editor, Author at Mediastreet

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Most Founders Get the Cost to Acquire a Customer Wrong. Here’s How to Do It Right

December 22, 2021 No Comments

Which CAC you show investors– and why– says more about you as a founder than you think

One of the most important metrics that venture capital (VC) funds look for when considering an investment is your cost to acquire a customer (CAC). Calculating your CAC seems straightforward, right? Well, it’s not as simple as you might think.

Showing the wrong CAC to a potential VC investor could completely derail your conversation. Approach the CAC discussion incorrectly, and VCs may either perceive that you’re paying way too much to acquire customers or think you’re being disingenuous or omitting key information.

There are actually two CACs, and they’re different.

If you ask an accountant to calculate your company’s CAC, most of the time they’re going to give you the fully-loaded version. This is your CAC with everything included– your advertising spend, marketing employees and contractors, public relations team, search engine optimization software, etc. It’s “the works,” everything and the kitchen sink. It’s theoretically correct, and it’s the number that will show the most information about your business.

But this isn’t the CAC you want to show VCs.

Most VCs are being presented with direct ad spend CAC. This is a more simplistic view of your spending to acquire customers. You get there by adding direct advertising spend (think Google and Facebook ad spend) together with your direct marketing spend (for example, affiliate commissions), then divided by the total number of customers you brought on in that period (for example, in your most recent year).

Using the wrong one may get you turned down by an investor– even if your business is great.

For example, let’s say you and another company in your space are presenting to the same VC. You calculated your lifetime value to CAC (LTV:CAC) ratio using your fully-loaded CAC, and you get LTV:CAC of 2.5x. But your competitor calculated their LTV:CAC using direct ad spend CAC, and they show 4.8x. On its face, your competitor wins.

But what if on a fully-loaded CAC, your competitor’s LTV:CAC ratio is 2x? That’s the problem with apples and oranges. In the short space of a pitch, you likely won’t make it far enough to talk through both CACs. That VC will likely go deeper with your competitor, whereas your team might have to keep knocking on more doors for capital.

Know both, but showcase only one.

On your VC pitch deck, showcase your direct ad spend CAC with an asterisk note indicating that you’re using direct ad spend but have fully-loaded figures available. This way, you ensure you’re being fully transparent but are not shooting yourself in the foot by showing an overweight figure versus what they’re used to. You’re also giving that VC a reason to want to dive deeper into due diligence with you– and that’s where you’ll have more time to discuss what costs you’ve included, versus which you haven’t.

If they ask about it, what do I say?

If a VC asks why you’ve only shown your direct ad spend CAC, here’s your line:

We’ve calculated it both ways, but a couple of potential leads that we’re speaking with indicated that they preferred to see direct ad spend as a starter, and in due diligence we would get deeper into fully-loaded CAC with a view on how we’re expecting LTV:CAC to scale as we achieve more efficiencies across our sales stack.

This shows that not only do you know your metrics and understand their importance to investors, but you also know the road– and you’re already talking with other potential lead investors.

Ultimately, you’re showing that VC that you’re a founder that gets it.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Evan Fisher

Sourced from Inc.

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4 Ways Readers Have Adapted To Filter Out Irrelevant Content

December 22, 2021 No Comments

By John Hall

Only quality content is king. The rest is a court jester, distracting the audience but failing miserably to entertain or inform it. The internet features a proliferation of content, but not all of it is relevant to those who find it. Savvy readers have become wise to both irrelevant content and how to deal with it.

We live in a world where people seek instant gratification. Readers are told how many minutes it will likely take them to consume an online article, and when that amount might be too daunting, they’re given a TL;DR. And that’s just for content they’ve already decided they’re interested in! When it’s not, readers, including me, have found ways to filter out irrelevant material. Here are four of them.

1. They Have Become Contradictory Searchers

These days, most internet searchers are loath to scroll through pages of search results to find the most relevant links. That’s why the first page of a Google search captures 71%-92% of clicks of clicks and page two, just 6%.

Yet irrelevant content creates a bit of a Catch-22. Readers who have adapted to not finding what they’re seeking on page one may begin going higher in the page count. As they do, companies sense they have opportunities to create even more content—relevant or not—hoping they’ll be found if readers begin taking a deeper dive.

Businesses can do better. Search engines change algorithms hundreds of times a year to help quality content rise to the top. Businesses need to keep up with algorithm adjustments and focus on creating high-quality content that will land on page one.

Lowered expectations yields a rise in contradictory search behavior. When readers approach a search anticipating irrelevant content, businesses shouldn’t be surprised at this response. If they will make a concerted effort to raise the bar for their content, though, they just might raise their readers’ expectations as well.

2. They Have Learned to Navigate It

If irrelevant content creates a Catch-22, keywords create a chicken-or-egg quandary. Do you use keywords relevant to your product in your content? Or do you create your content based on keywords found using Google’s keyword tool? It’s your target audience that should be driving this decision.

Readers have figured out how keywords affect their search results. One recent analysis of keywords used on Google found that nearly 92% of search terms are long-tail keywords. However, those searches accounted for only slightly more than 3% of search volume.

When that long-tail search yields a multitude of irrelevant results, readers will shorten it trying to get more concentrated ones. Some will use that autocomplete prediction list that pops up under the Google search box. The tool uses information specific to the reader, such as past search history and the language and location of the query.

Businesses should use simpler, more focused keywords and avoid a broad match keyword strategy. Sure, the volume of searches using broad terms is greater, but that just means a higher number of readers are frustrated by the irrelevant content they find. Companies should create higher-quality content that steers readers to finding them on the first page of their query results.

3. They Take Shortcuts

The vast majority of the time, humans will take a shortcut if it’s available. We want what we want, and we want it now. Readers searching for relevant content and not finding it are even more likely to use hacks that shorten the process.

When search results come up, readers may hit “Command (or Control) + F” to highlight their keyword without having to read every result as they scroll down. If they take a site-specific shortcut, such as “site: website name + search term,” only results for that site will appear first. Readers can also use quotation marks around specific words, which means the search finds those specific words in that order first.

It’s obvious that your content will likely be buried in search results when readers take these shortcuts. You can’t blame them for taking them, but you can do something about it.

An intuitive digital marketing strategy should keep a company’s content prioritized. In turn, readers will find the company’s relevant content high in a search, increasing readership and the number of potential customers. That could help them eschew the shortcuts and enjoy a fruitful journey instead.

4. They Are Going Incognito

To avoid the distraction of getting search results based on predictive elements, readers are going incognito on Google. This offers an easy way to prevent the algorithm from offering results based on previous search history. It’s kind of like getting a new identity with every query.

A simple “Ctrl + Shift + N” in Windows is all it takes to stop the browser from storing a reader’s browsing history, cookies and information entered on forms, such as an email address or phone number. So why do people searching for relevant content feel like they have to go dark to do it?

The more often readers find relevant content on page one of their search results, the more likely they are to search overtly. It’s up to businesses to create the relevant content that keeps them out in the open by repeatedly giving them what they want.

To make their content relevant, businesses need to develop content that addresses readers’ concerns, answers their questions, solves their problems and engages them authentically. They also need content strategies that pivot as those concerns, questions and problems change. If your content says, “I see you,” your readers may come out of the shadows.

Search results connected to nothing readers are searching for has motivated them to adapt in a desperate effort to find what they are seeking. Those of us who create content have only ourselves to blame. As a result, only we can fix it by giving readers what they want when they want it. And they want it now.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By John Hall

John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a scheduling and time management app. He’s also the strategic adviser for Relevance, a company that helps brands differentiate themselves and lead their industry online. You can book him as a keynote speaker here and you can check out his best-selling book “Top of Mind.” Sign up for Calendar here.

Sourced from Forbes

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How to Increase Conversion Rates

December 22, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Influencive

Ecommerce conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce website/store or landing page who fulfil the action you want them to (e.g., purchasing a product, subscribing to your newsletter or a service, etc.) depending on the nature of your business.

Are you opening a new online store, but don’t know how to improve conversion rates? Perhaps you already own an ecommerce business, but are unable to turn leads into customers?

You’ve come to the right place.

Ecommerce conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce website/store or landing page who fulfil the action you want them to (e.g., purchasing a product, subscribing to your newsletter or a service, etc.) depending on the nature of your business.

The higher the conversion rate of your website – the more productive and impactful your marketing efforts are. In this guide, we’ll discuss the best approaches you can undertake to boost your conversion rates.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

Calculating your conversion rate is essential for keeping track of your business growth. The mathematical formula is very simple – divide the total number of converted clients by the number of your website visitors, then multiply the result by 100 to get the percentage.

For example, if your store made 60 sales from 3,000 visitors in a month, you divide 60 by 3,000 then multiply the result by 100. Therefore your conversion rate is 2%.

So, how do you know if that is a good conversion rate?

Based on the latest data, the average conversion date for ecommerce should be between 1.5% and 2%, so you’re right where you want to be.

10 Tips to Increase Conversion Rates

There are lots of strategies to increase online conversion rates. We’ve compiled the best and most effective tactics you can implement to boost the sales from your website.

Let’s get started.

A/B Testing

A/B testing, also called split testing, is a technique used to assess the responsiveness of your website and monitor how different changes may attract more visitors and stimulate conversion rates.

This technique relies on creating two instances of your site to test the different versions simultaneously and compare which one has a better effect on visitors. Using A/B testing is an essential and fast way to learn more about the status of your conversion rates. It can be used to analyse website designs, headlines, landing pages, and content.

A/B testing also helps you easily differentiate between your business strategies that are actually working and those that need improvements. However, in order for this to work accurately, your website must already have stable amounts of traffic.

Still, if your sample size is too small, the results won’t accurately reflect the effects of the changes made when the number of your site visits rises.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Unique selling proposition (USP) is what makes your business or product unique and standing out among your competitors. This needs to be displayed clearly on your homepage. It can be anything, from certain quality certifications to the way your products are created (handmade, 100% local craftsmanship, etc.).

You can display your USP in the tagline under your brand logo which will appear on every page of your website. You can also show it off on your homepage in full size, to let visitors know what they’re getting as soon as they access your online store.

Website Design and Product Visuals

It takes 50 milliseconds for a visitor to get a first impression from your website. Accordingly, you must make every millisecond count for a successful conversion. Designing your website based on studying your target audience will help you choose the right colour scheme, font styles, and create an aesthetic balance to capture their attention.

Shoppers prefer clear, organized, and easy-to-navigate pages. Having a cluttered website that’s full of flashy banners, pop-ups, and random content will put off your visitors. Instead, be subtle about guiding your shopper through your website to the desired call to action (CTA).

It’s also smart to place your navigation bar away from intersections so the visitor focuses on the CTAs rather than navigate away. In addition, an F-shape design of a website is more favored by users.

The F-shape pattern is based on occupying the top and left side of your page with important elements or content as people prefer to read horizontally starting from the upper part then move down a little further to read in another horizontal manner. Finally, they scan the rest of the page vertically from the left side. Therefore, make sure to arrange the essential elements and CTA along the F-shape lines.

How you display your products plays an important role in improving conversion rates. Displaying clear photos of products from different angles with zoomed-in details and detailed descriptions will help customers make a purchase decision faster.

Boost Your Website Speed

A slow website is often a traffic killer and doesn’t rank well. Did you know that 75% of shoppers tend to abandon slow websites just out of impatience?

There a few actions you can take to avoid this disaster and make your website load faster:

● Use Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to keep track of your site performance on different devices. This tool gives you reports of any performance issues on pages and how you can improve their loading speeds.

● Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to access a global network of servers and help your customers reach your website quickly from different locations.

● Make sure to compress and optimize the size of imagesand other media files on your website. This can boost your page speeds significantly.

● Optimize your code by removing unnecessary formatting, code comments, and characters such as commas and spaces.

● Reduce page redirects to minimize the wait time for the completion of the HTML response cycle. This happens when visitors are redirected to another page.

Create Offers and Discounts

Shopping cart abandonment is a serious issue for online stores and people tend to empty their carts when they feel they can get a better bargain elsewhere.

Offering discounts may increase purchases and conversions, but you should award incentives strategically to avoid profit loss. It’s best to find a balance between promotions for new customers and existing ones. You can also provide referral and seasonal discounts to keep the ball rolling.

Offer coupons or vouchers to existing customers occasionally to maintain their loyalty through push notifications, SMS, or email for example. Another good use of discounts is promoting other sales platforms like a mobile app. Rewards like a free item or a voucher when a customer makes a purchase through your phone application.

Provide Multiple Shipping Options

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You finally find exactly what you’re looking for, but might end up facing one or more of these scenarios at the check out:

● Shipping rates are too high

● Item takes too long to be delivered

● Limited shipping options

● Not enough information about the delivery process

● No option to track your order

● No clear refund policy

What are you going to do in this case? Most probably, you won’t proceed with the purchasing process and look elsewhere.

Shipping is an integral element of an ecommerce store and an important conversion rate optimizer. That’s why it’s critical to ensure you provide a smooth and transparent delivery experience for your customers, especially one-time shoppers. This is one of the best ways to turn normal users into loyal fans.

Fast shipping is a high priority when it comes to driving more sales. Collaborate with a third-party logistics service (3PL) that has a proven successful shipping history and maintains a network of locations that aligns well with your business.

Give your customers various shipping options like home delivery and include extra services such as pick-up from your retail store (if available), or from the nearest 3PL station.

Free shipping is another excellent perk to increase conversion rates and will also give you an edge over your competitors. For instance, you can offer this service for customers who make purchases over a certain amount or for bundle deals.

Make sure to include a clear and detailed shipping policy on your website. Let your customers know when they should expect their goods to be delivered and provide them with a tool to track their orders.

Build Customer Trust

Your competitors may offer similar services or products, but customers will always go for the most trustworthy business. Clients need to be in the know and feel their opinions matter in order to trust your brand and continue doing business with you.

So, how can you achieve that?

Customer support is the bridge between customers and your brand. Providing excellent client assistance ensures your visitors will feel appreciated. As a result, they will return to your store and spread the good word about it, leading to more traffic and higher conversion rates.

Train your staff to handle queries and complaints with care and efficiency. Implement multiple support channels such as live chat, ticket system, phone, and email. Add FAQ and comprehensive knowledge base sections to your website for self-assistance.

Getting customer feedback through reviews and ratings on the products/services you sell, and surveys about the level of service they receive is crucial. This level of transparency makes it easier for other potential clients to learn more about your products and build a long-lasting bond with your brand.

Take Advantage of Social Platforms

Being available on social media is not only a marketing strategy to widen your target audience but also a way to win the trust of potential visitors.

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow people to get to know your business. For those who already used your service or bought your products – it’s a platform to express their honest opinion about their experience. In return, this gives other potential shoppers a sense of trust that your business is legit and has been used by plenty of customers.

Another advantage of being on social media is that you can create paid ads (i.e. Facebook’s marketplace or Instagram’s Instafeed) and use the platform’s popularity to have a wider outreach to your target audience and potential customers.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency or scarcity is to indirectly give the impression to your visitors that if they don’t take a specific action (e.g., purchase an item), they’ll miss a great opportunity. This can be done using several different strategies. The most common one is displaying a notification under each product whenever a few items are remaining in stock (usually less than 10).

Another common marketing strategy is to have limited time offers. For instance, having a certain attractive discount that’s only available for a specific period of time (a day, the weekend, until the end of the week, until the end of the month, etc.). Shop owners often display a countdown until the offer ends to make it even more exciting.

Creating this sense of urgency plays a big part in visitors’ subconscious attempts to avoid missing a good chance.

Make Your Website Mobile-friendly

It doesn’t come as a surprise that mobile shopping, or m-commerce, is gaining popularity as more customers find it easier to purchase goods using their phones.

For that reason, having a mobile-friendly website can greatly increase your conversion rates. Adding a mobile app for your smartphone users is even better. The most important thing is for your site to be easy to navigate, load fast, and don’t contain bugs when viewed on any screen or device.

You can easily advertise your user-friendly mobile app on your website and include a link to the store where users can download it from. Having this means that visitors will be able to access your site or app no matter where they are, boosting your traffic numbers in return.

Final Thoughts

Getting your customers to convert is more paramount than just attracting them to your website. By implementing the discussed tips, you’ll be able to optimize your conversion rate and gain even more clients in a shorter time. You’ll also notice improvements in your marketing campaigns, brand popularity, and rise in traffic.

Sourced from Influencive

In News

Earn Passive Income for Your Business with Shopify

December 21, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

Build a Shopify Store on a budget.

E-commerce boomed during the pandemic and as people have become more comfortable with shopping online, there’s good reason to believe the upward trend will only continue. For savvy entrepreneurs, this presents an outstanding opportunity, especially since platforms like Shopify are so easy to leverage.

That said, you may need a little help getting started in your passive income venture. Get your feet off the ground with The 2021 Shopify Drop Shipping & Private Label Bundle. It’s just $19.99 (reg. $796) for a limited time.

This four-course bundle gives you 14 hours of training to help you set up a Shopify store and start scaling it. You’ll learn the rules for choosing what to sell with a dropshipping model and understand how to discover suppliers for quick dropshipping. Additionally, you’ll understand how to save money with suppliers and even set up your site to automatically accept credit card payments to fully automate your selling.

You’ll also learn a step-by-step process to opening up new sales channels for your private label products and discover how to use targeted paid ad campaigns and promotions to market your store and products. Further your store’s reach by performing keyword research effectively and discovering SEO secrets both on- and off-page to amplify your store’s place in the marketplace.

Finally, there’s a crash course designed to help you build a T-shirt selling business as a practice round. You’ll get started with Printful, create graphics with low-cost tools, create products, and add them to Shopify to start selling fast.

Start earning some passive income or launch a side venture for your business. With the e-commerce boom here to stay, it’s an opportunity for all entrepreneurs to earn a little extra. Right now, you can get The 2021 Shopify Drop Shipping & Private Label Bundle for just $19.99 for a limited time.

Feature Image Credit: Roberto Cortese/Unsplash

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Keep It Quirky: 5 Small Business Owners Share Their Best Email Marketing Tips

December 21, 2021 No Comments

By Andrea Forstadt

Actionable advice on capturing subscribers, attention and loyalty through more meaningful messaging.

Email is ubiquitous. It’s the one marketing tool that spans the globe, is relatively low in cost, is powered by automation, offers customization and is measurable in terms of success. It also has the highest ROI of any other type of marketing. Ranking as the preferred method of brand communications across all demographic groups, email marketing is a no-brainer for businesses of all sizes. Crafting the right message requires skill, however. As these five business owners will attest, it requires a thoughtful, nuanced approach that is informative and engaging. Here, they share their advice for making emails matter to those that matter most: your customers.

A smiling man wearing glasses, a plaid shirt and an apron stands in a bike shop with rows of bikes behind him. — **John Robinson, owner of Johnny Velo Bikes in Columbus OH, suggests creating engaging and entertaining email content and collaborating with other businesses in your area.** — Johnny Velo Bikes

John Robinson, biking advocate & owner, Johnny Velo Bikes

Who we are: We are a local, family-owned bike shop in Columbus, OH, that serves all forms of cyclists in sales, service, and disco dance-offs.

We use our email strategy to build a customer-based following. We strive not to make it about listing products for sale, and instead to provide quirky and funny information that keeps people intrigued and engaged. I think about the emails that I click on and ask myself, “Why did I click on this? Was it the subject line, company, or the pretext that intrigued me?”

We utilize software that interfaces with our POS system and has certain scripts attached to it, based on what people buy. For instance, if you purchase a bike from us, you will receive an email the next day thanking them for your purchase with information about helmets and accessories as well as a link to our favorite biking routes, based on your skill level. Thirty days later, you will receive an email reminding you about bringing your bike in for its 30-day tune-up.

To build an email subscribership, we feature links on our website where people can sign up for our newsletter. We also add every email address into our POS email database when a customer shares it upon making a purchase. This database integrates with our email marketing software. We used Mailchimp for our first three years, and it was extremely easy to set up, design and send emails. We switched about a year ago to Klaviyo, which allows POS integration and email flows that can automatically keep our best customers engaged.

It’s all about engagement. Make your emails fun. Be real, write in conversational form and make each email something they want to open. Tell a story and work on ways you can engage other small businesses in your area. Follow Johnny Velo Bikes on Instagram & Facebook.

Children create art in an art studio with plentiful windows and natural sunlight. — **Sunflower Art Studio’s owner, Lika Gitis, believe that when emails are simple and approachable, the can maintain a personal touch and a real connection with her customers.** — Sunflower Art Studieo

Lika Gitis, owner, Sunflower Art Studio

Who we are: A community children’s art school, teaching Boulder, CO-area kids since 2000.

I think that emails are very important, as they provide a simple and approachable way of communication. As most of my clients are parents of my students, it’s important to maintain a personal touch and a real connection. I feel that social media doesn’t provide such an individual approach.

To grow our mailing list, we have a subscription button on the website that provides a discount. We also use Sawyer Tools, which collects new emails at registration — with clients’ consent, of course.

We have been using Mailchimp for years because of its all-in-one emailing platform. It builds beautiful emails, edits pictures and text, has merge tags and lets you see how your emails were opened and seen.

I think that emails are great in small amounts. I don’t like to be spammed, so I don’t spam my clients. I think that if used for announcements or newsletters, once every couple of weeks or monthly, those emails will be enough to keep your audience involved and informed. I also feel that short emails with pretty pictures and action buttons work best. Follow Sunflower Art Studio on Instagram & Facebook.

An image of a yellow smiley face is surrounded by the phrase The Hell Yeah Group loves you. — **L.A.-based The Hell Yeah Group creates share-worthy weekly newsletters to engage readers and grow their list of email subscribers.** — Hell Yeah Group

Paco de Leon, founder, The Hell Yeah Group

Who we are: We are based in Los Angeles, CA, and help creative professionals with their relationship with money.

Every week my business publishes an email newsletter. We use the newsletter as a way to add value for our readers and help them get to know our company. The main tactic for growing our list is to focus on making a newsletter so good that people feel compelled to share it. I measure success by the amount of replies I get from readers (a handful each week) and inquiries about my bookkeeping service (a few each week). Emails that provoke people to think differently, offer another perspective, or disturb or agitate a long-held belief tend to do the best.

Finding the right email platform depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you plan to run drip campaigns to segmented lists, ConvertKit is a great option. If you just want to send out simple broadcasts, Mailchimp or Email Octopus, which is what we use, work well.

My advice on email best practices is simple: Spend time looking at your email from the reader’s perspective. Make it worth their time and attention. Each subscriber is a person with feelings and fears, who have others who love and care about them. Treat your readers like humans. Care about them. Make your emails worth their time, energy and attention. Follow The Hell Yeah Group on Instagram.

Image of strawberries plants in a row of crops. — **Tanaka Farms’ email strategy centers around building awareness of specials, services and activities to community members and visitors.** — Tanaka Farms

Joni Newman, marketing & social media, Tanaka Farms LLC

Who we are: Family owned and operated 30-acre farm located in Irvine, CA, featuring a fresh produce market stand, CSA program, u-pick activities and more.

We use email newsletters to reach out to our customers with events, sales, specials and other activities here at Tanaka Farms. We also send out special promo codes and discounts to our email subscribers. We have a fairly large subscriber list, and have found that we see a marked increase in sales whenever we promote something through our newsletter. We have email newsletter sign-up sheets at all of our cash registers, and we also have a pop-up window on our website to sign up for our newsletter. In addition, we have links on our social media accounts to sign up. We use Constant Contact for our contact management. It is a robust platform with many features, including tracking, analytics and reporting. It is also fairly intuitive to use.

We try not to spam our customers and only send out newsletters when we have something of value to offer. We generally stick to a bi-weekly schedule, with the occasional “quickie” thrown in between. We have found that by not sending them out too often, and always offering our subscribers something of value, we have a high open and click rate compared to the national average.

We also make sure our newsletters have a very consistent look and feel. We include vibrant photos and links back to our website to provide more information or to purchase tickets to one of our many activities. Follow Tanaka Farms on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter & Facebook.

Product image of three varieties of essential oils. — **Guru Nanda’s email marketing strategy and messaging centers around the brand’s commitment to authenticity, quality and good karma.** — Guru Nada

Puneet Nanda, chief essential oil, Guru Nanda

Who We Are: Buena Park, CA, makers of top-quality, ethically sourced healing products that incorporate Ayurvedic values at every level.

We love to use emails to form a connection with our customers. Guru Nanda products follow the practices of authentic Ayurveda, ancient Indian healing. Each product is rooted in my passion for the ancestral wisdom of my Indian culture, and I love using email to share more about this.

We send and manage our promotional emails using the email marketing software platform Klaviyo. We find it to be very user-friendly, as it offers helpful reports for tracking our success. In terms of database growth, our website has an automatic pop-up window that offers customers a discount on their first purchase when they subscribe to our list. We also offer monthly discounts to our subscribers. Both efforts have seen strong results each month.

My best advice for email marketing success? Keep it short and sweet! Have a marketing calendar and build your emails and social media around that to maintain cohesive messaging. Follow Guru Nanda on Instagram & TikTok.

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By Andrea Forstadt

Sourced from CO

In News

Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? You.com is betting on it

December 21, 2021 No Comments

By Luke Dormehl

You know that a technology’s changed the world when it becomes a verb. It speaks to a level of popularity and ubiquity that goes beyond the wildest dreams of marketeers. “I’ll WhatsApp you.” “I spent the evening YouTubing.” Disrupting any of these aforementioned brand-name products is beyond difficult — it requires a change in the default way that we relate to some standard action.

“To Google” is a verb — and a powerful one. In Google’s own words, its reason for being is no less than to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

And Richard Socher wants to disrupt it.

Richard Socher standing in front of a whiteboard — Salesforce

Socher (pronounced soh-chur) is the former chief scientist of Salesforce, one of the world’s premier customer relationship management platforms and makers of enormously successful enterprise apps. During his career, he has started and sold the A.I. company MetaMind, and been published broadly in fields ranging from computer vision to machine translation to summarization within natural language processing. His new search engine — You.com — seeks to challenge the single gatekeeper of search that is Google. He’s not about to let a pesky thing like a near-$2 trillion giant stop him, either. Even if it is a gosh-darned verb.

“My first thought was, you know, it was a verb ‘to Skype,’” Socher told Digital Trends at the start of a video call to showcase You in action. “And you know what we’re [speaking] on right now? Not Skype.”

A different approach to search

The idea driving You is to be the “not Skype” to Google’s Skype. The contention of Socher and co-founder Bryan McCann is that the world is at an inflection point when it comes to search. The company’s publicity materials drive this claim home: “Today, a single gatekeeper controls nearly 90% of the search market, dictating everything you see. The advertising and SEO biases of current search engines result in a lack of control over what people read, watch, research, eat, and buy. All of this makes people an object of artificial intelligence algorithms designed to monetize them rather than utilizing technology to harness the world’s information in relevant ways that build trust and confidence with every search.”

The most noticeable difference between Google and You comes down to aesthetics and operation. Socher points out that, for years, search engines have all looked kind of the same. They assume that information can be — and, more importantly, should be — arranged in a text-based list, neatly sorted from the number one slot (most useful) downwards. But is this really the best way to arrange information? And, even if it once was, is it still? You, by contrast, leans more heavily into widgets, with a design that owes a bit to the tile layout of kanban boards or social media platforms.

The tiled search results on You include the likes of Amazon pages, news stories, Yelp discoveries, Wikipedia pages, Reddit posts, Medium articles, coding snippets, LinkedIn listings, eBay sales, tweets (which can be retweeted and liked inside the search window), and more. Rather than Google’s sequential list of search results, You offers something more akin to a topographical view of the internet that lets people view the different content islands at once before zooming in to explore the ones that seem relevant.

“Can You displace Google? Can anything displace Google? This remains to be seen.”

“It actually took us a lot of iterations and thinking about design constraints and thinking about mobile,” Socher said. “When you think about Instagram and TikTok, people are very used to swiping left, right, and up and down. If you’re on Instagram, you swipe left to see more pictures of that story. Then, if you swipe down, you see the next story. We don’t want to have this massive engagement track of social networks. We want to help you search less and do more. Get things done, save your time, and summarize the web for you. But these are still very convenient ways to interact with content and are very intuitive — especially to younger generations.”

screenshot of you.com — A screenshot of the You.com search results with “the metaverse” used as an example query

These individual tiles can be upvoted and downvoted in something akin to Reddit. Searches consist firstly of preferred sources, followed by neutral sources, and then downvoted sources. Personalized search is nothing new: Google has been doing it since 2004. But You’s degree of transparent manipulation, the same way you can juggle around the apps that appear on your mobile home screen page, is fresh. In an effort to escape the filter bubble effect — whereby users may be shown slanted search results without realizing the slant — You makes it easier to separate the personalized searches from the objective ones. “That is something that no one else does, really,” Socher said. “To give that kind of agency and control to their users on a search engine.”

You also emphasizes privacy in a big way. Again, this isn’t a wholly unique claim to fame. DuckDuckGo has been leaning into private search for years. But You’s combining of this (the company won’t sell private data and promises an impressive incognito mode) with its new reinvented approach to search could be enough to lure in some users.

Taking on the mighty Google

All of this, of course, brings about the trillion-dollar question: Can You displace Google? Can anything displace Google? This remains to be seen. Search engines have certainly fallen before, replaced by faster, sleeker, better offerings. Remember W3Catalog, World Wide Web Wanderer, WebCrawler, Lycos, Jump Station, Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista? All of these launched, rose to semi-prominence and were then crushed underfoot to varying degrees in the decade before Google established itself. Others like Yahoo and, more recently, Bing, have been successful in their own way — but there’s no doubt which search engine trumps rules the roost.

Logic dictates that, at some point, Google will falter. Empires have a habit of doing that, in the corporate world as much as anywhere else. Just 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies for the year 1955 have remained on the list in the years since — and more than 89 percent have gone bankrupt, merged with or been acquired by others, or fallen off the Fortune 500 companies list at one time or another. When it comes to search, however, Google is a tricky customer to dislodge.

The search engine business today is bigger and more profitable than it’s ever been. Google generates piles of cash that would have been unfathomable for the companies that preceded it. Furthermore, through deals with the likes of Apple (Google pays Apple billions of dollars per year to remain the default search engine for iOS), many of us use Google even when we don’t explicitly think we’re using Google. This money means that Google can continue to innovate in search, hoovering up the best minds and, when needed, startups to fortify its castle walls.

You has raised a not-impressive $20 million to date. But that’s small potatoes next to the $183 billion that Google parent company Alphabet raked in in revenue in 2020, the overwhelming bulk of which came from advertising.

Socher is under no illusions about the challenge of taking on a Google. However, he also notes that Google’s focus on selling advertising could ultimately hurt its ability to nimbly experiment with new approaches and search layouts. (After all, if someone’s paying to be top of a list, they’re unlikely to be happy if they are suddenly one entry in a much larger grid.) At some point, the need to do pure search conflicts with the moneymaking model of selling ads. “It’s becoming harder and harder to find just naturally relevant content [on Google],” he said.

The start of a journey

It’s still the start of a long journey for You. The search engine has just entered a public beta, opening it up for critique and usage by the general public. There are also obvious ways that You could improve its offering — most notably in making it a touch-friendly interface for mobile.

“The interface is made to go on mobile, and we will very soon make more progress [in that area],” Socher said. “But the experience right now is much, much better on the desktop. We haven’t really put enough … we’re just a small startup. We just haven’t had the time and resources to make it work on different kinds of platforms. [But over] the next couple of weeks and months, we’ll continue to improve the mobile experience.”

One thing’s for certain, though: As tough a challenge as You has ahead of it, it’s got a whole lot of promise. Search is only going to become more important, and its requirements will continue to shift as the internet evolves. You has a smart team behind it, and some big-name investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Now it just remains to be seen if it can deliver.

Taking on the mighty Google is an incredibly tall order. But then so was challenging Yahoo when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to build a page-ranking search algorithm for their Ph.D. thesis. And that turned out pretty darn well for them.

By Luke Dormehl

Sourced from digitaltrends

In News

Five Free Ways To Generate Blog Topics That Get You Noticed

December 20, 2021 No Comments

By Kailynn Bowling

Content marketing is a must if you want to boost your brand on a budget. But only 33% of brands have a content marketing strategy — and the brands that have a plan still struggle to come up with innovative blog topics.

The good news is that content marketing is accessible to just about anyone: All you need is the time and expertise. Done right, blogs put your brand in front of more engaged shoppers thanks to the power of search engine optimization (SEO).

But what happens when you’ve run out of things to say? Or if your brand’s blog is feeling a little flat?

Whether you’ve just started blogging or you’ve been doing it for a while, you know how hard it is to think of something new to say to your audience. Nobody wants to read a short, rehashed piece that doesn’t teach them something new. With so much noise out there, your brand needs to say something with substance. Unique, intriguing topics are the best way to connect with more customers.

If you’re in a blogging rut, try these five tips to generate effective, interesting content that won’t put your readers to sleep.

1. Research what people are looking for.

What do your readers want to know? What information do they crave? Instead of guessing what your customers want to see, do a little research to find which topics are most important to them. This way, you only spend your energy on blogs that readers will actually engage with.

And no, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on fancy research tools to know what your customers want to see, either. You can find inspiration in so many places! When you’re in a rut, check out:

• Google Trends daily searches

• Google Analytics to see what people search for on your website

• Upvoted Quora posts

• Google autocomplete

• Social media posts by your customers

• Your customers’ emails to sales or customer service

• Twitter Trends

If these sources don’t yield anything interesting, you might have to dig deeper with your customers. Try conducting paid video call interviews with a handful of your more engaged customers. Treat this interview as a source of blog ideas and as information that can improve your business as a whole.

2. Choose topics for each customer persona.

You’ve created customer personas for your business, right? Put them to use! Instead of writing generic content that applies to all of your customers, create blog topics based on each persona’s pain points.

For example, one persona might be more worried about the cost of your products (and would want to see topics like DIYing) while another persona might want to know different applications for your product. Those are two very different needs, so make sure your topics cover the needs of every persona.

3. Do an expert roundup.

Does your brain need a break? Roundup-style posts are great for your readers, give other experts in your industry a little love and free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.

Sign up for a free Help A Reporter Out (HARO) account and ask experts to submit their opinions on a particular topic. Once you have at least 10 experts, put their quotes in a roundup post with a backlink to their site. More often than not, the quoted experts are happy to share your post with their network, putting your blog in front of more readers for little effort.

4. Attend a conference.

Conferences are the best place to hear about the latest news in your industry. If you’re lacking inspiration, sign up for a virtual or in-person conference.

Sometimes you’ll get a great idea for a unique blog when you’re listening to conference speakers. But this isn’t about transforming other people’s speeches into a blog. This is about forming your own take on upcoming trends or changes in the industry. The more unique your blog is, the better!

5. Tag-team with other businesses.

Nobody says you have to blog alone. If you have existing relationships with complementary businesses, ask them if they’d like to co-author a few blogs together. Two heads are better than one, after all.

The Bottom Line

Your goal is to create content that’s so good, it helps your readers sleep better at night. Successful content marketing requires consistency, but it gets harder and harder to generate good topics over time. It just won’t work if you rehash and recycle what everyone else is saying, so when in doubt, try these five tips to create better content for your blog.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Kailynn Bowling

Co-founder of ChicExecs PR & Retail Strategy Firm.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Avoid These 4 Social Listening Pitfalls at All Costs

December 20, 2021 No Comments

By Scott Clark

Social listening enables brands to understand what their customers truly think about the brand’s products and services. By “listening” for mentions of the brand’s name, products, and services on social media, brands can remove pain points in the customer journey, resolve customer complaints, learn what customers like and what they don’t, and even learn what customers think about the brand’s competitors. That said, there are several things that brands should avoid doing when using social listening. This article will discuss the pitfalls of social listening and how to avoid them.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is a marketing practice in which brands “listen” for keywords, typically the brand name, the brand’s products and services, and its competitor’s brand names, products and services, on social media outlets. By actively listening for those terms, brands are able to rapidly respond to customer complaints, determine where the pain points are in the customer journey, understand what they are doing right, and where they are going wrong. Additionally, brands can learn the things that customers like or dislike about the brand’s competitor’s products and services.

Research by SmartInsights revealed that as of October 2021, 57.6% of the world’s population (4.55 billion people) use social media. The leading social media outlets are, in order, Facebook (2.8 billion users), YouTube (2.2 billion users), WhatsApp (2 billion users), Instagram (1.3 billion users), and farther down the list, TikTok (732 million users), Pinterest (478 million users), and Twitter (397 million users).

A report from GlobalWebIndex showed that up to 50% of social media users use social networks to do research on products and services. Additionally, a report from Statista indicated that 33% of those polled from the United States said that they have used social media to complain about a brand or its customer service. Given these statistics, brands have a huge opportunity to learn more about their customers through social listening.

Don’t Fail to Listen to How People Feel

Dean Browell, PhD, Professor of Digital Ethnography and Social Listening at the VCU School of Business, shared his thoughts on the true benefit of social listening: gaining a much clearer picture of the personalities, behaviours, and feelings of customers. “Social listening provides deep behavioural insights into the decision making of the online public while also providing the landscape through which peers find when they are information gathering,” explained professor Browell. “It helps to illustrate the personalities and behaviours of audiences and can be used to follow trends and patterns in both the audiences and their feelings toward brands, services, products, facilities, and more. Social listening seeks to provide the voice of the consumer and understand the volume and timber of that voice and how it influences others.”

Brands often get caught up on metrics, rather than paying attention to the feelings that their customers are expressing on social media. These customers are representative of all the other customers that feel the same way but haven’t taken the time to post on social media. “Listen to them — they’re telling you what products they want, how they want to be treated, and who they trust. And if you think those are just the loudest voices, then understand the power of those loud voices for all the lurkers looking for answers. Social listening can help you understand the customer experience and their perception of it — and how it influences others. That’s very different than simply how they navigate your website or find products in store (although they might talk about that too),” said professor Browell.

Don’t Focus on the Brand’s Official Social Channels

When brands focus on social media, they often turn to their own official channels, focusing on what customers post there, or how they respond to what the brand has posted. Often, however, the most revealing aspects of social listening will show up on customer’s own profile pages, or within other groups or communities.

“It’s understandable that brands would be focused on the channels they own first, but there’s a real issue with thinking that by mostly paying attention to who shows up at your official channels represents how people actually feel about you,” said professor Browell. “Yes, there’s things to be revealed in those interactions, but the context of those interactions is incredibly important — and showing how people speak to peers when you’re not around is crucial to understanding why some segment shows up at all on your digital doorstep. It’s too small of a focus group.”

According to Davitha Ghiassi, executive vice president of Social and Integration at Red Havas, a merged media public relations and communication agency, going beyond the comments that come to brands is vital to gain a fuller understanding of their customers. “Whilst much of your customer feedback may come to you directly via branded channels — research shows that 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles,” said Ghiassi. “Therefore, looking beyond the comments that come to you is crucial in order to see the complete picture; and social listening enables you to do just that by tracking conversations including relevant keywords, brand mentions and even visual mentions of your brand (i.e. logo, product through visual intelligence tools like Talkwalker).”

Don’t Just Listen, Participate

The 2020 Sprout Social Index report revealed that 79% of customers expect a response within the first 24 hours after they have reached out to a brand through social media, and 40% expect brands to respond within an hour. Although social listening is about just that — listening — it also provides opportunities for brands to interact and respond to customers.

When customers create a post extolling the virtues of a brand’s products, that brand should step in and reply, thanking them for their feedback. When customers leave negative comments about a product or service, it’s the perfect time for the brand to resolve a problem and gain a loyal customer. Social listening is not just about listening to what customers are saying — it’s about participating, and having conversations with customers, showing them that the brand cares about them, and is grateful to be able to learn how they feel about the brand.

Brands must avoid being confrontational or defensive when they reply to what may appear to be negative comments left by customers on social media. They should leave a well thought out reply explaining that they are sorry that the customer had an issue, along with a way for the customer to contact them directly to resolve the issue. If the issue cannot be resolved, they should offer to immediately reimburse the customer for the entirety of what they paid. Once the offer has been resolved, there is always the opportunity to provide the customer with a special discount, buy one get one free, or something extra that shows that the brand cares about the customer’s feelings.

“Social listening not only offers a powerful means of identifying and directly addressing comments, questions or concerns surrounding your brand or product — it also allows you to look to them for insights that can help improve the overall customer service strategy,” explained Ghiassi. “For example, by creating pro-active content that can live across channels and addresses frequently asked questions sourced via social.”

Don’t Fail to Set Goals for Social Listening Initiatives

Many brands begin social listening initiatives without setting any specific goals or KPIs. Not only do specific goals require different practices, but without goals or KPIs it becomes impossible to gauge the effectiveness of social listening initiatives.

Depending on the goals that have been set for social listening initiatives, brands can gain a much deeper understanding of their customers’ needs and desires, how they feel about the brand in general, or how they feel about specific products and services, than they can through other channels. “Goals of social listening can be incredibly varied,” said professor Browell. “Social listening could help inform a brand of their actual brand health, it could provide insight into how their target audiences (B2C or B2B) make decisions and therefore inform decision paths, it can help validate and enhance personas, it can help with recruitment and retention, it can illuminate crucial geographic differences, it can enrich other research including making big data more valuable with rich insights, it can help in product development and adoption…honestly, the applications are as endless as a market research tool, the only difference is social listening also informs you on what the public will find when they look for peer input — something that a survey or focus group can’t fundamentally confirm.”

Final Thoughts

Social listening can be a very effective tool that enables brands to get to know their customers on a more personal, emotional level — when it is done correctly. Brands must set goals for their social listening initiatives in order to reap the most benefits, listen to how their customers feel, and learn to empathize with what they are hearing. They must not make the mistake of only listening to what is posted on the brand’s own official social media channels, and they must participate, rather than just listen, responding to customers when appropriate. Finally, brands must take action based on the insights that social listening has revealed, and ultimately, improve the customer journey.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe

By Scott Clark

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

Inexpensive Marketing Ideas for Small Business

December 20, 2021 No Comments

By Elvira Barucija

In today’s times, inexpensive online marketing for small businesses has become the best way to market your services and products. The traditional way of marketing is still important; however, online marketing ideas for small businesses supersedes most of the traditional forms of marketing and advertising. Except for TV and radio advertising, other forms of traditional advertising are not as noticeable to the average consumer.

Inexpensive Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Yet even with the different types of online marketing, it’s still important to use it wisely. One reason is because it’s important to reach your appropriate audience. This can be done, for instance, when advertising is sent to consumers who have searched for similar products and services like yours. There are inexpensive marketing ideas for small business, like social media, email marketing, and popups. They normally display advertisements when consumers have searched for similar products/services online. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and money advertising to consumers who are not interested in your product or services.

Secondly, with all the competitors online, it’s important that your website, content marketing, blog, etc, display words that will promote better search engine optimization. If not, your business can run the risk of having lesser visitors due to your business being displayed several pages down on the Google search.

Marketing on a Budget

When working out your marketing budget, you should keep different things in mind. First of all, maintaining great SEO and SMO is always extremely important. In doing this, you will have a much higher probability of visitors to your website, which means having a higher probability to have more customers.

Another thing to keep in mind is to use mobile marketing and email marketing to consumers who have shown similar interests in your products/services. Mailing lists are normally a great way for finding these consumers.

Also, utilizing analytics for social media, the website, and Google will help you get appropriate feedback, and adjust accordingly. And finally, banner advertising could also be a great way to hire someone else to strategically advertise across different social media outlets, while you’ll have more time to focus on other aspects of your business.

Digital Marketing at Your Fingertips

Marketing Tips Online

There is no doubt that online marketing is crucial when it comes to the success of your business no matter the industry. Online marketing is the best practice if you want to reach and connect to a larger crowd.

Here are some tips for marketing online that will help you reach your customers.

Offer Valuable Content

As consumers, we are aware of how much we are bombarded with content that we don’t even need. However, if the content is valuable, informative, and entertaining we will keep reading. Valuable and interesting content that relates to your industry will encourage subscriptions, comments, and sharing on social media which will all contribute to your ROI.

Keep in mind that your valuable content should be related to your product, and it should be original.

Do you have Your Social Media Accounts set up?

All businesses have moved to the digital world, and you must be there too. You need to have your online presence there and your social media up and running. There are so many social media platforms that you can utilize, but you need to focus on platforms where your targeting audience is spending most of their time.

Focus your Energy on 20% that will Bring you the Results

There are so many things you can do online, and you will get lost trying to do everything. In the beginning, you must focus your energy on 20% of things that work instead of trying to do everything. Let’s say you have a yoga studio. You should have your website, do SEO optimization, have your Facebook, Instagram account, Twitter account, and YouTube account. Maybe you should focus at the beginning on YouTube and build from there. Or if you have an ice-cream shop, maybe the best way to present yourself to the world would be through nice pics on Instagram.

Social Media for Business

If your small business doesn’t have its own social media accounts, then you might be missing out a lot. You are losing insight into your brand, engagement from the customers and more information on your competitors. On top of this social media can be cost-effective in reaching customers in more personalized ways.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is probably still the most popular with an audience of over 2.7 billion users. Every business should have a Facebook page. You can use Facebook to share photos, important updates and you have access to powerful advertising tools and analytics of your customer base.

Instagram Marketing

On the other side, Instagram is gaining a lot of customers with the current number being 1 billion active users. There is no shortage of business tools on Instagram that can help you promote your services. Instagram is a visual platform so it’s the best platform for those who have strong visual content.

On Instagram, you can use the services of influencers who are ready to promote your products. Here, we are not talking about Kardashians but influencers who are in the same niche as your business. For example, there are so many moms on Instagram with 50 000 or more followers that would be ready to promote your baby products for a fee. The fee can be arranged on the percentage of sales they make. Here, you only need to be mindful to work with influencers who have less than 100 000 followers since those who have hundreds of thousands of followers will probably not work for a fee but for the payment in advance (which doesn’t guarantee any results).

Twitter Marketing

Twitter is the third most popular platform and it’s great for sharing short updates, videos, and blog posts. Twitter is super easy for interaction with your followers by simply mentioning users in your posts, liking and retweeting tweets. However, if your brand is visual you might want to skip this network at least at the beginning.

Online marketing can be overwhelming when you are starting and it’s important to know where your energy should go first meaning what will bring you the results that you want to see.

By Elvira Barucija

Elvira has a Master Degree in Psychology. She is passionate about writing, is always on trend, and thoroughly researches her topics to offer readers high quality content. She also enjoys working with children and practicing yoga.

Sourced from GILDSHIRE Magazine

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Email: How to use it (and how not to use it) in 2022

December 17, 2021 No Comments

By Stephanie Vozza

Expert advice about email for today’s hybrid work world.

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with our inboxes, but they’re not going away anytime soon. Get a grip on email in 2022 by knowing its strengths and weaknesses:

What to do:

Note time zones
If your working hours aren’t the same as a coworker’s, schedule your messages to be sent later, says Lynne Oldham, chief people officer at Zoom. You’ll demonstrate respect for your teammate’s work-life balance.

What to avoid:

Don’t inadvertently create silos
Unless you’re sharing sensitive information, skip the email and put conversations in public threads that are searchable, says Job van der Voort, cofounder and CEO of HR software provider Remote.com. This is essential for companies with remote workers.

Don’t expect an immediate response
Use email for nonurgent announcements only. Collaboration should be done on shared platforms like Slack or by picking up the phone, says A World Without Email author Cal Newport.

By Stephanie Vozza

Sourced from Fast Company