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…
Batch and blast aren't pretty, and there are better email tactics. But nothing gets you more bang for your buck.
I don’t intend this to be a sales piece but I feel you need to know a little about myself and my company before you read this.
I work in marketing for an email service provider and my company preaches the value in sending sophisticated emails.
Now I’ve told you that, I have something to get off my chest. Something that would appear to contradict the opinions of my industry peers and perhaps, on occasion, that of my own company.
Here we go: although I think sophisticated emails are great, I think a ‘batch and blast’ style of emailing is better.
Yes, batching and blasting emails (the act of mass marketing through email) is great. I highly recommend it. Do it for all it’s worth. Seriously.
You will never, ever find a greater ROI rate…
How to use Artificial Intelligence to boost ROI from advertising
For marketers, the tide of artificial intelligence has finally crashed ashore.
It has begun making waves at industry events like WSDM: The 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining Web Search and Data Mining conference in San Francisco. In his keynote address, Google research fellow Jeff Dean told attendees it’s time to embrace techniques like deep learning. Once a land of buzzwords, rapid improvements in machine learning have made AI a pivotal member of marketer’s toolkits. As best practice guidelines on Machine Learning at Google shared by Martin Zinkevich (technical) show, Google are actively using Machine Learning in many projects.
Dean and others are excited about AI because it will finally allow marketers to take full advantage of the hordes of data they’ve begun collecting. While we’ve been able to generate mind-boggling mounds of data for a while —…
Live chat, video and product finders can help you massively boost your conversion rate
If you suddenly discovered you had superpowers, you’d use them, right? Of course you would! (and hopefully in a socially beneficial way). Well, I recently discovered a few user experience (UX) techniques that are proven to significantly lift E-commerce revenues, so I wanted to share these techniques so that you can starting use them yourself soon.
First I’ll describe the revenue ‘leverage factors’ each of these features provide. Then I’ll provide guidance on how to design and implement them for your eCommerce website.
The X factors, please
My recent analysis for a website that sells surveillance products found that the Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) - the top conversion metric for E-commerce websites - was amplified by the following factors:
By 3.9X when visitors used chat
By 1.7X when visitors viewed videos
By 2.2X when visitors used a product finder
In other…
Are LinkedIn's new features the most effective B2B ad product on the market?
This week has seen the launch of two powerful new B2B advertising products from LinkedIn. Both have the potential to help B2B advertisers get far more benefit from the business-focused social network.
LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Matching audiences to email addresses is one way to re-target people who you know are interested in your product (because they've given you their address). Facebook, Twitter and Google already have options to re-target audiences based on email address.
The idea is you upload the list of your customer's email addresses, and then the ad network matches these addresses to the people on its database, so you can serve ads to those exact people. This is a great tactic for B2B because the long, complex selling process for big ticket purchases often involves signing up to research and white papers and then comparing several different providers. Advertising to…
How to create and implement a successful SMS marketing campaign
There are countless reasons why your business should consider implementing SMS marketing as part of your overall communications strategy.
It’s budget-friendly - you can send messages from around 2p / 2 cents per message
It hits the mark - over 97% of text messages are read within the first four minutes
It gets your customers to act - 19% of people will click a link in a SMS campaign rather than just 4.2% for emails
It produces results - 30% of SMS campaigns receive average response rates of 30%, compared to 4% for emails
But there are rules to follow in order for each of your SMS campaigns to be successful. In this post I will…
Use these live chat tools to engage your users at the most critical stage of the buying process
As customer expectations rise and users demand instant responses to questions & complaints, live chat tools are growing rapidly both in usage and in capability. 60% of those in the 18-34 'millennial' age bracket reported in a study for Forrester research that they preferred to have their questions answered via live chat than via phone. 44% of that age group also reported that having the ability to ask questions via live chat was one of the most important features a site could offer.
With the growing importance of live chat to the customer experience and thus your bottom line, you need to review what technology is available to deliver a great live chat experience, at a cost that is right for your business. That's why we've reviewed a wide range of live chat tools…
Mobile sales are growing rapidly, but many still fail to properly account for them in their analytics.
Most Americans use mobile devices at some stage in the purchasing process, but mobile-influenced sales can be tricky to pin down. Marketers need to quantify mobile’s impact; failing to do so paints an incomplete sales picture and undervalues the ROI your mobile strategy produces.
Mobile is now overtaking desktop in overall usage. Data assembled for the KPCB mobile technology trends survey shows that people spend 51 percent of their time on mobile and only 42 percent on desktop. Even more use mobile to research purchases or look for discounts.
An ideal method to help pinpoint a mobile ad campaign’s effectiveness is mobile app attribution, which tracks app installs, in-app purchases, completions, and other mobile-related behaviors. The majority of marketers have a more difficult attribution challenge than tracking digital downloads. If you sell…
Examples of high converting calls to action to inspire your own copywriting
To succeed online you need to build an effective testing and optimising strategy that will help you to maximise conversion rates. How do you know what are the most important things for a better conversion? Versatile. scientific testing, pages optimization, various payment gateways, landing pages, and more. These factors will definitely help you to improve your bottom line by getting higher conversion rates. One of the most effective ways to boost your conversion rate is to improve your calls to action by making them more compelling.
You can test many different messaging and design techniques to boost conversion, but in this article I will focus on the humble CTA to get your audience onto the next stage in the path to purchase.
You can create a great CTA of any shape, style, and size. The main thing is to create CTA buttons in…
