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Let’s say you’re a top-performing salesperson. You’ve been in your position for three or more years, and you feel like you’re getting stale and not moving quickly enough. Maybe you just want to try something different. So you decide to look for a new sales job.

You’re looking for an opportunity to do something new and exciting that’s potentially more financially lucrative. Where do you start, and what should you look for?

When you’re changing jobs, basic things you need to understand include knowing your short and long-term personal and professional goals, the type of industry you want to work in, and the people you want to work with. Effective salespeople should look for industries in growth mode -- taking a job in an industry that’s stagnant or shrinking could mean a long, hard slog.

To start the job search, identify 10 to 20 companies that meet your criteria for industry, size, reputation, growth prospects, and culture.

Moving jobs is usually not a casual decision. You should take some time to review your past performance and define the sales culture that is the best fit for you and your skills, as well as inventory the things you would like to learn in your next venture.

The interview process is just like any other exploratory process you go through with prospects. It helps to speak with multiple individuals and do research online to make sure you have a good picture of the company and a full perspective on whether it will be a good fit. Check reviews on Glassdoor, and contact at least three current employees you trust to give you a perspective on the company’s reputation and what it’s like to work there.

Of course, make sure you ask questions of your interviewers as well. Once you’ve defined those target companies, it’s helpful to ask a mix of the 39 questions below in sales interviews to make sure it’s really a good fit for you and will help you advance your career.

1. How is business this year? (Up, down or flat?)
2. Is your sales organization above plan year-to-date?
3. Are some divisions performing better than others? Which ones? Why?
4. Do you have any one specific competitor in the space that seems to have an edge?
5. How often do you win against that company in competitive deals?
6. How would you describe the sales culture here?
7. What type of people do you hire?
8. What are the top three attributes of a successful salesperson at your company?
9. What’s your annual sales rep turnover?
10. How long is the average salesperson’s tenure at your company?
11. What’s your marketing and support staff turnover?
12. How do you keep people in the loop of company, product, staffing, and other updates?
13. What’s expected of salespeople here?
14. Do you have a buddy or mentorship program for salespeople?
15. Are reps assigned territories or named accounts?
16. How do you create territories, and how often do they change?
17. Are there specific industry or annual events that take place in those territories?
18. What is the percentage of time salespeople will typically spend traveling?
19. How are quotas assigned?
20. How often are quotas adjusted?
21. Do you have a performance plan process for underperformers?
22. Do you have a lead generation program?
23. Do you have inbound leads?
24. Do you have alignment with your marketing organization?
25. Do you have BDRs who set appointments for quota-carrying salespeople?
26. How many leads or accounts do top-performing salespeople typically manage?
27. Do you provide your sales team playbooks and scripts?
28. Does your marketing team provide sales collateral and competitive information?
29. Do you have a sales training or coaching program?
30. Do you have demographic and persona information on your target markets?
31. What is your promotion policy?
32. What is the compensation plan? How is it calculated?
33. Has it changed recently?
34. Does compensation change every year?
35. When do you actually get paid?
36. How many managers were promoted internally last year?
37. Do you typically hire managers from outside?
38. What are the top three challenges facing your sales team today?
39. Where do you think the sales organization will be next year?

What are your favorite interview questions to ask potential employers? Let us know in the comments below.

More than 67% of respondents in a recent survey indicated that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions in some way, shape or form. While online reviews can help tell a part of story for your organization, a case study can help tell your audience an entire success story (start to game-changing) of one of your customers using your products or services.

A great case study can help solidify to your audience that you’ve been there and done that for similar types of organizations and would love to bring them in on the action. Ever looked at an organization’s website and checked out their case studies or testimonials pages on their website and before filling out a form or giving them a call? These are great pieces of collateral that can show immediate impact to the audience you connect with and can be used in a number of ways throughout the course of your marketing and sales efforts.

When you are looking to put together your next case study (or looking to revamp some of your older ones), take these 4 essential elements into consideration:

1. Showcase the Problems You Answered

The customer has come to you with a problem or need for you to solve and you knocked it out of the water! What exactly were those problems that you were able to solve? Better yet, do those problems match in line with what your ideal customers and personas are experiencing?

Your customers are looking to take their efforts to the next level. By showcasing that you are able to solve similar problems they are facing can create an immediate impact on your audience and establish an early degree of trust.

2. Tell The Story of Your Customers’ Experience

Now that we know the problems the customer was having before partnering with you, let’s nail down the story throughout their entire experience. Let your audience know the “white-glove” approach they’ll be experiencing once they’ve agreed to use you to solve their problems.

Nothing is off the table here! Give a quick background and overview to your customer and go through the problems they were experiencing. While walking through those past issues, showcase some of the concerns the customer had prior to getting started, like giving up ownership of particular pieces of its business or the cost to return to highlight to your audience potential similar occurrences.

Here are a couple of example questions to get the story started:

• What was the customer looking to solve when partnering with you?
• What were the needs of the customer that you were able to provide?

Let’s put these questions together and bring it all together with the all-encompassing question you want your audience to see solved.“How did you solve their problems and what did you do to get there?”

Next, start to lay the entire foundation of the process. Don’t be afraid to get into the details of this and really show off what your business does differently from others.

Something to also consider is showing where your customer is looking to go after their initial needs are solved and that you are along for the ride on helping them reach these goals. Your moments with your customers doesn’t end at the point of sale or at the end of an engagement, but can (and should continue) with them based on the experience you have provided.

3. Let’s See Some Results!

The story is lined up and you are showing how everything fell into place, but in order for this to have a happy ending for both your customers and your audience, you need the results to back it up.

The key here is to be as specific as possible with your results. Let those results shine and give your audience a glimpse into what they can potentially see from partnering with your organization.

Also, don’t be afraid to go the exact recommendations, strategy or tools you were able to provide to the customer to reach their goals. Your audience doesn’t just want to see that you can “double their revenue”, but they want to know the hows and what it takes to get there.

Take a marketing agency for example. All of them will tell you that they can increase your traffic, leads or customers, but what sets them apart from the other marketing agencies? It could go back to online reviews or case studies with companies in relevant industries, but what it should go back to is how the organization was able to handle X problem in Y timeframe using Z strategy/tool/recommendations or a combination of all three.

By aligning your case studies to specific problems with results to back that up, you showcase to your audience that you’ve solved their issues before (and have done it to success).

4. Use In Multiple Formats

With having your now great case study at your fingertips, you now have the opportunity to re-purpose this type of content to multiple formats across your website, blog and other various verticals.

Let’s start with your website and blog. Here’s a few quick tips to getting you started:

• Make sure your header speaks to the problem you were able to solve
• Show those results and give a brief snippet to the tool, strategy or recommendation you were able to accomplish
• Use bullet points to point out key findings within the story and grab some quotes from your conversation with the customer to highlight
• Create some calls to action on the sidebar or footer of your related blog content

There are also many other great places to showcase your next case study. Have a great quote to share? Showcase that within your sales collateral or event materials (including your booths and product sheets). Have the resources to use video during your customer conversations? Send these out through your social channels to give your audience a face and a voice to the results you are bringing to them.

How is your audience viewing content now? Look at those metrics and find what’s most successful and capitalize on those options for your next great case study.

What are some of your favorite case study examples?

Yoga has long been a popular workout for those of us looking to improve flexibility, get in tune with our body and strengthen our core. But now, a new study has revealed that yoga can also help us exercise our mind.

Sticking to a weekly routine of yoga and meditation can improve mental skills and fend off age-related cognitive decline, according to scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, looked at whether yoga could help strengthen a person's ability to think, The New York Times reported.

Scientists examined 29 middle-aged and older adults who were found to have mild cognitive impairment, which can lead to eventual dementia. The participants underwent brain scans that tracked communication between the different parts of their brains, and then were divided into two groups.

One group underwent a brain-training program, which entailed an hour-long class and a series of mental exercises they were told to try at home for 15 minutes a day over the course of 12 weeks.

The other group was taught a form of yoga known as Kundalini, which involves breathing exercises, movements, poses and meditation. Those participants were also taught a form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya, which involves repeating a mantra while doing hand movements. The yoga group meditated in that way for 15 minutes each day, also for 12 weeks.

After the study period was completed, participants in both groups underwent another round of cognitive tests and brain scans.

Each of the participants performed better on cognitive tests, but only the yoga and meditation participants showed improved moods and tests that gauged balance, depth perception and the ability to navigate and recognize objects.

Both groups also displayed improved communication between the brain parts relating to memory and language, but only the yoga participants showed improved communication in the brain regions that control attention.

The finding demonstrated that yoga and meditation were more beneficial to the brain than cognitive training.

Join the conversation about this story »

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In an ideal world, your PC would last as long as you need it, and the only reason to get a new one would be for the performance boost. Unfortunately, life isn’t fair. PC parts die. Replacements can be expensive—so it makes sense to get the most out of every part you can.

The most important thing you can do is maintain your PC components properly. A long-lasting PC starts and ends with good maintenance habits, especially when you build the PC yourself. To get started, check out these tips on how to extend the lifespan of your PC parts.

1. Motherboards

There are several reasons why you should upgrade your motherboard. However, let’s hope you do so voluntarily instead of being forced into it by a broken motherboard. Motherboard reliability increases with each generation, as you might expect.

Why Do Motherboard’s Die So Quickly?

Even though there are no moving parts, motherboards are very complex and delicate in their designs. As the focal point for everything else on your system, small malfunctions can have catastrophic effects.

Motherboard lifespan is difficult to gauge, too, as accounting for individual user habits and local environments is almost impossible. Still, a 2018 Puget Systems study found that “while motherboards seem to be getting more and more complex,” the overall failure rate was just “2.1% or about 1 out of every 49 motherboards.” Importantly, this figure is “about half what we saw in 2017.”

A 2016 HardWare.fr report returned similar results, with ASRock motherboards coming in at 1.45% and MSI coming in at 2.36%.

The biggest reason for motherboard failure is that the capacitors deteriorate over time and become exhausted. Sometimes the capacitors will even leak, potentially damaging other hardware components. You can replace a capacitor, but it is a non-trivial DIY operation that you may be uncomfortable completing yourself.

Other causes of motherboard failure include heat, static, and moisture.

Tips for Prolonging Motherboard Lifespan

Keep your computer away from environmental hazards like excess moisture or extra-dry air, which can promote static buildup. Excess heat can sometimes cause a motherboard to warp, leading to shorts and broken components.

But the best thing you can do to prevent motherboard failures is never to touch the motherboard. That’s hyperbole—you obviously have to touch it to install or replace parts. But try to limit the motherboard’s exposure outside of the PC case.

When you must touch the motherboard, be sure to ground yourself first, so you don’t accidentally shock and fry the motherboard itself.

2. Data Drives

Data drives come in two main forms: hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). A computer cannot function without one, because that’s where the operating system resides. It’s crucial to your system. If it dies, you’ll need to get a replacement ASAP.

Why Do HDDs and SSDs Die So Quickly?

HDDs and SSDs are both prone to failure, but for different reasons.

HDDs are mechanical—they have moving parts—and will physically break down over time. The platter might get scratched, the head might stop reading, or the parts might become “paralyzed” by a power surge.

SSDs are based on flash memory chips, so they have no moving parts. However, they have unreliable long-term data retention, they are more susceptible to extreme temperatures, and power outages can lead to data corruption.

Tips for Prolonging Data Drive Lifespan

No matter which kind of data drive you have, it’s always a good idea to invest in a good surge protector. Electrical surges can cause a lot of harm to all kinds of devices, not just PC parts.

Avoid extreme temperatures when possible. Refer to your data drive’s manual for safe operating temperatures. This means cleaning dust out of your computer to ensure good air circulation and prevent overheating!

Other than that, it’s mostly about buying a good model from a reputable brand. The next time you’re shopping for a data drive, check out our articles on some things to consider when buying a hard drive or a solid-state drive.

3. RAM

RAM is vital for a pleasant computer experience, and it’s one of the first parts you should upgrade if you want to speed up your PC performance. How much do you need? Well, it depends, but 8GB is the current norm.

Of all of the computer hardware components, RAM has the lowest relative rate of failure. However, depending on the model and brand of RAM you buy, the lifespan of the RAM module can vary. Dead RAM modules do happen!

Why Does RAM Die So Quickly?

Given perfect conditions, RAM actually has a remarkably long lifespan. The same 2016 HardWare.fr study found incredibly low incidences of RAM returns, as low as 0.20% for Kingston and up to 1.08% for Corsair. Given the staggering amount of RAM in use around the world, these figures are extremely low.

But two things can kill a working RAM module in the blink of an eye: temperature and power surges.

Most RAM modules have an operating temperature between 0 and 85 degrees Celsius. If you head outside of those temperature limitations, you could corrupt your RAM. It won’t happen instantly, and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. But prolonged exposure to “extreme” temperatures reduces the lifespan of your RAM.

Power surges from faulty motherboards, bad power supplies, and electrical spikes can also cause failure.

Tips for Prolonging RAM Lifespan

The most important piece of advice is to buy a high-quality module from a reputable manufacturer. Reputable manufacturers include Kingston, Crucial, G.Skill, and Corsair, although other manufacturers are available. Make sure to read the product reviews before buying.

Otherwise, ensure you have adequate surge protection. Check out the best surge protectors you can buy right now.

4. Power Supply Units

A power supply unit (PSU) delivers power to all of the components in your computer. There are a number of considerations to keep in mind when buying the right PSU for your needs, but lifespan is one of the more important ones.

Why Do PSUs Die So Quickly?

Despite the perception, PSUs are only slightly worse than RAM modules in terms of hardware lifespan under perfect conditions. The HardWare.fr indicates failure rates between 0.49% for the best performing PSU (Fortron) and 2.41% at the other end of the scale (Cougar).

Again, the Puget Systems report corroborates the PSU rate of failure, with a “total failure rate of 1.15%.”

Under normal intended use, a PSU should last a long time—at least five years, possibly up to 10 years if you’re lucky. But if you start putting the power supply under high loads over long periods, it can be overstressed.

Tips for Prolonging PSU Lifespan

As always, start with a high-quality model from a reputable brand. Many generic models are overrated and don’t have much tolerance for stress. Poor build quality can also lead to faster aging and early death.

Another thing to consider is that some brands don’t manufacture the PSUs in-house. Instead, some PSUs are sourced from OEMs. This process means that the quality of PSU models can vary, even within the same brand.

The only effective way to prolong your PSU lifespan is to cut back on high-stress activities. For example, cryptocurrency mining is a very strenuous process. Overclocking your CPU or GPU can also place additional stress on your power supply unit, although you can mitigate this using appropriately rated hardware.

If you want a new PSU and don’t know where to start, check out the best PSUs for PC builders.

5. Cooling Fans

You probably haven’t given your PC fans much thought. They spin up when you need them, and they spin down when you don’t. Sometimes, we don’t even notice when one stops working (at least, not straight away!). Fortunately, most case cooling fans are relatively cheap to replace.

The situation changes when you consider CPU cooling fans, which can be more expensive than their case cooling counterparts, and similarly, GPUs.

Why Do Cooling Fans Die So Quickly?

This one’s really simple. Just as with hard disk drives, cooling fans are mechanical—they have moving parts that are susceptible to general wear and tear. Over time, as the fans spin and spin and spin, they’re more likely to break down.

But this process is accelerated by the dust and particles that build up on the fan blades and within the rotating mechanism. When exposed to heat and moisture, the dust can even get caked on and turn into gunk, which could cause more friction and stress.

Tips for Prolonging Cooling Fan Lifespan

The first tip for keeping any type of cooling fan working effectively is cleaning. That means cleaning the excess dust and buildup from fan blades, plus the dust from the PC case that contributes to the issue.

You could also consider the location of your PC in your home. Leaving your PC on a thick carpet, for instance, can cause extra heat and additional dust ingress, in turn causing your fans to work harder to keep your system cool.

So, how often should you clean your cooling fans? If you’ve never cleaned them before, give everything in your case a good clean. Then, head back one month later and see how much dust and buildup are gathering on your cooling fan blades. You can gauge your PC cleaning schedule from there.

If your CPU dies, read our guide to choosing the right Intel Core processor. Alternatively, check out the best gaming CPUs for all budgets.

Stop Your PC Parts Wearing Out

There is no doubt that certain PC parts wear out quicker than others. You can manage the general wear and tear on yours computer using the tips set out in this article. Keeping your system cool, clean, and dust-free will maintain your PC hardware for much longer. Furthermore, looking after your hardware keeps costs down, as you won’t have to replace bits that break.

Of course, if you want to upgrade, do! Just make sure to ask yourself these important questions first.

Image Credit: Michael Wick/Shutterstock

Read the full article: 5 PC Parts That Tend to Die: How to Extend Their Lifespans

Influencers are one of the key metrics contributing to the growth of any business. Engaging new influencers and retaining the current ones are a priority for your marketing campaigns. Fresh ideas and a general perspective might be required for the newest influencers that your campaign is targeting, ensuring that a significant proportion of them commit to engaging with your business. For your existing network of influencers, strategies may vary depending on your past experiences with them. Their interest areas, participation platforms, engagement with your past campaigns etc., will help you determine how best to craft your influencer marketing campaign and personalize them for new audiences.

Here are several influencer marketing campaign ideas that are bound to increase engagement levels:

Product Naming Previews

Consumers love to be a part of their favorite brands’ journey. Whenever your brand is getting ready to launch a new product, invite your influencers to participate in the naming exercise. They’ll appreciate the opportunity, and they will feel a stronger attachment to the product – and your brand.

Organize Events with your Influencers

Organizing events for your influencers may be the best way to reach them and deliver your message in a more personal manner. In an offline vs an online event, offline events are successful in giving you returns in building long-lasting relationships with potential influencers. Online events help establish thought leadership and can be easier to drive traffic to your web properties. You can even encourage your influencers to organize events themselves that will be sponsored by you, where you talk about your brand, or at the very least, get to know your influencer’s demographics, interests and other metrics.

Promote Giveaways to Increase Influencer Interest

Giving away products, especially for free, pique the interests of a number of potential influencers. In fact, it is these small giveaways hosted by businesses that has helped them capture new influencers. Usually these giveaways would be hosted on the company’s blogs, or social profiles. Influencers would be notified of the giveaway and be prompted to take part in some activities like social sharing, or subscribing for accessing the free products. These products may include a preview package of your best selling items, e-books pertaining to your brand, bonuses or coupons.

Launch New Products to retain your Influencers

Announcing new products are a great way to reach out to potential customers and letting your existing network of influencers know what your brand is up to. The best way to impress your influencers is by making them a part of your product launch by making them the first ones to know about your product, and actively encouraging them to spread the news. Invite your influencers to try out your products and give rave reviews. Provide them with a signup bonus, or early access bonus and coupons for a few weeks to get the maximum number of customers guaranteed to be engaged as soon as the product launches.

Entice Influencers With Competitions

Often, competitions can boost your brand’s reach and increase its visibility and increase interest among potential influencers. Consumers love competitions, and if it does not require a significant time-intensive commitment, many would be happy to participate. Some of the most common competitions include sharing photos or experiences in the form of videos, images or blog posts, with a social hashtag pertaining to your brand that helps you identify the participants.

Encourage Collaboration among your Influencers

It is important to know your influencer’s opinions on subject matters that pertain to your brand. Some ways that you can achieve this is by taking surveys and seeking opinions directly. Surveys can help you organize your influencer interests based on key metrics and distinguished across several demographics. You can also seek their opinions directly by encouraging them to respond on your social posts by commenting, posting, liking etc. You can even have a dedicated forum for your influencers where they can discuss their opinions.

Ultimately, the right, targeted marketing campaigns will help your brand grow its network of influencers. This will result in an upward spiral of marketing success that leads to better engagement across all your marketing channels, elevated word-of-mouth and social participation, increased traffic to web properties, and of course, more sales.

As CMOs, and like all strong leaders, we're constantly thinking about how we could do things better. Disruption is the new normal, and we must step outside of our own thoughts and leadership circles to scan what other leaders are doing, thinking and saying. I think this quote by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is well put: “One of the lessons of leadership worth emphasizing is that you want t...

You crave it in the morning, you wait in long lines for it, and I’m drinking it while I write this: coffee is everywhere. But that means misinformation about it is everywhere too. Coffee doesn’t rob you of water, sober you up, or keep your children short, so let’s grind up these myths and brew a hot pot of truth.

Read more...

Although some marketers fail to realize the value of email marketing, you can make the most of it if you use it properly. It not only helps you interact with your audience, it’s also a great way to generate leads. However, converting these leads require you to optimize and improve your emails so that readers open them and also click through on them. Here are some useful ways in which you can fully optimize your marketing emails:

1. Write a strong subject line – The subject line is the first thing your readers are going to see when they open their inbox. Try to get them interested enough to open the mail and spend some time reading the content. Focus on the reader; that’s the mantra. Here’s a good example from Sephora.
2. Personalize your subject line – Even by adding a simple “you”, you can make the subject line of your email more personal. In a test run by Wishpond, it was found that the addition of “you” to the subject line had a higher open rate of 37%. The non-personal subject line had an open rate of 26%.
3. Opt for shorter subject lines – In the same test mentioned above, shorter subject lines seemed to perform much better than long subject lines. The shorter subject line had an open rate of 37%, while the longer one had an open rate of 32%. The idea is to grab the attention of the audience while being descriptive about the content of the mail.
4. Strong call to action as subject line – People receives tons of emails and may be too busy to read through the entire email. It would be a good idea to be direct and clear about what you want them to do in the subject line itself. Take a look at the example below for a CTA subject line.
5. Have a plain text version ready – Not everyone in your mailing list is going to be able to view HTML text on their device. Make sure you give them the option to view the plain text version of your mail and ensure that this option is clearly visible.In fact, a Hubspot study found that plain text emails had a 25% higher open rate than HTML. Take a look at the differences below:
6. Optimize mails for mobiles – 61% of brand emails are viewed using phones and tablets. This is why many email marketers are starting to send out emails with responsive designs. The image below is a good example of how HTC has embraced responsive email design in their newsletter.
   
7. Use sender name – Along with the subject line, the sender name is the first thing readers are going to see in their inbox. Since building trust is extremely important in email marketing, it’s a good idea to send your marketing emails from an actual person.
8. Optimize mails for images-off viewing – Some email clients have the images turned off by default so you could benefit from optimizing your mail with images turned off. In the image below, you can see the difference between the images-on and images-off view for PizzaExpress emails.
9. Display important info at the top – Avoid putting pictures and logos at the top of the email. Make the most of this location for the most important information since it’s the first place readers will look at after opening the mail.
10. Write a clear and concise CTA – Your call to action should be short and direct, clearly telling readers what you want them to do. Some examples of good CTAs are “Shop Now”, “Buy Now”, “Read More”, “Download Now”, etc. Here’s an excellent example of a clear and short email CTA from H&M.
11. Limit graphics – Like I’ve mentioned earlier, some email service providers don’t automatically display graphics. If you have graphics in your email, all readers will see are empty boxes instead of the pictures. Try to limit images to as little as possible for your email.
12. Have a single CTA – It may be easy to assume that having multiple calls to action increases the chance of someone clicking on one of the buttons. However, this may result in separated actions and distract readers from the main focus of the mail. In the case of Whirlpool, reducing the CTA buttons from 4 to just 1 helped improve the number of clicks by 42%.Original email design
    
    
    New email design
13. Include an unsubscribe link – For every email you send out, make sure you include an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Otherwise, you might have people marking your message as spam without informing you.
14. Keep it short – Since many people don’t have the time to read through a long email, it’s always better to keep your email content short but straight to the point. In the case of HealthConnect One, a non-profit organization, coordinating its year-end direct mail with 4 short emails helped them increase donations by 50%. Here’s an excellent example of a short and direct marketing email from Asos.
15. Run a test – According to a report published by Marketing Sherpa, 83% of marketers who participated in the survey are overlooking the importance of testing their marketing emails. You should occasionally run a test and track the performance of various email layouts, content choice, etc. so you can find out which works best for you.
16. Sending reminder mails – Try sending out reminder emails to inactive users and subscribers every once in a while. Keep it short and emphasize on the message that you just want to remind them of your existence. Take a look at how Dropbox is subtly and non-intrusively reminding inactive users about the features of their service.
17. Brand your emails – Make sure your readers know whom the email is from by branding your marketing emails. If you’ve sent a memorable email, you’d want them to remember that they came from you. Take note of how Birchbox has clearly branded their email at the top without going over the top.
    
18. Keep it simple – Simplicity is the key to optimizing your marketing emails. Whether it’s in the layout and design or the content of your email, make sure it’s simple and direct. Take a look at how Canva sends out beautifully-designed yet simple emails to let readers know about new layouts available.
19. Segment your audience – According to the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report, 39% of marketers who segment their subscribers experienced a higher open rate. 28% had a lower unsubscribe rate, while 24% experienced better revenue. Through segmentation, you will be able to build a more relevant mailing list for various campaigns. Take a look at the image below for a complete data published in the Lyris report.
20. Experiment with timing – The effectiveness of your marketing email may vary depending on the time and day you send it. Try experimenting with various timings at different days of the week to see which works best. Also, experiment on the various timings with different segments of your mailing list. According to Wordstream, the best time to send marketing emails is between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM on Thursday. The worst time is between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, what works for them may not necessarily work for you.Email data from Harland Clarke shows that 26.9% of emails were sent on a Wednesday. However, there was only a 15.6% open rate. On the other hand, only 5.5% of emails were sent out on a Saturday. The open rate for these mails was 32.5%. So you see that there are differences in which timing works for different business.
21. Be witty – Witty subheaders and subject lines could very well help you on your way to a successful email marketing campaign. Take a look at how Paperless Post uses a clear call to action as a header. The subheader says “You didn’t forget Mother’s Day, did you?” It’s both witty and helpful, so readers are left to wonder whether or not they actually forgot about Mother’s Day.
22. Be helpful and relevant – Your emails should be a way for you to help your readers and providing them with the information they would need. It could be a friendly reminder about what they signed up for or even to remind them to renew their subscription. For instance, TurnStyle Cycle sends out an email reminding people about their expiring series. The email includes an offer for help along with some useful details.
23. Match your email with your landing page – Instead of sending readers to your home page, it would be a great idea to design a specific landing page for your marketing emails. Make sure the landing page matches the email and you have a different landing page for different offers.For example, Indian ecommerce store Koovs sends out emails that match their landing page design. The first image shows the marketing email and the second image shows the landing page.

 

Conclusion

You now have some of the most important tricks to optimize your email marketing campaign. While the above ideas are the best practices, it may be a good idea to experiment and run tests on different subject lines, timing, and CTA. Avoid being satisfied or giving up too easily. There are endless possibilities to increase the success of your email marketing campaign, so get started today.

No matter your industry, quality customer service has become a major differentiating factor for businesses. If your customer service team isn’t up to snuff, your company will eventually lose to competitors who are doing it better.

But quality customer service is not complicated. Essentially, anyone on your customer-facing team simply needs to embrace theses mantras:

• Be humble
• Be helpful
• Be friendly
• Be knowledgeable
• Be thoughtful
• Be useful
• Be timely
• Everyone is in customer service
• Ask for that review!

In this article, we’re going to reverse-engineer some great reviews in order to illuminate 9 customer service hacks that will impress your customers, have them returning to your business in droves, and influence them to drive new business your way via word-of-mouth and 5-star online reviews.

Stay with us until the end of this post and download our customer service article roundup, chock full of tool tips, hiring advice, and the future of customer service.

1. Be Humble and Don’t Make Your Customers Feel Dumb

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James sounds like a pretty amazing guy, and he’s developed quite the relationship with George, going from broker to friend. While we may not have the same type of connection with our customers, we can aspire to be like James. Not only did he answer ‘every stupid question,’ he did so with humility. Many of your customers come to your business with a complete lack of knowledge. Sure, they may have done research on their own, but they expect you to be the expert.

When your support team has been on board for a while, and they hear the same simple questions day in and out, a glazed over eye roll is understandable. But the true gems of the customer service world take those FAQs and explain them in a way that doesn’t make the customer feel like a child. That humility and respect will go a long way in the eyes of your customer, especially if they already are insecure about working with your business.

2. Be Helpful Instead of Pitching the Sale

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Honestly, while we as business owners like to know how our prospects find us and ultimately become customers, one buyer journey is never exactly the same as another. We should anticipate that a potential customer might think they’re ready, but after consulting with us, realize they haven’t considered a variety of components that might inform their decision.

Even if they have this realization early in their interactions with your team, it’s essential to be as helpful and transparent as possible. People appreciate when customer service reps don’t lay on the hard sell from the get go. If your prospect isn’t ready, and you don’t pressure them prematurely, they will feel comfortable returning to you when the time is right.

Karl of Flores Landscaping was ready to help guide his prospect on her time table. Then, as they developed Amy’s vision together, Karl earned Amy’s trust based on his expertise and thoughtfulness. I’m sure Karl’s suggestion to reuse Amy’s concrete slabs and save her money was icing on the cake.

3. Be Friendly and Surprise Your Customers

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Some businesses benefit from making their customers feel like family. When your business model includes routine check ups or frequent repeat customers, get to know them! I always appreciate when the baristas at my local coffee shop greet me by name or already know my normal drink. Taking the time to ask your customers about their lives (in a non-intrusive way) will help them feel like family when they’re at your place of business.

In the dental industry, you wouldn’t expect people to be this excited for their routine visits, but Charlie’s experiences at Lee Dental Clinic stand out, because not only did he connect with his dentist on a personal level, but the little giveaways were a useful and clever delight.

4. Be Knowledgeable and Educate Your Employees

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If you’re working in an industry where the stakes for your prospective customers are high (like law), and they’re considerably undereducated on the matter, your expertise on the subject is essential. Not only being able to empathize with your client, but also educating them on their problem will set you apart from the competition.

Sometimes, the potential client will have attempted to research their situation on their own (WebMD set off any alarms?) and come to you thinking that they’re knowledgeable on the subject. It’s important in these scenarios to know your field inside and out with evidence that you can turn to so you can reveal why the prospect came to you in the first place.

5. Be Thoughtful and Solve Problems

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Mistakes happen. No business goes without a negative review forever, because no matter how informed our customer service team and leadership are, the unexpected happens, and it’s our responsibility to be able to handle the curveballs we’re thrown.

While it’s important to have policies in place to protect the bottom line, having managers or customer service reps who can make exceptions to save a bad customer experience is paramount. Not only will these exceptional cases protect your customers from a disappointing encounter with your company, but it will help your employees save face and avoid the dreaded, “That’s our policy.” company line.

Even if the situation loses you money in the short run, you will possibly see a larger return in the long run. A satisfied customer will sing your praises when you turn a bad experience around in a timely fashion and offer (what the customer considers) a fair solution.

6. Be Useful – Have Vetted Recommended Vendors

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Whether you’re an events planner, a home services provider, a hotel, or any local business, knowing the other local businesses around you can make you more useful to your customers. When you’re able to recommend complementary vendors to your clients, you’ll save them time and money–and probably make some local business-owner friends who can return the favor.

Of course, we want to vet the companies that we recommend. The last thing you want is to send one of your customers to an unorganized and incompetent business. That’s an easy way to make your customers hate you. Good vendor recommendation builds trust with your clients.

Pro-Tip:

Hard as it may be, sometimes your services are not the right fit for a particular prospect. While it sounds scary to recommend a competitor, it’s sometimes the right move. You may lose that one customer to your competitor, but the next time they have a friend who is a perfect fit for your service, a recommendation is practically inevitable.

7. Be Timely – Even at Inconvenient Times

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Sometimes, your free advice alone can earn a positive review! In the case of Chanel, she reached out to George expecting to pay a fee simply for the advice he provided. Combine the free advice with the timely manner of George’s reply, late at night nonetheless, and you can see why he earned a customer for life.

8. Everyone Who Interacts with Customers is Customer Service

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Yes, you have a dedicated staff to customer support, but that doesn’t mean they are the only employees providing support to your customers and clients. Remember that EVERY employee that interacts with clients face to face has the responsibility to maintain the same level of customer service as your dedicated reps. As you can see, the reviewer above had a positive interaction with everyone at the hospital, from the employees dedicated to checking in on her to the Wound Care nurses, to the maintenance staff.

Sometimes, just one negative touch point can ruin an experience. If you have employees that are sullen, argumentative, or just plain sour, keep them out of the way of customers! Not everyone is a people person, but social skills are imperative for any client facing role, no matter how small.

9. And Don’t Forget – Ask for the review!

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Finally, while it may seem awkward, always remember to ask for the review. Make sure your customer service managers ingrain this important request in their teams’ heads.

Who should be asking for the review? It helps to have someone the customer knows make “the Ask.” This is a business that rewards authenticity, so if a customer had a good experience and feels well-served by the person asking them for the review, they are more likely to do it. Automating the review ask can be effective–and certainly we can help–but remember that even if you’re automating the process, it still helps to personalize the request as much as possible.

Takeaways

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The selected reviews in this post represent the best types of reviews you can get. As you can see, all of them name the person that helped them, revealing the personal connection that was developed. The reviews aren’t novel length, making them consumable by other people researching your company. They all share a personal story that adds to the credibility of the review. The ones that show how they solved a problem are even more valuable, since customers tend to hope for the best and expect the worst. Being a friendly, helpful, problem solver can sometimes be more important than the actual service or product you sell!

And always remember, EVERY employee that interacts with customers needs to have the same mindset, training, and support as your dedicated customer service representative. Employ these customer service hacks and your positive reviews will explode.

Small changes often equal small gains.

That was just one of the many conversion truth-bombs Larry dropped in his popular post “Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Rate is Wrong.”

Sure, switching your landing page’s button from orange to green might help. A bit.

However, data shows that small improvements from small changes often regress back to the mean over time.

So while those initial results seem promising, many times they’re short lived.

Instead, the unicorns – the accounts regularly topping 10% conversion rates – are playing a different game altogether.

What do the unicorns to increase conversions do that you currently don’t? Here are the three top areas to focus on – none of which involve changing your button color or other small-time A/B tests.

1. Upgrade Your Offer

Free trials, discount coupons, and free consultations. Three things your site probably has in common with every other product, ecommerce, and service website out there.

That’s an issue, because Point #1 in Larry’s article was: “Across all of the high-performing landing pages, we saw massively creative and differentiated offers.”

It’s fair to say that if your core offer is generalized and cliché, it literally doesn’t matter what the landing page even looks like. There’s no compelling value proposition to get strangers to buy-in.

Instead, you need a differentiated offer to build everything else around.

That was the genesis for the AdWords Performance Grader.

Marketing graders and other calculator-like offers are commonplace now in the marketing industry. They work because they give people:

• A quick, painless audit of their current performance
• Benchmarking data to see how they compare with others
• A personalized action plan with recommendations to improve performance

In short, they do all of the hard work and provide prospects with an immediate solution to a problem. In exchange, the company gets some basic user data to begin nurturing each lead over time.

Another great example (brought to my attention from this post by Brian Sun) is Lowe’s Lawn Care Plan.

This interactive feature helps people plan out their lawn (you know, city folk, those things with dirt and grass in them) based on their desired style, even factoring in your local climate (which also nets Lowe’s your zip code).

After answering a few very basic questions, the result offers users instant answers, and a customized, step-by-step roadmap to follow for improving the quality of their lawn.

They also include a GINORMOUS purple email subscription call-to-action at the bottom of the page to encourage people to sign-up for reminders.

In both cases, these interactive tools are focused on the primary problem or pain point people are experiencing first. They’re using that compelling hook to get your attention, before building a little interest and eventually showing how their products or services can fix said problem.

This final example is completely different, and focuses on large-scale, industrial real estate transactions. But the overall objective is the same.

When new companies are opening or moving warehouses (for product storage), they’re primarily concerned with availability and cost when searching for vendors. Things that take too long, or cost too much, threaten to throw their project timeline off the rails or kill their budget.

So when my company worked with United Material Handling to revamp their website, we wanted to bring their internal inventory system to the forefront of the site, allowing customers to browse their product line and get this feedback instantly.

Customers can simply select a Part Type and the Condition (New or Used) they’re looking for to get results. For example, if they selected Carton Flow and Used, here’s what they’d see next:

Here are the results they get:

1. Sizing: Users can scroll through the exact sizing they’re looking for.
2. Quantity: They can enter their desired quantity, and we also show how much of a given product is currently in-stock and ready to ship.
3. Price Estimate: We then give users a rough pricing estimate based on the selected product type, condition, size and quantity.

If it all looks good, they can immediately “submit” this information to the company for an official quote (or keep browsing, similar to an ecommerce experience).

Even though the execution and context is different, the goal is the same:

Find out what’s most important to customers (based on their biggest pain points) and figure out a way to give them a sample solution (which leads to your products or services).

2. Analyze Your Conversion Flows

If your offer is good, you should have something compelling to share, promote, and drive new leads at a faster pace.

That flywheel momentum leads us to the next step:

“Identify the obstacles keeping prospects from converting and get those roadblocks out of the way by changing the flow. Test different variations to find out exactly which path to conversion works best for your audience.”

Friction is an important concept to keep in mind when trying to increase conversions. Generally speaking, less is more; as in, the fewer steps, fields, or pages required prior to a transaction, the better.

For example, instead of making people click through your Shop and Product pages before adding their desired widget to a cart, you can bring these most popular items to your homepage and eliminate a few unnecessary steps.

Marketing Experiments tested and proved this theory, first looking at what happens when customers need to go through seven (!) different steps before signing up for a subscription.

The results, predictably, were abysmal.

Zero registrations. And only a tiny fraction (1.88%) of the audience even bothered to begin this lengthy sign-up process.

Next, they tried reducing this down to four (and later three) stages to see if it improved conversions across the board.

The result? Simply changing from four steps to three (so reducing one page) resulted in a conversion increase of 32.35% (or 0.34% to 0.45%).

BUT…

There’s always a but.

Introducing more friction isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it’s desirable.

For example, Moz has found that their most profitable customers are ones who visit their site at least eight (!) times. These users tend to stick around longer, while those that convert quickly also don’t have the time, patience, or understanding to use Moz’s tools, and churn quickly.

This is dependent entirely on your business, and should be tested thoroughly (probably much earlier than any simple landing page A/B test).

If you zoom in a little bit to individual pages in this “conversion flow,” there are other things that can (and do) affect success.

Ideally, you want to give people an idea or indication of where they’re at in the conversion flow and what it’s going to take to get them over the finish line.

You can do this explicitly, like Amazon does with their checkout page (which also condenses important steps like Shipping and Billing into one final page).

You can also do this subtly, providing visual cues to help people figure out where they are, and where they should go to finish.

Along the way, bottlenecks or problems can pop up and throw people off their tracks. For example, this lightbox feature pops up on one site BEFORE you can even add something to your cart.

While legally prudent, the nature of the strong warnings and language here – at this first step! – will undoubtedly make a few people second guess their decision.

However if you located this step last, AFTER adding to cart but BEFORE purchasing, it probably wouldn’t have such a potentially damaging effect.

3. Implement Remarketing!

One thing you can almost guarantee is that NOBODY is looking at your display ads.

86% of consumers today are banner blind.

As is always the case, you don’t beat grim stats like that with more ads, but better ones. Ads that are more relevant, more personal, and better timed: Like remarketing ads.

Three out of five people notice these ads. Previously dismal ad responses can raise 400%. Even Larry agrees:

“Use remarketing to recapture [the 98% of] people who showed intent but didn’t convert.”

Larry went on to present this information at Inbound a few years ago, highlighting how ad fatigue affects remarketing much less over time.

Using Google’s Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool, you can even see how (and where) remarketing display ads can influence purchases in your industry.

For example, you can see how remarketing display ads for small beauty and fitness ecommerce businesses influence customer purchases – specifically, AFTER they have the chance to discover and become familiar with the brand’s products.

Otherwise, start with one of these common remarketing audiences, scenarios that apply to most industries:

1. New Recent Visitors: New visitors to your site who bounce, but might be interested in a related content piece that helps them become aware of the need for a product or service like yours.
2. Product/Service Viewed (or Added to Cart) But Not Purchased: These people have shown a little interest, but aren’t quite ready to convert just yet. (Here are a few more ways to combat cart abandonment.)
3. Upsells to Recent Purchases: Now that you’ve got a new customer, introduce them to additional products or services that could enhance the core offering they purchased.

The second audience above, where a prospect shows intent but doesn’t purchase, is especially interesting. You know they’re beginning to check out and evaluate your offerings, but aren’t quite sold for one reason or another (or simply aren’t ready to be sold just yet). The opportunity in this segment of people can be HUGE.

Introducing a lesser commitment for people who aren’t yet ready to buy (for whatever reason), can be a great way to widen your funnel and increase future conversions through better lead nurturing.

Remarketing can help recapture these people (who would otherwise bounce) by delivering that “lesser” offer (like the ones listed above in Section #1).

A simple change like this can result in huge cost-per-click improvements, too. In one case, we saw switching the messaging and offering for remarketing ads reduced CPC’s by 62%.

Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads are like a cross between Google Shopping Campaigns and remarketing, giving you the power of increased relevancy and scale. You set up a product feed (similar to Google Shopping) that will be used to power your Dynamic Product Ads database.

(image source)

An ad template can be then set up to help you dynamically pull this data in and tailor each retargeted Facebook ad depending on those specific products viewed on your site.

(image source)

The result?

Better relevancy, timing, and personalization. The key ingredients to combating (and defeating) banner blindness.

For example, The Honest Company saw 34% CTR increase and a 38% drop in cost-per-conversion using this new remarketing feature (compared with standard Facebook ad costs).

The Real Way to Increase Conversions

Most conversion rates hover around 2%, but the outliers – the unicorns regularly topping 10% – aren’t simply switching out button colors.

They’re focused on BIG changes, because they know small ones typically only yield small gains.

Instead of sticking to the same generic offer, they’re testing multiple offers that target customer pain points and problems.

Instead of focusing on a single landing page, they’re obsessing over how changes to their entire conversion flow affect profits.

Instead of giving prospects only one change to convert, they’re employing remarketing ads to bring people back into the fold and deliver more relevant, personal ads at the exact right time.

Sure, a simple A/B test could give you good results. But most don’t.

These bigger tips might require more time and effort, but it’s worth it when you see the increase in conversions.

The post Are You Cheap or Are You Exceptional? How to Price Your Services appeared first on Copyblogger.

The collaborative environment at Pixar Animation Studios is the stuff of legend. Not only has the studio given us their magnificent portfolio of Disney/Pixar movies and created indispensable animation technology, they have also birthed a work practice that encourages group creativity, brings out the best in individuals and guarantees success. No matter what they are working on, Pixar’s endeavours are successful both artistically and financially.

So what can small businesses, with far fewer employees and no backing from Disney, take away from Pixar’s success? Luckily, the core principles at the heart of Pixar’s practice can be replicated on any scale. These are the four most important ways to bring some Pixar magic to your business.

Trust in people, not ideas

Pixar founder and president Ed Catmull says many observers think his studio is successful thanks to good ideas; Toys coming to life, monsters in the closet, a fish far from home, etc,. He disagrees. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Catmull says while most companies value ideas above people, Pixar values people above ideas. His logic? “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.” In other words: Good people can elevate bad ideas, but bad people can ruin good ideas.

Catmull sees this as the most important factor in Pixar’s success. Their hiring practice is geared towards bringing together the most gifted group of people possible. Fostering a talented community will attract even more talented people, allowing the team, and the team’s reputation, to grow.

On hiring, Catmull has another important message, sometimes lost on small-minded CEOs: “It’s okay to hire people who are smarter than you are.” This advice, obvious if you are dedicated to creating a truly brilliant workforce, leads us onto our next Pixar principle.

Leave your ego at the door

According to Catmull and others at Pixar, another important factor in Pixar’s success is the ‘postmortems’ they perform when their movies are released. Project postmortems are common in many industries, but Pixar’s are some of the most thorough.

Even though nearly every movie they make is successful, the management and everyone involved dedicates time to going over what went wrong in the process, and what could be done better next time.

Postmortems can be difficult, but it never helps to adopt a defensive attitude. At Pixar, all the employees speak their minds, no matter how junior or senior, and they are all open to criticism. This is the only way a group can learn from its mistakes together. It can be painful, but ultimately it leads to better practice. Peers can still be supportive during the postmortem approach, which will lead to an even more productive process.

This ego-less approach extends beyond the postmortem process. During every project, Pixar employees display their work to their colleagues for feedback while it is still in progress. Other workers give their opinions, and hopefully help fix any issues before they become major problems. Catmull says exposing your work in progress allows people to be more creative in what they do, and to up their game when they see someone else’s great work.

Work in a creative environment

The people and the attitude are important at Pixar, but so too is the building they work in. Pixar’s main campus is based in Emeryville, California. The campus’ main building was dubbed ‘The Steve Jobs Building’ when the Apple CEO died in 2012. Steve Jobs designed the building himself when he was Pixar’s CEO, with the intention of building the perfect incubator of creativity.

As a result of Jobs’ dedication, the building encourages creativity by forcing employees into chance encounters as they cross the large central atrium to get to the single set of bathrooms, or to other departments. Unexpected chance encounters like these can spark new ideas and collaborations that could bring the company more success.

You don’t need a huge atrium to replicate this design; having communal areas in the middle of the office will do fine. Workers waiting for the kettle in the kitchen have spawned great ideas since the offices of old. Try rearranging your desks to create more surprise collisions between employees.

The creative environment ethos at Pixar is about more than just bathroom bonding. Pixar workers are encouraged to decorate and customise their desks in any way they please. CCO John Lasseter’s office is strewn with toys and memorabilia from every Pixar film. Other Pixar cubicles are designed to look like beach huts, old sheds, castles and much more.

Allowing workers to feel comfortable and at home in their workspace has a hugely positive effect on their performance, according to Pixar. Other workspace designers agree that even something as simple as colour in office design can impact productivity.

A creative environment, populated by a skilled team unafraid of criticism, can bring Pixar success to any small business. But what is the final and perhaps most important Pixar principle for a small business to take on board?

Take risks and be unconventional

In the same Harvard Business Review article, and in his book Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull says the reason Pixar has been so successful is that their ideas are totally ridiculous and that they could go terribly wrong if they were done badly. The premise of the hit film Ratatouille involves a talking rat who wants to be a chef who can somehow control a young man’s movements by pulling the man’s hair. The movie Up is based around an old man’s flight to South America in a house pulled by balloons. These are crazy ideas. As we mentioned earlier in the article, all it takes is a great team to bring a crazy idea to fruition.

Taking chances on such strange and unique ideas is what makes Pixar films stand out in the world of ‘safe bet’ sequels and bland blockbusters. “If you want to be original,” says Catmull, “you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable.”

Accept the uncertainty, work with talented people in a creative environment, and you will see success, whatever you do.

This week, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced that people are keeping their PCs a lot longer before upgrading: The average has increased from four years to as many as six.

The tablet-refresh cycle isn't much shorter than that, to Apple's eternal chagrin. Even iPhone sales have started to taper off, partly because people are keeping their phones longer or choosing cheaper Android phones.

What's happening is pretty simple. The hardware and the software running on any device itself have become way less interesting than the web apps and services, like the ones that Google and Amazon have made the core of their business.

Why buy a $700 iPhone when a $200 Android phone can access the same YouTube or Amazon Music as everyone else? All you need to do to get new Facebook features is refresh your browser or update your app. You don't need a high-performance device to participate in the 21st century.

It's a stark contrast with the traditional model for consumer electronics, where you're expected to upgrade the hardware to keep pace with the new features they release.

And it could be a dire omen for high-margin hardware companies like Apple.

Meanwhile, web-first companies like Amazon and Google are more than happy to exploit this, even as our notions of what a computer actually is continue to shift. Just look at devices like Google Chromecast and the Amazon Echo.

Chromecast, Echo, case in point

Since 2013, Google has sold 25 million Chromecast devices — the completely amazing $35 dongles that turn any TV into a smart TV. That's right, $35.

The real brilliance of the Chromecast lies in what it isn't, rather than what it is. It doesn't have an interface of its own. You just push a button on your phone and have whatever YouTube video you're watching or Spotify album you're listening to appear on your TV screen.

A nice side effect: It's relatively simple to take an existing smartphone app and add Chromecast streaming capabilities, and literally tens of thousands of apps have done that integration.

You don't have to think about it or learn a new interface; you just click and go.

It means that every single day, I get more return on the initial $35 investment in the Chromecast I bought in 2014. But since all of the good stuff is happening in the apps, not the Chromecast itself, it's extremely unlikely that I will ever have to replace this Chromecast, barring a hardware malfunction.

You could probably say the same thing about the Amazon Echo home voice assistant. Developers have released almost 1,000 "skills" for the Amazon Echo's Alexa platform, including the ability to call an Uber, play Spotify music, or order a Domino's pizza.

These gadgets are getting better, not worse, the longer they stay on shelves. And while there may be periodic minor hardware improvements, they're way more minor than the gap between an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 6, and far less necessary to keep getting maximum value from the device.

The pressure is on

This move is going to keep putting pressure on hardware-first manufacturers — especially those who rely on high margins, like Apple.

The Chromecast and the Echo are relatively cheap gadgets — because all the important, useful stuff about them lives in the cloud, they're optimized to be small, efficient, and unobtrusive.

Amazon doesn't need to make money on the Echo itself, as long as it drives more commerce to its retail business. Same with Google: as long as the Chromecast gets more people to watch YouTube videos and download more stuff from Google Play, they don't have to make money from the gadget itself.

And you're seeing more of this all over, like when Tesla made thousands of its electric cars partially self-driving with an overnight software update. The gadget Tesla drivers already owned — in this case a car — suddenly got way more useful.

This trend isn't going to kill off the smartphone, or the PC, or the tablet. But it means lower-cost gadgetry that lasts a lot longer. We're only seeing the early stages of this shift now, but it has a lot of potential to shake up how we think about and how we buy our devices.

SEE ALSO: Mary Meeker thinks Apple is the past, Amazon is the future

Join the conversation about this story »

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I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

“What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
in an age which advances progressively backwards?”
— TS Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

Only a decade ago, I was part of the Strategy and Innovation Core Team for a huge multinational consultancy, and writing exuberantly on my (then-new) blog about innovation and technology and how they could possibly save the world. The image above, from the Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum Synthesis, describes a universal “technology development process” popular at the time. One of the leading business speakers in those heady days was Chris Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, whom I more or less idolized.

And then something happened. My own research into the history of innovation and technology suggested that, rather than being the result of rigorous process, excellence and inventiveness, most enduring technologies of any value seemed to be the result of fortuitous accidents, or were the throw-away byproducts of massive, outrageously expensive military programs. Complexity science was by then throwing serious doubt on a lot of accepted theories about how change actually happens in organizations and societies. Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress and similar works by Jared Diamond and others argued that ‘progress’ was an illusion, and that all civilizations inevitably collapse (taking the capacity to support their technologies with them).

We actually likely lived healthier, happier (and often longer, when we weren’t eaten by predators) lives in prehistoric times, it seems, way back before the inventions (or more accurately discoveries) of the first great technologies (the arrowhead, fire, the wheel, and then abstract language and later, agriculture (which Richard Manning in Against the Grain says should more accurately be called “catastrophic agriculture”), enabling the unnatural human evolution we call “settlement”. Settlement brought with it a blizzard of new problems for technology to solve (most notably infectious and emotional diseases), and each well-intentioned new technology has produced yet more problems, arguably greater in number, size and intractability than the benefits the earlier technology provided.

Nothing is new in any of this. Back in 1994, in his book Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld described our civilization’s technological underpinning as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and now beginning to rattle and moan as it inevitably comes apart.

In the past decade, disillusionment with innovation and technology has grown. Christensen’s work has been largely discredited by a review (by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker), with the benefit of hindsight, suggesting that “innovative” companies don’t ultimately fare any better than those they “disrupt”. A recent study by Peter Thiel in MIT Technology Review claims “technology stalled in 1970”. As global corporate power is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, he explains, there is less and less motivation for innovation and more wealth to buy it out and squelch it, with the help of armies of IP lawyers.

My own research in recent years substantiates this claim. My greatest learning from 35 years in (and studying) organizational culture has been that size is the enemy of innovation and that most of the useful and creative things that happen in large organizations happen through workarounds by people on the front lines, in spite of, not because of, the cultural tone and processes established at the top. Looking back at hundreds of expensive strategic and change-oriented programs and projects I was involved with (including not a few that I led myself) there is almost nothing left to show for them ten, or even five, years after they were conducted.

The most damning critique of the Kurzweilian technophilia that so many bright people now embrace comes from John Gray, who devotes an entire chapter of Straw Dogs to deconstructing the idealistic and uncritical notions that technology, in the long run, steadily and sometimes astonishingly improves our lives. He writes:

If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

Whether we believe that innovation and technology ultimately make the world better or worse, there is now overwhelming evidence that they are unsustainable in any case. Between economic over-extension, energy over-dependence, and the ruination of our atmosphere and other environments by our civilization and its technologies, it is now almost inevitable that we will soon see a collapse that will make the Great Depression, and perhaps even the five previous great extinctions of life on Earth, look like nothing.

This collapse is going to require us to live a much simpler, more local and more diverse and place-dependent life. We are destined to be very nostalgic for the good old days of modern technology as soon as it is gone, and that’s likely to happen soon. Modern technology requires cheap energy, and, notwithstanding the recent power games between the US and Russia temporarily and artificially driving down oil prices, we are quickly running out of it. Modern technology requires massive standardization and globalization, and without cheap oil, cheap foreign labour and cheap raw materials, none of which is sustainable, we cannot expect it to last much longer. A barrel of oil replaces six person-years of labour, and when those barrels become unavailable or unaffordable, the vast majority of what we all do is going to change drastically.

But at least, you may insist, the Internet will survive and it will allow other technologies to continue to thrive even if they must be manufactured and operated more frugally and locally. Dmitry Orlov, as he explains in The Five Stages of Collapse, clearly doesn’t think so, and the staggering cost and time required to keep the Internet afloat when the economy is in free-fall seems utterly unsustainable as server farms become luxury items and people’s time is diverted to living sufficiently in the real world.

Likewise with other technologies we pin great hopes on for our future, or have come to take for granted: solar panels and other expensive and resource-dependent goods; the private automobile; non-emergency airplane travel; the miraculous products of the pharmaceutical and plastics industry (including synthetic fibres); industrial agriculture; the mass media, and anything that depends on a reliable and consistent electrical or communications grid.

What will life look like without oil-powered technologies? It will vary hugely from one increasingly-isolated community to the next. Much will depend on the state of the land (the quality of the soil, its capacity to produce sustainable food, the proximity to abundant healthy clean water, its vulnerability to drought, floods, pandemics and natural disasters induced by climate change), the number of people in the community that must be supported, their cohesion as a community and their physical and mental health, essential skills and capacities.

It will depend on our collective ability to live sufficiently, not extravagantly, and to be resilient to change. Dmitri Orlov, in Communities That Abide, says such communities need three qualities: (1) self-sufficiency, (2) able to self-organize and recover in the face of calamity, and (3) mobility: not being tied to any one place. Most modern technologies don’t fit well with such a model.

Ronald Wright not only wrote the aforementioned A Short History of Progress, but also the novel A Scientific Romance, which depicts life in the present-day UK centuries after collapse. When I read it, I was struck by how much our ancient human nature (as scavengers, more like crows than fellow mammals) comes out in his vision, and how much the world he describes resonates with the world described in Pierre Berton’s book The Great Depression. Both books describe worlds that are accepting (or even resigned), self-supportive, full of struggle and joy, and only occasionally (and briefly and spectacularly) violent.

Both books describe people initially trying to perpetuate their technologies, to make them work illogically in a world where the underlying infrastructure can no longer support them. And both books describe how people finally let go of these technologies, and free themselves from dependence on them.

It is not so terrible, a world without modern technologies and the Internet. It is the world hoped for in Mark Kingwell’s The World We Want and Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency, though it will not come about as elegantly as their authors would have hoped. Technology has always offered us false hope, and continues to do so (the latest technological “miracle” sold to us was fracking). The sooner and more gently we let go of it, and our dependence on the systems that it underlies so precariously, the sooner and more gently we can begin to make our way to a more resilient way of living.

Crows, a spectacular evolutionary success both with and without us, have much to teach and show us in this regard. They have almost no technologies, and those they have discovered (e.g. the elaborate use of hooked sticks) they hold lightly, using them for non-essential, amusing tasks. They have a sophisticated sense of fun, and creatively use their leisure time joyfully and exuberantly whenever and wherever it’s available. They love, support and teach each other without expecting reciprocation. They adapt themselves to places, instead of foolishly attempting to adapt their chosen places to them.

Technology’s false hope can bring us only disappointment, sorrow and suffering. It’s time to learn to let it go, gradually but starting now, and give up our dreams of “smart” technologies that are too smart for our own good. In so doing, we will embrace not progress and the wisdom of crowds, but resilience and the wisdom of crows.

In March of 2016, an entrepreneur, a product designer, and a marketer based in Sweden launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise money for what sounded like a futuristic device: artificial gills that would help a person breathe underwater.

Within a few days, they'd raked in more than $800,000, sixteen times their initial goal.

But this isn't a story about a few guys with a wonderful, seemingly impossible idea that turns out to be wildly successful. Instead, it's a cautionary tale that's increasingly common: a slick crowdfunding campaign that rockets off based solely on the hype of the crowd, before there is any evidence that the idea is feasible or that the campaigners have any idea what they're doing.

With the artificial gills, referred to as the "Triton," there were questions from the start. The Triton team posted videos to demonstrate a person breathing underwater, but they were cut so a shot never lasted longer than a minute. Observers started to cry foul and question whether or not the device they described — the team claimed it could extract enough oxygen from water for a person to breathe — could possibly exist.

"It's not realistic, it's science fiction," Neal Pollock told told Tech Insider at the time. Pollack is a research associate at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology at Duke University Medical Center, and the research director for the Divers Alert Network, a nonprofit organization that helps divers in medical emergencies and promotes dive safety.

Other experts agreed with him. Soon, Indiegogo announced that the original campaign was canceled, with all money returned to backers.

This is just one of the stories that show how unpredictable and — as of right now — mostly unregulated the growing crowdfunding industry is.

One recent report estimated the size of that market at $34 billion in 2015, more than double its value the year before. That's a massive expansion for a market that was worth just $880 million in 2010.

The crowdfunding world isn't necessarily rife with fraud, which is technically forbidden by the major sites. But enforcement is difficult and sometimes nonexistent.

Deceptive campaigns and irresponsible campaigners are most definitely out there, and for now at least, there's little protection for consumers who are left out to dry.

'A lot of potential for scams'

The basic crowdfunding model is straightforward.

Individuals or companies list whatever they want to raise money for. Project creators assign reward tiers for donors. For hardware products like the Triton gills, a certain amount of money will theoretically reward an individual funder with the actual product being described; for a creative project, a donor might get a download of an album or a subscription to a magazine.

In some campaigns, the people raising money need to hit their target to get their funds. Sites like Indiegogo also allow creators to offer "flexible funding," meaning they get access to any money raised.

GoFundMe, which allows users to raise money for any cause, immediately gives donations to the funder, without campaign deadlines or minimum amounts. And of course, nearly all of the popular crowdfunding sites — including Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe — take a percentage of the money raised. (There are some exceptions, like Indiegogo's Generosity site for fundraising for a cause.)

By definition, people who donate to these campaigns are investing in an unfinished thing, and there's always the chance that something could go wrong. Still, some have argued (in court) that the degree of risk isn't adequately communicated, and crowdfunding companies have taken steps to better communicate that uncertainty over time.

"[W]e aim to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly," David Gallagher, a spokesperson for Kickstarter, tells Tech Insider via email. "You can't back a project on Kickstarter without seeing a box that says in part, 'Kickstarter is not a store.' Every project page has a 'Risks & Challenges' section detailing the things that might delay the project or prevent it from being completed."

In the case of hardware, Kickstarter requires that the creators show backers at least a prototype of what they're designing. Indiegogo does not.

"Running a crowdfunding campaign is not the same thing as buying a product in a store, and our backers on Indiegogo understand this," a spokesperson for Indiegogo tells Tech Insider. "They are instead supporting an entrepreneur on their journey to bring a product to life."

On their site, GoFundMe advises that people only donate to users they "personally know and trust."

No one denies that campaigns can fail. That can happen when creators get in over their heads and can't fulfill their promises.

But it's also possible that the people behind a failed campaign never had any plans to fulfill their promises in the first place.

In the spring of 2015, Kickstarter commissioned a study from the University of Pennsylvania to investigate how likely a project is to fail. The study found that 9% of projects fail to deliver their rewards, though the Wharton professor behind the study also concluded that there "does not seem to be a systematic problem associated with failure (or fraud) on Kickstarter, and the vast majority of projects do seem to deliver."

Bobby Whithorne, a spokesperson for GoFundMe, tells Tech Insider that "less than one tenth of one percent of all GoFundMe campaigns are fraudulent," based on their analysis of known fraudulent campaigns compared to all campaigns.

But consumer advocates have a clear message for potential crowdfunding investors: buyer beware. "I have absolutely no doubt the scam artists are out there," says Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

Rheingold isn't anti-crowdfunding, and thinks it can be an important way to fund ideas that are a little out-of-the-box. The key thing, he says, is figuring out how to promote innovation while preventing scammers from taking advantage of the system and stopping impossible projects before they are funded.

"There's a lot of potential for scams and a lot of potential for good stuff," he says.

Impossible drones, smartwatches, and more

As crowdfunding has become more popular, big failed campaigns that expose the vulnerabilities in the system have become more common.

On November 24, 2014, a British startup called Torquing Group launched a Kickstarter campaign for a small drone called the Zano: "an ultra-portable, personal aerial photography and HD video capture platform, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and intelligent enough to fly all by itself!"

It could autonomously follow its owner, avoiding obstacles and shooting photo and video. The promo video showed the prototype flying up to a group at a pub to take their picture and following a mountain biker, all impressive and hard-to-pull-off stuff.

Torquing hoped to raise about $190,000. But its tiny drone looked almost magical, and people wanted it. Lots of people. More than 12,000 backers later, the fledgling company had pulled in $3.4 million.

The promised ship date, July 2015, came and went. Nothing happened.

Later that year, when the first few hundred (out of more than 15,000 expected) drones were finally shipped out, buyers were irate. If the machines could get off the ground at all, the recipients said, they'd hop and crash right into a wall, barely capturing some terrible footage along the way.

On November 18, Torquing announced they were bankrupt and in debt, voluntarily liquidating their assets to pay creditors. Backers were left out to dry.

Kickstarter hired freelance journalist Mark Harris to investigate what happened. He published an epic report. He didn't think there was any evidence of fraud, but he did conclude that the people behind Torquing never had the background, experience, or knowledge needed to pull off the drone. Harrus said there was evidence the promo video was misleading; and he thought the massive success of the campaign made it even more impossible for Torquing to deliver the Zano.

Ivan Reedman, the director of the Zano project, did not respond to a request for comment.

"We appreciate Mark’s analysis that there’s more work to be done here," Gallagher, of Kickstarter, tells Tech Insider. "We're building Kickstarter with the longest term in mind, we've made many changes to it over the years as we've learned from our experiences, and we're always looking for ways to make it better."

The Zano is far from the only massive crowdfunding success to fail.

Another prominent example is the Kreyos smartwatch campaign, which raised $1.5 million on Indiegogo, promising a powerful, gesture controlled waterproof smartwatch with weeklong battery life, all for about $150. It sounded too good to be true. And it was.

The units that were eventually shipped barely functioned, were unable to keep time, and died upon contact with water.

In that case, Steve Tan, the Kreyos founder, who could not be reached for comment, explained the failure in a Medium post. The launch team, himself included, was comprised of marketers with very limited technical knowledge, he wrote. They outsourced the watch design and production to a company in China that failed to deliver and — Tan writes — walked away with a good portion of their money.

Legal action

On June 11, 2015, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that they'd settled the first crowdfunding case handled by the agency. A man named Erik Chevalier had raised more than $122,000 from 1,246 people for a board game he was creating, "The Doom That Came to Atlantic City."

But instead of spending the money creating the game or the pewter figurines that were supposed to accompany it, Chevalier used the money for rent, a move, and other expenses, according to the FTC's complaint. The financial judgment against Chevalier, who could not be reached for comment, was suspended due to an inability to pay.

States too have started to legally pursue impossible crowdfunding campaigns. Washington State filed the country's first consumer protection lawsuit against a crowdfunding campaign in 2014.

Yet so far, there haven't been many court cases involving crowdfunding. Legal experts in consumer issues like Rheingold think that this may be because crowdfunding is still relatively new.

"My guess is that this is a space that will require additional legislation," Rheingold says. And he thinks there's a chance that the sites that host crowdfunding campaigns may have to take some responsibility for vetting those campaigns.

The terms of service of crowdfunding sites state that they aren't responsible for campaigns that fail to deliver on their promises. Like many other profitable new businesses in the Silicon Valley era, these sites are platforms that allow other people to do business. They take a cut for making things convenient, but they aren't selling the products themselves.

That model is coming under scrutiny. States are challenging the idea that Uber drivers aren't employees, for example. Airbnb is facing increasing regulatory oversight. Rheingold says he thinks it's possible that courts might eventually decide crowdfunding platforms have at least some responsibility to evaluate the campaigns that run on their sites.

He asks: "Are we going to live in a marketplace with caveat emptor?" We can't assume that buyers alone are responsible for evaluating whether the team behind a campaign can pull it off on their own, he argues.

"Whatever disclaimer you put on there should not be sufficient to avoid any liability," he says.

'The wisdom of the crowd'

For now, we still trust that the crowd is smart enough to figure out how feasible a product really is.

In the case of Triton, the trio relaunched their crowdfunding campaign hours after the original one had been shut down, making what seemed to be new claims about how the gills actually worked.

They released a new video that showed a person sitting underwater for 15 minutes, definitely an improvement over the previous videos. But the one angle that video was shot at, along with some other questions about buoyancy, made some question whether or not there was some sort of trickery going on.

"It is possible, even probable, that the current video is misleading," Pollock, of the Divers Alert Network, told Tech Insider at the time. "There remains a huge gulf between what they promise and what would be a marked jump in technological innovation."

The relaunched campaign continued to its end and the Triton team raised $454,958 from it. Their Indiegogo page said they'd start delivering the gills by December 2016.

But once again, Indiegogo canceled the new campaign and refunded the money to investors.

It sent an email to backers, explaining: "Over a month ago, our Trust and Safety team reached out to the Triton team in response to numerous questions from our community surrounding the the claims made in their most recent campaign. Despite our repeated requests to substantiate these claims, the Triton team have not been able to comply, and we have decided to refund all contributions to the campaign."

Tech Insider reached out to the Triton team several times while reporting this story, but they did not respond to questions about experts' doubts or about the campaign's cancellation.

Perhaps the Triton team thought they had something they could create if they only had the funding. Or perhaps they had an idea that was unrealistic, maybe impossible, in the first place.

It seems like the rudimentary crowdfunding safeguards may have worked this time. Until recently, the Triton campaign page still said "Coming Soon," though it now appears to have been taken offline. They may well relaunch the campaign once more — but they'd probably need an even bigger overhaul of their claims this time around, and maybe even a new platform to host it.

And that's the thing. Crowdfunding sites seem to be getting better (some with more developed and stricter rules than others) at policing the campaigns on their sites, but there's still no legal obligation for them to do it. Financially, they're incentivized to have as many campaigns as possible raising as much money as possible. A campaign that's — maybe — completely unfeasible can be launched over and over, even if that means backers occasionally get duped.

Rheingold recommends that people investing in a campaign look at the people behind it to see if they have the business plan, personnel, and expertise to pull it off.

After all, "you’ve got the wisdom of the crowd, but you've also got the madness of the crowd," says Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection with the Consumer Federation of America.

"And how you distinguish between those two is anybody's guess."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Scientifically proven features men find attractive in women

B2B marketers have a love affair with the funnel. We have books about the funnel, blogs named about the funnel, personalities like my good friend the @Funnelholic … the list goes on. You would be hard pressed to sit through any marketing conference and not hear about the funnel. We are obsessed!

While the funnel has certainly made a big impact on B2B marketing and sales, there is an inherent danger in being too head over heels in love with the funnel. In reality, the managing of the funnel in some organizations is having a negative impact on their effectiveness of connecting with their Buyers.

The danger stems from marketing and sales equating the traditional funnel with the very untraditional new buying process. To be clear, they are not the same anymore!

In a recent post on his B2B Digital Marketing Blog, Eric Wittlake frames the problem perfectly when he states, “It is called a complex sale for a reason, but B2B marketers keep trying to fit it into a simplistic measurement framework.” His supporting graphic drives home the point even further.

The point is that if marketers are truly going to align their content and Demand Generation programs to that of their Buyer’s purchase path, we need to think less in terms of the funnel and move to developing deep Buyer insights:

• Why do they purchase?
• What stages do they take to purchase?
• What challenges and pain points are they trying to solve?
• What are the trigger events that cause them to initiate a purchase?

The more you know about your Buyers and what drives them through their purchase decisions, the better you will be able to align.

I have never heard a Buyer state, “I am in the Sales Accepted Lead Stage of my Purchase Process” but this is often how sellers manage it. I have met with many companies who have gone so far as to organize their marketing teams to match the stages of the funnel. Keep in mind, the Buyer does not care how you want to sell, they care about how they want to buy.

The funnel is useful as an internal measurement and baseline for marketing and sales to see their impact on revenue. However, be warned, those who equate their internal methodology with the purchase patterns of their Buyers do so at their own peril.

There’s always a competitor in the sales process. Even if there’s not another vendor that’s being considered, “do nothing” or “do it internally” can be your biggest competition.

Without the ability to clearly differentiate your solution, and understand its value, a buyer’s decision is arbitrary and often price-driven.

Focus on Meaningful Value

When you differentiate on value, you can avoid the dreaded discounting that happens at the end of sales cycles. If you’re constantly having to lower your price to close a deal, you will lose margin and find yourself scraping the bottom of the barrell to meet your quota.

It’s important that the value has meaning to the individual buyer. You can tell me your marketing solution provides the ability for me to have 100,000 contacts in the system. If I only need 45K contacts, that feature means nothing to me. Buyers need to see the core benefits that your solution provides, in terms of what’s important to their business needs. You can rattle off features and functions that make your solution different, but if those qualities aren’t vital to the buyer’s business, your product will seem too expensive or not an adequate solution.

Remember, there is as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell.

Offer Tangible Examples

Buyers want to know that you can do what you say you can do. They want evidence of past success. When you have proof to back up your differentiation, it’s much easier for the buyer to defend the spend.

“I know we can do that at your company, because at Company X, we implemented this solution and cut their time-to-market by 50%, saving them $500,000.”

Proof of performance helps alleviate buyer skepticism. Telling buyers you can cut their processing costs by 25% is one thing. Hearing that same metric from three of your customers is much more impactful — and help buyers believe your differentiation.

It’s Not About You

Even when you are trying hard to focus on the customer in your conversations, it can be difficult to not share the bells and whistles about your company. Potential customers really don’t care about your financial stability or company culture when they’re trying to solve a problem. They want to know how your solutions can help them achieve their business objectives. The best way to set your solution apart from the competition is to speak in the buyer’s language. How long you’ve been in business or who you have worked with may help a buyer feel comfortable signing the check, but it’s not going to seal the deal when it comes to competitive differentiation.

The B2B eCommerce industry is booming. At $780 billion, the B2B eCommerce market is worth more than double that of the B2C market in the US, where it currently represents 9.3% of all B2B sales. Forrester has predicted that this phenomenon will spread to a global level by 2020, with B2B ecommerce accounting for $6.7 trillion in trade worldwide, compared to $3.2 trillion for B2C.

As the industry continues to evolve and mature, with more investment pouring in by the day, it has undergone some significant changes. Manufacturers, distributors, and B2B customers are all shaping the B2B eCommerce ecosystem in diverse and interesting ways. In this post, we’re going to look at four key areas that are experiencing growth, and how they’re affecting the broader industry as a whole.

4 Ways the B2B eCommerce Market is Maturing

1. Software is being designed to meet millennial demand

Close to 50% of B2B eCommerce users are millennials, up from 27% in 2013. This has prompted suppliers to invest in eCommerce platforms that meet the unique needs of this demographic and cater to a customer-base that expects 24/7 access to a range of complex features.

Increased competition is also driving this change. The online customer journey for tech-savvy B2B buyers has grown increasingly nuanced. With a plethora of catalogs and online marketplaces at their customers’ fingertips, suppliers are being forced to offer features that meet millennial needs and take into account the differences between B2B eCommerce platforms and their B2C counterparts. It’s likely that 2016 will be the year when the distinctions between B2B and B2C eCommerce really become clear.

2. M-Commerce is taking center stage

Mobile use now outranks desktop for B2B transactions, and the figures are continuing to grow. Companies are responding to this trend by designing mobile-specific interfaces and including features like mobile wallets and push notifications. It’s not uncommon for suppliers to also have their own app, as native mobile Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are making this much easier to achieve.

One of the challenges with mobile B2B eCommerce portals is providing the extensive content and information (including images, inventory data, promotional materials etc.) about products that buyers need to conduct research. This is why mobile first design is so important––seeking out software vendors who can help companies organize information in a way that’s easy to navigate on a mobile device.

3. Sales and marketing teams are focusing on new online opportunities

On the whole, B2B marketers have been slow to adopt digital marketing methods. Whilst it’s predicted that 46% of B2B sales will be conducted through digital channels and the average conversion rate for B2B eCommerce sites is currently 7.8% compared to 3.0 % for retail sites, a recent Forrester report has suggested that B2B marketers still prefer to invest in traditional marketing channels and that “this fact is hindering B2B marketers from reaching early stage buyers.”

Nonetheless, the same report indicates that marketers and sales reps are starting to shift their focus. By providing a structured self-service process online, companies selling through B2B eCommerce portals have been able to change the direction of their sales and marketing departments.

Alongside seeking out new clients through digital advertising, suppliers are also becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of shifting their current offline client base online. Buyers who have access to a range of channels spend more on average. The fact that repeat purchases can be automated and submitted at any time of the day has been put forward as a leading reason for this. Feature-rich SaaS eCommerce software also provides marketers with the opportunity to design immersive, data-driven customer-centric experiences at a fraction of what it would have cost five or ten years ago.

Marketing teams are also ramping up their digital marketing efforts, now that they have an online destination where they can immediately convert promotions into sales.

4. The ability to integrate is becoming increasingly important

When asked about their top priorities, 60% of B2B executives included backend integration in their answer. Suppliers are seeking to integrate their B2B eCommerce software with a range of backend systems like ERP and accounting software, and B2B eCommerce SaaS vendors are offering off-the-shelf integrations with some accounting systems, as well as custom integrations for more complex ERPs. Seamless cross-communication between systems is becoming more the norm.

SaaS spending will account for 66% of B2B eCommerce spending by 2019, compared with resources expended on in-house systems. The ease and efficiency with which companies of all shapes and sizes can transition to a SaaS solution has made them very attractive and has been a significant force in lowering overall barriers to entry.

Do you have any questions or thoughts about the shifts we’ve outlined? Let us know in the comments below!

Author: Heidi Bullock

A little over two weeks after marketers gathered at the Marketing Nation Summit in Las Vegas, a new group of savvy marketers converged in Nashville, Tennessee for three days of informative sessions, networking, and, let’s be honest, great music.

As you might expect, SiriusDecisions did not disappoint. The event was packed full with new frameworks—this year, there were 30+ new models—that covered product marketing, sales, content measurement, and just about everything else you can think of. Yet, what I found to be most interesting were the key themes discussed among the great marketers that attended.

If you weren’t able to make it out to Tennessee, it’s OK. Here’s a recap of some of the most talked about topics and key takeaways:

Marketing Automation—It’s the Heart of the Technology Ecosystem

No surprise here, there were quite a few takeaways about marketing automation as it continues to evolve over time:

• Beyond Demand Generation: If you read Charm Bianchini’s blog about the marketing automation predictions that came out of SiriusDecisions, you’re already familiar with the way that marketers will leverage marketing automation in the future. Marketing automation will enable marketers to extend beyond classic demand models—applying it for ABM, channel marketing, and more. Some companies have already started doing this. For example, on my team at Marketo, we use the Marketo Marketing Automation Platform not only for acquisition marketing, but also for retention, cross-sell, and advocacy marketing.
• Personalization Is Critical: Another key takeaway was about personalization, which speakers and marketers alike recognized as a key component to effective marketers ,while also recognizing that marketers still struggle keeping up with ‘Amazon-like’ expectations. The answer? Just get started. You don’t need to be Amazon in a day; in fact, web personalization is a great place to start if this is a new area for you.

• Marketing Clouds: One point that struck a chord with me was that companies need to create their own ‘clouds,’ with marketing automation as the engagement system of record. It is interesting to think how marketing automation can evolve to be the system of record for your customer and also be used across the organization to truly understand and monitor buyer activity.
• Data Science Impact: When the audience was polled, data science stood out as the one factor that marketers believe will affect their organization the most (48.3%), specifically in the following categories: the volume of data, having repeatable/scalable processes for data projects like reporting, identifying hand-off points with cross-departmental teams, and lastly ensuring your organization has the right people in place for these evolving roles.

Account-Based Marketing—One Size Doesn’t Fit All

There was a lot of discussion around account-based marketing (ABM) as a powerful marketing strategy that companies should evaluate. While ABM is definitely not a new approach, the key takeaway and discussion revolved around how the technology to support an ABM strategy is really progressing and how that makes target account marketing more scalable and measurable. Technology that helps marketing and sales align, simply and in an integrated way, is ideal.

Predictive Technologies—It’s the Future

Predictive was definitely popular at SiriusDecisions this year, and yet all the conversation about it highlighted to me that it still means different things to different people. Predictive analytics is being applied to lead scoring, account targeting, personas, tactics, and content matching. What predictive is and how it is being used to help marketers be more effective and efficient is very exciting and definitely an area to watch.

It’s important to understand what the different companies in the space have to offer. For marketers who are already using a complete marketing automation platform that sits at the center of their marketing technology stack, like Marketo, these capabilities—whether through an partner integration or a native feature—will change how marketers listen and respond personally, in real-time. Companies to check out include Everstring, SixSense, Lattice Engines, Infer, and Mintigo. Additionally, Marketo currently offers a web personalization app that delivers personalized content to your visitors across your website, and we introduced predictive content for email as part of our product roadmap at the Marketing Nation Summit in May.

MarTech Stack—Keep Calm and Be Thoughtful and Clear on Your Goals

There still seems to be plenty of opportunity within MarTech for improvement. Right now, companies are approaching it piece by piece. But, it is becoming increasingly important to have connected stacks not separated by marketing, sales, and support and ‘insert hot new tech term here’ silos. I think marketers need more advice and guidance on how to think about this growing challenge. Here is one model we’ve developed to provide a simplified and practical way to think about it:

Buyer’s Journey

The thinking about the buyer’s journey has evolved, but the big theme at this year’s conference was about understanding your buyer throughout the organization—not just in marketing.

Buyers have more information and access than ever before and marketers that can be personal, relevant, and leverage multiple channels will win. More specifically:

• Behavior, conversion, and engagement data will be used to determine next steps.
• The key is to understand personas and leverage technology to offer 1:1 relationships that scale and indicate the optimal pathway to pursue.

Your Marketing Org.—It’s the Glue

Lastly, the critical piece to connecting the strategy (and internal processes) with the technology and data is the most important: the people and the MINDSET of the people. Having the right organizational structure and skills, and a growth mindset are essential for marketing teams to be successful in an environment where the only given constant is change.

Did you have any other key takeaways from SiriusDecisions? If you couldn’t make it, which takeaway resonated with you and how you see the future of marketing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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In the past, sending an email was like putting a message in a bottle and setting it adrift in the vastness of the ocean, never knowing if anyone would find or read it. Clicking that ‘Send’ button was the end of the line, the only thing left to do was to wait and wait and wait.

This is no longer the case. Email tracking software gives your email the superpower of gathering actionable intelligence. Every interaction is traced, tracked and communicated back to the sender.

Email marketing is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Research shows that 82% of B2C and B2B companies use some kind of email marketing technology. In fact, 95% of companies with an automated marketing strategy, have integrated email marketing into their approach. Most of these companies see a 50% increase in conversion rates when they implement an email marketing program.

Though there are plenty of email tracking tools out there, we review the top 5 to help you find one which suits your needs.

Here they are in no particular order:

1. Bananatag

Bananatag is a popular tool and is widely used among the top players of the industry. It has a high rating (4/5) on the Google Chrome Web Store. All metrics are displayed in attractive dashboards which allow you to quickly understand if your marketing efforts are working or not.

Features

• Separate metric and resources dashboards
• Single-click email tracking (+ automatic tracking of links)
• Sent emails display the sender’s address
• Tracking of detailed email metrics and interactions

2. GetNotify

GetNotify is a no-frills software with a focus on rugged functionality rather than design. The setup is simple and the free plans will suffice for small businesses or bloggers.

Features

• Email tracking
• Tracking hyperlinks in emails
• Tracks reading duration
• Fetches the recipient’s location and IP address
• Fetches the kind of operating system and browser the recipient is using
• Tracking is enabled by adding a ‘getnotify.com’ after the email address

3. Yesware

Yesware is one of the more powerful options out there. Aside from the basic tracking functionality, it also offers a more sales-focused approach to email marketing. It contains an activity feed which compiles data which salespeople can use to quickly make decisions. This tool has a 4.7/5 rating on G2 Crowd and is used by more than 600,000 users.

Features

• Tracks opened emails and links clicked
• Check the platform and device used to read the email
• Create personalized email templates
• Allows usage of hyperlinks and rich text
• Tracks metrics such as: emails open, replies, response rates of individual templates, and link clicks
• Customizable reports and analytics

4. WhoReadMe

WhoReadMe is a completely free tool which offers a simplified approach. It focuses on the most important aspects of email tracking—the basics. It offers no paid options and is rather limited in features.

The tracking functionality has to be manually activated by adding the “whoreadme.com” tag to the recipient’s email address.

Features

• Track email events
• Track recipient location
• Track browser and OS details
• Set an expiration date on content
• Notifications of attachment download

5. ContactMonkey

ContactMonkey is designed to primarily serve the need of a sales team. Since the main purpose of email tracking is to refine the sales process, this software helps you integrate marketing and sales effort. It even allows you to see the likelihood of a prospect opening the email.

Features

• Can be integrated with Gmail, Outlook or Salesforce
• Real-time notifications
• View and manage information about contacts and leads
• Manage opportunities within emails
• View likely outcome before you hit send
• Manage open activities and history
• Log calls, add events and tasks

Conclusion

There are a number of factors you should consider when trying to find the best email tracking software. You will need to check if your email service provider can support that tool, what kind of reporting and analytics are available in the software, the accuracy of the tracking function, availability of email templates, and CRM integration options.

Assess each of your top choices against these factors to make the best decision.

B2B Lead generation is a different animal from general advertising or marketing communications. The biggest difference is that lead generation relies on direct marketing, also known as direct-response marketing communications. Direct marketing comprises a set of marketing tools, approaches, and activities that are targeted, measurable, and driven by return-on-investment (ROI) considerations. But the key difference is that direct marketing’s goal is to motivate an action. The action can be anything from a click, to a phone call, to a store visit—whatever the goal of the B2B marketer is.

Based on prospect information captured and maintained in a database and using a variety of analytical and communications techniques, direct marketing provides the underpinnings of some of today’s most effective marketing approaches. These approaches include e-commerce, data mining, customer relationship management (CRM), and integrated marketing communications. But the major contribution that direct marketing makes to the business marketing equation is generating leads for a sales force, whether a field sales team, inside sales, or an outside sales resource like a distribution channel partner or representative.

The Direct Marketing Association publishes some interesting statistics on the size and value of direct marketing in business markets. Consider these from The DMA 2010 Statistical Fact Book:

1. B2B direct marketing spending in all media channels in 2010 was $74.6 billion.
2. Spending growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014 is expected to be 4.9 percent for B-to-B, compared to only 4 percent for the consumer direct marketing spend.
3. B2B sales driven by direct marketing in 2010 represented $786 billion.
4. Sales growth CAGR in 2009 to 2014 is estimated at 5.4 percent, compared to 4.9 percent in consumer.
5. An estimated 3.9 million people were employed in B2B direct marketing in the U.S. in 2009. This is big business, in every sense of the word.

Sales people are an expensive resource for a company. The job of lead generation is to make them more productive. So, it’s not about a wide reach and a lot of volume. In fact, fewer, better leads trump more, lower quality leads every time.

There are many things that can derail your presentation. Some, like a faulty structure or poor delivery, require an investment of thought and time to change. The following however are surprisingly simple presentation hacks you can make right now to address three common problems occurring in sales presentations which can distract your audience and significantly reduce your chance of success.

3 Surprisingly Simple Presentation Hacks:

Presentation Hack #1

Check out the picture above. The presenter is smiling, facing the audience, appears to be engaged. But you probably also observed that he is standing in the projector light. Now you may be thinking, “big deal,”but here’s the thing: whatever critical point the presenter may be making, most of the audience will miss as their attention is focused on the slide elements running across the presenter’s shirt, arm, and face. Don’t’ blame the audience as they can’t help it: There is an area of the brain called the Limbic System which is drawn to distractions like this. As a presenter, you could certainly try to remember to avoid the projector light, but the reality is that you have many things to pay attention to when presenting and this is probably not the top thing on your mind. So here’s hack #1:

Hack #1: Always carry duct tape

Get to your space early (if you can), turn the projector on and walk the stage, noting where the light starts to hit you on each side. Pull out your duct tape and take a small piece and mark the edges of the light on the floor. This serves as a quick visual reminder to avoid standing in this area. Don’t worry if you have to cross it, just do so quickly and near the projector to limit distractions.

Tip: Can’t get in early? Use a pointer or stay to the side of the screen.

Presentation Hack #2

Asking your audience a question and being greeted with nothing but silence or blank stares is every presenter’s nightmare. Not only does it feel awful, but interaction is key to the success of your presentation. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get audiences who are used to passively watching a presentation – especially a web presentation – to get involved. What can you do?

Hack #2: Get a plant

No, not that kind of a plant. Identify someone in your audience before your presentation (could be a sponsor or an early bird) and enlist their help. Tell them the question or activity you have planned and ask them to jump in and provide the first response. Most people are glad to help and often all it takes is one person to break the ice to encourage others to participate.

Presentation Hack #3

Here’s a situation you may be familiar with: The invite to your web presentation said 9:00, now it’s 9:02 and everyone’s arrived – with the exception of the key decision-maker. So do you make everyone else wait and engage in awkward small talk until he joins, or do you go ahead and start, risking the decision-maker misses a key point or set up? No pressure, but how you handle this will affect the first impression your audience forms of you (read how those first few seconds can influence the outcome of your presentation.) How can you avoid frustrating on-time audience members without penalizing latecomers by missing your opening?

Hack #3: Make a false start

Save your “hard opening” for when the decision-maker arrives, but have a false opening that leads your audience into the topic, and gets them engaged without revealing your big “hook.” A prepared poll or a story is a great way to do this — just make sure that it ultimately ties into your topic, but is not mandatory to someone’s understanding of your key message. The second opening is your real opening, reserved for when everyone is in attendance. This way you can start both on-timers and latecomers on the same page.

Bonus Hack #3.5:

The decision maker can’t make it? Record the presentation so you can send it to him or her as a follow-up.

When you don’t have a ton of time, these surprisingly simple presentation hacks can make a profound difference.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr: Jesper Rønn-Jensen : Lukew presenting

When you’re struggling to hit your sales target, what are some of the things you start scrambling to do to try and get a deal through the door?

If you’re like most salespeople, you might try emailing leads that have gone dark, sending follow-up emails to opportunities in the pipeline, or reaching out to ask customers to make a referral. In desperation, you may even consider purchasing a list and email blasting it in search of that one golden nugget.

Before you do that (and please don't), let’s take a step back for a second and think about the techniques you’re using to sell.

My guess is that email is a primary driver of the majority of your communications, right? Did you know that more than 78% of emails are completely ignored? Imagine how many deals you lose, or never get off the ground, because your prospect never actually opened your email. Now imagine how much money you could’ve made if your emails had an 80% response rate. Do I have your interest now?

We know how difficult and stressful it can be to hit quota if your leads aren’t interested enough to even open your email. However, we also know a few highly successful companies that have figured out their own formulas to writing sales emails that get huge results, and we’ve compiled 21 of them for you to use in your own sales process.

Here are three examples:

1) Reviving a Dead Lead

Mack McGee, VP of a marketing agency, was able to effectively follow up with a big ecommerce lead that went dark for nine months. Using email tracking, he was able to see his lead had reopened his email which had included his pricing pitch. The email he used to follow up with this contact resulted in closing a $100,000 deal.

2) Getting a Prospect to Ask You For a Meeting

Caroline Ostrander, a business development rep at HubSpot, sent a well-crafted email that impressed her prospect so much he asked her for a meeting to get more information.

3) Increase Conversions by 1,100%

Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Holmes International, a multi-million dollar consulting company was wondering why people didn’t convert after viewing a bottom-of-the-funnel webinar. So she sent one email that resulted in more sales than all her other webinars put together, seeing a 1,100% increase in conversions.

Whether you’re prospecting, following up, closing deals, or breaking up with a prospect, we’ve got a proven email that you can use to improve sales and grow your revenue. Stop wasting your time writing and sending emails that get ignored and start selling to people who want to buy from you.

Get our 21 proven email templates and start using them today to create more opportunities and grow your revenue.

Content marketing is easy, except when it isn’t. Here are content marketing mistakes to avoid.

For any business content marketing is vital to building not only a profitable business but a good reputation against your competitors. Unfortunately for many businesses, content marketing isn’t a strong point, leaving businesses with a content strategy that isn’t up to the standards necessary to ensure their online reputation stays intact.

Marketing content to your audience is more intricate than just writing about any random thing associated with your business. Instead it takes careful planning and some strategic thinking. When not planned correctly your business may fall into the path of making easy to fix. So how do you know if you’re making these mistakes? The following is a guide on some of the content marketing mistakes that many businesses make but don’t know it.

Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Creating Content Without A Purpose

All content in your content marketing strategy should serve a specific purpose. Whether it’s subscriptions, sales, conversions or gaining leads, all content should have a purpose for creating it. Ask the question “Why does this piece of content exist?” before wasting time creating it. Ask yourself “What is the inended outcome of this content?”.

The idea of creating content to build your brand reputation is to provide your target audience with something valuable, insightful, and most of all useful. In giving your audience something worth reading it not only helps them to determine you’re a strong player in your industry, but it also gives your business a good reputation.

The purpose of most content marketing strategies is to generate leads back to your website in order to gain conversions. Most content created will have a call to action at the bottom to direct potential customers to visit your website or buy a product. Have you incorporated your call to action?

Not Making An Effort When Creating Content

While content marketing may encompass different areas, one key area that shouldn’t be ignored is taking the time to develop great content that solves a problem for your target audience. Many businesses make the mistake of generating ordinary, boring, or non-useful information that doesn’t help their target audience. This doesn’t help your chances of improving your brand’s reputation. In fact it could make things worse. When someone visits less than wonderful content the click away from it and click on something else in search results. This is called a “bounce” and signals to Google to move your search result lower.

Instead you need to start by working out which content sales funnel you’re looking to target. Here are some examples of sales funnels and the messages associated with each of them:

Low Funnel

• What do I need to make a website?
• How to setup a website?

Mid Funnel

• Creating a website for your business
• Best ways to create a website

Top Funnel:

• How to make a website?
• How to create a website?

Those in the low funnel are only browsing and haven’t completely made up their mind on what they really want to do. Although many people target this area of the sales funnel, it does tend to be more generic information. There is a higher probability that the prospect will choose a company other than yours for the final decision – but not all is lost.

If you take the time, focus on the top funnel you have a better chance of really pushing your reputation as an industry leader. These more generic searches place your company in the running from the very beginning so long as they are still there for later searches – the “buy now” related searches people engage in during th end of the decision making process.

Make sure when creating the content, you answer the question that is posed in full detail. If someone wants to know how to create a website, you need to tell them all the details and exactly what they need to do. You don’t want them to “bounce” and go to another site to get the rest of the info they look for.

This will show them you know what you’re talking about and you’ve taken the time to help answer their questions. The end result in creating great content is to:

• Increase the number of clicks
• Increase your audience base
• Gain brand and social recognition
• Encourage reader engagement (sharing, comments etc).

You also need to take the time to:

• Format it correctly
• Make the content interesting and easy to read
• Add high quality images that add additional clarification to the message
• Remove any grammatical errors
• Add a call to action
• Write about a topic that’s right for your target audience.
• Include relevant keywords for search engine optimisation

Not Trying All Content Types

Successful content marketing strategies make use of all content avenues available to them. Many businesses tend to only write a blog or two and hope for the best. Instead you need to test the waters with some other areas of content, instead of just blogs. These other types of content include:

• Infographics
• Articles
• Emails
• Calendars
• Videos
• Case studies
• Website content

All these areas of content can help to improve your reputation and give your business a chance to market to a wider audience that’s interested in your industry. Only using one content outlet such as blogging will only push your business so far, so try to design your marketing strategy with more content outlets.

Not Measuring Content Performance

Your content marketing strategy won’t be successful if you done measure the performance of the content. You can measure your content’s performance through a number of ways which include:

• Customer Engagement – Are your customers engaging and commenting on the content?
• Business Revenue – Is your business making a profit from the content, if that’s what it was designed to do?
• Quality Leads – Are you generating quality leads within the first few weeks of posting the content?

While there’s no right or wrong answer, other metrics to consider include:

• Linking domains
• Social shares
• Website traffic
• Downloads and/or registrations

Google analytics can also measure and provide performance results to give more accurate data. See the images below:

Overall

When creating a content marketing strategy for your business the best way to avoid some of these common mistakes is to work out who your audience is (called Personas), what they want, and how you can give it to them through words. Creating any old content marketing strategy is easy, creating a powerful and success content marketing strategy on the other hand takes time, effort, and research. So were you making any of these mistakes?

While visitor session recordings and heatmaps are great at telling you how many visitors visited your website, how long they took, and where specifically they visited, they sadly cannot tell you why they left.

There are many reasons why people leave your website. For example, you overwhelm them with advertisements. Online advertisements have always been a tricky business.

In a study to understand the level of trust that online users had to advertisements, the Nielsen company revealed that people trust traditional forms of advertising such as TV commercials and newspaper ads more than they trust online banner ads.

The image below shows us a clear breakdown of the findings.

Source: Hubspot

What this study showed is that online banner ads develop distrust with your site’s visitors. So, how do you figure out which types of ads your audience actually wants to see? How can you find out why they leave your website? The usual answer is market research, but that’s a tricky topic.

Different avenues such as email surveys have been used but their use is getting complicated especially after the establishment of new email laws and technologies in North America. In Canada particularly, there is the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) whose anti-spam regulations affect email surveys.

Fortunately, there’s a better tool. We can use website exit surveys to know the exact and specific reasons why people are leaving your website.

Here is what we’ll discuss in this post:

1. What are exit surveys?
2. How to use exit surveys to improve lead generation
3. How To design your exit survey
4. Sample exit survey tool

Let’s get started…

What are exit surveys?

While there are many reasons why people leave a website, exit surveys eliminate the need to rely on speculation and comparisons, instead offering first-hand, business-specific information. Exit surveys are a type of intercept survey that asks people leaving your site why they are leaving.

Usually, most businesses like displaying this survey as a pop-up window as illustrated below.

Source: Getsitecontrol

While these surveys can be your gateway to understanding what your clients need as well as generating leads, it is important to know many of your visitors will not respond to your survey. But this is okay.

As Ted S, a community user at Sitepoint puts it, exit surveys are about getting sample traffic to make judgements.

Here is what he says:

Source: Sitepoint

How to use exit surveys to improve lead generation

The biggest challenge for B2B marketers is generating high-quality leads, as shown in the image below.

Source: Slideshare

To improve their leads, 78% of these businesses turn to email marketing, 73% to event marketing and 67% to content marketing. Frustratingly, marketers still struggle when it comes to the effectiveness of content marketing in their business.

To add to this, lead generation efforts are stifled by lack of resources, with 46% citing lack of time, staff and budget. The image below shows us this and more of greatest barriers to lead generation.

Source: Slideshare

 

While these avenues for lead generation are popular and most common, we should not rule out the power of exit surveys in generating quality leads.

After all, 59% of companies aim to improve the quality of their generated leads and 49% want to increase the number of their generated leads.

Source: Capterra

Now that you understand the struggles of lead generation and agree that improving them should be a priority, let’s see how you can use exit surveys to improve the quantity and quality of your leads.

1. Use problems your visitors might be facing as bait

Sometimes, people perceive exit surveys as a nuisance. Take for example what Alex Dawson, a Sitepoint user says about exit surveys.

Source: Sitepoint

He strongly advises against usage of exit surveys. But, see this:

Alex says that these surveys interrupt a user. While he could be right, I say that this is your chance to go for the kill.

How?

To capture a response from someone that isn’t predisposed to answering surveys, you need to ask questions they’re willing to answer. And what better way to do this than use problems you think could be affecting them?

Marketizator understood this point and wittily used its exit survey to generate more leads. The business asked 4 key questions that indirectly made the respondent feel that the business was concerned.

The screenshot below shows us the 4 targeted questions.

Source: Marketizator

As you can see, these questions were aimed at getting the site visitor to talk about his or her problem and business satisfaction levels. After these 4 questions, the person surveyed was prepped enough to continue with further questions.

This is where Marketizator cashed in on. Question 5 asked the respondents to state how much they were willing to spend to increase their conversion rate. If you are keen enough, you will notice that the questions were a build up to number 5, but the business did not bombard its visitors with the core question. They softened them up first.

The result was that Marketizator was able to get 5.7% lead rate out of the visitors who were leaving the site, as illustrated below:

Source: Marketizator

2. Use Branch Logic

On average, 10 to 15 percent of lost visitors can be “saved” with exit intent technology. One of the ways of doing this and generating leads is by using branch logic in your exit surveys.

Branch logic is useful when you need to send survey participants down different paths. Usually, participants are redirected based on their answers in the survey.

Let’s see how this is done:

Source: Marketizator

From the above image, you can see that the site visitor was asked why s/he did not complete the order. When the price was cited as the reason, branch logic was used to send the visitor to a page offering 5% discount, specific to the user.

Of course, this would entice the site visitor to buy and fill out the lead generation form as part of the checkout process.

3. Keep the exit survey short

By use of common sense, anyone trying to exit your website has no intentions of staying there longer than they actually want to. Therefore, an exit survey should be designed to be as short as possible.

This means that our survey should collect as much relevant data as possible. If you don’t know how to do this, it is important to learn how to design short but effective survey forms.

How to design your exit survey to increase response rate

Your exit survey design has a significant relationship to your response rate. So, how do you design your exit survey to increase your chances of a high response rate?

• Have an engaging introduction

We have all seen the “why are you leaving” pop-up window. Yes, such a headline would attract my attention but I need to know why you had to stop me.

This is where the engaging introduction comes in handy. Let’s see how Papercut uses an engaging survey introduction.

Source: Cloudfront

From the illustration above, the business informed the site visitor that this was a survey and gave a brief introduction why responding was necessary.

• Be transparent about length

You understand the need to keep your survey short. But, let me ask you. Suppose you had 9 questions spread across 3 pages, how will you ensure that your respondents don’t leave the survey halfway?

I have an answer for you:

Be transparent about length. Tell your respondents that they are on page 2/3 for example, to motivate them to keep filling the form. Otherwise, one could assume that the survey is longer than it actually is, and opt out.

Alternatively, you can use a progress bar:

Let’s see how Network magic was transparent about length in one of their surveys:

Source: Cloudfront

• Offer an Incentive

Dental Art Implant Clinic used an incentive in its exit survey to generate leads. Instead of asking why people were leaving, the business simply offered a free check-up and a better incentive of free panoramic X-ray valued at 75 GBP.

Here is how the business did this:

Source: Maxtraffic

Basically, the business offered a special deal in exchange for an email address and phone contacts.

Let’s see how a different business, Startup Vitamins used incentives to generate leads. In exchange for a newsletter signup, the business offered a discount of $5 for the first purchase.

Source: Maxtraffic

• Use Your brand colour

Did you know that colour increases brand recognition? Better yet, ads in colour are read up to 42% more often than the same ads in black and white. Jon Loomer understood this point, hence created an exit pop-up that used its brand colour as illustrated below:

Source: Amazonaws

 

Sample Exit Survey Tool

We have discussed how to create exit surveys and use them. Well, what you now need to know is that you require a tool that will help you create an optimized survey in terms of design and other features. Truconversion is focused on offering all-in-one web analytics, featuring exit surveys.

You get to decide how many site visitors should have access to the survey, select the types of visitors that can see it, and even decide at what point your exit survey should be displayed. To increase your response rate, the tool also gives you the opportunity to display incentives which you can offer your site visitors.

Final Thoughts

Exit surveys are important when you need to retarget your traffic or get insight on what could be causing people to leave your site. It is imperative that you understand that exit surveys are about the insight you get and the quality of leads you generate.

It is better to have a few quality leads than generate many useless leads. While you do this, remember to design your exit survey in an effective manner, keeping it short, attractive and transparent.

Additionally, select a good survey tool, which will offer all your desired features that will help customize your survey as much as possible.

Have you used an exit survey tool before? How was the experience and what would you improve? Please talk to us in the comments section below.

A new experiment looking at clouds is about to change the way we think about climate change.

For decades, scientists have thought that the tiny particles that form clouds — and play a big role in keeping the planet cool — were produced as a counterintuitive side effect of pollution.

So, while it was understood that we were putting loads of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere and heating things up, it was also thought that at least some of those particles were getting trapped inside clouds and helping to keep that warming from being even more catastrophic.

But a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which looked more closely at these tiny particles, found that they can be produced naturally. This will help us understand just how cloudy the world actually was before we started polluting it, which is key to figuring out the rate at which our planet is heating up.

A cloud conundrum

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes aerosols as the single biggest source of uncertainty in human-driven climate change. Part of the problem is that we have no way of measuring just how cloudy the planet was in the preindustrial era.

Thanks to this uncertainty, and despite our precise measurements of the effects of human-induced greenhouse warming on climate, the estimates for projected climate change have entertained a wide range of numbers for projected warming, and these numbers haven't changed for the past 35 years.

The models predict that if carbon dioxide doubles over the next century, then the planet will warm anywhere from 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit — a critical difference that should inform the way we prepare for the future.

So, what's the deal with aerosols? Turns out that there are two sources of the particles:

1. Direct aerosol particles: produced by dust, sea-salt spray, or the burning of biomass
2. Secondary aerosol particles: formed when gas is converted into a particle — these are the type the scientists of the new study are interested in

Unlike what happens with direct aerosol particles, gas to particle conversion occurs everywhere. As a result, more than half of all the cloud seeds in the atmosphere are secondary aerosol particles!

This is where it gets tricky. Up until now, scientists believed that sulfuric acid, which is mainly produced from fossil-fuel emissions — cars, factories, etc. — were necessary for the formation of secondary aerosols. But in this new study, a group of scientists shows that Earth can actually produce these particles without any help from humans.

Instead, it gets made from a mix of tree vapors and highly energetic particles that bombard our atmosphere from outer space called cosmic rays.

We found that nature produces particles without pollution. That is going to require a rethink of how human activities have increased aerosols in clouds.

"We found that nature produces particles without pollution," Jasper Kirkby, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) particle physicist and the originator and spokesman of the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment, told Business Insider. "That is going to require a rethink of how human activities have increased aerosols in clouds."

To estimate how much the planet is going to warm up, scientists look at how much hotter it gets as carbon dioxide increases. And abundant clouds in the preindustrial era — something the new study hints at — would mean less warming.

Taking this into account, current estimates about Earth's projected warming in the 21st century could be sharpened, and even slightly reduced.

Heads in the clouds

The cloud chamber where scientists perform their measurements for the CLOUD experiment at CERN is an unassuming 3-meter-wide stainless-steel chamber. But inside this chamber, scientists use vapors to recreate parcels of Earth's atmosphere, injecting ultraviolet rays into the top of the chamber to simulate sunlight.

The chamber is actually the cleanest cloud chamber in the world, which is important because the experiment requires the sensitivity to detect the very poorly established vapors responsible for aerosol-particle formation, which exist at about one in a trillion molecules.

"No one has done this before except at CLOUD. We put a lot of CERN know-how and expertise and care into building this chamber. To build a large chamber and keep contaminants below one in a trillion molecules is right at the limit of technology," Kirkby said.

The scientists directed a beam of artificial cosmic rays from a CERN particle accelerator at the chamber to study the effects of cosmic ray ions on the rate of formation of aerosol particles. They found that aerosol particles form as much as 10 to 100 times more abundantly if an ion from a cosmic ray is in the center of the cluster to help stabilize it.

"Since time immemorial nature has had a perfectly good way of making cloud seeds throughout atmosphere by this gas to particle conversion, and that's new," Kirkby said. "Previous knowledge was that you required sulfuric acid — and that sulfuric acid is dominated by human activities."

What this means

One consequence of this study is that scientists will be able to sharpen their estimates about future warming in the 21st century. It will also slightly reduce these estimates, bringing the central value down a little, Kirkby said.

A second consequence of this study is that observations of solar climate variability in the preindustrial climate might be explained by the influence of galactic cosmic rays, which might be a natural source of climate change, since the flux of particles raining down on the atmosphere varies with solar activity.

If this is the case, Kirkby said, then Earth has exquisite records of these cosmic rays going back hundreds of thousands of years because of trace radioisotopes they leave in ice cores. Although the effect of these cosmic rays is likely very small today because of the effect of pollution, in the preindustrial era they could have played a key role.

"Human impact is not going to go away," Kirkby said. "Temperature will still go up and warming will still occur. But now that we've got this important result, that is going to pin down the pre industrial atmosphere, it's going to sharpen our results and shrink the range of predictions."

SEE ALSO: A stunning glacier in Iceland shows exactly how much the climate has changed

DON'T MISS: Happy Earth Day! Here are 29 images that show how we're drastically reshaping the planet

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This mystifying cloud is made of birds

Ask your friends who they trust and they’ll say family or friends. The human disposition is to trust our inner circles, and this has enabled mobile referral marketing to become a popular brand strategy in recent years.

Creating any successful marketing campaign requires an in-depth understanding of your customers. With mobile referral marketing you also need a strategy behind creating your rewards, encouraging referral invites and onboarding newly referred users.

In today’s guide we’ll highlight examples from Busbud, Tile, Sprig, Airbnb and Uber to show you the strategy behind creating a successful mobile referral experience.

4 Key Factors That Make a Mobile Referral Marketing Program Successful

Product Fit

Your company needs to have a level of product-market fit established before your customers will want to refer your product. For a referral program to influence your bottom line, your product must provide sufficient value so that customers naturally want to share it with their network. Product-market fit is the foundation of where a successful referral program can be built, but this doesn’t necessarily guarantee mobile referral marketing success – you need to constantly find new ways to tell your happy customers about the program.

Segmentation

If you’re going to get viral-quality reward shares on mobile devices, you’ll need properly segmented lists of users. Segmenting your best customers will help you market to similar customers and build more durable networks in which to market your referral program. For example, customers with the highest lifetime value will know others who will find your product useful. These customers have discovered the core value of your product and can relay the message to the right audience.

Targeting should include:

• Customers with highest lifetime value
• Influencers with large social followings
• Highly engaged customers

If you’re concerned with handling the growth from your referral program, stay away from offering referral campaigns to those with high ticket volumes. The needy tend to hang out with the needy. Long term, this is by no means bad, but you need to also prioritize premium customer service throughout the lifetime of your campaigns.

Happy, Good Customers

Only happy customers will refer your product, so previously high levels of customer service, positive user experience, and overall brand satisfaction are essential before considering referral programs.

The law of social proof, or informal social influence, is the spirit of your referral program. A Nielsen study found that word of mouth is the most trusted form of advertising; it’s also increasingly trusted, dwarfing other forms by a long shot.

A German banking case study by Harvard Business Review also found that “customers obtained through referrals are both more loyal and valuable than other customers.” With the cost of acquiring customers typically high, referrals cut costs associated with finding new customers while simultaneously returning customers with high lifetime value. Both those referring and referred are shown to spend more and be more loyal brand ambassadors.

Mobile referral marketing is not affiliate marketing. Affiliate programs do not discriminate upon the quality of the motivation for referees: these programs are happy to have anyone advocate to anyone for the brand. Referral programs are more personal, hinging on happy customers wanting to share your product or service with their friends because it will make their lives better.

The principle of altruism makes referral sharing a deeply satisfying way to connect with others – as opposed to a way to simply create profit for oneself.

Double-Sided Rewards

Users aren’t typically out to send invites to friends just so they can incur an upgrade or credit. This idea of individual reciprocal incentive doesn’t work nearly as well the double-sided incentive.

If you want brand ambassadors to readily refer close friends, reward the friend in question – or better yet, include both parties.

When brands leverage the customers’ desire for rewards with their innate desire to assist their networks, the value of equal party incentives becomes readily apparent. The added incentive to help themselves – and to help others equally – motivates them to action today. That’s because it feels better to act on the behalf of others and gives a joy not found in pursuing gains for oneself. Altruism runs referral programs.

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3 Ways to Make the Mobile Referral User Experience Easy

How easy your mobile referral program is to use will be a major factor in its success. With small screens and diminished attentions, brands need to make sharing rewards as easy as possible.

Clear CTA with Value Proposition

When optimizing referral campaigns, look for areas that create friction for customers. Anything that slows down the process, sounds confusing, or requires user input will greatly reduce rates of reproduction and hamper virality efforts.

A viral loop of sharing hinges upon clear value for both parties and an easy invite.

Seamless Integration

Most customers won’t participate if they sign up and have to complete multiple steps before collecting their reward. Prepopulating user information is a great step in helping speed up the login process and keep it simple for customers. Be careful, though: mobile devices are personal. Leave users with the proper amount of agency, allowing them to select their sharing and contacts personally.

Only provide a concise set of options for users: go back, learn more, or invite friends.

Easy to Use

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Also position social buttons centrally and in large format to make them easy for users to click.

Busbud executes their referral page flawlessly. This one-page, one-step referral flow makes choosing a sharing option incredibly easy. The bus ticket app uses a simple design to position its value statement and incentivize sharing.

After Busbud users click the large social CTA buttons, they’re taken to the next (and final) screen where they select who will receive their rewards. Simple, easy, and direct.

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7 Ways to Promote Your Mobile Referral Program

Your customers need to know about your mobile referral program for it to be effective. To decide when to give out rewards, consider points after which an action is taken – a juncture that allows users to promote a value they may have just enjoyed themselves. The goal is to make sharing rewards an organic, seamless extension of the present action that improves the quality of the process.

Opportunities include:

• Points of sale
• Blog signup
• Trial signup
• User converts to a paid account

These are all actions that signal user interest and make for a threshold where users can refer the product or service to others with enthusiasm.

Offers could include:

• Free shipping for customers that refer a friend with free shipping for the new friend as well
• Discounts or gift card for customers who influence new members to try your products
• Complimentary trial memberships for users that invite others try your product
• Exclusive access to select content or additional content if customers will email a colleague or share

Now, let’s look seven effective ways to place your referral program for easy mobile use.

#1 Main Menu of App

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App users will come across your referral rewards in the menu of their app. Your goal is to make it as easy to see and enticing to click on as possible.

Custom meal plan app Sprig does an excellent job of creating a ‘refer’ button worth clicking. The bright green CTA button pops out of the main menu with a great action word. The resulting action sequence is equally intuitive and rewarding for app users. Bright and engaging buttons detail the intermediary screen while the autofill functioning within makes sharing a piece of cake.

#2 In-App Messaging

A great way to reach actively engaged app users is with in-app messaging. For example, inform users where to find the referral function in the main menu with an unobtrusive discovery message or interstitial message (among many other available ways. In-app messages are a customizable, content-rich tactic for driving many actions – updates, flash sales, referrals – within an app.

Users will appreciate the help in getting more value from the app, as well as any time-sensitive promotional messages or other feature updates you might send. One downside: the user has to be actively using the app to see these messages.

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Uber makes a very appealing reminder to app users after they’ve selected their pickup location. With a great, timely aesthetic (during the holiday season) the ride app makes a strong case for immediate rewards with very available share icons. These two screenshots are an example of Uber’s A/B testing of their copy and design for increased effectiveness; something that should not be overlooked.

#3 Mobile Email Digests

These abbreviated mobile newsletters are great chances to share feature information, deep links within the app, company news, and goings-on during the past week. There are many ways you can choose to let readers know about your incentives.

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Tile, a locator app, even makes use of their blog to point users toward their mobile referral program. By linking to their website, Tile is able to improve their multi-channel presence with users while positioning readers to learn more about features (and increase overall value).

#4 Push Notifications

Push notifications reach mobile app users on the home screen of their phone – not within the app itself. That said, the customer must have opted in to allow push notifications. Unlike in-app messages, these swipe-away messages are all text. Among the benefits, they are a guaranteed method of direct, quick communication with users outside the app.

Push notifications, being somewhat intrusive, are best kept highly relevant and brief. If you’re sending obnoxiously timed or valueless push notifications, users might opt out or uninstall the app.

#5 Invoice Reminders and Receipts

Invoice messaging, given its highly personalized nature, receives high email open rates. These also make for great follow-up push notifications.

The pain point surrounding payment can be relieved by including an opportunity to see some extra money or savings on their next bill. Plus, they’re sent out regularly.

#6 Monthly Email Digests

To grow, focus on channels that you already own and have traffic. Your own system notifications, monthly reports, newsletters, and other content-rich forms of correspondence are a great way to insert a rewards incentive.

This Udemy email footer is great at driving awareness for their referral program while not detracting from the main message of the email.

#7 Re-Engagement

Once a customer has made a referral, there’s an opportunity to boost the amount of referrals they’ll make in the future; for example, asking a customer to make another referral after they’ve earned their first reward. If this is an app user, an in-app message or push notification is a great choice to affirm engagement and promote immediate reward redemption. Triggered emails will likewise increase the virality and share rate of your program.

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Takeaways

Your mobile referral marketing strategy needs to use compelling copy and CTAs to target a segmented list of customers. Once you’ve established your reward structure that will grab the attention of your customers your strategy should take advantage of owned marketing channels. This can include push notifications, in-app messaging, email digests, invoice messaging, and more. Finding organic and authentic ways to reach your customers with your referral program is key, as referrals should feel like spontaneous and altruistic actions.

Deb Calvert has been called “The Queen of Questions” thanks to her 20+ years of field research with buyers and sellers. Her findings demonstrate how asking questions in selling can differentiate you and can also advance the sale to a faster close.

Calvert’s research became the bestseller DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected. It’s available in two versions — one for all selling professionals and a special edition for advertising sales professionals. Recommended by leading experts, a finalist for Best Sales & Marketing Book of 2013, and now an award-winner and top sellers for over two years, DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected has taken the sales world by storm.

According to research with buyers, the way you are asking questions in selling truly does make a difference. In before-and-after comparisons, buyers rated sellers who used DISCOVER Questions® significantly higher than those who did not. Numerous buyers went so far as to say that those who were asking questions in selling that were varied in these eight ways were “the one seller I’d clear my calendar for.”

CONNECT! Radio host and author Deb Calvert describes the eight purposes for asking questions and the research behind this powerful approach in this classic from our vault. Listeners will learn at least five new ways for asking questions in selling and how to connect with buyers by using these purposeful questions.

In this broadcast, Calvert also shared examples of questions asked by actual sellers. Each example includes a breakdown of what happens when sellers are asking questions in selling this way — complete with how the buyer responded, what the purpose of the question was and what it yielded, and how the sale advanced when DISCOVER Questions® were used throughout the sales process.

Deb answered listener questions about How Asking Questions in Selling Differentiates You from the Competition. Here’s an excerpt:

Deb: “How were these questions developed? I’ve been in sales going on 30 years, but actually even longer than that because I was selling when I was seven years old …I just always enjoyed selling. But I learned over time that — especially when I become a professional — that in selling, asking people one or two questions at the beginning of a relationship can give you a little bit of connection, a little bit of intimacy, an openness, and an opportunity with the buyer. And it’s not a manipulative opportunity, it’s a genuine opportunity because it opens up an avenue for you to truly meets someone else’s needs. So I’ve always been a user and a fan of questions.”

 Tune in to find out more on DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected and How You Can Close Mre Sales by Asking Questions in Selling

You can become the ONE seller that buyers actually WANT to talk to. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals. And once you’ve listened to this introduction, don’t forget to get your copy of this classic guide to improve how you are asking questions in selling.

The post How Asking Questions in Selling Differentiates You appeared first on People First.

Millennials make up an increasingly significant piece of the global spending pie. A study from the Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research estimated that Millennials born between 1980 and 2000 possessed a spending power of $2.45 trillion worldwide in 2015.^[1] As the younger portion of the generation begins to control more money and become more financially independent, that number is expected to rise, and businesses want to be there when it does.

The changing face of interactions

A fluid technological landscape has changed the way we shop, the way we bank, the way we interact with businesses. It isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to Millennials, but Millennials are the ones embracing this new age at a higher and faster rate.

It comes as no surprise that mobile is direction retailers need to go to reach Millennials. With 89 percent of Millennial shoppers connecting to the Internet from their smartphones^[2], it’s the fastest and easiest way merchants can get their foot in the figurative door in a world filled with distractions.

Social media also plays a serious role in the changing tide of consumer spending among young adults. Traditional marketing is losing out to social media as the place Millennials are learning about new products or services. Facebook leads the way for those looking to find out more about and connect with a company, but Twitter and Pinterest, among others, are also major factors.^[3] In fact, 55 percent of respondents to a Blackhawk Engagement Solutions survey reported that social media is their “go-to” source for shopping news and information. Television, the study shows, ranked sixth.^[4]

But beyond simply shopping around, the Dartmouth report stated that another main reason Millennials “Like” or “Follow” a particular brand or retailer or product is to show support.

Social media has the ability to evoke an emotional response from users in ways other forms of media and marketing cannot. Television or print advertising can never make someone feel as connected to a brand as social media can. After all, here are thousands of other people who feel the same way I do, bound by our love of Brand A … united we stand!

What’s nice for companies is that this kind of loyalty can convert to sales rather easily.

Tapping into tech

It’s not just one and done if Millennials like a brand. An Edelman study showed that 80 percent of these young Americans say they “keep coming back”^[5] to show their loyalty. But they’re not opposed to a perk here and there, and they’re quick to sign up for a loyalty program.

More than 75 percent of Millennials participate in some form of loyalty or rewards program.^[6] Some of the key reasons for joining include members-only sales and events, charitable contributions and coupons.^[7] Loyalty programs have shown to deepen the connection between customer and company, with 68 percent of Millennials saying they change when and where they buy something to maximize their benefits.^[8]

But this number comes with a caveat. Truth is, Millennials can also be a little finicky. Loyalty programs can compel them to reveal some personal information for a more targeted marketing approach^[9], but 49 percent have terminated their participation after they felt like they were receiving communications not relevant to them.^[10]

Keeping up with the technology is also a key aspect for companies to keep in mind with regard to their loyalty programs. As mentioned earlier, Millennials want to be able to do just about everything on their smartphones, and they certainly don’t want to keep attaching mini cards to their key chains. A loyalty program that has a smartphone app makes a measurable difference in retention. And, if that app also allows for mobile payments, that’s an added bonus with a sizeable gap between Millennials and Baby Boomers. A COLLOQUY survey revealed that 42 percent of Millennials are willing to continue participation simply because of a mobile payment option, while just 15 percent of Baby Boomers said the same thing.^[11]

Thad Peterson, Senior Analyst at Aite Group, says, “Millennials may well represent a ‘perfect storm’ for loyalty programs:

• Their extensive interactions on social media provide opportunities for relationships and communications that cannot be replicated through any other channel
• They share preferences and activity with others, broadening the potential reach of a merchant
• And, they’re maturing into productive adulthood where spending increases dramatically

To capture this segment, mobility has to be used to create frictionless interactions. While a great opportunity, this generation has little patience for complexity in loyalty and offer delivery.”

Conclusion

It all comes down to reaching Millennials on their terms and being able to deliver. Social commerce has taken center stage, and interacting with Millennials on a more personal level and providing incentives to engage is critical for companies to develop and nurture customers for long-term loyalty. However, it’s one thing to offer mobile apps, mobile payment options and personalized communications, but if merchants can’t protect a user’s information and sensitive financial data, that will spell trouble for loyalty much faster than a seemingly irrelevant marketing email.

Merchants can’t expect loyalty to be generated with a single interaction. It’s a collection of experiences and events and even partner systems that ensure Millennials are getting exactly what they want. Put all the pieces together and merchants can create strong, grassroots advocates that will help the brand for many years to come.

“The key for merchants or banks is to focus more on solutions that are less invasive to the consumer, but still keep security a priority,” Verifi Senior Vice President of Business Development Rick Lynch said. “It’s about providing a faster, lower-cost result, and a better experience for all parties in the supply chain (consumer, merchant, member bank).”

For a closer look at how Millennials are shaping the way transactions are completed, the “Do you have what the $200 billion Millennial consumer base wants?” white paper from Verifi, Inc. has more helpful information.

^[1] http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/socialmediaresearch/socialcommerce/

^[2] http://www.bhengagement.com/report/infographic-millennials-disrupt-shopping-the-new-world-of-connected-shopping/?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=release&utm_campaign=PR-release-millennial-shopper

^[3] http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/socialmediaresearch/socialcommerce/

^[4] http://www.bhengagement.com/report/infographic-millennials-disrupt-shopping-the-new-world-of-connected-shopping/?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=release&utm_campaign=PR-release-millennial-shopper

^[5] http://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanDigital/8095-white-paper

^[6] http://www.aimia.com/content/aimiawebsite/global/en/media-center/news-releases/viewer.html/en/how-generation-y-will-reshape-customer-loyalty

^[7] https://colloquy.com/latest-news/tough-lesson-from-our-new-research-report/

^[8] http://info.bondbrandloyalty.com/the-2014-loyalty-report-us

^[9] http://www.aimia.com/content/aimiawebsite/global/en/media-center/news-releases/viewer.html/en/how-generation-y-will-reshape-customer-loyalty

^[10] https://colloquy.com/latest-news/tough-lesson-from-our-new-research-report/

^[11] https://colloquy.com/latest-news/tough-lesson-from-our-new-research-report/

B2B content marketers who create and follow through with a plan are more successful than those who wing it. Here’s how to avoid common planning mistakes that can derail your content marketing success …

We’ve all heard the saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.

With content marketing now mainstream (88% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing), most brands have jumped on board with generating more content in the hopes of boosting brand awareness, engaging a larger audience, and standing out from their competitors.

But only 30% of B2B marketers think their content marketing is effective. This is because they’re going in without a plan.

To win at content marketing, you need both a strategy and a plan to implement that strategy.

Doing content marketing without a plan is like driving to a new destination without your GPS. You’ll likely make wrong turns and get lost along the way.

Are You Making These 10 Content Planning Mistakes?

Regardless of where you are in your planning process, if you know what to look out for, you can easily avoid these ten common planning mistakes.

1. Not setting goals for your content

Ninety-three percent of the most effective B2B content marketers cite lead generation as a goal. When you set goals, you can structure your strategy around what matters.

Measuring your goals is equally important. Looking at metrics will help you track your growth and success en route to your target.

According to the B2B Content Marketing 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, the most important goals and metrics for B2B content marketing:

Goals:

• Lead generation (85%)
• Sales (84%)
• Lead nurturing (78%)
• Brand awareness (77%)
• Engagement (76%)

Metrics:

• Sales lead quality (87%)
• Sales (84%)
• Higher conversion rates (82%)
• Sales lead quantity (71%)
• Website traffic (71%)

2. Not documenting your strategy

Having an idea about where you want your marketing efforts to go and putting that idea into action are two different things. Documenting your strategy can set you apart from your competitors and help you reach your goals. It’s not surprising that sixty percent of B2B marketers with a documented content marketing strategy say they are effective, compared with 32% of those with just a verbal strategy.

Use your goals to create your strategy. Then, break down your strategy into actions with deadlines. Once you create your schedule, stick with it. Having a tangible roadmap will keep you on track towards your goals and successes.

3. Not having the right resources

Having the right resources at your fingertips is critical to your content marketing success.

While many B2B marketers are a “marketing department of one”, you can’t be expected to do it all yourself. It’s hard to find the time to plan, create, and promote your content on top of everything else that you need to do.

You can find it helpful to delegate some of your content creation to a team, especially if you feel overwhelmed. With other contributors, your content will end up fresher and more vibrant. Meanwhile, you’ll be less stressed about finding the time to do everything yourself.

There are a ton of tools to help you source, create, organization and distribute your content – as well as manage and collaborate with your team. Check out the B2B Content Marketers’ Guide to Getting it Done.

4. Not getting other people in the organization involved

Your content marketing goals likely span all areas of your business, so it makes sense that multiple departments should be involved. Collaborating with other departments will make your content more effective and help other areas of the business achieve their goals.

In particular, sales, customer service, and product development can provide insights that will translate into more valuable content.

5. Not repurposing content

Today’s B2B marketers are producing more content than ever. However, many marketers will publish a piece of content once on their website or blog and then fail to do anything else with it. This begs the question, how do we create large volumes of content without sacrificing its quality?

Twenty-nine percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose their content. If you’re not doing the same, you will fail to capitalize on each piece of content and maximize your reach.

It can be tough to keep your feeds full of fresh posts, but there are ways to scale your content.

6. Not using evergreen content

Just like it’s namesake, evergreen content stays fresh for a long period. It can work hard for longer – increasing your traffic, social shares, leads, and search engine rankings. You can also use your best evergreen content a list-building tool to grow your subscribers.

If you want your content to have a longer shelf life, pick a topic that will interest your customers for the next few years. You don’t want to discuss a trend that may become dated in a few months.

7. Not planning content that improves customer experience

Buyers are spending more time looking at content online and less time interacting with sales and customer service reps. Shockingly, Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without interacting with a human.

Use your content as an opportunity to provide customers with a great experience. Be relevant, accessible, and honest.

8. Not telling your customers’ stories

The best way to connect with your audience is by telling your customers’ stories. Savvy B2B buyers don’t like sales pitches. They want to connect with real people – not with faceless brands.

Sharing customer stories is a great way to build these connections. The truth is, the best stories come from your customers, not from your sales or marketing teams.

Share how customers have used your products and what benefits they have achieved. And don’t be afraid to address things that didn’t go well in your case studies. This shows potential customers how you handle and solve problems.

9. Not budgeting enough

Seventy-six percent of marketers are increasing their investment in content marketing, and 51% of B2B marketers indicate that they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. Social Media Examiner’s Industry Report estimated that marketers will increase spending on creating visual assets, including videos, as well as original written content.

Not allocating enough of a budget for your content marketing can be a major roadblock. You can have a stellar strategy and content plan, but without the proper budget, you won’t be able to see it through.

Also, inefficiency in content planning and creation can result in budget blunders and overspends. According to a recent study, mid-to-large B2B companies waste $958 million each year on inefficient and ineffective content.

10. Not answering customer questions

Talking about what you want to talk about, not what your customers want to talk about, is a common B2B marketing mistake. Providing customers with value should be at the heart of your content. Listening to your customers can give you ideas on what they are interested in, so you can create content that resonates with them.

The stronger your content marketing plan, the more successful you will be. Look at your content marketing strategy to determine if you have any gaps that are preventing you from connecting with customers and driving business through your content.