A Quick 5-Step Intro into A/B Testing Posted on March 2, 2016June 28, 2016 by Lindsey Stroud When you first hear AB testing, it can easily take you back to college statistics, where you begin to envision standard deviation graphs and complex test conditions. Many people even shy away from A/B testing because they believe once they understand the basics, they won’t have the time or resources to run tests. Testing is one of the most important things you will do in email marketing. Everything from your subject line to your call to action will impact whether or not the contact chooses to engage with you. Small tweaks over time can drive big results, and help keep your contacts engaged during every stage of the buying process. Let’s break down the basics: What is AB Testing? In simple terms, A/B testing (or split testing) is when you take 2 variations and test them against each other to identify which performs best. Common A/B Tests: Sender (John@ vs. Marketing@) Subject Line Personalization vs. Non Personalization (Hi John vs. Hi There) HTML vs. Plain Text Call-To-Action (Free Trial vs. Start For Free) Day/Time of Email Send Timing Between Communications (Once a Week vs. Once a Month) Landing Page Testing on different parts of your emails and campaigns can be critical to your overall conversion process. For example, subject lines and day/time of your email send will impact whether your email gets opened, while your call to action will determine whether or not someone chooses to convert. How to A/B Test Testing emails is an easy and simple way to start driving more conversions from your email marketing. Here are the 5 easy steps to implement a successful experiment: 1. Decide what you want to test In order to avoid skewed results, stick with testing one variant at a time. Reason being? If you use the same A/B test to test Subject Line and Sender, you may not be able to pinpoint the success or failure of either variant. It is best practice to run higher impact tests in the beginning of your testing. Save the lower priority items for further down the road when you are fine-tuning the details. Some examples of high impact variants include sender, subject line, HTML vs plain text. Create both test email templates. Keep everything the same except for the one variant you want to test. In the test below, we tested two subject lines against each other. 2. Choose your sample size Nothing sounds scarier than sending out a test to a large group of contacts that completely flops. Since marketers are not mathematicians, test on at least 100 contacts. If you test on too few contacts, chances are you will not see a clear-cut winner. The goal is to find the lowest amount of contacts you can comfortably test on, while gathering good data. As you find your sample sweet spot, stick to testing on 100-500 contacts each time. Pull out the segment you want to send your email out to. From there, portion out the sample randomly. If you are using Hatchbuck, all you have to do is select the number of contacts you want to test. 3. Run the test Split the your sample size in half and send one template to one half and the second template to the other. In Hatchbuck, we make this step easy. Just select your sample audience, Click ‘Send Email’ from your templates, then select the two test templates. Hatchbuck will evenly split your list between the two templates. 4. Pick the winner Around Day 5-7, you should have pretty good picture of your results. If you look into your results too soon, you will likely see a significant change in your stats. If you wait too long, you are also likely to run into skewed results. If you are using Hatchbuck, review the “Email by Template” report to decide the winner of the experiment. Look at the open rates and click through rates. 5. Test again As you test different variants, keep the top performing variant as you move forward. For instance, in the example above, we first tested the subject lines. Once we found a winner, we then tested the email copy to continue to fine-tune our prospect campaign. For the best results early in your testing process, dedicate one week to testing each item independently. As you gain experience with A/B testing, you can get a better idea of your audience, what gets them engaged, and make the necessary changes to your testing time frame. Once you have ran a couple tests to fine-tune your email, it’s time to put your email to the test (literally). You will have confidence to email larger segmented lists and drive more ROI from your email marketing. We all go in with opinions on what we think our contacts want to receive from us, but the proof is in the stats. Go into AB testing free from opinions and guess work, and collect the data necessary to help you better target, communicate, and convert your prospects over time!
Why Your Agency Should Use a Subscription Based Pricing Model Posted on February 29, 2016December 5, 2018 by Katie Culp From Netflix to Dollar Shave Club, some of the best businesses on the planet are winning over consumers with subscription based pricing. And, if you think that subscriptions are best left to software as a service (SaaS) businesses – like Dropbox, Freshbooks, and Hatchbuck – you’re missing out on a business model that can increase revenue for your marketing agency. In a subscription-based pricing model, consumers benefit from the ultimate convenience of set-it & forget-it products and services delivered when and where they need them. At the same time, subscription-based businesses benefit from predictable, scalable revenue and better customer retention. If your agency spends too much time scrambling to find new clients or staff new projects, moving to a subscription based pricing model can help you build a healthier business that serves a more satisfied customer. Still a Project Based Agency? What You’re Missing… Predictable Revenue: Project-based work can be a chaotic roller coaster. One minute you’re scrambling to find your next client. The next moment, you’re hit with a big project and struggle to ramp up staff. With a subscription-based model, you have steady revenue from your client base month after month. You can focus on delivering stellar campaigns instead of focusing on business development or coordinating the outsourcing of work. Steady Staff: Staffing your agency can be quite tricky if you’re working on a project-by-project basis, and you may have to turn to contract employees to help you scale up or scale down as project work ebbs and flows. A predictable budget through subscription-based work ultimately means that you can hire and keep key talent to serve your steady clients, helping your agency to deliver a better product. Better Work: While there’s plenty of good freelance and contract workers out there, outsourcing can dilute your company’s vision and core values, affecting the product you put on the market. When you transition to a subscription model, your core team is made up of full time employees. Your team members feel more ownership of their work, they better understand the mission and vision of your agency, and you have more control over employee performance. Client Retention: When everything is project based, it’s tough to reject work because you can never be sure when your next project is coming. As a subscription based agency, you can be more picky about the clients you bring on. When you do bring on a new client, you can elevate the conversation to talk about their overall business goals – not just the goals of a specific project. And, because you’re well-staffed, your client gets a dedicated team that really knows your client’s business and can deliver better results, keeping clients happy and loyal for the long-haul. Agencies that adopt the subscription-based model can build a healthier business, but the benefits aren’t just on the agency side… Why Clients Love Subscription Based Agencies For the same reasons businesses prefer investing in SaaS – from easy maintenance to managing cash flow – clients love a subscription approach to working with an agency. Institutional Knowledge: A subscription gives your agency the ability to form long term relationships with your clients. You get to know their business and their ideal buyer inside-out, so when the time comes to execute a new campaign, you can skip the introduction call and get right to business producing better results for your client. Big Picture Ideas: Because you’re working together long-term, the focus becomes less about the net results of a single campaign, and more about moving the client’s business forward. Agility: If something’s not working, an agency can adjust the strategy to get the win for the client. So, when SEO doesn’t seem to be paying off, you can move efforts to content marketing for a time to get the ultimate ROI for the client. Cash Flow: Instead of shelling out a lump sum for a one-off project, your clients have a steady, predictable monthly fee. This also means that they’ve budgeted to spend on marketing every month, making marketing a core function for their business rather than a one-off project. Less Work for a Better Product: Switching anything is tough, whether it’s your mobile data plan or your sales and marketing software. But switching from agency to agency can be especially excruciating for clients. It takes time for you to understand your client’s goals, their culture, their ideal buyer – it takes time to build a good working relationship. Clients win when they can stick with one agency and get a dedicated staff for their account. So now that you know that the subscription based pricing model is good for agencies and clients, how do you make it happen for your marketing agency? Transitioning from Project-Based to Subscription-Based Pricing To move from a project-based to a subscription-based model, you might need to think a little differently about how you position your agency. Here are a few key areas to look at when switching to a subscription-based model. Think big picture: In a subscription model, stickiness is important. To keep your services sticky for your client, focus on your client’s overall business goals, not just deliverables for a specific campaign. Bundle your services: One digital strategy often fuels another, so if you can offer content marketing services with SEO, or landing page design with PPC, you can add more value to your client. Don’t forget to bundle sales and marketing software with your services. Managing a marketing automation tool and CRM for your client gives them insight into the results your campaigns are driving. Leverage reports: So you ran an email campaign for your client. That’s great, but what are the results, and how did you move the client closer to their goals? Reporting shows your value and feeds into the stickiness of your service. Monthly reporting can tie your work back to the business goals you kicked off with your client at the beginning of your relationship. Test pricing: If you take the set-it & forget-it approach to your pricing, you could be missing out on revenue. By testing your pricing, you can find the maximum amount clients are willing to pay. Move the needle on your subscription pricing and with a little testing, you can make sure you’re receiving the maximum ROI on your services. So how do you put these tips into practice? For instance, if you build WordPress sites, how do you turn that single project into an ongoing subscription service for your client? In this case, you could bundle web design with SEO and marketing automation. Once the website is built, you can continue to demonstrate value to your client by driving leads to their website, capturing those leads in the client’s CRM and nurturing them into customers through marketing automation. Every month, you can track how many leads you drove and nurtured into customers, showing your client directly how you’re impacting their business. Consumers are happily making the shift to subscription-based services – and the marketing industry is no exception. Leveraging subscription-based pricing for your agency means you can build a platform that puts people before projects, creating sustainable revenue, loyal clients, and a scalable business. image credit
The Key to Small Business Success In Sales: Caring About People Posted on February 26, 2016October 6, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick Caring – Defined as displaying kindness and concern for others. It’s a term not often heard in the sales process. In fact, for most businesses, sales is just a means to an end. A way to get a potential customer to buy your products and services and bring in the bacon. But Dale Carnegie said it best: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Honestly caring about the people who buy what you have to sell is the key to success in sales. So if you are looking to increase sales in your small business, here are a few ideas that can help to win the hearts of your prospects and customers: Put down the bullhorn. People don’t care what you know until they know that you care. It is a truism in life and in sales. Before you try to persuade your prospects and customers to buy your product or service, they need to first know that you truly care about solving their problem. Showing your prospects and customers that you care is not just about being all mushy and emotional. It’s more about being a genuine and authentic at every step of the communication process and being a great listener. That means asking questions with a sense of curiosity and truly looking for ways to provide valuable solutions to your prospects challenges. At the end of the day, caring about their needs first might just lead you to tell a potential customer that your product may not be the best for them or that a competitor’s product might be. Either way people will appreciate your refreshing approach to solving their problem, giving you a better chance to earn their trust and their business down the road or maybe even a referral. Do what you say. When a new prospect engages with you or your business the first thing that goes through their mind is can I TRUST you? Trust between you and your potential and current customers only happens when your business delivers on the promises that have been made. It is one of the golden rules of sales-Do what you say you were going to do. That means follow up when you said you would. Whether it’s a response to a simple pricing request or delivering your service on time, every time, prospects become repeat customers when they can depend on your word. In fact, there is nothing worse in sales than when a business promises something in the sales process and doesn’t deliver. It is a surefire way to show a prospect that you care more about making the sale than keeping your word. Think about promises you need to keep with your customers and work hard to keep them everyday. For example at Hatchbuck, we share our promises on our website so we can build trust and confidence with prospects and customers. It is a great way to keep us accountable and reminds daily that promises made to our prospects are promises kept once they become a valued customer. Understand your impact on others. When it comes to caring about people in sales, don’t forget about everyone that is required to make a great customer experience happen. After all sales doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It involves relationships. That means your customer, your customer service team, your vendors (just to name a few) are key to pulling of a successful sale. So with every sale that’s closed there is a ripple effect to the decision of signing the right customer or force fitting a solution into the wrong situation. For example, let’s say you own a bike manufacturing company that decides to sign a new customer that that is looking to buy 1000 new mopeds. So who wouldn’t want a 1000 new units right? By just focusing on the sale and not on the customer needs, it causes a huge problem for the business in it’s ability to keep a happy customer long-term. Showing care for everyone involved in the sales process will go along way to helping your business find and keep the right kind customers and ultimately deliver a better customer experience. Care about people beyond the sales process. Being a business that cares will make a lasting impression if you show that you care about people in general and not just those who are interested in buying your products. Look for ways to make an impact within your community by sponsoring non-profits when you can or even by offering your support during area disasters or tragedies. For example, if a youth sports team needs funding, be willing to offer what you can and if a major storm leaves many people struggling, offer to donate food and bottled water. The more active you are in the areas where your presence is not a requirement but a voluntary action, the higher your reputation of being a caring business will climb with your prospects and customers. Success in sales is not just about closing more customers for your small business. It’s about demonstrating that you care about the needs and interests of your prospects and customers. Authentically caring about people is the key to sales and business success.
Why WorkXO Powers Their Newest Project with Hatchbuck CRM Posted on February 25, 2016July 21, 2016 by Travis Arnold by Maddie Grant, Founding Partner of WorkXO We are WorkXO, a small business in the exciting process of what we call Mapping the Workplace Genome(™). We help companies of all sizes to map their own Workplace Genome, create an authentic brand story that helps to recruit people who are truly aligned to their business, and effectively push the culture transformation they’ve been dreaming of. We are still in the launching process, so in the past few months, we have been busy shoring up our internal processes so we hit the ground running. This includes finding the right CRM so we can build better relationships with our prospects and customers while scaling our business at the same time. The Challenge: Following Up with Prospects and Customers One of the first things we wanted to do to facilitate the launch of the Workplace Genome project – partly because we were combining an existing culture change consultancy with a new partner and new technologies – was consolidate all of the different ways we were reaching our customers. Email Lists: We had email lists all over the place. We had been in a referral business, meaning our pipeline consisted of “being lucky that people email us to ask us to do work”; we had no concept of what a true CRM process would look like. Contact Management: We had a low-tech way (basically a Gmail plugin) of keeping track of certain prospects and whether we needed to follow up or not, but it lacked any kind of to-do reminders. Sales Pipeline: We had some random pipeline spreadsheets where we manually tracked how much money was contracted to come in each quarter, but we had separate documents for pipeline versus sold and no easy way to connect them. We were so busy just doing the really important work that we do, that we had basically no infrastructure. We knew that a piecemeal process wasn’t going to cut it in the new company we were building – we were going to have exponentially many more customers in varying stages of the customer lifecycle. We would have referral business, like always. Our subscriber base is growing through the popular content we’re writing – topics like digital transformation and humanizing the workplace. Lastly, we had some new products and services to sell that we already knew we would want to build campaigns around. It was enough to make our heads spin, trying to make sense of how to organize it all. Oh, and did I mention there are only three of us? So when we started investigating CRMs, we panicked a little, because: We didn’t want to spend a ton of money on some huge system we didn’t need and wouldn’t be able to understand; we knew that we needed to start forming some new habits around building relationships with customers; and we needed it to be like “connective tissue” between all of the new things we were going to be doing. So when we found Hatchbuck, it was like a light shining from above, illuminating the path through the forest. (Not even joking). The Results: Hatchbuck Wins For a start, we could immediately migrate all of our various email lists into Hatchbuck in a matter of minutes, while tagging them with specific tags so we could keep a record of where these lists had originally come from. We immediately began to see how we could slice and dice our now huge list in multiple ways to maintain our ability to nurture relationships with individuals – that personalized handshake which we believe is at the core of building a company. Not only that, but we started immediately seeing how different people were clicking around different places on our website. We were able to set up rules so that we would be notified if someone was clicking around our consulting pages versus our Genome pages. And of course if anyone filled out our contact forms, we would know immediately what exactly they were interested in. And once we had those initial prospect conversations, we could instantly adjust their profile information and proposal statuses to keep track on a constant basis of the progress of those conversations. Most importantly, we could use the email marketing functionalities to make sure we could stay top of mind, by sending them the latest blog posts that were relevant to what they had been looking at. We’re just at the beginning of this journey – we only implemented Hatchbuck a month ago! We haven’t even scratched the surface yet in terms of automating campaigns, further segmenting our leads and customers, and all of the things we want to try. But we’re excited, and particularly grateful to have a partner in Hatchbuck to lead the way. About Maddie Grant Maddie gained notoriety as an expert digital strategist who has helped hundreds of organizations engage with their customer base and build capacity for using social media and online communities to achieve business results. Recognizing the transformative and human-centric power of social media early on, she helped organizations integrate social media into their culture authentically, rather than attempting to bolt it on a new process. In addition to her culture change work at WorkXO, Maddie is Editor of SocialFish.org, one of the most visited and respected blogs written for nonprofit and association executives. She is ALWAYS working on her next book, and the two she wrote with her partner, Jamie Notter, are clearly just the beginning (see When Millennials Take Over). About WorkXO We are WorkXO, a small business centered around what we call Mapping the Workplace Genome(™) – our proprietary assessment, based on years of our research and writing, that allows companies of all sizes to understand “what it’s really like to work here”. With your Workplace Genome, you can create an authentic brand story that helps you recruit people who are truly aligned to your business, and effectively push culture transformation, which so many companies are trying to do in our changing times.
The Top 4 Most-Used Drag and Drop Website Builders Posted on February 24, 2016March 24, 2020 by Jessica Lunk Think you need to hire an expensive website vendor to design and develop a new, modern website? Think again. If you need to update your website for your business, there are a surprising number of drag and drop website builders available. Before, building a website required a lot of technical knowledge; but today, not so much. The process of designing a website is so simple that one simply “drags” and “drops” design elements onto pages. On top of that, you can get a brand new website quickly. There are many of these services, but not all of them contain the same features and capabilities. Here are the four most popular “drag and drop” website builders: Squarespace Pros Squarespace is among the top three sites. It features beautiful, sophisticated templates that are mobile-responsive that are more customizable than their. In addition, there are plenty of gadgets and integrations you can add to the site you build. Additionally, the site automatically optimizes your site for searches. Cons Although there are many options to create a customized look, Squarespace has a limited template library. The style editor can be overwhelming and it is not the easiest drag and drop builder to use. Should You Use Squarespace? Yes! Squarespace has excellent customer support and they are very reliable with updates. Finished sites rival those sites built for your competitors by professional website designers. Pricing starts at just $12.00 per month. Wix With Wix, you can create a beautiful, sleek, clean-looking website, and for totally free! They have tons of features for designing, managing, and promoting your website online. Plus, their platform gives you a lot of design freedoms so you can create something you’ll love. Pros Wix has advanced design features, unlimited fonts, and absolutely beautiful templates. Cons You aren’t able to switch templates after your site is published online. So no changing your mind, as what you initially pick is what you get. Should You Use Wix? If you’re looking for a modern design or want to easily move your existing site and create a new one, definitely give Wix a try. Just make sure you have a firm idea of the layout, look, and feel you’re going for. And, make sure you choose a template that has staying power because the last thing you’ll want to do is have to change it later. Paid accounts start at $13 per month. Weebly Pros Weebly is a very close second to Wix in popularity. Like Wix, it too has a very intuitive interface for building your website. Also like Wix, there is no need for coding experience or expertise. This means even if you have never built a website before, your site from Weebly will give you a professional, confident, and attractive website. Weebly offers a free account option, gorgeous design themes and full options for an e-commerce store front. Additionally, it offers free metrics—so no explicit need for Google Analytics—though many believe that Google Analytics is the gold standard for free analytics. It also optimizes your site for mobile search and mobile operations. The source code is downloadable too. Cons Once you make a change you cannot undo it. Instead, you have to go to the editing mode to change what you did, otherwise, it will publish your unwanted changes unless you edit them out. Should You Use Weebly? Weebly is a solid choice as it includes many features such as an exceptional interface, free accounts, and site metrics. Paid accounts start at $8.00 per month. Duda Pros Duda is the newest entrant on this list of “drag and drop” website building sites. With Duda, you can drag images, charts or whatever you please onto your site. It includes optional widgets such as Click-to-Call and online scheduling. It also allows for essential integrations with other kinds of a web-based solutions including Yelp reviews, OpenTable, Disqus Comments, PayPal and more. A recent upgrade allows for the ability to add an e-commerce storefront. Duda also has an analytics dashboard and is hosted on Amazon Web Services. Duda also builds websites that are responsive which mean that the site automatically adjusts to the size screen it is being viewed on. Cons With Duda being newer to the market, there are still a few hiccups in its page-editing function. Also, the site can only be hosted on Amazon Web Services and does not yet have blogging capabilities. Should You Use Duda? Overall, Duda offers many excellent features with more on the horizon. But, with an inability to port to another hosting site, an inability for blogging, and some ongoing issues with its editing capabilities it makes sense to wait until the next update is released before jumping in. Paid accounts start at $5.00 per month. Other Resource: Hatchbuck’s Landing Page Builder If building an entire website isn’t what you’re looking for right now, then at least make sure your current one is set up for success. Take, for example, our landing page and popups builder. As our marketing automation software gives you the ability to track success from your inbound efforts, it also provides you with a simple solution for building landing pages so you can attract, capture, and convert leads on-site. Create landing pages that are totally customizable, beautiful and on-brand, and help push your inbound strategy forward. Your website is a key tool in your sales and marketing process, so is it effective in capturing the attention of new business? An updated site with clean design will help you boost conversions. Keep in mind that you will be limited to the customization options the drag and drop builder offers and its not extendable like a WordPress site. You may run into search engine optimization issues. Also, your prospect may be able to tell you built your site on a builder which could relect poorly on your brand reputation. All in all, though, using a drag and drop builder can help you get a new site quickly without breaking your budget. (Edit 2/25 – Duda does offer blogging on their platform!)
The Unexpected Secret to Effective Leadership: Listening Posted on February 23, 2016May 27, 2016 by Erin Posey You have all of the qualities of a good leader: You are sincere, honest, accountable, and have a respectable attitude. However, there is one key difference between leaders who are truly successful in their business and those that are just mediocre. The most effective leadership requires skilled listening. As a leader who listens to and understand their employees, you will foster a relationship that encourages employees to achieve their own personal goals, and in turn, be more willing to give their best to you and your company. What are the consequences of not being a good listener in a leadership role? When you fail to listen to what your employees need to say, a communication gap grows that can hinder business relationships and be a stumbling block in business growth. Employees have a need to be heard by their employer, whether it is when they have personal issues that compromise their performance or want to voice a concern about their position. A disconnect between you and the people you are trying to lead means a break in transparency, which will inhibit loyalty from developing for the long term. How do you effectively evolve into a leader with good listening skills? There are many benefits to reap as a leader who effectively listens to your employees. However, listening is about far more than just being quiet while an employee talks. There are a handful of ways you can show that you are growing as a leader who is a good listener. Be engaging in employee conversation. The best listeners don’t just sit silently taking in a conversation, they stay actively engaged by asking questions and showing interest. If an employee comes to you with an issue, stay open to listening, but let them know you are engaged by inquiring about further information or suggesting solutions. Listen without judgment. Being judgmental when you are listening will only further the gap between you and your employees. Stay neutral and be conscious about what you say in responses to make sure that you do not come off sounding like you are making assumptions about a situation. Listen on an expansive level. Being an effective listener means you are not just hearing, but seeing the conversation and the non-verbal communication signals. You pay attention to a person’s demeanor, body language, and eye contact. Embrace two-way communication without interrupting. Being a leader often means that you hold an executive presence, sometimes with an all-knowing personality. In business, confident communication is important, but don’t let your confidence get in the way of effective leadership. Encourage open communication by staying tuned in and asking questions, but do not interrupt or intercede your opinions without being asked. Believe it or not, only about two percent of professionals have formal education and training to help them improve their skills with listening in communication. Therefore, becoming a good listener on your own is always an admirable trait and is often viewed as compassion by your employees. Become a more compassionate leader and your employees will trust you and your business.
Save Time with Marketing Automation Posted on February 22, 2016September 16, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 7, 2020. Modern marketing campaigns are fragmented with different channels and lots of moving parts. An interested buyer might see your ad in a trade magazine, see your AdWords ad in a Google search, like your social media page, and subscribe to your email newsletter all before deciding to buy from you. It can get a little complicated. It’s no surprise, then, that small business owners want the most help when it comes to creating a sales and marketing process. Segmenting contacts, sending catered messages, nurturing, tracking, and converting can take a lot of manual labor and time. That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is key to saving you time while making sure that every contact is being nurtured for your best chance to turn them into a customer and a loyal fan of your business. Let’s take a deep dive into the various features and areas of marketing automation that save you a ton of time. Tasks Marketing Automation Takes Off Your Plate 1. Lead Nurturing Wish you could regularly communicate with leads so that they’d move closer to being sales-qualified leads? One effective marketing automation functionality is a drip-email campaign. Pre-written emails are sent out to specific individuals at the right time when they perform a specific action. Once you’ve written them, your marketing automation software handles the timing and sending, allowing you to nurture leads without spending your entire day sending emails. Each customer has a path to take before making the decision to buy – whether it’s investing in new technology, partnering with a business consultant, or choosing the right insurance. That path – the buyer’s journey – can include blog content, social media, digital ads, emails, and phone calls. You can’t control exactly where buyers go, but you can help guide them in the right direction, shortening their journey. Once you’ve been introduced to a new lead – maybe from a trade show list, lead magnet or networking event – a lead nurturing process can automate the flow of information to the buyer. For instance, say you’re a travel agent who specializes in corporate incentive trips. You meet several great contacts at a networking event, including the CEO of a midsize business. After such a short introduction, it’s not the right time to proceed with a sales pitch, but you want to stay on her radar. You put her information into the CRM of your sales and marketing software and start her on an introduction campaign. The campaign automatically sends her an introduction about your company, then proceeds to send a sequence of your best blog posts regarding employee incentive programs. As she clicks blog post links and goes back to your website, she downloads your Incentive Trip Planning Checklist. The intro campaign stops, and she’s started down a more sales-focused campaign, sending a case study of businesses that have improved sales performance through your employee incentive trips. The case study is followed by a call-to-action to reach out to you for a free incentive trip itinerary. She follows through, and you’re on your way to winning another customer who has been warmed up with relevant, helpful information through the lead nurturing process. 2. Email Marketing Email marketing campaigns, quarterly newsletters, end-of-the-month sales incentives – there are a lot of emails to create. In fact, most lead nurturing campaigns include multiple emails and some can be super short, but some can include 10 or more. Email has been around forever, but it’s still the most effective digital channel for converting contacts into customers. Email can pay off, but getting bogged down in design woes can hinder your performance. Instead of reformatting every email you send, marketing automation lets you build and track email templates. Benefits include: Maintaining a consistent look and feel for every email you send to prospects and customers, boosting recognition and recall of your brand. Using merge fields to include personalized text in your emails, such as contact name, contact company, the contact’s sales rep and more. Tracking email open and link click stats for each email template Testing one template against another to see which templates perform the best. Many marketing automation systems provide an email template library of predesigned templates so you can start out with a format that adheres to best practices, giving you an even greater chance of reaching prospects and customers in their inbox. 3. Lead Scoring and Segmenting Not every lead is ready to talk to a sales rep. The quickest way to annoy your sales team is to send them the contact information of people who aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision. With marketing automation software, you can assign scores to leads based on what kinds of activities they perform. So if someone just visited your site once, they probably aren’t very interested in buying your product or signing up for a subscription. But if they signed up for your newsletter, follow your social media, tune into your webinars, and downloaded your ebook, they are clearly an engaged lead who may respond to a sales call. If you pulled a list in a standalone CRM, or even pulled up your contacts in Outlook, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which contacts where hot prospects, and which were cold leads. Lead scoring allows you to approach marketing more efficiently by spending your time on promising prospects. When you hook your CRM into marketing automation, however, you can track contacts’ activity and tally a score. With contact scores, you know who is ripe for reaching out to, and who could use a little more information about your business or their pain-point before starting a sales conversation. For instance, you might give every lead one point for clicking an email link, five points for filling out a form on your website, and -10 points for unsubscribing from your newsletter. Lead scoring your contacts with marketing automation gives you the information you need to determine what leads are most important to follow up on. You can intelligently prioritize people to contact so that no one will slip through the cracks. It also helps you understand what kind of activities you should perform (emails, calls, etc.) to move colder leads down the funnel. Marketing automation allows you to segment your leads into respective contact lists. For example, a common pain point or interest in services. With an automated process, these emails can be drip-fed to these designated contact lists. Again, relevant content at the right time! 4. Content Management Content is valuable, be it for your brand, your clients, or both. Prospects and customers want to be targeted specifically based on their interests, or they’ll pass you up for your competition. Marketing automation can help you manage that content efficiently and save your agency time by connecting the right content with the right leads. Below are several ways marketing automation software supports your agency’s content management: Dynamic Content Dynamic Content is “smart” content. It’s also your secret weapon. It adapts to the behaviors and interests of the lead, based on website data it gathers from your leads and customers. The content can be personalized based on the lead’s request or previous visits to your website. It also allows leads to submit information back to you, which will help you gain additional information on that lead’s behavior. And better yet, updating the materials is a lot simpler and less time consuming than doing it manually. Content Amplification Take that valuable, dynamic content, and break out of the traditional organic strategies. Integrate it with paid, earned and owned tactics across multiple channels, such as websites, social media, and advertising. 5. Troubleshooting With an automated process, it’s more apparent when you see a glitch or bottleneck in your system. You can identify these issues more quickly and find a solution in real-time, as opposed to waiting for next month’s report and seeing discrepancies that happen too late to make changes to. Not only does marketing automation take things off your plate, but it also has built-in features that streamline your efforts and make getting things done a breeze. Here are a few of those features and how they help you save time. Marketing Automation Features You Need 1. Tagging Few things stay static these days, and keeping tabs on your database of contacts can be a chore. Tags help you dynamically segment and filter your prospects and customers into lists you can easily target with hyper-relevant communication. For instance, with BenchmarkONE marketing automation, you can tell BenchmarkONE to add tags to your contacts based on the pages they visit on your website, or the links they click in your emails. So, if you’re a fitness center, you could tell BenchmarkONE to automatically add a “Yoga” tag to any contact that visits pages on your website that have information about yoga classes. With tag rules, you can then create a rule like “if the ‘Yoga’ tag is added to a contact, send them a yoga email.” As you learn more about your contacts’ preferences and activity, you can send them messages they can relate to and help them along the path to conversion in the most efficient way possible. 2. Tasks Attracting, converting, closing, and delighting (the stages of the inbound marketing methodology) take time. It’s a process, which means there are multiple steps. But, with hundreds or thousands of contacts to keep tabs on, it’s easy for processes to break – causing hot opportunities to slip through the cracks. Marketing automation helps keep processes and people on track with campaign workflows and tasks. So, if someone makes a purchase, downloads an ebook, or subscribes to your newsletter, your marketing automation software can automatically send the appropriate follow-up email, as well as create a task for a team member to follow-up. Then, your customer-facing team – whether it be a salesperson or account manager – can easily keep track of follow-up, like meetings and calls. 3. Tracking You can track engagement, lead source, contact status, sales rep and more, giving you precious insight into what’s working, and what’s eating up valuable resources in your sales and marketing process. Other items you can track: You can tell if one salesperson is particularly good at closing big deals. You can see what your top customer lead source is. You can tell which emails are getting the most click-throughs. With data at your fingertips, you can easily turn up the dial on your sales and marketing efforts. When the daily grunt-work of tracking, tallying and analyzing is all automated for you, your sales and marketing process actually gets less robotic and more personal. With marketing automation, you can free up time and resources to focus on growing key relationships for your business. Digital marketing can seem complex, but with marketing automation, you can standardize processes, deliver a consistent customer experience and save a ton of time. Rather than focusing on manual, administrative tasks, your team is freed up to create awesome marketing content, follow-up with hot leads, and build better relationships with customers.
Be a Leader: Title or Not Posted on February 19, 2016May 27, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Everyone has a role to play in business. There are people who can always be counted on to provide solid work, there are others who ask really important questions, and then there are others who motivate everyone to perform better. Some of these people have titles and some of them do not, but when it comes to being a leader, titles really don’t matter. How Can You Be a Leader? Being a leader has to do with one thing: choosing to be proactive. Yep, that’s it! The only thing you need to do to be a leader is to make a conscious choice to become one. Although some people may have a natural leadership instinct, everyone can make the choice to be a leader and then work hard at it. The following are some simple ways you can become a leader—title or not: Work like crazy. Leaders identify themselves as such by doing really good work. By always going the extra mile, leaders earn the respect of others who also want to work as hard or as well. Another result of working extra hard is trust; other employees and superiors trust that you can take on more difficult and challenging tasks. When a respected person does excellent work and makes a supreme effort, coworkers notice and mimic that effort. Help others. Leaders are part of teams who are striving to accomplish the same thing, often by ensuring everyone is up to speed and on board. When someone is struggling to keep up with the amount of work or the quality of work, the team suffers. A leader goes to the person who is struggling and assists them or ensures they have what they need to succeed. Assistance with the struggling coworker may help them do better in the future, and they will be more likely to be just as helpful in the future. Encourage others. Leaders have the power to influence. That influence can be for bad—griping about deadlines and resources—or that influence can be for good—encouraging everyone to work toward the same goal with high-quality efforts. Never underestimate the power of compliments and praise. Everyone responds to positive reinforcement and building positive relationships is the only way to be an effective leader. Receiving a leadership title without having any relationships with those you lead make you an ineffective leader. Speak up. Be willing to suggest changes that will make things work better in the office. Read blogs and other material that will offer suggestions—not just materials on leadership, although they are important—but articles about your industry. Sometimes, if you make a suggestion to your boss, your idea will be shot down. This can be a learning opportunity. What may seem like a great idea to you might not, in reality, be possible. In the least, your boss knows you have ideas to share and you can now use that knowledge to learn more about your business. Even without a title, there are many ways to be a leader. Leadership and responsibility can make jobs more enjoyable. Becoming a leader now, without a title, can eventually lead to the title, but even if it doesn’t, you will have gained the respect of your peers, contributed quality work and done your best for the company you work for.
3 Ways Marketing Automation Software Makes Salespeople Happy Posted on February 18, 2016June 18, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick If you own a small business, then chances are you spend your hard earned money on marketing channels such as SEO, PPC and social media to drive leads. But often times those leads don’t convert into sales and long term customers. It can be a big frustration not only for you but a source of contention for your sales reps as they often blame the marketing campaigns for bad leads. So if you want to make your salespeople happy and help them close more sales, then it’s time to think about bringing marketing automation software into your business. Here’s why: 1. Improved Insights Salespeople are happy when they have as much information as possible about their leads and prospects in the sales pipeline. In today’s fast-paced online world, a sales professional needs to have more than just the basic contact info in their CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) such as: name, phone number, email, address, etc. By leveraging marketing automation software within your CRM, sales people have insights at their fingertips such as what pages of their website their leads have visited, what emails they have clicked on and what online forms they have filled out. Not only does this help salespeople to build relationships faster, but ultimately allows them to respond to leads more quickly – and we all know speed wins deals. In fact, according to Inside Sales, when leads are called within 5 minutes, they are 100 times more likely to convert into a sale than leads called in 30 minutes. 2. Nurture Leads Salespeople are happy when their leads are ready. Most of the time, leads generated by marketing get sent over to sales with no forethought of whether they are close to purchasing or not. For example, someone who is an attendee at a trade show or downloads a whitepaper from your website may not be the same quality of lead as someone who is ready to demo your software and fills out a contact form on your website. In fact, studies show that on average 50% of leads are qualified, but not yet ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research) Marketing automation software has the power to nurture all of your contacts from the top of the funnel all the way through the customer lifecycle. Marketing software converts website visitors into leads and then segments them into the right buckets based on their specific needs and interests. It also enables you to evaluate where a prospect is located in the sales process (or sales funnel): If the customer is in the top of the funnel (Just looking phase), the customer probably doesn’t need a hard sell, but might be better served with a simple three step email campaign introducing your business and how it can solve a problem they have. If a customer is in the middle of the funnel, a marketing automation software platform can help create a more focused response to that interest using targeted emails. These specific emails can be customized according to the prospect’s interests and how often they have visited the site and looked at a product or service. By engaging or nurturing your customers seamlessly using marketing automation software, you can better prepare leads before sending them over to sales. 3. Score Leads Salespeople are happy when they know the hot leads from the cold. Marketing automation helps identify the high-quality, hot leads from the low-quality, cold leads. It does this using a simple scoring model. Certain scores are applied to customers based on interactions on your website, online and through content they engage with. Your business can weight certain interactions differently so that scores reflect the true progress of a lead. This way, when the salespeople receives their leads from various marketing initiatives, they know the hot from the cold and where to focus their valuable sales time.The result- salespeople spend less time cold calling and more time talking to “HOT” prospects and earning commissions. The goal of marketing automation software is obviously not just to make the sales team happy, but to give them high-quality and organized leads to make them more productive and drive more revenue for the business. By leveraging automation you and your team will gain better insights into your contacts and have more time to spend with those leads who are ready to purchase.