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18 Feb 16:34

5 Unique Marketing Tools to Grow Your Small Business

by Ry Glover

These days, it seems there’s a tool for just about every task in an e-commerce marketer’s day-to-day. Just take a look at Scott Brinker’s famous Marketing Technology Supergraphic. There are literally thousands of tools out there—close to 7,000 in the supergraphic alone, and that’s not even all of them!

Let’s just say, there isn’t much of a scarcity problem in the marketing technology landscape. The bigger problem for small businesses is a lack of awareness of what tools are out there (mixed with a dash of decision paralysis).

That’s where this article comes in.

Disclaimer: This piece won’t provide a comprehensive what-to-buy-when analysis of all the tech tools we consider invaluable for small e-commerce marketers.

Instead, our goal is to highlight a few of our favorite tools for resource-strapped marketers. For each tool, we’ll share why we think it’s cool, what makes it unique, and how it can help small e-commerce businesses grow.

5 marketing tools to add to your e-commerce arsenal

1. Airtable

Spreadsheet meets database meets powerful collaboration tool

How They Describe Themselves
“Organize anything, with anyone, from anywhere. Our native mobile and desktop apps make it easy to edit, comment, and collaborate in real time—changes are instantly synced across everyone’s devices.”

Why We Think It’s Cool
Frankly, I don’t know where we’d be without Airtable. It’s the organizational foundation that underpins pretty much all of Matcha’s cross-team collaboration and processes. With it, we’re able to transparently track the progress of multiple ongoing projects simultaneously.

For example, Matcha manages the content strategies of hundreds of small businesses. With our Content Services Tracker base in Airtable, our team has visibility into the entire content strategy lifecycle for each of our customers. This means we can see every stage of content production—from ideation and first draft to publication and distribution.

It’s this type of transparent step-by-step workflow that’s made Airtable an invaluable tool for us at Matcha. Not only can everyone see exactly what’s being done and when, but each team member also has a very clear understanding of their individual tasks and duties, so nothing slips through the cracks.

How It Helps Small Marketing Teams
Airtable basically combines the efficiency and accountability of an assembly line with the intricate organization of a beehive—all in one tool that’s delightfully easy to use.

With the ability to set up multiple bases—“a collection of related tables, often reflecting a single project, process, or workflow that you collaborate on with your team”—small teams are able to organize and keep track of every aspect of their brand’s operation.

You can even use Airtable as your customer database, or set up automated workflows using Zapier.

In short, Airtable works for small marketing teams because it’s malleable. The bases, the personal views, the naming conventions and tagging systems—all of it!—can be modified for your team’s workflow.

Pricing
Airtable is quite affordable. There’s a free version, which gives users core features like unlimited bases, multiple views, and so on. By upgrading to a paid plan (just $10 to $24 per month), you’ll get more revision history, and more advanced stylings and features.

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2. FullStory

Understand and optimize the user experience on your website and online store

How They Describe Themselves
“FullStory captures more customer data than any other digital intelligence platform and makes it easy to solve problems, find answers, and optimize your customer’s experience. More than the sum of its clicks, FullStory replays your customer’s journey—like a DVR for your website—so you can search, see, and understand your user experience.”

Why We Think It’s Cool
Full disclosure: Our head of product, Giovanni Hobbins, actually joined Matcha from FullStory, so we’re constantly getting an earful about how great the product is. Even without the bias, though, there are plenty of reasons we’d write home about the platform.

Here are a few.

  • It has a beautiful user interface, and it’s easy to use.
  • It allows you to understand exactly what people are doing on your website and why they might take certain actions, click certain things, go to certain pages, etc.
  • This makes it easy to identify areas where you can improve the user experience.
  • It plays nice with others. FullStory integrates with a bajillion different tools that you’re already using, like Shopify, Optimizely, and Google Analytics.

How It Helps Small Marketing Teams
FullStory helps marketers do two things really well.

  1. Visualize your website data and conversion funnel. FullStory surfaces the data that matters most. You can see heatmaps of your website activity, pages that need attention, and where your visitors are coming from. Plus, you can track your conversion funnel (see the video above) and get valuable insights into where and why people might fall off in the buying process.
  2. Read your customers’ minds. Maybe not literally, but close enough. Oftentimes, cart abandonment is a result of easily fixable issues around user experience. With Session Replay, FullStory essentially allows marketers to read their customers’ minds to dive into the heart of where things might be going wrong, so that they can provide a better brand experience.

Pricing
The free option is suitable for many small e-commerce brands just starting out, and it offers 1K sessions per month. The next tier, Professional, includes 25K sessions per month and starts at $199 per month.

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3. Yotpo

Turn strangers into customers, and customers into brand advocates

How They Describe Themselves
“With the most advanced solutions for user-generated content marketing, referrals, and loyalty programs, Yotpo helps brands accelerate growth by enabling advocacy and maximizing customer lifetime value. With Yotpo, brands can effectively leverage social proof to increase trust and sales, cultivate loyal customer advocates, and make better business decisions based on customer feedback.”

Why We Think It’s Cool
Scaling user-generated content (UGC) can be difficult. Quality control is sometimes tough to manage, and the people creating this content typically aren’t professional creatives using brand books or being paid for their work. Instead, they’re brand advocates who possess more enthusiasm than technical skill.

Done wrong or half-heartedly, UGC can range anywhere from slightly awkward (no one’s offering any customer feedback) to seriously detrimental (people are offering negative feedback or painting your brand in a bad light).

Done well, UGC can be one of the most powerful marketing tactics out there. It’s a testament to your brand’s ability to build a loyal tribe. Yotpo helps brands do it right.

How It Helps Small Marketing Teams
Yotpo is great for lean teams because it allows brands to:

  • Showcase customer reviews—which is basically free marketing.
  • Leverage the power of peer-to-peer trust. People trust recommendations from their friends and family infinitely more than they trust brands, so you can use Yotpo to put this social proof front and center.
  • Create loyalty and reward programs to retain current customers and get new ones.

Pricing
Yotpo allows you to create a free account and upgrade as you go, with paid plans starting at $29 a month.

<•••>

4. Vyper

Contests, giveaways, and rewards programs

How They Describe Themselves
“Build viral campaigns that grow your email list, social following, and online revenue.”

Why We Think It’s Cool
Who doesn’t love games? Vyper uses gamification—think giveaways, sweepstakes, referral programs—to make potential customers more engaged and excited about your brand.

How it Helps Small Marketing Teams
Giveaways, contests, and referral campaigns are great (and inexpensive!) ways to grab user attention and rapidly grow your following. If you’ve never exchanged your email address for the chance to win an all-expenses-paid-for trip, then hats off to you! You’re probably in the minority.

Vyper allows marketers to gamify their funnel. Whether that’s helping a new brand launch a giveaway program to quickly attract new customers or helping an established brand communicate with an already-engaged audience to refer new people, there are a number of ways Vyper can help build an engaged audience, increase customer lifetime value, and drive revenue.

Pricing
The cost to get started with Vyper is far from prohibitive. Every plan is free to try out until you’re ready to launch your first campaign. From there, prices start at $34 a month.

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5. Bulk.ly

Set-it-and-forget-it social media

How They Describe Themselves
“Bulkly is a social media automation tool that allows you to spend less time managing updates and more time engaging with your audience. It’s built with a minimal feature set that makes it easy for anyone to create truly ongoing social media updates within a few minutes. Once set up you never have to check it, reload it, or do any sort of management.”

Why We Think It’s Cool
You probably already know about Buffer. It’s a social media scheduling tool that allows you to automate your distribution across a variety of social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on). Its more obscure cousin, which you might not know about, is Bulkly—a tool that helps you easily and automatically fill your Buffer queue and keep it full of content.

How It Helps Small Marketing Teams
You don’t have hours each day to manually schedule social media posts—but consumers expect you to be active on social media. Bulkly does it for you.

With the “Recycle Posts” and “Shuffle Posts” features, there’s no need to constantly upload and re-upload the same content to your social media queue week in and week out. With Bulkly, you just need to set the frequency with which posts will be shuffled and shared, and you can set your social distribution calendar on autopilot indefinitely.

Word of caution: You need enough posts in your content library to not seem spammy. Nobody wants to see the same article shared every single day. And licensed content is a great way to quickly and inexpensively fill out your library.

Pricing
The Pro plan costs $12 per month and is perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses that post a few times a day.

<•••>

There are seemingly infinite marketing tools out there, but you don’t have to max out your budget to build your tech stack. All the tools in this article are affordable for small businesses, and they have the potential to power serious growth for your company.

18 Feb 16:34

8 Approaches You Can Use to Strengthen Your LinkedIn Following

by Young Entrepreneur Council

LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for reaching out and connecting with fellow professionals, as well as a good way to share ideas or thought leadership. To find out how best to establish — and build — your following on the site, we asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:

What is the best way to gain a community of followers on LinkedIn?

Here’s what they advise:

1. Publish Well-Researched, Thoughtful Content

The single best way to build an online community, on LinkedIn or anywhere else, is to publish high-value, thoughtful content. Of course, because everyone knows this, you have to go the extra mile. Steer clear of publishing “hot takes” or shallow opinion pieces. The most effective content is deeply researched, well-written and expresses original ideas in an interesting way. – Vik Patel, Future Hosting


2. Start or Join a Group

Get involved with or start your own LinkedIn group. Post compelling content on the latest industry news and events. If starting your own group, assign a member of your team to moderate and monitor ongoing discussions, and post new ideas and thought topics to instigate new conversations. That’s a great way to appeal to a larger audience rather than just targeting individual followers. – Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance


3. Tag People in Your Posts

One way of making sure that you gain new eyeballs within your community is by raving about members who haven’t joined yet. Tag them in your post and make them feel special. Once you are able to make them feel special they will want to join because the other community members have already heard about them. This is one way to get your voice heard within a community and build authority. – Sweta Patel, Startup Growth Mode


4. Create Video Content

Right now, a video is working well. I’d like to call LinkedIn Facebook for professionals, so you need to create video content that would be valuable for your audience. With that said, do it regularly and be the first to engage with people. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS


5. Post Stuff You Would Click On

Before posting anything on LinkedIn ask yourself, “Would I click on this if someone else posted this exact same thing in my feed?” If the answer isn’t yes, do not post it. Sometimes self-editing is hard. We think of something, jot it down and then instantly hit the “post” button. Ask yourself if this is a dynamic enough post, statement, video that you yourself would click on it. – Kim Kaupe, The Superfan Company


6. Promote Your Profile and Articles

An easy way to get more followers on LinkedIn is to promote your profile and articles. Share your LinkedIn articles on your social media profiles, link your profile in your other profiles, on your website, at the end of blog posts, etc. And don’t forget, when you promote your LinkedIn profile ask people to connect with you. If you ask, they’ll be more likely to send a connection request. – Blair Williams, MemberPress


7. Show Off Your Credentials

I find that people are more likely to want to connect so they can network with you and your circles. The social barriers present with non-business social media platforms make it harder to grow your circles. By providing useful content and demonstrating your experience and credentials, others will want to connect with you. – Jared Weitz, United Capital Source


8. Be Someone Worth Following

It’s been said that the best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. Release fresh and relevant content to your network and engage people in industry-specific groups. Be someone who consistently adds value for free and is looking out for the best interests of others. You’ve had success in your field, so share your expertise freely with those who aren’t at your level yet. – Bryan Citrin, Chiropractic Advertising

18 Feb 16:09

7 Pitfalls Where Content Marketing Can Fall Apart for B2B Marketers

by Frank Strong

Multiple surveys show the majority of businesses say they are doing content marketing. Many say they plan to increase the budget for it.

Generally speaking, I think this all good and smart.

Content marketing isn’t fast, and it’s not magic, but it does work. It also complements so many other aspects of marketing. Robert Rose has likened content marketing to butter: you wouldn’t eat it by the spoon, but it spread it on almost everything else and those things taste better.

Still, there are pitfalls too. Have implemented content marketing programs – both on the in-house side and agency side – I can tell you these pitfalls stem from what people think they know. Too many confuse content marketing with marketing content.

“Marketing has always done content marketing,” they’ll say.

No. No, you haven’t.

You’ve made content and blasted it all over the web hoping for a download and email address. That might work and it can be effective, but it is not content marketing. It’s not the same thing.

Content marketing is publishing content, at the same place, at the same time, consistently over time, in order to build an audience that knows, likes and trusts your company because you help them. Some of them will become customers that stick.

If that sounds like a useful goal for your business, here are seven pitfalls to avoid.

1) You don’t have a subscription mechanism.

To be successful, you must build subscribers. Visitors are a good indication, but email subscribers are best.

Research shows B2B organizations spend an average of $150 for every email address they capture. I have known businesses that spend a lot more than that. Most of them do this with gated content and in a bit of sleight of hand, pass that captured email off to an SDR to follow up.

Given the long sales cycle of B2B, this is what I call going from hello-to-marriage-proposal in a white paper download. They wanted the idea in the white paper; they aren’t interested in the product when they are just getting the idea. Subscriptions are nurture stream – it’s the marketing in the middle between the first touch and last touch attribution.

It’s measurable too. Measurement isn’t on this list, but if you start by counting email subscribers as the key metric, you’ll have the ability to measure value, and the capacity to do it retrospectively. You’ll even be able to see omnichannel touches.

Content marketing is its own channel. You can run a campaign inside a content marketing program, but content marketing is not a campaign.

2) You don’t treat content marketing as its own channel.

For many B2B marketing shops, content marketing just means putting stuff up on a website under the blog section. Next, they are faced with deciding what content they are going to send via email. In other words, they must choose between sending that well-researched blog post to the company email list or that demand generation email.

Guess which one wins?

It doesn’t have to be that way, and it shouldn’t be that way. In recent words of a smart client, content marketing “it’s its own thing.” People subscribe to the content and they get it automatically every time it’s posted.

That’s is the essence of a subscription. That’s why for a hundred years paperboys and papergirls delivered daily newspapers to your doorstep by 6:00 a.m.

It’s also why you need to be deliberate about the content you produce. Instead of passing those email addresses off to an SDR, you should continue to nurture your audience, build trust and weave in well-considered opportunities for an audience member to raise their hand.

Content marketing is its own channel. You can run a campaign inside a content marketing program, but content marketing is not a campaign.

harshahars / Pixabay

3) You have too many lead forms.

The pressure for leads in marketing forces short-sighted goals. This means a B2B marketing shop that starts a new blog, is under immediate pressure to demonstrate lead results.

In response, they fill it up with lead forms. If you’re going to just slap the introduction to a white paper up as a blog post with a lead form, save yourself the effort and forget the blog and just make the lead form.

Look, I understand the pressure marketing shops face to produce leads. It’s an impossible situation when you’re negotiating with a business leader that needs a class to understand the difference between PPC and organic search results. I’ve been there more than once and it’s not fun.

If you’re in that position, I recommend skipping the half-hearted content marketing effort and just focus on getting really good at running campaigns with lead forms, email marketing and PPC.

To be clear, every marketing shop probably needs some manifestation of that campaign-style program, but content marketing isn’t the place for it. Content marketing is a strategic communications program that can produce leads, but how you do that has to be subordinate to the audience building goals if you want the program to be successful.

4) Your content marketing is organized around a product.

Benefits not features, right? That’s what pragmatic marketing taught us and it’s a valid approach, but it doesn’t belong in content marketing.

Too many B2B organizations try to organize content around product benefits and it pigeonholes the content into stuff nobody wants to read. Think about it for a moment: it’s really hard to create a publication around the benefits of a product because you run out of interesting things to say very quickly.

Instead, take it up a level, think about the things on the minds of your target audience, and then organize your content around those categories. If you look for the questions they have, you’ll wind up with an infinite number of ways to tacitly weave the benefits of your product in a manner that is useful and relevant to your community.

5) You don’t promote your product enough.

What?! I know. You just read 700 words where I’m telling you to go easy on the product plugs, and now it seems like I’m going 180 degrees the other way. I often say there’s a nuance to content marketing that matters, and that’s true here too, so hear me out.

A few months back a relatively mature startup doing some cool things in IoT and corporate real estate approached me for a proposal. The young man leading up content marketing was a former journalist, and the content he had been producing was exceptional with one big glaring omission: relevancy to the product.

The guy was a fantastic writer. His stuff was interesting and well-researched. He published on a deadline and did it consistently. The problem was, most of it wasn’t even remotely related to his product or industry. So, while he’s probably building an audience, it was an audience that had zero potential to become a customer.

I’m a big believer in being agnostic and vender-neutral, but content marketing in B2B isn’t a benevolent exercise in goodwill either. We do this to build an audience of likely customers, and to earn a reputation for a smart, factual, and relevant point of view that customers and prospects find useful.

Your product has a place in the content marketing program but be smart about it.

6) You don’t have the right players involved.

Research shows content marketing is often a responsibility assigned to one person. While those people generally come with a work ethic that exceeds their salary, the chances of success are slim.

Moreover, you need more than just a writer or editor, you need a team with a vested interest in growing this thing. You need digital advertising for PPC and social ads. Remember those emails you’ve been collecting with subscriptions? It’s a treasure trove for remarketing.

You need creatives to bring flair and polish. You need a truly technical SEO (not the snake oil variety that’s rampant in SEO). You need corporate communications, sales operations, product marketers, product managers, and business leaders.

Finally, you need marketing leaders that truly understand content marketing, its value, and are willing to commit to the vision and support the decisions of whoever they’ve assigned to lead the program. Or marketing leaders that admit they don’t, are willing to learn and in the meantime, get out of your way and let you do your job.

meineresterampe / Pixabay

7) You don’t publish content consistently.

You’ve probably heard this one before but for years there’s been a whole pile of research that demonstrates people that are successful with content marketing are consistent. I’m going to try to explain why this matters differently.

If you publish on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, and then skip two weeks and publish four more posts in a row, you are not being consistent. What you are doing is taking a bunch of stutter steps and the data shows your content marketing program will dither along on in mediocrity.

Why is consistency so important? There are two primary reasons.

First, it conditions your marketing organization to establish a tempo that can hit a deadline repeatedly. It’s like taking the whole team to the gym – it’s hard at first and your team tires easily. However, over time, they get stronger and build endurance. Discipline in content marketing will benefit your marketing organization in many more ways than just building an audience.

Second, it conditions your audience to expect the content, and to expect content they can trust and use. There are elements of consistency to any successful relationship, whether it’s personal or professional. It’s true with pets. It’s true with people. And it’s true for organizations.

If your organization truly wants to build relationships with prospects and customers, be consistent with your content marketing.

What about “Good” Content?

Everyone has heard content has to be good to attract an audience and that’s true. What’s also true is that what precisely constitutes good content is highly subjective.

It’s your job to figure out what your audience thinks is good content. This is an exercise that occurs over months and years. It requires the synthesis of data, trends and intuition.

You also have to be careful because tastes change over time. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, it changes.

To me, this is a good argument for producing content at higher volumes. You must experiment and try a lot of different things to find what works. If you don’t publish often, you just don’t have enough tries to make the experiment work.

Note: A version of this post was previously published on Sword and the Script: 7 Reasons Your B2B Content Marketing Program Fails to Deliver that You Probably Haven’t Heard Before

Featured image credit: Pixabay

18 Feb 16:09

How Webinars Can Help Build Transparency and Create a Sense of Authenticity

by Kate Uhry

mohamed_hassan / Pixabay

Well-done webinars are like well-taught classes. They have a teacher who knows their stuff, engages the students, teaches them something mind-blowing, and leaves them wanting to come back. Bad webinars are either boring presentations, or worse, experiences that leave you feeling like you’ve just wasted an hour of precious time.

As a company presenting a webinar, your relationship with your audience is critical. If you have done your homework leading up to the webinar, you’ve already picked a topic that interests them. You’ve selected the right time to hold the webinar, found your guest speakers, created a slide deck, and practiced what you are going to say. In the midst of focusing on preparations, it can be easy to forget that your audience consists of influencers, decision makers, and thinking beings who are going to judge you on the effectiveness of your presentation.

If you aren’t honest with them, they’ll see it. Like frighteningly insightful kindergarteners, they’ll know if you are lying. They’ll know if you don’t know your stuff. And they could decide, based on their experience with your webinar, that they don’t want to do business with you. No pressure.

Because a webinar subconsciously reflects the setup and expectations of a classroom—the place where most adults spent the majority of their time learning to learn—it has a set of underlying rules. The audience expects the presenter to teach them something of value, present the truth, and have facts, logic, and history to back up their claims.

If a webinar doesn’t follow those rules, and instead becomes a place where the presenter and company isn’t truthful or genuine, it can undermine your entire relationship with your audience. Strive instead for transparency and authenticity by doing the following:

  • If you are throwing out facts or statistics, show the research to back it up. Cite your resources and your methodology.
  • If you are stating an opinion, say so but tell your audience why your opinion is worth listening to.

There is a fine line between manipulating an audience and engaging an audience. Solid lead generation techniques, such as polling your audience during the webinar, breaking the ice with a joke, or responding to questions and comments, engage the audience. Strategies like withholding the most important piece of information until the end, inserting pitches for your latest book, or asking them to grab one of the 10 appointments available on your calendar before someone else does are manipulative.

Stick with honesty, transparency, and authenticity in your webinar. You’ll find that your audience will respond in kind. As a result, you may end up with lifelong customers.

15 Feb 18:10

Amazon's HQ2 deal with New York is officially off — and it means that the state and city will lose out on $27.5 billion in tax revenue (AMZN)

by Bob Bryan

andrew cuomo bill de blasio

  • Amazon announced that the company will pull its planned second headquarters, also known as HQ2, from the Queens borough of New York City.
  • "After much thought and deliberation, we've decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens," Amazon said.
  • The move comes after New York lawmakers complained that HQ2 is not worth the roughly $3 billion in incentives the state and city have promised Amazon.
  • According to a study commissioned by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office, Amazon's presence in New York City would have generated $27.5 billion in tax revenue for the state and city, much more than the incentives.
  • But there are some caveats to the rosy picture painted by the study.

Amazon's huge move to New York City is off after the company announced the move to Long Island City, Queens will not move forward and the local governments of New York may have just watched billions of dollars in tax revenue walk out the door.

"After much thought and deliberation, we've decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens," Amazon said in a press release.

The decision comes after a slew of New York lawmakers opposed the roughly $3 billion in tax incentives that the city and state offered Amazon.

But while some lawmakers decried the incentives, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were enthusiastic supporters of HQ2 because the project, they argued, would have brought in more tax revenue than the government was planning to give out in incentives, as well as increased economic growth.

Read more: Amazon cancels New York City HQ2»

In fact, Cuomo's office said that the HQ2 project would have brought in $27.5 billion in new tax revenue over 25 years based on two economic impact studies, one commissioned by the governor and another by the city. This would have well-exceeded the amount of incentives given to Amazon. Of that amount, $14 billion in tax revenue would have gone to New York state and $13.5 billion would have gone to New York City, according to Cuomo's office.

Given that amount of revenue, Cuomo touted the fact that the Amazon investment would have brought in $9 in tax revenue for every $1 of revenue forgone due to the incentives.

"Amazon, by our current tax structure, would generate approximately $1 billion per year in new revenue," Cuomo wrote in a November op-ed defending the HQ2 decision. "Our proposal offered that, when and if those revenues are realized, the government would effectively reduce their $1 billion payment by about $100 million for a net to New York of approximately $900 million. New York doesn't give Amazon $100 million. Amazon gives New York $900 million."

But, based on the study, the advantages may not have been as great at Cuomo makes it seem. Inflation would have taken a bite out of the value of the future tax dollars generated by HQ2. Put another way, $1 in tax revenue in 25 years would not be worth as much as $1 of revenue in 2019.

Since much of the tax revenue would have been realized later in the report's 25-year time frame, the New York state report estimates that HQ2 would have brought in just under $9 billion in state tax revenue in 2019 dollars versus the promised $1.4 billion in state tax incentives. So, the report concluded, "the benefit-cost ratio is 6.3," well below Cuomo's promised 9:1 ratio.

Critics of the study also pointed out that the estimates are based on the idea that Amazon would bring in 40,000 jobs for HQ2 over 15 years. Instead, Amazon split its second headquarters between Northern Virginia and New York, so only 25,000 jobs would have been coming to the Big Apple over the first 10 years.

The company also said that an additional 15,000 could have come to Queens in the five years after the initial wave, but made no firm commitment.

In addition to the modeling issues, some experts also pointed out that the study does not consider the alternatives for the area where Amazon was going to put HQ2, and recent studies show that investing in preexisting, local businesses could be more economically stimulative than wooing new corporations.

On top of that, the study also does not account for the fact that the influx of workers will create liabilities for city beyond the incentives, such as increased trash collection and education costs. Critics also point to other externalities that would have made HQ2 less attractive for New York City residents.

SEE ALSO: A huge opponent of Amazon's HQ2 in New York may soon have the power to kill it

Join the conversation about this story »

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15 Feb 18:09

MoMA's "The Value of Good Design" Exhibition

This week the MoMA opened The Value of Good Design, an exhibition that examines the titular subject by looking backwards to look forwards:

Peter Schlumbohm (American, born Germany. 1896–1962). Chemex Coffee Maker. 1941. Pyrex glass, wood, and leather, 9 1/2 × 6 1/8? (24.2 × 15.5 cm). Manufactured by Chemex Corp. (New York, NY, est. 1941). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lewis & Conger
Sony Corporation (Tokyo, Japan, est. 1946). Television (TX8-301). 1959. Plastic, metal, and glass, 8 1/2 × 8 1/4 × 10? (21.6 × 21 × 25.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder
Sori Yanagi (Japanese, 1915–2011). Butterfly Stools. 1956. Molded plywood and metal, each: 15 1/2 × 17 3/8 × 12 1/8? (39.4 × 44.1 × 30.8 cm). Manufactured by Tendo Co., Ltd., (Tokyo, Japan, est. 1940). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer
"Is there art in a broomstick? Yes, says Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, if it is designed both for usefulness and good looks." This quote, from a 1953 Time magazine review of one of MoMA's mid-century Good Design exhibitions, gets to the heart of a question the Museum has been asking since its inception: What is good design and how can it enhance everyday life?
Greta Von Nessen (American, born Sweden. 1898–1978). Anywhere Lamp. 1951. Aluminum and enameled steel, 14 3/4 × 14 1/4? (37.5 × 36.2 cm). Manufactured by Nessen Studio, Inc (New York, NY, est. 1927). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architecture and Design Purchase Fund
Dante Giacosa (Italian, 1905–1996). 500f city car. Designed 1957 (this example 1968). Steel with fabric top, 52 × 52 × 116 7/8? (132.1 × 132.1 × 296.9 cm). Manufactured by Fiat S.p.A. (Turin, Italy, est. 1899). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Heritage. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar © The Museum of Modern Art
L.M. Ericsson Telephone Company, (Swedish, est. 1876). Hugo Blomberg (Swedish, born 1897), Ralph Lysell (Swedish, born 1907), Hans Gösta Thames (Swedish, born 1916). Ericofon Telephone. 1949–54. ABS plastic, rubber, and nylon housing, .1 (white): 8 1/2 x 3 7/8 x 4 3/8? (21.6 x 9.8 x 11.1 cm); .2 (yellow): 9 1/8 x 3 7/8 x 4 3/8? (23.2 x 9.8 x 11.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously
Featuring objects from domestic furnishings and appliances to ceramics, glass, electronics, transport design, sporting goods, toys, and graphics, The Value of Good Design explores the democratizing potential of design, beginning with MoMA's Good Design initiatives from the late 1930s through the 1950s, which championed well-designed, affordable contemporary products.
Swift & Anderson, Inc. (Boston, MA, est. 1926). Outdoor Thermometer. Before 1946. Metal, painted metal, and glass, diam. 4 1/8? (10.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lewis & Conger
Max Bill (Swiss, 1908–1994). Kitchen Clock. 1956–57. Ceramic, metal, and glass, 10 1/4 × 7 5/16 × 2 1/4? (26 × 18.5 × 5.7 cm). Manufactured by Gebrüder Junghans AG (Schramberg, Germany, est. 1861). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architecture and Design Purchase Fund. Photo by Thomas Griesel © The Museum of Modern Art
John R. Carroll (American, 1892–1958). Presto Cheese Slicer. c. 1944. Cast aluminum and steel wire, 4 1/2 × 3 3/4? (11.4 × 9.5 cm). Manufactured by R.A. Frederick Co. (United States). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.
The exhibition also raises questions about what Good Design might mean today, and whether values from mid-century can be translated and redefined for a 21st-century audience. Visitors are invited to judge for themselves by trying out a few "good design" classics still in production, and exploring how, through its design stores, MoMA continues to incubate new products and ideas in an international marketplace.
Irwin Gershen (American). Shrimp Cleaner. 1954. Plastic and metal, 8 1/2 × 3 1/4 × 3/4? (21.6 × 8.3 × 1.9 cm). Manufactured by Plastic Dispensers Inc. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Department purchase
Charlotte Perriand (French, 1903–1999). Low chair. Designed 1940, manufactured 1946. Bamboo, 28 1/2 × 24 1/4 × 30 3/8? (72.4 × 61.6 × 77.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lisa Tananbaum, Susan Hayden, Alice Tisch, and Committee on Architecture and Design Funds. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar © The Museum of Modern Art
Zeiss-Werk (Jena, East Germany/DDR). Werra 1 35mm film camera. c. 1955–60. Aluminum body with vulcanite surface, 3 × 4 1/2 × 2 1/2? (7.6 × 11.4 × 6.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Michael Maharam. Photo by Thomas Griesel © The Museum of Modern Art

The promotional video makes good use of archival footage:

The Value of Good Design runs until June 15th, 2019.

Title image: Installation view, The Value of Good Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (February 10–June 15, 2019). Digital image © 2019 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John Wronn

15 Feb 18:08

Great Elevator Pitches from SaaS Companies

by Shannon Delmarle

Pitch, pitch, pitch … all you do is pitch! Okay, joking aside, when it comes to a remarkable elevator pitch, practice makes perfect and there are some extraordinary SaaS companies that understand what a successful pitch is all about. But let’s start at the beginning and go over what an elevator pitch is and why you need one.

According to HubSpot, an elevator pitch is a “30-second memorable description of what you do and/or what you sell. The goal is to earn a second conversation, not to convince the person you’re talking to that they should hire you or buy your solution.” So with all that being said, it’s pretty damn crucial that you not only have your elevator pitch down, but that you also understand the main objective of using it. A pitch isn’t a way to sell your products or services—it’s a way to easily explain what you do or what your organization does to someone that doesn’t know, which then allows the doors to open for further discussions.

You can Google “how to craft an elevator pitch” and get about three million links for different ways to craft an exceptional pitch and also discover that there are different types of pitches, but I want to share the steps that I’ve found to be super effective:

  1. Introduce yourself and what your position is at the company.
  2. Explain what your company’s goals and mission are.
  3. Share what value your company provides to its customers/clients.
  4. Spark excitement with an interesting fact or story that relates to the business and customer.
  5. Consistently edit and rework your elevator pitch until it feels natural and the person listening actually appears interested in learning more.

During my research, I was surprised by how many times the advice of “continue to edit and revise” came up, but it makes sense because finding the right way to explain confusing job roles or complex services and products is like an art form and takes practice. So keep the pitches coming until you can rock it like these SaaS companies:

Slack: “We help businesses and organizations communicate with a simple chat interface.”

They are using the short and sweet method of elevator pitching which can be effective and memorable.

Shopify: We offer a platform that enables both the early entrepreneur and the large enterprise to build and run their own stores.

“Unlike most marketplaces where you can sell your products, Shopify lets you build and brand your own online store with the tools to sell across a variety of channels, manage inventory, start small and scale fast.

“Today, over 500,000 entrepreneurs use Shopify to power their businesses.”

In this example, Shopify is using a pitching method known as the all-purpose pitch, which is great for conveying information about your company, your target, and your competition.

SurveyMonkey: “SurveyMonkey is an online survey development cloud-based software as a service company, founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley. The company provides free, customizable surveys, as well as a suite of paid back-end programs that include data analysis, sample selection, bias elimination, and data representation tools.”

SurveyMonkey has adopted a method of pitching that also includes historical data. According to Quantified Communications, “using a story in your pitch can make it 22 times for memorable.”

Industries like SaaS tend to make their elevator pitches complicated or hard to understand, and for this reason, more involved products or services will need a simple pitch. A simple-to-digest pitch will tell someone why they would want to work for you, why they should spend their money with you, or why they should be an investor of yours—all in under 30 seconds.

Smart startup SaaS companies are also exploring more in the world of digital pitching. In one of Vidyard’s blog posts, “Video Pitching: Making Media Relations Human Again,” the author explains why video pitching is so successful: “By nature, video is attention-grabbing and personal. In fact, when I first gave video pitching a trial run, my pitches received nearly 50 percent higher engagement than my text-based attempts.” There are also sites like Product Hunt and AngelList which allow you to post your digital pitches so that investors, partners, and future customers can see and hear what your startup SaaS is all about.

The biggest takeaway is that a truly remarkable elevator pitch has to be able to back up what it’s stating with data and case studies. It’s not enough to memorize a paragraph of pitching copy and robotically spit it back out. You have to make people understand what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, and then back it up with the numbers.

15 Feb 18:07

Why your startup may not be as great as everyone says

by David Riggs
Gil Ben-Artzy Contributor
Gil Ben-Artzy is a founding partner at UpWest Labs.

One of the very first things we ask Israeli entrepreneurs who are hoping to break into the U.S. market is to tell us how their product or service is being received by their target market. What is the feedback? Are potential customers hungry for what the team is selling?

Validation, both of the broader vision and the early product itself, has to be a key focus for any aspiring entrepreneur. Testing your product and getting specific feedback is the only way to know if the company is on the right track or wasting its time chasing down the wrong path. However, even for seasoned founders who understand how vital market validation is to the success of their company, it can be all too easy to get distracted chasing the wrong kind of validation.

Not all validation is created equal. It is crucial that founders differentiate between meaningful validation and vanity “wins” that do little more than make you feel good. Fake validation is everywhere. Here are some common traps founders need to beware of.

Not all customers are born equal

Founders need to be careful about soliciting customers that are either too small or too big for their entry point into the market, or not even in the actual market segment they are targeting. If your early customers are different from those you eventually hope to acquire, then the things they ask for and feedback they provide will skew your short-term goals and put your business on the wrong path.

The best companies and founders are the ones that aren’t afraid to go out and get real, tangible feedback from potential customers.

This is especially common when targeting companies outside the U.S., where startups build long lists of customers in their home market that may or may not have the same set of needs as U.S.-based customers. But by the time these startups are “ready” to expand beyond their home country, they have a hard time selling investors and foreign customers on a product that has only been validated by unfamiliar brands in a small domestic market. Many times, these early customers do not have exposure to competing products in the larger U.S. market, or they have a different set of problems they are aiming to solve altogether, which sends misleading signals to the startup.

Securing customers is obviously crucial to any startup’s success, and can be helpful in shaping how a startup markets itself in the early days. Yet founders must be able to properly contextualize the pedigree of those customers, and always keep the long-term vision front and center. The product isn’t truly validated until you have the right type of customers validating your product.

Corporate guidance?

Large corporations are constantly looking for the next cutting-edge technology that will propel their next phase of growth. This is why countries like Israel, with its deep talent pool in AI, IoT, cybersecurity, etc., have become hotbeds for corporate innovation labs.

At first glance, this is a great thing for Israeli entrepreneurs because it gives them exposure and access to the biggest companies in the world. But proximity and feedback from these groups isn’t everything. Many of these innovation labs accept local startups into their program, which can obviously be exciting for those founders, especially at the early stage. The corporate will then aim to work on a pilot program with the startup to test their product, which could be beneficial for the startup. However, gaining just this one customer doesn’t always guarantee future success, nor does it truly validate the product.

Getting a pilot with a larger corporate can be a great opportunity, but diligent founders must also continue to pursue other pilots. First, pilot programs do not always translate to becoming real customers and founders need to avoid placing all their eggs in one basket. Second, the feedback founders receive from just one large customer may not be representative of the entire customer segment. Simply being in the innovation hub is often not enough by itself to signal long-term success.

All your startup friends say your product is cool

This one may seem obvious, but it remains just as pervasive as ever. It’s easy for first-time founders to drink their own Kool-Aid and get overly hung up on any positive feedback that’s heaped upon them or their product. An overwhelming number of new startups are created in heavily concentrated markets like Silicon Valley, which can make it difficult to find unbiased feedback outside the echo chamber.

It’s not only nice to be told your product is awesome, but it can become downright addicting.

This is especially true for startups that are just beginning to validate their product offering, or a specific piece of their technology. Afraid of approaching someone who “won’t get it,” we see founders chasing the feedback they want to hear, often from peer entrepreneurs, who will be excited by a piece of technology but obviously won’t be the ones who end up buying and using it as real customers.

By self-soliciting feedback from the wrong people, founders make the mistake of focusing on the wrong aspects of the product instead of taking it directly to potential customers in the market who will specifically tell you what they do and don’t like.

You just raised $10 million. That has to mean something, right?

Even raising a sizable round from VCs can be a form of fake momentum. Much has been written on the topic, but it’s easier than ever for some entrepreneurs in specific domains to raise significant capital these days. There are more seed funds out there than ever before. Valuations and deal sizes at the seed and Series A stages continue to climb. What this truly means is that bets on the success or failure of a startup are being made earlier in the life cycle of the company.

Just because a VC chooses to invest in a company does not mean that startup has reached the promised land. VCs are not your customers, and while capital they provide is a critical means to further the development of the business, it does not replace getting real validation from and selling to the target market.

Winning!

Founders often misunderstand or overestimate the tangible impact that awards and PR recognition will have on their businesses. We see this all the time when entrepreneurs come bragging about some competition they won, or a top 10 list they were included in. Don’t get me wrong, awards are nice to have and they can help with attracting talent and hiring into your startup. However, founders need to realize that the value is capped, does not serve as real validation and is typically meaningless to investors and potential customers alike in their evaluation of the startup.

There are several potential traps on the journey to validation, and it can be easy to fall victim if entrepreneurs take their eyes off the prize. It’s not only nice to be told your product is awesome, but it can become downright addicting. The best companies and founders are the ones that aren’t afraid to go out to market and get real, tangible feedback from potential customers. If you’re not doing that, you’re simply making yourself more susceptible to fake validation that can derail your vision.

15 Feb 18:06

Top 5 Healthcare Startups & Digital Health Tech Disruptors

by Laurie Beaver

bii top 5 startups to watch in digital health

The healthcare industry is facing disruption due to accelerating technological innovation and growing demand for improved delivery of healthcare and lower costs. Tech startups are leading the way by seizing opportunities in the areas of the industry that are most vulnerable to disruption, including genomics, pharmaceuticals, administration, clinical operations, and insurance.

Venture funds and businesses are taking notice of these startups' potential. In the US, digital health funding reached $1.6 billion in Q1 2018, according to Rock Health — the largest first quarter on record, surpassing the $1.4 billion in venture funding seen in Q1 2016. These high-potential startups provide a glimpse into the future of the healthcare space and demonstrate how we’ll get there.

In this report, a compilation of various notes, Business Insider Intelligence will look at the top startups disrupting US healthcare in four key areas: artificial intelligence (AI), digital therapeutics, health insurance, and genomics. Startups in this report were selected based on the funding they've received over the past year, notable investors, the products they offer, and leadership in their functional area.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

  • Tech startups are entering the market by applying the “Silicon Valley” approach. They're targeting shortcomings and legacy systems that are no longer efficient.
  • AI is being applied across five areas of healthcare to improve clinical operation workflows, cut costs, and foster preventative medicine. These areas include administration, big data analysis, clinical decision support, remote patient monitoring, and care provision.
  • Health tech startups, insurers, and drug makers are rapidly exploring new ways to apply digital therapeutics to the broader healthcare market that replace or complement the existing treatment of a disease.
  • Health insurance startups are taking advantage of the consumerization of healthcare to threaten the status quo of legacy players. 
  • Genomics is becoming an increasingly common tool within the healthcare system as health organizations better understand how to extract the value from patients’ genetic data. 

 In full, the report:

  • Details the areas of the US health industry that show the greatest potential for disruption.
  • Forecasts the industry adoption of bleeding edge technology and how it will transform how healthcare organizations operate.
  • Unveils the top five startups in AI, digital therapeutics, health insurance, and genomics, and how they're positioned to solve big issues that key players in healthcare face. 
  • Explores what's next for the leading startups, providing a glimpse into the future of the healthcare space and demonstrating how we’ll get there.

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15 Feb 18:06

The missing variable in your lead scoring methodology

by Matt Heinz

You’ve probably seen, heard or maybe even used the term “interesting moments” in tracking and scoring what your prospects are doing.

You may track site visits, downloads, email clickthroughs and other activities.

You may even string together some of these activities and, assuming an establishment of momentum and prospect interest, accelerate the pace of “active buyer” content and/or sales phone calls as a result.

But there’s one problem with most variables we historically have used to track and score prospect interest – they fail to account for and measure time.

So what if someone downloaded your white paper. Did they read it? How much of it? How much time did they spend in it?

So what if they clicked on your video link? How much did they watch?  How far did they get?

So what if they went to your blog today?  Were they at your big “middle of funnel” post for just a couple seconds? Then they didn’t read it.  Were they on that page scrolling for a few minutes? That tells me they were likely engaged.

Adding the variable of time makes all the difference.  You can weight interest, understanding and intent in a more compelling way.  You can ask better, knowledgeable questions in your sales team’s follow-up.

And, you can start to measure the financial value of content you create.  Ever thought about what it costs to generate a minute of your target prospect’s engagement?  How much would you be willing to spend on a minute of your ideal customer’s focused attention?

And how can you use that information to prioritize which content to do more of, and which to cut out from your next plan and/or budget?

Activity is a great start, but it’s only part of the picture you need to see in order to know when prospects are not just acting, but also self-educating and understanding.

Today’s diatribe was inspired by some awesome new tools launched by PathFactory yesterday.  They did a great job in this blog post describing what’s been missing in most marketing analytics and how adding immersive engagement and time-based metrics can impact and improve sales and marketing performance.

The post The missing variable in your lead scoring methodology appeared first on Heinz Marketing.

15 Feb 18:06

How to sell a $1,000 coat without having a sale

by Jake Edmiston

Instead of risking its future inventory levels rushing to sell more parkas in the middle of a vicious winter, Canada Goose Holdings Inc. is content to watch its wares sell out this season, says chief executive Dani Reiss. Plus, it adds the perception of scarcity — “a little bit of the magic” behind his company’s success selling coats for more than $1,000 apiece.

In its third quarter, reported on Thursday, Canada Goose’s revenue rose by 50 per cent to $399 million. The growth, Reiss said, was accomplished while Canada Goose competed in two of the biggest discount shopping holidays without having held a sale.

Instead of a sale on Black Friday, Canada Goose released a new jacket. “At a time when consumers are bombarded with promotional messages and brands are competing on the lowest price, we chose to cut through the noise with a high-impact product moment,” Reiss told analysts. For China’s Singles’ Day in November, “we were one of the Top 10 brands in our space despite offering no promotions,” he said.

As part of its push into the Chinese market, Canada Goose opened flagships in Hong Kong and Beijing, as well as a partnership with Alibaba’s Tmall platform — well before Canada’s relations with China soured over the detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. “We leave politics to the politicians,” Reiss told Bloomberg News on Thursday. “We’re really happy with our Chinese business plan and the way we plan to approach it. It’s been executed really well.”

Canada Goose is in the middle of an ambitious global expansion, shifting from its roots as a wholesaler to open its own stores. And because of that growing fleet of stores, Reiss said, Canada Goose’s inventory is growing as well. In its quarterly update, the company reported that inventory had soared by 75 per cent — a number that startled Wells Fargo analysts, who wrote Thursday that the inventory level was “slightly concerning.”

But Reiss assured analysts on a conference call the high level was part of the company’s growth plan to build inventory for the future. “It’s for next year,” he said. “We’re right where we want to be.” Canada Goose on Thursday announced it will continue to expand its ability to build inventory through its Canadian production network by opening a new production facility in Montreal.

One analyst, Omar Saad of Evercore ISI, noted that Canada Goose “seems like it’s continually a supply-constrained brand, which is obviously a great situation to be in.”

Indeed, several Canada Goose winter parkas appeared to be sold out on its website in certain size/colour combinations. The $1,295 Pembina coat in the Bordeaux colour, for instance, was only available in small, extra-small and double-extra-small on Thursday. It was puzzling perhaps, since now is the time to need a good parka, especially in the parts of Canada that saw intense bursts of snow and ice this week.

“It’s amazing to be in a position where there’s perceived scarcity for our brand,” Reiss said on the call. “There is a lot of scarcity. It’s a hard to find our product. But our year-over-year growth percentages continue to be as strong as they are. And I think those things together create a little bit of magic, which is why we continue to do so well.”

Saad then asked about all that inventory Canada Goose was building. “That’s inventory you could sell now if you wanted to,” he said. “But you want to build it for next year. Is that the right way to think about your strategy?”

Yes, Reiss said, Canada Goose could “cannibalize” some of that inventory and sell it now — but it won’t.

“We don’t want to disappoint our customers next year at all, so we don’t.”

15 Feb 18:03

Even without explicit collusion, pricing algorithms converge on price-fixing strategies

by Cory Doctorow

Literally the only kind of monopolistic behavior that the US government is willing to prosecute is price fixing, and that's why it's so important to read Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, a paper by four Italian economists from the University of Bologna who document how price-fixing is an emergent property of pricing algorithms -- the systems online merchants use to price-match with their competitors.

The researchers find that "even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies," through iterated turns in which each tries to meet the others' prices without losing money, and that it's seemingly impossible to design pricing algorithms that don't evolve collusive strategies ("the propensity to collude is stubborn – substantial collusion continues to prevail even when the active firms are three or four in number, when they are asymmetric, and when they operate in a stochastic environment").

Pricing bots usually come to our attention when they made weird decisions that produce hilarious outcomes, but this paper suggests that the unsexy, invisible workaday world of algorithmic pricing is ripping off everyone who buys just about anything, even by the narrow and lax standards of modern antitrust enforcement.

Update: This confirms a decade-old paper's findings about collusion in pricing algorithms. I went looking for this paper this morning, but only just found it now!

What is most worrying is that the algorithms leave no trace of concerted action – they learn to collude purely by trial and error, with no prior knowledge of the environment in which they operate, without communicating with one another, and without being specifically designed or instructed to collude. This poses a real challenge for competition policy. While more research is needed before considering policy moves, the antitrust agencies’ call for attention would appear to be well grounded.

Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion [Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, Sergio Pastorello/CEPR]

Left to Their Own Devices, Pricing Algorithms Resort to Collusion [David Grossman/Popular Mechanics]

(via /.)

(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY)

15 Feb 18:03

Are You Using 1999 Metrics to Measure 2019 Customer Care?

by Amy Bennet

It’s 2019, which means contact center metrics from 1999 are almost old enough for their first legal beer (and already knocking them back in Canada.) Those metrics were born in an era when customer service was a race, where whoever got to the finish line first (i.e. off the phone) – upsetting the least number of hurdles, extra points for a graceful gait – was the champion, the most successful, the most likely to win “customer service agent of the year.”

Today’s consumers and their shifting expectations have turned that perspective on its head. Instead, we live in a customer-centric world, where metrics like Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Average Handle Time (AHT), and First Call Resolution (FCR) are, by themselves, short-sighted and more focused on controlling costs instead of enhancing the experience. That said, the contact center accumulates millions of data points every single day. How do we use that data to improve the customer experience?

Fighting the Cost Center Mindset

We get it; earning executive buy-in on the decision to outsource your contact center usually includes a discussion about ROI. But calculating how the costs of your customer service solution make an impact on your bottom line can be complicated. For example, at first glance, an hour-long phone call with a customer that doesn’t result in first call resolution or a sale appears to be a high-cost, low-efficiency interaction.

What you may not initially see is how that hour inspires the customer’s lifetime loyalty and widespread promotion and advocacy, converting other customers on top of increasing their own spend. If that call was cut off at two or three minutes in the name of low AHT, an important opportunity to provide exceptional customer experience would have been lost.

Though hour-long calls are extraordinarily rare (though still nothing compared to the Zappos record customer-service call of 10 hours, 43 minutes!), this example holds its integrity even when scaled down to mere minutes and seconds. The point is, while data that describes an agent’s efficiency has its place (no one wants to be kept on hold unnecessarily or sit through minutes of pointless back-and-forth with a less-than-stellar agent) these metrics, taken alone, do little more than tell us to work as fast as possible to disengage from the customer.

Even if we are committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience, the fact is that many businesses turn to these metrics by default when making an outsourcing decision. Changing this approach and perspective is the first step in becoming a brand that your customers love. (For the same reason, we also believe that contact center pricing should never be your first question in the quest to outsource). But where do we start?

One Metric to Rule Them All

What one metric best reflects the state of your customer experience? Consider that today’s consumers are loyal to the brands that personalize the experience, are instantly responsive to their needs, and are authentic in the way they deliver service. The more loyal those customers are, the more they buy.

With that in mind, it’s clear that the quality of your customer experience is directly correlated with Lifetime Customer Value. (We discussed the LCV metric in more depth in our recent blog post, The True Cost of Losing a Customer.)

When you focus on improving that metric, what you’re really doing is shifting your efforts to decrease churn rate and increase retention. In our blog post about the cost of losing a customer, we referenced the example of a client who worked with us to implement a 24/7 team of Subject Matter Experts in support of a customer who had threatened to leave after a disappointing experience. The increased effort to meet expectations and provide a better experience was highly successful. Not only did the client stick around for the long run, their continued business meant a higher lifetime value.

Data is the GPS Mapping Your Customer Experience

While Lifetime Customer Value is a critical measure of your customer experience, it can’t by itself tell you what to focus on in your efforts to improve it. That’s where you have to take a holistic approach with the underlying data.

For example, we can’t forget about Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). NPS was a metric first introduced in 2003, which feels like a lifetime ago. But instead of growing obsolete, this metric has simply entered its wiser golden years. Asking a customer to rate the probability of their promoting your brand to friends and family is a highly effective way to measure how well each interaction is being handled. We are big fans of the “Willingness to Assist” (WTA) metric which we measure through post-contact surveys. WTA is an actionable coaching point for your agents and relates directly to the customer experience. Moving the bar on Willingness to Assist is almost always correlated to an increase in CSAT and/or NPS.

That said, it’s important to remember that most customers respond to an NPS or CSAT survey with one specific interaction in mind, which doesn’t necessarily reflect their big-picture perception of your brand or their lifetime loyalty as a customer. A high NPS score after one successful interaction doesn’t guarantee a customer won’t switch brands next month. Thus, NPS, CSAT, and other scores like Customer Effort Score (CES) are still only a fraction of the big picture when it comes to improving the end-to-end customer experience.

These metrics are most valuable when you can segment and filter them by type of customer (especially by tenure and lifetime value), type of interaction (related to the channel they use or teams they interact with), and the customer’s score over time. Comparing these metrics against data about buying habits, social media interactions, eCommerce activity and more will begin to give you the bigger picture. This is also where you get to add in those more elementary contact center metrics, like Average Handle Time, Average Speed to Answer, and First Call Response rates.

The key is to map out the data in alignment with the customer journey – even in the moments when they are not interacting with you – creating a picture of exactly how well you are serving a customer throughout the lifetime of their advocacy. How that data maps out for high-value customers will likely look very different than the map for short-term, low-value customers. The differences between the two will indicate areas where you can use the data to improve the customer experience in a way that increases the average lifetime customer value.

Sound complicated? It can be, but the time and energy invested into using your customer service data will be returned ten-fold in the value of your customers.

15 Feb 18:02

These Bolts Change Color When Tightened Properly

I love torque wrenches, because they let me ensure that dangerous parts like lawnmower blades are properly tightened. But what if you didn't need the torque wrench (which are pretty damned pricey) at all? A company called Stress Indicators Inc. has invented SmartBolts, which feature a red dot in the head when loose. Once the bolt is tightened to the proper torque, it turns black:

The technology is a boon to maintenance folks, manufacturers and heavy equipment operators, as they can tell, at a glance, whether a bolt is starting to work loose.

"The constant movement of the welding robot was causing the bolts to lose tension," writes an anonymous heavy equipment manufacturer, in a testimonial on the SmartBolts website. "So we decided to retrofit our robots with SmartBolts; now the maintenance technician can look over during welding and visually check that the bolts are secure. This has had a positive impact on improving our overall safety and manufacturing efficiency."

"We initially had some concern about using these more 'expensive' bolts," writes Yajie Wang, and Advanced Process Engineer at Cooper Standard Automotive, "but after several tests and trials showing their value in added safety, as well as less downtime and visual inspections – it was an easy decision to replace all our mold clamping bolts with SmartBolts. And the appreciation our operators have expressed is priceless!"

As for how it works, the company (unsurprisingly) explains it in broad strokes only:

"A SmartBolt is a fastener with a built-in visual tension indicator. We call this the Visual Indication System™. As a SmartBolt is tightened, tension forces it to stretch, and our patented Visual Indication System™ correlates fastener tension with color."

You can check out pricing here.

15 Feb 18:01

B.C.'s industrial land squeeze spreads well beyond the Lower Mainland

by Derrick Penner

Industry owners who feel like they are being squeezed out of the Lower Mainland by soaring costs and lack of land for expansion won’t necessarily find relocating is an easy option.

Even if it makes sense to move in terms of the business, while opting for the less hectic, and less costly lifestyle of say, Kelowna or Victoria, similar limitations with real estate still apply.

“(In) Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna, at least, the core areas are squeezed in by mountains and rivers,” said Garry Fawley, CEO of Vancouver-headquartered Denciti Development Corp.

That has Denciti putting an expensive bet on building out a four-hectare (10.37-acre) industrial park just off Highway 97 outside of West Kelowna in the Okanagan.

Denciti spent about $10 million on the site with plans to divide it as a strata-titled property, with the first phase being marketed to smaller potential clients looking for between 1,250 and 10,000 square feet of industrially zoned space.

Fawley said his firm is putting together a database of potential buyers for the development, starting with smaller Okanagan firms struggling to find space for expansion in an industrial market that has 1.65 per cent vacancy.

However, Denciti also plans to test the Lower Mainland market for potential relocation targets, dangling the enticements of less-expensive housing and commuting times in the range of 20 minutes, not an hour or more, on top of less-expensive industrial real estate.

“In engaging the market, we’re going to learn more about who’s open minded to a relocation or expansion,” Fawley said.

Much of the news about industrial real estate in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley has been about the continuing squeeze on space.

Last June, the province’s Agricultural Land Commission rejected a proposal by the city of Abbotsford to remove almost 200 hectares from the agricultural land reserve, which would have relieved some of the pressure on the region’s industrial land base.

“People need to have a place to work, not just to live,” an exasperated Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun told Postmedia at the time.

While the unfamiliar might look at the Fraser Valley’s seemingly wide-open spaces as having plenty of room for an overflow of industrial users from Metro Vancouver, it too is becoming increasingly constrained.

Metro Vancouver, near the end of 2018, saw a slight uptick in industrial vacancy, according to a report from commercial realtor CBRE. However, it was only a small change to 1.8 per cent from 1.5 per cent, with the report remarking that almost 90 per cent of all new industrial-oriented construction delivered by the end of the quarter was already occupied upon completion.

Considering a relocation isn’t a simple calculation of comparing real estate prices — industrial and residential — and commuting times. It has to factor in where raw materials are coming from and the markets that finished goods have to be shipped to.

“If your finished product goes back to the Lower Mainland, it’s probably pretty challenging” to move to the Okanagan, said Eric Weber, an associate vice-president with commercial realtor Colliers International in Kelowna. “But if your distribution is through Western Canada, it could be a real benefit.”

An architect’s rendering and aerial photograph locating the four-hectare industrial business park being built by Denciti Development Corp. in the Okanagan municipality of West Kelowna. The company expects to break ground this spring hoping to have purchasers into its first phase by 2020.

Kelowna is not a good fit for businesses in the logistics and distribution sector that depend on long-haul links between the Port of Vancouver and Calgary, because Kelowna is not on the Trans Canada Highway, Weber said. “It’s not like a long-hauler is going to stop in,” Weber said.

And it’s not easy finding space in any major urban area in B.C.

Southern Vancouver Island, for instance, has a strong labour pool and lower cost of living, said Ty Whittaker, a senior vice-president with Colliers, but much of its available industrial space has been filled up by businesses that service ship maintenance at the Esquimalt navy base.

“Victoria has the lowest (industrial) vacancy in all of Canada at 1.3 per cent,” Whittaker said. “It’s ridiculously low.”

And in B.C.’s Interior and the Okanagan, Weber said conditions are almost equally limited.

“We’ve got tenants and buyers calling, saying ‘here are my requirements, what have you got for me,'” Weber, said. “And regrettably, we don’t have a heck of a lot we can show them.”

“In the good old days, we could say, “here’s four or five, which one do you like.'”

Now, brokers have maybe a couple of options to show clients, but those options might not meet specialized requirements for loading bays, ceiling heights or power.

“Even Kamloops, which for quite a while had reasonable selection for land inventory and (industrial) lo, appears to be quite limited,” Weber said.

depenner@postmedia.com

twitter.com/derrickpenner

15 Feb 17:58

Social Selling: Why Salespeople Should Be Curating Content

by Tom Martin

content curation for social selling sales prospecting

Whenever you read about Social Selling, everyone spends a lot of time talking about creating content. It makes sense, because content is at the core of a successful social selling program. But you shouldn’t be paying your salespeople to create content. Instead, teach them how to properly curate content to create awareness, entice interest and convert sales prospects to happy new customers.

And that’s why today we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about the four key social selling roles of content curation for salespeople.

Content Curation vs Content Filtering

First though, let’s talk about the difference between Content Filtering and Content Curation because most folks use the latter term as a generic.

Specifically speaking, most of what you see in today’s Social Selling efforts is Content Filtering — folks finding and sharing “helpful” articles, research, etc., on social media or via direct channels such as text and email.

Content Curation takes Content Filtering one step further on the helpfulness meter. When you curate content, you don’t just find and share. You find and share along with some kind of contextual information you add. It’s this context that helps your reader understand why they should pay attention to the content you’re sharing and what it should mean for their business. It’s what converts the content you share from noise to signal.

Anyone can filter and share. But when you truly curate, add that additional contextual information or frame of reference, you begin to craft an image in your prospects’ mind. Now you’re not just the human RSS feed for (insert topic here) but instead evolve to the known expert in a particular vertical, category or field.

But at a more basic level, content curation helps salespeople achieve four key sales KPIs.

Name Awareness

At its base, content curation creates awareness of your salespeople, your brand(s), product(s) and your organization. While your sales & marketing goal is to achieve TOMP, you can accomplish a lot of that preference building simply by curating vs always creating new content to share. More importantly, because your salespeople can easily curate far more content then your marketing teams could ever create, they can share more often. Remember, out of sight is out of mind — so when it comes to building name awareness, frequency is your friend.

Ultimately though, when your salespeople consistently link themselves to appropriate, helpful content coupled with their own added context, they not only begin to create baseline awareness, but more importantly, maybe even a little bit of preference – the kind that gets their proposal top-of-stack status.

Invisible Sales Prospects

When your salespeople are constantly pushing targeted content out into the world at their key Propinquity Points , they give people a chance to send them a sales signal — especially the invisible buyer. No, not the one you can’t see, but more importantly, the one they can see but they’re not aware that person moved from contact to prospect.

When salespeople share content and people engage with that content, those salespeople can see and track that engagement. That’s huge from a sales prospecting point of view. Think about how many voicemails are left every day by salespeople and none of them will ever know if the voicemail was listened to or ignored outright. BUT with social sharing, you can see who engages with the content you share.

If a current contact all of a sudden begins engaging with certain types of content, say content about sales prospecting, that’s a signal. If your salespeople follow those signals, chances are they’ll find a willing sales prospect that will welcome their outreach.

Lead Nurturing

Content is the ultimate lead nurturing tool. Maybe a salesperson has a stuck lead. Someone who has gone radio silent. Instead of blowing up their email and phone with “did you receive” or “how can I be of service” messages, teach your sales teams to send the prospect an appropriate piece of content. I do this all of the time and it never ceases to amaze me how often it entices some kind of response or action.

Or if your sales team is working with a lead that has a long sales cycle or is trying to convince colleagues they need to buy what your company sells, content is a great tool in a nurturing process. Teach your sales teams to find great content, preferably from media or content sites vs competitors, that speaks to the issues, hurdles or possibilities associated with what the prospect is buying. Then send that along periodically via social, text or email to your sales prospect. It’s easy, and it works.

Networking

There is really two ways to use content curation as a networking tool.

If there are people (prospects or influencers) your sales teams want to stay in touch with, meet, etc., and those people publish content, republishing their content and tagging them reminds them that your salesperson respects and values the person’s contribution. It also reminds them that your salesperson is doing his or her little part to help the person gain a wider audience. It’s a very effective way to make friends and gain meetings — virtual or in the real world.

Additionally, curated content is excellent for staying in touch with sales prospects. Teach your sales teams to find good studies, articles or presentations. Then, put in a system that makes it easy for them to look back in their CRM for all of the sales prospects or influencers that would be interested in what they’ve found. Hint: if they’ve properly tagged everyone in the company CRM, this should be pretty easy. Then, teach them to create a quick, personalized, merge email that explains what they’ve found and why they’re sending it along. All that is left is for them to hit send. Presto, they just networked at scale with multiple people and it took them just a few minutes to create the email.

But remember, the key here is the curation — that added context that your salesperson provides. That’s what makes their content not only stand out, but also helps them to build a relationship with their sales prospect.

15 Feb 17:57

How Startups Can Deal With Scaling Problems

by Joe Flanagan

In the USA, more than 50% of businesses fail within the first 5 years of operations, though the rate changes depending on the particular industry. Premature scaling is the leading cause of failure, but businesses with two founders are 19% less likely to scale prematurely, as well as raising 30% more money and enjoying 3 times more user growth. This indicates that choosing a good partner early on could solve a lot of problems down the line.

But scaling is a unique phenomenon which needs to be constantly managed. The startups that scale the best are the ones that will be the most successful. There are ways to tackle the plethora of scaling difficulties facing startups and they need to be given serious consideration.

Use Automation

Automation is going to become the defining characteristic of 21st-century business. Automation technology has already permeated the digital marketing and online business models. There are automation tools for email marketing, social media management, paid advertising campaigns, chatbots, scheduling, data analytics and more.

Automation is perfect for scale because it leads to the routine completion of tasks without any extra cost. There are also many online tools that can assist when collaborating with large global teams, such as Slack, Trello or Asana. Of course, it is important to be very selective in what you choose to automate. As per Bill Gates, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Employ Freelancers

Freelancers are another way to scale a business without breaking the bank. Hiring an employee is a very expensive process. It requires an interview and vetting system, negotiation of terms and conditions, expenses, healthcare, insurance, mandated holidays and many other complexities.

In contrast, it is possible to hire a freelancer to complete a job in as little as 24 hours and then go your separate ways without any hassle.

Another advantage is that with a long-term employee the skill set is limited to that particular person. But it is possible to hire a freelancer with a specific skill set for a short time period and hire another one with different skills for a different task.

In short, freelancers offer flexibility and efficiency. Startups should investigate the benefits of using freelancers for jobs that need to get done as they arise. They can often constitute a low-cost means of expansion without being tied down for the long-term. Good freelance platforms include UpWork and People Per Hour.

Be Prepared to Change

Studies have indicated that businesses that change their model frequently have a far better chance of success compared to startups that stick to the same business model. In other words, adaptability and flexibility are core components of success. Startups will need to take opportunities as they arise.

There is a big jump from a startup to a medium-sized enterprise and the thinking and business model may have to change. This will nearly always mean a significant shift in terms of the hierarchical structure of the company as well as new departments. Streamlined managerial reporting and a compartmentalized system are very important to scaling a business so that the flow of information is as smooth as possible.

Scaling is not optional and change is a prerequisite. According to James Penny of JC Penny, “No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn’t.”

Scale Sensibly and at the Right Time

Scaling too early has been identified as the number one cause of startup failure. A study undertaken by Startup Genome indicated that 70% of startups were guilty of scaling too early.

The way this takes place is that firms scale in an area where it is not necessary. They complete this scaling ineffectively, and also completely fail to scale in the necessary areas. Startups often scale with known product errors believing that these can be fixed with time.

They also have a tendency to scale without understanding their customer base. These are grave errors and it is best to wait for the right moment to expand. The comprehensive study also demonstrated that startups that were willing to change their business model once or twice were far more successful in the long-term.

Despite all the hype about information companies, they are the ones most likely to fail with only 37% surviving after 5 years. The best industries include finance, insurance and real estate where 58% survive past the 5-year mark. The total average across industries is 50% after 5 years.

Changing Roles or Cutting Back

As a business scales, it can become necessary to bring in new talent while sometimes letting other employees and third-parties go that are no longer a fit. Cutting back what no longers works is equally as important as expanding in new directions, though this point is often not understood by business owners.

While removing people from the startup can sound harsh, sound business choices do need to be made. Before letting staff go, consider in an agile startup environment if their skillset may fit another area of the business better. If that’s not possible then restructuring the workforce may be necessary. Startups and small businesses can make use of outplacement services to assist in transition and reorganization.

According to Pavel Krapivin, Founder of VelvetJobs, “Businesses that plan to scale sometimes need to restructure while aiming to attract new talent. Instead of leaving a former employee displaced we match their skills to new jobs and connect them with a large number of support services such as counseling, interview preparation, resume writing and upskill initiatives. This can improve the reputation of the startup and bolster productivity of the existing workforce with the knowledge they will be looked after in future.”

Identify Scaling Errors and Focus on Smart Scaling

Scaling needs to be looked at in a realm of its own as opposed to something that takes care of itself while building a better business. This means that startups need to look at the different aspects of scaling. Everything needs to scale in tandem, so your sales, product improvement, hiring, customer service, testing, marketing and networking needs to grow together as much as possible.

If any of these are focused on too much or too little, it can lead to imbalances. Try to isolate what needs to scale the most right now and don’t focus too much on one area of scaling. This mistake is often made when businesses place too much of an emphasis on profit maximization and blow budgets on sales and marketing.

It can also be very helpful to identify what typically goes wrong in terms of scaling a business. The most common errors made in relation to incorrect scaling as per a De Gruyter research paper are:

  1. Spending too much on customer acquisition
  2. Adding unnecessary features just because they are “nice to have”
  3. Hiring too many people too early
  4. Not adapting the business model to a changing environment
  5. Hiring managers instead of functional specialists
  6. Scaling the product before its a market fit
  7. Investing in scalability before the product is ready to scale

Systematize

As a business grows, it becomes necessary to compartmentalize so that there are specific people working on specific roles and functions. The startup culture is just not a fit as the company expands and it becomes more important to be professional and detailed across all aspects of the business. This means more clearly defined roles for all people and an efficient reporting process. Everybody who comes into the company needs to know what their roles are and communication needs to become paramount.

Taking a startup to the next level requires a delicate mix of systematic and cautious experimentation with some innovation and risk-taking. There is no standardized path to success and as per ‘Scaling Up’ author Verne Harnish “There are no straight lines in business or nature.” This means that startup owners will have to follow certain trends and patterns while choosing to be innovative and creative in others.

The post How Startups Can Deal With Scaling Problems appeared first on OpenView Labs.

15 Feb 17:57

How to decarbonize America — and the world

by Jonathan Shieber
Ramez Naam Contributor
More posts by this contributor

The Green New Deal has burst onto the American stage, spurring more conversation about – and aspiration for – ambitious climate policy than at any point in at least a decade.

I’m glad to see it. Suddenly, climate is on the agenda, and ambitions for climate policy are higher than perhaps at any point in US history.

The Green New Deal is a resolution right now. It’s a statement of intent. It hasn’t yet progressed to the point of detailed policy proposals or legislation, which means now is the time to help craft its details.

For the last decade I’ve written about and publicly spoken about innovation in clean technology and ways to address climate change. I’ve helped to lead a climate-fighting citizen ballot initiative in my home state of Washington, invested in clean energy startups, and advised on climate and clean energy policies of other nations.

In that time, my views on what sort of climate policies have the most impact and have the greatest chances of winning over voters have changed. Policies that I thought were foolish a decade ago have revealed themselves to have been farsighted and effective. Policies I thought were powerful and elegant have, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to be far less effective than I believed. And the history of climate and energy legislation and attitudes in the US has demonstrated a path to getting new and more ambitious policies passed.

What I’ve learned over time is that good climate policy has 3 key traits:

  1. It has a large, meaningful impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
  2. It specifically tackles the problems that aren’t already being tackled by the market.
  3. It actually gets passed into law.

All of that is compatible with a Green New Deal. Here’s what it could look like.

  1. Impact: Climate Change Isn’t Local. Good Policy Isn’t, Either.

The conventional wisdom on climate policy is straightforward. Every nation uses its policies to reduce its own emissions. This conventional wisdom is wrong. Carbon dioxide doesn’t honor national boundaries. Climate change is global. And the best climate policies have a global impact as well.

The US, overwhelmingly, is the country most responsible for climate change. The carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’ve emitted over the past decades are largely still in the atmosphere, still warming the planet. The world’s present and future emissions, though, are increasingly elsewhere. The US now accounts for just 15% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.  And because the developing world is rising in energy consumption far faster than the US, American emissions will be an ever-smaller share each year.

That means that, despite the fact that the US is the largest overall contributor to climate change thus far, the US could completely eliminate its carbon emissions and barely affect the future course of climate.

This means we need a different strategy. It’s not enough to eliminate the US’s carbon emissions alone. Our goal has to be to drive down the whole world’s emissions.

The Most Effective Climate Policy in the World

How can the US drive down the emissions of other countries? We can do it by making clean technologies irresistible to the entire world. And there we can take a lesson from the most effective climate policy of all time – Germany’s early subsidies of solar and wind.

Solar panels and electricity-producing wind farms have been around for decades. Yet, for most of that time, they’ve been a far more expensive way to produce electricity than burning coal or natural gas. Germany changed that. Starting in 2010, Germany’s Energiewende legislation heavily subsidized solar and wind. That, in turn, drove utilities and home owners and corporations to purchase solar and wind. And that, in turn, made the technology cheaper. As prices fell, other nations – first European nations, then the US, and then China – jumped into the fray, enacting more ambitious policies that further brought down the price of solar and wind (and now batteries and electric cars).

Why did subsidies bring down the price of technology? Because industry scale leads to industry learning and innovation, and that, in turn, leads to lower cost ways to manufacture, deploy, and manage new technologies. We’ve seen this for a century. Almost all technologies improve via Wright’s Law, often referred to as the learning curve or the experience curve.  In the late 1930s, Theodore Paul Wright, an aeronautical engineer, observed that every doubling of production of US aircraft brought down prices by 13%.  Since then, a similar effect has been found in nearly every technology area, going back to the Ford Model T.

Electricity from solar power, meanwhile, drops in cost by 25-30% for every doubling in scale. Battery costs drop around 20-30% per doubling of scale. Wind power costs drop by 15-20% for every doubling.  Scale leads to learning, and learning leads to lower costs.

Germany began subsidizing solar and wind when they were extremely small scale industries, and their costs were quite high. Those subsidies drove German utilities, businesses, and home owners to purchase clean energy. That created a market. That, in turn, led solar and wind manufacturers to leap into the market, competing ruthlessly against one another to bring down their prices faster, offering the best product at the best price to customers.

By scaling the clean energy industries, Germany lowered the price of solar and wind for everyone, worldwide, forever.

The International Renewable Energy Agency finds that, between 2010 and 2019, the price of solar power, worldwide, has dropped by more than a factor of 5. The price of offshore wind power has dropped by a factor of three.

In just the past decade, solar power has gone from being uneconomical anywhere on earth without subsidies, to being cheaper than any fossil fuel electricity in the sunniest parts of the world. Building new solar is now cheaper than building new fossil fuel electricity plants in India, Chile, Mexico, Spain, and in sunny US states like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and  Texas.

And because, in general, businesses, utilities, and consumers all around the world will deploy the cheapest energy they can, solar is now the fastest growing energy source around the world.

Happy? Good. Thank policy makers in Germany, and the US, and China – all of whom took action to bootstrap markets for solar and wind before they were cost-competitive.

The lesson for US climate policy is clear: The biggest impact we can have is by driving down the cost of technologies that reduce carbon emissions, to the point that clean technologies are cheapest way to provide the energy, food, and transportation that everyone around the world desires, and then spreading those technologies to the world. That means a mix of early-stage government R&D, government incentives to scale deployment in the private sector, and a very healthy dollop of private sector competition.

1 – As solar volume has grown, prices have dropped, leading to more growth.

Would the Green New Deal drive down the cost of clean technologies in a way that scales to the rest of the world? The current resolution is vague on exactly how the rapid decarbonization in the US would happen. One reason for concern is that the now-retracted Green New Deal FAQ released by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically dismissed the idea that the private sector – even with government incentives – could pull off this decarbonization, and explicitly says that “Merely incentivizing the private sector doesn’t work”.

I agree in one sense – basic government R&D is a high-value investment, especially when the technologies we need to invent don’t even exist yet. The government has a vital role to play. At the same time, the incredible, unprecedented decline in cost of solar power, wind power, batteries, and electric cars has happened both because of early government R&D, and because private sector companies, incentivized by governments, have brought these technologies to market and been forced to compete with one another to provide the best technology at the lowest price. Ignoring this is to ignore what brought us the very best progress we’ve seen in cleaning up the way we produce energy.

The FAQ I reference has been retracted. The Green New Deal hasn’t yet become a detailed roadmap or legislation. As it does, I urge you, Green New Deal legislators and architects: Craft policies that create incentives to build and deploy clean technologies. Then use the market for what it’s good at: fierce competition that delivers ever-better products at ever-lower prices.

  1. Tackling the Hardest, Least-Solved Problems

The Green New Deal resolution is really quite comprehensive. It touches on almost every source of US emissions.

Even so, there’s a tendency for climate and energy wonks – and legislators – to focus on electricity and cars when discussing climate policy.

Electricity and cars aren’t our hardest problems. They’re both big chunks of our carbon emissions, yes. And they both need more policy to drive them home. (More on that down below.) They’re also the areas where we’ve made the most progress, with incredible declines in the price of clean electricity and electric vehicles that put us at the edge of a tipping point. We aren’t over the hump yet, but the solutions are here – and if we continue to push them with policy, we can decarbonize electricity and cars.

Our hardest climate problems – the ones that are both large and lack obvious solutions – are agriculture (and deforestation – its major side effect) and industry. Together these are 45% of global carbon emissions. And solutions are scarce.

Agriculture and land use account for 24% of all human emissions. That’s nearly as much as electricity, and twice as much all the world’s passenger cars combined.

Industry – steel, cement, and manufacturing – account for 21% of human emissions – one and a half times as much as all the world’s cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes combined.

Add industry, agriculture, and land use together and you have a very sticky, very difficult-to-improve 45% of carbon emissions.

By contrast, electricity and transportation are 39% of global emissions – nearly as big. The good news is that in electricity and transportation, we have momentum.

We do NOT have momentum in reducing the carbon emissions of industry and agriculture.

Decarbonizing Agriculture and Industry

The Green New Deal does, happily, mention these sectors. In agriculture, though, it avoids the biggest chunk of the problem: Livestock.

Livestock around the world – specifically cows, pigs, and other mammals – consume a tremendous amount of the world’s agriculture output. They drive the bulk of the deforestation around the world (which itself releases carbon into the atmosphere, and reduces forest land that could absorb carbon instead). And cows and pigs belch methane – a greenhouse gas that’s causes tremendously more warming than CO2 – about 100 times more in the first year, and 30 times more over the course of a century. Livestock in total produce about 15% of the world’s carbon emissions, as much as all transportation on land, air, and sea combined.

And the world’s appetite for meat is rapidly growing, with consumption expected to double in the next 40 or so years.

Cows should scare you more than coal.

In industry, meanwhile, steel and cement production both remain incredibly carbon intensive. We’ve learned to recycle steel using electricity, but making new steel from ore still involves the use of a tremendous amount of coal. (Theoretical ways to make steel without coal exist, but aren’t expected to be commercially viable for another 20 years.) We’re closer to technologies that could make cement without carbon emissions, but those technologies are still young, expensive, and haven’t been deployed to any significant degree. And the rest of industry – from manufacturing finished goods to making petrochemical products like plastics and lubricants – remains extremely carbon intensive.

These two sectors – agriculture and industry – are on path to be the two largest sources of carbon emissions in the world. And they’re the ones we have the fewest and least developed solutions for. The Green New Deal – or any serious climate policy – ought to focus first and foremost on R&D to develop methods for clean agriculture and clean construction and manufacturing; and then on incentives to deploy those clean methods, which will initially be extremely expensive, until they hit the scale to compete directly with dirty methods on cost alone.

What would a climate policy for agriculture and industry look like?  Let’s take a page from energy, where we have a one-two punch: 1) Agencies like the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, ARPA-E, that funds early stage energy science and technology R&D; and 2) A breadth of state and national subsidies and incentives that help those technologies reach higher scale and lower costs.  

This one-two punch first invents technology (ARPA-E is modeled after the original ARPA, which created the foundations of the internet, originally called ARPANET), and then scales technology to the point that the new clean technology is cheaper than the alternatives.

We can use that one-two punch in agriculture and industry, by creating:

  1. An ARPA-A in the Department of Agriculture, tasked with finding a way to reduce the carbon emissions of agriculture broadly, and especially of livestock and meat. ARPA-A might fund research into:
    1. Radically increasing crop yields so farmers have less need to chop down forests to feed their animals.
    2. Technologies to eliminate the methane emissions of cows and pigs.
    3. Technologies to reduce the emissions of NOx (another incredibly powerful greenhouse gas) that’s produced by animal manure left on fields, and to a lesser extent by excess synthetic fertilizer.
    4. Real-time global deforestation monitoring technology, (perhaps in partnership with other agencies) to spot illegal deforestation as soon as it happens, and nip it in the bud.
    5. New alternatives to meat – from plants or stem cells – that might someday taste and feel as compelling as the real thing.
  2. Incentives to Deploy Clean Agriculture would be paired with the early-stage research of an ARPA-A.  Just-out-of-the-lab technologies to reduce agricultural greenhouse emissions are likely to start expensive. Early (and steep) subsidies could motivate farmers (or even consumers) to adopt those new technologies and products. Just like German subsidies, by scaling solar, bootstrapped an industry whose fierce competition then brought down prices, early subsidies for clean agriculture and clean foods would do the same.

    Such incentives could include:
    1. Incentives for farmers who capture carbon in their soils. (By far the cheapest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere.)
    2. Subsidizing feed additives or other products that reduce methane emissions or NOx emissions from animals and their manure.
    3. Tax breaks for farmers who invest in “precision agriculture” technologies that reduce the amount of fertilizer or fuel they use on the farm.
    4. Incentives for farmers to deploy clean energy on their farms, and to switch farm operations from diesel to electric.
  3. An ARPA-I for Industry, meanwhile, would be chartered with funding early stage R&D in carbon-free industry.  Research areas would include:
    1. Carbon-free steel – technologies that can make steel from iron ore without the use of coal.
    2. Carbon-free cement technologies.
    3. Alternative building materials that have lower carbon emissions.
    4. Carbon-free manufacturing technologies.  
    5. Better carbon-free or low-carbon plastics, lubricants, and other petrochemicals that don’t require oil extraction.

In several of these areas some options exist today, but a need for more innovation and more fundamental research – that the federal government is uniquely equipped to fund – still exists.

2-ARPA-I would fund research to decarbonize industry, starting with the largest industrial sources – steel, cement, and petrochemicals.

  1. Incentives to Deploy Carbon-Free Industrial Methods would give steel mills, manufacturers, and builders a reason to use these new, carbon-free methods while they’re still young and expensive.  These incentives would include:
    1. Tax breaks for new carbon-free industrial equipment, to reduce the cost for manufacturers to adopt these new technologies in their early stages.
    2. Tax breaks or subsidies for the buyers of carbon-free steel, cement, or other industrial goods, to bootstrap a market of customers for these new products and grow it to scale.  

As with solar and wind in Germany, scaling use of these methods in industry would bring their prices down, with a target of beating the price of existing, carbon-heavy methods.

All of the above is compatible with Green New Deal language. It’s just a matter of emphasis. We need to double down on these two areas – agriculture and industry – that are soon to be the largest sources of global carbon emissions, and the ones we have the least progress in solving.

  1. Good Policy Must be Passable

Perhaps the most important question about the Green New Deal is this – what can we actually pass?

The Green New Deal has already moved the Overton window, by elevating the conversation about climate. At the state level, in progressive states like California and New York, Democrats have solid majorities and could pass large parts of the Green New Deal that are applicable at a state level. As I argued just after Donald Trump’s election, the States are where we can most effectively push for climate action.

What about at the Federal level? Maybe the Green New Deal, by motivating the base, will lead to more electoral victories for Democrats in 2020.  Or maybe it will hurt in red states like Alabama, where Democrats are defending a Senate seat. It’s far too early to say.

Democrats don’t have any chance of reaching 60 Senate seats in 2020. They do have the option, if they win a majority and the Presidency, of eliminating the legislative filibuster (using the so-called “nuclear option”), in which case a simple majority of the House and Senate could pass as much of the Green New Deal as Democrats could achieve consensus on, without the need for any Republican legislators.

What if none of the above occurs? What if Democrats don’t get a Senate majority at all? Or do get a majority, but are unwilling to eliminate the legislative filibuster?  Could any parts of the Green New Deal pass with some Republican support?

Bipartisan Climate Policy is Possible. In Fact, It’s Here Now

Yes. Recent history shows that, while climate is a highly divisive issue in the US, clean energy and innovation have massive support on both sides of the aisle.

Consider the following:

  1. In 2015, a Republican Congress reached a bipartisan deal to extend the solar and wind tax credits (the ITC and PTC) out through 2022.
  2. In 2017, a Republican Congress, under Donald Trump, could have easily repealed or prematurely ended these tax credits. Yet the GOP left solar, wind, and electric vehicle tax credits untouched.
  3. In 2017, a Republican Congress gave clean energy research in the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E its largest budget increase since 2009.

Wait. Don’t Republicans hate clean energy?

Nope. Not at all. Americans on both sides of the aisle love solar and wind.  Solar is the most popular energy source in the US, with 76% of Americans saying that their utility should get more energy from solar. Wind is a close second, at 71%.  The third choice, natural gas, is 24 points behind solar, at 52%. And a meager 30% of Americans want more coal.

It helps that clean energy is literally everywhere in America. Solar and wind have been built out in every state. Wind power, especially, is booming in rural districts in red states. Representatives from these districts, and Republican Senators from red states like Iowa and Texas that have deployed a tremendous amount of solar and wind, have every reason to support policies that benefit clean energy.

What’s more, Americans – on both sides of the aisle – wildly support research into new technologies that can improve their lives. A whopping 85% of Americans support funding more research into renewable energy sources. Ready for the real shocker? Solid majorities in virtually every county and every congressional district in the US support more funding of research into clean energy.

Nearly as many Americans – 82% – support tax breaks for Americans who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels. And again, the support isn’t limited to blue states or blue districts. It’s overwhelmingly national.

So Americans don’t just love innovation and R&D spending. They also support incentives to deploy clean technology faster. And, in fact, those two policy levers – more research funding, and incentives to deploy clean technology – get both the most support in poll after poll, the most bipartisan support, and the most geographically consistent support.  If you want a policy proposal that that will work in red or purple states, or that can win over some Republican Senators and Representatives, clean technology research and clean technology deployment incentives are the two most likely to garner support.

What Bipartisan Policy Would Look Like

If Democrats do get both the White House a filibuster-proof congressional majority – one way or another – and get enough internal consensus, they can drive forward whatever GND policy they wish. Right now, that seems unlikely to me.

In the event that we have a Congress without that filibuster-proof majority, or with enough moderate democrats who balk at the entirety of the Green New Deal, there are still extremely effective climate policies that Congress can put in place.

First, in industry and agriculture, the four policies we mentioned already:

  1. ARPA-A to fund research into carbon-free agriculture & forestry.
  2. Clean Agriculture Incentives and subsidies to deploy carbon-free ag rapidly to farmers and drive down its price through scale.
  3. ARPA-I to fund research into carbon-free steel, cement, and manufacturing.
  4. Clean Industry Incentives and subsidies to deploy carbon-free industrial tech and drive it down in price.

Those policies in agriculture and industry have an excellent chance of getting bipartisan support. They follow a pattern of Americans being willing to invest in new science and technology R&D. And, because they benefit industrial and agricultural states and districts, by giving carrots for deploying clean industry and clean agriculture, they’re a benefit to politicians from those – often red – states that have the greatest concentration of farms and factories. That’s the exact opposite of a policy that penalized farmers or factories for their carbon emissions. You’d have a hard time getting much bipartisan support for that. Make the policy an incentive that helps farms and industry thrive, and helps them get an edge over their global competitors, and the politics completely change.

In electricity, transportation, and buildings, there are also policies – some of them counter-intuitive  – that would accelerate us towards a clean future :

  1. Continent-Wide Electricity Transmission.  It’s a common perception that renewable energy means less dependence on the grid. The opposite is true, for two reasons. First, at any given time, weather may hurt the output of solar panels or wind farms in any given area. The further away you are from that area, the less likely you are to be in the same weather pattern. Second, the sunniest parts of the US, the windiest parts of the US, and the parts of the US that need the most electricity don’t all coincide. Study after study shows that the larger an area we integrate renewables over, the more renewables we can put on the grid, and the lower the cost.

3- A nation-sized grid increases the amount of energy we can use from solar and wind, and reduces the overall cost. Source – Nature Climate Change

Long-range transmission is also remarkably efficient and low cost. High-voltage DC transmission lines can send power 2,000 miles with only 10% losses and a small additional cost. That means solar power plants in Texas could be powering New York City…an hour after the sun has gone down in New York. China understands this, and is building the world’s largest high voltage power grid, moving power from the sunniest and windiest areas in the west to the coastal population centers 3,000 km (1,860 miles) east.  In the US, meanwhile, it’s nearly impossible to build new long-range transmission – largely because of NIMBY. Congress should make it easier to get the necessary permissions to build transmission, paving the way for a grid with more and cheaper clean energy.

4- China’s Ultra High Voltage Grid moves clean energy 2,000 miles from the sunny and windy interior to the population centers on the eastern coast.  The US has nothing similar.

  1. Clear the Way for Offshore Wind. The most exciting development in wind power is building offshore. Winds blow faster and more consistently just a few miles off the coast of the US than they do almost anywhere on land. Not only does that mean offshore wind power is likely to be the cheapest wind power, it also means – because the winds are more steady – that it causes fewer intermittency problems for grid operators and is closer to being a “baseload”-like power source. Offshore wind sites are also closer to electricity demand in cities along the coast, making it easier to get power where its needed. And while solar power peaks in the sunny months of summer, wind power peaks in winter – making solar and wind great complements for each other. Offshore wind has plunged in price in Europe, reaching grid parity last summer, and is now growing faster there than wind power on land. It’s also still much smaller than on-land wind. That means that is has much farther to fall in price, and that deploying it now can bring the price down faster than with on-land wind. Unfortunately, the US is far behind in building offshore wind. A law from the 1920s and a raft of lawsuits have held offshore wind power up. Congress can and should take action to clear the way for offshore wind.
  2. Extend & Unify Solar, Wind, and Energy Storage Tax Incentives. Congress should make the 30% Investment Tax Credit for solar (the ITC) permanent. Failing that, it should extend it out to at least 2030. Wind, which has long mostly used a different tax credit called the PTC, should be moved to the same 30% tax credit and timing as solar. Energy storage – batteries and the technologies that come after them – should get the exact same tax credit, however and wherever that energy storage technology is deployed. While this tax credit may sound modest, solar and wind are now on the very edge of a tipping point.  

    Consider, for example, that late last year, a utility in Northern Indiana announced that the cheapest way for it to provide power to its customers was to go from being 65% coal powered today, to just 15% coal powered by 2023, and zero coal by 2028 – and to replace that coal with solar, wind, batteries, and flexible storage.  Let me repeat that: This utility wants to replace 50% of their power generation in just 4 years, and the rest in 5 more. And it wants to do so because solar and wind and batteries are cheaper than running their existing coal power plants. That’s a tipping point moment. And the solar and wind deployed in Indiana will lower the cost of future solar and wind deployed elsewhere. If this sort of tipping point can happen in Indiana, a deeply red state that Donald Trump won by 19 points, that isn’t all that sunny, and that has good but not amazing wind, then that tipping point can happen anywhere. Our job is to keep the pressure up.
  3. A National Renewable Portfolio Standard. 29 US states – including red states like Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio – have Renewable Portfolio Standards that mandate that a certain percentage of their electricity must come from carbon-free or renewable sources. That means 21 states don’t have such mandates. If electricity were a perfectly competitive market, solar and wind and batteries would win on price and displace coal and gas in all these states. But utilities have a number of ways to resist change, even when it makes economic sense.

5-29 US States have Renewable Portfolio Standards

The solution is for Congress to mandate a Renewable Portfolio Standard nationally, dragging the laggard states up to the standard of the rest. How high should that mandate be? The Green New Deal goal of 100% carbon free electricity by 2030 is incredibly ambitious. And it pushes us into the unknown. Beyond 70 or 80 or 90% of electricity from renewables, integration becomes increasingly difficult as periods of bad weather nation-wide cause serious problems. The technical challenges there can be overcome – perhaps through nuclear, or next-generation carbon-capturing natural-gas plants, or long-term energy storage technologies (which are being funded by ARPA-E).

Those challenges are still real enough that even a clean energy optimist like me gets nervous. A goal of 50% of electricity from carbon free sources in every state by 2030, then 80% by 2040, and 100% by 2050 would be in-line with what scientific models say we need to achieve in order to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. And by scaling both clean energy and the technology to integrate it to high percentages of the total grid, it would drive those technologies down in price for the rest of the world, and pave the way for cleaner grids everywhere.

  1. Permanent, Uncapped, On-the-Spot Electric Vehicle Tax Credit. On transportation, we may have reached another tipping point. 2018 may have been the peak year for gasoline and diesel car sales, ever.  Electric Vehicles, while still small in number, are growing at an astounding rate, and account for all growth in the auto industry. In some areas, electric vehicles are now cheaper to own than gasoline cars on a per-mile basis. And that will become true in more and more areas as the price of batteries declines. Even so, we need to move faster. On average, a US car gets replaced when it’s around 10 years old. That means that, even if electric vehicles were 100% of new sales today, it would take around 20 years for them to replace all gasoline cars. That needs to happen faster. Congress can help.

First, for individually owned vehicles, Congress should improve the federal electric vehicle tax credit. Today’s $7,500 federal tax credit is capped at 200,000 electric vehicles per manufacturer. That’s an absurdly low number in a country that has 260 million cars on the road. General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently called for the cap to be removed. Congress ought to put electric vehicles on the same footing as solar, wind, and batteries: A 30% tax credit – like the solar ITC – with no limit on the number of vehicles its applied to would be simple, clear, and consistent. For individuals buying their own vehicles, that tax credit ought to be structured so it can be taken off the purchase price of the vehicle directly, rather than waiting for tax season.

Second, the same tax credit ought to apply to fleet operators who buy or build electric vehicles to offer rides to consumers. While the pace at which consumers buy new cars is slow, the pace at which they switch miles of transport can be far faster, as they switch some of their travel to fleets like Uber, Lyft, and whatever comes after. Those fleets, today, are mostly gasoline engine vehicles of hybrids. As electric vehicles increasingly become the cheapest per mile, those app-based transport fleets will go electric. And a typical taxi drives 70,000 miles a year, or roughly 4 times the 13,500 miles per year of a typical individually-owned car. That means each electric vehicle deployed as a taxi can have the impact of four individually owned vehicles.

Finally, Congress ought to accelerate the deployment of autonomous cars on the nation’s roads. Why? Because an autonomous vehicle, by taking out the cost of the driver, can cut the cost per mile by half. Some calculations show that an autonomous electric taxi, by 2025, could cost 35 cents per mile. That’s 1/10th of what a taxi costs, 1/5th of what a Lyft or UberX costs today, and half the cost of owning and operating your own car. That lower cost would cause even more rapid switching to electric transport fleets, as currently-owned gasoline vehicles increasingly sat unused, or saved for long-distance trips or other scenarios. Some studies find that, even at twice that price, as much as 40% of miles driven would switch to these electric fleets.

6 – Autonomous Electric Taxis could be half the cost per mile of owning and operating a gasoline car – if autonomous vehicles arrive.

Getting to those costs absolutely depends on autonomy. Today, however, autonomous driving is regulated by a hodge-podge of different laws at the State level. Congress should step in and act to standardize safety testing, unify laws between states, and accelerate the deployment of safe, cheap, efficient, electric autonomous taxi services.  Congress almost did so in 2018. It’s time to try again.

These three actions would both accelerate the deployment of electric vehicles in the US, and drive innovation in a sector where US companies are currently in the lead, and where they could be global leaders in trillion-dollar industries for decades to come.

  1. Incentives for EV Chargers – Everywhere. Deploying more electric vehicles also means a demand for more charging infrastructure.  Congress ought to create incentives to deploy electric chargers in the places they make the most sense, and to lower the cost of charging stations by scaling them.

    For individually-owned vehicles, incentives already exist to install a charger at home.  But drivers who park on the street or who live in apartment buildings without charging don’t have an easy way to use a home charger. Congress ought to create federal incentives to deploy charging stations in multi-unit buildings, in malls, at grocery stores, and so on. Congress should especially create incentives for employers to deploy charging stations for their employees at work.  Charging stations make the most sense in the locations that cars spend the most time in. And after home, the clear #2 for most vehicles is at work. In addition, vehicles driven to work are most likely to be idle during the day – when solar power is producing. Charing electric vehicles during the day both allows the US to put more total solar power to use (effectively storing it in these vehicles) and solves the problem of a lack of charging location for those who don’t have convenient charging at home.

    Similarly, if transportation is going to move more and more to electric (possibly autonomous) taxi fleets, those vehicles will need charging too. Congress ought to create incentives for that charging infrastructure to accelerate its deployment.

    More generally a report from the Smart Electric Power Alliance finds that  as electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging infrastructure spread, there’s an opportunity to use software to manage when vehicles charge, to line that charging up with both solar and with the hours of peak wind power output, allowing more renewables to be integrated onto the grid.  

7 – Electric vehicles with smart chargers could charge when solar and wind are most abundant on the grid, increasing the amount of renewable energy we can use.

  1. Tax Credits for Carbon-Free Heating and Building Efficiency. Beyond electricity and transportation, heating buildings accounts for 6% of all carbon emissions around the world, and is growing rapidly. To decarbonize the world’s economy, we need to shift from heating with natural gas (or, in the poorest parts of the world, with coal or wood) to heating with carbon-free energy. While extending tax credits for solar and wind, Congress should keep those credits consistent for passive solar heating and geothermal heating systems, and extend those tax credits to also to include switching to an electric heat pumps, and any energy efficiency improvements made to a building.

Wait, but what about?

So I didn’t list your favorite technology, policy, or issue?  Here:

  1. Nuclear.  In 2018, the US got roughly 20% of its electricity from nuclear power, or roughly twice as much as it does from solar and wind combined. That’s carbon-free electricity from already running reactors. Shutting down those reactors prematurely would be a mistake. Germany’s shutdown of their nuclear reactors led to Germany missing their goals for carbon reduction. Existing reactors – so long as they’re safe – should be kept running as long as possible, while solar and wind scale up. And indeed, there’s still quite a bit of debate about whether solar, wind, hydro, and batteries together can power 100% of the US. Some very smart scientists who care deeply about climate are skeptical that renewables can get us all the way there. I’m on the more optimistic side of this equation. Even so, let’s not tie one hand behind our back.

    New nuclear, on the other hand, is probably dead in the US and Europe. Costs are rising over time, and reactors are plagued by cost overruns and schedule delays. The US ought to continue funding research into next-generation reactors that could be built smaller, more repeatably, and hopefully one day at a lower cost. Even those reactor designs are most likely to be a fallback in case solar, wind, and batteries stop falling in price the way they have.
  2. Carbon Taxes.  I spent much of 2015 advocating for a revenue-neutral carbon tax in Washington State. I love carbon taxes. And in electricity, they can be quite powerful. As I explain elsewhere, though, outside of the electricity sector, carbon taxes are far less effective than believed. They have only a little impact on industry, almost no impact on transportation, and usually aren’t applied to agriculture. If a carbon tax magically passed Congress, I’d cheer, and it could be an effective way to fund some of the proposals here. It’s not a silver bullet, though, and it doesn’t address the hardest sectors.
  3. Carbon Capture. People mean a wide variety of things when they say “carbon capture”.  If we mean retrofitting coal power plants with equipment to capture their carbon emissions and store it, that’s probably a waste of time. Coal is economically dead, even before adding on the cost of carbon capture. On the other hand, the NetPower design for an advanced natural gas plant that has carbon capture built right in could be a great complement to solar and wind, filling in for them during wind droughts in winter. (Though keeping any sort of natural gas in use also requires that we address the serious  problem of methane leaks from natural gas wells and infrastructure.)  

    The most important type of carbon capture, though, is being able to capture carbon directly from the air. I support more R&D into high-tech ways to scrub carbon from the air. I’m also cheered to see the tax credit Congress created to encourage carbon capture. That said, overwhelmingly the most affordable ways to capture carbon, today, are the ones the Green New Deal talks about:  returning carbon to the natural environment, by enriching soils and planting trees. Enriching farm soils and planting trees cost ten times less than fancier methods of carbon capture, and could capture a billion tons of carbon a year in the US alone. What’s more, the US could make those methods even cheaper by spurring new technology – like tree-planting drones, or transparent digital markets for carbon capture – in a way that increases the adoption of carbon capture into natural ecosystems around the world.  Ultimately, we may need to draw even more carbon out of the air than soils and trees can handle.  We should do the R&D for higher tech methods that can do so, and encourage their deployment, even as we use the cheapest methods of soils and forests first.

8 – The cheapest ways to capture carbon are on the bottom of this chart – in soils and forests.

What About Climate Justice?

The Green New Deal advances a plan to fight climate change and to ensure that we do so through a just transition. Here, I think a few principles clearly apply.

  1. First, the cost of the transition shouldn’t be paid by those with the lowest income or who’ve contributed the least to the problem. In the long term, transitioning to a clean economy will make energy, transportation, and the rest of the goods we consume cheaper. If, in the short run, (when we’re using subsidies to scale out new technologies to drive their costs down) there’s any temporary increase in the cost of life’s necessities, that shouldn’t be passed on to low-income Americans. If costs for basic necessities go up, that needs to be offset by policies that buffer lower-income Americans against those changes.
  2. Second, if we need new taxes to pay for these programs, those taxes should be highly progressive. If those taxes are on income, they should come in at the higher tax brackets. This also has to inform our view of a carbon tax. Carbon taxes are, on their own, highly regressive. Lower-income Americans spend a larger fraction of their paycheck on electricity, heating, transportation, and other carbon-intensive goods than wealthier Americans do. Rural Americans, who also tend to be lower income and who have the highest rates of poverty in America, spend even more of their paycheck on transportation. So raising the price of energy, transportation, and other goods hits low-income Americans and rural Americans the hardest. If we use a carbon tax, we can offset it by sending a flat dividend check to every woman, man, and child in America. In Washington State, in our 2016 ballot initiative, we used another approach, using carbon tax revenue to boost the federal Earned Income Tax Credit – a tax credit that goes to low-income working families, and which is the closest thing to a basic income we have now.
  3. Third, we need to help Americans in the most vulnerable communities with climate resistance and climate adaptation. Whether those are communities that are vulnerable to climate-related flooding, crop losses from extreme weather, heat and drought, or to wildfires that will get worse as temperatures rise, society ought to invest in boosting the resilience of these communities, and, if necessary, in helping individuals and communities relocate to areas that are less vulnerable to climate.
  4. Fourth, massive investment in new clean energy, industry, transportation, and agriculture will pour trillions into the US economy. What’s more, it has the potential to turn the US into an exporter of new clean technology. Together, they’ll create the opportunity for potentially millions of new jobs. That opportunity ought to be open to all – to workers in dirty industries like coal who have their jobs displaced, to lower income Americans who have fewer opportunities today, and to immigrants willing to come to America and work. Job training programs, and programs to bridge the gap between the end of an old career and the start of a new one – are a win/win for America. They help us produce the labor pool to transition to this clean economy, and they provide a means for millions of Americans to uplift themselves with new, highly in-demand skills.

All of that is fully in alignment with the Green New Deal resolution.  The GND goes further, though, making the case for universal healthcare, universal higher education, universal housing, a job guarantee for all people in the United States, strengthening unions, reducing discrimination in the workplace, respect for Native American rights and sovereignty, and stopping the transfer of jobs overseas.

Many of those policies are ones I support, or at least where I support the motivations behind them. Yet I am not at all certain those policies should be coupled with climate action. Coupling a long list of liberal priorities with climate action would seem to make it harder to get the bipartisan support we’ll probably need to enact these climate policies.  That said, the Green New Deal resolution is a high level map, not a specific bill. The original New Deal wasn’t one piece of legislation – it was made up of more than 30 separate bills. Democrats should approach the Green New Deal the same way. They ought to embrace the idea that the overall effort may take multiple years and multiple Congresses to enact, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to support some parts of the Green New Deal and not others. They ought to embrace alliances and assistance – including bipartisan alliances – to pass parts of the Green New Deal where they can.

(Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)

Climate Action is the Ultimate Climate Justice
Even more importantly, though, acting on climate change itself creates a more just world. Climate change is a slow, insidious, and massive threat to human well-being. It’s also profoundly unjust. Americans may only emit 15% of carbon emissions today, but all the CO2 we’ve emitted in the past will linger in the atmosphere for roughly a century from when it was released. Add up all the carbon the US has emitted over time, and the US remains the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. We Americans are more responsible for climate change than any other nation, even those with many times our population.

Meanwhile, two billion people live in countries that have emitted the least carbon dioxide over history – the poorest countries on planet earth – which are also the countries where people are likely to suffer the most from climate change. Climate change itself is a deep inequity. The most just thing we can do is to address climate change as rapidly as possible, and to produce and spread the tools that also boost climate resilience around the developing world. Indeed, most of the benefits of fighting climate change don’t go to Americans at all. Americans do benefit. But the largest benefits of fighting climate change go to the billions around the world who have the fewest resources and who live in the nations with the greatest vulnerability.
Lower income Americans also stand to suffer more from climate change than do wealthier Americans. A lower-income American in Detroit isn’t as vulnerable as a subsistence farmer in Botswana – not by a long shot. At the same time, it’s hard to deny that Katrina, for example, hit the poor of New Orleans harder than it did the rich. Wealthier Americans can relocate more easily, can pay energy bills more easily, can rebuild from climate disasters more easily. And here again, the most just thing we can do is to act on climate, as rapidly as possible.

Should we find ways to use the fight against climate change to also address the long history of inequality and injustice, and the differences in wealth and income that exist in the US? If so, should we stop there? Climate change is global. Carbon emissions and the harm they cause know no national borders. The harm of American (and European, and more recently Chinese) carbon emissions will fall most heavily on the poor of the developing world. Should climate policy aim to decarbonize the world as rapidly as possible? Or should it aim to decarbonize and address other global ills?

For me, the answer is clear. Climate change itself is so unjust, so lopsided in who has benefited from burning fossil fuels and who will suffer the most from that combustion, that addressing climate change is, itself, to help undo an injustice – one that threatens billions of people around the world.

Let’s tackle all the world’s other problems too. As we do so, let’s keep in mind that addressing climate change, even if we don’t succeed at everything else, is a major, vital, and necessary step towards a more just world.  

15 Feb 17:57

Sales Leadership is About Creating Momentum

by Mark Hunter

We should never underestimate the power of momentum and what happens when we allow things to come to a stop. It’s winter right now and for a lot of us, that means there is often snow on the ground. With snow comes a change in how you drive. For those of you that live in warm climates and never get to experience driving in the snow, let me give you a quick lesson.

If you’re driving on a snow packed or icy street, it is much more difficult to accelerate after being at a complete stop. As your tires spin and nothing happens, you tend to want to give the engine more power, but that only makes your wheels spin more. Still, the car doesn’t move. The best way to drive on snow packed or icy roads is to never allow the wheels to stop turning. It is all about making sure they are always in continuous motion. If the wheels are turning even just slightly, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to increase speed.

Being successful in sales is the same way. It’s all about creating momentum just like keeping your wheels moving when driving in snow or ice. The key is to never allow yourself to come to a complete stop. This is why I believe so strongly that you must always be prospecting. You cannot allow your pipeline to ever become empty, otherwise you’ll be like the car stuck on a snow packed or icy road unable to move.

Are you committed to prospecting each week? You might be an account manager who doesn’t prospect, but that does not exclude you from working on opening up new opportunities in your accounts. The same goes for every other step in your sales process / sales pipeline. You must ensure there is at least some kind of opportunity at every level.

When there is a complete lack of momentum, your brain will flip out. You’ll suddenly panic and think you need to do something drastic to make it. The panic causes you to freak out, like slamming your foot down on the accelerator. That’s not helpful; however, because your wheels have already come to a dead stop. It also doesn’t help that at this point you’re in a rush. The clock keeps ticking and you constantly have tasks to complete and deadlines to meet. You’ll find it difficult to get moving again and notice yourself just becoming more stuck. Whenever you find yourself in this type of situation without momentum, the key is to look for the smallest opportunity to capitalize on. Don’t worry about its size. Don’t look at the clock. Your goal is to simply gain the slightest bit of momentum to help get you rolling again. By achieving a tiny bit of momentum, you’ll then be able to seek out slightly larger opportunities. Don’t panic and think you don’t have time. The more you panic about the lack of time, the more your wheels will just spin and not get you anywhere.

Creating momentum in sales is identical to driving in snow or ice. If you remember how to drive in those conditions, you’ll be just fine whenever you find yourself at a low point in sales.

Don’t forget: A coach can help you excel in your sales career. Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

15 Feb 17:56

The Complete Digital Marketing 2019 Guide

by Bianca Gregorio

If you’re on the hunt for an updated, comprehensive and easy to understand digital marketing guide, this is the one for you.

This is your Complete Digital Marketing 2019 Guide aimed to give you the full run down on everything you need for your digital marketing journey. Whether you’re a beginner student or a professional, we’re here to offer you the skills and knowledge you need to be the next digital marketing wiz.

Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

The Financial Times defines it as products or services that are being marketed using digital channels in order to reach consumers. Its main goal is to promote brands via different forms of digital media.

Digital Marketing Activities are defined by Equinet Academy as doing market research with the use of research tools like Google Keyword Planner or analyzing the performance of your marketing with software like Adobe Analytics. It may also go into the use of digital ads through digital advertising platforms like Google Marketing.

This goes further than internet marketing because some venues don’t require internet usage. Examples of these include the use of mobile phones, social media, display advertising and the like. Digital marketing is a whole new approach and takes a different level of understanding customer behavior. It involves analysis and quantifying the number of downloads and views along all devices. It also includes interaction and replies on social media.

Altogether it may sound overwhelming, especially if it’s your first time hearing about it, but that’s why we’re here. Digital Marketing is something anyone can master with enough effort and resources.

In this guide, we offer you all our resources, just bring in the willingness to learn and let’s get started!

Why should you use Digital Marketing?

You’ve probably been exposed to Traditional Marketing most of your life. Everyone’s youth was filled with newspaper and TV ads and while these are still alive and kicking, Digital Marketing is now the smarter and more effective way to go. If you’re still unconvinced, you can read a full article on how it trumps Traditional Marketing over here.

The Internet as an Essential

First of all, it’s now a vital part for both the businesses and the customers. While some think it can at having a website, it actually goes way beyond that. This is due to the Internet becoming a part of our everyday lives. This equates to the value of digital marketing in order for a business to thrive.

You are able to reach your audience where they spend their time the most which is usually on their phones. They are inclined to buy your product especially if it is to be promoted towards your target market. Whether you are a small or big business, digital marketing works because you are able to suit your ads. You can also adjust the duration due to your budget. You can also get into growth hacking if you want to take your business even higher.

Telling your Brand’s Story

Most importantly, it’s a quick and easy way for your brand to tell your story and get people to listen through an online platform. People are a lot more responsive when it’s a narrative. Digital platforms can give you the opportunity to tell them that wherever they may be as long as they have a device. This direct access to consumers is something that you can utilize. Most customers are getting information digitally now more than ever.

Earn more Revenue

When you think about it digital marketing practically converts itself to digital sales as your goal is to get people to avail your service or product. Everyone is starting to get into digital marketing more and more and if your competition is using it and you’re not, you’re really at the losing end.

Without the use of digital marketing, your sales would mostly come from word-of-mouth and traditional channels which will cost you more and has less assurance of success. This is why most brands are making it their main method for marketing.

If you’re apprehensive you can try it out through free channels like Facebook pages and from there, we can assure you’ll see its major difference in reach and effect with non-digital channels.

Which Digital Marketing channels do you need?

With your brand and persona on hand, it’s important to use this and know where you can market your products and how to make the most out of these channels. These channels are your gateways towards reaching potential customers so it’s good to know what options you have and which suit your brand the most.

Let’s start with Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing

You can use Inbound Marketing to attract visitors and customers to your brand. It combines the use of several marketing channels as its goal is to increase the reach of your brand and increase the quality traffic, conversions and engagements. You are able to attract more prospects with the use of relevant and helpful content. From there you can connect with them further with newsletters and chat to keep them up to date. Altogether, they creates a lot of trust and credibility for your business.

This is a good starting point since it’s the most commonly used strategy. It’s a tactic to present your product/service to prospects that are already looking for solutions to a specific point. When you use inbound marketing then they are able to find your site and they will immediately be interested because you offer what they need.

Its whole methodology has four stages: attract, engage, close and delight. It is able to help create trust, credibility and momentum and overall, add value to your customer’s journey. This methodology may also be compared to how your business grows as the customers are the ones fueling it. It can only end up with them buying form you again or even recommending you to others. At the same time, if you have unhappy customers, it will slow down your growth and maybe even halt it.

Inbound Marketing has 4 main channels namely:

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Social Media
  • Content Marketing/ Lead Generation
  • E-mail Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) involves improving a website’s content through using specific keywords. It can be in the title or the content of the website so that it ranks high once searched on the different search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEO is a tried and tested method of increasing the visitors on your website. It’s also budget friendly because you don’t need to spend in doing this. Do not be misled in thinking it’s easy though, SEO is a complex marketing activity taking months to understand.

Google’s algorithm is complicated and uses more than 200 factors to determine your site’s rank. There is also no guarantee for it to rank high and you cannot pay to have it rank higher. Google works hard to retain the quality of their search results.

Social Media Marketing

We are all in the world of social media.

This is the very reason why it’s a great tool for B2B & B2C companies who aim for increased leads, sales, brand exposure and referrals. These are also good for improving SEO since the shares your site gets is part of the major factors Google considers for a better rank.

In order to truly succeed in using social media, you must be able to integrate it in all your activities because it is now a big part of digital corporate culture. It is a place where everyone in your brand can further its reach and the networking power.

Influence everyone to go social.

Content Marketing / Lead Generation

When you use Content Marketing, it goes beyond simply creating blog posts on your site about your product. Rather, it goes into discussion of more general topics. What are these topics? They’re chosen based on the community’s interest so it has more appeal compared to product content which features more specific problems. Whenever you create content, keep in mind that this is all about the customers’ preferences than about your product. This is what gets their attention early in the sales process.

It’s easier to activate customers to make a small action like reading a blog post that getting them to immediately buy a product or review one. This content is also shareable which will gain you more web traffic.

You can get more attention when you are offering to educate them, apart from selling a product. This will build their trust which is significant in breaking into an established market.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail is the spine of any effective automated marketing strategy because it delivers your message directly to your customer’s inbox. It needs an efficient strategy and a purpose of achieving a larger goal.

To get started on e-mail marketing, you must add a newsletter subscription option in your website or Facebook page. Once they are subscribed you can start sending them a set of auto-responder emails. The aim is to gain trust by creating insightful and education information for your prospects. These e-mails should be designed and produced carefully as they will convince your subscriber about how your content is something they need to read.

Once you are able to obtain more subscribers, you are then able to heighten your converts by so much more. This is due to the fact that people who buy via e-mail spend 100% more than those who don’t. Surprisingly, it also has more converts than social media and is at least three times higher so it is definitely something to tap into.

Direct Response Advertising

Direct response Advertising makes use of paid advertisements offered to customers while they are browsing the internet. It involves the following channels:

  • Paid Search Advertising
  • Display Advertising
  • Affiliate Marketing

Paid Search Advertising

search ads paid eoi digital

Paid Search Advertising is when you pay to place text ads on search engines like Google. Why would you want to do this? Simply because it’s one of the most effective advertising channels to use both traditionally and digitally. You also get to control the keywords that bring up your ad and bring you prospects that are ready to buy.

Almost all of the big search engines have a real-time auction system in running their ads. This is so advertisers specify keywords that pop up when users search. You will then place a maximum bid on each keyword. From there, when a prospect searches this keyword, all the advertisers are entered into a real time auction and the one with the most relevant ad and highest bid will win. You will then get the prized position of your ad being at the top spot.

Keywords can be added and edited as you through the process and learn new keywords that users are using. There are many tools like Google Analytics to measure the conversion rates and ROI for the keywords you bid on.

Display Advertising

Display Advertising, meanwhile, is a more visual process. You get to create banners and video ads that will appear on websites and blogs. This is a great channel for creating brand awareness and increasing clicks to your website.

Remarketing

This can be related to display advertising as it is also a visual activity and something you can probably relate to. It’s when you visit an e-commerce website and you browse for items and when you click off and go onto other websites, you notice ads from that same shopping website. It’s usually the exact products you viewed from the first one. This process is better known as remarketing which is a display advertising technology that lets the advertiser serve ads to buyers that have already been to the site. It’s significant because of the following:

  • Increase response rate of up to 600% over traditional banner ads
  • Focuses on prospects that have already show interest for your product
  • Triggers a brand recall
  • Speeds up the buying process

These can be purchased through ad networks like Google AdWords, Youtube and Double Click. These usually costs 1/3 of the search ads.

Affiliate Marketing

When you watch any sponsored YouTube video or Instagram post, do you notice the voucher? They usually give this for the item they’re promoting. This may also be called as a re-seller or commission program. This type of marketing allows third party companies refer business onto your site and they will receive a referral fee for it. This is usually ranging from 5%-15% of the subscription price.

This is like Zalora’s ambassador program wherein you can apply to become an ambassador. Once you are approved, you are given a referral code which can be used as a discount voucher by buyers. Every time they use it, the ambassador is able to earn a percentage.

If you’re a company with a product to sell, it’s pretty simple to set up this program and track your referrals. You may recruit affiliates using low-cost softwares. You can also create a part of your site to explain the program for future affiliate partners.

We hope you found this guide super helpful in your pursuit towards creating an effective digital marketing strategy. Feel free to talk to us about anything. EOI Digital is a digital marketing and transformation agency so we’ve got the ideas and experience to help you out! Let’s have a chat and get your strategy going!

14 Feb 17:11

How Brands Should Offer Email Expertise Every Stage of the Customer Journey

by Kevin George

Expertise builds trust. For a life-threatening ailment, you would prefer a doctor with expertise of multiple years than a freshly graduated medical student. Same is with your customers. Unless you don’t show your expertise of solving their pain point, they may not choose your business. Now, the most common problems that businesses face are how to offer expertise to someone who is interacting with them for the first time. The answer lies in the message that your customer receives from you. Purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message in an email has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social, direct mail and more (Source).

So, we have proved that emails are a great way to display expertise, yet offering expertise is not achieved from a single email. It is gradually built by educating your subscribers at every stage of the customer journey.

  1. Awareness – Prospect learns about the brand or product
  2. Purchase – Prospect purchases product and becomes a customer
  3. Relationship building – Brand nurtures relationship with customer
  4. Retention – Brand retains one-time customer, making them into a loyal one
  5. Advocacy – Customer advocates for brand on social media and beyond

Awareness stage emails

At this stage, your potential customers are only aware about your brand name and some of your products / services. They are curious to know about your brand and what solutions you have to offer. Emails that list out different products/services you offer and the relevancy, of what your offer, to their current problem are what businesses need to send in this stage.

In the below welcome email by Virgin America, the subscriber is felt welcomed and the email copy states what the subscriber stands to gain from their emails. They finally concluded the email by providing a relevant link for the subscriber to be better prepared during their next trip.

Virgin Awareness stage email

Most subscribers at this stage opt for a free trail to understand the hangs. You can send an email listing out the features the subscriber can avail as well as what they can expect when they opt for a paid version. In the below email by Headspace, the subscriber is welcomed for opting for a free trial and assured that they can access the content provided in the trial forever. In the end, they have showed the benefits of choosing their subscription plans.

HeadSpace Awareness stage email

The goal of the emails at this stage is to provide enough information to the subscriber in order to bring them to the verge of making a purchase. So, you need to ‘nurture’ them with emails such as:

  • Content Resources: Links to webinars, white papers, instructional videos, ebooks, slide decks, etc. that your subscriber can refer in order to gain further information.
  • Introduction to features: For those who are experimenting with free trial, an email listing out the different features of what you are offering would help them learn more.
  • Actionable Tips: While your subscribers will like to explore by themselves, offering them actionable tips can help them be educated better.
  • Drip emails: One of the best ways to nurture your leads, drip emails are a series of emails that are sent to your subscribers based on their interaction with your brand. i.e. If they download a whitepaper, an email with option to download an eBook is sent, else an email with an embedded video would be sent.

Purchase Stage emails

At this stage, your subscribers are contemplating on whether your brand is the perfect fit for their problems and would be comparing what you offer with those being offered by competition. This is the time to highlight your USPs and how you stand out. Depending on your industry, you can also offer an incentive for those who are on the fence. Tone over here is very important as you cannot force them to purchase nor are, they obligated to be buying from you.

In the email below by Uber, the email copy provides enough motivation to the subscriber that they are pulled towards redeeming the lucrative offer.

Uber Eats Purchase stage email

Sometimes the discount code is not a strong motivation and by organizing a contest and linking the entry with a purchase, you substantially increase the chances of your subscribers taking the plunge. In the email below by PhotoJojo, the job is well done with relevant images and a list of what the subscribers stand to win.

Photo Jojo Purchase stage email

In order to choose the incentive, it is a good idea to dive into the preferences chosen by the subscribers while completing their profiles.

Post Purchase Relationship building emails

Congratulations! You have customers but this is not the end yet. Businesses thrive on new customers and grow with repeated customers. By providing a good user experience and making them feel like a part of your brand family, you connect with your customers and build relations with them. This enables them to provide repeated business for your brand. Email newsletters are a great way for customers to remain in contact with your brand in form of product improvements, industry updates, upcoming events, and much more.

Additionally, offering loyalty bonus to your existing customers are also a great tactic to make subscribers feel special as well as ensure a repeat order. In the email below by Lyft, they appreciate the customer and offer a discount for being a 5-star rating customer. This way, your customer feels the rush to remain on the top and bring business to you.

Lyft Post purchase stage email

In the email below by Apple, the customer is sent a product update email concerning Apple Watch and Apple offers the customer in-store credit to upgrade their watch.

Apple Watch Post purchase stage email

Asking for customer feedback, once you assume your customer has managed to use your product, would make them feel valued. Asking for review is twice advantageous for your business. One, you build relation with existing customers and you get testimonials to rope in new customers. In the email below, Massdrop thanks the customer for the order, shows an image of the product for easy recollection and asks them to review the product.

Massdrop Post purchase stage email

Retention stage emails

The above emails are for those customers who are active enough for repeated business. For those who became dormant after a purchase, emails can be sent to retain them and gradually turn them into loyal customers. Target the USPs that might greatly help them or show them features that they can gain by remaining loyal.

In the below email by Vimeo, they reminded the customers of the dormancy and offered a discount code to retain them better.

Vimeo retention stage email

Advocacy stage emails

Word of mouth travels far and wider than emails. Humans are built to trust those who are close to them. Leverage the trust built by your customers to bring new customers for your business. While every customer of your business may not turn into a brand advocate but by studying your customer base and identifying key customers, you can send them emails promoting referrals in exchange for lucrative offers.

In the email below by Webflow, the customer is offered a faster access to beta version, provided they share the news. Additionally, they also promoted social sharing in order to boost sales as well as social exposure.

Webflow Advocacy stage email

Similarly, in the email below by DigitalOcean, the customer is lured with an option to get rewards for them as well as their referral and this is observed to increase the sharing chances.

Digital Ocean Advocacy stage email

Takeaways

  • Add testimonials and links to relevant content for your lead nurturing emails to build trust.
  • Give a lucrative incentive for those prospects sitting on the fence in the purchase stage of their customer journey.
  • A glance through the subscribers’ preferences can help you understand what kind of incentive might strike a tone with your subscribers.
  • Relationship building post-purchase is crucial as it goes a long way. Ask for customer feedback to make them feel close.
  • Everybody loves to be loyal to those who appreciate loyalty. Reward yours with loyalty bonuses
  • Encourage your customers to refer your brand. Offer referral advantages to lure.
14 Feb 17:08

Coaching Individual Salespeople, with Mike Montague & Suzie Andrews

by Sandler Training

Coaching Individual Salespeople with Suzie Andrews: Suzie Andrews, Sandler Trainer, and Mike Montague, VP of Online Learning, take your questions about coaching salespeople live on Facebook.

Watch Time: 56 Minutes

14 Feb 17:07

5 Reasons to Embrace Email Unsubscribes

by Anthony Helmstetter

5 Reasons to Embrace Email Unsubscribes

Brace yourself: email unsubscribes are not necessarily bad.

That may seem counter-intuitive. After all, isn’t list size one of the key metrics we’re supposed to report up to senior management? Aren’t we always looking for more and more subscribers? Isn’t list growth a key measure of how well our advertising, marketing and content are performing?

The truth is, list size is a false metric. You may have to explain this to your boss. The exception would be for businesses who derive revenue based on CPM advertising within, or sponsorship of, their email. But, for most organizations, there are more important goals of engagement and corresponding KPIs.

Here are five examples of the benefits of losing subscribers, and what you can learn from those who opt out: 

1. A bloated list of disengaged subscribers messes up your email performance metrics.

Those who are truly disengaged are just diluting the actual metrics you use to optimize your email performance. Ten thousand disengaged subscribers will completely obfuscate the real learnings from the 1,000 that are engaged.

Opportunity for Improvement: If a subscriber has not clicked through in the prior six months, initiate a last-chance re-engagement campaign. If still no response, then purge and archive them.

2. Email unsubscribes are an indicator of list quality.

How were those emails addressed initially obtained? Under false or misleading pretenses? Were they truly a legitimate opt-in? Were they obtained as the result of a low-commitment sweepstakes or contest entry?

Opportunity for Improvement: Clean up your list-growth processes—the forms, the CTAs, the messaging—to focus on and appeal to the most qualified prospects and customers. Otherwise, you’re wasting their time and yours.

3. Email unsubscribes signal how well you’re doing with email segmentation, content, frequency, relevancy and CTAs.

Irrespective of how the subscriber was obtained, if your message isn’t relevant, the format isn’t right for the recipient’s device or the interval is too frequent and annoying, expect disengagement at best, and ultimately an opt-out.

Opportunity for Improvement: Test each email variable using a repeatable, controlled process—even simple A/B split testing—to help you continually learn and optimize for each audience segment. Unless your total list size is less than 2,500, you should always be testing some aspect during each send.

4. Think of the subscriber relationship like dating. Maybe they’re just not into you—yet.

If things just aren’t quite working for the other person, as an alternative to breaking up completely (unsubscribing), allow recipients to alter the relationship.

Opportunity for Improvement: Let them take a break and pause email for a period of time. Let them reduce frequency according to the recipient’s preference. Allow the recipient to alter the types of content you’re sending. These and more options should be offered in a user-controlled preference center. If/when you get the unsubscribe click-through, offer these alternatives to completely ending the relationship.

5. And if you can’t salvage the relationship—it’s a final breakup—ask “why?”

Of course, you’ll never get 100% of unsubscribes to share their reasoning, but, if executed well (even cleverly or humorously), over time you’ll collect enough data to draw some conclusions about why subscribers are leaving.

Opportunity for Improvement: That final unsubscribe confirmation screen should offer 4-7 options for the fleeing subscriber to tell you why they’re leaving. You can even place it on the initial unsubscribe page so long as the actual unsubscribe button is clearly available right below the optional (never required) check-box selections. It might be them. It might be you. You won’t know unless you ask.

The post 5 Reasons to Embrace Email Unsubscribes appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

14 Feb 17:05

Your Giant Email Marketing Statistics Guide [Infographic]

Email: the rock-solid, time-and-customer-tested, Marketing-approved way to keep your customers coming back for more. And here are the stats to prove it--and help you be a better email marketer. So check out this epic compendium of email-related statistics from 40+ sources. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
14 Feb 16:58

37 of the Best Google Chrome Extensions Suggested by Top Marketers

by Nico Prins

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world. There’s a decent chance that you’re using it right now to read this article. It’s a great platform for accessing the web, and it can be made even better with the addition of some Google Chrome extensions.

Of course with so many Chrome extensions in the Google Chrome web store it can be hard to know what to use. To help make the choice easier I decided to shortlist the best Google Chrome extensions on the net. So I asked 37 top marketers what were their ‘go to’ Chrome extensions.

To make things manageable I split the list into a couple of different categories. They are:

  • General
  • Management
  • Social Media
  • SEO
  • Blogging
  • Screen Capture
  • Productivity

Here are the results.

The Best General Chrome Extensions

1. Anil Agarwal – BloggersPassion

Recommendation: Hunter

Finding email address of someone you want to collaborate with is one of the most daunting tasks. Here’s where an extension like Hunter comes into handy. You can use it find email addresses from anywhere on the web, with just one click.

It works out of the box. Just install and activate the extension and whenever you visit a website, click on the Hunter extension and it will put all the data including email addresses, names, job titles, social networks along with phone numbers (if they are available on their site).

If there’s only one chrome extension I had to pick (I use way too many), it’s undoubtedly Hunter which saves me a ton of time to find email addresses really quickly.

2. Nick Loper – Side Hustle Nation

Recommendation: LastPass

The extension I use most often is LastPass, which I rely on dozens of times a day to generate, store, and autofill passwords for me. I love this software because it’s taken a major load off my brain in trying to remember the login details for probably hundreds of different sites. On top of that, I use LastPass to securely share access to certain sites with members of my team. Overall, it’s just a huge time and headache saver.

3. Zac Johnson – Blogging.org

Recommendation: Show Pixel Color

While I’m sure many marketers are going to list Google Extension tools related to SEO, backlinks, social media and content creation… I’m going to mix things up and list one that I personally get a lot of use out of. It’s called “Show Pixel Color”.

As someone that is often using online tools like Canva and others for quick graphic design, sometimes you simply need to grab the color code to make something match perfectly. Instead of opening different software tools and trying to find a matching color, this tool does the trick in a matter of seconds. Simply click the tool icon, hover over the color you are looking for, then copy the color code given.

It’s that simple, and it’s free to download and use!

4. Nico Prins – Launch Space

Recommendation: Lifetime Software Deals

This is a simple Chrome extension that notifies you when a lifetime software deal goes live. It picks up deals from sites like AppSumo, StackSocial and private Facebook groups. It’s a simple idea, but useful if you want to keep tabs on what offers are around at the moment. Especially if one of those offers could save you money on a tool that you’re already using.

5. Harsh Argrawal – Shout Me Loud

Recommendation: Dashlane

Dashlane chrome extension: I’m a firm believer of “Time is money” and Dashlane has helped me a lot to save time. I have always been apprehensive of using a password manager but when a friend who is also a productivity expert, recommended Dashlane, I gave it a shot. Their chrome extension is a perfect companion which auto-fill my passwords, speeds up form filling and helps in creating a new account quickly. None-the-less, as cyber attacks have become a common thing, using unique passwords is the smartest thing to do for anyone who spends most of their time online.

6. David Campbell – Voila Norbert

Recommendation: Right Inbox

My favorite Chrome extension is Right Inbox for Gmail. Right Inbox integrates seamlessly with your Gmail account and lets you schedule your emails to be delivered at a future time. This is ideal for users who interact with other people in different timezones.

Right Inbox also has an email reminder feature that sends you a notification when you need to be reminded to follow up. This feature is crucial so that you don’t lose track of important conversations.

7. Shaurya Jain – Attention Always Link Building

Recommendation: Inbox when Ready for Gmail

In this day and age, we need to protect our attention from distractions to do meaningful work.

One way to this is to batch process your emails. Most people impulsively keep checking their emails but batch processing emails as popularised by Tim Ferris is a great way to get more out of your day.

With this extension you can put a lock on your inbox for certain number of ours and access it only at a specified time of the day that you decide. I check my emails at 4PM and 7 PM and keep the inbox locked for the rest of the time.

The extension however allows you check your old emails and compose outgoing emails which is a plus too.

8. Alex Yong – SocialAlex.com

Recommendation: One Tab

We all know a few colleagues who have 53 tabs open (or some other ridiculous amount of open tabs) on their Chrome and think it’s normal — oops, maybe you’re that person! A free and simple solution named One Tab was created by someone who could no longer tolerate multiple tab insanity in his own workflow. In addition to collapsing any, some, or all open tabs into one sane tab (hence the name), the tool has extra functionality (totally optional and free – therefore, use if you want to; ignore if you don’t) within its visible interface such as the ability to turn a collection of URLs into a permanent webpage, and more. See the YouTube review by Jake Miller for more details on the bells and whistles beyond One Tab’s basic use. I can’t tell you how immensely helpful this tool is; it’s a daily must-have.

Social

1. Jacob Cass – Just Creative

Recommendation: Buffer

Buffer is a huge time saving tool when it comes to social media. You can schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all your social accounts in one place. The Chrome extension allows you to click one button and then type what you want to share on each social media post, even including imagery!

2. Jack Paxton – VYPER

Recommendation: Lempod

If you like automation you’re going to love this LinkedIn extension. Join a pod (growth hacking pod 4189) and share your LinkedIn posts. You can add 1 post every 24 hours and everyone in the pod likes and comments on your post. This works extremely well for high-quality content. We also use this to boost engagement on our LinkedIn ads.

3. Josh Barney – Einstein Marketer

Recommendation: Zest.is

I love Chrome Extensions, so picking just one is a serious ordeal.

On this occasion I’m going to plump for Zest. This extension acts as a high-quality content stream that replaces your Chrome homepage. As well as discovering all the latest articles in marketing, business and social media, I am able to suggest and distribute our own content on their platform.

The best thing about Zest is their audience. All their users have an interest in our niche, making it a seriously valuable congregation spot for our audience and a great traffic source.

If you’re thinking about suggesting content to Zest, be aware that not everything is accepted! They have a content team who study everything before it’s published on their stream (maintaining interest from their high-quality audience).

4. Jason Martinez – Redefine Marketing Group

Recommendation: BuzzSumo’s Social Share Checker

Link builders and content marketers rejoice! The BuzzSumo Chrome is perfect for link builders and content marketers who want to quickly track how a piece of content is performing at a given moment. The extension allows you to see the total number of engagement across all social channels (i.e Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, & Reddit) directly from your browser. You can even get a quick look at BuzzSumo’s ever-so-popular “Evergreen Score.” Most important of them all, you can save your articles to a project. So, whether you are managing 1 project or 10 projects you can easily save an article to track it’s performance over time!

SEO

1. Ann Smarty – Viral Content Bee

Recommendation: SEO TextOptimizer

My favorite SEO extension is SEO TextOptimizer. This plugin allows me to create better-researched more-optimized content. Whenever I am writing an article, I copy-paste my focus keyword in the extension and it returns the list of related and neighboring terms as well as popular questions on the topic. The suggested terms help me match the search intent better and the list of related questions helps to structure my content well. I started using the extension a few weeks ago and I am already seeing a huge improvement in rankings (which was actually quite surprising). Overall it’s a great writing helper and since I write a lot, I turn to the tool for help several times a day.

2. Gail Gardner – GrowMap

Recommendation: Majestic Backlink Analyzer

Have you ever wondered whether you remembered to add a particular link attribution to content you’re writing? Are you interested in improving the quality of your site by knowing whether excellent or spammy sites are linking to you? You need the Majestic Backlink Analyzer Chrome Add-on. The entire summary page and the On-page links options are available with the free version. Backlinks and Anchor Text distribution requires a subscription. Watch the trends and if your Trust Flow goes down, you may need to check for incoming links you need to disavow.

3. Jitendra Vaswani – BloggersIdeas

Recommendation: Open SEO Stats

Currently my favorite chrome extensions are Open SEO Stats and LastPass. Why I love these because they are super helpful and I cannot live without these extensions. Open SEO stats gives me detailed insights on webpage online like Alexa ranking, traffic and backlinks details for the domain. It’s very helpful in my daily SEO tasks.

LastPass helps me to save/ remember my passwords as it’s very difficult to remember password for every online site. So LastPass keeps me reminding and I never have to remember passwords.

I always ask my team to use this chrome extension for their daily task.

4. Jenna Scaglione – Foundr

Recommendation: Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is one of my favorite Chrome extensions primarily for the ease of use. It helps me brainstorm good blog topics and keywords and provides a list of suggested keywords (along with search volumes) directly in my Google search page for easy access.

I use the app as an accessory tool for suggestions when we are looking for alternative angles, keywords or ideas for our blog posts.

5. Derek Gleason – ConversionXL

Recommendation: Bulk URL Opener

One of my favorite Chrome Extensions is Bulk URL Opener. Often, when researching, I’m working with large lists of URLs—perhaps exported from a tool, scraped from the web, or custom built (e.g. using a spreadsheet to build hundreds of URLs that include search parameters).

Bulk URL Opener is a simple copy-and-paste to open all the URLs in separate tabs or windows. You can also specify the number of URLs you want it to open so that Chrome doesn’t eat all of your RAM.

Ultimately, it’s a simple way to build efficiency into a process, and the no-frills design is nice for practitioners who just want to get stuff done.

6. Stefan Debois – Survey Anyplace

Recommendation: Push by Zapier

When I am reading articles and I come across something useful, I used to copy-paste specific content to another document. This is quite a hassle as you have to open the other document and leave the tab containing the article.

With Push by Zapier, it takes two clicks to send the article title, URL and some specific text to another document – this is a Google Sheet in my case. This allows me to quickly ‘save’ specific tips that I come across for later use.

7. Adam Enfroy – AdamEnfroy.com

Recommendation: Word Counter Plus

When it comes to increasing your website’s organic search rankings, high-quality, long-form, SEO-optimized content is king. That’s why I always aim to write blog posts of over 2,500 words with content that matches a user’s search intent. However, I can’t create content in a vacuum – I need to analyze pages of my competitors to understand what I can do better. One very simple metric to examine is the page’s word count. That’s where Word Counter Plus comes into play.

This simple Chrome Extension allows me to select text, right click on any web page, click ‘Word Counter Plus’, and view metrics like word count, character count, average word length, and longest word length. If I see that a competitor has a blog post titled “The 75 Best Affiliate Programs of 2019” and it’s 5,100 words long, I’ll create a new and improved post titled “The Best 87 Affiliate Programs for 2019” and make sure it’s 6,100 words long. While word count by itself won’t help you rank, it is an easy KPI to measure.

8. Robbie Richards – Robbierichards.com

Recommendation: Scraper

I use a lot of different chrome extensions for various SEO and sales tasks at my agency. This extension has countless applications. I use it to scrape question-based keyword ideas out of the People Also Ask box in Google, as well as scrape third party link building tools and blog comment sections for targeted link prospects. If you want a step-by-step walk-through, I cover both of these applications in my organic traffic guide.

9. Aljaz Fajmut – Nightwatch

Recommendation: SEO Search Simulator

One of my favorite Chrome extensions is the SEO Search Simulator. It allows me to quickly check and track my website’s or my competitor’s rankings directly in the browser.

The best part? I can simulate and save unbiased search engine queries on Google for any existing location in the world. No need for a proxy, VPN, or incognito mode. A highly recommended time-saving extension for any SEO professional!

10. Nick Brown – Accelerate

Recommendation: GA Debugger

We do a lot of technical work for clients at our agency. I find the GA Debugger tool useful for doing initial reviews, and identifying problems that need to be resolved. Would definitely recommend this plugin if you do a lot of technical analytics work for clients or for your own web properties.

11. Krista Neher – Boot Camp Digital

Recommendation: Google Analytics

Google Analytics: The google analytics Chrome plugin is great for instantly looking at your analytics and visually seeing how your site is performing. With the plugin you get summary statistics and click details on your actual website instead of having to go into analytics. It also visualizes your data nicely by showing the click rate beside each link or button.

This is a huge help in keeping analytics top of mind and visually understanding website performance.

12. Jamie – MYUKMailBox

Recommendation: Moz Bar

While there are no limits to SEO tools, their accessibility is usually questionable. Some would ask you to download the tool, for others you have to visit their sites or signup to their premium packages.

Moz bar offers this cool extension which sits on your chrome browser. All you have to do is – simply install the extension, then on a single click it will display the vital stats of whatever site you are browsing. DA is the most important metric today and with MOZ bar, you can easily check the sites DA and know if it is a worthy site or not.

On the down side, this MOZ bar too requires a free Moz account for the toolbar to work.

13. Paul Granger – Website Promoter

Recommendation: Ahrefs SEO toolbar

This tool needs no introduction for any seo professional or enthusiast.

I love this extension as it allows me to quickly collect valuable information and metrics for any website.

I can view at a glance things like

  • Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)
  • Ahrefs URL Rating (UR)
  • Ahrefs Rank (AR)
  • Number of Backlinks
  • Number of referring domains
  • Estimated organic search traffic
  • Number of ranking keywords.

This is often my go to tool when analysing competitors websites.

The Metrics are frequently updated so you can be confident the data is fresh giving you that extra edge for your SEO campaigns.

Blogging

1. Michal Leszczynski – GetResponse

Recommendation: Grammarly

Our team members come from various parts of the world.

While this has many clear benefits – different points of view, experiences, and ideas – it also creates some challenges.

One example is making sure everyone’s using the same brand voice. That’s why in the past, we had to run most of our copy through internal and external proofreaders.

While this is still the case for the most important pieces of content, with Grammarly, we’ve been able to improve the quality of our copy and reduce our proofreaders’ workload.

One less-obvious benefit I also notice is that thanks to this extension I’m reminded that content writing isn’t only about using the right keywords. It helps me balance my writing to fit the needs of our readers and search engine robots, at the same time.

2. Daniel Tay – With Content

Recommendation: Pocket

As a content marketing agency, we deliver between 50 to 60 blog posts and articles per month. That’s a lot of fresh, relevant, and helpful topics to come up with on a regular basis!

As such, I’m constantly on the lookout for trending topics and new angles to tackle on behalf of our clients. With the Save to Pocket extension (which does exactly what it says), I can easily save and tag articles that catch my eye to read and analyze later on.

Previously, I had to save links in – wait for it – Apple Notes. It was an absolutely nightmare to use, especially when I’m looking for that one article that seemed really, really interesting and relevant at that point of time.

3. Pawel Ogonowski – Growcode

Recommendation: bit.ly

I tend to share a lot of links on social media (either on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn), in emails and messages. Some of them are extremely long right from the start and other become monstrous when I add Google Analytics utm tracking parameters. That’s where bit.ly extension comes in handy. It shortens every url into a friendly form. What I love in this extension is that you can even easily change the shortened URL from a random bit.ly/34DSds to a more descriptive and familiar form that scores you more clicks: bit.ly/easy-breezy-mobile-checkout.

Screen Capture

1. Keller Tiemann – Leadsurance

Recommendation: CloudApp

My favorite chrome extension is CloudApp. It makes taking, annotating, and sharing screenshots, screen recordings, and other files with teammates and clients a breeze. By automatically saving all of your captures in the cloud you’ll be able to easily keep all your documents organized and shared with everyone who needs access.

CloudApp automatically saves links to your files into your clipboard. So, simply capture a screenshot, then simply Ctrl+v to paste a URL in your browser that takes you directly to your screenshot in the cloud. From there you can annotate, edit, and share your files which are called “drops” in the cloud.

ClouadApp makes the entire screen capturing or recording, annotating, and sharing process quick, simple, and seamless. I was able to capture, annotate, and share the screenshot below in under 60 seconds without ever having to even open an app.

2. Alex Birkett – HubSpot

Recommendation: Loom

The only extensions I use regularly are HubSpot Sales (for outreach), GA Debugger (for analytics), and Loom. Loom is probably the one I use most nowadays, so I’ll recommend that one. If you ever need to communicate an issue and share your screen, Loom gives you the ability to quickly snap a screenshare and spread it to your team or privately with individuals. It’s also great for sharing step-by-step tutorials with the public, which I’ve done for tons of blog posts on my personal site. It’s even got some basic editing and trimming functionalities.

3. Uttoran Sen – Guest Crew

Recommendation: Full Page Screen Capture

Taking screenshot on a computer is a normal thing – but that screen capture is only limited to the amount of visible screen space you have. For taking a full page screenshot, where the entire website which might scroll down to several pages requires a service or a software.

This small little chrome extension does exactly that. In a few seconds and on a single click it takes the full page screenshot and saves it in an image file on your computer. Really easy and does its work perfectly every time.

4. Henry Cazalet – The SMS Works

Recommendation: Awesome Screenshot

If ever you find yourself talking screenshots and then fiddling around with the images, then this Chrome extension is for you! It allows you to capture either the whole screen or just part of it and then add comments or annotations. If your image contains sensitive information that you’d rather not share, you can also blur sections out.

This tool has saved me so much time over the past few years and it’s now one of my most used extensions. With over 2 million users, it’s the most popular screen capture and image annotation tool on Chrome.

The Best Productivity Chrome Extensions

1. Stuart Walker – Niche Hacks

Recommendation: StayFocusd

The only extension I use is “StayFocusd” which I use to limit my time on distracting websites such as Facebook.

For Facebook for example I have it set to allow me just 30 minutes per day, which is just enough time to check into my members only group and if enough time left over my general group, and then StayFocusd blocks FB and it can’t be accessed.

You can’t easily alter the settings or change the allowable time so it forces me to get on Facebook, deal with the important tasks as quick as possible, then before I know it I’m unable to access FB until the following day and I’m forced to go do something productive instead.

It really helps with my productivity as I can easily get distracted and lose loads of time just interacting in my groups (and I’m not even one for checking notifications, DMs or the Facebook timeline) so this forces me to get away from the platform.

2. Jeroen Corthout – Salesflare

Recommendation: Pushbullet

In a world where we switch all the time between phones and computers, Pushbullet is the best.

It picks up notifications from my phone and shows them on my computer, so I don’t need to take my phone all the time during the day. I can easily see and dismiss every notification from my computer. And even respond to messages.

There’s also times I’m on my phone, but I would prefer to pick it up later when I’m at my computer. At that point I push the page to my computer. As soon as I open my computer, it’s there. Couldn’t be handier!

3. Max Benz – Maxbenz.co

Recommendation: FocusMe

There are so many interesting things on the Internet. And it gets harder and harder to fully focus on your most important tasks since every day new potential distractions pop up. That’s why I love FocusMe.

Based on the Pomodoro approach, it helps me to manage my time and regularly make breaks (also quite important!). When using this chrome extension, it gets easier to work on your tasks in a more effective way and to turn your working day into smaller chunks of tasks.

4. Karola Stachowicz – Landingi

Recomendation: Google Keep

Google Keep is a great tool to help you work. You can quickly save a list of tasks, a link, a note, set a reminder, both on the phone and desktop. The note can be sent via various channels: e-mail, Messenger, sms, save to Google drive or set as a task in Trello. It is only worth remembering to sometimes order in the notes!

5. Elad Burko – Paperwallet

Recommendation: Toggl

Toggl Button is a Chrome extension that allows you to track your productivity in real time. It functions much like a regular stopwatch, but aggregates all time entries in easy to digest reports.

These reports can be broken down by the day, week, month or year. I tend to be a perfectionist and often sink too much time into a single task. With Toggl I can view exactly how long I’ve spent fiddling with something, and move on to a new task if necessary.

One of my favorite things about the tool is that it integrates with my team’s project management software. For each project we’re working on I create seperate cards in Trello. As Toggl integrates with Trello, I can start the timer directly from my Trello card, it names the time entry according to the task and project, and at the end of the day I can view exactly how long I spent on each card.

14 Feb 16:58

Five Ways to Quadruple Your Blog’s Income

by Darren Rowse

The post Five Ways to Quadruple Your Blog’s Income appeared first on ProBlogger.

5 ways to quadruple your blog's income

Let’s say you’ve already monetized your blog – at least to some degree.

But while you’re bringing in some revenue each month, it’s not as much as you’d like. Perhaps you want to be quit your day job, or take your business to the next level. So how can you start earning more?

Well, that’s what we’ll be covering in this blog post.

Even if you’re just starting out with monetizing your blog, give this post a read anyway. There’s a lot that you’ll hopefully be able to use in a few months’ time. (You might also want to check out our beginner-friendly page on making money blogging.)

The Power of a Deadline

In my first year of blogging I had no idea you could make money from a blog. But in my second year I started dabbling with Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate income. And soon I was earning a few dollars a day.

But even though I could see slow and steady growth, I knew I wanted to move faster. At the rate I was going it would be ten years before I’d be able to go full time with blogging.

So my wife Vanessa and I set a six-month deadline. To be at the point where I could make a full-time living from blogging I needed to quadruple my income. And if I couldn’t do it, I’d go and get a regular job.

You might not want to set such a strict deadline. But having a particular date in mind can really help you to stay focused and motivated.

The day I set that deadline was the day I started doing things I knew I should do but had never actually done. I worked really hard on those. And after just three or four months I reached that full-time level.

My blog took off because I was actually doing the things I knew I should do.

Maybe you have a bunch of those things yourself: things you plan to get round to “someday” but haven’t tackled yet.

In this post, I want to focus on five key areas that have helped me significantly grow my income over the past 15 years.

#1: Increasing the Blog’s Traffic

Looking at my past earnings, I can see a clear correlation between increased traffic and increased income. The traffic has paid off in different ways, depending on the source. For example, Google traffic tends to do well for AdSense earnings.

If you can increase your traffic, you’ll increase your income. When I was doing this I put a lot of effort into learning SEO and writing content that matched up with keywords people would be searching for. I wrote guest posts for other blogs and participated in forums. And today I put time into social media.

For help on how to grow your traffic, check out:

#2: Adding a New Income Stream

There are so many ways you can monetize a blog, and I’ve seen my income increase dramatically when adding new income streams. Think about:

  • Running ads on your blog (or more ads, as long as you don’t go overboard)
  • Creating your own products such as ebooks or online courses
  • Promoting affiliate products (e.g. other people’s ebooks or courses, or products on Amazon)
  • Offering coaching or freelance services
  • Launching a membership area on your site with a monthly subscription
  • Creating a mastermind group
  • Setting up a Patreon account (so people can donate money and get bonuses)

Take a look at what other bloggers in your niche are doing. How are they making money with their blog? You might also want to have a look at my money map that covers 40+ ways to make money from a blog.

#3: Increasing Your Conversion Rate

If you already have several income streams in place, are they performing as well as they could? Could you could tweak them to make even more money?

For instance, if you run ads on your site then take a look at things such as where they’re positioned, what size ad units you’re using, and so on. If you’re promoting affiliate products, don’t just have a widget in your sidebar. Mention them in posts and have calls to action like “Get the price on this product on Amazon”. I found that creating bestseller lists of products worked really well, too.

If you’re selling an ebook or product, you could create two versions of your sales page and split test them. There are plenty of tools around that will allow you to do that. (We use Thrive Architect.) You can test different headlines, images, colours, calls to action, and so on.

If your income is from sponsorship, look at ways you can offer more to your sponsors. For instance, you could mention them on social media, run a competition, or include their ad in your newsletter. They’ll often be willing to spend more if you can offer some extras.

If you have several products, you could try “upselling” – promoting one product at a discount just after readers have purchased another. This can be a great way to get money you wouldn’t otherwise have coming in.

#4: Running a Promotional Burst

Eight years ago on Digital Photography School we started doing our “12 Days of Christmas” campaigns. During the year we would have launched three or four products, and this was a chance to promote them again.

During the campaign, we sent 12 emails in 12 days about our products (and about some affiliate products too). It was pretty intensive, and I did worry that our audience would react badly. But they seemed to like it, and it led to a massive spike in income.

There are lots of good times to run a sale. Some bloggers do it for Valentine’s Day, others for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and so on. But you can also just pick a day (or a few days) to run a flash sale. These are all great ways to boost your income from products you’ve already created.

Another option is to use an email autoresponder to create an ongoing income stream by promoting your old posts, your products, and even affiliate or sponsor products.

Don’t forget to take a look at how easy (or hard) it is to find your products on your site. You may have a bunch of products no-one really knows about because they’re hard to find from the menu. You may need to create a “Shop” page, or a “Resources” page for affiliate links.

#5: Increasing Your Pricing

This might seem blindingly obvious, but raising your prices can lead to increased income. (Mind you, sometimes lowering your prices works better. So you might want to review the pricing of your products in general and maybe do some split testing.)

On Digital Photography School we used to sell our courses for $29. We realised a lot of our competitors were selling similar courses for $300.

While ours were packed with value, our underpricing meant some customers bought them from our competitors instead, thinking their courses were better simply because they had a higher price tag.

I’m not saying you should increase all your prices by a factor of ten. If your prices seem unreasonable, people won’t buy. (Or they’ll buy and then ask for a refund.) But many of us do undervalue what we’re offering.

You could also look at offering a premium level for your products or services. When we added a mastermind day to the ProBlogger Event, we found a significant segment of our audience was willing to pay more for greater access to myself, my team and the speakers.

These aren’t things you should do in isolation. If you want to double, triple or quadruple your income, you’ll probably need to do one or more of them. For instance, you may need to increase your traffic, add new income streams and use your existing income streams more efficiently.

Who knows where it could take you? Perhaps you’ll achieve your dream of being a full-time blogger like I did. Yes, you may need to do some intense work in the short term. But it could pay off for many years to come.

The post Five Ways to Quadruple Your Blog’s Income appeared first on ProBlogger.

      
14 Feb 16:57

How to Be a Memorable Salesperson Part 5: Create Value

by deb.calvert@peoplefirstps.com (Deb Calvert)

Being memorable matters!

You work far too hard and put in way too many hours to be easily forgotten. You don’t want to be part of the ho-hum background noise in other peoples’ days. You’re better than that. You have more to offer than that. And it’s time you made some simple changes to how you present yourself so the impression you make is a lasting one.

That’s what this 12-part series is all about. You: being memorable. Your buyers: remembering you when it’s time to buy, to renew, or to make a recommendation/referral to others in their networks. Each installment in this series shows you how to be a memorable salesperson.

14 Feb 16:56

AI and Sales: What We Misunderstand

by Dave Brock

GDJ / Pixabay

Based on much of the press, much of it created by vendors of AI solutions, AI is the answer to all the problems we have with sales and marketing. We are presented a brave new world where we can engage the right customers, say exactly the right words at the right time, making sure we ask no more than 4 discovery questions, that our opening pitch(?) is no longer than 9.1 minutes, that…..

All of this, done under the auspices of AI or it’s companion, machine learning (ML) will be the answer to our revenue generation challenges.

Sales execs and sales people breath sighs of relief, “We don’t have to worry any more. AI identifies the customer, gives us all the answers, it even puts the right words in our mouths.”

If that scenario is true, one then can project the perfection of voice technologies, imagining worlds of chatbots engaging customers in the right conversation all the time—why do we need SDRs, AEs any more, why deal with all these people issues, AI/ML is the answer to our revenue prayers.

OK, so I’m exaggerating a little–but not by much–at least when one reads the articles or talks to people anxious about the technology.

Actually, I have great hope for the application of these technologies in marketing and sales. Having co-founded, built, and sold one of the early AI start-ups, and now serving on the boards of several others. I think I understand some of the possibilities. At the same time, I’ve seen many of the challenges and the things that AI just can’t do.

AI offers great promise in helping better identify, segment, and target our prospects. It offers great promise in helping us identify the moment in time when there might be a higher propensity to buy. It gives us insights and helps us identify patterns that would have been impossible to recognize without the technology.

Of course, much of this isn’t new. In some sense it offers us more of what we already have–but aren’t using despite having them.

For example, for years we have had analytic and marketing automation tools to better segment, better tune, and refine our marketing and content outreach to customers. For years we have had the technology to “profile Dave, understand what he is interested in, understand the content that resonates best with him, and get it to him in an impactful way.”

This is nothing new, yet why am I and millions of others inundated with the same meaningless drivel, every day. For some reason, these companies who should know what I want, what I have responded to, feel the need to send me (and you) everything. Much of it seems to be an old advertising mentality where measuring impressions is more important than understanding relevance.

And the phone calls, there is no excuse for anyone not to have a nominal understanding of who I am, what my business is, and what might resonate with me. For years, technology has provided outstanding solutions to help sales people be more relevant in engaging customers and prospects, yet fewer than 10% of the people contacting me appear to be using it. Their only concern is broadcasting their message to see if I respond (of course the right use of the marketing/targeting/segmentation tools should never have put me on most of their call lists.

I can’t help but have more than a little cynicism–not about the technology/tools–but how we implement and leverage them for impact. If we fail to exploit the capabilities of the technologies and tools we have had for years, will we be able to realize the true promise of these new technologies.

I think part of the answer to that lies in the naivete or possible laziness of the people buying them (and somewhat from the messaging of the vendors). One of the great discoveries we made in the AI based enterprise analytics company I co-founded in 2002, was that to exploit our technology we needed really smart people thinking about the right issues (in essence focusing and training the AI/ML) and really smart people to know how to leverage the results we could produce. We started qualifying/disqualifying prospects based on these criteria.

The same applies for today’s technologies. I think too many naively think the technology can do these things, that it does the heavy lifting of figuring things out. (One wonders why data scientists are among the most sought after people if this is true.)

But let me get to what I think the real misunderstanding of these technologies is, at least for the complex B2B buying environment. AI/ML is really bad at a number of things:

  • Understanding context
  • Consciousness
  • Empathy
  • Common sense
  • Sense making

I’ll stop here. While AI/ML can help us understand potential answers and solutions, it can’t help us understand the right answer, because the right answer is always dependent on the customer, their context/experience, and a specific moment in time.

Ironically, the things these technologies are very bad at are the things that great sales people excel at. It’s these abilities that drive engagement and the ability of the sales person to create value with the customer.

These technologies offer great promise, as have past technologies. We have to be smart about how we exploit them. But these technologies fall very short in the things that are most important to our customers in complex B2B buying. We can’t fail to develop the capabilities in our sales people to help our customers.

14 Feb 16:55

What is Meaningful Engagement in Account-Based Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

by Torrey Dye

janeb13 / Pixabay

The role meaningful engagement plays in your account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns can’t be overstated. In fact, it enables your marketing and sales teams to identify the accounts most likely to close and gives them a personalized buying experience.

Additionally, understanding the ways your prospects are engaging helps your team efficiently allocate resources, identify when opportunities are heating up or cooling down, and report on your marketing impact.

But with so many ways prospects can engage with a company these days, coupled with our ability to access that data, it’s important to remember that not all data is created equal and not all engagement is meaningful.

How the approach to engagement has evolved

Traditionally, marketing and sales teams have been focused on the individual –– the lead. At the time, a form fill was the most reliable way to alert your sales team that someone was interested in your solution. But now we know that’s a bit short sighted. According to Google, while 64% of the C-suite has final authority on purchases, 81% of non-senior staff has a say in the decision.

This is why it’s critical to build a 360-degree view of your account, as well as seek to understand an account’s engagement, which looks at the behavior from all the stakeholders at each account and not just one individual. With this approach, the focus turns to the entire buying committee and known and anonymous engagement data. Aggregating engagement data from both known and anonymous will help you more accurately, and quickly, identify which accounts to prioritize.

But here’s the catch: not all engagement is created equal. You’ve got to be able to separate the good from the fluff, and that comes down to quality over quantity. Keep in mind deciding what is meaningful engagement and what is not will vary for every team.

So, how do you measure meaningful engagement in ABM?

Deciding what engagement is most relevant

In previous posts we’ve talked about the different stages of account engagement and how to know when a target account is surging. But generally speaking, what we’re really exploring is how your company can determine which accounts are engaging versus which accounts are meaningfully engaged. Because every team has a unique set of target accounts, solution offerings, strategies, and goals, what is deemed “meaningful” will look different from one organization to the next.

With that in mind, here are two models to help you determine what meaningful give you a clearer picture of which accounts are meaningfully engaged:

The Foundational Model

Does your company have one primary product or service? If so, meaningful engagement might look like multiple high-value website visits from several people in a target account. But only if you have historically been able to convert website visits into opportunities.

For example, if you’re looking at an account that has six people on the buying committee and based on engagement data, you can see that four of the six have visited high-value pages on your website a combined 15 times (and that should include product pages), this would be classified as meaningful engagement. Alternatively, one individual from the target account visiting your website or downloading a white paper is not high-quality engagement. Both activities count as engagement, but one account is more invested than the other and sending signals they’re highly interested in your solution.

The Layered Model

The layered approach to assess meaningful engagement is a better fit for organizations that sell multiple products or have a high-traffic website. In this case, you’d want to go deeper than the foundational model and incorporate several other indicators. Here’s what a simplified layered model for meaningful engagement might look:

# of total website visits from # people
+
# of visits to high-value webpages from #people
+
# of content downloads from #people

+

# of email opens from # people

Keep in mind, you can create more than one model to see which performs best for your team in terms of helping you best identify priority accounts. That said, the layered model can seem complex at first, but it is a powerful tool that can be tailored to adapt to changes in your strategy.

To start with the layered model, you’ll need to create a baseline. Analyze the current deals in your sales cycle. What is their average engagement level? How many engagements does it take to close an account on average? What types of content are they most often engaging with? With this baseline data, you can start measuring increases or decreases to see when meaningful engagement is occurring as well as when an account is cooling off.

The foundational and layered models can be used to uncover additional metrics your organization will find useful, including rates of meaningful engagement –– the percentage of target accounts that are engaged –– and the time from the first touchpoint to meaningful engagement. Think of this as the amount of time it takes for an account to first connect with your company on a website visit, until a more meaningful engagement such as setting up a demo or spending time watching a webinar.

Defining meaningful engagement within your company

Successful ABM starts with stakeholder alignment. You have to get consensus from marketing, sales, customer success and company leadership.

Every ABM initiative will take testing to find what works for a business. It will take a few iterations to land on a definition everyone can agree upon. Start with a foundational or layered model to begin, and look out for patterns that uncover meaningful engagement.

To learn more about meaningful engagement, including how to target the right accounts using engagement data, how to personalize and prioritize your outreach to speed up the sales process and measure the success of your marketing programs, download The Complete Guide to Account Engagement for ABM.

14 Feb 16:51

Global Hardware Maintenance Provider Supercharges Sales Team with Relationship Selling

Microsoft Dynamics Sales Navigator

Editor's Note: A version of this blog post originally appeared on Microsoft's Customer Stories microsite.

When Park Place Technologies expanded its hardware maintenance business globally, business boomed, deals got larger and more complex, and its internal systems were challenged. The company used Microsoft Dynamics 365 to prepare for the future with modular sales, marketing, and financial tools. Using Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Park Place Technologies salespeople shortcut their sales efforts with relationship selling and, soon, high-touch, personalized engagement at scale.

By using a Microsoft and LinkedIn solution, we can supercharge and empower our sales team and shorten the sales cycle. — Jennifer Deutsch, CMO, Park Place Technologies

If you own datacenters filled with hundreds or thousands of servers, you want to extend that capital investment for as long as possible. Server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) want you to upgrade every three years, conveniently timed to their warranty expirations. But if you can get a few extra years out of your investment, you can save millions of dollars.

Park Place Technologies can make that happen. Since 1991, the Cleveland, Ohio-based company has provided post-warranty storage, server, and networking hardware maintenance for government agencies, businesses, universities, and other owners of enterprise datacenters. 

Too many manual sales processes 

The post-warranty maintenance business is good—so good that in 2016, Park Place Technologies faced a pressing need to modernize its core business systems to keep up. Its aging applications couldn’t handle the complex transactions that transpired after the company expanded into international markets and began a spate of acquisitions. 

Further, salespeople turned to social media sites such as LinkedIn to enrich prospecting, but they still had to copy and paste data about these online interactions into sales systems. “Our salespeople were frustrated, and our growth was on the line,” says Jennifer Deutsch, CMO at Park Place Technologies. “When we went global, we went head-to-head with big international OEMs, and we were under tremendous pressure to compete effectively. Our systems were unable to keep up with our pace of growth. We needed to do something fast.” 

One seamless process, from lead to loyalty

Deutsch worked with Chris Adams, President and COO at Park Place Technologies, to identify a new integrated software suite that would manage customer data from lead handling all the way to customer service.

They chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 over Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle ERP Cloud. “We felt that Dynamics 365 had a more complete feature set, with modular business apps that we could turn on gradually as our business evolves and grows at a rapid pace. It was the best solution to future-proof our company,” says Adams. The company is deploying Dynamics 365 for Customer ServiceDynamics 365 for Sales, and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

A supercharged sales force

Park Place Technologies is particularly interested in rolling out the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution, which combines Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Salespeople can engage in relationship selling by seeing complete relationship data inside Dynamics 365—an individual’s LinkedIn profile, news, connections, activities. This gives the sales team a comprehensive view of the prospect: professional interests, professional network, and previous interactions between Park Place Technologies and the prospect’s company—all of this right in the CRM where they work. Relationship selling makes it easier to personalize engagement with contacts, prioritize the right connections, and know next steps to move the relationship forward.

Deutsch is excited about the potential and is working with partner NuSoft Solutions to take full advantage of Relationship Sales. “By using a Microsoft and LinkedIn solution, we can supercharge and empower our sales team and shorten the sales cycle,” she says. “Our salespeople will become more knowledgeable and powerful in a shorter amount of time.”

That will lead to a lower cost per call and higher close rates. Already, the company’s ability to tie leads to marketing efforts has skyrocketed because it can now link inbound calls to specific marketing campaigns. Salespeople can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to learn more about these inbound callers before contacting them. 

“Our new sales hires are part of the LinkedIn generation,” says Adams. “They expect to have access to social media information in their business tools, and that’s what they get with the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution. Instead of switching between Outlook, Dynamics, and LinkedIn all day, they stay in one application and get everything they need.”

More innovations to sell smarter

There are even more groundbreaking efficiencies on the horizon for Park Place Technologies. The company is using Microsoft services to enhance sales efforts with bots and other automation technologies. The Relationship Insights feature in Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights helps sales teams find critical opportunities, manage email communications, identify actionable email messages, and determine next steps to maintain relationship health.

“We’re getting to the future faster by working with Microsoft,” Deutsch says. “We’ll be able to create a category-killer offering that delivers unprecedented uptime for our customers and puts us leagues ahead of the competition.“

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