You probably know that word-of-mouth is the most valuable form of marketing out there. With 92% of consumers trusting referrals from people they know, one way to generate word-of-mouth is by transforming your loyal customers into brand advocates. But this is not the only way! Companies have been turning to influencers for help. Simply stated, social media influencers carry influence over others that they wield through social media. Consumers trust their favorite influencers in the same way as they trust friends and family. In fact, according to Twitter research, 49% of consumers seek purchase guidance from social media influencers.

How to incorporate influencer marketing as a small business?

You don’t need a Kim Kardashian to promote your app (but if you know her, it can’t hurt to ask!). A newer concept known as micro-influencer marketing recently joined the scene. It’s the same concept as influencer marketing, but on a smaller scale: you partner with influencers with smaller followings to promote your local business with authentic posts of sponsored ads. According to Hubspot: “They’re individuals who work or specialize in a particular vertical and frequently share social media content about their interests.”

You might think it’s counterintuitive to use micro-influencers, as their following might be smaller than yours. However, there are severals reasons to believe micro-influencers can get better results for your local business.

First, micro-influencers have better engagement rates. In fact, Markerly’s Instagram research found that as an influencer’s numbers of followers increases, their number of likes and comments decreases. As a result, they recommend brands pursue micro-influencers with Instagram followings in the 1,000-10,000 range. Companies will achieve higher engagement rates by following this strategy.

Not only will micro-influencers have higher engagement, they will also have a highly targeted audience. Here’s an example: if a brand like Barkbox partners with Kylie Jenner (who has several dogs), they will reach a very large audience on Instagram. However, many of her followers might not be interested in dog products. Barkbox instead partners with Instagram dog influencers. These accounts, while popular, come nowhere near the following of a celebrity like Kylie Jenner, but the followers are definitely all dog lovers. So the promotion has a much higher chance of leading to conversions, i.e. people buying Barkbox products after seeing the sponsored content. In this case, a micro-influencer allows the brand to connect with the right audience.

Which micro-influencers should you go after?

You will have to spend some time conducting research into influencers that align with your brand’s identity and narrative. Would this person use your product or service in their daily life? Do they embody your brand’s story? You want customers to understand and appeal to your brand through the chosen influencer. It’s not all about the number of followers and likes. The better the fit, the more effective the influencer marketing campaign.

This might seem obvious, but make sure you are looking on the platforms that your target audience is already using. If your target audience is on Instagram, then an Instagram influencer could be the way to go. However, be wary of sponsoring content on channels that you are not highly involved in. If your company doesn’t have a presence on Instagram, this might create a disconnect with your target audience.

Find micro-influencers among your fans. It will be a lot easier to convince people who are already a fan of your company to work with you. For example:

• If you own a gym, look for the people who are always working out there. Find that gym fanatic who has an engaged audience. Approach this person for a partnership deal. Maybe you can offer this person free gym membership for 6 months in return for a couple posts on Instagram tagging your business location.

• If you are in the restaurant industry, find local food bloggers in your area. Invite them to dine at your restaurant for free in return for a blog post about your establishment.

If you are not sure how to find the right influencers, or you don’t have time to do this manually, these third-party tools can automate the process:

• BuzzSumo is a tool that allows you to search for influencers using specific keywords. In the search results, you can see the relevant statistics of each influencer. They also let you filter the results based on different categories; for micro-influencers you would select “Regular People.”
• Klear is, similarly, an influencer search engine backed with years of historical data. You can find Instagram influencers, Twitter influencers, Youtube influencers and influential bloggers. Start your search by choosing a target audience based on the social network, the category and the location.

How do you reach out to these micro-influencers?

Make a list of potential influencers, taking into account that not everyone will say yes to your request. Approach these influencers over email or on the platform they use to reach their followers. Make sure to personalise the message to the influencer, instead of copy-pasting the same message over and over (e.g. reference their content, or a common interest). Get the conversation started by introducing yourself and your company, and describe the mutual value the partnership would provide. This mutual value can come in various forms. Partnering with micro-influencers is a lot more affordable than going after celebrities. However, you shouldn’t expect that just because they have a small following they will partner with you for free. Managing a blog or curating an Instagram account is hard work. Acknowledge this hard work by offering your product or service for free or offering a one-time payment in return for their sponsored content.

Make sure to include the most important elements of the partnership in your first message. This will make it easy for influencers to decide whether or not they want to collaborate, without wasting anyone’s time.

Working with influencers can be a great way to reach potential customers and breath new life into your small business marketing strategy. For more inspiration, just scroll through your Instagram feed and see how other brands are partnering with influencers to grow their business. On a side note, Instagram just released a new feature allowing influencers to formally disclose their paid partnership (instead of using #ad or #sponsored). This feature will allow you, the partnering company, to directly access the sponsored post’s analytics like reach and engagement metrics. In other words, social media networks are underlining the growth and value of influencers. Time to find your new brand ambassadors!

Most people measure loyalty by how many clients leave. But it’s unfortunate to be measuring loyalty once it’s too late to keep a client.

Luckily, loyalty can actually be measured in advance; and as Management Guru Peter Drucker says, “If it can be measured, it can be managed”.

At Step Change, we use the Active Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure client loyalty. This powerful indicator of future growth provides a clear measurement of client satisfaction over time, drives innovation and potentially performance management, creates a simple and easily actionable system at an individual customer level, and supercharges testimonials, referrals, and innovation opportunities. Just as important, it provides the opportunity for you to address and fix issues for dissatisfied clients.

The Active NPS lets you track customer satisfaction by asking one simple question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

How It Works

The NPS is expressed as a number between -100 and +100. One of the best scores in the marketplace is Apple, which has an NPS of 76. On the other hand, just about ever player in the financial services has a negative net promoter score.

Here’s how it works.

A survey respondent indicates how likely they are to refer someone, with a rating between 0–10, 10 being the most likely. If, for example, 35% of respondents are Promoters, 25% are Passives and 40% Detractors, the NPS is -5. An NPS that is positive is good, with an NPS of +50 being excellent.

You can track the results with the following groupings to get a clear measure of the business’s performance through customers’ eyes. Customers respond on a 0- to 10-point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

• Promoters (score 9–10)

These are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying your product or service and refer others, fuelling growth. Those that give you a 10 will refer three times as many people as a nine would.

What you should do: Request for testimonials. Get these testimonials up on your website or on Google My Business. You may want to use software, like Bravo, to capture video testimonials. The benefit of getting a testimonial is that it cements that customer’s loyalty.

• Passives (score 7–8)

These are satisfied customers but not thrilled enough to recommend you to their network. They are likely to continue buying your product until they come across a supplier with a competitive value proposition.

What you should do: Engage them by asking for feedback and ideas on how to get a 10 from them in the future. You can use a crowdsourcing innovation platform where customers can suggest ideas that they would like your business to implement. Users can then vote on the ideas by promoting or demoting until they reach a critical response level, which you set. You don’t need to overcommit yourself by promising to respond to every post or to activate every idea.

• Detractors (score 0–6)

These are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word of mouth. People are wired to remember painful moments; this explains why when people had a terrible experience with your product or service, they are going to talk about your business almost 10x as much as a promoter.

What you should do: Call immediately and resolve the issue that’s bothering them.

Conclusion

It’s not enough to just measure customer loyalty. We need to attend to it. One of the two biggest mistakes concerning the Net Promoter Score is that businesses do it quarterly or annually. This just doesn’t work.

If you sent your survey today to a customer who purchased a product six months ago, you are just wasting your time. People forget quickly. So when you send out the NPS survey, make sure it’s in proximity to the actual purchase or peak intensity of the experience. For us here at Step Change, we give out the Active NPS survey after we conduct our Intensive (or workshop), but before the end of the project — that will give us some time to address and fix issues.

And don’t just measure it — act on it. The only worse thing than giving people a poor experience is asking for their feedback and then doing nothing about it. Only ask for their feedback if you are prepared to do something about it.

First seen on The Step Change Blog.

Today’s article is focused on your value proposition.  Does your value proposition tell a story that compels your customers to act by answering the key question, “Why change?”   If you need more help with your value proposition, download our 10th annual

LONDON — In 1690, the UK imposed a 25% import tax on all goods coming from France to Britain. France responded likewise. For the next 200 years, until about 1860, British people who wanted to drink French wine paid 25% more per bottle than anyone else. Trade between the two countries almost vanished (except for brandy, which for some reason was exempt).

The intent of the tax was to boost domestic makers of wool, silk, and linen, and to protect British merchants selling salted fish and cattle. It was a blanket tax, and it covered wine as well.

The Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote about the tariffs in Wealth of Nations, his keystone analysis of capitalism. He noticed that there was one specific group of British businessmen who benefited more than the others from the tariffs — smugglers:

"Those mutual restraints have put an end to almost all fair commerce between the two nations, and smugglers are now the principal importers, either of British goods into France, or of French goods into Great Britain."

Last week, we learned that President Trump wants to start a trade war with the rest of the world by imposing a 20% import tax on goods entering the country.

This is familiar territory.

There is a trade war brewing between Britain and the EU, too. Europe is implicitly threatening to tax British imports after it leaves the EU in order to show EU countries that Brexit comes with negative consequences. Prime Minister Theresa May's government has hinted that it may lower corporation tax in response.

Until very recently, most people felt this debate was settled in favour of free trade. Almost no one who is serious about economics argues in favour of protectionism, trade wars, or restrictions on international free trade.

So perhaps it is worth going back to basics.

Why doesn't Scotland make its own wine?

When Smith wrote about trade between Britain and France in 1776, he suggested that if the tariffs were effective then Scotland ought to be making its own wine. The tariffs made French wine expensive. You can grow grapes in Scotland. So surely Scotland's domestic vineyards would have an advantage. Obviously, they did not, Smith wrote, 241 years ago:

"The natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hot walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?"

Scotland is cold and rainy, and France is warm and dry. It makes more sense for France to specialise in wine based on its natural advantages, and for the Scots to let that wine into their country as cheaply as possible. 

Specialisation is the key to free trade.

There is a reason you don't make your own shoes

There is a reason free trade exists: It's a lot easier than the alternative.

Before capitalism, there wasn't much trade. People lived in rural villages and made a living on small farms. They grew their own food, made their own clothes, and built their own houses. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is laborious.

Try making your own shoes, for instance.

Obviously, it is a lot easier for people to take some extra wheat to the local market and trade it for shoes than it is to make your own shoes from scratch. Unsurprisingly, some people stopped bothering to grow their own food and began to specialise exclusively in making shoes for sale or barter. Specialisation and trade have gone hand in hand ever since.

That principle remains the basis of free trade today: It's more efficient to specialise in one trade and buy everything else you need than it is to make everything yourself. The principle is the same for individuals, families, villages, cities and nations. Trade has been conducted this way for about 7,000 years.

OK, so the French are good at wine and the Scots shouldn't try to compete because their climate is lousy.

Not all industries are like wine.

What about something like steel, which is not dependent on the local environment? Anyone can make steel. China makes really cheap steel. How do you keep steel jobs from being outsourced to China?

A trade war sounds like an easy, cost-free solution to a country's jobs problem: Place a tariff on foreign goods. The government gets a new stream of income from import taxes. Foreign goods become more expensive. Domestic ones cheaper, comparatively. As a result, money stays at home where it saves jobs instead of leaking out of the country to foreign suppliers. 

In the short-term, that may indeed happen. That's is why "economic nationalism" is so popular right now.

The problem is that the short-term doesn't last very long. Pretty soon you're living in the long term, where things get harder.

Tariffs give all your enemies an instant advantage

Steel is a good example because both the US and the UK steel industries have suffered from competition from cheaper Chinese steel imports. Factories have closed and jobs have been lost due to Chinese steel "dumping." Tata's Port Talbot plant in Britain was losing a £1 million ($1.3 million) a day at one point because it could not compete with steel from China.

Let's assume that the UK government had followed Trump's plan and propped up Port Talbot by taxing foreign steel at 20%. What would happen next?

In the short-term it would be good news for the workers of Port Talbot, they would all keep their jobs.

But it would be bad news for everyone else in Britain.

Other companies in other countries don't care about the origin of their steel. Those companies would immediately source their steel more cheaply, probably from the Chinese. So suddenly every single company on the planet that buys steel would have a cost advantage over every British company buying British steel. That would instantly hurt British companies who trade globally.

One of Britain's main industries is car manufacturing. The Brits make 1.7 million cars per year, mostly for export to the EU. All those cars would become more expensive, either because the car companies would be using comparatively expensive British steel or because they would be buying foreign steel with a 20% tax markup. Remember, the tariff hasn't actually brought down the cost of British steel, it has merely made foreign steel more expensive for British people. Outside the UK, foreign steel would still be cheaper than British steel. So the government's attempt to make foreign steel feel more expensive has the exact opposite effect on the global market, to the disadvantage of British steel buyers.

Carmakers in Germany, India and China — who all make a lot of cars — would love that to happen. It would give them a 20% head start over Britain.

The Soviet Union had good trade barriers too

The cost of protecting British steel would quickly seep back into the UK economy. Anything that contained steel — any product, any toy, any component — would cost the British more than it cost the Germans or the Chinese. British companies, saddled with the expense of buying either British steel above global market prices or foreign steel with a 20% tariff, would lose business to foreign competitors able to make the same goods cheaper. Their revenues would suffer, and their profits would decline. They might put their prices up to compensate — but that would make them even more uncompetitive, and spur internal inflation. And when prices creep up, workers get poorer in real terms.

That's when long-term stagnation hits.

Britain might carry on for years with full employment in the steel business. But the investment capital you need to keep every other business going, innovating, renewing, and creating more jobs, would all evaporate. Capital isn't stupid. It would notice the declining returns and go elsewhere — probably to the companies in countries who hadn't erected a steel tariff barrier.  

Britain would find itself falling behind other countries, in much the same way as the Soviet Union fell behind during the Cold War. (If communism was successful at one thing, it was good at restricting imports from competitive countries.)

By the end of a decade, Britain would be stuck making steel no one wants to buy. Smaller, more marginal UK companies would go out of business, unable to shoulder the extra cost of steel. Those jobs are lost. The economy would coalesce around only the biggest, most profitable companies that can withstand the hit. That's OK, as long as you are comfortable with your national economy being run by only gigantic mega-corporations.

Lastly, everyone in Britain would be incentivised to create products using any other substance than steel. There would be a boom in the aluminium and plastics business. Wood and bricks might make a comeback in the construction industry. There would be fewer skyscrapers.

Again, this is fine ... as long as you are comfortable distorting your entire economy — even the skylines of your cities — to save one type of business.

This is what trade barriers do. They might boost your domestic industry in the short term but they distort everything else in the long term.

America is Britain's biggest single trading partner. £100 billion ($130 billion) of goods are shipped to the US from the UK every year. Trump's 20% tax might reduce that trade, and shift some of that business from the UK to America. But assuming the UK responds in kind it would hurt America, too. The US exports £61 billion ($80 billion) in goods to the UK annually. The American jobs created by that £61 billion in trade would all be in jeopardy, along with the jobs dependent on trade with every other country on the planet.

How you create jobs when China is destroying them

There are negatives to free trade, of course.

China's government subsidises its industries, and many of its products are so cheap they drive Western companies bankrupt. That costs us jobs.

It is tempting to simply block China from trade. But by doing so you set in motion the cycle just described, and most of the damage is inflicted on your own workers, years later. The Chinese have plenty of other people to sell steel to. India (pop. 1 billion) for instance. The Chinese would love it if the UK and the US hobbled themselves with a protectionist steel tariff.

The solution is for countries to behave like the guy in the village who stops growing wheat in order to make shoes: When countries can't compete in the steel business they ought to get out of steel and get into any business that can exploit China's supply of cheap steel. If Chinese taxpayers want to subsidise British industries that need steel, then we should quietly rejoice and import that steel like crazy! Cheap steel is good, as the car workers of Sunderland (Nissan) and Swindon (Honda) will tell you. Yes, we might lose some jobs in Port Talbot. But we will gain many, many more everywhere else.

This is why, eventually, Britain and France lowered their tariffs Adam Smith was complaining about to around 5% by the 1800s.

When Britain joined the EU in 1973, all those tariffs went away, cut to 0%. One of the monumental achievements of the EU was to persuade 28 different countries to remove all trade barriers with each other. It created a democratic, prosperous, Western counterweight to US economic power. (It also kept the peace for 60 years on a continent that had seen two world wars in the previous 50.) Now, 44% of British trade is conducted tax-free with Europe. That's £240 billion ($312 billion) of business per year. That's a lot of UK jobs.

As for the Scottish wine industry, despite Adam Smith's warning from 241 years ago, there are still people trying to make wine in Scotland today.

It is "undrinkable," according to The Scotsman.

Want to comment on this story? Tweet at @Jim_Edwards.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'I'll ask it one more time': Kellyanne Conway won't say whether Trump thinks climate change is a hoax

There’s something to be said for early adopters who latch onto a trend and figure out how to leverage it. Using hashtags on LinkedIn is one of those trends, and here’s how you can use them to your advantage.

1. Weave hashtags into your LinkedIn profile, especially your summary and/or headline. The easiest way to make this change is to turn the keywords in your LinkedIn summary into hashtags. I would avoid putting too many hashtags into the copy above this section because you want your profile to flow. The hashtags are to help you get found in LinkedIn’s search engine when prospects or buyers are looking for someone who does what you do.
2. Start using hashtags in your status updates. I caution you to start slowly weaving these hashtags into your status updates because you may annoy others if you get “hashtag-crazy” on LinkedIn. Instagram and Twitter users are accustomed to several hashtags in each post, while LinkedIn users are not accustomed to seeing/using hashtags. I recommend choosing a maximum of 3-5 hashtags for each status update.
3. Here’s how you want your post to look. Notice how I spaced out the hashtags and moved them further away from the actual status update. This is visually pleasing to LinkedIn users, while still making your updates searchable.
4. Start using hashtags with your LinkedIn Pulse articles. If you already use LinkedIn Pulse, you may have noticed that your reach and engagement has subsided, unless you are a LinkedIn influencer. To get your articles in front of more eyeballs, you need to use every tactic possible on LinkedIn. Weave hashtags into the body of your LinkedIn Pulse articles, or list them as keywords at the bottom of your article.Also, include those hashtags in the status update that shares your article when you publish it to LinkedIn Pulse. These are very easy changes to make, and they will help others outside your network discover your LinkedIn Pulse articles.
5. Add hashtags to your LinkedIn Company Pages. Weave hashtags into your LinkedIn Company Pages, especially within the About Us section. You can easily do this by hashtagging your Specialties and including them at the bottom of the About Us section.
6. Add hashtags to your comments on other people’s status updates. When you comment on other people’s status updates, you are building a stronger network. Simply weave in hashtags to ensure that your comments are helping to categorize status updates on LinkedIn. If you want your name associated with certain hashtags, this is one way to do just that.
   
7. Start monitoring hashtags for opportunities to engage and listen. If there are certain hashtags you monitor on Twitter or Instagram, start monitoring them here on LinkedIn. You’ll have to do it manually (for now), but engaging with posts that are using industry/niche hashtags is one way to get noticed on LinkedIn, build thought leadership, and become a savvier social seller.

Even if you choose to only do social listening, LinkedIn is a great place to do it. It’s not yet too noisy for conversations to get lost, as they are on Twitter. Posts have more staying power on LinkedIn, and you should be capitalizing on it.

If you’d like to learn more about social selling for LinkedIn and Twitter, join me at my Biznology webinar in July.

Have you ever wondered why two heads are better than one -- and four heads are better than two?

It’s because we’re all limited by our own experiences, biases, and areas of expertise.

Your manager has a different background than you, which means she can bring different ideas to the table. You spend more time with customers on a daily basis, which means you have a better understanding of their challenges and priorities. Put you together in a room, and your combined insights can crack a challenging problem.

But it’s not feasible to host a roundtable discussion every time you need to make an important decision.

Luckily, there’s a way to hack the decision making process and reap the “two heads” effect by yourself: Mental models.

This guide covers the definition of a mental model, how to use them, and the most useful types. Let’s dive in.

The definition of a mental model

A mental model is a way of examining a problem. As James Clear explains, “Each mental model offers a different framework that you can use to look at life … If you develop a bigger toolbox of mental models, you'll improve your ability to solve problems because you'll have more options for getting to the right answer. This is one of the primary ways that truly brilliant people separate themselves from the masses of smart individuals out there.”

14 Mental Models That Will Improve Your Decision Making

Bayes’ Theorem

This describes the probability of something happening based on potentially relevant factors. To give you an idea, you might tell your prospect the average business has a 70% chance of failure. In their industry, however, that number is even higher -- around 85%.

Circle of Competence

We can thank Warren Buffett for this mental model. In 1996, Buffett told his shareholders, “You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”

Concentrate on your area of expertise, and don't be afraid to say “I don’t know” when you’re dealing with someone else’s circle of competence.

For example, a HubSpot rep can teach her prospect about inbound marketing and sales, but she shouldn’t try to teach him about his niche market. After all, he knows far more about his customers than she does.

Confirmation Bias

This is a human tendency to look for and interpret information in a way that reinforces or confirms what you already believe.

For instance, if you’re confident the prospect is going to buy, you might focus on their enthusiasm about the product’s features and overlook their hesitation about the price.

To protect yourself against confirmation bias, accept the idea that your perception doesn’t always (or even frequently) equal reality. Challenge yourself to find different interpretations of what’s happening.

In the above example, you might think, “Is there anything to suggest this deal won’t close? What might stand in the way of the purchase?

Being more skeptical will lead you to probe more deeply for objections -- which, in turn, will help you defuse the buyer’s price anxiety before it’s too late.

Inversion Mental Model

The inversion perspective is one of the most powerful mental models. Rather than thinking about your desired outcome, consider the outcome you’d like to avoid.

For example, say you want to be promoted to sales manager. Instead of asking yourself, “What are the top five things I could do to get promoted?” ask yourself, “What are the top 10 things that would prevent my promotion?”

Then, you’d make sure to do none of those things.

As Shane Parrish says, “Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.” While you won’t always find the answer by inverting the problem, you’ll definitely improve.

Fundamental Attribution Error

We’re more likely to believe someone is acting a certain way because of their character than the situation.

In other words, if your sales engineer doesn’t show up to the meeting, you’ll probably think, “They’re flakey,” not “They must have gotten stuck in traffic.”

Challenge yourself to give people the benefit of the doubt. Behavior is usually situational, so your predictions of how people will act will be more accurate if you don’t chalk things up to “how they are.”

Hanlon’s Razor

If your prospect goes dark at a critical moment of the sale, you’re probably going to assume they were kicking tires or decided to go with your competitor. But according to Hanlon’s Razor, which states “Never attribute to malice what could be explained by carelessness,” you should assume the buyer is busy instead.

Jealousy Tendency

There are two types of envy. The productive type is “inferiority,” or the desire to raise yourself up to another person’s level. Do you want to become as successful as the top-selling rep on your team? You’re motivated by this kind of envy.

The unproductive type is malicious envy, or the desire to take something valuable away from someone else -- not for your own means, but so they don’t have it.

These motivators are worth remembering when talking to buyers. Your prospect might be personally invested in a goal because they want to do as well -- or better -- than another person at their company or beat someone else’s record. Identifying these desires will help you craft a better pitch.

You should also be conscious of the jealousy tendency in your own decision making process. While a competitive streak (inferiority envy) usually benefits you in sales, wanting other people to fail (malicious envy) will only distract you. Overcome envy by reminding yourself of your similarities to this person, which will trigger your empathy, and avoid the temptation to sabotage them. Turn those impulses into growth opportunities: What skill or habit can you improve to get their results?

Law of Diminishing Returns

At a certain point, the incremental benefits you get from an investment get increasingly smaller. The first month you go on a diet, for example, you might lose six pounds. The second month you might lose three. The third month you might lose two.

This concept applies to sales in several ways. First, make sure you’re focusing on the most valuable activities. Let’s say you’ve spent 10 minutes researching your prospect before the call. You’re not going to double your results by spending 10 more minutes researching them -- so use that time to research a different prospect or send emails.

Second, analyze the deals you’ve won versus lost to figure out your optimal number of touches. Maybe just 3% of closed deals required 15 touches. That means you should probably stop reaching out to prospects after the 13th or 14th time.

Third, recognize what you need to know to be successful. Developing your qualifying and rapport-building skills might be more productive than learning about a little-used feature or rare use case. There are diminishing returns to memorizing obscure details about your product.

Margin of Safety

A bridge might theoretically handle up to 15,000 pounds, but it would be wise to cap the weight limit at 14,000. It would be a major disaster if the bridge wasn’t actually that strong -- and the risk isn’t worth it.

The margin of safety is the idea that we should leave ourselves room for mistakes or failures. For instance, when creating your sales forecast, you might count a deal as $400 even if the prospect wants the $600 package, just in case they change their mind.

Think of this model as a safety net. It’s better to be pleasantly surprised than proven right.

Occam’s Razor

This principle states the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. If you’re trying to understand what happened, develop the most basic hypothesis possible.

Opportunity Costs

Every choice comes at the cost of another. If you decide to send emails after lunch, you can’t use that time to make calls. If you pursue one large, high-risk deal, you won’t have the bandwidth or the risk tolerance to pursue another at the same time.

Keep this in the back of your mind every time you’re deciding what to do. What’s the alternative? Are you willing to give that up?

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, means most results aren’t distributed equally. In other words:

• 20% of the work generates 80% of the returns
• 20% of your prospects lead to 80% of your sales
• 20% of features are responsible for 80% of your usage
• 20% of your time produces 80% of your results

If you can home in on your top customers, selling activities, and so forth, you’ll be dramatically more successful.

At my former company, for example, we analyzed our customers and found those who spent the most (i.e., the 20% who created 80% of our revenue) worked in HR. Once we knew that, our reps could target HR professionals. The company’s revenue increased by 230%.

Preferential Attachment

Imagine two runners competing in a race. The first runner to pass the one-mile mark gets water and a protein bar. The slower one gets nothing.

This describes the preferential attachment, where the leader is given more resources than their competitors. Those resources give them an even greater advantage.

As a salesperson, you’ve probably seen this effect with competitive deals. The first rep to establish a champion gets more information than her competitors, which helps her build trust more quickly than them, more accurately craft her pitch, and ultimately, win the business.

Redundancy

Along similar lines, good engineers always put back-up systems in place to protect against failure. This drastically reduces your chances of total failure.

As a salesperson, you can use this strategy to hit quota no matter how an individual opportunity turns out. Maybe you’re working on a huge deal that’ll push you 130% over your target. Pursue four or five smaller, low-risk deals at the same time to ensure you’ll still hit even if your prospect goes dark.

With these mental models at your disposal, your analytical and decision making skills will exponentially improve. 

Impactful, strategy-changing customer engagement and referral program data just hit the market this past week. This data comes from the release of the new report, The State of Business Customer Referral Programs, and the webinar, Customers: Your most important source of demand, with Lisa Nakano, Service Director Customer Engagement Strategies at SiriusDecisions. In the webinar, Lisa discussed how customers need to be leveraged to impact demand via advocacy and referrals.

Based on that claim, it is interesting to investigate how customer referral programs are performing this crucial task and the success rate of referrals by companies running customer referral programs. This includes:

• The average referral activity of customers
• The kind of leads coming in directly from customer advocates
• How customer referrals are converting
• The impact of referral selling on the success of customer referrals
• How rewards figure into the success of referrals

What is the average customer referral activity a company can expect?

In the recent study done by Amplifinity based on millions of referrals made by business customers on the Amplifinity platform during the course of a year, it was determined that on average only 36% of customers are actively referring throughout the year. On average this was 2,106 customers making referrals out of the average enrolled in the referral program, 5,850.

While the 36% may seem low, it is important to understand that this data is over the course of year, not the lifetime of the customer. That means that this percentage can also be attributed to how long customers have been enrolled in a program. Bottom line, there are a lot of willing customer advocates that need to be reengaged with to keep them active.

How high-quality are the leads that come from customer advocates?

Many times companies assume the easier the referral method, the more a customer advocate will engage within a referral program and the more new customers will be generated. This assumption isn’t necessarily true. Here is how the different types of referral methods rank in popularity.

Most Commonly Used Referral Methods

As the chart illustrated, social media is the most used referral method even though it is was discovered that only 50% of referral programs offer it in the study. However, a referral from social media converted from lead to new customer less than 1% of the time. While referring in social media can be easy, this study showed that for business customers, a broad social blast doesn’t work for referrals. This is most likely because these aren’t one-to-one direct referrals from a trusted source. Therefore, while this type of referral is good to build awareness, it loses its power to generate demand.

The importance of that one-to-one interaction is further expanded on by Lisa Nakano when analyzing ADP’s demand generation tactics. In the webinar, Customers: Your most important source of demand, Lisa explains how many companies today have challenges with demand generation, because no matter how many times they email prospects or create targeted nurture campaigns their prospects only trusted what their peers tell them. To combat this Lisa told listeners ADP’s solution, “They [ADP] turned to Amplifinity as their partner and used referral marketing to bring in the positive word-of-mouth and activity to feed demand.”

Looking at the opposite spectrum from social media, the verbal referral method was only used 13% of the time but was the top source of conversion with 32% of referral leads converting to new customers. It also had a higher inclusion rate in customer referral programs, coming in at 54.4%.

Trisha Winter, CMO of Amplifinity predicts the continual rise of inclusion and use of verbal referrals, “Even though verbal referrals is fourth in overall use, this is a fast growing referral method thanks to new referral program technology introduced in 2016 that allows referrals to be captured from sales and customer success via Salesforce CRM. We predict verbal referrals will climb in adoption and usage in 2017.”

A large reason for verbal referrals having such a high conversion rate besides it being a one-to-one referral is that this method includes sales which increase conversions significantly. But more on that later.

What impacts referral program conversion rates?

The success of referrals has come a long way. Previous to the study done by Amplifinity, a B-to-B referral industry standard conversion rate of 3.63% was established by Salesforces’ Implisit. But the management and automation of a customer referral program has brought industry conversion rates to a whole new level. On average, customer referrals made on the Amplifinity referral platform had a 13% conversion rate.

This is over 3x the referral industry standard determined by the Implisit study. This drastic increase in the success of referrals can be attributed to establishing referrals as a channel for demand generation as opposed to an ad hoc campaign. By automating programs to collect referrals at scale, companies are able to remove breakage and operational hassle so marketers can refocus their efforts on the promotion and optimization of the program.

Lisa Nakano commented on ADP’s referral conversion rate, saying “They [ADP] had some very nice results with this once they started understanding what they needed to do to activate their advocacy community. Referrals became their number one source of new demand. The conversion was amazing in terms of how quickly folks worked their way through the funnel and the percentage that converted.”

How does enabling referral selling change the referral conversion rate?

The Amplifinity report showed that enabling referral selling produced even better results. On average, a referral program that enabled sales to actively recruit new customers to the program, generate referrals from customers, qualify referrals through customers, and receive a facilitated introduction from customers more than doubled the average conversion rate. In fact, referral selling increased the average conversion rate by 17 percentage points, with a 30% average conversion rate.

This helps explain why verbal referrals were the highest converting method as it is a referral method enabled by sales.

The increase in conversions that referral selling delivers is a result of it being a further extension of the one-to-one referral. By enabling referral selling and breaking lead routing rules the trust that exists between the customer and their referral, and the customer and their salesperson can also be used to connect the customer advocate’s referral to their trusted salesperson. This way, any referral from the customer advocate will be automatically sent to that customer’s salesperson.

As an example of how the power referral sales enablement can contribute to demand generation, Trisha Winter pointed to ADP, saying, “ADP has stated they have higher customer satisfaction/NPS scores for customers who are advocates with them making referrals. Because they break lead routing rules, this naturally incentivizes sales to work on that relationship with that customer and have really great engagement.”

How rewarding are referral incentives to customers?

There has always been much debate over incentivizing referrals. For the most part, everyone now understands that the effort a customer puts into making the referral and following up on the referral, whether that is by helping sales qualify them or making an introduction, needs to be compensated like any type of work. The question now is, what reward amount should be offered to customers that is enough to incentivize them but isn’t prohibitive to the ROI?

Looking at the data, reward payments for the customer programs ranged from $20 – $2,500. The data was analyzed based on actual reward payments since many programs have varying reward amounts by product purchased or offer a percentage of revenue.

Overall, the most popular and most successful reward was between $41 – $100. But you shouldn’t take this to mean that a reward amount of $41 will drive referral success. In fact, the vast majority of these rewards were $100. While the overall average reward amount for customer referral programs came in at $111.

While this data might mean to some that they can provide a lower reward amount and still get results, that isn’t quite the case. Rewards must be provided to customer advocates not only as compensation for the amount of work they put into the referral but also based on the cost they are asking their referrals to spend. As the cost for a referral to buy goes up, there is more often greater success with a revenue sharing system, like Lisa Nakano talks about ADP in the webinar. While the data may show the success rate as lower for rewards above $100, that can be attributed to the natural decrease in the conversion rate of any higher priced service or product.

Download the full report to see more data on business customer referral programs including:

• All the referral methods from frequency of inclusion to conversion
• The success of higher reward amounts
• How many referrals you can expect from each customer over a year
• The success rate of the top 1% of advocates
• And more

All too often we cringe when that great sales call switches gears toward budget and pricing. Today we’re going to break down some pricing strategy examples and show why you should be discussing it early in your sales funnel.

Maybe we take a deep breath or we start back peddling or rambling before spitting out those numbers… Well, it’s time we embrace the opportunity to easily differentiate between a potential client and one that simply can’t fit our cost into their budget.

The sales term BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) has been around for decades guiding millions of salespeople through those all-important discussions with clients.

While it may be slightly antiquated, there is an undeniable need to find out if the budget will be an issue with a potential client early on. After all, why waste your time (and theirs) if the lead is totally unqualified?

One of our biggest fears as salespeople is that we will discourage the lead if we instantly bring up price. Believe it or not, there is nothing taboo about getting the budget discussed and laid out in the open early in the conversation.

That said, it’s necessary (with some careful tact). If you aren’t currently doing this it’s time to embrace (not run from) the budget discussion!

Pricing Strategy Examples and 8 Tips for Mentioning Pricing Early

Getting product pricing into the discussion early helps you find prospects earlier and stop wasting time with those who won’t buy.

Here are 8 tips (along with some pricing strategy examples) for discussing budget early in the conversation and how to successfully handle objections to your pricing.

1. Be confident in your product and pricing

If you aren’t confident that your services are worth the cost, who will be?

The number one objection to buying a new product or service is how much it’s going to cost.

As salespeople, we constantly hear price objections like “I can find this cheaper somewhere else,” or “I’m interested but can’t seem to understand why the cost is so high.”

The key is to convince your prospective client that the value of paying for your product or service trumps the value of keeping that money in their wallet.

You have 20 seconds to raise interest in a potential customer. Mentioning your price early on shows you are confident and fully believe there is nothing to hide.

There are many proven sales techniques for overcoming objections to price.

One that you may or may not have heard of is the “reduction to the ridiculous” sales approach.

Essentially, this technique is to help the customer see the value in the money they are investing. By doing a little math, you can break down the cost over a more tangible timeline, emphasizing that the pricing is more “doable” than they originally thought.

Here are some pricing strategy examples that demonstrate the concept:

Skincare company Rodan and Fields uses this type of selling technique well in many of their campaigns:

One thing we have learned from integrating sales and social media is that potential customers listen to what established customers have to say (social proof) more than they listen to us as sales people.

In fact, roughly 63% of consumers say they are more like to purchase from a website if it has product ratings and reviews. Additionally, more than 70% of Americans say that they look up product reviews prior to making a purchase.

Important, but Not Everything

It is imperative that you have confidence in product pricing but sometimes even this alone can’t make the sale. Have a variety of testimonials that you can share to help navigate those potential price objections.

You can talk about your USP until you are blue in the face, but to really drive that information home, use these testimonials to your advantage. Check out this example from CrazyEgg.

2. Know your product inside out

If your potential customer seems to know more about your product than you do, you’ve got a real problem. Part of being effective as a salesperson is being the authority on what you sell.

The success or failure of mentioning the product pricing early in the sales funnel often comes down to what you know (or don’t know).

Have you ever been on the other end of a sales call and stumped the person on the line by asking a seemingly basic question about a product?

Think about how quickly that made you feel anxious about your purchase. Don’t give a vague, “I’ll-get-back-to-you” answer, this only serves to bring more doubt to the purchase and a lowered ability to feel comfortable in the price.
Invest the time to be able to answer tough questions, especially when they pertain to the financial aspects of the sale.

3. Don’t be afraid to say goodbye to unqualified leads

Another great advantage of mentioning cost upfront is that you will say goodbye to unqualified leads right away.

This may sound scary to some, but really we shouldn’t be afraid of this – we should embrace it.

Not convinced?

Consider the fact that only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to a sale.

Why waste more time than necessary on the other 75%?

A recent study found that 80% of marketers admit to sending unqualified leads to their B2B sales team! It’s also true only 56% of B2B organizations verify valid leads before passing them on to their sales team.

With numbers like these, how on earth are you supposed to convert these useless leads into sales?

You can’t – plain and simple.

The easiest way to weed these bad leads out is to mention price upfront. Stop wasting their time as well as yours so that you can spend more time on those qualified leads.

4. Focus on the difference of price and cost

As we mentioned earlier, having tact when first mentioning cost is key to successfully continuing the conversation with a lead. Part of this tactful approach should include highlighting the difference between price and cost.

Just to make sure we are on the same page, let’s sum up this basic principle.

Price is the actual amount that the customer pays your company for your product or service.

Cost, on the other hand, is the difference between the price paid and the profit made when your customer invests in your product or service.

Make sense?

For instance, you may be talking to a lead and they are telling you that your competitor is offering them a similar service for $100,000 less a year.

How the heck are you supposed to respond to that?

It’s not always easy to shift the conversation from price to cost, but it is key in this instance.

Calculating the return on investment isn’t necessarily easy either, but it is a surefire way to show the prospect that you have the business sense and knowledge to actually show them how they can save cash in the long run by investing more money than your competition.

Having a high price is an objection most can easily overturn if your cost is less than your competitor and your value is much higher.

Blogger Anthony Iannarino wrote a great post on the Sales Blog. Check out his great tips on differentiating between price and cost.

5. Give a price range if you aren’t sure of an exact solution

When you talk about price, the best thing to do is leave the door open for the conversation to continue. Allow questions and time for price consideration.

One of the easiest ways to inadvertently shut down the discussion is to give a specific price answer as opposed to a range.

Being that you are discussing the financial part of their investment early on in the conversation, it’s likely that you don’t know all the details or the extent to which they plan to utilize your products or services so keep the price to a range rather than a specific number. This is something that we see done effectively on the majority of websites.

Think as the consumer for a minute.

Check out this pricing strategy example from Price Intelligently.

Understanding that all customers don’t have the same needs is key when showcasing the pricing.

Flexibility is key to not scaring off customers when discussing the financial end of the deal.

With these thoughts in mind, discuss the customer’s needs and then discuss many options that will better fit their needs and their budget.

6. Don’t be afraid to ask questions before giving your price range

Following along this same train of thought, take time to ask the questions you need to know in order to give a realistic price point.

After all, you want to find the right product for the customer not necessarily just the right customer for the product.
An infographic from the Hubspot blog illustrates some great questions:

7. Be able to differentiate between “sticker shock” and “Rusher’s gap”

You mention the price and you instantly get a knee-jerk reaction from the client…now what?

There are a variety of reasons you might be getting this response. As mentioned earlier, they may just be one of the 75% of unqualified leads you will deal with. But what if they are part of the other 25% and are just experiencing sticker shock? Or perhaps anticipating the cost will end up being even more than what you quoted (which is the basis of the term known as Rusher’s gap)?

Being able to understand what is driving the potential price objection is necessary for learning if this lead is going anywhere or is a lost cause.

If it’s sticker shock, this may be overcome.

Or, if your lead has done his or her homework and has completed some price comparisons and are still interested in your service (even though your price is higher) – this is a situation you now know how to deal with (refer back to #4 – differentiating between price and cost).

But if you are dealing with Rusher’s gap your approach will need to take a slightly different turn.

Rather than defend the price (by explaining value and actual cost) you will want to make certain that all your numbers are correct so you then assure the customer there will be no unexpected costs (within reason).

Another option is to refer them to references who can affirm that the price they were originally quoted is the same that they paid for the service/completed job/product etc.

8. Address potential objections to pricing respectfully

When you are following up on leads each and every day, burnout can happen. Your pricing and the typical objections can make it easy to experience this over time.

Yes, this seems simple. But you must remember that when you bring up pricing early on, you must address all the potential objections to product pricing respectfully. This is in order to earn their trust and help them see the value you offer them.

Ask questions to find out how far out of the ballpark your pricing seems to the prospect’s budget.

This offers you the opportunity to lead them toward another area of tiered pricing or a product that may fit their budget more easily.

Here are just a few example questions that you can ask to get the client to rethink their objection to the price. Many are as simple as restating the objection prior to addressing it.

Another important and respectful approach is to also make sure there are no other objections holding them back. By inviting additional objections, you can address these as well.

Some Questions to Consider

• “Can you tell me why you think it’s too much?”
• “Do you mean that you feel it is too much money and not enough value?”
• “Can you share your specific concerns with me?”
• “I completely understand how you feel about the cost. In fact, many other clients felt the same way until they actually began using our products/services. Do you mind if I explain the benefits and share a few testimonials with you?”
• “Off the record, what is the ideal budget for you?”
• “Are there any other concerns that you have?”
• “Have you received cheaper quotes elsewhere?”
• “Is the lowest investment cost your main focus at this point or is quality the deciding factor?”

Will you encounter objections when you discuss the cost right away? Absolutely. If you know what to expect and have many of the tools and strategies we have discussed at your disposal—you will feel prepared and confident. This confidence when you address these objections.

Tell Your Leads About Pricing

Waiting to bring up price will ultimately mean two things.

1. You will spend time nurturing prospects who will not buy. Or,
2. You may lose prospects who could have been warmed to your pricing if it had been brought up earlier in the conversation.

Talking early on about budget may seem scary, but it can only help you and your potential clients. You’ll both save time and likely close more accounts.

What are some pricing strategy examples you have seen? Do you agree discussing pricing early is better than later in the sales process? Let us know in the comments!

The fact that you can send an email has caused you to give up on using the telephone. Choosing an inferior communication medium simply because it is more convenient is laziness or fear, neither of which are a justification.

The fact that you can view a profile on LinkedIn has caused you to do less research, and mostly the wrong kind. The insights you need aren’t going to be found in a single location, and deep insights are going to require a wider, deeper approach.

The fact that you can automate communications with your dream clients has eliminated the effort of nurturing relationships. Without meaning to, you have given up caring and absolved yourself of the responsibility to be known for something.

Because you acquire inbound leads, you have dropped all outbound prospecting. You have traded one method of acquiring leads for all of the other methods for creating opportunities. Read this sentence again to take in the full meaning here.

Now that a lot of communication is electronic, you pay less attention to the person sitting in front of you, whether it’s a peer or a client. You have traded intimacy for the distractions of the open laptop lid and the tiny screen of infinite distractions. The technology that allows you to communicate without having a physical presence has reduced your face to face visits. You have given up depth in exchange for something less.

The SMEs that accompany you on calls have caused you to abandon the efforts you need to develop real business acumen. You have given up your role as trusted advisor, trading it for the role of passenger in critical conversations, observing, but offering nothing of substance.

Because you can generate reports without having the person report their own effort and results, you have given up accountability at all levels. You have also given up the best performance your people are capable of.

The discounts that you routinely agree to have prevented your team from learning to defend your pricing and justify the delta between your price and your competitors. You have given up capturing part of the value you create to make selling easy.

Most of the time, taking the easy way also means giving up the greater, long-term results that accrue to those who make a better choice, a choice that you are unwilling to make, but perfectly capable of.

The post Giving Up More Than You Believe You Are Giving Up appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Let’s face it: outside of denim shorts, Doc Martens, and home-sewn SLAYER patches, it doesn’t get more metal than email marketing.

There are mounds of KPIs to track and optimize for. It’s expensive. There’s segmentation. Time of day. Design. You have to sacrifice goats. CTA placement. Need I go on?

(This is the part where you say, “No, man. That’s quite enough. Turn down that racket and get to the stats already.”)

To help guide your email strategy, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of useful email marketing statistics. Keep these in mind when you’re considering planning a new campaign or heading back to the drawing board with your existing email marketing funnel.

B2B Email Marketing Statistics

1. Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders.
2. 86% of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.
3. CTRs are 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than B2C email campaigns.
4. 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.
5. Tuesday is the best day of the week to send email (according to 10 email marketing studies).

B2C Email Marketing Statistics

1. While 26% of SMBs polled use email marketing for sales, just 7% use email as a brand-building tool.
2. Only about 30% of US retail email list subscribers have actually made a purchase from the retailer whose email list they subscribed to.
3. Welcome emails are incredibly effective: on average, 320% more revenue is attributed to them on a per email basis than other promotional emails.
4. 80% of retail professionals indicate that email marketing is their greatest driver of customer retention (the next closest channel? Social media, identified by just 44% of those same professionals).
5. 77% of people prefer to get permission-based promotional messages via email (versus direct mail, text, phone, or social media).

Email Marketing Device & Demographic Statistics

1. Men and women are equally likely to convert from an email opened on a desktop — but women are more likely to convert on a tablet, and men are more likely to convert on a phone.
2. 73% of millennials identify email as their preferred means of business communication.
3. The Apple iPhone leads email client market share with 31%, followed by Gmail at 22% as of May 2017 (calculations based on 1.29 billion opens).
4. When a prospect or customer who opens an email on a mobile device opens that same email again on another device, they are 65% more likely to click-through to your site/offering.
5. People SAY they prefer HTML emails, but plain-text emails actually get higher open rates.

Spam & Segmentation Statistics

1. 49% of digital marketers indicate that the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) has had no discernable impact on their company’s email marketing program.
2. The average number of legitimate business emails received each day has remained static since 2015, but the number of spam emails that bypass security filters (spam that actually hits your inbox) has risen from 12 emails per day in 2015 to 16 emails per day in 2017.
3. Nonprofits lose about $15k/year in donations due to spam filters blocking fundraising campaign emails from prospects’ inboxes.
4. Segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14.32% higher than non-segmented campaigns.
5. Click-throughs are 100.95% higher in segmented email campaigns than non-segmented campaigns.

Email Marketing Volume Statistics

1. The number of email users worldwide is forecasted to rise to 2.9 billion by 2019.
2. The number of email users in the US is projected to grow to 244.5 million by the end of 2017, and 254.7 million by 2020.
3. Nearly 105 billion emails are sent each day; this number is expected to reach 246 billion before 2020.
4. The use of emoji in email marketing messages increased 775% from 2015 to 2016.
5. The percentage of emails containing GIFs rose from 5.4% in 2015 to 10.3% in 2016.

General Email Marketing Statistics

1. 49% of businesses use some form of email automation.
2. Pet and animal services has the highest email open rate — people love their pets!
3. In the UK, every one pound spent on email marketing has an ROI of 38 pounds; in the US, it’s $44.
4. According to the DMA, the four most important email marketing metrics (as identified by advertisers) are: CTR, Conversion rate, Open rate, and ROI.
5. Checking email is a complementary activity. People do it while watching TV (69 percent), in bed (57 percent), and on vacation (79 percent). Bonus points if you’re looking at that JCrew Gmail ad while doing all three!
6. Using the word “Donate” in your subject line can reduce open rate by 50% or more.
7. The average email opt-in rate across all verticals is 1.95%.
8. The average open rate for businesses in the Daily Deals industry is 15% – the cross-industry average? 20%.
9. 28% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails more than once per week.
10. A study of 1 billion emails revealed that video emails see CTRs 96% higher than non-video emails.

Is our list missing any valuable kernels of email-marketing wisdom? Let us know!

About the Author

Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Google has announced that it has released Google Posts to all businesses with listings in Google My Business.

Appearing alongside business listings in search results, use cases for Google Posts include promoting specials, events, content, and products, as well as encouraging newsletter signups.

For B2B companies, Google Posts offers a new way to claim additional search real estate, and a new marketing channel that doesn’t require advertising for visibility.

What Are Google Posts?

Google Posts are short pieces of content that are published through Google My Business (GMB). They can include a title, image, up to 1500 characters of content (although Google “prefers” 150-300), event details, and a CTA button.

Google Posts are not related to Google Plus. Google Posts are managed through GMB, and represent a brand or business. Google Plus is a public-facing social media network.

Posts were originally launched in January of 2016. At that time, the feature was only available to political candidates. Since its launch, availability has expanded incrementally, becoming available to a small number of local businesses, movies, museums, sports teams, and musicians before last month’s wide launch.

Google Posts appear in a variety of search result locations for branded queries.

Google Posts appear in the knowledge panel on desktop searches. If multiple posts are available, results display in carousel format.

On mobile, Google Posts appear below Maps results for businesses with a Google Maps listing.

For businesses without a Google Maps listing, Google Posts appear in general search results for branded queries on mobile devices.

Google Posts Use Cases for B2Bs

Much of the buzz has focused on local and/or small businesses, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that there is always an application (or at least a warning) for B2B marketers as well. Confirm that Google Posts is available to your company by logging into your Google My Business account. If it’s available, you’ll see a new “Posts” tab in the navigation.

Whether or not the functionality is currently available for your business (and it probably is), it’s a good time to form a strategy for how use can use Google Posts as another marketing channel. Remember, Google Posts display for branded searches, which are usually bottom-of-the-funnel and imply a strong purchase intent. Make sure the content you share is suited for that audience:

• Promote upcoming events. If you have a big industry event planned for later this year, promote it on Google Posts with event dates and times, a brief description, and a CTA pointing to the event details page of your site. You could also promote upcoming webinars.
• Promote sales and specials. If currently discounting event tickets or offering a special rate on a product or service, let people know with a Google Post. It could also be a great place to encourage people to sign up for a free trial.
• Promote your newsletter or important content. If you want to grow email subscribers or promote a high-quality piece of content you’ve published recently, a brief Google Post will allow you to promote within search results without paying for advertising. Google Posts that point to gated content may also help increase leads.
• Share case studies. You probably know this, but buyers like to see case studies – especially toward the end of their journies. Someone searching your brand name is familiar with your company, so show them the kind of results you create to help close the deal.

Since Google Posts are new for most businesses, it will take time to test different types of posts and form validated B2B best practices (which we’re working on — look out for our results in a couple months), but we recommend approaching them similarly to a marketing email:

• Keep the content brief and focused.
• Write a compelling headline.
• Use an original, eye-catching image or graphic.
• Use an upside-down pyramid structure that leads with the most important info first.

Additionally, the two most important posts should be the most recent so that they’ll appear in results without users having to engage with the carousel.

The Future of B2B Search Results

Google Posts offer an opportunity to grab more real estate on the search results page and promote events, specials, case studies, and content without having to invest in advertising. The advantage of Google Posts over similar functionality—Twitter carousels, event schema, and sitelinks—is that Google Posts are larger, simpler to add, and offer more control over the content that appears.

Although most of the focus right now is on small, local businesses, we expect to continue to see Google Posts for larger business. B2B marketers should be aware that Google Posts may soon become one more necessary step to get the most brand exposure out of Google.

Log in to Google My Business and see if Posts functionality is available. If so, create a post—even something simple like a newsletter or gated content promotion—and add a tracking URL so you can monitor results. If the functionality isn’t yet available, go ahead and take time to brainstorm some possible use cases. More likely than not, it will become available in a future release.

As more and more companies transition to the cloud, Oracle and IBM may find themselves in a fight for the bottom.

The two technology vendors are set to lose out considerably in IT budgets over the next three years as the result of the shift to cloud, according to the June AlphaWise/Morgan Stanley CIO report. CIOs expect that 46% of their workloads will be in the cloud by the end of 2020, while only 34% will be on-premise. 

Between now and then, the 100 US and European CIOs surveyed expect to decrease spending on IBM by 13%, and to decrease spending on Oracle by 11%. 

This is to the benefit of two of the biggest players in cloud services, Amazon and Microsoft, which topped the list of companies getting the most spend in the coming years. CIOs expect to increase their spending at those companies by 27% and 12%, respectively. 

In the more immediate future, Amazon and Microsoft are expected to be the big winners of all digital transformations in 2017. Despite the longterm decline, Oracle and IBM trail just a little behind in popularity. 

When the CIOs were asked to list up to three vendors that they expect to gain the largest incremental percentage of their IT budget in 2017, Amazon got 15% of the responses and Microsoft got 14.6%. IBM and Oracle got 5.2% and 4.3%, respectively. 

Not so bad, considering 37 of the 55 vendors asked about didn't even make the chart. 

SEE ALSO: This $2.9 billion company's stock skyrocketed after signing a key deal with Google

Join the conversation about this story »

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The Harvard Business Review discussed the different types of innovation within a company’s portfolio in their article “Managing Your Innovation Portfolio.” What they found was that “Companies that allocated about 70% of their innovation activity to core initiatives, 20% to adjacent ones, and 10% to transformational ones outperformed their peers, typically realizing a P/E premium of 10% to 20%.” They also noted that the return on that investment was inverse (the 10% of time spent on transformational change yielded a 70% return when successful, and so on).

But they didn’t discuss the different types of solutions that organizations are looking for when they launch an innovation program. However, in a recent survey of IdeaScale customers, we asked how they are currently innovating and this is the range of projects that innovators are currently solving with innovation management software (the most commonly sought solutions appear at the top):

• Finding process improvement opportunities. This could be anything from ways for employees to save time to new processes that lead to increased performance and better efficiencies. This could be inside a company’s processes or opportunities for improvement within the value chain.
• Improving existing offerings. This is usually incremental change to the core offering, but leveraging the power of the crowd not only gives new ideas, but also helps to prioritize what sorts of change is most important.
• Improving employee satisfaction. Asking for ideas from employees is a great way to improve an organization’s culture, but employees are also a great resource when it comes to ideas that will improve their culture, as well.
• Identifying cost savings opportunities. The ability to measure the value of these types of campaigns is often one of its advantages. This includes ways to save money on process, product, new partnerships, and more.
• Sourcing new offerings. These changes are on the transformational side of the business, the ones that are looking down the road a bit to see what the company’s offering should look like in the future based on current trends and customer needs.
• Improving customer experience. These campaigns are generally looking to improve NPS scores by prioritizing ideas that will improve the customer experience.
• Enacting social change. From ideas for improving healthcare ideas to new offerings in public education, these innovators care about making the world a better place.
• Identifying new markets or business models. Although only a small segment of innovators are focusing on this, everyone agrees that seeking a new market or business model can offer a huge transformational return on investment.
• Market research. These more open feedback campaigns can be used for trend tracking of feedback on particular notions.
• Sourcing sustainability solutions. More and more companies care about reducing carbon footprint, improving energy efficiency, and become a more responsible organization.

To learn more from IdeaScale’s customer data, download the 2017 Crowdsourced Innovation Report.

If you’ve been working in marketing for a few years, it’s likely you’ve heard about data-driven marketing.

Data-driven marketing, just like its cousin “growth hacking,” has become a big hit among the marketing community.

Check Google Trends, and you will see how popular it has become in recent years:

Far from being a fad, data-driven marketing is a real thing. Marketers want to learn more about it because it works. For example, a study carried out by Teradata found 78% of marketers use it for their strategic decisions.

The question is, what is data-driven marketing? And how can you use it to deliver better results for your company?

In this post, you’ll learn what data-driven marketing is by discovering how data and marketing work together. Then, you’ll learn three ways to increase your conversion rate with data-driven marketing.

How data and marketing work together

Online marketing has one large advantage over its offline counterpart: tracking. The development of modern software tools has allowed marketers to track almost anything online.

For example, Google Adwords provides you with the exact number of impressions your ads get, the demographics of your audience, and the specific amount of money each ad generates. Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, shows you the open rates, click-through rates, and the number of clicks each link on your email gets, among other metrics.

The sophistication from which technology companies deliver their data helps marketers understand what works and what doesn’t. This allows companies to get a deep understanding of the results they’re getting for what they spend on each channel as well as improving the customer experience once people are on their site.

Having access to large amounts of data has both positive and negative implications for marketers. The good news is, having access to data can help marketers optimize their campaigns to maximize results. Just like the old saying goes “what gets measured gets done,” whatever you can measure, you can improve.

The bad news is, marketers can get flooded with all sorts of irrelevant data, making them lose sight of what matters. Sure, you can see how many clicks each email link gets. But how do you use that information to impact your strategy?

Data analysis requires discipline and a passion for mining data for insights. You need to know exactly what you need and focus on getting that data and ignore everything else. It requires having a clear balance between what you want to know and what you need to know. The latter is what helps you; the former is what distracts you.

Increase your conversion rate with data-driven marketing

Conversion rate is an important metric marketers must continually try to improve. Most importantly, increasing the conversion rate helps you lower your acquisition costs as you drive more revenue per visitor.

There are countless conversion rate optimization tactics you can implement to improve your conversion rate. According to Econsultancy, however, the three most popular methods for improving conversion rates derive from data:

1. Customer journey analysis
2. A/B testing
3. Website personalization

Next, you will see exactly how each tactic works and how you can use data to improve your conversion rate.

Optimize your customer journeys with real-life personas

Customer journeys represent the steps your customers go through with your company, from the moment they become aware of the existence of your business until they become loyal customers. In a previous article, I explained there are three stages most customers go through:

• Stage 1: Represented by casual visitors and, in some cases, email subscribers. They are not yet customers but could be interested in your offers, and their purchase intent is low.
• Stage 2: These are subscribers that are enjoying their first experience with your business. They are not yet loyal or long-term customers, but people who are interested in your business yet not fully committed to becoming a customer.
• Stage 3: These are people who have become customers and could become loyal ones.

Customer journeys allow you to take people from the first stage to the next one until you get to the third level and keep them there. To achieve that goal, you need to know who they are and what they need actually to move. Therefore, you need to have real-life data about your personas.

The process of getting data from your personas comes mostly from qualitative research, such as:

• Email, phone or in-person interviews: Talking to your customers can provide valuable information into their buying habits, what motivates them, and the words they use to describe your product or service.
• Web and exit surveys: Similar to interviews, they can help you understand if your site or products on your site are meeting their needs.

With the help of interviews and surveys, you can collect all the data you need to develop your real-life personas. Then, you can create segments based on commonalities you find from that data. Some of these commonalities include:

• Customer’s goals
• Hesitations and concerns
• How much information they need to make a purchase
• What expectations they have from the product to purchase

With each of your personas developed, you can then see exactly what you need to do to lower their concerns, give them the information they need, be clear about the expectations, and help them fulfill their goals.

Optimize your pages based on A/B test data

Before you make any change on one of your site’s pages, you need to have data on which to base your decision. The best way to get this data is through A/B testing.

A/B testing gives you real-life data based on your visitors’ actions. You don’t assume anything; you see how your visitors behave, and from this behavior, you can base your decisions.

The whole process of finding what to test, developing testing hypothesis, and developing the actual test requires data, which you can collect from:

• Your analytics provider
• Surveys (web or email)
• Mouse tracking
• Heatmaps
• User testing
• User session analysis

The process of optimizing your conversion rate starts with having a good idea about which part of your website you want to improve. Peep Laja, the founder of ConversionXL, has written at length about how to identify these pages with Google Analytics.

Once you know what to test, you need to develop a testing hypothesis. To do so, you need to define the following four elements:

1. Your business objectives
2. Your website goals
3. Your Key Performance Indicators
4. Your target metrics

Once you have defined each of the four elements mentioned above, you need to brainstorm different ideas to improve each target metric. This is where you get creative with your solutions. Make a list of all the ideas you can come up to improve each metric.

To simplify the testing process, you need to prioritize each idea. You can use a framework, such as the PIE framework, to prioritize the ideas with the largest potential and lower implementation costs.

After you have prioritized each testing hypothesis, you need to then implement each test idea you have defined before until you get significant results. To do so, you’ll want to predetermine a sample size and run the test for a few weeks.

Finally, you need to analyze your results by creating a group of segments from each of your tests and analyze them one by one.

Some of the best A/B testing tools you can use to run your tests are Optimizely and VWO. You can also run A/B tests on your email campaigns with the help of Campaign Monitor.

Personalize your website with behavioral targeting

Website personalization, as defined by Optimizely, is “the process of creating customized experiences for visitors to a website. Rather than providing a single, broad experience, website personalization allows companies to present visitors with unique experiences tailored to their needs and desires.”

To personalize your website you first need to know why and what your goal is. In most cases, it will be to increase relevancy, which can help you decrease bounce rate and increase your conversion rate. Whatever your goal, you need to be clear about it.

Then, you need to know to whom you want to show that personalization. What segment do you want to influence? Your personalization segments can be based on many attributes, which are explained in further detailed in this article. These include:

• Geolocation
• Device used
• Traffic source
• Visit data
• Transactional data

Finally, you need to know what you want to personalize. It could be from a simple CTA to a whole new homepage.

Just like with A/B tests, every personalization campaign is a hypothesis that should be measured. Don’t believe that all your personalization implementations will work. Test the impact of every change just as you test other site changes.

Some tools you can use to personalize your visitors’ experience include:

• Barilliance
• Pureclarity
• Omniconvert
• Monetate
• Personyze

Wrap up

87 percent of marketers consider data to be their organizations’ most underutilized asset.

It’s time you start preaching the data gospel and start implementing data-driven marketing tactics like the ones shown in this post.

WannaCry paralyzed hospitals. NotPeya crashed banks. But how to know if you're vulnerable to the stolen National Security Agency exploit that fueled two major cyber attacks and helped bring down computers across the globe?

Thankfully, a new tool has your back. 

After the Shadow Brokers hacking group dumped a cache of stolen NSA exploits in April, the cybersecurity community issued dire warnings that things were about to get really, really bad. But then Microsoft quickly chimed in to note that it had already patched the vulnerabilities in question.  Read more...

More about Nsa, Cybersecurity, Hackers, Hacking, and Ransomware

• Americans overwhelmingly want to protect the environment, and while the political extremes can't agree on "climate change," they can still forge a path for the US to curb it.
• Bipartisan solutions, like carbon pricing and renewable energy, do exist. And they could become reality in the next five years.
• While the federal government might need to eventually enact sweeping climate-change policies, businesses and cities are already leading the way because market forces — and public opinion — support climate action.

DALLAS — It was the afternoon before Earth Day in April when an imposing Republican stood up and declared war.

John Walsh III had spent the past half-hour sitting in the front row listening to former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, who happens to be a retired four-star general, try to convince the crowd that climate change is a national-security issue.

Then Walsh took the microphone.

"This is a war, and we need to treat it like one," he said. "I'm on the other side of the aisle from you politically, but I'm right in the trench with you on this issue."

It was already a day of contrasts. A conservative had organized this Earth Day celebration. It attracted 100,000 people to Texas' state fairgrounds, including climate researchers from elite universities as far away as New York City, oil-company executives, and families.

In this polarized political environment, and at a time when many of the people running the government won't acknowledge the reality of climate change, this sounds like a remarkable moment of common ground. But 1,300 miles from Washington, DC, this kind of agreement is commonplace.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that our climate is changing, and most say they worry about it. But Texas shows that it's when we talk about it that things seem to fall apart.

Take away the charged language and start talking about clean water, clean air, and clean soil, and there's a lot of agreement. And a lot of opportunity.

You can find consensus in the war against climate change — as long as you don't call it "climate change."

Tree huggers

Walsh never had one specific moment when he accepted that the climate was changing.

His father taught him to respect the land growing up. And as a Christian, he learned to be a good steward of God's Earth.

He's the CEO and founder of a real-estate firm in headquartered in Frisco, Texas. And he's been a tree hugger for decades.

In 1984, Walsh's company, TIG, was starting to put up some high-end office buildings in Carrollton, Texas. The site had many old-growth trees, but instead of bulldozing them wholesale, as most developers would, he decided they were worth saving.

On signs in front of each tree, he wrote a message: "It took God 50 years to put this tree here. Don't even think about moving it."

Walsh personally signed each message so the workers would know who they'd have to answer to if they cut a tree down. By keeping all the trees, TIG actually ended up saving money on energy and new plantings.

Walsh says it's logical arguments like that people need to hear if everyone is going to get onboard to fight climate change. Wear your jeans three days instead of one, he recommended, and you'd be surprised how much energy, resources, and money you can save.

It's a modern day echo of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism.

To Walsh and others in the movement, environmentalism has always been a conservative idea. They say Democrats stole the mantle.

"To conserve is conservative," Earth Day Texas founder and Republican Trammell S. Crow said in March, when he visited Business Insider's offices to try to persuade New York journalists to come to Earth Day Texas.

Yes, I'm a Republican. I'm also a huge environmentalist.

Ryan Sitton, the Texas Railroad Commissioner, agrees. An engineer by training, he was elected to the post overseeing the state's agency regulating the oil and gas industry (much to Sitton's chagrin, the job has nothing to do with railroads).

What Sitton finds most challenging is that because everything is so polarized these days, there's no dialogue.

"Yes, I'm a Republican. I'm also a huge environmentalist," he says.

"Parties are black and white. 'Oh, Republicans are the party of the economy and jobs, and Democrats are the party of the environment.' Yet all of us in this nation want a good economy, we all want good jobs, and we all want to protect our environment for future generations," he told a crowd of two-dozen constituents at a town-hall-style talk. "None of those are partisan issues."

A new message

If you want to understand how so many conservatives these days can be pro-environment and still deny climate change, meet Paul Braswell. He's a chemist turned computer consultant who raises Texas longhorns. And he's on the executive committee for the Republican Party of Texas.

He says there's a common misconception that farmers and Republican landowners are all for using resources at the expense of the environment. They're "good stewards," he said.

He wants to protect the land. But ask him about climate change and his tone changes.

"They're fudging their data," he said of climate scientists. "There are flaws in their global-warming theory. And instead of adjusting their hypothesis, they're adjusting their data."

Braswell says that he's more conservative than most Republicans in Texas. But his line of thinking echoes that of EPA Chief Scott Pruitt and President Trump. And it sounds a lot like what the president used as his justification for pulling the US out of the global Paris climate agreement.

Braswell is a scientist himself, of course, and when you talk with him, he's just as likely to start talking about Einstein's theory of relativity, or how farmers can use better chemicals for the earth.

That's partly why, for all he does personally to protect the environment on a small scale — buying a fuel-efficient truck and limiting the use of insecticides on his land — he doesn't believe climate change is happening. He says humans couldn't possibly cause that much warming, and if it is getting hotter, the earth will fix itself.

Scientists leading the fight against climate change see people like Braswell as a missed opportunity.

"Climate scientists failed to relate what we know to the public," Peter de Menocal, a renowned climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told Business Insider.

"There's a big, angry mob out there. Those are very real feelings. I respect that. All I can do is tell people what I know about how the climate is changing."

Food, water, shelter, energy

Until recently, when experts tried to convince Americans to care about climate change, they'd often show them this chart:

Over hundreds of thousands of years, the climate has gone up and down in a fairly consistent cycle, and then at the very end, it's like a hockey stick: the amount of carbon in the atmosphere skyrockets.

It's compelling to look at, but for many, it's too abstract.

Former President Barack Obama can call climate change the greatest threat facing humanity, but if you can't see it in your own life, it's hard to really care.

That's why at a Columbia University event at Earth Day Texas, de Menocal said when he's trying to convince people to take climate action, he's started referencing tangible things everyone can get behind. These are humanity's basic needs: food, water, shelter, and energy.

In a sign of burgeoning common ground, at the town hall the next morning, Sitton was making the case that Texas could help developing nations climb out of poverty by showing them how to regulate their natural resources.

"When you look around the world and you say, what is the No. 1 thing when you talk about the basic elements of society — shelter, food, and water are the first three. When you look at society's needs, energy is a huge component of that."

This line is breaking through the partisanship in a way that talk of warming has not.

"The best way to communicate with those minds-made-up climate deniers is not to talk about climate change but air quality," Crow said. Improving food, water, shelter and energy also help reduce the amount of carbon emitted, and global warming.

"Temperature can take care of itself if you deal with air quality. That's a public-health issue; that's not an argument. Everybody believes in that."

A 2016 Pew survey found that 48% of Americans believed that the Earth was warming because of human activity, a belief that 69% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans share.

But concern is growing. A March 2017 Gallup poll found that 45% of Americans worried "a great deal" about global warming and 68% believed humans were causing it.

And three-quarters of Americans said in an Earth Day Pew survey that they were particularly concerned about protecting the environment, and 83% said they try to live in ways to help protect it all or some of the time in their daily lives.

So there is common ground. Now what can be done about it?

Smokestacks to carbon tax

Braswell remembers growing up on the Texas panhandle, when his dad worked at a factory that made carbon black, which went into black paint and tires. The smoke stacks spit out so much pollution that the white-faced cattle turned black.

As he got older the plant installed scrubbers and filters to clean up the air. The cows returned to their normal color.

We have made progress since Rachel Carson sparked the environmental movement with "Silent Spring" in 1962, and we can keep capitalizing on that momentum.

If you listen closely, the next logical step in this climate war we're waging is clear to liberal environmentalists — and to a growing number of Republicans.

Several conservatives, including former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, have put forth a plan for a carbon tax.

And as a local organizer for the nonpartisan Citizen's Climate Lobby told Business Insider at the group's booth at Earth Day Texas, it looks a lot like plans that it's proposing along with Democrats. A carbon tax, or carbon fee as liberals prefer to call it, would put a price on carbon dioxide.

A similar cap-and-trade system limiting the amount of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide the US could emit per year is what stopped the acid-rain crisis and closed up the holes in the ozone layer surrounding Earth. And that was passed with Democratic majorities in Congress in 1990 and signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush, who ran for office as the "environmental president."

Made in America

While Braswell doesn't think humans burning fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide is changing the global climate, he is willing to plan for the chance that scientists are right.

The answer, to conservative Republicans like Braswell, Pruitt, and Sitton, is never more government regulation like Obama enacted — it's innovation. You want to shut down a dirty power plant? Fine, they say, do it in a way that doesn't kill American businesses.

"If it's not a good idea, let's not build it again," Braswell said. "If there's something better, then we can do things smarter using technology."

His belief that American innovation can lead the way sounds just like what de Menocal of Columbia says convinces him there's momentum to vanquish climate change.

"As long as we make enough progress in the right direction, it's all good," de Menocal said. "Let's repower the planet. Let's get miners back to work installing solar panels. If I can wave the American flag for a minute, this is the kind of challenge we respond best to. They can be the heroes of this story. From a purely conservative standpoint, fighting climate change allows us to create jobs, protect national security, and ensure American resilience.What good American doesn't want those things?"

From a purely conservative standpoint, fighting climate change allows us to create jobs, protect national security, and ensure American resilience.

One example is "carbon capture," which sucks up carbon emissions from power plants and sticks them in the ground so they don't enter the atmosphere.

At Earth Day Texas, Business Insider asked the new US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor of Texas, whether Americans could expect more carbon-capture projects under the Trump administration.

"The short answer is yes," he said, and he's particularly excited that American companies can sell such technologies to our allies so they can reduce their carbon footprints.

"We make it in America. You know, made in America, sold to our friends around the world. It makes a lot of sense. I think that's the president's, that's his mindset, as well, so you're going to see a lot of technologies. Not just on the carbon-capture side, but in a host of different ways," Perry said. "If we're going to really affect the world, it's going to be innovation that does that."

Coming to grips

Minutes before Trump announced his decision to exit the Paris accord on June 1, de Menocal called. His voice was soft. He sounded beat.

Rolling back Obama-era regulations that it deems stifling to the economy at a breakneck pace, the Trump administration is slowing the federal government's climate progress at a time when scientists say it's crucial to speed up more than ever.

But on the phone that day, de Menocal was feeling hopeful.

"I'm not that pessimistic. I'm devastated, of course, but I'm not that pessimistic," he said. "If you think about it, if the nation's largest cities maintain their commitments, then we can do it without the government."

Market forces, an appealing motivator to conservatives, can also help lead the way.

The world added more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels in 2015 and 2016, and the plummeting price of clean energy has allowed the US to decrease its carbon emissions over the last three years while the country's GDP has increased.

But eventually, agreeing on clean air, water, and land won't be enough, says Lynn Scarlett, who served as the deputy secretary and acting secretary in President George W. Bush's Department of the Interior. Now she's the managing director for public policy at the Nature Conservancy.

"You can drive forward a lot of solutions under the banners of clean energy, energy reliability, energy efficiency, and not have to grapple with 'climate change' as a word. You can do a whole lot," Scarlett told Business Insider.

"But at some point, to really come to grips and say we really need to address greenhouse-gas emissions, carbon-dioxide emissions. That requires understanding that those emissions are a pollutant. That requires understanding that those emissions are in fact responsible for a changing climate. That requires understanding that there is that linkage between human action and greenhouse-gas emissions and all these bad things we're seeing — melting permafrost, unpredictable storms, rising sea levels. At some point, one has to really actually embrace the problem."

At some point, one has to really actually embrace the problem.

Until then, there are Americans across the political spectrum clamoring for climate action. There are states making their own emissions reductions pledges, and cities making their own plans for sea level rise, and companies making their own clean-energy investments, and farmers installing wind turbines on their own land, and homeowners installing solar panels on their own rooftops.

And somewhere in Texas, there's a Republican real-estate developer doing his part to save one tree at a time. And he's telling us to join the war — before it's too late.

SEE ALSO: Scott Pruitt came to Earth Day Texas, and the whole thing was pretty weird

DON'T MISS: Texas hosts the largest Earth Day event in the world — here's what it was like

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: French president excoriates Trump in English over US withdrawal from climate deal

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

Insurance companies have long based their pricing models and strategies on assumptions about the demographics of their customers. Auto insurers, for example, have traditionally charged higher premiums for parents of teenage drivers based on the assumption that members of this demographic are more likely to get into an accident.

But those assumptions are inherently flawed, since they often aren't based on the actual behaviors and characteristics of individual customers. As new IoT technologies increasingly move into the mainstream, insurers are able to collect and analyze data to more accurately price premiums, helping them to protect the assets they insure and enabling more efficient assessment of damages to conserve resources.

A new report from Business Insider Intelligence explains how companies in the auto, health, and home insurance markets are using the data produced by IoT solutions to augment their existing policy pricing models and grow their customer bases. In addition, it examines areas where IoT devices have the potential to open up new insurance segments.

 Here are some of the key takeaways:

• The world's largest auto insurers now offer usage-based policies, which price premiums based on vehicle usage data collected directly from the car.
• Large home and commercial property insurers are using drones to inspect damaged properties, which can improve workflow efficiency and reduce their reliance on human labor.
• Health and life insurance firms are offering customers fitness trackers to encourage healthy behavior, and discounts for meeting certain goals.
• Home insurers are offering discounts on smart home devices to current customers, and in some cases, free devices to entice new customers.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts the number of Americans who will have tried usage-based auto insurance by 2021.
• Explains why narrowly tailored wearables could be what's next for the health insurance industry.
• Analyzes the market for potential future insurance products on IoT devices.
• Discusses and analyzes the barriers to consumers opting in to policies that collect their data.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Monologues may be celebrated in Shakespeare, but you want to keep your discovery call away from the theatrics and encourage open communication. New research from Gong.io shows that there is a real tactical advantage to increasing the number of verbal exchanges during your discovery calls. The discovery calls with the highest rates of success aren’t one-side, they’re more like a verbal tennis match.

After analyzing over 500,000 discovery calls, the data showed that even the number of conversational exchanges impacts success rates. The research found that on average, the more a conversation switches speakers, the greater likelihood of a successful conversation.

The chart above shows this interesting correlation: as the speaker switches increase, the call success rate also ticks up.

Improving Conversation Flow

While much of our new report data has some clear prescriptive take aways, the number of speaker switches is a less intuitive metric to improve. You can’t force a prospect to talk more, right? However, you can make substantial improvements to your conversational flow by simply being more aware of your conversational habits. Tools like Gong.io allow you to see how much you’re talking and listening in an easy-to-understand, visual format. For many sales professionals, the amount of time they actually spend speaking is surprising. Asking more questions and encouraging more conversation will help you balance out that ratio.

When making your discovery call, you may want to dive straight into problem finding mode, just like you may want to slip into your sales pitch. Remember you are building a customer relationship. Dividing your discovery call into segments, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, allows for you to provide efficient call value. Our research found that successful discovery calls with consistent back and forth break down into three different sections; rapport building, open discussion about current company problems, and logistics and next steps.

Build Your Rapport

It’s easy to imagine top performing sales reps jumping straight into calls with their perfectly honed sales pitch, but data showed top performers took a more engaging and welcoming approach. Top performing sales reps consistently spent the first few minutes of their discovery calls easing into a comfortable rapport with their prospects.

Rapport building may conjure images of small talk and simple questions like “How’s the weather?”, but I highly recommend you do your research on how to break the ice. Learn more about your prospect by using social media or SalesLoft’s integration with Crystal. You can often find topics or tid-bits that can make your prospect more comfortable and get them to open up and start talking right off the bat. Regardless of how you build report, this first call segment is about welcoming a potential business partner and starting that relationship on the right foot.

Uncover Business Issues

Now it’s time to shift focus on your discovery call to why the prospect needs your product. This doesn’t mean diving into sales pitch mode. You actually need to put on your detective cap and work to discover just what problems currently exist within the company.

Our research found that the most successful sales reps spend a majority of their sales calls uncovering a company’s ongoing problems. This is where the bulk of your back and forth will occur. Ask the questions to find and learn the problems that you will be able to provide a solution for.

We found that calls that talked about three or four issues saw the most success. By uncovering either three or four existing problems that your product can solve, you provide a valid reason for the prospect to continue the sales process. Interestingly enough, success rates began to decline once five or more problems were discussed — which makes sense, I wouldn’t want someone listing off five of my flaws either.

Discuss the Next Steps

The final portion of your call needs to revolve around logistics and next steps. Sales cycles are all about momentum. Top performing sales reps ensure that the end of their discovery calls are focused on moving the conversation forward. What are the next steps? Who is responsible for taking them? What is the expected timeline for those next steps to happen? You shouldn’t leave any room for ambiguity or doubt.

If you think about it, breaking your discovery call into these sections is a lot like drafting a three act play. Each prospect offers a different storyline. The question is which role will you deliver? Are you the average performer with rigid behavior that falls into old habits? Or are you billed with the top performers by executing efficient conversation flow?

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Download your copy of the free report today and start turning every discovery call into a highly qualified opportunity.

The post 3 Essential Parts of a Successful Discovery Call appeared first on SalesLoft.

Everyone's measure of and path to success is different.

For some, it's mostly linear. Others encounter more twists, turns, and bumps along the way.

Before becoming the leader of the free world, Donald Trump, was born into a real-estate development family and inherited his father's business at 25.

Kat Cole, the group president of Focus Brands group, on the other hand, saw her 20s as more transformative years, working her way up the ladder from a Hooters waitress to the company's vice president by the time she was 26.

To illustrate how no two paths to success are alike, we've highlighted what 25 highly successful people were doing at age 25.

SEE ALSO: 17 jobs that are quickly disappearing in the US

DON'T MISS: The 21 most promising jobs of the future

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had a cushy job in finance.

At 24, the future Amazon founder and CEO went to work at Bankers Trust developing revolutionary software for banking institutions at that time, according to "Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com" by Ann Byers.

Two years later, he became the company's youngest vice president.

President Trump took over his father's real-estate-development company.

Trump grew up the wealthy son of a real-estate mogul.

At 25, the young real-estate developer was given control of his father's company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, which he later renamed the Trump Organization, according to bio.

Shortly thereafter he became involved in large, profitable building projects in Manhattan.

Actress Jennifer Lawrence was an Oscar-winner raking in millions.

Twenty-six-year-old Lawrence is Hollywood's highest-paid actress, raking $46 million pretax over 12 months in 2016, and closer to $52 million in 2015, according to Forbes.

By the time she was 25, Lawrence had starred in the box-office hit "Hunger Games" trilogy and worked alongside a star-studded cast in the "X-Men" series.

At 22, she became the second-youngest winner of the best actress Oscar for her performance in "Silver Linings Playbook," and she has won many more awards for her work.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Amazon is taking over the world, and it has one secret weapon making its conquest possible.

The online retailer blows its competition out of the water when it comes to customer loyalty. In a recent survey from RBC Capital Markets, 93% of the 2,200 Americans surveyed said they use Amazon more than any other online retailer over the past year. That's quite the market penetration.

Amazon isn't just good, it's getting better. In 2015, the gap between Amazon and the next closest retailer, eBay, was 52 percentage points. In 2017, the gap is 59 points.

Among the huge swath of Americans that use Amazon, nearly half of them use the service at least two to three times a month. They spend a lot of money too. 33% of those surveyed by RBC said they spend more than $800 annually.

Take a second to let that sink in. About the same number of people surveyed that have used eBay in the past year have spent more than $800 at Amazon.

These would be impressive numbers for any company, but don't think that success is slowing Amazon down at all. More than half of those surveyed, 55%, have signed up for Amazon Prime. This means Amazon brings in about $6.4 billion a year in Prime subscriptions alone, according to RBC.

Those Prime subscribers are really loyal customers. Nearly half of those subscribers are spending more than $800 a year at Amazon and 74% of them are shopping with Amazon at least twice a month.

America must be envious of all their neighbors Amazon branded boxes showing up each month because more and more people are signing up for Prime. Six percent of America signed up for Prime last year.

This kind of customer loyalty means bad things for competitors. When Amazon entered the grocery store business by buying Whole Foods, grocery stocks lost $24 billion of value in a week as their stocks tanked.

The Amazon effect is so strong that fund managers are starting to look for stocks the company can't conquer.

All of these numbers come from RBC's survey, which only hit 2,200 Americans, so the results aren't perfect but they certainly are impressive.

Shares of Amazon currently trade at $975.35 and is up 29.45% this year. 

Click here to watch Amazon's stock price in real time...

SEE ALSO: Blue Apron got Amazon'd before it even became a public company

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: PAUL KRUGMAN: Trump can't take credit for the soaring stock market

More opens. More clicks. Better email deliverability. Less spam complaints. One email can help you accomplish all of this. It’s the welcome email! Although it’s the first email subscribers receive (after the confirmation email if you use confirmed opt-in), it may be the most important email you send. And there’s no reason not to send it. Between the awesome results you can get and the ease of setting it up, the welcome email is the one email you should always be sending – no matter what. If you’re wondering why it’s so important and how you can write an amazing welcome email yourself, read this article. And then set up your welcome email.

Why welcome emails

Welcome emails get amazing results. In fact, they get open rates that are 4 times higher and click-through rates that are 5 times higher than other emails. Here at AWeber, we often see welcome emails with open rates above 90 percent and click-through rates above 50 percent. That’s amazing! Welcome emails get such great results because they arrive in your subscriber’s inbox at the peak of their interest – when they’ve just signed up for your email list. And often times, welcome emails contain the incentives businesses promise on their sign up forms. So subscribers are eagerly awaiting those emails and their freebies. At other times, subscribers are excited about signing up for a newsletter, and the welcome email gives them a sneak peek into what they’ll be receiving. Whatever the scenario is, welcome emails consistently perform well and can do a lot towards improving your email marketing strategy. For example, a great welcome email will:

• Help to improve your email deliverability
• Get more emails to subscribers’ primary inboxes
• Boost open rates and click-through rates for future emails
• Decrease spam complaints and unsubscribes
• Help you sell your product or service

And more. But there are a few key things you should do in your welcome email to earn these kinds of results. In fact, there are five things every welcome email should include. Keep reading to learn about them.

5 things every welcome email should do

1. Deliver your incentive

If you promise a freebie or incentive on your sign up form, your welcome email should deliver it. You should design and structure your email in such a way that the incentive is prominent when subscribers open the email. Making sure that subscribers see your incentive is important, because it builds trust by delivering on your sign-up-form promise. Additionally, a good incentive can get people excited about receiving more content from you – which can lead to higher open rates and click-through rates down the road. For example, on the sign up form for our course and guide “What to Write in Your Emails” we promise a guide and email course in exchange for subscribing: To make sure we’re delivering on that promise right away, we give subscribers the guide in the second line of our welcome email, which subscribers receive seconds after they join the list: When you deliver your incentive in your welcome email, you can use hyperlinked text like we did above, or an eye-catching button. Either way, your incentive should be easy to find in your welcome email. If you don’t promise an incentive on your sign up form, then you don’t need to worry about this step. Instead, try sharing a popular blog post or another piece of content that provides value to your audience. 2. Ask subscribers to whitelist you Earlier in this post, I mentioned that welcome emails can increase deliverability and help more of your emails reach the primary inbox. To make this happen, ask subscribers to whitelist you in the copy of your welcome email. Whitelisting is when a subscriber adds your sender name to their email contacts. When an email provider such as Gmail recognizes that you’re in the subscriber’s contacts, they’ll be sure to deliver your email. You can ask someone to whitelist you by providing instructions for how to do so. For example, Further provides subscribers instructions on how to whitelist in this welcome email below: Another even simpler way to have subscribers whitelist you is to ask them to reply to your email. By replying to your email, your subscriber will automatically add you to their email contacts. John Corcoran does this very effectively in his welcome email to subscribers. He asks subscribers to reply to let him know they received his email by asking them to answer a question:

3. Set expectations

Setting expectations in your welcome email is a great way to decrease spam complaints and discourage unsubscribes. You can set expectations by explaining how frequently subscribers will receive emails from you and by walking them through the kind of content they’ll receive. If you tell subscribers up front that you’ll be emailing them daily, for example, they’ll be less likely to mark your emails as spam, because they’ll be expecting daily emails. Additionally, when you inform subscribers of the kind of content they’ll get from you and you stick to those guidelines, subscribers may be less likely to mark your emails as spam or unsubscribe, because they’re aware of the kind of content you send. Take a look at how Farnam Street does this in the welcome email below by explaining that subscribers will receive an email each Sunday with the best brain food from the week:

4. Introduce yourself

Typically, you should not try to sell anything in your welcome email. Doing so is like getting a cold call from a salesperson. While that can work on occasion, many times it just annoys the person receiving the call, because they don’t have a relationship with the caller. However, the welcome email is a good opportunity to begin establishing a relationship that can lead to sales later on. By introducing your company (or brand) and mission in your welcome email, your subscriber can begin to become familiar with you. This familiarity can carry over to later emails and make your subscriber more likely to purchase since they know who you are. In this welcome email, Melyssa Griffin spends a lot of time introducing herself, her mission and who her ideal audience is. When an entrepreneur reads this email, they know that Melyssa is specifically trying to help people like them, because she says so in the email. That can go a long way in encouraging people to trust and purchase from her later on.

5. Build excitement

Your welcome email plays an essential role in establishing your relationship with a subscriber and in setting up how they interact with your emails in the time after they subscribe. A well-written welcome email can increase open rates and click-through rates for months after your subscriber receives it. One way it does this is by building excitement for the emails that’ll be arriving later on. You can accomplish this by explaining the benefits of being on your list and teasing the content that subscribers will be getting from you. This is similar to setting expectations, except that the goal is to use language, sentences and words that’ll get your subscribers as excited about receiving your content as a child is excited about opening their birthday presents. Nomadic Matt, a travel blogger, builds excitement in his welcome email by telling subscribers they'll get, "amazing tips, tricks, and deals sent to you so you can travel more on less." He then allows them to choose the type of travel content they want to receive from him by having them select the country they want to travel to next.

Welcome your subscribers with 5-fill-in-the-blank welcome templates

And that’s it! When your welcome email accomplishes these five things, you set yourself up for email marketing success. Ready to write your own welcome email? We’ve made it really easy. Our free “What to Write in Your Emails” course and guide gives you 5 fill-in-the-blank templates (and 40 other templates!), which you can use to write a welcome email in minutes. All you’ll need to do is fill in the blanks in the templates with your own information and then add your content to an email. It’s that simple! Sign up for the “What to Write in Your Emails” guide and course today, and start sending welcome emails.

The post The One Email You Should Always Send – No Matter What appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Are you fed up with being ignored by influential people in your niche?

Does every email you send seem to fall into the darkest depths of the digital ether?

Do you find yourself hopefully checking your email inbox anyway, patiently waiting for that magic reply?

Well, unless the email monster is back again, it looks like you could use some help building connections with influencers.

The biggest problem I see in this area is people who go in cold.

How would you like it if some random person came to your door and started telling you their life story?

But if you already knew a bit about the person, you might be more tempted to listen. Let’s say you’d actually read their content and seen their name around.

This would make you more likely to become a part of their community and more disposed to build a relationship.

After all, friends like to help friends!

And in that spirit, I’m going to share with you my top ten ways to build powerful connections with influential bloggers in your niche.

1. Get an introduction from a mutual connection

How many people do you know in your industry?

Are you part of any groups that are focused on your niche?

Take stock of all the people you know in a professional capacity and see if they share a connection with an influencer you are trying to get in contact with.

Being introduced is the easiest and most ‘organic’ way to get noticed.

Imagine being at a party with a friend where you know nobody. You might feel pretty awkward, but you can rely on the fact that people will start smiling at and talking to you because you have a mutual connection.

Think of digital marketing as one big party where using your existing network to meet new people is key.

When you are introduced to someone, you get a perfect opportunity to let your personality shine.

Don’t be shy – ask people who already know you in your industry for an introduction to the people you want to connect with.

2. Use blog comments to gain their attention

If you have exhausted all your connections but no dice, try going directly to the source.

By this, of course, I mean the influencers’ blog. This is where they spend the majority of their time online. This is where they go to develop content, answer questions, look at metrics and check out stats.

Pick your favorite blog of theirs and actually read it. I don’t mean skim-read it, I mean read it word for word, start to finish.

Your task is to find a way to add value to the influencer’s blog post using the blog comments.

Can you add an extra insight to the comments?

What tips or experiences can you share?

Answer questions. If this is a guru blogger, then they will struggle to answer all the questions they get asked here. This is where you can sweep in and start answering other bloggers questions in the comments for them.

If you do it in a polite way and add value to the commentary, they will undoubtedly appreciate it.

Plus other people see you as a helpful person. It’s a win-win situation – you get noticed and you also get a little exposure!

3. Get to know them as much as possible

Do you know anything about this person?

Your answer should be yes!

You know they are an influencer in your niche.

You can learn more, though, because most bloggers make it super easy to get to know them on a deeper level.

Check out their About page. What does it tell you about their life?

Check out their social media profiles. Who do they follow? How active are they? How many connections do they have?

Read the stories they tell, and gather as much information about them as you can.

You can even tweet them or comment on their statuses.

Be specific, if you can. Let’s say you notice they are big cat lovers. If you have a cat, you could share a picture of it with them. This will show your personal side but also connect with them on a level outside of their business.

By making the blogger feel like you actually know them and care about them on a number of levels, you stand a much higher chance of being noticed by them. If and when they do reply, your job is to keep the conversation flowing.

Friendly conversations are much easier to remember than formal ones.

4. Share their content on social media

I touched on this above, but it’s worth going into depth as a standalone tactic to connect with an influencer.

It’s a fairly obvious way to try and get on someone’s radar, but most people are very lazy when they do it. It’s easy to add something to Buffer or to click a retweet button, but to really get noticed by your influencer crush, you need to stand out.

How about making a custom infographic for their post, then sharing a summary on social media? Tag them in your post, embed their link and you are good to go.

This sort of action shows the influencer that you care about them and the work they do. It takes a lot more time and thought to create a custom infographic than it does to hit a retweet button.

If you really want to stand out, you could even create a video that summarizes your favorite piece of their content. When you post it on Facebook, just tag them so that they see it, and don’t forget to thank them for creating it in the first place!

Again, this shows more commitment from you. You could run some paid ads with the post too. This will get more traffic for the influencer in question while boosting your exposure and making you appear more helpful!

5. Join their Facebook group or a group they’re a member of

A lot of big blogs have now started creating Facebook groups for their business. Joining one could help you connect with other like-minded people as well as put you right in front of the influencer.

You can help others in the group with the struggles they are facing by providing relevant advice, insights or commentary. Just make sure that you have read the page’s house rules and know what the influencer stands for.

If the blogger asks the group a question, get involved and provide a valuable answer.

Some bloggers will even let you share your own content once in a while.

6. Feature the influencer on your own blog

When you link to somebody’s website, they automatically get pinged on their WordPress comments dashboard. It also supplies them with your link so that they can visit and see how you have linked to them.

Big bloggers might miss these though, so it is best to always follow up with an email.

All you have to do is provide a quote from the influencer and then link back to their blog. Personally, I like to create a custom graphic and add a ‘click to tweet’ button.

A lot of people use outbound linking nowadays, and by putting this extra effort in, you can really stand out.

Just remember that both inbound and outbound links should always add value to your content and for your audience. This tactic should not just be about getting noticed and it shouldn’t affect your audience’s experience.

However, if you are partly doing this to get noticed, it may be beneficial to feature them on a guest post. The blog you are posting on should be more authoritative than your own. This adds more value to the person you are quoting.

They will get more traffic, exposure or credibility from your guest post than they would on your blog at this stage.

I have actually created roundup posts on higher authority sites. This is a perfect way for you to get noticed as you are linking to them with an authoritative link which adds more ranking power for them.

Because it’s a roundup you are pulling in a handful of awesome influencers all at once.

7. Be their assistant on Facebook Live

Facebook Live is a great tool for getting right in front of an influencer because you can interact in real time and they can see your efforts straight away.

The problem is that a guru’s ‘live’ sessions tend to be packed full of fans and other marketers.

So how can you stand out? Is it all luck?

Nope, you can act as a helpful virtual assistant.

Live chats are usually so busy that there is no way one influencer can read all the questions or comments.

This is where you come in.

Get involved in the chat, answer questions and share links that the guru mentions.

Doing this gives you prime exposure, plus if you can keep your pace up, the influencer will be able to see all your hard work in real time.

8. Get noticed during a Twitter chat

Twitter chats are similar to Facebook Live, except that when you answer any question, you should mention the gurus @username.

This is just an added measure to ensure you get noticed by the influencer.

You could download TweetChat, a simple but powerful tool to quickly interact and reply to tweets in the chat. It gives you an added edge so that you can stay with the pace and get maximum exposure.

Use the same approach as you would playing virtual assistant on Facebook Live – be helpful, answer questions and share your own experience.

9. Review their products/services on your blog

Sometimes you don’t need to try hard to get in front of your favorite influencer. If they own a product or service, just buy it.

This changes your relationship in their eyes as you become a customer, and in my experience, customers have a much easier job getting attention from the influencer.

For example, if coaching is the service you purchase, then you are going to be working alongside the influencer directly.

If they offer something else that isn’t coaching, you can review the product or service. Don’t be boring and follow a crappy review template. Go into detail:

• What is it and why did you need it?
• How exactly did you use it?
• What benefits have you gotten from using the tool? Show proof!
• What would you like to be added to the product or range in the future?
• Were there any downsides?
• Can you provide a video walkthrough or tutorial?

This type of review offers a lot of value to your audience and to the influencer.

When your post is live, you should share it with your email list first to get some social shares and comments. Then post about it on Facebook, tweet it, add it to LinkedIn or do whatever fits best with your content marketing strategy.

This will give the post some traction.

Once your post has gained a little traction, reach out to the influencer and tell them about your review.

They might actually have got the WordPress Ping about the new link already.

10. Be as helpful as you can

As you can probably see, the biggest takeaway from this post is to show how helpful you are. It doesn’t matter what option you take, just show the influencer that you want to help them and give them value.

When I reach out to people, I usually start with a simple little line… is there anything I can help you with?

This is best left for once you are at the emailing back-and-forth stage because by then they will have an idea of what you can do for them.

If they haven’t seen you write, why would they ask for your help to write a blog post?

If they need SEO help, why should they trust you?

You need to position yourself so that they already know what you are good at.

Wrapping up

It doesn’t have to be a difficult undertaking to get noticed by the movers and shakers in your industry. Sure, you have to stand out amongst the hundreds of other people craving their attention, but there are clear tactics to do so successfully.

Always ask yourself, how can I add value to their lives and enrich this relationship further down the track?

Promote their content and be living social proof that their products/services work. It might take a few days, weeks or months, but eventually, they will take notice of you.

Oh, and once they have noticed you, that doesn’t mean your work is done. You are not giving to receive – you are giving to give more!

Reciprocity will kick in before you know it.

Now, tell me all about your experiences. Do you use influencer marketing for your blog? What struggles have you faced when connecting with influencers?

At first glance, measuring innovation might seem as inexact as a Supreme Court Justice’s description of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

One of the cornerstones of my Anticipatory Organization Model is the critical need to craft an environment that fosters innovation. That’s important, but it still begs the questions: How much innovation is “enough”? Further, how can you tell when your efforts to encourage innovation are producing the results you desire?

Fortunately, there are reliable benchmarks that can move the answers beyond an educated guess.

One Measurement: Wide Participation

Exponential technology advances have brought us to a unique tipping point, a period of transformational innovation—not mere change but game-changing digital disruption. That includes everything from how we “drive” semi-autonomous automobiles to chatbots, wearables, and next-generation smartphones, which are supplanting any number of other devices, including laptop computers and video cameras. This powerful trend is pervasive, no matter your organization or what industry you happen to be in.

That sort of constantly transformative environment underscores the value of continuous innovation—either you innovate or you fall further and further behind your more innovative competitor. Moreover, innovative thought and action shouldn’t just occur in corner offices or corridors of power; rather, innovation needs to be pursued by everyone in an organization, no matter what they do or their level of authority.

That’s just not an issue of being democratic. It’s a question of the sort of innovation that takes place, be it an industry game changer or one that improves the most routine everyday function or responsibility. By encouraging a broad approach, you can be sure that a sufficient level of innovation is occurring at all times.

Here’s one example of what I mean. As detailed in this article, an IT firm that was the subject of a recent study on innovation introduced what it called “idea portal.” This was an intranet-based tool accessible to most employees that helps track ideas from seed to implementation. As a result, employees formed small groups to devise and submit new product ideas as well as operational suggestions. This improved communication with client teams as well as the efficiency of workflow within specific departments.

Another Barometer: Is There Sufficient Time to Innovate?

An additional means to measure innovation involves a bit of backtracking. Simply put: If you want people within your organization to think about new ways to innovate, do you really give them the opportunity and motivation to do so?

As this article points out, you need time to pursue innovation. It can’t be a mere add-on to a workday or something that is crowbarred into an already overloaded schedule. It’s far too important to be considered optional or ancillary.

That means a real commitment in terms of time. In some organizations, employees are encouraged to earmark an hour a week or even an hour a day to explore innovative solutions to problems or new product or service ideas. Others, such as the one detailed in this piece, set aside a specific day once a year to discuss and build on ideas that can lead to all sorts of innovation.

Want to be confident that your organization is innovating enough? If there’s enough time designated just for that objective, and executives are both supporting and leading the process, chances are good the results are what you want.

Ultimately, It’s Results

At the end of the day, the question of whether you’re sufficiently pursuing innovation boils down to the sort of results you’re after. If you want to be as empirical as possible, there are formulas for quantifying returns on innovation investment, as this article explains. Some analysts have gone so far as to crunch the value of innovation into a company’s stock price.

But it doesn’t have to be quite so analytic. Take a look at your organization’s products and services. Are you introducing genuinely new ideas or merely rehashing old ones? Have a look at employee retention numbers. If you say you have policies that encourage innovation and, as a result, talented, motivated people are staying on board, that’s also a good sign that your commitment to innovation is real and not mere lip service.

The question of how much innovation is the “right” amount obviously varies from one organization to the next. But, in this era of ongoing digital disruption and change, it’s valuable to know your organization is committed to a sufficient level of ongoing innovation. Your success and even your survival may depend on it.

At Campaign Monitor, our 200,000+ customers around the world are designing some of the world’s most engaging and successful email marketing campaigns. Email marketing has been the top performing marketing channel for businesses for decades. That said, some email marketing tactics that work well for some businesses may not work as well for others.

New data from research firm Aberdeen Group examined the different approaches used by B2B and B2C email marketers, and there are some important takeaways for B2C marketers. The overall finding affirms that email is integral for both B2B and B2C marketers — 95 percent of B2B respondents cited email as an integral channel for marketing communications, and 78 percent of B2C marketers cited active, dedicated email operations.

While email marketing is a priority overall, the pressures driving the strategy differ slightly. Fifty-five percent of B2B email marketers cited the need to hit annual organizational revenue goals as the number one priority, while 71 percent of B2C email marketers noted that measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue is strongly valued as a key performance indicator. Both groups reported low favorable effectiveness levels at connecting marketing efforts to revenue (just 46 percent of B2C email marketers and 31 percent of B2B email marketers), indicating a skill gap that needs to be addressed.

While program goals may differ for B2B and B2C email marketers, there are some common best practices that top-performing email marketers use to achieve success. A few highlights:

1. Prioritize email marketing for a greater ROI

B2C marketers who prioritize email marketing average an 89 percent higher contribution to revenue, vs. marketers lacking such priorities. They also reported an email open rate that’s 167 percent higher and a click-through rate that’s 2.3 times higher compared to organizations lacking such prioritization. Those who don’t prioritize the program are seeing a decline in performance, which means that B2C email marketers have two options: either aim to master it on your own, or find a trusted partner to manage the program for you.

2. Integrate data-driven campaigns for success

B2B email marketers will often test and optimize campaigns to distil distinct formulas for success — 59 percent say they can duplicate the results of effective campaigns with this approach. Additionally, 70 percent of B2B email marketers can identify the most profitable customers in their networks, which maximizes the value of outreach. With data at their fingertips, B2B email marketers are more effective in developing repeatable processes and personalized campaigns. This presents a huge opportunity for B2C marketers to learn more about your customers, build behavioral profiles for them, and then deliver more relevant email marketing, such as what we’re bringing to customers with the acquisition of Tagga.

3. Personalization is key

Most B2B (55 percent) and B2C email marketers (69 percent) are effective at maintaining consistent, relevant, personalized communications with prospects and customers. Sixty-three percent of B2B email marketers segment marketing efforts by industry, region, topic or vertical to avoid any unsegmented “blast” email campaigns.

Wrap up

It’s clear that organizations that prioritize email marketing drive greater success, customer engagement and retention. When done right, email marketers can realize massive benefits and see a significant impact to the bottom line.

To learn more or to download a full copy of the report from the Aberdeen Group.

Of all blockchain’s potential applications, smart contracts may have the most potential to change the way companies and organizations do business. In our overview of blockchain, we detailed some of the advantages to having a distributed, authoritative ledger of transactions. Today, we’re going to explore how that same technology can be used to create self-executing smart contracts and what hurdles remain to be overcome before the technology is ready for general use.

What Is a Smart Contract Exactly?

It’s not always clear what people are talking about when they talk about smart contracts. According to the most restrictive definition, they’re a specific type of contract created and stored on a blockchain, designed to facilitate legally binding, self-executing transactions between parties. At the other end, they simply represent any agreement between parties that is stored on and executed by a blockchain. For our purposes, we’re going to use the looser understanding.

Though blockchain is a relatively recent innovation, the idea of a self-executing contract stored on a distributed ledger has been around since at least 1994. The concept itself is pretty simple: rather than relying on a middleman (ie, a lawyer, notary, or broker) to facilitate the performance of a contract, two parties can create a self-executing digital contract that’s stored on a shared network.

The key distinction here between a smart contract and any other kind of agreement is that a smart contract doesn’t just record the terms of an deal, it also makes sure that deal is carried out. In a typical contract, a seller’s asset is held by an agent (the lawyer, broker, escrow agent, etc.) until the seller is paid by the buyer and the agent can verify the transaction. Only then is the asset released. This verification process can take months in certain scenarios.

With smart contracts, verification happens in real time. As the terms of the contract are met, the contract automatically transfers assets between parties, whether money, stocks, or anything else of value. A better way to think of smart contracts might be as a kind of digital broker, since it does much more than simply record the terms of an agreement. In fact, the originator of the concept likened smart contracts to a digital vending machine that holds assets (ie, candy bars) which are dispensed once you’ve fulfilled the terms of the agreement (ie, inserted your money).

What’s So Exciting About Smart Contracts?

The above example is pretty simple, but the real promise of smart contracts lies in more complex arrangements, like the kind of highly structured trades that take place between financial service firms, or elaborate and highly contingent supply chains that tie together dozens of suppliers and buyers. These are situations that involve lots of money, lots of people, and lots of time. Smart contracts have the potential to make these complex transactions more efficient while also increasing transparency and trustworthiness among all parties. Here’s how:

• Efficiency. Transactions take place as soon as the terms of the contract are fulfilled. Currently, it can take months for assets to be moved after a contract is signed. There’s no lengthy verification process. At a minimum, this means larger and more complex agreements will take less time to execute, allowing companies to move more quickly.
• Trustworthiness. Smart contracts are encrypted and stored on a shared blockchain that’s controlled by the parties themselves. There’s no need to trust a third party to hold assets or ensure the terms of the agreement are executed. Furthermore, it’s practically impossible for information to be lost, since the ledger is replicated in full across many different machines.
• Transparency. When the terms of a contract are expressed in computer code rather than natural language, there’s no room for ambiguity. It’s even possible to test an agreement with any number of variables so that all parties involved can know exactly what will happen under any given circumstances. This makes the process more fair and should reduce or eliminate disputes that arise under unusual circumstances.
• Privacy. Smart contracts can have variable permission structures, meaning that regulators may be able to see the terms of the contract while protecting the identities of the parties themselves. This allows regulatory authorities to monitor for fraud and suspicious activity without violating the privacy of individuals.

Futuristic Applications

We’ve laid out some pretty straightforward problems that smart contracts may be well suited to solving, but much of the excitement around them involves more futuristic scenarios that we’re just now beginning to dream up.

One particularly exciting (theoretical) application for smart contracts is in internet-connected devices. IBM, which is developing its own blockchain technology, has outlined a system built on a combination of smart contracts, peer-to-peer messaging, and file sharing (a la BitTorrent) that could create distributed ecosystems of IoT connected devices. Imagine all internet-connected appliances on a single power grid negotiating to share electricity most efficiently without requiring a central controller to assign and balance loads. It’s also possible to imagine networks of self-driving cars that know when to buy their own fuel based on mileage and fuel prices, or schedule their own maintenance with the local auto shop.

The exciting promise here is that these ecosystems can grow and manage themselves without requiring humans to develop and manage a centralized control system. To be clear, we’re still a ways from such a scenario (and there are very real obstacles to its implementation), but it represents one of the ways smart contracts can do more than just automate stock trading between people.

Let’s Not Get Ahead of Ourselves

A few words of caution: Blockchain is still in its very early days, and there are some very good reasons to be skeptical of it right now. For starters, blockchain and smart contracts are still in their infancy, technologically speaking. Most of the applications we’ve looked at are hypothetical or still in the proof-of-concept stage. Even the developers behind Ethereum acknowledge that their platform is experimental and thus unsuitable for mission critical services. That isn’t to say that the tech won’t get there someday, but for the moment you probably shouldn’t be restructuring your supply chain to rely on blockchain.

Another consideration is less technological than legal or political. For starters, blockchain or related technologies are unlikely to replace contract lawyers anytime soon. In large contracts especially, lawyers are still likely to be play a critical role at the negotiations stage.

Furthermore, it always takes governments and courts some time to catch up to the latest technological developments. Smart contracts have the potential to transform the way legal contracts are structured, implemented, and litigated about, but they’re only valuable to the extent that they’re recognized by either legislation or court rulings.

We’ve spent some time looking at what blockchain can do, but it’s also worth considering what it’s not suited to. Blockchain has the potential to really shine when it comes to complex transactions involving quantifiable assets. These are frequently the kinds of transactions that really benefit from automation. But there are plenty of scenarios where you can’t (or wouldn’t want to) automate the process. For example, a smart contract can’t gauge whether a job was done to the buyer’s satisfaction unless the buyer explicitly tells it so, in which case, the smart contract really hasn’t simplified anything.

Furthermore, a smart contract is only as good as the code it’s written in. Poorly written contracts can lead to all kinds of unexpected and undesirable consequences, and the same properties that make it difficult to tamper with or alter a blockchain also make it very difficult to stop or rewrite a faulty contract. In this scenario, developers play a role that isn’t so different from the one lawyers play when drawing up physical contracts.

Want to Learn More About Smart Contracts?

As we’ve said before, it’s still very early days for smart contracts and blockchain more generally. The technology is immature, and there are no universal standards or widely acknowledged best practices yet. Again, you probably shouldn’t be actively looking to blockchain technology to replace core functionality yet.

That said, there are a number of blockchain and smart contract-related projects right now, with more springing up by the day. Two of the most exciting blockchain technologies are Ethereum and Hyperledger.

Ethereum is an open source, public blockchain based on the original Bitcoin blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, however, Ethereum is meant to serve as a platform for any number of different decentralized applications. It also offers some scripting functionality for creating smart contracts.

Hyperledger is a cross-industry effort with contributors from IBM, SAP, Airbus, Deutsche Bank, and other major companies to both encourage the adoption of blockchain while advocating for a common set of standards. The Hyperledger project includes a number of open source implementations of the blockchain framework geared toward different use cases, of which Fabric is currently the major blockchain-for-business implementation.

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For a long time, the folks that sell inbound marketing and “social selling” (which they are now struggling to differentiate from what they are calling “social marketing,” a distinction without a difference) have used CEB’s research that buyers are 57 percent into their buying process before they engage a salesperson to suggest that:

• Cold calling is dead.
• A salesperson can create no value before the point the buyer decides to engage.
• A salesperson’s only hope of being found when a buyer reaches that 57 percent mark is developing their personal brand on social media.
• A salesperson’s only chance of being relevant is by having content that serves the buyer when they decide to engage in exploring change.
• One should never interrupt the buyer, but rather one should serve the buyer, by helping them once they engage.

CEB does not share this statistic to make any of the above points. Quite to the contrary, the point that they make with this statistic is that you should try to command as much of your dream client’s mindshare as they move down this path—especially when you can initiate the change by coming in at 0 percent!

Because the buyer is doing a lot of work to understand and frame their problem, meet with people on their team, and explore some of their options before they proactively reach out to a salesperson, that isn’t an excuse to passively wait for your prospective client to reach out to you.

But please don’t take my word for any of this. Listen here as I ask Brent Adamson (CEB, now Gartner) to explain this in his own words—and act accordingly.

[smartads]

The post The Truth About the 57 Percent appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Here they are: the most important charts in the world. 

Once again, we asked dozens of top strategists, economists, and writers for one chart that is top of mind right now. The slideshow includes their verbatim analysis of the trend they picked. 

All of these charts were submitted by June 16, so some of the data may have evolved since then.

With assistance from Rachael Levy, Elena Holodny, and Jonathan Garber.

 

David Rosenberg

"This is where the power and influence still reside, and nothing is going to stop the inevitability that nearly two million of this critical demographic group will be turning 70 annually for the next 15 years. And they are very likely to make it to 85 or even older with medical advancement.

This has crucial implications for the financial markets because it is when you turn 70 that you undertake the most profound asset mix shift since you were in your 30s and loaded up on equities — when you turn 70, preservation of capital and cash flows becomes much more important, and yet in a world where 'safe yield' has become extremely scarce, the investment challenges for the aging but not yet aged boomers are going to be daunting, to say the least."  

Rick Rieder

"This crisis has under-appreciated negative side effects for the US economy as a whole. Most significantly, student loans are making it harder for first-time home buyers to afford their own home, with more than 70% of would-be first-time buyers saying student loan debt is delaying their home purchase, according to the National Association of Realtors. As a result, the homeownership rate in the US has fallen each of the last six years despite a solid economic recovery, according to the US Census Bureau, with the biggest impact coming from the 25-34 year old cohort as seen in the chart above. 

The student loan burden is not just curtailing young adults’ home buying; it is weakening their consumption in general, posing a major headwind to US economic growth. In addition to the direct economic impact, the student loan crisis could also worsen the class divide. Home ownership levels at age 30 are much lower among those with college debt than those without, and when faced with today’s high college costs coupled with the prospect of taking on significant debt, more students from lower-income households may choose not to attend college, worsening their outlook for employment and wage income over the course of their career. The bottomline: This crisis is likely to be a major drag on the US economy for years to come if it remains unaddressed, and an elegant fiscal-policy solution is needed, the sooner the better."

Torsten Slok

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Ecommerce marketing automation, if done correctly, is a great tool to efficiently and effectively acquire and nurture customers. With the advancements of big data and machine learning, you can give customers an outstanding personalized experiences without having to hire a large marketing and sales team to do so.

Businesses that use ecommerce marketing automation to nurture prospects experience an increase as high as 451% in qualified leads. In turn, nurtured prospects make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured ones.

For this article, we asked for expert advice from Beeketing – a Marketing Automation platform for ecommerce. Lori, a growth specialist and content enthusiasm at Beeketing, put together three proven marketing automation tactics for effective lead management and prospect nurturing in ecommerce.

#1. Automate email marketing to nurture your leads through the entire buying process

Email marketing – the oldest form of digital marketing, is also the biggest are for marketing automation. When combined with advanced segmentation features, email marketing can deliver highly-targeted, personalized messages to your customers at the right moments.

Here are 4 automated email campaigns that can kickstart your company’s customer nurturing flows immediately.

Welcome email

Welcome emails are the digital handshake between you and your customers.

According to Entrepreneur, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue per email than promotional emails. They also generate 86% more unique open rates, 196% higher unique click rates and 336% more transactions.

Tool: Happy Email

Some tips for crafting a strong welcome email campaign:

• Make your customers feel special by adding personalization elements into your email content. Make them sound like each email has been personally written by you

• Offer an incentive (free shipping/ discount code) to your customers. This can bring an immediate increase in sales and customer engagement
• Avoid spam words to ensure your emails get delivered

Make sure that your email is timely, actionable and engaging so that you can get the best out of the welcome emails sent out.

Cart abandonment email series

Cart abandonment rate is a frequently overlooked sales channel. 70% of customers abandon their shopping carts without making a purchase, but 63% of them would be recoverable with a simple Cart Email Series.

Cart abandonment emails are a popular tactic to remind customers of what they left behind and guide them back to your store to complete the purchase.

You should be sensitive about the timing and frequency of these emails. Some important things to take note:

• Remember to add a Call-to-action button into your email to let customers know what to do and redirect them to their abandoned cart to complete the purchase
• Offer an incentive to encourage them to take action
• Add urgency and scarcity into the email to boost conversions

Sales nurturing email series

Thanks to customer segmentation, which is one of the best features in automation marketing tools, you can easily divide customers into groups, such as:

• Loyal customers
• New customers
• Customers who bought a specific product

Use this knowledge to send emails that are relevant to each segment, driving them to take the desired action.

Below are some campaign ideas to consider:

• Get repeat customers by sharing product recommendations which are relevant to their past purchases
• Reward your best customers with discount cupons
• Show appreciation for your most loyal customers or biggest spenders by sending them a special incentive
• Create an email or series of emails to encourage lapsed customers to return to your store or re-engage with your campaigns
• Showcase your latest products or offer an incentive to potential customers who have signed up for your list but haven’t bought an item from your store just yet

#2. Automate Social Media Presence Without Killing Engagement

Social media is one of the best marketplaces for your business. A place for business owners to stay connected with customers, influencers, reach new leads and develop brand loyalty.

Having a rich and varied social media content strategy is a necessity, but generating and managing such content can be extremely time-consuming. In order to reduce your working time and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, automate your social media posts and monitor your accounts with tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and SproutSocial 

With these tools, you can schedule your social media posts to multiple channels at the best times of day for maximum engagement.

However, remember to strike the right balance between automation and engagement. Do not just simply share links without context. Add personality, thoughts and comments to your automated posts and manually handle the interactions with your followers.

No customer wants to have a conversation with a bot. The involvement of human in social media is still essential for all businesses to remain relevant. Keep this in mind so you can reap tremendous results with social media marketing.

Also, it’s important to measure the performance of your posts. If they do not get enough attention, consider changing content; image; number of posts or schedule and test over and over again. Automation tools such as Revive Old Post and Buffer both provide you a huge amount of insightful data to analyze the performance of your posts. Take advantage of this feature to make an effective decisions for your social marketing plan.

#3. Dynamically personalize product recommendations to boost average order value

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – Steve Jobs’ immortal words.

Personalized recommendations generated by marketing automation tools show customers items they would like, but are unlikely to discover themselves. They improve a visitor’s experience by offering relevant items at just the right time. And indeed, statistics shows that 86% of consumers indicate that their purchasing decisions are influenced significantly by personalization.

Big names like Amazon or Netflix are the live evidences of this tactic:

• Amazon says 35% of its revenue resulted from product recommendations
• About 75% of what people watch on Netflix is due to recommendations

Product recommendation tools understand your visitor’s preferences based on their past behavior and the behavior of similar customers. Using recommendation algorithms, these tools can generate highly relevant recommendations to help customers discover products that are likely to match their interests.

There are plenty of places to display recommendations on your ecommerce website. For example:

• Homepage: Since customers won’t look for anything in specific on this page, this should be a place for you to display your Best Sellers or Product Recommendations based on their browsing and purchase history
  

Tool: Personalized Recommendation

• Product pages and Cart pages: Recommend complementary products based on what they are viewing in your product pages or what they have in their carts. This is an effective way to influence customers and improve average order value.
  

Tool: Boost Sales

Conclusion

Use automation marketing tools responsibly, do not just set and forget. Those tools are made for you to efficiently execute your campaigns with less effort, maximizing profits.

Remember that content is still the most important part of any marketing plan and no tool can automatically generate this better than marketers themselves. The key point to have an effective ecommerce marketing automation strategy is to create content that doesn’t sound automated, making your messages sound as natural as possible. By doing this, you are able to drive sales at scale and grow your business without having to grow your marketing team.

Measure your Marketing efficiency with Compass’ Acquisition Benchmark report:

The post Grow Sales With 3 Easy Ecommerce Marketing Automation Tactics appeared first on Compass Blog.

The days of boring lead-capture forms and irritating questions from sales reps are over.

An interactive content assessment – also known as an assessment, persona assessment, personality assessment or maturity assessment – is an easy way to automate your lead scoring while engaging prospects in an active and informative experience.

With interactive content technology, lead scoring can be as fun as taking a personality quiz. Done well, assessments create the opportunity for a two-way conversation. Prospects share qualifying information and rich data with you, and you provide personalized follow-up that helps them solve the problems they tell you they’re struggling with.

According to a report from Demand Gen Report, 86% of marketers are currently using lead scoring as part of their demand generation strategy. The remaining 11% plan to implement a lead scoring system in the next year.

Lead scoring is so effective at helping businesses get ahead that marketers are spending their valuable time on it. However, most lead scoring systems can stand to be improved. That same report found that only 20% of marketers think their current systems are highly effective.

For marketers, assessments help them spot super MQLs – those highly qualified leads who are ready to be sent to the sales team.

For customers, these assessments are actually valuable resources that help them decide – for themselves – whether or not your solution is right for them.

Here’s an example. In this assessment from Euler Hermes, users learn about the company while also determining if strategic credit management is the right choice for them. As the user answers each question, they’re scoring themselves.

Ultimately, an assessment is a two-way discovery tool. Marketers learn about prospective buyers, and customers learn about themselves and the company’s solutions.

Not every assessment works the same, however. If you’re thinking of creating a assessment for your own organization, or you have one that you’d like to improve, read on.

Two Ways to Build the Ideal Assessment

There are two proven types of assessment that work. These two assessments give you the information you need about prospective customers, and they give users a great experience that sets them on the path to purchase.

The first is a Personality Assessment, where each answer ties directly to one of the result categories. Think of a Cosmo quiz or Buzzfeed quiz, here. Use this type of quiz when you need to give more generalized results to the user.

Here’s an example from Unitrends:

The second kind of assessment that works well is the Range Assessment. Think of a Myers-Briggs personality test, here. Each answer has a point value, and those points add up to a score that determines the user’s result. Use this when you need a more distinct score.

21 Ways to Improve the Results of Your assessments

Now that you know the two best ways to create an assessment, it’s time to get down and dirty. Here are 21 ways to make sure your assessment works optimally for your business goals and assessment users – so you can convert those qualified leads into happy customers.

1. Decide what information you need BEFORE you create the assessment

What specific information do you need from users to qualify them as leads? Decide what information is most valuable to you for lead scoring before you create your assessment.

2. Talk to your sales team

Set aside time to talk to the people who interact most directly with customers: your sales team. Find out what information they need to make the sale, and what questions they most often get asked.

You’ll make the sales reps’ jobs easier by sending them super MQLs (which also increase sales results, which lead to higher ROI for your marketing team – win/win!), and your job will be easier because your assessment will do the scoring for you.

3. Leverage your buyer personas

Dig into your buyer personas to uncover more effective lead scoring criteria. What makes a persona highly qualified? Ask assessment questions around those traits.

4. Create different assessments for different sections of the sales funnel

Each section of the sales funnel is unique. Your assessments should be, too.

First, decide on the goal based on where the customer is coming from. Do you want to create awareness? Improve engagement? Convert visitors?

At the top of the funnel, where your goal should be around creating awareness, an assessment with three to five questions and broad results would work well.

In the center of the funnel, where engagement is key, focus on educating users. Provide them with more specific, individualized results and next steps. Keep the number of questions low, still, though. We recommend no more than eight questions, because more than that can cause customers’ interest to wane.

At the bottom of the funnel, focus your assessment around conversion. Gather more information from users, and offer them fully detailed and very specific results. You can use more questions, here, but try not to include more than 10.

5. Take advantage of the power of interactive content

The big difference between an old-fashioned lead-capture form and today’s assessments is interaction. Sure, in both cases, the lead is giving you information about who they are and what they need – but the interactive elements of assessments make that a two-way conversation. Take advantage!

Include interactive elements that make the assessment more fun for and more valuable to the user. Use interactive elements to educate them, help them assess their situation and overcome their obstacles.

In this example from ServiceNow, the interactive elements not only help the user to learn about their IT needs, but the animations make the experience more alive.

Still not convinced? This study by Demand Metric found that interactive assessments convert 2x better than static content.

“Interactive content, such as apps, assessments, calculators, configurators and quizzes, generates conversions moderately or very well 70% of the time, compared to just 36% for passive content.” – Demand Metric

6. Reach out to current customers

Look through your customer feedback and keep an eye out for patterns. What made them choose your solution? You might be able to identify common pain points that your leads need to see as their taking the assessment. Let them know you understand their pain points, and they’re more likely to believe you can solve them.

7. Keep the assessment brief

No one has the time or patience to complete a mile-long assessment these days. Keep your assessments brief to keep engagement high and keep the momentum up. Determine each user’s assessment result in as few questions as possible.

8. Make it FUN

Your target customers might not feel excited about filling out a form – but ask them to take a Marketing Superhero personality test, and they’re on board.

Image source: kissmetrics.com

9. State the benefit up-front and make an offer at the end

No matter how fun a assessment looks, not everyone will want to take it if the value isn’t apparent from the get-go. In this example from our very own SnapApp team, the value proposition is on the first page:

At SnapApp, we’ve also found that assessment creators who include an offer at the end of the questions experience higher completion rates.

10. Make sure every results page has instant value

Your results pages are where the rubber hits the road. Make them VALUABLE. For example, don’t just tell the user which personality type they are, but explain what the personality type is, why it matters, and how their answers determined that result.

11. Give the user just enough information

Conversely, don’t give the user too much information on the result page, either. Give them enough information to understand why they got their result and what the next steps are – but don’t overwhelm them. Use follow-up emails to provide more details if you need to.

12. Have a plan for each result

Put your MAP (marketing automation provider) in the mix and create a plan for each result. For example, if a user gets Result A, they get sent to sales as a super MQL – but if they get Result B, they get added to an automated email sequence designed to warm them up before sending them to sales.

13. Use different question types

Once you know what the assessment results will be, and you have your plan for each result, it’s time to develop your questions and answers. The questions are your first opportunity to have a dialogue with the user, so they should be engaging and representative of your expertise.

To avoid putting the user to sleep, use different types of questions to create a livelier experience.

• Single Select Questions: The user gives a specific answer, typically by selecting a radio button.
• Multi Select Questions: The user can provide more than one answer, typically by clicking checkboxes.
• Slider Bars: Great for ratings questions.
• Dropdown Lists: Best for when there is a long list of answers.
• Open-ended questions: The user can type in their own answer.

14. Caveat: Not every question has to tie to results!

For the sake of engagement, feel free to include questions simply for fun or for your own information gathering.

15. Make the questions and answers clear and concise

Leave out the jargon and complex language. Write your questions in an understandable way, and keep them short. Make the experience fast and easy.

16. Maintain a conversational tone

Remember, a assessment is a conversation – so maintain a conversational tone. Give your answers personality (that matches your brand, of course), like replacing “Yes” with “Yes we do!”

Don’t worry about making the answers match the relevant sections in your MAP. You can use Alternate Lead Values to make sure the information gets sent over correctly.

17. Make the logic simple

Avoid super complex combinations of answers, or answers that lead to hyper-specific results. Keep things simple for a better user experience and ease-of-use on the marketing end.

18. Make sure your marketing automation is linked up and ready to go

Test your questions and answers to make sure they’re getting sent to your marketing automation software properly, and the user is added to the right sequences. One glitch can take a qualified lead out of the sales cycle – or put an unqualified lead in the hands of an already overburdened sales team.

19. Point the user to the next step – clearly

Use the results pages to tell the user what the best next step is for them. You can include a link to a relevant webpage, a downloadable content asset, or even just some clear-cut advice based on their result.

20. Keep the themes of your assessment and follow-up aligned

Make sure your follow-up emails match the theme of your assessment to ensure a consistent experience for the user. It can be jarring for a user to go from a lighthearted superhero personality quiz to a follow-up email that’s written in heavy tech-speak.

21. Deliver personalized follow-up

Make sure your marketing automation software is set up to deliver personalized follow-up emails based on the user’s result. Best practices here include repeating the information from the result page so the user gets a “receipt of the information,” and including a note about sharing the assessment with their peers or colleagues.

HubSpot is a good example of a company with a great personalized follow-up system. After a user takes this Website Grader assessment, the company sends personalized marketing messages based on the result – and from there they nurture the lead until they’re ready to buy.

Image Source: website.grader.com

Now You’re Ready to Turn Your assessments into Powerful Revenue-Generating Tools

Assessments are great for automating lead scoring and turning content into a two-way conversation. With the tips in this article, you’re now ready to turn yours into even more powerful customer-relationship-building tools.

 

The growing popularity of smartphones and mobile advertising has changed the way consumers shop and convert online. According to Google, more searches take place on smartphones than any other device, and more than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile. When these smartphone users engage with mobile ads or website content, they often convert by calling.

According to research by analyst firm BIA/Kelsey:

• Search, social, and display advertising drove over 108 billion call conversions to U.S. businesses in 2016.
• That number will grow to 162 billion calls by 2019.
• Search advertising alone will drive over 40 billion call conversions in the United States this year.

To succeed with calls, marketers must make it easy for consumers to engage in conversation with their businesses over the phone. But you shouldn’t stop there – you should also capture and leverage data on calls, callers, and conversations to improve marketing ROI and acquire more customers. Here are 4 strategies for marketers to take a data-driven approach to phone call conversions.

1. Attribute Every Phone Call

It’s important to capture the same granular level of data for phone call conversions as you do for online conversions, including:

• The marketing source that drove the call: For each call, you should capture the marketing channel, ad variation, keyword search, email or direct mail, or other marketing source that drove it. This data helps you see which sources are driving the most calls.
• The caller’s path through your website: If a lead visited your site after running a search or engaging with your marketing, you should know that person’s entry page, the content he or she viewed on your site, and the page he or she eventually called from. Knowing what content drives call conversions enables you to optimize your website to generate more leads and customers.
• Data on the caller: You should also capture who the caller is, their phone number and geographic location, the day and time of the call, their device and browser, and if they are a first-time or repeat caller. This data is useful for optimizing both online and offline marketing, but is especially valuable in fine-tuning keyword bidding and ad targeting for channels such as paid search, social, and display. Also, tracking and anticipating peak call times is helpful in deciding how to staff call centers or business locations that answer calls.

2. Integrate Call Data with the Tools in Your Marketing Stack

Calls are an important data source to include in the tools you rely on to drive growth. With calls, you get a more holistic view of the customer journey and can best allocate budget and optimize campaigns to generate the greatest return. Some tools and platforms that can benefit from call data:

• AdWords and Facebook: By far the most dominant digital advertising platforms, including your call data alongside online conversion data in AdWords and Facebook makes it easy to measure ROI and make smarter optimization decisions.
• Web Analytics and Optimization: Include call data in tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to understand the digital activities generating both online and call conversions. Use that knowledge to optimize website and digital advertising performance to increase engagement.
• Bid Management: By adding call data to bid management platforms, these tools are able to calculate the true ROI from search and social media advertising. They can then allocate budget to the keywords and campaigns with the best CPL and CPA.
• Marketing Automation: Including call data in marketing automation reports and workflows can help you optimize email targeting and conversion rates, improve lead scoring accuracy, and better capture each contact’s behavior, whether online and offline.
• DMP and DSP: Call data belongs in data management platforms (DMPs) to improve customer analytics and decision-making. Call data should also be passed to demand-side platforms (DSP) to target audiences most likely to call with the right digital ads.
• CRM: Marketers now pass call attribution data to CRMs to measure specific marketing sources and spend that drive the calls that convert to leads, opportunities, and revenue. It’s a necessary step to prove marketing’s impact on the business.

3. Personalize the Caller Experience to Convert More Calls to Sales

To improve conversion rates over the phone, marketers are now taking responsibility for the call channel – whether calls are going to a call center, remote sales agents, or business locations. You can use the call data captured at the time of the call to tailor and optimize the caller experience to win more customers. Here are three ways:

• Route callers optimally to close more sales: When shoppers call, they expect to get assistance and answers right away. It’s important to connect them quickly in conversation with the right agent or business location. You can use intelligence captured on each call – including the marketing source, caller location and history, and day and time of the call – as signals to best determine where each caller should be sent.
• Prioritize your most valuable callers: Some businesses have a priority queue where they place callers they believe have the highest purchasing intent and sales value, ensuring those calls get answered immediately. Some do this based on marketing source – with calls from search ads being the most common leads to get prioritized. But others do it based on a caller’s past history or the web page they called from.
• Pass data on callers to sales agents before they answer: When calls come in, some businesses pass information on the caller and marketing source that drove the call to their sales agents before they answer. Knowing that a call is coming from a specific marketing campaign, referral source, keyword search, or webpage helps sales agents anticipate a caller’s needs and deliver a more seamless, personalized experience to win the sale.

4. Analyze Phone Conversations from Marketing for Actionable Insights

A necessary step in taking ownership of a business’ call channel is monitoring call activity and conversations. That’s why marketers are now analyzing what happens on the calls they generate to call centers and their business or franchisee locations. Analyzing if calls were answered and the content of the content of conversations provides actionable insights you can use to increase conversion rates and customer acquisition. Data to examine includes:

• The value of the call: Knowing if a call was a legitimate sales call and if it converted to an opportunity or revenue helps marketers know which campaigns are driving the most “good” calls.
• What the agent said: Marketers should analyze the performance of the agent who takes the call to ensure they are on-brand, using the right scripts, and mentioning the right promotions.
• The call experience: Marketers are monitoring if calls to each location, agent, or client are being answered, how long callers spend on hold, and call abandon rates.
• What the caller said: Understanding the words or phrases callers actually use can be an excellent way to optimize for the right SEO and SEM keywords and create more effective marketing messaging.

To learn more about measuring and optimizing phone calls from marketing, please download the eBook, The Digital Marketer’s Guide to Call Attribution.