Rnordman

Since I just started the 14-Day Facebook Marketing Challenge yesterday (it’s not too late to join us!), I have Social Media on the brain.

I’ve been thinking about one of the biggest reasons why businesses and entrepreneurs take the time to be on social media. Aside from showing off their cute pets or grandbabies, it’s to help grow their business.

When wanting to grow our business, we often think of the more tradition methods of marketing and advertising. As an example, typical advertising channels are newspaper, radio and TV ads. Where typical marketing includes SEO, PR, and Direct Mail campaigns to name a few.

But when we look to social media to help with this, the approach needs to be different than those more traditional methods of getting qualified business leads.

Pull and relationship marketing relies on developing relationships with prospects before doing any overt promotion. The premise being people, especially women, tend to do business with others who they already know, like and trust.

In fact, according to Nielsen, 83% of consumers will trust the recommendations of family and friends so it’s our goal as business owners to gain that trust.

So how does one go about gaining trust and generating qualified leads from social media?

Here’s 13 best ways to attracting qualified leads to your business:

1. Establish yourself as being knowledgeable in your industry. Do this through your blog, newsletter, and the types of posts you add to your social media accounts.This authority will build trust with your followers as they learn more and more about what you do, and your expertise in that field.
2. Pick the best channels for you to get visible on and focus just on those. Don’t try to spread yourself too thin by being everywhere.Instead of chasing after the social media channels that are getting a lot of attention, ask yourself this important question: “Where is my target audience hanging out?”Then go build your brand presence there.
3. Be on social media with the intent of being helpful, not on pushing your wares. People smell desperation a mile away and it’s a turn-off to most.Instead of always trying to “push” your products or services on others, “pull” them in by being engaged with them. Comment, like and share their posts. Answer questions that are genuinely helpful.Developing trusting relationships will give you greater returns in the long run than doing nothing but promoting yourself.
4. Provide exclusive offers just for your loyal followers. In between posting informative posts, sprinkle in special offers, discount codes, contests or giveaways that are exclusive to your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram followers.Shortstack offers an easy way to hold Instagram, Facebook and Twitter contests that will also help you stay within those platform’s rules.
5. Ask for a referral after someone has made a purchase. When an online purchase is made, the purchaser is sent to a “thank you” landing page. Use that page to offer some sort of incentive to share what they bought with their social media followers.
6. Host a Twitter Chat or Facebook Live show. This is a great opportunity to get in front of your followers and showcase your expertise.Use the show to have a question and answer session, share a valuable tip, strategy or perhaps some inspiration. Use your imagination and think about what your followers would want from you.
7. Incorporate a paid ads campaign. Despite what we tend to think, social media is not really a free platform for business.In order to get the exposure you need to generate solid leads, you need to look at it from a “pay to play” perspective. Invest in Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn ads, depending on where your ideal clients are hanging out the most.It wouldn’t hurt to supplement your efforts with Google ads too. Google ads can be extremely effective at driving qualified traffic back to your website.
8. Create a custom tab on Facebook for your free giveaway. Facebook users don’t like leaving that platform so one way to get people to sign up for your free giveaway is to host a custom tab within your Facebook page that provides the signup ability. Here is ours as an example.Pagemodo offers a means to do this or you can use Static HTML as well.
9. Add your list of services to your Facebook page. Facebook recently implemented a new feature on the business page that provides an opportunity to showcase your services. Take advantage of this great feature so your followers know what it is you offer!Here’s ours as an example.
10. Use Twitter cards. Twitter cards are a great lead generator that has a call to action embedded right in the tweet.Once the visually eye-catching and compelling tweet is created, pin it as a feature tweet to the top of your page. This is prime real estate that twitter followers will see when checking you out.You can view our Twitter card here.
11. Use video. Video is where it’s at on the social media scene so take full advantage of the excellent exposure it can bring your business.You can use video on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and of course YouTube to demonstrate how to use your product, share informative tips and strategies, offer inspiration and words of wisdom to name a few ideas.
12. Add a call to action to your Facebook page. Your Facebook business page has a great feature located right under your header banner that allows you to add in a call to action.Ask yourself what you want your followers to do once they have discovered your page? You can choose from several options such as booking a service, getting in touch, learning more, making a purchase or donation or downloading an app or game.
13. Get engaged with your followers. One of the fundamental strategies you can incorporate into your social media efforts is to get involved and engaged with other people and pages posts.A great way to get more exposure to your page is to like, comment and share other page posts as your page. Find other pages that share the same target market as you and like those pages as your page (as opposed to your personal profile) and make a daily habit of interacting with those posts.The more you get engaged with your followers, the more they will be aware of who you are, which will begin to develop the know, like and trust factor with them. The more that happens, the more apt they will be to go check you out and if they need what you’re offering, they will then become a lead for your business.

As you can see, there are lots of ways to take advantage of social media’s powerful lead generation possibilities. The key is to be consistent, be strategic and be patient with you efforts.

For more in-depth strategies and assistance with hands-on, step-by-step help, check out my monthly Social Blast program specifically created to help entrepreneurs and small businesses use social media and online marketing to help build their business.

Find out more here: www.socialmediagroupcoaching.com

P.S. If you want to get a taste of the kind of high-caliber training I offer, I’m hosting a brand new 14-Day Facebook Marketing Challenge for the next two weeks. The cost is only $17 CDN and I promise you will receive a tonne of valuable Facebook Marketing information over those 14 days.

Join the Challenge Here: www.evisionmedia.ca/14-day-facebook-challenge

Source: hiphopwired.com

…and every year thereafter.

I usually write in an uplifting tone, sharing positive information, which when applied, can garner great results.

This post is a bit different. Sometimes you have to warn, present insights in a way that spotlights the downside. The good news, if you take to heart the observations in this post and quickly take action, profits can rapidly be rescued!

But, left unaddressed, the financial bleed and “human resource” headaches will continue.

Here we go…

In my experience, when reviewing with company leaders the human side of their operations, it’s easy to spot ways in which profits can be bolstered through operational adjustments. Those “easy to spot” elements will be addressed in the list to follow. They are part of the checklist I use in assessing a company’s operational infrastructure and strength to best leverage the human side of the enterprise.

Here are my top 15 Ways Key Leadership Can Waste Money in 2017 — each point is reflective of something missing in an organization’s operation, talent and human resource practices.

1> Attempts at leadership and management development through periodic, ad hoc 1 day “training” workshops or seminars.

2> Having a leadership team that has not taken the time to establish collective values and vision for how they will operate.

3> Having a leadership team that has done the above, but for which leaders are not held accountable.

4> No formalized leadership and management development program that is part of, embedded in the operational infrastructure of the organization and which supports continuous growth, development and alignment to company needs at all levels.

5> No defined, intentional company culture that consistently communicates and sets expectations for employee behavior and atmosphere.

6> Continue to let HR and leadership industry trends and lingo cloud or distract from essential, basic operational practices.

7> Have random employee training without any accountability for implementation.

8> Have random employee training without any practical ties to needed business outcomes.

9> Don’t train employees on how to successfully manage conflict. (This alone wastes so much time & money through loss productivity!)

10> Keep and continue to allow dysfunctional bosses.

11> Keep and continue to allow toxic employees.

12> Wait until the end of the year to give employees feedback on their performance.

13> Don’t hire beyond the job description – meaning put more emphasis on perceived experience on a resume vs. the quality of the person and fit for the culture.

14> Not being willing to invest in employee development.

15> Keep and continue to allow underperforming employees with no help or coaching.

Honestly, there’s more…I had to stop myself, because my complete list would be overwhelming. I know these are good starters and are high-impact issues.

Now, what will you do with this information? You could have a senior leadership strategy meeting (including HR of course).

Recommendation => Use this as an informational resource to enhance your view of the human side of operations. Having a more educated view I call being behavior and financially literate. It’s the absence of this knowledge that is causing a company’s leadership to lead in a way that undermine the very efforts being made to increase profits, growth, and value.

Remember — any one of these could have a substantial, positive impact on operations and profits.

Uber’s experiment in San Francisco showed that bicycles and bike lanes are a problem self-driving cars are struggling to crack

Slack is changing recruiting faster than you think. In fact, it’s already happening.

Most of the innovative HR and recruiting tech companies have Slack apps. If they don’t, they’re most likely designing and building them right now. Including Drafted.

But most of these Slack apps are being designed as a small “value add” to the existing service these tech companies provide. Here’s a thought experiment of how you could actually use Slack to completely change the way recruiting and process happens at your company.

How Slack can evolve as an Applicant Tracking System

If you’re a small company that doesn’t pay for tools, you might already be doing some of these things.

1. Use Slack Notes to keep notes on different candidates for your position
2. Make a Slack channel per job opening to discuss and organize the notes for all the candidates for that job. Link to a Slack note for the Job description in the channel title so that it’s always easy to access.
3. Have a Slack hook that simply sucks in new resumes from your site and posts them into your recruiting channel.
4. Use reactions in a recruiting channel to have your entire team give their opinion about a new resume that comes in.

You can imagine that a slick app that combined a lot of these things would be pretty easy to build. Slack itself might give you tools to help with these workflows instead of relying on outside apps.

How Slack can evolve as an Employer Branding Tool

This one is easy, especially if you believe in having communities around your company.

1. Start a new Slack group for your company’s community.
2. Invite all your Social media followers and mailing lists to join.
3. Make sub-discussion channels for customers to talk about your product, for prospective applicants to ask questions about what it’s like to work for your company, etc.
4. Make channels for discussing new technologies with the engineering team, design trends with the design team, growth hacks with the marketing team, and sales outreach tools with the sales team, that are open for anyone in the community to join.
5. Announce new job openings at your company in a dedicated channel with an informal note directly from the hiring manager about what that team is up to.
6. Invite your most active channel members to company outings and host weekly or monthly giveaways to keep your community engaged.

How Slack can evolve into a Referral Tool

In your ATS hack ^^ up there, simply allow people to post resumes of referred candidates in your dedicated job channel, and use reactions to quickly make decisions and communicate about them.

No bullet points required.

How Slack can replace Headhunting Agencies

Sooner or later, someone will start a slack community to manage their headhunters over Slack instead of email.

Maybe some headhunters will make a Slack for all their clients, but restrict access to individual channels for individual companies, so that they can manage the entire relationship through Slack, and easily send the same resume to multiple clients.

This would also allow groups of freelance headhunters anywhere to come together to collaborate on clients and large projects. E.g Acme is opening a new office in Dublin and needs 5 sourcers working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Executive Recruitment, but there’s no single agency that specializes in all 5 in Dublin.

In yesterday’s world, Acme would settle for the generic “we do everything” large staffing agency.

But with Slack, the best-in-class 5 freelancers can create a “spot-team” kind of like the movie industry, to serve Acme really well. This could evolve into the asymptotic fragmentation of the agency industry, because freelance headhunting is always more profitable than serving through an agency if you’re the best in your industry.

How else do you think Slack is going to change recruitment? Reply back!

How will improvements in artificial intelligence change SEO? In this new episode of Real Smart Marketing, we’ve posed this big question to four of our favorite influencers. Here are their responses.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Impact SEO?

If you’re like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “AI” might be this:

But as I’ve come to realize, what we’re talking about is a lot less creepy. AI is changing the face of SEO, but not like that. We’re talking about algorithms that enable machines to make connections, “learn” to process data, and apply its learning in future tasks.

Basically, improvements in artificial intelligence like deep learning and natural language processing mean that search engines are becoming smarter and more human-friendly. (highlight to tweet)

When you search for something, the results displayed take into account a bucket of considerations like your location, search history, favorite websites, and what other users click on for a similar query. AI improvements mean ranking factors can change from query to query, as the algorithm learns from how people are clicking on the search results and decides on the most relevant factors to take into account for each search.

But enough about algorithms. What does it mean for marketers? How does it change our jobs? I don’t have the answers, but our experts do. Here’s a quick recap on what changes AI will bring to marketers according to four industry influencers, plus suggestions of what you should do in face of these changes.

1. Optimizing Your Visual Content SEO Will Become Increasingly Important

According to Sam Mallikarjunan, Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, visual content will have an increasing influence on SEO. He says, “Search engines are getting good at knowing what a video, audio clip, or image is actually about.”

Google doesn’t just favor YouTube videos in search results—they’re also getting better at analyzing what visual content is about. This changes things for visual content creators. Just like how content writers had to learn to optimize headings and keywords, visual artists will have to start thinking about SEO when creating visual content like images and videos. SEO for videos, for example, means optimizing keyword targeting, descriptions, tags, video length, and more. Here’s a great guide on optimizing videos for SEO from Brian Dean, if you want to learn more.

(Want to learn foolproof ways to create epic visuals? Join Mention’s webinar with Venngage’s Marketing Director, Nadya Khoja.)

2. Quality and Relevance Are the New Ranking Factors

Google’s AI, RankBrain, is an artificial intelligence change that attempts to understand the context of content on websites. As Google gets better at analyzing search intent, it’s more important than ever to get our keyword research right, and then tie those keywords back into our content. Basically, content has to do a better job than ever at serving searcher intent. So rather than older factors like keyword density, things like content relevance, context, and value are now more important ranking factors.

That means it’s time to focus on providing real value, answering what people are asking, and not trying to stuff as many keywords as possible in a blog post. It’s no longer about writing a blog post about one keyword phrase you picked from your keyword research. It’s about creating a blog, or a series of blog posts, around a concept related to that keyword.

In fact, the best option would be to focus your website around a single topic. This way, you not only help RankBrain learn the niche you’re in, but you also narrow your competitive pool. Google will compare your websites only to others from your niche, so you’ll have higher chances of ranking and getting traffic.

3. Get More Selective with Your Link Building

Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream, predicts that websites with “strong domain authority with lots of links pointing to it but mediocre content” will be most susceptible to Google’s AI improvements. Since the smarter search engines will analyze whether people clicking on your links actually stay and read your content, SEO marketers need to focus even more on relevance and quality in their backlinks.

We’ve covered content quality, but how do you improve link relevance? Basically, your backlinks should come from the same, or similar, category and industry as your site. It means you’ll have to be more selective with your link building.

If you sell cat food, and your website is all about cats and their food, then you shouldn’t have lots of backlinks from websites selling lizards. RankBrain won’t like it and may penalize you for it. In addition to restricting your content to a single niche, you also need to restrict your links to the same niche. Any fast and dirty ways to purchase links are surely out of the question.

Going forward, we’ll have to build links the “old-school way”—by building real relationships. Find influencers talking about your niche, and connect with them to find link opportunities.

4. Going beyond web optimization only with mobile and voice search

If you’re only thinking about SEO for web browsing on computers, think again.

Mobile Searches

According to a Google study, 40 percent of searches are now mobile, and more than one in four users only use a smartphone on an average day. As a marketer, if you aren’t optimizing the way your brand is reaching customers on mobile, you risk missing out on a quarter of your potential audience.

Whether you’re ready or not, Google has put more pressure on us to make our sites more mobile-friendly when they announced making it a part of their mobile algorithm.

A positive effect of this mobile shift is that it opens new doors for brands to market. For example, If you have a mobile app for your site, you can make it show in mobile queries to increase exposure and brand awareness. If you search for “Wall Street Journal” on your smartphone, you’ll find the WSJ app among the first few results, and it stands out against other ranking websites. Currently, it’s still a relatively untapped market, so act fast.

Voice Searches

With the rise of mobile usage came voice searches. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana have become virtual assistants of all our capricious demands. And this changes things for SEO.

Most of us are more concise when we type. For example, you’d type “best pizza place NYC” into a search bar. But when you do a voice search, you’re more likely to say a complete sentence like, “Hey Siri, what’s the best place to get pizza in NYC?” As Rand says, “Voice searches are getting longer and more conversational.”

Say Goodbye to Black Hat

In short, a smarter Google means black hat tactics are closer to becoming obsolete. Short-term strategies that try to trick or outsmart algorithms won’t work. It means investing in long-term best practices will be rewarded more than gaming the system.

It may sound like a lot of work, but with improvements in AI, SEO should also become more intuitive and natural. So focus on delivering relevance and value to searchers, and let RankBrain work out the rest.

Inspired to brush up on SEO basics? Learn from what Mention did to increase our web traffic by 373 percent.

Get more content like this, plus the very BEST marketing education, totally free. Get our Definitive email newsletter.

In ecommerce, loyal customers are valuable not just for their ability and willingness to provide you with good praise and support—but also for their ability to significantly impact sales. Attracting and converting new customers is an essential part of growing your ecommerce business, but if you really want to boost sales in 2017, you need to put more focus on getting active and one-time customers to visit your store again.

Why?

Because existing customers are more likely to buy. They’re also more likely to spend more than a first-time customer. Consider these statements shared in a blog post from Sweet Tooth Rewards about the value of repeat customers:

• “Customers who have purchased with your store 2 times before are 9x more likely to convert than a first time shopper.”
• “Your loyal top 10% spend 3x more per order than the lower 90%, and your top 1% of customers spend 5x more than the lower 90%.”

So here’s the question: what can you do to transform more of your one-time customers into repeat buyers?

Below you will find a list of proven tactics, categorized by focus area, that you can review and consider incorporating into your marketing and sales strategies to boost sales in 2017.

Focus Area #1: Your Website

To begin transforming more one-time customers into repeat buyers, the first place that requires attention is your website itself. As a general rule, you should always be working to improve, optimize, and test new ideas on your website. Other types of businesses can afford to have slightly out-of-date websites, but not in ecommerce. In order to continue building a sustainable and profitable business, you have to constantly be working to ensure that you’re always providing your customers with the best experience possible whenever they decide to visit your website again.

You also have to be willing to use your website not only as a place to showcase and sell products, but also as a tool and platform for driving more sales.

There are three tactics you can implement on your website this year to get customers to buy again:

Tactic #1: Make your website fast and the shopping experience easy. If your customers do decide to return to your website again after purchasing from you, it’s essential that you create a fast, easy, and positive experience for them. Remember: if you can get them to buy from you more than once, their lifetime value is going to continue increasing steadily over time.

To ensure that your one-time customers have no trouble buying from you again, make sure:

• Your website is accessible across all devices.
• Your homepage hasn’t become overly cluttered or too unfamiliar since their last visit.
• Your website loads fast across all devices. You can check by using the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google.
• Your customers can easily find the account sign in button anywhere on your website. This can enable them to save more time during the checkout process.

Tactic #2: Use pop-ups to give returning customers a reason to buy again. Pop-ups can also be a great way to encourage past customers to buy from you again. A lot of pop-up tools give you the ability to target visitors based on whether or not they have purchased from you in the past. With that in mind, consider building pop-up campaigns that allow you to:

• Tell returning customers about special offers only available to them.
• Direct former customers to newly released products or newly stocked inventory.
• Encourage them to sign up for your VIP email list to receive special deals and early-access invitations to new products.
• Cross-sell related items that you think they’d be likely to buy based on past purchases.
• Remind them of any items that were left in their shopping cart during their last visit.
• Perform surveys that help you better understand what products your customers are looking for.

Example from Fabletics

Tactic #3: Understand your customers better by incorporating list building opportunities everywhere. You can also add opt-in forms throughout your website in an effort to get to know your returning customers better. Instead of adding the same standard email list building form in multiple places throughout your website, consider creating unique forms that incentivize people to sign up for different reasons. This will allow you to gain more information about the interests of your customers.

For example, if you ran a men’s outfitter ecommerce store, you could create different forms for based on the different categories of products that you sell. In this example, customers might only want to receive updates and information about hunting clothing. Or, they might only be interested in fishing gear. To find out which customers are interested in which products, create separate list building forms for each primary product category in your catalog.

Focus Area #2: Your Emails

Email can also be an incredibly powerful tool for driving one-time customers to visit your store and buy from you again. At a minimum, you’re probably sending a few transactional emails out to customers when they purchase products from you, and maybe a few offer emails that goes out to your entire list of subscribers, but there’s a lot more that you could be doing to drive one-time customers to buy from you again.

Here are three ideas:

Tactic #1: Turn your transactional emails into sales emails. If you’re sending standard order receipt and shipping confirmation emails out to first-time customers, you’re missing out on a huge sales opportunity. In most cases, the time at which a customer receives an order confirmation email is when they are most excited and interested in your products. Not to mention, these emails have amazing open rates! It’s the perfect time to provide customers with the information and incentive they need to make another purchase from you. You can build sections onto your transactional emails that include:

• Information about related products
• Special limited-time only offers
• Featured recommended products that could support the product they just purchased
• Opportunities to add more products to the same shipping order before it gets processed

Example from Dollar Shave Club

Tactic #2: Build out a lifecycle marketing program. You can also drive customers to buy again by creating a lifecycle marketing program that allows you to send emails based on certain triggers or actions that your subscribers take. Example of emails you could send include:

• Cart abandonment emails
• Replenish stock emails
• Item back in stock emails
• Special offer email that gets sent out a certain number of days after a purchase
• Win-back emails

To learn more about how to create an effective lifecycle marketing program for your ecommerce business, read through this helpful guide from Rejoiner.

Tactic #3: Share value with customers for free. You can also use email to provide free, educational value in an effort to drive past customers back to your product pages. It’s a great way to nurture relationships with customers, build loyalty with your biggest fans, and leverage your brand as an influencer in whatever space you’re operating in and in relation to whatever pain points your products solve for your customers.

Harry’s, for example, sends email marketing campaigns that educate subscribers about face-washing. It’s not as aggressive as most typical promotion emails you see, but it still gives Harry’s the opportunity to feature their products and drive subscribers toward action.

Example from Harry’s

Focus Area #3: Your Social Media Channels

If you’re already investing a lot of time and energy into email and website tactics, the next area you can turn to do drive more repeat sales is your social media channels. Aside from email, social media is one of the best tools you can use to communicate and engage with your customers and loyal advocates.

Here are three tactic you can try in order to engage your customers and drive them back to your website again.

Tactic #1: Post user-generated content. Your Facebook and Twitter followers don’t want to see your perfectly staged product photos all the time—they want to see your products being used in real-life. One of the best ways to remind customers how great your products are is by encouraging everyone who buys from you to share photos of themselves using your products on your social media pages.

To drive this type of user-generated content, you can:

• Create a custom hashtag for customers to use when posting photos of your products, or looking for photos of your products that have been taken by other customers. The goal here is to create a movement—a platform for customers to interact with each other and share their excitement and experiences using your products. You can also incorporate the photos you get from customers into your product pages. This is done most often through Instagram using apps and tools that connect seamlessly with your merchant platform.
• Run a contest that asks customers to post a photo in order to enter to win a prize.
• Collect stories from your best and happiest customers, then feature those stories with your social media followers on a regular basis—like every Friday afternoon.

Tactic #2: Invest in social advertising. You should be willing to allocate some of your marketing budget toward Facebook and other social network ads that get your products back in front of your customers.

If you haven’t experimented with social media advertising for ecommerce before, explore these resources:

• Ecommerce + Paid Traffic: How Ezra Firestone Turned $434,256.72 into $1,422,500.15 in 30 Days Using Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google and Shopify [READ IT]
• An Introduction to Facebook Ads for Ecommerce [READ IT]
• Copy & Paste Guide: How to Drive a Flood of Ecommerce Sales Using Facebook Ads [READ IT]

Tactic #3: Launch exclusive offers. Don’t be afraid to share exclusive offers and promo codes with your loyal audiences on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Your customers are connecting with you because they support your business, but they’re also connecting with you to stay up-to-date on your product offerings. Reward them by creating limited-time-only and VIP deals that drive them back to your website and into the shopping cart.

Though not ecommerce related, GrubHub presents a great case study for how you could be using Snapchat to share exclusive offers and promo codes with your most loyal customers:

Image Source

Focus Area #4: Your Products

The final area worth investing in to drive customers to buy again is your products themselves. To build customer loyalty and increase repeat sales, you have to create amazing, unforgettable experiences for anyone who purchases a product from you. In ecommerce, we don’t have the luxury of being able to interact with customers face-to-face when they’re buying from us—so we have to delight them through the ordering and delivery experience.

Here are three ideas you can use to create unforgettable product experiences that drive your customers to return to your store again:

Tactic #1: Invest in and streamline multi-channel selling. As I mentioned earlier in this post, in order to build customer loyalty and drive more repeat sales, you have to make it incredibly easy and convenient for customers to buy products from you. For a lot of ecommerce businesses, that means selling your products on other marketplaces where your customers go to shop, like Amazon and eBay. Investing in multi-channel selling can help you connect with and market to customers on sites and channels where they feel most comfortable.

Pro Tip: to manage and streamline the entire process, sign up for a free 14-day trial to try Sellbrite.

Tactic #2: Include special offers and thank you’s in your packaging. To delight and surprise customers, consider stuffing surprise offers, exclusive promo codes, and handwritten thank you’s when you send out products to first-time customers. It’s a small, but impactful way to show your customers that you care, and it will help you differentiate from your biggest competitors. It’s essentially the same strategy you’re using when you optimize your order receipt emails, but in this case it’s offline and something that your customers can actually hold in their hands.

Tactic #3: Create an amazing and unforgettable unboxing experience. Along the same line as the previous tactic, you should also consider put money into creating amazing packaging for your products to create a memorable unboxing experience for your first-time customers.

This goes back to the idea that you don’t get to be there with your customer when they receive your product, so instead, you need to create an amazing, exciting experience for them that doesn’t involve you. If you can create an exciting moment in time for customers each time they receive a product delivery from you—one that makes their day a little bit better—your customers will want to buy from you again. To learn more about how to create an amazing unboxing experience for your products, read this post from Shopify.

Over to You

What steps are you taking to transform one-time buyers into repeat customers? Tell me in the comments below, I’d love to hear about your ideas and experiences.

Sometimes, organisations get so caught up in digital strategies and social media to drive sales leads that they overlook the final stage in the buyer journey, which typically involves a great landing page.

Your website landing pages need to be current, impactful and informative, to efficiently transform current prospects into customers.

The following is a look at why landing pages matter and what strategies to employ to optimise them.

Landing Pages in the Sales Funnel

In the most basic sales funnel, the buyer’s journey includes awareness, consideration and decision steps.

Targeting advertising campaigns, social media and content formats designed to attract search engine users help you establish awareness.

Whether directly from a search or based on a call-to-action through another channel, a user’s visit to your landing page typically aligns with consideration and decision stages.

Unfortunately, recent data showed that average landing pages convert just 2.35 percent of users.

With a solid plan and execution, there is hope. The top quarter of landing pages converted at a 5.31 percent rate.

Staying Current

There is a lot more to a quality landing page than only keeping it current, but this is an important priority.

Imagine an organisation using various digital strategies to drive sales leads, only to present outdated solutions or contact information.

Staying current with your page content projects greater credibility to someone who lands on your site, and equips them with the most relevant information.

Common Landing Page Goals

The specific goals of your landing pages depend on your business, your solutions and how your website fits into the grand scheme of your content marketing strategies.

However, some purposes and goals are consistent, and include:

• Converting a visitor into a buyer/customers
• Converting a visitor into a subscriber/member
• Getting a visitor to comment or offer feedback on content
• Getting a visitor share information/resources with others
• Driving a visitor closer to the point of decision

Elements of a Great Landing Page

To achieve your primary landing page objectives, consider elements consistent with success. Great landing page features include:

• Attention-getting headlines and subheadings
• Clear, concise and on-point solution descriptions with benefits
• Proof devices that illustrate the value of your solution
• Content or product specificity
• A clear conversion offer with a compelling call-to-action

Also, your visual design scheme affects the reaction a user has to your landing page.

Designs and colour schemes have a psychological influence on a persons buyer psychology.

Your landing page design should be aesthetically pleasing, in line with your business and other marketing strategies, and relevant to the psychological goals you want to leverage.

Wrap Up

Your content marketing plan should emphasise the value of a high-quality landing page as buyers move toward a purchase design.

Plan for the objectives you want each page to achieve, implement content strategies unique to those goals and the solution offered, and keep your information up-to-date.

Ultimately, the goal is simple – generate more sales for your business.

There is a little bit of confusion online as to what ‘integrated calling’ really pertains to. Verizon subscribers, for instance, might think it simply refers to the brand’s instant messaging and calling integration feature.

For professionals, especially those in the sales, marketing, and business process outsourcing, integrated calling is an alternate way of referring to CTI or computer telephony integration.

CTI is technology that merges the telephone with the computer. This interaction enables better and speedier handling of phone calls. With the right application, it can personalize the interaction, and make call authentication faster.

In sales and marketing, integrated calling translates to a more efficient way of reaching out to our leads and clients.

This is because any point of contact is data driven. An inbound call is immediately transferred to relevant departments. The caller’s information is brought up right away through automated screen pop-ups. Their issues and concerns are immediately updated. There are notes about conversations, deals and agreements that ensure the continuity of service.

Take note, however, that integrated calling is a general term. It refers to any technology that allows the interaction between your phone and computer systems. It could be as simple as a call routing technology that automatically transfers calls – and that’s it. Or, it could be systems tailor-fit for big call centers that deal with large numbers of inbound calls daily. It could also be one that is customized for you sales team’s needs.

The key for effective computer integrated telephony that increases the productivity of your sales and marketing team lies in the applications you use and the stability of the CTI servers you employ. Know what you need, and then look for a CTI system that fits.

What are the key features of effective computer integrated telephony?

Control and information are the defining characteristics of effective integrated calling. You want to have an enabling system in place, through which you can implement a solution for your specific needs. The goal has to be to enable faster and more productive conversations.

Some of the key features to look for in your integrated phone applications are:
Skill-based routing: At the very basic level, your integrated calling system should be able to route calls to where they should go. This is done through automatic call distribution and interactive voice response, among others technologies used in call routing.

This is especially helpful in managing large volumes of inbound calls. Logical routing can help you manage your resources better. It gives you an idea where to best allot additional manpower and technology investments. Ideally, this should also help you speed up the call processing and improve customer support. When a caller reaches the right person immediately, their concerns can be dealt with faster.

Phone flexibility: An integrated phone system also allows you a variety of devices to use with your designated phone numbers. This gives you the flexibility to take your calls from anywhere. You don’t even need an actual phone!

In a typical sales department setting, calls are routed to your desktop when you’re logged in. You can bring up the caller’s information immediately, take notes and assist accordingly. When you’re not logged in, your calls can be rerouted to your devices.

This set-up ensures access, which is crucial when you want to close deals and cater to your clients.

Caller authentication: A company that manages a large pool of subscribers and their data needs to guarantee their security. A reliable authentication system is required; and, for voice calls, this responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the call agent.

A good integrated calling systems should make this process easier and more secure for all parties of that call: the caller/ subscriber, the agent and company. Again, for this one, the automated screen pop-up plays an important role in delivering relevant information that the agent can cross-check with the caller.

Call data recording: Through integrated calling, a client’s call and other support channel history, personal and billing data can be instantly brought up or activated. This information is built up in time to provide better service. Plus, it makes your sales team more efficient in call handling. The conversation becomes more personal. You also have everything about the caller literally at the tip of your fingers.

Automated screen pop-up system: This is possibly the main draw of an integrated calling system. It is the interface that holds relevant information about your callers. Details include the caller’s name, email, location, products bought, call history and more.

When configured correctly, it can hasten the resolution of customer issues and concerns. In sales and marketing, reaching out to your leads and current client base becomes easier because you have personal information to back up your talk.

Call monitoring: This integrated phone feature comes in handy when you’ve got a newbie in the team. Listen in and/ or record calls for assessment. Likewise, you can gain helpful insight on your sales life cycle and your team’s effectiveness through call monitoring. Use your data for coaching and retraining purposes, and you might see performance and customer satisfaction levels improve.

Automated dialing: Got a hot lead that you need to constantly follow-up on? Are there numbers that you usually call?

Because computer integrated telephony is all about speeding things up, even outbound calls can be processed faster. This way, your sales team’s productivity, as well as your sales revenue, can increase.

What are the practical applications of integrated calling?

The key features of integrated calling are just that – features. Without thoughtful application, either by your IT team or a third party, you are bound to miss out on CTI’s optimized use.

Make a checklist of what you want to achieve through your integrated calling system. Then, consult with an expert on how to implement this.

Below are a few typical CTI applications.

CRM and CTI: This is, of course, a marriage made in sales department heaven. Sales and marketing departments naturally deal with a lot of inbound and outbound calls, to and from leads and customers alike. Your CRM system helps you manage these many relationships at their different stages. With phones used as a primary means of communications, an integrated calling system fits right in.

There are several CRM and CTI integration packages available in the market. These are designed to suit a variety of industries and business size. Map out your exact needs and choose what’s best for your sales team.

Business process outsourcing companies/ Call centers: Support services of big companies are often outsourced to local of international call centers. In many cases, the services provided by these business process outsourcing companies have been on par with client expectations – thanks to integrated phone systems.

Through intelligent call routing, call center agents seem on-site to callers, who dial either dial a 1-800 or the company’s local number. Client information is accessible with one click. And, call histories are logged. Regardless of who takes the next call, whether someone within the company or the call center, updated data about the client is available.

Phone systems for big boys: Integrated calling systems are also the necessary phone systems for big companies that have multiple departments and satellite offices. It means callers get the convenience of calling one (or multiple) hotlines, depending on their concerns. Calls can easily be transferred within the company or to a contractor when necessary.

How can you benefit from an integrated calling system?

Regardless of the size of your company and your industry, you stand to benefit in implementing an integrated calling system.

First of all, an integrated calling system aligns with the present standards. Customers have come to expect it. Anything less may be regarded as an inconvenience. When you’re in an industry with a high customer defection rate, look at an integrated call system as a necessity. In any case, you stand to benefit from CTI in the long run, anyway.

An integrated calling system is an investment in your team’s efficiency. Whether you have a big sales team or multiple departments, or you provide support to a massive amount of customers, your CTI is there to help you work better.

A reliable CTI system also helps you streamline your operations. Access across departments, from internal or external sources, becomes easier. And since calls are processed faster, your teams can work more efficiently.

Ideally, this should lead to an increase in the productivity of your sales and marketing department, as well as with your support team. Coupled with a robust CRM system, they can convert leads into clients more effectively.

All these efforts can lead to higher sales, and thereby higher revenues. You will see a return in your investment, not just in terms of profit. With integrated calling, you also affect prospect and customer perception and experience. They see your company as a modern entity, one that puts customer convenience on top.

It also becomes easier to retain customers. When you’ve established a good relationship with your clients, one that is backed by a hefty automated pop-up page filled with their information, they are likely to remain loyal. Your CTI system helps you in this respect.

How do you to put an effective integrated calling system in place?

To start off, map the flow of communications within your company, including the flow outward to / inward from clients, prospects, contractors and other partners. This is your communications map, one that you’d want to affect for the better through integrated calling.

Note the information that is exchanged within this map. This should be part of your database, and visible via your automated pop-up screen.

There are several CTI integration packages you can opt to use. These just need to be configured correctly to fit your organization and specific needs. Talk to a consultant about it or refer with your IT department.

Putting together a well though-out integrated calling system is a big company-wide endeavor that pays off immensely in the long run.

Ford CEO Mark Fields is perfectly willing to admit cities of the future won't be ruled by cars.

In an interview with Business Insider, Fields discussed his company's vision for moving into urban planning projects within 15 or 20 years. One takeaway was clear: Ford is setting its sights on just about every mode of transportation out there.

"The transportation system that worked so well for us the last hundred years isn't going to cut it in its current form, particularly in urban areas," Fields said.

Cities pose an interesting challenge for automakers. Congestion is only getting worse. But as ride-sharing grows ever more popular and the rise of driverless cars looms, car companies may be solving the wrong problem if they try to merely get more vehicles on the road.

The real problem, it seems, is how to prepare for a future in which people prefer to get around using all different modes of transportation: driverless cars, ride-sharing, train, bus, bicycle, and on foot.

Ford has tried to turn its attention toward that second problem, according to Fields.

"The approach has always been, from a city-planning standpoint, how many cars can you get through the area?" he said. "If we turn that on its head, and ask how do we maximize people getting through the areas, it makes you think very differently."

In addition to its extensive plans to create commercially-available autonomous vehicles by 2021, Ford's main focus in cities has been to increase its involvement with ride-sharing and bikes.

In March of 2016, the company created Ford Smart Mobility, a subsidiary focused on creating, growing, and investing in new transportation services. One of the first ventures was buying Chariot, a San Francisco-based shuttle service. Around the same time, it partnered with bike-sharing company Motivate to launch its own bike-share service by the end of 2017.

The incentive isn't just greater convenience for city residents. Fields says he's met with dozens of mayors from all around the world, many of whom complain that local businesses would do better if people didn't have to deal with heavy traffic. 

Further into the future, Fields imagines the company working to make different mode of transportation talk to one another. Cars could send information to other cars, street lights to other street lights, and people would naturally enjoy less congestion because there'd be more of a central command.

"We're trying to think about this holistically for cities," he said, "not just, how do I carve out a little piece of business for ourselves?"

SEE ALSO: Ford's CEO reveals his plan for the company's biggest transformation in history

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: FORD CEO: This is why women and young people love SUVs

 Club Penguin, the Disney-owned social network for kids, announced this morning it’s shutting down. In its place, the company will launch a new product for mobile, Club Penguin Island, which has been in development over the past several years. Club Penguin Island will launch in March, while the Club Penguin game on the desktop and mobile devices will shut down on March 29, 2017. The… Read More

If you haven’t heard the news: LinkedIn is getting a makeover. One third of the United States LinkedIn members have it today and the company seems to be picking up speed on the rollout. I work with many other consultants in my same space and we do not know the selection process of how LinkedIn is doling out access; so, don’t lose sleep trying to figure it out. Be patient if you do not have it yet because your time is coming.

Here are four ways you can proactively prepare…

Already have the new look? This article is for you too…

#1 Update Your Profile

With more and more of your connections getting access to the new LinkedIn UI (User Interface) / UX (User Experience), your profile is going to look different on their computer screen. I am one of the members who does not have access yet, but I made updates to four main sections of my profile.

I also recommend saving your LinkedIn profile to a PDF. Before you do this, make sure that all of your profile sections are expanded in order to capture all of the text.

· Picture

The new thumbnail of your profile picture is a circle. To ensure that what you want captured is what is actually showing on your picture, go to edit your picture and confirm that it looks good.

· Summary

While I still believe that the Summary section is a critical element to telling your professional story in your LinkedIn profile, we need to grab people’s attention now to read more. The new look only shows the first two lines of your Summary. As one approach, I simply added a line of text as a call-to-action for people to view my entire Summary.

Be mindful of spacing. If you do not have the new LinkedIn UI/UX yet, check to see if your colleagues and friends have it; then, view your profile on their account to see if it is appearing the way you want it to appear.

· Skills

The new profile view only shows the first 3 skills you have listed in the Skills & Endorsements section. Since you can reorder your skills, I recommend selecting the top three that are most important to you to be visible.

· Background image

The dimensions for the background/header/cover/hero image are changing significantly. The new dimensions are 1536 x 738. Check out my article here to get a great template.

#2 Capture Your Saved Searches

For those of you with LinkedIn’s new look and have the free LinkedIn subscription, you may be wondering where your Saved Searches went…Unfortunately, they are gone (I totally agree that a little warning here would have been nice). However, you can still use Boolean search methodology and filters then bookmark the actual website link on your browser toolbar to save the search.

If you do not have the new LinkedIn UI yet, then go into your Saved Searches to copy your Boolean search strings and filters. Then, paste them into a Word document. This way you will be ready to recreate the search when you get access to the new LinkedIn look.

#3 Export Your Connections

If it has been a while since you last exported your 1st level LinkedIn connections. Now is a good time to revisit this exercise. Whenever LinkedIn is going through major changes, I advise my clients to export their connections as a ‘just in case’ measure.

Here is a quick tutorial of how to export your connections: Export An Email List From LinkedIn

#4 Have the Right Mindset

*Keep reading: Important info here*

We all know that change is inevitable in life. The only thing you can control is how you respond to it. So, let’s think through some basic logic here.

We need to change our mindset that all technology should be and is free. LinkedIn has been stripping away features from their free/basic membership plan for months now. I have become a big advocate for the paid Premium Subscription, LinkedIn Sales Navigator because it gives us:

· Access to search through our 1st level connections’ open networks

· Advanced filters

· Saved searches

· Access to at least 20 monthly InMails

· Customized news feed based on prospective individuals and clients who are important to you

…And more. In addition to Sales Navigator’s perks, it is worth noting two considerations: (1) there is a cost and (2) it is a separate interface from the ‘regular’ LinkedIn.com (i.e. I have two bookmarked links on my Google Chrome toolbar; one for my paid Sales Navigator subscription and one for my free LinkedIn.com subscription). Contact me for a 1:1 training session when you are ready to move to Sales Navigator.

If you have acquired a new client (or multiple new clients!), booked more calls and meetings, found your new career opportunity…and my list could go on…using LinkedIn…Why then, would you not look at investing in LinkedIn as an integral part to doing business? If you are using it often and well enough to get results, then it should be viewed as exactly that: an investment, not an expense.

We are in a state of transition with this powerful business tool. Your attitude will not change that fact. So, you have the choice to be ticked off and quit or embrace it and learn. I recommend trying the latter mindset as LinkedIn will continue to keep you competitive – in whatever market space and business pursuit you are in.

Here is a brief video from LinkedIn to get a peak at the new look:

And finally LinkedIn’s formal press release on the new UI: “LinkedIn Desktop Redesign Puts Conversations and Content at the Center” Personally, I’m most excited about the new look for Notifications!

There are certainly more changes with the new LinkedIn UI than were mentioned in this article, but you have a solid foundation to lead you in the right direction now. Stay tuned as I publish more articles on the topic so that you can continue to leverage the power of LinkedIn to positively impact your business goals. If I can help you in the interim, contact me for training.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

From the moment you dial a prospect’s number to the moment you hang up the phone -- do you know exactly what you're doing? Most salespeople totally wing their sales calls, a surefire way to squander opportunities for great sales conversations that lead to meetings and revenue.

If you want to strengthen your prospecting this year, it’s time to take a good, hard look at what you’re doing wrong on the phone. 

Chances are you’re making at least one of the following eight phone sales mistakes. Check them out below -- and then banish these mistakes from your phone selling strategy, so you can dominate your competition in sales. 

8 Phone Sales Mistakes Destroying Your Ability to Close

1) Procrastinating your calls.

It might sound obvious, but the worst thing you can do in phone sales is to procrastinate making calls in the first place. This is one of the most common ways that salespeople sabotage their own phone selling goals. Do you find yourself checking your email multiple times, re-organizing your desk, or revisiting your to-do list when you should be on the phone making calls? Stop letting distractions prevent you from making the call. Commit to a certain number of calls per day, dial the numbers, and repeat.

To learn more about this pitfall and others like it, watch the video below:

2) Greeting like a salesperson.

When you hit your prospects with a wave of enthusiasm as soon as they answer the phone, they immediately sense you’re trying to sell them something. It’s as simple as that. Their walls go up, and the call is over before it even begins.

Instead of greeting your prospects on the phone with a loud, cheery, overly enthusiastic opening, try a more genuine and low-key greeting. Your prospects won’t be expecting it, and you’ll get them to stay on the phone longer -- increasing your chances of setting a sales meeting.

3) Not following a call structure.

If you think following a template or call structure makes you sound too scripted, then you simply haven’t practiced it enough. Structure keeps salespeople focused during sales calls, and that’s always a good thing. Failing to plan out the important points you must hit in every phone sales call will do far more damage to your conversation than “sounding scripted” ever could. 

4) Failing to address the prospect’s challenges.

What do your prospects really want to talk about on the phone? The answer is simple: How you can solve their deepest frustrations. Whatever loses them money, gives them trouble, or makes them work harder than they want to are the key challenges you need to address on every sales call you make. If you don’t, you’ll lose the prospect’s attention and fail to generate interest in another call, a sales meeting, or any type of follow-up conversation.

5) Talking too much about your offer.

The purpose of phone sales calls isn’t to tell prospects about your product or service. This is a deadly misconception that many salespeople are guilty of acting on. If you’re talking about your offer during an initial sales call, you sound like an infomercial instead of an expert. Prospects don’t actually care about your product or service -- they only care about themselves. It’s just human nature. Focus your call on your prospect and their key issues, and you’ll find you get much further in your conversation with any prospect.

6) Not establishing a clear next step.

Just because you have a successful first call doesn’t mean you’ll be able to easily get that prospect back on the phone. To ensure the next step is crystal clear, get the follow-up call on your calendar during the first call, and have your prospect confirm it in theirs. This quick and simple task will ensure that there’s a future appointment on the books, and keep you on the prospect’s mind until you talk again. 

7) Making calls from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Yes, you read that right: One of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is to call prospects during normal work hours. Your chances of getting through to a high-level prospect skyrocket during odd hours. Start making your sales calls before 8:30 am, after 5:30 pm, and even on the weekends. You’ll bypass those dreaded gatekeepers who keep you from connecting directly with prospects. 

8) Not having contingencies in place.

What’s your plan if a prospect says, “Sorry, I can’t talk right now”? If you don’t have one in place, you’re not alone. Most salespeople are caught off guard when prospects push to get off the phone, and they end up losing the call -- and the potential sale, too. It’s important to have your own contingencies in place, in case you face this common situation. So be prepared to say something like, “I totally understand. But would you mind if I just took another 20 seconds to explain why I’m calling? After that, we can hang up if it doesn’t make sense to you.” This type of preparedness will help you close sales you would have lost. 

Have you been making one of these 8 critical mistakes in phone sales? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Check out this free e-book on 25 Tips to Crush Your Sales Goal for even more sales advice to turbocharge your strategy.

 Daimler and Uber have announced a partnership that will see the automaker introduce its own self-driving cars for use on Uber’s ride sharing service. The team-up is the second alliance Uber has struck with a car maker in pursuit of its goal of delivering self-driving service to users, the first of which was struck with Volvo and resulted in the XC90 self-driving test car that serves… Read More

Asking for a raise can be tricky and nerve-racking.

Some people are natural negotiators. For everyone else, it's easy to mis-speak.

Business Insider recently spoke with Michael Wheeler, a Harvard Business School professor who teaches a course on "Negotiation Mastery" for the school's online initiative HBX.

Here are Wheeler's top eight tips on talking your boss into paying you more:

1. Don't just focus on the money

"Consider forms of compensation beyond just salary," Wheeler says. "There are bonuses, benefits, title, location and more, to take into consideration."

Other forms of compensation could include commuting benefits, greater work flexibility, and increased vacation time.

"You should always begin by evaluating what you're willing to compromise on — and what you're not — in order to get an idea of what is best for you and your career in both the long- and short-terms," Wheeler says.

2. Set a 'stretch goal'

Research the range of salaries for your role and level. Then, make a case for why you ought to be at the top of the pay scale.

"A stretch goal is an end-result that is improbable, but not completely out-of-reach for you," Wheeler says."In this case, it is a salary or compensation package that is higher than you think you'll receive. By implementing a stretch salary in your mind, you will develop the mentality to truly advocate for yourself."

3. Find a good balance

"Straddle the line between self-confidence and practicality," Wheeler says. "Negotiation is a careful art. You need to be enthusiastic without coming off as greedy, and prompt without coming off as eager."

He notes that your boss will be far more inclined to advocate for you if they like you. So champion yourself, but don't come across as obnoxious.

4. Consider the other party's perspective

It's important to advocate for yourself. However, in order to do this effectively, you also must see things from your boss's perspective.

"Too many people fall into the trap of only seeing the situation from their point of view," Wheeler says.

5. Be prepared to respond

Wheeler says he's fond of the adage, "To get a yes, expect a no."

"List all the reasons — both good and bad — that your boss might have for turning down your request," Wheeler says. "Then prepare a solid — but not contentious — response for each."

6. Practice

Wheeler advises practicing with a friend before asking for a raise. If you can't convince your friend to hypothetically up your pay, you probably won't have much luck with your boss.

7. Schedule strategically

Schedule a time to talk that's extra convenient for your boss. You don't want to catch them at a bad time.

"You probably shouldn't meet first thing on a Monday morning when she's getting herself organized for a busy week," Wheeler says. "And late Friday afternoon probably isn't great either, as she may be scrambling to clear things off her desk before she heads out of the office for the weekend."

8. Take care of yourself

"Negotiation involves both head and heart," Wheeler says. "Whenever the meeting is scheduled, be sure that you are well-rested. And make sure you block some time off before you meet with your boss, so you can close your eyes, do some deep breathing, and get centered."

SEE ALSO: A horrible side job where I found myself waist-deep in a dumpster taught me valuable lessons about negotiating salary

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Reality TV star and Skinnygirl founder Bethenny Frankel shares her best negotiation tactic

Uber has teamed up with Daimler to build self-driving cars, marking the second partnership between Uber and a major automaker for its autonomous efforts.

Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes, will build self-driving cars for Uber, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Uber also has a partnership with Volvo and integrated its self-driving technology into Volvo XC90s for a pilot program in San Francisco.

(The San Francisco pilot was moved to Arizona after Uber refused to file necessary permits with the California DMV for autonomous vehicles testing.)

For its first self-driving-car pilot program, Uber attached roof kits with its self-driving-car hardware to Ford Fusions. An Uber spokesperson said the company doesn't have an official partnership with Ford, only with Volvo and now Daimler.

"Auto manufacturers like Daimler are crucial to our strategy because Uber has no experience making cars—and in fact, making cars is really hard," Kalanick wrote in the blog post. "That’s why instead of building them ourselves, we want to partner with the best auto manufacturers in the world."

Daimler made history when its self-driving truck became the first to drive itself on a public highway in 2015. Uber also has ambitions in the self-driving truck space — it acquired self-driving-truck startup Otto in August. 

SEE ALSO: A driverless future is coming — but it won't start with self-driving cars

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A self-driving Mercedes-Benz truck drove on Germany’s Autobahn

Your competitors are likely at different stages in their development than you are. Maybe you launched a year ago and they are a legacy brand that you are chasing that has been in business for 60 years. Or perhaps you had a competitor enter the market at the same time you did. Whatever the case, you should definitely keep an eye on what they are doing in terms of branding, marketing, PR, and just general business decisions.

We often hear “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but many people still get upset if a great idea is stolen. While I would never advocate for stealing a great idea and taking credit, it is a good strategic move to see what is working for your competitors and adapting some ideas to match your unique brand and style. It’s not about stealing ideas, it’s about figuring out their strategy and why it is working for them. If you know something is working really well for a competitor, it’s kind of hard to ignore it when you have a similar (if not the same) audience you are trying to reach.

Here are 6 things you can learn from watching your competitors.

#1: Create a better customer experience

If you take the time to listen to what your competitor’s audience is saying about them and to them, then you can use that info to make your customer experience better. For example, if they aren’t happy about something, fix the issue in your own business. By creating a solution for their discontent with your competitor, you are making your business more attractive.

#2: How to interact with your audience

Audience interaction is key when it comes to customer service and building long-term loyalty among your audience. Does your competitor have a better relationship with their audience than you do with yours? Figure out why. Do they respond faster and solve customer problems better? Are their policies more customer-friendly?

It can also come down to what channels they use to interact with their audience that maybe you are missing out on. Do they use social media (what channels)? Email? Direct marketing? Experiential? Media and influencers? If they are using specific channels to successfully reach their audience, then you should seriously consider those channels.

#3: How to build trust

If your competitors are trusted and respected in the industry, it is a status you should also strive for. What tactics are they using to build that trust? Sometimes it’s as simple as making themselves more available for public-facing opportunities.

#4: How to use social media

If you aren’t on social media and your competitors are, then you are at a disadvantage from the start. Look through your competitors’ social media profiles to get a sense of what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Do they have branding continuity across platforms? Do they offer exclusive specials for social media followers? What content has gotten the most engagement when they post? When do they post and how often? When do their followers respond on social media?

#5: How to create content

Content should be a major focus for your marketing strategy. If you take a look at your competitors, you should be able to tell a few things such as blog layout, readability, the types of calls-to-action, they type of content they share (video, blogs, listicles, etc.). You can also look at the timing of content in terms of how much they post of each content type. Once you identify these things, look deeper to see whether their content strategy is effective in terms of audience engagement. This should form a solid foundation for your content planning strategy.

#6: What not to do

Mistakes are always easier to identify than successes when it comes to competitor research. Finding out what a competitor is doing wrong is just as important as identifying what they are doing right. There is no point in repeating mistakes others have already made if you can avoid doing so.

This blog post is the first installment of our new series, The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing. Over the next eight weeks, we’ll feature a new article a week that covers a specific area of focus in email marketing! Want a sneak peek into the content? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing. Out of all the marketing predictions for this year, there’s one we’re excited about most: Email marketing is going to be bigger and more important than ever to the growth of your business. But taking on email marketing for the first time is easier said than done. With so many different ways to promote your business nowadays, it can be difficult to identify which ones work and are worth putting time and money into. But the benefits of email marketing can’t be tossed aside:

• Almost ⅓ of customers prefer to receive communication from brands via email over any other channel (including social media and print ads)
• Sixty-six percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of viewing a brand email
• Email marketing delivers a return of 4,300 percent, which means that for every dollar you spend on email, you can earn $43!

And the benefits don’t stop there. In the rest of this article, we’ll cover other ways you can use email marketing to grow your business and reach more people. Prefer listening to reading? Check out the podcast version of this post or watch the video on YouTube:

Discover how email can help your business

There are a number of ways in which email can help drive revenue and nurture customer relationships that grow your business. Here’s what Justin Rondeau from DigitalMarketer says about the power of email: "Email marketing is the lifeblood of any business. If you don’t have a solid email marketing strategy, then you hate money. Email isn’t going anywhere and is still one of the best ways to move a lead to a prospect, a prospect to a buyer and a buyer to a consistent customer." [bctt tweet="If you don't have a solid email marketing strategy, then you hate money. - @jtrondeau"] At the end of the day, the success of your business relies on your ability to connect with people and motivate them to buy your product or service. And when you use email to help achieve that goal, you gain an opportunity to meet people where they are, build relationships, establish trust, prove your value and convince them to take action when they’re ready. So how exactly does email accomplish all of this? Here are six ways email can help transform your business:

1. Turn site visitors into customers.

Launching a website is a huge milestone for any new entrepreneur or small business owner. But with all of the effort you put into creating a website to attract new business, you might notice it’s harder than it seems. While you may receive a couple hundred visitors a day, you’re having a difficult time converting them into actually customers. That’s where email marketing can help. When you have an email list, you can add a sign up form to your website or blog’s homepage and capture the email addresses from your visitors. As you convey the value of your business over time in the emails you send them, you’re able to nurture those relationships. So when people are ready to make a purchase, they go to you instead of a competitor. On Enchanting Marketing’s homepage, for example, the first thing site visitors will notice is the sign up form promoting a “snackable writing course”: Once someone signs up, they then get to experience the value of the founder Henneke’s expertise. Not to mention, as they receive the email content they were promised, it also helps build trust. After delivering the 16-part course, Henneke then encourages subscribers who enjoyed the email series to purchase her book. In it, she explains that they’ll find writing advice similar to what they consumed over the last 16 days: As a result, Henneke’s able to capture visitors from her website and warm them up so they’re ready to make a purchase.   

2. Grow your audience… even without a website!

Don’t have a live website? Email marketing can play a critical role in helping you stay connected with your audience. If you own a brick-and-mortar store or frequently attend conferences and networking events, you can leverage these in-person opportunities to grow your list. Download a sign up form app to your mobile device and use email to share updates with your customers. Or, set up a piece of paper on a clipboard with a pen at your cash register and ask customers to sign up for your email list. If you still want to maintain a presence online, create a dedicated landing page that tells people about your business and features a sign up form. This way you can still be discovered online and capture email addresses in the same way you would if you had a multi-page website.

3. Raise brand awareness.

People love sharing content with friends, family and colleagues if they think they’ll benefit from it. And email can be another great piece of shareable content. If you commit to delivering valuable information to your subscribers, there may be times when your subscribers want to pass it along to others who might also find it interesting.   To encourage subscribers to share your email, include a call-to-action that tells them to forward the email. This way, it can help increase shareability and get your brand in front of new audiences. In this email below from the digital publishing company DMN, you’ll notice the link to share located at the top of the message: By encouraging subscribers to send this message to others who may find it interesting, they also increase the chances that they’ll get in front of new audiences.

4. Increase traffic to your website by sharing new content.

As you regularly send emails to your subscribers, aim to always include at least one call to action. Consider what links you can include to drive them back to your website. Email is the perfect channel for driving people back to your website. You already know they’re interested in what you have to say, so it’s time to feed the content beast and send them links that drive back to your website. A big piece of this will depend on your ability to create new, valuable content subscribers will want to interact with. Whether it’s a blog post or video, give them a reason to read more than what’s in your email. By driving traffic back to your website, you’re able to keep your brand top-of-mind, and hopefully encourage them to buy another product, log into their account or sign up for a service.

5. Boost sales by promoting products/services.

In addition to sending emails with new content published on your website, you can also use email to promote new products and sales or promotions. Consider this: 98 percent of people check their email every single day. With so many people frequently checking their inbox, this makes it a great way to get urgent information out to your audience. You can influence people to take action by crafting subject lines with the promotion discount, or emphasize urgency by including how much time is left for the sale. Fortunately, your product doesn’t have to be a physical item – it can be an ebook, course, event or any other type of property you create to be sold or registered for. Copyblogger, for example, recently ran an email campaign to promote a discount off of their education platform, Rainmaker. In the final emails, they emphasized both urgency and value: The subject line stressed the timeliness of the discount, as well as how much I would save if I took advantage of it. Most importantly, Copyblogger increased the chances that I would see the email.

6. Establish customer loyalty and advocacy.

In addition to using email as a way to acquire new customers and increase revenue, it can also be a powerful tool for establishing loyalty and brand advocacy. Highlighting customers success stories or featuring user-generated content like social posts and images can be great for reinforcing how much you care about your individual fans. As you listen to what your followers say about your brand on social channels like Facebook and Twitter, look for opportunities where you might be able to share the stand-out posts. Or browse through customer reviews if you regularly collect those. Before you post their feedback, however, be sure to get their approval. Here’s an example of using customer testimonials in an email from online mattress company, Casper: By using a raving customer review in an abandoned cart email, Casper shows that there are other happy customers out there – and you can experience a good night’s sleep like them.

Commit to email marketing

While these are only a few of the many benefits of email marketing, there’s only one way for you to learn more about them – and it begins with experiencing its power for yourself. With all of the benefits mentioned in this article, is there one thing you hope to get out of email marketing that wasn’t listed? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments! To learn more about getting started with email marketing, read next week's post, How to Plan an Email Marketing Strategy. Or get the full experience by checking out the Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing!

The post Email Marketing 101: 6 Ways it Can Boost Your Business appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

How will improvements in artificial intelligence change SEO? In this new episode of Real Smart Marketing, we’ve posed this big question to four of our favorite influencers. Here are their responses.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Impact SEO?

If you’re like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “AI” might be this:

But as I’ve come to realize, what we’re talking about is a lot less creepy. AI is changing the face of SEO, but not like that. We’re talking about algorithms that enable machines to make connections, “learn” to process data, and apply its learning in future tasks.

Basically, improvements in artificial intelligence like deep learning and natural language processing mean that search engines are becoming smarter and more human-friendly. (highlight to tweet)

When you search for something, the results displayed take into account a bucket of considerations like your location, search history, favorite websites, and what other users click on for a similar query. AI improvements mean ranking factors can change from query to query, as the algorithm learns from how people are clicking on the search results and decides on the most relevant factors to take into account for each search.

But enough about algorithms. What does it mean for marketers? How does it change our jobs? I don’t have the answers, but our experts do. Here’s a quick recap on what changes AI will bring to marketers according to four industry influencers, plus suggestions of what you should do in face of these changes.

1. Optimizing Your Visual Content SEO Will Become Increasingly Important

According to Sam Mallikarjunan, Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs, visual content will have an increasing influence on SEO. He says, “Search engines are getting good at knowing what a video, audio clip, or image is actually about.”

Google doesn’t just favor YouTube videos in search results—they’re also getting better at analyzing what visual content is about. This changes things for visual content creators. Just like how content writers had to learn to optimize headings and keywords, visual artists will have to start thinking about SEO when creating visual content like images and videos. SEO for videos, for example, means optimizing keyword targeting, descriptions, tags, video length, and more. Here’s a great guide on optimizing videos for SEO from Brian Dean, if you want to learn more.

(Want to learn foolproof ways to create epic visuals? Join Mention’s webinar with Venngage’s Marketing Director, Nadya Khoja.)

2. Quality and Relevance Are the New Ranking Factors

Google’s AI, RankBrain, is an artificial intelligence change that attempts to understand the context of content on websites. As Google gets better at analyzing search intent, it’s more important than ever to get our keyword research right, and then tie those keywords back into our content. Basically, content has to do a better job than ever at serving searcher intent. So rather than older factors like keyword density, things like content relevance, context, and value are now more important ranking factors.

That means it’s time to focus on providing real value, answering what people are asking, and not trying to stuff as many keywords as possible in a blog post. It’s no longer about writing a blog post about one keyword phrase you picked from your keyword research. It’s about creating a blog, or a series of blog posts, around a concept related to that keyword.

In fact, the best option would be to focus your website around a single topic. This way, you not only help RankBrain learn the niche you’re in, but you also narrow your competitive pool. Google will compare your websites only to others from your niche, so you’ll have higher chances of ranking and getting traffic.

3. Get More Selective with Your Link Building

Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream, predicts that websites with “strong domain authority with lots of links pointing to it but mediocre content” will be most susceptible to Google’s AI improvements. Since the smarter search engines will analyze whether people clicking on your links actually stay and read your content, SEO marketers need to focus even more on relevance and quality in their backlinks.

We’ve covered content quality, but how do you improve link relevance? Basically, your backlinks should come from the same, or similar, category and industry as your site. It means you’ll have to be more selective with your link building.

If you sell cat food, and your website is all about cats and their food, then you shouldn’t have lots of backlinks from websites selling lizards. RankBrain won’t like it and may penalize you for it. In addition to restricting your content to a single niche, you also need to restrict your links to the same niche. Any fast and dirty ways to purchase links are surely out of the question.

Going forward, we’ll have to build links the “old-school way”—by building real relationships. Find influencers talking about your niche, and connect with them to find link opportunities.

4. Going beyond web optimization only with mobile and voice search

If you’re only thinking about SEO for web browsing on computers, think again.

Mobile Searches

According to a Google study, 40 percent of searches are now mobile, and more than one in four users only use a smartphone on an average day. As a marketer, if you aren’t optimizing the way your brand is reaching customers on mobile, you risk missing out on a quarter of your potential audience.

Whether you’re ready or not, Google has put more pressure on us to make our sites more mobile-friendly when they announced making it a part of their mobile algorithm.

A positive effect of this mobile shift is that it opens new doors for brands to market. For example, If you have a mobile app for your site, you can make it show in mobile queries to increase exposure and brand awareness. If you search for “Wall Street Journal” on your smartphone, you’ll find the WSJ app among the first few results, and it stands out against other ranking websites. Currently, it’s still a relatively untapped market, so act fast.

Voice Searches

With the rise of mobile usage came voice searches. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana have become virtual assistants of all our capricious demands. And this changes things for SEO.

Most of us are more concise when we type. For example, you’d type “best pizza place NYC” into a search bar. But when you do a voice search, you’re more likely to say a complete sentence like, “Hey Siri, what’s the best place to get pizza in NYC?” As Rand says, “Voice searches are getting longer and more conversational.”

Say Goodbye to Black Hat

In short, a smarter Google means black hat tactics are closer to becoming obsolete. Short-term strategies that try to trick or outsmart algorithms won’t work. It means investing in long-term best practices will be rewarded more than gaming the system.

It may sound like a lot of work, but with improvements in AI, SEO should also become more intuitive and natural. So focus on delivering relevance and value to searchers, and let RankBrain work out the rest.

Inspired to brush up on SEO basics? Learn from what Mention did to increase our web traffic by 373 percent.

Get more content like this, plus the very BEST marketing education, totally free. Get our Definitive email newsletter.

In just a few years digital technology has connected an ever-growing number of people, sensors, and devices. It’s created new business and social networks, resulted in new ecosystems, and transformed our economy. Of course, not all organizations have responded to it in the same way. While some have invested significantly in technology, operational, and cultural changes, others are lagging behind. Our research shows that digital transformation is paying off for those who embrace it: Digitally transformed organizations (“digital leaders”) performed much better than organizations that lagged behind (“digital laggards”), effectively creating a “digital divide” across companies.

Our research focused on 344 enterprises* listed on U.S. exchanges with a median company revenue of $3.4 billion, including most major firms in the manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, financial services, and retail industries. The table below includes all participants in our study and shows how organizations that scored in the top quartile of our digital transformation index obtained much better gross margins, earnings, and net income than organizations in the bottom digital quartile. Other financial and operating indicators showed similar disparities.

 

Our research also shows that a digital advantage is not simply a function of spending money. The best-performing companies stated they have technology budgets on par with digital laggards; the average IT spend as a percentage of revenue was 3.5% for leaders and 3.2% for laggards. Clearly, digital transformation involves some significant capability building.

What Digital Leaders Do Differently

Our research indicates that these leaders approach the digital opportunity with a different strategic mindset and execute on the opportunity with a different operating model. Data and analytics are obviously key. Leading organizations are more likely to have a comprehensive data acquisition strategy and differentiate themselves from competitors based on their data platform. This difference in strategy means that business users are more likely to have access to a consistent set of up-to-date metrics for decision making, and the organization can generate predictions about their business from data they collect.

The broad deployment of digital technology requires rethinking both business and operating models. A business model defines how your organization creates and captures value. An operating model defines how your organization delivers the value promised by its business model. In combination, business and operating models define and rank the range of options available to operating managers in making their daily business decisions.

Digital technology changes the way an organization can create value: Digital value creation stems from new, network-centric ways your business connects with partners and customers offering new business combinations. Value is increasingly captured by new data, embedded and shared in your networks, with “network effects” growing value as the network expands. This means that business models are increasingly network-centric and data-oriented — and we see that among the digital leaders like Honeywell. (A company doesn’t have to be born digital to become a digital leader.)

Honeywell’s Lyric, which competes head-on with Google’s Nest connected home thermostat, is only the most visible of the company’s efforts. Within the core business, digital technologies are fundamentally changing the way Honeywell creates and captures value for its industrial customers through new efficiencies and services that unlock new value. And Honeywell recently established a dedicated Industrial IoT (IIoT) division to create an IoT platform that helps industrial clients derive greater value from its products and the 2.5 billion gigabytes of data the company captures each day.

Opportunities for capturing the value an organization creates also expand greatly, with pricing technology, ubiquitous sensors, and business instrumentation offering completely new ways to drive price differentiation, efficiency, and accuracy. An increasing portion of the value captured is also shared with partners, customers, and community participants as the locus of any business model expands to business networks and communities. For example, automobile insurance companies like Allstate, Progressive and State Farm have launched programs to use connected devices to monitor customers’ driving patterns. Automotive telematics can capture metrics such as the frequency and length of trips and unsafe driving behaviors like hard braking and rapid acceleration. Insurers can use this data to better understand their customers and to price policies accordingly. Safe drivers stand to benefit from lower premiums as traditional pricing policies are amended using real-world data about customer behavior.

Delivering the new business models requires adopting new operating models that change the very nature of the way companies explore new ground, experiment with new concepts, and deliver products and services to customers. Ecolab is a prime example of this. Ecolab’s products and services help major refineries, petrochemical plants, and manufacturing facilities process and save water in their operations. Increasingly, Ecolab’s business is taking advantage of data it collects from its equipment to ensure greater uptime and performance, deliver enhanced customer service, and help customers achieve key business outcomes.

Ecolab’s data platform has been designed to generate operational insights from the rich data generated by the company’s equipment and a profusion of networked sensors. Insights gleaned from this data have transformed Ecolab’s field service operations, enabling the company to monitor its products for potential problems, suggest and dispatch the best available technician, and minimize downtime or process disruptions. Ecolab is also using its growing network of equipment to generate new services. Data can be aggregated to benchmark a customer’s operations, suggest performance improvements, and help the customer capture greater value through energy and water savings, increased product performance.

Four Operating Pillars

Digital operations are built around four pillars. The first is customer interaction and relationship management, which leverages new and extensive data and analytics platforms to shape relationships and target opportunities. The second is manufacturing, product, and service delivery, which manages internal operations as well as the increasingly crucial and extended ecosystem of partners and external contributors. The third is product creation and delivery, which combines a tailored mix of engineering, product management, data sciences, traditional engineering ops, design, and economics resources. The fourth is human capital management, which focuses on recruiting, developing, and enabling information workers, providing the processes and systems to empower them with the tools required to connect and remain productive. Digital leaders have achieved more-robust capabilities across all four operating model pillars:

Customer Interaction and Relationship Management

• Digital leaders are 2.5x more likely than digital laggards to harness real-time data and analytics to deliver tailored customer experiences
• 2.5x more likely to use analytics to develop perceptual intelligence about customers
• And 2.6x more likely to use analytics to prescribe business actions to limit customer churn

Manufacturing, Product, and Service Delivery

• Digital leaders are 1.5x more likely to optimize production runs based on demand forecast
• 1.7x more likely to be able to predict equipment downtime using advanced analytics
• And 2.3x more likely to use predictive modeling to anticipate customer support requests

Product Creation and Delivery

• Digital leaders are 2.3x more likely to inform product design by capturing data on how their products are used
• 1.8x more likely to monitor products remotely and drive customer support based on data insights
• And 1.9x more likely to use data to benchmark customers and advise them on how to realize greater value

Human Capital Management and Employee Productivity

• Digital leaders are 2.6x more likely to collect data on employee performance and generate recommendations for development
• 1.4x more likely to empower employees with access to self-service business intelligence and data visualization tools
• And 1.7x more likely to allow employees to define and receive real-time alerts to more effectively manage changes to the business

Driving digital transformation does not imply replacing old business assets and capabilities. But, like any significant building addition, doing it well requires modifying the existing structure. There are no blank sheets of paper. Digital transformation is about reconstructing the firm around digital operating principles, integrating traditional assets to address new challenges and pursue new opportunities. To do this well, leading companies invest not only in technology but also in developing the data-centric and network-centric capabilities and mindset to put that technology to the best use.

*The authors have consulted for a number of companies in the software industry, included several mentioned in this paper. The research was performed in collaboration with Keystone Strategy LLC, which received funding from Microsoft Corporation.

With an abundance of new features being introduced every week, it can be a challenge to keep up with all the available opportunities worth taking advantage of in your paid search accounts. And sometimes it can be easy to get so involved with all the new and exciting strategies that you forget about the tried-and-true tactics that are most valuable for improving account performance.

Here are three tactics to brush off and (re-)evaluate with your 2017 paid search strategy planning.

1. Evaluate the Time Lag Report

The Time Lag Report in AdWords is a great tool that provides the ability to evaluate how long it takes your customers to convert after first seeing or clicking your ad. Time lag can vary greatly client by client—higher-ticket items typically require more research from consumers and therefore result in longer conversion windows. But on the other hand, low-ticket or need-to-have-now items could yield a small conversion window.

It’s important to know how long your conversion window is, because it’ll give you a better sense of how long you should wait before truly analyzing recent performance. For instance, if you have a long conversion window but attempt to analyze recent performance, it could appear that this year’s performance is worse than it actually is because of the conversion delay.

Knowing your conversion time lag will also ensure that your conversion pixels are set up with the proper conversion window. If 15% of conversions happen after 30 days, then consider increasing your conversion window beyond the 30-day default to gain credit for those delayed conversions.

2. Monitor Assisted Conversions

AdWords gives conversion credit to the keyword that received the last click before the conversion occurred. On the surface, it may seem pretty apparent which keywords are performing well. On further investigation of assisted conversions, however, you might discover that seemingly under-performing keywords play a large role in helping users down the conversion path.

In order to evaluate this data, you have the ability to assess click- or impression-assisted conversions. Both options can be a great resource to identify which keywords help drive the most conversions. This information is easily accessible directly in the keywords reporting tab (right beside other key data metrics) so that you can easily make informed bidding decisions and prevent optimization mistakes such as pausing “poor performing” keywords that are actually providing value.

For instance, you may consider pausing a certain non-brand keyword because of its high CPA. But, after analyzing the click and impression assists, you realize that the keyword is driving a large volume of assisted conversions. Despite the fact that the CPA is high, you decide not to pause this keyword since it’s driving valuable conversions to the account.

3. Watch for Impression Share Lost Due to Budget

One thing you certainly want to avoid is having campaigns that regularly cap out on budget. Hitting campaign budget caps can falsely hurt performance because you miss out on clicks (and therefore conversions) from top-performing keywords, which ultimately ends up increasing the cost per conversion.

If you’re consistently hitting the budget cap on a particular campaign, you should consider increasing the budget (if it makes sense and you have the budget capacity to do so). However, when a budget increase isn’t an option, then the primary focus should be to reduce keyword bids. Ultimately, it’s important that budgets are controlled and managed via bid adjustments and not budget caps. This’ll allow you to generate stronger performance because you drive more click volume and conversions within your budget.

Monitoring lost impression share due to budget at the campaign level will help you stay on top of this and ensure you don’t end up paying more for less.

In Sum

There are countless strategies to improve account performance and always new things to test. These are just three dependable tactics that are worth taking the time brush off and use in 2017. Take a look at this data in your account and make sure you’re ready for what the year has to offer!

How does recouping some of your digital ad budget sound?

How about saving a hefty percentage of conversions that would have bounced otherwise?

If so, you’ll want to employ an exit-intent popup ASAP. As your visitors go to leave (aka bounce) from your website or landing page, the exit-intent popup will stop them in their tracks. Think of it as a last ditch effort to collect their email or make them an offer they can’t refuse.

To get the most power out of your exit-intent popup, experiment with these 51 strategies, tips, and examples.

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1. Negative CTA

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We’ll admit not everyone is a fan of the negative CTA. Sometimes the text can go a little overboard.

A negative CTA works because the user is forced to make a choice: yes I want your offer or no I’ll continue on my way. The point being that a choice has to be made.

The negative language is meant to persuade the reader to accept your offer. In the example below the reader has a choice “Yes, sign me up” or “No, I hate saving money”. The language address most people’s aversion to loss. Consumers want to save money whenever possible so the choice of yes become obvious.

2.Image of product

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An image of your product (e.g. an ebook cover) will make your offer much more compelling. Access to a reader’s email won’t come easily so a visual aid will make your offer much more tangible. Include imagery wherever possible to cut down on the words your reader has to gloss over.

3. Progress bar

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When a visitor accepts your offer on your popup they’ve become invested. A progress bar that shows a 50% completion harnesses what is called the Zeigarnik effect. It refers to the nagging effect one gets when they leave a task incomplete.

A progress bar is meant to persuade a visitor to complete the process they’ve started. In the example below, the visitor sees that they’re halfway there. One more step and they’ll receive the reward.

4. Benefit oriented CTA

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A benefit oriented CTA is meant to address the question, “So what?” Why should the visitor care about what you have to offer? What is the benefit?

Using a benefit oriented CTA implies a reward or the end of a problem for the visitor. Use a benefit oriented CTA to increase the feeling of reward.

Example:
* Grow my business * Save me 50% * Get my free template

5. Action oriented CTA

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When making an offer, action or fulfillment is paramount. Visitors want to know what they’re about to accomplish. Mystery or uncertainty is the enemy of conversion. Make it clear what the user is going to accomplish by using an action oriented CTA button.

The language or text should match the offer you are making. Be specific so that any hesitation or “friction” is eliminated for the visitor.

Example:
* Offering a free ebook. CTA: Get my free ebook * Offering a free trial. CTA: Start my free trial * Offering a discount: CTA: Claim my 10% discount

6. Discount code

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Offering a discount to customers about to leave your website or abandon their carts can be a powerful persuasion tool. Think of the small discount as a last ditch effort to save a sale or else lose the sale completely.

As a visitor moves to leave your website they’ll see the discount and finish their transaction. In the example below Behappy.me offers visitors 10% off their first purchase before they leave their website.

7. Free template

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A free resource or template is a suitable lead magnet for almost any website. Designers, writers, or marketers could all use helpful resources to get their projects off and running quickly. Templates like a Photoshop mockups, prewritten emails, precoded plugins etc are all examples of things that can hook your visitors into giving you their emails before they leave.

8. Ebook

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A value-packed ebook is an excellent resource, and if done properly, can be the least costly lead magnet to create. First off, does your company actively promote and maintain a blog?

If so, you’ve already done most of the work. Collect all of your high-traffic and widely shared content. Organize that content under one topic. Create a book cover and you’ll have your very first ebook.

The social ad gurus at AdEspresso took all of their Twitter ad content and combined them into a single resource 500 Twitter Ads Examples to Inspire You. An ebook packed with valuable information will surely collect the email of any visitor before leaving your website.

9. Deadline for promotion

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Including a deadline for your offer (e.g. offer expires tonight at midnight!) will create urgency. In the best case scenario your visitor will question, “should I buy this now before it’s gone?”

Abandoning one’s shopping cart or leaving before accepting a free resource will be much more difficult if the offer won’t exist tomorrow.

10. Full overlay

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Instead of a popup, experiment using an entire page overlay to really grab the attention of your visitors before they leave. Use your most valued free resource to hook their attention and second guess their decision to leave.

Brian Dean of Backlinko uses this bright exit-intent overlay to stop visitors in their tracks. He offers his visitors the checklist he used to rank #1 in Google — an invaluable resource by my standards. What makes an exit-intent overlay so great is that it only provides the visitor with the option of opting in or clicking the no button, nothing else. Clicking elsewhere has no effect, visitors must make a decision.

11. Social proof

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As much as we like to think we’re not susceptible to peer pressure there are moments where we can subconsciously cave-in. Knowing that like-minded individuals are doing something that we aren’t, is enough to make us want to join in. Social proof or seeing that others are doing something is a powerful persuasion tool.

“Join 72,558 subscribers”, says this HelpScout exit popup. By seeing that there are 72,558 other subscribers on their list it makes you question yourself. Am I missing out on something valuable?

12. Loss aversion

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Focus on what your visitor has to lose by not accepting your offer. “Losses loom larger than gains” means that people are inherently more averse to losses than equal gains. It is a bias all people posses subconsciously. That’s why we know people prefer to save 25% rather than spend only 75%. The thought of losing $5 is much more painful than the joy of receiving $5.

This exit-intent overlay from BounceExchange leverages loss aversion. Stop wasting the potential revenue from the traffic you’re already receiving. Convert that traffic into revenue instead.

13. Unlock

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Using the word “unlock” communicates exclusivity in your offer. Visitors are receiving the privilege of unlocking your ultra-valuable offer in other words.

Tim Ferriss uses this tactic on his exit-intent overlay to capture visitor attention. Before leaving they have the opportunity to unlock the tools and tactics to change their lives and business. Fairly compelling offer, no?

14. Join

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The use of the word “join” suggests a feeling of access or oneness with a group. Being able to join something gives us all a certain sense of belonging. We’d all like to feel included right?

By joining the Later newsletter you’re one of 600,000 other subscribers receiving the best social media content on the web.

15. Instant savings

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Using the word “instant” in your offer communicates immediacy. Your visitors will instantly receive their 10% off when they accept your offer, for example. Stating exactly what your visitor will accomplish or receives creates action because the next step is explicit. Whatever you can do to lend confidence to your visitor’s actions will reduce friction and lead to more conversions.

16. Directional cue

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Your desired conversion goal is not always obvious. It hurts to assume that your visitors will know exactly what you want them to accomplish. So help them out a little. Add a directional cue arrow to the areas you’d like to bring attention to. Point towards the form field or the CTA button to naturally draw a visitor’s eye toward it.

Jeff Bullas uses a directional cue arrow on his exit popup to lead the eye down the copy towards the form fields.

17. Personalize with name

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Being able to address visitors by name is a nifty trick to add personalization to your offer. Users that have already opted into your website can be targeted with personalized messages. A new promotion or feature can be given more attention if the offer is directed to a visitor by name.

Let’s say you’ve collected a visitor’s name in a previous interaction or sale. If they’re about to abandon a cart your exit popup will be able to say “Wait, Jim!” and offer them 10% to complete their transaction. Much more compelling.

18. Add authority

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Coming from a place of authority provides much more credibility to your offer. It’s much like saying, “You’re trying to do this? Well I’ve done it already so listen up.”

Going back to Brain Dean’s resource offer, he comes from a place of authority. He has proven success in an area that many are attempting to accomplish. It makes him an authority on the subject.

19. Use numbers or data

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Large numerals and concrete data are powerful persuasion tools. Big numbers within a headline or body copy automatically attract the eye. Anytime you can support your offer with data or large numbers it makes for much more compelling communication.

20,000 digital marketers are already receiving the Convince & Convert newsletter, are you in? The large number and bold headline command attention. Even if the visitor clicks no, they’ll at least have read and understood the sell.

20. Personalize with referral source

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Personalization in all of its forms adds much more value to your offer. Addressing visitors by name or location, for example, makes the offer seem uniquely crafted for them.

Thrillist personalizes their popup with a user’s location to entice them to sign up before they leave. To be sent the best content on food, drink, and fun is good, but the best in my city? Even better.

21. Source specific offer

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A source specific offer is an offer related to the source of the visitor. For example, an offer for all your fans coming from Facebook, a different offer for those coming from Twitter or a partner website. The more personalized you can make the offer seem the higher the conversions.

22. Content upgrade

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Before leaving your website an exit popup could be used to offer a content upgrade. This could be a downloadable infographic, a handy checklist, or a pdf of the entire post for offline reading.

23. Provide several choices

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An exit popup does not always have to present an offer. It could be used as a navigational tool. Landing on a website from a Google search result, for example, could be a navigational challenge for a visitor. They’re only presented with the blog post and will leave right after they’ve found what they were looking for.

An exit popup could stop them from leaving by leading them to another topic of interest. In the example below, visitors could be persuaded to explore more of the site by following one of these three topics.

24. Address objection directly

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Addressing visitor hesitations and objections comes from knowing your audience. Addressing concerns directly is a quick way to give your visitors confidence. Confidence to trust in and claim whatever you have to offer.

Neil Patel is so confident that you’ll love his product that he’d like to offer you 83% off plus a 30 day money back guarantee. Addressing the concerns that his product won’t deliver on value by offering a steep discount is a smart way for Neil to show that he’s more than confident that it will.

25. Provide a reminder

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If a visitor has browsed your website, picked out some items, but then proceeded to abandon the transaction, an exit popup could show them the items and remind them to finish. Some visitors may simply forget they’ve picked out products from your store. An exit popup can be used as a friendly way to remind them they’ve forgot to finish.

In the example below the visitor is shown the dresses she’s picked out and is given the option to save her items for later. This exit popup does double duty by wisely collecting an email or persuading a visitor to complete their transaction.

26. Imply scarcity

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A product that is in high demand and low supply creates scarcity. Create a sense of scarcity in your exit popup by including things like stock numbers or supply levels. Seeing that there is only one jacket left in their size would be powerful enough to convince them to make the purchase.

27. Free trial

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Don’t leave the site without signing up for a free trial! GraphicStock makes a compelling offer in their exit popup for “7 days of free downloads.” A free trial can make a tempting offer for those who wish to explore your product without any commitment. Once visitors have explored your product and you’ve demonstrated your value it is more likely that they will commit.

28. Suggest related products

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Having the choice to explore other related products can help keep visitors on your website longer. An ecommerce shop, for example, can use an exit popup to show visitors other items that they might be interested in — increasing on-site time.

Items on sale or new stock as in the example below, persuade visitors to explore more of your offerings before they make the decision to leave.

29. Exit survey to collect user data

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Just because a visitor chooses to leave doesn’t mean you should be left with nothing. An exit popup could be used to collect visitor feedback in the form of an exit survey. The information collected could range from the user interface, shopping habits, or interests. The goal here is to learn more about your visitors to make measurable improvements. Use this tactic to optimize for future conversions.

30. Wait _______

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Starting with “Wait!” will get most people to stop dead in their tracks much like yelling it on a street corner. It grabs attention, plain and simple.

Green Mountain Mustard stops their visitors by yelling wait! Then they pitch a 10% discount to make sure no one leaves without some tasty mustard.

31. Use humour

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Humour can create a memorable interaction with your visitors and your brand. Humour creates happiness, an emotion that makes visitors relate positively with a brand.

Experiment with humour like Esquire does on their exit popup. Visitors can opt-in to receive 75 Movies Every Man Must See or stick to the latest Adam Sandler films.

32. Two step opt-in

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Research has shown that a two-step opt-in consistently performs better than a one step opt-in. Meaning, a visitor clicks on a button, choosing to opt-in and then provides their email in the second step. Two step opt-in.

Visitors must click “Yes Please” on this Marie Forleo exit popup and then enter in their email on the next step. By first agreeing to opt-in, visitors are implying “yes I want this” and thus are more likely to complete the opt-in process. This will ensure that visitors actually want the offer resulting in much better lead quality.

33. Animations

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Adding animations to your popups are meant to draw attention to specific areas like the CTA. Experiment by having the CTA button wiggle or jump. But use animation sparingly. They may slow down the speed of your popup or cause loading errors.

34. Yes or No choices

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Much like the two step opt-in process the visitor should only be presented with a choice of yes or no. Why? When presented with only an opt-in box a person will always choose to make no choice at all.

To get past this popup on SmartPassiveIncome you’ll either have to opt-in or click no. Pat Flynn provides only two buttons for his visitors to click so that they’re forced to consider his offer — nothing else. (Same goes for the CopyHackers example above)

35. Win a _______ giveaway for email

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Those who join Invision’s email list are entered to win a free t-shirt. A giveaway like this can be a fun incentive for people to opt-in. Think of an item you can offer your audience for free. Pick something that ties itself back to your business and brand. Those who win this shirt will receive something for free and Invision will receive free promotion in return.

36. Use contrast

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As far as design tips go, contrast is most imperative for popups. Lightly colour forms and CTAs should be contrasted with dark backgrounds vice versa. Exit popups literally have seconds to persuade a visitor to stay so it’s important that each element is easy to see and read.

It’s hard to ignore the text in the Groove popup example below. Each element easy to read because of the well contrasted use of colour and font weight.

37. Create curiosity

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Add a bit of curiosity to persuade the reader to continue to explore. One way to do this is by asking a question.

SocialTriggers asks, “Want to learn how to get 5,000 subscribers for free?” The mystery creates curiosity. By opting in, visitors can learn Derek’s secrets. Try creating curiosity with your offer to peak the interest of your visitors.

38. Free bonus add-on

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A bonus add-on can be just thing to push your offer over the edge. By separating your offer into two parts you can double its perceived value.

Neil Patel offers his Advanced Customer Acquisition Webinar to all of QuickSprout’s visitors. As a free bonus they also receive the 24-step framework he uses to teach marketing. An added bonus like, a free framework or checklist, is a clever way to easily increase the value of your offer.

39. Redirect traffic

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As we mentioned before, an exit popup can work as a tool to redirect visitors to other areas of interest. Imagine a visitor lands on your website looking for information about your new lawnmowers. After struggling to find anything he decides to leave but a popup promoting your new stock of lawnmowers shows up and saves the day.

Visitors can find exactly what they’re looking for on this SmartBlogger popup. If they go to leave the website this popup will redirect them to a blogging topic of their interest.

40. Optimize for speed

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Optimizing your exit popup for speed is the single best thing you can do today. When visitors decide to leave your website they do it quickly. The quicker the popup appears the better chance you have of saving the interaction. This can be accomplished by using smaller image sizes and fewer amount of graphics. For the best results, switch to a popup provider with proven speed.

41. Segment by interests

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Segmentation is important for personalization. As well as collecting email addresses — interests, industry, or position can be helpful information for sending personalized promotions in the future.

Visitors of the Wishpond blog can select what type of content they’re most interested in when opting in. This saves them from having to receive irrelevant emails and it allows us to provide more content that interests them. When updating features or running promotions we can email the people who are most likely to be interested.

42. Mobile friendly/responsive

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By now you should know that half of all web traffic is from a mobile device. This means all of your lead gen tools, especially popups, should be mobile responsive. A better user experience always leads to more conversions.

43. A/B test with popup software

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To get the most out of your popups they must be continuously optimized through A/B testing. Much like most of your website, conversions can be improved by testing different copy, images, and colours. A popup building platform (like Wishpond) allows users to run and test different variations to see which performs better.

44. AIDA

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The AIDA copywriting formula is one of the most tried and true copywriting formulas around. Use it to organize the hierarchy of your exit popup copy.

AIDA stands for:

• Attention. Grab the attention of the reader using an emotional or benefit based headline. The headline should hook the reader and interest them enough to continue reading.
• Interest. Create interest with a compelling fact, figure, or piece of data. Demonstrate that your solution is proven to solve the problem.
• Desire. Create desire by explaining what’s in it for them.
• Action. Your call to action. Make it precise and specific so that the reader knows exactly what to do.

45. PAS

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The PAS copywriting formula takes a problem-based approach. Identify the problem. Dig into why that problem sucks. Then present your solution to the problem.

• Problem.
• Agitate
• Solve

CTA Button Text Examples

46. Teach me _________

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Mastery of a skill takes 10,000 hours of practice says Malcolm Gladwell. If your offer is educational in format you’ll need to use a CTA button that reflects your offer.

Examples:

• Teach me how to retain more users
• Teach me how to reduce churn
• Teach me how to increase conversions

47. Hook-line-sinker

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This CTA formula is courtesy of Wordstream. It’s great for ad copy but also text links and buttons. Here’s how to use it:

Command verb + offer + urgency

Examples:

• Download our whitepaper today!
• Access the templates now!
• Download your free report now!

48. RAD

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The RAD CTA button formula stands for:

• Require
• Acquire
• Desire When using this formula the very first thing you want to do is make sure you’ve clearly explained the offer first. Don’t prematurely place a button anywhere on the popup before you’ve explained the information first.

According to RAD: First give your visitors the info they require, make the button easy to acquire (locate), then make sure your visitor desires what the button promises.

49. Claim my __________

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There is no better way to piss off a potential customer than to not come through on your promise. If you’re offering an amazing lead magnet or promotional discount, the last thing you should do is make your visitors jump through more hoops than they’re comfortable with. It will more than likely lead to a bounce rather than a conversion.

Let your visitors know they’re about to claim your offer immediately with this CTA button text.

Examples:

• Claim My Free Ebook
• Claim My 15% Discount
• Claim My Spot

50. Become a __________

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This landing page CTA button is for those who are offering some sort of education based product. The offer is purely aspirational so the button language reflects that. Visitors are opting in to become something. Add in a prospected timeline and you’ll have yourself a very tempting offer.

Example:

• Become a better blogger in 30 days.
• Become a conversion rate expert.
• Become a better writer in 30 days.

51. Send me the free _______

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Your resource is on the way. Like the previous button, this one will tell visitors that the resource they want is on its way. It also includes the fact that it is cost-free so commitment costs nothing.

Example:

• Send me the free ebook.
• Send me the free resource.
• Send me the free templates.

Final Thoughts

An exit-intent popup can be applied to many areas of your website to capture lead information or save a sale. The benefits are hard to ignore.

Hopefully these strategies, tips, and examples can help give your website a conversion boost.

Do you use exit popups on your website?

What strategies, tips or tricks work best for you?

The first post I wrote in defense of cold calling was July 17, 2009. If that post was a child, it would be in 1st grade right now. It’s closing in on its 6th birthday. The post was titled “The Anti-Cold Calling Crowd Are Charlatans. Period.” That post is as true today as it was the day I wrote it.

In 2009, the idea that social selling and inbound marketing was going to replace the telephone was gathering steam. The people who sold social selling and inbound tools and services set up cold calling as a straw man, knowing that a large portion of salespeople hated cold calling. They offered social selling as the replacement, suggesting that no one should dare interrupt another human being, that it was rude, and that it was no longer effective. Not only did salespeople buy this, big companies bought it, too.

The tools at the time were Twitter and LinkedIn Groups. Twitter was where you were supposed to go to listen to your prospective clients. LinkedIn Groups was where you were supposed to go to comment on your dream client’s posts and questions as a way to warm them up before trying to move them to engage in real life. Neither Twitter or LinkedIn groups are known for their massive engagement potential with B2B buyers of goods and services now. Instead, it’s Instagram and SnapChat.

In 2010, I won a $1,000,000 account using LinkedIn to connect with the prospect and to ask for an appointment. It was a simple, direct InMail. That year, I also booked multiple speaking gigs, a few of them International, after the people who hired me followed a link on Twitter back to my site. This is because social tools benefit content creators most of all, and don’t do nearly so much for the content consumer, the content curator, or the quota-carrying sales rep.

Over the last few years, you’ve heard voices in the social selling and inbound spaces beginning to speak honestly about the need to make outbound cold calls, including the very same organizations that created graphics that suggested to connect and engage, and never cold call. The voices that suggest that you should never pick up the phone are growing increasingly rare. What were once loud, confident, aggressive voices disparaging the phone are all but a whisper, with the exception of a few who discovered social selling in the last year or two and believe the party is still in full swing.

For almost 8 years, a few of us have been in the wilderness eating locusts and honey. A few of us have strongly admonished salespeople to continue to use the phone as their primary tool, suggesting that the social tools were important, but by themselves not enough for non-content creators to succeed.

The Charlatans post, inspired by Mark Hunter, marked the beginning of this period in sales, and this post will mark its end. And so will this post by my friend, Tony Hughes.

The post The Triumphant Return of Cold Calling appeared first on The Sales Blog.

You have a documented content strategy. Your content is mapped to personas and buyers’ journeys. You write great stuff, use images, share on social … but it’s still not ranking well in search engines. What gives?

Sometimes even the most relevant, useful, and/or engaging content struggles to climb through search engine rankings. If your content happens to land on the second page of the SERPs, you’ve already lost the vast majority of your audience.

Don’t let low search engine rankings throw you off course. Bring out your magnifying glass, throw on your checkered cape, and let’s investigate.

When you are ready to get to work, scroll to the bottom and download a PDF checklist of everything you’re about to read—plus some extra tools—to help you knock out those content reviews.

Reason #1: Your Technical SEO is Broken, so Fix it First

Before you take a good, hard look at your content, take the time to investigate whether a technical malfunction is behind your ranking problems.

…

Reason #3: Your Content Lost Focus, so Discover User Intent and Target Strategically

Great content supplies a demand. If you’re not touching on users’ pain points or answering their questions, you’re not likely to earn a top search ranking. You can use a keyword strategy checklist to lead you through the process of creating user-specific content.

It’s also important to remember that user intent can change or evolve over time. Periodically revisiting search results for important keywords can help your content stay on target. When you did your initial keyword research six, nine, or even twelve months ago, there might have been much less competition on the SERP than there is today—especially if you’re in a growing industry or niche—so take another look.

Here are a few questions to help evaluate if you’re really hitting user intent:

• Does it cement the topic and grab the reader in the first paragraph?
• Does the content follow EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)?
• Does it answer the user’s question or need quickly and clearly?

When answering these questions, it’s important to not only look at your existing content, but also the content of your competitors—especially those whose posts rank higher than yours in Google.

Reason #4: Your Content Isn’t Cool, so Earn Better Backlinks

Despite some black hat tactics of the past, backlinks are still one of Google’s top ranking factors. There’s just no denying that when other high-quality sites link to a piece of content … it’s probably good content.

When your content isn’t ranking well, it might be time to inspect your backlinks. You can do this with a tool like Moz Campaigns, which allows you to see how many links there are to a piece of content, the number of referring domains, as well as the quality of the domains that are linking back to your content.

Google has worked long and hard at sorting the good from the bad when it comes to backlinks. Authentic, earned links from high-quality sites are the only ones that will help. That means you want to earn links that are:

• On authoritative sites. .gov and .edu sites fit into this category, but so do many news sites or other domains that are generally recognized as leaders in their industries.
• On relevant sites. Links should come from pages and content that is relevant to your brand.
• Unique. A link from a good piece of content with only a handful of links is more valuable than a link from a piece of content that lists you and all of your competitors.

In general, quality trumps quantity when it comes to backlinks. If the competition is earning backlinks from news organizations or influencers, for example, and all of your backlinks are coming from backwoods blogs, you may need to rethink your content strategy to help bolster your backlink appeal.

There is one exception to the rule of quality over quantity, however, and that is when all the top-ranked organic results have links and you have zero. In that case you need one. Don’t go out and start buying links, but consider reaching out to smaller publishers if you haven’t been able to get anywhere with bigger content producers.

It’s also possible that you have the wrong backlinks. Links from spammy sites will hurt your SEO efforts. A tool like Ahrefs can help monitor your backlink profile. If you notice an unwanted link, reach out the publisher and ask him/her to remove it. If that doesn’t work, you might want to get in touch with Google to disavow the link.

Reason #5: Your SERP Snippet Sucks, so Stand Out on the Page

Take a look at your SERP snippet. Would you click on it? Improving your click-through-rate by even 3% can move a page up one ranking.

Today, increasing your organic position is more critical than ever. SERPs have gotten incredibly competitive—and crowded. Besides the influx of pay-per-click ads teeming at the top of the page or mobile display challenges, Google keeps adding more features—leaving even less room for top-rankers to share. Consider everything that can appear on a SERP:

• Ads (top and bottom)
• Knowledge Graph panels
• Related questions
• Featured snippets
• Answer boxes
• Tools – Calculators, etc.
• Shopping results
• Image results
• Local results
• News box
• Reviews
• Tweets
• Etc.

All of that means that the #1 organic search spot isn’t even above the scroll on some SERPs anymore. (And small, mobile screens are even more restrictive.) The top of the SERP for [logistics], for example, is almost completely consumed by an answer box and local results:

With “Top stories” further down the page, and “Searches related to” at the bottom, there are only nine organic search results on this page.

The SERP for [file sharing], conversely, has almost no images or boxes, but it does have a full four ads at the top of the page and three at the bottom. There are still (as of this writing) 10 organic links on the page, but, when added to seven sponsored snippets and four “People also ask” accordions, those 10 snippets become less than half of the content on the page!

Getting noticed on a crowded SERP means designing a snippet that speaks to the user and stands out on the page. The best way to do this is to capture the featured snippet spot, but as you work toward that goal, craft a good SERP snippet in the meantime.

How to Create Page Titles that Get Noticed

Search engines like Google consider title tags one of the most important elements of on-page SEO, coming second only to page content.

To optimize your page titles:

• Include the keyword naturally and as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
• Be aware that Google will truncate the title after about 55 characters.
• Include a compelling CTA.
• Communicate the value to the user.

A good SEO title, then, is a blend of working within Google’s display constraints, and enticing the reader to consider your snippet. Conventional wisdom, for example, has been to keep titles under 55 characters so they don’t get cut off on SERPs, but some marketers have been cleverly taking advantage of that limitation:

Google your keyword and look at the titles that are ranking. If they are all listicles, you probably want a number in your title. If they’re all, “5 Good Ways,” maybe yours should be, “5 Completely Amazing Ways.” Give readers what they want, but stand out from the crowd at the same time.

How to Create Meta Descriptions that Inspire Clicks

Meta descriptions are not ranking factors, which makes them essentially ad copy. You’re writing 100% to the user, so create a message that both engages and entices your targeted users.

That’s not to say that keywords aren’t important (they are!). Similar to page titles, Google bolds keywords that match a user’s search query, which encourages clicks.

Here are a few questions to ponder whilst writing meta descriptions:

• Does the meta description address user intent?
• Have I included a call to action?
• Is the meta description between 150-160 characters?

If you’re stuck, don’t be afraid to draw some inspiration from the meta descriptions that are ranking well, and identify patterns. Consider the PPC ads that appear on the SERPs too: marketers are more likely to be testing the titles and text for their paid ads, so steal what is working for them.

Get Google to Notice Your Content

When your content isn’t ranking, don’t give up hope. Use this opportunity to take a 360-degree view of your content—and identify ways to make your content even better.

When technical issues can be ruled out, meet with your team to track down what makes your existing content great, and work to replicate the results for the rest of your editorial calendar. Soon enough, you’ll earn your footprints on Google and drive more traffic to your website.

Perfecting your lead generation takes a lot of hard work. In addition to constantly implementing new strategies, you also need to keep analyzing your progress to see how your strategy is resonating with those leads.

Without strong leads, a business can’t build their customer base. While a lead is certainly not the same as a current customer, the goal is to get them there as quickly as possible. And, keep them there. Converting a lead over is one of the most challenging aspects of any business. After all, how do you know when it’s time to send that lead over to the sales team?

Are your leads qualified enough for that next step? How do you know?

Ask yourself these questions:

• How much time does this lead spend on your page? And, what do they do?

When this lead visits your website, you need to study how long they are spending on that page, and what pages they are visiting. Does it look they are just considering your site for a moment, or are they spending serious time getting to know who you are? If they are just taking a glance, they aren’t quite qualified yet. But, if they are opting-in and also searching your products page, you’re going to need to get this lead over to sales. They are qualified.

• When was the last time this lead visited your site? What about frequency?

If it’s been three months since this lead last visited your site, you might not want to spend too much time focusing on them. In addition to looking at other criteria, there’s a good chance their activity is too far back to qualify them. On the other hand, if this lead has been on your site once yesterday, once Monday, and three times a week prior, you need to hone in on this lead ASAP. Remember, time is money, and you only have a little time left to take care of this qualified lead.

Dig in Deeper

• How are they treating your emails?

When you send out e-mails to this lead, how are they “responding” to it? We don’t mean whether not they are literally responding, but are they reading it? If these leads are opening up your emails and reading them, that’s a great sign and means this lead may be qualified. However, if a lot of those emails aren’t being read, you need to then try another strategy.

• Are they showing interest? Where are they showing that interest and how serious is it?

Taking into consideration the emails and the website factor, does it seem like this lead is showing interest in what you do? Try to pin down what it is they are interested in. Are they only interested in your complimentary ebooks? Or are they interested in something you’re selling, but maybe they are deterred by the price? Consider what it is that this lead wants. If they’re close to conversion, think of a more personalized strategy to keep that interest long enough to convert them.

• And finally, can you score your leads?

None of this will really make a difference unless you can score your leads. Scoring your leads means you’ll have an easier way of taking all these criteria and understanding them individually.

Lead scoring gives your leads a “score” on a scale, so you can quickly determine whether or not this lead is qualified or if this lead needs to be put on the backburner.

Request a demo to learn more!

UX (User experience) can be very time-consuming, done right it’s an ongoing process of continuous iterative tweaks and refinements. The aim of the game being to make a product, site, culture and experience that your audience LOVE. That sounds like hard work but never fear! There is some juicy low hanging UX fruit to be picked that will help you increase your homepage conversion and product revenue. If you have the resources to make basic website tweaks and a thirst for conversion optimization, this post is a great place to start. When I perform a UX audit for a client, it always surprises me how many small pain points COULD be solved to create a unified page with a real purpose!

At this point, I’m going to assume your home page has a solid identity and visual style and on the face of it… your homepage looks good! If your page is a little rough around the edges, no worries! The below will still apply, but in this post, I am not going to lecture you on style, color or visual appearance. What you will learn is the thinking behind what makes a perfect page.

So let’s get to it and uncover the top 10 UX hotfixes for your home page.

1. Create captivating taglines

Arguably you have under 2 seconds to grab a user’s attention when they first visit your site. That’s no time at all! Your main Value Proposition has to resonate with your target audience and fast! If your visitor clearly understands your main USP and you set the expectation and goal for the page, then they are much more likely to read on and convert. Try using this tagline formula for better results:

End result customer wants + Specific period of time + Address the objections.

So let’s see that in action, whoosh: Fresh pizza delivered to your door, in 30 mins, or get it free.

End result customer wants: Fresh pizza delivered to your door
Specific period of time: in 30 mins
Address the objections: or get it free

Mmm pizza! This approach may not work for all business types (an undertaker for example!) but this method taps into the way we make decisions. It leads with the USP, positioned as a benefit to your audience. It also highlights I could get me some fresh pizza in 30min which is an attractive benefit! And to conclude if it isn’t here in the allotted time I get it for free, so what’s the risk? Win, win, win. I’m hooked.

2. Concentrate on one goal

Keep your home page goal simple and focused. And by the ‘goal’ I mean the thing you want your audience to do. The more options you provide, the more hoops you ask your prospect to jump through, the more cognitive load you place on the unfortunate individual’s brain. We’ve all been there, staring at a page not knowing where to look or what to do. Attempt to keep one primary goal per page. Provide everything that individual needs to make a clear decision and remove ALL the ‘fluffy’ stuff.

3. Reiterate your USP

Now your goal is focused, don’t forget to repeat your goal throughout your home page. There’s a lot of evidence that states hammering home the same USP more than once per page increases conversion and improves clarity!

4. Craft an empathetic landscape

Remember you’re writing for REAL people – tell a story! Most homepages are bleak, corporate landscapes with little time for real emotion. People connect with feeling, empathy and humor subconsciously. Breath life into your copy, images and videos – and stand back and watch your online conversions increase.

5. Leverage fear of missing out

On the flip side, loss aversion is another powerful trigger and emotion that can be utilized to connect with your audience. We are more scared to lose than happy to gain. Knowing this enables us to position our messaging as such to promote an emotional response. But be careful, too much fear is never a good thing. Here’s an example of how to use our natural aversion to loss to your advantage:

– You will save money by fixing your website’s UX issues.
– You will lose money by not fixing your website UX issues.

Which of these resonates with you? The second is more compelling as it draws attention to the monetary loss you’ll incur if you don’t fix your UX. Losing money is perceived to be more compelling than saving. Our brains can be strange places!

6. Reinforce action with social proof

We are programmed to follow the crowd, and as an individual, I crave to be in the best community for my needs; be it a digital product or my friendship group. We are relying on social proof increasingly to back our decision-making and why wouldn’t we? Whether it’s Amazon for product reviews or Rotten Tomatoes for movies, we all want to avoid the risk associated with losing money or time. We all seek out social proof! Increase your conversion by showcasing your best testimonials, reinforce your reputability and work hard to develop your sites’ crowd mentality.

7. Sorry, it’s not me… it’s you.

Use the second person, not first person tense in your sales copy. By that I mean stay clear of any text that starts with “We do this…” It’s not about what you do, but about how you help your prospect. Here’s an example:

Incorrect: WE help increase website conversion with UX.
Correct: Helping YOU increase YOUR website conversion with UX.

People are more likely to connect with your copy when you talk about their situation, not yours. Connect with them! This one is über common and makes a huge difference.

8. Keep it simple, stupid.

Reevaluate what elements are truly important to your customer decision making then dial back the design and remove any unnecessary elements. Here are three quick UX experiments to test:

– Reduce the number of menu links in your navigation. Any exit away from your page should fight for its place. Remember keeping your goal focused on conversion is key.

– Remove mega menus and long drop downs from menus. Presenting too many options is a killer when it comes to decision making. Apply this less is more thinking throughout your page.

– Reduce sentence and paragraph length and hammer home the benefits. Longform (long landing pages) work well depending on your situation but make sure you’re breaking up content into snappy sentences with plenty of white space. And always stop and take the time to thoughtfully write your content. Your content should take as long to create as your design work.

9. Always write for your audience and avoid jargon

Your content must connect and resonate with the right audience for your product. Putting yourself in their mindset is vitally important and enables you to present them with on point, concise jargon-free content that taps into what they need to hear. Lay off the long, complicated words, back away from the thesaurus! You will only alienate your prospects.

10. Page psychology

Behind every great home page is an approach, an order in which things should be presented to help aid conversion that taps into how we think, leaning on neuroscience and psychology. Rarely should content just be dropped into a page and if it is in your case, it’s time rethink your strategy. Appreciate that like any great sales pitch, there is an optimized order to the information presented. There is always a deeper level to conversion, be it through a tuned sales pitch, newspaper ad, video ad or landing page. Sadly this topic is too broad to discuss in depth here. Want to know more about page psychology? Let me know, and I will write a dedicated post. It’s a fascinating subject!

How do I make these changes on my landing page?

That’s an excellent question! Here are three scenarios that should get you started:

1. I don’t have a lot of traffic yet, but I want to get on and do it!
Great! Then go for it. If you’re looking for further proof first that some of the above issues are affecting your page, experiment with some small-scale user testing before and after the work for early validation. You should see an increase in customer happiness and engagement. Then once you start getting more traffic move on…

2. I have an reasonable amount of traffic and want to get going!
Sweet! Go you! You may find batch testing entire pages is the way to go here. Create a copy of your home page, make your changes and run version A against B. This will give you a generic winner but won’t drill you down into the detail. This way at least you know you’re improving!

3. I have all the traffic and want to improve my conversion!
Great, well you’re reading the right thing to get you started. In this instance, small changes will obviously make a large difference. A/B macro testing tweaks is the way to go. Start at the top of the page and work your way down improving as you go, being careful not to run too many experiments at once.

It’s important to mention that all the top companies test! Experimentation and validation are absolutely key to understanding how your users relate to and perceive your product in the real world. Building an internal culture of unbiased, open minded experimentation enables you to act in confidence and scale a product that your users will love to be a part of. And that is a fun place to be!

I’m not here to tell you email marketing is dead and that you shouldn’t focus on it, it’s still by far our highest revenue producer in the biggest way that we can use to optimize the value of our leads. With that being said, there’s always new and innovative ways to really stay in contact with your leads. You get the most value from every lead that comes into one of your funnels. In this video, I’m going to share two different ways that we’re using right now to once again maximize the value of all of those leads.

SMS Marketing & Lead Value Optimization

I’m not sure if you can read this clearly, but I’ll read this to you. It’s a few stats about SMS marketing that really got me thinking that we’re definitely moving in the right direction with this. One of them is that 91% of all adults have their mobile phone within an arm’s reach every hour of every day. 91% of adults have their phone within an arm’s reach.

If you’re watching this, you probably do too. Obviously the majority of people do. That’s a great reason to send messages directly to people’s phones. You might be thinking, we do that with email. Everyone has email on their phone. This other stat that shows us that we’re moving in the right direction here is that 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being delivered. If you think about it, of course. Your phone, if you get a text it makes a ding. You look at it, you read a text message right away. That is why SMS marketing is working so well right now.

One of the reasons why people are somewhat afraid to do it, and rightfully so, is because it’s very heavily regulated, and it’s something you can get in a lot of trouble if you just use it to spam people. That’s not what I’m saying to do. There are ways to use SMS marketing ethically, and to do it in a way your leads will actually appreciate. So, I’ll tell you how we’ve been using it most effectively. That’s with webinar reminders. So, we do webinars every couple of weeks over here. Before we do them we’ll tell people, if you want us to text you a reminder before we start, enter your phone number here.

When they do that, we actually take that lead in InfusionSoft, and we put that information into an app. It’s called Fix Your Funnel. I don’t know why that’s what it’s called. It doesn’t really make sense, with what it does. We put it in there, and when that happens, we are now about to send broadcast text messages to these people. Again, to people that said yes. Please text me a reminder. They give us their information, and boom. One hour before the webinar begins, we send out a broadcast SMS. It says hey, just a reminder. Check your email. We just emailed you the join link. We’re starting in one hour.

It really does increase attendance rates for the webinars, it gives us a unique way to connect with our prospects and our leads, and it’s something that’s so simple. It’s something that not a lot of people are doing, which of course always benefits us. It’ll benefit you if you’re doing it as well, because even if however many people that watch this video start doing it, it’s still going to be a small fraction of all the people out there that are online marketing, so definitely implement that.

You want to use SMS messages for reminders, and again, it’s because people look at it right way. It will increase your attendance, which will increase your conversations, which will increase your bank balance. We want to do this stuff. One more quick tip that we do for this, not with SMS, but something that is again, a way to engage our leads that not many people are doing. It’s through push notifications. I started seeing it probably about a year ago.

We’ve been using them for probably about a year as well. We use a company called Push Crew, at pushcrew.com. Basically, let’s just say you’re using Google Chrome. If you’re on one of our websites, what this will do is say, will you allow this company to send you push notifications and keep you updated on news and resources surrounding whatever topic our site is about? If you click okay, we can push out a notification that will go ahead and have a little box come up on Google Chrome no matter what website you’re on.

Same thing in Safari, it works on Mobile. It’s a really cool way for us to have another unique point of contact I would say, without subscribers. Segmentation is huge here, so you can use this any way you want. We have general lists, with people that we just push all notifications to. For example, new blog posts, different promotions, really just anything we want to announce. Let’s just stick with the webinar theme here. You can also use this on your webinar thank you pages. You can have them opt in for a push notification as a reminder, so now you have that segment of your push list, and you can send them reminders when the webinar is going to start. You can send them reminders about promotions from the webinar.

So, those are some really cool ways to use SMS marketing and push notifications. Again, the majority of marketers aren’t doing this, which means it’s an opportunity for you. It’s an opportunity for us. It’s something you should start capitalizing on now, because it’ll only lead to basically higher sales, higher conversion, higher attendance. Everything you want to have, basically. Hope you guys got value out of this. If you did, as always please do like it or share it with someone that would benefit as well. Definitely make sure you subscribe to our channel. It’s youtube.com/performancemarketer. That way you can get all of our weekly updates. You can see all of our interviews, and get more tips just like this. So thanks guys, and I’ll see you next week for Marketer Monday.

When I ask a client about their goals, it’s common to receive an answer about driving more conversions, increasing traffic, getting more social followers, etc. For a while, I nodded my head, looked at historic data, and used trendlines to set realistic goals going forward.

The thing is, there’s something wrong with doing this. It’s related to communication and a lack of connecting on certain issues or initiatives. I’m a pretty solid marketer and I can help a company achieve its goals. I help keep goals realistic and I direct my team to drive success to achieve them.

I swear, I’m not bragging. If anything I’m actually berating myself a little here.

This approach leads to challenging meetings with stressed clients who exhibit wild mood swings meeting-to-meeting. Truth is, we didn’t uncover the real goal here, and sadly it’s actually common sense *embarrassed face*.

Buyer Persona Research Will Help Boost Brand Equity

All your clients care about from you is the bottom line because they want a more profitable company. I’ve been exposed to marketers who want to support companies who see the importance in their culture and the perpetuation of it. I agree with this completely, and as marketers, we should be using culture to amplify a brand.

If we focus on amplifying the brand, then we would want to know about a company’s mission, culture, etc., and use it for amplification.

What I mean by this is using messaging that resonates with people who are attracted to this kind of company. This is achieved through strong buyer persona research. Side note: if you haven’t read “Buyer Personas” by Adele Revella, you probably should stop reading this post and go take care of that.

Okay, I’m sure you get the point, buyer personas are important, so where do you start?

I get that there are a lot of templates for building buyer personas and they ask for data points like age, gender, education, where they might live, professional status, etc. I recommend looking beyond these broad data points, however, it’s good to be aware of them.

Basing all of your persona research off this surface level analysis isn’t going to help you stand out, and that’s the overarching goal here.

By observing a company and the attitude of it, we can begin to piece together who wants to engage with it. This might be something that’s achieved by looking at a company’s brand identity and widdling down the people who wouldn’t want to engage with it.

Be authentic, comfortably exist within a company’s culture code and ask:

• Who would be offended by the way I talk (I being the voice of the company’s brand)?
• Who would be bored with what I’m talking about?
• Who’s going to change the subject and shift the conversation away from the company’s message?

Once we begin asking questions like this, the natural progression is to ask:

• Who’s going to appreciate what we’re talking about?
• Who would engage with the way we’re talking
• Who would appreciate our temperament and appearance?
• Who would identify with the social mores that shape our company?

Getting This Deep with Buyer Personas Provides Brand Equity

One of my friends told me that we were such good friends because we have “effortless chemistry”.

Getting to this kind of territory with your audience takes research and gives your messaging incredible power. The gravity of this kind of persona research is tremendous because it enables us to speak with our audience in a way that no one else can. This builds trust but it also builds value.

If people identify with a company, it’s consistent voice, what it stands for and how it carries itself, then brand equity begins to get established. This company stands out and its services become unique too. These services become harder to replace and thus their price becomes more elastic.

A smart company would set its price based on being irreplaceable.

Now that a bond has been made between a company and an intricately tailored audience we can set prices based on value, not volume optimization.

Your clients don’t want to sell more to make more, even if they say they do, it’s an inefficient strategy.

Let’s look at an example:

50% increase in sales from 1,000 units to 1,500 units.

Sales figures with 1,000 units sold at $50/unit:

Per unit sale price: $50

Revenue: $50,000

Fixed cost: $15,000

Per unit cost: $20

Total unit cost: $20,000

Profit: $15,000

Profit from 1,000 units sold = $15,000

Sales figures with 1,500 units sold at $50/unit:

Per unit sale price: $50

Revenue: $75,000

Fixed cost: $15,000

Per unit cost: $20

Total unit cost: $30,000

Profit: $30,000

Profit from 1,500 units sold = $30,000 (100% increase in profit)

Let’s look at another scenario, and instead of a 50% increase in the number of units sold let’s increase the unit price by 50%.

Sales figures with 1,000 units sold at $75/unit:

Per unit sale price: $75

Revenue: $75,000

Fixed cost: $15,000

Per unit cost: $20

Total unit cost: $20,000

Profit: $40,000

Profit from 1,000 units sold = $40,000 (About 165% increase in profit)

This comparison is assuming a few constants that I don’t think will remain constant.

• If you establish brand equity chances are sales will increase at least a little.
• Increasing the volume of sales dramatically will eventually impact fixed costs (new or larger facilities, needing more vehicles for delivery, increased insurance for increased resources, etc). Without establishing brand equity this can work against creating economies of scale.

Increasing Sales Volume vs Increasing Brand Equity

For anyone who says “building brand equity takes a lot of work”, I recommend evaluating how much effort goes into building a content calendar, creating content and performing the persona research around that content.

Few agencies don’t do any persona research, and the ones that don’t are definitely getting left behind, so it’s not like the effort put into persona research to build brand equity is specific to the effort of building equity. It’s being done regardless.

Why not consider how hard it is to take that persona a step further, stand out, talk to people like no one else is, and price your product for people who really want it?

I’m an advocate of growth marketing, but not marketing for the sake of growth. Growing can happen with or without brand equity, but if profitability is the goal (and it is, or it should be if it isn’t), then brand equity needs to be the focus.

Things are going great, your website is getting a lot of great organic and paid traffic, visitors are spending a good amount of time on your website, and visiting several pages per session. The only (and major) issue is that you don’t have any leads to show for all this great traffic. What’s the problem?

The problem could be that your website doesn’t have the proper lead capture tools in place to convert those website visitors into new leads.

Let’s look at three easy methods for capturing website leads.

Case Studies

An effective B2B marketing strategy includes a blend of both ungated content and gated content. This enables a varied mix of educational content to fill the sales funnel and nurture leads to conversion. Case studies are excellent for gated content. Why? Because they are extremely valuable, results oriented, and are typically needed closer to the decision phase of vendor selection. Near the decision phase of the sales process, prospects are more willing to exchange their contact information for the case study. They provide the contact information with the understanding that your B2B company will contact them.

White Papers

When gated, white papers or guides are a great lead capture tool for any B2B marketing strategy. The caveat is that in order to be gated, a white paper must provide a significant value for prospects. A white paper is not a glorified sales brochure. It should be a well-crafted guide or documentation on how to effectively use a service or a product. The white paper should help your prospect to do their job and to make their life easier. Here are examples of great white papers:

A Practical Guide to Hiring the Ideal Candidate

How to Hire the Right Accounting Firm

Your Guide to Partnering with Recruiters

All of these white papers or guides give helpful information to prospects, they aren’t just a long ad. We should also mention here that sales brochures should not be gated. You want your prospects to be able to access these at any time.

Compelling CTAs

Weak, hard-to-find, or non-existent calls-to-action (CTAs) are one of the main reasons websites fail to capture leads. Easy-to-find, properly placed, compelling CTAs can turn non-performing websites into lead generation machines. There is no one CTA that will work for every website. The best approach is to include a variety of enticing CTAs on a website, particularly suited for each stage of the sales process.

For prospects in the beginning of the sales process, you want your B2B website to educate them and nurture them. CTAs, like “Learn More” are a great, leading CTA.

However, these CTAs don’t capture any information about the leads, so it’s important to also have compelling CTAs that generate leads. Below are great examples of CTAs that are focused on capturing leads.

These are all direct, clear, and compelling. They entice the visitor to provide their contact information. They make it easy for the prospect to get in touch with your firm.

There you have it – three easy ways to capture leads.

Do you need help with capturing leads on your website? Schedule a consultation with our B2B marketing experts to find out how to improve your lead generation.