollow” meta tags

When a website is in a process of creation, web developers usually make use of special meta tag which is called “noindex/nofollow”, in order to make sure that while the website is being worked on, it does not get found by search engines. It can seem surprising to you, but many developers forget to remove these tags after launching the website.

The result is that a company can have a great website with great content, but it cannot be found by Google because of not being indexed. To make sure that these tags are removed, try to do a quick Google search for “site:companydomain.com”, in order to see how many pages are shown.

5. Creating value proposition for subscribing

There are many websites that have that typical “subscribe to our blog” button above their forms. However, this button has no value for readers to take action. If you want to have a quick boost in your conversion rates, try to treat your subscribe form like a call to action. Create a headline and supporting text that will create a desire among the readers to subscribe to your blog.

For example, Sidekick is a great example for this practice. Instead of using ordinary words, in their subscription form it’s written “ 70,000+ Subscribers Receiving Exclusive Content”. So it creates a desire among other readers to become one of their subscribers.

Here are the main inbound marketing practices that are overlooked but that should be used in every inbound marketing strategy. Are there any other such practices we missed? Please share them with us in the comments below.