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Have you ever run an email contest? It’s a great way to engage your audience and today’s guest post, Marry McAleavey shares her tips for a successful email giveaway.- Elena

According to email marketing data compiled by Privy, based on the activity of over 5,000 users, “enter-to-win” campaigns actually generate the most conversions — by a lot! Compared to offer email campaigns, enter-to-win generated 300% more conversions. When stacked up next to sign up campaigns, enter-to-win contests were ahead by 1,500%. This is quite a huge difference, and worth sinking your teeth into.

What this data tells us is that the most incentive leads to the most sign ups. So, the more you can give, the more you will receive. This doesn’t mean that you should rule out the other two common email offers.

Here’s why not: For every 100 sign up emails you send out, you’re likely to gain a new conversion. So, if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, you could still gain 100 sign ups. But, when you really want — or need — to see major action, here’s how you can do it.

First, Remember to Never Spam Your Readers, No Matter What

By now, we should all know that spamming and buying email lists is bad practice, but I still like to include this disclaimer: If you’re still not allowing all of your readers opt-in, you’re not going to generate the conversions you like. Consumers are smart; they have ad-blockers on their browsers, spam filters that will get you black-listed, and the brains to know whether or not they asked to be signed up for your list.

So, just use the the subscribe forms offered with your email marketing platform, and you will be golden. You can build your list organically if you don’t already have one.

This Checklist Will Help You Easily Plan Your Email Contest

Planning is an email marketer’s best friend. Many people don’t plan their campaigns very far in advance, but that can lead to failure. One of the first things you need to do is plan and schedule. This gives you the time you need to go back and make edits (the magic always happens during the editing process). Here’s a checklist to get you started.

• Goals of the campaign – you will want to know what the measurable, attainable goals of the campaign are. If you’re looking to gain a certain amount of new subscribers, write it down. If you want previous subscribers to share your contest with their social networks, include that in the plan too.
• Target market; list segmentation, if necessary – Your target market, for an email contest, may or may not be your current subscribers. It may include only a portion of your email list, or your entire customer base. This is an important detail that you need to consider.
• Language used by target market – During your market research, you should be collecting samples of the language used by your consumers. This way, you can duplicate it. Use words and phrases that are familiar to your audience for the highest engagement. For example, a millennial may be more moved by the word “selfie,” where a senior might like “portrait of yourself.” Include word-use in your strategy.
• Number of contest winners – Will there be several winners, or only one? Will there be a tier with a grand prize and several smaller gifts? Decide what your approach will be.
• How long the contest will run – If you don’t set a calendar for your contest, you run the risk of watching the momentum fizzle out before the end of the campaign. So, let your readers know what to expect from the moment you launch. You could run it for a week, and you could run it for a month. When deciding the length of your enter-to-win email campaign, consider what a reader has to do, and how long it will take. Essay contests take longer than a facebook sharing contest, for example.
• Where the contest will be promoted; will it run on multiple platforms? – Just because this is an email campaign doesn’t mean that is can only happen via email. You should at least have a landing page on your website, and you may cross-promote on social media and other marketing platforms. Include the final decision in your plan.
• Setup tracking – Your email marketing platform may have an awesome analytics dashboard. If so, that’s fantastic, but think about whether or not Google Analytics or another system will be valuable for monitoring the success or failure of your contest.
• Create a calendar – Once a strategy is in place, it is a good idea to use a calendar for your team and yourself, to ensure that everything is done thoroughly and on-time. Before you ever start creating content, know when you will need content. Deadlines for your email scripts should never be the same day that the content will be published.
• Create content for email campaign – Once the calendar is set in place, you can start using the language and word-use strategy to generate compelling content, introducing your readers to your exciting enter-to-win
• Schedule posts in advance – Remember that you may need to make last-minute edits when you schedule your emails to go out well before the launch date. Do this, also, so that you have the time to test all of your software. You want everything ready to go for the highest probability that your contest will roll out like a well-oiled machine.
• Set times for analysis and modifications (try running to only a portion of your list at first) – A day or a week after you launch your email campaign, you will want to take a look at everything to see how well it’s converting. If you’re not meeting your goals, take a deep look into your analytics to find out how you might make adjustments to improve things. So, before you ever launch, just so you’re ready for it, set a schedule for analysis to happen.
• Launch campaign – You’re all ready to go. Just hold your hat!

6 Awesome Platforms to Help You Run Your Next Email Giveaway

You may have noticed that the checklist didn’t include what software you would use to run your contest — the best was saved for last. Here is a list of the best platforms to help you run your next online contest.

1. Strutta – This platform is self-proclaimed as the best platform for running branded contests and sweepstakes that convert. They offer a DIY promotion builder to launch contests and sweepstakes on multiple platforms with customizable templates that are excellent at driving entries. The turnkey promotion builder is available at $249.
2. ContestCore – The most flexible platform for online contests and sweepstakes, this system is customizable, scalable, responsive, and viral. You will get full design control, customizable data capture, and an easy-to-use dashboard and insights. Pricing starts at $3,999.
3. Votigo – Offering custom and full-service or DIY solutions for your next contest, this software is setup for sweepstakes, photo contests, hashtag campaigns, polls, quizzes, and coupons. Small business pricing starts at $29/ month.
4. WizeHive – With contest management software to grow and engage your audience and contestant pipeline, you can set-up, integrate, and manage your online contests. Take advantage of contest flexibility, easy embed forms for your website and emails, customization, lead inspiration, and payment integration. You’ll find the features you need to streamline the management of your online contest. Pricing starts at $249 + $3/day for the duration of your contest.
5. Binkd – Engage your audience and grow your brand with the software to help you generate leads and engagement with your contests and social media. You can sign up for free to try it out, then pay $29/ month or more, depending on your needs.
6. Rafflecopter – This is the world’s easiest way to run a giveaway. They make it simple to launch and manage a giveaway on any website, as much as you want, with no IT assistance required. They claim you can launch a giveaway in three minutes for free. Pay up to $84/ month for pro features.

Final Thoughts

The very best way to increase conversions via email is to offer an enter-to-win campaign. Make sure subscribers have opted-in to receive emails from you, use the checklist above to plan your contest, and enlist the help of software designed specifically for this need to see the most success. Start planning your next email marketing campaign today, and if you integrate what you’ve learned here, you will see tremendous gains in reader engagement.

Marry McAleavey is a social media enthusiast and enjoys crafting exciting content. She currently works at TheEssayService.org writing company.

Shopping online is fast, easy, and convenient — and that's exactly what retailers want us to think. 

It takes a lot less effort to shop online: We can shop when we're tired, we can shop when we're emotional, and we can shop instantly. But just like how retailers use tricks to make us spend more at brick-and-mortar stores, there are also tricks they use to make us spend more on their websites. 

"The internet is the wild west in terms of pricing," Mark Ellwood, retail expert and author of "Bargain Fever," told Business Insider. "It’s policed far less aggressively than brick and mortar stores."

Online retailers are competing with hundreds of other sites who might be able to offer the same thing for a lower price, so they have to come up with more ways to get us to seal the deal on their site.

In fact, according to The Robin Report, a site that provides insights on retail and consumer industries, the retail space is expanding faster and greater than the human population, which "creates an era of oversupply and underdemand."

Here are 12 tricks online retailers might use to get you to spend more:

SEE ALSO: 9 sneaky ways cell phone companies get you to pay more

They make you feel like you're part of an exclusive club

Becoming a member of a retailer's loyalty or rewards program has its perks, but it's another way retailers get you to spend more. 

In fact, according to the 2016 Global Retail Report from PriceWaterhouse Coopers, 91% of the consumers surveyed were part of a loyalty or rewards program. 

Special promotions, exclusive member discounts, personalized marketing offers, and other benefits might make you feel like you're part of an exclusive club, and more inclined to take advantage of the "perks" of membership.

They remind you of items you might have 'forgotten'

Having an account on a retailer's website makes shopping easier for you, but it also makes it easier for them to lure you back in.

For example, online retailers might offer discounts to "help" you finish the purchase when they see you've abandoned your cart, Ellwood says. He calls it "cart abandonment" — when you're logged in to an online retailer's site with things in your shopping cart, but you closed the browser before finishing your purchase. 

"If you play your cards right, you should receive a follow-up email with a coupon to entice back to the cart and close the deal," Ellwood said.

They push products strategically

According to Ellwood, the first few products you see on an online retailer's website aren't necessarily the most popular.

Instead, the featured item is usually the product the company has the strongest need to get rid of, since online retailers know people buy what is on the top of the list. 

"It's true with consumer shopping: People are busy, people are bored, people trust the recommendations," Ellwood told Business Insider. "They are the pulls to selling and are the items that are there are looking to cross the finish line first. "

Imagine you’re in the marketplace in some long ago city. Instead of selling whatever high-tech product or process that you sell now, you’re selling fruit.

People from all over the world are in the marketplace, everyone vying for their business.

If this doesn’t sound all that different from the internet, well, you’re on the right track. The marketplace may be digital, and your product more high-tech, but it’s still tough to capture b2b buyers’ attention.

With tighter schedules and fewer resources, purchasing and procurement professionals are using the internet to source and purchase supplies and components. If your business can’t fill their needs, chances are they’ll find a business that can.

Here are a few numbers to consider:

• In 2013, 57 percent of B2B buyers bought goods online. By the following year, that number had jumped to 68 percent.
• About a fifth of all B2B buyers spend at least 90 percent of their budgets online.
• Nearly half of B2B buyers research company products on a smartphone or tablet. If you confine the data solely to millennial workers researching with smartphones, it jumps to 55 percent.
• Close to a third of all B2B buyers say they research at least 90 percent of what they plan to buy.

There’s a thread running through all these examples: the audience you’re targeting — the B2B buyers, the procurement professionals, the manufacturing engineers – are on their way to your website. What will they find when they get there?

Here are a few different inbound marketing tactics to help your customers – and potential customers –better understand who you are.

1. Your Blog

When you post a new entry on your business’ blog, you’re adding to your company’s web presence, giving search engines another path to lead customers to your site.

You’re also creating content that – in most cases – will be useful to customers today, tomorrow, a month, or even a year from now. Blog posts can help solve problems, or at least, show how a company like yours can help. The more you blog, the more leads you attract, so try to publish at least a couple of times a week.

2. E-books and Case Studies

An e-book allows you to share the same sort of information that you would on your blog, only in more detail. And because you’re putting more work into this piece of content, you’ll be asking for something in return: contact information. You’re sharing your expertise, and in exchange, they’ll give you their e-mail address.

You can also share case studies that give your audience specific examples of how your company helped an existing customer solve a problem. Readers see this and know how you’d be able to assist them.

3. Webinars

Explaining what you do in print might seem kind of dry, so why not present that information in a webinar, allowing your audience to look and listen. You can start with the presentations your sales and marketing teams use, and build from there. And once you’ve conducted the webinar, you can save it and continue to push it as a piece of content.

4. Videos and Photos

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth…well, no one’s done the math, but we’ll assume it’s a pretty high number. A video of one of your products in action, or a demonstration of how it’s made, can be more effective than a few paragraphs explaining the same thing.

And when you share photos of what you do on social media, they’re more likely to be liked, shared and retweeted than a standard link. All of this brings people back to your site.

Need to improve your sales numbers? If you’re looking for ways to get more leads, you could be wasting your time. Too many sales teams are relying on outdated and inefficient methods to win sales, and finding more leads might be the last thing you need to do.

If you want to get the most out of your sales team, do it smart. Here are 11 sales enablement statistics—and takeaways—to help you crank your sales up to 11!

via GIPHY

Sales Enablement Stats You Need to Know

1) 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. [Source: The B2B Lead]

Are you prospecting your own leads or using cold-call lists? Instead, focus your time on warm leads generated by your marketing team. Make sure you’ve got alignment with Marketing on what a qualified lead looks like.

2) Only 44% of companies are using any kind of lead scoring system. [Source: Decision Tree]

Sometimes it can be hard to tell which leads are most important. Use a reliable Lead Scoring system like HubSpot’s to help you identify the warmest leads that are closest to buying. Generate a report every morning to review the activity and news leads.

3) In a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions. [Source: Brevet]

It’s rare that you’ll be addressing just one person’s questions and concerns, even if you’re working with a small company—so you’ll need to understand all of the personas involved in the buying process. Do you know if you’re speaking to the decision maker or a stakeholder? HubSpot marketing automation identifies the lead’s persona and role. Using HubSpot Sequences also lets you send content that’s matched to the buyer and where they are at in the buyer’s journey.

4) 95% of buyers choose a solution provider that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.” [Source: DemandGen Report]

It’s critical that you understand what is motivating your lead and how to address pains and questions throughout the buyer’s journey. Monitor the HubSpot CRM, which shows your prospects’ recent activity so you can know exactly where they are at every point along the buying process. HubSpot Sequences helps automate the content to the prospect during the buyer’s journey. Sequences sends the email directly from your email (not HubSpot). The sequence ends when the prospect opens an email.

5) An average buyer gets 100+ emails a day, opens just 23%, and clicks on just 2% of them. [Source: Tellwise]

Are your emails getting lost in the abyss? Seventh Sense is a terrific tool that delivers your sales and marketing emails to your recipients at the ideal time—when they’re in front of their email. And it integrates with HubSpot for tracking metrics!

6) Personalized emails that include the recipient’s first name in the subject line have higher open rates. [Source: Retention Science]

Are your emails getting opened? The HubSpot Sales tool is like a radar that lets you see who opened your email and when, as well as which links they clicked on. Using email templates in the HubSpot Sales tool lets the sales and marketing team see metrics on which emails or documents are getting the best performance.

7) 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up, yet 80% of sales require 5 follow-up phone calls after the meeting. [Sources: Scripted and The Marketing Donut]

You’re not interested in wasting time on prospects that aren’t going to buy. But quitting on them too soon means you’re missing out on sales. Solution: use Sequences in the HubSpot CRM to auto enroll a prospect for follow-up emails. The emails automatically stop when the lead clicks on an email.

8) 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects—the most common complaint of sales teams. [Source: Kapost]

Tired of searching for a previously used email or document for follow-up? Speed up the process by creating templates and documents in the HubSpot Sales tool.

9) If you follow up with web leads within 5 minutes, you’re 9 times more likely to convert them. [Source: InsideSales.com]

You need to know each time a contact returns to your site so that you can respond in a timely manner. HubSpot notifications can trigger an email to your inbox or mobile device to keep you in the know of when a prospect returns to you or raises their hand for help.

10) 71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry. [Source: Toutapp]

You’re not a data entry operator. Use HubSpot Marketing and CRM to collect and pass contact data so you don’t have to. Use HubSpot Sales Pro to pull in contact details. Save even more time by using it on the go: download the mobile app to have access to all your sales data. You can even record your phone calls—eliminating the time to type notes after your calls.

11) The average salesperson makes 8 calls per hour and prospects for 6.25 hours to set just 1 appointment. [Source: Ovation Sales Group]

Are you wasting time researching leads or prospects? Use the appointment feature in the HubSpot Sales tool. It saves time from calling or emailing back and forth to set appointments, and the Prospects feature lets you cull your leads as you need to.

BONUS! Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads [Source: ANNUITAS Group]. Imagine how much more success you could see by implementing the HubSpot CRM and Sales tools. You could crank your selling up to 11!

According to an inside sales survey from ZS and Reality Works, 40% of large technology companies plan to increase their inside sales headcount this year. But simply hiring first-rate inside sales professionals does not guarantee that they will drive revenue for your sales organization. The right compensation plan can both ensure that reps know what is expected of them and can help motivate them to sell at their best.

The right compensation plan can make the difference between sales being a revenue or cost center. Not surprisingly, a question we asked regularly is how to best structure inside sales comp plans. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. The way you structure comp plans will often vary based on a rep’s experience and role. A comp plan that works perfectly for an SDR that’s right out of college won’t work at all for a heavy-hitter account executive.

Common Sales Compensation Factors

Creating the ideal compensation plan presents a fair share of challenges:

Setting the Right Quota

The ZS and Reality Works survey shows that 79% of tech companies use quota-based comp plans (90% of larger companies). However, setting quota properly requires a delicate balance. If quotas are too aggressive it can lead to high turnover or lack of motivation. If quotas aren’t high enough then reps just aren’t going to be motivated to do their best. Setting quotas accurately requires accurate sales forecasting. And in order to make accurate sales forecasts, it requires tracking the right predictive analytics. Only by tracking the right metrics can you predict pipeline and set quotas accurately.

Weighting Compensation Plans

Comp plans need the right weight of base vs. bonus. Base salaries are important to provide reps with a sense of their security (they won’t get evicted if they have a slow month). Commission, however, is what drives most sales reps. A bonus needs to sufficiently inspire reps to sell at their best. Placing a cap on a rep’s bonus will correlate with a cap on their motivation to sell for your company. In sales, the sky should be the limit.

The Rising Cost of Hiring Reps

Let’s get one thing straight: there is a lot of competition when hiring reps. If a rep has a proven track record of success, that rep is going to be highly in-demand. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that pay is competitive. Because if a rep’s comp plan isn’t competitive, they’re going to be inundated with offers from recruiters with pay that is more competitive.

As a result of high competition to hire reps, many companies are hiring reps with less experience (often right out of college). As a result, companies need to know how to structure compensation plans that appeal to less seasoned reps.

In order to help you overcome the challenges associated with creating compensation plans, this post will offer some compensation plans designed for various roles. Whether you are hiring outbound SDRs with no sales experienced, or heavy hitter AEs, these comp plans will help you motivate reps to be top-performing members of your team.

Outbound SDR Sales Compensation Plan Example

Sales development reps (SDRs) are reps that are tasked with lead generation and appointment setting. They almost never actually close deals, instead handing deals off to account executives to close. SDRs are often fresh out of college. As a result, they are looking for plans that offer a lot of structure and security. Our joint webinar with OpenView Venture Partners reveals some tips that can help you structure compensation plans that are ideal for SDRs.

Keep It Simple for SDRs

In order to keep comp plans simple for reps that are beginning their journey in sales, we recommended separating comp plans into three sections:

• Base: The regular amount that reps see in their paychecks that is unaffected by performance
• Bonus: The additional amount reps receive based on meeting various goals.
• Kicker: Any additional bonus that is tied to closed won deals or competition

Base Vs. Bonus

Since SDRs are concerned about meeting their basic needs, 70% of their total compensation package is the base and 30% is the bonus.

How to Calculate the Bonus

When calculating the bonus, many of OpenView’s portfolio companies are using a 40/60 rule: 40% of the bonus is tied to appointments set and 60% is tied to actual opportunities. Another powerful way to motivate SDRs is by offering a kicker (extra pay) for opportunities they drove that actually end up closing. This motivates reps to not simply source opportunities, but source great ones.

Inbound Sales Rep Compensation Plan Example

Inbound reps (sometimes known as lead qualification reps or marketing qualification reps) are tasked with following up with leads that call as well as leads that fill out contact forms or download content.

Base Vs. Bonus

Like most sales comp plans, compensation plans for inbound sales reps should be comprised of a base and a bonus. Like SDRs, 60-70% of an inbound sales rep’s total compensation plan should be base salary, with the remainder making up the bonus. Inbound sales reps, like SDRs are often early career — my first sales job was as an inbound sales rep. They will usually want to have a large enough base salary to pay rent (whether a particular month is fruitful or not.

How to Calculate the Bonus

Where inbound sales rep compensation plans differ from comp plans for outbound SDRs is how bonuses should be structured. Here’s what we recommend:

Accepted Opportunities- Tie 65% of an inbound sales rep’s bonus should be derived from accepted opportunities. It’s key that these opps are all “accepted” by sales. That way it helps account executives provide oversight into opportunity quality. The last thing you want is inbound sales reps handing unqualified opps over to sales.

Opportunity Revenue- 25% of the bonus should be tied to revenue that actually closes. We like doing this because it further incentivizes inbound reps to source high-quality opportunities and gives them a stake in your company’s wins.

SLAs- Finally, 10% of the bonus should be tied to hitting SLAs. These are the activities that are expected of inbound sales reps and should be clearly outlined in their comp plans. Some vital SLAs for inbound sales reps might include responding to every inbound lead within five, following up with every inbound lead at least eight times and more.

This is an excerpt from a post that originally appeared on the RingDNA blog. Read the full post here.

If you’ve read much about inbound marketing or lead generation, you’ve heard about personas—and you know how important they are to generating the right leads. Personas are vital to a successful inbound marketing campaign, but they’re only the first part of delighting your customers. To maximize your inbound machine, you need to develop a buyer’s journey to nurture your personas through the sale.

The buyer’s journey is like a map that plots out every interaction point your personas will have with your content or your company. When you understand the journey your personas take toward becoming a buyer, you know what specific content they need, and at what points. Your lead nurturing becomes more intelligent and more strategic—and more successful. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

How to Create a Buyer’s Journey

1) Pick the best persona to map the buyer’s journey

Start with just one persona. This will typically be the one that’s most important for your business from a financial standpoint.

2) Identify your internal information resources

Tap your salespeople, business development, and customer service staff. Your team members who interact with customers will be your best source of information about those customers.

3) Identify what happens in the Awareness stage

This is the moment when a buyer first identifies that they have a need. This is NOT when they become aware of your brand, product or services. Some of the key things to understand in this stage include how the persona describes their pain, goals, and challenges. How does your persona educate himself on latest trends?

4) Focus on the Consideration stage

After the Awareness stage, the persona will enter the Consideration stage, when they begin to consider solutions to their problem.

Don’t focus on what you want your persona to know about you, but on what they want and need to make an informed purchase. How does your buyer identify the types of solutions to do further research on? How do buyers educate themselves on potential solutions? How do buyers evaluate pros and cons of potential solutions?

5) It’s time to make a decision

In the Decision stage the buyer has decided to make a purchase but they need to validate their options. Typically they’re deciding between a few solutions and they have specific criteria they’re using to make the decision. Work with your sales or business development team to identify the typical criteria. Make sure to identify additional decision-makers or influencers in the buying process.

Tip! Depending on how important these key decision-makers and influencers are, you may need to develop personas for each of them.

6) Tie it all together with some inbound campaigns

Pick a few key questions your persona is likely to ask at each stage of the buyer’s journey, and answer them with a strategic campaign of valuable content. Use the information you gathered from your sales and business development team to guide your answers.

For example, if your persona needs “how to” information during the Awareness stage, give them step-by-step info, or provide a template to use. Follow up with information that helps translate the how-to information into a comparison infographic or a checklist. Help the buyer understand the benefits and solutions with some case studies or white papers. If they need to make a business case to their own team, equip them with the right type of content and train them to sell it. Make sure the content has a common theme through all of the stages in the buyer’s journey. That will help the buyer understand why they need the next item from you.

7) Identify triggers to hand off leads to your sales team

Now that you have your buyer’s journey mapped and are developing content that targets specific questions at different stages, find out when it makes sense to pass along those leads to sales. If you have a specific piece of content that generates leads at the Consideration stage, consider sending all of those leads to sales to see if they can speed up the purchasing timeline or start to build a relationship with the buyer.

If you have the right plan and system in place, you can leverage sales enablement to help move buyers through the buying process.

Now that you have the basics of the buyer’s journey, work through these questions and walk through the buying process that your buyers go through for your product or service.

The magic number is 21. No, I’m not playing blackjack. That’s the number of people I’m meeting for the first time at the Sales Innovation Expo in London this month. I’ve never spoken with any of them. I met them all on LinkedIn and Twitter.

So, why do they want to meet me?

Because we began a conversation on social media. Yes, a conversation. We didn’t just connect online; we made a personal connection. That’s the power of social selling.

I always write a personal invitation to connect, and I respond to invitations (even when people send me the standard invitation). That personal outreach—even if it’s only a few sentences—solicits a wonderful response. People tell me they’ve read my blog, commented on posts, and want to learn how referral selling really works. That’s how we begin a relationship. Sure, it’s a digital relationship at first, but then watch where it goes.

How I Packed My Calendar

I publicized the Sales Innovation Expo on all of my social channels, then sent personal messages to each of my LinkedIn connections in the U.K. and surrounding countries, letting them know when I’d be there. I will meet with 21 of them … and the number is growing. Some of my connections can’t attend, but they wrote back and told me why. And so, we began new conversations.

I’ll also be meeting with four social selling influencers, all of whom reached out to me and requested personal meetings. Again, I’ve never actually spoken to any of them. Our relationships have been digital … until now. We’re meeting outside of the conference—for coffee, breakfast, drinks. My goal is to get to know them, learn their social selling strategies, and find out how I can support them.

If you’ve done the math, you know I plan to meet 25 people. And these are just the beginning. I’ll also meet everyone who attends my presentation, my fellow speakers and presenters, event sponsors, and many other new people throughout the two-day conference. I’m excited to learn from everyone and to start new conversations.

Are You “Social” Enough?

Social media is a place to begin conversations, which leads to building relationships. It is a place for engaging audiences, not for pitching prospects.

When crafting a social selling approach, sales team should keep in mind that:

• Posting without a personal message isn’t being social; it’s just clicking buttons.
• Inviting people to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately promoting your company breaks the rules of social selling.
• When you ask for referrals on LinkedIn, you miss the chance to explain the business reason for the introduction and get the inside track on the person you want to meet.
• A social media connection is not a relationship.

#SocialMedia is a place to begin conversations, which leads to building relationships.
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How can sales reps use social media effectively?

• Share your insights with your network. Provide information or links that would interest them.
• Share other people’s content—once you’ve read it and evaluated how important the post is to your connections.
• Blog consistently and build your brand.
• Continue to stay in touch with your connections. Ask how you can help them.

Ultimately, social selling success is not about the number of contacts we accumulate; it’s about the real connections we make. And that doesn’t happen overnight. I’m meeting with people in London I’ve “known” on social media for several years.

Manners Matter … Even Online

Sales reps know the value of relationships—with prospects, clients, and referral sources. But far too many of us waste opportunities to build real connections with people because we think the rules for relationship-building are different online. And that’s just not true.

We understand in-person codes of conduct. We smile and shake hands before beginning a conversation with someone. We say “hello” on the phone before diving into an exchange of ideas. Our voicemails are welcoming and friendly.

But our communication skills and manners go out the window when we’re online. We click buttons to invite people to connect with us on LinkedIn. (Where’s the “hello?” Where’s the conversation?) We don’t even use salutations in emails to sales leads. We just begin with truncated sentences. (OK, maybe that’s the English major in me surfacing.)

Here’s a hint for sales reps: Your online persona should be just as professional, engaging, and polite as your real-world self.

Showing Up Counts

Woody Allen said that 80 percent of success is showing up. We show up a lot differently today than when he made that quip. We show up in person and online. But the goals are still the same—to develop connections and build relationships.

Social selling isn’t a new concept. Sales has always been social. It’s just that some of the tools have changed in the digital age. While technology tools can certainly drive business development, nothing beats sitting down with someone and talking face to face.

#SocialSelling isn’t a new concept. #Sales has always been social. #SalesTips
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Too many sales reps forget it’s the quality of relationships, and not the quantity of your connections, that really counts. You can collect LinkedIn connections like baseball cards and get nowhere. Or you can make the connections you already have stronger—a strategy that’s much more likely to grow your referral network and fill your pipeline with hot sales leads.

Join the conversation: What are your strategies for turning online connections into real-world relationships?

(Note: This blog post originally appeared on NoMoreColdCalling.com.)

See Joanne Black at PSN’s Sierra Sales Summit!

The post How Social Selling Got Me 21 Meetings in 2 Days appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Recently, I had the opportunity to present on the topic of the “Customer Experience Economy” to a group of partners at a Google conference. It was important to me to provide some actionable takeaways that would help the audience accelerate the evolution of their customer success best practices. As the world, more specifically, the world of enterprises, is transforming … again. We are well underway in the “Customer Experience” economy — where your clients expect more VALUE and are more focused than ever on how quickly you deliver quantifiable business OUTCOMES.

There are key changes in the market place that are driving the shift to Customer Experience. Most notably, the shift to the cloud has changed nearly everything about the way prospects and customers research and make purchase decisions. In the past, revenue was collected up front, we had time to show value and we had money to invest in solution development and value differentiators.

But now with the cloud, that has all changed. Empowered customers expect a new way of doing business with you. The idea of brand loyalty is ancient history, as cost to switch vendors is lower and competition is fierce across every industry. We are all challenged to think differently. Sell differently. And deliver customer success differently. We must evolve—or die!

However, a slow evolution is not acceptable—speed and agility is critical not only to survive, but also to thrive. When today’s customers demand immediate value, you must be prepared to deliver. Here are 5 tips that will help create winning customer success best practices:

Tip #1: Utilize a Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) framework and maturity model to benchmark where you are today

It is critical to have a framework by which you can benchmark your approach to customer success across five key areas — technology, data, KPI’s, people and process. As you go through this process, it’s important to keep in mind that “One Size does not fit all” —> think about the outcomes the solution you are selling needs to deliver for the end customer. It starts with understanding how to “create a successful end customer”. By understanding where you are today, you can evolve faster by investing in and implementing customer success best practices where needed. A maturity model helps you focus on continuous improvement and evolve faster.

Tip #2: Create a customer journey map that clearly demonstrates outcomes and the path to achieve them

By mapping your entire customer journey – as it is today, you will get a better understanding of what is missing and what data you will need to fill those gaps and improve the customer experience. There is A LOT of information out on the web to help you with your customer journey mapping. However, most of it focuses on mapping out the purchasing or acquisition experience. In recurring revenue business models, you need to focus on mapping out the entire customer lifecycle – with the emphasis on the revenue lifecycle pillar. By starting with an understanding of the customer experience, you can be sure to pull data from all available sources.

Tip #3: Data has a significant impact on the customer experience and lowering your cost to deliver customer success

As we migrate solutions to the cloud, the handoff between what is sold and what is delivered is more important than ever. We are also learning that outcomes continue to evolve as the partnership with our customers evolves. Our customers EXPECT just to know this and delivery on these changing outcomes. We must be aware of how products are USED and we must use end customer feedback to deliver insights that allow our customers to rapidly shift their strategies. It is important to leverage usage data or things like usage (TLUs) to drive the customer journey. Learn more in our blog on creating a data-driven revenue lifecycle.

Tip #4: Continuously innovate to improve products, services and processes to lower the cost to serve, while simultaneously growing revenue faster

Customer success is not a set it and forget it strategy. As technology is changing the market faster than ever before, you must innovate continuously to keep up. This is only possible if you are utilizing the right performance metrics. Measuring churn or customer retention is a lagging indicator. Sure, it is very important, but it can only tell you that there is a problem, not where the problem is in the customer journey. Your customer health score is critical to facilitate innovation in customer success. And yet, many companies continue to rely on a red, yellow and green traffic light indicator. Learn more in our blog on creating customer health scores that work.

Onboarding

1. Customer Time to Value
2. Activation %
3. Onboarding On-Time Rate

Adoption

Are customer end users using the product? Are they using the highest value “sticky” features?
Are they using the highest value “sticky” features?
What is the relative health of your customer based on key criteria identified?

4. Adoption Score
5. Product/Feature Usage
6. User Loyalty

Upsell + Cross-sell

Are there opportunities to sell more and how successfully are you upselling additional offers?
How many leads, by number and dollar, are you converting to new product and/or service sales to your existing customers?

7. Expansion Bookings
8. Net New Bookings
9. Value Expansion Rate

Retention

Of those customers who come to a decision, how many are renewed versus lost?
Of those customers who come to a decision, how many are renewed versus lost?

11. Retention Rate
12. Churn Rate
13. Customer Health Score

Renewal

How many, by number and by dollar, of your customers are renewing for and extended term?
Of those customers who come to a decision, how many are renewed versus lost?

13.Resolution Rate
14.Close Rate
15.Final Renewal Rate

Tip #5: Consult with post-sale customer engagement experts

It is important to learn from those who have gone before you. Take the time to learn from experts in customer success best practices and recurring revenue. Quite often, partnering for success will accelerate your evolution and help you scale your customer success organization faster.

Learn how the key components of a customer success best practices deliver value throughout the customer lifecycle in the customer experience economy by downloading our How to Create a Customer Success Plan White Paper.

Michelangelo famously claimed that when he sculpted, he simply removed the extraneous. He didn’t so much create human forms as liberate them. He wasn’t imposing his vision on slabs of stone; he was revealing the figures within.

What if we adopted this mindset with personas? What if, instead of creating personas from our imaginations, we found out everything we could about the flesh-and-blood people we want to sell to and keep happy – and then used personas as a means of revealing those people to the teams that need to communicate with them?

This analogy came to mind as I listened to Ardath Albee at the Intelligent Content Conference. In her talk, How to Develop Audience Personas That You’ll Actually Use, she emphasized the need to base buyer personas on research. All of the content in this article comes from Ardath’s ICC talk and from my subsequent conversations with her.

Why you must build personas on research

As marketers, Ardath says, our dream is to inspire prospective customers to call our salespeople and say, “We want what your company talks about. Can you help?”

Buyer personas, done well, lead to phone calls like that.

(Like many of you who read this blog, Ardath has a B2B focus; when she says “buyer,” “customer,” or “audience” – terms often used interchangeably here – she means people who make substantial purchasing decisions.)

Ardath has seen buyer personas done well and done poorly. “Getting your marketing team in a conference room around a pizza at lunch and saying, ‘OK, let’s build a persona’ doesn’t work,” she says. “You are not your buyers. You have too much knowledge.”

What works is research.

Research – the time lag for everything – is the most effort-intensive part of building a persona. It’s not quick. It’s not convenient. But you can’t create sales-boosting personas without it.

You can’t create sales-boosting personas without doing research via @ardath421 #contentstrategy
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In this article, I summarize Ardath’s advice on three equally important types of research – three ways marketers find out about the people they want their personas to reveal:

• Sales interviews
• Customer interviews
• External research

When you do all three kinds of research and convert that research into well-formed personas, you end up with buyer personas that you and your team want to use – personas that help you get the right content to the right people at the right time. That’s the kind of content we all want to create: the kind that builds relationships that result in sales.

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Essential parts of a persona

Before we dig into how to research your personas, here’s a review of the nine components Ardath suggests for your personas:

1. Day in the life
2. Objectives
3. Problems
4. Orientation
5. Obstacles
6. Questions
7. Preferences
8. Keywords and phrases
9. Engagement scenarios

You can read what Ardath has to say about each part in depth in this post: Buyer Personas You Want to Use: The 9 Essential Parts. All aspects of your research relate to one of these parts.

How and why to conduct sales interviews

Where do you start with your research? Ardath suggests interviewing your salespeople first. You can then align your personas with the people the sales team wants to interact with.

If you ignore the sales team, your personas may fail to help the business. Salespeople who don’t see your personas as relevant won’t see any improvement in their leads, Ardath says. Those salespeople aren’t going to tell the same story you’re telling in the marketing department. As Ardath says, “We all need to be on the same storyline.”

The good news is, when you reach out to salespeople, you can expect an enthusiastic response:

They usually get excited about this conversation. Salespeople want better leads as much as you want to give them better leads. They want to be more productive. They want to earn more commissions. They want to close more deals.

Interviewing five or six salespeople typically gives you enough perspective although, depending on your goals and the complexity of your solution, you may need to do more. And you must talk with people individually. “Otherwise, they herd up and follow the leader,” Ardath says. “They agree with everything that leader says. That’s not helpful.”

Ardath suggests that you ask your salespeople these questions, each of which relates to one of the nine persona components she identified in her talk (as indicated in parentheses):

• With whom do you interact at a prospect company? (persona identification)
• Who influences those people, and whom do they need to influence? (day in the life)
• What questions do they ask you? (questions)
• How do they describe the problems they’re solving? (problems)
• How would they phrase what they want to achieve? (objectives)
• Why haven’t they achieved those things already? (obstacles)
• What do they need to build the business case? (preferences)
• What types of pushback do you get? (obstacles)

Throughout your sales interviews, remember your goal: to build buyer personas that build sales.

How and why to conduct customer interviews

Salespeople and customers tell you different things. Since your buyer personas must address the needs of both sides, you need to talk with customers as well.

How long does each interview last?

Ardath suggests asking for a half hour from each customer. “More than that is tough, but most people will happily give you 30 minutes. People love to talk about themselves,” she says.

How many customers do we interview per persona?

Plan to do about 10 customer interviews per persona. “Once you get to the point where you’re hearing the same stuff over and over, you know you’ve got it,” Ardath says. If you sense that you’re missing something, do more interviews. She once added six interviews when the original responses were too varied to enable her team to generalize.

What kind of customers do we interview?

If you can, interview recent customers whose buying journey is still fresh in their minds. You may not always have this option; the sales reps or account managers who manage the relationships often choose their better customers as interviewees. These aren’t always the people who did the buying; the buyers you want to talk with might not even work for those companies any more. You can still gain useful insights from the customers chosen by the sales team, but you may not learn the things you most need to know.

Ideally, interview people who have been through the buying process – especially if that process is complex – so that you can understand the whole process from the customer point of view.

You may even want to interview prospects who ended up not buying from you, Ardath says:

Lost opportunities would be my preference if interviewing prospects because they’ve made it to the end stage. But they can be hard to get on the phone. They have no incentive to speak with you, whereas customers will do it as a favor – or they might do it in hopes of getting better content or a better experience or better service.

As much as possible, match interviewees with your goals for the persona. For example, if you want a persona to help build sales with enterprise companies in the financial services industry, interview customers “who fit that premise.”

How long does the interview process last?

Invest the time to get the interviews you need. “I’ve had persona projects where I could get all my interviews done in a few weeks,” Ardath says. “For other projects, the interviews took four months.”

What goes into a good interview?

Let interviewees know that all they have to do is show up. Help them feel comfortable. Ardath says, “Assure them that the conversation is strictly internal. You only want to talk with them about their experiences with your company and your products.”

Conduct customer interviews as conversations, not interrogations.

Conduct customer interviews as conversations, not interrogations via @ardath421 #contentstrategy
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You can’t treat this opportunity like the Grand Inquisition. It’s not a big opportunity to find out the laundry list of things you want to know. It’s about finding out what prospective customers want to know.

Ardath suggests asking questions like these, each of which relates to one  (or more) of the nine persona components:

• What do you do in your job? (day in the life)
• What happened that made you look for a solution? (problem)
• What was the outcome you wanted to achieve? (objectives)
• What did you need to learn about? (questions)
• What kept you from solving this internally? (day in the life)
• Who else was involved? (persona identification)
• Where did you find the most useful information? (preferences)
• What kind of pushback did you get? (obstacles, questions)
• Do you remember the turning point, the moment when everyone got on board? What happened? (engagement scenarios, sales enablement)

Ardath cautions against feeling attached to this list or any list of questions you might prepare. Let the interviewee lead. Listen with all your might. You want to discover everything you can that’s relevant, even things you didn’t think to ask about.

External research

External research enhances and validates the information you collect in your interviews, helping you keep the personas unbiased. Ardath suggests digging into the following sources:

• LinkedIn profiles
• Analyst and research reports on the industry or role
• Industry blogs, thought-leader blogs, and webinars
• Competitors’ content
• AdWords Keyword Planner
• Twitter hashtags, influencers
• Job listings

LinkedIn profiles

“I live on LinkedIn,” Ardath says. “I have a subscription on LinkedIn, so I get access to the advanced search capabilities. I can go out and do profile searches on people like the personas I’m building.”

For every persona she builds, she sifts through 50 to 100 LinkedIn profiles, looking for people who have taken the time to build their profiles. “You can learn a lot from people’s profiles,” she says.

If people are posting on LinkedIn Pulse, figure out their viewpoints from what they publish. If they belong to groups, find out what’s going on in those groups.

Ardath gets the most value from the LinkedIn summaries people write about themselves and from the recommendations others give about them.

I document all this stuff in spreadsheets. I look for commonalities. I look for attributes that keep coming up across the profiles, like ‘Sally was a great mentor to me’ or ‘Edgar is detail-oriented and always on point.’ I look for information that repeats.

Analyst and research reports on the industry or role

Analyst and research reports can give you insights into a persona’s industry or role. If you can’t afford to buy a report you’re interested in, you may find a company that’s using that report as a lead-generation tool, in which case, Ardath says, you just have to fill out the form. “You want to get your hands on some of that analyst research to validate what you’re seeing and hearing elsewhere,” she says.

Industry blogs, thought-leader blogs, webinars

Read the blogs that are read by people similar to your personas, Ardath says. Those blogs will give you insight into your personas’ interests and motivations. Even better, look at the kind of comments people like your personas leave on those blog posts.

Also attend webinars that draw this audience, and notice what questions attendees ask. “You can gain huge insights there,” Ardath says.

Competitors’ content

Review your competitors’ websites, blogs, social media profiles, and case studies. Learn what you can about people who have purchased your competitors’ products. “What can you learn? Sometimes nothing. Case studies for some reason are horribly sucky. But sometimes you find good case studies,” Ardath says.

AdWords Keyword Planner

Ardath uses the AdWords Keyword Planner to look at long-tail phrases and search volumes. “I look at the search results to see if they’re relevant,” she says. For example, if you search on “nurturing” vs. “lead nurturing,” you’ll get all kinds of web pages related to babies. You want to DO the searches yourself to make sure that prospective customers are going to find pages they consider relevant.

Twitter hashtags, influencers

Suss out the Twitter hashtags that your persona is likely to use, and look at those streams to see what’s being posted. Find out who the influencers are on social media and what they’re talking about.

Job listings

Research the responsibilities described in job listings for roles that people like your persona would have. Look for any attributes you’ve missed. “What kind of background are employers looking for? Is everybody asking for an MBA? Or is it five years of experience? There’s a big difference,” Ardath says.

Pulling the research together into personas

At some point during your research, you decide how many buyer personas to build. The more personas you have, the more differentiated your stories need to be. You can’t tell the same story to different personas. You must tell a story to each one based on what makes that persona tick.

Without well-built personas, you may tell stories that engage the wrong audiences or no one at all. Your content may not help buyers solve their problems.

Without well-built personas, you may engage the wrong audiences or no one at all via @ardath421
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Well-built personas increase your chances of reaching the right people with the right content at the right time. You may even reach them early enough in their process to give your brand an edge.

If we get our content in early enough, and it resonates, we have the opportunity to get our salespeople in that conversation early – and our competitors’ ideas won’t resonate. The first relevant information that comes along becomes the anchor for how people look at the situation.

(Ardath cites Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, as the source of this concept of first-in information as anchor.)

After you’ve created your personas, Ardath suggests presenting them to the salespeople before presenting them to the corporate team.

Find out if your personas match up with what the salespeople are thinking. If not, explain why some things don’t match their perceptions. Show them the research, the data, the transcripts – whatever it is – so that you all end up on the same page.

Typically, your personas end up different from what your salespeople originally described. “Get ready to earn that buy-in from sales (team). If you don’t, you’re going to have problems,” Ardath says.

Conclusion

All the research described here has one purpose: to help you build useful personas – personas that reveal your buyers, personas that inform your content marketing strategy­, personas that build sales.

Here’s how Ardath summarizes well-built buyer personas. They:

• Inform smart content decisions
• Help companies build relationships with the right people
• Keep buyers front and center as the heroes of our stories
• Drive buyer outreach
• Help all teams across the company tell the same story

Has your team created buyer personas? If so, do you use them? What has (and what hasn’t) worked well? Please let us know in a comment.

You can learn more about B2B buying from Ardath Albee at Content Marketing World 2016. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100. Early-bird savings ends May 31.

Also, sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers newsletter, featuring exclusive insights from CMI’s Chief Strategy Officer, Robert Rose.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Build Buyer Personas That Build Sales appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

A scenic view at twilight of Sunset Beach on the West End’s waterfront, English Bay, Vancouver, B.C. (Bayne Stanley/CP)

Vancouver’s strong economy and privileged location at the gateway to the Asia Pacific mask weaknesses that could blunt its long-term competitiveness, according to an ambitious new study.

The 2016 Greater Vancouver Economic Scorecard is the most detailed piece of public-policy work in two decades from the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. Working with the Conference Board of Canada, the organization compared the Vancouver region against 20 international competitors — including Shanghai, Sydney, San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and others — on 32 economic and social indicators.

The report will be released Wednesday in Vancouver. The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade gave Maclean’s exclusive advance access.

The scorecard ranks cities on two composite scales—economy and social. Vancouver fares only middling-well on both scales—ninth on the economy, seventh on social—with a grade of “B” on both. Three Asian powerhouses, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, topped the economy ranking, while Barcelona, Copenhagen and Sydney were at the top of the social scale.

The report’s authors say Vancouver’s long-term performance will depend on the ability of local and regional governments to tackle seven big challenges. Inadequate roads and transit lead to long commute times and heavy traffic. Home prices are through the roof, and the region’s boxed-in geography make it hard to find relief. Land scarcity also leaves little room for the Port of Vancouver to grow and boost trade. Labour productivity is low, as is educational attainment—relatively few adults over 25 have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. While payroll taxes are low by U.S. standards, the region has a high marginal effective tax rate on capital, a measure of attractiveness for business investment. Vancouver has fewer head offices than other cities in the ranking.

“If left unaddressed, these challenges could prevent Greater Vancouver from fully realizing the advantages of being a preferred gateway economy to Asia, as well as deter talented people and business investment,” said Daniel Muzyka, President and CEO of The Conference Board of Canada.

While lots of things make Vancouver attractive, “the benchmarking results suggest Greater Vancouver still faces significant challenges that if left unaddressed could impact our future economic vitality,” Ian Black, the Vancouver Board of Trade’s president and CEO, said.

The report’s authors say one of the big obstacles to making Vancouver more competitive is the patchwork of municipalities and regional authorities that administer the region’s 39 census metropolitan areas, often jealously and usually with little coordination. The Vancouver Board of Trade isn’t hiding its motives with this report: by producing a relatively objective data set to compare Vancouver’s assets and shortcomings against its competitors’, the VBOT hopes to get the region’s governments to focus on long-term improvements instead of on infighting.

The moment for such a report could be propitious. British Columbians will elect a provincial government in a year. Vancouverites will elect a mayor a year later. And the Vancouver area sent eight Liberals to Ottawa last year to join the government caucus with Justin Trudeau, whose mother’s family is from Vancouver and who lived there for years as a young adult. The confluence produces highly motivated governments at all three levels. Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson told Maclean’s there have been preliminary talks aimed at reviving the Vancouver Agreement, a three-level accord from 2000 that identified common priorities and tasks for governments in Vancouver.

The original Vancouver Agreement expired in 2010 because Stephen Harper thought Ottawa should have no business setting urban policy for a big city with provincial and municipal governments. Justin Trudeau disagrees entirely. Today’s report could help guide a change in the way governments divide tasks in one of the country’s most promising regions.

The post A city in need of long-term vision appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Typically, users pay a lot of attention to apps right after they download them, but that engagement falls off a cliff after the first day.

To change this, app marketers need to properly employ push notifications by personalizing them for their customers. This would increase engagement and create more loyal customers, according to a new report by mobile marketing platform Leanplum.

The report examined 1.5 billion push notifications for iOS and Android users to analyze push notification engagement behavior, along with the crucial role of timing and content in these campaigns. The study found that personalization increased user engagement by 800%.

Push notifications with personalized touches such as a user's name, favorite topics, or recently viewed items generated open rates four times greater than generic messages.

Furthermore, push notifications triggered by a user's action led to open rates eight times greater than typical blast campaigns. For example, sending a message to a mobile app shopper to remind them to check out after they add items to their cart is far more effective than sending them a message the moment they enter the app.

Finally, iOS users respond to push notifications seven times faster on average than Android users, but Android users have higher open rates overall.

There is a problem, however, as marketers try to increase app engagement. Users are receiving more push notifications on their home screens, which is causing many of them to outright ignore the messages. In fact, a recent study by Localytics revealed that 52% of users find these messages annoying.

Another issue is the sheer volume of apps out there in the app stores.

Cutting through the noise of an overcrowded app market is critical for any app developer looking to build a viable user base. There are now well over 3 million apps available across the world’s five largest app stores. Delivering the right product to the right audience at the right time in this environment is imperative to the success of any app.

The challenge of marketing an app effectively has made app-install ads — an ad unit that directs users to download a mobile app — an essential tool for developers seeking to stand out in the Google Play and Apple app stores. This is why it's not surprising that more marketers are using paid channels to drive downloads than ever before. In fact, over 80% of respondents in a survey of the top 100 grossing mobile app developers noted they plan on increasing their spend on app-install ads in 2015.

Will McKitterick, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on mobile app-install ads that looks at the revenues from app-install ads and how they're expected to grow over the next five years. It also looks at the performance of app-install ads and how these metrics are expected to change over time.

Furthermore, the report examines the top app-install ad products and pricing models offered by the leading advertising platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google, as well as newer app-install formats from Instagram and Snapchat. Looking to the future, the report examines how companies are shifting their app-install ad spend to new formats, as well as the new tools they're using to improve optimization and ad effectiveness.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Mobile app-install ads — ad units that direct users to download a mobile app — are an essential tool for developers, and they account for a major share of mobile ad spend. We estimate 25% of total US mobile ad revenue was generated by app-install ads in 2015.
• A combination of new developers entering the space and rising ad budgets will drive increased spending in years to come. US app-install ad revenue will grow to over $7 billion by year-end 2020, according to BI Intelligence estimates.
• Mobile app install advertisers have traditionally invested heavily in display and interstitial ads, but are moving to mobile video and native install formats. 86% of developers currently use in-feed video app-install ads, and video ads are seen as the most effective app-install format.
• As formats like video rise in popularity, older formats are losing their appeal for install campaigns. Static nonnative ads are widely used but are not seen as effective. Free app networks and offer walls have also fallen out of favor.
• Ad platforms are now developing innovative new install formats to earn even more revenue from these lucrative ad units. New approaches, including deep linking and app streaming, are more contextualized and interactive than older ad formats.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts app-install ad spending in the US through 2020.
• Explores which app-install ad formats developers believe are most effective.
• Discusses what the most popular platforms and ad networks are doing to attract ad spending.
• Investigates new tools for marketing apps, including deep linking and app streaming.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the IoT universe, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of the IoT.

Join the conversation about this story »

B2B selling has become increasingly complex. Every sales leader today understands this, and it’s obvious we need to take steps to increase the effectiveness of our sales processes.

I believe that modern selling is not just a heady blend of art and science - it also benefits from applying an engineering mindset. Engineering is about finding repeatable, implementable solutions to common problems. If you want to scale a sales organization, you need the ability to encapsulate critical information and apply it in a way that drives repeatable results.

I recently talked about this challenge with Cara Hogan, the host of Ramp, InsightSquared’s SaaS analytics podcast. I hope you'll find the conversation as stimulating as I did...

In this exclusive 23 minute episode, Cara and I discuss:

• How successful selling is a blend of art, science and engineering
• How machine learning might help improve sales results
• A simple formula for improving your sales forecasting
• How sales teams are having to change to be successful in 2016 and beyond
• ...and much more

One of the key themes we explore is the idea that “there are dozens of factors that drive success in a sales opportunity ... data points that are unique to each sales process, and have a very high predictive value as whether an opportunity is likely to close. If you identify those patterns of success for winning opportunities, you know where you stand.” You can listen in on the whole discussion by clicking on the link below.

 You can find out more about our partnership with InsightSquared here.

The importance of mobile for today’s retailers is indisputable. According to SimilarWeb, 65% of total ecommerce traffic in the UK in January 2016 came from a mobile device.¹ However, despite its apparent dominance, brands need to approach their strategy with caution. A better understanding of the true role of mobile within the omnichannel consumer journey will ensure budget is spent where it’s most effective, rather than wasted trying to improve performance in silo.

Don’t become blinkered by mobile volume
Whether it’s due to pressure from the CMO, or as a reaction to huge traffic volumes, marketers can become fixated on mobile at the expense of other channels. Unless the response is supported by analysis of a brand’s own consumer journey and mobile’s role within it, it can be easy to take the wrong action.

Focusing solely on increasing mobile conversions may not have the desired effect as often the high level of mobile visits don’t translate into conversions and revenue. This can be due to the device being used by consumers for research, before purchasing on a desktop or in-store. 69% of shoppers say they have searched for a product or service on their phone, then gone on to purchase on a computer or offline.² When purchases are made on mobile, the monetary value of the sale can be less; the average order value on mobile purchases is 20% lower than on desktops.³

A unified approach is key
Instead, effort should be placed on understanding mobile’s role within the consumer journey, with the goal of increasing overall conversions. Consumers do not shop in silos so brands need to join activity across devices to understand the real impact of their marketing.

Budget should be spent in a way that optimises overall conversions, rather than on any single device. This can only be achieved with cross-device measurement and attribution, which enable marketers to concentrate their effort where it’s most useful.

This can be easier said than done, as there are often technical and organisational challenges to this joined up view, with channel or device specific teams using different methods and technology to measure their performance. To ensure teams work together, responsibility should lie with someone who sits above all teams and understands the value of a combined approach.

Despite high traffic volumes, investing heavily in mobile without an understanding of its place within the overall consumer journey is not necessarily going to mean more sales. Companies that take a joined-up approach will gain a true understanding of the contribution of the device to their business. Looking at mobile in context means brands can ensure the right amount of time and budget is invested in the device, with the right messaging and at the right time.

¹SimilarWeb as cited in company blog, March 2^nd 2016

²Lars Hirsch at SMX Advanced 2014

³The Custora E-Commerce Pulse Mobile Report

Win/loss analysis is often seen as a tool for the sales teams. After all, they’re the ones at the end of the funnel either closing the deal or watching the prospect slip away.

Win/loss is an incredibly useful tool for gaining insight into the consumer mindset as they move through their journey, which means that these interviews can be equally powerful for helping marketers improve their efforts. It’s simply a matter of asking the right questions.

So what are the key questions all good marketing win/loss analyses have in common? They may vary in verbiage, but they lead to answers in three crucial areas: better understanding of the buyer’s process, identifying gaps in expectations versus reality, and strengthening the product or marketing messages.

The Buyer’s Process

Questions that speak to the customer buying process should revolve around consumer pain points and your business’ competitive landscape. This might include:

1. What first led you to consider our brand?
2. What problem were you trying to solve?
3. Who was involved in the decision to consider it?
4. What other solutions or brands were considered in your evaluation?

Your customers and even prospective customers should know the answers to these questions easily, which will give you important information (some of which you may already know), but more importantly, it will put your interviewee at ease in what may be an awkward environment for them. Once you’ve obtained basic information, ask, “What made you decide to start looking for a solution to this particular problem?”

As they search a little deeper and deduce the answer to this question, they will likely provide you insight into their underlying motives to purchase, timelines or life events they were working against, and their buyer persona.

Identifying Gaps

Often, a sale won’t close because of a disconnect between what the prospect was expecting and what the company was offering. This could mean any number of things: The product didn’t meet needs or expectations, the salesperson didn’t click with them, or the prospect was dealing with other outside pressures. For marketers, expectation gaps could exist with anticipated value through messaging versus perceived value when actually interacting with the product.

Specific questions around specific marketing campaigns or assets can help align your marketing to close these gaps. For example:

1. What were your thoughts about our “How to develop your own app” education series?
2. What did you think about our brand before you enrolled in the series?
3. What would you have liked to see done differently?
4. What do you think about our brand now?

Leaving questions open-ended will get your audience talking, and the answers they give here will help you identify positive perceptions to amplify in marketing messaging and negative sentiments which need to be addressed internally.

Strengthening the Messaging

At the end of the day, it all comes down to using a win/loss analysis to craft better messages that engage your target audience with your brand and ultimately lead to more sales. Even if the reasons your customers gave for engaging with your brand are incongruous with what you intended, knowing which aspects of your marketing plan fell on deaf ears is important. (highlight to tweet)

Questions that can help you refine your messaging include:

1. What initially piqued your interest in our brand?
2. What messages from other brands caught your attention while you were making your purchase decision?
3. What type of content can we create to better serve you?

Once you’ve established rapport, and the conversation gets going, follow your interviewee down that path. You may uncover information you didn’t think to inquire about. Be sure to take notes to serve as a reference. At the close of the interview, give them one more opportunity to speak candidly about your brand, your product, and your messaging.

Direct feedback from the customer as to what’s working and what’s not is like a treasure trove from which you can improve your brand’s communication with customers.

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

       

Ask anyone in sales today, and they’ll agree: B2B selling has become increasingly complex. Bob Apollo wants to help sales teams handle that complexity, and break it down into more manageable and understandable processes.

Apollo is the Founder and Managing Partner at Inflexion-Point, the UK-based B2B sales process experts. He has worked for many of the world’s most respected technology companies, including HP. Apollo now uses his experiences in sales to help tomorrow’s tech companies cut through the complexity.

“Modern selling is not just a combination of art and science, it’s also engineering,” he noted. “Engineering is about finding repeatable, implementable solutions to common problems. If you want to scale a sales organization, you need the ability to encapsulate the data and apply it in a way that drives repeatable results.”

In the latest episode of Ramp, Bob Apollo shares how you can improve your sales processes to drive better forecasting, higher revenues, and a more efficient sales team.

Listen now:

A lot of today’s sales challenges come down to the struggle to interpret and utilize the vast amount of sales data effectively, Apollo explained.

“There are dozens of factors that drive success in a sales opportunity,” he said. “There are data points that are unique to each sales process, and have a very high predictive value as to if an opportunity is likely to close. If you identify those patterns of success for winning opportunities, you know where you stand.”

In this exclusive 23 minute episode, Apollo shares:

• The potential for machine learning to improve sales results
• How to analyze your sales funnel
• The processes your sales team needs to be successful
• …and much more.

Learn how data can drive repeatable sales success in the latest episode of Ramp.

The first time I came across a video within an email was in 2011 when I received a Game of Thrones email from Sky TV in the UK. Even though I was using Outlook 2007 at the time and had images blocked, I was still pretty amazed to see a real working video when I clicked on the “Can’t view this email” link.

As a fairly geeky email marketer, I viewed the source code to see what magic was going on.

I quickly identified something that looked like this:

<video width="640" height="360" poster="https://www.campaignmonitor.com/assets/uploads/https://www.campaignmonitor.com/assets/uploads/fallback.jpg" controls="controls">

<source src="http://mysite.com/videoname.mp4" type="video/mp4" />

<a href="http://mysite.com/"><img src="https://www.campaignmonitor.com/assets/uploads/https://www.campaignmonitor.com/assets/uploads/fallback.jpg" width="640" height="360" /></a> </video>

If you’re wondering what that code is, it’s actually HTML5 video tag which I can tell you was very advanced stuff at the time. Campaign Monitor co-founder, Dave Greiner blogged about this snippet of code back in 2009 and came to the conclusion that it was the best way to embed a video within an email, but still lacks support from most email clients.

According to our friends at Email on Acid, videos in email will work in Apple Mail, older iOS versions of the iPhone and Outlook.com. So, if you happen to have a high number of subscribers using one of those email clients, you can consider including a video within your emails, otherwise, it’s not something we would recommend. You can easily check what the most popular email clients and devices are among your subscribers with our email client usage report.

To solve for all the other email clients, we have some alternative options for using video in email in this post.

Optimizing your video for email

If you determine that you have a large Apple Mail/Outlook.com subscriber base and you want to try embedding an HTML 5 video in your email, there are a number of things you can do to optimize the experience for your subscribers.

Keep it short

It’s likely that half of the subscribers who open your emails spend less than 10 seconds reading them. Don’t bother trying to display a full feature film within your email. We recommend keeping your video under 60 seconds.

Keep file size low

Another good reason to keep your video short is that you also want to try and keep the file size as low as possible so that the video doesn’t need to buffer to start playing. Keep in mind that many people open your emails on mobile devices which might not have the fastest download speed.

Turn the sound off

People don’t expect sound to come out of their emails. So make sure that you turn the mute sound option on within your code.

Use video for the right reasons

Don’t use a video in your email just for the sake of doing it. Make sure that you have the right audience for the video and that it actually adds value to the email. Some good use cases might include event announcements, new product launches, exclusive interviews, etc.

What’s the alternative to embedding video in your email?

While embedding video in email isn’t a great idea for most due to the lack of support across email clients, there are other solutions you can use to bring videos to your emails including the following:

Animated GIFs

The obvious alternative to video within email is to use an animated GIF. These are easy to make, lightweight and are supported by most email clients. That’s why so many emails you receive from retailers includes an animated GIF of some sort.

Here’s a fun example from Australian retailer, Trelise Cooper:

Static image with play button

Using a play button on top of a static image is an incredibly easy way to link to video content hosted on sites like Wistia, YouTube or Vimeo. Like the animated GIF option, this is a great lightweight solution. And unlike embedding your video in the email, you’ll be able to track your clicks to see how many people are viewing the video from the email.

We did this recently in our Campaign Monitor newsletter with a slick video for Jaybird:

Animated play button

To add a little extra emphasis to their play button, Harley Davidson of Australia & NZ used an animated play button to draw attention to the video in their email campaign:

Using these alternatives is very easy and has none of the drawbacks of embedding video in email.

Wrap up

Whether you choose to get more technical and use HTML5 video in your email or choose to use one of the alternatives outlined in this post, using video in email can be an engaging way to bring compelling content to your subscribers.

How can a startup successfully build a new business with a limited budget and engage diverse customers while breaking into a very competitive industry? Here is how Blink Fitness is managing diversity marketing in New York City.

Blink Fitness is a value fitness center that focuses on feeling good as the primary motivator for joining. They have been in business for five years, experiencing increasing double-digit growth and positive bottom line results. I recently had the opportunity to hear its President, Todd Magazine, share about his experience growing this retail concept with the Kellogg Alumni Club of New York.

Blink Fitness’s Three Steps to Engage Diverse Customers

While Todd did not specifically speak to diversity marketing, I gleaned the following principles from him that will be useful to any new venture launching in New York City or any other U.S. market that is more than 45% multicultural:

1. Speak to diversity, even if not cultural. Seeking a differentiated positioning, Blink Fitness goes against the grain by featuring a wide range of real bodies and promising “feel good” results rather than pounds/inches lost or achieving your ideal body. The by-product of that approach is a stronger multicultural appeal, as its message is by nature inclusive. Moreover, people in Blink Fitness ads reflect what New Yorkers really look like, unlike the many startup ads that I have seen on the subway which only portray a certain kind of person.

Blink Fitness 2016 Video Advertising – Source: YouTube

2. Identify key benefits that need tweaking for diverse audiences. Given its budget and staff limitations as a startup, Blink can’t tailor every element of its value proposition to its trade area. However, music is one of the “mood lifting” pillars that are key to delivering on the Blink Fitness brand promise. And the emotion evoked by music is correlated to the age and ethnicity of the listener. Therefore, Blink plays different music to engage diverse customers based on their varied preferences. Another differentiation is their “everyone cleans” policy, which requires instilling a sense of pride in employees. Hiring people from the neighborhoods in which it operates accomplishes such a goal plus makes a positive local impact that customers also appreciate.

3. Operate with excellence regardless of your location. Blink has built a strong business by consistently delivering a quality affordable fitness experience to consumers regardless of their socio-economic level. When developing its value concept, Blink leveraged the high-end operations philosophy and architectural design resources of its luxury sister brand Equinox. And they are reaping the benefits of their approach. This stands in contrast to retailers that allow their stores in highly ethnic, lower socio-economic areas to become run down, causing its shopper base to migrate to more affluent areas to make purchases. That creates a vicious cycle that erodes sales in the highly ethnic locations which in turn lowers a company’s desire to invest in the upkeep of the facilities.

At the end of the day, a startup’s business model and value proposition is what will drive its success or failure. However, for the many new ventures wanting to launch in the iconic New York City to attract trendsetters or impress investors, it is a must to give some thought to how the organization might engage diverse customers. May they draw inspiration from Blink Fitness.

Can your brand implement these ideas? Have you found any other budget-friendly ways to engage multiple segments simultaneously?

Microsoft erased another part of its massive Nokia mistake this morning, selling its feature phone business for $350 million to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn. Microsoft had already written off the entire value of the original acquisition, and has scaled back its phone business dramatically in the last year.

As this chart from Statista shows, Nokia's smartphone business was already on a steep decline when Microsoft bought it in 2014. Nokia's total phone sales peaked in late 2010 at over 120 million. The company signed its smartphone platform deal with Microsoft the following quarter. But by the time Microsoft bought it, its annual sales had already been cut in half. It would've taken a miracle — or a serious misstep by competitors like Apple or the Android handset makers — for Microsoft to turn that business around.

SEE ALSO: Business users are flocking to Microsoft's Dropbox competitor

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch never-before-seen footage of SpaceX's most impressive rocket landing to date

Creating value? If you’re like most sellers, this is a stretch.

It used to be enough for a seller to deliver on the value that mattered most to the buyer. If a buyer expressed a preference for “made in the USA” and the seller had products manufactured in America, the value was recognized and the solution was sufficient.

As competitive pressures increased, marketers began adding value to incentivize buyers. In addition to meeting preferences like “made in America,” companies began offering added value, everything from the old S&H Green Stamps to today’s Box Tops for Education. For many years, programs and offerings like these ensured buyer loyalty.

Value + Added Value — Isn’t That Enough?

This is not the case any longer. Today, the same buyer wants “made in the USA” plus the standard added value AND something more. The “more” is seldom defined. Buyers don’t know exactly what they want, but they know what it is when they find it. Until they find it, they are always on the lookout for it.

For a seller, this is a precarious position. Providing a product but not fully satisfying the buyer opens a window of opportunity for competitors to swoop in and steal the business. This is not an empty alarmist threat. This is what buyers describe. Sellers need to be aware and vigilant to prevent this from happening.

Are You Creating Value for Your Buyers?

What causes this buyer dissatisfaction? It isn’t always attributable to price or product quality or corporate image. It isn’t necessarily a lack of value or a deficit in added value.

Oftentimes, sellers simply aren’t creating value. Even when the reason given by the buyer for choosing another supplier is lower price, superior quality or more appealing brand… Even then, the first inklings of dissatisfaction can be traced back to a lack of value creation by the seller.

Fortunately, creating value is not expensive, time-consuming or difficult. It all starts with a genuine connection and well-crafted questions. Keep reading the CONNECT2Sell Blog or DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected to learn how YOU can start creating value for your buyers.

Next Steps:

• To learn more about DISCOVER Questions® and how to get connected in meaningful ways with your buyers, order your copy of this bestseller from Amazon.com
• When you need sales or management coaching, customized sales training, or a dynamic speaker call us at 408-779-PFPS or book an appointment with Deb.
• Check out these resources for sales managers and front line sellers. New webinars, infographics, research, podcasts and more added every month!

The award-winning CONNECT2Sell Blog is for professional sellers who believe, as we do, that Every Sale Starts with a Connection.

Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author and Top 50 Sales Influencer, is President of People First Productivity Solutions, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a former Sales/Training Director of a Fortune 500 media company. She speaks and writes about the Stop Selling & Start Leading movement and offers sales training, coaching and consulting as well as leadership development programs. She is certified as an executive and sales coach by the ICF and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Deb has worked in every sector and in 14 countries to build leadership capacity, team effectiveness and sales productivity with a “people first” approach.

The post Creating Value: Your Buyers Are Demanding It appeared first on People First.

Ever wondered what people say about you behind your back? If it’s your business they’re talking about, this isn’t mere paranoia – your survival is at stake. Online reviews are read by anywhere from 67-97% of consumers, depending on which study you cite.

There is less data available about how B2B companies are affected by online reviews than there is for B2C companies. But I don’t think that gets B2Bers off the hook. We are people, after all, whether we’re in B2B or B2C. And while buying decisions in B2B are often more complex, it’s still people making those decisions – and those people are swayed by online reviews.

There are also plenty of circumstances when it’s obvious that even pure B2B businesses are affected by online reviews.

• Employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
• If you’re a SAAS biz, on sites like GetApp.com and Product Hunt. Or Spiceworks and G2.
• Industry-wide research reports or surveys of what people think of different B2B services.

So while we don’t talk as much about online reviews for B2B companies, it’s not like B2Bers are in a review-free environment. Reviews also carry more weight when you put them in context.

As you probably know, word of mouth marketing is arguably the most effective type of marketing, as this chart from Implisit shows.

Well, online reviews are basically just digitized word of mouth marketing. And if you add in businesses’ responsibility to respond to how they are reviewed, we tip into the territory of customer service.

It doesn’t end there. Expand your focus just a bit and you might think of customer reviews as a way for customers to tell their stories. Really positive customer stories, of course, are sometimes known as case studies. And they do pretty well in terms of results, too.

Chart from Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America.

One last point about why online reviews matter just as much for B2B marketers as for their B2C friends. Remember the Corporate Executive Board survey that found B2B buyers complete 60 percent of the purchase process before they ever directly engage with a vendor? Some of that “pre-purchase research” will be reading online reviews.

Of course, if you’re a local business, you’ll already be fully aware of how important online reviews are. You’ve run into the influence of Yelp and Google Local already.

I hope that makes it clear how critical online reviews are to B2B companies. And so now that I’ve got your attention, here’s what you need to know – and what you need to do – about your own company’s online reviews.

1. A one-star increase in your rating score can increase revenue 5-9%.

That’s according to a Harvard Business School study by Michael Luca. Luca studied the effects of Yelp ratings for independent restaurants, cross-checking them with data from the Washington State Department of Revenue. His conclusion was that every star boosts revenue by 5-9%.

Of course, that’s not a B2B study (though some restaurants definitely benefit from their business clientele) and it’s only for one segment of an industry. But it does give us a clue about how valuable positive reviews can be.

By the way … that’s a great measurement to help you decide if launching a review program – aka an “advocacy marketing program” – is worthwhile. How much is 5 to 9% of your company’s revenue worth? What would it cost to create enough of a program to increase your rating by one star?

2. Each negative review costs the average business about 30 customers/clients.

That’s according to a 2009 Convergys Corporation study, and I can’t imagine that the effect isn’t still with us. You can calculate how much just one bad review might cost you with this free calculator.

3. More reviews are better, but even a few can help a lot.

This is a chart based on B2C company data, but I find it so compelling I’m including it anyway. Some marketers might think that having no online reviews is somewhat good news – nobody’s complaining, right? But you stand to actually increase sales by getting more reviews.

So ask yourself: Given the data shown in this chart, how much would it be worth to you to get a 30% lift in orders? Then figure out if you can set up an advocacy marketing program for less than that.

Just for some contrast, consider this B2C chart from BrightLocal. Most of their survey respondents said they need to see between two and six reviews in order to trust a business.

4. Online reviews are a search engine ranking signal.

Yup. Google and Bing take these review blurbs pretty seriously. Moz’s 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors survey.

As you can see, they’re definitely not a top-tier ranking signal. But they help! Both for reviews on Google Local and for third-party sites.

How many reviews do you need to see a difference? BazaarVoice says the magic number is eight or more.

And how much more traffic can you expect? According to BazaarVoice, 15-25%.

5. Your Google reviews will show up in the search listings.

Ratings can effect how many click-throughs your pages get in the search results, too. If you’ve got reviews for your Google local account, they’ll appear as part of your search listing, as stars. When your searcher clicks the stars, the reviews open up.

That could positively – or negatively – affect how many clicks your search engine listings get. Google estimates that just having the star reviews next to your listing increases click-through rates by 17%. And that click-through rate, in turn, could move your listings closer to the top in the results.

There’s more: Google Local reviews also show up on Google Maps.

6. Negative reviews can be a blessing in disguise.

They sure won’t look like (or feel like it) it up front, but two or one-star reviews can help you. How? Three ways.

• A few bad reviews sprinkled in lend an air of legitimacy to your other reviews. Online users are savvy and skeptical – they know reviews get manipulated sometimes. Seeing a negative or tepid review verifies we’re not looking at paid or fabricated reviews. And that’s not just my opinion: According to Econsultancy, “68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores.”

• Less-than-glowing feedback might reveal a business issue you weren’t aware of before. It may be legitimate feedback about your business that you need to fix.

According to Trackur, 96% of unhappy customers will never complain to the company they’re peeved with. But they will mention their complaint to fifteen friends.

Other research (albeit a bit old) from Covergys confirms that most customers won’t complain… they’ll just leave.

• If you reply to the negative review intelligently, you could change the perception the reviewer has of your company. Even if you can’t woo them, everyone who reads your response will hear your side of the story. They’ll see you care about your customers’/clients’ experiences. That builds trust.

Dave Kerpen of Likeable Local stressed and restressed how important it is to always reply to a negative comment in a webinar he did, “5 Hacks to Turn Negativity Online Into Rave Reviews” earlier this year. His most pointed? Never delete or ignore bad reviews. You’ll only make matters worse.

Case in point: The musician Dave Carroll, whose guitar was broken on a United Airlines flight. Dave complained on social media to the airline, but they deleted his complaint. So he took it to YouTube. His song, “United Breaks Guitars,” has been seen by over 15 million people. It made a $180 million dollar dent in United’s stock value.

7. Don’t forget the Better Business Bureau – and all the other lesser known B2B review sites.

Don’t limit yourself to just Google Local and Yelp. The granddaddy of online review sites – the Better Business Bureau – is still alive and kicking, thank you very much. If you haven’t checked your company’s listing recently, you’d do well to go do that now.

Also check these popular B2B review sites:

• Angie’s List

It is acceptable to ask your customers to review you on all these sites – except for Yelp. They have an unusual but very strict policy about that. Also, reviews may note that the reviewer was solicited.

Just one last tip: Don’t wait to ask people to write you a review. The longer it’s been since their happy experience, the less likely they are to write a review. Or to remember exactly why they were so delighted. So ask early: No more than a week after the transaction or a customer service exchange.

Conclusion

B2B marketers need to be thinking about their online reviews just as much as B2C marketers do. That may mean actively getting more reviews, but it definitely means monitoring the places where people are likely to review your company. It also means having a policy in place for what you’re going to say when someone does leave you a negative review. It’s not okay to just ignore it. And it’s not okay to let a lot of time go by.

What do you think?

Are you monitoring or responding to the online reviews your company gets? What’s your policy for negative reviews? Please tell us how it’s going, even if your company policy right now is just to pretend online reviews don’t exist.

Getting your customers to love you isn’t always easy, and marketing is the only function with the infrastructure to take control. Modern customers expect personalization, consistency, and interactions that take their unique needs and desired outcomes into account. Download Act-On’s free guide, Marketing: The New Stewards of the Customer Relationship, to learn five concise recommendations for improving customer engagement.

The rise in ad blocking is continuing to cause major concern for advertisers and publishers who stand to lose ad effectiveness and revenue if they can’t curb this trend. Ad blocking has grown by 41% globally year over year, according to Pagefair’s 2015 Ad Blocking Report. Even in the face of smarter programmatic advertising (software-created, specifically-targeted advertising) algorithms and massive databases storing information on industries, businesses, consumers, and everything in between, ads are still falling flat with your audience–where the use of ad blockers is clear evidence that something needs to change.

Solving this problem isn’t about trying new tricks to get around ad blockers, blocking users who employ the software, or making seemingly desperate pleas to convince people to tolerate ads (e.g. The New York Times recently went all in with an appeal to its readers, developing a pop-up ad that essentially begged them to stop using ad-blocking software). Better ad performance calls for, quite simply, better ad creation and that’s where personalization comes into play. Publishers and advertisers can take programmatic advertising a step further with personalization. Doing programmatic personalization properly calls for significant shifts in the way advertisers build their creatives and how they determine who sees what. Let’s take a look at the two major shifts that marketers need to make:

Personalize Based on Data, Not Assumptions

At its core, personalized content of any kind may seem like a pipe dream for those marketing to large databases. But your buyers need more than a generic message if they’re going to tolerate your ad content, let alone engage with it. With advancements in marketing technology, you can serve tailored content to target audiences across channels, from your website to your ad channels and beyond. This technology, like Marketo’s digital ads app, enables you to engage customers across their entire lifecycle and tell a continuous, relevant and personal story based on the activity and engagement of your audience member from other channels.

Companies currently store massive amounts of data in publisher platforms and data management platforms (DMPs), never mind the personal customer and profile data already stored in their marketing automation database. The critical component is to use all of this data to deliver ad content that is truly relevant to the individual user–not just similar users–at the right time, by first organizing data stores and then analyzing them to derive actionable insights that drive strategy. Programmatic personalization creates and serves content that matters to your buyers based on their unique profile data, web behaviors, previous transactions, and any other data points available–in a precise and timely manner that is the essence of successful ad delivery.

Recommend the Next Best Action, Not the Next Best Offer

Frequently, programmatic ads display content designed to generate more sales immediately, even if a purchase was made just days–or even hours–beforehand. But personalization helps advertisers create more meaningful interactions with a “next-best-action” approach, rather than a “next-best-offer” approach. The next best offer is all about driving an immediate, second sale. In this case, a customer made a purchase and then is served ad content trying to sell related products or other items that appealed to other customers who made similar purchases. Whereas, the next best action restarts the process from the beginning. When a customer buys something, subsequent ad content aims to improve their experience with the product or help them use it more effectively (e.g. an instructional video).

Advertisers should consider each customer relationship as a story and each purchase as a chapter. When a customer buys something, they likely don’t want another overt sales pitch for the next interaction. As such, your personalized content needs to nurture them and consider where they are in the customer lifecycle, rather than calling for another purchase immediately. Sure, there’s always a good chance a customer will capitalize on a promotion or sale right after making a purchase, but the overwhelming probability suggests another kind of content will work better. For example, if a customer’s last purchase was a tool set for a dorm room, content about decorating dorms and small apartments will likely be more valuable to them than direct offers for more purchases. When brands shift to a next-best-offer approach, they encourage further sales by becoming a part of their customers’ lives–a trusted resource rather than just a store.

Shift Now, Not When It’s Too Late

The time for companies to augment programmatic with personalization is now. Marketing technology is emerging from major players that makes personalized content a reality. Many of these organizations currently possess a significant amount of industry, market, and customer data. For them, the next move is monetizing this information and developing new marketing and advertising technologies aimed at personalizing each interaction.

As more technology for programmatic personalization enters the market, it’s critical for organizations to take advantage of it instead of sticking to the status quo. Programmatic advertising without personalization has driven countless people to install ad blockers. Because of this, neither advertisers nor publishers have seen the results they want. The consequences of continuing to ignore personalization in digital advertising are too significant too ignore. Once programmatic personalization technology becomes pervasive, organizations will see customers who not only accept ads, but also are more engaged with it and loyal to the brand.

What other changes do you see in the works for more effective programmatic advertising? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

In his new book, Hug Your Haters, Jay Baer reveals some surprising realities about customer service. “The hard thing about writing a customer service book,” he says, “is that everybody thinks they’re already good at it.” However, a pivotal study from Bain & Company showed that while 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, only 8% of their customers agree. Talk about a disconnect.

“Customer service is being disrupted in the exact same way that marketing has been disrupted, and for the same reasons: mobile, social media, and Millennial behavior.” Baer explains. “The trouble is that everybody is using a 1995 playbook to solve 2016 problems.”

As a business strategist with twenty-three years of experience, Baer knows what he’s talking about. A renowned expert on marketing and customer service, he has worked with more than 700 companies (including 32 of the Fortune 500), presented hundreds of keynotes, authored five books, and founded Convince & Convert, a consulting firm and its #1 content marketing blog.

While Baer’s client roster spans almost every industry from retail to manufacturing and financial services to healthcare, his insights about customer service are particularly relevant for SaaS companies. “We all agree that in the SaaS business, churn is the most important number,” Baer says. “So why would you ever value marketing over customer success? It doesn’t make any sense.” And yet, that seems to be exactly what most companies do.
According to research Baer did for his book, the annual global spend on marketing is about $500 billion while the corresponding spend on customer service is only about $9 billion.

Survey Says: You Just Need to Show Up

Baer was inspired to write Hug Your Haters when he recognized a trend in the questions on the consulting side of his practice. “Increasingly, the questions companies asked were about social media customer care, how to balance marketing with customer care, and how to balance social media customer care with traditional customer service,” he says. “There’s a lot of confusion in the market.”

Rather than compile a collection of expert anecdotes and advice, Baer partnered with Edison Research to conduct a massive research project about the “science of complaint.” The intensive, full-blown study surveyed more than 2,000 Americans about not only whether they complained, but also where, why, and how they complained. Baer went into the exercise with a hypothesis, “My thesis was that speed is the killer app – that you have less than an hour to respond to a customer on the phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, or via skywriting. What we discovered, however, is that while speed is important, it’s not the most important factor. The most important thing companies can do right now – the differentiator – is just show up.”

A Colossal Opportunity

“The reality is most companies are, at best, only adequate at customer service,” Baer says. “They don’t put enough time, money, or emphasis into it. They think of it as a necessary evil in the truest sense of that phrase.” The good news is that the prevalence of this half-hearted, mediocre approach to customer service creates an opportunity for companies who are willing to go the extra mile. “The competition can have similar products and similar pricing and similar everything else,” explains Baer, “but if you are genuinely better at customer service and care more about your customers, that’s a competitive advantage that can stay with you for a long time.”

How big is this opportunity?

The research Baer and Edison did for Hug Your Haters indicates a full third of complaints go unanswered.

“And almost all those unanswered complaints are made online via social media, discussion boards, review sites, etc.,” Baer says, “So, we’re spending all this time and money to answer all the private conversations, but we willingly and even purposely ignore many of the public conversations? That’s probably backwards.”

This situation is especially relevant for SaaS companies because of the additional consideration that goes into a software purchase. “The more expensive the purchase, the more considered the purchase, the more important good customer service is,” says Baer. He explains that someone shopping for a SaaS product will research not only features and cost but also what kind of customer service experience to expect. Anticipating future issues, prospective buyers will, he says, wonder what the customer service experience will be like. “Buyers start poking around, looking at the company’s Twitter account and Facebook page, researching on G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, discussion boards, and forums for evidence that when something goes wrong, you’re going to take care of them.”

“It’s a colossal opportunity,” says Baer. “If somebody has a criticism, answer it on the record. Go out in public and say, ‘Look, we give a shit what people think about us.’ No response says, ‘We don’t care about you or what you think.’.”

The Benefits of Hugging Your Haters

There are two primary benefits to investing in better customer service. The first is about translating advocacy and loyalty into profits. It may seem obvious that better customer service makes for happier customers, and happier customers tend to stick around (and recommend your product), but there’s a flip side to that coin. “Answering a customer complaint increases customer advocacy by as much as 25%,” Baer says. “Not answering a customer complaint decreases customer advocacy by as much as 50%.” It’s up to you if you’re going to make a bad situation better by responding, or make a bad situation (much) worse by failing to respond.

The second benefit to building a better customer service experience is the opportunity to improve your product. “The most overrated thing in business is praise,” Baer says. “Praise doesn’t teach you anything. What actually makes you better is negative feedback and criticism. That’s the petri dish for operational improvement.” While Baer acknowledges that it can be frustrating and expensive to deal with customer complaints, the truth is there aren’t enough of them.

“Research from Fred Reichheld found that only 5% of unhappy customers ever complain via channels (phone, email, Facebook, etc.) that allow a business to find the complaint,” Baer says.

“That 5% – the haters, if you will – are not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is the mass of dissatisfied customers who never tell you they’re dissatisfied. They just don’t renew.”

This “meh in the middle,” as Jay calls it can kill a SaaS company. Silently unhappy customers leave you with a high churn rate that you can’t explain, putting your company in a vulnerable position. The solution: solicit more complaints.

Baer illustrates this strategy with a favorite anecdote about Belgium-based restaurant chain Le Pain Quotidien. When Erin Pepper signed on as the company’s Director of Customer Experience, she set a goal to triple the number of complaints. “It may seem crazy,” Baer says, “but she understands the principle of complaints being the petri dish of improvements. She knows that if you can increase the percentage of accessible complaints from 5% to 10, 15, or 20%, it gives you a lot of raw material for making your company better.”

Pepper’s strategy had two parts. To start, she analyzed all the customer service interaction points and found ways to use those “marketing moments” to nudge customers into providing honest input. She trained cashiers and wait staff to solicit feedback, produced table tents and window signage that invited comments, and added requests for reviews to bills. The message was simple: if anything was less than 100% perfect, Le Pain Quotidien wanted to hear about it via whatever communication channel the customer preferred. The result was an influx of valuable data that empowered Le Pain Quotidien to make critical changes to their operations.

The other piece of the strategy is something Baer says is particularly applicable for software companies. “Le Pain Quotidien answers all negative comments, like a one- or two-star review, in public. As I recommend in Hug Your Haters – every complaint in every channel every time. That’s the formula.” In addition, Pepper takes the conversation further. “She waits about two hours and messages the customer again via private message,” Baer explains. “She says, ‘Hey, I just answered you in public over here. Hopefully you saw it, but I’ve been thinking. You’re a particularly perceptive customer. You see things other customers miss. What I’d like to do (with your permission) is send you two gift cards each month and invite you to visit a different Le Pain Quotidien location and then fill out this detailed survey of your experience. You really understand what we’re trying to achieve and we can get to where we want to go with your assistance. Will you to that for me?’ and now she has about 200 people doing really detailed secret-shopper exercises. Total cost of the program: gift cards.”

Customer Service For the Win

With Hug Your Haters, Baer hopes to convince readers that customer service is much more than a necessary evil. He wants to show companies how it can be a game-changer. “Customer service can be, and frankly should be, one of the most important differentiators you have,” he says. “This requires putting additional resources and emphasis on customer care. Don’t tell me you don’t have the resources. That’s bull@$%. You have the resources, you just choose not to deploy them that way.”

“If there’s any industry in the world where this principle makes the most sense, it’s SaaS,” he adds. “Without retention, you literally have no company. So, next time you’re thinking about spending money on a podcast sponsorship, tradeshow booth, or f!$*%@ golf balls, stop. Don’t spend another nickel on marketing until you’re sure you’re best of breed at customer service. Otherwise, you’re just filling a leaking bucket. And, I say that as a marketing consultant.”

The post Stop Using a 1995 Playbook to Solve 2016 Problems. Jay Baer on the Future of Customer Success. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

When it comes to conversation, “silence” is usually preceded by “awkward.” We usually attempt to fill the gap with the first thing we can think of -- getting more and more frantic as the seconds tick on.

But during negotiation discussions, silence is actually a rep’s best friend. Not only can it often mean the difference between favorable terms and average (or even bad) ones, it can sometimes mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Take a look at the six times during negotiation meetings you should say nothing (seriously: Not. A. Thing.)

1) As soon as the pleasantries are over.

Start the negotiation call on a friendly note with a warm greeting and a few rapport-building questions -- then it’s time to stop talking. Some reps immediately rush to offer discounts or adjusted terms if their buyer doesn’t speak up. Yet while this might show the prospect you’re willing to compromise, it frequently leads to compromises you didn’t need to make to close.

If you're not comfortable going completely silent after the introduction, use a neutral question or statement like, "What are your thoughts on the proposal?" or "I sent you the contract yesterday."

This puts the ball in your prospect's court. You may find she has minor (or even zero) proposed changes. If that's the case, you'll be glad you didn't lead with a discount.

2) Right after you’ve laid out a term.

It’s critical to cut yourself off as soon as you’ve introduced a stipulation or detail of the deal. 

To give you an idea of how this silence plays to your advantage in a negotiation conversation, check out this sample dialogue:

The prospect: So, how much would the additional onboarding cost?

You: $250 per employee. We also offer a video-enabled session for a $1,200 flat fee.

[3-5 seconds of silence]

The prospect: Okay, I guess that works.

Reps who keep going after they throw out a number often end up rambling, which makes them seem less confident and ultimately weakens their bargaining power. Even worse, you may end up unintentionally making concessions.

It’s possible the buyer will push after you've given them a term, but you’ll have ample opportunity to find that out in just a few seconds -- and you won’t give up any negotiating authority in the process.

3) When the prospect has made a counter-offer.

Keeping quiet right after the other person has made their own offer is difficult. That’s because society has taught us to take conversational “turns,” so by skipping yours, you’re violating a lifetime of convention.

But this fact also plays to your advantage -- because it puts you in control. Whether or not the prospect ends up modifying his offer, at the very least you’ll get a chance to think about what he’s putting forward and come up with a thoughtful response.

When you’re negotiating in person, simply nod once or twice and wait. But if you’re on the phone, the buyer might confuse your silence as a sign you didn’t hear them, so say, “I see …” and then let the pause begin.

4) Any time the prospect is speaking.

There will be multiple times during the negotiation you’ll probably want to cut in: When the other person makes a wrong assumption, brings up a completely unworkable suggestion, takes a long time getting to their point, etc.

Ignore the temptation to interject. Not only does it come across as aggressive and potentially disrespectful, but you never know what valuable information you’re missing by ambushing the buyer mid-sentence.

For example, he might begin, “We’re a fairly new company, so I’m not sure a two-year commitment -- ”

You burst in, “Oh, don’t worry, we can agree to check in at the 12-month mark, and if you’re not happy, you can end the service with no penalty.”

Crisis averted, you think. Too bad the buyer was actually going to say, “I’m not sure a two-year commitment with a 50-user cap is a good idea, since we’re projected to reach 400 employees by the end of 2018.”

The takeaway: Don't begin speaking until the prospect has clearly ended their comment.

5) When the buyer makes a ridiculous ask.

Prospects sometimes throw out unreasonable demands to see your reaction, test your composure, and ultimately, get a better deal.

The optimal response is staying mum. If you noticeably react ("That's impossible," "I definitely can't meet that price," "There's no way we can fulfill that promise," etc.), you'll look rattled. In addition, acknowledging the buyer's demand makes it seem more valid -- even if you're rejecting it.

However, if you say nothing at all, you'll subtly show your disapproval of their unjustified request. They'll usually feel pressured into retracting it.

To see how this might play out, here's a hypothetical conversation:

Prospect: "My boss would love to get the price down to the range of $5-8 per square feet."

[3-5 seconds of silence.]

Prospect: "I know that's pretty far from your quote, so I'll talk to her."

Rep: "What are her priorities for purchases like these? We can find another area of the deal to compromise on."

6) If you notice you’re taking up all the air-time.

Doing the majority of the talking might seem like a good thing. After all, doesn’t it mean you’re in charge?

Unfortunately, no. If you hog the conversational spotlight, you completely lose the chance to discover your prospect’s needs, priorities, and lingering doubts. A buyer who’s 90% confident in her decision to buy won’t sign a contract until you’ve answered her remaining objections -- so you need to shut up to hear her out.

And even if you are addressing the things on her mind, no one likes feeling bulldozed into a decision. You could lose the deal simply because you won't stop talking.

With that mind, pay attention to how much you’re saying versus your prospect. If it begins to feel like a presentation rather than a conversation, dial down the verbosity.

Those crickets you hear? They might make you feel awkward at first, but soon they'll make you feel awesome -- because they mean you're probably about to close the deal. So next time you enter a negotiation, remember success hinges just as much on when you don’t talk as when you do.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.

As marketers, we all want to know the numbers. What is working, which strategies are driving conversions, and where can I get the most bang for my buck? Below is a list of 50 incredible marketing statistics that every marketer should know and live by in 2016.

Content Marketing

1. 76% of digital marketers will produce more content. (source)
2. 51% of digital marketers will increase their content marketing budget. (source)
3. In 2016, 67% more leads will be generated by companies with an active blog. (source)
4. 88% of B2B marketers currently use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy, yet only 32% have a documented content marketing strategy. (source)
5. 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content strategy. Other popular platforms include Twitter (87%), Facebook (84%), YouTube (74%) and Google+ (62%). (source)
6. B2C marketers use infographics more than any other content strategy. 62% report using infographics, and 63% from this group said they were effective. (source)
7. The most popular social media platform among B2C businesses is Facebook, with 94% reporting its usage. Other popular platforms are Twitter (82%), YouTube (77%) and LinkedIn (76%). (source)
8. The #1 content marketing goal for B2C businesses in 2016 is sales (83%), followed by customer retention and loyalty (81%) and engagement (81%). (source)
9. Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts. (source)
10. Just over half (51%) of business owners report that content management is “very important” or “absolutely critical” to creating a cohesive customer journey. (source)

Email Marketing

1. Segmentation and personalization is a top priority for marketers in 2016. Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email Marketing Industry Census report says 78% of their respondents believe that in the next five years all email communication will be personalized. (source)
2. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. (source)
3. In the third quarter of 2015, 54 percent of all email opens occurred on mobile devices or tablets. (source)
4. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. (source)
5. Transactional e-mails produce an average open rate of 72% and a click-through rate of 30%—well above the averages for non-transactional emails, which have an average open rate of 40.8% and an average click-through rate of 9%. (source)

1. Email marketing ranks highest on ROI compared to other marketing strategies. (source)
2. 78% of consumers rank email as the most preferred communication platform. (source)
3. Mobile matters: as of 2015, 53% of emails are opened on mobile. (source)
4. Emails that include social sharing buttons have a higher CTR of 158% than those that don’t include share links. (source)
5. Deliverability is a big issue: 17% of all emails never see the inside of a recipient’s inbox. This is due to defunct emails and SPAM traps. (source)

Digital Marketing

1. Total spending on Internet advertising is predicted to grow 12.9% next year. The Internet will become the largest medium for advertising in 2016 (ahead of TV). (source)
2. By 2019 mobile advertising will represent 72% of all US digital ad spending. (source)
3. One-third of marketers say they don’t which digital marketing tactic has the biggest positive impact on revenue. 26% of respondents say email is the digital marketing channel with the greatest positive impact on revenue; SEO is second (17%), followed by paid search (15%), social media (5%), and online display advertising (5%). (source)
4. The top four channels for increases in digital marketing spend last year were email marketing (61% of marketers increasing spending on this channel), social media (49%), mobile marketing (40%), and SEO/PPC (38%). (source)
5. Programmatic advertising currently represents nearly two-thirds (62%) of the digital display advertising marketplace (online, social and mobile) and will grow to 82% by 2018. The size of the programmatic marketing is expected to more than double over the next three years. (source)
6. 54% of users don’t click banner ads because they don’t trust them. (source)
7. 88% of businesses say that video is an important part of their digital marketing strategy. (source)
8. 64% of businesses who use video believe that it has directly led to increased sales. (source)
9. 91% of businesses say they plan to increase or maintain their spending on video in 2016. (source)
10. Gartner’s 2015-2016 CMO report shows that 98% of marketers believe that digital and offline marketing are merging and marketing strategies will need to reflect this. (source)

Social Media Marketing

1. Social media now plays almost as large a role in purchasing decisions as does TV, and 57% of consumers say they’re influenced to think more highly of business after seeing positive comments or praise online. (source)
2. 90% of young adults—ages 18 to 29—use social media (compared to just 35% of those over age 65). Fully a third of millennials say social media is one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses. (source)
3. 46% of B2B marketers say they’re not sure whether any social channels have generated revenue for their businesses. Only 13% believe they’ve proved the impact quantitatively—though that may be because just 14% tie social media marketing activities to sales levels. (source)
4. 84% of CEOs and VPs say they use social media to help make purchasing decisions. (source)
5. The share of overall marketing budgets devoted to social media marketing is expected to increase from about 10% on average today to nearly 25% within the next five years. (source)
6. 60% of marketers identify “measuring ROI” as one of their top three social media marketing challenges. These are followed by closely related challenges “tying social activities to business outcomes” (50%) and “devloping our social media strategy” (48%). (source)
7. “Engagement” (such as likes, shares, etc.) is considered the most important metric for evaluating social media marketing success, with 80% of marketers identifying it as one of the top three metrics. Audience size (61%) and website traffic (56%) round out the top three. (source)
8. The tools most commonly used to measure social media marketing results are the native analytics provided by the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) themselves, at 65%. These are followed by social media management platforms like HootSuite (62%) and web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) at 59%. Just 22% of businesses use dedicated social media measurement platforms. (source)
9. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest drive the most social media referral traffic back to websites. But YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn drive the most engaged traffic. (source)
10. 58% of marketers say original written content is their most important form of social content. 19% say the same about original visual content (e.g., infographics). 10% say curation of others’ content (like this post) is most important. (source)

Mobile Marketing

1. 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine and 33% of consumers start mobile research with a branded website. (source)
2. Tablet devices account for the highest add-to-cart rates on e-commerce websites at 8.58%. (source)
3. 68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy. (source)
4. Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. (source)
5. Pinterest is the most mobile social network and 64% of its referred traffic comes from either smartphones or tablet devices. (source)
6. By 2019, mobile advertising will represent 72% of all US digital ad spending. (source)
7. Mobile email opens have grown by 180% in the last three years. (source)
8. 83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important. (source)
9. Average smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to the average desktop conversion rates. (source)
10. 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. (source)

Now that you know the facts, check out our Data-Driven Marketing eBook to learn how to implement the right strategies to drive your own marketing success.

Most people who have adopted LinkedIn as a tool to find new clients – outbound prospecting – do so very artfully.

Much of it has to do with who you’ve brought into your network. Call it the proximity effect. If you’ve got the ‘right’ kind of people in your network, others will want to connect with you and with your company because of course, you look like the ‘right people’ too!

So the big question is how do you get those prospects to come to you? The content you post – blogs, reposts of relevant content – along with the frequency make you more interesting in general than folks who merely set up a profile and never work it.

Continue to seek out new people by actively monitoring who’s checked out your profile. Then check out their connections. If everything looks good ask for an introduction via a mutual acquaintance or just get in touch and drop some mutual names. You never know – they person you are looking at may be the one doing the requesting.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is also a great tool for prospecting, as well as social listening. It has more advanced search features and deeper visibility into LinkedIn. Consider this question: is developing your own leads and prospecting an important component of your job? If yes, then Sales Navigator is definitely worth the investment.

Better still, if your company purchases the corporate edition of Sales Navigator, it ties all the individual LinkedIn licenses together and gives you a management reporting or dashboard feature, which includes the ability to view everybody’s Social Selling Index scores.

So whether it be upping your prospecting game on regular LinkedIn or diving into Sales Navigator’s in depth possibilities, there’s many ways to bring up the number of quality contacts in your LinkedIn world.

How’s your content marketing game?

Unless you’re Buzzfeed or Upworthy, it could probably use some work. (And even those content juggernauts are starting to see a slowdown in their numbers.)

No matter where you are in your marketing, you can always do better. Even if you are currently meeting your goals, you could be exceeding them.

It’s time to up your game.

Here are a few content marketing upgrades for your business you should make:

Become a Master of One

Too many people try to become a Jack of All Trades.

But how does that old saying end?

They end up a Master of None.

You need to focus on becoming a Master of One.

Don’t try to be an authoritative source of information on all topics. Instead, focus on becoming an expert on one topic. You will become a trusted source of information, and you will be the site that readers turn to on that subject.

If you try writing about topics on which you are not an expert, you will damage your credibility. Readers won’t come to your site even for information on the topic on which you are an expert. Your reputation will be damaged.

Cultivate your expertise in one topic and then focus on developing a few subtopics.

Keep Testing

Treat your content marketing like an experiment.

Every aspect of your content is a hypothesis about what you think will work. Test that hypothesis to find out what is actually landing with your audience.

For example, the headline style you choose is a hypothesis about what is going to get readers to click on your article. You can test that hypothesis by trying out different headline styles for the same content type and seeing what gets more clicks.

Continue to conduct A/B testing by changing specific elements of your content and seeing which strategies are more effective. You’ll strengthen your copy and increase the return on your investment, whether it’s the money you spend for freelance writers or the time you invest in writing the content yourself.

Get Rid of Gated Content

Unless you’re a content goliath, no one is going to pay for your content.

Putting up a pay wall is only going to cause you to lose visitors. As soon as people see that pop up asking them to pay, they are going to click away to another site.

Keep all your content free and open to all visitors. Don’t even play around with offering a limited number of stories or asking for free subscriptions. People won’t come back.

You’ll make more money on ads and with your email leads by making your content free and generating more visitors than you will with the very few people who will actually cough up a few dollars for your content.

Promote Your Content

Social networking is a great way to promote your new content and get new site visitors. However, the algorithm changes on popular social media sites have made it harder and harder for you to reach even your own followers.

Consider paying to promote your content on sites like Facebook and Twitter to ensure that more people see those posts. The bigger your following, the more visitors you are likely to get to your site as a result.

Network with the Best

Stop treating your competitors like your rivals, and start treating them like potential business partners.

Think about all the followers and site visitors that your biggest competitors have. Now think about what would happen if you were able to address all those people. The easiest way to do that is to create a partnership with those competitors.

Brand partnerships help you to reach more of your audience and to strengthen your authority in your field. No matter how big your own brand gets, you will always get these benefits from partnering with other big brands.

Think about ways you can join together in your content marketing efforts. Perhaps you can publish a white paper together, or maybe you can even develop an online course together. At the very least, you can establish a guest blogging relationship that will allow you to post content on each other’s sites from time to time.

Treat Your Blog Like a Business

Don’t treat your blog like a way to promote your business — treat it as seriously as your business itself.

You need to be focused on the success of your blog as intently as you are focused on the success of your business. Focusing on your blog to help your business will only water down your efforts. Creating a strategy as if the success of the blog itself is the main goal will help you focus and get results faster.

Improving your content marketing will help you increase customer engagement, grow your sales, and improve your opportunities for content monetization. Try these tips to improve your content marketing this year and start meeting your goals.

Sales follow up is crucial to your closing success, especially as an Account Executive. In fact, it’s equally as important for AEs to stay on top of opportunities post-meeting as it is for Sales Development Reps to follow up with their prospects and leads.

We’re constantly championing the SDR, and sharing ways to keep prospects from falling through the cracks — and we want to do the same for the closers out there. We want to ensure that you, the AE, don’t lose a deal by simply failing to follow through on a sales follow up opportunity. 

Today on SDR TV, we have SalesLoft Senior Account Executive Kevin Walkup here to talk you through his three sales follow up strategies that will help you effectively stay in touch with an opportunity post-meeting and close strong. Check out the video below to learn more:

Video Transcription on Sales Follow Up Strategies:

Hey guys, Kevin Walkup here with SalesLoft.

I’m a Senior Account Executive over here, and today I want to cover three different tips with you guys on how to most effectively follow up with people after you’ve done the demo.

Step number one is defining next steps. Just like SDRs following up with their leads, it’s just as important for an AE to be following up with their prospects and taking those opportunities to turn them into net new deals.

Tip number two is owning the deal. Now that we’ve defined next steps, you are in full control of what’s going to happen next in this deal process. You need to stay top of mind, maybe even drop some valuable content into these folks that you’ve found from the SalesLoft blog based on the conversation that you had with them last.

Tip number three is to be unique and be memorable. This starts when you’re on the demo and all the way through when you’re following up through the entire opportunity and deal process.

I might even go in, look at someone’s Crystal Knows profile based on their personality, send them a funny gif, maybe a funny joke, or be a little bit more cut and dry but it’s all about sticking to the process and making sure these people remember you and come back to you when they’re ready to buy.

So those are my three tips for owning the process from an AE standpoint after you’ve done the demo that these SDRs have set for you. And I’d love to learn from you guys as well about what has worked for you.

Maybe some funny gifs, or even jokes that you’ve used in the past to be successful.

—

For a more sales follow up strategies and execution tips, download the second section of our newest playbook trilogy, The Sales Development Playbook: Executing. In this section, we share the ins and outs of efficiently using SalesLoft to call and email prospects. Download our free white paper and optimize your sales efforts to start crushing your sales development goals today.

The post Sales Follow Up Strategies From a Senior Account Executive appeared first on SalesLoft.