Batteries lie at the the heart of a device you likely never leave home without. Here are some easy and efficient ways to milk your cell phone's battery for all its worth, so you can worry less about demanding apps.
The post How to make your smartphone battery last longer appeared first on Digital Trends.
A Walmart employee pulls fresh baked rolls out for sale during the grand opening of a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. ( Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)
Last year, Walmart decided to give its associates a 10. In return, they gave it a serious high five, as in $5 billion.
That’s the amount by which Walmart’s sales rose in the first six months of 2016 after it boosted hourly pay to $10 in 2015. Revenue advanced to $149.5 billion from $144.2 billion in 2015, according to its second-quarter earnings report. The company attributes this gain largely to the ‘positive customer traffic’ that followed the pay increase as well as the creation of 200 management-track training centers.
Put another way, better-paid, better-trained workers are creating a better in-store experience for Walmart shoppers. Today, the world’s largest private employer reports its non-management workers make an average of $13.69 an hour, up 16% from 2014, according to The New York Times.
Combined with the training centers, the investment has cost Walmart about $2.7 billion, a bet that many retailers are eager to see played out. Will paying workers more and offering them better opportunities result in higher profits?
Higher Service Scores, Lower Income
The answer is… possibly. Since Walmart increased wages and invested in better training it has recorded the following:
“During this time of increased investments, operating expenses may grow at a rate that is greater than or equal to the rate of our net sales growth,” the report states.
On the other hand, as it points out, operating income may grow at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of net sales growth.
Other Ways To Measure Success
This of course should not mean all bets are off when it comes to investing in worker compensation and training. It takes time to recoup a few billion dollars, after all.
Further, it’s possible to record the return on investment in ways that can’t be accounted for in pure dollars. Following are five key return-on-employee investments that won’t make it to the financial report.
A better caliber of workers: Before adding its dedicated training centers, Walmart did not provide its employees a clear structure for achieving management status. This would be like treading water just out of sight of land. It’s not surprising, then, if a lot of workers were less motivated. Since investing in the centers, Walmart has begun attracting a higher standard of worker. “We get more people coming in who want a career instead of a job,” one manager told the Times.
More orderly stores: Hourly employees generally are not likely to make workplace cleanliness a priority, unless they are properly trained, experts say. Using Walmart as a case in point, the retailer said its customers are reporting higher satisfaction rates in store cleanliness, as well as speed and customer service. Clean stores not only are more attractive to shoppers, they make for healthier workers and require less frequent asset replacement (flooring or carpeting, for example).
Brand loyalty: Consumers are drawn to brands that share their beliefs, and most believe in a better living wage. Three-quarters of Americans support increasing the minimum wage to at least $12.50, according to a 2015 report from the Hart Resource Association. There is plenty of evidence that Walmart’s choice to raise employee pay has captured it positive media attention.
Further, better-paid employees are more likely to be brand loyal because the company has made them feel financially secure.
Friendlier environments: Workers who feel appreciated are more likely to seek camaraderie with others (and would be less likely to gripe). The more friends an employee makes at work, the more she is likely to love her employer. More than 70% of employees who have 25 or more friends at work (71%) love their employer. Of those with no friends, 24% love their companies, according to research by the Ohio University. As we know, love means never wanting to hand in your resignation.
Less shrink: OK, this is arguably a bottom-line figure but it gets back to sentiment. Unhappy employees, who are often stressed, underpaid employees, are more likely to take from the company. Also, they are more likely to care less if its products are inadequately cared for – whether the fresh produce is quickly stocked, for example. Employees steal an estimated $50 billion from companies every year, representing 43% of total retail shrink.
It should be noted that not all of Walmart’s 2.3 million employees are paid a minimum of $10 an hour. Those who joined the company since the beginning of 2016 started at $9; they get a buck-an-hour raise once they complete the chain’s skills and training program.
Which reinforces the overall “its pays to pay” strategy. Once trained, workers will be better engaged and worth every penny of that hourly wage, and then some. That’s worth a hive five.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, you can view the original story here.
Terms of service? Are they really important? Actually, yes. If you plan to establish a successful eCommerce business, your customers need to know what to expect (and not expect), and that means knowing how to write the legalese that defines your obligations as a service provider.
And yes, it’s a little boring. Entrepreneurs look forward to this process about as much as a five-year-old looks forward to eating a plate of steamed broccoli. Or at least that’s how it usually goes. So let’s switch it up and give you a handful of best practice tips for what to include in an effective terms of service while also injecting some humor and humanity into what you write.
The 6 Must-Haves
First, while the terms statement does need to be fully accessible by any customer who shows up at your store, it shouldn’t be the first or even fifth thing your customers see. Instead, include a checkbox at checkout that allows shoppers to signify that they agree to your terms before they buy.
A fundamental component to a terms document are basic stipulations about the services you offer, and the requirements for using them. Is there an age requirement? Spell that out. Is there a Q&A functionality, or some other user-generated content component? Be crystal clear about the fact that you will own the rights to that content. In general, just state clearly that you own the intellectual property generated by the services, as well as the services themselves.
Whether your business sells a product or service, it’s crucial for your terms to spell out what you’ll deliver, when, for how much, and what your policy is for returns and refunds. If items can’t be returned after being unwrapped or used, say so and explain why. “We’d love to take back that toothbrush you bought from us, but that would be, well, gross” isn’t exactly the right phrasing, but you also don’t have to be robotic. Instead, follow the legalese with something like this: “And if our product isn’t working the way you expect? Give us a call at 800-HELP-ME or write to us at help@me.com. We can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to fix the problem or get you exactly what you’re looking for, but we’ll do our best to meet your needs.”
No one likes a bully, and you needn’t tolerate them at your website or store. Make it clear what legally rises to the level of abuse and then be specific about the consequences for engaging in unacceptable behavior. Then, make it real with language anyone can understand. Something like this should suffice: “So, yes, if you’re trolling us or other users in the comments or using profanity or other rude language, we reserve the right to kick you out of the club. Be nice and we’ll be cool. Cool?”
Protect yourself by including in your terms legal language that indemnifies you and the site in the event of errors or unanticipated events, such as outages. Also, if you offer a warranty on products you sell through the site—and you should—this section of your terms is where you set reasonable limits. Include some plain language to put it all in context. “We’re only human and we’ll make mistakes. So please, don’t ask us to take back the product you bought two years ago and broke yesterday. We’re not going to do that. Our kids have to eat, too!”
This is where you discuss what’s called governing law. Usually, it means if your business is located in a certain state, that the laws of the state where you’re incorporated will “govern” any dispute. You can also choose to include a clause that says disputes will, by default, skip court and instead be resolved through arbitration. Add some reassuring language so that customers who’ve taken the time to read this far don’t see you as a bully. Something like: “Obviously we don’t want it to get to this point. Let’s agree that it would be just better for us to get you something you love—and we’ll try our best to make that happen, OK?”
You own the content of your website and all the intellectual property that went into building your products and offering your services. Place copyright notations and trademarks where necessary and then be clear about the protections you’re claiming in your terms. Follow it with a kind but unambiguous warning: “We love you for being a customer. Don’t ruin it by stealing our stuff. Let’s all play nice.”
This Is Easier Than You Think
Now, ready for the best news of all? You don’t have to write your terms of service from scratch! Avvo has a terms of service form available for download if you’re just getting started. Or, if your business is taking off and you need more expertise, you can have a lawyer review or help you customize terms and conditions and fix whatever holes might need plugging.
Happy terms writing!
Personal finance is, well ... personal.
That's why the answers to money questions can seem so complicated, and why so many people find it helpful to work with a financial planner. Everyone's life and situation is different, and it's the same for their money.
That said, just because the answers to money questions may be different depending on who's asking doesn't mean they're always complicated. Below, find nine basic money questions that can be answered in 30 seconds or less (although, if you want, we've included links to 90-second explanations, too).
SEE ALSO: I'm a financial planner, and here's what I tell my 30-something clients
One for every reason you're saving.
Since savings accounts are free — and sometimes even incentivized by the bank where you open them — the only reason not to have multiple is if you find that you're unable to keep track of them. Otherwise, keeping an account per savings goal accomplishes two purposes:
1. It gives you an exact count of how much money you have allotted for a specific goal.
2. It keeps you from dipping into savings you've mentally, but not technically, attributed to one goal for another (like "accidentally" using your emergency savings for a mid-winter trip to Barbados).
At least two.
Let's go ahead and assume you're already on board with the need-a-credit-card-to-build-credit-and-make-major-purchases rationale and that we're all clear on the fact that a credit card does more harm than good if you don't pay your bill in full each month. Having only one means if your card gets lost or stolen — which is more common than you might think — you'll be in a tight spot for a while.
After two, it's up to you to decide how many cards you can handle responsibly.
20% of the house price.
By putting down 20% of the price, you avoid the monthly cost called private mortgage insurance (PMI), which the bank requires in the case that you aren't able to meet your payment obligations. This means you will pay more over the life of your loan than if you didn't have it.
However, if putting 20% will wipe out your savings, it's less risky to accept paying PMI until you can refinance when you have more cash. "I would much rather see people put 5% down, wipe out all their other debt with cash, and still have three months of emergency savings versus putting 20% down on a house," writes CFP Sophia Bera.
It didn’t take long after Loblaws Cos. Ltd. bought Shoppers Drug Mart in a mega $12.4 billion deal before some consumers settled in on what the “important” part of the transaction was.
“What’s going to happen to my Optimum points?” In online chat rooms and discussions, people fretted that all their accumulated purchasing power would be wiped out — a fear that has so far turned out to be unfounded as the loyalty card for Shoppers Drug Mart, with an estimated 11 million users, has gone nowhere.
“Some people were worried (about Optimum ending) but it’s just too popular,” says Lynn Wiegard, a 45-year-old shopper from Cambridge, Ont., who can quote her shopping stats pretty quickly. “I just love the game aspect of collecting points. It’s a strategy game. You can’t play a strategy game by just sitting there and hoping for the best.”
The points game has become part of the Canadian shopping fabric. A 2015 study from Colloquy Loyalty Census Canada, run by LoyaltyOne — the operator of the Air Miles program — found Canadians have almost 130 million memberships, or an average of more than four per person. The retail sector accounts for the biggest chunk of membership at 48 per cent and it grew by 12 per cent in 2015.
“Canadians love their points programs. I spend a lot of my time travelling the world meeting with other program operators and looking at the structure of loyalty programs in different countries and Canada is probably one of the most developed loyalty program markets in the world,” says Bryan Pearson, chief executive of LoyaltyOne.
But Wiegard says there’s more than fun to points collecting. In an economy with low wage growth, people need the extra cash breaks wherever they can get them. Her 2016 gross purchases at Shoppers would have been $1,746 she says, but the coupons and redeemed points cut her spending to $1,078.
“I love the (Shoppers) program because I’m doing the best with that program as far as the money that will come back,” Wiegard says.
Consumers vary widely in how they collect points, some treating it, like Wiegard, as an exercise in strategy, while others are more passive about collecting the points. Navigating the divide, and pleasing all its customers, is the great challenge for loyalty providers.
“I once took a group of collectors out for dinner and I was talking about our program relative to others and I had this one guy who knew the terms and conditions and specifics of our program better than (I did),” Pearson says.
The other side of the coin is people who just swipe and collect points, figuring one day they’ll cash them in.
“The spectrum is similar to how any consumers react to different brands that are out there,” Pearson says.
If you have to trace the origin of the loyalty program in this country, it probably begins with Canadian Tire whose famed bills, adorned with the fictional character Sandy McTire, first appeared in the 1950s. The Canadian Tire money bore a resemblance to real Canadian currency and helped the retailer create strong loyalty with customers.
When Air Canada rolled Aeroplan in 1984 as an incentive for frequent flyers it was one of the first real points-based programs. Coalition programs, which team up with multiple retailers and allow businesses to collect user data, started in 1991 with the introduction of Air Miles. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, single retailers like Shoppers started introducing their own brands.
But, that loyalty comes at a price.
Air Miles has come under fire for its redemption program and some people maintain it is difficult to cash in the points that will begin to expire at the end of this year. At the end of 2011, Air Miles issued a five-year expiry date on reward points and, with the date now upon us, it somehow has caught some off guard.
“The biggest thing you can do is try to be clear and communicate in the best way possible whatever changes are coming along,” Pearson says. “The biggest problem in the reward program is you have undeclared intentions from the consumer because there is no signal to say ‘I’m interested in a flight to Paris or four grocery certificates.'”
If an offer disappears, the risk is an angry consumer.
Companies have been rapidly changing their programs as they compete for customer attention. Starbucks recently overhauled its reward program from one that gave consumers points based on each purchase or visit to a program that reflects what the consumer actually spends at the coffee chain. The latter model seems to be catching on across the rewards industry because it favours customers who are willing to spend more.
“The hotel model programs are shifting from a program that was (based on) a night stay and if you get, say, 35 stays you were a super elite customer. Now they are rewarding on what customers are actually paying,” Pearson says.
Some of the changes are to close loopholes where consumers had gamed the system. One trick employed by airline consumers to achieve a certain status was to load up on cheap short-haul flights at the last minute.
“They’d be six segments away from achieving top tier status so they book a ticket where they go Toronto to Chicago to Washington to New York to Boston to Toronto. They get their six segments and secure their top tier status on one Saturday,” Pearson says.
Naturally, any change to a loyalty program risks challenging the very nature of why it exists — namely, to keep customers coming back to a certain brand.
Ken Wong, a marketing professor with the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., figures Loblaw probably wanted to roll the Optimum program into its own PC Plus rewards program, but realized it was going to face some backlash under a single banner.
That concern is not without precedent. When Air Canada swallowed up Canadian Airlines in 2000, it rolled its points program into Aeroplan and made the transition more palatable by including some elements of its formal rival’s Canadian Plus features, like the concierge program for its top tier flyers, while also respecting their status level.
“I think it’s a bit like the TD Canada Trust situation where everybody thought (TD Bank) would drop (the) Canada Trust (name) from the banner but found they couldn’t do it,” said Wong, adding the efficiencies from joining two programs together can be achieved without completely eliminating the brands. “The unification of the back office to get scale efficiencies, you don’t lose that. You don’t lose the analytics. Sure, the advertising goes up, but you were going to spend some money on that already.”
Shoppers officials say there are no plans to end the Optimum loyalty program despite the recent changes in the terms and conditions that have some consumers convinced its future is limited.
“Yes, we revised the terms and conditions in September to make them more reflective of other loyalty program standards. As a result, there is no longer an end date of Dec. 16, 2016. The new terms and conditions indicate there will be a 45-day notice period should the program end. We understand the value of our customer loyalty program and this continues to be a major focus for us. There are no immediate plans to end the Shoppers Optimum program,” said Tammy Smitham, vice-president, external communication, Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart, in an emailed statement.
There’s another reason points program can’t simply just end — they are a legal and financial liability. Lawyer Sylvie De Bellefeuille with Option Consommateurs, an association that advocates for consumers and has launched a class action against Pharmaprix, Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., over points, argues you can’t just change the points structure either. Her case is still winding its way through the courts.
“What (the lawsuit) is based on is there was a contract for a certain period amount of time and it said your points had a certain value and what they did is lower the value of those points,” says Sylvie De Bellefeuille. “Now you need more to get the same thing.”
The argument by some is that points are giving you something for nothing, but the Montreal lawyer says your data or information about yourself is what you are giving. “No company is there just to give gifts,” she says, adding sometimes consumers also shop at a slightly more expensive store because of the points.
The reason to devalue the points is plain and simple, she says.
“It’s a liability, when you lower the points you don’t owe people as much,” De Bellefeuille says. “It becomes a question of how many consumers you will lose versus how much you will lose in your books.”
Jeff Novak, brand director for RedFlagDeals.com, said every time someone tries to change the terms and conditions on a plan they risk major backlash.
“Aeroplan made an announcement they were going to start expiring miles and there was a massive uproar. There were threats of a lawsuit and they decided to reverse course,” Novak says.
Patrick Sojka, the founder of Rewards Canada, says that ever since Air Miles announced points would start expiring people have become “jumpy” about all of their rewards.
“Loblaws knows they can’t just end the program,” Sojka says . “They all put these terms in (saying they can end the program), but it doesn’t mean they will,”
gmarr@postmedia.com
twitter.com/dustywallet
Are you a social media content creator who is looking to improve upon the existing editorial strategy?
If yes, then we just have the right set of tools for you, treading on the lines of visual empowerment. These tools or rather techniques appeal to the visual senses of customers— engaging them in a different yet resourceful manner. Be it videos, emojis or graphics— a social media editorial plan is actually incomplete without visual engagement and this is where most content creators lose the plot.
However, if you are looking to be unique and create that sense of satisfaction among readers, visual impetus is a must. So let us take a closer look at these 7 tool which can help spice up any content marketing strategy:
#1. Focus on Emojis
When it comes to emojis, content creation has certainly taken a step forward. These are nothing less than content allies which are ubiquitous when online conversations are considered. To be precise, emojis lend a definite personality to any piece of content— regardless of its seriousness. While there are many applications in the market for pairing text with emojis, the idea here is to select the perfect sets— suitable to the tone of your business.
Emojis shouldn’t be added vaguely to any content but must be paired with the associated graphics. Be it custom graphics or the personalized ones, emojis can easily define the actual essence of these to the user— without resorting to texts. It is therefore necessary to bring in a dedicated browser or an exhaustive emoji library for making the best use of this tool.
Apart from that, we can also download the specific art files from SlideShare and a host of other sources. Emojis can also work as the substitutes to content and can even penetrate through the impermeable layer of messaging applications where long and textual undertones aren’t exactly popular.
#2. Create Animated Videos
Presentations and videos make an integral part of any editorial strategy as these are shareable and exportable in nature. While there are many user platforms for creating online presentations and snippets, editing them perfectly is what makes all the difference. Most video creating platforms come with a host of optimizing options— specific to the goals and platforms.
The likes of Moovly help marketers create professional videos for an affordable price— mainly to pair and support the textual content with something substantial.
#3. Opt for Streaming Vendors and Push the Video Content
Now when you have already created a video, you need to push it via myriad social channels. One such tool which can make you popular is online streaming. Putting up your textual content along with a video or presentation over YouTube is a great start. You, as a marketer can stream HD cinema, TV shows and a host of other visually appalling stuffs over the likes of YouTube and Vimeo.
While texts will still be important for creating Seo-friendly descriptions and terminologies, the onus will be upon the videos for pulling in customers from the remotest of corners.
#4. Build Interactive Infographics
Infographics can actually say a lot without having to delve into the technicalities of text. This is why they are imperative to your content marketing cause. There are several vendors which can help create interactive infographics but you must be clear with what you want to visualize— beforehand. Be it editing the graphics or opting for the occasional tweaks, a lot of work goes behind creating infographics— sometimes even more than a usual article.
#5. Create GIFs
Be it Twitter, Facebook or Instagram— GIFs are actually everywhere. These are specific entities which can help any marketer with a brand name besides offering a newer perspective to look at images, videos and even texts.
However, you need to be careful with the selection of images and must make sure that they are in sync with each other. Upon selecting the definite order, you need to pick the perfect category and speed for optimizing the concerned GIFs.
One tip which can be handy is to refrain from putting up all work related GIFs. Social media is pretty fickle when it comes to the attention span of the readers. Therefore, the GIF must be humorous, interactive and intriguing to say the least.
#6. Turn Existing Visuals into Movies
If you are finding it cumbersome to shoot and create actual videos, you can always customize the same according to your requirements— by opting for something which can transform images and stills into videos.
However, you need to be sure whether the concerned audience will actually like this idea or not. Once you have zeroed in on using visuals for creating videos, you can choose the set of themes, intros or even outros to go with the same.
The trickiest part is always the audio as you need to opt for loyalty free music while creating these kind of videos.
#7. Design a Host of Custom Images
Social media engagement can also be amplified using customized images. However, by custom images we don’t actually mean only filters and effects. These images are visually enchanting and in sync with the concerned social media platforms. Be it Pins for Pinterest or specific dimensions for Instagram and Facebook— custom images are actually modified for a given social platform and must not be used over other channels.
Moreover, some marketers prefer using special icons and logos for the same— adding a hint of personalization to the featured custom images.
Bottom Line
You, as a content marketer, might be losing out on potential customers if articles and textual overlays are the only resources on your mid. If you want to broaden the repertoire, it is important to delve into the visual world of content— comprising of images, emojis, infographics and a lot more.
Social media is a volatile sphere and might be slightly saturated when it comes to textual content. However, attractive visual content is something which hasn’t been leveraged well and still provides ample scopes of engagement— only if you are creative enough and willing to take the plunge.
Product personalisation is a growing and important trend in the world of financial services. This is driven by two key factors. The first is in big data. Through advances in data analytics platforms, banks are increasingly able to explore opportunities to tailor their products to individual customers. Secondly, developments in adjacent industries such as online shopping and streaming – think tailored recommendations from Amazon, Netflix and Asos – mean that consumers are increasingly demanding more personalised services.
A number of innovative players are taking advantage of this trend to offer product personalisation to their customers. In this post we will examine 3 of the best from fintech challengers Simple, Monzo and Loot as well as exploring the work that established bank, Bank of the West, is doing to lead the way in this field.
Launched in 2012, Simple offers an online-only banking service in the US. Simple’s mobile app features handy budgeting tools such as Goals. These give customers the opportunity to set money aside in labelled “envelopes”, which calculate how much you need to save each day or week to reach your target in the desired time period.
Customers that save using Goals are said to save twice as much as those who don’t. What’s more the bank claims that it has helped customers to save 10% of their yearly income on average, clearly demonstrating the service’s effectiveness. By automating the savings process, Simple limits the amount of work customers need to put in to organize their savings, achieving their goal of providing a ‘simple’, efficient and effective banking service.
This UK based app-only bank earned the record for the ‘quickest crowdfunding campaign in history’ by reaching £1m in funding within just 96 seconds of launching its appeal on the crowd funding platform Crowdcube. Monzo provides current accounts and pre-paid cards, which allow the customer to track their transactions in real time.
The service categorises expenditure and provides an overview of the consumer’s spending habits. By clicking on the vendor icon, Monzo will provide you with information such as your number of visits to the store, your average and your total spend. This method of tracking helps customers to see where savings can be made.
There’s a lot of excitement surrounding this product, and beta testers are enthusiastic about the potential for sharing tracked data with retailers to create loyalty schemes. Monzo are taking full advantage of this and have taken the initiative to ask customers how they would like to be rewarded for loyalty.
Loot is another fintech firm leading the way in product personalisation. The brainchild of 23 year old Ollie Purdue, Loot hopes to bring a new banking experience to students.
By analysing and then empowering customers with the data it holds, Loot hopes to help its customers budget and manage their money whilst at university.
Like Monzo, Loot categorises the transactions you make so that you can break your spending down by type. What’s more, it allows you to see how you compare to other (anonymised) users so you can identify ways to save. The app also features a clever tool which predicts how much users can spend each day to get to the end of the month safely and provides tailored offers at different bars, shops and restaurants to help customers reduce their spend.
Almost uniquely amongst big traditional banks, Bank of the West are ahead of the product personalisation curve with their innovative ‘relationship pricing’ program. Based on analysis of customer data, this offers loyal customers personalised rates on new products tailored to their individual saving or borrowing needs. This approach has allowed them to improve their customer service and customer loyalty and, thanks to their embrace of the kind of personalised service demanded by customers, they currently rank as the USA’s top bank for customer satisfaction
These developments from Simple, Monzo, Loot and Bank of the West are exciting. But what do they mean for traditional bank’s products and services? Simply put, changing customer expectations mean that traditional banks will have to start developing similar offerings to compete. Those that are able to stay ahead of the curve on product personalisation will be able to prosper in the near future as personalisation drives better customer service and an improved product offering for customers and greater loyalty and opportunities to sell additional products for banks.
Image via Unsplash
Let’s say your product is ideal for travel—hiking boots, maybe, or one of those folding toothbrushes, a pair of awesome hiking pants, or the most durable suitcase in the world. You want everyone to see it in action, watch it hit the road, and get honest and genuine feedback from the influencers using and showcasing it.
In short, you need travel influencers. Who better to tell your brand’s story than an influential traveling power couple who can write, take great photos, and showcase that toothbrush to thousands of followers that have grown to trust them? Good news: These people do exist.
Meet Hannah and Adam from gettingstamped.com, two thirty-somethings that busted out of the corporate world and decided to travel the globe, all while writing about and photographing everything they see, do, and use. Over 100,000 people see where they go, what they pack, and how they use it every day.
If you’re a smart marketer, you’re probably craving a chance to showcase your brand in such an authentic and organic experience. We recently talked to Adam of Getting Stamped, and he told us exactly how to do it.
As with all types of influencer marketing, being authentic and complementary to your brand are key components. If it isn’t something your audience would use, forget it. Unless a blogger is a true brand fan, it’s not a post that would do your brand any good, anyways. Always use authentic brand fits as your first filter when vetting.
Adam says, “Brand and blog mismatches are one of the biggest causes of failure with influencer campaigns. Many bloggers don’t see the downsides and take the projects anyways. This can cause blogs to lose credibility and brands to waste marketing dollars. It’s a lose/lose.” (highlight to tweet)
In short, don’t stretch. The blogger will feel uncomfortable trying to include the product, and the audience will sniff that out. If another influencer can better integrate your product into their lifestyle, it’s a better choice—even if they have fewer followers!
Following that train of thought, it makes sense to have, say, your new toothbrush in a list of must-haves, rather than an individual review. Featuring one item on its own can seem a bit forced. If you include it in a list, or a kit of travel essentials, it has context, and its utility is much more obvious—and it will almost certainly get more clicks. If you want interactive feedback and engagement with the consumer, it’s sometimes best to be a part of one of these lists.
Adam explains it like this: “We always try to give some real inspiration on why someone would want or need a product by talking about it in context or wearing/using it in some great photos.”
Really getting to know the influencers is one of the more overlooked aspects of this type of marketing. Notice on their blog that they’re heading to the Maldives? Maybe hold off on shipping them the flannel shirts, and send the bikinis instead; it’s much more likely to be appreciated and, most importantly, used and reviewed.
Likewise, thinking through their travel plans and sending something versatile that is likely to be used every day would make that campaign that much more effective. One of Adam’s favorite campaigns did just that.
“If I had to pick just one memorable successful project, it would probably be the ‘7-day Stretch‘ Campaign with PrAna. We had to wear their pants for seven days and take Instagram pictures and share our experience. We took the pants on a road trip full of hiking and outdoor activities that paired well with the brand and our style. It felt natural and unforced, and we got plenty of great shots and a bunch of comments on the clothing in the pictures and posts.”
Don’t ever underestimate the value of creativity in the campaigns you set up and the way you engage your influencers on a community level. Ask your influencers questions, and get a feel for what they like and need. The return on this simple investment of time and effort can be incredible.
The travel lifestyle has a lot to offer influencer marketing: exotic locales, gorgeous settings, and the unique opportunity to showcase your product as indispensable. In the hands of folks like Hannah and Adam, your single piece of gear becomes essential in the eyes of thousands. Check out their site at gettingstamped.com, and who knows? Maybe your brand’s folding toothbrush is all they need.
Have you come across any travel bloggers you’ve loved? Share in the comments below!
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I'm not great with money.
It's not like I'm a big spender. I don't really splurge and my payments are timely. But I'm pretty clueless and careless when it comes to personal finance — especially things like credit card rewards programs.
I recently tried out Birch, a free service based in Gainesville, Florida that's meant to help people make sense of perplexing credit card reward programs.
"I had a really terrible experience finding a good resource when trying to make sense of credit cards and their reward programs. I felt that a lot of the blog and credit card sites were just sets of confusing tables and lacked any sort of personalization," Birch founder Alex Cohen told Business Insider. "I think I’m similar to most people in that I get overloaded with credit card offers in my email and see the ads constantly on TV. So a few years ago when I was in the market for a new credit card, I really had no idea where to even begin looking. The tools that were out there to help me find a new card felt really biased and just spammy. I even went as far as putting together Excel spreadsheets to compare my personal spending to the rewards on each card so I could figure out what the true value of those cards were."
So, Cohen set about creating a service that would help people make sense of credit card programs. The first version — then called Swipe — went live in 2015.
Today, the service has slightly over 3,000 users and employs a full-time team of five people. Birch has raised a total of $150,000 through angel investors and an accelerator.
After using the app for over four months in the hopes of learning a little more about navigating the confusing, treacherous path to credit card rewards, I realized my favorite part of the app has nothing whatsoever to do with credit cards — and that I had no idea where my money goes.
But first, here's how Birch works: You enter your bank account information and Birch analyzes your spending habits. Then it recommends different credit cards that will allow you to rack up more points. Birch breaks down your rewards by month. For example, for the past 12 months, I might have earned $1,142.77 in rewards had I been using Chase's Sapphire Reserve, which the app selected as my most advantageous match based on my spending habits.
The app also includes features that allow users to set spending goals, track spending on a calendar, and receive notifications about missed rewards via Facebook Messenger and text. It categorizes missed rewards and detects and tracks subscriptions.
In case I didn't want to go with Sapphire, the app provided me with two backup options: Chase's Southwest Premier and American Express's Platinum Delta Skymiles. Birch isn't compensated for its recommendations.
My takeaway from watching Birch calculate rewards is that they really add up. As of right now, I'm missing out on $1,142.77 worth of rewards. If I switched to Sapphire, Birch tells me I'd experience a 1211% increase in my yearly credit card rewards.
Since Birch tracks your spending in order to find the cards that best suit you, I quickly realized it was having an impact on the way I manage my money, completely aside from cards and rewards: For the first time ever, I started checking my spending regularly.
The service presents your spending habits in a very simple and visual format, breaking it into broad categories illustrated in a graph. There are a good number of services that do this, like Mint and Personal Capital, but I like Birch's clear layout and graphics.
Once I started looking, I couldn't stop. Using the app, I can quickly scan all the stupid stuff I've bought in a colorful, easy-to-read graph, or a straightforward list of purchases. Two trends that recurred throughout the report were pizza and bagels. Seeing it in a purple percentage gave me the guilt trip I needed to cut back on my random poppyseed bagel runs. I do all my spending on my credit card. Having just graduated from college, I'm not looking to go crazy and start applying for multiple cards.
The app imports historical data from about a year back, so I'm able to check my spending trends over the past month, three months, or twelve months. I even found out that I've been making considerably fewer purchases lately. I may be a bagel addict, but at least I'm somewhat responsible.
Even though I signed up to learn more about credit card rewards, honestly, I don't think I'll be swapping out my card anytime soon. I'm pretty happy with my current card, a Go Far Rewards Visa from Wells Fargo, which I got thanks to the convenience of an ATM and general presence on my college campus. Maybe this sounds too conservative or stagnant, but I am just starting out and I'm not looking to run into a lot of debt opening multiple cards. I'd rather delay messing around with my finances too much until I'm a bit more established.
Today, I check Birch weekly to review my purchases and make sure I'm on track. I came for the credit cards reward feature, but I'm staying for the easy-to-digest spending reports.
SEE ALSO: A new app aims to fix a $1 trillion problem by making credit cards cheaper and easier to manage
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You might think life would be easier, happier, and infinitely more fulfilling if only you could rack up a few more IQ points.
But that's hardly the case, as evidenced by the 100-plus answers on a Quora thread titled, "When does intelligence become a curse?"
Users wrote about everything from the absurdly high expectations that people place on them to the trouble of constantly being perceived as a braggart.
Below, we've rounded up some of the most thought-provoking responses and explained the science behind them.
SEE ALSO: 8 common traits of highly intelligent people
Quora user Marcus Geduld says he generally understands his emotions really well and can tell other people about them — but he never feels the relief of expressing them.
"This is a common problem for smart people, especially ones who are highly verbal. They use words as a smoke screen, and it's all the more effective when their words are true. Less articulate people tend to vent through physicality. They yell, punch, kick, run, scream, sob, dance, jump for joy... I explain. And when I'm done explaining, everything I've explained is still stuck inside me, only now it has a label on it."
Geduld's observation highlights the distinction between cognitive and emotional skills.
Scientists can't say for sure whether and how the two factors are related, but some interesting research suggests that high emotional intelligence compensates for low cognitive ability, at least in the workplace. In other words, it would seem that people who are super smart might not need to rely on emotional skills to solve problems.
"You are automatically expected to be the best, no matter what," writes Roshna Nazir. "You have nobody to talk to about your weaknesses and insecurities."
What's more, you're panicked about what would happen if you didn't perform up to snuff.
"This makes you so cautious about your failure that you cannot sometimes afford to take risks just fearing that what would happen if you lose," writes Saurabh Mehta.
In an excerpt from "Smart Parenting for Smart Kids" posted on PsychologyToday.com, the authors write that parents are generally most anxious about their kids' achievement when those kids are smart and already doing well in school.
Unfortunately, they write, "sometimes that can lead to too much focus on what they do rather than on who they are."
A number of Quora users mentioned that intelligent people feel like they can get by with less effort than other people. But a high IQ doesn't always lead directly to success, and highly intelligent people may never develop the perseverance required to succeed.
According to Kent Fung, "Intelligence becomes a problem when those who have it discover early in life that they don't need to work as hard to keep up, and thus never develop a good strong work ethic."
One study found that conscientiousness — i.e. how hard you work — is in fact negatively correlated with certain types of intelligence. The researchers propose that highly intelligent people might feel like they don't need to work as hard to accomplish what they want.
Unless you are Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay, you will probably not be developing creative advertising for the Super Bowl commercial slots. In fact, both have reduced their outbound marketing strategies in favor of social media campaigns (“Share a Coke;” “Do Us a Flavor”). They are now engaged in inbound marketing by getting consumers to actively participate in their campaigns – attracting people through inbound marketing.
Businesses that want to generate leads would do well to take their cues from these “big boys.” Today’s consumers do not want to be found and sold to – they want to do their own research and participate in finding you. Once they do, it is your job to develop the relationship that nurtures that lead into something more.
Effective lead generation through inbound marketing, then, becomes the primary task of marketers. Here are six strategies to generate those leads and begin the relationship-building process.
By now, this term has become a “household word” among marketers. They know they have to generate lots of content that engages the right audience, keeps them engaged, and provides enough value that targets move to landing pages on the business site, trust the company, and then provide their contact information as a result. In fact, they do not even have to provide their contact information. Based upon their behavior on your site, you can then re-target them with content that speaks specifically to their needs and interests.
When content is consistent and relevant and valuable to the target market, they will come.
Traditionally, marketers have thought of blogs as the only and most important place for content. Not so. While popular blogs certainly attract readers and followers, other content venues are just as important – e-books, guides, how-to and explainer videos, podcasts, and obviously social media posts – all comprise methods by which content can be delivered. Smart marketers use them all, because they:
This of course is the crux of the matter. If you have defined your target audience, and you know where it hangs out online, you should know what it values, what information and education it wants, and what will entertain and inspire, then you will know the type of content to produce and where to publish or offer it. The key to content is not to sell; it is to build interest and foster relationships. Research your demographic, check out your competition and give your audience what it values and needs.
Each piece of content should have an objective. Before you create any content, define your objective – are you going to educate? Tell a story? Inspire? Entertain? All of these are worthy objectives. What is not a worthy objective is selling your product or service.
Your website should be a lead generation tool in itself. All content you post elsewhere should drive people to your site, where lead generation can occur, if done right. And if your SEO strategies are effective, traffic comes from organic searches. Here is all that your website should be doing to generate leads:
Now, about the site itself. If visitors find it appealing, they will tend to stay awhile; if visitors find it easy to navigate, they tend to stay awhile; if visitors can get a form filled out quickly, they will tend to do it. If visitors are not asked for too much information, they will fill out a form (e.g., email addresses are usually happily surrendered; phone numbers are not).
SEO is a topic for another blog post – however, if you do not feel as though you are effective in SEO strategies, get a good guide that will walk you through the best tactics.
Of course, you already have conversions from visitors if they have signed up for your mailing list. But how you use these leads in your email campaigns will make all of the difference in nurturing that lead through the process of becoming a customer. Your email campaigns can do two important things:
Here are just a few tips:
Like email, if you have a lead’s phone number, you have already achieved a great conversion. SMS lead nurturing is rapidly becoming an amazingly effective marketing tool. In fact, they are beginning to replace email campaigns. When smart phone users can receive a quick text message from you regarding some new of value that you are offering, along with a link to the landing page to get that value, they are far more likely to link over to you. Why? Because research is now showing that texts are far more widely read than emails. They are fast and recipients can respond just as fast.
Your website may have several landing pages, dependent upon where the visitor is “inbounding” from. The purpose of every landing page is to generate leads, and they must focus on that above all else. In exchange for surrendering their information, the visitor receives something of value.
Here is how to optimize your landing pages:
If you have been in the marketing business for any time at all, using social media is a “no-brainer.” It is how you develop relationships, followings, and shares. It is also a lead generation tool, because it drives traffic to your site, specific landing pages, and your blog. Marketers who use social media to promote products and services fail; marketers who use social media to establish trust and relationships succeed.
This is an information-filled post, to be sure. Many of these strategies you may already be working, at least to some extent. Hopefully, though, you will have some new information that you can use to improve what you already do. And one last piece of advice? Keep current with the research, think about branching out into SMS, and be as creative as you can.
Relevant messaging strives to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Yet to establish a credible connection with a potential buyer, sellers have to be willing to take the time to understand their prospects in detail.
A good messaging strategy:
What does it take to create effective messaging that connects your organization’s sellers with your target buyers?
Developing a marketing message that resonates requires substantial thought and understanding. By creating compelling and captivating messages, companies give themselves a way to rise above the din of the marketplace.
As a potential buyer, I am inundated daily with communications from companies trying to make a connection with me and prompt me to buy their product or service. In some cases, I have expressed interest, in others I have not.
What makes the difference between a message that’s rebuffed as noise, and one that’s embraced as relevant?
Here are 5 tips to help you discover your most relevant messaging:
Get the full details on these tips for creating relevant messaging for your buyers. You’ll find them when you download our new ebook: Relevant Messaging: Here’s How to Do It.
So you’ve launched an email campaign. Work is done, right? Wrong.
Studies show that if you don’t respond to an email within 90 minutes the likelihood of getting a response drops drastically.
Handling replies is your top priority (yes, even the negative ones). Try calling positive replies as soon as you get the email back! If you don’t get a response from a follow-up email or call, set a task to follow up again in another day or so.
For negative response, send a quick “thanks for your consideration” note — and let them know that if anything changes in the future that they should reach out to you.
A rejection is a great opportunity to share a piece of helpful content, so make sure you take advantage of it.
Most people think that their sales approach should be either cold calling or cold emailing. The truth is that the best practice is to do both. Having access to click and open rates data is a tremendous advantage when cold calling. These email tools give you insights into who knows your company, your name and what you do. These will be the warmest “cold calls” you’ll ever make. You should plan to call within 28-48 hours of the click or open.
After your campaign goes live, the metrics will provide important feedback for next steps. Open rates measure how good your subject line is, and replies measure how good your overall messaging and CTAs are. High open rate and low replies is an indication that you need to work on improving the CTA or the main value proposition of your message.
It’s important to track clicks, but beware of click-tracking features. Email service providers are catching on to click-tracking techniques, so including them in your messages can cause your emails to get caught up in spam filters.
“Always be testing” and use the data to your advantage.
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A/B test your messaging whenever possible and follow the template that performs better for you. Each time you launch a new round of emails, replace the underperforming message with an updated version of the top performing version.
And lastly, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! At a certain point, the metrics won’t budge any higher.
X number of leads = Y number of responses = Z number of opportunities = predictable revenue.
We hope you have enjoyed and benefited from this five-part series. Personal, cold email outreach is a powerful tool for building a predictable revenue engine. We’d love to hear from you, so please drop us a line!
The post 5 Days to Become a Cold Email Pro: Day 5 appeared first on Sales Hacker.
When you think of a Ferrari, you think of beauty and power. But what if the stunningly-crafted exterior housed a rickety, bare-bones engine?
That’s the mistake many loyalty programs are making today. While marketers are creating appealing programs and lowering barriers to entry, most of them are undifferentiated once the customer joins, relying heavily on tactics like simple discounts to keep users interested.
Although spending on loyalty is effective, this practice has created an overabundance of “loyalty programs” that actually have nothing to do with loyalty. According to one report, while consumers now belong to 13-14 different loyalty programs on average, they only actively participate in six or seven. Compare this to the year before, when consumers only belonged to just 10-11 programs, but were active in seven or eight. That’s a drop from 80% to 50% engagement in just one year.
Shifting Loyalty Investments
The reason we see this trend is that marketers are investing heavily in acquiring new users, rather than engaging with the ones they already have. Both of these components are vital for a successful program. What marketers need to do is shift their loyalty investments from acquisition, to retention.
According to Ric Elert of Conversant: “We have found most marketers do best when they spend about 70% of their marketing dollars talking to actual buyers, 20% of those
dollars talking to people new to the brand and the remaining 10% on people that just happen onto their website that they’ve never tried to acquire.”
Common Loyalty Mistakes
While the focus on discounts has gotten consumers in the door for loyalty programs, simply treating the programs as a means for distributing cost savings to consumers misses the point.
As Katie Casavant of Kantar Shopcom put it: “It frankly can create precisely the opposite behavior of loyalty. It can create loyalty to the lowest price, wherever that lowest price can be found.”
True loyalty programs create experiences for customers – more and more often, one personalized to their unique interests – to create an emotional connection with the user. One survey by Colloquy found that the desirable millennial demographic, although concerned
about finances, are more likely to cite nonmonetary reasons for their brand loyalty. 63% of millennials in the U.S. have continued to participate in loyalty programs that support their lifestyles or personal preferences, compared with 46% of baby boomers.
In fact, personalizing loyalty programs to create value for the consumer has repeatedly been found to be critical for keeping consumers involved. Capgemini reported that the leading reason for unhappiness in loyalty programs was the lack of relevance, flexibility and value of the rewards, cited by 44% of respondents. Colloquy divulged that 56% of consumers said they were most likely to leave a loyalty program due to irrelevant offers.
What Makes a Lasting Loyalty Program?
In order to turn loyalty programs into vessels for long term engagement, brands need to go beyond sign ups and transaction-based activities such as discounts and awarding points for purchases.
Relevant offers, attainable rewards that can be delivered and redeemed on the spot, gamification and enhanced communication and valuable information all have a role to play in the loyalty programs of the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to create value in your brand’s loyalty program, I would recommend downloading eMarketer’s report, “Loyalty Marketing: Creating Stickiness in a Distracted World.”
Imagine you’re about to leave the house to pick up your kids. As you grab your keys, you hear a voice from the device on your coffee table: “It looks like you’ll use the last of your milk tomorrow, and yogurt is on sale for $1.19. Would you like to pick up an order from Trader Joe’s, for a total of $5.35?” You say yes, and Alexa confirms. The order will be ready for curbside pickup, on the way home from your kids’ school, in 15 minutes.
This future scenario isn’t so far off. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are accelerating consumer expectations and what’s technologically possible, from same-day delivery to machine-powered image recognition. You can call an Uber with Siri and book a flight entirely through a Facebook Messenger bot.
Responsive retail has peaked, and we’re about to enter the era of predictive commerce. It’s time for retailers to help people find products in their precise moment of need — and perhaps before they even perceive that need — whether or not they’re logged in or ready to click a “buy” button on a screen. This shift will require designing experiences that merge an understanding of human behavior with large-scale automation and data integration.
Retail giants have been using machine-learning algorithms to forecast demand and set prices for years. Amazon patented predictive stocking in 2014, and saying that AI, machine learning, and personalization technologies have improved since then is an understatement. Retailers need to think more like tech companies, using AI and machine learning not just to predict how to stock stores and staff shifts but also to dynamically recommend products and set prices that appeal to individual consumers.
Say you’re on a business trip and realize you forgot your phone charger. You’ll pay a premium for a new one delivered to your hotel room before an all-day meeting. An electronics retailer might also predict that you want new headphones. It can offer you a deal on a noise-canceling pair at a price that accounts for current pricing on Amazon, in-store inventory at Best Buy, the current rates for on-demand couriers, and the fact that you’re taking a red-eye flight home tomorrow.
This level of prediction requires detecting subtle patterns from massive data sets that are constantly in flux: consumers’ purchase histories, product preferences, and schedules; competitors’ pricing and inventory; and current and forecasted product demand. This is where AI and machine learning comes in and where companies are investing. Etsy just acquired a company that specializes in machine learning to make its searches more predictive by surfacing nuanced product recommendations that go beyond simple purchase histories or preferences. This is the natural evolution of product recommendations, one that will be the standard for years to come.
Predictive retail involves inspiring consumers in different contexts — before, during, and after a purchase. Commerce is already becoming less of a deliberate activity than an organic part of how we experience daily life. It’s not just smartphones that make browsing and buying spontaneous; Amazon’s Dash buttons and Alexa-powered Echo device are enabling purchases in the home. You can hit the Tide Dash button in your laundry room when you see that you’re running low on detergent, or ask Alexa to order your mom a bouquet of flowers when you remember that her birthday is next week. This is just the beginning.
The next generation of smart assistants and connected devices will learn from user habits and pick up on behavioral and environmental patterns in order to make these experiences more predictive. Devices like the Echo will access data from everyday interactions to predict specific opportunities for a transaction.
There’s also huge potential for connected devices in retail stores to predict consumer behavior and respond to individual needs. Many stores are already using smartphones to follow customers’ activity and deliver context-specific offers. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the evolution of biometrics, identity technologies, and location sensors will allow retailers to personalize content based on factors such as how you’re feeling, how much time you have to browse, and whether you’re coming from the office or you’ve just finished working out.
Retailers will need to program brick-and-mortar experiences with the same targeting and personalization they offer online. Think about walking past Nordstrom and receiving a notification for an offer on a new pair of sneakers. Your current pair is worn down from running almost 500 miles — all logged by a chip in the sole that sends data to your fitness app. You swipe the notification to select the styles you want to try on, and an in-store map guides you to an associate waiting with your shoes.
The future of predictive retail requires designing new ecosystems for commerce. These systems will be built around the human, rather than around a particular device or around online or offline experience. These systems will need to incorporate human connection and storytelling, spatial design and context, and a lot of data.
Many retailers are getting ahead of this shift by creating innovation labs — teams and spaces dedicated to incubating new ideas and testing digital experiences that connect the online and in-store worlds. Sephora’s Innovation Lab is a great example. The brand introduced a “store mode” for its mobile app, which integrates a user’s online shopping cart and Beauty Insider loyalty card to remind them of the products they’ve saved, the points they’ve earned, and the benefits available to them, such as a free makeover.
Retail chains, brands, and e-commerce companies are also collaborating to bring new ideas to life. Several years ago, Westfield Malls’ lab worked with eBay to build 10-foot-tall interactive screens in its San Francisco shopping center. Shoppers swiped these screens to browse products from brands like Rebecca Minkoff and Sony, which they could purchase directly on mobile.
There’s huge potential to layer predictive capabilities on top of this AI-driven infrastructure. Imagine a store window that connects with your phone to display personalized content. For instance, you might see gifts for your partner’s birthday or swimsuits for your next vacation, customized based on the boards you follow on Pinterest and the brands you follow on Instagram. By connecting data from multiple sources and designing for the user, retailers can create more-relevant experiences that pull you into a store, website, or app. Even more powerful, they can predict what you want before you do.
There’s almost always some trade-off between privacy and personalization; this has been true for every generation of technology. Retailers need to move forward with transparency, respect, and security as their priorities. They also need to show value. Google has done this well, not just with personalized search results but also with services such as Google Now, which integrates with your calendar and Google Maps to alert you that traffic to your meeting is heavier than usual and tells you when you should leave the office to arrive on time.
Many of us are inclined to share personal information for experiences that are magical and valuable — and that we can’t get elsewhere. Retailers will need to create experiences that make this magic and value apparent. The revolution is already under way. Tomorrow, people will expect even faster and more-intelligent service than they do today. At a point in the very near future, the expectation will shift from on-demand to predictive commerce. It’s time for retailers to get ahead of that change.
If most people approached dating the way marketers approached marketing, the world’s population would likely plummet.
Why? Because when it comes to B2B demand marketing, we marketers seldom acknowledge the subtle differences between those tactics that successfully pique target buyer interest and those that simply annoy them (or creep them out entirely).
This is especially true regarding account-based marketing (ABM), in which B2B marketers must raise interest and credibility among an entire buying-committee across a set number of accounts. In other words, marketers can’t just play the numbers game and risk burning bridges with the accounts most likely to close and generate big revenue gains.
Forrester recently released a comprehensive report on the ABM technology vendor landscape. (It’s the first that I’m aware of.) A handful of Forrester analysts interviewed 38 marketing technology vendor and user companies, and conducted product demos and questionnaire surveys with 55 vendors. It’s quite an impressive feat considering how vague marketers’ understandings of account-based marketing remains.
This report is very strong and undoubtedly of great use to just about any B2B marketer. For obvious reasons, however, coverage of the various ways tech vendors help find and engage account buying committees is somewhat simplified. (Note: this is bound to happen in a report of this scope in a landscape of little maturity.)
The report basically lumps all tactics used to acquire decision-maker contact data (and the vendors that automate these tactics) into a single group. It doesn’t delineate the differences between them and how this will affect your relationship with these target buyers going forward. In my view, this is an important nuance.
All marketers are trying to get that first date with the target buyer. And from what I often witness through my conversations with demand marketing teams, there’s two ways to find the decision-makers at target accounts and get those first dates:
There are several vendors that (among other useful capabilities) offer the ability drop contact data among your target accounts directly into your database. At first glance, this is great – you immediately know who you need to engage at these high-value accounts. Quick and easy, right?
But what this essentially turns into is the old, outdated marketing practice of list buys and spray-and-pray emailing. After all, these people whose info you just acquired have yet to show any interest in your brand, product or service. Think about it: How often do you reply to unsolicited sales emails?
This method often comes across as irritating to your target buyers because it’s presumptuous and distracting. In an era that’s all about the customer experience, the last thing marketers want to do is start out their relationship with a prospective buyer with a sense of irritation.
Even worse is adding that level of buyer stalking to the equation. Plenty of new tools allow marketers to look “at individual team members’ social posts, search histories, site visits, and content consumption.” Now, imagine receiving an initial prospecting email that refences your social posts and content consumption. Or being continuously stalked by display ads from vendors whose websites you haven’t yet visited. It’s kind of creepy.
Cartoon created by Steve Kosaka for webinar “How to Evolve Content Marketing Strategy for an ABM World”
That’s not to say such buyer intelligence doesn’t have value; researching your target buyers and using this data in communication is very helpful once they’ve expressed interest (on their terms) and after you’ve created a good rapport.
The second way to find and successfully engage target buyers uses a subtler approach, one that’s more like being introduced by a friend.
Once you have your list of target accounts (whether based on a manual process of sales-marketing agreement or automated by predictive modelling), disseminate your content via several media partners that have proven relationships with the specific accounts you’re targeting.
Such media vendors act as hubs of information for specific industries. Their content libraries act as watering holes in which your target buyers go to consume content on their own terms. If your content is good, properly tailored to their persona and account profiles, they’ll fill out that lead form, showing their interest in your company.
This starts off the customer relationship on the right foot. When you reach out to them, they’ll be far more likely to have a positive reaction to the outreach.
This isn’t anything new. It’s simply making sure that new shortcuts presented in the name of ABM don’t result in us falling back into bad habits. It’s important to remember that just because we’re now marketing to entire accounts, we’re still building relationships with individuals who don’t like to be annoyed, hounded or stalked.
At Extole, we talk to a lot of companies who want to set up a referral program, but don’t know where to start.
Getting your referral program up and running isn’t hard—all you need is some inspiration and a little guidance to get started. That’s why we’ve curated an epic list of 50 referral program examples that you can get inspired by, and start your own.
Table of Contents:
1. UBER’S FREE RIDES PROGRAM
Uber’s referral program has been key to the company’s rapid expansion. What has aided Uber every step of the way has been its referral program, which sits at the center of Uber’s mobile app. All users have to do to refer friends is open up the Uber App, tap the “Free Rides” tab and they’re in!
2. GIVE THE GIFT OF LYFT
Similar to Uber, Lyft’s referral program is featured front-and-center. Like Uber’s mobile app, Lyft includes a Free Rides section of its mobile app—give $20 off a Lyft ride to a friend, and get a $20 credit. With Lyft’s mobile app, however, you can give a free ride directly from the home screen by tapping the gift icon. This increases chances that happy Lyft riders will refer.
3. ROBINHOOD’S USER ACQUISITION MACHINE
Robinhood is a mobile app that allows users to buy and trade stocks on their phones. Robinhood leveraged referral for massive user growth with the launch of its Robinhood Instant product. Referring a friend to sign up for the early-access list allowed users to cut over 200,000 spots in line. As mobile-app platform Apptimize points out, the more we can’t have something the more we wantit—a fact that Robinhood used to its advantage, gaining over 800,000 new users in a few short months.
4. SPREAD THE LOVE WITH HOTEL TONIGHT
Hotel Tonight is another mobile-first company that’s grown rapidly due to the viral success of its app. With Hotel Tonight, customers can find and book a hotel near them with three taps and a swipe. Its referral program similarly makes giving the gift of referral a breeze.
5. FREE SHIPMENTS WITH SHYP
When designing your mobile app for referral, one of the most important things to nail is the friend landing experience. When a friend taps on a referral link in the App Store, it breaks context and user flow if they’re treated to a generic login sequence. Shyp gets around this by using deep-links, so that the referral message is the first thing new users see.
6. TRAVEL FREE WITH AIRBNB
When friends click on a referral invite from Airbnb, they’re taken to a dedicated landing page that shows them a picture of the friend that shared the referral, to great effect. At Extole, we’ve found that simply including a face on the referral message increases friend conversions by 3%.
7. REFER-A-FRIEND TO MARRIOTT HOTEL
When you already have a loyalty program in place, referral is a great way to transform that infrastructure and gear it toward customer acquisition. Marriott’s refer-a-friend program is a great example. For each friend referred, Marriott members earn 50,000 bonus points—the equivalent of 5 nights at any Marriott Category 2 hotel. Referred friends get 10,000 points, or a one-night stay.
8. SHARE EXPERIENCES WITH VIRGIN ATLANTIC
Like hotels, airlines are an industry where referral can leverage existing loyalty program assets—Airlines cumulatively have over 356 million frequent flyer members. Virgin Atlantic’s referral program is notable because it offers tiered rewards for the advocates based on the order value of a referred friend’s purchase. Referring a friend who buys a first class ticket nets you a quick 10,000 miles.
9. INVITE FRIENDS TO CAR2GO
Car2Go is a car-sharing service that allows you to rent a car on-demand from your mobile app. For every friend that signs up, the advocate receives $10 worth of driving time.
10. GETAROUND FASTER
Getaround is another peer-to-peer car-sharing service that lets users take a car for a spin for $5 an hour. Because it relies on users to provide cars, its referral program is geared toward getting new users to do so. For every friend who shares a car, advocates get a $200 reward.
11. SHARE THE OUTDOORS WITH GOTENNA
goTenna is a phone accessory for adventurers and explorers. It’s a little stick that gives you text and GPS service even if you’re 1.5 miles above sea level in the Sierra Nevadas. Backpacking is better together, and goTenna plays into that with referral. For every friend who grabs a goTenna, an advocate gets a $10 Amazon gift card.
12. REFER-A-FRIEND TO THE BACKCOUNTRY
Backcountry is a retailer of outdoor gear for those who love the wild. Its online referral program provides a dual-sided referral invite of $10.
13. SHARE FREE HEADSPACE
Headspace is a service that helps over 5 million people meditate from wherever they are, be it desktop, mobile or tablet. It offers a one-sided referral program. When you share headspace with your friends, they get 10 free guided meditation sessions.
14. SHARE BEAUTY WITH JULEP
Julep is a cosmetics brand that offers skincare products, nail polish and more. The Beauty Box is a subscription service that sends customers personalized selections of beauty products each month. For every friend you refer to Julep’s Beauty Box, you get $15 to apply to your next purchase.
15. SPREAD SOYLENT
Soylent has provoked headlines for its vision of replacing food with a bio-engineered drink. Although Soylent certainly isn’t for everyone, the company has built up a staunch community around its mission of providing affordable food to everyone—which makes it perfect for referral. Friends you invite to Soylent get 50% off their first 12 bottles.
16. FITNESS WITH FRIENDS AND 24 HOUR FITNESS
Going to the gym is a social activity, and that’s something that 24 Hour Fitness nails with its referral program. Friends who receive a referral invite get a free 3-day pass to hit the treadmill at the gym.
17. FREE CLASSES WITH SKYFIT
Skyfit is an on-demand fitness program that pairs you with top personal trainers from your mobile phone. For every friend that you refer to Skyfit, you receive a free week of Skyfit classes.
18. SHARE ORAL HYGIENE WITH QUIP
Quip is a dental hygiene service that delivers electric tooth toothbrushes and toothpaste via subscription. It uses referral to spread word of mouth buzz around providing the world with better oral health. Quip’s refer a friend is beautifully designed, and utilizes a dual-sided $5 incentive to spread the love.
19. GROWING AMAZON PRIME
Amazon Prime members now outnumber non-prime customers, at around 63 million strong—a 19% increase in the past year. Amazon Prime’s referral program offers advocates and friends a pretty simple dual-sided $5 incentive. Considering that Amazon Prime customers spend an estimated $1,200 a year on Amazon, this works out pretty nicely for Amazon.
20. SHARE GREAT DESIGN WITH BLINDS.COM
Blinds.com offers beautiful and affordable blinds for your home online. They offer a dual-sided $20 incentive referral program—with a twist. Customers of Blinds.com get access to a specialized design consultant. By allowing advocates to refer their friends to a specific consultant, they were able to boost new customer conversions by a whopping 82%.
21. REFER-A-FRIEND TO STYLE WITH BODEN
Boden, a British online clothing retailer gives friends 20% off their first purchase and advocates a $15 voucher towards their next one. Their referral program uses fun, clear copy that eschews marketing speak altogether and gets friends to actually share.
22. LOYALTY & REFERRAL WITH EBAGS
Like many e-commerce companies, eBags leverages referral to achieve greater distribution and lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) to get new customers into the funnel—rather than paying increasingly high CPIs. eBags ties in its loyalty program to referral by offering advocates $10 worth of reward points, and 20% off of a friend’s first purchase.
28. STARBUCKS: GAMIFYING LOYALTY WITH REFERRAL
Starbuck’s best-in-class rewards program ties in both loyalty and referral. Starbucks offers loyalty members stars for every friend that they refer, which members can redeem for free coffees, treats and prizes. This gamified program makes referral fun and keeps Starbucks customers coming back for more.
29. SHARE THE LOVE WITH SEAMLESS
Seamless, the food delivery service, offers a dual-sided $7 referral program. What’s great about its referral program is that it makes it a seamless extension of the Seamless site, with customized colors and fonts in the modal pop-up window.
30. RESERVE WITH FRIENDS
Reserve is a restaurant reservation and payments app that currently operates across 7 cities in the U.S. It helps foodies every step of the way from finding somewhere to eat to paying for the bill—all within their native mobile app.
31. SHARE TASTY GIFTS WITH MOUTH
Mouth.com is a website for tasty treats, where you can buy everything from bacon and salami to chili granola. It’s referral program gives customer advocates a double-sided incentive where referred friends receive 20% off their first order and advocates get 20% of their next.
32. DROPBOX’S VIRAL REFERRAL PROGRAM
Dropbox has earned itself a great reputation for being so easy to use. The intuitive design makes uploading, sharing, and organizing all possible from the dashboard in seconds. That’s why they opted out of putting their referral program front-and-center, where it would be a distraction. Instead, they put the CTA in a place where the reward—getting more space— would be most relevant.
33. XOOM MONEY TO A FRIEND
Xoom is a money-sending service, so it makes sense that their referral program offers cold hard cash (well, sort of) as a reward. Not only will their customers be $20 happier, but they’ll be reminded of how easy it is to get and give money using Xoom.
34. TRELLO: REFERRAL GOLD
Trello is a beloved project management tool that helps you organize everything, from personal to-do lists to customer support and product management. By sharing Trello with friends, customer advocates get a free month of Trello Gold for every friend that subscribes for the service. With Trello Gold, users get more storage space for their files, stickers, and the ability to personalize their boards.
35. DOCSEND: SHARE SMATER DOCS
Docsend is a platform where salespeople can store, share, and edit documents, getting rid of the long email chains plaguing most sales teams. Their referral program—giving you $15 off any plan—incentivizes you to both, recommend the software and upgrade. Since they offer pricing plans of $0, $10, and $30 per user per month, $15 is enough to minimize the blow associated with moving up one plan.
36. FREE TRADES WITH OPTIONSHOUSE
Optionshouse is a trading platform that offers low fees and a suite of trading tools for stock, option, and futures traders. True to their name, they provide users an option of what kind of reward they get. And the referred friend gets an even better deal to get them to follow through on the offer.
37. SHARE TAX REFUNDS WITH TURBOTAX
Famous tax software Turbotax also has a dual-sided referral program. They reward the advocate with a gift card—no string attached— and give new users a discount off their paid product. This enables free users to bring in new paid users.
38. FARMIGO: REFER-A-FARM
Farmigo is an online marketplace that connects farmers with businesses and consumers. Really capitalizing on the power of word-of-mouth, they let advocates hyper-personalize the referral by providing a place for a personal message and the name of the friend’s farm.
39. WELCOME TO HUBSPOT
Inbound marketing platform Hubspot offers referrers something more valuable than a couple of bucks. Knowing that their userbase consists of well-researched marketers trying to get ahead in the space, Hubspot offers a tactical book written by its founders who are well-known industry experts.
40. SHARE PRODUCTIVITY WITH GOOGLE G SUITE
Formerly known as Google Apps, this suite includes everything from file storing, to emailing, to video conferencing. Their referral program offers the big bucks—$15 per user who signs up. This compels advocates to recommend bigger, more stable companies that have many employees.
41. REFER-A-FRIEND, REWARD YOURSELF WITH AMERICAN EXPRESS
Credit card companies have traditionally high customer lifetime values (LTV) because customers don’t like jumping ship and switching between companies. That’s what makes them a prime target for referral. American Express’ referral program is a great example. For every referred friend, an advocate receives 5,000 Starpoints on their Starwood Preferred Guest Business credit card—a value worth around $125.
42. WELLS FARGO’S FREE STAGECOACH
Banks also operate in a high LTV industry, and are practiced at using referral. Wells Fargo’s referral program jazzes up its program with a promotion that gives customer advocates a remote control stagecoach for each referred friend.
43. CAPITAL ONE: MAKE BANK WITH FRIENDS
CapitalOne offers a dual-sided $25 incentive for advocates and friends who open either a checking or savings account. What’s notable about its referral landing page is how easy it is to use—CapitalOne doesn’t overwhelm referred friends with a million different choices. It tries to make the process of opening an account through referral as smooth and easy as possible.
44. CHASE REFER-A-FRIEND
Certain Chase credit cards reward you with between 5,000 and 10,000 ($50 and $100) points for each friend that you refer. They keep advocates on their toes by constantly updating which credit cards are eligible. They even have a separate website—chasereferafriend.com—in which you can see if your account qualifies.
45. SHARE COMMUNITY WITH COINBASE
Coinbase is the world’s most popular bitcoin exchange company. Dedicated to making more people use “the future of money,” Coinbase offers rewards in their own preferred currency standard—and they’re not stingy! 121,980 bits equates to roughly 78 US dollars.
46. SHARE THE DREAM WITH TESLA
Tesla Motors, the company spearheading electric car innovation, isn’t popular for their product, alone. Their extensive referral program has the potential to become a side-business in itself. In fact, one internet-famous Tesla advocate made $135,000 off of it when he convinced 188 people to buy, earning the company over $16 million in sales.
47. FREE STATIONARY THROUGH MINTED
Minted is a marketplace that sells cards, design pieces, and personal art styling made by independent designers. You can get a completely custom design or browse through their selection. Their tone of sentimentality and their focus on the art of giving is extended in how they promote their referral program.
48. STOCK UP WITH T-MOBILE
T-mobile’s referral makes their advocates feel invested in the company, literally. Their referral program gives away T-mobile stocks.
49. VERIZON: IT PAYS TO HAVE FRIENDS
On the surface, Verizon’s referral program looks like most—they reward the advocate $100, and give the friend an extra $50. But their use of social media is what makes this referral program extra effective. They’re using two of the most effective forms of marketing—social media and word-of-mouth—to amplify their reach.
50. CREATE CUSTOM CARDS WITH VISTAPRINT
Vistaprint is a company that helps small businesses create customized cards, marketing materials, clothing and more. With its focus on small business, referral is the perfect customer acquisition strategy—low cost, targeted and effective.
Recently one of our clients asked about the difference between mentions (@) and hashtags (#) on Twitter. I left the conversation thinking about how they are used and misused, and how they can be added to tweets more effectively. I also realized that there may be other clients and subscribers of ours that would like to know more about this topic.
It seems as if mentions and hashtags are often confused by novice Twitter users. Admittedly, when I first started using Twitter I didn’t fully grasp how important they both are. It’s something I learned over time, using the platform myself and watching the interactions of others.
First, it’s helpful to examine how Twitter is used. The platform is typically used to share important announcements, interesting content, and brand developments. You’ll often find bits of conversations between accounts. The use of mentions and hashtags helps users find others who have similar interests.
Mentions are used to call attention to or draw the attention of another Twitter account. They are searchable so a user can search for all the mentions of a particular account. When you mention an account, they will receive a notification. Often if you mention an account in a way that is beneficial to them, they will mention you back or retweet your post.
Using mentions wisely can lead to added exposure for your brand. You want to draw the attention of the owners and followers of a particular account, but it has to be in the right context. For example, an effective way to mention a brand would be if you’re sharing your blog post that discusses the use of social media management tools. If the article itself mentions Buffer, then adding @Buffer to your tweet would be appropriate. It’s valuable to their brand (they’d love to know that they were written about) and helpful to their followers.
The use of mentions can appear gratuitous and self-serving when they are misused. Don’t tag accounts that are not relevant to the subject of your post. For example, if you sell shoes on eBay and you’re tweeting about your products, you wouldn’t add @Zappos.
Hashtags are for grouping conversations and categorizing content about a topic. Like mentions, hashtags are searchable, so you can view what other people are tweeting about, relative to a particular subject. They reflect what people are talking about and you’ll notice that certain hashtags “trend”.
If your tweet is relevant to a particular current event or trending topic, adding a hashtag is a way to join in the conversation. Hashtags allow you connect with others who have a common interest. Social media is about developing relationships and hashtags play an important part in finding your tribe on Twitter and other social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook.
I like to think of hashtags as adding value by being helpful to Twitter users who are searching for information about a particular topic. The benefit of the hashtag is that a user can filter their search for the same hashtag simply by tapping or clicking on the #word as it appears within a tweet.
Hashtags are also valuable for branding. Come up with your own hashtag phrase and use it in your social campaigns. It will set you apart from other brands and you will start to be associated with that phrase. It lets your followers know that if they search for that hashtag they will find other useful information about your products or services. Not only that, if your hashtag strategy connects with your users they will start to use it in their own social media, resulting in user-generated content. That’s when you know you’ve hit the social media jackpot!
If you want the maximum exposure for your post, the optimum number of hashtags is 2. According to research on Twitter hashtags, engagement drops by 17% on posts with 3 or more hashtags. (Sendible) You’ll want every click, reply and retweet you can get so this is important to note.
Be sure to do some research about the hashtags you intend to use if they are not commonly used in your industry. You could discover that the same phrase is used by accounts that do not align with your brand’s mission and values.
There are some great resources around the web to help you fine tune your hashtag strategy. Here are two of my favorites:
How to Choose a Hashtag from the Twitter blog includes a flow chart which will help you hone in on the best hashtags to use for your brand.
Need some help brainstorming relevant hashtags? Check out Hashtagify.me where you can search for hashtags, discover related hashtags and get a list of leading influencers who are using that tag.
Mentions and hashtags are an important part of your Twitter strategy. Use them thoughtfully and they will increase engagement on your posts, help you get noticed within your niche, and help you develop relationships with others in your industry. If you have any thoughts you’d like to add, please comment below. We’d love to hear what’s working for you on social media!
There are thousands of ways to kill a sale.
I start a lot of my blogs with those exact words and with good reason – people are still making the same mistakes and are blown away when the client says “No”. My mission is to help those in business understand that excuses are not valid anymore, know the how, why and what of securing the sale.
Bringing me to the reveal of a trade secret. The four most powerful question I know that will help you to identify what you can do to extend and deepen your existing client relationships.
The Four Sales Questions.
These questions are structured purposely to lead your client through a conscious process of associating you, your business and team, your product and/or service with their own ongoing success. Think of these questions as not only ‘Sales Questions’ but ‘Focus Questions’, ‘Revenue Growth Questions’ and ‘Client Questions’.
So what are these elusive golden ticket questions I’ve been hiding up my sleeve?
Ask your client these four simple questions:
Now let me explain.
How Are We Going? – Is about making your clients take the time to think about and realise how much value you are providing them and how much they enjoy working with you.
This question may also draw out areas of your relationship and performance that your client feels are not meeting their expectations. Similar to publicity, there’s no such thing as bad feedback- just a chance to be better.
It’s better to proactively find out and then you can use the other questions to develop an action plan to improve in these areas jointly, then to reactively find out when your client goes to tender or worse still, starts buying from one of your competitors!
What Else Can We Do, to Make Things EVEN BETTER? – Is about showing them you want to add even more value for them.
This question is also showing your client their importance to you, that you are not taking them for granted.
It’s a significant question to use as the basis for jointly developing an action plan to implement ideas, processes, systems, and or regular communications that focus on continuous improvement of the relationship.
What Are You Planning?– Is about getting clients to associate you and the certainty you provide (your value) to their relevant plans/projects/proposed activities.
You may need to drill into your clients’ responses to get further details about each particular opportunity they share with you.
Don’t forget to ask them if they have any plans/projects/proposed activities after their initial one you’ve discussed.
How Can We Help You? – Is about getting clients to think consciously about including you, your products and services in their plans.
Remember your clients buy from you because they:
Your clients are so busy that they don’t have the time or desire to shop around because it would be harder than continuing to buy from you.
Now you know the questions, how can you implement them to help you now?
1. Select a couple of important clients and organise a meeting to ask them the above questions in order.
2. Remember, negative feedback from question 1 can become positive, as long as you resolve whatever it is they are dissatisfied with. Use question 2 to jointly develop an action plan to improve the identified areas.
3. If you ask the questions, you need to follow through on what you talk about. Make sure you keep them up to date with your progress.
4. If your client identifies a couple of plans that you can help with, make sure you ask questions to understand the timeframe, preferred approach, scope, key stakeholders, budget, etc.
5. You can ask ‘The Four Sales Questions’ whenever you think it is suitable. These questions can form the basis of a client survey or become an excellent tool for your CEO, GM or any senior manager to ask when visiting your key accounts.
The key is being seen as part of your clients’ business, not just another supplier.
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Scarcely a presentation on marketing trends is complete without reference to the Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z segments and allusions to each generation’s unique expectations, behaviors, attitudes, and values. The grand conclusion is always that these distinct demographic segments define generation-specific consumption patterns that marketers ignore at their peril. Gen Xers, born between the mid-1960s and 1980s, are the successor generation to Boomers, born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, and each successive generation takes up about 20 years. The contention is that each generation has a set of defining experiences that have shaped it and that in turn shape them as consumers. This segmentation scheme is perhaps marketers’ most successful product. And it is, unfortunately, mostly nonsense.
Here’s why. For it to be useful, a segmentation scheme must meet two simple criteria: (1) It must explain the variance in the behavior of interest better than other available variables, and (2) consumers within segments should be more homogenous than those across segments.
Below are some questions to ask the next time you hear someone describing generational segmentation.
First, are the labels just shorthand for the age group, or do they provide some additional insight? For example, is it more informative to say 30–40 year olds or Gen Xers? Calling them Gen Xers presumes that there is something generational about their characteristics that will remain constant as they traverse different age groups. But most often the label is used as a substitute for an age bracket. Retirees are more likely to be interested in savings products, health care, and travel and leisure, while younger consumers are more likely to be interested in education, job searches, budget travel, and so on. And that has always been the case. Adding the generational labels does little to enlighten us on product category usage and even less to tell us about brand or feature preferences.
Still, the generational schemers will argue, each generation has different media preferences, depending on when they came of age. For example, older consumers rely on print and TV as sources of information, while younger consumers prefer to be reached through the internet and mobile media. But this distinction is so obvious as to not require a generational segmentation scheme; age brackets remain sufficient (and more predictive) for media preference.
It is worth keeping in mind, also, that the cutoff dates for the generations (every 20 years after WWII) are entirely arbitrary, with an arbitrary starting date. And by lumping consumers into generational brackets, we lose a lot of information. If we have to use demographics (and we no longer have to — see below), we are better off using finer variables such as age or even age brackets. As a corollary, if the world is truly moving faster (with new technologies changing the marketing landscape at an ever-quicker pace, adoption of new products occurring faster than ever before, and product life cycles shortening), then the defining experiences of each successive generation should be entirely different. Should marketers adapt by defining generations as 10 years or even five years, rather than 20? This is not to suggest that we should, but rather to highlight the arbitrariness of our generational cutoffs.
But a second consideration makes the generational segmentation scheme even more meaningless, and indeed obsolete. Demographic segmentation is so 20th century. In a world rich in behavioral data, accurate assessment and targeting of the individual consumer is not only possible; it is easy. Using coarse demographic segments is unnecessary. Demographic segmentation was valuable when marketers needed to lump individuals into large enough groups to make it economically viable to target them as a whole. Mass media was too coarse a tool to allow individual level targeting, so marketers made assumptions about the similarity of consumers who were of similar age, lived in similar geographies, or earned a similar income. Demographics offered a rough proxy for expected behavior. Lumping consumers into generations based on when they were born is among the crudest forms of segmentation.
Today, individualized media (smartphones) have made those segmentation exercises as obsolete as rotary dial. It is far more viable and profitable to target individuals based on their individual media and consumption habits than by grouping them into segments that marketers hope are homogenous. You can find and reach the 60-year-old who reads and watches Vice News (a news outlet aimed at younger viewers) and the diligent 25-year-old who is saving for retirement — individuals you would miss with a coarser demographic segmentation scheme. What’s more, the very nature of pull versus push media make cross-demographic consumption much more likely.
Third, are consumers really more homogenous within generations than across them? For example, generational segmentation gets weird when it is used to predict generational values. Millennials, we are told, are endowed with a sense of civic responsibility and enlightened attitudes toward the environment, and these qualities so define the generation that they will endure even when Millennials are 50 years of age. But there is little evidence that this generation is any more environmentally conscious than the generation that eliminated phosphates from our rivers 50 years ago, or that they are any more civic-minded than the generations that fought for civil rights. And there is little predictive value in stating that this generation’s values will endure. (It precludes the possibility of defining experiences to come — for example, a war or an economic depression.)
Finally, are generation segmentation schemes really predictive of brand preference, or brand loyalty, or a preference for certain product features? The answer is no. There are far better predictors; the best of them is past behavior. And past behavior is now recorded and available as a variable.
So the next time you’re at a presentation and you hear about generational segmentation, try asking some of the questions above instead of tuning out and checking your smartphone.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Facebook made industry news when technology reporters discovered a Jobs tab on their business page. The social network later confirmed that it was experimenting with a suite of sourcing tools to capitalize on the boom in social recruiting. Workforce industry experts believe that Facebook may be trying to muscle in on LinkedIn’s sacred grounds. However, even bigger revelations came November 15 when Google announced its own foray into the realm of talent acquisition — a move that staffing insiders have been predicting for some time. The fascinating twist with Google is that the Internet giant has no plans to build a standalone technology, such as a branded applicant tracking system (ATS), online recruitment platform or vendor management system (VMS). Instead, Google is offering “Cloud Jobs API,” which allows workforce technology developers to integrate robust machine learning features into their systems.
Google is promoting its targeted API as a powerful job search and discovery platform dedicated to improving processes in the talent industry. Machine learning forms the core of the technology and its potential boon to staffing professionals. Google describes the innovation on its site:
Company career sites, job boards and applicant tracking systems can improve candidate experience and company hiring metrics with job search and discovery powered by sophisticated machine learning. The Cloud Jobs API provides highly intuitive job search that anticipates what job seekers are looking for and surfaces targeted recommendations that help them discover new opportunities.
To ensure that users receive the most relevant search results and recommendations, the API relies on Google’s advances in machine learning to understand how job titles and skills correlate. It then compiles the data to determine the closest match between job content, location and seniority.
When Google first launched its search functionality, it revolutionized the Internet. It masked cutting-edge algorithms in a simple interface, which delivered the most comprehensive and relevant results available — and disrupted an entire industry. Google is no longer just a technology solutions provider, it’s become a cultural institution. Now, it’s expanding that reach into our industry.
Recruiters today still face challenges with cumbersome job boards, muddled sourcing systems and attempts to cull vital information from a lot of digital noise. That’s precisely what Google intends to help them overcome.
As Google explains: “Job postings are often worded in industry- and company- specific jargon that job seekers don’t search for. Cloud Jobs API provides intuitive job search that surfaces relevant opportunities by leveraging a complete graph of how job titles, skills, and seniority relate to one another.”
The inherent machine learning in Cloud Jobs API promises to bring big data directly to users, while compacting it into right-sized data. Google’s platform will monitor job searching behavior and the data present in career path progressions to suggest opportunities. It will also recommend additional roles that are aligned to a job seeker’s skill sets and interests. As the API collects more information, it can render more accurate assessments.
Because cultural fit has taken precedence with candidates, recruiters, hiring managers and contingent workforce leaders alike, Cloud Jobs API could streamline the process of creating ideal matches.
Simplicity in user functionality has always been a hallmark of Google. The company assures staffing industry technology providers that integrating the API is a fairly effortless undertaking. Despite this ease, however, the API will continue to support a wide range of critical features.
“At the heart of Cloud Jobs API,” Google explains, “there are two main proprietary ontologies that encode knowledge about occupations and skills, as well as relational models between these ontologies.” For the sake of avoiding confusing tech terms, let’s just call these “ontologies” data models.
The first data model deals with occupation. It includes about 30 general job categories (e.g., accounting and finance, human resources, hospitality, etc.), over 1,000 occupational families (e.g., database administrators), and 250,000 specific job titles.
The second data model focuses on skills. Google claims that it can define and organize about 50,000 hard and soft skill sets with different types of relationships. Basically, it seems to produce an analogy along the lines of “this hard skill is related to this soft skill.” Or, as an example, we could say “customer service is related to strong interpersonal communication skills.”
Of course, the breakthrough of Cloud Jobs API comes from access to Google’s machine learning algorithms, which play a predominant role in driving the performance of talent acquisition strategies. The first step involves cleansing job titles. Google’s API is programmed to standardize the titles it sees, which represents a huge benefit to job seekers and job posters.
The APi initially removes language not directly related to the occupation’s definition. This includes location, employment type, salary details, company names, advertising phrases and “administrative jargon.”
Next, the API takes the scrubbed job descriptions and attempts to recognize actual occupations from vague expressions. Google illustrates the process with an example: “The title ‘retail sales’ maps to the broad category ‘Sales and Retail,’ while a ‘flooring installer’ job title encompasses ‘carpet installer,’ ‘floor layer,’ and ‘tile and marble setter’ occupation families.” The system can detect titles that are not occupations and assign a confidence score to the mappings.
After these processes, machine learning takes over and supports the following functions:
According to ERE Editor-in-Chief Todd Raphael, three big industry firms have already incorporated the API into their systems: Dice, CareerBuilder and Jibe. In his article, Todd provides insights from this early batch of Google partners. The results enjoyed by CareerBuilder are particularly compelling and seem to hint at great potential for the API.
Dice. The company says it was selected “specifically for its technology focus and position in the technology community.”
CareerBuilder. Google says that CareerBuilder created “a prototype in just 48 hours, found improved, more accurate results when compared to its existing search algorithm.” Google gives an example of a search for “part time” and how the results are “richer” because of the use of synonyms like PT. CareerBuilder appears to be just testing the tool and later expanding it to greater use among its customers.
Jibe, whose CEO Joe Essenfeld says, “With the launch of Google Cloud Jobs API, Google machine learning will become the standard for career sites” and is a cornerstone of the company’s candidate experience platform. Jibe says career site/ATS users — job candidates, in other words — will get better search results as Jibe integrates Google with career sites.
Google’s Cloud Jobs API is definitely a gift to staffing industry professionals and candidates. Workforce solutions providers will be able to integrate the platform into their own systems to create a more vivid way to hire exceptional talent. However, I believe Google’s approach has accomplished something even more important.
Staffing technology companies are facing fierce competition these days. Big VMS providers, for example, are acquiring other tech offerings and growing to levels where smaller players struggle to stay afloat. Meanwhile, lean and savvy startups have circulated new offerings into the market, such as freelance management systems, online recruitment platforms and a variety of tools that target niche groups. Existing workforce technology providers are scrambling to incorporate the latest modules and remain relevant.
Google probably could have built its own machine and just dominated the space. It didn’t. Instead, Google chose to become a great equalizer. The API gives tech players of all sizes the chance to benefit from its enhanced functionality. It will be exciting to see how this offering helps reshape our industry in the coming months and drives performance to unprecedented heights.
We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley’s engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products.
It struck me as I watched the teams try to find how their technology would solve real customer problems, is that machine learning is following a similar pattern of previous technical infrastructure innovations. Early entrants get sold to corporate acquirers at inflated prices for their teams, their technology, and their tools. Later entrants who miss that wave have to build real products that people want to buy.
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I’ve lived through several technology infrastructure waves; the Unix business, the first AI and VR waves in the 1980’s, the workstation wave, multimedia wave, the first internet wave. Each of those had a set of common characteristics that the Gartner Group characterizes as the Hype Cycle .
The five stages of the hype cycle are:
Stage 1: The Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Stage 2: Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; most don’t.
Stage 3: Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
Stage 4: Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Stage 5: Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
Shiny Object meets First Mover Advantage
What’s become apparent in the last few technology hype cycles is that for startups and their investors there is a short multi-year window of opportunity (at the Peak of Inflated Expectations) to sell a startup at an inflated price. This occurs because large technology companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, Salesforce, Intel, et al,) and increasingly other non-tech firms, are in an arms race to stay relevant. For example, according to CBInsights nearly 140 machine intelligence have been acquired since 2011, with over 40 being bought so far in 2016.
Most often the first acquisitions in a hype cycle are for the “shiny objects” – the technology, the team and the tools. The acquired technical teams usually start up or complement the company’s research group in a specific new technology area.
If you’re a startup (or their investors) getting acquired at this point in the hype cycle is exactly where you want to be – short time in business, large acquisition price, value based on a frenzy, perceived scarcity of expertise, and fear of a competitor getting the key talent.
History shows that the acquirers often overpay buying this expertise early. While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) The irony is that the acquisitions made later in the hype cycle – when companies have built real products that customers want, are the ones that generate revenue and profit for the acquirer.
I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.
Machine Learning Meets Lean – Berkeley Lean LaunchPad Class
Each of our teams in this class followed the canonical Lean model:
Each week the teams got out of the classroom and talked to 10-15 customers, testing a new part of the business model canvas. And after week two, they had to build and then update their minimal viable product weekly. And present what they learned each week in an 8-minute presentations.
The presentations below are their final Lessons Learned presentations, along with a 2-minute video summary.
SalesStash
Three Berkeley PhD computer science students and an MBA working on machine learning. How can you not hit out of the park on day one?
This team epitomized rapid learning. Once their initial assumptions ran into the wall of actual customer feedback they rapidly built multiple minimum viable products (MVPs) and kept pivoting until they found product/market fit (i.e. a customer segment that was grabbing the product out of their hands.)
If you can’t see the video click here
If you can’t see the presentation click here
Delphi
Before this class this team had spent three months in an incubator building the product after talking to only one customer. After week two of the class they realized they had wasted three months building something no one actually wanted. What they next learned was pretty amazing.
If you can’t see the video click here
If you can’t see the presentation click here
Homeslice
Homeslice had a great journey. They came together over a personal pain – the inability to afford a house in Silicon Valley. Their initial plan was to provide fractional ownership to solve that problem. But they found that first serving an adjacent market – slices of investment properties – could serve as a launchpad for their initial idea of fractional home ownership.
If you can’t see the video click here
If you can’t see the presentation click here
Exit Strategy
Exit Strategy was building the penultimate planning tool. This teams learning that this wasn’t a business was as important as finding one that is. Really impressive process.
If you can’t see the video click here
If you can’t see the presentation click here
This class this was a team effort. Professor Kurt Keutzer and Errol Arkilic (former program director for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps), now founder of M34 Capital) were the lead instructors. Steve Weinstein (CEO of MovieLabs) and I assisted. Thanks to our TA Kathryn Crimmins and all the team mentors: Lev Mass, Kanu Gulati, Ewald Detjens, James Cham, Kanu Gulati, Patrick Chung, Rick Lazansky, Ashmeet Sidhana, Mike Olson, Michael Borrus, Fabrizo De Pasquale, Amit Kumar, Rob Rodick, Mar Hershenson.
“I thought the call was going well,” the salesperson told his manager. “Then my prospect’s webcam randomly turned on. He and his boss were sitting at a conference table staring at their phones -- they weren’t paying attention to a thing I said.”
“Let’s listen to the recording and figure out why they tuned out,” his manager replied.
After playing the recorded call, it was easy to understand the buyers’ boredom. The rep had fallen prey to a common problem: Talking too much and not asking enough questions. He was eloquent and made well-formed points, but his prospects were understandably uninterested in listening to a monologue.
To keep your prospect’s attention, avoid taking up all the airtime and making these three other mistakes.
According to Mark Goulston, business psychiatrist and author of Just Listen, there are three stages of speaking to someone else:
There’s a simple technique for staying in the first stage: Don’t speak for more than 20 seconds at a time.
“Unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for longer than 30 seconds at a time for more than roughly half minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty,” Goulston explains.
Asking any question is better than none. However, your questions won’t be effective if you don’t ask them with the right intent. Toss out random questions just so your call is “interactive,” and you’ll quickly lose their patience.
Every question should have one of four objectives:
Throughout the sales conversation, you should use a variety of questions. Read this sample dialogue and see if you can identify the different types of questions.
Rep: “What’s your biggest priority this year?”
Prospect: “We want to reduce overhead by 20%.”
Rep: “Which strategies have you already tried?”
Prospect: “To be honest, I’ve been really overwhelmed with other projects. But in the past two weeks my boss has been turning up the pressure to cut operating costs.”
Rep: “So you’d say your manager is pretty concerned with this?”
Prospect: “Definitely.”
Rep: “Have you thought about outsourcing your IT needs? Not only will you reduce IT costs, but you’ll also cut sales, administrative, and general expenses. Research shows spending $96.14 million on IT outsourcing leads to an average $121.14 million drop in operating costs in other, non-IT functions at the company.”
Prospect: “That’s incredible.”
Here’s how that conversation breaks down:
Rep: “What’s your biggest priority this year?” (New information)
Prospect: “We want to reduce overhead by 20%.”
Rep: “Which strategies have you already tried?” (New information)
Prospect: “To be honest, I’ve been really overwhelmed with other projects. But in the past two weeks my boss has been turning up the pressure to cut operating costs.”
Rep: “So you’d say your manager is pretty concerned with this?” (Clarifying)
Prospect: “Definitely.”
Rep: “Have you thought about outsourcing your IT needs? Not only will you reduce IT costs, but you’ll also cut sales, administrative, and general expenses. Research shows spending $96.14 million on IT outsourcing leads to, on average, a $121.14 million drop in operating costs in other, non-IT functions at the company.” (Thought-provoking)
Prospect: “That’s incredible.”
Each question is intentional and moves the conversation forward productively. If you want your prospects to seriously consider your questions -- and by extension, your message -- ask relevant, thoughtful ones.
Would you rather hear a story read by its author or a random person? Probably the former. The author will probably be more passionate and enthusiastic, which’ll make your experience better.
The same concept applies to sales calls. Prospects unconsciously mirror your attitude: If you sound apathetic, they’ll assume your product isn’t worth getting excited about. If you’re energetic, on the other hand, buyers will be more intrigued by your pitch.
Be careful not to take this lesson too far. Salespeople who put on a high-pitched, unnatural voice usually make prospects want to hang up. Walk the line between earnest and cheesy by imagining you’re calling a friend with some good news. You’ll sound genuinely enthusiastic and friendly without being salesy.
You might have dozens of case studies and multiple testimonials, but unless your prospect can visualize themselves using your product and experiencing similar results, they won’t care how you helped Michael Scott from Dunder Mifflin.
Buyers are only interested in listening to you if they clearly see potential business value. With that in mind, make sure you’re choosing examples of similar prospects. That means:
Don’t make prospects draw these connections themselves. When you cite a case study or customer reference, explain how Company X and their company are alike.
For instance, you might say, “Like your own department, Westworld’s programming division was having lots of issues with corrupted code. You mentioned you’ve had a lot of attrition in the past year -- Westworld lost 20 engineers in 14 months. We came in, audited their entire system, and found and fixed the weak points. Their code quality improved dramatically, and guest satisfaction rose by 30%. I think the same service could really benefit your company.”
Imagine your prospect’s webcam spontaneously turning on next time you’re on a call. Would they be absorbed in the conversation or barely listening? If you want to see the former, steer clear of these four mistakes.
Social selling has quickly become one of the most powerful tools in your sales arsenal. It’s also an increasingly complex one. If you’re not prepared, even the most effective tools in the world might waste your valuable time and energy.
They key to an effective social selling strategy is a streamlined process. Discover a few simple ways to maximize your time and output with these tips from the pros.
Transforming Outbound B2B Sales with Social Selling
Outbound B2B sales is often inefficient. Prospects require too many points of contact and are far less likely to respond to traditional outbound methods like sales emails and calls—callback rates are below 1%, and only 1 in 4 outbound sales emails are ever even opened!
However, according to professors Laurence Minsky and Keith A. Quesenberry of The Harvard Business Review, social selling could be the answer to declining outbound B2B sales.
“Social media sales professionals are six times more likely to exceed quota over peers with basic or no social media skills,” notes Minsky and Quesenberry. The key is the power of social referrals. “84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations influence more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.”
The best part about social selling? ”B2B salespeople only need to invest 5% to 10% of their time to be successful with social,” according to Minsky and Quesenberry. Get started expanding your social selling as soon as possible to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in just minutes a day.
Simplifying the Sales Cycle (The 80/20 Rule of Social Selling)
The modern sales cycle is complicated. Multiple social media accounts, community channels, complex dashboards, and a rotating roster of support tools and software all take time to learn and implement. Sales strategist, Lori Richardson interviews three sales experts for their tips on how to streamline the sales processes and spend more time actually selling every day.
“Sellers spend 40% of their day on non-sales related work,” according to sales expert and author Jill Konrath. The problem is the “Flywheel Effect.” Sales reps add more and more social tools for support, but it only compounds complexity. The answer is to apply the 80/20 rule to social selling interactions.
Find the platform that generates the most revenue, whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, and invest the bulk of your time there. If you dedicate yourself to one channel, your fluency and efficiency will increase over time, making the investment even more valuable to you and the clients your interact with.
12 Things To Do Every Day to Be a Sales Success
It’s not rocket science: simple, focused, daily progress is the key to success. Author and management consultant, Roy Osing, share his 12 daily steps for continued sales growth.
His list of simple daily actions is a great guideline for any sales professional, but almost reads like a perfect introduction to social selling. Tips like, #2: Don’t try to boil the ocean (“Focus on the critical few things that will help you achieve 80% of your goals”) is a call to strong demographic building and focused targeting. Sales tip #5 (“Build time in your schedule for deepening client relationships”) is a hallmark of successful social selling.”
The list includes valuable everyday actions like continued education, non-sales client interactions, and “discovering customer secrets” that give clues to their future sales needs and desires.
Efficient Is Effective
The key to an effective social selling strategy is a streamlined, simplified process. Find the platforms and clients that comprise the bulk of your business and focus the majority of your time reaching those buyers.
Streamlining your social selling strategy is a daily task that evolves as your client base changes. Adapt and you’ll continue to thrive in even the most diverse, competitive, and challenging markets.
Subscribe to the LinkedIn Sales Solution blog and keep your sales team sleek and successful with cutting edge social selling tips, tricks, and best practices.
Have you ever thought about what makes a sales presentation effective? Why does one increase the likelihood of the sale, while another reduces the probability of the purchase?
There are many scientific studies that have decoded how the brain determines if a presentation is engaging and persuasive or confusing and uninspiring. Once you begin applying this science, you will be equipped to present in ways that will arouse buying behaviors.
Here's one science-backed sales presentation strategy that will help you effectively convey your ideas and amplify buyer receptiveness.
Our minds can perform incredible feats, but they also have limited cognitive resources. Research across a variety of scientific disciplines, such as neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have proven the brain can only process a small amount of information at any given time. And once the brain’s threshold is surpassed, its capacity to cognitively grasp information is severely diminished.
When too many options are presented to the brain it has trouble making a buying decision, which drives down sales. Social scientists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper demonstrated this in a well-known experiment they conducted at an upscale grocery store in Menlo Park, California. The researchers set up a tasting booth that allowed consumers to sample an assortment of jams. The first week, 24 different jams were available for patrons to taste. Despite many people trying the jams, only 3% purchased any.
The following week, the researchers went back to the store, but this time they offered only six jams for the shoppers to taste. Sales skyrocketed by 900%! The conclusion: limiting the amount of selections boosts buying behaviors.
Why is this the case? It does not take much at all for the brain to become overwhelmed when evaluating numerous products, even those as simple as jam. When the brain reaches its cognitive limits, it becomes stunned and confused. This will cause buyers either to refuse to make a buying decision or, if they do purchase, to be plagued with doubt over whether they made the right decision.
Here's another example. Some enlightening research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzed what influenced the participation of nearly 800,000 employees in their company-sponsored 401(k) plans. The study disclosed that when a company provided an abundance of investment options, an alarming amount of employees declined to participate in the 401(k) programs.
One company that participated in the assessment only gave its employees two mutual funds to choose to invest in. In spite of offering so few options, an impressive 75% of its employees chose to participate. Another organization, which offered its employees 59 different mutual funds to choose from had a participation rate of only 60 percent. The analysis of the overall participation rate revealed that for every 10 investment opportunities, employee participation declined by two percent.
Likewise, many salespeople hinder the effectiveness of their sales presentations by engulfing buyers in a plethora of options. They mistakenly assume that more options will help buyers make better choices. But as we’ve seen, too much information obstructs the brain’s capacity to make a decision.
This presents a magnificent opportunity to better serve your buyers. When you begin to make it less cognitively demanding for their brains to perceive and evaluate the worth of your product or service, it will give you an advantage over your competitors.
So how do you do this? Only provide buyers with the information necessary for them to confidently make a buying decision. This has been shown to make such a difference in sales that even mass retailers are changing how they present products to consumers. For example, when Procter & Gamble reduced the range of skincare products at some of their retail outlets, sales of the products still on the shelves increased.
My favorite example of the difference this strategy can make is personified by a salesperson we’ll call Katie. When we met, she had been selling for her employer for more than two years, and though she was passionate about serving customers, her sales were unremarkable. She insisted to me that what her customers loved most was how many options they could choose from to customize the product to their exact needs. When I asked her to show me what she meant, she pulled out her iPad and scrolled through pictures of more than 100 different options that, to me, looked nearly identical.
“Which do you show in your presentation?” I questioned. Beaming with pride, she said, “All of them, of course.”
I was speechless. I’d been dazed by what she had shown me for just a moment; I couldn’t imagine how her customers felt having to choose from so many selections at the end of a long sales presentation.
I suggested she identify the most popular options and show only four of them. If customers needed to see more, she could remove the ones they were not interested in and replace them with other options, but never show more than four at once. Reluctantly, she agreed to try out this strategy.
What happened? She later reported that customers were pleased with the choices she presented and rarely did anyone ever need to see more than the initial four. Most telling of all was her sales, which rose by nearly 30 percent!
If you are like many of the salespeople I have trained, more and more information has likely crept into your sales presentation over time. I would encourage you to review your sales presentation and ask yourself: What can be removed? Do you share too much information?
Think through what your buyers need to be able to confidently make a buying decision. Anything more than that -- cut. Adopting this approach will increase the effectiveness of your presentation, because when it comes to the brain’s ability to process information, less really will help you sell more.
Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the book The Science of Selling and has been published here with permission.
Modern marketing and marketing technology have become inextricably linked. There is no marketing without technology. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling to other businesses or to consumers. You need technology to reach your prospects and customers. The word “reach” could even be replaced with “discover,” “communicate with,” “nurture,” or “retain.” Technology can help with all of that.
In a study by Ascend2, 63 percent of marketers say they have all the marketing technology they need. (highlight to tweet) We’ll get to whether they feel like they are fully utilizing it in a moment, but let that sink in. Nearly two-thirds don’t believe they need any more martech tools to run their marketing.
Now, let’s just forget that I work for a company that sells marketing technology and think of me as another marketing practitioner just like you. I create and distribute content that hopefully resonates with our prospects and customers. Are we using technology to do that? Of course we are. Are there additional tools we could use that could help us do that better? Of course there are.
In a marketing world where everything is in a constant state of change, we can always do better. The bar of success is continually rising, and the activities that work today may not work tomorrow.
Writing blog posts, sending emails, publishing ebooks, posting social updates, and creating videos are all tactics that have worked to varying degrees for marketers. Compare your results from each channel to your results a year ago. Some may have improved, but certainly some communication tactics have decreased in their effectiveness.
Whether or not you fully understand the reason for the change, you can see the trend line. And you need to try to do something about it. Technology might be the answer.
Those external pressures for tangible growth are not the only ones that marketers feel. Not many of us work in organizations that don’t desire growth in our marketing function. How many leads did you generate for sales last year? Well, sales has a bigger number this year, and so does marketing. 10 percent? 20 percent? 50 percent? This is hard to do without making some significant change.
You’ll need a new strategy for a big increase, but you also might need new tools, too. Remember what they say about doing the same thing and expecting a different result? Besides being a definition of insanity, it is not a way to improve your marketing results.
But the marketers in the survey seem to have everything they need. How are they expecting to address both the internal and external pressures to improve performance?
I always imagine marketers as little kids with their noses pressed up against the glass of a toy store, eyeing the latest martech solutions and making a technology list for their CMOs. It’s really hard to believe that they have everything they need.
Ascend2’s study also reveals the following: About half of those with all the technology they need say that they are both fully utilizing their technology and are very successful compared to their competitors. Again, this feels like a bold statement from a marketer who is trying to rationalize something to someone: “Yes, boss, we have everything we need. And we are using it to the fullest.”
I don’t know about you, but I could never picture those words coming out of my mouth. Every feature and every function of every tool is being used to connect with the right prospects and pass them along to sales. Does this mean that you have identified every potential customer in your universe? Or just every feature and function that can help you reach them?
Have you ever rung out a wet washcloth and twisted it as tightly as you can? Is there still water in it when you’re done? Always. There is always more you can get out of your marketing technology.
So the next time you are reviewing your software investment, don’t just think about what you are doing today and how it serves your current strategy. Consider what has to change when someone or something ups the game and you need more leads or sales. Lots more.
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Whether you’re new to B2B sales or a veteran, you’ve no doubt had questions. Leads that suddenly go cold, prospects engaging but not buying, and not enough fresh leads are areas of concern for any sales professional.
Through our conversations with partners, customers, industry experts and our own research, we’ve uncovered some of the top sales questions that stump even the most experienced salespeople.
In the first of this four-part blog series, we’re looking at a common sales stumbling block: Personalization.
Question #1: How do I write a killer subject line that will be opened?
Writing a cold sales email is tough, but writing a subject line is even tougher. The subject line is your email’s first impression. If it doesn’t generate interest in the recipient, she won’t click it, and all that sales copy you painstakingly wrote will be shuffled into her trash.
The best sales subject lines are:
If you’re stuck on your subject line, HubSpot has a fantastic list of 23 sales email subject lines that get prospects to open, read and respond for some inspiration.
Question #2: How much personalization should I incorporate into my sales emails?
The answer to this question is a little vague: Some, but not too much.
Too much personalization will scare a prospect off, and make you sound “creepy” or “sleazy”. If, for instance, you know that your prospect downloaded two of your whitepapers and engaged with one of your competitor’s blog posts in the past week, you don’t need to mention the specifics – most people don’t like businesses knowing about their every move online. Instead, try mentioning that you know they are interested in your industry’s content, and perhaps reference a recent, related tweet they sent (since Twitter is public, this information will not be seen to be as “creepy”).
Using first and last names, place of work, job title and other related information is also effective when reaching out via email.
Question #3: Should I personalize each message, or send a mass email?
Sending a personalized, hand-crafted email to every prospect would be nice, but it is nearly impossible to scale. Instead, try finding a balance between mass emailing your list and extreme personalization.
To personalize at scale, we recommend creating several template emails. Within each email, you can leave blank fields to be personalized. Each template should speak to a broad persona, such as a job title or account you are targeting. Then, you can personalize the various blank fields to ensure each recipient receives a unique email.
PersistIQ has a great Cold Email Generator tool that you can use to create personalized sales emails at scale.
Question #4: If I personalize the first message I send, should I continue to personalize all follow-ups?
Short answer: Yes! Continue to use your prospects’ names and any contextual information that will be helpful for them to understand why you are following up.
Stay tuned for next week’s post, where we’ll answer common questions about targeting the right prospects.
The relationship between marketing and sales teams has always been tenuous, but getting both teams on the same page will help improve new business development. Creating this alignment requires a shared common goal for everyone to rally behind. And then starts the exercise of communicating and working together to achieve that common goal.
Once the goal and group collaboration is established, the teams need strong technology solutions to help facilitate communication and enablement between teams. A wide variety of technology solutions for marketing and sales teams have become available in recent years. Yet integrating your various platforms will empower you to take your alignment efforts to the next level.
Here are 3 integration plays that will drive your marketing and sales alignment.
Marketing automation is the powerhouse tool of choice for the marketing team. A CRM system is the same for the sales team. Integrating these two systems is absolutely critical: it allows both teams to work with the same database of leads and contacts.
Marketers use marketing automation systems to capture and engage with prospects. By connecting this system with your CRM, marketers can run strategic campaigns against current opportunities to supplement the efforts of the sales team. This integration also provides marketers with valuable data that is entered by the sales team within the CRM database.
The sales team lives inside of their CRM system and uses it to inform their sales process. Having an integration that pushes marketing automation data into your CRM gives your sales team prospect engagement data that can heavily influence their sales efforts. With insight into which pieces of content a prospect has downloaded or which pages they keep revisiting on your website, your sales team will be better equipped to sell toward those interests.
The sales team sends out a large number of emails, but often times that data is never recorded. With an integration between your sales email tracking tool and your CRM system, every piece of correspondence sent during the sales process can be recorded in the appropriate CRM records.
The marketing team often provides specific language for the sales team to use in their email communications to prospects. Without any record of these emails in the CRM database, marketers will have a hard time understanding what language is actually working for their sales team. Marketers love to optimize and with a record of their email messaging effectiveness, they can continue to improve the messaging they provide to the sales team.
For the sales team, this integration is all about context. Having a complete history of all email correspondence with your accounts and prospects gives sales agents a comprehensive view of what was said in the lifetime of the relationship. Having email history in your CRM records also gives sales managers the ability to understand the communications their sales agent have had with prospects. This will also provide context to any new sales agents taking over existing accounts.
Calls to businesses from digital marketing are on the rise and are expected to hit 162 billion by 2019. These are conversions that marketing and sales teams need to understand together. With call attribution software marketers have the ability to attribute their call conversions back to their marketing source. Call attribution software can then route the calls directly to the ideal sales agents and provide them with information on the caller, such as demographics, purchase history, and which marketing campaign drove the call.
Marketers have a huge blind spot in their data by not attributing calls to their marketing campaigns. In fact, marketers may be missing or misattributing up to 49% of their conversions. This means that marketers can’t accurately optimize their campaigns without these conversions. They’re also not getting full credit for the inbound leads and revenue that their campaigns are driving. If call attribution is integrated with your CRM system, you can effectively optimize your campaigns for all conversions and calculate ROI with accurately attributed revenue.
Call attribution takes the guessing out of inbound phone calls for sales reps. A CRM and call attribution software integration gives sales reps all of the context they need when their phone rings. A screen pop from the CRM window shows them exactly who’s calling and provides a link to the caller’s CRM record. Set your sales reps up for success with caller data immediately available when the phone rings.
Integrations between your various sales and marketing tools gives both teams the ability to rally around the same data and work together to drive revenue. And call data has a big role to play in driving this team alignment. To learn more about how both teams can benefit from call attribution software, watch our on-demand webinar, Mastering Online-to-Offline Marketing: New Digital Strategies for Offline Conversions.
In every business there’s a transition time between when a lead is generated and when it is finally turned into a sale. To increase the chances you are making that conversion from lead to customer, it’s important that you begin nurturing your clients effectively from the very start.
Integrating a good Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM, is the foundation of managing your customer journey. By implementing good CRM software into your business, you can keep tabs on where your customers are on their journey and what the next step is for you to convert them. This kind of detailed information will allow you to customize your sales approach with each and every one, exponentially improving your chances of making the conversion.
Once your CRM is implemented your next step is to create steps along the customer journey that will help lead to sales. The actual nurturing process can take many different shapes or forms but we’ve identified some of the most common ones that you’ll see.
By far the most common technique to nurture leads is through email. Once you’ve got them on a list you can drop them into a drip campaign or take some time to personally message each person to give things a bit of that intimate feeling that customized messages contain. The main point of using email is to constantly stay in touch with the lead and slowly give them assistance with things until they come to your business wholeheartedly.
One of the most time-tested and intimate ways to nurture a lead is through the use of physical mail. Since the beginning of marketing, snail mail has been one of the most utilized methods for lead nurturing, only increasing in effectiveness in the mostly digital era. Simply sending a hand written note can mean a lot to your customer since it’s something that rarely happens today.
While constantly calling your leads can come off a bit “spammy,” if done correctly, it can actually be one of the most personalized and effective methods of nurturing a lead. By not constantly bugging them or trying to push a sale on them through phone calls you can slowly develop a relationship in a way that emails and letters just can’t. This relationship can ultimately develop into a great working relationship which in turn will provide you with a long lasting customer.
The main takeaway is that efficiently managing your CRM will help you stay organized and convert leads into customers at a much higher rate. Keep in mind none of these require the use of a CRM to complete, it’s just much easier to keep track of what stage each lead is in with one in place. Understanding your customer journey and taking the correct action in response can give you far greater insight than just blindly sending out emails or letters. The extra effort taken to provide true value to your lead is the key to developing the kind of business relationship that last for years to come.
So what do you think? What are some of your tips for nurturing leads into loyal customers? Leave a comment below and to get the conversation started.
