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Two Important Lessons Learned From Spending $70 Million On Marketing

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By Joy Gendusa

I spend about $100,000 every week marketing my company to businesses nationwide. Spending that much per week on marketing may strike many business owners as excessive. And for some businesses, it is.

Obviously, I wasn’t spending $100,000 on marketing when I first started out in 1998. I didn’t have much working capital back then (just a $5,000 credit card, if you can call that capital), and I bootstrapped everything. I paid myself a minuscule salary for years in order to invest as much as possible in marketing. As a result, I’ve closely tracked my marketing returns — and failures — from the beginning.

Here are the two biggest, most business-defining lessons I’ve learned since spending my first dollar on marketing.

Lesson 1: Any decrease in your overall marketing can have a similar effect on your revenue.

I learned this lesson early on. Back then, my only marketing strategy was sending 1,000 postcards per week to businesses around me.

As those 1,000 postcards brought in new leads and those leads turned into revenue, I started to increase the quantity of my weekly outflow — first to 2,500 and then to 5,000. Each time I increased my weekly marketing expenditure, leads and revenue followed after about four to six weeks, like clockwork. Since then, I haven’t missed a mailing in 21 years, and we mail about 180,000 postcards each week.

My point is that your marketing sets a pace for leads and revenue. This includes cutbacks. I learned this in 2008. The housing market crashed, and I lost virtually all of my mortgage clients, who made up 46% of my entire client base.

I was advised to cut my marketing budget midway through 2008, and I reluctantly agreed in order to avoid layoffs. Shortly after, incoming leads started to slip. At the close of 2008, gross revenue was down 7.2%.

That was the first and last year our revenue ever decreased. In early 2009, I returned our marketing budget to its rightful place. By the end of that year, we had regained all lost ground and then some with a 14.5% increase in revenue.

How much your business should allocate toward marketing will vary, but it typically will be a percentage of your gross annual revenue. From what I’ve seen, larger businesses hover somewhere between 5% and 25%, with an average of about 12%.

Small businesses, on the other hand, often spend a significantly smaller portion on marketing. In fact, 50% of small business owners don’t even have a marketing plan. And the majority (55%) spend less than 5% of their annual revenue on marketing.

If you’re a small business owner reading this and want to increase leads and sales and grow your business, I recommend increasing your marketing budget by at least 3%.

Finding the right number for your business will require testing and (most importantly) close tracking and monitoring.

Lesson 2: If you have any competition whatsoever, you likely need a unique selling proposition (USP).

Your USP can set your business apart and give prospects a reason to choose you. Without one, you’re effectively surrendering to the buying process and relying on luck (or worse — being the cheapest) to attract new business.

I learned this lesson not long after founding my company. To compete with other direct mail companies, and ensure that we wouldn’t become another commodity racing to the bottom on price, we had to develop a USP.

Now, a real USP goes beyond merely positioning your business and actually offers something unique and tangible. Let’s say you’re a dentist. It’s the difference between statements like “We put dental health first with excellent board-certified care and attention” and “We put dental health first — if you develop a cavity within six months of your last appointment, we’ll fill it for free.”

The first merely positions the dentist as an expert. The second offers a real and tangible selling point: “No worrying about cavities as long as you’re with us.”

To develop your USP, start with competition research. Blind shop them. That means going through the entire customer journey, from new lead to buyer. Along the way, note what you like about their processes and what could improve.

Then, repeat the process within your own business. Compare notes to see what differences emerge, and analyze those differences. Do any stand out? Would any actually sway someone to choose you?

For my business, back then, the answer was no. Sure, I could say we did this and that better, but every business claims that. You need something real.

At this point, I suggest listing the pain points in your industry. What do consumers dread about your industry? If you can eliminate that from their experience with you, you can really stand out.

For my business, a marketing agency, consumers usually dread wasting money and getting zero results. I addressed that apprehension with our USP. We created a new position (our results manager), whose role is to compile results from our clients and train staff on successful tactics to ensure expertise from top to bottom.

Formally, we came up with this USP: “PostcardMania is the only marketing company to create your campaign based on the results of thousands of small businesses.”

Not only is this still our USP (though the number of businesses is up to 87,537), but we’ve outlasted and outgrown many of our competitors. So if you’re facing commoditization, don’t wait — run toward a USP for your business now.

There you have it: my two biggest marketing lessons. Hopefully, you’ve gained some insight to help you grow your business with smart, well-spent marketing dollars.

By Joy Gendusa

Sole Founder/CEO of PostcardMania. Joy bootstrapped her business to $59 million in 2018 with only a phone, a computer and postcards.

Sourced from Forbes

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The Four-Part Formula For Marketing Success

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By Udi Ledergor.

I spend a couple of hours each week helping less experienced chief marketing officers (CMOs). They usually seek my advice looking for quick wins, tips and hacks.

By now, I’m used to their sigh of disappointment when I share with them what I’ve found to be the four-part formula for marketing success. It includes no hacks, trickery or sorcery. Just four, time-tested elements I’ve found you absolutely must get right to build a successful marketing operation: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

Strategy

Here’s what it’s not: pulling together an odd mix of campaigns in hopes of them coming together. They won’t.

Strategy can be difficult to achieve but should always be simple to articulate. What’s “the big idea?” If you can’t easily explain it, you probably haven’t found it yet. I’ve found it useful to have a “big idea” for my overall strategy and for smaller components of it, like trade shows (why will people line up at our booth?) or content (what will make them download it?). There should be a simple way of describing what success will ultimately look like. Then reverse-engineer your tactics to get there.

Different is better than better. I explained one aspect of this in my recent article on the unwritten rules of business-to-business (B2B) branding and why you should break them. Now I propose being different in your overall strategy. Unless you want to be a “me too” company, you’re probably better off choosing a strategy others haven’t tried rather than attempting to be 10 times better than another player already using the same strategy.

Plan for galactic scale. You don’t need to understand all the details just yet, but you should be able to grasp the big picture of what your success will look like in one, two and three years. You’ll likely change a few things on the way — maybe even big things. But without a firm grasp of what future success looks like, you’re unlikely to put the right wheels in motion to get you there.

Execution

Open-water diving lessons often start with “Plan your dive; dive your plan.” The same truth holds for your marketing. Execution excellence starts with detailed planning and key performance indicators (KPIs).

How detailed should you be? Our events manager is measured on the number of event-driven opportunities we create and tickets sold to our annual event. Our weekly marketing team meetings start with reviewing every KPI we’re tracking this quarter. How well are we doing? How much have we advanced since last week? What bottlenecks do we need to solve for? We currently have 10 quarterly KPIs, each with an owner whose compensation is tied to this number. That’s how we create accountability.

I’m a big believer in the “fail quickly and learn from it” approach. Constant experimentation is the basis for fast empirical learning. We could argue until the cows come home on which subject line will perform better, but a simple A/B test gives us the answer and allows us to move on. Does someone have an ad creative idea? Great! What time can it go live? If it works, we scale it. If it doesn’t, we kill it. Rinse and repeat.

People

Hiring mistakes are painful to correct. We’re all human. So when things don’t work out for a new hire, we’ll give them another chance. And then a performance plan. And a final warning. By the time we’ve come to the conclusion things aren’t going to work out, we’ve wasted nearly 12 months we’ll never get back.

Don’t compromise. Hire the best people you can. You’ll need to reach out to the best candidates because they might not be actively job searching. This is hard work, but in my opinion, nothing else you do will yield higher returns. Candidates for junior positions are often surprised that I take the time to interview them. I respond that there’s no better use of my time. If we hire them and it works out, they’ll make our company millions. If we hire the wrong person, we could lose millions. Once you look at hiring through this lens, you’ll quickly realize the resources you need to invest in the process.

If your company is growing fast, hire overqualified people. Within a short time, you’ll promote them to fuel your growth. They’ll evolve from individual contributors to managers. It’s far easier to promote the people you have on your team than to parachute external managers.

Hire people better than you in at least one key skill the team needs to succeed. I struggled with this in the early stages of my career. I felt that I needed to be the best at every skill my team needed. I eventually realized how crippling that approach was and started hiring amazing people who were much better than me at their craft. That’s when things really took off.

To run an amazing marketing organization, you don’t have to be the best marketing operations person. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer. You only have to know how to hire, motivate and coordinate the efforts of amazing people who can do all those things.

Creativity

Don’t wait for your muse. Get systematic about your creativity. We hold regular creative brainstorming sessions on everything from our next event’s swag to our social media videos. Some of the best ideas have come from team members who don’t regularly get to flex their creativity muscles.

You never know where your next brilliant idea will come from. Get everyone involved. Make it fun. Follow up on the good ideas to motivate everyone to contribute more. There are no stupid ideas at these meetings and nothing gets knocked down. We list everything on the whiteboard, then prioritize by voting and taking into account production considerations. Some of our best work was created this way.

Marketing teams fail in many different ways, but the best ones I’ve seen or experienced firsthand always got these four elements right: strategy, execution, people and creativity.

By Udi Ledergor

CMO at Gong, the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales.

Sourced from Forbes

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Ad revenues remain a bright spot for Amazon as profits falls flat

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By Rebecca Stewart

Amazon‘s profits might have fallen for the first time in two years, but its advertising revenue outshone its overall sales growth in the most recent quarter – showing brands are taking it seriously as a challenger to the Google-Facebook duopoly.

During its most recent earnings call on Thursday (24 October), the e-commerce giant revealed that sales were up, but profit had slumped year-on-year for the first time since mid-2017.

The business reported a third-quarter profit of $2.1bn, a drop of 28% on the previous year, which was put down to investments in shipping and warehouses to help its core retail business maintain its edge.

Over the past three months, the businesses has garnered $70bn in revenues; up from 24% on on the same quarter last year.

Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results, with ‘other revenue’ (which principally refers to Amazon’s ad business) hitting $3bn over the three months to the end of September, up 45% on the same quarter last year.

Driving ‘relevancy’ and looking beyond search

The firm’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said it was “very happy” with its ad sales progress and that it was now focused on helping brands deliver more targeted ads within the Amazon ecosystem.

“We continue to focus on advancing advertising experiences there, [making them] helpful for customers and helping them to see new products. We want to empower our businesses to find attracting and engage these customers and it’s increasingly popular with vendor sellers and third-party advertisers,” he added.

“It’s still early and what we’re focused on really at this point is relevancy, making sure that the ads are relevant to our customers, helpful to our customers, and to do that, we use machine learning and that’s helping us to drive better, better and better relevancy.”

Earlier this month it was reported that Amazon was eating into Google’s search dominance, with eMarketer forecasting that Amazon’s share is expected to grow to 15.9% by 2021, with Google’s expected to contract to 70.5%.

However, Dave Fildes, Amazon’s director of investor relations said that increased adoption among brands was pushing the company to expand its video and OTT offerings.

Pointing to the ad-supported movie streaming service it recently launched on IMDb and live sporting deals, Fildes said it planned to ad more inventory to the latter and across its Fire TV apps via Amazon Publisher Services integrations.

“[We’re also looking at] streamlining access for third-party apps and really just making it easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns and provide better results,” he continued.

Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer, at self-service ad platform 4C Insights highlighted how quickly Amazon is ramping up its ad platform.

“It has the unique ability to close the loop from purchase intent to sales and allow brands use that data for ad targeting and measurement,” he explained, saying clients using 4C’s platform had upped their spend by 250% in the past year.

Feature Image Credit: Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results / Amazon

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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5 Simple But Effective Ways To Market a Services Business

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In the ever-changing world of marketing, businesses are always on the lookout for new, and innovative ways to sell their products to a broader audience. At times, service-centric companies find themselves overlooked in a sea filled with organizations advertising products.

Well, simply put, marketing a service is no easy feat. The most obvious problem being the lack of physical evidence – how do you promote something that isn’t tangible? How do you convince an individual to invest their time and money in an object that they can’t see or feel? The grey area that lies between selling the invisible is precisely where the great conundrum of the marketing world lies.

However, to make the process of advertising promising and ideas a tad bit easier, we’ve compiled five excellent tips that’ll catapult any service-selling business onto the thrones of success. However, before we get into that, let’s talk about why you need to market a services business differently than your standard run-of-the-mill product business.

Why should you market a services business differently?

Perhaps the most critical mistake service vendors can make is to utilize the same techniques used to advertise businesses with products. If you’re trying to convince a customer to buy your service, the golden word you need to keep in your mind is ‘trust.’

When it comes to marketing a service, consumers need to be assured of the fact that they can rely on you, since a service can’t be returned if it turns out to be faulty. If things go awry, the initial investment that the customer made goes stale, and any chances of fostering a healthy customer-supplier relationship go to waste.

To prevent angry customers from ruining any glimmer for your organization to make it in the services industry, try to instill in your mind the fact that service-based businesses require different marketing strategies.

Moreover, aside from the regular 4P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), service-based businesses require 3 additional components, which are People, Physical Evidence, and Process. Keeping in mind the vitality that these principles bear, we’ve compiled five brilliant ways to market a services business, starting off with sending a clear message.

#1. Send a clear marketing message

While coming up with ideas to market a services business, try to be as clear as possible with the message that you’d like to convey. When it comes to selling services, many business owners and marketers find themselves surrounded by an arsenal of ideas and perspectives, which leads them to fail to commit to one.

The most important advice a service-vendor could get is to choose a simple yet clear message to send through a marketing campaign. An essential aspect of your marketing campaign should be to create a vivid experience for any potential consumer.

To indulge an individual in experiencing the service you offer, try creating adverts that highlight how your service works to alleviate pain points, and offer comfort. The primary challenge for you as the service vendor lies in creating a convincing experience that captures the attention of any prospects immediately. Once the message is decided on most service-vendors utilize a variety of marketing techniques to promote their content, which focuses on turning prospects into customers.

The most frequently encountered problems faced by companies range from generating organic traffic to securing the best executive sponsors, as shown below:

Company's Top Marketing Challenges to market a services business

Image Source

The ads you send out aren’t the only thing that bears witness to your marketing message. From the way you interact with clients to something as subliminal as the color palette of your website – all of them are key contributors in getting your marketing message across.

#2. Find a way to make your business stand out

To demonstrate what it means to make your service-centric business stand out, let’s consider an example. Imagine a man named X, who’s in dire need of marketing services to promote his content. However, after going through countless websites and testimonials, X proceeds to do the job himself, since nothing he came across had grabbed his attention.

Unfortunately, most customers share the same plight as X, with too many services being marketed in the same boring and predictable way. With that being said, most service-vendors find it challenging to distinguish themselves from their competition, which is when a thorough self-analysis comes in handy.

Service-based businesses should compare themselves with their competitors’ marketing strategies and devise a list of differences that make them stand out the most. Later on, a service-centric organization should base their primary marketing message around what sets them apart from the competition. Using the medium of video can also set you apart, while increasing revenue since many consumers prefer quick videos, instead of reading a brochure.

Video content is preferred for brands for market a services business

Image Source

#3. Focus on increasing value for your customers

If you’re a service-vendor, get one thing straight. Your job is to sell value, not price! Unlike product marketers, who compete primarily on price, to market a services business is heavily reliant on value.

While brainstorming for marketing strategies and ideas, try to focus on increasing value for your customers, rather than mindlessly decreasing the price of the service you offer. Moreover, any organization that provides a service cheaper than its competitors is usually considered to be the black sheep of the bunch.

An easy and effective method of increasing value for customers is to bundle two or more services together, which serves as the next best alternative to lowering your price. Most service-centric organizations combine an arsenal of useful features and amp up the value for consumers and treat consumers like actual people instead of a number.

Personalization to Winning Business to market a services business

Image Source

The fun thing about increasing value for customers is how creative you can be with it. Furthermore, the way you add value can also help distinguish your organization from the competition. Alternative ways to add value to services include:

  • Increasing delivery speed.
  • Providing customers with expert opinion/advice.
  • Improving the customer care you offer.

#4. Continuously revise your marketing strategy

This point may seem a bit redundant, but analyzing and updating each aspect of a company’s marketing strategy is the first stepping stone to success.

An effective marketing strategy doesn’t revolve around how you’re going to market your service; it delves deep into every nook and cranny of the process. Simply put, a marketing strategy amalgamates the goals you have for your company with the actions you take to achieve them.

Several newly-found businesses make the error of etching their marketing strategy on to stone. As the marketing world around you evolves, your marketing strategy should evolve with it. Try to revise your marketing strategy as much as you can, keeping in mind that the goals you set to achieve are SMART:

Revising your marketing strategy for market a services business

Image Source

#5. Work on improving existing client relationships

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of marketing service-based businesses is that the sale isn’t complete at the cash counter. Unlike companies selling products, when marketing services, you’ve got to be there for the long run, which includes delivery and customer support.

A simple tip to keep under your sleeve is to consistently improve existing customer relationships. As a general rule of thumb, consumers that are kept happy over a period of time are the driving force behind a company’s success.

Furthermore, catering to existing clients encourages an organization to expand the services they offer and come up with new programs to entertain them. Improving current consumer relationships also yields more revenue than marketing to new prospects.

So, where do you go from here?

I hope we’ve acquainted you with some stellar marketing tips for your services business.

With that being said, now’s the time to get working on promoting your service, with these brilliant tips making the path to success a little easier!

By

Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about Fashion and Tech. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover. She is currently associated with OutlookStudios.com.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

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Semantic content analysis will disrupt marketing – for the better

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By Jergan Callebaut

We know that exceptional content is what makes a brand. We also know that analysing our data to very specifically target audiences is crucial for great ROI. But we rarely put the two together and use the data available to actually analyse what content works – and why.

Yet knowing exactly why content works can give us that winning edge. And, luckily, the ability to see what indisputably resonates the most with our audience – and drives our bottom-line – is already in our hands.

The state of play

In the climate of the current ‘data boom’, audience targeting naturally takes precedence, with the majority (55%) of marketers saying ‘better use of data’ for audience targeting is their priority in 2019, according to Econsultancy.

It makes sense. On a daily basis, we’re faced with countless blogs, podcasts, speakers and everything in-between promising that if we perfectly optimise our targeting, our messaging will beat the daunting odds of the 0.9% CTR cited by WordStream. And so, we dedicate hours and hours every week to creating personas, hypothesising about audiences, segmenting users and running lengthy A/B tests to find the piece of content that our audience love. We add to our already-complex marketing stacks tools that tell us what messaging has been more successful, in order for us to optimise.

But when we do find that winner, do we know why it works? Do we know exactly what features caused the higher CTR? Do we know how we’re going to recreate it in our next campaign, to make it better, even?

This lack of knowledge – despite all the tools and techniques we use to offer insight – is what we at Datasine call the ‘black box’ because when it comes to understanding why, we are left in the dark. Just looking at results doesn’t give us the insight needed to truly understand content preferences in an actionable way.

Semantic content analysis

To crack open the black box, we need to start conducting in-depth semantic analysis of our content. Only then can we begin to truly understand why some content resonates and some doesn’t.

As experienced marketers, we come prepackaged with a deep understanding of – and fascination with – psychology and our audience, meaning we’ve already got the skills on paper to analyse our content. It’s simply a matter of breaking it down into parts. We’ll look at this in terms of images and text.

If you want to analyse your imagery, you can take all the image assets you’ve ever created and note down the particular elements you used in each, then check to see if there are any patterns which relate those choices to your ad performance.

For example:

  • Did you use a photo of your product outdoors? Or in the showroom?
  • Were people visible in the shot?
  • What was the size of the text, and the colour of any overlays or CTAs?

It may even be worth inviting a panel to judge your images on the emotions that they evoke, or photographers to assess the quality and composition of the shot.

You can do the same for text content, approaching this by categorising how you describe your product or service. For example:

  • Do you appeal to your product’s ease of use?
  • Are you emphasising your innovative credentials?
  • Do you use particularly casual – or formal – language?

With this process, we can see which types of content are receiving the most engagement. And we can use these features to keep creating great campaigns that we further optimise as our understanding of customer content preferences grows.

Scaling content analysis

If we have just a few campaigns on the go, content analysis is easier, but it gets harder as we scale. It stops being practical to expect humans to spend days, weeks, even months labelling what goes into each piece of content. Here’s where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come to the rescue.

AI models can extract all of these elements in seconds by analysing image or text semantically to look at content like humans do. That way, we can cut back on lengthy, expensive A/B testing, and get rid of guesswork once and for all – a vision we at Datasine are working toward. Our AI platform Connect (formerly Pomegranate) automatically identifies the most effective content for your audience.

By embracing semantic content analysis and working collaboratively with AI, we can feel confident in understanding exactly what content is going to work before we hit send.

Sourced from The Drum

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6 Tips to Help Solve Today’s Real-Time Marketing Challenges

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How can marketers tackle the challenges of real-time marketing? They need to be organized, quick and prepared for multiple outcomes, according to Brock Murray, COO of seoplus+, a digital marketing agency. “If a client doesn’t like an idea, don’t be hurt by it — have another one ready,” Murray said. “In other words, don’t just be on time, be a step ahead. Also, if there’s a communication problem between you and the client, comply with whichever method of communication the client prefers.”

We caught up with Murray and others who shared ways marketers can address the challenges associated with real-time marketing, which Gartner calls one of the transformational strategies of the martech ecosystem of the next decade.

Take Customer from ‘Ideation to Actualization’

Responsiveness from customers and constant overall communication is the key to being a successful real-time marketer, according to Murray. This ensures you and customers are on the same page throughout various stages — from ideation to actualization, he said.

“Whatever method of communication works best for the client that will allow for faster approval, which will transition to the company’s success, should be the only thing that matters,” Murray added. “… Over time, your goal should be to build trust with your customers, so you have some leeway and can react quickly without being micro-managed through the process. If you strongly believe you’re not putting the customer at risk of anything and that your decision will, in fact, benefit them, your customer should have your trust to move forward. However, that trust doesn’t come easy but can be earned by continuously going the extra mile for them and showing that you care.”

Deploy Rules-Based Approach for CX

To counter challenges with real-time marketing, marketers should employ a contextual, rules-based approach when using data to inform their CX strategies, according to Will Crocker, senior director of customer experience at Braze. “This includes,” he said, “triggering engagement campaigns that should feel timely and interactive for customers and be based upon data including customer preferences, behaviors and decisions, as well as product/brand context.”

For example, before sending a push notification about a flash sale to a customer who abandoned their shopping cart, a retailer’s system should verify that specific product’s availability and tailor the message accordingly.

Machine Learning Allows for Refined Approach

Until a few years ago, tracking customers’ digital behavior was done with the help of their past data, such as their browsing history, psychographic and demographic data and prior purchases, according to Jaykishan Panchal, SEO and content marketing manager at E2M Solutions. However, progress in cloud infrastructure, machine learning and data processing has empowered brands to determine consumer patterns in real-time.

“Machine learning technology, for instance, allows a more refined approach to purchase recommendations because you no longer need a customer’s entire history to engage with them,” Panchal said. “AI is capable of absorbing even the most elusive indicators from a user, use its powerful algorithms, and create a digital user experience in accordance with their current physical reality.”

Don’t Forget About Brand Training

Panchal advises to provide adequate training to your front-line staff so they’re aware of everything there is to know about pertinent content topics, your brand’s central message and your company’s best practices for responding to problems. “This information will help them create and publish content in a short span of time without going wrong,” Panchal said.

Activate Brand Ambassadors

To deal with problems like staying up-to-date on the latest news and events and a lack of staff resources, leverage brand ambassadors, whether they be employees, happy customers or influencers, according to Jonathan Chan, head of marketing at Insane Growth. “Unless you’re a multimillion-dollar brand that can afford to hire staff dedicated solely to constantly monitoring social media and the news, activating your brand ambassadors is a great way for brands to keep up-to-date and stay in the conversation.”

Setting this up isn’t easy, but it’s best to view it as an affiliate program of sorts, Chan added. Select people are invited to be a part of the brand ambassador program. They’re given incentives to speak on behalf of the brand, and that can include doing things like responding to comments, offering coupon codes at their own discretion, or just starting conversations about the brand’s latest initiative.

Creating the Right Marketing Sequences

Being too reactive can be solved by brands taking the time to create the right marketing sequences to ensure a consistent and seamless customer experience. “At its most basic level there’s your basic email marketing automation, where certain email sequences are triggered by specific actions,” Chan said. “To adopt a more multi-channel approach, this requires taking a deep dive into analytics and rigorously monitoring where customers are coming from and what actions they take next. Taking advantage of interactive content like chatbots is one of the best ways to do this in my opinion.”

Feature Image Credit: Northwest Retail

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Sourced from CMS Wire

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How to Build an Email Marketing List From Scratch

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By Jared Atchison

Building an effective email marketing list can help grow your business in numerous ways.

If you have yet to build an email marketing list, you’re missing out on a key way to help you achieve your business goals.

Email trumps every other channel in terms of conversions and return on investment (ROI). Research shows that for every dollar spent on email campaigns, you get a $44 ROI. In addition, 91% of subscribers are open to receiving promotional emails from brands. Digging deeper into research, you’ll find that you can’t go wrong with an email list if you want to grow your business to new heights and cater to customers.

There are nearly four billion email users worldwide, and with so much activity, it’s crucial to take advantage of this channel to market to customers. When built to target the right audience, growing an email list can be one of the most effective and lucrative strategies for your business. It provides communication between brand and customer, sends subscribers relevant content and lets businesses collect user feedback.

Email marketing is important because it turns everyday website visitors into paying customers. When someone signs up to join your email list, it’s clear they’re interested in your brand. All you have to do next is send them relevant content, cater to their needs and keep them happy. Since it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones, it’s crucial to pay attention to email subscribers.

Based on what offer they signed up for, you can then segment your subscribers, send them relevant content and move them down the sales funnel. Building a list from scratch can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.

Here are 5 key ways how to build an email list from the ground up

1. Create personalized landing pages

It’s better to create separate landing pages for each campaign rather than one landing page for several campaigns. Why? Because people come to your website for different reasons, looking for different things. One generalized landing page is not going to cater to the masses the way you think it will. Instead, it’ll drive visitors away because they aren’t finding what they’re looking for.

Personalization is the key to creating landing pages your visitors want to engage with. If you’re a furniture company and you create a landing page for every piece of furniture in your store, then you aren’t catering to the small group focused on armchairs. When they don’t see offers for armchairs, they’ll quickly leave your website. The same goes for any website that doesn’t use personalization in its marketing strategy.

By using a landing page creative tool, you can create individual landing pages for each campaign. You can take subscribers who signed up for a specific offer or campaign and segment them according to their behavior on your website. The more landing pages you create, the better, since companies who increase their landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads.

2. Use a timed popup

Timed popup opt-ins are effective because they appear to users after they’ve already spent time scrolling through your content. Unlike static forms, they use the element of surprise to encourage visitors to hand over their information. If someone is already engaging with your content and an opt-in appears, there’s a good chance they’ll join your email list.

Pay attention to the word “timed.” A popup should not appear after one second of someone visiting your website. It’s irritating and doesn’t give people the chance to consume your content before you bombard them with an opt-in form. Set up your popup so that it appears after a set time, or once a user scrolls to a certain point of the webpage.

Take it a step further by turning your popup into a simple survey. Limit it to no more than two questions followed by the opt-in that collects users’ email addresses. You can ask anything that helps you determine how to cater to them better, such as how their experience on your website is or if user navigation is easy. Kill two birds with one stone by collecting user feedback and growing your email list at the same time.

3. Simplify your forms

According to a recent study, 55% of B2B professionals say their top priority is increasing lead generation. It’s a struggle many marketers face as they try to grow their brand and its following. An easy way to collect more leads is by simplifying your opt-in forms.

You need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to join your email list. For new visitors especially, they won’t bother dealing with an opt-in that’s difficult to navigate or asks for 12 different pieces of information. It might not seem like a big deal, but when you go out of your way to make things complicated, you’ll see your conversions remain stagnant. Removing as little as one form field can increase form conversions by 26%, so avoid adding several fields in your forms.

4. Create a lead magnet

Instead of showing a standard opt-in to visitors, what if you incentivized their reason for signing up? As much as 30% of people will return to complete a form if they get something in return, which is why creating a lead magnet increases conversions.

Lead magnets are free resources you provided your audience in exchange for their email. Visitors gain access to high-quality content while you gain a new email subscriber, which is the perfect start to a mutually beneficial brand-customer relationship.

Examples of lead magnets include:

  • Ebooks
  • Templates
  • Checklists
  • Guides
  • Whitepapers
  • Webinars

Whatever freebie you offer subscribers, the important thing is that it has value. No one will bother giving you their contact information for content that doesn’t have anything to offer. Make sure you teach something new or provide excitement and intrigue so that the subscribers you convert stay for the long haul.

5. Host a giveaway

If you want to increase your subscribers, build buzz around your brand, and heighten its recognition, consider hosting a giveaway. Giveaways are fun and encourage those within your target market to check out your website.

It’s important to find a giveaway plugin for WordPress that works for what you’re trying to achieve. Pay attention to the specific features you want so you pick the one that’s right for your campaign.

Choose a giveaway prize that sparks interest in your audience. Offer them something you know they want so they’re more likely to enter.

Set rules that do the work for you. For example, you could create a rule that subscribers must tag a friend in your giveaway post to enter. That way, they spread the word about your giveaway and encourage their friends to enter as well, increasing your subscribers. If you plan your giveaway with a strategy in place, your email list will grow.

Building an email list is something every marketer and business owner must do to succeed. Email is the easiest, most responsive channel for generating leads and sales, and it connects brands to their audiences. When you market your email list to visitors by giving them content they care about and making it easy to subscribe, it makes all the difference in your conversions.

By Jared Atchison

Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code.

Sourced from business.com

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Discovering Brand: The Value Of Marketing For Research Nonprofits

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By Howard Breindel

In our work with nonprofit research institutions, we’ve found that many of them are often hesitant about marketing. Many of them believe their missions — and their accomplishments — should sell themselves.

In the past, this just-the-facts communications approach may have been sufficient for research nonprofits, since they could depend on generous government funding. However, the funding landscape has changed. Stagnant federal funding has forced an increasing reliance on philanthropy, which has introduced research institutions to a new audience with new motivations: results-oriented, high net worth individuals.

In a crowded field of institutions vying for donations from business-minded individuals, just-the-facts communication likely won’t cut it. Instead, I believe that institutions need to provide the kind of experience that potential donors have come to demand at the companies they lead. And I’ve noticed that to do so, the most successful fundraisers have taken on a series of purpose-driven branding transformations.

From Piecemeal To Purpose

If you look at best-in-class research brands, you’ll notice that most lead with a clear and singular purpose. These stand in contrast to some others, who have difficulty communicating succinctly what all their activities connect to and build toward. That’s understandable — scientific minds aren’t usually geared toward generalizations. However, in my experience, clear, higher-level messaging can resonate with potential philanthropists who come from business backgrounds. A good example is the Salk Institute. Although it has 10 research areas, it unites them with a single purpose listed on its homepage: “Where cures begin: We explore the very foundations of life for the benefit of all.”

One useful activity for articulating a nonprofit’s purpose is to think collectively about the role it plays in the world. Is the research about making discoveries? Creating cures? Caring for patients? Nailing down this answer can help lead to a refined and united purpose.

From Niche To Narrative  

Personal relationships can be key to attracting sustained donations from high net worth individuals. Philanthropists often want to feel like partners, not ATMs, so building a rapport and maintaining open communication is crucial. However, creating compelling communications can be difficult for those who don’t come from a business development background. That’s where branding and marketing come in. They provide a platform that can be expanded into a tool kit to help employees speak about the common mission with ease, rather than getting bogged down with details or jargon. When equipped with writing guides, talking points and other turnkey communications tools, every employee can serve as a passionate brand advocate who makes philanthropists feel informed about the organization’s projects and excited to work with it.

From Collection To Cohesion

I’ve noticed that research institutions are often siloed into specialized laboratories. While this may be the most effective way to advance discovery, listing these labs for external, nonexpert audiences can be overwhelming. For example, one institution lists some 37 labs, centers, institutes and groups on its homepage, leaving the visitor drowning in information that dilutes the organization’s overall focus.

Without shaking up operations, institutions can reconsider their brand architecture and how it can better contribute to a cohesive message. For example, does every lab need its own sub-brand, or is this diluting the main organization’s equity? Would descriptive naming — at least in external communications — be clearer than acronyms? Answers will be different for every organization, but in many cases, rethinking brand architecture may streamline external communications, presenting a unified, mission-driven organization rather than a list of programs.

From Telling To Showing

Often, philanthropists are swayed by the on-the-ground experience at a research institution. Branding, marketing and design can help bring this experience to individuals while they’re still at their desks. Think of a website as a virtual tour. Use photography and video to show research in action and highlight the experience of visiting and working with the organization. For example, rather than simply listing the unique features of its campus, the Salk Institute presents digital exhibits on its history and architecture, using video and rich media to immerse the viewer in the Salk experience.

Brand storytelling is also an effective way to fulfill donors’ desires for results, which can be difficult to do in the research sector, where progress is slow and incremental. This can be a tough pill to swallow for results-obsessed donors; 54% of high net worth donors aren’t sure whether their investments are having the intended impact, which doesn’t bode well for continued support. Storytelling can help organizations show results that are hard to quantify. Whether it’s researcher blogs, TED Talks or practical guides for the community, this type of content can demonstrate impact.

The work research institutes do is vital, and their continued success relies on the generosity of a new generation of market-minded philanthropists. Reaching and convincing this audience will likely require researchers to enter an unfamiliar world: that of branding. However, by grounding their branding and marketing in a strong purpose, they can bridge the gap and tell a compelling donor story that cuts through the clutter and stays true to the organization’s values and mission.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By Howard Breindel

Howard Breindel is the Co-CEO at DeSantis Breindel, the leading B2B branding agency in New York City.

Sourced from Forbes

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‘Who actually loves authentic content?’ Brands need to understand their value exchange

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By Ryan Reddick

A few years ago I was working on the Coffee vs Gangs content series. After a successful launch, which saw Kenco help young Hondurans out of gangs by training them as coffee farmers, l found myself in an all agency meeting. After some initial self-congratulatory backslapping, discussion of the ‘raw authenticity’ led to a new addition to the group confidently chiming in.

‘I loved the first series and was wondering if it might be possible to see some of the kids from the gangs drinking Kenco’.

Awkward pause.

We’ll come back to that.

Fast-forward a few years to The Drum Content Awards, of which I recently had the pleasure of sitting on the judging panel. To kick off the day all the judges took part in an ice breaker, where we were asked to share our thoughts on ‘authenticity’ in content.

A question like this is catnip for content professionals. And the 25 of us, all released from our respective agencies formed a warm cosy echo chamber. One which made us feel reassured that we are all saying the same things to our clients and none of us are doing it wrong.

I listened. But I contributed nothing. Because the only thought I had ringing around my head was ‘isn’t all this just bollocks?’ Which wouldn’t have gone down well at all.

That’s not to say that my fellow judges didn’t engage in an intelligent and considered discussion. But this wasn’t about them. It was about the concept of ‘authenticity’ itself.

Before I go on, I dare any current creative or content specialist to review their proposals, treatments and pitches delivered in the last three months and not cringe at overuse bordering on abuse of the word.

The truth is, it’s become a dog whistle we blow on in front of our colleagues and clients to try and sell ideas without thinking about it. But when you actually think about it, it means very little on the outside world.

When was the last time anyone saw a piece of content and said ‘I love it because of its authenticity’?

Never.

Because no one ever says that.

Alongside ‘disruptive’, ‘authentic’ has become a nonsense husk of a word that means nothing and everything to us in our comfy communications and marketing circles.

That’s not to say that Kaepernick or Patagonia Black Friday didn’t come from a truly brilliant place. In the same way that featuring a bunch of troubled kids from gangs drinking Kenco obviously comes from a hideous one. But let’s not over inflate the sentiment behind this too much. Or to bastardise the words of Scroobius Pip –

Nike. Just a brand

Patagonia. Just a brand

Kenco. Just a brand

When a consumer engages with any form of content made by a brand or business an unspoken contract is entered into. ‘I know you are trying to sell me something or make me like you so I eventually buy something. But I’m willing to let you do that in exchange for getting something back’.

And this is far more authentic than authenticity. Because authenticity may be dead, but the authentic value exchange is very much alive.

I am willing to engage with your marketing, communication or advertising in exchange for you entertaining me. Making me laugh. Teaching me something new. Helping me with utility that enables me to do my job better.

Authentic value exchange. Much better. Not hiding behind the fact that something is authentic just for the sake of it when we all know what’s going on. Consumers are not stupid.

And that’s what was great about judging The Drum Content Awards. To see so many examples of exceptional work that creates a compelling value exchange between brand and consumer.

Examples that used comedy in exchange for brand trust around online security (Santander), that answered fuel economy questions in exchange for consideration of an electric alternative (Nissan Leaf) and that showed future parents what having children really looks like to build market share of their baby wipe brand (WaterWipes).

And by the way, in case you were interested.

We never featured any gang member drinking Kenco.

Now that’s authentic.

Feature Image Credit: ‘Who actually loves authentic content?’ Brands need to understand their value exchange

By Ryan Reddick

Ryan Reddick, creative director, Edelman is a judge for The Drum Content Awards 2019. A full list of the finalists can be found here. The awards ceremony will take place in London on October 30 at The Marriot Grosvenor Square Hotel, tickets can be purchased now.

Sourced from The Drum

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How Customer Segmentation and Targeting Can Increase Your Email Open Rates

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Sourced from www.squareup.com

What exactly are customer segmentation and targeting?

What is customer segmentation?

First things first, let’s talk about customer segmentation. It may sound intimidating, but customer segmentation is a way to separate your audience into groups according to categories like gender, age, and similar interests. By dividing your customers into groups, you’re able to send each group an email with products, promotions, or coupons that they might find interesting and are more likely to buy.

Within Square Marketing, you can access filter options including Last Visited, Hasn’t Visited, Card on File, etc.,which allow you to create groups of customers you’d like to target. You can also filter based by location if you have multiple stores and only want to target customers who have purchased from a particular location.

It’s worth noting, there are also smart groups that are automatically updated for your regular customers and those customers that were regular but have become lapsed. You can view and update the definitions of these smart groups by going into your Customer Directory within your Square Dashboard, clicking on All Customers, selecting Regulars or Lapsed, and going to Edit.

Creating buyer personas, which are profiles of your ideal customer, may help you decide how you want to divide up your audience base to send them the most relevant email. When creating buyer personas you may want to consider the following:

  1. The demographics of your customers: Age, gender and income bracket can impact what products your customers may be interested in. For instance, Millennials and baby boomers are unlikely to have similar interests. (You can find more information on customer demographics using third-party or industry data).
  2. Your customers’ hobbies: Maybe some of your customers are bakers and maybe some are gardeners. No matter their hobby, it’s useful to know how to segment your audience.

What is customer targeting?

Once you’ve identified your customer segments, you can clearly target your ideal customers with the products they’re most likely to buy. Customer targeting can help focus your messaging so your email is most appealing to the specific customer segmentation you want to reach.

Think of customer segmentation as putting your customers into like-minded buying groups and customer targeting as the messaging you use specific to each of those groups. By “targeting” your customers with messages that most resonate with them, you’re more likely to get them to take that next step and click-through to buy your product.

Using customer segmentation and targeting in your business

By identifying and segmenting your customers into groups according to the marketing categories you have identified with buyer personas, your email marketing can go further.

Segmentation allows you to focus on groups of customers and target them specifically, rather than trying to target all of your customers in one group. Your email marketing is much more likely to be successful if you’re targeting individual groups who you know are more likely to engage with a certain product as opposed to blindly sending it to your entire list.

Also, if you’re still on the fence about segmentation, consider that “marketers have found a 760 percent increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns,” according to Campaign Monitor.

Sometimes it’s easier to use a specific example than marketing terms. So, let’s say that you own a chocolate shop. You know through your Square Dashboard that you have a group of customers who buy lots of your dark chocolate sea salt caramel (but of course they would –– who doesn’t love dark chocolate with sea salt?).

You could target this audience segment with an email letting them know about a sale you’re having on dark chocolate sea salt caramels. By sending them a sale on a product you know they love, they are more likely to buy the product (did we mention we would buy your dark chocolate sea salt caramels? Because we will). It’s really that simple—and a method you can start using today in Square Marketing.

Sourced from www.squareup.com

 

 

 

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