8 Signs Your Brand Is Outdated Posted on August 31, 2018August 30, 2018 by Allie Wolff Big, goofy bubble fonts. Obvious stock photos. 3-D clipart. Most designers are glad these are things of the past. But at one point in time, they were cutting-edge. The truth is, every brand needs a revamp from time to time. Take a look at Google’s logo changes, for example. The original version is a far cry from what we see when we start a search today. It may seem obvious that Google was in need of an update – but it can be harder to tell when you’re analyzing your own brand. Plus, a complete rebrand comes with a lot of other implications and responsibilities, from reworking your messaging to updating all of your design files and style guides. Before you make the leap, it’s important to consider whether your brand is truly outdated, or if it just needs a few tweaks (sometimes called a brand refresh). To help you out, here are some surefire signs your brand is living in the wrong decade. #1: You don’t have a responsive, mobile-friendly website. A responsive website means one that doesn’t require excessive scrolling, zooming, or other maneuvering to view on different devices. The easiest way to test this is to whip out your smartphone and open your site. If this was your first time visiting it, would you feel frustrated? Are there any technical issues with closing popups, opening links, or other logistics? What do images look like? You may be tempted to shirk this one, but the stats show that most users are accessing websites on mobile. And with voice search on the rise, Google’s a lot more likely to shower you with fame and glory (i.e., put your site at the top of search results) if your site is optimized for mobile devices. #2: Your company is modern, but your graphics say “1997.” In the dark ages of the internet, it wasn’t uncommon to see neon yellow body text on a black background – or bright green on red. Today’s browsers and web design platforms make it easier than ever to create modern, sleek graphics, so if you haven’t given your site an overhaul since then, it’s probably time. There are tons of tools out there – even free ones! – that can make non-designers look like pros. #3: Your competitors’ designs look completely different from yours. It’s not always best to go with the flow. Sometimes, and especially if you’re in a creative field, it makes sense to disregard trends and competitors, and instead forge your own path. However, if there are vast differences between your site and your competition, take note. If the differences are purely aesthetic (they use a cool color scheme, while you use a warm one, for example) you probably don’t need to change. But if their sites have improved functionality, stunning images or graphics, or unusual effects that create a powerful user experience, you may want to incorporate those ideas into your own branding. #4: Your main offering, or result, has changed – but it lingers in your messaging. It’s perfectly normal for a business to start as one thing and transition into something else. Look at Apple: once just a computer company, it now sells phones, smartwatches and TVs. If your brand has made a similar shift, is it reflected in your messaging? The last thing you want to do is confuse your prospects about what you do. #5: Your prospects don’t understand what you do. Pay attention to your initial conversations with prospects. Further, talk to your sales team about the most common questions (and objections) that come from your leads. If your brand creates an impression that doesn’t accurately indicate what you do, it’s definitely time to rethink your brand identity. #6: Nobody’s visiting your website. Check your traffic and unique visitor stats over the last several months. There’s no rule of thumb for what’s normal and what’s not, but if you’ve seen a decline in traffic or unique visitors over time, a brand refresh can be the perfect way to re-generate buzz around your business. #7: You’re in a tech-focused industry. If you’re, say, a tailor or a plant nursery, you may not need the latest parallax scrolling effects on your site to stay ahead of your competition. However, if you’re an internet-based business, an agency, or any business that touts forward-thinking as a value, you should be giving your site a regular refresh. How can you expect your future clients to believe that you’re tech savvy if this isn’t reflected in your own web design? #8: Your brand lacks meaningful visuals. Design is, at its core, a language. Like writing, its mission is to communicate an idea or feeling. And when done right, good design can share ideas faster and with a greater chance of recall than text alone. Modern brands are leveraging the power of digital technology to include images, illustrations, animations, infographics, and more. Take a hard look at your brand: does it rely too much on text to communicate your identity and offerings? If so, it might be time to hire a strong conceptual designer to help you reimagine your brand with images.
6 Tips For Making the Most of Your CRM in Your Marketing Efforts Posted on August 30, 2018November 11, 2022 by Jessica Lunk What if you already had a tool that gave you a plethora of detailed information on your customers – what they find interesting, what annoys them, and when, where, and why they’re buying your products or services? This would be incredibly valuable to your marketing. You could turn repeat customers into brand evangelists, and start connecting with the new prospects who are most likely to adore your offerings. This tool exists, and it’s your CRM. Your CRM is essential to the success of your sales and customer service efforts. But your CRM has another incredible power: it provides invaluable insights into your customers’ interests, personalities, and behaviors that can supercharge your marketing strategies. Unfortunately, whether due to the learning curve or overwhelming amount of data available, many businesses (both large and small) are under-utilizing their CRMs in their marketing. Don’t be one of them! Here are our top six tips for getting the most out of your CRM in your marketing efforts. Refocus your training and onboarding process. Humans are resistant to change, even when the change is something that will make life easier – like a powerful new CRM. And even those employees and contractors who do appreciate the value of your CRM are still prone to error, meaning they may not always use your CRM consistently. The solution is both to create a consistent training program for new hires and existing team members and to establish a list of rules or best practices for using the CRM. Your training program doesn’t need to be elaborate, either. Create a series of short video tutorials on key aspects of how your business uses your CRM. Supplement this with a “cheat sheet” for busy salespeople and contractors to make it easy for them to follow your best practices. And remember, even the best-laid training plan is a waste without follow-up: either you or another team member should be responsible for enforcing these changes. Utilize tagging. Storing all of your customers’ data in one place (your CRM) is a good first step. However, you’ll start to see truly significant ROI when you use that data to personalize your marketing content. Use grouping, tagging, and segmentation to assign meaningful labels to your contacts. Categorize them by: age gender job title income level or revenue interests critical issues at work preferred social media channel, and more. Then, sync up with your marketing team to develop personas based on these demographics – and use them to guide the creation of your marketing content. Sync CRM data with your website and landing pages. You can learn a lot from studying user behavior on your website. Imagine one of your contacts views your “pricing” page three times in a day, but soon forgets about your product and continues researching competitors. By contrast, imagine you’ve set up your CRM to send an automatic follow-up email to users who repeatedly visit your pricing page. Now, just several minutes after your prospect reads about your pricing, they receive an email from a friendly sales rep asking if they’d like to learn more. Behavioral data serves another purpose, too: it helps you understand which components of your campaigns are working and which aren’t. Study bounce rates, average session time, click through rates, pageviews, and pages per session to identify opportunities for improvement. Create a drip campaign. Use the data in your CRM to create one (or several) customized email drip campaigns based on your subscribers’ unique interests. For example, if you’re sending out a newsletter to all contacts, make note of how they respond. Who’s opening your emails, and who’s clicking? Target those leads with a middle- or bottom-funnel email drip campaign to move them from prospect to customer. For more on creating effective drip campaigns, check out our blog post on the topic. Import and sync your contact data across all channels. Your CRM isn’t just a place to store data from your email subscribers. Maximize your reach by syncing your CRM with all channels where you make contact with new leads – from your personal and professional email accounts to those of your sales team. You can even download contact information from LinkedIn and other professional networking sites and add that information to your CRM in order to grow your reach. Automate anything you can. Most CRMs have some degree of automation capabilities, whether it’s email marketing automation or reminders sent to your sales team to follow up with specific prospects. Study the automation features of your CRM, and if you’re in need of more, use a tool like Zapier to set up workflows that serve your unique organization. Your CRM is a goldmine of information that can teach you how to better serve your current and future customers. Though it will take time to adapt it to your particular needs, it’s well worth the investment in the long-run.
9 Ways to Deliver More Effective Feedback As A Leader Posted on August 28, 2018August 28, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick As a leader, you have a lot of people under your influence who depend on you. One of your responsibilities is to nurture and guide your team members so they’ll acquire the skills and tools needed to advance in their careers. Effective feedback is one of the most important things that your team can receive from you to enable them to learn, grow and move forward. Give feedback regularly. If feedback is given regularly and followed up with positive action, it becomes an extremely valuable tool for career progression and personal growth. However, if feedback becomes something which is given on an ad hoc basis, it can be harder to implement and is not as useful in the grand scheme of things. Give it the constant attention it needs so it becomes a regular tool in your company arsenal. Provide context. It is hardly worth telling someone that their performance is lacking without being able to show real-life solid examples. How did their actions impact the others on the team? How did it affect the company as a whole? Emphasize the importance of their position and show them that everything they do has a knock-on effect. Without the context, it can be hard to understand the feedback, let alone take it to heart. Don’t be afraid to give some tough love. It’s understandable that you want to be liked as a leader, but if you don’t shy away from handing out difficult feedback, you’ll be more respected for it. It may be painful to tell someone about their faults, but at the end of the day when you see them grow because of it, that’s a reward in and of itself. Take a deep breath and give out constructive feedback tactfully. No one is perfect, and we can all improve in certain areas. Be the guide to show them the way. Acknowledge that you might mess up. As hard as dolling out feedback is, know that you may not get it right every time. You may make mistakes, and you may miss the mark on valuable judgment calls, but that’s all part and parcel of a leadership position. The more you work on the delivery of your feedback, the more you’ll improve. Give yourself time and be kind to yourself if you get it wrong. Creating a feedback loop can be a huge learning curve if you have never had to do it before. Align feedback with their goals. The feedback you give will have more meaning to the recipient if it ties in with their goals – whether on a professional and personal level. Make sure you know what their goals are before you deliver any sort of feedback. If need be, chat to determine goals and direction before you hold a feedback meeting. If your feedback is irrelevant to their aspirations, it will be taken with a grain of salt and largely ignored. Demonstrate compassion. Demonstrate compassion when it comes to the behavior and efforts of others. Choose language carefully so your team understands that you have their back even if mistakes were made. Be empathetic to their needs and forgiving when things go wrong that are out of their control. Follow up. In between feedback sessions, take the time to schedule a follow-up session to see how everything is going. Did they understand what was said? Were they able to implement any changes? This follow-up meeting ensures that time isn’t wasted during the next meeting or review, and you can move forward at a more rapid pace rather than continuing to re-examine the past. Remember to document your conversations for exactly this purpose. Listen before you speak. While it may be part of your job description to deliver the necessary feedback to your team, don’t hog the conversation. You won’t learn anything if you don’t listen. Perspective is important and may uncover some gems of wisdom if you just take the time to listen. Listening closely will provide clarity and benefit both you and your team members. Be prepared. As a leader you owe it to your employees to plan your feedback ahead of time. The more honest the feedback, the better. Provide them with tools and suggestions that will help them learn from their mistakes. Remember to always maintain the focus on professional takeaways and never make it personal. Avoid the use of scripts, but rather provide a list of constructive points that will help move the conversation forward. Remember that feedback can motivate your team to a very high degree and increase employee engagement. It paves the way for better and more open lines of communication and can solve many issues that would otherwise become massive problems for your company.
How to Tie Google Analytics into Your PPC Strategy Posted on August 27, 2018August 28, 2018 by Guest Author For every PPC marketer, it’s a challenge to find the right balance when analyzing data. Ever felt torn between “need more data for a full picture“ and “totally overwhelmed by numbers?” The solution is probably easier than you’d imagine. There are several ways to streamline your analytics efforts in order to keep the balance – one of them is to make sure you’re squeezing the most out of the tools you’re already using. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful platform for marketers, but with the wealth of features it provides, it’s easy to overlook what’s really important. We’ve put together five Google Analytics features you should be using to enhance your PPC strategy. Read on to make sure you’re leveraging them all! Quickly test goals with Real-Time reports Before launching a PPC campaign, you need to make sure all the goals and events are set up correctly, in order to properly track the campaign’s results. The quickest way to do this is to use the ‘Real-Time’ report. Open the ‘Conversions’ tab and then go to your target page and perform the action you’ve set as a goal; if set up correctly, the counter on the ‘Conversions’ page will reflect it. Explore assisted conversions When it comes to tracking conversions, an average conversion path will most likely have several channels contributing to the final goal. If a channel appears at any stage except for the final interaction, it’s considered to be assisting the conversion. Google Analytics allows you to explore assisted conversions, identify which channels were more effective in assisting conversions, analyze how the situation changed over time and tweak your PPC strategy based on this data. The main advantage, compared to Google Ads, is the ability to compare multiple channels, including social advertising, referral traffic, and more. Gain Audience insights Google Analytics has huge potential for identifying the best-performing and the worst-performing audiences for your niche. There are some ways you can improve your PPC performance based on audience insights: Build audiences for remarketing campaigns in both GDN and DoubleClick and use Analytics to define the criteria for adding users to remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). Find ideas for attracting new traffic by exploring those who convert best. Once you determine their characteristics in terms of demographics, interests, geographical position, etc., you can launch new campaigns targeting audiences with the same characteristics in GDN or social media. Identify what your worst-performing users have in common, in order to exclude these audiences from your campaigns. It’s important to note that Google Ads provides audience insights as well, but only based on the traffic from Google Ads, while Google Analytics is able to accumulate data from all channels. Compare key metrics for different channels Analyzing behavior and conversions in Google Ads doesn’t give you the full picture. How do visitors brought via paid search and display ads perform, compared to those brought by social media advertising? Email? Referral? Organic? The bird’s-eye view of all the types of traffic will help you better understand the value of PPC channels and, eventually, reallocate budgets and efforts to boost your results. Make use of Custom Alerts and Annotations Setting up custom alerts is great if you want to have control of your overall traffic and user behavior situation. While Google Ads alerts are handy to warn you about drastic changes in CTR, CPC or conversions for a particular campaign, Google Analytics is helpful to understand a full picture. There are some metrics you might already be tracking through custom alerts like shifts in impressions, clicks and conversions. Some less obvious examples that could be helpful for you as a PPC specialist include: Site load speed slowdown – can lead to a conversion rate drop Bounce rate spike – one of the ways to know if the landing page content is irrelevant Branded traffic from Google Ads decrease – may be a signal a competitor has started bidding on your brand name Branded organic traffic increase – useful to track when you run a massive brand awareness campaign Annotations are another great opportunity to track and analyze changes on your website, especially when there are several departments (technical department, PR managers, event planners) to use them. Migration to a new CMS, big conference or massive PR campaign – these are just a few examples of what can influence the results of your PPC efforts. Author Bio Olga Basova is the PPC lead at SEMrush. Olga has worked in international IT companies for over eight years, including big market players as Veeam and Wrike before joining SEMrush. She has hands-on experience in all fields of digital marketing taking special interest in running high-performing lead generation campaigns using various paid acquisition channels.
12 Podcasts That Will Make Your Commute More Productive Posted on August 24, 2018 by Allie Wolff For many, commuting is just part and parcel of getting to and from work each day. How you use that time is, of course, up to you. As a huge fan of podcasts, I’ll tell you that they’ll not only make the time go faster but will also enable you to learn more about yourself and may even help you forge ahead in your business. Listening to a podcast is a hands-free approach to travel even in the most crowded of circumstances. You can kill time while being productive and subsequently entertain yourself whether you’re walking, carpooling, riding the subway or catching the bus. Here are some podcasts we definitely recommend. Ted Talks Daily The subjects and experts featured on Ted Talks Daily are varied, to say the least. Ted Talks Daily allows you to listen to inspiring leaders from all walks of life, condensed into bite-sized pieces for you to enjoy on your travels to and from work. Girlboss Radio Sophia Amoruso talks to female entrepreneurs and poses all the questions you need to ask. Wishing to push the boundaries and learn from the best, then Girlboss Radio discusses topics with those who have trodden the unpaved paths before you. Listen Money Matters If you want to get ahead in your finances and free your “inner financial badass,” while at the same time avoiding tedious financial discussions, make this podcast your first stop. The informative range of interviews discusses budgeting, money management, investing and more. Planet Money As the global economy shifts, sometimes seemingly overnight, Planet Money can help you make sense of the ever-changing environment. Produced by NPR, this series will get to the heart of money matters and keep you in the know. How I Built This Curious how some of the world’s most well-known brands got their start? Join NPR’s Guy Raz for this in-depth look at how some of the world’s most original thinkers and leaders turned their dreams into reality, sparking innovative new products and popular movements in the process! Online Marketing Made Easy Need help staying current on SEO best practices and the latest marketing trends? Tune in with Amy Porterfield as she shares her top insider tricks and best insider hacks to help you market your business online and build your brand. Work Life with Adam Grant Get an insider’s view of the world’s most unique and innovative workplaces with organizational psychologist, Adam Grant. Episodes blend interviews with entrepreneurs and other leaders and add in the latest research from the social sciences to help listeners make the most of their working hours for a better work/life balance. Freakonomics In this weekly podcast, Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books, speaks with a wide variety of guests from the world of sports, business, science and politics. The podcast enables listeners to learn the “real” truth behind the myths, misconceptions and accepted half-truths that most of us have spent all our lives believing. The School of Greatness Podcast If you want to listen to inspiring stories from great minds and influential people, then Lewis Howes’ podcast is a great place to start. All sorts of topics are tackled on The School of Greatness podcast including creativity, branding, and innovation. Entrepreneurs on Fire Join host John Lee Dumas daily as he talks with rising entrepreneurs and other business leaders. With over 2,000 interviews completed to date, you have everything that you need to gain the motivation and knowledge that you need to transform your business and personal life! So Money This daily podcast is hosted by personal finance guru extraordinaire, Farnoosh Torabi. Listeners can learn about helpful tips to get their finances in order, fund start-up and expansion costs, and even how to teach your kids how to handle money or save for retirement. Productivityist Wish to find and keep your focus each day so that you could get more done, but, aren’t sure where or how to start? Then this 30-minute podcast is for you! Productivity strategist, Mike Vardy, and his guests offer time-saving strategies and organizational tips to help you make the most of your time. If you’re anything like me and listen to podcasts on a regular basis, you’re going to start wishing your commute was long. There’s so much great information out there; you just have to plan ahead, download in advance, and sit back and relax. Before you know it, you will have arrived at your destination and will have undoubtedly learned something in the process.
How the GDPR Makes ABM a Great Marketing Option Posted on August 23, 2018August 23, 2018 by Jessica Lunk In the days leading up to May 25, 2018, Internet users worldwide received a sudden influx of emails from brands. Some simply mentioned they were updating their privacy policies, others asked whether the customer would like to keep getting emails. No doubt many readers didn’t bother opening or responding to these messages, and digital marketers have been scampering to recollect new data since. This is the new reality under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the new law enacted by the European Union to protect its citizens’ privacy. Because of the wide-reaching and inherently nebulous state of the Internet, many brands had to update their privacy policies globally and email wider swaths of people than just those they believed were physically located on the one continent affected. Optimistic marketers would have gritted their teeth and called this a good thing – after all, periodically purging your email subscriber lists is actually a great way to boost engagement numbers, hone your data and save people’s time and effort. But realistically, asking people – even if they like and appreciate your content – whether they want to keep getting your emails is always risky. One way to mitigate this risk is by focusing less on spray-and-pray outbound or inbound marketing, slowly gathering emails from potential leads and qualifying them over time, and instead focusing more on specific accounts. Account-based marketing (ABM) calls for a more careful and deliberate approach, sometimes targeting specific people at specific companies and nurturing them over time. You know your product would be an ideal fit for that company – it’s just a matter of convincing them of that truth. Why is ABM a good direction in a post-GDPR world? ABM is a good solution for companies struggling after the GDPR because it relies less on a widespread gathering of emails and more on targeted, deliberate lead-generation. The GDPR presumes a world wherein everyday Internet users are more wary of giving away personal information to brands, and marketers should anticipate that and be prepared to do a bit more legwork in advance of reaching out. How should companies using ABM adjust to the GDPR? There are a few implications for companies jumping into ABM tactics. First off is awareness. This is more a legal issue than a marketing one, but for small businesses, it’s invaluable to make sure a lawyer has checked over the GDPR requirements and ensured your company’s in compliance. One follow-up to that is to create a data audit. Under the new law, even keeping old data that hasn’t been double opted in could risk you getting penalized. You need to purge all customer data that doesn’t conform to the standards. Auditing your records will flush out that old junk, plus bring to light aspects of your safe data that you may not have been aware of. Most companies have already updated their privacy policies and websites’ cookie tactics, and that’s a good thing. If you have not yet, you still can. Why is the GDPR a good thing for account-based marketers? Because ABM is an inherently more personal approach to marketing than the spray-and-pray styles, the GDPR has actually handed account-baser marketers a beautiful gift: the excuse to reach out personally and see if their customers have the same goals. An automated (but well-segmented) email would suffice, or a phone call would work if the client is important enough or you have the time and staff to do it. It’s a great excuse to touch base and catch up – which is something ABM promotes in the first place. If you find your customers have grown significantly and are still enjoying your SaaS product, for example, it could be time to onboard them to a higher subscription model, or offer them a discounted rate on a trial membership. You can also use this opportunity to create innovative new campaigns to align your goals with your customers’ needs. For example, introducing a new perk to your product that requires your customers to input or save their data alleviates any worries they might have about what you’re doing with their information. Of course, you need to offer them something valuable: making your product easier to use, doubling down on a free white paper or ebook, and bulking up your newsletter are all on the table, depending on your company’s product. Lastly, the GDPR presents partnership opportunities that you may not have realized before. By leveraging the data you already have and teaming up with a company who can offer more value (think of app integration, for example), you can bulk up your data sets while giving your customers a better, smoother overall experience. One thing’s for sure: the GDPR is not necessarily a bad thing. It made lazy marketing efforts a little harder, and more rewarding efforts start to look even more promising. Double-down on your key accounts and let the days of full transparency reign.
9 Essential Sales Tools For Solopreneurs Posted on August 21, 2018September 25, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick Every solopreneur has a slightly different take on the sales process, based on what they’re selling and their own personal strengths and weaknesses. However, the general process is roughly the same for all salespeople: prospecting, initial contact, sales call, the offer, handling objections, and following up. We’ve researched a variety of sales software for solopreneurs – from complete CRMs to solutions that help with specific parts of the sales cycle – in order to give you a solid list of options for streamlining your sales process and closing more deals. Today’s technology, when implemented correctly, can free up a significant portion of your time for becoming a better practitioner, working on your marketing, closing more deals, or whatever else you might do in your business with some extra time. So let’s get to it! Below you’ll find the nine of the best sales tools for solopreneurs. Zapier Have we mentioned that we love Zapier? With Zapier, you can easily automate pesky, repetitive tasks that eat up a lot of time, create room for error and yet add little value to your day. What’s not to like? Zapier integrates with over 1,000 web applications (including Hatchbuck!) and seamlessly streamlines your workflows to make creating conversations simple and closing sales a no-brainer. Price: Free for personal tasks, plans start at $20/month for businesses Pandadoc Need help creating sales proposals? Pandadoc offers templates to make this process smoother and more consistent across your business. Manage your contract lifecycle and offer secure e-signatures, and even track how your prospects are interacting with your document in order to optimize it for the future. Another bonus? It integrates with over 20 other apps, ranging from Dropbox and Google Drive to Xero and Stripe. Price: Plans start at $19/month per user. Workflow Max This business insights tool is great for solopreneurs and freelancers – especially as it applies to managing the technical aspects of sales, like quotes and financial management. This tool helps you manage legal and other documentation, track invoices and even create custom fields to make a database tailored to your unique business. Price: Free trial, plans start at $15/month for one user Calendly If you typically send lots of back-and-forth emails with prospects to set up meeting times, those tasks can pile up into a lot of wasted time that you could be spending on selling. Calendly is a simple, straightforward scheduling tool for different types of sales meetings (say, for instance, a short introductory call and a longer consultation call). Simply sign up, sync your Google and other calendars, get your custom, branded link, and send that link to prospects so they can schedule meeting times that are convenient for them. Best of all? It’s free. Price: Basic plan is free, premium plans start at $8/month Google Apps Google Apps can serve as the ultimate solution for the bootstrapping solopreneur. If you’re not ready to spend a monthly fee on a CRM, you can certainly get Google Apps to do the trick. Set up your own custom forms in Google Forms, use Google Sheets to track and sort prospects, or use one of the many available third-party apps to integrate your Google account with tools to fit specific needs. Price: Varies depending on the app Quickbooks Online It’s more than a bookkeeping tool – you can use it for logging and automatically categorizing sales-related expenses like gas mileage, travel expenses, and coffee meetups with your prospects. Sync your business bank accounts, transfer money between accounts for free, and automatically invoice your clients when payment is due. Price: Free 30-day trial, plans start at $10/month Slack Whether you’re working with a distributed team or not, Slack is a lifesaver for company-wide or one-to-one communication. With designated channels for various times of communication, departments, and projects, Slack allows your team to convene in one place (even if they’re spread across the country). With the help of Zapier and Slack’s API, you can integrate Slack with numerous other applications to make your channels your hub for all things business dialogues. Price: The free version works for most small to medium-sized teams. The upgraded version is $6.67/user per month. BenchmarkONE If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, powerful sales CRM, we’d be remiss to leave BenchmarkONE off the list. BenchmarkONE’s all-in-one CRM provides all of the typical functionality and automation usually found in more expensive tools such as Salesforce and Hubspot. That means for as little as $89 per month your business gets access to features such as contact management, email marketing, advanced segmentation and tagging, customer behavior tracking on your website and more. Mailshake Mailshake is a sales engagement platform that helps salespeople create highly personalized outreach cadences using email (via your personal email account), social, and phone. With Mailshake, you can upload a list of prospects with personalization fields like name, links to social profiles, phone numbers, and even fully personalized sentences and paragraphs. Once you publish the cadence, the messages are sent automatically according to your campaign settings, and can be paused automatically if a recipient replies or clicks a link. When a lead engages with your outreach, you can reply to them directly from Mailshake, or through your own email. You can also track your campaign’s performance in real time, and see which messages in your cadence have the best engagement. If you’re looking for a sales tool that’s truly comprehensive (and integrates with your favorite apps through Zapier), BenchmarkONE could be the missing link in your sales software stack. Learn more about BenchmarkONE’s small business CRM. Price: Plans start at $39/month.
The Power of Automation to Supercharge Your Marketing Efforts Posted on August 20, 2018September 22, 2022 by Guest Author Given the growing popularity of marketing automation, it should come as no surprise that Giselle Abramovich, writing for Adobe’s CMO magazine, reports that nearly all respondents (91 percent) “agree that marketing automation is ‘very important’ to the overall success of their marketing across channels.” This universal opinion seems to stem, in part, from the results delivered by the strategy. Abramovich also found that “77 percent of CMOs at top-performing companies indicate their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to grow revenue.” Few other tactics deliver same ROI as great marketing automation installations. Yet, Abramovich’s research reveals that found that only forty-nine percent of companies are using the tactic. It’s astonishing that something the industry agrees on as being highly effective still lags behind in adoption. The bottom line: if you aren’t using automation yet to supercharge your marketing efforts, you risk falling behind savvier competitors. The Benefits of Marketing Automation Marketing automation’s insanely great performance comes from a number of different sources: Ongoing Nurturing Only a small percentage of your website visitors will take your desired action the first time they stop by. That’s why it’s crucial that you get them into your funnel where they can be nurtured as leads until they’re ready to convert – and why it should come as no surprise that Forrester data finds “companies that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured leads.” Marketing automation takes the manual effort out of this process, as I’ll describe in more detail in the next section on campaign examples. Resource Savings Lead nurturing isn’t the only process that can be improved with marketing automation. When implemented correctly, this approach can: Save you the sales and marketing hours needed to do manual outreach Allow you to build a campaign or piece of marketing collateral once and deploy it again and again, automatically Reduce your outbound advertising spending by maintaining a steady stream of qualified, nurtured leads Better Metrics Finally, one of the most underutilized aspects of a good marketing automation implementation is the data it generates. Because the system tracks – in granular detail – which actions prospects and leads take at different stages, you can use its analytics features to learn: Which marketing messages people in your funnel respond to The optimal number of touches required for a conversion How different segments behave, in order to inform future outreach efforts 5 Marketing Automation Campaigns to Build Today Ready to get started with marketing automation? If you’re new to the technique, it can seem complicated. Most marketing automation programs contain far more features than you’ll use right away. Keep things simple to start with the following five campaigns: Cold Sales Outreach and Follow-Up Yes, it’s “marketing” automation, not sales automation. But don’t let that stop you from deploying this powerful technology to automate elements of your sales process – specifically, your cold outreach and follow-up. Yesware has found that prospects can take as many as 10 follow-up messages to a cold email to send a response: Sending these follow-up messages manually is a surefire way to lose sales by letting conversations fall through the cracks. Instead, automate them with a workflow that triggers follow-up messages if it determines prospects who were initially targeted with cold emails haven’t responded. Nurture Campaign for Qualified Leads Remember that statistic above how nurtured leads are better qualified and less expensive than non-nurtured leads? This is where we put it into practice. Automated nurture sequences can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. A simple campaign involves a single trigger action (such as gated content opt-in form completion) and a series of predefined follow-up actions (such as sending five content-rich emails over a five-week period). Depending on your level of marketing automation sophistication, however, they can also be as complex as Digital Marketer’s multi-stage Email Marketing Machine. Start small. There’s always time to add things like dynamic content and segmentation features later on. Lead Scoring That Triggers Sales Involvement Lead scoring lets you assign a points value to the different activities taken by your tracked prospects. Your first effort at lead scoring doesn’t have to be comprehensive. Instead, focus on activities you know indicate a high level of interest in your products or services, such as: A lead generation form fill A visit to your pricing or contact page Viewing a particular video Viewing at least five pieces of content Design your scoring system so that achieving a certain points total triggers outreach by a salesperson so that you can strike while the iron is hot. And don’t forget – your lead scoring arrangement isn’t permanent. Revisit it as your marketing automation skills become more advanced or you learn more about your prospects’ behaviors. Re-Engagement Email Series By some estimates, 45% of recipients who receive re-engagement emails read them. So if you have prospects or leads on your list whose engagement is declining, you may be able to save them with a well-timed re-engagement email series. To set one up, you’ll need to determine what constitutes declining engagement for your business. Once you’ve identified that trigger, test a sequence of three re-engagement messages – each with different messaging to prompt a return. If prospects remain dormant after the sequence, they can be scrubbed from your list. Onboarding Workflow for New Customers You can still lose sales after you’ve closed the deal. If new customers struggle to get up-and-running with your product or service, they may feel disheartened, request refunds or even give negative reviews of your company to others. Minimize these risks with a new customer onboarding sequence that sends either a defined set of messages or that’s triggered based on new users’ behaviors. Watch the analytics to see where customers are falling off in order to identify future product development opportunities that’ll benefit your current customers – as well as those to come. Author Bio Sujan Patel is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency helping companies leverage the latest and greatest marketing strategy to fuel their businesses. In addition to running his marketing agency Sujan is also a partner at a handful of SaaS businesses such as Quuu.co, Narrow, Linktexting.com & Mailshake. His SaaS companies help 10,000+ marketers scale their social media, mobile marketing and content marketing efforts.
7 Tips to Create a CTA That Really Converts Posted on August 17, 2018 by Allie Wolff Calls to action do just that – they call a visitor to take action on your website, in an email, on an ad and more. But there’s more to it than simply putting a “click here” or “buy now” button on a webpage. As with any marketing practice, there’s a certain strategy involved. To really make your CTAs compelling, try putting the following seven tips into action. Make them visible. You’d be surprised at how many marketers hide their CTAs below the fold. Others may place them higher on the page, but fail to make them stand out. Simply put, if your visitors can’t quickly and easily get to the next step, they probably won’t and you’ll miss out on countless opportunities as a result. Tell your visitors what you want them to do in a clear, concise and compelling way and use a well-placed, eye-catching button to do so. Use practical language. Don’t stuff your CTA with too much junk or use confusing jargon. If you want people to click on your calls to action, you have to use practical language that speaks to them. Think about the problem you’re trying to solve for your target audience and then communicate that as simply and effectively as possible in your CTAs. Be consistent. A bright yellow oval shaped CTA on the top of your landing page followed by a dark red square one down below can confuse your visitors. You should most definitely repeat your calls to action as many times as it makes sense, but you should do so in a way that is consistent, both in design and in language. Use command words. Calls to action are designed to gently push visitors through the funnel to the next step, whatever that step may be. As such, you shouldn’t just assume your visitors will know what you want them to do. You should tell them, and in a way that commands action. For instance, “Buy,” “Download,” or “Subscribe,” are all active verbs that make CTAs more effective. Be transparent. People want to know what they can expect if and when they click on your CTAs. As such, you should be as honest and forthcoming as possible. For instance, including the price of what you’re trying to sell. This adds credibility and helps to build trust. And yes, it may keep someone from clicking, but if they’re that averse to what you’re offering, they probably wouldn’t have become a customer to begin to. Create a sense of urgency. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a very real thing and it’s something that marketers can use to their advantage. Utilizing urgent language can make visitors more likely to proceed out of a fear that if they don’t, they’ll miss out on an opportunity. For example, use words like “limited time only,” “almost gone,” or “time is running out.” Keep character count low. Your calls to action should be clear enough that your audience knows what to expect, but they should also be concise enough to hold the visitor’s attention. A compelling CTA is typically in the range of 90 – 120 characters, which equates to about five to seven words. A call to action is one of the most powerful and effective weapons in your marketing arsenal, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The seven tips above should help you craft compelling CTAs that are more likely to convince and convert your target audience on a consistent basis.