Rnordman

Here at WordStream, we have access to a ton of ad data thanks to our free tools and client base. We’ve analyzed over $60 million in AdWords ad spend. And we love to play around with that data, giving you performance insights like average click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per click, and cost per conversion across all different industries.

But one thing we had never looked at before was the ad text itself. Obviously, all of us folks on the content team are obsessed with words. So we got to thinking: What are the actual WORDS that go into really great, super-high-CTR ads in AdWords? And while we’re at it, what about stuff like numbers and punctuation marks? What are the best CTA’s? Are the best ads in Google AdWords positive or negative? Are they keyword-stuffed or more creative?

In this article, we’ll cover nine, often surprising things we learned by running text analyses on some of the best ads in AdWords from the past year.

This analysis was a group effort. Shout-out to everyone who worked on the project including our data analyst Josh Brackett, our web team leader Meg Lister, our designer Kate Lindsay, and content team leader Elisa Gabbert.

About the Data Set: How Did We Define “Best Ads”?

Here’s how we arrived at our set of top AdWords ads. Our free AdWords Performance Grader checks every account that runs a report to determine that account’s best ad (along with its worst ad)

We pulled all the data collected from Grader reports between August 1, 2016 and April 30, 2017, then looked at the top 15% of ads seen during that time period (judged by a combination of impressions, clicks, and CTR), which gave us 612 total ads to analyze.

We only looked at advertisers bidding in USD, AUD, CAD, and ZAR, and eliminated non-English ads and duplicates from that set. We also split the set into branded and non-branded ads (335 brand ads, 277 non-branded).

Note: We separated out branded ads (brand ads are the ads that show up when users search for a business’s brand name) because these ads naturally tend to have very high performance, including high click-through rates and Quality Scores. Why? Because people searching for a brand name are often just trying to navigate directly to your site; plus, they’re already heard of you, so there’s natural brand affinity (which can increase CTR by 2 or 3x). Therefore, we excluded brand ads from most of our analysis, so we could see what tricks and tactics lead to super high performance even when businesses don’t have the benefit of high brand affinity.

With that said, let’s get into the data!

#1: What Are the Most Popular Words in the Best-Performing Ads?

Back in 2016, Google released Expanded Text Ads, which basically double your ads’ max character counts. Compared to their predecessors, Expanded Text Ads are a sprawling canvas. To some, having more characters to fill with ad copy is akin to torture; to others, it represents opportunity.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, it is a universal truth that more opportunities to use more words means that choosing the right ones is more important than ever. But which words are the “right” ones?

To find out, we looked at our set of top performing text ads and broke them into individual words, stripping out conjunctions (and, or) and articles (a, the) until we were left with the ten most popular words:

According to our data, in 335 high-performing non-branded text ads, we determined that the words appearing most often were, in this order:

1. Your
2. Free
3. Now
4. Get
5. Online
6. Our
7. Save
8. Best
9. Shipping
10. You

Any standouts?

“Your,” “Free,” and “Now” seem obvious, but “Shipping” (which, I’d assume, is typically accompanied by “Free”) making an appearance surprises me; it leads me to believe that our top performers lean more towards eCommerce than lead generation. Speaking of, the fact that “Get” and “Save” are the only verbs on the list makes total sense since they have application across both B2B and B2C text ads.

With both “Free” and “Save” on the list, we can assume that shoppers are as cost-conscious as ever. And “Now” and “Get” imply they want stuff fast.

Also really important: the second-person pronouns “You” and “Your.” Make sure your ad copy speaks to your customer; don’t make it all about you!

TL;DR: When you’re struggling to write your best ad copy, remember: “Your Free Now Get!”

#2: What Calls to Action Appear Most in the Best Ads?

The call to action, or CTA, is perhaps the most important component of your ad copy. If it doesn’t live in one of your headlines, you’re doing it wrong. If you can squeeze a reminder into the description or URL paths, do so. You’ll thank me later.

What’s a Call to Action?

In this context, it’s the bit of language you append to an ad that tells a searcher which action you’d like them to take (and how/when to take it). Knowing which is the right CTA for a given ad is very much vertical, audience, and offering specific. You’d never tell someone who’s about to score your ballin’ mid-funnel whitepaper to “Buy Now,” would you?

Now, we’ve excluded branded ads in our analysis of calls to action because oftentimes advertisers will fail to explicitly drive action (or actively choose not to) in branded ad copy. Instead, many advertisers use them more like text-based billboards atop the SERP; the goal is to tell prospects that you exist, not necessarily incite a click. While this is certainly useful to some degree, it doesn’t help us understand what makes non-branded (often more commercially relevant) text ads tick.

While phrasing will differ slightly on a case-by-case basis, the verbs that you leverage are pretty limited based on the action you’d like a prospect to take.The top non-branded text ads we analyzed revealed that the most popular CTAs were (by number of ads each verb appeared in):

If you sell a product, the obvious CTAs are “Buy” or “Shop” (perhaps “Get” if you’d prefer to downplay the required exchange of currency); conversely, if your goal is to accrue mad leads, it’s likely your CTA deploys the likes of “Learn” or “Discover” or “Sign Up.” If you look at frequency, though, you’ll notice that the most-used CTA verb in our data set is “Get.”

Nobody with a top ad is using the verb “Click,” as in “Click here.” (In fact, trying that will probably get your ad disapproved.

#3: Are the Best Ads in AdWords Positive or Negative?

From schadenfreude to merriment, the sentiment of your ad copy plays an important role in how prospects consume and interact with your ads. This isn’t news. In fact, over the years we’ve talked about using emotional triggers to bolster your ad copy and landing pages ad nauseum: how many of you were listening?

We used the Vader sentiment analysis tool in concert with Python’s NLTK library to determine the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) evident in our set of top ads. If an ad returned a compound score of greater than .5, we called it a positive ad. Ads with a compound score of between -.5 and .5 were considered neutral. And finally, ads with a score less than -.5 were considered negative

According to our findings, ya’ll are all smiles, which made me frown.

45% of the text ads conveyed a positive sentiment; 53% conveyed a neutral sentiment; and just 2% conveyed a negative sentiment.

I am shocked by these figures, especially when you take into account that they only represent non-branded text ads.

It’d make total sense if the same analysis, conducted on branded ad copy, yielded the same results; after all, no brand wants to be seen as negative (see: dumb Pepsi commercial, every airline ever, etc.). But isn’t negativity — a measurable degree of sentiment — better than milquetoast copy?

Personally, I’d take ad copy that can incite a response (even a negative one) over that which resembles wet cardboard stuffed with keywords. Causing a prospect to experience sadness or fear or a sardonic giggle with your ad copy is better than going unnoticed, contributing to the SERP’s ever-growing white noise.

#4: How Lexically Diverse Are the Top Performing Ads in AdWords?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “What the heck does lexical diversity mean?!” It means it’s time to get a little academic.

It refers to the proportion of unique words in a given corpus (set of textual data) to all of the words in the texts. When used as a lens through which to analyze and optimize text ads, measuring lexical diversity is a key indicator of keyword stuffing. It’s important to have a handle on how often you’re using keywords in your ad copy. Too little and you’ll derail your Quality Scores; too many, and you’ll piss people off.

Our data reveals that top advertisers tend to repeat just 2 words per ad. Like so:

Which is a helluva lot better than, say…

The moral of the story here? Maintaining lexical diversity in your ad copy is essential. Even if stuffing your text ads with the keywords you’re bidding on might please an algorithm (for now), it’s wholly unappealing to human eyes.

This is a problem you should try like the dickens to avoid since, you know, humans are the ones who will click your ads and purchase your wares.

#5: What Are the Most Common Punctuation Marks in Great Ads?

“Let’s eat grandma!” Eh.

“Let’s eat, grandma!” Sounds lovely!

Punctuation is important, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re attempting to distinguish between supping with or on a geriatric relative or trying to sell products to prospects, it’s pivotal to getting your message across. In fact, I can’t think of a way outside of punctuation that a single character can so profoundly impact the meaning and tone of a text ad.

As such, the way punctuation is used in top performing ad copy can offer you some particularly salient advice on which types of punctuation to use in your copy and, more importantly, how often.

Punctuation in Branded Text Ads

Shock of the century: exclamation points win out in a landslide. I’ve got a feeling that if we were to look at the location of exclamation points in text ads (branded or non-branded) the majority of them would come at the very end of the description line. The general idea here is pretty straightforward. Basically, “You just read my ad! I hope you’re jacked up! BUY BUY BUY!”

The relatively low usage of dollar signs in branded ad copy makes contextual sense because it seems likelier that branded ads would attempt to hammer home, you know, brand over, say, pricing. Ditto for the percentile.

• Exclamation: 48%
• Commas: 38%
• Question Mark: 2%
• Percentile: 8%
• Dollar Sign: 11%

The place where punctuation use in branded ad copy really interests me, though, is question marks. Just 2% of the 335 branded ads surveyed asked a question (or did so knowingly at least).

Test different punctuation marks in your ad copy – even though most top advertisers aren’t using questions to get high CTR’s, you might find that doing so makes your ad stand out. Pattern breaking can lead to high performance.

Punctuation in Non-Branded Text Ads

Punctuation frequency for non-branded ad copy parallels pretty closely what we noted in the branded ads: lots of exclamation marks, oodles of commas.

Interestingly, though, the rate at which dollar signs are used is about 3% lower in non-branded ad copy than branded. While the relatively low percentage of ads using the almighty $ makes sense on the brand side (the objective is likely awareness vs. a direct path to conversion), the fact that it’s not only low but lower for non-branded text ads feels counterintuitive. I’d have assumed that there would have been dollar signs galore in the non-brand ads, and maybe with a larger sample of all ads (not just the cream of the crop) we’d see that play out.

• Exclamation: 42%
• Commas: 25%
• Question Mark: 11%
• Percentile: 9%
• Dollar Sign: 8%

How will knowing about punctuation frequency help you write better text ads?

Based on these figures it’s pretty easy to see that many successful advertisers aren’t asking questions in their ad copy, nor are they leveraging the almighty dollar. If you can find a way to do so in a way that speaks to your prospects, your ads are sure to stand out! However, when in doubt, the path is clear: Use an exclamation point!(!!!)

#6: Are the Best Ads in AdWords Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

In a word: no.

If you’re unfamiliar with DKI, it’s a tool that allows you to customize your ad to match a user’s search query. This affords you the ability to create more specific, highly targeted ads. All you need to do is create a generic ad containing the formula for dynamic keyword insertion and voila, you’ve got yourself an ad with perfect intent-match.

In theory.

While it does have useful applications (especially for online retailers with diverse inventory), our data says that top performing text ads– branded and non-branded alike– tend to avoid DKI like the plague.

As you can see, just 10% of the non-branded ads and 6% of the branded ads we reviewed employed DKI.

While this is a bit surprising (since so many accounts use DKI to some degree or another), the data affirms my belief that DKI is an ad copy stopgap, not a solution. Relying on dynamic keyword insertion probably stifles your creativity, wich is why ads using DKI aren’t among the cream of the crop.

#7: Do the Best AdWords Ads Use Trademarks & Other Brand Signs?

Simply observing whether a top performing ad was branded or not wouldn’t have revealed many profound insights; we already know that advertisers bidding on their branded terms leverage those same terms in their ad copy, and this makes a ton of sense. Branded search campaigns are no longer an option: they’re a necessity.

After all, there’s nothing worse than having a stranglehold on the SERP for your branded organic keywords only to be shoved below the fold by some neerdowell competitor with junk Quality Scores bidding on those very same keywords.

To thwart your competitors it’s important to convey authority, and one of the simplest ways to do this is through the use of the Trademark sign (™ ) or language that otherwise conveys officiality. In the past, we even found that using symbols in your ad could increase your conversion rate. Interestingly enough, though, only 28% of the Branded ads and 6% of the non-branded we analyzed did so.

I’d wager that this speaks to the fact that many SMBs lack the brand equity of a multinational corporation like Nike or Coke or what have you. Case in point…

Search for any yuge brand and you’ll see some attempt (whether through ™ or words like “Official”) by the advertiser to let you know that they are, in fact, the real Slim Shady. If the big guys are willing to use every tool on the ‘ol utility belt, you should be, too.

TM and other symbols aren’t a requirement for high performance, but test out using them to see if they have an effect on your CTR and conversion rates.

#8: Do the Best-Performing Ads Use Numbers?

About a third of the time! Which seems low, right? Think about how often the ads dotting the SERP you see on a daily basis have numbers in them…

Most of those folks are doing it wrong.

According to our data, just 40% of top-performing branded ads and 37% of non-branded ads include numbers.

Before digging into this data, if you’d asked me how many text ads feature numbers, I’d have wagered on something close to 50%: particularly for non-branded ads. But after seeing the relatively low usage rates for the dollar and percent signs in our pool of top-performers, it makes sense that numbers play less of a role in great text ads than I’d initially thought.

This is not to say that numbers are useless; rather, it’s a solid reminder that your prospects care about more than the price of your goods or services. The way in which you frame (and phrase) your offer matters as much as the offer itself. It’s completely possible to convey value in a text ad without numbers.

Top ads are using numbers in their ad copy (not just to showcase better prices and discounts), but more than 60% of the superlative text ads we studied only used words. Arithmophobic advertisers rejoice (sorry Mark!)

#9: What’s the Average Reading Level of Top-Performing Ads?

How complex are the best-performing Google ads? We ran our ad set through the Readability Calculator using the Fleish-Kincaid scale (a method of determining how easy or difficult a text passage is to read).

What we found is that the average reading level of the copy in our set of best-performing ads is geared at a 14-year-old. So, if you want great CTR, write for a 9th grader!

Interestingly, a lot of best-selling authors are doing the same thing. Shane Snow at Contently found that most best-selling authors are writing at or below a 9th-grade reading level:

Note that Hemingway is even more readable than Goodnight, Moon…

The Ultimate Best AdWords Ad Would Look Like…

Mashing all this data together, we can gather that the ultimate best-performing AdWords ad of all time would look something like this….

This ad uses:

1. Top-performing words (your, free, get, our, save)
2. Top performing CTA word (get)
3. Positive sentiment (the ad is about saving money in the future, not wasting money in the present/past)
4. Lexical diversity
5. Exclamation point
6. NO DKI
7. No trademark / brand sign
8. It’s written at about a 9^th grade reading level
9. A single number in the description line

Some of this data surprised the heck out of me. What about you?

You may think that a prospect needs your solution. But if she doesn’t want it, you’re out of luck.

That means you have to first create demand along the buyer’s journey. There are three ways to do this:

• Cold calling and promotional campaign
• Trigger Events
• Educating prospects with useful information

A cold calling campaign may look like the most efficient way to reach your target market. They all need your solution. Right? Not so fast.

Bombarding prospects with cold calls and promotional emails is simply pitching. It annoys prospects, and it doesn’t work.

If prospects don’t think they have a problem you can solve or have never heard of you, they can easily ignore you. Caller ID and spam filters will consign you to oblivion.

Trigger events, such as an acquisition, a product launch, or a key hire, can create an immediate opportunity. But these instances are rare. You’ll probably starve if your prospecting strategy depends entirely on waiting for trigger events.

Educating prospects systematically about the problems you solve is both more effective and more efficient than the other two approaches. You’ll find more qualified prospects faster.

The Buyer’s Journey

B2B buyers follow a three-stage buyer’s journey below:

To move the buyers along, they need relevant information, particularly for the “Awareness” and “Consideration” stages.

Your marketing department should provide all the “tools” necessary to attract and engage prospects. These include:

• Website that attracts visitors and captures leads.
• Informative and compelling content (articles, white papers, case studies, etc.).
• Systems to automatically “nurture” leads via periodic emails and offers.

You, as a salesperson, must know how to use these tools effectively.

Don’t rely on your company website to produce all your leads. Many of these unsolicited inquiries may be from unqualified prospects who cannot use or afford your solution.

Be proactive. Develop a list of executives that meet your target customer profile (industry, company size, location etc.) and send periodic pieces of useful information and offers.

You may get some nibbles. The advantage here is that these are qualified prospects.

Also, you won’t be investing a huge amount of time in a cold calling effort. And your prospects won’t consider you a pest.

Awareness Stage

Your marketing department plays a key role here in driving traffic to the website, capturing names of prospects, and, in many cases, nurturing the leads with automated email sequences.

Prospects who show interest by, say, downloading a white paper or participating in a webinar along the buyer’s journey become marketing qualified leads. The leads are forwarded to the sales team for further nurturing.

Goal: Convince prospects they have a problem or opportunity.

Objective: Educate prospects about a problem or opportunity and its costs along with the benefits of solving it.

Tactics:

• Drive traffic to website
• Capture names and contact info
• Send Info and Offers

Tools:

• Social Media Postings
• Blogs
• Website content
• Industry white papers
• Articles
• Webinars
• Automated nurturing programs

Consideration Stage

This is where you, the salesperson takes over. Using the tools provided by marketing, you develop the leads and begin to interact with them extensively. You’re driving them toward a decision.

Goal: Convince prospects to evaluate your solution

Objective: Demonstrate how your solution can solve the prospect’s problem

Tactics: Show how your solution works and how it compares to the competition

Tools:

• Customer case studies
• Testimonials
• ROI Calculators
• Demonstrations/Presentations

Decision Stage

Your goal here is to convince the prospect to buy your solution. Presumably, she has all the information she needs.

Systematic Communication

Here is an example of a nurturing sequence along the buyer’s journey spanning the Awareness and Consideration phases. Note that the salesperson does not create her own content. She selects appropriate material from her company’s content library.

This saves time and ensures a consistent message.

• Day 1: Leave voicemail and send follow-up email.
• Day 28: Send e-newsletter with voicemail alert that it’s there.
• Day 42: E-mail recent customer success story, in related industry if possible.
• Day 60: Send personal invitation from selling professional to forthcoming seminar.
• Day 80: Mail case study and personalized letter of transmittal.
• Day 100: E-mail recent article of interest on Internet.
• Day 120: E-mail “touching base” note.
• Day 140: Mail follow-up letter with free report.
• Day 160: Prospect calls you: now a qualified lead!

If you’re like me, your inbox is now bombarded daily with what has politely been called “BDR spam” – automated, multi-touch sales email campaigns made possible by 1) the emergence of sales engagement platforms like ToutApp and SalesLoft, and 2) sales professionals who believe that beating their prospects into submission is the key to success. (“I’m following up on my last 4 emails …”)

Most BDR emails that make it to my inbox (i.e. from those reps that I haven’t already “blocked”) are bereft of anything approaching relevance or value to our business. But, ever so occasionally, an email makes it through that immediately resonates, or at least grabs my attention.

The email below (I’ve purposely omitted both the company and the rep’s name) is one such example. And the qualities that make it an effective sales email are lessons for anyone embarking on a sales outreach campaign, or any rep who writes emails, for that matter.

Here are the 5 key techniques and principles that make this email rise above the rest:

1. The subject line references both my name and my company’s name. It’s an old trick, but it works because it makes the email stand out in my inbox.

2. The first paragraph references a recent blog post I wrote. Immediately I know that the writer has invested time in research, and knows what our company does. (It’s a low threshold for praise, admittedly, but the percentage of BDR emails that exhibit NO understanding of what our company does is astonishing.) Plus: quoting something I wrote appeals to my already inflated ego.

Subject Line: Howard | Spear + [Vendor Name]

Howard,

I was intrigued by your position on pre-qualified leads in a recent blog post. As someone who has sold SaaS before + works with demand gen firms regularly, I really agree with your critique that “No lead generation vendor will qualify and convert leads better than you will”. That was definitely the case for me, even when working with an internal SDR resource.

Anyhow – I’m reaching out because I’d like to explore partnering with Spear Marketing. My company provides data science consulting to sales/marketing/demand gen organizations. We use machine learning & predictive modeling to help them win more revenue with data-driven strategies and ABM.

We’ve already partnered with demand gen firms [Competitor #1] & [Competitor #2] to deliver predictive analytics services to their clients.

I believe there could be a similar opportunity with Spear.

Can we grab 15 minutes to discuss further?

Best,

[Name of Rep]

3. The second paragraph succinctly describes 1) the purpose for writing, and 2) what the vendor’s company does, in simple terms (“win more revenue”) that imply a benefit to my business.

4. The third paragraph references two competitors with whom the vendor already does business. That immediately prompts the question: what do these competitors know that I don’t?

5. The email ends with a specific call to action, and the phrase “15 minutes” is a live link to a Web app that allows me to schedule a meeting date.

I’ve written previously in this space about how sales engagement platforms are a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. This email illustrates how a few simple principles, common sense, and yes – investing a little time in understanding your prospect’s business – can make the difference.

Despite all denials of the techies, the Bitcoin continues to fly under the pressure of marketing that makes it a form of Russian roulette that benefits those who know the manipulation. Since March 26, the Bitcoin has increased from $ 973 to $ 2,795. A real explosion of prices which can only be explained by fraudulent maneuvers. It went from $ 16 billion to $ 43 billion.

But behind this surge, there are formidable manipulators who have means that are the exchanges of bitcoins of which several leaders are in prison. The founder of the world’s largest depository based in Bitcoins, now based in Zug, Switzerland, predicts that the value of a Bitcoin will surpass the million dollar mark in 10 years, taking by surprise the whole assembly and even the most Optimists in the sector. Some see the replacement of gold. We are in full delirium.

On several occasions, these dramatic increases came from the conversion of dirty money into Bitcoin. We do not know what causes these mood swings that fall quickly. Do they pose a fundamental question: Beyond the technology behind the object, from where comes the value of $ 32 billion?

No regulation of false rumors or manipulations

There is a lot of talk about the Bitcoin right now, as well as a few other crypto-currencies, but are they really good investments? Recently I read research which describes why Bitcoin are a good investment for the future. They also provide detailed analysis and data to showcase their study. So I am exploring based on that and my personal opinion on crypto-currencies.

I will divide this question into two points:

1. Are crypto-currencies really an investment?
2. What currency crypto choose?
3. Are crypto-currencies really an investment?

Nowadays, virtually everything is called an “investment”. In the case of crypto-currencies, trading (trading) and investment are again confused, even by financial professionals.

An investment is when you buy an asset that produces something, and that by extension creates income.

For example, if you buy a tractor and lease it, it will allow someone to dig to then put the foundation of a house, pull farm machinery, and much more. In exchange for the productivity of your assets, you receive an income.

The question is, therefore: does the crypto-currency produce something?

The main added value of crypto-money is that it can make anonymous transactions, so it increases economic activity (albeit generally illegal).

That said, it produces nothing tangible for you because its overall productivity is drowned in the pool of all transactions.

Your only hope is therefore that its overall productivity in the form of a currency function is growing so that you can “freak out” your crypto-currency.

Basically, crypto-currency does not produce income for you, and your only option to make money is that its demand increases.

When a profit is generated not by production but by the difference between the purchase price and the selling price, it is called trading and not an investment.

What does it actually mean that it is trading and not an investment?

Trading is speculation and it’s not complicated, 95% of people lose at this activity.

Investing is a much safer way to get rich. You simply need to be aware of what you are doing with your money, and not speculate in thinking that you are investing.

Which crypto-currency to choose?

Bitcoin? Zcash and Zcoin? SafeCoin? Syscoin?

Admitting that you understand that you are speculating, the only crypto-currency I would negotiate personally is the Bitcoin, for two reasons:

Reason # 1: Everyone knows the Bitcoin

This point seems banal and simplistic. However, it should not be forgotten that the value of crypto-currencies is based on people’s trust. Indeed they are “fiat currencies”, like the Canadian dollar, the US dollar, and virtually all currencies in the world.

People have a tremendous confidence in the Canadian dollar and particularly the US dollar, which is the world’s reserve currency. What about crypto-currencies?

How do people trust you, the Bitcoin, the Zcoin, or the Syscoin? Obviously, people have more confidence in the Bitcoin, and one can easily assume that it will only go by increasing over time.

However, there is always resistance, and people do not have enough confidence in the Bitcoin to move away from the Canadian dollar or the US dollar.

In particular, the critical point or the Bitcoin could explode in price is when people will have enough confidence to use another function of the currency: the reservoir of value.

When people have confidence in Bitcoin to use it as saving, as an entity where they can retain the value of their work, then everything will change.

But how could the Bitcoin reach this level? How to develop this trust? These questions lead me to the second reason.

Reason # 2: The Bitcoin is the only crypto-currency that has a real chance

The Bitcoin is the only crypto-currency that has a real chance of what? To become an official currency, endorsed by the government and the financial system.

A strong and unshakeable confidence in the Bitcoin can only exist if governments and the financial system give it their approval.

In fact, it seems that in Canada the government is increasingly ready to incorporate the Bitcoin into daily transactions. This is not cast in concrete, and the future is still vague at the legislative level.

One of the barriers to official currency status for Bitcoin is that the government cannot legalize a private currency, which would limit its ability to tax transactions.

Can another crypto-currency based on the blockchain possibly be adopted rather than the Bitcoin? Yes, but precisely, there lies the whole aspect of speculation: we must try to predict the future.

In summary, invest in crypto-currencies or not?

Honestly, the majority of people do not even have $ 2,000 in an emergency, according to an article I read, so I do not see myself buying Bitcoins.

In this situation, I would buy stocks, bonds, gold, and real estate well before buying Bitcoins.

So unless I have a full RRSP and a TFSA, stuffed with income-producing assets, I cannot justify buying crypto-currencies.

I understand the desire to hit a home run with the Bitcoin, the desire to make 10 times his initial bet. This may be suitable for some people, but I cannot endorse this strategy because it makes a lot more losers than winners.

The strategy to get rich that works for me and in general is to get rich in the long run, walking by walk, so surely find myself at the top of the stairs.

A brief history of Russia's digital meddling in foreign elections shows disturbing progress.

Today I’m kind of sad. I lost a really good long term customer, somebody I’ve been doing monthly maintenance on multiple websites and a whole bunch of other things for years. I got an email yesterday that said, “We’re here to inform you that we’re terminating your agreement as of the end of the month.” No warning, no explanation. It just happens. I’ve been in the web business long enough to know this, and I’ve seen it time and time and time again: while you’re sitting there working diligently on their projects, they’re getting bombarded with sales people over the phone, walking in their door, trying to sell them a better mouse trap. Maybe they do have a better mousetrap, but all you can do is give them the best possible service for what they’re paying for.

Is Your Value Understood?

I know I was giving them great value because I was doing a lot of things per month. There were five websites. I was updating them, maintaining all the plug-ins, backing them up, and managing the analytics and AdWords. I would be on the phone with Google every single month talking about how we could make it better. I did about as much as I could. At one point, they came to me and said, “How do we get your costs lower?” They were spending five to eight times what they were paying me on advertising. I said, “The best way to do it is scaling

back the advertising because I can’t continue to do more for less.” I think that they finally had that person walk in the door that sold them on the package that’s going to get them to number one on Google and they’re going to be making tons and tons and tons of money, but I think they’re going to figure out what kind of value they had after they start paying for those other services.

Here’s the thing: I’m not bitter. I knew it was coming. How did I know? I’ve been in the business for so long. I know that there’s always somebody coming in trying to change things. In the website business, the average life expectancy of a website is about two and a half to three years. This has been probably about four years, so it was time for a change. We kept trying to update and talk about that, but I would go into meetings and never really get anywhere. I could never convince them to use content marketing as a tool. They just wanted to keep paying for ads. That’s the way they wanted to do it, which is fine.

I want to talk about a few things that you can do before, during, and after to maintain great relationships and overcome the adversity of change.

Communication

The first thing is, during the conversations, or during the engagement with your customers, the first thing you have to make sure that you do is communicate. You have to communicate with them on a regular basis.

Every single month, I gave them the opportunity to have an online meeting to discuss everything. I would go into their offices all the time for face-to-face meetings. Every time we discussed something, nothing would change. I offered to help engage the change, but when it came to actually making things happen — between losing people, people changing jobs, and what have you — they just never could pull the trigger. At the end of the day, I know I did everything I could to communicate with them regarding best practices, what’s new, what’s changed since we’ve started, and how to make things work.

Accessibility

The second thing you have to be is accessible. When they want to have meetings with you, you have to make sure that you spend the time to be there. If they’re sending you email, you have to respond quickly. If they’re picking up the phone and calling you, you have to take their phone calls.

In certain instances, they would send me project work and I would make sure I was really super clear that if they’re sending me things like changes to the website, it could take up to three days because I’m already pre-booked. I’ve got stuff booked out for the entire week and I may not have the bandwidth. Sometimes I would get it done that day. Sometimes it was three days. The thing is, I made sure that I was accessible and let them know what to expect.

The last piece is to continue to educate. I tried like crazy to get them to listen to my podcast, to read my blogs, to attend webinars, seminars, whatever it is. I gave them as many opportunities as I possibly could. Like I said, I would go in and do mini-seminars for a group of their people to explain the benefits of content marketing, on how Google Analytics and AdWords work, on what Search Console is, and all these other things. I was constantly teaching people there what to do and how to do it.

I gave them as much service that I could possibly give for the amount that they were paying me on a monthly basis. Again, in this business, there’s always a better mouse trap.

After The Shoe Drops…

The next thing that you have to think about is what happens when you get that phone call — or like yesterday, when I got that email. What can you do to manage what’s happening next? The first thing you have to do is set expectations. Make sure that they understand that you’re going to do x for whatever it is that they’re expecting. In this case, they’re asking for all the usernames and passwords and access to all the different things.

They wanted access to all their Facebook accounts. I immediately let them know, “I did not set up your Facebook accounts. They were set up internally by your organization.” I made that super clear upfront and laid out exactly what I was going to do, when I was going to do it, and that I will continue to communicate with them throughout the rest of this month to make sure that we’re setting those expectations, because what will happen if you don’t is the next company coming is going to say, “Well, can I get this? Can I get that? Can I get these files? Can I do all this stuff?” You’re going to basically be a slave to somebody who’s taking over your job. It’s almost like training your replacement. You want to make sure that you’re super, super clear.

An example of what I’m going to do is I’m going to fill out that document, I’m going to send it to them, I’m going to print it out and bring it to them with a CD ROM of every file that I have, and that way they can take that CD ROM and hand it to the next person. I’m going to say, “This is all I have. This is everything I’ve got.” They know that I’ve done the best that I possibly could to keep them informed, in the loop, and given them every asset so they don’t have to chase me down.

In other words, don’t be a Mr. or a Mrs. Poopy Pants. Give them what they asked for. Go over and above again because you never know, if this other company fails, that they might come back and say, “You know what? We understand we had it better. Let’s go back to where we were.” They may not. I haven’t seen it happen very often. It does happen though. Make sure that you leave on really, really good terms because also, you never know if they might refer you to somebody else. Maybe your service just isn’t a right fit at this time, but it might be for somebody else that they know.

Find A New And Better Client!

Finally, the last thing you have to do is you have to replace that client. If you have a regular client that’s paying you on a monthly basis, that is part of the foundation of your business; you can’t just all of a sudden let that void sit there. For me, I do that consistently because I know it’s coming. I’m always looking for that next opportunity that’s going to fill that void.

Yeah, sometimes you can take it over the top and make additional money at the same time and have another great customer, maybe even a better customer, but when you lose a customer, that’s the worst time to start looking for new ones. That’s the way that a lot of people do their marketing, is they’ll stop marketing when they’re busy and they’ll market like crazy when they’re bored.

I always tell all of my clients that the best time to market, the hardest, is when you’re the busiest because that lull is going to come, that change is going to happen. You need to prepare yourself for it by constantly looking for new opportunities, getting out there, meeting people, doing things like a podcast, putting together newsletters, making videos, doing blogs. Whatever your thing is, make sure that you’re constantly doing things to fill and grow your pipeline, and examine if what you did for that price is right. Maybe it’s time to start raising prices and setting different expectations.

Take Action?

Think about where you were, think about where you are, and make sure you understand where you’re going in the future.

I would love to hear your stories, thoughts, and comments on this subject. Comment below and share ways that you have used to turn losing a good client into a positive experience that has helped you grow your business!

Personal name SEO requires a personal name claim along with a complete and consistent use of your resume name, both on and off the web.

“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things.” ~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

And, so should you always use the proper resume name for personal name SEO (search engine optimization).

As the first step in developing a strategy for personal name SEO, I wrote about how to complete a personal name SEO audit to determine the best resume name to use for personal branding and job search.

The second step is to register your personal name across the web for added consistency and to strengthen a resume name search and to dominate the search engine result pages.

This called a personal name claim.

“A personal name claim is the process of registering and consistent use of your chosen resume name across the social web. This also includes personal name search trigger points, such as your email signature and business cards.”

How Do You Future-Proof with a Personal Name Claim?

1. Use Your Chosen Resume Name on All Current and Active Social Profiles.

Your social media profiles are the most supporting of your personal brand. Your social activity can cause these profile links to rise to the top of your personal name search. Thus, it is extremely important for high consistency with the use of your personal name across all social platforms.

This is even more important on LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides the most extended social profile to sell you, and your experiences and qualifications. Thus, make sure your LinkedIn display name and your public profile vanity link are a match. For example, linkedin.com/in/dennymccorkle (customized to eliminate the originally assigned link that included random letters and numbers).

A consistent personal name on Twitter is also important because your tweets can show up in the personal name search engine result pages. And, the same personal name front-facing your Google+ profile ensures that Google knows and remembers you from similar others.

When it comes to some Social IDs, you may need to be a bit more creative and add descriptors to your name (if space allows), such as TheJohnWSmith, JohnWSmithMgr, or JohnWSmithTX. Regardless of Social ID name, you should always register the display name that matches your current or revised resume name.

Advanced Tip: If your personal name, profile photo, and/or social email address is attached to content that is questionable or not professionally supportive of your personal brand, then for the social accounts that you do control: (1) take it off the public grid by upping the privacy settings, (2) change the profile, photo, and display name to something unrelated to your personal name and photo, or (3) mute or delete the account.

For the web accounts that you do not control: (1) contact the owner of the web or social site and politely ask that the content in question be removed, and/or (2) follow these personal name optimization suggestions so the consistency of profiles and social activities can push your professional accounts to the top, while pushing the less than desirable accounts off the first page search results.

2. Cross-Link All Your Active Social Profiles.

Don’t forget to cross-link all your social profiles to show Google that they are all connected with the same personal name. For example: on LinkedIn, you should have social links to your blog, Twitter, or other most active social profiles; on your blog, you should have social links to your other active social profiles, etc. This use of backlinks will increase the SEO and search popularity of your blog and other social profiles.

Advanced Tip: For an extra personal branding boost, when possible you should showcase those social links using personal name rich anchor text (clickable text in a hyperlink). For example, Denny McCorkle on Twitter.

3. Don’t Forget the Profile Photos.

You should revisit all your social profile photos. Your profile photos should be the same for personal brand consistency and to show Google you are you. Your singular photo should be a headshot for identification from the thumbnail photo in a Google search and for easy recognition in a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook updates stream.

Advanced Tip: The file name for this profile photo should be your chosen resume name for added personal name SEO, and so Google will know it is you.

4. Register Your Chosen Resume Name on Other Social Networks and Web Profiles.

You should register your resume name on any other up-and-coming social networks of current or future interest. While it is always good to give new social networks a test drive, more important is for you to personal name claim. Your use of the social network can come later. Writing about personal branding SEO, Andy Crestodina recommends adding a statement to your inactive profiles or pin a social share to the top of your stream leading others to your more active social accounts. For example: “Thanks for finding me here. I am not currently active on this account, but you can follow me on ______.”

There are also many places on the web to register a personal profile and offer yet another opportunity to claim your resume name.

Klout offers a short profile and shows others the quality of your social networking by measuring your social influence and topical expertise. It also recommends targeted content for social sharing.

About.Me and Flavors.Me provides your personal name and brand a visual profile, long bio, and cross-links to your other social profiles.

“Your personal name SEO end game is to OWN your personal name in a Google search.”

5. Set-Up a Social Email Address for Use on Everything Public.

A few years ago, I had a student in one of my marketing courses that regularly emailed me with questions. Her email address began with ByteMe. While cute and creative for a CIS major, imagine the negative impression that was made by everyone that received an email from her. So, yes, your email address plays an influence in personal branding and in personal name SEO.

Thus, your chosen resume name should also be used in your email address for consistent personal branding. So, personal name claim a Gmail email address and use this email consistently across all your social media profiles and personal name search trigger points.

I have seven active email addresses, but the one used across the social web and especially for all my professional and public use of social media includes my resume name. Fortunately, my work email also includes my resume name.

Advanced Tip: For job searchers, I recommend that you use a separate phone number, apart from your home or current work numbers, on your resume and for your job search. This is accomplished by signing up for a free Google Voice phone number for your area code. Then when your GV number is called, you can assign it to ring thru to your mobile phone with a GV notification stating there is an incoming call. You are forewarned and can answer it in a professional tone or send it to a professional voice message stating your resume name and to leave a name and number for a callback.

6. Use Your Resume Name at All Personal Name Search Trigger Points.

Of course, the primary trigger point for a personal name search is your resume or job application.

However, you should consistently use your resume name at all other personal name search trigger points in preparation to be Googled. This includes: (1) your email addresses and email signatures, (2) your business card, (3) profiles or listings in your professional or trade membership directories, (4) conference name badges and attendance directories, and (5) your profile on your employer’s website or directory.

If you write original content such as blog posts and other digital content (or journals and other printed publications), then be sure to include your resume name as the byline. If digital, use your resume name in the Gravatar display name, in the About Me section, and for the original image credits.

Or, if you write insightful reviews on Amazon or other websites to support your personal brand, or leave comments in discussion groups or communities online, then don’t forget to sign off with your resume name.

All these efforts contribute to a consistent and repeated use of your personal name that is optimized for external search engines and internal social network searches.

Advanced Tip: Disqus is a blog comment plugin used on popular WordPress blogs across the web. I recommend that you go there and register your resume name along with a link to your blog and/or Twitter account. Then, when you comment on a favored blog post, your commenter name will be consistent across the web. An added benefit is that your comment on a popular blog post can often show up in a personal name search.

7. Register Your Resume Name as a Domain Name.

Someday in the future not far away, a dot com domain name of your resume name may become one of your most valuable digital assets. A personal brand website or a personal blog can become the hub for your personal branding, personal name SEO, and online reputation management (ORM).

So, whether you plan to use it now (or not), domain register your resume name for multiple years in the future. At $10 or less per year, this effort is the best way to future-proof your personal name SEO and personal brand.

Advanced Tip: For the benefit of personal name claim, you should also register your resume name as a subdomain on the free blogging platforms of WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. For example, dennymccorkle.wordpress.com.

When you do begin blogging for career purposes, you should use your registered personal name as your domain name on a paid and self-hosted WordPress site. For example, dennymccorkle.com.

8. Consider Doing a Personal Name Claim for Your Spouse and Children.

To future-proof and avoid Google grief, you should assist your spouse and children in optimizing their resume/personal name for personal branding, too.

However, you should be aware that most social media sites require a minimum age of 13+ to register and use. More specifically, Facebook considers that if the parents register their underage child, it is a violation of their terms of service. So, don’t go there. However, you can register a web domain name and Facebook has a Family Link early access program. Be sure to check the terms with any other social accounts.

More proactively, I strongly recommend you consider doing a web domain name search and a Google search before choosing a personal name for your newborn.

Don’t laugh or tell my wife, when my daughter was born 6.5 years ago, I Googled the many variations of personal names under consideration before casting my family voice and vote. Hint: the middle name can really make a difference.

9. Monitor Your Resume Name in Real-Time.

After you have made the personal name commitment across all web and physical properties, it is an appropriate time to begin your online reputation management (ORM) with the real-time monitoring of your personal branding effort.

You can do this yourself by regularly Googling your resume name, what Susan P. Joyce calls defensive Googling. This proactive personal name search effort should be repeated often, particularly prior to the start of a job search.

Or, you can automate this process.

You can do this by registering all variations of your name as a Google Alerts and/or a Social Mention. Be sure to use quotations and include all variation of your name along with the IDs used in your social profiles. Hint: use one name variation per alert; do not list them all in one alert.

10. Next Up: Career Confirmation SEO.

Now that your resume name is optimized, the next step is to optimize your social media profiles and social sharing activities.

This requires that you develop complete and consistent social profiles/photos along with a consistent strategy of value-added social activity. This is so that others (and Google) will like what they find attached to your personal name.

Also, you should begin to regularly (perhaps monthly) conduct another personal name SEO audit to confirm that your personal name SEO and career confirmation optimization efforts are working.

In my next blog post I will write about career confirmation SEO as part 3 of this personal name SEO for personal branding series.

“The second most important keywords for personal branding are the career-focused keywords and topics associated with your personal name.”

The Take-Away.

Google and social media have become the new resume, the new cover letter, the new networking, and the new business card.

With a carefully designed personal name SEO strategy, you can take control of where others will find you and what they will find about you.

Or, just let Google do it.

These are my thoughts and now they are yours.

Have you conducted a personal name claim across the social web? If so, then what did you do and how has it helped you?

Image credit: Denny McCorkle

This article originally appeared on Digital Self Marketing Advantage and is republished with permission.

Every day, it seems, there is a new technology promising to revolutionize the world. The public has been promised so many life-altering products and systems that our eyes glaze over when we see the terms “radical” or “revolutionary” in technological expositions.

After all, our lives have already been rocked by the Internet and social media networks. But today a new opportunity is on the horizon—one that challenges perceptions of centralization, transparency, transactions and development.

Ethereum is an open-source platform that facilitates the development of next-generation decentralized applications. Ethereum was conceptualized in 2013 by Viktor Buterin, who was conducting research in the Bitcoin community at the time. Since Buterin’s initial ideation, Ethereum has blossomed into a full-fledged movement; today it is poised to overhaul open-source development.

Like blockchain technology, Ethereum often gets lumped into Bitcoin discussions, and for good reason, as both share similar traits of decentralization. In fact, Ethereum stems from the technological concepts introduced by Bitcoin.

In 2009, the world was mesmerized by the introduction of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that challenged preconceived notions about the limits of transactions. The inception of Bitcoin commanded the attention of financial institutions, technologists and the public. However, since its debut, the term Bitcoin has also become synonymous with scandals and fraud.

Although open currency systems have undergone a few growing pains, their potential continues to expand. Today, new systems have emerged that, like Bitcoin, challenge the conception of centralized control. Ethereum is a decentralized global computer powered by Ethereum nodes. This technology does not require servers, memory or CPU power.

According to Buterin, “Ethereum uses many of the same systems (such as blockchains and peer-to-peer networking) in order to generate a shared-world computing platform that can flexibly but securely run any application users want to code (shared ledgers like Bitcoin included).” Bitcoin opened the world to the possibilities of shared ledgers, and now Ethereum is expanding on that potential.

Since Bitcoin’s debut on the world stage, many developers have sought to apply the ideology to new systems similarly underpinned by blockchain technology. However, these iterations failed to impact the tech and financial service communities because they were limited to a few functionalities.

The intent of Ethereum is to transcend those limitations by creating a blockchain protocol with its own native programming language, which enables any application to be written on top of it. This structure supports all existing and future applications and lends itself to an environment of constant and immediate development innovation.

Another facet that separates Ethereum from Bitcoin is the support Ethereum continues to receive from the financial and technological communities. Institutions like Microsoft and JPMorgan have pledged their allegiance to Buterin’s Ethereum organization. They have recognized the immense power of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to boost security and efficiency, and are joining the party.

What can Ethereum do for your business?

It can be difficult to convey a technological structure’s potential in abstract forms. For Ethereum to catch on in the mainstream, individuals—and especially entrepreneurs and startup founders—need to understand the potential value Ethereum presents.

Lower Development Fees

Like its predecessor, Bitcoin, Ethereum has instituted a native form of currency: Ether. The driving force behind the development of Ether is to ensure that developers are compensated adequately for their work.

Ether inhibits payment for wasteful code, which helps entrepreneurs and small businesses keep developer costs down, but it also ensures that developers receive timely compensation. Ethereum is seeking to create an infrastructure that protects developers, as well as attracts them to organizations that run on Ethereum. The companies that choose Ethereum may very well have an easier time attracting the top development talent.

Furthermore, the efficiency of Ethereum has the potential to cut down on operational costs—a possibility that excites business owners across every industry. Like Bitcoin, a future executed by Ethereum payments eliminates any third-party intermediary, thus decreasing transactional fees and increasing the speed and efficiency of making transactions.

Smarter Contracts

Many, especially those in financial institutions, view Ethereum’s potential to offer Smart Contracts as its most enticing feature. Smart Contracts are a way of transporting anything of value—money, shares or data—without an intermediary, and Ethereum technology makes this possible. It used to be that you’d have to make a request to receive something of value and wait for an intermediary to facilitate your request, but Smart Contracts are immediate.

Another benefit of Smart Contracts is that the rules and regulations associated with the contract are automatically enforced. In fact, according to a recent QZ article, there are suggestions that if Smart Contracts reach their potential, they could remove the need for lawyers and judges, because disputes would be settled automatically.

In theory, Smart Contracts cannot be violated. This means that any business running Smart Contracts could potentially save thousands (if not more) on potential legal fees should any disputes with third-party vendors or customers arise.

Limitless Innovation

Buterin and Ethereum supporters believe in complete decentralization; they envision a system that puts users in complete control and allows them to innovate in any direction. Through Ethereum, there is the potential that anything from medical histories to financial records to social media data can be decentralized without risking trust.

Ethereum is powered by nodes that are immune to crashing, censorship and interference, placing the power in the hands of the people. Through Ethereum, entrepreneurs can develop applications swiftly, and without fear of unnecessary costs and security snafus. For example, Ethereum brings efficient crowdsourcing to life.

Using Ethereum, entrepreneurs can create contracts that hold a project contributor’s funds until the contract specifications are met (either by date or fundraising limit) and the contract will automatically release the funds when the criteria have been met. There are no gray areas or human interferences, and this will streamline global collaboration.

Furthermore, Ethereum can help budding entrepreneurs build the right teams. An Ethereum-run organization is based on democratic shareholder voting, which means every backer or contractor has access to your latest updates and initiatives based on the contracts you’ve set. Ethereum takes the pain out of managing an organization and answering to shareholders because all of those initiatives are automatically executed within the contract.

In 2016, consumers started using Bitcoin in droves. The trend was fueled by widespread consumer desire to employ alternative payment methods. As more consumers were adopting Bitcoin, venture capitalists continued to double down in support of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and Blockchain experts predict more merchants will adopt some form of cryptocurrency in the future, heeding public demands for alternative forms of currency.

Both sides of the equation—financial and technological institutions, as well as the public—are ready for a future fueled by decentralized innovation. Ethereum has the potential to not only transform development for the better; it can also help fuel the growth of individual startups. Entrepreneurs can better position themselves for future success by understanding the benefits of conducting a business fueled by Ethereum.

If the support of major organizations indicates anything, it’s that all of the buzz surrounding the radical potential of Ethereum is justified. This technology is poised to alter transactions and developments forever.

Companies need to use fresh thinking and innovation to boost their business growth. Plus, they can utilize suitable B2B software solutions such as CRM, project management, collaboration software etc. to enhance efficiency and productivity. To select the right system for your needs, you can read the in-depth reviews of software products in a reputable SaaS directory.

In this article, we look at a few key business trends of 2017 in different sectors and how they are redefining technology and business strategy this year. Plus, we analyze the logic and reasoning behind these global trends, how they are reshaping industries, and the ways in which you can utilize them to further your business and get an edge over the competition.

The trends we discuss below include both emerging business as well as technological models. They offer great opportunities for businesses to create value for their customers and gain more revenue and market share.

• Customer Centric Approach
  Businesses are focusing on understanding customer needs and providing them personalized experiences. They are utilizing omnichannel and digital communication mediums to engage their customers and offer them what they want. Companies that are not customer centric are sure to get left behind.However, customer centricity is not easy to achieve as it involves a host of factors such as technology, and company structure and mindset. The focus is not on a company’s services and products, but on the customers and clients. To implement this strategy, companies need to use omnichannel solutions to get an all-round view of customer needs across the different touch points. This will help them understand users and build close relationships with them moving from traditional segmentation to trendy hyper-personalization. In this manner they can provide delightful customer experiences and give users what they need, when they need it. To do this, businesses need to develop new methodologies such as user experience design, service design, and design thinking to create convenient user journeys across channels. Plus, they can utilize predictive analytics to learn about the intentions of each customer and predict their future needs.

  Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Uber have invested heavily on technology and training to create frictionless customer experiences. For this reason, they have become global leaders in today’s digital economy.

• Micro Economy
  There are two main types of micro economy: Pay-by-X such as pay-per-hour rental and pay-per-mile insurance and Micro-X such as micro-donations and micro-payments.This trend is happening because technology and resources have become democratized and affordable which has raised the living standards of people who previously were not able to pay for these services and products.

  Micro economy products and services help the underprivileged and they are lucrative too for businesses due to technologies such as Blockchain that have drastically reduced the cost of transactions. For this reason, companies can get a lot of revenue due to the high number of deals and transactions though the margins are small.

• Sharing Economy
  This trend involves owning the interface for customer supply. Uber does not own any vehicles, Facebook does not create any content, and accommodation provider Airbnb does not own any real estate.Sharing economy involves less privacy, more openness, and increased social interaction. It shifts consumer trust from big institutions to dispersed social networks. This results in a more personalized and humanized customer experience. Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb have become popular because they help people get additional income.

  Another development arising from the sharing economy model is the utilization of crowd wisdom and resources through peer-to-peer, crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding applications which leads to the generations of fresh solutions and ideas that bypass conventional methods.

• Direct-to-Consumer
  This trend is also called “disintermediation”. It has changed the model of distribution by eliminating the middleman as the services are delivered directly to consumers.
  For example, direct-to-consumer company Tesla eliminates car dealers and sells directly to consumers while Netflix does not need the help of cable companies as it delivers content directly to users.The advantages of the direct-to-consumer business model are that companies can bypass expensive middlemen and build more intimate relationships with their customers. At the same time, consumers also benefit as they get more personalized experiences and products.
• Self-Service
  Self-service enables customers to find or do what they require using automated solutions without needing the help of experts. Both companies and consumers benefit from this trend. Businesses can save money by replacing customer support agents with technology, while consumers can resolve issues on their own quickly and easily.The self-service model has traditionally been popular in industries such as travel and shopping. Now, sectors such as banking are using it as customers can deposit checks utilizing mobile devices, while the healthcare industry lets patients perform some lab tasks at home. The popularity of the self-service trend has received a boost with companies using chatbots for customer support.

• Smart Machines
  Intelligent machines are driven by sophisticated algorithms and examples are Internet of Things (IoT) products run by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Autonomous cars are a well-known type of smart machines. A McKinsey report states that robotics AI and will create value worth $50 trillion by the year 2025.Conversational User Experience products such as chatbots and Amazon’s Alexa are using natural communication channels without screens to engage users. Plus, technologies such as predictive analytics, machine learning, and neural networks are becoming smarter the more they are used.

  Smart devices are likely to generate more value when they are connected to infrastructure such as smart homes. Such trendy innovations are in their early stages and are likely to get a boost with use of smart machine technology.

• API Economy
  Application Programming Interface (API) is used by many leading companies to enable users to create integrated solutions. APIs have become popular and are driving digital transformation because they enable agile product creation, integration with third-party software systems, swift introduction of fresh features, and innovation using crowdsourced events such as virtual challenges and hackathons. Companies that are making good use of APIs include Citi, Uber, PayPal, Twilio, and Stripe.

Conclusion
The main concept that is common to all the business innovation trends discussed in this article is customer centricity. This strategy can be executed by overhauling technology and organization structure, and realigning services and products. The task is difficult but since the benefits are immense these business innovation trends, along with a robust innovation management system, have become indispensable for companies to survive in intensely competitive industries and markets.

For more information, contact us to learn how the Qmarkets platform can help you take incorporate these trends into your organization’s innovation program.

Nancy Harhut is an expert when it comes to blending creativity with science to prompt a response in marketing.

Nancy was named the NEDMA Direct Marketer of the Year, Ad Club Top 100 Creative Influencer, and OMI Top 40 Digital Marketing Strategist. She’s held senior creative management positions with Wilde Agency, Hill Holliday, Mullen and Digitas. Nancy and her teams have won more than 150 awards for their effective digital marketing and direct marketing strategies.

Today she offers her insight into psychology and how it influences email marketing.

EMAIL MARKETING IS ALIVE AND KICKING

Nancy points out that email marketing is still a strong line of support for marketers. In fact, it is still the primary channel for most marketers. One survey that Nancy highlights found that 89% of marketers use email for lead generation.

Email is powerful, and clearly something that every marketer must use correctly. Most importantly, a marketer must know how to talk to their customers on the receiving end of each email – by applying some psychology.

THE POWER OF PSYCHOLOGY COMBINED WITH EMAIL MARKETING

The best-kept secret in the industry is psychology paired with email marketing.

When creating integrated campaigns, it is important for marketers to use psychological techniques. The same techniques can then bleed into other communications, such as social media marketing.

Marketers are always competing against mass emails. In fact, Nancy points out that the average person receives 85 emails per day, and business executives receive even more. Therefore, marketers must find a way to stand out among the sea of emails waiting for someone in their inbox.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS IS A POWERFUL TOOL

One significant takeaway that Nancy offers is an observation from a Harvard Business School professor by the name of Gerald Zaltman, who says that 95% of decision-making is subconscious. So, a company must find a way to attract the subconscious and get people to act.

Essentially, companies need to break through the decision autopilot process.

THE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS FOR BETTER EMAIL PSYCHOLOGY

Nancy shares her tips for the best practices in all aspects of email marketing and psychology integration.

SUBJECT LINES: NEVER IGNORE THE MOST POWERFUL LINE IN EMAIL

A subject line is important, but Nancy says that they must remain short, but compelling.

She recommends 35 characters or so because most users are opening emails on their mobile devices. The most important words should be positioned at the front of those 35 characters too.

She recommends magnet eye words, which are words scientifically proven to attract the human eye. These words include “new,” “free,” and any other word that provides value to the customer directly.

A person is more attracted to a subject line if their name appears in it. So, Nancy recommends using software that puts the recipient’s name in there as part of the magnet word integration.

USE WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, AND HOW

To make a compelling email for readers, Nancy says that the basics of journalism and psychology bleed into email marketing.

Companies need to include the who, what, when, where, why, and how in each email. These are trigger words that tell a person to act, what they can do, where they can go, and why they should consider the offer in the email.

INTEGRATE BEHAVIOR PRINCIPLES IN EMAIL MARKETING

There are three behavior principles: scarcity, availability bias, and social proof. Each of these is important in email marketing, says Nancy.

· Scarcity Principle: Scarcity refers to a customer that knows what they want, but cannot have it. Humans always want what they cannot have, so if that thing they want is available right now, they will take advantage of that. Telling people that something is available to only them or a limited number of people strikes on the scarcity level too.

· Availability Bias: When a person can recall something, or imagine it, they are more likely to act. Marketers must use the “what if” theory when marketing their product. They need to help the reader imagine a time they did not have that product and how it affected them.

· Social Proof: People do what others do. They follow the leader, more or less. Therefore, social proof in email marketing talks about something that is back in stock that recently sold out, a best seller and integrates words that tell a reader the product they are getting has social proof.

CREATING A CALL TO ACTION THAT DEMANDS ACTION

Call to action statements in email marketing determine if that recipient is going to act. Nancy recommends just one call to action in an email so that nothing is competing.

A good call to action is one that forces them to act now, rather than giving them the option of acting later. Before the call to action, using social proof and authority can help encourage the reader to take action, says Nancy.

WHAT IS GAINED VERSUS WHAT IS MISSED

Another psychological aspect of email marketing is playing benefits against one another. While an email is powerful when it highlights the benefits, it is just as powerful when it touches on the pain factor.

For example, sending an email with the subject line “5 Ways to Improve Your Business,” might interest someone enough to open it. After all, it tells them the benefit outright. However, an email with the subject line “5 Ways to Ruin Your Business” provokes a pain response. No business owner wants to contribute to the demise of their company, so they will open that email and read further.

User-Friendly, Scannable Content

Any time an email is sent out, marketers must consider the mobile factor. More people open their emails on their phone, so the email needs a single column, and it should be easy to scan to see if reading it is worth it.

Furthermore, links in the content must be easy to click on even with a mobile device ­– so omit small links.

ADDING TOUCHES OF PSYCHOLOGY INTO EMAIL MARKETING MAKES FOR HIGHER CONVERSIONS

There are numerous benefits to adding psychology to email marketing, but the biggest is that it will increase conversion rates. The click through on an email campaign can increase rapidly when these techniques are used well.

You can reach Nancy at nharhut@me.com and discover more actionable insights by following her on twitter at @nharhut.

ABOUT NANCY HARHUT
An unusually strategy-minded, results-oriented creative director, Nancy is nationally recognized for best-in-class creative. She and her teams have won over 200 awards for direct marketing effectiveness. In her role as Chief Creative Officer, Nancy draws upon more than 20 years of senior creative management experience honed at Wilde Agency, Hill Holliday, Mullen and Digitas, where she worked with such clients as Dell, IBM, Novartis, House of Seagram, Bank of America, AT&T, American Express, Sheraton, Nationwide, and GM, among others.

Nancy holds a BS in Journalism from Boston University. She is a frequent contributor to industry trade magazines and a requested speaker at marketing conferences.

To view the original post on effective email marketing, please click here.

We’ve all heard the stats: “Buyers are 67% through the buying process before engaging salespeople,” or “70–80% of buyers do their own research prior to the sale.” They make for splashy headlines, but regardless of their validity, one thing is for certain: buyers are doing a lot of research. And not just on the the product and the company, but on the sales person as well.

That’s right. Just like any potential new relationship in the modern era, people are going to turn to social media to do a little research — or light stalking, whatever you want to call it — to see whether you and your company are the right fit for them.

According to SalesforLife buyers today are seeking trust, connectedness, and compatibility with sales reps. And they’re not looking to find them from a phone call or an email. They want to know who you genuinely are and will do some digging on their own to find out. This includes your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles.

That’s why it’s important for any sales professional to keep a strong social presence. So how can you present yourself online as somebody your prospects can trust, connect with, and be compatible with before even speaking with a person?

Build Trust as an Industry Expert

92% of B2B buyers use social media to engage with sales industry leaders. 

-SalesforLife

92 percent! That’s a staggering figure. But who are these illustrious sales industry leaders that can hold so much sway over B2B buyers? Are they chosen by a mysterious sales council on high? Did they pass some rigorous test the rest of us schmucks would fail? Nope they just started to share valuable industry expertise and never stopped. Sound like something you could have done yourself? That’s because it is, and you should.

Start by building your social media profiles to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the industry you are selling in. You can’t brand yourself as an industry expert, what you share has to do the talking for you. So, what should that content be?

Share what you know! You likely speak with dozens of people within this industry every single week. Those people share their hopes, their struggles, and you offer solutions. And you know what? Those same struggles are shared by almost every other buyer in your industry. Share the insight you give to buyers over the phone or in email every day on social media.

Just steer clear of talking about your product or service too much. You can work mentions of your product in, but they should be few and far between.

Delivering valuable content convinces potential buyers you are a trusted source of knowledge within your own space. That trust develops the foundation for buyers to ask more questions like how your product fits their needs and what you, the sales professional, can offer.

Engage and Be Seen Engaging

While the conventional wisdom of social selling has always been focused on what you post, there is a whole other component to your social profiles that you need to pay attention to: the engagements you have. Potential customers are looking to see how you interact with customers online, since it gives them a pretty accurate idea of what they can expect from you during and after the sales process. This means your social news feed and client engagement matters.

Don’t leave customer engagement up to your support team. Activities such as answering a customer question demonstrate knowledge and show how supportive your company can be. Or you can respond to exciting customer news with a friendly “Congratulations!” It’s really easy to say “we put our customers first” on your profile page. Social interactions show potential buyers that you care to provide additional resources and support.

Be an Ambassador for Company Values

This should go without saying, but keep your social messaging consistent with your company. Actions speak louder than words, but words are all you have on social so use them wisely. If your company values customers, positivity, efficiency, etc. prove it through your posts.

Your social networks are an extension of your company, as well as your own integrity. No one appreciates people airing their dirty laundry on social media. That goes double for a prospect. By aligning with your company’s values, proving you are a team player, you stand out as a compatible candidate for your buyer.

In the online buying game you have to be aware of your own social presence. Your company website won’t be the only one buyer’s look up. Your social network could be pitching a deal before you even speak to the prospect, so be sure it’s delivering the right message.

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Want to learn more about effective sales and strategy? Download your free copy of our latest ebook and start landing larger clients, earning more revenue, and enjoying more sales success.

The post Why Your Social Profiles Matter as a Sales Rep appeared first on SalesLoft.

I was once asked what the very first thing I’d do if I were to launch a brand new, startup ecommerce business.

My answer?

Invest in local Facebook ads, and then retarget, retarget, retarget.

. . . and then comes the inevitable question.

“But how?!”

Like most marketing efforts, the recipe for success isn’t a sexy, breakthrough tactic. You’re not one counterintuitive “growth hack” away from 100x ROI.

People often focus purely on creating their remarketing campaigns and placing retargeting pixels, then assume they can set and forget. Make no mistake — you can shoot yourself in the foot by not creating the right strategy from the get-go.

But in my experience, the secret to effective retargeting campaigns is careful management, analysis, and optimization.

It’s not easy, but there are some basic principles you can follow to avoid the landmines frequently stepped on by marketers of every ilk.

But first of all….

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that displays custom advertisements to visitors who leave an online store without purchasing or performing another desired action.

Expansive third-party ad networks, such as Facebook and Google Display Network, enable ads to be displayed across the web, reminding customers of products they viewed or added to cart.

Now that we’ve officially defined it, let’s explore the following –– and unbelievably common –– mistakes, so you can learn what not to do before diving into your retargeting efforts.

Mistake #1. Segmentation

You’re targeting the default “All Visitors” audience.

Example of All Visitors audience in AdWords

Different customers came to the site for different reasons. They visited different pages. The pages they visited represent different intents.

Lumping all these customers into one group is a big mistake.

If you’re treating all your customers like they’re one demographic, you’re lacking something called segmentation.

Mistake #2. Recency

You’re using the default 30-day cookie window.

Not every site has a stereotypical 30-day buyer path. The conversion path varies greatly depending on the website, product type, and industry.

Take a look at the path length for two of our clients. Both are ecommerce companies, but they focus on different verticals. You’ll notice that the first company has a longer conversion path than the second company.

Example of Conversion Time Lag for Client #1

Example of Conversion Time Lag for Client #2

By using the default 30-day cookie window, you’re either:

• Wasting your budget by serving too many ads to customers who have a short conversion path, or
• Limiting your opportunity to buyers who have a long conversion path.

By using a 30-day time window, you’re throwing fish back into the pond.

Mistake #3. Frequency

Another critical mistake: you have no ad frequency limit.

InSkin Media studied U.S. consumer emotions associated with retargeting ads and determined that ad frequency had a negative impact on buyer emotions.

Heavy ad frequency changes a buyer’s outlook from positive to creeped out. It can be intrusive, annoying, and worse yet — it may cause customers to become angry with your brand.

The negative impact of high ad frequency (via InSkin Media)

As you can see, the more a customer interacts with a particular ad, the less likely they are to buy the product featured in the ad.

If you have no ad frequency limit, you’re basically waving a flag with your brand’s logo on it in your customer’s faces, blowing an airhorn in their ear, and tying their shoes together. One or two well-placed billboards along their morning commute would suffice.

Mistake #4. Creative

Using the same boring creative assets across the board.

Think about it — if you have one static ad displayed across all channels you’ll induce “banner blindness” — especially without a frequency limit in place. It’s saturation, plain and simple. You’re showing your ads too much, and suddenly people just stop seeing them.

Customers will ignore your ad the same way you ignore the speed limit signs on your home street. You know what the sign says, has always said, and you presume to know what it’ll always say. Don’t bury your ads in plain sight.

According to an Infolinks study, 86% of U.S. consumers suffer from “banner blindness.”

“Banner Blindness” Stats (via InfoLinks)

No wonder 86.6 million Americans are planning to use ad blocker in 2017!

The numbers put ad blockers in a wholly separate territory than your usual internet trend. This isn’t colored browsing tabs — it’s WordPress all over again. A significant portion of the entire internet are using those services, and that’s only going to intensify as time goes on.

Take a look at the visual below. In a short few years (this dataset reaches back to 2014), ad blockers have skyrocketed in popularity:

Ad Blocker Stats (via eMarketer)

In a word, it means you’ve got to make your ads count. They’re getting less play from customers everywhere, and it’s up to you to intelligently make use of the time and attention they do get.

Mistake #5. Magic Bullets

You spend time looking for a “magic bullet” in marketing blogs, podcasts, webinars, and courses instead of putting your head down, and executing on proven ideas.

You’ll never get it right the first time, and that shouldn’t be discouraging. Practice makes perfect. If it were that easy, everyone would opt for these magic bullet strategies.

No magic bullet tactic can, or will, make your business successful. I feel so strongly about it, I have a saying:

“Magic Bullets are for losers. Execution is key.”

Marketing is about developing a clear strategy, and executing it systematically.

You’ll need to do the hard work yourself. You’ll have to test, learn, and test some more until you know exactly what to offer to your market.

Peep Laja from ConversionXL agrees:

“Everybody wants wins, but nobody wants to do the hard work of doing proper conversion research, actually figuring out what matters and developing a systematic approach.”

If you’re looking for that one-punch-knockout in your first fight, you’re making a big mistake.

So, What Does it All Mean? A Note on Granular Ad Campaigns [+ a Framework!]

So, we just looked at a few mistakes that are causing your ads to become too general, too frequent, or too annoying. You’re probably not sure exactly where things are going wrong.

U.S. consumers want brands to be useful, and they want their experiences personalized.

In fact, data from MyBuys’ 7th Annual Personalization Report revealed that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to purchase from retailers who:

• Suggest products based on their browsing or buying behavior (53%)
• Personalize online ads that promote offers and products from websites they visited (49%)
• Show personalized ads in social media feeds (33%)

The bottom line is this: consumers purchase and engage more when they receive a truly personalized shopping experience in a consistent, coordinated fashion.

7th Annual Personalization Report (via MyBuys)

To personalize your customer’s shopping experience, you need to know the following:

• How buyers use your website
• What their pain points are
• How to address those pain points

Once you know those things, you can become granular. You can personalize your ad experience based on your store.

Be forewarned — when you go granular and start growing your campaigns, things get messy. Tactics will change, and so will the platforms. Don’t panic. It’s about staying consistent.

So, how do you stay consistent?

The framework of your campaign is the holy grail of consistency. It’ll help you systematically adapt your approach for any industry.

See the example below:

Retargeting Matrix Example via SCUBE Marketing

Here’s a breakdown of what you’re looking at in the above visual:

• We’re targeting buyers in the “Product Page Visitors” segment. It includes people who abandoned a product page before adding anything to their cart. I call this whole sheet a “Buyer Segment.”
• This Buyer Segment is broken down into 3 Recency Segments, which are based on how recently each customer interacted with the Buyer Segment. Recency Segments are clearly visualized for ease of understanding.
• Each Buyer Segment and Recency Segment have corresponding hooks, each of which serve to portray the essence of the ad.
• Buyer and Recency Segments are running on Facebook Advertising and AdWords channels. Both channels have consistency.
• Finally, the respective Targeting and Exclusion audiences are presented and mapped to each segment for easy implementation.

The strategy for this segment is pretty clear. This visual is a snapshot of a Retargeting Matrix framework I developed.

The Retargeting Matrix Framework

I’ve covered the Retargeting Matrix framework in blogs, podcasts and presentations. The framework helps you systematically plan, implement, and scale retargeting campaigns.

It forces you to approach your campaigns strategically, and it presents the plan in an easily-understood format.

The Retargeting Matrix represents 4 levers:

1. Buyer Segments
2. Recency Segments
3. Hooks
4. Channels

Here’s how you can apply that to your campaigns.

Lever #1. Buyer Segments

It all starts with Buyer Segments.

Segmentation is an old trick, and it’s still popular in marketing for a reason — it can be a strong contributing factor to better campaign ROI. Direct Marketing Association attributes 77% of ROI to segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.

In the context of retargeting, I’m referring to segments based on URLs your buyers visit. Why does that matter? People visiting different URLs have a different intent.

Each segment has a different behavior, and they need to be marketed differently. Your Retargeting Matrix will have a tab with details on each Buyer Segment. You’ll have a clear picture of what each segment is, what their objectives are, and you’ll know how to market to buyers in each of those segments.

See the example below:

Retargeting Matrix Example

If you are a BigCommerce customer using Insights, you can get similar information from your “Views But Did Not Purchase” report.

How To Create Buyer Segments

First, define an intended buyer path on your website. This is critical.

Name the Buyer Segments based on intent. The number of segments you can capture on your website depends on the complexity of your website.

Think about a simplified version of the buyer’s journey as it applies to visitors to your site:

Simplified Buyer’s Journey

Based on the example above, you have a few different Buyer Segments:

1. Home page visitors
2. Product page visitors
3. Abandoned cart visitors
4. Recent customers

Next, group website URLs into different Buyer Segments. The buyers will self-identify what segment they belong to based on the pages they visit.

Third, understand minimum segment granularity by adding up the 30-day traffic for all URLs in each Buyer Segment. Find the Landing Pages report in Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

This is important!

Every retargeting channel has a minimum audience size, which will directly affect how granular you can get. If you create segments that don’t meet the minimum requirements, your ads won’t be served. Your only alternative would be to get more traffic to these buyer segments.

See the screenshot below:

Landing Pages Report in Google Analytics

Finally, set an objective and an intended action for each Buyer Segment. The easiest way to do this is to take each segment, define what users are doing on your site, and add your goals for them (what you want them to do).

Lever #2. Recency Segments

Your buyers have different urgency depending on their recency. That’s because buyer intent progresses over time, as users make their way through your funnel. Some users will go from 0 to 100 quickly, but by and large, there’s a “getting to know you” process.

The next step is to break down your Buyer Segments into Recency Segments. Each Buyer Segment will be broken down into further segments based on the last visit to that segment.

In the example below, the Decision segment visitors are broken down into 3 groups:

• 0 – 30 days
• 31 – 60 days
• 61 – 90 days

For an easier understanding, check out the “Visualize” column:

Retargeting Matrix Example via SCUBE Marketing

Again, if you are using BigCommerce Insights, much of this work is already done for you.

How To Create Recency Segments

First, define segment depth. How deep and granular you can get? It depends on two things:

• Your traffic over a 30 day period in the segment (see minimum granularity above)
• The length of your customer’s journey

Let’s explore the customer journey, as it’s very relevant to this topic.

Customer journey varies by industry, size, and business type. In the chart below, I mapped the customer journey for medium-sized businesses in the shopping industry using Google’s customer journey mapping tool.

Notice that you need up to 5 touch points before influencing a buyer to purchase:

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase via ThinkWithGoogle.

To determine the customer journey for your own store, use the Path Length report in Google Analytics. It will show you exactly how many interactions your buyers take before converting.

In the example below, 69% of first-time interactions lead to conversions, and 25% of customers needed between two and four interactions. This is your opportunity for retargeting intelligently.

Path Length Report in Google Analytics

Now, let’s get to the recency. The Time Lag Report in Google Analytics reports on how many days your buyers take to convert. This report is similar to the Path Length report, but it’s measured in days.

The example below shows that the conversion window on the site is fairly short, since 86% of visitors convert the same day they make their initial visit. If you’re seeing data like this, it means you probably don’t need granular audiences requiring months of retargeting.

Time Lag Report in Google Analytics

Next, define your Recency Segments. By knowing the depth of your customer journey and traffic, you’ll also know how to break up your Buyer Segments into more granular Recency Segments.

The reason we break everything down by time is urgency. Urgency goes down with time, and your objective is to adjust your ads based on recency.

Some of your buyers will move from one Buyer Segment to another, progressing ever-closer toward a purchase. Some will remain in one segment longer. Everyone’s different.

Recency Segments will help you move these buyers from their initial segments into the next. You’ll be able to create ads tailored to the individual intent of not only Buyer Segments, but Recency Segments, too.

Lever #3. Hooks

Once you have the Buyer and Recency Segments figured out, you can perform customer research. This will allow you to discover a segment’s intent, and it’ll help you develop appropriate hooks (a.k.a. ad angles) for each segment.

Jay Conrad Levinson defines a hook as:

“a tease, a sample, and a mental appetizer. The hook should give your prospects just enough taste to leave them wanting more.”

In the example below, we have a dedicated hook for the respective Buyer and Recency Segment.

Retargeting Matrix Example

How to Create Hooks

First, you need to understand the pain points of your buyers. You can’t accomplish this without performing customer research.

Your customer research will fuel your hooks for each segment when creating retargeting campaigns.

How do you find out what your customers want? I’ve covered customer research in detail in my article about Facebook Ads.

I recommend starting with four methods and tools:

• Method #1. Customer Review Sites
• Method #2. Live Chat and Help Desk Logs
• Method #3. Customer Survey
• Method #4. On-Page Surveys

They will reveal a great deal of useful information you can act on.

Second, develop hooks for different segments. Different buyers are in different frames of mind. To have effective retargeting, you have to know what they want, and you have to communicate it to them in their words.

Think about the decision process, and the pain points of each segment (hopefully your research has revealed that).

Using that information, you can develop hooks to engage with each audience and address their pain points. Your objective doesn’t change — you need to be proactive, and you need to help your customers through the process with gentle nudges.

Example: Shopping Cart Segment, Issue: Trust

69% of shopping carts are abandoned (based on 37 different studies). I’ll explore this segment as a result.

Any number of things can impact a shopper’s online experience. Even taking for granted how popular and widespread online shopping has become, it’s a given that we behave differently from one another when making our purchases. If we didn’t, there’d be no such thing as remarketing campaigns.

Any number of things push or pull us in different directions when shopping online. Our decisions are easily influenced. While there’s still some mysteries to solve, we know plenty about these factors to make actionable decisions.

The factors that carry the most influence over shopping behavior include speed of delivery and order fulfillment, brand reputation, and shipping costs — the usual suspects.

Take a look at some of the other major deciding factors influencing shoppers:

Influencing Factors for Purchasing Online

If your customer research revealed that your customers were worried about returning items, your hook could be “Free Returns for 90 days.”

Lever #4. Retargeting Channels

Once you have Buyer Segments, Recency Segments, and Hooks ironed out, it’s time to implement your knowledge.

At this point, you should have a nice document with a framework that can be implemented on any retargeting platform, be it Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, AdRoll, or a combination of platforms.

To implement your framework, first map the Buyer and Recency Segments and their respective hooks across the retargeting channels.

Your message will be consistent across the board. When making a decision, consider the following questions:

• Which platforms will reach the most users in your target audience?
• Which platforms are the best fit given the size of your site?
• Which platforms will reach a unique audience, and which will cannibalize your existing efforts?

The example below uses two retargeting platforms: Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.

Retargeting Matrix Example

Second – develop audiences in the respective retargeting platforms. This includes both audiences — who you want to target, and who you want to exclude. The Retargeting Marketing Framework allows you to visualize the audience structure.

Third – develop campaign and ad group structure based on the matrix. Use Buyer Segments as Campaigns, and Recency Segments as Ad Groups/Ad Sets. This structure helps with evaluating performance, which allows you to make tweaks where necessary.

Fourth – develop your ad copy and creative. Use the Retargeting Marketing Framework as a spec sheet for your creative team. You have the audiences, objectives, and hooks.

Fifth – hit launch, and monitor.

Final Thoughts on Retargeting

Let’s stop for a moment and let everything sink in.

Retargeting can be managed effectively. Remember, it’s about going back to basics and knowing how your buyers use your website, what their pain points are, and then executing on a campaign that helps them make an informed decision.

Once you get the basics down, you can start with the really fun stuff like mobile retargeting — but one thing at a time.

You have all the tools you need. You have a framework you can use to plan, develop, and scale retargeting campaigns — the way professionals do.

Time to get to work and execute on your retargeting strategy. What’s the first thing you’ll do about your retargeting campaigns when you get to work tomorrow? Let us know!

 

The more we know, the better we can sell – especially when it comes to knowing what B2B buyers want.

That seems to be the underlying premise of marketing right now.

It’s not a bad premise. It leverages one of the all-time great marketing principles: relevancy.

Relevancy is what turned Google AdWords from an experiment into a trillion-dollar project. It’s why retargeting works and personalization converts. It’s why account-based marketing is so hot.

So, no wonder we like information. It lets us be more relevant.

But has it gotten us anywhere?

Well … Yes!

Reliable data, organized in a useful way, can make a huge difference in the revenue you generate. Information like that powers CRMs and databases all over the world.

This data is very important, but it’s not all the information we need. And too often, all that data clouds some of the basic things our prospects wish we knew. It’s just that most of them are far too polite to tell us.

So we keep marketing at them. And they keep politely ignoring us.

Because we’re kinda tone deaf on some key information about them, more specifically what B2B buyers want.

It’s time to change. No matter how many petabytes of data we have, sometimes we need to see our marketing through the eyes of our customers.

Here are a few ways to do that:

1. Don’t bury them with sales follow-ups.

Now, not every company does this. Some organizations are very savvy about letting visitors download several different white papers or other content resources before they ever start selling.

Many of those same companies even remember visitor information from prior visits, so you don’t have to type your information in again and again and again. Only after maybe your third or fourth visit will they activate a little pop-up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, with some nice person offering to help if you want to know anything more.

Then there are other companies. They don’t just ask you if you want to be called by a rep ― they ask what you want the rep to pitch you about. And within minutes of downloading any asset, the phone calls begin. The email follow-ups begin.

And they keep coming. Jim Brodo says he got 42 follow-up emails and 17 phone calls after downloading just five whitepapers. That was just in the first two weeks.

I can guarantee that is not what B2B buyers want.

Which is why…

2. Most people hate putting their phone numbers into content-download forms.

Only one in three of us B2Bers are willing to put our phone numbers into lead generation forms when we download content.

That’s not the only report to show this. Huff Industrial Marketing and Ko Marketing found the same thing in their 2015 B2B Web Usability Report.

For my two cents, I’m with the majority here who don’t want to put their phone numbers into lead gen forms. So I cheat. If the form requires a phone number ― and most do ― I enter a fake number.

By the way … about putting email addresses in. It’s not uncommon for people to have a slush or junk email account. Not just an email folder ― an entirely separate account.

According to the Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report, 2015 – 2019: “Over the next four years, the average number of email accounts per user ratio will grow from an average of 1.7 accounts per user to an average of 1.9 accounts per user.”

3. Your website must have thorough contact information.

While B2B buyers hate giving out their own contact information, they expect a vendor’s website to have ample contact info. Having that information ends up being one of their primary ways to verify a company’s credibility.

That seems like a pretty low bar. But half of B2B buyers say the vendor websites they visit don’t have that contact information.

4. Understand their needs and where they are coming from.

Again ― this is something that many companies just nail. You can tell from the moment you land on their homepage that they get you and what you need.

Then there are other companies. They mean well, but they don’t seem to really know what you need, even when they say they have what you need. Sometimes, they don’t even appear to be clear on what they offer.

Knowing where a prospect is coming from would include:

• Having really done your buyer persona homework. You have figured out who your buyers are (based on data, not opinions).
• Leveraging your sales and customer support staff’s knowledge. You understand the unique needs of each of those groups.
• Developing content and resources (calculators, assessment tools, videos, case studies, and whitepapers) that are solely for each group.

Some of you ― the truly world-class ones ― have created those resources with so little bias and with such good supporting research that prospects can truly trust what you say. Bravo, all you companies who do this. May your tribe increase.

5. “We don’t do that” is a legitimate answer.

If your company doesn’t do certain things, don’t conceal that information. It’s easier on prospects if we just know up front, without hassle, that your company/service/software doesn’t do certain things.

Don’t make us have to quiz you to reveal that information.

Here’s an example:

Last night I was researching survey tools for an upcoming project. I wanted to add tracking code to the final confirmation page of the survey, so I could see which channels (email, advertising, Twitter, LinkedIn) generate the most completed surveys.

Survey tool #1’s site had a help section. When I searched for “’tracking code’ ‘custom page’”, I immediately got a detailed how-to article with screenshots that explained exactly how to do what I wanted.

They even described some other cool things I could do with the tracking. And I could use Google Analytics ― a free, widely-used tool ― to do the job.

Great!

In survey tool #2, the help section was hard to find. Multiple searches about tracking codes revealed nothing. So I contacted customer service.

To their credit, someone got back to me within an hour (this is unusual and they deserve major credit for it).

But the person who responded basically said they had no idea what I was talking about and then wrapped up the email with a cheery pitch.

So I replied, and asked my question two different ways. With as much clarity as I could muster.

They emailed me back (again, within an hour) saying, “No, our software can’t do that.”

I get why companies might want to cover up if their software or service doesn’t do basic things a user might expect it to do. But leaving a vacuum of information like that, then making it hard to confirm there is no functionality for that, just makes life harder. Unnecessarily harder.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. It’s the second time in as many weeks this sort of thing has happened to me.

When I was researching which graphic design outsourcing service to use, I had a specific question about whether or not they would lay out an email for me. That is, I wanted them to set up copy and images to assemble the email message within my email service provider account, using a pre-defined template.

At first I got a breezy, “Yes ― we do emails! We do anything!”

Still not sure that that was a yes, I asked again.

After four emails back and forth, it was finally revealed that no, they won’t do that. Even though my question had never changed. Their rep ignored what I asked and said yes without really reading my question. They even said that much in their last message.

(Of course, if this is the roughest thing I have to deal with, life is pretty good.)

But it’s a pain to do business like this. It turns prospects off.

I would have had a more positive view of both companies if they had just made that information easy to find. If they had told me upfront, “No, we don’t do that.”

6. Your messaging needs to be clear.

Buyers are zooming through hundreds of pages of marketing collateral, trying to develop a short list of products that could solve their problem. They are looking to winnow out companies that can’t help them.

Weak messages, particularly on your home page, can repel potential buyers.

As Gordana Stok says in her article, “5 Things B2B Buyers Want Your Content To Do”

“The short-form messages on your home page and product-landing page help convince buyers whether it’s worth their time to take a deeper look at your solution.

To get your value proposition under 100 words and ensure it truly resonates with buyers, you need to be absolutely certain that you understand what they’re looking for in the first place.”

It’s not just Gordana saying this, either. In a research study from Ko Marketing, “Lack of message” was the #1 thing that B2B buyers said annoyed them and made them likely to leave a site. (Note that lack of contact info, mentioned earlier, was #2.)

Conclusion

You know the golden rule, right? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Perhaps we can apply this to marketing: “Market unto others as you would have them market unto you.”

I sincerely hope that doesn’t offend anyone, and please excuse the religious overtones, but maybe following that credo would help us do our jobs better.

If we truly did embrace the spirit of the aphorism, we’d lose the jargon and the marketing speak. We’d say what we do ― and don’t do ― plainly. We’d be helpful first and sales-focused second. We’d always be thinking about how to make it easier for our customers to work with us, and how to get them better results.

Actually, we’d be following pretty much all of the best practices of content marketing and “customer experience” marketing.

Who knew, right?

Back to you

As a prospect, what do you wish the people who pitch you knew?

In his May 26 article, Postmedia reporter Sam Cooper noted that the B.C. government’s decision to exempt farmland from the 15-per-cent foreign buyers tax is fuelling runaway speculation on property in the Agricultural Land Reserve.

He also noted that several other provincially sponsored tax breaks have been contributing to an agricultural land rush in the Metro Vancouver area — lower property taxes on farmland that meets minimal production levels, a 50-per-cent break on school and transportation taxes, and an exemption from the property transfer tax if the constructed home is occupied by a family member for at least a year before it is sold.

Mentioned only in passing were “controversial zoning rules,” which permit farmland buyers to build much larger homes on farmland than on residential lots. This is a significant understatement. Regulations on house size are the main determinant of land prices, and they are a municipal responsibility. By allowing farmland buyers to build monster homes where blueberry bushes once grew, municipal politicians are opening the door to rampant farmland speculation and crowding out real farmers.

This was confirmed by Site Economics Ltd., a private consulting firm hired by the City of Richmond to report on the issue. It found that the ability to build very large houses on ALR land “is the primary factor driving small ALR lot prices to levels in the order of $750,000 to $1.5 million per acre.”

The firm concluded that restricting the maximum house size to 4,200 square feet, which is the largest house size allowed on the average residential lot in Richmond, “would reduce ALR land prices to market standards and past trends, allowing farmers with the intention of actual farming to acquire or lease these types of properties.”

Although the Agricultural Land Commission has recommended a maximum house size of 5,382 square feet, the final word lies with individual municipalities. This is a problem — it leaves the long-term preservation of farmland in the hands of local politicians who are more concerned with short-term issues, such as getting re-elected.

The result is radically different house-size limits in different municipalities. Delta has restricted the maximum size to 5,005 square feet. Port Coquitlam, consistent with the provincial guideline, has imposed a limit of 5,382 square feet. In Maple Ridge, the maximum is 6,995 square feet. In Pitt Meadows, council has directed city staff to prepare a bylaw limiting house size to 18,000 square feet. As recently as last month, there was no established limit in several other municipalities, most notably Richmond.

Richmond has become ground zero in the struggle over farmland preservation. (Cooper mentioned the municipality 21 times in his article.) Several years ago, Richmond council, with mayor Malcolm Brodie at the helm, floated a proposal to limit house size, but buckled under pressure from farmers who don’t want any regulations that might compromise their land values, and more specifically from Indo-Canadian farmers who claim they need extra-large houses to accommodate their extended working families. That has left the gate wide open for developers and speculators.

In 2010, the average application for home construction on Richmond farmland was 7,329 square feet. By 2015, it had soared to 12,087 square feet. Some are much larger, most notably the 21,733-square-foot house (with 13 bathrooms) conspicuously located at the corner of Steveston Highway and No. 4 Road. Some offended neighbours have tagged it “Brodie’s bungalow.”

By July 2016, the speculation reached stratospheric levels. One application — for a 41,000-square-foot house with 23 bedrooms and bathrooms — was rejected by city staff — not because it was too big, but because it looked like it was being developed as a hotel, which is not allowed. The council then asked the B.C. agriculture ministry to draw up rules limiting and standardizing house size on ALR land. In October, the ministry rejected the request, making it clear that house size would remain a municipal responsibility.

Rather than embracing that responsibility, Richmond council took no substantive action until Nov. 19, when the Globe and Mail published a feature story on the problem. Like Cooper’s article, the Globe story focused on the “astonishing” provincial tax breaks that make building on ALR land so attractive, and only in passing mentioned Richmond’s failed attempts to limit house size. Richmond councillor Harold Steves, who has lobbied for controls on ALR farmland, pressed his fellow councillors to take meaningful action. On Nov. 22 — just three days after the article was published — council directed city staff to prepare a report on limiting house size. 

With restrictions on the way, Steves and fellow councillor Carol Day sought a moratorium on building permit approvals, but Brodie and the remaining six councillors defeated the motion. That opened the door for a rash of permit applications. It wasn’t until late March that council finally declared a moratorium, but the damage was done. From January to March, the city received 45 applications to build houses on Richmond farmland, more than double the entire previous year. The average application was for 12,918 square feet, the largest was a massive 32,660 square feet.

In April, after extensive research and public consultation, city staff recommended a maximum of 5,382 square feet, consistent with the ALC’s guideline and the majority of survey respondents. Then the farming lobby intervened.

The city’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, which is compromised almost entirely of Richmond farmers, recommended 12,387 square feet. Its rationale was simply that this size is consistent with the “current average” of approved building permits, an average that has offended so many citizens. It made no attempt to relate its recommendation to the actual needs of the farming community, most likely because no working farm actually needs a 12,387-square-foot farmhouse.

The Richmond Farmers’ Institute, which is also controlled by Richmond farmers (many of whom are also members of the agricultural advisory committee), also recommended a maximum size “consistent with recent house sizes” on farmland, which it set at a slightly more modest 10,763 square feet. Although this figure is exactly twice the size recommended by city staff, twice the size endorsed by the ALC and the majority of survey respondents, and two and half times the optimal size calculated by Site Economics, Brodie deemed it a “compromise.” He noted that some homes built on Richmond farmland have been as large as 23,000 square feet. “What we’re doing is at least cutting in half the size of homes that we’re allowing,” he told reporters.

This is a neat but disingenuous manoeuvre: allow unbridled speculation, then take the most objectionable house size that ensues as the starting point for your “compromise.” Sadly, six other councillors concurred and shot down councillor Carol Day’s more genuine compromise motion of 7,500 square feet. The only concession was an agreement to review the bylaw in six months, which ensures that the issue will continue to simmer into next year.

Although Brodie and the majority of his fellow councillors acted against the wishes of most Richmond residents and placed Richmond farmland at continuing risk, it is important to note they never wanted to be saddled with this responsibility in the first place. They have repeatedly asked the B.C. government to impose province-wide limitations on house size. The government has demurred, precisely because it doesn’t want to get involved in the same sort of imbroglio that is happening in Richmond and many other municipalities.

Hopefully the NDP (which created the ALR) and the Green Party (which promised during the election campaign to restrict “mega mansions” on ALR land) will implement new rules that, in the words of one of the “bungalow” neighbours, reflect its true spirit and purpose, which is to grow things, not build things. 

David Baines is a retired Vancouver Sun columnist and Richmond resident.

According to research by Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, up to 95% of our purchase decisions are directed by subconscious mental processes.

As digital marketers, we know this intuitively. How many articles have you read that advised you to appeal to the emotional, irrational, subconscious part of the brain?

Despite this evidence, a majority of marketing efforts still focus on making logical appeals to a rational mind.

This approach leads to a sub-optimal user experience and poor conversion rates because it ignores how the human brain actually works.

So, how do we effectively target the subconscious brain? Well, we first need to understand the nature of subconscious decision making, including the role of emotions and the mechanisms that trigger attention.

How Good is Our Subconscious Brain at Making Decisions?

A lot has been written about how our decision-making is prone to bias, and as a result, people often make poor judgments. While this may be true some of the time, research by Alex Pouget found that people can often make optimal decisions, and usually do so if the choice is made by the subconscious mind.

So, users will trust their gut instinct – because it is often right! This is why if an offer doesn’t come across as credible (e.g. it is too good to be true), visitors will often reject it. Psychologists have also found that the goals which direct much of our behavior are often activated by our subconscious mind.

If it’s too good to be true…

Neuroscience research has also found that when our subconscious brain identifies a good opportunity to achieve a goal it produces a positive emotion. The brain then automatically triggers a decision to seek goal fulfillment.

The opposite is true when our subconscious brain identifies something that we don’t expect to help us meet an active goal. A negative emotion is triggered and we avoid the behavior associated with that outcome.

Our conscious mind, System 2, on the other hand, is much more deliberative and conservative in thinking.

Don’t worry though, it only tends to be in control when we do mental math or if there is a problem of some kind. System 2 uses up a lot of energy so it gets depleted easily.

That’s why marketers should be ruthless with removing clutter on a website and create an intuitive design. A design that is easy and simple to navigate does not activate System 2 and so the user’s mental energy does not get depleted so rapidly.

Do we buy what we like or like what we buy?

Neuroscience research by Gregory Berns and Sara Moore from Emory University found subjective likability is a poor indicator of sales.

Instead, activation of the brain’s reward center was much more predictive of future sales than subjective likability. So, it’s true we like what we buy, not buy what we think we like.

How do We Target the Subconscious mind?

To target the subconscious brain, we have to communicate that our brand meets implicit or psychological goals that activate our reward center.

When this happens, we trigger an emotional response which leads to a quick decision. When there is no strong emotion involved, we are more likely not to make a decision – at least immediately.

So, what kind of psychological goals do people have? It’s complicated, but many of these goals relate to protecting us from harm or building strong social ties. Indeed, our brain is hard-wired to make decisions that optimize our survival chances. That’s why we find movement on a screen so distracting. We can’t stop ourselves looking towards a moving object as in the past it could have signaled potential danger.

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Whatever the motivation, we almost can’t help ourselves when we see an opportunity to achieve such a goal.

“Implicit motives determine which actions are experienced as rewarding and satisfying,” said Joachim Brunstein, Professor of Psychology at the University of Giessen. “Goals that do not align with implicit motives, cannot bestow feelings of reward or satisfaction.”

One benefit of identifying your visitors’ most important implicit motivations is that you can include relevant psychological goals in your value proposition and content to improve engagement and intent.

What are the key implicit motivations?

Marketing consultancy Beyond Reason has developed the first comprehensive model of implicit motivations by combining insights from a number of psychological and neuroscience studies. The model has eight overriding implicit motivations, each of which is then broken down into four individual motivational categories. The eight implicit emotions are:

• Certainty
• Individuality
• Belonging
• Recognition
• Physiology
• Sexuality
• Self-Development
• Power

Each of the thirty-two categories also has four expressions/manifestations to enable marketers to identify the detailed nature of each motivation category.

This motivation model is the intellectual property of BEYOND REASON

This model, in its precise level of detail, avoids the ambiguity that many traditional behavioral models suffer from. Marketers get clear feedback on how to craft messages to engage the subconscious mind.

What follows is a number of examples outlining the effective use of these implicit motivations on the web.

Using the Beyond Reason Implicit Motivations for Marketing

1. Certainty

We hate uncertainty and so if your brand stands for stability, safety, security, reassurance and righteousness this can be appealing to certain segments.

The internet is full of uncertainty and so brands that communicate longevity and stability have an advantage over sites that are unknown and lack credibility.

For example, the UK retailer Marks & Spencer effectively communicates longevity and tradition by prominently displaying the date it was established (EST 1884) immediately below its logo. This is a subtle, but effective way of demonstrating that it represents tradition and certainty.

The Co-operative Bank uses an ethical business policy to appeal to our desire for righteousness. Treating people fairly by operating according to standards of morality and justice can sometimes be important implicit motivation in sectors such as banking and investment management.

People like to feel that their actions are not harming other people as this gives us a positive emotional response.

2. Belonging

People are extremely social animals. We love being part of a group, community, or team. This implicit motivation includes relatedness (attachments), collaboration, conformism, and empathy.

Tesco demonstrates a desire for empathy and compassion for people less fortunate than ourselves through their Community Food Connection initiative. This aims to deliver surplus food from stores to local charities for free.

Another great use of this trigger comes from MyBlogU.

What they do particularly well is to facilitate collaboration through forums and ask for feedback from other members. Collaboration is important to people because it helps members realize their goals through the group structure. We also like to be part of groups because it makes us feel more secure as members can protect and support each other.

Lifehack.org uses a desire to conform to established norms of behavior to persuade users to sign up to its newsletter.

It seeks a small commitment by asking users if they agree on something (“it’s never too late to start over.”)

Visitors who agree with this question are then served a second pop-up asking for an email address. Users feel compelled to sign up due to the inherent power of consistency/commitment, one of Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion.

3. Recognition

Humans like to be perceived as valuable and appreciated by others. This motivation includes being noticed by others and feeling respected.

Quora allows answers to be edited and organized by its community of users. However, the site also ticks a number of implicit motivations that encourages user participation.

Members get attention as the site displays how many views an answer receives, and users can show appreciation or not by upvoting and downvoting answers.

The notifications tab allows users to keep track of how well their contributions to the community are received.

This same trigger is what drives user behavior on Reddit to a large extent – the ever present pursuit of Reddit Karma.

Amazon has created a brand which works on paying attention and listening to customers. After each purchase, Amazon emails customers to rate the service received. As well as making customers feel their opinions are important it also provides Amazon with reviews for their website which displays strong social proof.

4. Individuality

Individuality the feeling that we are independent thinking and can act according to our own free will. This is defined as being original, the master of our own destiny, having autonomy and being self-centered.

Airbnb has been a massively disruptive force in the hospitality and travel sector in recent years. However, Airbnb’s competition with traditional hotels is overstated, as the average Airbnb stay is 2.5x longer than the average hotel stay.

This is because Airbnb appeals to the non-conformist traveler who wants to wants to experience the real essence of a city or neighborhood. To capitalize on this implicit goal Airbnb created lifestyle experiences. The example below is for “Maverick Biker,” a package designed for the curious cyclist who wants to visit Cuba.

One way of appealing to our self-centeredness is to allow customers to customize your product. For example the footwear company, Converse does this well by letting users customize their shoes. They also allow customers to have their name printed on the final version.

5. Power

The desire to have influence and persuasion over others. This involves having authority, a hierarchy, competition, and prestige.

Online gaming sites use power and the desire for mastery to motivate users through a number of strategies, including competition with other players and leaderboards. Zynga, for instance, also allows users to play against friends on Facebook, and it uses levels to communicate progress and the competence of players.

Virgin Atlantic uses prestige to promote its first class service and airport lounges by comparing their Clubhouses to a private members’ club. This creates the impression of exclusivity, but also of power and influence.

6. Self-development

This motivation relates to self-improvement and includes understanding of how mechanisms work, altruism, critical questioning, and purpose.

The Farnam Street blog is a great example of a website that is focused on helping people broaden their knowledge and improve how they think. These benefits are explicitly communicated. However, the site also targets our subconscious desire for a more meaningful and purposeful existence. This is one of the most powerful motivations that people can have.

7. Sexuality

Sex is, of course, one of our most basic motivators. It helps to ensure the continuation of our species. But importantly, it is also about intimacy, lust, and the parent-child bond.

Parents are strongly motivated to strengthen the relationship with their children and brands can often convey this more effectively through imagery rather than words.

Netflix communicates the parent-child bond on their homepage through a powerful image that needs no words.

IKEA’s homepage is also a great example of communicating the parent-child bond. The headline and image resonate strongly to any parent thinking of shopping at IKEA. It also highlights the important social benefit of collaboration by emphasizing the enjoyment family members get from cooking together.

8. Physiology

Apart from the basic need for adequate nutrition, physiology also includes avoiding injury, promoting behavior that maintains good health, and a desire to live in non-polluted environments.

The Zombies Run game uses gamification and social proof to promote a healthier and more active lifestyle.

It allows users to create their own story while they walk or run to prompt more frequent exercise. The app also aims to encourage users to run for longer periods of time than they might otherwise have done.

How do we measure the strength of implicit motivations?

Because implicit motivations work at a subconscious level, traditional self-reporting surveys and direct questioning of respondents does not measure them accurately.

Instead, companies working in this field use research methods such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT).

The IAT measures the speed with which people can sort words or images into categories each time they are “primed” or presented with a stimulus (e.g. a brand logo or product). It is also the test that is used to measure possible racial or gender bias.

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When people are primed with a word or image, the associations they have with that concept are much more easily accessible than feelings that are not associated with the stimulus. It teases out implicit associations

This means the IAT can measure emotional feelings to brands, products, and services that users won’t or can’t express through direct questioning. One big advantage of the IAT is that it is scalable and relatively cost effective because it uses computer software to carry out the test.

(Author’s note: there’s no lack of controversy surrounding the validity of the IAT’s validity. Investigate and decide for yourself.)

How Can Digital Marketers Apply These Learnings?

Our brains analyze the difference between the pain (i.e. the price) and the reward (i.e. achieving goals) when considering a decision.

When the difference is sufficiently large and a net positive, we will be open to purchasing a product. The net value can be changed by increasing the expected reward (i.e. improve the benefits or performance of the product) and/or reducing the pain (i.e. lower the price or make it easier to purchase).

This means that optimizers should focus on simplifying the decision making process. You can do this a variety of ways, but it starts with understanding the implicit motivations of your users. Are they seeking power, self-development, individuality? Are you echoing these sentiments in your copy, your value proposition, your design?

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Furthermore, are you creating dissonance with your messaging? If you’re not aligning your messaging with that which your users expect, there’s an inherent divide (which isn’t helping your conversion rate).

The goal here is to produce messaging that caters to System 1 – the fast and intuitive brain. If not, your users will shift to System 2, which is often less rewarding for them and less effective in the sales process.

That’s not to say the rational side needs to be thrown out entirely – products meet rational needs while brands help us meet psychological motivations. Especially with more generic products and services (e.g. hosting sites), your brand can use psychological motivators to differentiate from the competition.

But it all starts with understanding your users. There are many research methods available for this, and we’ve covered them extensively.

Conclusion

Attention, preferences, and loyalty are most strongly driven by our subconscious mind, but it’s still important to have a strong rational motive to purchase. So to wrap up:

• Ensure rational benefits are aligned to a customer’s implicit goals.
• Simplify the user’s decision-making process to retain attention and build satisfaction and loyalty.
• Do extensive user research to uncover motivation and intent.
  • Try implicit association tests instead of directly asking users what their motivations are.
  • Continue to research and experiment with this. Just like user personas, this is an evolving model and accuracy improves with time and insight.
• Use implicit motivations to form the basis of hypotheses for building more successful online experiments.

As I mentioned in my prior post, there are a lot of people promoting the application of Lean Manufacturing principles in sales. There is a lot we can learn, at the same time, there are huge areas where the comparisons break down.

If you haven’t read the first post, What We Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, be sure to read this. This post continues on the foundation of Toyota Production System’s 4 P’s, by diving into the 14 principles. Recapping them briefly:

Philosophy as the foundation:

Principle 1: Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

The right process will produce the right results:

Principle 2: Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.

Principle 3: Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction.

Principle 4: Level out the workload.

Principle 5: Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

Principle 6: Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.

Principle 7: Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

Principle 8: Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

Add value to the organization by developing your people.

Principle 9: Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.

Principle 10: Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.

Principle 11: Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

Continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning.

Principle 12: Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation.

Principle 13: Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options. Implement decisions rapidly.

Principle 14: Become a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement.

Principle 1: Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy, even at the expense of short term financial goals. This, as you’ve come to learn is not unique to manufacturing, it’s sound business practice. In sales and marketing, we tend, however to be driven by the opposite, we are focused on today, this week, this month, this quarter.

We constantly shift priorities, we create programs du jour, abandoning them for the next cool idea. Inevitably, this short term focus and shifts in priorities has an adverse impact on our people and customers, and ultimately the results we achieve. Both our people and customer get confused with these constant shifts. Our people never get the opportunity to master the program execution, when things are shifted and they have to start again.

For sustained performance improvement, to hit our goals year after year, to retain and grow our relationships with customers, we have to have a long term view of our own business goals and strategies, and a goal of creating customers for life. Built on this platform, we build the strategies, programs, develop/train our people, and execute our strategies. We learn and build on that platform, sharpening the capabilities of our organization and each individual.

Principle 2: Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface. As you have already seen, the foundation is “the right process will product the right results.” If we don’t have processes in place, that our people are using, then we have no way to truly understand what works and what doesn’t work. Having processes in place helps us identify problems, roadblocks, failures; enabling us to correct them and improve the results produced.

The sales process is fundamental. How do we increase our win rates, decrease our sales cycle time, increase average deal value/margin unless we have a process that people are using. In executing the process, we start to see where the problems are. Are we targeting the right customers, are we aligned with their buying process, are we working with the right people….. There are any number of problems we encounter in finding and qualifying deals, but those problems are difficult to identify unless we have a process.

There are many processes and workflows critical to our success in driving performance in our sales and marketing organizations. Without these we have no idea of what our problems are, which are the highest priority, and how we begin to improve them.

Imagine an organization where we have no processes in place. It would be utter chaos. If that organization wasn’t achieving it’s goals, where would we start in looking to improve performance? Is it our customer engagement strategies, is it problems with our sweet spot, do we have the right people, do we have the right skills, do we know how to reach and engage the customers……… It could be anything and everything.

Processes provide the basis for understanding what drives performance and for identifying where we can improve performance.

Principle 3: Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction. This is one of the most misunderstood principles in applying manufacturing methods to sales and marketing. In the old days of manufacturing, production was separated from customer demand. The principle was “build to stock.” In these systems, manufacturing executives provided their best guess about what they should build, they built it, and put it in inventory. This caused huge inefficiencies. They would build the wrong products–wasting resource and money on product that couldn’t be sold.

The principle of “build to order,” or pull came in with TPS. The principle was to have fast/responsive production, not manufacturing anything until an order was received, then manufacturing the product that matched the order. In addition to reducing inventory and WIP, it allowed tremendous flexibility in the manufacturing line and the ability to respond to customer requests. Before this, for example, manufacturing might build all blue cars, with the premium features, leather, all wheel drive and so forth. But what if someone wanted a red car with just the basic features. Pull systems created the ability to customize each product and build it in a very efficient manufacturing process. Red minimalist cars could be mixed with blue full featured cars, along with yellow, purple, green, white and black cars.

The dream behind pull manufacturing was highly efficient, yet highly flexible manufacturing. It was perfectly predictive because you knew which orders you had to fulfill, there would be no change, and you could manage the workflow very efficiently.

Marketing and sales people started applying this in the principles of inbound marketing/sales. A customer would make an inquiry, that inquiry would be handled then passed to the next person in the “assembly line” to be handled, all the way through closure. The problem with this concept in marketing and sales starts with the very first assumption behind the order that creates the pull. It was a fully configured order, it was from a customer who had committed to purchase that product. It specified “I want a blue car with these features on it.” Once that order was accepted in the pull line, there was no question the customer would accept it, there were no changes or variations in the process, so the line could be set up and optimized for production.

Of course these foundation assumptions are non existent in inbound sales and marketing. A query from a customer wasn’t an order or commitment. But more importantly, what the customer wanted could change at any point in the process or be stopped at any point in time.

So while manufacturing processes could be optimized for any mix of red, blue, yellow, green cars, with whatever features–because at the beginning of each day we had orders that would not change, you can see how this falls apart in sales and marketing. The customer is likely to shift their needs, priorities, anything at any point in the process, so what we had to do to respond to it changed completely throughout the process.

Underlying this and many of the other principles is the concept of variability. TPS and other lean processes work, as long as variability is minimized or eliminated. That means, the “order” doesn’t change once it’s started in manufacturing, that the steps we have to go through don’t change and so forth.

The problem with sales and marketing is that it is infinitely variable. Each customer in the buying process will change their needs, priorities and attitudes many times through their buying process. We have to deal with multiple buyers (the CEB’s 6.8) changing their needs multiple times through the buying process, often stopping and abandoning it at any point in time.

Finally, pull was fundamentally put in place to avoid overproduction. In sales and marketing, we are seldom worried with overproduction, instead being worried about having enough leads/opportunities to achieve our goals.

You can see how the principles of pull manufacturing are very challenging–perhaps impossible to implement with rigor in sales and marketing.

Principle 4: Level out the workload. This principle was tied closely to the previous principles to help improve the overall efficiency of the manufacturing process. Prior to this each step of the manufacturing process was treated somewhat independently. For example, if one step required a lot of time and processing, there could be a WIP pileup before the start of the step, and all the manufacturing line downstream of that step might be idle.

Leveling the workload sought to get the highest levels of efficiency out of the line. First manufacturers sought to eliminate WIP. They did this by breaking down manufacturing into steps that took roughly the same amount of time for each process. That way, each step finished their function in the same time, passed their work to the next step, which because it was on the same cycle would be ready to accept the work. This way the utilization of all the machines in the process was very high, there was no WIP and the process could be very efficient.

If you want to impress someone at dinner conversation, talk about this step and drop the words “TAKT time” every once in a while. They will think you really have understood this an the other principles.

There are some that would argue you can design a “sales assembly line” in much the same way. By specializing each of the functions, handing the customer off to each specialist you can create the efficient process. While in principle, it’s nice, in reality it’s unrealistic–and actually leads to huge inefficiencies. Each step in the process is highly variable–from step to step and from customer to customer. One customer might need more “demo time,” than another–they might need several demo times. One customer might need to be restarted in the process, others drop out along the way. There is infinite variability in the customer and what it takes to work with them through all stages of the buying process.

It’s because of this variability, many of the concepts around specialization that work in manufacturing actually end up making our processes very inefficient and unpredictable.

Another premise in leveling the workload is 100% quality. A way to look at this, is 100% of what is started is finished. If we start 100 cars down the line today, we will get 100 cars at the end of the line.

Clearly in marketing and sales this is unrealistic. In fact a very small part of what starts actually finishes, for any number of reasons. So this principle really breaks down in it’s application to sales and marketing.

Enough for now:

This is a long post. But it’s a very complex set of concepts. By understanding them, we can better learn which principles of lean manufacturing can really help in driving sales and marketing performance, and which actually have the unintended consequence of adversely impacting sales performance.

We’re almost through the toughest parts, it will start going faster in the following posts. Thanks for hanging in there!

Image Copyright 2Jenn

You've heard that hope is not a strategy - and it isn't a strategy if you're sitting there saying to yourself, "I hope I win this deal..."

As you know, hope was a big news topic this week when James Comey revealed that President Trump said, "I hope you can let this go."  All kinds of partisan and legal strategies will be discussed relative to the meaning, intent and context for the word hope.

Earlier this week, Brad Ferguson, a long-time OMG Partner in Arizona said, "They'll meet with you based on hope and buy from you based on belief."  You'll find three short paragraphs with links below to clarify the ideal way to strategize by utilizing hope and belief.

by Karen Chiang

A solid pricing strategy necessarily needs to be based on an understanding of your customer and their alternatives. There are a lot of tools that can be used to gather this information. At Ibbaka, we use everything from 'Jobs to be Done' interviews, Economic Value Estimation studies, and surveys. All of this leads to a great deal of unwieldy data that has to be organized. The way that it gets organized is by market segmentation. Market segmentation is the foundation of pricing. You cannot craft an effective pricing strategy without a good market segmentation.

At Ibbaka, our goal is to help our customers create and communicate differentiated value and to then capture their fair share of that value through excellent pricing. Value-based pricing is the best pricing methodology for most innovative offers. We share Tom Nagle’s view that value creation is the source of pricing advantage. As such, understanding how your offering creates value for your customers is THE “essential initial input to pricing strategy.”

Value is always tied to a specific customer segment and value is relative to an alternative. To tackle value-based pricing you need to be able to understand who your customer is, how they get value from your offer, and then to compare this to the customer’s next best competitive alternative. Many companies have not developed a systematic approach for how to understand value and determine price. I would even argue that many companies are challenged because they do not have the right framework to integrate the science, math, data and art to justify—even validate—their pricing decisions.

Where to start? As value is tied to a specific segment the place to begin is with market segmentation. Many of our projects that begin with a question about pricing go back to segmentation before looping back to develop the pricing strategy.

Too often, when we ask our clients for their segmentation, we get back firmographics (demographics for companies) such as the industry classification, size and revenue. This method of segmentation fails to link the segment to how a customer gets value or how they buy. Consequently, it is not a good foundation for pricing decisions.

A more powerful approach is described by Tom Nagle in his book The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. Dr. Nagle recommends we look at

“value-based segmentation models that facilitate pricing commensurate with actual value perceived and delivered to customers.”

Unlocking this, will enable us to ensure that we understand each segment’s ‘willingness to pay’ and that we can develop our pricing accordingly. From there, we are able to also determine the most attractive segments and to validate the size of the opportunity.

To do this type of segmentation, we need to identify those groups of customers where we can provide differentiated value (differentiated from the next best competitive alternative that is). Segmentation is the process of understanding the underlying pattern of needs, attitudes, and behaviours among customers who may appear similar but who are actually quite distinct groups. What matters in segmentation are needs and attitudes but these are hard to observe. On the other hand, firmographics are easy to observe but have little meaning.

 

 

At Ibbaka, we begin by looking for segments that get value in the same way and that buy in the same way.

Our typical process for doing segmentation involves:

1.     Building & validating a preliminary Economic Value Estimation, EVE, model to guide research

2.     Designing a data model to capture and connect data on value to customer, usage and possible pricing metrics

3.     Segmenting the market using value drivers and the customer buying process. What are the purchase motivators? Interviews and surveys are designed to capture relevant data

4.     Connecting firmographics to segments to estimate opportunity size

5.     Using influence maps, opportunity size, cost to access and cost to serve to identify target segments

Once we have built this foundation, we can build a compelling pricing model. This pricing model will have a pricing metric that connects to the value metric, a pricing architecture, pricing levels and pricing policies. This is an iterative process of course. As the customer segments come into focus, we get a better understanding of value. With this understanding, we can give better guidance on pricing. Also, markets change so segmentations need to evolve. It is important to monitor price acceptance, behaviour across pricing tiers, competitor response and respond accordingly. 

Accepting a sales management position with a new company can be both exciting and stressful at the same time. On a positive note, you’re excited you found the right position with a great company. On the flip side there’s going to be some obstacles that come along with it. In this post, I’m going to share 4 sales management tips that will steer you to success in your new role. 

Facing The Double Edged Sword of a New Sales Management Role

You’ve come so far. You negotiated compensation (Of course you did… you’re in sales, for crying out loud). You made it through the resignation process. You’re hype to get started in your new role. Now what?

You’re probably going from being one of the most knowledgeable sales professionals at your past company to the “new kid on the block.”

On top of that, you’re inheriting a team built by your predecessor. While you have the skills and experience that got you the job in the first place, the reality is you’re walking into a new company, new product, and new team.

If that wasn’t enough, I’m guessing that moving companies isn’t something you’ve done recently.

According to Deloitte, even millennials who are known for job hopping have an average tenure of three years.

Chances are, that’s how long it’s been since you’ve last done this, if at all.

Except, this isn’t like riding a bicycle. You don’t magically have muscle memory for how to do something that you’ve maybe done once or twice before.

Ideally, you’d just Google it to get a refresh, right? Not quite.

Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of credible information out there for best practices when starting a new sales management position.

I’m betting there also isn’t a section titled “How to become a solution expert, win over your team and build cross-functional relationships” in the new hire on-boarding.

Fear not! I was recently in your shoes. As I on-boarded in my last role, I took notes of what helped me ramp quickly in the hope that someone else could benefit from my experience.

With that said, here are my top 4 sales management tips to help you succeed in your new role:

#1 – Make It A Priority To Connect With Your Direct Reports

As nervous as you are about starting your new sales manager job, your new team is just as nervous. They are anxiously waiting to see what you’ll be like.

Here’s what your new sales team is probably wondering:

• How much you’ll change things.
• How well you’ll get along.
• If you’ll be able to effectively coach and develop them.

One of the key things you can do in the first one or two weeks to quash these fears and questions is to schedule a “Getting to Know You” one on one meeting with each direct report.

Whether they are managers or individual contributors, this is a critical part of establishing the relationship foundation.

Block an hour with them (ideally go to a coffee shop or more casual setting) and send them the questions ahead of time you want to discuss.

Questions to ask your sales team during your first 1 to 1:

Don’t be afraid to break the ice and go first! Share a little about your background, why you’re excited to be at the company, and why you’re passionate about sales management. 

If you have a team of managers and no individual contributor direct reports, I’d recommend picking a handful of IC leaders to sit down with.

They have a wealth of knowledge and significant influence over their peers, so winning them over will help you succeed with the team.

#2 – Establish Contacts With Key Departments

Building a working relationship isn’t isolated to just your direct reports. Make sure to meet with your peer equivalent in every department that is engaged with the sales organization.

5 Teams you should definitely meet with:

• Product
• Marketing
• Finance
• Sales Operations
• Customer success

Take time to understand how they interact with the sales team. Learn their key initiatives for the quarter and year. Discover and establish a regular meeting rhythm or feedback loop between their department and sales.

A great sales book to read for more on a building a high functioning team is “Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”

Recommended Read: 23 Legendary Must-Reads For All Salespeople

Best Sales Books: 23 Elite Picks to Step Up Your Sales Game

#3 – Get To Know Your Prospects And How Your Team Sells

As a brand new sales manager, seeing the end result isn’t enough. You want to know what your top and bottom performers are doing to create their results.

Historically, the only way to do this would be to do call listening session or shadow a demo. Although this could help, it is less than ideal because reps tend to be more nervous, and you are dependent on luck if the prospect gives objections, ask common questions, and is the right fit.

For SDRs, you have no way to guarantee that anyone will answer. There is nothing more frustrating than setting aside time or rearranging meetings for these type of things and then have it be unproductive.

Fortunately there is amazing technology today that makes life so much easier for sales managers. SalesLoft is great technology for enabling your reps and ensuring they follow the sales process.

It also records every call made so I didn’t have to shadow a rep. I can easily find the ones I want to listen to based on sentiment by running a report for a specific timeline and/or rep.

This is a snapshot of the report in SalesLoft to easily pick the calls

For the AEs, rather than sit in on hour long demos that may or may not yield value, I use Chorus.ai to give me the same high level overview to know which demos to listen to and where in the hour I should focus.

Within Chorus.ai, I can easily view key moments by rep or across the team. Below is a picture of the summary:

I can drill into any of these major areas and decide which demo I’d like to listen to and where in the demo I should focus.

Here are some questions to ask yourself while listening to your reps sales calls:

• What is the balance in talk time?
• How consistently do your reps execute or follow their call scripts?
• When you compare average performers to top performers, what do your top performers do differently and/or better?
• What are the common objections?
• What type of needs/challenges do prospects face?
• During a demo, what functionality solicits the “wow” reaction?

Having the right sales stack in place isn’t just about enabling the rep. As a new manager, these tools ensure you can quickly understand what’s happening on sales calls and ensure the time you set aside for this is always productive.

Gone are the days of having to work around the sales rep’s calendar and being at the mercy of whether or not the prospect answers the call or attends the demo.

Recommended Read: 30 Sales Automation Tools to Turbocharge Your Sales Process

Sales Automation: 30 Tools to Turbocharge Your Sales Process

#4 – There’s No Such thing As Too Many Questions

The rule of thumb with most companies is you get at least 90 days (some say up to a year) to ask as many questions as you want.

Take full advantage of this. No one is expecting you to have all the answers so don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself to have them.

Questions can be a great way to start building a relationship with the key roles you interact with and for individual contributors it empowers them to have a voice.

Starting at a new company is a great opportunity to set new expectations and habits while establishing your leadership identity.

Whether you follow the tips above or not, take time to think through your transition plan and the key things you want to focus on in your first 30 days on the job.

This time will go by very quickly but it is critical to building a foundation for your future success with the company.

The post You Got A New Sales Management Job. Now what? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Are you looking for high-quality subscribers to join your list? (Okay, okay. That’s a silly question. Of course you are!) There are hundreds of tactics out there that’ll help you grow your list. These tactics typically promote adding many subscribers, but very few of them focus on how to add the right subscribers. If you want to attract subscribers that will convert to paying customers and raving advocates, you have to be where your target audience is. For many, that audience might be on LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional network. Learn how you can use LinkedIn’s advertising platform with Zapier and AWeber to grow your list and create a remarkable opt-in experience for new subscribers.

Easier lead generation for everyone

Using LinkedIn’s advertising platform, you can dial in the targeting to help your incentive or offer reach the right people at the right time and grow your email list. And with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, your prospects’ information is pre-filled using their profile data. This means you’ll get more accurate information and less abandoned forms. [caption id="attachment_83728" align="aligncenter" width="350"] Image source: LinkedIn[/caption] Using Zapier, you can now automatically send new lead information from LinkedIn Lead Gen Ads to your AWeber account. In short, over 500 million registered LinkedIn users can be one click away from joining your AWeber email list! To learn more about how to get started with LinkedIn ads, I recommend checking out Zapier’s step-by-step guide.

Same flow, less friction

Not sure how this might fit into your current strategy? Here are a few content starter ideas to help you get started. In many cases, you can use LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms similarly to how you currently run LinkedIn ads or ads on other platforms. By pre-filling lead form information, you’ll simply be decreasing the user’s friction to sign up. Not sure where to start? Here are four ideas for how you can practically use LinkedIn ads to grow your list:

1. Invite LinkedIn users to join an educational webinar or demo

One of the best ways to promote the value of your product or service is to invite users to learn or experience that product or service firsthand. A simple ad promoting a webinar or demo at a designated time or place can attract attendees. You may be doing this now by directing ad traffic to a landing page or your webinar signup page. With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, however, you can collect the registration right in LinkedIn. Using Zapier, you can send that information, along with relevant tags, to AWeber. Using multi-step zaps, you can even send the information to AWeber and a compatible webinar hosting platform as well, like GoTo Webinar.

2. Offer a guide, checklist or eBook to LinkedIn users

Creating an attractive incentive or lead magnet (such as a PDF guide or checklist) is a great way to grow your list. Use a LinkedIn ad to offer it to your audience with a one-click path to receive it. Looking for inspiration? Check out this guide on creating the perfect incentive. Using Zapier, you can send your new leads to AWeber with a corresponding tag. Use this tag to trigger an automated email campaign from AWeber that delivers the incentive. Add an additional autoresponder email to nurture the relationship with your new subscriber, provide additional value and offer additional products and services.

3. Create and deliver an automated email course

At AWeber, we’ve found great success educating prospects with email courses. We use a sequence of automated emails configured to be sent over a set period of time to deliver course content. You can create a simple email course with AWeber in minutes using Campaigns, and market the course on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. When a prospect opts-in to your course, you can automatically send their information to AWeber using Zapier and immediately deliver the first email lesson.

4. Encourage LinkedIn users to set up a consultation

Are you a coach or consultant? Invite a prospective customer to sign up for a free consultation. You can do this by implementing a simple LinkedIn Lead Gen Form ad inviting users to book some time. When a subscriber is added to your list via Zapier, include a link to schedule the actual 10 to 15-minute call with a free tool called Calendly. Using Calendly, you can automate your scheduling, minimize the time spent emailing back and forth with prospects and ensure that your consultation is limited to a short amount of time.

Get started today

When using automation and advanced advertising tools like LinkedIn’s platform, there’s a ton of room for creativity and innovation. To learn more about connecting AWeber to Zapier, check out this Knowledge Base article. Although AWeber’s Zapier integration can be used with a free Zapier account plan, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms is a Premium zap (which requires a paid subscription to Zapier). You can check out their 14-day trial to see if it’s right for you! Please also note that by default, confirmed opt-in is turned on for all AWeber integrations. This can be changed to single opt-in. Contact our customer solutions team to discuss single opt-in options when using Zapier or other trusted integrations. I can’t wait to see how you use these exciting new features! If you’re using ads and automation to grow your business, share your success in the comments below.

The post What Email Marketers Need to Know About LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Sales skills mastery starts by getting to its core. What is sales really about? Is it just a scoreboard of your career achievements and goals? Is it about performance metrics and sales quotas? Or, do we need to shift our focus and look at it from the customer’s perspective?

The gist of our top six sales skills is that the true masters of sales have an eye out for their customers, not their numbers or performance metrics. And, while these tangible measures of achievement come secondary, they always follow.

Mark Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing, says it best: “Customer point of view. Always. Filter everything you’re doing, saying and pitching through that and you’ll improve just about every metric you care about today.”

Top Sales Skills 1: Listening Skill

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.”
– Roy T. Bennett, from his book The Light in the Heart.

It is important to remember that the sales process is not about you. It’s not about your quotas and commissions. If you make it about that, then you bring an agenda to the table – an agenda that is not in the best interest of your prospects.

So, instead, listen to them sincerely. Get to know their pain points, concerns and needs. Then, if what you’re offering aligns with their needs, present a solution.

Top Sales Skills 2: Ethical Sales Skill

The ideal customer is someone who made an educated decision in choosing you over your competitors. They know your product; and will likely stand by their decision and remain loyal.

Ethical sales means presenting your product truthfully. You are there not really to convince the prospect – you’re there to share. Present and explain what you offer with integrity. This means not glossing over flaws and issues, and not exaggerating your product’s merits.

Remember what Dale Carnegie said in his book How To Win Friends and Influence People: “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

So, provide all the information your prospect needs to make an informed decision. Strive towards beginning a truthful win-win business relationship.

Top Sales Skills 3: Question Asking Skill

Again, remember that sales isn’t about what you want. It is about what your prospects need. And, the best way to know about these needs is by asking. Be inquisitive. Know what they require and expect from what you offer. Look at your product from their point of view. Be sincere in your presentation, and responsive to their concerns.

Top Sales Skills 4: Product Knowledge

A salesperson who lacks product knowledge is an ineffective one. They are unable to present the product thoroughly. They won’t be able to answer your prospect’s queries satisfactorily.

When you’re putting together a sales team, make sure they go through extensive product training first. They should master these basics:

• how your product works
• your product’s business value
• how it integrates with your prospect’s current technologies

In the same way, they should be able to do a thorough demo. This is particularly important for B2B companies, where system integration and application are crucial to business operations. Product demos are effective ways of showing off what your product can do. It goes above words and shows your product’s features in action.

Top Sales Skills 5: Objection Handling

No matter how best-fit your product is to your prospect needs, you may still run into objections. This is natural. You just have to be prepared for it. The key is to communicate empathy.

According to self-development speaker and author Brian Tracy: “Treat objects as requests for further information.”

Let your prospects know that you sincerely understand their needs and objections. Ask them to explain further. Clarify yourself – how you explained your product – and then reiterate how it can address their requirements.

Top Sales Skills 6: Post-Sale Relationship Management

We’ve repeated this quote from sales training coach Patricia Fripp, time and again: “To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don’t close a sale, open a relationship.”

Keep this in mind even when you’ve sealed deals and closed sales. This isn’t the end. You are starting a business relationship with your clients. You might not be their main point person once they become clients. But, you need to be present. Check in on them regularly. Get to know if there’s anything else you can help them with.

Not only is this a great way of soliciting referrals and learning of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. It also nurtures your business relationship.

As a business executive, you can likely point to a number of metrics currently being utilized in your company, all of which measure the effectiveness of various practices and processes—everything from marketing, to sales, to customers. That’s because the value of metrics is not generally up for debate. If you’re not well-informed about all aspects of your business—knowledge gained by continually tracking and assessing your performance—you may not be in business for long.

The logic behind such measurements is clear; they help us understand where we’ve been and where we’re going. Somehow, though, this logic never seems to extend to the business continuity (BC) program.

Why? I’ve heard every reason under the sun as to why business continuity managers don’t use metrics to measure the effectiveness of their program, but none of them hold up if you consider this: As the business continuity manager, the “product” you deliver is a BC program that works. If you can’t say for sure that it will, then you’ve failed to deliver. You’re also putting the health of the company—which has been so carefully monitored and maintained with the help of myriad metrics—at risk.

If you’re unsure about which business continuity program metrics to use, you’re in good company; few resources offer guidance or a definitive list. But there are, in fact, numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) that are useful in measuring the state of your program; I’ve listed the most critical below to get you started. If your program performs well against the following 15 business continuity KPI examples, you can rest assured you’re heading in the right direction.

15 Business Continuity Program Metrics

1. Senior management support: Senior management promotes continual improvement of the program by:

• Conducting management reviews.
• Requiring regular program audits.
• Confirming that employees are continuously trained.
• Validating that enterprise tests are being conducted regularly.
• Reviewing test results for successes and opportunities.
• Validating that the program is regularly updated to heighten its sophistication and maturity.

2. Policies and standards: The business continuity management policy and standards consider and address the scope of the program, management commitment, organizational activities, roles and responsibilities, business activities, services, products, partnerships, supply chains, relationships with interested parties, and the potential impacts related to a disruptive incident.

3. Program metrics: A comprehensive metrics process consistent with organizational and industry best practices, standards, and guidelines has been implemented to monitor and measure the performance of the business continuity management program at regularly planned intervals.

4. BC budget: The business continuity management budget(s) is a regular line item on the annual corporate-wide budget and is consistent with the scope and needs of the program.

5. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) reporting: A Business Impact Analysis is conducted at regularly planned intervals (a minimum of every two years) for critical business units and associated activities that support the organization’s products and services.

6. BIA/Disaster Recovery plan alignment: The BIA and its most current results (including recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives) are used as the basis for alignment of recovery requirements between individual business units and IT.

7. Threat and risk assessment process: Your threat and risk assessment process systematically identifies, analyzes, and evaluates the risk of disruptive incidents to the organization on a regular basis, at least annually.

8. BC management program training: Training is multi-tiered and addresses general employees, recovery team leaders and members, the crisis management team, and senior management.

9. Crisis management team: A cross-functional crisis management team representative of the scope and nature of the organization (senior management, facilities, human resources, information technology, etc.) has been identified and is in place to manage incidents across the organization.

10. Recovery exercises: Recovery exercises (tabletop, walkthrough, functional, etc.) are held at regularly planned intervals (at least annually) to provide crisis management and recovery team members with a training scenario to further assess and heighten their capabilities, validate the plan and its content, assess operational capabilities of the recovery strategies, and identify opportunities for further improvement.

11. Crisis communications plan: A crisis communications plan uses accepted incident/crisis management best practices and standards in its format, content, and steps to communicate the status of an incident from its detection, to activation, to recovery, to resumption of normal operations.

12. Emergency notifications: Emergency notifications follow industry best practices and address the escalation processes, procedures, and various communication methods (such as pagers, satellite phones, cell phones, email, or two-way radios) that can be used to promptly notify internal and external parties of an impending or in-progress disaster situation.

13. Recovery plan template: Business units and the IT department use a standardized recovery plan template that is consistent with approved recovery plan standards.

14. Alternate work strategies: Business units follow an approved mix of alternate work strategies (e.g., work from home, from another company facility, or at a third-party site) established by the business continuity management office that are based on the recovery time objectives derived from the BIA.

15. BC alignment with Disaster Recovery for incident response: Incident response is a complex undertaking that requires substantial planning and resources. The business continuity management program specifically addresses and integrates its structure and operations with key IT policies and procedures such as those used to prevent, mitigate and respond to cyber-security related attacks (computer security incident response).

These business continuity KPI examples are just a sampling of the metrics needed to truly evaluate your program’s effectiveness, but they are a great place to start.

Will your business recovery plans work when you need them? Here’s everything you need to know about how to create and implement a business recovery plan successfully.

Always Be Looking…for Opportunities

By Richard F. Libin, President, APB, rlibin@apb.cc, www.apb.cc       

A.B.L. – Always Be Looking…for opportunities. 

Change happens. It’s a fact of live. We all experience it and deal with it in different ways. Some prefer the status quo and constantly guard against impending change. Others turn a blind eye to the world around them and stay in their comfort zone. They don’t notice problems until it’s too late. Some reluctantly move on and others remain behind and hope that things return to “normal.” Those who move on may find a new source of comfort. Those that remain behind typically find failure. The book “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson addresses these issues.

We see this exact behavior in sales professionals. Some salespeople constantly look for new opportunities, prospect, and work to keep a full pipeline of leads. These salespeople consistently have business to work on and rarely deal with the peaks and valleys. Unfortunately, however, most salespeople work on the wish or hope system. “I hope something will happen” or “I wish something will happen.” Seeing strong sales and manufacturers’ incredible incentives they stop looking.  They go through the prospects they have in front of them. Ultimately, they realize there are only a few left or they’ve completely run out. They wait essentially until it’s too late to act. So, which are you? Do you always look for opportunities, or do you wait for something to happen? Which way do you want to work – smarter or harder?

When everything is rosy, sales should be booming and the showrooms should be busy. So, it might seem odd to say that NOW is the time to look for new opportunities.  The truth is, however, that salespeople should always be looking for opportunities – prospecting – even in good times.  Proactive salespeople always look for leads so that they never run dry. Reactive salespeople wait for something to happen.

Looking when it’s too late takes too much time to pull off. Looking now for opportunities (prospecting) is a lost art and many don’t understand its purpose or how to prospect. Prospecting is about building a continual pipeline of opportunities and referrals that flows continuously, in any time. It is the key to increasing traffic without increasing expenses.  Mastering the art of prospecting can build a rock solid base of clients and deliver a steady stream of referrals, most of which bring a significantly higher closing ratio.

Prospecting pays off, over time. Prospecting might not lead to immediate sales; it has to be executed over and over, every single day. Today, everyone is looking for instant results; instant gratification. This won’t happen with prospecting, but if salespeople are persistent the long-term payoff will be huge. Sometimes that’s why they stop doing it.  If you stop doing it, it stops working.

Why don’t salespeople prospect? One reason is the long-term nature of prospecting. It lacks instant gratification. Or perhaps it’s the belief that it’s someone else’s or the manufacturer’s job to have not only the best product, but incentives that bring people in to the dealership. Some are afraid of rejection, but a real salesperson is not afraid to talk to anyone. Who is talking to your customers? Another may be that you really don’t know how well your prospecting is working until a requested first-time customer comes in…but then, the realization hits. Working with a prospect that asks for you by name translates into a lot less work. Another reason may be that salespeople rely on management to bring in their traffic.  While management should provide 30 first-time customers to each salesperson monthly, salespeople have a responsibility to bring in a minimum of 10 additional, requested cultivated customers through prospecting.  This then, creates a pool of 40 opportunities to draw from.  If salespeople bring back 50% of those unsold customers as be-backs this increases their total opportunities to 56.  Combining the be-backs and prospects the potential to close increases without any expense increase.

Prospecting has three primary results:  an appointment for an immediate sale; referrals to new prospects actively looking to buy, and creating future prospects.  Successful prospectors know that while there are many approaches, the best methods are in-person (personal), telephone, and written communication.  Yet today, most salespeople don’t have the first idea about how to prospect successfully. 

This is where managers, as the coaches and leaders come in.  The first step is to focus the team on the overall goal – changing the variables they control, beginning with driving traffic – and then to change their mindset.  Develop a game plan and create opportunities for the team to practice, play and win. It’s like Vince Lombardi says, “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

• The importance of team.  Think of a professional football team.  They practice for hours at least five days a week to play a single, one-hour game.  The team who wins is not always the biggest, fastest, or best, but the one who goes in with a well-rehearsed game plan and then executes it. Practice, Play and Win
• Change the mindset.  Teach the team to prospect – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yes even in your sleep.  Take them out into the field and train them.  Then be sure the team views each individual who enters the showroom as a customer with the ability and intent to purchase.
• Assign a dollar value to each customer. Every potential customer who comes to the dealership has the power to increase your paycheck along with the dealership’s gross. 

Create a mindset so that every individual who comes into the showroom is viewed as an opportunity and client. A client is somebody who buys all their products and services from you and sends referrals – friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. Would you rather have a client or somebody who buys from you just one time? 

Salespeople cultivate customers through prospecting and referrals; they convert customers into clients by establishing and maintaining a relationship that allows them to build a sense of trust.  It’s this trust that allows clients to rely on the salesperson for advice, and allows the salesperson to secure more referrals and sales.

We have seen over and over again, that when sales managers make the commitment to let APB helps them train their teams, the pay back is tangible and exponential. 

The bottom line is A.B.L.  Always Be Looking – every single day, not just when the business is bad or down. Prospecting needs to become an automatic reflex, like breathing, an act that happens successfully and continuously. With a positive mindset, a view toward the future, and the right training, salespeople will understand the need and will continue to Always Be Looking for opportunities and loyal clientele, regardless of how business is doing.

Richard F. Libin has written two acclaimed books that help people of all walks of life improve their sales skills, because as he says, “everyone is a selling something.” His most recent book, Who Knew? (Who-Knew.com), was published in early 2017. His first book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” (WhoStoppedTheSale.com), is now in its second edition. As president of APB-Automotive Profit Builders, Inc., a firm with more than 48 years experience working with both sales and service professionals, he helps his clientele, through personnel development and technology, to build customer satisfaction and maximize gross profits in their businesses. Mr. Libin can be reached at rlibin@apb.cc or 508-626-9200 or www.apb.cc.

People-based marketing represents an industry shift from targeting cookies to targeting real people across channels and devices using a persistent identity. For marketer seeking to understand the complete consumer journey, create valuable brand experiences and improve ROI, people-based marketing isn’t just a good idea – it’s a necessity. In fact, LiveRamp’s State of People-Based Marketing report found that nearly all marketers (over 90%) agree that the ability to execute people-based marketing is of significant importance. Yet the vast majority (84%) struggle to do so, with data fragmentation, identify resolution and omni-channel consumer views cited as major obstacles.

While these challenges are common, they aren’t insurmountable. Marketing intelligence solutions can help jumpstart people-based marketing strategies by aligning various data sources, creating rich consumer profiles and improving the relevancy of marketing and advertising at every stage of the consumer journey. Let’s explore:

Unifying Marketing & Advertising
People-based marketing requires having insight into every touchpoint in the consumer journey, so you can engage customers and prospects with relevant messages and offers at key moments of opportunity. Yet most likely, your marketing is managed separately by different internal teams, and your advertising is managed by one or more outside agencies. When channels are managed and measured in silos, it’s impossible to holistically assess performance, or track the consumer journey from first exposure to final conversion.

Marketing intelligence solutions break down these silos, incorporating all your audience and interaction data into a single, centralized repository, so you can analyze and optimize your marketing and advertising performance by audience segment. With a holistic view of what’s working and what’s not for each type of audience, internal and external teams can work together to maximize spend efficiencies and deliver a better overall experience.

Resolving Identity
People-based marketing offers marketers the chance to target real individuals, not theoretical segments or archetypical buyer personas. Most CRM systems contain the information needed to personalize interactions with prospects and customers, but marketers have historically lacked the ability to resolve identity across all digital channels and devices. Without a single view of each individual, you can’t deliver relevant, one-on-one communications across their chosen devices, browsers and channels.

Marketing intelligence solutions solve these challenges by combining effective cross-device identification with deep demographic, intent and interest attributes to build robust consumer profiles. You can then segment and target these profiles with more relevant, timely and effective messages and ads that boost conversions, improve retention and increase customer lifetime value.

Optimizing Experiences
People-based marketing prioritizes how brands connect and engage with consumers along their journey. But modern consumers no longer move from awareness to consideration to conversion in an orderly, linear fashion. Consumers now dip in and out at any point, and they expect different interactions depending on what stage they are in.

Marketing intelligence solutions not only help you understand the journeys your customers take, but also optimize their experience with individual touchpoints along the way. By combining audience and attribution in a single platform, you can see all the consumer touchpoints involved in the buying cycle and track how each interaction contributes to a desired action at each stage in the funnel. With visibility into how certain audiences are responding to your messages, offers, creatives and other granular tactics, you can spend your marketing dollars more efficiently and effectively while making the consumer’s whole journey a better experience.

People-based marketing is the strategy of the future. So why wait? With marketing intelligence, you can be well on your way to delivering targeted, people-based messages and ads that drive better experiences, and better business results.

Don’t you just hate it when a salesperson decides to spam your inbox with useless, boring, and repetitive emails because they just want to “follow-up” with you or “bubble their message to the top of your inbox”?

I’m in sales, so I get that salespeople are told they need to be persistent and relentlessly follow-up with leads if they want to close the deal–and they do–but that doesn’t give you a right to send 7 redundant follow-up emails either.

It’s true that if you don’t send 8 emails, you’re probably missing out on 33-60% of responses (or more) from qualified leads. After helping more than 480 B2B companies optimize their sales emails and running our own experiments with more than 360,000 emails, we’ve concluded that about 1/3 of your total positive responses in a campaign will come from touches #5-8.

But those numbers are only true if you make the time to craft thoughtful and targeted emails for EVERY step of your email campaign. Otherwise, you won’t get any results, and you might even develop a spam complaint problem that tanks own email deliverability, sabotaging yourself from even reaching the prospect’s inbox.

Avoid these seven mistakes if you want to get responses to your follow-up emails instead of being marked as spam:

1. Don’t assume they saw your last email.

Sometimes you might get lucky and have a prospect engaged, reading your every email. But a lot of times, a prospective customer might have never read anything you sent them until the 4th, 5th, or even 6th email. And even if they did read what you sent them before, you can’t assume that they remember what you said, or that they cared for anything your email said. After all, if they had been compelled by those previous emails you sent they probably would have responded by now.

2. Perseverance isn’t always respected or appreciated.

There are a lot of automated email tools out there that make it really easy to send “bump emails,” you know–those “RE: ” threads that contain a chain of all the emails you sent in your attempt to reach the prospect. But contrary to popular belief and claims, sending bump sales emails aren’t always the best way to get a positive response.

In fact, sometimes reminding prospects about all the previous emails you sent them can sabotage your current efforts.

Consider these 3 scenarios:

1. The prospect didn’t open your message, and never read the body. This means they probably weren’t interested in your subject line. Your subject line might suck, but if it is at all related to the benefit/pain point you were focusing on, chances are they aren’t interested in that.
2. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they weren’t interested. In that case, you probably don’t want to be reminding them about that concept that they already decided wasn’t worthwhile discussing with you.
3. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they were busy. If they were really interested in what you had to say, but didn’t make an effort to respond, you still haven’t won yet. You might be getting closer to their needs and pain points, but chances are that timing is wrong or what you’re talking about doesn’t resonate strongly enough with them, since they didn’t respond.

There are plenty of tools to help you know if someone opened your message or not, but you still don’t know why they didn’t respond.  That said, if someone did actually read your message AND found it interesting, they’ll probably remember it. And if they don’t, it’s not actually that interesting.

That’s why in most cases it’s better to not remind people that you’ve already sent them 6 emails with a giant thread of unsolicited “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE”‘s that never had a response. In most cases, those “RE”s are a red flag that you’re probably an annoying salesperson who’s spamming them, and they’re much more likely to hit delete or even mark you as spam.

There are some cases where either mentioning another email thread or using a “RE” bump email might make sense, though. For example, if one of your emails is “building upon a previous one,” meaning that you’re adding new information that is referencing a previous email you sent, then it makes sense to reference that email or even include a copy of that email thread below your new message for context.

3. Don’t be redundant.

Many follow-up emails don’t work because they’re damn boring and repetitive. Just like your first sales email must be compelling, every follow-up needs an interesting new angle that gives the prospect a reason to keep reading and respond.

I realize that crafting great sales emails is hard. And crafting 8 of them is even harder. But rather than seeing this as a giant chore, see those 8 messages as different opportunities to test a different message that might excite your prospect into responding.

Even if you’re sending targeted messages to a specific and well-defined “buyer persona,” it doesn’t mean that everyone in that audience thinks and feels exactly the same. Not all Chief Marketing Officers are going to have the same taste, and everyone will have slightly different problems and goals at the time they get your message. That’s why you need to try different things in your email campaign, and these 8 emails are your opportunity to do so.

The more you differ your messages (while still keeping them relevant to your audience), the more total opens and responses you’ll get from your campaign.

4. Don’t write a novel.

Avoid the temptation to ramble in any email you send, especially follow-up emails. The most polite thing you can do in an email is cut out all the unnecessary pleasantries and filler that will bore your prospect to death. The shorter your emails are, the better.

As a general rule, keep your follow-up emails to 3-5 short sentences or less. Just make sure you’re getting your point across clearly in those sentences so that the prospect isn’t confused.

5. Don’t forget about the Call to Action.

Whenever you write an email, you should have a particular goal in mind. Maybe you want to schedule a phone call with the prospect, or you want them to watch the video you’ve linked to. But whatever the desired action is, you need to explicitly ask the recipient to perform it in your Call to Action (CTA).

Follow-up emails are no different: you need to have a clear ask and provide a good reason for the prospect to do what you’re asking.

6. Don’t just follow-up once.

How many emails are you sending before you give up on a prospect or an account? It’s good if you’re following up at all, but just sending 3 follow-up emails after your first isn’t enough. Persistence pays off: remember that about one-third of your responses might come from emails #5-8, so if you quit before then you’re losing all those potential customers.

And sometimes, when you’re testing new things, email #6 might actually get the most messages in the campaign. If this happens, you should probably consider moving it much earlier in the campaign, but you’ll never know which email works best until you try, and each email in your sequence is another chance to get even more responses.

7. Don’t forget to say Goodbye.

You shouldn’t be sending infinite follow-up emails. At some point there’s diminishing marginal returns, meaning that if you keep following up you will probably not get much benefit for your time spent. Likewise, sending people TOO MANY emails will actually increase your chances of getting marked as spam, since you might be driving them insane. Based on our own research and experiments, we recommend ending your campaign at 8 emails, but feel free to test that for yourself to see what works best for your buyers.

When you do finally end things, you need to make sure you let the buyer know it’s “goodbye.” As corny as this sounds, letting them know that this is your last outreach attempt can often have an interesting rescue effect. Whether it’s a sense of fear of loss or some other human psychological reaction, good breakup emails will always capture a few people who were silently reading your emails without responding.

But instead of sending that corny “little green aliens” or “alligator” breakup email, try writing a thoughtful message that actually adds value to the recipient. There are lots of ways you can do this, but the more you can end on a positive and helpful note, the more likely they are to either have a change of heart and respond to you, or reach out later when the timing is better.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten emails from people I prospected years ago, who finally leave their companies and go to a new role or start companies of their own, telling me things like:

“Heather, I got your email [x time ago], and I really wanted to work together then, but it just wasn’t going to work because [reason x]. But I’d love your help now…”

Follow these 7 pieces of advice for follow-up emails (lame pun intended!), and I promise you’ll get more positive responses to your sales emails.

If you liked this article, leave a comment or ask a question. And if you want to hear even more cold email tips, subscribe to our newsletter.

The post Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Follow-up Emails? appeared first on Salesfolk.

You know the feeling. A potential customer has shown interest in your brand. She’s been to your site a few times, downloaded a couple pieces of content and subscribed to your blog.

Knowing all this, it’s hard to hold back the temptation to throw everything you have — whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, blogs — at her to address her pain points. This is why you’ve been creating content!

Before you hit that send button, step back. It’s not uncommon for a prospect to get overwhelmed when at the receiving end of a content firehose. Enter the drip campaign. These carefully thought-out emails offer “drops” of content at spaced-out intervals to keep your brand top of mind until your prospect is ready to contact you.

But do they work? Let’s dive in and investigate.

What’s So Great About Drip Campaigns, Anyway?

Drip (or automated) campaigns are great for building trust with your customers and prospects. The repeated, relevant interactions that come with these campaigns can help create this trust.

Because the customer journey isn’t a straight line, these emails also can help nudge customers and prospects along an ideal decision-making path.

Do Drip Campaigns Really Work?

In today’s world of instant news updates, social streams and quick gratification, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out in inboxes. Let’s look at a few successful drip campaign examples.

Example 1: Senior Scam Education

An innovative aging-in-place program wanted to educate its prospects about senior scams, a common issue affecting older adults. To do this, the brand created a piece of gated content about how to avoid these scams. Once someone downloaded this piece, they would be enrolled in a five-email drip campaign featuring additional pieces of scam-avoiding advice, and finally receive a call-to-action to attend one of the brand’s seminars.

What We Learned

Overall, the campaign performed well, getting above-average opens and clicks for the industry.

Looking at the data, we discovered that although the campaign was performing well, people disengaged at emails three and four.

Like email two above, emails three and four contained a brief video clip of advice from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. However, it’s possible that a five-email campaign was too much for some people. Or it could have been that our language didn’t clearly specify that, a) these videos are different from the videos in the previous email, or b) these videos are very short (30 to 45 seconds). To remedy this, we are currently evaluating if all three videos in the second email, shortening the entire campaign to three emails, will be more effective.

Example 2: A Medical Product Demonstration

A well-known medical device manufacturer wanted to educate the hemodialysis market about the benefits of using a vascular access coordinator in dialysis clinics, and get kidney care professionals to request a demo of its hemodialysis monitor.

When someone downloaded its vascular access coordinator piece, he or she was enrolled in a three-email drip campaign that would end in a product demonstration call-to-action.

What We Learned

Like the example above, this drip campaign performed well with open and click-through rates surpassing the industry average.

Since the campaign’s launch, the manufacturer has seen the following product demonstration request results:

Though the above statistics seem a little low, these results are quite impressive for this client considering the campaign was sent to such a limited and niche audience.

What’s in a Successful Drip Campaign?

As these examples demonstrate, a good drip campaign has a central goal—whether that’s to get the recipient to request a consultation or demo, make a purchase or set up an appointment.

Use Data

Whether you want someone to schedule a consultation, sign up for a free trial, or make a purchase, your drip campaign needs to be centered on data. Who from your list has visited relevant pages, downloaded relevant content or taken some other kind of relevant action? Once you have your campaign up and running, don’t forget to take a look at how it’s performing. Doing so gives you insight into whether you have too many emails or if a certain call-to-action should be reworked.

Create Different Campaigns for Different Audiences

Not only should you base your campaign on what actions someone has or has not taken, you also should break out campaigns according to whether someone is a loyal customer, a prospect or knows nothing about your brand.

Include Great Content

While it might be tempting to spend most of your campaign educating the recipient why he or she should do business with you, don’t do it. What makes the above examples so successful is the content. Each email hits on a pain point for the reader—like keeping your investments safe or staying up-to-date on CDC initiatives—and doesn’t showcase the brand until the last email.

Alternative Ways to Nurture Leads into Customers

Keep in mind drip campaigns won’t work for your brand if you have a small contact list or no contact list at all. Also, consider the audience you’re sending to. If you know their pain points and how they prefer to engage with your brand, you may find email isn’t the most effective tactic.

Here are a few alternatives.

A One-Off Targeted Email Send

You have a great resource you think your list will love, but it’s not necessary to have an entire drip campaign around it—you just want to get it into the hands of your audience. Create an email that’s targeted in its content and to whom you send it to.

In the example below, the email is targeted based on the content—blood sugar awareness—and while this is an issue that could affect anyone, we sent this email to anyone who viewed previous content on our website about blood sugar or diabetes.

Because we sent this email to a targeted list based on the recipient’s actions, we saw much higher engagement rates than we would have had we sent it to our entire list.

Lead Flows

You’re browsing a website, when suddenly a pop-up takes over what you’re reading, forcing you to take action before you can continue your journey. Annoying, right? Lead flows do what pop-ups are meant to do—capture leads, further engage someone down the sales funnel—without hijacking their browsing experience.

A new tool from HubSpot, lead flows enter a screen from the top, bottom or side, and encourage the visitor to take an action. The medical device manufacturer mentioned above uses lead flows to encourage site visitors to request product demos, download content or subscribe to its blog. Here are two examples:

After being live for a little over three weeks, this lead flow already has netted seven new contacts—an achievement in this niche market.

Retargeting

Another option is to use demand generation tactics to retarget someone with an offer or to take an action once they’ve left your site.

In the example below, the aging-in-place company retargeted site visitors who came to the landing page for a specific type of content, but did not convert. The company used demand generation to retarget these visitors on Facebook.

The company saw 82 conversions in one month using retargeting on Facebook.

Should I Use a Drip Campaign?

That’s up to you and your brand’s specific goals. Drip campaigns work well for establishing trust between a brand and customer or potential customer. But depending on your audience and industry, if your recipients are busy or don’t usually engage with email, it might not be the best option.

It also may not be the best option if your contact list is slim to none, or if you lack the staff or resources to respond to an increase in product demonstration requests, purchases or event attendance, for example.

PointClear is known for its perseverance. While some sales people stop after placing one or two calls (if they don’t get the prospect on the phone or don’t get a call back, they deem the lead no good) our sales support associates keep trying.

We know that in the lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing business, it takes multiple tries, across multiple cycles, to fully work a lead.

Our success stories are attributed to this persistent (yet professional) approach to teleprospecting.

Case-in-Point

One opportunity we turned over to a client took 42 touchpoints across 3 months to nurture to sales-qualified status.

This engagement had our team reaching out to CFOs at the 50 largest utilities in the US, on behalf a technology solutions provider.

The CFO with the deal described above, who was with one of the top five largest utilities in the country, at one point called one of our associates back and left this message:

“Don’t stop calling me. You are my conscience. I have been extremely busy but I’ll be ready to talk to you soon.”

We didn’t stop.

We persevered—and then turned over a Sales Qualified Lead which closed for $1,000,000,000 five months later. Yes. One billion dollars.

Here’s What PointClear Persistence Looks Like

While the size of the deal described above is not typical, the “don’t give up too soon” success stories that lead to deals on the high side of the sales spectrum are. Here’s another one:

A services and technology company targeting the branding, design and advertising industry leverages PointClear’s account-based marketing services, including lead generation, qualification and nurture to keep their pipeline full of sales-qualified leads. Here’s an experience our associates had in delivering a particularly valuable opportunity:

• The prospect was worked from Aug. – Dec. of 2016
• There were 32 total touches from start to finish
• Calls were split: 5 were make to decision-makers/influencers and 5 were made to executive assistants
• We reached 3 decision-maker/influencers and 2 executive assistants
• There were 7 voicemails left and 8 emails sent
• The touch cycle resulted in 6 conversations … and 1 giant opportunity

The client wrote, after getting the SQL from their dedicated PointClear team:

"Our AE’s would never have been persistent enough to get this opportunity.”

A Keep-at-It Story Close to Home

I recently spoke with a PointClear prospect regarding the persistence of one of our associates (who supports PointClear’s sales team).

“Thank goodness Christine stayed on me and kept reaching out for me to take this conversation.”

After that conversation I sent our operations team this note:

“This was a nice thing for him to say. It also was a perfect way for me to actually show, versus evangelize, how our process works and how our people are different than what he has seen with other lead generation companies in the past … so thank you not only for the lead but the persistence and professionalism that epitomize what we do and that clearly impress prospects.”

Anecdotal Validation

I talked to a senior exec recently who said he was amazed at the number of sales calls he receives that are never followed up. Most of the time he does not pick up the telephone, but sometimes he has an interest once he hears the voicemail.

But then he gets busy and forgets to call back. He never hears from that company again; and even though he had interest, the person working the lead didn’t invest the number of touches required to earn a conversation and win his business.

It takes persistence and professionalism to drive big deals in complex selling environments. Read more about how we do it here.

Send me an email (dan.mcdade@pointclear.com). I have more stories like the ones you just read that I’d be happy to share with you.

(Ask me how we helped one client spend $49,000 on B2B lead generation, qualification and nurturing, instead of $172,000 – and doubled their return.)

5 Marketing Automation Tools to Increase Lead Conversions written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing automation helps small businesses compete with large organizations by helping them accomplish more with less manpower and time. Automation need not necessarily be expensive, contrary to popular beliefs. Most of this software offer affordable monthly subscriptions.

Lead conversion is a daunting task and metric for marketers. Driving traffic to a website is a task in itself, and only 1-2% of that traffic actually ends up converting, and sometimes it’s even less. Conversion requires optimized web pages and content, and constant engagement of website visitors/consumers so they aren’t interrupted by a competing business. Automation can help you do just that.

Here are five marketing automation tools to increase lead conversions.

1. Zoho

Managing online campaigns, collecting data and leads from them and finally sharing leads with your sales personnel is a long process. In the time that loss between those steps, your leads may have run cold, or worse, been captured by competition.

A good integrated CRM, like Zoho, can help you document, manage and nurture leads better.

On the tool, you can scan business cards collected at events and instantly upload them into automated email nurturing campaigns. Your website visits and form fillers are automatically indexed on the tool’s CRM and you can custom create the lead nurturing email chains to get those leads to convert.

2. DrumUp

People spend 30-40 minutes a day on social media, making it a great platform to capture leads (Source: SocialMediaToday). But making an impact on social is tough, given that your competition is not only other brands but posts created by friends and family.

A good social automation tool like DrumUp can help manage multiple social accounts, and reach and convert more of your target audience.

Using the tool you can schedule posts weeks in advance on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and set posts on a repeat schedule. You can also curate content related to your industry, catch influencer attention with #tags and @mentions, and reach a wider audience on social.

3. GetResponse

Reorders from existing clients form an important part of every company’s revenue. The more your reorder rate is, the better your financial success is because it costs more to acquire a new customer than retain an old one.

A good email marketing tool like GetResponse can help you keep your consumers engaged.

Designing email marketing templates isn’t easy, especially if it isn’t in your skillset, but this tool eliminates the need for design with its industry-based template library. Post email creation, you can run A/B tests with the email and landing pages on the tool, and set autoresponder emails to keep your leads engaged.

4. InfusionSoft

The actual billing/payment step is critical in the lead conversion cycle. If your leads face issues during payment, there are high chances of losing those conversions.

A good sales automation tool like InfusionSoft can help you ensure performance without hitches in the final stages of conversion.

On the tool, you can create and automate contact management, follow-ups, and billing and payment communication. You can also capture new leads and have them run through your created shopping experience.

5. Socedo

Social networks are also busy with people who are ready to buy from you right now, but finding those people can be tricky, given that most social platforms (apart from LinkedIn) don’t exactly support lead prospecting.

A good prospecting tool like Socedo can assist you with social lead generation.

Using the tool, you can identify prospect leads based on their ‘social intent data’, which is essential an understanding of their intent derived from their actions and behavior on social networks. You can also contact these prospects via Direct Messages on Twitter.

When the world seems to be moving towards humanized marketing, it is understandable that some brands are apprehensive of relying on automation. What those brands overlook is the prevailing competition that exists in today’s market and how surviving without automation can not only be hard but limiting.

Another key difference is that between solely relying on automation and using it as a tool to enable one-on-one communication. Some outreach cannot be manually managed and needs to be automated.

This isn’t channel-specific. Brands are automating email newsletters, social media posting and purchase related communication to ensure efficiency and a hundred percent response rate.

Without automation you risk missing emails, responding too late or messing with brand consistency.

So, automation is a necessity, but the messages that you create and set on automatic mode are under your control, and so are the responses that you can write to people who personally interact with your brand.

Another advantage of automation is that it lessens the manual burden, leaving you enough time to deal with more important issues – like guiding your team, creating strategy, and one-on-one interactions with customers.

Regardless, automation is key in lead conversion, because it ensures a near hundred percent outreach rate and improved results.

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About the Author

Disha Dinesh is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration.

Content marketing is the basis of an Inbound Marketing strategy and is one of the key determinants of your overall marketing success. But we do not do content marketing in B2B as we do in B2C. Here are some thoughts to tailor its content marketing.

DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

To be able to adapt its content marketing, it is necessary to define precisely its target and very well know it to create the appropriate content. You must establish the typical profile of your average buyer. In B2C, the buyer is often motivated by a personal desire, without really external constraints. In B2B, your buyer persona is often at the heart of complex purchasing processes during which several players in the company intervene. Nevertheless, this person is the one who will make the decision to use your services.

Depending on the composition of your offer, it can be the purchasing manager, the sales manager, the person responsible for the renewal of the computer equipment, or the CEO. Put yourself in that person’s place to understand his state of mind. What are her desires for her business and for herself? The psychological dimension is important, this person will try to do the maximum for his company, but will also try to turn to the solution that will value it most individually.

KNOW THE PURE PURPOSE OF YOUR CONTENT MARKETING

In B2B, you most often create content to acquire traffic on your website and then convert those visits. You inform your buyer persona, in order to generate leads that you will try to transform into customers, mostly following the principles of Inbound Marketing. Your content must, therefore, be varied, and take into account the different stages of your prospect’s customer journey.

In B2C, content marketing is meant to build where to feed your brand image, as well as to promote your products more directly.

SHOW THE ADDED VALUE OF YOUR PRODUCT

In the case of B2B, this step is important but it will come in the second time. First, you must inform your audience about the best practices to have in order to make the right choice, the right questions to ask, in order to allow him to situate himself. You will show the added value of your product once you have leads, so visitors have already shown some interest in your offer. You will explain how this will help the company to perform.

In B2C, it is again a matter of satisfying a personal requirement. The information is therefore focused on the pure promotion of the product itself, and have an immediate sales target.

CONTENT MARKETING: IN PRACTICE, WHAT DOES IT GIVE?

After thinking about the angle to take to adapt your content marketing, you are ready to get started. You will set up an editorial calendar to put your content online at the right time, and broadcast channels to use. For the latter, the main difference is that B2B will use more professional broadcasting channels, such as blogging, for example, whereas B2C will be able to use conventional mass media (TV advertising, posting, etc.). The use of social networks is also different, the B2B being mainly present on LinkedIn whereas the B2C will instead bet on Facebook or Instagram. Twitter can be used for B2B like B2C.

In B2C, you have to create your content in order to focus on promotional messages, often playing on emotion. Engagement with the customer is also one of the keys. Its development can go through online contests for example. The goal is to create a community by enhancing your brand image. In B2B, the content to be created often results from the exploitation of specific elements. Here are some examples of elements to use to create quality B2B content:

• Questions asked directly by customers (also valid for B2C)
• Topics of emails received from customers for keywords to use
• Updates of legislation in the field of business
• Case studies and testimonials from satisfied customers
• The practical advice of all kinds for the use of the product/service that the company sells

Knowing how to adapt your content marketing is an important foundation for establishing an inbound marketing strategy.

Money motivates people. Not a big surprise, right? Though it’s not the singular reason folks wake up in the morning, compensation enriches employee engagement, especially in the staffing industry. Firms that boast competitive base salaries and frequent commission payouts give their team a regular reminder of their value. With staffing growing into a $146.6 billion market according to SIA, only premium compensation packages will attract new and retain existing top billers.

Through experience, I’ve found there is no perfect catch-all comp model. What works like gangbusters for some staffing organizations sputters out for others. Nonetheless, there are several sales compensation best practices that act as a sort of North Star, helping staffing firm owners maneuver toward a sustainable plan.

Pick the Right Economic Model

Financial performance is dependent on the strength of your economic model. The right type of model works out a balance between revenue, gross profit, and the operating overhead. If it’s a three-legged race, every factor is moving in unison toward a common goal. Recruiters and salespeople, with limited pressure from management, produce the most desirable outcomes when the right model is in place.

What is the prime comp rate? On average, 30% to 35% of the company’s gross margin is allocated to the total sales and recruiting expenses in an effective economic model. Each model depends on the importance of targeted profit margins compared against the direct costs and operating overhead.

Also, staffing firms should run the gross margin percentage numbers on each employee to determine the right economic model. How much of a recruiter’s gross margin production goes toward their total sales package? If the percentages overshoot or fall short of the 30% to 35% target, revision needs to be made quickly.

The long and short: Get granular with economic models to find a blend of revenue, gross profit, and overhead goals that satisfy growth. Use gross margin targets to drive sales and recruiting compensation.

Single Out the Best KPIs

Good sales compensation plans are mindful of a firm’s measures for success. Staffing KPIs determine whether individual outputs are above or below expectations and to what extent commission and bonuses should be given. Often, compensation divides into base salary and commission earned from closing deals – a limited criteria that indirectly neglects other KPIs. In fact, strong compensation plans find a way to further incentivize successful IT staffing professionals without going overboard.

On the other hand, compensation plans built around a surplus of KPIs overcomplicate the administration process and dilute engagement in those drivers. KPIs stacked to the sky may surpass the competition in design and complexity, but will fail to get attention and any effective buy-in from recruiters.

So, how many KPIs should shape sales compensation plans? I find that sweet spot to be between three and five drivers. As always, less is more. Evaluate the included performance indicators based on sales activities with the greatest ROIs, those needing greater incentives, and those requiring the most intense focus.

Again, it’s important to clarify to sales and recruiting teams that their performance in these areas have a positive impact upon their compensation. So whether it’s ambitious account acquisition and new staffing lead generation or fill rates and submittal-to-hires, there needs to be clear communication about how their actions pay off.

The long and short: Reduce principal KPIs to those eliciting the best sales and recruiting results. Expand compensation and commission to reward employees for hitting those exact benchmarks.

Pay Commission Bimonthly

Think of your favorite loyalty program. Maybe it’s Starbucks or American Express. Regardless of brand, the rewards are structured so positive reinforcement is prompt. Programs taking too long to pay off fail to condition customers to buy at the desired frequency. When working to motivate sales and recruiting teams, the same mentality generates more frequent success.

What’s the best payment cadence? Staffing firms see different results, but commission disbursement is a stronger trigger when payments are made on a bimonthly basis. That way, the actions that resulted in fulfillment of certain KPIs are front-of-mind and become habit.

In a perfect world, that’s a great strategy, but what about the X factor that has the potential to rock the commission cadence boat: client payment schedules. Just about every staffing firm has dealt with the true variability of outstanding invoices (probably to the point that some accounts receivable folks feel like bookies). Instead of putting commission installments on hold, an option is to draw against expected commission. Though unearned commission due to falloffs or the like needs to be repaid, recruiters will nonetheless feel motivated because they have the immediate reinforcement of getting paid sooner.

The long and short: Compensate employees promptly, even if that involves using a draw as good faith.

Adjust the Plan Annually

Even if you put the most strategic, most well-received comp plan into action, it is only temporary. Market demand, team size, gross profit margin targets, operating overhead, and a range of other factors change in the blink of an eye. Competitive compensation plans evolve alongside the ebb and flow of the staffing industry.

How often should compensation plans be updated? Every 12 to 24 months at minimum and look at the following considerations:

• Review industry trends – How is compensation changing in the market? Evaluate whether recent staffing industry trends influence compensation for your staffing firm. Use the SIA Internal Employee Compensation Estimator to measure trends across years of industry experience, staffing segments, and company size. A view of larger trends helps close in on competitive compensation.
• Evaluate growth targets – You know your target revenue. Which metrics will get help cross the finish line? A successful staffing firm is not going to have static KPIs. As objectives change and new recruiters and salespeople join the team, KPI priorities will reshuffle. Regular comp plan reassessment maintains the right benchmarks to ensure employee motivation remains strong.

The long and short: Audit your compensation plan every 12 to 24 months. Revise it to fit industry trends and internal growth benchmarks. Be sure to dig deep.

Exploring the Right Sales Compensation Best Practices for You

In the end, famed psychologist B.F. Skinner was right: “the way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.” Staffing firms that make informed decisions about their economic plan, KPIs, payment frequency, and flexibility have a more lasting influence upon their sales and recruiting team. It all sparks ground floor changes that have the most sustainable impact on staffing firm growth.

Increase your gross margin

By Kevin O’Brient and Tom Kosnik