10 Major Ways To Decrease The Sales Funnel

10 Major Ways To Decrease The Sales Funnel

Every business owner probably knows what a sales funnel is. If you don’t, sales funnel is a process or set of actions that a customer should go through to purchase your product. Understanding the sales funnel is essential to manipulate it in a way so that your potential customers become your buyers and not chicken out at the most critical moment.

The sales funnel consists of six main stages:

  • Awareness: The first stage of the sales funnel grabs the attention of your potential customer. Your goal at the awareness stages should keep them coming back.
  • Consideration: Now that they are interested, they start considering the purchase. The goal here is to get their email address.
  • Preference: Now, they are hooked. On the stage of choice, you should pre-qualify the prospect.
  • Purchase: Once they’ve decided, they should purchase. Here, your goal is to make the sale.
  • Loyalty: After they made one purchase, you should keep them loyal so that they buy something else. This time your goal is to make the sale again.
  • Advocacy: And finally, they are not only coming back for more but also advocating others to purchase from you.

This article will look into ways that you can decrease the sales funnel by working on the first five stages.

1. Awareness: Blogging

Most probably one of the most recommended ways of increasing your online presence, blogging has proven to be an effective and relatively cheap way of promoting yourself. It doesn’t matter if your business has anything to do with writing – blogging is meant to increase your visibility for search engines and have more customers find you.

Another reason to put blogging on your to-do list is that it is a surprisingly powerful storytelling tool that can showcase the importance of your brand. It is also a perfect persuasion tool.

When used right, blogging can give enormous results. If you are not good at it, you can always look for writing and translation professionals at PickWriters or search for freelancers on Fiverr. It’s ideal for personalizing your customers’ experiences, and this can be achieved by enabling them to access the information on your website in their native language. English is suitable for larger audiences, but when it comes to going global, it is always better to customize your content for each country separately.

2. Awareness: Social Networking

Apart from indirectly impacting your search engine rankings, social networking is also the best way to gain social media recognition.

social media

Your availability on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook may also influence how much customers trust you. Reviews and recommendations are prevalent on social media platforms, which means that this is where your advocacy stage customers will operate to find you, new clients.

Decide on the platforms perfect for you and create accounts. To link them all in one place, you can use Linktree. There are also numerous social media management apps and programs in case you want to be able to maintain them all from one place or even schedule posts. You might want to check out such services as Buffer or Hootsuite.

3. Consideration: Landing Pages

Landing pages are very different from the home pages. A landing page is a page on your website that has content on it addressing a specific problem and containing a clear call to action. A home page, however, will represent the general aspects of your business. For example, your home page might say that your business is called XYZ and you sell ABC, while one of your landing pages may assume that you sell the EFG segment of products (from the overall ABC) and will include a form to order one of the products.

To increase your conversion rate, it is recommended that you work on your site’s landing pages. Make sure that they are as appealing as possible and have the content on them as meaningful as the images or illustrations. Have a clear call to action. After all, the page’s purpose is to capture the prospect’s contact information or make a sale. To see how landing pages work, try to compare the landing pages of big company websites to their home pages.

4. Consideration: Calls To Action

Calls to action are a must when it comes to conversions. For every page on your website, think of what goal are you pursuing. What work should the visitor complete?

Of course, the ultimate goal is to have them purchase the product from you, but what about the smaller actions leading up to it? Most of the time, you will need your potential customer to click a link, leave their email, or watch a video. Making a purchase already comes after it.
When including a call to action, it is better to have several here and there. This way, your audience will be reminded about the operation several times.

5. Preference: Email

emails

Email marketing is a great way to keep your potential customers involved at least to some extent. But even a simple email answering the most frequently asked questions or explaining the basics of your company can keep the person interested.

If you haven’t had any experience with email marketing yet, then this is the perfect time to start. Collect all the knowledge you may need and plan your email marketing campaign before diving-in. You can also set up autoresponders that send out electronic messages once your customers complete specific actions. Do not forget to thank them for what they do – sincerity and gratitude are always appreciated. On the other hand, don’t bury them under piles of emails because they can unsubscribe or mark them as spam.

6. Preference: CRM

Customer Relationship Management, commonly known as CRM, is a program that helps you track interactions with current and future customers. This software enables you to identify on which stage of the sales funnels your prospects currently are.

By using CRM, you can identify which emails each potential customer should receive based on their cookies and what you already know about them. CRM, when combined with email marketing, is a powerful tool that helps you personalize the experience of every customer or prospect and lead them on to the next stage of the sales funnel.

7. Purchase: eCommerce Promotion

Never assume that your customers will easily find their way to check out. You should guide them up until the end of the process and make sure that they follow the calls to action you included. This is why eCommerce promotion is so important, and here are some ways to use it:

ecommerce

  • Marketing Campaigns: Schedule your marketing campaigns around favorite holidays. This will give your prospects an incentive to buy your product.
  • New Products: Always email or notify them about new products. If you don’t tell them what’s new in stock, nobody will. They are not on the lookout for new products – you are on the lookout for new customers.
  • Offers: Offer them various bonuses and opportunities such as free shipping, live chats, etc. Sales and discounts are a sure way to attract their attention and maybe even convert it into a deal.

8. Purchase: Social Monitoring

Social monitoring will not only help you see who is talking about you but will also let you engage with your potential customers.

Set up Google Alerts to notify you when someone is discussing your brand or something related to it. Monitor who has tweeted at you and reply to their question. Reply to comments under your posts on social media and get involved with both your prospects and your customers.

If someone has written a review of your brand or product, it would be good to see what it is about and maybe even display it to persuade more prospects that you are worth the money. People tend to trust other people, especially when the reviews are not fake or bot-generated.

9. Loyalty: Referrals

Referrals are a great way to appreciate your customers and show them that you value them. Ask them to refer a friend and let them get a reward. It could be a discount or a different kind of bonus.

Referrals are useful for establishing long-term relationships with your past and present customers. They help set up a group of people that will come back to purchase more and help you gain yet another client.

If you think referrals are not for you, you may want to try setting up affiliate programs for your customers, but that might take more time and will require more effort both for you and your customers. Moreover, referral programs do not apply to all of your clients.

10. Loyalty: Resells, Upsells, Cross-sells

Last but not least, resells, upsells, and cross-sells are another way to keep your customers interested in the loyalty stage.

Resells mean that you are selling the same product to your customer that they already purchased from you. If they enjoyed the first, they would probably enjoy it again. The only thing they need is a soft nudge.

Upsells and cross-sells prompts your customers to purchase other items that are similar to the one they bought but that are more expensive. These can also be items that function as a kind of an add-on to the main thing your customer purchased. You can market these either before, during, or after the purchase.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, the sales funnel one of the basics that you should know about your business and operating it. Make sure to try out these strategies to decrease your sales funnel and increase the probability of a potential customer becoming a buyer.

5 Tips To Boost Conversion Rates Of Your Emails

5 Tips To Boost Conversion Rates Of Your Emails

One of the oldest means of marketing; email marketing still works like a charm whether it’s to reveal a new product to your existing customers or to connect with more potential customers for the same, with an email conversion rate you can do it all.

Just write up a great one. Use a good structure and design — the right links. And SHOOT!

email marketing

If only it were all that easy.

While email marketing is just a simple term, its right implementation can get the best in a sweat.

From writing a great subject line to keeping the mail body comprehensive yet short. And then the pressure of compellability, I tell you. All of it requires some in-depth analysis, research and the right choice of words (of course).

But does it mean email success is too hard to achieve? Well, not if you go by these five tips.

5 Killer Tips to Boost Email Conversion Rates like anything

Here are the top tips for leveling up your email marketing game to earn a spate of conversions.

1. Make use of existing intel

Be it offline or online; data is an integral part of all businesses.

Gathered after several hits and trials, it helps businesses strategize and optimize better for their future projects, including email marketing campaigns.

But how exactly?

Well, it’s a lot like targeting.

The data would tell you a lot about your audience. Its likes/dislikes. Geographical locations. Age group and the gender that they belong to. The brands that they love the most. Products that they are interested in. And a lot of other stuff.

Now here you need to do is make use of this data.

Craft your emails by that. Use it to be relatable with your emails. As relatable as you can be. Do you know how a joke suddenly becomes way funnier the moment you start relating to it? The same tactic works with all forms of content “Emails too.”

This will make your prospects believe that you can feel their pain and so can help them too.

2. Refine your email list

While you might be sending out emails to some subscribers who gave you their email addresses at one point in time, turns out not all of them are receiving those emails now.

Reason?

Every email list in the world has the following categories of subscribers.

  • Confirmed: Those who confirmed their subscription to your newsletter/mailing list
  • Unconfirmed: Those who didn’t prove their subscription
  • DNC list (do not contact): The ones who blacklisted you (no further contact)
  • Bounced: The file with (now) invalid email addresses

Now, this might have got you wondering,

All mailing lists are divided into four categories, three of which aren’t worth a try. But how does it matter? Why do I need to refine?

Well, I hate to break it down to you. All email service providers charge their consumers for every single email that they send.

This means that sending emails to the people who don’t want to see your emails or don’t want to respond to them or aren’t even going to receive those might be costing you $$ unnecessarily.

The solution is easy. Just take out an hour and refine your mailing lists.

Every time you shoot emails, make sure they are going to the right audience. Failing at that will cause you throwing money for nothing.

3. Create outstanding mail copies

Not to pressurize you or anything, but your mail copy can make or break your email campaign.

It’s like while we all try to persuade users with our content, there is a whole bunch of competitors trying to do the same.

A myriad of emails is sent every day, every week and every month. What magical do you think your email copy has to beat them all and be clicked on?

Well, in all cases we can still be better. Aiding to that, let us look at the four ‘U’s of email copywriting.

Urgency

While the world is moving at the speed of light and everybody is super busy, getting users to click through your emails in the first go is a challenge.

But is there a way to win? Well, do we say no to any urgent calls? Highly rarely, right? That’s the key. If you can create urgency in the readers’ minds, you can win their attention that can lead to more clicks.

Still, don’t get it? This example might help.

Let us say; you want to buy an electric guitar. You visit a website reviewing the model that you want to buy. You read the reviews. I liked the product. And chose to sign-up for updates, so you don’t miss out on the latest offers or updates.

The next noon you receive an email offering a limited time discount on your favorite guitar. Wouldn’t you consider it? Well, even if you won’t, somebody else will.

Email conversion

What it does is boost the chances of the user opening up your email. The rest of the best (i.e., conversion) still depends on other factors like CTA, landing page, etc.

Uniqueness

The next thing your email copies need to be is unique.

Just as discussed in the sections above, we receive a large number of marketing emails every day. How many do we click?

Well, if we notice carefully, it’s easy to conclude that emails that are unique and interesting make us want to know more. And for that, we generally click through.

For example, a while ago, I received this email from NeilPatel.com’s email list that I once subscribed to. First, I saw it on my phone and couldn’t just archive or delete or even ignore it (which I or maybe most of us generally do).

This is what the email’s snippet said.

Email

Starting with the title, it’s simple and spots on. Something that every internet marketer/website owner would love to know. And then the first text in the email. As relevant and essential as it could be.

He starts with his success story. He is implying that this hack really worked for his website and so it can work for mine.

Now, here, he might have lost me if I had just read the title. But then the right next line goes like ‘Over the last 30 days, I generated 53878 visits from …’.

Who wouldn’t want to know more?

This is one excellent example, and there can be many others like this.

So, think of creating unique subject lines and useful opening texts like these. Chances are, your conversion rates will be boosted.

Ultra-specific

Just as mentioned in the very first tip, you need to make use of the data that’s available to you. The aim is to know your consumers better. Understand their needs and then craft emails with that intel.

You need to know their problems the best and then address those in your emails. If you can do that, more of your emails will be read.

Usefulness

Why waste a sentence saying nothing? – Seth Godin.

Brownie points if you feel that the above quote makes sense.

The thing with the content that you create is that it has to be useful at all costs. Because, what’s the point of creating any content at all if it doesn’t help its audience?

Also, if you aren’t helpful to the audience, why will they subscribe to you? Or buy your product? Or even listen to your words at all?

So, keep this in mind and try to create useful content for your audience.

While writing great email copies will require brainstorming and more time, it’s highly crucial. Coming up with perfect email copies is how you can compete with other businesses sending emails to your prospects.

Also, you can use a good video to charm up your emails. Emails with visual content get higher CTR.

4. Work on your CTAs and Landing Pages

You might have spent hours and hours brainstorming the right design, layout, text copy and everything else for your entire email, but right before you send it out, two things matter.

CTA and landing page.

Getting users to click through and read your email is a tough bet; we all agree. But what’s more robust is to convert them. And basically, that’s what every other step in the process comes down to.

So, how to do it right? How to optimally pick and design your CTAs and landing pages?

Well, let’s start with the CTAs first.

One common mistake that marketers generally make is generic with their CTA copies.

While writing a CTA saying ‘Read more’ or ‘Fill form’ might seem like a good idea to some, turns out it isn’t!

CTAs that are too generic can bore the reader. And CTA copies that impose work turn them off. I mean, who likes extra work on their desk?

CTA image

In cases like these, saying ‘Read more’ will make the user imagine huge blocks of text which he/she’ll have to go through.

Solution? Come up with better CTAs. Better here means actionable. Something that makes the user go through your CTAs smooth. A CTA that offers the users something of their interest.

For example, instead of using “Read More” as a CTA, try out options like “Find out more.”

We might like finding new useful stuff, but we aren’t always in a mood to read, are we? Just take it like that. And save yourself from repelling readers.

Once you have created the right CTA copy, you should start getting more clicks, leading the users to your landing page. Just what we need to focus now.

While you are trying to craft your perfect landing page, the following tips will help you.

Create great headlines

The first thing that an average internet user will see in your landing page is your headline.

If you fail to make an impression with that, chances are, you’ve lost the user.

What you need to do is create headlines that grab the reader’s attention — telling them about your product or service. And not exceeding 20 words at max (preferable limit is 10).

And once that’s done, move on to optimizing your landing page further.

Be persuasive with subheadings

Another characteristic of actionable content is persuasiveness.

And right after you’ve crafted a good headline, you need to work up your subheadings similarly. But how can you make it happen? Well, keep the following tips in mind.

  • Give details in your subtitles. A subheading is supposed to be more informative/in-depth than the main heading.
  • Make it have information gaps. How does it work? Make a point that you’ll discuss later in your content. Maybe at the end of your content.

This will keep the user intrigued till the end of the piece.

Use visuals

The next thing you need to keep in mind is the right use of visuals.

No matter how great your textual content reads, without the right visuals, it’d still not be thoroughly optimized. While picking the right one for your landing page, keep the following points in mind.

  • Everything your landing page pictures need to be.
  • Large in size.
  • Highly relevant to your product/service.
  • High quality.
  • Highly intriguing and attention-grabbing.

Your best bet would be to use fresh, converting and actionable infographics for your landing pages.

The right images on landing pages can boost overall conversion rates by up to 89%.

5. Fine tune your offer

While you might have tried anything and everything possible to acquire conversions with email marketing, it might not still work for you. Reason can be your offer.

It’s like even the copywriting experts like David Garfinkel say that a fair copy with a reasonable offer can work wonders for all marketing campaigns. Like, also if your grammar isn’t correct or you’ve made spelling mistakes, your drive can still sail with a reasonable offer.

Do you see how it works?

It’s like we need to get into our prospects’ shoes. When planning on making a purchase, would you go for a great offer or good grammar?

It’s all simple. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.

email conversion rate

Final words

Email marketing is an excellent way of driving in bundles of conversions for your business. The problem which catches marketers cold is the right optimization.

In this post, I tried to share some useful tips for boosting email conversion rates. Hopefully, this helped you.

Still, have doubts? Share and discuss this piece with your marketing friends. It will help.

Converting Fashion Site Based Instagram Account Traffic Into Email Leads

Converting Fashion Site Based Instagram Account Traffic Into Email Leads

So, you have been quite busy for the past couple of month’s right? You have been setting up the Instagram account up after going through some hardcore research for capturing as much traffic and interest as you can. Then you have to spend some time in creating the most perfect Instagram marketing plan as well as email listing and start to track the progress that you have been making. For the next step, you can easily grow the Instagram following. And lastly, you have started to drive some traffic right back to the website from the chosen Call to Action posts. Now, to be honest, that’s a lot of work you have been working on just to make the Instragram marketing a lot better and effective for your business.

Yet, there will be no point in doing all these works for driving traffic from IG if you are not likely to capture that traffic in the first place. If you are associated with the fashion world, you got to keep an eye open for gaining more traffic by your side. But, it is further true that traffic will prove to be nothing but useless if you fail to convert it well.

At the end of it all, you just do not want the followers to visit the website once and then just leave. If they ever get to do that, chances are high that they will not come back. So, you have to be very careful while dealing with Instagram followers right from the first time for sure.

Growing email list and more:

By just growing the current email list that you have, you can easily create automated traffic machine. In place of just relying on the strangers to just come to the site, you can easily engage with content and get to buy services and products. For that, you just have to click on the button, which states “send”. It can easily help in driving not just hundreds but thousands of highly and well engaging email subscribers to any page that you want on the website.

email listing

  • Lucky for you, the IG traffic will always have this current potential to be well engaging in nature and most of the bloggers and businesses will get the chance to grow email lists and sales substantially through the field of IG.
  • For example, you might have collected so many emails from IG and you do not even send the traffic back to opt-in offer.
  • There are some experts who have gained success with proper use of IG for generating a lead, which helps in creating a whole complete course on how you can work on that.
  • Some other pros are here to use IG for growing email lists by thousands and more of people on a monthly basis over here.

So, there are some proven steps which you can use for converting traffic that you have worked so hard for in order to generate and start growing the current email list and finalizing on the income in the said business.

Have to create one enticing offer:

It is really important for you to create one such enticing offer for the IG visitors now. It is well used to be that promise of the new content through email, which is stated to be enough to get some visitors to subscribe to the present email lost. But, the bad news is that this step is no longer enough. The visitors are getting kind of greedy.

  • There are dozens of websites from the same fashion category trying to gain their attention and on a daily basis. Almost all of them are asking for the email addresses as well, just like you. So, you have to work hard to just set you aside and apart from the rest. You can do that by just triggering the IG followers’ reciprocity instinct.
  • It is during this time when you have to create “opt-in offer” and then give it away for free in rather exchange for the email addresses of the said visitors. Now, this is something which your visitors might be looking for. Otherwise, it won’t prove to be that big of a deal.
  • In case, you are planning to post Call to Action posts to some content pieces on the IG, you might want to create some content upgrades that visitors might not be able to resist. Some of those options are discount, checklist, infographic, cheat sheet, email course, swipe file, and even added a content piece.
  • Instagram might be a visual stage, yet despite everything you have space to add a strong suggestion to take action in your post depictions. Clients need to be advised what ventures to take straight away. Counting an extraordinary suggestion to take action (CTA) in each post is an incredible method to divert those clients from programs into purchasers.

Instagram Account

  • Inspiring your clients to make that first buy might be one of the greatest obstacles you’ll confront. A cautiously set markdown offer can be the ideal device for inspiring your adherents to open their wallets. It adds to the esteem you give your devotees on an elite premise.
  • Joined with the privilege hashtag, this sort of Instagram action is probably going to drive changes and win high offer tallies – helped no uncertainty by Instagram’s incorporated sharing highlights for Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. This strategy satisfies abundantly in light of the fact that when individuals realize they can routinely snatch a rebate or two from your Instagram feed, they’re all the bound to stick around. What’s more, in the event that you use channel-explicit coupon codes, you’ll generally realize that it’s Instagram that drove those deals.
  • However, you should always remember that traffic will from coming from the IG sector. It means that the visitors are well coming from a visual platform. So, once you have already nailed down content upgrade or just opt-in offer especially for IG visitors, you can get to the offers now.

Always head for the opt-in opportunities specified to IG followers:

You might have already established IG to be quite a unique form of social platform, depending on the visuals. As t is a bit different from some of the best platforms, you can always cater to the present opt-in opportunities and offers mainly to those visitors.

  • For example, any visitor coming from a link within article or blog is associated with an entirely different headspace than a visitor coming from IG, where they will be browsing and then stumbling across the CTA post.
  • Therefore, it is mandatory for you to create customized opt-in opportunities specified to followers. You can always deal with the offer and now can have to get that in front of just the IG traffic.
  • This mat helps in converting at around 12%, which is rather a solid conversion rate. As IG is one visual platform, you can decide to use Mat with a visual component other than a template with a blank background.
  • Instagram is tied in with distributing the correct substance. You can have the best methodology behind your posts, astounding duplicate, and incredible thoughts, however, in the event that your substance isn’t energizing or convincing none of that will matter — you won’t get any traffic! Since Instagram is such a visual stage, your substance should be outwardly speaking to inspire individuals to interface with your image and conceivably turn into a paying client.

Make sure to get to the point of this section well and also dealing with the options in this regard. Once you have noted down the alternatives and options, things will start to work out right in your favor.

Email Marketing Principles Made Easy For Small Business

Email Marketing Principles Made Easy For Small Business

Email Marketing is an effective tool to promote your brand and company. The traditional ways of communication are still email marketing. There are email marketing principles which when followed drive good results to your website. However, the future of email marketing is very promising and can build a good relationship with customers and the company.

email marketing

By following proper email marketing principles, you can get noticed in the competition with many email marketing tips. Staying well connected with the existing customers, thereby generating the leads for new customers. In fact, there are many free email marketing software you can use to attain the expected outcome.

Is Email Marketing Effective?

Of course, yes. Email marketing is as effective as the present social media platforms. Therefore, is very essential for small scale business.

For example, if we can an email. What do we do? We either readjust the outlines or mark as spam. It seems that they do not feel like opening the email. The emails do not shout out “open me” or “read me”.

Consequently, email marketing principles include all the email marketing strategies where it strengthens customer- client relationships by reminding you to send emails regarding the existing offers, upcoming events, not to miss clearance sales and many more.

Now, let us see to send email marketing principles depending on the type of emails you are sending. Eventually, each organization needs different email marketing tips.

What is Email Marketing Tips?

Email Marketing tips are critical to consider the main structure of the email. Major targets are achieved by thoroughly following the email marketing tips. You should follow certain tips to impress the customers on a single go that guarantee good success rates. Let us look at the main aspects of email marketing.

Content is king:

Whatever email you are trying to frame, the main hero in the email is the content. Plan the content carefully. However, by segmenting your email lists through the reader demographics makes your work easy. Provide with the simple and plain content. Always the simplicity wins. Do not overdo the content and confuse the customers.

email marketing principles

Keep it entertaining and traditional:

Keeping emails the same traditional way is equally important to keep your emails interesting and distinctive as well. However, you should sound that you create an email as if it real. It should not sound like an automated message. Keep it entertaining. Email marketing tips should not sound that your email is forwarded by a marketing machine. If here, you made a difference, then you won half of the battle.

Irresistible subject lines:

You should make sure that your emails are personalized. Sending a high volume of emails every day is no easy work. First, speak to the readers and then tell them you are sending an email to their inboxes. This way, your sent email will not go unnoticed and will take out time to read and respond.

However, these above mentioned key points are the main deciding aspects of successful email marketing. Always encourage the readers to respond to your emails. Listen to what your subscribers have to say.

What is a Free Email Marketing Software?

With free email marketing software, you can send emails in bulk for a certain limit or a limited number of subscribers. Each free email marketing software has a specific limit for the number of emails to be sent to the list.

Below given are the well -known free email marketing software used to develop your small business. However, each free email marketing software is different from each other.

Mail Chimp:

MailChimp, after its major breakthrough in 2014 is back in action with a podcast marketing campaign. However, MailChimp is the most widely used free email marketing system for small businesses. There is an estimation of over 16 million users. In a recent email marketing survey of 60 small scale business owners, it has received rave reviews.

However, MailChimp free plan is for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. MailChimp integrates well with WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Magento, Salesforce, Google Analytics and many more.

Mailjet:

As the name suggests, it is going to work fast. The company head office is in Paris and operates in more than 150 countries. In short, Mailjet is a one-stop solution for email marketing. Its free plan includes 6,000 emails per month or 200 emails per day, for unlimited contacts.

However, there are no limits in contact list even for a free plan. The user interface is anyway simple and user-friendly.

SendPulse:

SendPulse is a newcomer to this email marketing industry. Since 2015, SendPulse has received a lot of positive feedback. However, it offers a very generous free plan. SendPulse also offers SMS text messages and web push notifications for an additional charge. Therefore, it will offer 15,000 emails per month for less than 2,500 subscribers for emails.

Benchmark:

Benchmark was found in the year 2004. This focuses on basic email marketing and works best for creative people. The best part is Benchmark is available in 8 languages. In Benchmark, free plan is available as a life plan for up to 2000 subscribers and 14,000 emails per month. You can add additional features like automation, A/B testing and list verification. Benchmark is a clean template email marketing service with user-friendly interfaces.

SendinBlue:

SendinBlue is a truly a colorful email marketing service from France. Therefore, SendinBlue has been in this industry since 2010. It also offers services in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. However, 9000 emails per month, 300 emails per day to unlimited subscribers. SendinBlue offers very simple automated text messages.

What is Email Marketing Example?

Well, there are many success stories for email marketing which shows that with proper planning and email marketing principles, you can do wonders in the targetting the audience.
One of the best and simplest examples of email marketing is Charity.

charity: water

This is an Email Marketing Campaign for donation Donation Progress Update. When you talk about email marketing, often forget about the transactional emails. However, these transactional emails are automated emails in the inbox after a series of actions on a website. This would include filling a form, to purchase a product, or even updating on an order. These are nothing but text emails sent by email marketers.

Well, coming to the email marketing example Charity: water has taken an innovative step towards the amount of donation you give.
Suppose, when some X donates to a charity which is a water project. This money will obviously take a long journey until its purpose is fully filled.

Most of the charity organizations will take the amount and just leave. On the contrast, this Charity took an initiative and uses the automated emails to show the X (donors) how the donated money is making a journey and impact on thousands of lives.

However, with the emails and the timeline emails, you will know where you are in this whole process and can move on with things once reading the track of your hard earned money.

charity: water took an alternate route. Once someone donates to a charity: water project, the money takes a long journey. Most charities don’t tell you about that journey at all — charity: water uses automated emails to show donors how their money is making an impact over time.

With the project timeline, you don’t even really need to read the email. You know immediately where you are in the whole process so you can move onto other things in your inbox.

What are the Principles of Email Marketing?

Email marketing is not just merely blasting out emails to a bunch of email addresses. But, it is a process which involves email marketing principles to make each contact list as the asset to the company.

Let us look at some of the email marketing principles for effective small business growth.

In the right way to the right audience:

You should be completely clear in the mind that, what audience to target at the specified right time.
Suppose, take a real estate agency. Now, the agency will have to send emails for both the buyers and sellers along with the prevailing offers, the homes nearby, the shops nearby and much more.

You can reach more audience, by sending out emails and can get more response. Weekly emails or bi-weekly emails should be sent to make customers remember and make a CTA.

Communicate as if you are on Social Platform:

If you treat email as a simple flyer, then even the customers will just ignore as spam. Therefore, to make a difference in how the customers react to the emails, keep them to the relevant topic. Specify the actual reason to communicate in the description.

free email marketing

Plan the content in such a way that the customers should go through the whole email. Don’t forget to add taglines like “call us on”, “for an easy explanation, give us a call” so that the customers revert to you.

You can also add, customer testimonials as advertising emails. Thereby, creating trust and reliability.

Add relevance to the content:

Whenever you are composing an email, always make sure that set your words straight out in a polite way. Readers feel it bore to go through the long emails and sometimes they mark as spam.

The emails you send out should be clear and reach the audience in a timely manner. Also, do not overdo the emails. You should plan in such a way that, the emails you send are informative.

Building relationships with email marketing:

You can build good customer – client relationships with email marketing. As a medium of communicating, email has remained in the top. Write a personalized email, and touch all the topic you would like them to know. Always be welcoming. You can compose an email kile you normally talk to your customers. This way, the customers will feel interested to go through the email and thus have a healthy relationship with the

Segment the audience:

After days of email marketing, you will see a group of readers who will actively participate and respond to your emails. Target them and funnel the conversion rates in favor of your company.

email marketing tips

However, you will also come across a few groups who will read but do nothing. This is the right time to target them and convert them into the customers. Segmentation at this stage is very important at this stage, to rule out which segment of customers expect changes for betterment.

Data Etiquette:

The major concern today is the privacy of the data. Make sure you follow data etiquette so that the customers will be delighted to listen from you. Give them a chance or mention them that, they can unsubscribe to email anytime. This phrase is strong enough that they will feel secured to receive an email from you and to read and respond to it.

Final Keywords:

Finally, all these email marketing principles and email marketing tips when followed according to a proper plan and execution will fetch outstanding results. However, marketing is a tricky beast. Everything in email marketing principles is trial and error methods. By eliminating the process that didn’t work and coming up with new ideas is what business is all about.

Scale Up Your Digital Campaigns by Integrating MailChimp Automation

Scale Up Your Digital Campaigns by Integrating MailChimp Automation

Let’s be honest, maintaining a business can be incredibly challenging especially for small business owners that have to stay connected with their customers and still keep up with their business processes. If this sounds like your situation, it’s time to adopt automation and free up some of your valuable time and resources. An excellent place to start is marketing automation – a set of activities that, if conducted properly, can enhance how you engage with your market and also enable you to build your brand.

Unlike in manual marketing campaigns, automation tools help you run your activities in the background while eliminating repetitive tasks that derail efficiency in a business. In some cases also, automation directly engages your customers thereby minimizing your day-to-day interactions to tend to consume your already constrained time and other resources. Put just; it’s like having another business partner who works round the clock.

Are you looking to automate your email marketing and scale up your digital campaigns? You may want to consider MailChimp which is easily the most popular tool for sending bulk emails and setting up autoresponder sequences.

Read on to understand how you can leverage this software to grow your client base and ultimately increase business sales.

Before that though.

How does MailChimp automation work?

Picture this – you’re in the process of setting up a new campaign to introduce your newly launched product or service to your mailing list. With a few hundred or even thousands of subscribers to reach, it would be practically impossible to make significant sales contacting each manually. How many emails can you (or even your team) send in a day if you were to do this?

This is where an automation tool like MailChimp comes in. For starters, this software comes with pre-set automation based on common shopping events such as order notifications and abandoned cart series. And if the pre-built options don’t offer what you’re looking for, MailChimp allows you to create custom automation based on your unique preferences.

MailChimp also helps you buy, run and manage ad campaigns across multiple platforms like Facebook and Google. This way, you can target an even wider audience that goes beyond your mailing list and organic web traffic.

Automation supports every phase of your customer’s journey

Advertising

Understanding the process of converting a lead into a prospect, and finally to a buying customer will help you provide the right information at every stage of your users’ journey. To be able to do this, you need to personalize your marketing campaign using automation software. No one wants to receive generic content that hardly solves their unique problems or meets their needs. This is why tools like MailChimp enable you to segment your email list so you can send relevant offers and solutions to different audiences based on their exact needs and preferences.

For example, if the marketing aim is to connect with newly acquired prospects, you can use Mailchimp’s data-based and welcome message automation to reach and welcome them onboard. On the other hand, if you want to make more sales, consider using the abandoned cart and product follow-up automation. You can also set up a customer re-engagement automation to bring back old clients by sparking their interests in your products.

Tracking your campaigns

Monitoring the performance of your email campaigns is probably one of the most comfortable and most exciting parts of email marketing. After you send out your bulk email, the first thing you need to monitor the number of subscribers who successfully received your email. You also want to know the name of recipients who opened it as well as the types of links that attracted the most clicks.

Campaign tracking

From here, you can track your conversions, purchase details, and total sales from MailChimp’s reports section. With this information, you can rethink your campaign’s strategy and probably look for ways to make it more productive. Tracking helps you identify the behavioral patterns of your subscriber base to improve on future mailings.

Also, apart from Mailchimp’s inbuilt tracking feature, you can track your campaigns by adding e-commerce integrations or third-party tools such as Google analytics in the tracking section. This way, you can compare your reports and gather extra data that you’d otherwise have not acquired using one tool alone.

Re-engage past customers

Mailchimp’s re-engagement campaign provides a perfect opportunity to identify subscribers that are not responding to your emails. Even better is the fact that the tool also facilitates easy reconnection with them as you aim to win back their attention.
Here’s how you do it – using information from your MailChimp’s reporting tool, create a listing of subscribers who have not been opening your emails during a particular period. Once you have this list ready, send an enticing email hoping to give them a reason to come back and check what you have for them.

If after a few more reconnections attempts a section of the dormant subscribers still can’t seem to react, the best idea henceforth is to remove them from your mailing list and assume they’re no longer interested in hearing from you.

Run ad campaigns on social media

social media

Let’s talk this out – social networking has played a significant role in the success of much online business. Indeed, this is one channel you should be targeting if your digital marketing is to scale up and reach a broader market. An effective way to maximize social media reach is by creating paid ads and running them across significant platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

MailChimp and various email marketing tools permit you to build and run social media ads with an added advantage of reaching your email listings. Another advantage is that you can quickly reconnect with people who have in the past unsubscribed from your list through social media ads run through these tools.

Leverage the power of MailChimp integration.

One of the simplest ways to get the most out of MailChimp (and pretty much many other tools) is by integrating it with compatible tools and extensions. For example, MailChimp seamlessly integrates with numerous tools, most which you possibly use daily to run your online business. Do you use PayPal, a CRM software, or run an e-commerce site using Shopify? You’ll be glad to know that all these syncs with MailChimp.

This Pipedrive integration is one such utility that allows you to send highly-targeted and personalized emails to a specific group of customers. All you need is to define your segmentation criteria in the Pipedrive CRM, scroll to the bottom of your list, and hit the Mailchimp button to export these contacts. As a result, you’re able to save on time, minimize spamming, and more importantly, boost your sales and conversions!

Conclusion

With modern tools like email marketing software, it’s easier than ever even for non-techies to automate business processes and streamline their digital campaigns. Putting it all together, sales and marketing automation brings you three essential benefits for fast business growth;

  • Allows you to find and close better deals.
  • Enables you to deliver the right messages to the right people on time.
  • Helps you cut on administrative tasks so you can focus on other more critical business processes.

There is always a whole new world of possibilities for both small businesses and large enterprises that integrate powerful automation technologies like MailChimp in their processes. Make the switch today if your goal is to start roaming with the big boys!

How to Grow Your Small Business with Digital Marketing?

How to Grow Your Small Business with Digital Marketing?

Brand identity and brand awareness are always two concepts at the forefront of every marketing strategy regardless of the nature of business or organization. Often at times, small businesses will struggle to make it to the radar with insufficient or ineffective attempts at making their brand known to the public.

However, thanks to the versatile nature of the tech, it is much easier to grow and expand the bounds of the business by knowing how to utilize the digital landscape properly and this is what we will be focusing on today.

An Effective Use of Time and Resources

One of the reasons why small businesses marketing can now and even compete to a certain extent with established and well-reputed companies is because digital marketing is not nearly as expensive or resource-heavy than traditional marketing (billboards, TV ads, newspaper and magazine entries etc.).

Furthermore, thanks to the many analytical tools provided by popular platforms like Facebook Audience Insights, Google Trends, and Google Analytics, every marketer regardless of the scope and financial position of the company can employ a sufficient strategy to target its audience and spread the word of the brand.

In fact, due to the highly affordable nature of digital marketing for business and the ease with which marketers can carry it out, almost 40% of the companies claimed that using a digital marketing strategy led to considerable savings for the money to be spent elsewhere. Furthermore, the results also reflect the success of such a marketing strategy as digital marketing helps companies have a 2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy. There’s also the aspect of internal growth of the company, as internet marketing is 3.3 times more likely to allow businesses to expand their workforce and user base.

So what exactly are the many channels made accessible via digital marketing?

The brand’s website

First and foremost, digital marketing for business is all about creating a digital ‘presence’. This is where the information hub for your brand as a business and as an ‘investment’ of trust and money lies. Your website must seamlessly integrate the latest design trends and optimum usability.

From the ‘About Us’ section for detailing the goal or vision of the brand to ‘Contact Us’ page for details to get in touch by proceeding forth with the deal, a website is a must even if the associated company operates entirely out of a physical store following the ‘brick-and-motor’ model.

Marketers know the real value of online presence since having a website more or less puts you on the radar when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here it is when the valuable metrics come into play including traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates and bounce-rates, domain authority (DA). This puts the focus on optimizing both the desktop and mobile versions of the website to establish a user-convenient and streamlined platform.

From effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to an intuitive and interactive navigation bar, every little detail adds to the overall reputation and confidence among the users as well as the search engine ranking algorithms. Backlinks, which serve as references that redirect back to your company’s website, are especially significant when it comes to ranking higher in the organic search results.

Page load times are also an important factor that contributes to the overall user experience and such an aspect is especially relevant to mobile optimization as Google highly values the metric for ranking purposes. Of course, above all, a website is the personification or the identity of any brand when it operates in an online environment. With specific color palettes, patterns, design choices and page layouts, the website is the visual reflection and representation of what your brand is all about.

Social media and shareable content

We can’t host a conversation about digital marketing for business without bringing social media into the picture. As the numbers suggest, almost 71% of small businesses marketing utilize social media in one way or another in their digital marketing strategies.

Apart from the Audience Insight Tool for a segmented marketing approach, Facebook is ahead of the other social networking and media sites thanks to its video ads and live podcasts. As videos constitute to 135% more organic reach compared to image-based advertisements.

From a survey hosted by HubSpot, 76% company owners said that advertising via video content helped them increase their sales while 81% of the surveyed individuals claimed to have successfully convinced a visitor to purchase a product online via video content. It’s no surprise that YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world after Google, and processes almost 3 billion searches every month.

Most importantly, 83% of consumers are likely to share content with their close friends and relatives if it’s in video format, which brings us to the next important aspect of online marketing: shareable content.

Apart from Facebook, other platforms including Twitter and Instagram are all about redirecting traffic to-and-fro between the business’ website and these social networking platforms. Twitter is especially viable when creating the buzz for any new arrivals or trending products for the business and any issues are addressed directly with satisfactory responses. An astounding 82% of users actively engage with brands on Twitter. With Instagram, we have the Insta Story or short videos that have 250m daily active users.

Why social media sharing is so important?

Sharing is important not just because of the awareness for the brand it creates, but the positive reviews and impressions you can potentially spread among the dear friends of the individual who made a purchase. This ‘social proof’ concept is relevant to business strategists because all individuals look forward to people with authority or experience, namely those who’ve tried a particular service and if it’s a close relative or a credible source, then the reputation and authenticity of the business also receive a huge boost.

OfferFactor is e-commerce specializing in clothing & apparel which, in addition to providing the social media icons on its product pages, will ask for permissions to sync the shopping cart with the Facebook Messenger app.

Source: Offer Factor

This is activated by default, so there’s a constant reminder to the individual of cart expiry which is good as an anti-cart-abandonment measure.

Source: Offer Factor

Email marketing

Finally, the fact that people regularly like to check their inboxes cannot be overlooked. This makes the channel, a primary one for daily or monthly reminders in the form of newsletters about any promotions, special discounts or voucher codes and customer services including electronic receipts. The numbers speak volumes as well since email marketing is reportedly said to have an incredible ROI of 3800%.

Then there’s the matter of email lists which you can utilize to promote a new range of products on every special occasion. Here the number of newsletters you roll out and their quality and relevance for the particular individual matters. PlayStation does a good job in this regard by constantly keeping in touching with its players, which is the core value they stand on as evident in their slogan: ‘This is for the players’.

Apart from handing out free voucher codes, communicating any advancements or purchases from the PlayStation store, the company will even congratulate the player on completion of a video game and sometimes, if you’re lucky, even get 10$ allotted to your account as a kind gesture from the company. As this year ended, PlayStation rolled out interesting statistics associated with every player that counted the number of hours they’d spent on a daily basis, which games they played the most and how many trophies they earned while doing so. This is an excellent case of when businesses are willing to nurture their relationships with their users and strive to continue improving and building upon it.

Source: Sony

Conclusion

An online environment houses just the right tools and tech that can help you understand the user’s behavior and patterns, target them accordingly and allow them to share the experience with their dear comrades ultimately helping the business gain traction, recognition, and credibility as it continues to expand and spend more resources on digital marketing for business via the social media and email channels.