Amazon's new Video Skill API for Alexa makes developing apps that control your TV easier than ever. It's launching in June 2017, and developers that submit an app by the end of the month get a free Echo speaker.

The post Alexa will soon be able to control more of your TVs, apps, and set-top boxes appeared first on Digital Trends.

When it comes to social media strategies, publicly traded companies are in a tricky spot. Unlike smaller start-ups, these companies are established and have an adequate marketing budget to allow them to experiment with new concepts and platforms in the hopes of progressing on a quarterly basis. When an emerging company hits a social media home run it is celebrated because it is unexpected.

But when a major, well-established corporation distributes strong social content, it isn’t as lauded because it is expected. These kinds of companies are up against a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” mindset. But even though the expectations are incredibly high, many organizations are rising to the challenge.

The Times are A-Changin’

Five years ago social media was primarily a branch within marketing departments. Sure, organizations paid attention to Facebook and Twitter, but these platforms weren’t necessarily driving their overall strategy. Today, every brand marketer understands that performance across social media can be the determining factor between failure and success. As a result, social budgets, and teams, have grown exponentially. As each platform constantly works towards new iterations and features, major brands are constantly working to stay abreast of the latest social media updates and trends.

The average person spends 76 minutes each day on social media. More specifically, individuals spend 35 minutes on Facebook, 25 minutes on Snapchat, 15 minutes on Instagram, and 1 minute on Twitter.  And it’s not as if users set aside dedicated time each day to log into their social accounts; they’re constantly checking their feeds, sending snaps, and multi-tasking with social media. Staying up to date on their friends and family is never far from anyone’s minds. Knowing that users across demographics devote such a significant chunk of time each day to surveying their social feeds, brands are creating content to cut through the noise of each platform and speak to their target customers where they already live: on social platforms.

Over time, brands have gotten smarter and savvier at mastering social media content creation and deployment strategies. They know that organic reach on platforms like Facebook has dropped due to increased competition, and more have become adept at using platform analytics to make more informed decisions about future content.

Here are the 10 publicly traded companies that have excelled in the social media arena over the past year

1. Starbucks

Starbucks is a brand that knows its strength. Its products are so ingrained in the lifestyles of consumers across the world, that some of its best content comes from simply celebrating the drinks that have made it famous, like the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Posts announcing the arrival of both almond milk and it’s seasonally famous latte dominated on Facebook and Instagram.

2. Taco Bell

A subsidiary of Yum Brands!, Taco Bell inarguably steals the show from it’s fast-food relatives. Taco Bell was one of the early brand pioneers on Snapchat, realizing that creating playful content could forge daily connections with Millennials and Gen Z-ers. Taco Bell is still creating some of the best branded Snaps. In fact, it’s 2016 Cinco de Mayo filter was viewed over 224 million times.

3. GE

On the surface GE doesn’t seem like an organization ripe for social success. But over the years it has used social media as a vehicle for getting people interested in science. This past year, the company created content specifically for Snapchat, Facebook Live and Instagram Stories as it documented the live eruption of a Nicaraguan volcano.

4. AmEx

In an effort to connect with Millennials, American Express launched a social-first Everyday Congrats campaign that featured Tina Fey congratulating people on achieving lifestyle milestones.

5. Disney

Thanks to the live action remake of Beauty & the Beast, Disney has already enjoyed gigantic box office returns this year. But the company didn’t just bank on the power of nostalgia to drive viewers to the theater. Instead, they launched a massive social campaign across platforms that sparked over 987,000 conversations. This has caused consumers to think Disney as their go to brand for high price events like birthdays, graduations and weddings.

6. Chevrolet

Social media was designed to be a two-way street, yet so often, brands simply talk at users. Chevrolet decided to highlight users’ own social posts by giving users overall positivity scores. Powered in tandem with Watson’s IBM, the campaign gave audiences a new way to get involved in brand initiatives.

7. Lowes

Lowes knows that, alone, paint and plywood don’t make for the most exciting Instagram and Snapchat content. But put into use for a fun DIY project, and that paint and plywood can create a social media frenzy. Their 360 degree Facebook video series Made in a Minute shows followers easy homemade projects and attracts the views of up to 5.7 million people.

8. Target

To celebrate the launch of a new children’s clothing line, Target enlisted the help of some of its most influential friends. Leveraging the power of six Instagram influencers, Target was able to reach 2.63 million people in the first two weeks of the campaign.

9. Ford

Rather than simply using social media as a promotional tool, Ford has found a way to incorporate it into their product. The automotive company recently released a new patent for a vehicle patent system that allows drivers and passengers to find the best angles and shots while on the road.

10. FedEx

The FedEx social team has long believed in the power of story. They know that their organization is responsible for transporting treasured items across the globe every day, and subsequently, bringing people happiness. Their content is focused on these unique stories to put a human touch on the brand.

The post 10 Publicly Traded Companies That Hit A Home Run With Their Social Media Strategy in 2017 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If you are an American scientist, student, teacher, or business person working on climate change solutions, France would love for you to stay awhile.

Following President Trump's June 2 decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement — a multi-country pact that acknowledges global warming poses serious threats to humanity and the environment — the French government has created an outlet for people from all countries who still want to fight climate change.

The website is called Make Our Planet Great Again.

Researchers, teachers, and students can apply for a four-year grant that allows them to continue their studies or instruction, fully financed. The site also provides information on how to move to France by obtaining a work visa and residency permit.

The website explains: “You will be able to stay in France at least for the duration of the grant, and longer if you are granted a permanent position. There is no restriction on your husband / wife working in France. If you have children, note that French public schools are free, and the tuition fees of universities and 'grandes écoles' are very low compared to the American system.”

Businesspeople and heads of NGOs can also apply to receive funding from the federal government, which issues grants to organizations it considers deserving.

Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election May 7. Since his victory, a video his campaign posted in February has been making the rounds on American social media. The Facebook video was addressed to American climate scientists who feel alienated by the Trump administration. Looking straight into the camera, speaking English, Macron tells American "researchers, entrepreneurs, [and] engineers working on climate change" that they have a home in his country.

"I do know how your new president now has decided to jeopardize your budget, your initiatives, and he is extremely skeptical about climate change," he said. "I have no doubt about climate change."

Macron went on to promise robust funding for climate initiatives. In Europe, as a general rule, climate change is less of a political issue, with few major political parties arguing against established science.

Macron's opponent in the second round of the election, the far-right candidate Marinne Le Pen, was a bit of an exception to this rule. Le Pen opposed various environmental initiatives and did not acknowledge outright that humans are the primary cause of climate change.

Macron defeated Le Pen 66% to 34%.

You can watch Marcon's appeal to American scientists below.

Rafi Letzter contributed to an earlier version of this article.

SEE ALSO: The EPA just kicked half the scientists off a key board — and may replace them with fossil fuel industry insiders

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just hit record lows — here's what would happen if all the ice melted

Why use an editor at all? Many of you might ask this question every day. After all, there are about a million apps and plug-ins that help you to write. Some of them can even help you dumb down your writing to the 6th grade level so that 12-year-olds can comprehend your words. But is that really your audience? Twelve-year-olds?

Editors Are Old-School, But Then Again, No

After all, isn’t having an editor a bit old-fashioned? Like using an old-school typewriter? Well, no, not really. You see, an editor can make your work flow, especially a great editor who can do a structural edit. A structural edit looks at the big picture–see Robert Doran’s article So What Is a Structural Edit Exactly?

Get in the Flow

Speaking of flow, a good editor can help the sentences flow from one paragraph to the next. If the style changes, if the verbs and nouns disagree or even fight each other (a terrible sight!), an editor can help.

They Know More Words Than You

Not only that, but they know what parts of speech those words belong in. Sheesh, does that even make sense? I might have to stop and ask an editor!

They Are Not Afeared of Semicolons

Or colons. And when to use an ellipses (…). And what an em dash is! Who the heck knows what an em dash is?! Seriously. Who does? By the way, here’s a snazzy article about punctuation, from the Living Oxford Dictionary. (I particularly like their explanation of the Oxford comma.)

Contrary to Popular Belief, They’re Not Meanies

Now, some people are clearly too sensitive to work with an editor. And I remember back in the day when my words were me. Do you know what I mean? But now they’re just words–doing their own thing. It’s the thoughts behind the words that really matter.

They Are Actually Nice

We all know that mean people suck (a bumpersticker that no editor would ever put on her Honda Civic, by the way), but editors are not people who suck. They are kind 97% of the time. The other 3% of the editors are suffering from psychological damage.

They Help Your Writing Soar

If you’re a perfectionist, then you are ripe for an editor. Because an editor can make your writing soar. And not in a Red Bull gives you wings kind of way, either.

Photo by luca.sartoni

They Can Remove All the Weird Bits

Everyone has a few things they always do. We all kinda sorta make mistakes that can make our writing less than good. But with the digital equivalent of the red pen, an editor can get rid of those. In other words, a good editor won’t let you embarrass yourself.

Make Your Writing More Concise, Editors Can

If you have the tendency to write like Yoda speaks, as do I sometimes, an editor help you can. By the way, if you don’t have the skill of writing like Yoda, you can use the Yoda Translator. And you write yourself into a grammatical corner if also assist you an editor can. Did you see what I did there?

Photo by luca.sartoni

Your Writing Might Not Be As Good As You Think It is

Or maybe it is! But only an editor will tell you the truth. By the way, here’s an article about how to write a headline that people will want to click.

Editors Need Love, Too

If you don’t own a mug that says Have You Hugged An Editor Today?, then you might want to think about getting one.

Photo by -closed- look 4 /MyVisualPoetry

Do You Love Editors?

Tell me about your love in the comments! And thank you!

Generating Leads Through Social Media (5 Little-Known Tactics)

Generating leads through social media can seem impossible.

The truth is, social media can be a great source for lead generation, as well as for nurturing leads and turning them into customers.

In this blog post, I want to share with you 5 ways that you can be generating leads through social media.

1. Hold a Contest on Social Media

One of the best ways for generating leads through social media is to give people a good incentive to get them to provide their email; and what better incentive is there than a prize?

However, if you want to generate good leads, and not just people who want to win your prize, with no interest whatsoever in what you sell, then you need to give away something that is directly related to your business – or, the best option is to give away one of your own products or services.

You might not get as many people interested and participating than you would with a prize that appeals to a large audience, but the leads who do sign up will be of a much higher quality.

If they are participating in order to win one of your products or services, that shows that they have a need or interest for that product or service – they might not get it for free if they don’t win the contest, but you might be able to sell it to them later on.

Facebook is probably one of the best platforms for holding contests; you can easily create one by using a tool. For example, you can use something like Agorapulse to create a quiz, a photo contest, a sweepstakes, a fan vote contest or a fun personality test with prizes.

Another useful tool for creating social media contests is Woobox, which you can use to create quizzes, sweepstakes, photo and video contests and much more.

2. Use Monitoring to Discover Potential Leads

By thoroughly monitoring different social platforms, you can generate more qualified leads that are on the lookout for products or services just like the ones you’re selling.

That is why you should set up a few monitoring searches to help you uncover some leads that would otherwise be lost to your competitors:

• Monitor your brand name: not everyone will use your social handle when mentioning your business, so it’s best to monitor your brand name and check it consistently. It could be a customer service issue or it could be a lead – a lead that wouldn’t get on your radar unless you were listening.
• Monitor relevant keywords for people searching for similar products/services: think of what keywords people would use when searching for products or services like yours and set up a search for them. When you use a dedicated monitoring tool (such as Brand24 or Brandwatch), you’ll have access to all kinds of filtering options, so that you can get more relevant results.

• Monitor your competitors’ social handle: by monitoring your competitors on social media, you could find potential angry customers that you can reach out to, or you could find people interested in their products and services – then, you can jump in to show why you are the better option.

3. Monitor Locations and Use Geo-Targeting to Find Leads

If you operate in certain areas only, you can discover potential leads by monitoring social media activity in that location only.

You can do this on several social networks, such as Twitter and Instagram; to start you off, think of the keywords your ideal leads would use on social media and then select the location you want.

There are several tools that can do this, such as the aforementioned Agorapulse (for Instagram, Twitter) and Brandwatch.

4. Connect Your Social Media with Your CRM and Email Leads

Generating leads through social media isn’t always easy, but this one is pretty straight forward.

Social media is a great tool for nurturing leads and building trust. It allows you to engage with your leads and to build a stronger relationship – one that helps move leads along the sales funnel and get them to buy and one that gets your leads to think about you.

If you have a list of leads – for example, your email subscribers list – connect it with your social media profile. Then, start following these leads and engaging with them – it will help bring you back on their radar and furthermore, it will help build a relationship between you, too.

Engage with them as often as possible, share and retweet their updates, leave comments and likes and so on – the more you engage with them, the better.

Then, whenever you get a new lead, connect with them via social media if they have an account. This will help speed up the entire process and get them to trust you faster.

5. Hold Twitter Chats and Google Hangouts to Generate Leads

Twitter Chats, Google Hangouts and other similar services offer a great way to connect with your audience on a deeper level, demonstrate your expertise and your knowledge, as well as to generate leads.

While one is by video and the other by text (or rather, tweets), the principle behind them is the same: hold a discussion surrounding a particular subject, chosen by you, and connect directly with your audience.

The Hangout/Chat/etc. can be about your business – or, rather, one of your products or services – which will attract a smaller, but much more targeted audience, or it can be about a more general subject, such as a discussion about recent news in your particular industry, which would have a broader audience.

Once the Hangout or Chat is finished, you can direct the audience towards your gated content or directly to your landing page.

Plus, by sharing (and showing) your expertise and knowledge, you can find potential leads in your audience.

Once the event is over, you can then continue reaching out to them via social media (or other contact information, if you can get it) with the purpose of moving them through the sales funnel.

Conclusion

Social media started out as a fad and grew into a tool for improving brand awareness and engagement; now though, it’s so much more than that.

It’s become one of the top sources of referral traffic, as well as a great source for generating leads.

And it makes sense; after all, everyone is using social media – young, old, wherever there is access to the Internet, people are on some sort of social network.

Not to mention, an increasing number of people is using social media to find and research businesses, which is why businesses need to be constantly listening and monitoring social media for opportunities.

What are some of the ways you’re generating leads through social media?

We just finished our second Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. Eight teams presented their Lessons Learned presentations.

Hacking for Defense is a battle-tested problem-solving methodology that runs at Silicon Valley speed. It combines the same Lean Startup Methodology used by the National Science Foundation to commercialize science, with the rapid problem sourcing and curation methodology developed on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq by Colonel Pete Newell and the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force.

Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class
Our primary goal was to teach students entrepreneurship while they engaged in a national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or Americorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community or other government agencies.

Our second goal was to teach our sponsors (the innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC)) that there is a methodology that can help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving asymmetric threats. That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions.

Finally, we also wanted to show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.

The Class
Here’s a brief description of the Lean Methodology our students used:

If you can’t see the video click here

Our mantra to the students was that we wanted them to learn about “Deployment not Demos.” Our observation is that the DOD has more technology demos than they need, but often lack deep problem understanding.  Our goal was to have the students first deeply understand their sponsors problem – before they started building solutions. As you can imagine with a roomful of technologists this was tough. Further we wanted the students to understand all parts of the mission model canvas, not just the beneficiaries and the value proposition. We wanted them to learn what it takes to get their product/service deployed to the field, not give yet another demo to a general. This meant that the minimal viable products the students built were focused on maximizing their learning of what to build, not just building prototypes.

(Our sponsors did remind us, that at times getting a solution deployed meant that someone did have to see a demo!)

The Hacking for Defense class was designed as “fundamental research” to be shared broadly and the results are not subject to restriction for proprietary or national security reasons. In the 10 weeks the students have, Hacking for Defense hardware and software prototypes don’t advance beyond a Technology Readiness Level 4 and remain outside the scope of US export control regulations and restrictions on foreign national participation.

Results

• Eight teams spoke to over 800 beneficiaries, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc.
• Seven out of the eight teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor really wasn’t the problem. Their sponsors agreed.
• Received from a problem sponsor mid-live stream broadcast “we are working funding for this team now.”
• Over half the student teams have decided to continue working on national security projects after this class.

This is the End
Each of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem and then gave an 8-minute presentation of their Lessons Learned over the 10-weeks. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.

The teams presented in front of several hundred people in person and online.

21^st Century Frogman

If you can’t see the video click here

 

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their slides right below this video.

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VA Companion

If you can’t see the video click here

 

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their  slides right below this video

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Austra Lumina

If you can’t see the video click here

 

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their  slides right below this video

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Xplomo

If you can’t see the video click here

 

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their slides right below this video

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Seacurity

If you can’t see the video click here

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their slides right below this video

If you can’t see the video slides click here

 

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Surgency

If you can’t see the video click here

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their slides right below this video

If you can’t see the slides click here

 

 

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Broadcom

If you can’t see the video click here

 

The video of the team presenting is below.  You can see all their slides right below this video

If you can’t see the slides click here

 

If you can’t see the presentation slides click here

The Innovation Insurgency Spreads
Hacking for Defense is now offered at eight universities in addition to Stanford – Georgetown,  University of Pittsburgh, Boise State, UC San Diego, James Madison University, University of Southern Mississippi, and later this year University of Southern California and Columbia University. We established Hacking for Defense.org a non-profit, to train educators and to provide a single point of contact for connecting the DOD/IC sponsor problems to these universities.

The Department of Defense has expanded their use of Hacking for Defense to include a classified version, and corporate partners are expanding their efforts to support the course and to create their own internal Hacking for Defense courses.

Another surprise was how applicable the “Hacking for X…” methodology is for other problems. Working with the State Department we offered a Hacking for Diplomacy class at Stanford.

Both the Defense and Diplomacy classes created lots of interest from organizations that have realized that this “Hacking for X…” problem-solving methodology is equally applicable to solving public safety, energy, policy, community and social issues internationally and within our own communities. This fall a series of new “Hacking for X…” classes will address these deserving communities. These include:

• Hacking for Impact (helping NGO’s and Nonprofits) at Berkeley
• Hacking for Energy at Columbia
• Hacking for Urban Resilience (Cities) at Stanford
• Hacking for Journalism at Stanford

If you’re interested in learning how to apply a “Hacking for X…” class in your workplace or school we’ve partnered with the 1776 incubator in Washington DC to offer a 2-day “Hacking for X…” certification course 26-27 July for those interested in learning how. Sign up here.

It Takes a Village
While I authored this blog post, these classes are a team project. The teaching team consisted of:

• Joe Felter a retired Army Special Forces Colonel with research and teaching appointments at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Hoover Institution, and the dept. of Management Science and Engineering. Joe is the incoming Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia.
• Pete Newell is a retired Army Colonel currently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the National Defense University’s Center for Technology and National Security Policy and CEO of BMNT Partners.
• Steve Weinstein a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies.  Steve is CEO of MovieLabs the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios.

Our teaching assistants were all prior students: Issac Matthews our lead TA, and Melisa Tokmak, Jared Dunnmon, and Darren Hau.

We were lucky to get a team of 25 mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) who selflessly volunteered their time to help coach the teams. Thanks to the team Lean Startup mentors: Paul Dawes, Tom Bedecarre, Kevin Ray, Craig Seidel, Daniel Bardenstein, Roi Chobadi, Donna Slade, and Rafi Holtzman and other advisors; Lisa Wallace, Peter Higgins, Steve Hong, Robert Medve.

We were privileged to have the support of an extraordinary all volunteer team of professional senior military officers representing all branches of service attending fellowship programs at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). These included: Colonel Lincoln Bonner (US Air Force), Colonel Curtis Burns (US Army), Captain Kurt Clark (US Coast Guard), Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Helphinstine (US Air Force), Colonel Seth Krummrich (US Army)), Commander Leo Leos (US Navy), Lieutenant Colonel Eric Reid (US Marine Corps), Colonel Mike Turley (US Army), and Colonel Dave Zinn US Army.  Additional volunteers from the active duty military providing support to our teams included  Lieutenant Colonel Donny Haseltine (US Marine Corps), Captain Jason Rathje (US Air Force), Major Dave Ahern US Army) and, Major Kevin Mott (US Army).

And finally a special thanks to our course advisor Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense and Professor Emeritus, and Tom Byers, Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP.

Workplace productivity is highly desirable. Yet, for most of us it’s elusive.

The ongoing goal of most business men and women is to achieve a high degree of productivity, but many find the road to productivity frustratingly tractionless.

Fortunately, there are many changes you can make to your lifestyle and business strategy to help you be more productive. Many of these changes require significant alterations to your schedule or lifestyle. But don’t let that frighten you! Because many changes come with very simple steps that are easy to carry out.

Want to reach your goal of increased productivity? Keep reading…

How to Increase Productivity and Grow Your Business with 10 Simple Hacks

1. Silence Your Phone

Turning off your alerts is the single best thing you can do to increase your productivity. Distractions come in many shapes and sizes, but most come through your smartphone. Shutting off that noise and focusing solely on the job at hand is the first step in increasing productivity.

2. Take a Break

Putting one’s nose to the grindstone for too long invariably leads to getting burned out. Work for 90 minutes, then take short breaks.

“If we work at high intensity for more than 90 minutes, we begin to draw on these emergency reserves to keep us going. Effectively, that means we move from parasympathetic to sympathetic arousal — a physiological state more commonly known as “fight or flight.”

Tony Schwartz for Huffington Post

3. Do Your Worst!

That pile of work sitting on your desk is even more daunting when you have one particular task you are really dreading. Begin by doing your least favorite task first. Get it out of the way early so it’s not looming over your workday. You’ll also have the added benefit of not being drained by the time you get to it. Once it’s done, your other work will seem a breeze in comparison.

4. Follow the “Two Minute Rule”

If a task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it immediately. Don’t let these easy tasks clog up your desk and weigh you down. Besides, knocking out a task quickly gives you a great boost to push you through the rest of your duties!

5. Deter Yourself from taking rabbit trails

Make the urge to slack off easier to ignore. Hide the remote somewhere you’ll have to work to get it: upstairs, under the dirty clothes, behind the couch. If you don’t need the internet for the work you’re doing, you can even unplug the wifi or turn off your phone if the urge to wile away an hour or two on social media or Netflix is too strong.

6. Exercise in the Morning

Start your day off right! Rather than making you feel tired, exercising in the morning actually energizes you for your day. Plus, beginning your workday with a workout already under your belt will help you feel productive.

7. Drink Water

If you exercise in the morning, you’ll need to hydrate. Also, drinking a lot of water throughout the day gives you more energy and keeps you healthy. Besides, bathroom breaks are a great excuse to get up and walk around!

8. Quiet Your Perfectionist

Be reasonable. Do what you can do based on your skillset and the time allotted, then stop.

9. Declutter

A cluttered and messy workspace is a stressful environment to work in.

Clean those coffee cups and pieces of scratch paper off your desk and see how it affects your mindset and motivation.

It’s bound to increase your productivity.

10. Stay Positive!

Being negative is unconducive to getting work done. Keeping a good outlook spurs your productivity, and will keep you mentally healthy and happy. Even when things aren’t going as well as you’d wish, seek out those silver linings.

CONCLUSION

Get the most out of the above productivity hacks by taking on one new behavior change at a time. Once you master one, move to the next.

One of the hardest things about getting a great foothold in your niche is by getting ahead of the competition. If you can beat your competition, you can dominate your niche and greatly boost your revenues.

However, competition can be extremely difficult, and most business owners often wish their competition never existed. Obviously, that’s understandable. With less competition, they have the whole market for themselves and they can be assured of business success.

Surprisingly, however, while that’s understandable, it’s actually not the best for your startup. In fact, in order to get your startup to pivot faster towards success, you really need to have a good level of competition.

Today, we’ll show you the five reasons competition will lead your startup to greater success.

Competition stops complacency

Complacency can be a difficult to overcome, especially when success is achieved early on in a startup’s life. Complacency comes around when you find something that works and stick with it.

This means you can double down and be sure of the successful products or services. You know your customers are there and soon you adopt a “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” attitude.

This is not good for your business, your customers or yourself. This type of complacency is the cause of death of so many businesses, including the brick and mortar and taxi industries, thanks to eCommerce and Uber.

With great competition, however, you are pushed out of your comfort zone and forced to look more close at your products or services, your business structure, marketing, customer service and more.

When you are on your toes, you become a better business and your startup will succeed more quickly.

Competition spurs innovation

Being on your toes doesn’t just help you fix the broken parts of your business, product or service, etc. It can also help you to find newer and better ways to deliver those goods and services.

With the right amount of competition, you are forced to provide your customers with something better than what your competitors are offering.

This could be in the actual product or service. But it could also be in the delivery, the marketing, customer interaction or many other parts.

Innovation is the lifeblood of successful businesses, and it’s the reason Airbnb and Apple are such huge successes. If those companies had no competition, they would have much less innovation.

Competition allows you to avoid mistakes

Another great thing that competition allows is for your startup to avoid the mistakes of your forebears. Essentially, your competitors will be trying many different tactics and strategies in order to boost their success.

These may very well be strategies and tactics that you would have ended up using as well on your startup journey. However, by studying your competition, you will see which things worked for them and use that.

And, very importantly, you will see what didn’t work at all and avoid those. That means you are saving yourself the headaches associated with the bad or untimely strategies that could have deeply or irreparably impacted your startup.

And now you can skip right over those mistakes, thanks to your competition.

Competition lets you know you’re on the right path

How do you know your business idea will be a success? How can you really be sure that this path that your startup is on is not only good for your business, but also something that people really want?

One simple answer: competition.

If your market is void of any serious competition (with such a competitive, globalized world we’re living in), then that could mean something is wrong.

This wrong thing could be that the niche is extremely difficult to find customers for. Or it could be that the products are too expensive and that the profit margins are impractically low. Or it could be for any other number of reasons.

However, if you have a healthy dose of competition, the opposite is probably true.

There are lots of customers, the products have great profit margins, and more importantly, there’s lots of room for newcomers.

This helps to let you know that you are in fact on the right path and, with the right business strategy, your startup has a good chance of success.

Competition forces you in your customer’s shoes

Perhaps related to complacency, competition will force you to think about how your customer experiences your products or services.

This is because you are constantly on the lookout for advances that your competition is making. If you want to hold onto your market share or increase it, you will need to stay a few steps ahead of your competition.

This means that you will have to understand the areas your customers love about your business model, and the areas that need work.

This could be in your pricing strategy, your customer service personalization, customer acquisition and retention, marketing, and of course your products.

Instead of looking only at your profits, competition will force you to consider what’s best for the customers, which will eventually be best for your business.

Competition doesn’t have to be a death knell for your business. In fact, it is one of the causes for why your startup will survive in the first place.

With greater innovation, perspective, strategy, focus, and the right amount of competition, your startup will surely be a success in no time.

Long-distance train travel is a great way to see the natural beauty of a country.

Naturally, taking a train doesn't have to break the bank. But for anyone interested in splurging on comfort for trips that can last a week or more, there are several ways to ride in style.

Scroll down to see the most luxurious train options out there:

SEE ALSO: 15 of the coolest customized Teslas we've seen

South America: Belmond Andean Explorer

The Belmond Andean Explorer offers sweeping views of the Peruvian Andes with stops in Cusco, Puno, and Arequipa. The train is South America's very first luxury sleeper train and comes with a library car and piano bar car.

The price of a one-night itinerary in a double room is $480, according to Travel + Leisure. More specific pricing information is available upon request.

Africa: Rovos Rail

The Rovos Rail has been selling tickets for nearly three decades and offers a variety of trips to places like Cape Town, Victoria Falls, and Durban. Guests can enjoy Champagne and lobster tail in the luxury train, which offers Royal Suites that come with a tub and shower. 

The price of a room starts at $1,475 per person.

London to Venice: Venice Simplon-Orient-Express

The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is one of the most iconic luxury trains in the world. It features Art Deco interiors, plush fabric, crystal glassware, and a champagne bar.

It's best known for its classic route from London to Venice, with a stop in Paris. But you can also opt for a journey from Paris to Istanbul or from Istanbul to Venice. Tickets start at roughly $2,500 per person.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Influencer marketing is a type of “sponsored content.” There should always be a value exchange between the marketer, the influencer and the customer if you want the content to be received favorably. The key to success is ensuring alignment between your brand, the influencer, the influencers audience, and your target audience.

Sponsored content works particularly well when supporting top of the funnel goals and net new lead acquisition. It isn’t, however, good at cutting through the noise, appealing to users who don’t want to see branded content or getting passed ad block. That’s where “sponsoring” content through influencers works so well. Sponsored content through influencers is unique in the way it maximizes the long tail impact of content, in a recent study we uncovered there was actually 2x the amount of impressions post campaign (when using sponsored influencer-generated content). The same study further proved a massive return on investment of influencer-generated content.

What is the Facebook Branded Content Tool?

If there is an exchange of value between a brand and an influencer, the influencer must use the Branded Content Tool to publish the resulting sponsored content. The Branded Content Tool is only available on Pages, not profiles, so you must have a Page to publish sponsored content. When you use the Branded Content Tool, you will be prompted to tag the sponsoring brand in the post. Once you publish your post using the tool, the word “Paid” will appear next to the post date. It looks like this:

How do I use the Branded Content Tool?

Simply follow the instructions on the Facebook Help Center here. It’s easy!

What if I wasn’t paid in cash, but instead I received a free product or a trip?

Any kind of value exchange between an influencer and a brand must be disclosed using the Branded Content Tool. Sponsored content requires that you adhere to some important guidelines and policies issued by both the Federal Trade Commission and the individual social networks. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you navigate those policies so you don’t lose any velocity on your valuable influencer content creation.

If you haven’t already checked out our FTC Success Kit. It’s a great collection of resources that will help you ensure your sponsored content is compliant with the guidelines of the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC guidelines are not the only regulations influencers and marketers need to adhere to when it comes to creating sponsored content. Facebook just launched its updated Branded Content Tool and associated policies that help influencers disclose their relationships with brands. This simple set of FAQ will help you better understand how to use the Branded Content Tool so you can continue creating great authentic content without worry!

Does using the Branded Content Tool mean I don’t have to include an FTC disclosure like #ad or #sponsored?

No. Facebook has stated that the Branded Content Tool should be used alongside any other regulated disclosures. I actually reached out to the FTC directly to get clarity on this topic. Because the Paid symbol may not be “clear and conspicuous,” which is a key tenet of ensuring your content is FTC compliant, and tagging a brand does not always indicate a sponsored relationship, the FTC recommends that an additional disclosure like #ad or #sponsored be used alongside the Branded Content Tool.

I hope this was helpful! Happy creating.

I get the feeling that many small business owners consider marketing as nothing more than a tactical endeavor, completely lacking in any semblance of strategic thought.

Sun Tzu, perhaps the greatest strategist ever, was a Chinese general and philosopher who lived somewhere around 500BC. His teachings are documented in The Art Of War, a book summarizing his philosophy on managing conflicts, wining battles, and beating the enemy.

While originally a military text, The Art Of War became rather fashionable in sporting and (especially) business circles. Back in the 80s, in the days of Big Hair, power suits and Filofaxes, every self-respecting yuppie had a copy of The Art Of War strategically placed on their business bookshelf. Even if they hadn’t actually read past page three.

Sun got the point of strategy. He understood the importance of the destination over the journey. He knew that tactics, while clearly important, were pretty much useless without a defined strategy. Perhaps the most famous quote from The Art Of War is “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Yet here were are, two thousand years on, with businesses concluding the reason their sales suck is because their don’t have a chatbot on their Facebook page.

Confusing Marketing “Strategy” With Marketing “Tactics”

Let’s take a step back and look at the difference between strategy and tactics. In marketing terms, strategy is defining the space where the business decides to engage, and how it plans to win in the market. Tactics, in contrast, are the tools and executions deployed in order to deliver on that strategy,

In Sun Tzu’s day strategy meant first looking at the battlefield in great detail, evaluating the enemy’s forces, strengths/weaknesses, and capabilities. Then it was a question of deciding where and when to attack, and what military units would be deployed. Once the strategy was defined, the generals would give their orders to the appropriate regiments, battalions, or squadrons. The leaders of these troops would focus on the tactics that would deliver on their stated objectives.

At its most basic, business marketing follows a similar set of operations. The first stage to define is a map of the particular market, identify the players in that market, and categorize it into clear segments based on discovery, research, and analysis. The next step is to decide on which market segments to attack, and work out how to position the brand and value proposition in the most effective way to achieve those aims. The final stage is setting clear and unambiguous strategic goals for each of the defined target segments, outlining the tangible and measurable goals that we’ve defined as ‘success.’

Only once all of the above has been decided and agreed is it time to look at the tactical execution of that plan. Once the target has been defined, we can then decide on what kinds of tools and processes might be deployed to hit that target.

It’s during this last phase where, in the case of many small businesses, things start to go pear-shaped.

Putting Technology Before Purpose

Just as with pretty much most industries you care to mention, the marketing industry has been upended over the past few years from technology. As consumers continue to adopt and integrate new – often digital – channels in their buying decisions, a raft of martech rises to better leverage these new marketing opportunities.

And that’s half the problem.

The 2017 version of the Marketing Technology Landscape was published recently, outlining the various tools, platforms, and services available to today’s well-tooled digital marketing professional. The number of digital marketing solutions has grown to 5,381 – that’s up 40% in just one year.

Martech Technology Landscape 2017 ©Scott Brinker, chiefmartech.com

‘Realtime’ this. ‘A/B testing’ that. The sheer volume and immediacy of data has exacerbated the problem, making marketers and businesses focus on interpreting numbers without a clue as to what those numbers actually mean, or which numbers are actually useful to plot a path to success.

The inevitable result is a plethora of number-crunching, dashboard-tweaking ‘data scientists’. Under-trained, overly-tactical mathematicians more interested in pivot-tables or impressive-looking PDF reports than whether the mode of execution bears any relevance to the desired strategic goal. The don’t know whether to fire an arrow, torpedo, or nuke since they haven’t got a clue where, who, or what they’re supposed to be attacking.

Tactics Without Strategy

We constantly get inquiries from business owners looking for “our best price” for the latest-and-greatest marketing tactic that’s managed to secure enough backlinks and column inches to make it to Page 1 of a Google search. When we try to inquire the strategy these tools are meant to deliver on, we inevitably get blank expressions – or outright derision from suggesting such heresy. Implementing tactics is the easy bit. What’s harder is finding out what you don’t know.

It’s not about social media, virtual reality, 3D printing, or anything else. None of these tools have a Hell’s chance in working if you don’t know what result you’re trying to achieve. When you’ve got 5,381 hammers, everything ends up looking like a nail.

Anthony Iannarino wrote a post, Why C Level Executives Should Take More Meetings With Sales People. Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking, we tend to complete each other’s sentences (which makes for odd conversations). While I get Anthony’s point in the post, there’s an unfortunate reality.

Most of the time, sales people waste the executive’s time. Survey data shows customer complaints:

• They don’t understand my business.
• They don’t talk about what I want to talk about.
• They don’t know their products (even though that’s what they want to talk about).
• …….., They waste my time.

My personal experience aligns with this. As a “C-Level” executive (albeit for a very small company), I get dozens of calls a week. When I can, I answer every one, unfortunately, this is what happens:

“Can I speak to the person responsible for [Insert whatever you want] decisions?” They are just calling a list, they have no idea where they are calling other than a number on their call list. What value are they going to create for me.

I get a lot calling for me directly. Recently, I’ve gotten inundated with follow up from exhibitors at a conference I attended ( I was actually a speaker–in and out pretty quickly). These calls begin with, “I’d like to follow up with your visit to us at XYZ conference…” Well, I may have walked by their booth. I actually didn’t stop by to visit any.

I respond, “I was just there as a speaker, I didn’t visit your booth.” They say, “Well, we think your company might get a lot of value from our product…” My response is, “Do you know what my company does? Do you know what I do?” Ironically, much of the them of this conference was “customer intelligence.” You can guess what their responses are.

Like many of you, I download lots of white papers. Yes, I get the calls within a minute or so. No one ever asks me about the white paper–inevitably, I haven’t had a chance to read it in the seconds since the download, or why I was interested in it. Most of the time, “I’d like to tell you about our company…”

Reflecting back on the dozens of calls I’ve answered in the past 30 days, none of them have talked about anything I’ve been interested in. None of them really knew about me or my company or what I might be interested in.

Anthony’s right, C-Level execs, or any customer for that matter, are hungry to learn and improve. They want new perspectives, they want different points of view (OK, not all of them), they want to learn.

But why don’t they take sales people’s calls?

It really is our fault. 1000’s of blog posts, hundreds of books, every keynote speaker, every training program tell us what customers are interested in and how to get them to respond.

But why do we so consistently fail to do this? Why do we ignore what customers are telling us, what research supports?

Well, it takes work…..

We have to learn who our target customers are and how we help them achieve their goals and dreams. We have to engage them with insight, helping them learn, helping them discover. But all the data shows that when we do this, customers welcome us.

Ironically, not doing this takes work as well. We make dozens of calls, send hundreds to thousands of emails. We invest hours of our time doing the wrong work, doing the things that customers have told us they don’t care about.

Imagine what would happen if you started changing how you work? Imagine if you focused your work on what customers care about, what change might that drive?

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

If you follow this blog you know that I do not understand or stand with those who say sales is not a numbers game.  While I agree that the focus should always be about quality over quantity, the reality is that no matter the quality of your prospects, you will need a given (minimum) quantity of quality sales in order to meet, or better yet, exceed quota.  Now, unless you are one of a privileged few, there is no getting away from the fact that your quota is a number!  You’re going to have to deal with, and use numbers to meet or exceed that all important number.

Numbers = Accountability

I find it amusing that many of the pundits who insist that sales is not a numbers game, will drone on for hours about conversion and conversion rate.  They are absolutely right, without those ‘numbers’ (conversion rates) it is not only hard to plan, but know where you are, so you can refine your plan and execute.  This may explain why so many sales people fail to achieve quota.

Knowing your key conversion numbers gives you the power to take charge of your success and be accountable for your results.

Can’t Measure Everything – But You Should Measure Some

Part of the problem is the lack of imagination displayed by many managers, sales leaders and enablement types.  They use numbers as a weapon, and each time they are at a loss to explain why things are the way they are, they add another measure to the mix, leading to their people working the numbers rather than the sale.  The fix is in focusing on key numbers that help one plan an improvement plan that will the rep execute and win sales, not just hot arbitrary and meaningless numbers.

What to Measure

I find four numbers give you the opportunity to continuously leverage them to improve your sales approach and execution, and by extension your success.

1. Deal size
2. Proposal to Close
3. Discovery to Proposal
4. Initial meeting (live or virtual) to Discovery

To change any of the above, you will need to develop a strategy for change and improvement.  As you implement the plan, you will be able to measure and review, and make changes based on the results.  Numbers 1 & 4, will require you to change your territory and account planning, while challenging who you prospect and how.  Number 3 & 4, forces you to examine and how well you can engage and help the client articulate how you can help and deliver value, and maintain focus, if not urgency.

These are tip of the iceberg things, the devil is in the detail, and the execution.  We plug these into a proprietary tool that helps our clients develop improvement plans for their reps, based on real world inputs.  This in turn allows them to plan specific improvement plans for individual reps, while still supporting a standard sales process.  And what makes it work are the numbers.

Failing to focus on numbers in sales, always results in the number on your commission check decline or dwindle; but you don’t care cause sales is not a numbers game, and neither is your mortgage, right?

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

Join Now!

The post Why You Want Sales To Be A Numbers Game appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Finding the right salesperson is like catching a butterfly.

But the butterfly can talk.

And it probably has work experience and people skills.

And it should know how to dress well.

And it has good body language.

And it would freak a lot of people out if it could fly.

Well, I got a lot less mileage out of the butterfly analogy than I thought I would, but there’s one key similarity between finding a butterfly and a great salesperson. Both can be really hard.

Hiring an exceptional salesperson is a tricky process. There’s no universal blueprint that lays out every step to do it successfully. It takes a lot of finesse and good judgment — with some pure luck peppered in every now and then. That being said, there are certainly some steps you can take to set yourself in the right direction.

In this article, I’ll outline what you should do to put yourself in the best position to find and hire a great salesperson.

1. Set terms for your ideal candidate.

When you’re hiring salespeople, you’re going to wade through a lot of applicants. And I’m not using the term “a lot” lightly.

According to the Jobvite 2019 Recruiting Benchmark Report, individual job requisitions in financial services received an average of 32 applicants each, while listings in information technology received 39.

And those figures may be considerably lower than what you could expect from your business. Run a quick search for “entry-level sales positions” in your area on LinkedIn. There’s a good chance you’ll find several listings with well over 100 applicants.

My point is, when hiring salespeople, you may have to wade through an ocean of resumes, so it’s important to know what you’re looking for.

Set terms for both your minimum and preferred qualifications for the position you’re trying to fill. Identify the relevant experience, education, and qualifications you’d like out of your ideal applicant. Use those to filter your applicant pool and only engage with prospective employees who are qualified to fulfill the responsibilities of the position.

2. Write a great job ad.

Once you’ve locked down what you want out of your ideal candidate, write a job listing that will resonate with that persona. If you want your job ad to register with the candidates you’re after, there are some things you have to be mindful of.

You need to optimize your job title to suit your target candidates. Try to hit keywords that they may be searching for, like “B2B” or “Entry-Level.” Don’t get carried away, though; you still want your title to be straightforward and convey the nature of the position.

After that, you need to write a company summary with engaging copy. Avoid just copying and pasting some boilerplate overview from your company website. Also, give some insight into what your specific sales team does day-to-day. Describe the company’s perks and benefits package as well.

And set clear, realistic job requirements — enough to register with legitimately qualified candidates without scaring too many off.

Finally, use strong verbs to describe the job’s responsibilities. Using creative yet authoritative language — think “enabling success” as opposed to “overseeing projects” — can excite potential candidates and help motivate them to send an application your way.

3. Pick the right candidates for interviews.

Take notice of the most personal applications you receive. If you’ve asked for a cover letter, take the time to make sure it’s not just some generic document that an applicant has been blanket-sending to every post they see on LinkedIn.

You want candidates that want you back. A personal, compelling cover letter can tell you a lot about how much this opportunity means to an applicant. If they put in the time to write a thoughtful cover letter and tailor their resume to suit your job description, they probably took the chance to work for you seriously.

Once you’ve identified the best applicants, start running phone screens. Call your candidates and see if their previous experience is legitimate, if they took the time to learn about your company, and how quickly they can think when put on the spot.

After using your phone screens to narrow down your applicant pool, you may want to conduct remote interviews. These should be slightly more intensive phone screens, and generally, you’ll use them to identify the applicants you feel are best fit for in-person interviews.

4. Pay special attention to candidates who reach out before the interview.

Touching base with an interviewer before speaking with them in-person is usually a sign that a candidate is putting extensive effort into preparing for their interview. It’s also a great way for them to demonstrate the confidence and thoroughness they can bring to the table.

Reaching out to an interviewer before an interview is inherently imposing. Candidates are often put off by the prospect of coming off too pushy or saying the wrong thing. And, honestly, that could very well happen. There’s a real possibility that their effort to reach out could come off as hollow or unproductive.

But, if they ask the right questions — like if there are specific materials you’d like them to prepare, what the name of everyone their meeting with is, or what the appropriate dress code is — they’re showing that they’re diligent and self-assured enough to do their homework and power through uncomfortable situations.

5. Ask thoughtful questions during your interviews.

You need to get a feel for who these candidates are beyond their resumes. When conducting an interview, you don’t want to just mull through technical questions without challenging candidates to demonstrate how they think outside of a conventionally professional context.

That process can mean asking good interview questions like, “Tell me about a time you screwed up,” or, “If I were to poll everyone you've worked with, what percentage would not be a fan of yours?”

You want them to reflect on things that they can’t necessarily brag about. That will give you a feel for how they’ll function as both an individual employee and a part of your team. Remember, hiring a salesperson with excellent qualifications who won’t fit your company culture or team dynamic may be more trouble than it’s worth.

6. Make sure they ask thoughtful questions as well.

Asking thoughtful questions is a great way for an applicant to demonstrate critical thinking skills and a genuine interest in your company. By asking great questions, a candidate is demonstrating a willingness to try and understand your business. They’re also showing that they know how to ask for help when they get stuck.

A candidate that asks specific, meaningful questions that extend beyond facts anyone can find on your website often ends up being a sharp, dedicated salesperson.

7. Be thorough and transparent when describing what you need.

Let your candidate know exactly what they can expect from this role. You want them to understand what they’re getting into — for both their sake and yours. If you hire someone who doesn’t have a great grasp on what they’re getting into, there’s a chance they may only stick around for a few months.

Tell them about what the role entails. Tell them about what could be hard about it. Tell them about some pitfalls they might hit, and gauge their response. You don’t have to be ominous and imposing about it; you just have to be honest.

Unless you’re hiring someone for a contract position, you’re looking for a salesperson who’s in it for the long haul. You can’t know if a candidate is cut out for a position if they don’t know what that position really is.

8. Follow up with promising candidates quickly.

If a candidate nailed an interview, let them know right away. Reach out and keep them engaged and interested in your company and the role itself. Let them know that they impressed you and give some information on next steps.

A great sales candidate can be a hot commodity. If a candidate you’re interested in is interviewing for multiple positions at other companies, you want to stay on their mind as much as possible. Getting in touch and scheduling next steps is a great way to do that.

Once you’ve arranged next steps — which often means more interviews — keep repeating most of the process outlined above. You might want to bring in additional interviewers, arrange scenario-based interviews, have candidates give presentations, or make them do anything else to demonstrate their practical understanding of sales.

Like I said, there’s no definitive step-by-step outline of the sales hiring process, but following the steps above should set you on the right course.

How to Find a Great Salesperson

We looked to the president of The Virtual CRO Casey Murray for a few tips on what to do when you do find that perfect salesperson and added a few of our own.

1. Connect with candidates before the interviews.

A candidate reaching out to an interviewer before the scheduled interview shows a high level of confidence. If they ask whether there’s anything specific they should prepare — and go even further by presenting a few topics they hope to discuss — they’re definitely above average.

Set aside a half hour per week to respond to candidate questions via email and LinkedIn. Time is valuable, so keep it brief, warm, and on topic. A little extra effort goes a long way to show candidates that you care and are excited to meet them during the interview. Even if you don’t select the candidates, they’ll exit the process with a good feeling about your company’s brand based on your thoughtful action.

2. Encourage thoughtful follow up questions.

The quality of a salesperson’s questions during the interviews is a clear indicator of their ability to succeed. A good question goes beyond facts the candidate could have easily learned by looking at your company website or LinkedIn page. It delves into what’s needed to do well in this role.

As the interviewer, you can keep the good questions coming by encouraging the candidate to ask more of them during the interview. Share information about significant topics such as your compensation structure, growth opportunities, or quotas. These hot-button points should pique the interest of a great salesperson and encourage them to seek more specific insight into those areas of the role.

Here are some examples of thoughtful follow up questions a great salesperson might ask:

• What is the revenue for this territory for the last three years? Why did the last person leave this territory?
• Who is the number one competitor that you lose to, and what is being done to address any gaps?
• How long is the average sales cycle? What is the current renewal rate? How many customers have multi-year contracts?
• Do you pay salespeople commission on support renewals?
• What is the sales manager’s style?
• What is the most money a salesperson has earned on your team?
• What is your average close rate? What is the average follow-on revenue for install accounts?
• When you lose a deal, why do you lose?
• What is the barrier to entry for another company to offer a similar solution to yours?
• What mechanisms are in place to protect the Intellectual property of this company (patents, trademarks, etc.)?
• What did the highest-paid rep earn last year? How much did their quota increase this year?

Prepare specific answers to these questions ahead of time. Not only does preparation show the candidate that your company values these topics enough to keep track of the data, they give the candidate plenty of information to make a decision about whether the role will be a good fit for them.

3. See how the candidates respond to your lead generation strategy.

Salespeople have one main goal – to close business. In order to do that, they need a pipeline of leads. Whether your team is responsible for prospecting their own leads or your marketing team does the heavy lifting for them, a good salesperson should respond with questions about your lead generation strategy.

Good candidates might ask questions like “What is the average close rate on those leads?” or “Where do your sales reps have the most success prospecting? Online, in person, at events?” And an even more advanced candidate may ask about marketing vs. sales qualified leads and what activities work best to bring in more warm and qualified leads. These questions show that your sales candidate can think critically about business processes to help reach their goals.

4. Gauge their curiosity.

It’s a positive sign if the candidate asks a question that relates to any information they just learned. This shows they’ll be engaged and curious during meetings with prospects. An example would be: “You mentioned that the company recently hired a bunch of support engineers. Has there been an uptick in support tickets?”

As the interviewer, you may not think twice about mentioning the new hires in the engineering department. You’ve likely been briefed on why there was a need for growth at a company meeting. However, a curious candidate for a sales position might want to know why that team grew. An increase in support tickets could indicate an obstacle to overcome during the sale while new product features the engineers might build mean new offerings to share with a potential customer.

5. Pay attention to detailed remarks about the company.

A good candidate has done more than just look at your LinkedIn profile. They have done things like:

• Researched people at the company in the position they’re applying for
• Read online reviews of the company on Glassdoor
• Looked up reviews from Gartner or Forrester to see where your solution rates

Exceptional candidates will also research aspects of the business like its financial health, any debt it may have, and any planned discussion of future fundraising or IPOs.

Pay attention to questions like these. They signal that the candidate has a long-term interest in the company’s success, not just their own achievements.

6. Invite cross-functional teammates into the interview process.

Good candidates treat HR and administrative staff as a vital part of the interview experience. They recognize that how well they approach the processes of setting up meetings, exchanging emails, returning phone calls, sharing documents, and coordinating onsite visits demonstrates the kind of employee and coworker they may be down the line.

While HR and admin staff are usually required in the interview process, consider adding marketing or customer service team members to the interviews, too. Great salespeople know how to cultivate positive working relationships with both groups. This type of interview will show you which candidate can become a champion of your customer’s experience across all three functions.

7. Watch for body language cues.

Body language drives a lot of our non-verbal communication. While interviews can be tense for any candidate, a poised disposition is imperative in a great salesperson. Meeting new clients, especially those from high-profile accounts, requires a salesperson with a demeanor that is calm and welcoming.

Look for candidates who appear confident, maintain an upright posture, and make eye contact. Other nonverbal cues that are just as important as body language include tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures.

8. Play conversational tennis.

Good interviewees understand the cadence of the conversation and know when to cut answers short and when to re-engage the interviewer with a question. These discussions should not be one-sided. A candidate who can read you well will also read your customers well and recognize when to speak and when to listen.

Do your part as the interviewer by asking direct questions, refraining from rambling, and offering concise responses to candidate questions. Brevity encourages the conversational tennis effect to flourish during the interview, allowing the candidate to feel at ease and shine!

9. Be open to new ideas.

Great candidates have strong opinions and are willing to share their views. A candidate once shared with me how much value he saw in the Challenger Sales method and asked if I was familiar with the concept. He attributed this book to his early sales success.

Although the Challenger Sales method wasn’t something my team used regularly, I enjoyed hearing about this candidate's experience with it. If offered the opportunity, the team would have embraced his work style and encouraged him to work in a way that made sense for him.

10. Listen for non-work accomplishments.

Did they complete a 5k? Or receive a certification in a welding class? Whatever it may be, drive and motivation are two traits that usually appear in a person’s personal life as well as their work life. 

Great salespeople have accomplishments outside of work that demonstrate the same soft skills they use to succeed at work. Asking a candidate to share their greatest accomplishment gives you a window into how they plan, research, and execute their long-term goals. A balance of personal and work accomplishments can also be a good sign that this candidate has experimented with methods to prevent burnout and manage stress in a healthy way.

11. Negotiate more than money.

There’s a common misconception that salespeople are only concerned with one thing – commission. That’s simply not true. Plenty of professions are not paid by commission and are motivated by benefits other than money. Great salespeople are no different. Listen for benefits that are important to your candidate and take note of these for the negotiation stage of the process.

Are they in school for a higher degree? Perhaps they’re growing their family? Work within the limits of your benefits package to highlight some perks that go beyond your compensation structure. Professional development stipends and flexible PTO are some examples of benefits your company may already have that can excite a great salesperson who is looking for more than commission in their next gig.

12. Prepare to answer uncomfortable questions.

Showing the courage to ask a hard question demonstrates high confidence and foreshadows how the rep will represent the company in the field. A good sales candidate will ask some hard-hitting questions and they’ll expect thoughtful answers in return.

Be prepared to answer uncomfortable questions like why your last rep chose a different path or what struggles the team is facing. No company or role is perfect, but painting the most realistic portrait of working with your team will be appreciated by any great salesperson. Plus, it’s ultimately up to the candidate to make the best decision using all the information at their disposal.

Find Your Next Great Salesperson

If a candidate possesses eight to 10 of these characteristics, you’re on the right path to hiring them. And if you’re a salesperson applying for a job, you may want to use these interview tactics to get the role.

Finding and hiring the right salesperson is a delicate art, and there’s no definitive blueprint to it. Still, with these tips in mind, you’ll be in a position to bring in qualified candidates and identify which one will be the best for your business.

People and companies go to great lengths to be valued by Google. Can you blame them, though? Studies show that ranking first in Google will net you 33 percent of the traffic for a given keyword. After that, it drops to 18 percent for the second ranking.

But if you’re thinking about finding ways to work around Google’s ever-complex algorithm, think again. Google spends a lot of time and money to make sure their rankings are fair and to ensure an optimal experience for their billions of customers.

When companies try to find loopholes in Google’s algorithm, they suffer the consequences. Digital Third Coast has analyzed some notable companies that have tried to cheat Google’s system, and the repercussions that followed.

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When companies try to find loopholes in Google’s algorithm, they suffer the consequences.
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Big Brands’ SEO Missteps

Back in 2007, The Washington Post was caught committing a major faux pas in the SEO world: selling links. Google punished the organization by making their PageRank (PR) value drop from PR7 to PR5. It’s hard to say exactly how long the penalty lasted, but the PR may have been restored after a few months. If this same penalty were to be levied today, it could result in a loss of more than 75 million visitors over two months.

WordPress committed a significant violation, too. In 2005, they created Doorway Pages. Google penalized WordPress by not letting their home domain rank for brand-name searches, and their PR was lowered to zero for two days. If this were to happen to WordPress today, they would lose over 10 million visitors over those two days.

Cheat Google, and You’ll Pay the Price

Unnatural (or artificial) links are also not taken lightly. Google defines link schemes or unnatural links as:

Media giant BBC made this mistake in 2013, having unnatural links on one of their pages. It’s not known how long their penalty lasted, but Google degraded that single page’s ranking. Even if the penalty lasted for just one day, they could have lost more than three million visitors.

BMW once tried to manipulate search results to become the top result for the “used cars” keyword, redirecting users to a regular BMW company page. This violation, known as “cloaking,” was committed by BMW in 2006, and their site was removed from search results for three days. If this same three-day penalty were in effect today, it could result in a loss of more than 70,000 visitors.

Mozilla committed a crime that any average Joe in the SEO world knows to avoid when they allowed spam on their site. In 2011, one Mozilla page had more than 10MB of spam spread across 21,000 different user comments. Google degraded that page’s ranking, and while the duration of the penalty is unknown, if it had been for just one day, it could have resulted in a loss of 1.25 million visitors.

In 2013, Genius (formerly known as “Rap Genius”) was found pursuing and accepting unnatural links, asking bloggers to link to lyrics in return for Genius tweeting out posts from those bloggers. Google reduced their PR score and restricted them from ranking for their own name for 10 days. In today’s world, no traffic for 10 days would equate to losses of up to four million visitors.

eBay has also been penalized in early 2014, but the exact reason remains unknown. All we know is that they suffered an unspecified drop in ranking after committing a manual penalty.

Overstock.com tried to manipulate Google’s algorithm by offering schools discounts in return for links back to their website. This violation of paid links, which occurred in 2011, resulted in their PR score being reduced. They also didn’t rank for their own name for a whopping two months after the infraction. This would result in up to 12 million users lost in traffic if the penalty were to happen today.

JC Penney made a similar mistake in 2011. They were caught in a paid-links predicament as well, but claimed to be unaware of black-hat SEO tactics, and subsequently fired their SEO firm. Similar to Overstock.com, JC Penney had many pages degraded from their first-page rank for two months, resulting in a loss of traffic equal to 12 million visitors.

In early 2012, The Home Depot made the mistake of asking providers to share a link to one of their pages, including anchor text that they said didn’t need to be visible. By asking for these hidden links, many of their pages were removed from their first page rankings for two months. If this same penalty were to happen to The Home Depot today, it would result in a loss of well over 35 million visitors.

Even Google Isn’t Immune

And then there’s Chrome. Yes, Google penalized Google for breaking the rules! No favorites are played in the game of Google’s algorithm. Back in 2012, Chrome bought links as part of a video campaign to promote their browser. Chrome claimed it was an accident, but they were penalized nonetheless. The rankings for the Google Chrome home page were lowered for two months.

Google AdWords was penalized as well. Some of their support pages were “inadvertently showing different content to the Google crawler than to users,” a Google spokesperson said—another case of cloaking, this time by Google itself. When this happened in 2010, their PR was degraded for an unknown period of time.

Trying to cheat Google’s algorithm only leads down a slippery slope. Companies are willing to spend millions of dollars to keep up with the best of them in Google’s rankings, but the safest way to do this is to play by the rules.

Google’s number one priority is to give users the best experience possible. SEO professionals are hired to work within guidelines Google has provided to improve and maintain their clients’ rankings. Following these guidelines, and not cutting corners, is imperative for success.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

As marketers, we all try our best to stay on top of the social media trends and changes to ensure we are doing what we can to keep our businesses relevant in the appropriate channels. For some, Facebook makes the most sense. For others, it’s Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. The options continue to grow and the channels continue to change. LinkedIn and LinkedIn changes are a bit unique in that it’s a channel for the brand of your business as well as the leading channel for your personal, professional brand.

There are plenty of examples in the LinkedIn news feed that it’s becoming watered down with “Facebook like” political posts and personal opinions that have no place on a professional network. We have all been annoyed by the sales pitches, but that’s just proof the recent LinkedIn changes have made it more mainstream. The real value of LinkedIn for you as a marketing executive is for recruiters like me to be able to find you We still use resources like OneSource, an AMA Executive Circle Partner, and Hoover’s, but LinkedIn is by far the preferred recruiter sourcing tool in the industry.

Recruiters spend millions on upgraded subscriptions to LinkedIn, and, according to DMR Research (Digital Marketing Ramblings), 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet and source candidates.

Here’s a little behind the scenes look at recruiting: when a retained search firm takes on a new assignment, the research team will run multiple Boolean searches on all of their databases. Regardless of the database used, LinkedIn will be cross referenced on every viable name sourced. For one search the research team will view approximately 400 candidate profiles.

In order for you as a candidate to improve your chances of being contacted for appropriate opportunities, your LinkedIn profile has to be up to date, and you have to take seriously how your professional brand is being managed on LinkedIn. In my upcoming blog posts, I’ll review how you can stay up-to-date with LinkedIn changes to make sure your profile is top- of-mind for those of us in the recruiting industry. Keeping up with LinkedIn changes will improve your chances of being noticed for appropriate roles.

According to research from Eisenberg Holdings, for every $92 spent on generating traffic only a measly $1 is spent on converting it.

Interestingly, this explains why a lot of “research” on what works in conversion do not have a strong basis and, as a result, cannot be replicated. For example, various researchers have found the “best color” for boosting conversions to be red, blue, orange, green, etc. Why are different researchers getting different results? Perhaps there is another underlying factor most conversion research is ignoring? Thanks to psychology, we have the answer.

In this article, I share four simple hacks — backed by psychology — that will help you get a serious boost in conversions.

#1. The Jam Study: Leverage the “Less is More” Principle to Boost Conversions by up to 10 Times

When trying to boost sales and conversions, may seem like common sense that the more options or choices you give people, the better your conversion rate, right? Not necessarily, according to science. While that rationale makes “common sense,” psychology shows that a lot of human action is not influenced by common sense.

Contrary to logic and common sense, psychology shows that the best way to boost conversions is by significantly reducing people’s options and available choices. Instead of giving people 20 options, give them just three. Of course, the average marketer would advocate giving people more choices — other than it being the “right” thing to do, it also supposedly gives them more avenues to make a decision.

A whole book was dedicated to this particular dilemma. In The Paradox of Choice, American psychologist Barry Schwartz analyzed a lot of research done on the subject of choice and came to the conclusion that giving people more choices not only makes it difficult for them to decide, but it also increases their anxiety and mental anguish.

When trying to boost conversions, give people fewer options. Giving more options can be psychologically paralyzing. A great study that shows just how effective giving people fewer choices can be for boosting conversions is the Jam Study. Conducted by Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in 2000, the study involved two tables of jam in an upscale supermarket. The first table displayed 24 varieties of gourmet jam, while the other table displayed just six varieties of jam. Both tables were then shown to an approximately equal number of people.

Naturally, the table that displayed 24 varieties of jam was more attractive and appealing due to all the choices, but conversions were poor: 145 people stopped by that table, but only 4 people bought. That’s a conversion rate of 2.8 percent. On the contrary, a much smaller 104 people stopped by the table with six varieties of jam, but a whopping 31 people bought. That’s a conversion rate of 29.8 percent. That’s a 10 times increase simply by reducing available options.

While people will be naturally attracted to more options, they are less likely to convert due to choice paralysis.

 

If you’re trying to get more people to sign up for your offer or purchase your products or services, realize that giving them more options isn’t necessarily going to favor you. Reduce your options and watch your sales grow. I use this technique to great effect at Hosting Facts. While we review dozens of hosts, some key sections identify and highlight only the best (usually around 3 – 6). This has been very effective for boosting conversions.

#2. Use Positioning to Make Your Visuals Do Their Magic

One of the most effective ways to boost conversions is by making smart use of visuals. If you’re not fully convinced that an image is worth a thousand words, then you should consider the following statistics:

• While most people will only remember 20 percent of what they read, they are likely to remember 80 percent of what they see.
• Infographics will usually be read 30 times more than text content
• Infographics usually get 832 percent more shares than text content

More likely than not you already use images in your content and copy — if you don’t already, free design resources abound to help you find and tweak images to be used in your web copy. However, there’s a way to make your use of images more effective: positioning. You can tweak your images to direct user attention to your CTA or object you want them to notice. If you’re using someone’s picture, for example, you’ll get the most conversions if the person’s gaze is focused on what you want readers to notice. Your images do not only have to blend with your copy, but they should be positioned in such a way that they direct attention to key elements — such as an important headline, a key CTA, or some other element — that you want readers to notice the most.

Here’s an example:

This isn’t good:

This is better:

#3. The Sensory Adaptation Phenomenon: There’s No Best Color. There’s Only What Stands Out.

In a 2011 article on the effect of color on conversions, Hubspot concluded that the red color beats the green color hands down. Many have since referenced that “study” to “prove” that the red color is the best color for conversions. It’s not that simple, though. Thankfully, even the author of the article admitted that he has heard the colors green, pink, red, orange and light blue said to be the best color for conversions.

Different marketing experts have claimed different colors to be the best — red, blue, green, orange, yellow, just think about it! In fact, the majority of these experts have test results to back up their statements. How can one test say that the color orange is best while another test says that the color blue is? We’ll let psychology come to the rescue:

When it comes to boosting conversions with color and CTA buttons, it is essential to realize something that underlies how we notice things: the sensory adaptation phenomenon. This phenomenon explains why we tend to tune out noise after a while, why we no longer feel our clothes and shoes after we’ve been wearing them for a while and while we often feel as if a chair is an extension of our body once we’ve been sitting on it for long. In essence, the sensory adaptation principle explains that we tend to tune out stimulus after continuous exposure to it for a long time — except when the stimulus changes. In essence, for the red/green color button debate, the page the button was tested on had an overall green color scheme, and using a green button meant that the user has been seeing practically the same color beginning to the end — making it difficult to notice a green CTA. A red button changes things, however, as it is radically different from what has been used on the page and thus attract more attention.

So when trying to boost conversions on your website, stop thinking in terms of what color converts best. There’s no single color with that magical power. Instead, start thinking in terms of “sensory adaptation” — what color stands out most and switches things on the page? This same principle can be generalized to other aspects of the page, not just CTA color. It could apply to font size, images, navigation, or other aspects of your design or content that you want people to notice.

 

Realize this key principle: What blends in gets ignored. What stands out gets noticed.

#4. The Milgram Experiments: Leverage the Authority Effect to Get People to Trust and Obey You

One of the most important psychology hacks you can use to massively boost your conversions is to tap into the power of an authority figure. Exactly how important is an authority? Two key examples demonstrate this:

This first example is one we all can relate to. It is the example of Oprah Winfrey and her endorsement of the T-FAL ActiFry. It was just another product Winfrey was using, and she made posts on her social media account to tell people how helpful the ActiFry has been for her:

How much impact do you think Winfrey’s endorsement of the ActiFry made? According to various sources, Winfrey’s endorsement of the ActiFry resulted in a share value increase for T-FAL (the company manufacturing the device) worth $150 million dollars. That’s just how important authority endorsement is.

Another example that shows just how powerful authority can be is the Milgram experiments. The experiments, performed in 1973, were conducted by Yale University Psychologist Stanley Milgram. It was designed to test the willingness of people to obey authority even when tasks they are asked to perform involves doing things that conflict with their conscience and personal values.

For the experiments, people were recruited through a newspaper ad and they were asked to administer electric shocks to someone strapped to a chair at the instance of an authority figure in the form of an experimenter. They were then asked to administer electric shocks from a scale of 15 volts to 450 volts; with 15 volts being “mild shock” and 450 volts being “fatal shock.”

Interestingly, Milgram polled forty psychiatrists before conducting the experiment and they predicted that compliance to the end will be 3.73 percent. Quite surprisingly, compliance was 65 percent. More simply put, as many as 65 percent of participants in the experiment were willing to administer a fatal electric shock to someone else at the instance of an authority figure.

These two examples show just how powerful authority can be for boosting conversions. While you’re not necessarily going to strap people to an electric chair and start electrocuting them, and while you don’t necessarily have the same clout as Oprah Winfrey for moving markets with a simple post on social media, the fact remains that you can easily use authority to boost conversions. Here are some tips:

• Have a well-known celebrity endorse you. This can be very powerful if you are able to pull it off. The more relevant the celebrity is to your niche, the better.
• Have an industry thought-leader endorse you. If you can’t get a celebrity to endorse you, getting someone well-respected as an authority figure in your niche to endorse you is the next best thing.
• Get featured in a well-known publication in your industry. You could be interviewed, you could be mentioned or you could be asked to share your opinion about an issue. Any mention can be really good for boosting your conversions.
• Contribute to a well-known publication in your industry. If you can’t get someone to interview or do a story about you on a reputable publication, you can try contributing a guest post. At the end of the day, just being featured on an authoritative publication is enough endorsement on its own.

More importantly, you should make sure to highlight any of the above forms of authority endorsement you are able to get. This could be done by quoting what a celebrity or thought-leader said about you, by adding “As seen on…” logos to a page you want to increase conversions on, or by highlighting the fact that you’ve been endorsed by certain authority figures or publications.

Sales communication is a wide open frontier. There is no surefire solution that solves all of the needs of every organization. While there are generally excepted tenets of any sales communication strategy—and it is accepted that a strategy is necessary for complying with sales enablement best practices—many organizations find themselves implementing a hodgepodge of ideas.

By its nature, sales communication often takes a back seat to other competing concerns. It’s only natural to focus on refining external marketing and sales communications to buyers; ensuring consistent messaging to potential customers is a clear priority. Conversely, the importance of maintaining an open and effective line of communication with Sales is not necessarily something that will be immediately apparent. But a sales communication strategy is like a foundation to a house: only with a well-prepared and informed sales team can the rest of sales and marketing functions be successful.

As previously mentioned though, sales communication takes many different forms, and it can be difficult for large enterprises to determine how their strategy should be designed. As with most cases, every situation will be unique and different organizations will find success with different strategies.

However, SiriusDecisions has pinpointed a few necessary components of a successful sales communication strategy. Their recommendation is that organizations should leverage technological solutions to execute on their strategy. Simply producing one-off announcements through mediums like email simply won’t cut it nowadays. A sophisticated technology solution is the best way to effectively communicate with large sales teams.

The SiriusDecisions report touches on the functions that every organization should be employing when seeking out a solution. Below we’ve highlighted two components in particular that are necessary for any sales communication strategy.

Prioritization and Segmentation

“Time is money” is a saying for a reason. And there’s no profession it applies to more than selling. There are only so many hours in the day and the more time that Sales can focus on closing deals, the better. As such, it’s unlikely that sales reps will be receptive to things that cut into their precious time. Sales communication efforts unfortunately are often categorized as a time leech and quickly brushed to the side.

But, these communications can make the difference between success and failure. Eighty-two percent of decision makers think sales reps are unprepared according to SiriusDecisions. The best way to be prepared is to have a dedicated approach to staying up-to-date on organizational developments and industry-wide changes. This knowledge empowers sellers to properly speak to the needs of buyers and usher them along their journeys.

To help facilitate a higher engagement with sales communications, a technology solution should offer the ability to prioritize and segment these messages, according to SiriusDecision’s report. “Sales enablement must react in a timely manner and assess whether and to whom the information is relevant, as well as the level of urgency.” Sales reps shouldn’t have to wade through a mountain of communications to find information that is relevant to their interests. In fact, if that were the case, engagement among reps would be incredibly low.

A sales communication solution should have the ability to segment the audience based on a wide-array of characteristics. Applying attributes like department, region, job function, and priority to messages will go a long way in ensuring that the right people receive the right messages at the right time. Additionally, prioritization and segmentation allows those creating the communications to optimize their efforts and refine their messaging.

Intuitive and Sleek Design

The hope for any sales communication strategy is to present the information in such a way that sales reps incorporate it into their daily lives; they should want to check for new content. The easiest way to do this is present the communications in an easy-to-digest format that integrates with platforms the reps are already using. The biggest hindrance to adoption of a sales communication strategy is a solution that is not easily accessible nor user-friendly.

Whether you are beginning to implement a new sales communication solution or looking to revamp a current strategy, take the time to study where sales reps are spending the majority of their time and thus most likely to engage with communications.

In a piece on sales communication best practices, SiriusDecision recommends housing a sales communication tool within a sales enablement platform. Both Marketing and Sales will spend a large portion of their time within the sales enablement environment and will be more receptive to communications efforts if they can easily access the information as they go about their daily activities.

An intuitive user interface will also drive higher engagement—and a better-informed sales team in the long run. For example, HPE recently launched a brand new sales communication tool that was specifically designed to integrate characteristics of popular online platforms like Pinterest and Flipboard. This layout allows their team to naturally navigate new communications in a way that they are already accustomed to and more likely to engage with.

A successful sales communication strategy will look different for every organization, but there are components that are necessary for driving engagement. Ensure that your reps are only receiving the communications that matter to them with prioritization and segmentation. Design will also play a major role in the success of a sales communication strategy. Reps are more likely to be receptive to messaging when they can intuitively navigate through a well-designed platform that integrates with a system where they already spend a large portion of their time.

The vast majority of conversation regarding enterprise software is focused on the efforts required to sell it, but there is very little conversation about the effort and art of building software for enterprise buyers. As a product focused company, we agree that great software is bought, not sold, and as a result, we decided to start an open source content project to share the technical requirements for building for the enterprise.

The research discussed in this article uncovers a core set of features that are essential for enterprise adoption. To date, most applications create their own custom implementation of these features and there is rarely a common experience or even consistent language used to describe them. For these reasons, our team at Replicated along with Segment, JasparSoft and several other contributors created EnterpriseReady.io to serve as the guide for SaaS companies to build the features that enterprises require. To do so, we leveraged our relationships with SaaS founders and CIOs and performed a deep study of the leading SaaS products.

EnterpriseReady goes far beyond the standard enterprise security checklist and illustrates how to meet and exceed the expectations of enterprise buyers. It is important to note that simply implementing these features will not instantly create a swell of demand for SaaS applications, but rather provides a clear understanding of the enterprise requirements that will streamline conversations with large potential customers and allow you to price for long term enterprise value.

Why enterprise features?

Before we dive into the actual features, it is important to take a step back and ask why enterprises require different features from small and medium sized companies in the first place. The answer? Risk and scale. By definition enterprise companies have many employees (scale) and significant existing business to protect (risk).

The next logical question we must answer then is why SaaS companies should bend to these often onerous requirements. And that comes down to revenue. Enterprises will pay more for features that allow them to decrease risk and operate at scale. In addition, most of these features are too advanced for small businesses to want or need. As a result, applications are better off maintaining a simplified experience for small businesses and only exposing these features to enterprise customers.

Discovering the common enterprise features

With several years of enterprise software experience and some of the fastest growing SaaS applications as customers, our team at Replicated relied on our expertise to help formulate the initial thesis about what features most enterprises required. Since the Replicated platform currently enables over 40 SaaS companies to deploy and manage on-prem, private instances of their applications to over 500 different enterprise customers, covering deployment options was a given.

Enterprise Deployment Options

Most modern SaaS applications start as multi-tenant, cloud native applications that are built and deployed to servers controlled by the application vendor (generally hosted by an IaaS provider). When these applications start moving up market either through an enterprise sales team or simply by being pulled up market by larger customers, they start to see demands for alternative deployment options. Fortunately, modern development practices have created a generation of applications that are fully automated and increasingly immutable from a deployment perspective. As a result, many applications can easily spin up a new environment (ie staging, dev, QA, etc.,) and manage it with the same automated and reproducible processes that are used for their production instance. This means that most modern SaaS applications are actually “ultra-portable” and can easily make the transition to offering deployment options that meet their end customers’ needs and reduce the friction of a third-party managing a private instance of that application.

Security Requirements

The next most common and obvious features would be requirements that enterprises often communicate in their 3rd party vendor security checklists (like the one produced by the Vendor Security Alliance). From these sources, it is generally apparent that features like overall product security are a critical enterprise feature. Additionally, features such as Single-Sign On (SSO) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) also jump out as standard requirements. Digging deeper, many large enterprises follow best practices for security published by industry groups such as NIST and ISO. ISO-27002 is a dense document that spells out the implementation requirements for enterprise IT teams and is often the underlying guide for their requests. This guide provides detailed expectations for implementing both audit logs and change management procedures.

Business Requirements

To validate the importance of these features as well as uncover new features, the team took a look at the pricing plans of 50 leading SaaS applications. This research instantly surfaced the concept and importance of product assortment or good/better/best packages. Ultimately, the most successful SaaS applications differentiate their pricing plans by including features that appeal to different buyer segments. This enables application developers to capture more value from enterprise buyers who are generally generating more value by using the application for their business. Based on this study, it was also clear that advanced reporting, deep integrations, support/SLA were each important and common differentiating features for enterprise versions.

Since the launch of EnterpriseReady late last year, we’ve seen a tremendous response from SaaS founders, product managers and enterprise IT organizations. As a living document, we encourage the community to open issues and to check out our guide for contributing to the project.

The post The Keys to Building Enterprise Ready SaaS Applications appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Virtually every sales professional who has ever sent emails to any prospects has seen their fair share of messages get stonewalled. Prospects are busy and particular — and exactly none of them want to waste their time on sales emails that don't offer value.

So if you‘re noticing that prospects aren’t giving your emails the time of day, taking a good, hard look at your email strategy is an absolute must — and when you do, you should look out for some key email mistakes that often trip sales professionals up.

Let's take a look at five of the main culprits here.

5 Reasons Prospects Might Be Ignoring Your Emails

1. Your prospect has never heard of your company before.

If your business is completely foreign to your prospect, they’ll automatically be skeptical of your email. They’ve never heard of you or your product, so what are you doing in their inbox? But even if your brand is relatively unknown, you're not totally out of luck.

You might actually have the opportunity to leverage your obscurity to pique a prospect's curiosity — but you can only do that by capturing their attention early. That generally means leading with an interesting or unexpected subject line.

But what makes a subject line intriguing? Well, you really have two main options — you can either be vague or hyper-specific. Here's what those lines might look like:

Vague: “Idea for your team”

Hyper-specific: “How you and [prospect’s coworker] can see [X result]”

If you go vague, you want to avoid being overly sales-y and self-promotional. If you say, “We here at [Your Company] have a great idea for your business,” you undermine your intrigue. Lead with a value proposition, but give them some room to dig deeper.

If you go hyper-specific, do your homework. Scour a prospect‘s LinkedIn, their company’s website, or any other public-facing resources that can cue you into what they do, why they do it, and who they work with.

If you take this route, you‘re trying to demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to understand their needs — that they‘re more than another name on the list. So be sure you don’t phone it in.

2. Your email isn’t relevant.

Brand recognition can definitely help, but it won’t close deals for you — your ability to convey how your product helps the customer solve a problem they're actually dealing with is far more important.

Unless your email talks about an issue the buyer is aware of, they’ll quickly dismiss it as irrelevant and move on with their day. Identifying that problem before the connect call is much easier when they’re an inbound lead. If that's the case, look at the pages on your site they visited, then infer their goals.

If they’re not an inbound lead, browse their company's LinkedIn page, blog, social media accounts, and so on to understand their position in the market, strategy, and offering. What challenges have your similar clients dealt with? Address the most common in your email.

3. They’ve already solved the issue.

Imagine you bought a new dishwasher last week. If you get an email about the latest dishwashers to arrive in stock, are you going to open it? Probably not.

The same effect happens when you reach out to a buyer who recently purchased a product similar to yours. Even if they’re not completely satisfied, they’re likely going to focus on brand-new problems — until their current solution is clearly not working.

You can get around this obstacle in two ways.

First, get to prospects earlier in their buying journey. Stop using the same trigger events as every other salesperson in your space — figure out which (usually smaller) trigger events precede those.

For example, if you currently target companies who just raised a round, start targeting companies who are in the process of getting funding. You’ll be able to build relationships before your prospects are even on your competition’s radar.

Second, play the long game. The buyer might have signed a contract one month ago, but if you can stay in contact with them over the next 10 months, you’ve got a real shot of winning their business. Figure out when they’re up for renewal, and put that date in your CRM. Then periodically check in — ideally, adding value each time.

4. Your email isn’t creative or memorable.

When your prospect is having a long, busy, draining day, it’s not just your email they‘re ignoring. They’re probably not responding to — or even opening — many more.

To cut through the noise, you need to be a little creative. Some reps use funny GIFs or memes to add some personality to their messages. Other salespeople have been successful using prospecting videos.

While these tactics aren’t enough by themselves to earn a response, they can be the tipping point if the buyer is interested but overwhelmed with other work.

5. Your email asks for the wrong thing.

Every sales email should end with a CTA or recap of what will happen next. However, if prospects aren’t responding, it may be because you’re using the wrong CTA or recommended next step.

For example, if you’re hoping to get a buyer on the phone, asking for 30 minutes of their time will seem too much. They’re probably going to say no. But asking for five minutes is dangerous too. Prospects know from experience most “five-minute calls” end up taking at least 15, so you’ll sound disingenuous.

Tailor the size of your request to your stage in the sales process. As the conversation continues, your requests should be increasingly larger.

For example, in your first email, you might ask a simple yes or no question, like “Is this a problem you’re currently focused on at [prospect’s company]?”

Then in an email following up after the demo, you might close with, “Thanks for agreeing to connect me to your manager — I think she’ll be interested in our reporting options. Can you please connect us sometime today or tomorrow?”

As buyers evolve, salespeople have to evolve too. The sales emails you sent two years ago won’t work on your prospects today. Avoid these mistakes to get responses.

For all the advances in technology we’ve witnessed over the last two decades, the business world still runs on email.

You don’t even need to cherry pick the statistics. Email wins across virtually every metric:

• Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. – Monetate
• Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. – McKinsey
• Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources. – QuickSprout
• 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media. – MarketingSherpa
• 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. – Monetate

But like with anything worth doing, effective email marketing requires some persistence and attention to detail. You need to know when and what to send and you have to take advantage of every opportunity.

Today, we’re going to be looking at how to use follow up emails to convert in a variety of scenarios. We’ll be looking at examples and providing templates for the following types of email follow up:

1. Cold sales follow-up
2. Warm sales follow-up
3. Free trial follow-up
4. Lead magnet optin follow-up
5. Product sale follow-up
6. Giveaway entry follow-up
7. Contributor outreach follow-up
8. Promotional outreach follow-up

Let’s get started!

1. The cold sales follow up formula

Cold email outreach is a big part of modern sales, and we’ve covered it fairly extensively on the Close.io blog.

Before we can get to the follow up email, it’s important that our initial email is strong, so we wanted to start by sharing a tried and tested cold sales email template with you.

Subject Line: "Trying to connect"

Hey [first name],

My name is [my name] and I'm with [my company name]. We work with organizations like [company name] to [insert one sentence pitch].

[One sentence unique benefit].

Could you direct me to the right person to talk to about this at [company name] so we can explore if this would be something valuable to incorporate into your events?

Cheers,
[Signature]

(For more cold email templates, click here)

Even the best cold emails rarely hit a 40% response rate, so how do we reach the other 60+%?

We follow up.

 

Many salespeople make the mistake of trying to win over prospects who simply aren’t interested. They will try to get creative with the follow up and reframe their value proposition, but in our experience, that’s a mistake.

We’ve found that the initial email is where the content matters. When it comes to follow up, it’s primarily an issue of timing.

Many recipients will see the original email when they were too busy or distracted to open the email or take action after they’ve opened the email. If they receive your follow up email at a time when they have the mental bandwidth to consciously process and respond to your email, they are likely to respond.

The Close.io follow-up formula

1. Send out first cold email.
2. 1 day later, at a different time of the day: Send out Follow-up 1.
   This email should be a modified version of your original email. It should communicate the same message, just in a different format. For example, if your initial email was several paragraphs long, make this follow-up email just two sentences long. If your initial cold email was just two sentences long, make this email several paragraphs long. Don’t write something completely different. Don’t add attachments.
3. 2 days after your second email: Send out Follow-up 2.
   Don’t even explain anything. Just succinctly restate your call to action. You can ask your prospect to introduce you to the right person in their organization, to schedule a call, or to respond to your email—whatever your desired call to action for your initial cold email was. For example, you could say, “Hey, when would be a good time for you to discuss this on a quick 10-minute call? How about Tuesday or Wednesday 10 a.m. Pacific?”
4. 4 to 5 days after your third email: Send out Follow-up 3.
   The break-up email. It’s an email in which you say goodbye to the prospect, betting on their loss aversion, a psychological principle describing people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.

Since cold emailing is a topic we’ve spent so much time on here at Close.io, we put together an entire book on following up for you, including templates and more.

 2. The warm lead follow up formula

With cold email outreach, there’s a timeline. If you follow our formula, it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, done. You spend a week on a prospect and move on.

With warm leads, it’s a different story. There is no timeline. You continue following up until you get a yes or a hard no.

Our very own Steli Efti says it best:

“I have a simple philosophy: I follow up as many times as necessary until I get a response. I don’t care what the response is as long as I get one. If someone tells me they need another 14 days to get back to me, I will put that in my calendar and ping them again in 14 day

If they tell me they are busy and they don’t have time right now, I will respond and ask them when they feel like a good time would be for me ping them. The key here is to actually keep following up. If someone tells me they are not interested—I leave them alone.

But here is the kicker—if they don’t respond at all, I will keep pinging them until they do. And trust me, they always do. :)”

The two things to keep in mind when following up on warm leads are frequency and relevance. You want to be persistent without being annoying, and you want your emails to be simple yet relevant.

For frequency, here’s what we recommend:

Day 1: First follow-up (+2)

Day 3: Follow-up (+4)

Day 7: Follow-up (+7)

Day 14: Follow-up (+14)

Day 28: Follow-up (+30)

Day 58: Follow-up (+30)

… (from there on once a month).

If you are using Close.io, it’s very easy to set these simple follow up reminders.

The follow up emails themselves don’t need to be complicated. Just keep them simple and relevant.

Example Template #1:

“Hey [first name], how is it going? Can we schedule a time to talk this week?”

Example Template #2:

“Hey [first name], we got some new press coverage [link]. I’d love to pick up on our conversation. When’s a good time to chat?”

Example Template #3:

“Hey [first name], can we hop on a quick call Wednesday 4 p.m. or Thursday 11 a.m.?

Cheers,

Steli

PS: thought you might find this article interesting [link]”

Another great example of a follow up email is John Barrow’s “Did I lose you?” email. You follow up several times with a prospect, and each time you hit reply all to answer. You always keep it in the same email thread. After doing this about six or seven times, you hit reply all, but you change the subject line to “Did I lose you?” and hit send. This will often get prospects who’ve gone dark to respond to you.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. If they aren’t giving you a “no”, there’s a reason. Your job is just to keep putting your business in front of them and reminding them how relevant your offer is to them.

That’s the core of sales follow up. Be willing to persist. If you aren’t convinced, grab your free copy of Steli’s book: The Follow-up Formula: How to Get Everything You Want by Doing What Nobody Else Does

3. How to follow up with free trial signups

The SaaS business model is a bit different than most other business models. Rather than pursuing a one-time sale, your goal is to get users signed up for an ongoing subscription to your software.

Many SaaS businesses offer a free trial to get interested users on their platform and actively using their product. This entails many of the same challenges as selling the product outright, but even when you get the signup, you still have to turn those free trial users into premium customers.

Doing this well requires you to hit a number of key objectives:

1. Get the user into the app
2. Get the user to have an “aha moment”
3. Get the user to sign up for the paid plan (or refrain from cancelling)

Hitting all three of these objectives is not easy to do within a brief free trial window, but it’s essential if you want to maximize your free trial conversion rate.

A great example of this in action comes from Groove, a simple help desk software platform. (They’ve also been documenting the journey of building their startup on their blog, sharing lessons learned along the way. Highly recommended reading!) Groove’s follow-up sequence starts with a welcome email focused on making a connection with the user rather than diving right into the product.

This initial email has also ended up being a significant source of feedback for Groove, which they’ve used to improve the product, the website, marketing campaigns, and the onboarding experience itself.

From that point forward, Groove sends emails based on user behavior. For example, users who have taken the step to create a mailbox on the platform get this email:

While users who haven’t reached that stage would get this email:

Groove’s follow up sequence is composed of six core emails sent out over 14 days. With the above customization, they end up sending 22 different messages. Adding this type of customization improved Groove’s trial-to-customer conversion rate by 10%.

Once the sequence is over, Groove sends out a “win them back” email. Some users opt in for a trial and then it just doesn’t end up being a good time for them to try out a new platform. The goal of this email is to get those users back at a better time where they can actually try out the software.

Groove has tested sending out this email 7, 21, and 90 days after the free trial expires, and the 90 day version has converted best with a 2% customer conversion rate.

A more aggressive example comes from SamCart, a platform for quickly creating high-converting checkout pages. SamCart offers a 21-day trial and sends users a new email EVERY SINGLE DAY of the trial period.

Here’s Day #1:

Notice that SamCart is doing some very important things here:

1. They tell the user exactly what to expect
2. They provide added value in the form of a course
3. Each action they are teaching the user incorporates their software

This is the perfect formula for accomplishing all those objectives we just talked about.

Clear expectations (along with an intuitive UI) will get the user straight into your app. Providing added value will get users feeling really good about your brand AND stir excitement, leading to more app time.

And most importantly, you need to be taking users on a journey that plugs your app straight into their challenges.

SamCart does this by walking users through a simple new feature each day.

They take the user through a journey, from initial checkout page, to upsell...

All the way to split testing checkout pages and other parts of the funnel:

Since SamCart’s free trial automatically converts to a premium account if the user doesn’t cancel, their goal isn’t to convert the user but simply to help them make SamCart a part of their marketing and sales system.

And even if the user doesn't follow along actively, they are being exposed each day to a new benefit of using the product.

4. How to follow up with lead magnet optins

A lead magnet is simply something of value given away in exchange for a website visitor's email address. They go by many different names: content upgrade, opt-in bribe, etc. and often come in the form of free checklists, ebooks, reports or whitepapers.

Lead magnets tend to be educational in nature, and accordingly, the follow up should nearly always be educational in nature.

For businesses with big tickets items to sell and a consistent content marketing strategy, there is really no need to use email marketing for direct sales as part of their normal follow up. These businesses will often use the email list primarily as an audience building asset, allowing them to send 30-40% of their list to new content any time they want.

Popular marketers like Pat Flynn, Brian Dean, and Sujan Patel use this strategy to keep their business on readers’ minds and to drive consistent traffic back to their websites. They will then run dedicated product launches to their email lists 2-4 times a year.

So essentially, their follow up model looks like this depiction of Pat Flynn’s autoresponder sequence:

With this model, the bulk of your follow up strategy is delivering educational content - tips, tricks, how-to’s, guides, case studies, resources - and then every few emails, you attempt to directly engage subscribers by getting them to actually reply to your email.

And as you can see from my inbox, guys like Sujan Patel consistently send out emails focused on education and marketing training, as opposed to attempted sales.

When’s it time to launch a new product, they do a specific, limited-time launch sequence, like this example from Brian Dean:

And then they go back immediately to providing free content and training.

With this content and engagement focused strategy, you can keep your list open and click-through rates incredibly high, allowing you to send large amounts of eyeballs wherever you please. Sujan Patel maintains a 35% open rate and 18% click-through rate, while according to Hubspot, the average open rate in the marketing niche is 25%.

When you get this level of engagement with your emails, your list becomes a true promotion asset, and with high-ticket products to periodically sell, you really don’t even have to sacrifice direct revenue.

At Close.io, we follow this model, sending our best new sales content out to our marketing leads once a week. We also send out a special offer to sign up for a free trial once per month.

If you’re curious about how your own open and click-through rates stack up against your industry, check out these benchmarks from Wordstream.

5. How to retain customers with a strong post-sale follow-up

It costs 5x more to attract a new customer versus keeping an existing one. The sale is just the beginning of the story, especially if you are running a SaaS business or offering some other type of recurring product or service.

What you do after the sale is just as important as what you do before the sale—and will only gain in importance in the coming years.

Every business model demands a slightly different approach, but we’re going to focus on three highly effective strategies for the purpose of this discussion:

1. Onboarding
2. Education
3. Incentives

The Onboarding approach is all about getting users to experience an “aha moment” with your product. This terminology was coined during Facebook’s meteoric rise. They determined that their users’ “aha moment” would come when they added 7 friends in 10 days, and they focused all their energy into making that happen, as Chamath Palihapitya explains in this video:

 The Education approach is all about educating your audience, establishing your brand as an authority and driving regular re-engagement with your website.

Buffer offers a great example of this in action. The start with a great, personable confirmation email:

And then they follow it up with a rock solid content marketing campaign. And by “rock solid”, I mean this thing is thorough. Look at my inbox. This is from just one and a half months.

The emails themselves don’t need to be in-depth. Buffer simply includes the headline, a short description, and a CTA to read more on the blog.

While these sorts of automated campaigns seem to be working for Buffer, we’ve found that custom, text-based emails works significantly better for us here at Close.io.

Not only does this content help Buffer educate their users, but it also establishes them as a major authority on social marketing and sends a flood of new traffic to their site every time a new article is published.

It’s fairly high investment compared to the other strategies, but it also doubles as both a customer retention strategy AND a lead generation strategy, so in the end, it’s a sound investment.

The third strategy is all about incentives. It’s about giving the user monetary reasons to come back.

This could look like daily (or twice daily) coupons, as we see from record breaking lingerie retailer Yandy.

Yandy regularly sends out these emails offering a variety of discounts twice per day. The constant offers keep the brand top-of-mind at all times.

It’s important to note that this type of email follow up strategy fits with Yandy’s branding as a discount fashion retailer and tends to be more effective for ecommerce businesses. As a B2B business, it’s often best to stay away from discounts—they’re an easy way to make some extra sales in the short-term, but can do more harm to your brand in the long term. Plus, if you keep hitting people with discount offers, you can be sure that a lot of prospects will insist on discounts once they talk with a sales rep.

Incentives can also look like a loyalty program, like the following example from New England food chain Boloco. The company uses a points-based loyalty program to provide discounts and rewards to members, sending updates via email and app notifications.

Southwest Airlines does this as well. By offering rewards that accrue with use of your product or service, you can incentivize customers to use your brand on a more consistent basis.

You can follow this up with exclusive discounts and member-only specials:

Another incentive strategy that toes the line between upsell and incentive is paid membership, like you might see from Costco or Amazon Prime. The price can act as a value signal, and it also plays on confirmation bias, encouraging members to purchase more from you, so as not to waste the money they spent on membership.

There are, of course, many other strategies. Customer retention is it’s own topic that deserves your attention, but hopefully these strategies spur some creative ideas for retaining and expanding your customer base.

6. How to follow up with giveaway entrants

As we discussed earlier, lead magnets are a fantastic way to build your email list over time.

But sometimes you want a quick boost. Maybe you have an upcoming product launch, or you are just getting started, and ten new emails per weeks isn’t good enough.

Giveaways can be another way to quickly collect more emails. Keep in mind that the quality of these emails will generally be lower, because the primary motivation of the people who sign up is just to get the free thing you're giving away. This is a big reason you want your giveaway item to be something that's relevant to your ideal customer.

Giveaways allow you to place tangible, irresistible value in front of your target audience without breaking the bank. Imagine if you could offer a physical lead magnet that costs $1,000? Who would say no to that? Giveaways basically allow you to use the appeal of a $1,000 lead magnet while only requiring you to pay for it once (or maybe not at all).

There are a lot of places you can go to learn about giveaways, but very few spend much time talking about the aftermath. Once you have 2,000 new subscribers... what then? How do you follow up with them?

The answers to those questions are insanely important, which is why we are turning to marketer Robbie Richards for an example of how to run a giveaway the right way. On only his first try, Robbie was able to grab 1,171 new email subscribers and turn that into 27 immediate sales.

He selected a SaaS license his audience would love as his giveaway prize and then sent out the following email to his list:

It’s essentially sales pitch, but you aren’t asking for money. You are giving something away for free.

But that’s pretty straight forward. Let’s get to the follow up.

Robbie had a 3-pronged strategy for his follow up campaign pushing the giveaway:

1. Reinforce the value
2. Incentivize sharing
3. Give people a guaranteed way to win

The first two are absolutely essential to running a successful giveaway. You have to have a great prize and be able to sell its value to your audience. And you absolutely need to have incentives in place for sharing.

Let’s look at each one of these elements more closely.

Robbie’s first follow up email was all about reinforcing the value through a personal narrative.

Let’s break this down into a makeshift template you can use.

1. Describe a problem you faced
2. Describe the pain you experienced from that problem
3. Share the solution and how the prize played a big role in that solution
4. Talk about the benefits of the prize
5. Talk about how it feels to have the problem solved
6. CTA

The next email in Robbie’s follow up sequence was focused on incentivizing entrants to share the giveaway with their networks. As I mentioned earlier, this is absolutely mandatory if you want to succeed with your giveaway.

People won’t just share your giveaway on their own. In fact, if you don’t have it set up correctly, it’s in people’s best interest NOT to share. It lowers their chance of winning... unless you have it set up to where getting referral entries gives them an increased chance of winning.

Tools like Rafflecopter or KingSumo Giveaways make it easy for you to incentivize entrants to receive additional entries by referring their friends.

The third part of Robbie’s strategy was to give people a guaranteed, surefire way to win. People are optimistic, but they understand odds. They know it’s highly unlikely they will win a giveaway. In order to increase participation, you should give them a guaranteed way to win something.

Robbie did this by following up with a special prize package for anyone who got 5 additional people to sign up for the giveaway through their referral link.

This final piece also positioned Robbie to turn his list into affiliate sales, as he was directly signing people up for SEMRush. He could have probably tried to get 30-day trials for every contestant.

Here’s his follow up that resulted in 27 affiliate sales.

First, he announced the winner:

Next, he sent out the awards.

There are a few key takeaways here that will help you launch your own campaign:

1. Don’t simply add giveaway entrants to your subscriber list without following up
2. Provide some value to every single individual who signed up
3. Reinforce the value of the prizes when you send them out
4. Invite new subscribers to engage with your content

You really can’t go wrong with giveaways. There’s not much more to say on the matter.

7. How to follow up with expert contributors

One phenomenal way to amplify your content’s quality and reach is to tap into the expertise of other influencers in your niche.

These types of posts are typically referred to as “roundup posts” and they are starting to get a bad rap... with good reason. Over the last few years, marketers have been butchering this technique with lazy, generic topics that rely on volume to be “noteworthy”, BUT that doesn’t mean you can’t do it the right way.

The key is identifying a topic that would actually be enhanced by expert insight and then getting a small group of legitimate experts to provide meaningful commentary.

A great example comes from marketer Jacob McMillen, who used expert insight to create this guide to A/B testing tools and rank it #1 in Google for the post’s target keyphrase. Jacob shared his outreach emails with us, pictured below.

Notice how he specifies that the recipient is on a short list and will be “featured” in the upcoming post. This frames the outreach uniquely from the standard trope of 100 influencers with one sentence each.

In this example, the recipients already had past connection with the host blog, so it wasn’t cold outreach. If you are attempting this cold, you could specify that you are asking 10 total experts to provide input, that you will be spending $500 on paid advertising, or anything that establishes value to the contributor.

For his follow up email, Jacob kept it super simple.

This campaign got a 60% response rate and resulted in Conversion Science’s most successful post of 2016.

8. How to follow up on promotional outreach

As more and more marketers are realizing, creating really great content is just the first step in the content marketing equation. You can create the greatest resource on the internet, but if you don’t get it in front of the right people, you won’t see an ROI.

How important is promotion?

Brian Dean, who built his blog Backlinko to over 100k visitors per month, spends 80% of his total content marketing time on promotion. In other words, for every hour he spends writing, he spends 4 hours promoting what he wrote.

There are many, many ways to promote your content, but one of the most effective methods (and the reason we are covering this in today’s article) is direct email outreach.

Sam Oh of Money Journal offers a great example of this strategy in action:

Notice how Sam’s email is short, to the point, and doesn’t ask me to do anything right off the bat. He asks me if I’d like to see his content when it goes live, and he also offers to lend his own aide if I ever need anything, letting me know he’s not just looking to use me for a quick share.

And while Sam didn’t end up needing to use his follow up email on me, he reveals the template he uses as part of his 74 Step SEO Checklist.

Hi [Name],

Just a friendly follow-up. Were you interested in the article on [topic]? I’m sure your inbox gets bombarded daily, so no hard feelings if you’re too busy. It just got me thinking…

If [name] saw value in [competitor company’s] article, then [name] will definitely want a unique take on the topic.

Not trying to get anything from you. Just want to impress lol 🙂

Cheers,
Sam

This exact follow up template increased Sam’s replies by 23.5% and even began a number of relationships with fellow influencers in his niche. He sends it within one week of the original email.

If this can work in the marketing niche, where people are constantly bombarded by hundreds of emails, it will most likely work in your niche as well.

Conclusion

The success of email marketing is ultimately in the follow up.

We’ve tried to cover every scenario your business will likely face in this article, but in an evolving marketplace, there will always be new opportunities for follow up.

To learn more about effectively following up, get a free copy of our book The Follow-Up Formula.

Writing a blog is a time consuming and labor intensive project, but when done correctly, can be an investment in your branding that delivers incredible ROI. In order to be a successful blogger, however, you’ll need to master several skills that go beyond simply writing about topics that are interesting to your audience. You’ll need to also master the technical and sales strategies that are required to convert someone from a casual reader to a qualified lead.

Here are the top tips that any brand can do that will significantly increase the number of leads you receive from your blog:

Keywords First, Content Second

Most people write up a piece of content that they personally find interesting, throw it on their blog and social media, and then wonder why no one is interested in reading it. If this sounds like a familiar situation, it’s time to change up how you decide what to write about.

The best way to get more targeted, organic traffic with a high percentage of potential leads mixed in is to do keyword research before you even give a single thought to what you’re going to write about. This means going to Google Keyword Planner (you already know your brand’s website keywords, right?) and cross referencing a bit with Google Trends, the internet giant’s live-updating list of what people are looking for on the internet right now.

If you’re lucky, one of your keywords will reference a search trend – for example, if you’re a SaaS company, and there was recently a large hack in an enterprise brand, an update from a major software provider, or a funny tech goof from a national personality, that’s what you’re writing about!

On most days, there will likely be no perfect match, but make sure to incorporate both your brand’s keywords and a few ideas that are trending to get best results.

Use Calls To Action Regularly

A call to action is exactly what it sounds like – a statement that prompts the reader to complete an action, such as clicking through to a link, calling your brand, signing up for email updates, or making an actual purchase. While you don’t want to overdo this, make sure you aren’t forgetting to entirely.

Additionally, as Buzzfeed has proven so well, the misconception that you should only have CTAs at the end of your article are just that – wrong.

Compile Blog Posts Into Landing Pages For Keywords

If you’re frequently writing about similar topics – and, as a brand blog, it can be assumed you are – then make sure to get some extra bang for your buck by grouping blogs that share the same topics into landing pages for keywords.

For example, if you’re a bank, you probably have several blogs that focus on the keyword “business loans.” Once you have a few of them (at least 4), create a landing page that focuses on that keyword as well, using the URL www.yourbankname.com/business-loans. Include the blogs you put together in the sidebar to add more depth and credibility to your page, and to keep readers engaged for longer.

By doing this, you’ll more directly target those searching for your keyword, and prove the depth of your knowledge to them more effectively.

Creating a great, lead generating brand blog is definitely dependent on the quality of your content, but its value can be maximized with a few simple technical updates. To further increase the quality of your blog and the speed at which you generate leads, study buyer psychology, and make sure your posts are as appealing to search engines as they are to human readers.

Don’t give up on your phone yet!

Yes, there are other reliable sources of leads. A phone ringing off the hook is no longer symbolic of a busy business today. You can be making connections online and communicating with your clients digitally.

But, consider this: according to media research and consulting company BIA/Kelsey, over $64 billion is spent yearly to generate inbound calls. And, of companies surveyed, 66.4% rank inbound calls as a high-quality lead source.

So, don’t take your inbound calls for granted. When you pick up the phone, make sure you’ve taken the necessary sales cycle steps that put your closer to transforming your callers into customers.

Sales Cycle Steps /1: Track Your Inbound Calls

It is not enough to know the volume of calls that you get. You also want to know where these calls come from, and which of your online and offline marketing efforts are sending them your way.

Use current technology to keep track and assess your inbound calls. CTI integration includes several call tracking features that help you understand what drives the best leads.

When you know what drives prospective customers your way, you can up your investment in these marketing channels.

Sales Cycle Steps /2: Turn To CTI For Data-Driven Sales Calls

Take it from InsideSales.com Founder and CEO Dave Elkington: “You have to generate revenue as efficiently as possible. And to do that, you must create a data-driven sales culture. Data trumps intuition.”

Your CTI integration comes with a pop-up screen that can be configured to show relevant information about your caller. Make the most of this feature. It can help personalize conversations and improve the call experience. A good rep can use this to establish rapport with the caller. It won’t be long before they become your customers!

Here are a few caller data your reps should know in real-time:

• the caller’s location
• their job and company
• referring website or marketing source
• search words
• past calls
• purchase history

Sales Cycle Steps /3: Make The Most of Your Call Routing

Not all inbound calls are the same. So, when you want to make the most of calls that come in, make sure they’re handled by your best people. Choose a call routing system that increases caller conversion. What works varies per business, according to location, industry, and the skill-level of sales reps, among other factors.

Availability routing is possibly the most commonly used routing system in call centers. However, unless you have sales reps who are similarly-skilled, it might not be your best option. When you want to transform callers into customers, then you’d want them to talk to the best rep for their specific needs. Use skills-based routing to route calls according to products or expertise. This improves the call experience and can be the start of a business relationship.

Another consideration is time. If your prospective customers are in different time zones, then you need to have reps available during the operating hours in these zones. Choose time-based call routing so you’re sure somebody will pick up the phone when prospective customers call.

Sales Cycle Steps /4: Offer Actionable Content

There is a good possibility that your caller will need more time and information before they buy. This is where your actionable content comes in. The simple definition of actionable content is content that educates and drives a prospect into action. This could be something as basic as FAQs or how-to guides. It could be your rave user reviews or your viral online videos. Or, it could be case studies and whitepapers.

You should be able to provide whatever your prospect needs to take that next step and buy. As Oracle’s Head of Social Selling, Evangelism & Enablement Jill Rowley says: “The modern sales professional doubles as an information concierge – providing the right information to the right person at the right time in the right channel.”

Sales Cycle Steps /5: Follow-Up

Your prospect’s first call to your sales team might not transform them into customers. But, what about the next call? Or, the one after that?

As you offer further information and actionable content, make sure to follow-up consistently through different communications channels. Follow-ups can be automated through your CRM system. So, relax, there’s no need to stay on top of your gazillion leads. Configure your CRM to follow-up according to schedule and user actions, such as revisiting your website.

This way, you can be “present” as your prospects make their decision. Ideally, they’d pick up the phone again to give you a call.

The secret’s out. Agile project management is a game-changer – and developers and IT folks are no longer the only ones to know about it.

As a marketer, you’ve surely heard about Agile. Your team may be using some Agile practices, like project sprints and stand-up meetings. If so, you’re in the minority. The benefits of Agile are still largely untapped by marketing teams. According to a new report by Workfront and MarketingProfs, only 30% of marketing teams use an Agile approach to manage their processes. The other 70% probably experience the same frustrations my team experienced before we committed to making Agile work.

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Only 30% of #marketing teams use an #Agile approach to manage processes via @workfront_inc @MarketingProfs.
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Our seven-person marketing team at Emplify has been practicing Agile for almost a year. It took us six months to get to a point of practicing it well: producing work better, faster, and with more energy and engagement.

When we started practicing Agile, we made a lot of mistakes. So many mistakes, in fact, that we locked half of our team in a conference room one day and didn’t leave until we had identified and addressed some significant shortcomings in our approach. Fortunately, there was beer and it was a Friday. Still, it was painful, and it took time to dig ourselves out of some deep process-oriented holes.

In this article, I share those mistakes so that you can avoid a painful lock-in like ours. Agile can revolutionize your marketing team’s ability to collaborate and deliver work faster – if you commit to making the process work for you.

Before we get started, let’s cover a few basics:

What are Agile practices?

Agile practices (often referred to as “Agile”) emphasize continual delivery of smaller portions of work over projects with larger interconnected tasks that may span weeks or months (which is traditionally called waterfall-style management).

Agile basics include:

• Scrum team: This highly collaborative team, organized under a scrum master, solves complex problems and delivers solutions in fixed-length iterations called sprints, which can last anywhere from one week to 30 days. A scrum team working on content, for example, might begin a two-week sprint committing to creating a new infographic or data sheet.
• Minimum viable product (MVP): When planning a deliverable, Agile principles emphasize getting the project out in the wild as quickly as possible so that your team can respond early to real problems. To achieve a model of continual delivery, scrum masters encourage teams to define the MVP and to figure out the most creative ways to finish the product within the confines of the sprint. For example, if you start a two-week sprint to create an e-book as your MVP, and your designer gets sick, you may decide to redefine that sprint’s MVP as a series of blog posts and design the e-book in the next sprint.
• Daily stand-up meeting: Team members stand in a circle for 15 minutes or so every morning to discuss the scrum team’s accomplished tasks, focus areas, and blockers that may hinder them from finishing their assigned sprint work. At the end of the sprint, Agile teams deliver a defined set of projects, which are then assessed and improved upon in the next sprint. Some scrum teams also incorporate retrospective meetings, where they discuss process shortcomings that can be addressed in the next sprint.

Why should marketers use Agile ?

National Public Radio uses Agile methodologies to create and test new programming. Think about that during your next “driveway moment.” Although Agile’s roots are in IT management, this form of project delivery can be applied to many functions of a business, including marketing.

Adopting an Agile model of continuous iteration allows your marketing team to quickly test new messaging or campaigns, react faster to product updates, and set expectations with stakeholders who request work from your team.

My team’s shining moment came almost nine months after we began our Agile journey, when we refreshed the content on our website to make some shifts in our product messaging. We defined what we could accomplish in one week, and we delivered that work on schedule. The content that we didn’t have time to update in that sprint, we hid from the navigation. We have been continually adding to and refreshing the messaging on those pages during our subsequent sprints.

What mistakes should be avoided?

If you’re considering adopting Agile on your team, even if you’re looking simply to streamline processes within your marketing team, you’ll want to avoid these four Agile marketing mistakes that our team made:

1. We called ourselves Agile without doing our homework.
2. We failed to designate problem owners.
3. We focused on deliverables rather than on problems.
4. We crammed instead of prioritizing (and pretended we could get it all done).

Mistake 1: We called ourselves Agile without doing our homework

When I started with my marketing team, I quickly instituted daily stand-ups to provide a quick, painless way to check in on projects. I figured that I had conducted stand-ups and organized sprints in former roles, so I had experience with Agile, right? Wrong.

Don’t come into work one Monday and announce that you’re “going Agile” as I did. Just because you’re doing work in two-week sprints and having daily stand-ups doesn’t mean you’re an Agile team. The beauty of Agile is that it gives your team the power to commit to projects together and to define a quality deliverable within a designated scope of time. If you’re just trying to cram as much work into two weeks as possible and sacrificing quality to get across the finish line, that beauty is negated.

Before instituting Agile processes on your marketing team, do your homework. Crack open a book or two. I recommend starting with Scrum by Jeff Sutherland (known to many as one of the fathers of Agile) and Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker. Also, read some of CMI’s excellent articles on Agile marketing.

After you’ve done your homework, prioritize a few simple changes to your existing process to begin crafting an Agile approach that will work for your team.

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Before instituting #Agile processes on your #contentmarketing team, do your homework, says @evacjackson.
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Mistake 2: We failed to designate problem owners

If the following scenario hasn’t happened, you can skip this section; you have achieved some form of marketing-process nirvana that I have yet to discover.

The rest of you, picture this: You’re 98% through a major team project with a clear deadline, and a surprise stakeholder steps in at the final hour with dozens of revisions. Then, your team is forced to prolong the project an extra two weeks to address those changes because no one can argue that this stakeholder is wrong.

Still reading? I thought so.

Our team’s lack of defined ownership was the biggest hindrance to our progress as an Agile marketing department. We were overwhelmed by work. We were frustrated when multiple stakeholders weighed in on project quality. And we were not getting anything out the door because of last-minute edits and fixes.

If your marketing team is anything like ours was, you struggle to know who the ultimate owner of a project is. Who is the person directly responsible for the success of a deliverable? Who sets measurable outcomes for a task that the team can align with? Who needs this project to be successful so he or she can ultimately be successful too?

To prevent last-minute rework, we now assign such a person – a problem owner – to every project.

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Prevent last-minute rework, assign a problem owner to each channel in #Agile #contentstrategy. @evacjackson
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Every quarter, we set a sales-qualified lead goal for each of our main marketing channels: advertising, events, organic website leads, and so on. Then, each one of those channels is assigned an owner on our team, and that owner becomes the go-to person for any deliverables that fall under that channel.

Problem ownership has been particularly successful for our team for several reasons:

• It places the onus of success on one person, who is held accountable if goals are not met.
• It forces the channel owner to surface problems early so the team can proactively address them.
• It allows the entire team to be involved with brainstorming a solution and implementing a fix.
• It empowers one person to guide the quality of any given project.

If your team is not clear on who has the final say in your content projects, sit down with your department and ask one bafflingly simple yet challenging question: “Who owns what?” Answering that question – and recording your answers for all to see – will create immeasurable accountability.

Mistake 3: We focused on deliverables rather than on problems

Another game-changing moment for our Agile team was when we stopped looking at our work as a set of deliverables to crank out and started thinking about our work as a set of problems to solve.

Think about the individual contributors on your team: developers, copywriters, designers, and other similar implementation roles. How often are they asked to “design this slide” or “write this e-book” with little context for why they’re doing it?

Simply assigning a task on a to-do list without helping your team understand the real purpose behind the project leads to lackluster work without personal investment from your team.

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Assigning a task w/ out helping your team understand the purpose leads to lackluster work, says @evacjackson.
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In fact, having a lack of purpose-oriented work can have severe implications on more than just your marketing tactics. In a survey of LinkedIn members, more than 60% of respondents who were not in purpose-oriented jobs planned to leave their company in three years or less.

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60%+ surveyed who were not in purpose-oriented jobs planned to leave in 3 years or less. @LinkedIn @Imperative
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On our team, we have a strong rule against starting any project with a prescribed deliverable in mind. Let’s face it, stakeholders don’t always know what they want. Problem-solving helps foster collaboration for better outcomes.

Instead, we start every project with a problem statement, which follows a format regularly called user stories in the development Agile world. That format looks something like this:

When __________ happens, I want to ________, so that we get this measurable outcome: ___________.

Here’s an example of this type of problem statement (or user story) from a hypothetical project:

Each project’s problem owner determines which problems the team will tackle for that project. For example, the owner might consider it a problem if the website is not ranking for a certain keyword or if messaging needs to be updated for an upcoming trade show. No matter the problem, the problem statement never includes a solution. After we decide to prioritize a particular problem, our team analyzes the problem together, ultimately scoping a solution that we can execute within our next sprint.

Solving a problem as a team allows everyone to have a stake in the outcome.

Additionally, this approach forces the team to uncover pain points behind the surface-level problem to arrive at a solution that addresses core needs rather than vanity requests.

For example, our sales team reported that some prospects were not showing up to their scheduled demo meetings and weren’t responding to reschedule requests. Our vice president of sales wanted the marketing team to create an animated explainer video that would better prime prospects for their meeting, even though doing so would have taken months.

After asking some questions about the sales process, we realized that the sales team’s core problems could be solved with improved email messaging prior to the demo meeting. We instituted a three-email drip campaign triggered as soon as a meeting is scheduled. This solution took the team only two days to build. Since building this campaign, we’ve reduced the number of people needing to reschedule meetings by more than half.

Before assigning a task to a team member, ask yourselves why that work matters. By creating a problem statement and collaborating on a solution, we were able to identify a quick fix that has paid dividends for our team. If we had created an animated video, the sales team could have been dealing with the same issue for months while waiting for our fix.

Mistake 4: We crammed instead of prioritizing (and pretended we could get it all done)

If you try to fit as much as possible into each Agile marketing sprint, as we did, you’re doing it wrong.

Without a shared sense of priority, you have no idea where to focus your time. And without focus, you resort to saying yes to everything. And when you say yes to everything and don’t have problem owners for your projects, you find yourself in the thick of a stressful quarter with a lot of half-finished deliverables.

Many Agile teams use estimation to prioritize work and increase velocity as a team. They approximate the amount of effort a project will require or discuss how many hours it may take for individuals to complete their tasks. Over time, many Agile teams arrive at a sense of average output per sprint, which helps them plan new tasks.

In our early months as an Agile team, we set out to do this kind of estimating. Unfortunately, we ended up manipulating our estimates to make it appear that we could get everything done. We guessed at how much work a project would take, and then we haggled down the requirements to make room for three other requests. In the end, we negated the value of estimating work, perpetuating an environment of relentless stress.

We tried two or three methods of tracking velocity (including planning poker, a common way of estimating work). We focused on using estimating as a way to prove that we could get lots of work done, not as a way to become a more efficient team. THAT was our mistake.

I recently had a chat with our company’s director of engineering who manages the Agile process for our product team. When I mentioned that our team had never mastered estimation, he said this:

If your stakeholders are constantly asking for velocity reports or improved estimations from your team, you are likely experiencing bigger process issues that are impairing your team’s ability to deliver work to them on time.

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Do you have an issue with #AgileMarketing velocity – or with overall project delivery? @evacjackson
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When your well-functioning Agile team is regularly delivering quick iterations of a project and flagging concerns to stakeholders when a deadline is unreasonable, you naturally avoid questions about output or productivity on your team. The project manager or scrum master has a responsibility to course correct and communicate those changes when work is falling behind.

Don’t be afraid to prioritize just one or two new projects (or problems or stories) in your next sprint because you have a few leftover projects in your current sprint. Just be sure to communicate that leftover work in a timely manner to the stakeholder and share your plans to finish the project as quickly as possible.

And don’t be afraid to designate one leader to make the ultimate call on what needs to be prioritized. Our team, for example, banned all people from moving Trello cards to the “priority” sprint column except our vice president of marketing. That placed the responsibility to prioritize on the person with the greatest view of the entire business.

Conclusion

Our team, like every Agile team, is adapting Agile principles in ways that work for us. Whatever Agile approach your team may take, it will work only if you provide opportunities for open feedback on the process and if you’re flexible enough to change your workflow regularly. If I had a log of every tweak we’ve made to our Agile approach so far, it would be longer than this post.

What mistakes have your teams made when implementing Agile processes? How have you addressed those mistakes? Let us know in a comment.

Want to improve your structure for content marketing effectiveness? Sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers weekly newsletter, which features exclusive insights from Robert Rose, chief content adviser. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Agile Practices: How to Avoid Mistakes Our Marketing Team Made appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

As an email marketer, you’re probably already familiar with the feeling that emerges when people don’t engage with your email campaigns.

We’ve all been there.

Email marketing has the highest ROI of all marketing channels, and yet many marketers don’t take full advantage of it, and instead, are left with average email campaigns that don’t perform as well as they could.

In this post, I’ll give you seven best practices for improving your email marketing campaigns that you may not have tried before.

1. Get more opens and clicks with split testing

Split testing is to me what a violin is to a violinist—indispensable.

Split testing is not just fun, it’s the best way to test your email marketing hypotheses and find the optimal solution for subject lines, content, calls-to-actions (CTAs), send time, and so on.

The best part?

You can always find new things to split test.

Naturally, the first step in email marketing is to get your emails opened, otherwise, all your other efforts are wasted.

Thus, your subject line is a great place to start.

Your subject line should always aim to evoke emotion in your recipients. If you get people to feel something such as curiosity, excitement, joy, or even fear, they’re more likely to open your email.

This example is an email I received from Brian Dean and immediately opened because I was curious and excited:

Test different tactics to see which works best for your specific audience.

In our experience, personal subject lines get higher open rates.

The easiest way to create a personal subject line is to add the recipient’s name.

These subject lines from Ebay and Netflix caught my attention because they included my name:

It makes the email seem like it was written specifically to me (even though we know it wasn’t), which helps build a stronger relationship with your recipients.

Next, you should test your content.

Many e-commerce businesses use the same template over and over again for their newsletters, which can save you loads of time, but you still need to test your content.

It’s easy to get lazy when creating email campaigns (trust me, I’ve been there myself), and your email campaigns end up looking pretty much the same every time.

While email templates can provide you with the right setting for your content, you still need to create new and unique copy each time suited for your specific audience.

Most promotional emails I receive look a lot like this one from GoPro:

Let me start by asking you this: How many people at this stage are ready to just purchase a new GoPro camera?

I doubt it’s many.

Promotional emails are usually packed with product images and buttons that say “shop now”.

And these emails might work for some e-commerce businesses, but I would recommend testing other types of content as well.

This could be testing softer CTAs, fewer images, fewer links, and more.

Writing a CTA such as “shop now” might scare off potential customers who aren’t ready to buy yet because they want to know more about the product or alternative products before they make a decision.

A softer CTA in GoPro’s case could be: “Check out the HERO5 now”, “Get your free bonus mount now”, or “Learn more”.

The voice is still active and with the headline “Two days left to get a bonus mount when you buy a GoPro camera” they’ve already created a sense of urgency that, along with the right CTA, can get them to click through.

No matter what type of CTA you go with, your email copy should convince people to click through while the CTA gives them the final push.

This brings me to the next item on this list: storytelling.

2. Tell stories for higher click-throughs

Storytelling is one of the oldest principles in direct response sales, and some might even argue if you can’t tell a good story, you can’t sell your products.

We connect with each other every day through emotional stories, and applying the same practice to your email marketing can prove insanely helpful.

Here’s an example from BarkBox:

They don’t mention the product until the very end of the email and focus on getting their recipients to feel gratitude toward their pet, making them more inclined to make a purchase.

Storytelling is an effective way to provoke feelings in your recipients and convince them to buy your product without actually pitching to them.

3. Sell your product without selling and boost revenue

Continuing on from storytelling and how you can sell your products indirectly, I have another effective tactic for you:

Your email footer.

This is a great place to add a short CTA for your product along with a link to where people can buy it.

This is an example from Boxcloud:

They use their footer to promote their webinar and drive more conversions through there.

This soft CTA doesn’t require people to make a purchase decision on the spot, but rather another way to indirectly sell your products.

When you use this type of CTA, don’t forget to have a strategy for how you will convert webinar participants into leads or customers.

You can experiment with a hard CTA in your email footer, where you directly ask people to buy your product.

The only way to figure out what works for you is to test it. See which option drives the highest engagement.

4. Write effective welcome emails to build stronger relationships

Welcome emails are a crucial part of your email campaigns because they set the tone for your relationship with your customers.

Foremost, your welcome emails should always be sent immediately after signup, when your business is still top of mind.

Your welcome email should be personal, including the name of the recipient, and an actual sender—so stay away from no-reply emails.

Next, your welcome email should set expectations for what recipients can expect to get in your emails moving forward.

Let them know what content they’ll be receiving, how often you’ll email them, and how to get in touch with you.

And more importantly, you need to meet these expectations.

This is how James Clear welcomes new subscribers:

If people signed up to get a free gift or another offer, this is where you would give it to them.

Your welcome email is a perfect platform to get valuable subscriber insights.

Ask people why they signed up, or why they made a purchase. These insights are extremely useful when you’re optimizing on all fronts.

5. Avoid Gmail’s Promotions tab and get your emails opened and read

A few years back, Gmail started using tabs to sort promotional emails from regular emails in their users’ inboxes.

Emails filtered to the promotions tab are easier to ignore, which is why we want them back under the Primary tab.

When filtering emails, Gmail looks at the content of your email such as the number of links, images, whether you use “spammy” words like free, MLM, low risk, urgent, winner, and they look at previous engagement with your emails.

As previously mentioned, you can test the number of links and images you use to see if it’s necessary to include them all.

Also, getting people to respond to your emails, is a sure-fire way of telling Gmail that people want to read your emails.

Once again, you can simply ask your subscribers or customers for feedback and make it as simple as just replying to your email.

The best place to do so is in your welcome email where you’ve already set expectations.

If you don’t want to ask for feedback in your welcome email, you can add a simple sentence telling people to add your email to their address book to ensure they’ll keep receiving your awesome newsletter.

6. Segment your list and drive maximum engagement

If you want to ensure you’re only sending relevant content to people, segmentation is key.

Once a user has signed up or purchased a product, you can ask them to choose their preferences by asking what their interests are and what kind of content they’d like to receive moving forward.

Segmented email campaigns drive a 760% increase in revenue, so what’s not to like?

If you run an e-commerce store with sports equipment, ask subscribers what kind of sports they’re most interested in, and create personalized email campaigns based on various segments such as tennis, football, skiing, etc.

There are different ways to ask subscribers this information:

• Ask in your welcome email
• Have subscribers complete a user profile
• Send a new email to existing subscribers asking them to update their preferences
• Segment based on previous purchases

This is how Pat Flynn asks for subscriber interests:

This email might be a bit too long (I only took out the part where he asks for user information), but it shows exactly how you can ask your subscribers for more information with a single click.

7. Measure the success of your email campaigns effectively to increase performance

When we measure the success of our email campaigns we tend to focus on the open and click rates for each email.

While this doesn’t constitute a problem, there are better ways to measure your email campaign performance.

The answer is: open reach and click reach.

For example, you could check the total number of people who have opened and clicked your emails in, say, the last 30 days.

Then, you could create segments based on inactive and active subscribers and tailor your campaigns thereafter.

While open rates and click rates only measure the effectiveness of one campaign, open reach and click reach measure the long-term effectiveness of all your campaigns.

Another effective way of measuring long-term engagement is through your click-to-open rate (CTOR). Your CTOR is the percentage of subscribers who click through after opening your email. This metric can be used across different campaigns to determine the effectiveness of your CTA, your content, and so on.

Wrap up

There’s never just one simple solution or answer when it comes to email marketing.

It’s about experimenting with different tactics and figuring out what works best for your business.

However, I hope these best practices have given you some ideas and inspiration as to how you can optimize your email marketing efforts and increase engagement.

As a marketer, you know how important it is to use data to fuel your marketing campaigns.

It‘s your job to look at what works and what doesn’t in your campaigns, so you can then optimize them for better results.

As you have likely experienced, finding data isn’t hard. Most email marketing providers offer analytics dashboards that show all sort of information about your performance.

What can be a challenge is finding the specific data you need as well as finding insights to drive your campaigns.

This post will help you understand how data drives your email marketing campaigns.You will also learn the key data you need to have before you launch a campaign and finally, you will see a few ways you can leverage data to improve the performance of your campaigns.

How data drives your email marketing campaigns

One of the best advantages of working in the digital world is you can measure pretty much everything you want. Do you want to see how many people see your ads? No big deal, you have it. Do you want to measure the specific ROI from your content? It’s hard, but it can be done.

In the offline world (you know, the world where you have to talk to people face to face), you don’t have that benefit. You have to guess what’s going on with your marketing campaigns and develop complex correlation models to see whether they are driving results or not.

Although it’s easy to see the value of data in any marketing campaign (whether that’s email, search, or social), there’s more to the phrase “data is king.” If using data to drive email marketing campaigns was so easy, you wouldn’t get blast after blast of irrelevant emails from companies whom you once signed up. Unfortunately, even professional marketers sometimes forget how data can help them.

To understand how marketers should use data for their email marketing campaigns, I’d like to borrow a framework created by the analytics legend Avinash Kaushik, which he called the Trinity.

The Trinity is a holistic strategic approach to analytics with the simple goal of finding actionable insights and metrics. In other words, the Trinity is a way of thinking about analytics to get the data you need to drive your email marketing campaigns (although it can be used to almost any kind of online marketing campaign).

Three elements make up the Trinity. The first element of the Trinity is the “behavior analysis”: the metrics that show what people do on your campaigns. This kind of analysis answers the most basic questions about your campaigns, such as:

• How many people open your emails?
• How many people click your links?
• Which link gets the most clicks?
• What time do people open your emails?
• How many unsubscribes do you get on average per email sent?

Most marketers use behavior analysis to inform their email marketing campaigns. The reason is likely to be related to the fact it’s easy to get this kind of data. Most email marketing providers show this data right on the dashboard. Since behavior metrics seem so useful, most marketers believe that’s all they need. As Avinash shows, there’s more to analytics than behavior analysis (also known as “clickstream analytics”).

The second element is the “outcome analysis”: the metrics that show what the results of your campaigns are. Outcome analysis allows you to find insights like:

• How many people purchase your products?
• What’s the average revenue per campaign sent?
• What’s the average revenue per subscriber?
• How many people convert into leads?
• What’s the average ROI of the campaigns you send?

While most email marketing managers focus on the clickstream metrics to analyze the results of their campaigns, chief executives care only about the outcomes. Chief executives don’t care about your open rate; they want to see whether they are making any money with email marketing or not. Showing the outcome metrics to the executive team of your company can change the way they perceive your email marketing efforts and its impact within the organization.

One common problem email marketers face is the problem of induction: how do you know what drives the behavior of your subscribers when you only have data that shows their behavior and not their hidden motivations?

That’s where the final element of the Trinity comes into play: “experience analysis.” Experience analysis explains the why behind the what. As Avinash puts it:

Experience analysis allows us to get into the heads of our customers and gain insight or an a-ha about why they do the things they do.

Experience analysis enables you to understand some of the following problems:

• Why do certain segments have higher open rates than others?
• Why you get unsubscriptions on every transactional campaign with no discounts?
• Why you get lower revenue per campaign during certain months of the year?

You can’t get the answers to these questions from your analytics provider; you need to get inside the mind of your customers. You can only achieve that by implementing some of the following analysis:

• Heuristic evaluations (i.e. when usability experts review your site’s interface and compare it against accepted usability principles with the intention of finding a list of potential usability issues)
• Lab testing
• Surveys
• A/B testing

Source: Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

Although the Trinity isn’t a new nor revolutionary concept, it can allow you to see beyond the most common analysis you end up doing with the data your email provider gives you. Most importantly, it allows you to see what people do, why they do it, and how that impacts your business.

The question now becomes: what specific data do you need for your campaigns? And, most importantly, how do you get that data?

The key data you need for your email marketing campaigns

In the introduction, I talked about how marketers have access to large amounts of data, and how that is both a blessing and a curse. It’s highly advantageous to know how people react to your campaigns, but it can also be hard to focus when you have five different metrics which you can use to measure your goal.

The overabundance of metrics and data leads marketers to focus on rather basic metrics, such as open rates and CTR, but that’s far from optimal. For example, how do you know CTR is the metric you need to improve? Most importantly, how could it help you improve the performance of your campaigns?

One useful way to overcome the problem of overabundance of irrelevant data is to focus on what you need for your company and each particular campaign. If you are an e-commerce marketing manager, some of the metrics that are most relevant to you are:

• Conversion rate
• Average Order Value (AOV)
• Adds to Cart
• Revenue
• ROI

If your goal were to engage, you would use different metrics to measure your results. The same would apply if you worked for a non-profit, a retail store, or a SaaS business. As a consequence, there’s no “holy metric” you need to use as a benchmark to measure your success; it depends on your business and your goals.

Another approach that can help is to ask yourself what question you are trying to answer with each metric you currently use. To find the data you need to improve your campaigns, start with questions that answer knowledge gaps you have about your audience and your past campaigns.

Let’s say you are an e-commerce B2C manager for a women’s clothing company and you want to launch a holiday campaign with 12 different emails spread out throughout the month of July. You want to showcase your different summer clothes to your subscribers, all of whom are young women. Still, you have some doubts about your audience. You don’t know what age is the most profitable, where these people sign up from, what locations drive the most conversions.

Some questions you could ask yourself are:

• What age does my audience range?
• What’s the most profitable age segment?
• What pages drive the highest sign-up rate?
• What do we offer on those pages?
• How large are the cities in which our most profitable sales happen?
• Where does our most profitable segment live?

You can see your most basic metrics from your standard email marketing provider. All of them have an analytics feature which allows you to see metrics such as open rates and CTR. If you want to dig deeper and see how email affects your overall website, you will have to go to your analytics tool, which usually is Google Analytics. Finally, you can get the whole picture, including the why’s from the experience analysis, by using tools such GetFeedback (for surveys), CrazyEgg (for heat maps), and UsabilityTools (for visual in-page analysis).

So far, we’ve seen how to think analytically about your email marketing and how you can find the data you need to improve your campaigns.

Now it’s time to consider four specific ways you can leverage data for your campaigns.

Define and segment your audience

If you constantly receive irrelevant emails from companies about offers for which you have no interest, it’s likely then you haven’t been properly segmented. This is one of the most common mistakes companies make, both large and small. Despite the fact that segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue, 42% of marketers still choose not to send targeted email messages.

Ascend2 found the ability to segment email lists and individualize email campaign messaging are the most effective personalization tactics for 51% and 50% of marketing influencers, respectively.

Fortunately, there are only a few ways you can segment an audience, which are based on the following attributes:

• Geographic. This kind of segmentation is usually based on the Census Bureau’s geographic groupings, which start in individual city blocks and then go all the way up to block groups, and finally to Metropolitan Statistical Areas (i.e. large population centers). Some simpler ways to segment an audience is by country, region, population density, city size, and climate zone.
• Demographic. This is the core segmentation based on individual attributes of an audience, which include age, income level, gender, occupation, religion, and marital status, among others. In many cases, you can purchase the demographic data from specific vendors to have it to the individual customer level. Some of these vendors are Experian, Towerdata, and Nielsen, among others.
• Behavioral. Another approach to segmentation involves analyzing transaction data. If you run an e-commerce store, this can be one of the most powerful ways to increase your ROI in a short period. The idea behind this segmentation is to group customers together based on the way they interact with you. According to marketing legend Philip Kotler, typical behavioral variables include user status, loyalty status, buyer readiness, and adopter status, among other variables.

Segmenting your audience is a simple process; you can find your audience’s geographic, behavioral, and part of the demographic information both on your email marketing provider and on your analytics provider. You can also use the power of a tool such as Tagga to add even more behavioral information to your subscribers. What can be challenging is defining what to base your segmentation on and how you are going to use each segment.

Here’s a good guide by Andrew King about how to use segmentation for your email marketing campaigns.

Tailor your message

As an email marketer, you spend a great deal of time trying to understand your target audience. You previously learned a few ways to segment your audience. Now you can use the information of each segment to tailor your emails in a way that resonates with each of your subscribers.

The simplest way to do this is to use your segment selection criteria in your message. For example, if the segment you are sending your message to is made up of families with young children, mention children in your message or include them in your imagery. If you’re targeting customers in a particular geographic region, make sure to mention something about that place in your message.

Time your message

There’s nothing worse than creating an amazing email that you think your subscribers will love, just to get it ignored due to a bad timing. Finding the right time to send emails to your audience can thus make or break your campaigns.

Nailing message timing depends on your goal and the moment of the month, week, and day you send your emails.

Each list and segment is unique in their own way. You need to test what works best for your goals. If you want to increase sales, test different days of the week as well as hours to see what drives the most conversions. If on the other hand, you want to increase engagement based on the number of opens, you need to test that too.You can use Time Zone Sending to send your campaign at the same time for each time zone, Say 8 am for a breakfast offer, or you could use Send Time Optimization to send at the time that is best for each subscriber. The later is better for non-time sensitive messaging.

Analyze your results and profitability

The most common way marketers analyze their email marketing campaigns data can be summed up in a three-step process:

1. They take all the data for the metrics they focus on, which most commonly are represented by clickstream metrics (like open rate, CTR, and bounce rate).
2. They see how these metrics measure both against their benchmark and their desired goal.
3. They think ways to improve each metric to drive better results.

Simple, right?

As you have seen before, this kind of analysis only takes into consideration a small part of what you can measure. The key to analyzing your results isn’t just to optimize for opens and CTR, but for profitability.

Remember the outcome analysis: what makes your customers purchase your products? What makes your subscribers want to sign up?

Of course, understanding your clickstream data is important. But instead of taking each metric on its own, think how their performance ties to your revenue and profits. For example, if your open rate improved in your last three campaigns, how did that affect your revenue? If your revenue improved, can you drive a correlation between your open rates and your revenue?

The second key way you need to analyze your results if to profile your current profitable customers and separately analyze each segment. Using all the data at your disposal, you want to find behavioral, demographic, and geographic patterns that relate with your profitable customers. To find this patterns, you need to ask yourself questions like these:

• Do they tend to come from a specific age group?
• Do they tend to have incomes above a certain level?
• Do they tend to have children? If so, what’s their age range?
• Are they concentrated in urban, suburban, or rural environments?
• What is their marital status?
• Do they tend to buy certain products in particular? Do they belong to a particular category or price range?
• Do they tend to buy products at a particular time of the year?

With this set of data, you can then target acquisition campaigns at people who fit your most profitable customer list. You can also use your customer profiles to help your advertising team choose the best media channels for its messages.

It’s worth mentioning once you find your profitable customers, you don’t need to ditch or ignore your unprofitable ones. You can turn your unprofitable customers into profitable ones by expanding your relationship with them.

Expanding your relationship means engaging with your current unprofitable subscribers by offering them content they find interesting, valuable, and even entertaining. You could also send them discounts, although you should proceed with caution. If you send too many discounts, you could end up destroying your profit margins.

Some of your customers, however, will stay unprofitable no matter what you do. That may mean they never buy from you or buy unprofitable products. Maybe they don’t trust you, or they just don’t like your brand. You could use some experience analysis to see why they aren’t profitable. You could also segment them and approach them in a unique way that drives them to purchase.

Wrap up

In this article, you have learned how you need to think about data analysis for your email marketing campaigns. You have seen Avinash Kaushik’s Trinity framework for analyzing the results of your campaign. Then, you discovered how to define the data you need to use on your campaigns. Finally, you’ ve seen how to segment your audience, tailor and time your message, and analyze your results using data.

The data you use to drive your campaigns can now help you get the results you desire.

Marketers are giving video a lot of attention — and for good reason. Savvy marketers are wielding this powerful tool to increase email leads by 300 percent, boost landing page conversions by 80 percent, and drive a greater number of prospects to purchase — faster.

A single, short video is said to be worth 1.8 million words, and with results like these, it’s quickly becoming a marketer’s newest and most powerful friend. But what’s on the horizon for video marketing? Will it hit a plateau when it comes to results? Will these impressive gains begin to diminish?

Statistics tell a clear story. Video marketing will only continue to grow. In fact, some say that 2017 will be the year of video marketing. Video is projected to claim more than 80 percent of all web traffic by 2019. So what is the current state of video marketing? Here’s a quick breakdown.

Video marketing: driving greater ROI

People are watching an increasing number of videos online, and it’s not just about entertainment; they are actively seeking product information. What’s more, after watching these product-oriented videos, many are taking quick action on what they watched. Ninety percent of these customers say that watching product videos helps with making purchasing decisions. Moreover, 64 percent of customers are more likely to purchase a product online after watching a video about it.

The majority of marketers, 73 percent, report that video is positively impacting ROI. This medium is helping them to not only sell products and services, but also to experience greater growth. A recent Aberdeen report showed that marketers who use video enjoy growth rates that are 49 percent faster than those who don’t.

Not just any type of video, however, will create these kinds of results; the content must be engaging. For example, Citrix Online created a video that focused on their GoToMeeting software. The video highlighted customer testimonials to showcase the benefits of using the product. But unlike traditional video, which may showcase testimonials with a “corporate tone,” Citrix Online’s video is more relatable to their viewers. The company used engaging B-roll footage that plays while the customers explain how they used the product to drive business.

Along with the testimonials, the video flashes to screen shots of GoToMeeting in use so viewers can see immediately how the product works. This makes the video footage more engaging and useful.

Cloud-based invoice company Taulia is helping customers feel more engaged by using this medium. The company created a video that played off an award-winning commercial series titled “Get rid of cable” by DirecTV.

The company shows what could happen if customers don’t use their services, and the video employs humor to create an authentic connection.

Customer preferences point to video

YouTube reaches more adults on mobile devices during prime-time TV hours than any cable television network. Plus, 75 percent of business executives watch work-related videos at least once weekly ― which is a very good statistic for B2B marketers to know.

When given a choice, the majority of customers will choose video. In fact, 79 percent say they’d rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page. What’s more, 84 percent of those people say they were convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video.

These customer preferences toward video are also apparent through social sharing. In fact, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be shared than other types of content.

Opportunities are expanding quickly

Customers clearly prefer watching video, and as data and research underscore this preference, an increasing number of platforms will be created to meet the demand. Marketers who watch, study, and explore this new medium may experience early adopter benefits. Here are a few tips for keeping a pulse on the changes in video marketing:

• Platform knowledge is key. It’s crucial for marketers to truly understand each platform in which they produce, publish, and share video content. For example, 85 percent of videos published to Facebook are watched without sound. Having this small piece of data empowers marketers to know that captions are crucial — and music is not.
• Real-time data collection and reaction. Marketers also have an opportunity in the future to produce content based on real-time data collection and feedback. They can find out quickly if content resonates with a target audience, as compared to a more traditional reactive approach, where data is measured over a longer period of time.
• Live video becomes more popular. A fast-moving trend that marketers should watch is live video. People spend, on average, more than three times more time watching Facebook Live video than video that is replayed. In addition, 80 percent of Livestream’s survey respondents reported they would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog.

Virtual reality will also gain strength as a video marketing trend. It allows customers to take a deeper dive into better understanding the products and services that a brand offers and the key functions of those offerings.

Conversational content and video: a hidden goldmine

Engagement is at the core of brand success. Without it, customers won’t grow to love, trust, and rely on your products and services. Video provides one more tool in fostering those relationships in a market that is increasingly competitive.

A study by comScore, a website that measures online engagement, found that 100 million people watch video on the Internet each day. This statistic highlights the overwhelming reach of video and its potential impact on customer engagement.

For example, Deloitte knows their target audience is interested in statistics and predictions. The company delivers this type of data, but recently did so through video to make the results more engaging.

The video below features a senior online marketing manager talking to the director of research in the lab about his predictions for the upcoming year. He quickly highlights these forecasts in an interview format that is short and to the point (under two minutes). The video is quick enough to keep people engaged, but has enough depth to provide value.

Tips for driving greater engagement

Engagement is at the core of video marketing success. Most marketers want to create more videos, but aren’t sure where to start in order to experience maximum results. Here are a few ideas to inspire your efforts.

• Infuse videos into blogging. Use a video blog post, otherwise known as a “vlog,” to break up written content. Optimize this content for mobile use and keep the length to two minutes or less.
• Sum up your company’s vision. Even written content that is already interesting can be spiced up with the addition of video. A video can show a company’s mission quickly, effectively, and with greater engagement on the “About” page. Here’s an example of a video that replaces the normal “what we do” website content.

• Infuse landing pages with video. Adding a video to a landing page is an incredibly effective way to capture more conversions. According to Unbounce, “Video should be used on your landing page whenever possible. It provides a passive engagement medium where visitors can experience your message with very little effort.”

The bottom line

Though marketers have touted video for years, it hasn’t even begun to take off compared what’s in store for the future. Data clearly shows one important thing: The customer’s appetite for video is enormous. As a result, when marketers serve up what customers are craving, great things start to happen. Conversions soar, sales climb, and ROI increases significantly.

But, everything starts and ends with engagement. Find new ways to use video to tell your brand story, unique selling proposition, and how you solve a customer’s most pressing pain points — and your brand is much more likely to grow and thrive in the future.

What do you think is on the horizon for video marketing in the coming year?