Rnordman

Read more on learning to put our customers first… the hard way….

The post learning to put our customers first… the hard way. appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

As Ursula the sea witch famously said, "Don't underestimate the importance of body language."

Some tricks, like remembering to smile, are pretty easy to implement in your everyday life.

However, there are other techniques that, while relatively commonsense, are somewhat trickier to tackle.

Still, they can make a huge difference.

Here are seven body language hacks that can be tricky to master, but will definitely pay off forever once you do:

1. Mirror the person you're speaking to

Mirroring — or aligning your body to match the position of whoever you're speaking to — can be a tough skill to master. But doing it shows admiration and agreement, says Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder.

It can be hard to do this subtly, without looking like you're mimicking or mocking someone, but this is definitely a good trick to employ if you're really trying to make a good impression.

2. Walk with purpose and energy

Not everyone walks with confidence. Some of us shuffle through life with a slumping, awkward gait.

And it can be tough to change the way we walk. But if you take some steps to improve it, you can help to ensure that people don't make snap judgments about your confidence, attractiveness, and trustworthiness, according to Scientific American.

3. Maintain good eye contact

It's all in the eyes.

People with a shaky gaze often come across as anxious, distracted, or dishonest. And it can be tough to master the skill of maintaining eye contact, since it's a very uncomfortable and unnatural thing for some people. But it's a practice that can help you immensely in life.

Luckily, there are some simple techniques for maintaining better eye contact if you feel your stare isn't cutting it.

In "How To Talk To Anyone," author and communication expert Leil Lowndes advises that you should "pretend your eyes are glued to your conversation partner's with sticky, warm taffy."

Once you master this trick, you'll immediately see an improvement in your face-to-face communications with others.

4. Keep your hands visible

It's hard to know what to do with your hands sometimes, especially if you're a somewhat nervous person.

As a result, you might take to compulsively jamming them into your pockets or crossing your arms. Those are understandable moves, but they also project a somewhat negative image.

As Business Insider previously reported, it's important to keep your hands visible, lest you look like you're hiding something.

Invite people in and allow them to trust you by using more open body language. Avoid positions that make you appear defensive (even if that's how you're feeling).

5. Don't fidget, but don't be too stiff

Some people are just a bit twitchy. Some people are almost unnaturally still. The problem is, others may mistake that for dishonesty or fear.

That might be common knowledge, but Dr. Lillian Glass, a behavioral analyst and body language expert who has worked with the FBI on unmasking signals of deception, previously told Business Insider that you should also watch out for people who are not moving at all.

"This may be a sign of the primitive neurological 'fight,' rather than the 'flight,' response, as the body positions and readies itself for possible confrontation," Glass said. "When you speak and engage in normal conversation, it is natural to move your body around in subtle, relaxed, and, for the most part, unconscious movements. So if you observe a rigid, catatonic stance devoid of movement, it is often a huge warning sign that something is off."

If you can strike a balance between swaying and stiffness, you'll be able to make a better impression with others.

6. Sit up straight

Your parents were right to constantly bark at you to adjust your terrible posture when you were a moody teen.

"If you lounge back in your chair, recruiters interpret it as a sign of your disinterest in the open position or that you're not taking the interview seriously, neither of which will help you land the job," Amanda Augustine, a career advice expert for TopResume, previously told Business Insider. "In addition, slumping over in the chair can indicate a lack of confidence."

Instead, she suggests sitting as if there was a string tied from the top of your head to the ceiling. Sitting up straight is seen as a sign of intelligence, confidence, and credibility, she explains.

Anyone with bad posture can tell you that correcting your slouch is not always easy. But it's definitely worth it in the long run.

7. Work on your handshake

No one wants to receive a "dead fish" handshake. Writing on LinkedIn, Ashish Arora notes that "a weak handshake equals a weak person" in most peoples' minds.

So how do you give a great handshake?

Arora breaks it down for us: "When squeezing your hand you want the grip to be tight enough to feel the bones of the other person’s hand lightly pressing into your skin and then keeping the same amount of pressure while you make two to three moderately strong shakes in the vertical plain. Maintain eye contact and a smile throughout."

SEE ALSO: 11 signs someone is lying to you

DON'T MISS: 11 skills that are hard to learn but will pay off forever

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A serial entrepreneur explains why starting a company 'has to be the only option in your life'

 Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a significant price drop for some of its storage services. In addition, it is also launched a few new features for developers who want to use its Glacier cold storage service. The new prices that most developers will likely care about are those for S3, AWS’ main cloud storage service. Instead of six pricing tiers, S3 will now use three: 0-50 TB;… Read More

When it comes to long-term success in retail, turning occasional shoppers into lifetime customers is one of the most effective strategies a business can implement. And at no time is this more important than the holidays. It's simple math: Engaging seasonal shoppers and converting them into repeat buyers provides a solid foundation for higher sales throughout the year.

Savvy companies know it's far more cost-effective to strengthen relationships with existing customers than it is to find and acquire new ones. A recent global study by Forbes Insights and marketing technology company Sailthru shows companies that make retention a priority significantly increased year-over-year market share compared with those that focused on acquiring new customers.

But building those lifetime customer relationships doesn't happen by accident. It takes a solid retention strategy and effective deployment of email, online and mobile messaging, and customer loyalty programs, especially during the holiday season. For many retailers, it's a make-or-break moment. Sure, numbers may be up during the gift-buying rush, but if businesses fail to put retention strategies into place, those customers will disappear just as quickly as they showed up.

Luckily, those fourth-quarter shoppers present a huge opportunity for years to come — if handled correctly. Here are some suggestions for turning holiday shoppers into lifelong customers.

1. Make retention and acquisition a C-suite priority.

Senior management should recognize the value of converting holiday shoppers into loyal customers while also focusing on acquisition. To do so, brands need to reassess whether or not they're looking at the full picture. Make sure you’re acquiring even smarter and more efficiently by finding out who your best customers are, and then acquisition and retention both become that much better.

2. Have the right marketing tools in place. 

By ensuring your marketing tools are up to snuff, you demonstrate a commitment to increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) through a long-term business strategy. When marketing tools are set up to fuel acquisition, engagement, and retention, all of your company's needs are served holistically and across multiple channels.

3. Train your team.

Make sure everyone on every team understands the importance of retention and knows how to deliver a positive experience online, in the contact center, or in person. Though great customer service is crucial for building long-term relationships, the Forbes Insights/Sailthru study found a need for improvement in terms of communicating the benefits and best approaches to retention internally. Great retailers make it everyone's job to provide an amazing customer experience, especially for those who may not be customer-facing but whose work reaches customers the most, like marketers.

4. Invite holiday shoppers to join your loyalty program.

Use your online, mobile, and social media channels to tell new customers about the benefits of staying engaged with your company. For instance, loyal customers might receive free year-round shipping for a modest annual fee, or receive 24 hours advance notice of in-store sales. In any case, highlight your loyalty program in your holiday sales and promotional messaging.

5. Examine your shipping and return policies.

Make it easy for new customers to return unwanted merchandise. Not only does that take away the perceived risk in placing an order, it also provides you with an opportunity to engage customers about their specific wants and needs. At the same time, minimizing shipping costs can also encourage holiday shoppers to place repeat orders in the coming year.

6. Target the most likely repeat customers.

Predictive analytic tools can help you identify the holiday shoppers with the highest likelihood to become loyal customers. That allows you to focus your marketing and communication dollars on the most likely prospects. The Forbes Insights/Sailthru study found that 67% of companies surveyed cited data-driven insights as critical for their retention programs.

7. Monitor the results.

After the holiday season is over, analyze your sales and marketing data to determine the effectiveness of your marketing programs in relation to retention and customer lifetime value. Was a social media post more effective than an email blast in terms of sign-ups for your loyalty program? Did a certain demographic or geographic segment show a greater propensity for staying connected with your company? At the same time, take a hard look at any tactics that produce results so you can shift gears in the future.

Finally, it's important to remember that while a great one-time offer can generate immediate sales, it takes a powerful, integrated approach to turn occasional shoppers into loyal customers. So be sure you deliver on your promises, exceed expectations, and implement strategies that keep customers coming back to your company time after time.

For more information on how to turn casual holiday shoppers into lifetime customers, get Sailthru's free holiday marketing playbook.

This post is sponsored by Sailthru.

Join the conversation about this story »

Account based nurturing refers to a strategy of precisely targeting sales leads on an account basis rather than an individual one.

The goal is to enhance overall exposure within targeted accounts to increase your influence among a broader pool of decision-makers and people that contribute to buying decisions.

The following is a deeper look at some of the primary benefits of taking an account-based approach to nurturing sales leads.

Broader Reach

An individual approach to nurturing means your reps interact with a single decision-maker at the targeted firm. With an account-based approach to nurturing, you attempt to market to anyone with ties to the purchase decisions made in an organisation, division or department.

Simply put, by reaching more people on the account level, you increase the overall level of awareness within organisations you target.

Imagine department groups or buying teams in a prospect firm discussing strategies for resolving challenges or problems, and having many people familiar with your company and solutions.

Heightened awareness gives you more voices in the room.

Broader Marketing Messages

Specificity is critical to effective targeting of buyers and accounts, but an accounted-based nurturing program allows you to offer marketing messages that cover account needs on a broader basis.

You can identify the different interests, motives and concerns of account influencers, and convey your message in a way that appeals to each.

This broader appeal enhances your influence during nurturing beyond what you accomplish by speaking just to the needs of one targeted individual.

Journey Alignment

Aligning your content with the buyer’s journey has become common in many nurturing programs.

When you take an account-based approach to nurturing, though, you can consider the thoughts and actions of a buying team as it goes through the process.

For instance, consider the initial conversations a team of five to seven people might have as they become aware of a problem. Then, analyse how these small teams begin to assess and research before taking action.

Having this broader account-based perspective enables you to better target the relevant contacts with your content at each stage.

Increased Sales Opportunities

One of the most direct and financially impactful benefits of account-based nurturing is opportunities to increase sales.

The more contacts on an account familiar with your benefits, the greater your openings to conduct add-on or cross-selling.

You might, for instance, find that a solution that works well for a particular department leads to opportunities to sell additional solutions to other departments within the target account.

Wrap Up

Account based nurturing offers many advantages, but not a lot of marketing companies or departments take advantage of them.

As B2B marketers, we want to generate leads for the sales team. After all, delivering more leads increases the likelihood of winning more sales. Therefore, it’s a cause for concern when the numbers aren’t as high as we might like. And it can be disheartening when it appears that your carefully-crafted marketing campaigns are failing to make a discernible impact.

Often, however, there is a simple explanation for what’s going wrong. By diagnosing the problem, you can provide the right treatment and improve your lead generation process.

So, are you making any of these common B2B lead generation mistakes?

1. Your data is old and dirty

Databases decay by as much as 40 per cent every year and, often, the original sources of some of your contact records weren’t accurate in the first place. If it’s been a while since you’ve given your data some TLC, you should look to have it cleaned and, perhaps, freshened up with new data.

2. You haven’t optimised your database

Often our databases are added to somewhat haphazardly – an email address here, a phone number there. When looked at in its entirety, then, the database is full of holes. It would be worthwhile remedying that by adding in the missing data, which will allow you to maximise the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns.

3. You haven’t segmented your data

Segmenting should be done both before you launch campaigns and after the results of campaigns have been analysed. Segmenting before you design campaigns allows you to tailor them to each target segment. And after you run a campaign you should further segment your data based on what you learn from the results.

4. Ignoring the buyer’s journey

Not every visitor to your site will be at the same stage in the buyer’s journey – for instance, a first-time visitor is unlikely to be ready to purchase straightaway. You need different content for each stage so that you help prospects whether they are researching how best to deal with their challenges or are ready to make a decision. You need a content strategy.

5. Failing to understand your ideal customer/ audience

Irrelevant offers won’t grab or hold the attention of your target audience. This point is related to the one above. Without truly understanding the needs and the motivations of your prospects, you risk creating content or offers that don’t resonate with them.

It’s important to do your research and not to make assumptions. For example, you might speak with your sales and customer service teams, who have insight from existing customers. You should also leverage your existing database to profile your customers, getting a deeper understanding of their characteristics.

6. Unconvincing CTAs

If your calls to action are hidden or hard to spot on the page or if they lack “pop” or action words, they just won’t work well. It sounds obvious but many marketers sacrifice effectiveness for design aesthetics, preferring their CTAs to “fit” with the look and feel of the site.

7. Too many CTAs

With too many CTAs you overload your visitors with noise – they don’t know where to look or are conflicted with too many choices.

8. Bad landing pages

If your landing pages make it difficult for your visitors, you set the hurdle too high and risk losing prospects before they convert. This is often done by creating tedious forms that ask for too much information too soon or by not making it clear what the visitor should do – e.g. providing too much information, not spelling out the benefits of filling out the form, or placing links or other CTAs on the page.

9. No value offered

You want something for nothing with your offers. If you are asking for people’s contact details, you need to be offering value in return. The amount of information you are asking for needs to be commensurate with the value of the offer. A subscription to your newsletter probably only merits a name and email address, whereas if you’re offering a detailed “how to” guide or technical white paper you can ask for more information.

10. There is a disconnect between CTAs and landing pages

Sometimes a CTA offers something different from its corresponding landing page – this “bait and switch” erodes trust and kills conversions. Prospects notice that disconnect and it risks annoying them. Make sure the promise your CTA makes is delivered by the landing page and its offer.

11. You’re too general

Your messaging and content is broad and top-level. You think you are appealing to the widest audience so as not to miss out on potential leads, but people are looking to solve specific problems they have, not general ones. You become really valuable when you dig deep.

12. You’re poorly positioned

You haven’t differentiated yourself from others. It’s hard to catch the eye of a prospect when you look the same as your competitors. Sometimes we worry about missing opportunities if we focus on a niche but trying to be all things to all people is unconvincing.

13. You try to be everywhere

Focus on where your customers are, not where the hype says you should be – for instance, don’t bother with Facebook if your audience isn’t there.

14. Your efforts are disconnected

Use multi-channel/ cross-channel marketing campaigns to deliver a consistent set of messages and offers – don’t confuse your prospects with disconnected, scattergun approaches.

15. You focus on features and benefits instead of on customer challenges, concerns and interests

You are being “marketer-centric” rather than “customer-centric” in your communications. Prospects are humans and, as such, care about their own challenges, not about the bells and whistles of your product.

16. You don’t convey credibility

Show, don’t tell. Don’t claim expertise; demonstrate it through your helpful, knowledgeable content. All of your competitors claim they have the best product or service too. The best way to convince a prospect that you are the real deal is to show them that you know your stuff rather than simply telling them.

17. You aren’t optimising your top site pages for lead generation

Traffic to most websites is focused on a handful of pages. This is where most visitors spend their time so take advantage of that by ensuring you have optimised conversion options for them. By not doing that you potentially miss low-hanging fruit.

As B2B marketers, we are focused on generating high-quality leads. If you’re finding that your efforts are not bearing fruit in the way that you might have expected, it may well simply be a case of needing to tweak something here and there. These mistakes are easy to make – but the good news is that they are also easy to remedy.

It’s easy to hop online and find information on just about anything, but it’s also easy to find unreliable, downright wrong information, too. Google Images can help detect a fake news story written around an image.

Read more...

When an app claims to be powered by “artificial intelligence” it feels like you’re in the future. What does that really mean, though? We’re taking a look at what buzzwords like AI, machine learning, and neural networks really mean and whether they actually help improve your apps.

Read more...

To say that the United States is polarized at the end of this most recent political season would be an understatement. In fact, Republicans and Democrats haven’t been this ideologically divided in more than two decades. The massive swing in government policies, which will begin to roll-out when President-Elect Trump takes office in January, will lead to an unpredictable economy, stock market and currency market.

The silver-lining, for e-commerce businesses, is that international exposure to geographically diverse markets can make it easier to weather unpredictable economic conditions in the United States. If the worst-case scenario plays out, and the US economy enters a downturn that impacts consumer confidence and damages the US dollar, international markets will offer a cushion. Although admittedly, this cushion would be dampened by economic trouble in the world’s largest national economy.

Add the Option to Shop in Different Currencies to Engage International Clients

In preparation for what many experts are predicting will be a turbulent year domestically, now is a great time to offer shoppers the ability to purchase products in their native currency. Nobody enjoys reaching for a currency calculator, and then paying currency conversion fees in addition to the purchase price and taxes for an item.

Online payment processing companies, like PayPal and Shopify, provide systems that can be easily implemented into a site without too much coding and customization. This is perfect for e-commerce sites that sell products to other business; the average b2b customer has an international team that speaks seven languages. Multi-currency support allows e-commerce sites to cater to the needs of a diverse set of decision makers.

Understanding the Currency Conversion Process

E-commerce sites that focus on supporting international currencies need to understand how currencies are converted and traded. When working with international partners, it is usually less expensive to pay for items with the partner’s national currency. And, if you’re able to carry a balance in multiple currencies, strategically moving funds between currencies can be a lucrative way to increase profit margins.

Of course, there is risk in converting between currencies; currency markets change dramatically from day to day as current events impact markets. But, I’ve found in our business that holding funds in multiple currencies provides us greater flexibility and the opportunity to pad our profits.

Create Shipping Centers or Drop-Ship Partnerships Overseas

The other major boundary to supporting customers in different countries and different continents is shipping costs. Customers shop online for many reasons, one of them being price competitiveness. If your item is cheaper, but requires expensive international shipping charges, you’re going to lose the sale to a more expensive local supplier.

To compete on a global scale, it’s critical that your e-commerce business establishes partnerships with local warehouses and drop-ship chains to fulfill overseas orders. This negates the international shipping fees, and hefty import / export charges.

Digital Delivery Products Will Fare the Best

The absolute easiest way to target international buyers is to offer a well-stocked catalogue of items that are delivered digitally, via download. My company did this by partnering with a licensing firm that generated secure, one-time use keycodes that would unlock a downloadable product. Pirating (the practice of disabling the paywall in downloaded products and distributing them freely via file-sharing sites) is a serious concern. Robust counter-measures are critical.

The developers of the products that you sell in your digital catalogue will offer robust counter-piracy measures. Coordinating with the developers will allow you to take full advantage of their expertise. After all, it’s in their best interest to limit the opportunity for their work to be pirated or stolen.

Google Local Search Becomes Increasingly Important for International E-Commerce Efforts

Targeting the market in your home country makes sense for individuals on a limited start-up budget. But, as an e-commerce company grows and expands, it becomes increasingly important to identify the international markets that offer the best opportunity for making international sales.

In my company, we found that Google Local was our best tool for targeting geographic regions with our products and services. Google Local search is a segment of Google’s search algorithm that is dedicated to serving up results based on the geographic location of the individual that is searching for an item, or answer to a question. For example, if I’m located in the UK, Google will prefer to show me results that are geographically relevant to me, before serving up sites from the US or Asia.

To tackle this opportunity, you’ll need to use a keyword explorer to identify popular keywords used by people in specific regions. For example, as an online seller of apparel, the keyword “cheap socks in London” might be a good keyword to research. Do you think the individual typing this into Google would be willing to order socks online? It’s possible that price is their primary motivator, so a bulk discount on socks could sway them to shop online, instead of visiting a local store.

Google’s Keyword Planner is an excellent, free resource for discovering keyword opportunities. Type in a few phrases that you think a customer would type into Google, and you’ll be able to see the competitiveness for that keyword, as well as the average search volume. In addition, Google will recommend additional, related keywords that can help you brainstorm new strings.

Local Search, International Partnerships and Multi-Currency Support are Key to International E-Commerce Success

Targeted landing pages, built to serve customers in different, targeted geographic locations will help ensure your site shows up in international markets. When the customer visits your site, listing your products in the native currency of the visitor will help ensure the customer can easily assess competitive pricing. And, by working with local providers and suppliers, you can minimize shipping and import/export fees. Plus, as an added bonus, international currency can be traded to improve profitability, based on market activity.

One of the many benefits of digital marketing is how transparent and measurable your activity is. Being able to understand the success of your activity means that you can demonstrate your return on investment and learn lessons from previous activity.

Google Analytics is an excellent source of such data – but it can be overwhelming with so many different views and metrics to choose from. So, I have produced a quick guide to the most common areas of Google Analytics. This is a deliberately limited guide and is for people new to analytics: Googler Analytics is capable of a lot more, but I think a firm grasp of the basics is essential. Here are the key areas using the options in the left hand column:

Real Time

This section looks at what is happening on your website in real time. For example, you can see where people are coming from, how many people are on the site, which pages they are seeing, etc. In many cases, this level of information is interesting but difficult to react to. However, if you are running an event tracking activity or you’re looking to see the immediate impact of an activity, it can be useful.

Audience

The overview is a really good place to get a quick overview of your website – it shows sessions, users, page views, pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate and % of new sessions. There are two particular reports within Audience which may be interesting. The Geo report shows where in the world people are visiting from – this can be viewed by country or by city. Also, there is a really handy comparison of user device within Mobile. This is a good chance to see how your website is engaging users whether they are on desktop, tablet or mobile.

Acquisition

This section takes a look at where your traffic is coming from – particularly important if you are running activity to drive traffic to your website. For example, there is an AdWords section which allows you to link your AdWords and Analytics accounts. This will enable you to look at the engagement on-page at keyword level, invaluable. The gateway to finding out more is the Channels report under All Traffic. You can click through on each of the channels to see more, e.g. clicking on social media will allow you to see the metrics by each social network.

Behaviour

The Behaviour section looks at metrics from the website’s perspective – namely, by looking at the performance of pages and sections of your website. The Site Content section and its sub-reports allow you to see what content is being looked at – and how interesting it is to your audience. You can look at the pages by total number of visits (All Pages) or by following the structure of your website. For example, if your URL is example.com/product/widget1/pricing then you can see how many people visit the product section, the widget1 section, etc. Also in Site Content is Site Search – this allows you to see which terms are more commonly searched for on your website and as such what your visitors want to see but can’t find.

Conversions

If you have an online form, you can track the number of conversions made on your website. But more interestingly, you can tell when they happened and where the visitor came from – e.g. if they visited from Facebook when they made their enquiry. While this only measures last click (attribution data is held elsewhere), it is a nice feature.

You really can spend hours and hours looking through Google Analytics, looking at all manner of measures. But before you even start your campaign, you should have a clear definition of what success looks like – and just investigate those metrics.

If you’ve ever had a mind-boggling experience when you used different ways to interact with a company, you’re not alone. Less than 10% of brands have seamless customer experiences, according to recent studies by Accenture and Economist Intelligence Unit. 97% of customers use more than one channel when dealing with a brand, yet 76% of them say it’s a poor, disjointed, silo-ized experience (NICE/BCG study).¹. As much as omni-channel and branded customer experience are hot topics, there is still a big chasm between what’s needed and what’s set up.

---

Channel silos include service, sales, marketing, and operational channels. Whatever way the customer is interacting with the brand, the bottom line is consistency.

Consistency is the name of the game because customers’ interaction with you is just one of a thousand things they are doing in any given day. Inconsistency can be:

Mind-boggling because it causes customers to waste time, effort, money, morale, reputation, or opportunity.

• Bad for your brand — it muddies what your brand means. It spells a lack of brand integrity as the customer inevitably wonders: “Am I dealing with one brand or a mish-mash of opportunists?”
• Bad for your revenue growth — it’s an annoyance for a percentage of customers that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back — leading them to transaction abandonment or account churn and negative word-of-mouth.
• Bad for your profitability — it piles otherwise unnecessary burdens on your service organization, derails productivity in the path of escalations (and takes a toll on employee tenure, etc. etc.), and diverts precious resources to remedial efforts.

Boggle-Busting ROI
How much is that costing? Do a quick estimate of all that bad stuff, and you’ll find some compelling figures for driving consistency.

Getting rid of what’s bad for your brand, revenue growth, and profitability is vital. It’s key to getting off the merry-go-round of throwing good money after bad. Companies striving for omni-channel customer experience saw 91% increase in customer retention rates (6.5% versus 3.4%) compared to companies without a coherent omni-channel strategy. Their customer profitability and lifetime value were also higher, as reported in an Aberdeen study.² Do the math for the upside: how much money is represented by a 91% increase in your customer retention rate? Add to that: a boost in customer profitability and lifetime value and a reversal of your quick estimate of all that bad stuff (above).

De-Silo-ing Your Omni-channel Approach
Note that the difference between multi-channel and omni-channel is that multi means various and omni means consistent. Branded customer experience also means consistent. Still, it’s typical that any discussion of omni-channel is still silo-ized: omnichannel for customer service is rarely discussed hand-in-hand with omni-channel for sales, and even more rarely alongside omni-channel for marketing or operations.

Customer experience journey mapping and customer lifecycle management are steps in the right direction — they are tools to shift your perspective to customers’ end-to-end experience with your company. Yet all too often these tools reflect internal steps or a so-called standalone snapshot of the journey or lifecycle.

(1) Reality: Matching up the customers’ steps with internal steps is important, but the emphasis in your quest for insights must be on the customers’ viewpoint — and most importantly, on consequences to customers, really wrapping your head around what’s mind-boggling to them. 69% of brands think they’re providing superior customer experience, while only 31% of customers feel the same, according to a 2015 study by IBM and eConsultancy.¹ Until you see customers’ reality, you’re still stuck in the silo of your own viewpoint!

(2) Big picture: Getting into the nitty-gritty of a certain step in the journey or lifecycle is important, but the initial approach you should take is the end-to-end journey or lifecycle. By getting a birds-eye perspective from A through Z, you’re more likely to prioritize wisely, see synergies, and avoid unintentional cannibalism, mis-steps or ironically, further silo-ization. Until you see the big picture, you’re still stuck in the silo of a cog inside a bigger machine.

(3) Omni-omni-channel: It’s possible for a customer to simultaneously engage with your company in a marketing interaction, sales interaction, operational interaction, and service interaction — or at least in rapid succession. So disparate look-and-feel across these 4 types of channels is problematic. Consistency across all of your service channels is great, and you should see lots of rewards for that, but it’s still undermined if you have inconsistency across your marketing channels. In fact, inconsistency in one type of channel may be costing you a lot more in another type of channel, regardless of whether the latter type is only multi or truly omni. Until you see how all the channel types interact, you’re stuck in a functional silo.

(4) Synergies: When you step back and think about it, connecting the dots between these 4 types of channels is an absolute must for customer experience excellence.

1. Operations channels are the ways that customers access your offerings — Internet, mobile, brick-and-mortar, vending machines, mail/parcel delivery, phone, onsite visit, and so on.
2. Marketing channels are the ways that customers access information about your offerings — Internet, email, mobile, signage, advertising, sponsorship, and so on.
3. Sales channels are the ways that customers interact with your company to make buying decisions and place orders — direct sales force, dealers, franchises, Internet, mobile, chat, brick-and-mortar, phone, onsite visit, vending machines, and so on.
4. Service channels are the ways that customers access help to get intended value from your offerings — Internet, mobile, phone, chat, brick-and-mortar, onsite visit, dealers, alliances, and so on.

Cross-organizational collaboration is non-negotiable! Ideally, you’ll compare notes with the other 3 types of channels whenever you’re setting out to add a new channel or make a change in one of your channels. You should make a habit of it going forward. And necessarily, you’ll need to join forces with the other 3 types of channels to iron-out hiccups and chasms. In all cases, consistency is the name of the game.

Consistency is essential for look-and-feel across channels, information accessibility (for the customer and for the provider), picking up wherever the customer left off without repetitive steps, and ease of doing business with your company.

Boggle-Busters’ Mission
If you’re serious about customer experience excellence — as a brand differentiator, as a growth accelerator, as the right way to run your company — you need dedicated boggle-busting efforts. Channel silos are serious hairballs. There is so much overlap across the channel types, across customer types, and across numerous players internally and externally, that you’ve got to size it up accurately and resource it adequately.

---

Fix the inconsistencies, find the synergies, integrate your data and policies and procedures, maintain the same look-and-feel, keep all the players on the same page, and proactively design harmonious channel experiences. Sanity-test your achievement of omni-omni-channel customer experience by monitoring the end-to-end customer perspective of ease of doing business with you.

It will take a village, but this is what business management is all about: establishing a well-oiled machine that creates value for all involved.

If you’re dealing with a mom-and-pop small business, run by just one person or a close-knit few, consistency is baked-in. Everything changes when additional players and moving parts are added. Channels are intended to save time and effort and increase volume and ease of doing business. They’re about economies of scale for the seller and convenience for the buyer. Yet the report announcement of a 2015 study by IBM and eConsultancy exclaims: “4 Out of 5 Consumers Declare Brands Don’t Know Them as an Individual”.³ This shows how sloppy we’ve become since our businesses were mom-and-pop size.

Consistency takes concerted effort. You’ll want to fully empower dedicated boggle-busters as a significant element of your customer experience strategy to stop mind-boggling channel experiences for customers.

¹Gerry McGovern, Customer Experience is Getting Worse, CMSwire.com.
²Aberdeen Group, Omni-Channel Retailing 2013: The Quest for the Holy Grail
³IBM, 4 Out Of 5 Consumers Declare Brands Don’t Know Them As An Individual, According to IBM and Econsultancy Study

Image purchased under license from Shutterstock.

Yes, it really has been a month since the last post in this series. My apologies for the delay; I have been sprinting (flying) toward Thanksgiving with events scattered from New Hampshire to Lake Tahoe, Philadelphia to South Padre Island, Chicago to New Hampshire, St. Louis to Boston, and Jersey City to Jacksonville in just the past couple weeks. The airlines were amazingly/suprisingly good to me, and each event and client workshop was a blast. So, like many of you, I’m tired – and ready to wrap up the Fall Selling Season, and to rest and reflect over this long holiday weekend.

Telephone Prospecting Tip #3: A Great Start to the Call

Previously, we looked at the importance of both our mindset and voice tone when it comes to proactive calling. Today, I want to help you get the call of to a great start.

The single hardest part of telephone prospecting is blocking out the time and actually picking up the phone to dial. We are ALL very good at finding excuses (and distractions) to avoid starting a call block. But once our butt’s are in the chair and we start cranking out calls, the next hardest part is when our prospect answers the phone. I know. it’s often a shock when they do pick up because my clients’ salespeople get voicemail about 77% of the time. That’s a big number and we’ll dedicate an entire article on how to effectively use voicemail in a future post.

I head up…

After listening to too many sales reps stumble, bumble and get outmatched by executive prospects very early in the call, I decided it was time to upgrade the first few words out of their mouths. When prospecting, as Jeb Blount loves to remind us, we are interrupting the prospect. They aren’t expecting our call and, in most cases, aren’t thrilled to discover it’s a sales call. To both raise the prospect’s perception of the caller and to help reduce their reflex anti-sales reaction, it’s helpful if we say this very simple, yet very powerful, little line when introducing ourselves: I head up… “Hi Joe, It’s Mike Weinberg from Acme Consulting; I head up _____________.”

There are two helpful benefits from using “I head up.” The first is that it makes us feel good. Has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you agree? Kinda makes you feel important and that you’d be worth the prospect hearing you out, doesn’t it? I certainly like the way it feels and many sales reps agree. The other benefit is that it sets us apart (temporarily) in the prospect’s mind. The immediate reaction is that someone of importance is calling. And you must admit, that’s a very different reaction than the buyer might have when immediately concluding that some sales rep is interrupting their busy day.

Try “I head up.” You’ll like it. In almost every situation, we’ve been able to find a way for a salesperson to deploy that phrase. I head up our agency business. I head up sales in the western US. I head up distributor relationships. I head up the XYZ client solutions team. I head up ________.

Let me take a minute…

Once we introduce ourselves, we must acknowledge that we’re interrupting and get some type of green light from the prospect to proceed. For obvious reasons, I’m not a fan of the all-too-typical, “Do you have a minute?” or “Is now a good time?” I don’t like those bridges into the call for two simple reasons. First, they’re overused – just like “I’m reaching out” is overused to the point of nausea. If everyone else is saying it then we don’t want to. And the second reason I’m not a fan of those questions is because I don’t like the answers they often produce. The truth is that even if the prospect does have a minute or it is a good time (unlikely), why would they tell you that? Asking if it’s a good time or if they have a minute makes it way too easy for the prospect to simply say, “Honestly, no.”

My coaching is to try this very simple phrase after your introduction/I head up line: “Let me take a minute.” I suggest saying this in the most calm, confident, executive tone. You’re an important person (who heads up something) calling another important person. You know you bring value to people and companies just like this prospect so you go into the call believing it, and assuming that, of course, this person will grant you a minute. They’d be foolish not to :).  Instead of asking for permission, we simply state that we’re going to take a minute. “Joe, Mike Weinberg with ACME Consulting. I head up __________.  Let me take a minute…”

If it truly is a horrendous time, as in the prospect is running late for a meeting with the CEO or finishing up a package for the FedEx driver who’s waiting in the lobby, the prospect will tell you that. And in those cases, let them go! Don’t even think about launching into your mini-story (tips for the mini-story coming in the next article.) When that happens, just say, “I’ll give you a shout on Thursday morning” and let them go. Trust me. When you do that, you not only score a respect point, you’ve also set up your call back. When you call back on Thursday the call doesn’t even feel as cold. You are more confident because you’ve already spoken with that person once and your opening is even easier: “Joe, Mike Weinberg getting back with you. I caught you scrambling to get that FedEx out the door the other day. Let me take that one minute now.”

I promise you that when your mindset is right, your voice tone is good, and you start off the prospecting call with simple, effective phrases like suggested above, you will be more confident and more effective. I’ll make another promise, too: It won’t be a month until the next article with the next telephone prospecting tip!

Favorite Resources:

If you’re looking for more resources to help increase your effectiveness securing meetings with prospects, these are my four favorites:

• New Sales. Simplified. by yours truly. Chapter 9 has my best thoughts on using the phone.
• Smart Calling by Art Sobczak is a must-have. I’ve bought more copies of this book for clients than any other. Art’s a pro’s pro when it comes to the phone and sales. I highlighted about 60% of the book.
• Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount has been a bestseller, often #1, for over a year. And that’s not just because I wrote the foreword. This is the most comprehensive guide to prospecting I’ve read.
• High-Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter is a powerful new book with great, specific tips to raise your prospecting game. Mark helps you aim higher and earn meetings with the people you really want to see. The introduction to the book ain’t half-bad either.

Yes, it really has been a month since the last post in this series. My apologies for the delay; I have been sprinting (flying) toward Thanksgiving with events scattered from New Hampshire to Lake Tahoe, Philadelphia to South Padre Island, Chicago to New Hampshire, St. Louis to Boston, and Jersey City to Jacksonville in just the past couple weeks. The airlines were amazingly/suprisingly good to me, and each event and client workshop was a blast. So, like many of you, I’m tired – and ready to wrap up the Fall Selling Season, and to rest and reflect over this long holiday weekend.

Telephone Prospecting Tip #3: A Great Start to the Call

Previously, we looked at the importance of both our mindset and voice tone when it comes to proactive calling. Today, I want to help you get the call of to a great start.

The single hardest part of telephone prospecting is blocking out the time and actually picking up the phone to dial. We are ALL very good at finding excuses (and distractions) to avoid starting a call block. But once our butt’s are in the chair and we start cranking out calls, the next hardest part is when our prospect answers the phone. I know. it’s often a shock when they do pick up because my clients’ salespeople get voicemail about 77% of the time. That’s a big number and we’ll dedicate an entire article on how to effectively use voicemail in a future post.

I head up…

After listening to too many sales reps stumble, bumble and get outmatched by executive prospects very early in the call, I decided it was time to upgrade the first few words out of their mouths. When prospecting, as Jeb Blount loves to remind us, we are interrupting the prospect. They aren’t expecting our call and, in most cases, aren’t thrilled to discover it’s a sales call. To both raise the prospect’s perception of the caller and to help reduce their reflex anti-sales reaction, it’s helpful if we say this very simple, yet very powerful, little line when introducing ourselves: I head up… “Hi Joe, It’s Mike Weinberg from Acme Consulting; I head up _____________.”

There are two helpful benefits from using “I head up.” The first is that it makes us feel good. Has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you agree? Kinda makes you feel important and that you’d be worth the prospect hearing you out, doesn’t it? I certainly like the way it feels and many sales reps agree. The other benefit is that it sets us apart (temporarily) in the prospect’s mind. The immediate reaction is that someone of importance is calling. And you must admit, that’s a very different reaction than the buyer might have when immediately concluding that some sales rep is interrupting their busy day.

Try “I head up.” You’ll like it. In almost every situation, we’ve been able to find a way for a salesperson to deploy that phrase. I head up our agency business. I head up sales in the western US. I head up distributor relationships. I head up the XYZ client solutions team. I head up ________.

Let me take a minute…

Once we introduce ourselves, we must acknowledge that we’re interrupting and get some type of green light from the prospect to proceed. For obvious reasons, I’m not a fan of the all-too-typical, “Do you have a minute?” or “Is now a good time?” I don’t like those bridges into the call for two simple reasons. First, they’re overused – just like “I’m reaching out” is overused to the point of nausea. If everyone else is saying it then we don’t want to. And the second reason I’m not a fan of those questions is because I don’t like the answers they often produce. The truth is that even if the prospect does have a minute or it is a good time (unlikely), why would they tell you that? Asking if it’s a good time or if they have a minute makes it way too easy for the prospect to simply say, “Honestly, no.”

My coaching is to try this very simple phrase after your introduction/I head up line: “Let me take a minute.” I suggest saying this in the most calm, confident, executive tone. You’re an important person (who heads up something) calling another important person. You know you bring value to people and companies just like this prospect so you go into the call believing it, and assuming that, of course, this person will grant you a minute. They’d be foolish not to :).  Instead of asking for permission, we simply state that we’re going to take a minute. “Joe, Mike Weinberg with ACME Consulting. I head up __________.  Let me take a minute…”

If it truly is a horrendous time, as in the prospect is running late for a meeting with the CEO or finishing up a package for the FedEx driver who’s waiting in the lobby, the prospect will tell you that. And in those cases, let them go! Don’t even think about launching into your mini-story (tips for the mini-story coming in the next article.) When that happens, just say, “I’ll give you a shout on Thursday morning” and let them go. Trust me. When you do that, you not only score a respect point, you’ve also set up your call back. When you call back on Thursday the call doesn’t even feel as cold. You are more confident because you’ve already spoken with that person once and your opening is even easier: “Joe, Mike Weinberg getting back with you. I caught you scrambling to get that FedEx out the door the other day. Let me take that one minute now.”

I promise you that when your mindset is right, your voice tone is good, and you start off the prospecting call with simple, effective phrases like suggested above, you will be more confident and more effective. I’ll make another promise, too: It won’t be a month until the next article with the next telephone prospecting tip!

Favorite Resources:

If you’re looking for more resources to help increase your effectiveness securing meetings with prospects, these are my four favorites:

• New Sales. Simplified. by yours truly. Chapter 9 has my best thoughts on using the phone.
• Smart Calling by Art Sobczak is a must-have. I’ve bought more copies of this book for clients than any other. Art’s a pro’s pro when it comes to the phone and sales. I highlighted about 60% of the book.
• Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount has been a bestseller, often #1, for over a year. And that’s not just because I wrote the foreword. This is the most comprehensive guide to prospecting I’ve read.
• High-Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter is a powerful new book with great, specific tips to raise your prospecting game. Mark helps you aim higher and earn meetings with the people you really want to see. The introduction to the book ain’t half-bad either.

Think about this for a moment. You’ve spent a good part of your day crafting your outreach campaign. You’ve made sure to build the right experience and ask the right questions.

So far, so good.

There’s should be no way your emails would end up in the recipient’s spam folder. Right? RIGHT?!

Hate to break it to ya! There’s a lot of savvy software and spam filters on perpetual vigil to protect people from unsolicited spam emails. While they do a great job at keeping spammers and phishing attempts at bay, they also send good-spirited, positive sales emails to their cold grave – the spam folder.

This is painful, especially when you know your outreach email is relevant to your audience and you can bring value to their business.

Two reasons your outreach emails can end up in the spam folder

1. Flagged by the spam filters: Tools like SpamAssassin are designed to look for certain criteria in email messages and if the message meets a certain threshold, it’s flagged as spam.Here’s sample criteria used by SpamAssassin:
   
   • Talks about lots of money (.193 points)
   • Describes some sort of breakthrough (.232 points)
   • Looks like mortgage pitch (.297 points)
   • Contains an urgent matter (.288 points)
   • Money back guarantee (2.051 points)

1. Recipients mark your message as spam: If the reader finds your email irrelevant and intrusive, that mark as spam button will be pressed. Have enough of those complaints and you may end up on the blacklist.

Lucky for you, we’ve compiled all technical aspects of creating and sending outreach emails so you can avoid email spam filters.

Common Techniques To Avoid Email Spam Filters And A Spammy Experience

1. Comply With The Spam Laws

When you are sending an electronic mail message, by default you need to abide the anti-spam and privacy laws of your country. Here’s a detailed post on how CAN-SPAM (for the USA) and CASL (for Canada) apply to sales outreach and cold emails.

2. Shoot For Relevancy – Segment Your Lists And Campaigns

Targeting the right people, asking the right questions and giving something of value makes all the difference between outreach emails that get positive responses vs the ones which get sent to the trash or worse, the spam folder.

Advanced sales and marketing automation tools make segmentation and targeting really easy. We don’t have an excuse to not segment our campaigns. A good way to go about this is to think of your Ideal Customer Profiles and then cater your emails according to each ICP’s needs.

3. Personalize The Right Way

People hate spam, so naturally, they are hesitant to open emails from unfamiliar senders.

Simply inserting someone’s {first.name} won’t do the trick either. Email recipients stopped being impressed by that fancy functionality some time ago.

Instead, write your email in the same way you’d talk to them if they were in front of you. I bet you won’t start with “Dear Kelly, I would like to….”.

4. Identify Yourself

This is a no-brainer. Make sure you include the physical address of your organization in the signature. It helps you build trust, proves that you’re representing a legit business, and brings you one step closer to compliance with anti-spam laws.

5. Monitor Your Sender Reputation

Your email delivery depends on your IP addresses’ reputation. If the IP address has a poor reputation, your emails are less likely to reach your recipient’s inbox. Also, if enough people mark your emails as spam, your IP can end up on the blacklist.

Fret not. You can check if you are on any blacklists using DNSstuff, MXToolbox, or Return Path.

If you find yourself on any blacklists, you will need to approach the specific blacklister. Every filter has their own procedure to do this. SendGrid has a list of 7 popular blacklists you should monitor.

8 White-hat Tips to Avoid Email Spam Filters

The first three are stylistic elements common to spam. Spam filters will be looking for them so best avoid them all like the plague.

1. Keep Formatting Simple. No CAPS!

   Use too big, too small or irregular font sizes and you’ll trigger Spam filters. Spammers
   are known for hiding text in emails using tiny font sizes or for using huge font sizes in
   their offers. Keep it simple with an 11-point, Arial (or any legible) font type.

2. Watch Out For Punctuation, Symbols, Typos, and Grammar

   Spam filters look for anything which is out of place. Blank lines, extra spaces between
   words, repeating the same words, and bad grammar (yes, it matters) can add to your
   spam score.

3. One Font, Type, and Color

   Just like simplicity (#1), consistency is your friend. We all copy bits and pieces of our
   emails from time to time. If you’re copying some text from a sale template, make sure to first paste without formatting and then ensure your font type, size, and color is the same everywhere.

The rest of these set-off spam filters in a different way. They should absolutely be avoided.

1. Absolutely No Invisible Text

   Invisible text is used to sneak hidden elements past the reader. Don’t deceive your reader!

2. Avoid Trigger Words

   Spammy words like Viagra, Free…, Double your…, and Cash… set off the spam filter.

3. No Forms, Attachments Or Rich Content

   These can be used as an opening for viruses and are usually caught by the spam filter.

4. Text To Link Ratio

   Spam tends to link to things that would normally be caught by the filter. Lots of links without text to back them up will trigger the filter.

5. Text To Image Ratio And Image Size

   Spam can use pictures of text to say a thing that would normally be picked up by the filter. Therefore the filter is suspicious of a lot of pictures without much text.

If your cold email/outreach email is relevant to the recipients and follows these guidelines, you’ve improved your chances to avoid email spam filters.

Ultimately your best email deliverability results will come when you work within the constraints set by spam filters, not by trying to fight against them.

Now that you know how to play within boundaries set by spam filters, check out this complete guide on how to create a non-spammy experience and the legal aspects you should consider when creating your sales outreach emails

B2B eCommerce coverage is picking up with industry analysts…

People (analysts) are finally talking about B2B eCommerce. It may have taken a while, but most B2B executives are starting to wake up and feel the winds of change. According to many industry analysts, this eCommerce breeze is going to quickly turn into a gust that could propel or destroy many long-standing customer relationships.

To better understand the near future, we should look at the (not-so-distant) past. In the past ten years, major disruptive players won the B2C/Retail market – Amazon and eBay offered a better way to find, research, and buy online. Retailers either did not have the online tools, or their online tools did not meet buyer expectations, so they often lost the more progressive customer to the online alternative. Many retailers did not have the content, experience or fulfillment savvy to compete, and, for some retailers, they got lost in the wind.

The B2B gusts will be more intense than B2C…

Today we are seeing a repeat of this phenomenon, but in the B2B space. According to many analysts, these winds of change will be much stronger, more complicated and last longer than B2C. As consumers, we may not see it, but there are 3x as many B2B transactions as B2C. This estimate makes sense if you consider the fact that stores, dealers, distributors and suppliers also need a better way to find and procure goods – online. Bottom line? B2B is NOT a niche. It makes up a bulk of the market.

The Analyst Predictions are in…

Analyst firms are taking the evolution of B2B eCommerce more seriously, with blog posts, whitepapers and research reports emerging on the topic. Some analysts believe the change will be rapid, while others feel it may be more drawn out and complicated. Then there are those analysts who believe that B2B and B2C are coming together, while others recognize major differences and requirements between the two. While there may not always be agreement, they all seem to recognize that B2B commerce is going to change. Let’s take a look at some of the research out there today.

Forrester

Forrester was one of the first to dig into the trends and key differences in the B2B eCommerce market. Analyst Andy Hoar has published a combination of papers and reports that have highlighted key B2B needs like negotiated pricing, unique buyer expectations, and complexities of selling highly-configured products, all of which are key to driving a strong B2B experience. Forrester’s research also offers the breakdown of features needed by each type of unique B2B buyer. Engineers and specifiers need very different online tools than more traditional buyers, like procurement. Forrester highlights this, and even publishes a separate Wave focusing on these features, highlighting the complexities of B2B versus B2C.

Below you will find links to a number of reports published by Forrester on the topic of B2B eCommerce:

• Download The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q2 2015 from Insite
• B2B eCommerce: A Trillion Dollars For The Taking
• The B2B eCommerce Playbook For 2016

Gartner

Gartner is often considered a key source of technology advice for larger enterprise companies. While Gartner still focuses heavily on B2C and retail features for their Magic Quadrant, they have published other very interesting papers. Penny, Gene and Chris have even penned papers that are more targeted toward mid-market organizations to help them with the online transition. Here are a few papers to consider:

• CMO Insight: Why Every B2B CMO Should Pursue Digital Commerce
• Drive B2B Revenue Growth With B2C Digital Commerce Best Practices

Others

The Aberdeen Group has been covering the B2B space for many years. Not necessarily B2B commerce, but they have been a source of research for many manufacturing and distribution companies over the years. Also, Justin King from eCommerce & B2B has published a document that outlines a number of the platforms and their strengths. We are excited to update Justin on our cloud offering and value-based pricing for his next report update.

• The Aberdeen Group – Steps to Success in B2B E-Commerce
• eCommerce & B2B – Guide to B2B E-Commerce

Summary

Many of the resources I suggested may require an email or registration. Some of them require a subscription or are sold at a fee. While it may seem expensive, keep in mind that the opportunity to lead in eCommerce is significant. Research and evaluate your options with B2B eCommerce.

The financial services firm USAA prizes its relationships with customers and consistently earns the highest customer loyalty scores in the industry for both its U.S. banking and insurance businesses. The high level of trust affords USAA access to copious customer data that it uses to inform personalized cross-selling and upselling. The company does deep data mining through multiple sources to spot signature events in customers’ lives. Those events trigger USAA to contact the customer at just the right time, with just the right offer, such as auto insurance when a customer’s daughter is about to turn 16. As a result, USAA outperforms most competitors in the number of products held by its customers.

USAA is something of an exception, though. Many firms still underinvest or underachieve in growing share of wallet with existing customers, compared to their initiatives in acquiring new customers. In the past, marketers have struggled to deliver the higher response rates they need from existing customers — a smaller group than potential new customers.

Several trends have converged in recent years to break through the barriers to higher response rates. The proliferation of customer data and the greater computing power to organize and analyze that data make it feasible to create much more dynamic and insightful profiles of customers. Digital channels now allow companies to fine-tune marketing messages based on observed behavior. And many companies have made significant investments to improve their customers’ experience, earning them greater leeway to cross-sell.

These favorable changes have motivated marketers to reassess cross-selling opportunities, which can be substantial. For example, Bain & Company’s recent analysis of the U.S. telecommunications industry found that up to 60% of customers split their services across multiple providers for mobile phone, landline, TV, and internet services. For one telecom provider, convincing just 10% of those customers to switch one service from a competitor was worth up to $480 million in incremental annual revenue. A similar story can be told in retail banking, insurance, credit cards, retail, and other industries.

Managers wanting to grow share of wallet and raise the productivity of their cross-selling efforts may have to confront longstanding practices that stand in the way. To that end, here are five guidelines for expanding share with current customers.

Take a balance-sheet view. Many businesses organize around product lines and focus on achieving quarterly, monthly, or even weekly targets. Although this centers the organization on achieving in-year goals, it hinders efforts to maximize the long-term value of customer relationships. Effective cross-selling organizations, such as American Express, complement the P&L perspective with a longer-term, balance-sheet view of the business and a multiyear view of customer value.

Create dynamic, high-resolution customer profiles. With the exponential growth in data and the increased computing power available, companies can now combine internal and external data that spans several years to build more-useful customer profiles. Knowing how the customer’s product usage has changed over time, how he or she has migrated among products, and which triggers or leading indicators caused changes in behavior is essential for designing effective share-of-wallet strategies.

Focus on discrete customer growth missions. When companies set customer growth goals, they too often pursue overly broad or diffuse objectives, such as “Let’s sell home insurance to all high-value auto insurance customers,” rather than identifying and focusing on the pockets of greatest opportunity.

Defining a high-value customer growth mission, by contrast, narrows the aperture to focus on the organization. An example of such a discrete customer mission might be: “Let’s target our high-value customers who are in the market for home insurance and are customers of competitor X, which has low loyalty scores.”

Defining customer missions takes work. Companies must understand the most profitable customer segments, how their behaviors and preferences have changed over time, the products and channels they use, and how they stack up against the competition in each area. And they must calculate the real economic value of these segments, so that they can create targeted strategies that will be profitable.

Just get started. It’s a common misconception that a company must invest in new data warehouses or CRM systems before taking action. In fact, organizations can mobilize quickly around internal data that resides in existing databases, assemble external market data in a few weeks, and often use analytical tools that exist in-house.

MGM Resorts was looking to raise booking rates among existing customers at its casino and resort properties in Las Vegas. Using existing customer data, MGM launched a multivariate campaign, testing different offer packages (a room discount versus a coupon to play slot machines), travel windows, brand messages, email frequency, and more. For one set of target customers, the best combination of variables achieved a 180% lift in bookings over the control offer and was worth millions in incremental revenue when extrapolated to the full set of customers. Moreover, MGM learned how different groups of customers — say, gamblers and nongamblers — responded differently to each offer. To keep the insights coming, MGM has set up a new cross-functional test-and-learn team, which has continued to introduce new variations with these customer groups.

Build a repeatable model. The test-and-learn approach allows a company to log some early wins, build new capabilities, and iron out the kinks as the organization learns how to work to a different rhythm. Leaders can then decide if it makes sense to create a new team dedicated to share-of-wallet growth and possibly to invest in building new capabilities or installing new technologies.

Conditions are right for companies to reinvigorate their cross-selling strategies. Now it’s up to managers to harness the wealth of customer data, advanced analytic techniques, and the power of digital channels for customer growth missions. Companies that outperform in these missions will be able to systematically expand their share of spending among loyal customers.

United Airlines announced Economy Basic fares last week. What an utter disaster it’s been. The perception of most people appears to be that United is taking away even more services from the beleaguered coach traveler. Scrooge.

The truth is far different and it doesn’t matter because perception is what matters. The perception is that United announced cuts in their economy fare offering including only being able to bring one bag on board. Last boarding status, etc. Jerks.

The reality is much different. United has offered two classes of economy fares for some time (not including refundable fares). Economy and Economy Plus. For the non-frequent traveler you could purchase a seat in the Economy Plus section (more leg room) for a fee if you so desired. Otherwise you were treated like everyone else on the plane. That is, with equal disdain and uncaring attitudes for the most part, despite videos to the contrary.

The announcement was actually about a THIRD class of Economy to be called Economy Basic. For an even lower fare, one could opt out of a preassigned seat and be limited to only one carry on, plus last group boarding. This was a bare bones fare to compete with bare bones airlines. The theory being you could get the extra value of flying on United (unclear what that actually is, but that is another conversation) while paying the bare bones fare of the lower cost airlines.

Not a bad strategy (delusional in terms of the value add they think they offer, but at least the passenger would have another low-cost option). Horrid announcement. But then if you don’t see yourself remotely through your customers’ eyes, it is easy to make such a simple mistake.

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion it occurs. Focus on how your customer and potential customer will view it, not how you or your C-Suite will view it.

Mitch

A detailed guide to scaling SERP rankings using competitor analysis

Every time search engine optimisation comes up in discussions with colleagues or clients, the first thing I do is place a mental bet on how quickly the chat is going down the rabbit hole. There is absolutely no denying the importance of SEO. No matter how much runway you think you have with PPC to fuel your business’ needs, sooner or later you’ll want to incrementally reduce the cost of acquiring users at the top of the funnel.

What’s that thing about rabbit hole again? There are numerous factors (some say over 200) that Google takes into account to decide where your page ranks for a given search query. If you go about optimising each of these factors, it is going to take you a whole lot of time before each piece of content goes out into the world. Either that, or you have to have a massive workflow with multiple QA checkpoints for each article that goes out.

Neither is bad (it is better to put out one quality blog post a week than five shoddy ones, and it certainly helps in having a robust workflow), but where do you start? What is more important than another? And what is that one strategy that guarantees high ranking for your content?

These questions become extremely relevant when you are not a huge publishing house or a media brand, but selling a service or a product. When content is important, but it is not your core focus. The content you put out is intended to educate, attract and convert leads. And you don’t have a whole lot of time or workforce for it. Where, then, do you start?

Remember it’s a rank game

Here is a process I have followed over the years with a lot of success, and it focuses on one thing that most seem to have forgotten when it comes to search engines: at the end of it all, it is a ranking system and not award-based. Google ranks you based on what is available out there, and not on how many brownie points you score with them. Hence, instead of ticking factors off a never-ending SEO list, all we need to do is ensure we tick enough boxes to steer clear of all the competition around us.

And here’s how to do it:

The Standard Homework

Before we get to reverse engineering our competitors’ content to ultimately rank better than them, we need to have a solid base. This entails the following:

1. Mapping your services to the right core (or seed) keywords
2. Finding the right long tail variations of these keywords
3. Finding semantic variations and thematic keywords

There is enough content out there on these topics so I won’t get into too much details. To round it up, here’s what you need to look into:

Mapping your services to the right core keywords

Sit down with a pen and paper, and list out every single thing that your service does. You might think it’s a fairly easy job. After all, I know what I do! But think of it from the point of view of a customer. Let’s say you run a service that connects local car mechanics and garages to internet-savvy car owners in need of vehicle jobs. Your services might include “Paint Jobs”, “Car Servicing”, “Repairs” and “Body Work”.

For a customer who is looking for a service, none of these are specific enough. You need to break down your services to smaller bits. For example, “Repairs” can lead to:

• Clutch Repairs
• Clutch Replacement
• Exhaust Fitting
• Exhaust Repair
• Gearbox Repairs

Have a sit with your product manager and map out the various second-level services that your product is offering but your website isn’t talking about. These are going to be your core keywords.

Finding the right long tail variations of these keywords

The second task is to find out long tail variations of these keywords. “Clutch Repairs” is a very common keyword, and there are probably thousands of pages competing for it. What about “Clutch Repairs in East Sussex” or “Clutch repairs for Chevy 1992 Camaro”? These are called long tail keywords. The search volume for these keywords might be much lower than the core keywords but they are very intent-heavy and typically have much lower competition.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to discover these keywords. Here’s a pretty good tutorial by Neil Patel on the topic. There are a number of great tools available online which can help you do the same. I’ll leave you to do the search.

Finding semantic variations and thematic keywords

This is where you think more like a human and less like a robot. Quite a paradox, considering that Google’s decision to involve AI in its search algorithm is what is forcing us to be more human about our content.

Semantic variations are natural language variations of a keyword. For example, “clutch repairs in East Sussex” and “East Sussex clutch repair shops” mean the same thing for a human. Less than a couple of years ago, Google wasn’t smart enough to give due weight to the semantic variations of a keyword. Not anymore. Hence, it is important to identify at least a few such natural language alternatives to your most important keywords and keep them handy for usage while creating content.

Reverse Engineering Part I: Find and analyse your competitors

Here comes the fun part. Let’s find out who your competitors are. While it is easier to find your USP competitors (competitors with similar unique selling point as yours), it’s usually never enough to stop there.

USP competitors mean nothing to the end user, just as you mean nothing to them. Yes, that is the bitter pill. The only thing that matters is who the end user finds when they look for answers.

Therefore, your real competitors are your keyword competitors. Bring up that list of core, secondary and thematic keywords that you made earlier. Go to Google, make sure you choose the region you are targeting (if you are not sure how to do it, look below) and search using those terms. Ensure (and this is important) you are in incognito mode (any modern browser has the option) so that your personal browsing habits do not affect your search results.

You can change the originating location of your search on Google by appending the following code at the end of the URL:

&gl=countryXX

Replace the XX with the country code that you can find here.

Alternatively, if you are privacy-sensitive person like I am, you probably have a few nifty tools already installed. I’m a big fan of TunnelBear.

Now that you are set up, let’s take the example of the repair shop and go through the steps for finding your keyword competitors:

Step 1: Identify the competing pages

Start by searching for the most important core and long tail keywords that you have already identified and note down the top pages in the search results. Depending on the type of keywords you use, there might be a lot of local business relevance, and Google might show a bunch of places in their maps widget. That’s incredibly powerful, but deals with Local SEO, something that deserves an article of its own.

Identify each of the top results. Depending on how specific your keyword is, and how competitive it is, you might need to look beyond the top 5 results.

Pay attention to the individual results. We’ll find out what exactly to look for in the pages themselves. But, for now, just look at the following:

• Page Titles
• URL
• Meta description

A look at these should tell you how much competition you are likely to face on this keyword. Look for your keyword being present in all of these three areas. This exercise is just for you to get a feel of your competition. You don’t need to note down anything specific here, save for perhaps a quick note on “easy”, “hard” or “OK” beside each keyword on your spreadsheet.

Important side step: Note down the main domain for each of the top 5 to 10 results.

In the above example, the key domains are:

1. co.uk
2. com
3. co.uk
4. com
5. co.uk

Step 2: Dissect the ranking pages one by one

This is most important part of the whole process. Here, we are going to analyse our direct competitors and try to pinpoint where they stand. While there are a number of factors you could look into (remember that 200 number I mentioned at the beginning?), I’d say focus on the basics. Look for these:

1. Content Depth: Word count
2. Number of H1, H2, H3 tags and how many have keyword variations in them
3. Links
   1. Number of backlinks
   2. Number of outbound (external) links
   3. Number of internal links (mainly in the body of the page, Google mostly ignores footers and navigation bars)
4. Keyword density: how many times does the main keyword and its variations appear in the text
5. Social Signals: How many times has the page been shared.

Note these metrics down for all the top results in a spreadsheet and average out the results. Important: If the results vary too much, you might want to do a mean value calculation rather than average. Create an easy to understand template like shown below:

Let’s take a look at the first result in our live example: search results for “Clutch Repair in East Sussex”:

1. There is one H1 tag which as a portion of the main keyword.
2. The size of the content body is pretty low.
3. There are a lot of internal links.
4. There is one main image in the content body but it has no alt text
5. There are a few outbound links

 

Now let’s go find the other information that is not present on the page itself - the number of backlinks and social signals.

For backlink analysis, there are tons of great tools available online. Let’s use one that is free: Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Paste the link in the search bar and you’ll see the number of external websites that are linking to the page.

For this specific example, there were no inbound links (backlinks). I hence looked for their main domain to illustrate how the results would look:

For Social Signals, I use Buzzsumo’s social sharing search tool. For illustration purposes, I have used a link that has been shared a lot of times. Here’s what a typical result looks like:

Once you have these key details, it’s time to send the details to your ace content writing team.

Reverse Engineering Part II: Methodical Content Creation and Distribution

This is the second step of the reverse engineering process. What do you do? Write an awesome piece of content that beats the average (or mean) metric for all the key factors you noted above.

Write the content such that it is more detailed than all the top ranking pages. Tip: mash them all up and then add a decent amount of your own content for good measure! Add more pictures with alt text, link out to relevant and high authority websites, ensure your meta tags have the necessary keywords, and so do your title, H1, H2 and H3 tags. Use variations of the core keyword in the body of the text.

Once you are satisfied that your new content piece beats all the competing pages, it is time for distribution.

1. Try and beat the number of aggregate social shares. If you have extra money to spare, don’t shy away from paid content amplification.
2. See who has linked to your competitors and reach out to them (use Open Site Explorer, as shown above). See if they would like to link to your piece as well. Find similar domains and reach out to them, too.

Bonus Step: Discover even more keywords

Remember the list of the main domains you created? Now’s the time to get sneaky and discover keywords that might not have come up during your initial results. The idea is to see what keywords these domains are optimised for, and then to do the whole process for the newly found keywords. Here’s how to do it:

Head over to Google Keyword planner (SEMRush, too, is a really good option, but their free tier isn’t much helpful).

1. Go for the first option which says, “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”.
2. Paste the main domain in the landing page filed.
3. Choose the right target geography and choose to show only closely related keywords.

Hit “Get Ideas”, and what you’ll have is a wealth of new keywords to put into effective use.

There you have it! A blueprint on how to reverse engineer your competitors and essentially rank better than them. One drawback of this strategy is that it is a lot of work and you might not be able to do it for hundreds of keywords. But this is not meant for that anyway.

This tactic works best for a list of keywords that you care for the most. This list of keywords can come from your keyword analysis and discovery process as described earlier, or from your AdWords reports where you can know about your most profitable keywords based on clickthrough rates and conversion numbers.

I hope this helps!

 

Voting to leave the European Union cost the UK around $1.5 trillion (£1.2 trillion) in wealth, and robbed 400,000 people of their status as dollar millionaires, according to the latest Global Wealth Report from the Credit Suisse Research Institute.

The annual Global Wealth Report — which tracks the distribution of wealth across the world, as well as the world's richest countries — showed that "household wealth fell by $1.5 trillion in the United Kingdom, as a direct consequence of the Brexit vote."

After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, the value of the pound crashed to a 31-year low against the dollar, and quickly became the worst performing of the major currencies worldwide. Sterling has now fallen around 15% since the vote to trade at roughly $1.24.

Generally speaking, global assets are priced in dollars, meaning that when a currency depreciates against the dollar, the wealth of a nation will fall. This is reflected in the fact that no major global economy has lost more wealth than the UK in 2016.

The only nation to come vaguely close is China, which has lost a great deal of wealth thanks to the ongoing devaluation of the yuan. China's wealth has only fallen by roughly half the amount the UK has witnessed.

Here's the chart illustrating that point:

Sterling's crash against the dollar also means that roughly 406,000 people who were millionaires in dollar terms prior to the EU referendum, can no longer be considered as such.

"The impact of the Brexit vote is widely thought of in terms of GDP but the impact on household wealth bears watching," Michael O'Sullivan, chief investment officer in Credit Suisse’s wealth management arm told the Guardian.

"Since the Brexit vote, UK household wealth has fallen by $1.5 trillion. Wealth per adult has already dropped by $33,000 to $289,000 since the end of June. In fact, in US dollar terms, 406,000 people in the UK are no longer millionaires," O'Sullivan added.

Regardless of the drop in household wealth caused by Brexit, Britain remains third overall globally when it comes to wealth per adult in major economies. The average British adult has an overall wealth of $288,800, coming below only Switzerland and the USA. 

Overall wealth is measured by combining financial assets, real assets like property, and subtracting debts. You can see a breakdown of the UK's wealth below:

Credit Suisse also noted that the overall wealth of Brits actually increased over the course of the past year when measured in pound terms, despite the dollar-denominated fall. Here's the key extract:

"The United Kingdom had a tumultuous end to 2015 – 2016, with sharp declines in the exchange rate and the stock market following the vote to leave the EU in the June 23 referendum. Nevertheless, as of the end of June, wealth per adult in pounds sterling was 6% above its level a year earlier. The stock market recovered later, but the outlook is very uncertain, both for the economy and household wealth."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Twitter will lay off more than 300 employees to cut costs

Image courtesy of hkricharusf

You know that your customer experience initiatives will die in the planning stages if you don’t have executive commitment, right?

I’ve written several times about the importance of having that executive buy-in and commitment for your customer experience transformation.

I’ve called it a Deadly Sin if you don’t have your executives on board, supporting and driving the culture change and the improvement efforts. Without them, you’ll never get resources – human, capital, or other – to execute on your customer experience strategy.

So I was thrilled to get an email from Zarina de Ruiter, editor of CX Network, that included a whitepaper written by my friend, Ingrid Lindberg, founder and CXO of Chief Customer and
former Chief Customer Experience Officer for both Cigna and Prime Therapeutics. If anyone knows about executive commitment, it’s Ingrid; in this paper, she writes about seven key steps for customer experience leaders to take to gain senior management buy-in. I’ll highlight them for you, but be sure to get your hands on this report to get the details.

1. Start with understanding where the company needs to go
Yogi Berra was the one who said: If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else. That’s what we’re talking about here, i.e., creating a Future State Architecture Map that spells out the path to what you’re trying to achieve as a company.

2. Understand the lifetime value of your customers
Customer lifetime value helps you understand how and when a customer becomes profitable. Ingrid advises that if you correlate the projects you’re trying to fund to the profit of the company, i.e., using math, not passion, then people will listen.

3. Customer experience leaders don’t need to drive the actual projects
This is a big mistake. As a CX leader, you cannot, nor should you, do everything. Instead, you should be influencing others to do the work they are ultimately accountable for. This not only spreads accountability, but it also spreads the funding. And Ingrid notes that no CEO wants to give all the money for projects to just one person.

4. If you aren’t at the table, find sponsors
If you’re not on the executive team, find a champion who is. He or she may not have the data to support a transformation, but you as a customer experience professional likely have a lot. Work together to get what you need.

5. Find ways to tie the customer experience work into existing projects
Companies typically have dozens of projects going on at one time. These are opportunities to bring in the voice and the needs of the customer. Any new project or effort is a chance to do things right for the customer.

6. Tell an epic story
When you tell a story, you can really grab someone’s attention. Ingrid has learned that data are not always the answer; sometimes, telling an epic story is. Especially when you bring the story to life with real customer examples or real customers telling it.

7. Help the CEO understand the impact
Set expectations with your CEO. Let her know how long the improvement initiatives will take. And then let her know the impact on the customer and the business overall. The other side of this is to take advantage of your CEO’s competitive nature, letting her know what your key competitors are doing and how well they’ve fared as a result.

Take a look at the report for more details, plus find out about the five stages that customer experience (or any organizational) buy-in and transformation follow.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. -Seth Godin

Are you looking for larger markets to sell your products or services in? If so, there are many different ways you can address this issue and start selling to more people. Below are some of the most effective ways you can do this.

Localization

Some businesses can , thanks to a range of localization and translation services provided by companies who specialize in translating software, books, video games and apps from English into a wide range of foreign languages. This has the potential to give you easy access to enormous foreign markets you may not even have realized existed and the great thing is you only need to create the original product once and then it’s translated to suit the market you’re selling to.

Build Your Business on Strong Foundations

Every successful large business had to start somewhere. Most of these organizations started from humble beginnings, but laid solid foundations, which later meant their success would be inevitable. As a business owner, you need to do the same thing and start your business on a positive note. Hiring the right people, providing high quality training, creating efficient work processes and providing value are just some of the factors you need to consider, so that your business has a much better chance of surviving and thriving.

Build Up a Great Reputation

People and other businesses prefer to deal with businesses they trust. If you are delivering quality and go the extra mile, this will be noticed by your current customer base. Eventually word spreads and you are more likely to be able to enter new markets with ease, especially if you and your business have established a great reputation.

Increase Your Product or Service Range

Many businesses are limited because they don’t have a large product or service range. Increasing your product range in a sensible way has the potential to attract many more customers, shoppers or other individuals who are interested in what you have to offer.

Advertising and Marketing

Unfortunately, word of mouth will only allow your business to grow to a certain size. Professional advertising and marketing campaigns are required to really establish yourself and reach larger numbers of people. Many traditional advertising methods such as TV, radio, newspaper ads and signs still work, but online advertising is becoming just as effective. A range of online advertising platforms and social media websites can reach huge numbers of people with the same interests who may be interested in your business. This can result in the generation of many more customers.

Partners, Local Agents and Affiliates

In some instances, it may not be practical to enter new markets by yourself. This is where business partners, local agents and affiliates can help you out. These individuals and businesses may already have the local knowledge and connections you need to become successful in other locations. They become your representatives and distributors, without your business having to establish itself in a new area.

Set Up an Online Store

The internet has no physical boundaries, so it only makes sense to set up your own eCommerce store if it suits your business model. A wide range of free and affordable shopping cart systems are available, that are able to handle all kinds of online transactions and sales volumes. As well as reaching a worldwide market, your store never closes, so you’re in a position to sell your products and services to anyone in the world, 24 hours a day.

List Your Products On Large Marketplace Websites

The world’s largest online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay give merchants the option to leverage their popularity and sell products all around the world, at any time of the day. These marketplaces charge a fee for this opportunity, but are more than likely going to increase your sales and the places you can sell your products.

Mobile Apps

Millions of people now use their smart phones to carry out a wide range of daily activities. This includes shopping and researching products and services. Developing an app that caters for the needs of customers and shoppers, has the potential to increase your audience of loyal buyers. The latest apps can incorporate shopping carts, blogs, loyalty programs and much more.

Provide as Many Payment Options as Possible

Some shoppers prefer to pay by cash or credit card, while others prefer the security of a reputable payment processor. Providing as many payment options as possible, increases the likelihood that more customers and shoppers will want to deal with your business.

Starting a business is challenging, so it pays to look for new opportunities and markets. However, the internet and other modern technologies and business strategies make it possible to deal with people all around the world, which would have been impossible for most business owners in the past.

The post Prove It! 6 Persuasive Techniques for Making the Sale appeared first on Copyblogger.

New homebuyers may be about to flood the US market for existing homes to lock in the lowest mortgage rates they can.

In the past two weeks — since Donald Trump was elected president — mortgage rates jumped alongside other interest rates. This happened as investors raised their expectations for economic growth and inflation, placing their bets on Trump's plans to spend heavily on infrastructure and cut taxes.

The Bankrate.com 30-year national average rate was up from 3.5% on Election Day to 3.95% on Tuesday, the highest level since December 2015. This is still historically low.

"In the short-term, some prospective buyers may rush to lock in their rate and buy now, while others — especially those in higher-priced markets — may be forced to delay as a larger monthly payment outstretches their budget," Lawrence Yun, the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said in a data release on Tuesday.

The NAR released its monthly report on existing-home sales, which showed that sales rose at the highest annualized pace in a decade during October. Sales increased by 2% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.60 million, beating economists' consensus forecast.

And if mortgage rates continue rising, existing-home sales — which record the most housing transactions — could increase to record levels. Additionally, a strong jobs market and higher wages could offset any drop in demand that higher mortgage rates cause, according to David Berson, the chief economist at Nationwide.

"October's strong sales gain was widespread throughout the country and can be attributed to the release of the unrealized pent-up demand that held back many would-be buyers over the summer because of tight supply," Lawrence Yun, the chief economist at the NAR, said.

The housing market has been faced with an inventory crunch that drove up prices, especially in coastal metros. The median existing home price rose 6% year-on-year in October to $232,200 — the 56th straight rise.

Ralph McLaughlin, the chief economist at Trulia, said Trump's focus should be on policies that encourage existing owners to sell and build, not just those that boost demand.

"Such policies could include a reduction in capital gains taxes for homes sold by investors to owner-occupiers, an increase in tax rates on rental income, or both," he said in a note.

SEE ALSO: The housing market is suddenly losing one of its biggest drivers

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A mysterious cloud moving 700,000 mph is going to collide with our galaxy — here's what will happen

I see a convergence of sales and marketing via content to reach buyers. In my research of successful companies, marketing is using content to reach many people at once (targeted to buyer personas) while great salespeople use the very same content to reach one buyer at a time.

Credit card processors are mostly responsible for data transmission and security when you use your card at a store or online to make a purchase.

There are two types of processors in the payment-card system. Front-end processors route transactions from merchants to the cardholder's bank to gain authorization; that is, they make sure a customer has enough available credit or funds to make a purchase. Back-end processors are responsible for a fund's settlement, which ends with the merchant receiving a deposit for transactions. 

Below, we've outlined the major players in credit card processing and described their major strengths.

• Bank of America Merchant Services: Bank of America Merchant Services has the advantage of functioning within the second-largest bank in the U.S. The service promises acceptance of all kinds of payments (credit cards, debit cards, electronic checks, and gift cards), access to funds on the next business day, and mobile support.
• Citibank:  The consumer division of Citigroup processes transactions in more than 100 currencies. It offers end-to-end processing services, from pricing to transactions, reporting, customer service, and billing.
• Wells Fargo: One of the "Big Four" U.S. banks, Wells Fargo offers next-business day funding, encryption and tokenization technology, and support for both PIN and signature transactions.
• Chase Paymentech: The payment processing arm of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S., authorizes and processes payments in more than 130 currencies. And like its peers, it offers analytics, fraud detection, and security solutions.
• Barclays: Barclaycard payment solutions facilitates in-person, phone, web, and even mail order payments through desktop and portable card machines.
• Vantiv: Vantiv has been successful thanks to its nearly error-free purchases, authorizations, and captures. In May 2015, it successfully completed 95% of these transactions, ahead of competitors such as Worldpay, PayPal, and Braintree. The company also has a significant speed advantage, as it often processes payments data in less than a second.
• First Data: First Data facilitates small business payments with its Clover suite of products, including a mini reader that works without Wi-Fi and a mobile reader that attaches to other devices in order to process payments on the go.
• Cielo: Cielo is the largest Brazilian credit and debit card operator and the largest payment systems company in Latin America. The company debuted on the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange in 2010.
• TSYS: Short for Total System Services, TSYS supports millions of buyers and sellers around the world through four major branches: issuing services, acquiring services, prepaid solutions, and merchant solutions.
• Global Payments: Global Payments focuses on ensuring businesses accept all major forms of payments. To that end, its services include credit/debit/purchasing cards, electronic check conversion, money transfer, verification and recovery services, gift/loyalty cards, check guarantee, ACH checks, financial EDI services, and point-of-sale equipment.
• Worldpay: The UK-based company is one of the longest-tenured online payment platforms. The company provides several payment services for both online and in-store channels. As of August 2016, the company had 400,000 merchant clients. In 2015, it processed 13 billion transactions valued at more than $526 billion. Worldpay has grown its volume primarily because of early-mover advantages that have allowed it to build scale. It also provides many different services across channels, which diversifies its revenue streams. 
• Moneris: Moneris is the largest credit and debit card processor and acquirer in Canada. It processes more than three billion transactions each year for more than 350,000 merchants, and the company employs more than 1,900 people in North America.
• Fiserv: American Banker and BAI ranked Fiserv third by revenue among technology providers to U.S. banks in October 2015. Fiserv provides services in account processing, electronic payments processing, check processing, web and mobile banking, and more.
• Adyen: Adyen provides e-commerce companies with a payment platform that includes gateway, risk management, and front-end processing services. Adyen is a full-stack gateway and has famous merchants like Facebook and Spotify as clients. The company has brought in merchants thanks to its single platform that can support payments in any channel across 100 different payment methods and 200 countries. The firm processed $50 billion in 2015, up 100% from $25 billion in 2014. It earned $350 million in revenue in 2015, and expects to break $500 million in 2016. 
• Heartland Payment Systems: Heartland helps businesses move beyond accept ng major credit cards. The company facilitates payment processing in-store, online, and offsite through multiple methods, such as EMV, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, and gift cards. It also offers next-day funding, real-time reporting, and 24/7 customer service in the U.S.
• Elavon: Formerly known as NOVA, this company is a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp. Elavon processes payments in more than 30 countries for more than one million merchants.

More to Learn

These card processors handle so much volume and so many dollars every day, but they are still just one piece of the larger payments ecosystem, which includes issuers, merchants, and more.

That's why Business Insider Intelligence spent months putting together the greatest and most exhaustive guide on the world of payments entitled The Payments Ecosystem Report: Everything You Need to Know About The Next Era of Payment Processing.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump once won a lawsuit against the NFL — but the result was an embarrassment

Believe it or not, email deliverability is more complicated than having Newman as your postman.

In our recent conversations on marketing automation, we’ve discussed the science behind marketing automation planning, using creative tension to spur organization-wide change, and the predictable (and preventable) stress points of a platform implementation.

Just as a marketing automation platform isn’t “set it and forget it”, neither is email deliverability. Ask any experienced email marketer what is the most challenging aspect of their job, and they will tell you: maintaining ongoing deliverability and inbox placement.

If the email doesn’t reach the recipient, a perfect subject line with spectacular content is worthless. Digital marketers expect that when they hit the send button each email will arrive in every recipient’s inbox, every time. Sometimes there will be a few bounced emails and a few unsubscribes, but generally speaking, emails get delivered.

However, it’s not as simple as it appears. It’s critical to follow the best practices and stay up-to-date to assure good results. By taking a few additional steps, marketers can build better email deliverability and improve marketing efficiency and dollars spent.

1. Choose a Marketing Automation Vendor with good email deliverability

Remember, how much you pay for a platform has nothing to do with the likelihood of your emails reaching the inbox.

While researching platforms, ask vendors for their email deliverability rate and inbox statistics. One of the most overlooked considerations for a MAP Vendor is historical deliverability data and email list policies. Talk to your vendor about this up-front to avoid serious deliverability issues that can wreak havoc on your lead generation program. Pro-tip: most marketing automation vendors and email service providers with an excellent email deliverability rate will not allow purchased lists.

2. Clean your email list prior to uploading to your new vendor

Did you know that 25 percent of consumers change email addresses every six months? It means that it’s possible that 25 percent of the emails you upload to your database and send will bounce — and if you’re paying by number of emails sent that’s essentially tossing marketing dollars out the window. Or even worse, a 25 percent bounce rate could get you blacklisted — meaning that no inbox provider will accept your email. No one wants that to happen, especially when launching a new platform! Email list cleaning is a relatively inexpensive service that can remove the emails address that will likely bounce, protecting your reputation as an email sender and ensuring your emails are going to real addresses.

Many vendors require a list cleaning prior to uploading your entire database. Even if your vendor doesn’t require this, it’s a best practice I highly recommend following.

3. Segment your email list by valid contacts and recently engaged contacts

Your first send from a new marketing automation platform is the most important — make sure you’re sending to engaged contacts.

You’ll see vendors use terminology like ‘warming up your IPs’. What this means is that when you first send email, the inbox providers (Gmail, Comcast, Yahoo) don’t know who you are and whether they should trust your messages in the future. Let’s say you send your first email deployment to the 200 most-engaged contacts. There’s a good chance this segment will open and click and, in turn, show the inbox providers that people want to receive your messages. You can then proceed with emailing smaller groupings of your larger database for the first send. By sending in smaller batches and focusing on the most engaged contacts first, you can prevent deliverability issues from occurring while you’re getting started.

4. Ensure contacts that bounce or report as spam are removed from future mailings

Repeated mailings to an email address that bounces will lead to deliverability problems. It’s important to remove all email addresses that hard bounce and any address that marks your messages as SPAM.

Not all marketing automation platforms suppress email addresses that bounce or report as spam. Find out if your marketing automation vendor automatically removes emails that bounce or report as spam. If not, you need to create a list of these contacts and manually remove them prior to email deployments.

5. Frequently re-engage or remove contacts that do not engage

Contacts that don’t engage can cause deliverability problems due to bounces.

If a contact has not opened a single email in 6 months, consider removing them entirely from your mailing list. You may also consider sending them a reengagement email. There are a variety of approaches to this email — coupons, special offers, or a simple text email stating the contact will be unsubscribed in 30 days with a ‘don’t unsubscribe’ link.

6. Optimize the unsubscribe page with options

It’s important to take a few minutes to optimize the unsubscribe options. People unsubscribe for various reasons, and sometimes they don’t want to be completely removed from your mailing list. Perhaps they want to receive more relevant content or less frequent email messages. Optimize your unsubscribe landing page with email frequency or content check boxes. Make sure your labels are clear and it is an easy process. I’ve seen unsubscribe requests that involve a phone call!

And remember, if an unsubscribe prevents a SPAM complaint, it is a win for your sender reputation. Unless you are seeing a large number of unsubscribes, they aren’t necessarily a bad thing. If you are seeing a spike in unsubscribes this may be hinting at a greater problem and you should review content relevancy, mailing frequency, and age of your email list.

SECRET: Understanding how your sender reputation is evaluated leads to better deliverability

Knowledge is power and the best action you can take to ensure good deliverability over the long-term is to develop an understanding of how your sender reputation is evaluated. There are many factors that inbox providers use to determine whether your messages reach the inbox. The number one positive factor is a subscriber clicking through links (because it shows engagement), and the number one negative factor is a subscriber marking your message as SPAM. (It only takes a few complaints to do permanent damage, like being blacklisted.) To help you along your Marketing Automation Journey, here are some lesser-known ways that subscriber actions affect your email deliverability and sender reputation.

Here are a few positive subscriber actions that lead to better deliverability:

• Clicking in the email (top factor)
• Opening the email
• Adding your address to their contacts or address book
• Enabling images
• Scrolling through the message
• Starring the message
• Moving the message over from the junk folder to the inbox
• Moving a message from the promotions tab into the primary tab in Gmail

And a few negative subscriber actions that negatively impact deliverability:

• Reporting the message as SPAM
• Deleting the message
• Moving the message to trash
• Marking messages as read
• Ignoring messages
• Not engaging with multiple messages over long periods of time

Marketing Automation is complex enough, and the nitty gritty details of email deliverability are rarely covered in the sales process. While we expect emails to be delivered, it’s the marketer’s job to follow email best practices, only send emails to opted-in contacts, and remove invalid email addresses proactively.

By following our basic tips and focusing on subscriber engagement, you’re on your way to marketing automation success. Be sure to download our Marketing Automation Conditions for Success Diagnostic to help you facilitate the transformational changes you need for a successful Marketing Automation journey.

Love him or hate him Donald Trump did something salespeople can learn from. I am not talking about the grandiose claims, the lack of detailed plans, the hyperbole. I am talking about the fact that he resonated with a whole slew of voters. His message struck a chord. He connected with a large faction of the voting public to the point that it caused them to get out and vote…for him.

Think about it. How successful could your sales team be if they were able to inspire 59,000,000 people to take action? Now as we know more than half the voters actually voted against Trump. They clearly did not connect with his message. What I care about is that he stuck to the message and captured about half the voters. Enough of the voters in the right precincts to win the election.

Aside from the fact that he stuck to his message, which is what all good politicians do, there is a more meaningful and unique lesson that is applicable to sales. He actually understood what the potential voters that could hand him a win cared about. Now I am not certain what methods he used to zero in on this, but he did. Maybe the thousands that stood in line to attend his rallies let him know he was on the right track. He listened to the voters and he communicated a message that inspired them. Agree with it or not, he clearly understood the pain that a segment of the American population was feeling. He figured out what the compelling reasons were for voters to select him. There is much uncertainty about Trump as a President, so the reasons had to be compelling enough to get the voters over that uncertainty.

In voting as in sales, there are really three motivations that cause people to make a selection or to “buy”. Pain, fear and gain. Trump zeroed in on the pain of how things are now or the fear associated with the way things will be into the future. While his slogan was “Make America Great Again” which would be considered a nod to the “gain” motivation, in essence he really played to the fear and pain that so many voters were feeling. They were feeling left out, over taxed, over regulated, disadvantaged for the benefit of others, and the list goes on. He tapped into this sense of pain and connected. This is the skill that salespeople would do well to understand.

Follow Trump’s lead and figure out what the truly compelling reasons are that will motivate your buyers to choose you now. Go deep. Be honest. Cut to the core. Similarly to the way Trump did. He was arrogant, tough, annoying and impolite. However, he connected with the “buyer” and was deemed to be honest and trustworthy by them in the process. The media chose to believe that Clinton would win. Don’t make the same mistake and get caught up in what you believe the buyer SHOULD want or determine that you know better about what the buyer needs. Be inquisitive. Ask the hard questions about what really bothers them and listen. Then discuss with them ways that you can help them with their fears or their pain. Don’t try to persuade them to listen to your story. Ask, listen and truly understand where they are coming from. Then and only then will you connect on a genuine level which leads to trust. This, in turn, leads to a real relationship in which the buyer will then listen to you.

When I sat down today to write I did not know I would go here, but it is such an interesting lesson that I could not resist. Please resist commenting on anything political. Please just take the lesson on its face. Salespeople could truly benefit from learning the skill of going deep, to the core, with their prospects and tapping into it.

B2B marketing trends for 2017 will be like the movie Terminator 2.

I came to this realization last night while searching for a classic sci-fi flick. If you know the story, you know that machine Arnold gets friendly with John Connor in the sequel.

Why?

Because there’s better, more evolved technology out there to contend with, aka the crazy-powerful T2000.

My point is, B2B marketing trends in 2017 will be about making the best things better. And getting more familiar with our existing systems.

Machine learning will go big this year. AI will infiltrate current technology to allow more seamless brand experiences and free up costly man-hours.

Automation will become more valuable, sales processes more efficient, data usage more agile.

Just like the quicksilver T2000 compared to regular ol’ Arnold.

Today’s campaigns via personalization, video, influencer and account based marketing will also continue to grow stronger.

Content creation and distribution will be more integrated and important, with ROI-focused initiatives giving us more reach and targeting across channels via expanding data sets.

Let’s see how 2017 will be a blowout year for these marketing trends and shift the landscape in the future.

#1 Account Based Marketing

(Source)

Who doesn’t want to flip the sales funnel upside down for better ROI? According to a Demandbase survey, 45% of marketers are testing or have adopted account-based marketing and 75% plan to use ABM in the future. The goal of ABM is to improve efficiency and gain higher revenues from marketing efforts while using fewer resources. All you do is target valuable accounts instead of pursuing an ocean of unknown leads.

The results?

80% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM is outperforming other marketing investments. And 84% say ABM is significant in retaining and expanding client relationships. Sounds good to me! A high-potential account demands a pinpoint campaign, so IP-based targeting plays a huge role in accessing individuals within key companies. As marketing strategist Eric Whitlakes explains from his blog:

“IP targeting can broadly reach a target company. Think of it like a billboard outside an office: nearly anyone working in that location has the potential to see it.”

The next step is onboarding offline databases and matching them with data providers. Account based advertisers, such as Terminus, will target individuals within the company for greater effect, a landslide of messaging.

“If IP targeting is like a billboard, think of this more like an email list purchase. You only reach individuals that match your select criteria.”

B2B marketers have always been relegated to B2C-built advertising platforms. ABM serves to let companies influence prospects and leads at different stages of the journey, letting marketers optimize media spending on CTRs and form submission on a real-time basis. Because ABM allows companies to combine the efficiency of targeted email outreach with display advertising for great impact, expect it to make waves in 2017.

#2 Machine Learning

(Source)

In 2017, AI will segue from science fiction into marketing reality. We already see chatbots learning like, dislikes and assisting customers in real-time. Beyond deep learning and higher level analytics feeding into marketing automation platforms for increased targeting and personalization, machine learning algorithms will make a diverse range of marketing channels more potent.

Gartner predicts as of 2018, 20% of business content will be written by machines. So long as the article is factual and straightforward, viewers are incapable of discerning between a computer and human authors, As seen above, the Associated Press is making good use of AI to report financial news. AI-generated articles have the tag, “This story was generated by Automated Insights.” Comcast and Samsung are already using this technology which can write 2,000 articles per second.

Expect machine learning’s automated interactions with big data to help out with programmatic advertising as well. Machine-directed ad buys increase ads clicks while increasing efficiency and potency in planning, buying and optimizing ads across demographics and channels.

Want help with targeting? Ask the machine! Clustering algorithms will be able to return predictive insights that would have formerly required countless man-hours. AI pores over emails, previous conversion and past behaviors in search of data to figure each prospect’s position in the pipeline. By collecting data and acting upon future adaptations through next-level A/B testing, machine learning can filter through sales lists to improve pipeline forecasting as well.

#3 Personalization

(Source)

These days, personalization is massive. From emails to display ads to pre-filled forms, marketers are looking into 2017 with an eye toward creating individual interactions across all channels. The most successful will provide a seamless, unique brand experience for customers at every touchpoint via insights from scoring technologies, personal profiles and big data. Giosg, the machine learning personalization service pictured above, shows us how personalization boosts ROI, whether streamlining purchasing or making content hyper-specific and time-sensitive.

The challenge arrives in segmenting effectively. According to a recent Kahuna survey, 85% of surveyed companies think their segments are too broad to be truly effective. Technology seems to limit most, as 32% said they were technological unable to build an effective view of the customer and 46% said legacy technology was holding them back. At the same time, 71% of top-level marketers are tailoring their messaging exclusively to decision makers.

What does this mean? Technology and automation platforms will merge with pinpoint data sets and machine learning in 2017.

#4 More Video, Better Video, All the Time

(Source)

Have you heard the news? Content is king – and video is the crown jewel of 2017. Any brands that don’t accommodate viewer preferences for moving pictures will suffer for it. Let’s consider the numbers from Hubspot:

• YouTube mobile viewership increases by 100% every year
• 50% of executives look for more information after seeing a product or service in a video
• 22% is the conversion rate increase for full page ads that include a video

Yes, with consumption up and viewer appreciation on the rise, more video and better video is what businesses will be going for this coming year. Looking at the success of Pokemon Go, we can expect virtual and augmented realities to flourish alongside the current visual modes. Perciscope has increased, Facebook Live is going strong and Snapchat is taking over.

Snapchat has evolved into a fully fledged marketing platform (surpassing Facebook) faster than the rest, a real-time means to make followers feel connected to a brand. The ephemeral nature conveys an authenticity that will only be more useful when quickly communicating transparency and values. Let’s get creative and cut to the chase with video in 2017.

#5 The Internet of Things (IoT)

(Source)

As datasets grow, mobile usership rises, technology expounds and connectivity reaches new heights, the internet of things will increase mightily. For example, car makers like Tesla will become technology companies. Say hello to the Jetsons!

Using on-board computers, cameras, sensors, laser road tracking, the Tesla Model S has an autopilot feature run by machine learning allowing intuitive acceleration, deceleration, self-park – even without the driver in the car. Such capability is only available through automation and intensive layers of connectivity and data transfer.

Businesses have access to some billions of connected devices, each touchpoint is an aspect of a marketers big data dream. The challenge will be utilizing the data effectively and minimizing dark data areas. Expect brands to leverage tech such as beacons, edge devices, clothing, TVs, sensors, fitness apps – and much more – to gather customer information and create more opportunities to create a more significant customer relationship.

#6 Influencer Marketing

(Source)

What better way to cut the noise of the internet than with an influencer? Between Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, influencers have made social their schoolhouse, attracting tribes of business people hungry for fresh insights. As a top-trending topic in a community focused upon thought leadership, loyal followers are attuned to these informational gatekeepers at the peaks of content.

Since follower numbers are only growing and the want for relevant information will never slow, except influencer marketing strategies to become fixtures in many more organizations. That said, the cost of premier B2B influencer marketing will also increase. Darnit.

#7 Amazing Writing

(Source)

Thanks to the automation of content creation and the surplus of content already (3,000,000+ blog posts per day) the internet is a loud place. How to make sure your brand messaging is spot-on, always converts and draws the attention it deserves?

Easy, just employ great writers. Hire freelancers, hold employee workshops – whatever it takes.

According to CMI’s most recent Content Report, the average B2B marketer allocates 28% of their total budget to content marketing. But the most effective allocate 42%, while the most developed,allocate 46%. Content spending gets results.

Yes, writing still counts and now more than ever. With all the communication channels available, every touchpoint needs to be finely attuned to deliver the right message in the right way.

“I know people think copywriting is about selling stuff, but that opinion is about as up to date as your CD collection. No. It’s about making yourself useful to your readers. They are looking for something – otherwise they wouldn’t have found your content – so tell them what they want to know and make it as enjoyable as possible for them in the process.”

–Doug Kessler, Velocity Marketing

B2B readers aren’t browsing for pleasure, they’re on a hunt for information. Your content is either going to help them sell products – or it won’t. Emphasize value foremost, but the best content should be both easy and enjoyable to read. Differentiate your brand in 2017 by making your reading rewarding in every way possible.

“Numbers motivate. Stories inspire.”

—Stephanie Tilton, Content Marketing Consultant

Because the human brain is wired to learn through stories, relate to your readers in the way they will appreciate. Give them a compelling anecdote that segues into relevant information. Bringing people along for a ride is a proven tactic to boosting your shares and overall visibility.

Conclusion

While automation increases our reach and influence, we’ll keep steady with marketing strategies that emphasize the best customer journey. This means using influencers, personalization and account based marketing to return solid revenue.

Machine learning will save time, money and create more information for better targeting. While types of AI will improve targeting and customer relationships, it still requires a human hand to operate efficiently.

Companies find themselves mixing machines with the human element, cozying up to customers and new technology simultaneously. One thing is certain, 2017 will show us some breakthrough moments in marketing.

Fingers crossed for no Skynet.

Chart of the Day: We explore recent research which shows that long term social media marketing engagement leads to increased sales and loyalty.

In a study by SocialMediaExaminer, marketers believe that when compared to short term work, long term efforts are proving fruitful for their businesses. The research suggests that most marketers believe that over time social media can increase sales, 66% believed that over 5 years of social media marketing, sales can improve.

The research also found that social media can increase traffic and loyalty long term, but not in the short term.

Key takeaways:

Marketers should accept that social media will not give immediate rewards for their efforts in the short term, however, when embraced fully, long-term social media engagement can eventually contribute to driving sales and loyalty.

• Sources: Social Media Examiner and Convince&Convert 
• Sample: 5000+ marketers
• Recommended resources: The Smart Insights social media management checklist lives in the social media toolkit and both can help guide your social media marketing strategy.