All online businesses need to move quickly to embrace a multi-channel strategy
All of us online business owners agree that our website visitors and paying customers are, by far, our most important asset.
It makes sense. Everything we do is targeted towards satisfying prospects, gaining their trust and hopefully, convert them in to paying and recurring customers. That’s why most of our marketing and sales efforts are focused on bringing visitors to our website (or app).
To convert this great story into industry terms, business pros live and breathe conversion rates and ROI metrics.
One important conversion enabler (or ROI generator, if you’d like) is related to the business’s customer communication strategy. I’ll focus on this one, in this article.
Online customer communication is a wide topic: It covers customer technical support, online chatting with prospects, answering frequent questions on different channels and much, much more.
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Two-thirds of carts are abandoned. Here's how to win those customers back.
When a consumer reaches the final stages of making a purchase but decides to abandon their shopping cart, it’s clear there is some level of objection. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the largest obstacles for ecommerce retailers to overcome and the extent of the problem is shocking.
On average, 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned (Shopify) meaning businesses who are failing to proactively engage with these potential customers are missing out on a huge opportunity to recover lost interest to generate conversions and, ultimately, sales.
It’s easy to assume the majority of cart abandonments happen because consumers are undecided over a purchase, when actually there are numerous underlying reasons that are directly linked to your business’ sales process - ’not being ready for purchase’ only takes third place according to Business Insider’s top eight reasons for shopping…
Pre-flight checklist for email campaigns
Sending an email campaign can be a nerve-wracking experience for any marketer. There can be questions, doubts, and even a little fear running through your mind before you push send. Do all the links work? Are there typos that were missed? Will readers be engaged and respond to the email? Proofing and editing are a must, of course, but is that enough to ensure you haven’t overlooked anything? Sometimes you spend so much time looking at an email you miss the little details. And with email marketing being an important strategy for any business, it’s crucial that each email sent be the best possible.
To help alleviate this sending fear and also avoid the most common email errors, Campaign Monitor is happy to share this email campaign preflight checklist. It covers each part of an email, like…
Chart of the Day: Annual churn hits 23% in the high-tech industry
Email marketing is a vital channel for B2B marketers. Providing a high ROI when compared to other marketing channels. Which drives us, marketers, to spend many hours creating engaging content for our target personas. After all this effort when you're ready to hit the send, are you sure that your data is accurate?
A recent study by Salesforce found that the rate at which B2B marketers were able to grow their email lists looks relatively healthy. In the High Tech and Retail sectors, the growth is as high as 21%. On the face of it, most marketers would take a 21% growth rate each year.
Average Annual Growth by Vertical and Department
But this is only one side of the story. The report also looks at…
How to grow your brand with an ambassador program
Word-of-mouth marketing remains one of the most effective tools at a company’s disposal; 74 percent of consumers identify word of mouth as one of their top points of influence. Rather than hoping word-of-mouth marketing occurs organically, many companies are taking matters into their own hands by creating brand ambassador programs.
A brand ambassador program takes advantage of the passion of your most enthusiastic fans. By giving them exclusive benefits and the autonomy to carry your message to consumers, you can create a word-of-mouth marketing campaign that thrives for years to come.
Successful Brand Ambassador Programs
Lululemon
Lululemon does more than sell athletic gear. The company’s target audience is youthful, active, vibrant and hip, and its brand ambassador program reflects this. Lululemon’s brand ambassadors have the kind of lifestyle the company encourages, and they do so in a public way. In return, Lululemon rewards…
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16 Jun 2017
Exploring the difference between Omnichannel and Multichannel and the implications for designing effective User Experiences
We've all been hearing and reading quite a bit about Omnichannel Marketing of late. It’s great that companies and brands are embracing the ethos behind the term to make their products and services more connected, open and oriented towards the individual. For this reason I feel it must then share and indeed integrate with many aspects of user experience online. This article aims to summarise my thoughts on how UX approaches and the principles of UX contribute to effective omnichannel Marketing.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Okay, so we have to say Omnichannel is simply buzzword or phrase to describe something not new in real terms along with the related but similar multichannel marketing term. Omnichannel marketing is as a strategic marketing activity helps to define the marketing decisions that are driven by the choices that consumers have in how they engage a brand. It…
Instagram to Launch New 'Paid Partnership Tag' for sponsored content
Instagram are launching a new feature for influencers. This feature described as the 'paid partnership' tag is aiming to make it clear to consumers which posts are sponsored and which are not. Allowing influencers and brands to tag the partners who have paid to be featured in the posts in some way.
The tag will clearly mark the image as paid and it will also do the same on stories. It has also been reported that influencers using the tag will be able to track insights allowing both parties view its metrics to track how the content is performing.
The paid partnership tag is currently only been rolled out to a select few influencers, brands and businesses but we may see a wider roll-out in the coming months.
This new feature is a great move on Instagrams behalf…
4 Video types that will help you generate brand trust
Trust is imperative in whether your prospects make a purchase or not. Your prospects want to know your brand, they need to feel connected to your brand on some level, and that’s why building trust is so important!
A big part of building trust is to really know your clients and their needs. Show them that you are aware of their problems and that your brand is committed to solving them.
The way to do this is through video content, as video is one of the strongest types of online content out there. Let’s see which types of videos work best for generating trust!
Types of videos that generate brand trust
1. Explainer videos
An explainer video is a short video, usually lasting less than two minutes that explains your brand or your product in an engaging and simple way.
It’s aimed to let your…
Chart of the Day: Don't forget your Lead Scoring
We all know about Email Marketing Automation, but what is Lead Scoring?
In the chart, we can see that Email Automation is the most popular at 65.50%, which is expected. The chart also shows how little people either know or use lead scoring, as it's only at 11.80%.
Lead scoring is an excellent way of ranking prospects using a scoring method. These scores will help sales teams to prioritise leads or which should be nurtured by marketing more.
In the beginning of the process, marketing and sales need to work together to decide on what their ideal prospect is and what we want them to do on your site. And then assign or detract points from the prospects score for doing those activities. For example:
Visited Pricing Page = 20 points
Visited Blog = 1 point
Visited Careers Page = -20 points
Each time a prospect visits one of these…
Simple recipes and tips to get you started with your Marketing Automation
Are you still sending out blanket e-shot campaigns to large, anonymous lists? The latest research from the Smart Insights - GetResponse Email Marketing and Marketing Excellence research 2017 shows that many businesses aren't yet tapping into marketing automation. More than half (54%) rated their use of marketing automation as limited including around 20% who weren't using it all. If this describes you, then the 'shot' part might turn out to mean 'shot in the dark.' In an age where PPC and SEO let you reach a target audience actively looking for companies like yours, blunt emails are rapidly becoming a thing of the past or should be.
Most companies already have all the ingredients - an email platform, a CRM full of client data, and an incoming source of leads gives you everything you need. Getting started can seem daunting,…
