Marketing Automation was one of the top trends of 2016, here is how to use it in 2017

Anyone who has run an online business, even for a short time, knows that digital marketing offers a wide range of possibilities. A survey of marketers by Regalix tells us that website and email are the most effective channel of online communication. For every retailer email is the primary tool for bolstering sales, however sending generic newsletter campaigns tends to be less and less appealing to subscribers. FreshMail’s research shows that highly personalized campaigns achieve better results and that’s our subject here. It’s important to get to know the real needs of your customers and to send interesting, engaging content based on advanced personalization and optimization of email marketing campaigns. The potential of Email Marketing Automation (EMA) helps marketers send effective messages suited to the needs of subscribers in a defined contact or…

Chart of the Day: What are the most popular automated emails?

Marketing automation is a great way to make email marketing more effective and the email marketer more efficient. This week's chart, that is displaying 2016 and 2017 data, is asking, "Do you send out automated emails based on the following triggers or behaviour?" The most used trigger, "Subscription or sign-up to website" is at 44%, however, it's down by 2% compared to 2016. The trigger with the highest growth is the "Subscription due for renewal" which has grown to 18%. What's interesting is that 7 triggers were more used in 2016 and 3 in 2017. So it's fair to say that more than half of these email marketers either don't have these triggers at all or they have to do them manually. I have done manual versions of all of these triggers over the years and it's fair to say that they…

AI isn't going to take your job. It's going to make you better at it.

When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1996, it was a testament to the incredible number crunching power of a computer. Deep Blue was capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second, and no one since built a more powerful chess computer. That's right - even though it was built in 1996, it's still the most powerful chess computer ever built. Can you think of any other type of computer for which processing power peaked in 1996? No, I didn't think so. So why has no one ever built a more powerful chess computer? Because advances in AI mean you simply don't need that hardware anymore. Today it's possible to get your old laptop to beat the best chess player in the world by installing some chess software, and even though your rusty old machine is only…

Hyper-personalisation is the future of email marketing

It’s well known that anything that’s tailored fits better. Be that a three-piece suit or your communications with your customers, in fact, companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle.

“Companies who send automated emails are 133% more likely to send relevant messages that correspond with a customer’s purchase cycle. – Lenskold and Pedowitz Groups”

Today, we’re going to give you a smart insight into how one of our customers, a domain name reseller sends automated cross sales emails to their customers by making use of dynamic segments and content.

Problem: Our customer had the business need of cross-selling related domain names after a customer had purchased a specific domain name. Opportunity: Use advanced segment definitions to optimize…

Leads are only as good as your ability to know how to calculate their value

Lead generation isn’t as popular as other acquisition channels such as Straight Sale, CPC, CPI or CPA. Why? Because most people struggle to understand two important things: How to do it properly How to calculate its value In this article, you’ll learn how to overcome these two obstacles and discover the information helping companies dominate their markets.

 How to do lead generation properly

 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has some excellent advice. He says: “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” This is the most important thing to master if you want to do lead generation well. You must be customer centric. Move away from a transactional mindset. Instead, think about repeat, retention-based sales. Doing this dramatically increases the lifetime value of…

See from this case study how these automated campaigns can generate new streams of revenue for your business

Behavioural emails can generate millions in online sales yet most retailers struggle to get it right. Time and time again, digital marketers grapple with the existential question: How important is email marketing, really? Email tends to have an astronomically high ROI of 3800%; for every $1 spent on email marketing, retailers make an average of $38 and it's one of the best sales online retail sales channels. Itís no surprise that there are hundreds of email marketing software solutions that offer numerous styling, scheduling, and automation options. As the e-commerce space continues to grow more and more crowded each year, all the software options in the world canít and wonít guarantee new streams of revenue for…

Chart of the day: Website lead response management research

If you're involved in a business where you collect leads from your website you will know the importance of timing - 'timing is everything'. For example, for a financial services or travel company who offer brochures for download, phone follow-up is still often an effective technique if the profile of the lead fits. Of course, within B2B marketing, this approach is even more common when offering whitepapers to help prospects learn about a product or solution. Today's chart-of-the-day isn't as recent as most we feature, instead it's a classic study designed to identify what day of week, time of day and time from creation to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates. The full report summary gives details on contact times (similar to best mail contact days Wednesday and Thursday are far more effective than other days and surprisingly, 4…

Email Marketing Expert Dan Grech explains his one goal for 2017: 'Do less'.

I've never really been a fan of ‘expert predictions’, especially when it comes to Digital Marketing. They remind me of Mystic Meg caressing glass balls, making some tenuous claims for the sake of entertaining an audience. I don’t think much will change in Digital Marketing in 2017. Like in previous years, email marketing will continue to hold the highest potential ROI against other marketing channels - yet so many businesses will get it wrong. Google will continue to make seemingly bizarre changes that we'll complain about - then we’ll accept them as being 'for the greater good' of online advertising. Video will continue to grow - yet people will scratch their heads at why a live broadcast of an eating contest on The Lad Bible's Facebook page gets more engagement than a 60 second YouTube pre-roll with a 6-figure…

Marketing Automation offers the key to effectively nurturing leads through the customer's journey

According to a research published by Smart Insights in 2016, 47% of businesses don't have a digital marketing strategy. The findings show that businesses have a big challenge structuring their digital marketing strategy and knowing where to start. So, how about we start by laying down some of the groundwork that you need to lay down in order to create and implement aworld-class digital marketing strategy. The strategy includes 4 key stages of the Smart Insights RACE framework - plus the initial Plan stage. Just in case you're not familiar with RACE, the stages are as follows:

1.    Plan:

This stage involves creating the overall strategy with SMART goals and measurable KPIs to run your digital marketing strategy.

2.    Reach:

Most customer’s journey’s begin through doing personal research instead of simply talking to a sales person. This means that providing content to feed this…

Examples of companies successfully using events to generate high-quality leads

Whether you’re organising events or attending them, face-to-face marketing can be one of the most powerful lead gen tools in your arsenal. Pair this up with a killer data capture campaign and you’ve got a recipe for success. We asked four companies to share their lead generation tips so you can follow their success.

Content

According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing – but costs 62% less. An industry report, for example, is a particularly cost-effective way to capture leads and get eyes on your brand. Salesforce recruitment specialists Mason Frank International did just that at Dreamforce 2016, when the company unveiled its latest salary survey. “From a lead-gen standpoint we wanted to engage job candidates by supplying genuinely useful information on how much…