More data insight from Unbounce

Unbounce has made a name for itself as a tool where companies can easily build landing pages and lead forms and increase their on-site conversions. The software provides design elements that companies can use to test and iterate to the best converting version of a landing page. Unbounce has also recently released a Conversion Intelligence Platform, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool that helps marketers iterate their campaigns faster. 

In order to train any AI tool, you need data. And LeadsRx has plenty of it. The company has built a database of over 2.5 billion customer data points from over 5,000 global brands. The data that LeadsRx will provide to Unbounce not only had depth, but breadth, spanning several marketing channels including digital radio, streaming services, podcasts, and TV.

What about consumer privacy?

Many marketers find themselves wanting more quality data about their customers while being simultaneously concerned about how their own digital data is being used. Unbounce was careful to address the data privacy in the press release, stating, “LeadsRx is deeply committed to consumer data privacy. The company works off its proprietary technology that collects first-party data only. Unlike marketing attribution platforms of its kind, LeadsRx doesn’t rely on third-party cookies but instead develops private identity graphs for each of its clients.”

And at this point, the two companies will work separately, “until further assessment takes place.” That sounds like we can expect an expansion of the Unbounce Customer Data Platform and an eventual dissolution of the LeadsRx brand. 

Also Read: Unbounce vs. Optimizely: Split Testing Tools for Lead Gen

The post Unbounce Acquires LeadsRx to Increase Conversion Visibility appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Natural language processing (NLP), also known as language analytics, is an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology that harnesses business insights from unstructured data, such as customers’ written or verbal responses to your product or service.

Related: What is Natural Language Processing?

How can NLP be used for Marketing?

As marketing strategies become increasingly customer-oriented, businesses are turning to language analytics to extract insights about customer motivations, intentions, buying journey, etc. from large qualitative data sets.  

Applications of NLP for Marketing

NLP can assist your marketing strategy in a variety of ways, but we’ll focus here on NLP’s application for branding, content, customer success, and lead generation. 

Branding

Tapping into qualitative data can help your company better understand how current and potential clients perceive your company. The manner in which your company’s name appears in conversations can inform how on-point your brand positioning truly is. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding tool is one that can help your company assess the effectiveness of its branding strategy. This tool helps you find out what current and prospective clients say about your brand by analyzing large data sets from a variety of sources like webpages, social media outlets, etc. to identify keywords, sentiments, and more. 

Related: Top BI Tools for Data & Predictive Analytics 

Content strategy

Your brand positioning goes hand in hand with SEM strategy which, in turn, depends in large part on your company’s ability to consistently produce relevant, high-quality content. Jarvis AI, now called Jasper AI, is one tool out there that can help your content team generate relevant content more quickly. It can auto-suggest the next sentence based on an initial input sentence. Jarvis AI can also produce long-form content, according to a set topic. 

AI is indeed getting better at producing content that meets Google’s increasing demands for high-quality content, but a content-generating tool cannot and should not replace your content team. Another key part of boosting content quality and thus domain authority is your content’s ability to emotionally connect with readers. A tool like Jarvis AI can certainly help your content team churn out good material more quickly, but content strategy can’t forego that human touch. At the end of the day, content written for humans needs to be built and curated by humans to ensure that content really resonates.

Customer experience/VoC

The “voice of the customer” (VoC) is integral to a customer-centric marketing approach. NLP tools can extract insights from your customers’ experiences with your product or service. IBM’s Watson Assistant tool, for instance, uses language analytics to process and respond to customer feedback in voice or chat format. 

The information that you acquire through NLP tools for customer support helps your company identify and rectify recurring issues. Supporting customers on their buying journey and post-sale is only part of the equation, however. That’s where a tool like Relative Insight or SAS Visual Text Analytics come into play to help you learn from the data collected in these interactions. While Relative Insight requires that you upload the unstructured data into its platform, the SAS tools sync seamlessly to data input from apps on mobile devices. Tools such as these analyze unstructured data for patterns that inform your decisions and get you the information you need quickly.  

Targeted lead generation

Natural language processing tools can aid your marketing strategy, especially if you engage in a targeted approach like account-based marketing (ABM). With NLP tools, your marketing team can keep its finger on the pulse of conversations regarding potential customers’ needs, problems, and maybe even about your company. The information that you glean from NLP can inform whom and how you target in your marketing, based on their level of brand awareness, intent to buy, etc. For example, Terminus now harnesses the power of language analytics in its B2B marketing tools, so that its customers can find the right clients and pitch tailored content to them. 

Why you should adopt NLP for your marketing strategy

Focusing on quantitative data like click-through-rates, conversions, etc. is important. However, by concentrating on these KPIs only, you’re missing out on the valuable insights that qualitative data can provide to your marketing and sales teams. Balance out your approach by accounting for the rich data contained in spoken and written communication. NLP tools like those mentioned here can help you tap into the knowledge gold mine of unstructured data sets to better understand current and potential clients.

The post Using Natural Language Processing for Marketing appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

To learn more about how to nurture leads by email, I had a chat with TechnologyAdvice Demand Generation Manager Lauren Eubanks. Read our lightly edited conversation below for tips on working your existing leads down the funnel, or contact us to learn more about the lead programs we offer.

Forrest Brown: How can you tell what’s causing your nurture campaign to fail? Is this just a matter of knowing your KPIs and knowing when your stats are bad?

Lauren Eubanks: I think KPIs are a big one, so it’s knowing the big goal of your nurture. In most cases, it’s trying to get net new leads, so you’re looking for responses or downloads from your campaigns.

Set your end goal and see where you are toward that goal. That’s how you’ll know if you’re failing or not. Beyond that, don’t focus just on getting the leads but on actually converting them into viable conversations for your sales team.

I think a lot of building a successful nurture campaign is defining your KPIs. Then you should watch them regularly and know what to fix, even if it’s just your open rate and click through rate. Focus on one of them. If it’s your open rate, you need to fix your subject line or maybe who you’re sending it from. If it’s your click through rate, you need to work on your call to action within your email.

So once you figure out what your KPIs are, it’s a matter of zeroing in on them and making them better.

FB: For determining those KPIs, is there ever going to be a standard set of KPIs you look at, or will that always be dependent on the type of business you are?

LE: In our world, a lot of these emails are going to be part of a nurture campaign for generating leads. So your KPIs are probably going to be the number of MQLs [marketing qualified leads] you generate from your campaign. So when someone reads an email within your nurture and downloads the content, they become an MQL.

KPIs could be different if you’re just running a campaign to generate brand awareness. You’d be watching for open rates and whatnot. But for nurture campaigns, how many leads you generate is probably going to be your most important KPI.

FB: Looking at campaigns for different stages of the buyer journey, how do you know when someone in your email list is BOFU or TOFU? Do you look at lead scoring in Salesforce?

LE: Look at how they got to you. What action did they take to become a lead? If someone’s just downloaded an ebook about, say, “Top 5 Tips To Boost Your Conversion Rate,” that’s a top of the funnel article, so your lead probably isn’t quite ready to purchase.

When clients run a TOFU campaign with us, we send out a lot of educational content. And our clients often take those leads and want to reach out to that person and ask if they want to buy. Sure, there’s a chance the lead is ready to buy, but more often than not, they need a little time to learn more about your company and why they should care before they’re ready to purchase.

You don’t walk up to someone on the street and be like, “Hey, do you wanna marry me?” No, you’ve gotta date them, you’ve gotta ask them questions about life in general and then as you get closer, you might start talking about marriage. It’s the same thing with working a TOFU lead down to being ready to make a purchase.

FB: Does your CRM ever play into that?

LE: Yeah, through different sales stages. It’s good to take your content and categorize it as top of the funnel, middle, bottom. Depending on your content or where someone might be engaging with it, where would that fit? That should align to lead scoring and then, in turn, sales stages.

The common lead categorizations in a CRM are a prospecting stage, which is high level. MQL stands for marketing qualified lead, that lead should be ready to talk to someone on the sales team when you pass them over to sales. And then when sales engages with them, that would be more of a contact, someone who’s immediately raised their hand. That should be a qualifier — they’re at the stage where they’re ready to talk to a salesperson.

FB: I know you’ve said before that marketers should integrate your nurture campaign with other marketing efforts. Is that a sort of sales-enablement type of thing, or…?

LE: The same way that when we’re purchasing something we don’t just look through one avenue, you don’t want to share content through only one channel — in this case, your nurture campaign. You might run ads, have sales reach out, and share on social media.

At TechnologyAdvice, we have several value propositions…All of those value props are what make us unique, but we don’t need to say all of that in one email.

FB: Would retargeting ever be relevant here?

LE: Yeah. Once someone visits your website and it pins a cookie on their browser, that’s an opportunity to learn a little bit more through all the other tools they’re using. LinkedIn is a good example. If you add the LinkedIn tracking pixel to your website, you can deliver personalized promoted posts to the news feeds of people who have visited your site.

FB: Going back to email, what are your thoughts on sending visual-heavy emails versus text-based emails? It seems that I’ve been getting more text-based emails recently.

LE: Well, it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to raise brand awareness by running a newsletter, you want that to be full-on HTML with images and buttons and things like that.

But in testing campaigns here before, we know that if we’re running a nurture campaign to get someone to download a piece of content, we get better results when it looks like it’s coming from a person’s email, not a mailing list. We even get reply-backs from them, people being interested and wanting to ask more questions. It looks more human.

FB: I guess that’s another important consideration then, who is sending the email. Because some of the content newsletters I subscribe to are sent from a company’s VP of marketing or something. I’m sure it’s just an email list, it can’t actually be them.

LE: Yeah we usually send it from a marketing-facing person, just because if it’s coming from a salesperson, people tend to back away from that.

It seems a little more personal, and we always get reply-backs from that. Also, if you don’t have a team with the time or resources to build out HTML, text-based is really quick to start with. All you need to do is write the content and plug it in. You don’t need to spend much time on design or do anything fancy.

FB: That makes sense. And does a certain length work best?

LE: I saw a stat recently saying something like the average read time of an email is eight seconds, so no one ever gives 100 percent of their attention to reading emails, they’re always thinking about something else.

Focus on making your email content more scannable. Use one to two sentences per paragraph and one clear call to action.

FB: We touched on retargeting briefly, and I know Tamara wrote an article about this not too long ago, but there’s personalizing an email and then there’s being creepy. How do you walk that razor’s edge?

LE: I think you try to not call it out exactly. You treat it like it just happens to be convenient that you’re mentioning something that someone has interacted with. I know that our sales team can see when someone reads an email or if they’re active on our website, but they don’t want to be like, “Hey, I see you’re looking at our website right now!” They want to naturally reach out to the person at around the same time and see if there’s anything we can help them with.

FB: There’s a Twitter thread about this where someone said they were on the Wayfair website looking at chairs or something and then they got a phone call from Wayfair saying, “Hey, I see you’re looking at chairs, do you need any help?” And the person got freaked out, understandably.

LE: Yeah that’s extreme. There’s a balance to it. It’s more helpful to take that information and not blatantly call it out but use it in whatever you’re promoting to someone. Like if they’re looking at chairs, maybe just send them an ad or an email about chairs later on.

FB: Earlier you mentioned that shorter emails work better and that you should stick to sharing one value proposition per email. Why is sticking to one value proposition so important?

LE: I’ve seen companies who seemed to think, “We know so much about our company and about all the different things we can offer to a client, we want to immediately shout all of those things at someone.” But it’s too overwhelming to do that to someone. You have to break it down into steps in your nurture campaign.

At TechnologyAdvice, we have several value propositions: we have US-based call centers, we have dedicated client success managers, we have one-on-one post-program kickoff coaching. All of those value props are what make us unique, but we don’t need to say all of that in one email.

We focus on one of those throughout one email and cover the rest in later emails. When you overwhelm someone, they’re not going to want to do anything.

FB: I guess that’s tied to the last question I have. How much content is too much? I’m a big fan of the “Taco from Trello” emails that usually share about four articles per email.

LE: I think one piece of content is ideal, two max. It’s the same thing as with value propositions. If you give someone too many choices, they’re not going to pick anything.

For example, I love going to Costco. If you go to Walmart, there are ten options for one item, but if you go to Costco, there’s one. You don’t have to worry about looking through all the different brands, you can just pick the one and keep shopping.

This concept works especially well in a nurture. If you have one goal in mind anyway, which is generating leads, send one offer in the email and focus on that. If you have more things to talk about, save them for later.

FB: Anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t touched on yet?

LE: When you’re building a nurture campaign, use a good marketing automation tool and storyboard your campaign out. I use a flowchart tool called Draw.io for storyboarding. Start with your goal and make squares for each email you think you want to send, considering multiple actions someone might take and then adapting your nurture accordingly. Start off simple and get more complicated from there.

If you’re ready to start connecting more with your audience through all stages of the funnel, contact us today to learn more about our lead programs.

The post Help! My Nurture Campaign Doesn’t Work appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft is a comparison of two marketing platforms, but in between the feature face-off lies a commentary on the state of small business automation. Automation brings inherent complexities, but small businesses seem eager to use it for their sales and marketing operations.

ALSO READ: Hubspot vs. Pardot

Infusionsoft has been growing at a rapid pace for several years now. Ontraport is also establishing a foothold as a market leader. Their growth shouldn’t be a surprise. Automation is particularly well-suited for small business because it helps a small team eliminate manual tasks and streamline marketing and sales processes.

So, which of these systems is better for your growing business? This article will make the choice easier by comparing the two systems based on CRM, marketing automation, and e-commerce capabilities, as well as their pricing structure and integrations.

Marketing Automation

As digital marketing has evolved, the number of systems marketers use has proliferated. One of the main draws of systems like Infusionsoft and Ontraport is that they centralize the most important marketing functions and help you build automated processes based on certain actions your customers take.

Infusionsoft’s marketing automation functions all work out of the Campaign Builder, which lets users build sequences of events using drag-and-drop functionality and easy-to-understand symbols.

Infusionsoft’s Campaign Builder

Infusionsoft divides its automation into Traffic Sources, Goals, Sequences, and Notes, each of which have a set of options underneath. For example, Traffic Sources will have Facebook and Twitter, while Goals offers certain actions that someone takes, like filling out a form or clicking on an email.

Also Read: 3 Detailed Examples of Marketing Automation

By taking a visual approach to automation, Infusionsoft has created one of the most user-friendly systems on the market. It’s easy to keep track of what’s going on with each program and easy to make changes to program elements like landing pages or emails. Navigating to either of those modules only takes one click.

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Infusionsoft’s Landing Page Builder

Ontraport supplies comparable automation functionality, though it uses a more “traditional” approach. That means the construction of a process or campaign requires custom rules based on if/then logic. The text of these rules is listed in vertical form under one all-encompassing view.

This doesn’t mean Ontraport’s automation capabilities are less powerful than Infusionsoft’s, per se, but it does mean they’re more difficult to keep organized.

Ontraport’s landing page and email builder, on the other hand, are more user-friendly. Drag and drop functionality coupled with a large library of templates makes designing and deploying new emails or pages simple.

Ontraport’s Email Editor

If you can’t find the template you need in the default library, there’s always the Ontraport Market, where you can buy new templates or design your own and put them up for sale.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM stores the contact information for potential and current customers. In the B2B world, sales teams use them to track the progress of complex sales, but they can also be used to house data from people who fill out forms on your website.

ALSO READ: How to Track Leads from Marketing to Sales

Both Infusionsoft and Ontraport have built-in CRMs. In both systems, the CRM module functions as the database that the marketing module pulls from during automated processes — like emailing everyone who made a purchase in the last six months.

Both CRMs include standard functionality for this type of software: default fields for collecting contact information, website activity, orders and account balances, and task management. Both CRMs also allow you to automatically distribute leads to your sales team as the contacts are entered into the database.

Ontraport’s CRM

Of course, each system does have its advantages.

Infusionsoft offers extensive sales pipeline and opportunity management features, which will be attractive to B2B organizations that manage a complex, multi-stage sales process.

Users can define their own sales stages, position them in the appropriate order, and run reports to see how long certain leads have been in a particular stage of the pipeline, how much revenue could be gained from deals in the pipeline, and so on.

Infusionsoft’s Opportunities Module

Infusionsoft’s CRM also includes a tagging system that assigns tags to incoming leads. This is very useful if you want to organize leads using custom criteria, like which product they’re interested in.

Ontraport lets administrators create custom objects in the CRM module, meaning you can create any kind of folder using any kind of fields to store information about your customers. In terms of CRM functionality, this is pretty impressive; there are numerous standalone CRMs that do not offer out-of-the-box custom objects.

You can also build custom reports inside of Ontraport, which makes it a breeze to assemble dashboards and track different metrics across sales and marketing.

Ontraport’s Report Dashboard

E-Commerce

The last major area to consider between these two systems is their ability to support online selling.

Both products support e-commerce functionality. Infusionsoft goes a bit further in this category by offering templates to help you build a complete online storefront. To its credit, Ontraport have a feature for building “members only” sites, which could be a strong selling point, depending on your business model. You’ll need a third-party integration to do the same thing with Infusionsoft.

Ontraport also offers a little more flexibility with coupon codes, but beyond that, both systems let you accept online payments, automate shipping, and perform other essential e-commerce actions.

Systems and Pricing

Infusionsoft offers its software in five subscription tiers: Essentials, Deluxe Sales Automation, Deluxe Ecommerce, Complete, and Team.

The Essentials package includes CRM and marketing automation, while the Deluxe subscriptions add either sales automation or ecommerce to the core feature set. Complete delivers all of Infusionsoft’s features, and Team builds on the Complete option by increasing number of users, contacts, and emails per month.

Ontraport divides its pricing into three levels: Basic, Pro, and Team. The Basic gets you the landing page and email builder, CRM, and marketing automation features. The Pro version grants you access to the full power of Ontraport, and the Team subscription increases the contacts, emails per month, and user limits.

Making Your Final Decision

Both Ontraport and Infusionsoft deliver a comprehensive set of marketing and sales automation features. Choosing between the two comes down to the details.

Infusionsoft is more expensive, but its campaign builder is exceptional. The ability to build and visualize automation programs is rare even when compared to larger automation tools. Infusionsoft also has formidable CRM and e-commerce modules, so its claim to be a true ,”all-in-one” automation platform is a strong one.

Ontraport may include less features as a whole, but the features it does include are more user-friendly than Infusionsoft’s. The email and landing page builder are as straightforward as it gets, and its CRM is equipped with a number of important features, notably custom objects.

If you’re still having trouble choosing between Infusionsoft vs. Ontraport or want to compare other marketing automation software, use our Product Selection Tool to get a shortlist of products that match your requirements.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

The post Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft: Small Business Sales and Marketing Automation appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Like their cousin, the article title, subject lines have been discussed ad nauseam in the marketing blogosphere — to the point where attempting to research the topic drowns you in a torrent of competing best practices.

This post is not the all-powerful-ultimate-marketing-secrets-guide to subject lines. It’s a story about how I achieved some dramatic results running a subject line experiment for TechnologyAdvice’s outbound email campaigns.

Given the importance of email for demand generation marketers, these results are something I wanted to share because I think they reveal an effective technique for creating subject lines.

When I analyzed the results of the experiment, one clear pattern emerged: people respond to headlines that show little to no marketing intent and instead vaguely preview the contents of the email.

Let me explain how I came to this conclusion and what I think it means.

The Catalyst

Like most B2B companies, email is a big part of our strategy at TechnologyAdvice. It’s part of our marketing mix at all stages of the customer journey, which means we’re using cold emails to bring people into our marketing funnel.

It’s easy to email people when they already know and like you. If brand loyalty is strong enough, just seeing the sender name can compel someone to open an email. But when people don’t know you, it’s substantially more difficult.

I was using lots of the best practices — value-focused words earlier in the subject line, mobile-optimized length, etc. — but the open rates were abysmal for almost every campaign targeting cold prospects.

I knew the content we had was relevant and that our value propositions were compelling, but I still couldn’t get people’s attention with our emails.

The Hypothesis

There’s a paradox regarding marketing email philosophy. Despite all the preaching about personalizing content and building a relationship with people, marketing emails almost never read like something a person would send another person — they read like something a marketer would send another person.

Marketing emails almost never read like something a person would send another person — they read like something a marketer would send another person.

I realized that everyone I was emailing knew I was a marketer. And because they didn’t know my company, this gave them a negative impression.

So, I began writing subject lines that didn’t sound at all like marketing. I shifted the focus from the value of the content to simply stating what the content was.

My theory was that people are so inundated with marketing messages that they’ve constructed mental filters to ward off unwanted marketing pitches and conserve their attention. The solution was an antithesis of the marketing best practices I read about across the internet.

Here are the tests I ran with this hypothesis in mind.

Test A

Control: Find your perfect software

Test: A Short Video

Context: This email was the first in a series targeted at engaging PPC leads who downloaded one of our buyer’s guides from a paid search ad but didn’t convert into a lead.

Results:

The test subject line produced a 115 percent increase in opens by promising less and plainly stating what to expect from the email. There was also an element of mystery involved in the test headline, which was a significant factor in why people opened the email.

Test B

Control: Join 4,000 B2B Companies

Test: Free product page for {{company}}

Context: This email was part of a campaign to convince people to sign their company up for a product page on TechnologyAdvice. The first email uses social proof to persuade people to open the email, while the second just states what the email was about.

Results:

Again, the test subject line is a recap of what’s inside the email. It’s not flashy — you might even say it’s boring. However, the added personalization from the merge field coupled with the allure of something free for your company conveys the offer inside the email without sounding too aggressive.

The percentage increase is more modest here (45 percent) than in Test A, but it’s still significant.

Test C

Control: Explore the TechnologyAdvice Library

Test: An Introduction

Context: This was the first email we sent to the audience segment that knew nothing about TechnologyAdvice. The test subject line implies that the sender is interested in making the recipient’s acquaintance, rather than beseeching them to read a piece of content.

Results:

These stats further reinforce the idea that people don’t want to be spoken to like prospects or members of a target market. What appeals to people in this sample of technology buyers is an understatement of what’s inside.

Also Read: Remember: B2B Leads Are People, Too

The subject line “An Introduction” gives little detail about the contents of the email (it even implies that the copy will be talking mainly about the sender), but it preserves the mystery that compels people to open emails.

The Implications

So why do people respond in greater numbers to copy that offers plain descriptions instead of value propositions?

I believe there are two reasons.

1. People are inundated with marketing

Most marketing is either poorly conceived or irrelevant, so people start ignoring it to preserve their sanity. This concept is similar to banner blindness, which explains why people ignore website elements that resemble ads.

There’s no good reason to think this wouldn’t happen with email. The fact that there are more than five million blog posts about subject line best practices is part of the problem. If email marketers collectively adopt the same techniques, then those techniques will become ineffective — just like the techniques used before them.

If email marketers collectively adopt the same techniques, then those techniques will become ineffective — just like the techniques used before them.

2. Short, descriptive subject lines build anticipation

Each of my test subject lines plainly communicated what to expect in the email while leaving room for curiosity. The most successful test, “A Short Video,” outlined the type of content someone would find in the email without providing any details of that content.

There was no teeth-grinding, neck-bulging declaration of value. This is similar to the email marketing strategy Loot Crate uses.

Loot Crate is one of several companies that more or less sells mystery in a box.

This works because people love being surprised. In fact, there’s a chemical in our brains called dopamine that anticipates surprises and rewards. It’s why people buy baseball cards, subscribe to Loot Crate, and mindlessly scroll through social media news feeds for hours.

An email subject line is an excellent medium for piquing someone’s curiosity. It’s all that most people see before they open an email, so if you add just the right amount of mystery, people will be intrigued. Hugely successful email newsletter companies such as the Morning Brew and the Hustle use the same strategy.

TechnologyAdvice can help.

Like I said, this technique isn’t the end-all-be-all of writing subject lines, but it is a tactic that helped me gain more engagement from marketing-wary cold prospects.

If you’re also struggling to get people’s attention, we can help you get in front of the people who want to hear from you. When you run a lead program through TechnologyAdvice, we guarantee to give you 100 percent accurate and up-to-date contact information for each lead, or we’ll replace it for free. We also provide you with free sales and nurture consultation at no additional charge.

Contact us today to get started, or visit our Partners page to learn more about our demand generation services.

The post Why I Stopped Following Subject Line Best Practices appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Email marketers often need a good dose of tidying up, too. Marketers work hard to build up their lists, and then hang on to those lists long past their usability.

Hoarding your email lists can only bring trouble:

• Higher spam scores
• Incorrect customer information
• Old or outdated customer profiles
• Cluttered CRM and marketing automation tools
• Reduced sense of calm and joy

Okay, that last one may be an exaggeration, but just as decluttering your junk drawer can bring a sense of calm and accomplishment, so can tidying up your email lists.

ALSO READ: 5 Follow Up Mistakes You’re Making And How To Fix Them

Data in any form degrades quickly. We’d like to think that once we’ve got an email address we have the key to the customer, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

You can expect a significant portion of your data to be out of date within 3 months of gathering it, and 22 percent of your list will be outdated in a year. It’s better to proactively remove those folks from your list instead of just waiting for those emails to bounce.

Start tidying up your data and get better-targeted email lists, starting with these six types of data purges.

1. Bounced addresses

You should be purging bounced email addresses after every send, but sometimes we get lazy and forget to clean out our current lists. Bounces can raise your spam score and mess with your metrics, so go ahead and get rid of those email addresses now. It’ll increase your open and click rates for future emails, too.

Once you’ve cleaned the bounced emails from your email service provider (ESP), flag these email addresses for an update in your CRM. There’s no reason to keep bad information in your CRM if you’ve already verified its inaccuracy with an email send. You may, in turn, need to flag those CRM contacts for updates and verifications by phone or social media outreach.

2. Date of last engagement

Do your contacts delete your emails without opening them? Send your calls straight to voicemail and never return? Okay, well, stop bothering them. Some folks won’t even put in the effort to unsubscribe from emails, so you’ll need to update your lists on your own. Purge these folks from your CRM and your email lists. If you’re afraid of getting rid of those hard-earned contacts, then separate these out from your master list and put them in an archive.

Some folks suggest sending a re-engagement email. Often, these emails just end up confirming what you thought would happen. But remember, these folks don’t normally engage, so they’re probably not sparking joy. Time to get them off your plate.

3. Customer lifetime value

Some of your customers are going to be more valuable than others. There are plenty of reasons why customers spend money differently, but you should know who your big spending profiles are and pay attention to them.

These are the folks that you do greater personalization for, that you send exclusive content, that you invite to your user conferences, and that you probably take out to dinner when you’re in town. Pare down your list so you can see who those big spenders are.

That doesn’t mean that you purge all but the top one percent of spenders, but there are going to be some customers that buy something from you once and then never come back. Invest in the folks that are invested in you, and they will reward you by spending more.

4. Coupon chasers

Are some customers just in it for the discounts? These folks may actually end up costing you more than you think. With a good marketing automation system and a little vlookup spreadsheet magic, you can get a pretty clear view of the folks that are only interacting with your coupons and discounts.

Discounts are no way to grow revenue, so think about getting rid of the folks that rely on you for coupons. Once you filter and focus your email lists, you may find you don’t have to give away discounts at all.

5. Missing information

Got an email address but don’t have a name, address, title, phone number, or another piece of information attached to it? Update it or purge it. Get rid of it.

Missing information on your contacts turns them into junk. You can’t segment with just an email address — you have to have some sort of context there, too. Don’t have time to update all of your contacts? This is a great job to outsource to a VA or an intern. Validate that data.

6. Segmentation

Not ready to throw away all that precious data? Segmentation is a stepping stone to a data purge. Split your CRM data into lots of different lists, and you’ll have an easier time of throwing away one or two of those lists later. Afraid of letting all those hard-earned contacts go to the digital junkyard? Archive the least important lists and discard any list that you don’t use after 6 months.

Every single article about email marketing ever talks about segmentation, so why am I repeating it here? Because it’s important, and not enough people are doing it. Segment your lists. Split them up, make sure you’re targeting the right people for the right products, and remove people from other lists so they don’t receive ads for products they don’t want.

Here are a couple of ways you can segment:

Product interest segmentation

Unless you only have one product, you should segment your email lists by what current customers have already purchased. This doesn’t mean that you send them more messages for the same item they just bought. Instead, use your knowledge of the target audience or your shopping platform’s AI to generate product suggestions based off of purchase habits.

Customer Profile

Whether you target your audience based on customer profiles, job titles, or company description, look to your customer types and your data to build tightly focused email lists for your outreach. Which of your customers don’t fit inside your customer profile? Are you wasting your email sends on these folks? Which are absolutely necessary?

Let TechnologyAdvice Help

Ready for some B2B contacts that are truly interested in what you’re selling? Contact us today to learn how TechnologyAdvice can help you find your audience and fill your funnel.

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How Has Media Changed?

Now business goals have switched from finding customers to being found by them. There is much less reliance on mass marketing tactics to deliver a one-time message, and more emphasis on using specific means to target potential customers based on consumer behaviors , and then cultivating these relationships. Also, the reliance on data from aggregation platforms and organizations like Nielsen have been replaced with in-house business intelligence software and customer behavior analytics data that results in decisions based on facts.

One reason for all of these changes is that the traditional methods of advertising are less effective. For example, there are so many TV stations to choose from, including premium channels that don’t allow commercials. Also, many consumers record their favorite shows, so they can skip past commercials. According to a Marketing Charts report, adults who are 65 years of age and older watch 48 hours of TV each week, while those between the ages of 50 and 64 watch 39 hours of TV each week. However, this is not the coveted consumer group among most companies.

Among 18 to 24-year-old adults, weekly viewership dropped from 76 hours to 64 hours per week. Older millennials (between the ages of 25 and 45) only watch 18 hours of TV per week, while Gen Xers (ages 35-49) watch 26 hours of TV a week. However, the downward trend in every age indicate that viewership is down across the board.

The trend can be spotted across most types of media. Newspaper subscriptions have declined sharply because consumers now get their news from online sources and ad blockers can prevent readers from seeing online ads. In addition, telemarketing has become so unwanted that hundreds of millions of people have signed up for the National Do Not Call Registry, and the Federal Trade Commission receives 150,000 telemarketing complaints a month, according to a CBS report.

While these changes have caused alarm, they also present new, unlimited opportunities to generate sales leads as companies discover more ways to find consumers who may be interested in their products or services.

Lead Generation Still Works

Although your company can’t fully rely on a magazine and TV campaign to bring in all the customers it once did, lead generation still works really well, and for less money than you would spend on a TV spot.

Company website

For both B2B and B2C lead generation, your website is likely to be the first point of contact. Don’t skimp on the design and maintenance of your site, because this is your company’s brand. Make sure that your web pages load quickly and your links are all active. Offering reports and other valuable information in exchange for contact info, such as an email address, is a great way to generate leads.

Content

Content is king. When you’re sharing information that consumers and other businesses want , typically through your company’s blog, your content naturally becomes filled with keywords that answer searchers’ queries on search engines like Google. This brings organic (free!) traffic to your website to read the content. Great content can also be shared through social media.

Social Media

Social media use has skyrocketed within the past few years. In fact, data from the Pew Research Center reveals that 70% of Americans use social media. Facebook is by far the most popular platform, but Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are also popular among social media users.

Social media creates another form of lead generation because people who might otherwise not find your website organically can see your social media posts when they are shared by one of their connections. Once they click on the article link to your website on the social media post, you can track their progress through your app, and even follow up with remarketing tools.

Conferences and Trade Shows

These events are a good way to attract new customers, so use these opportunities to share in-person information about your company. Send potential connections an email before the conference and ask for a one-on-one dinner or propose you grab a coffee. Being a presenter or teaching a seminar is another way to connect. Whether you distribute handouts or use PowerPoint presentations, always be sure to include the company’s website address so attendees can follow-up.

Email

Using the right CRM platform, you can capture, track, and build sales leads. Once you have contact information, such as an email address, your company can easily send mass emails or more customized, targeted messages. You can also see who is opening your emails or clicking on the links provided in your messages. And based on these prompts, your CRM can be set up to automatically send more information to recipients who express an interest in learning more.
While a successful campaign is always the goal, how do you know if your campaign is working? The CRM has a management system that can analyze results, so you can make the necessary tweaks.

While lead generation methods are changing, understanding how to use new, more efficient lead generation tools can allow you to reach more B2B and B2C customers.

Terri Williams is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com. She has covered business and tech topics for a variety of clients, including The Economist Careers Network, Intuit Small Business Blog, Investopedia, The Houston Chronicle, Daily News Energy, and Homeland Preparedness News. Follow her on Twitter @Territoryone.

Top Business Intelligence Software Recommendations

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This probably isn’t news for you. You’re likely running A/B tests or incorporating customer feedback to improve your site all the time. But the most effective way to deliver the best customer experience is by having the right data. The right data in this case is data about how your customers behave on your site at an individual level. So what are some high impact interactions and behaviors that you should be tracking? Well, it comes down to the questions you need to answer as a business, but here are five types of customer interactions that can make a difference for your bottom line:

Five important interactions you should capture

Calls to Action

One of the first things you’re going to want to think about tracking on your website or app is the way your customers interact with your calls to action (CTA). These have an obvious correlation to revenue and the success of your site, since they represent the actions that you want your customers to take. If you’ve set them up well, increasing the conversion rate on your CTAs should increase your revenue and the lifetime value of your customers. If you don’t understand how your CTAs are performing, you’re missing out on a lot of potential insight and lacking the basis to figure out how to make your customer experience better.

For your CTAs, you’ll want to make sure you’re capturing the full picture of what you want your customers to do. For example, if you have a modal popup on your blog that prompts visitors to subscribe, as well as a separate “subscribe here” sidebar, you’ll want to make sure you’re capturing how your customers interact with both of those CTAs.

Tracking your CTAs can help you answer questions like:

• Which of my CTAs are performing the best?
• Are my content CTAs converting better than my free sample CTAs?

Cross-platform visits

In today’s world, people visit your site from multiple devices. For example, a common flow is for someone to find your site on their work computer, check it out again on their phone on the way home, and visit from their tablet at home to make a purchase. Being able to recognize that all three of those visits are the same person makes a huge difference for understanding your business and your customers’ journeys.

A real-life example: we’ve seen e-commerce companies that specialize in expensive items like mattresses learn that the majority of their mobile traffic doesn’t convert to purchases, but instead comes back on their computers to make the real purchase. Since they realized that their mobile visitors ultimately became web customers, they’ve built out extensive content portals specifically for mobile to help them make the decision to purchase later on their computers.

Tracking cross-platform visits can help you answer questions like:

• Which of my users are using my site across multiple platforms?
• For users that access my site across multiple platforms, which platform converts best?
• Which platforms are my customers using for research and which are they using for purchases?

Repeat purchases and lifetime value

Being able to understand repeat visits, purchases, and how valuable each customer is to your business is a must-have. It’s not enough to just keep track of customer touchpoints like the first conversion event; you need to understand customer journeys. Optimizing your customer journey to bring in first time buyers is important, but for many types of businesses, repeat purchasers drive a substantial chunk of revenue. By gathering a complete view of customer identity, you can understand how repeat purchasers interact with your site and how you can improve their experiences and convert them at a higher rate.

Tracking your repeat purchases and customer lifetime value can help you answer questions like:

• What kind of users have the highest LTV for me?
• How many users make repeat purchases?
• What kind of flow do returning purchasers go through to find their next purchase?

Specific customer segment experiences

Your customers are not one homogenous group. Customers from specific geographies, age groups, company sizes, and more may have different impressions of your site or app. Being able to segment your customers along strategic and relevant lines for your business to understand how they’re interacting with your site can unlock surprising insights.

One real-life example: we knew an e-commerce company that had a wide international presence, and discovered that their customers in certain cities were behaving very differently than their average customer. When they dug a bit deeper, they learned that those cities all had extremely bad traffic, and people were browsing their site in sporadic gaps during standstills in their commutes! This led them to create specific experiences for those types of customers to help them better engage and win more business in those cities.

Tracking specific customer segment experiences can help you answer questions like:

• Are my customers in California interacting with my landing pages differently than my customers in New York?
• Are customers from large companies reading my blog posts, or is it more individuals from small companies?

Funnels

Many sites have funnels that they want their customers to go through. These funnels will take them through stages from awareness to education to evaluation to purchase. Understanding your funnels will tell you where the most customers are dropping out, or if certain steps are working extremely well for you.

Tracking funnel performance can help you answer questions like:

• What percentage of customers come from my ads to my blog to contact sales?
• Do more customers make purchases after they look at similar products or from going direct to the final product page?

Conclusion

Your customers are your lifeblood. If you don’t understand what real individual people are doing on your site and the experiences that they have, then you’re inevitably leaving money on the table. Aggregate views of all visitors or shallow level understandings of one or two things about user properties won’t cut it.

In today’s world, loyalty is driven by customer experience much more so than the actual product. If you don’t understand your customers, how can you offer them the best experience?

Now, the fact of the matter is that we don’t always know exactly what’s important to driving revenue and improved customer experience ahead of time, so building a culture of asking the right questions is more important than trying to create a perfect tracking plan. Solutions that automatically capture all your customer behavior data for you enable you to ask the right questions and get answers fast, rather than having to instrument new things to track and waiting weeks for data.

Josh Dreyfuss is a Content Marketing Manager at Heap. When not helping Heap deliver a world-class customer behavioral data tool, he enjoys backpacking, poetry, and beer. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and currently lives in San Francisco, CA.

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So, as a marketer at an email marketing automation SaaS company, I felt like it was my duty to find out the processes top marketers have a hard time with and what advice they have for beginners. I did just that by surveying over 130 marketing professionals.

But I felt like that wasn’t enough. I wanted to share all this insight and data, so I made a roundup article and wrote a 55-page report filled with data to share my findings with the world.

What follows is a condensed version of the advice I received back.

Marketing Automation Advice Stats from Experts to Beginners

In this section, we’re going to take a look at what people who want to start using marketing automation or have just gotten started with marketing automation should pay attention to.

This was the question we asked people who use marketing automation: “What would you say to a person just starting to use marketing automation? What should he or she pay attention to?”

We consolidated this data to recognize trends. You can read more about our methodology in the report.

Planning ahead (17 percent) appeared most frequently as advice for beginners. Marketing automation requires a clear strategy to be effective — without that there’s nothing to be automated.

Coming in second place, experts recommended that beginners pay attention to creating automations (12 percent). This is no wonder, as automated processes are the essence of marketing automation. Creating quality automations when you’re starting out will save you a ton of resources and frustration down the line.

Creating content (9 percent) was another frequently mentioned piece of advice from marketing automation users. Even the most sophisticated automation is nothing without quality content.

Eight percent of marketing automation users in our survey said that beginners should pay attention to finding the right software that suits your needs. Doing some research and finding a tool that does exactly what you need it to do will make it easier for you to get started and get the results you want.

While setting goals (8 percent) may seem similar to planning ahead, setting goals is more specific. It’s more about choosing measurable metrics to compare results against for evaluating the performance of your campaigns and automations. Closely related to setting goals, marketing automation users also recommended keeping track of data (6 percent).

It’s wise to segment your audience when you’re starting out with marketing automation, but only 4 percent of marketing automation users mention it.

Pricing, integrations, personalization, testing, providing value, and contact quality were brought up in only 3 percent of responses. Still, they are key functions that need attention after you get started.

Only a couple of participants mentioned lead nurturing, consistency and the quality of support (1 percent). These might not be your priority when you’re in the beginning, but keep them in mind as you improve.

Marketing Automation Advice Quotes from Experts and Influencers

I selected four of the best answers to the question I mentioned previously to provide some more hands-on advice. You can read all the quotes I received from my survey in the roundup article.

Sam Hurley, founder and managing partner at OPTIM-EYEZ says beginners should:

The head of marketing at Improvado.io, Hailey Friedman had this advice for people starting out in the world of marketing automation:

Bryan McAnulty, the founder of Keiro Consulting advises beginner marketing automation users to:

Tim Smalley, a product marketing strategist at Stratomic, says novice marketing automation users should:

Demographics

To put this data and advice into context, here’s a short breakdown of the distribution of company sizes, the positions of the respondents, and the industries they work in.

Company Sizes

In my research, 90 percent of the respondents are from companies with 50 employees or less. This means that small and micro businesses are overrepresented. Let’s break this down a bit.

More than half of the respondents (57 percent) work at companies with 2-10 employees.

A fifth (20 percent) of the answers came from companies with 11-50 employees.

Seventeen submissions (13 percent) came from solopreneurs.

Positions

The most submissions (38 percent) came from professionals working in growth positions like marketing and sales.

Thirty-one percent of the respondents in our survey are business owners.

A quarter of the participants (25 percent) are CEOs.

Altogether, these three groups make up 94 percent of the submissions.

Industries

The distribution of industries among the respondents leans toward marketing, with 47 percent of those surveyed working in marketing. This was intentional, as we collected the data so that about half of the respondents would be from marketing.

The software development industry came in second in the survey, with 25 percent of the submissions coming from this industry.

Non-marketing agencies also constituted a decent amount of submissions, comprising 14 percent of responses.

Five percent of the respondents work in hospitality, 3 percent in e-commerce, and 2 percent in copywriting or design. A mere 2 percent of respondents didn’t specify their industry.

Recap

If you’re a beginner, here are the top three pieces of advice you should keep in mind:

• Plan ahead
• Create quality automations
• Create quality content

Now it’s time to get out there and start your journey with marketing automation!

Mor Mester is the head of marketing at Automizy, an easy-to-use email marketing automation SaaS. His mission is to help small businesses and agencies implement marketing automation to increase productivity and consequently revenue.

The post Marketing Automation Advice from the Best in Business appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Comparing ConvertKit vs. MailChimp means first understanding their target audiences. Both platforms are designed for early stage startup and creator businesses like small ecommerce sites, bloggers, and small retail businesses. Both of these tools help these small businesses get started with email marketing, growing their subscriber lists, and ultimately building robust online businesses that produce revenue. And although both ConvertKit and MailChimp have options for early stage companies, they have a vested interest in the continued and rapid growth of these small businesses.

And yet, there are distinct differences in how ConvertKit vs MailChimp go about helping small businesses grow.ConvertKit is subscriber-based rather than list-based, so your subscribers can sign up for all sorts of lists, and you don’t get charged multiple times. You can also access all of the features in ConvertKit at every price tier, but the more you grow your lists the more you pay. MailChimp is design, image, and promotionally focused and has a large emphasis on ecommerce tools with connections to Facebook and Instagram ads that feed right into your subscription lists. Not all features are available at all pricing levels, but you can choose to pay monthly based on your list size or via pay-as-you-go credits.

ConvertKit vs MailChimp isn’t the only small business email marketing comparison out there, either. To learn more about the right email marketing and marketing automation tool for your growing company, call TechnologyAdvice at 855.718.1369 or visit our marketing automation software page to get your fast, free marketing software recommendations based on your company’s needs.

Features of

ConvertKit vs. MailChimp

Automation

ConvertKit gives you a visual automation tool where you can build your subscriber drip campaigns. Drag and Drop a workflow through events, actions, and conditions, and see how many subscribers have moved through the funnel right in the workflow. Build your email cadences, tags, and forms, and then assign those as events, actions, and conditions to move subscribers through the automation. You can also assign dates to better time the sends for particular emails or offers.

MailChimp has really gone all-in on automation in the past couple of years, and the tool has come a long way since adding automated drip campaigns. Automation in MailChimp means everything from running automatic response emails to drip campaigns to sorting your subscribes into segmented lists and pulling unsubscribes from your current lists as they happen. Connect to Facebook and Instagram ads to increase your mailing list, and the information from those ads can be used to help segment your lists and personalize your content through robust ecommerce automation features.

Email builds

ConvertKit believes in text-based email sends rather than image-heavy email templates. They have a whole blog post on why it’s important to not emulate the kinds of emails you would assume are advertisements and therefore don’t really read. This distinction about the types of emails people read is a major value for the company that directs how they design their tools. That being said, although you can’t access fancy image templates, you can write emails that have most of the major text edit functions: italic, bold, underline, images, and clickable links are all available. You can even set up click tracking for your emails to get a sense of where your customers interact. However, you’re not going to get lots of pretty templates.

MailChimp, on the other hand, gives you customizable drag and drop templating where you can choose to add text, images, or specific design elements throughout the email, or you can use HTML to design your own email templates. If you don’t subscribe to ConvertKit’s super-simple-emails-sell philosophy, then check out MailChimp to get your fancy image-ready email templates.

Forms and Landing Pages

ConvertKit has paid attention to the forms and landing pages that you can build to help convert readers into subscribers, and updated the form builder as of July 1, 2018. You’ll find that every part of the online forms you can build in ConvertKit are customizable, from the form’s messaging and colors to your follow-up confirmation/double opt-in email messaging. All of ConvertKit’s forms are available in-line, via a pop-up modal, or slide in at the bottom right or left of the screen. You can even connect your third-party lead generation tools to your ConvertKit forms to take advantage of the automations.

ConvertKit landing pages are built almost exactly like your ConvertKit forms, but they have the added value of a headline and on-page content that you would expect to see from a landing page. Set up the page’s forms just like any other ConvertKit form, including the confirmation email, and either embed the landing page on your website through the ConvertKit WordPress plugin, or share the landing page’s live link directly through your social media or email lists.

MailChimp’s forms come in 3 standard types: form builder, embedded forms, and subscriber pop-up. Each of these start in the Build It tab of your form builder, which you can access through your list. The Design It tab lets you choose different designs for the whole list, but you won’t be able to build different designs across different forms. MailChimp provides 2 different landing page templates to choose from based on your goals, but within those templates you can customize the look and feel with a visual editor. Embed your landing pages on your website with an embed code, or share your forms and landing pages directly to your social accounts via their individual URLs.

Reporting

Reporting in ConvertKit is limited to the overviews that you see in your dashboard: The Form Graph and the Subscriber Graph. These graphs show your list growth over the course of time, and some breakout metrics corresponding to the forms you’ve made to capture subscriptions. The Form Graph at the top of the dashboard is your opt-ins over time broken down by each form opt-in. The recently-added Subscriber graph gives you an overall view of your subscriptions, unsubscribes, and net growth for your entire account, and includes several filters and date ranges to customize this view.

MailChimp has extensive reporting designed to not only give you lots of information about how your campaigns are doing, but also to help you build better emails and campaigns in the future. Expect to see interactive graphs and a lot of automatic list maintenance in these reports. You can explore the results of that maintenance in your reporting features, but you don’t have to interact with the lists very much, which is pretty cool.

Subscriber activity reports show who’s responding to your emails and who’s not even opening, which gives you a lot of ammo to build follow-up campaigns. Benchmarking gives you a sense of how well your particular campaign does against other companies in the same industry. Click map reporting drills down into individual emails to show exactly where your customers are paying attention and clicking.

The Rundown

The ConvertKit vs MailChimp battle is a close call when looking directly at features and capabilities. ConvertKit doesn’t give you the pretty image-heavy email templates you might come to expect from a commercial email provider, but they make a pretty great case for leaving those out. MailChimp has a lot of automation, personalization, and customization functions, but for a small business these features might be overwhelming.

When it comes to features, bells, and whistles, MailChimp has ConvertKit beat. MailChimp even offers a mobile app where you can build and deploy campaigns from your mobile device and even do a little reporting on the go. ConvertKit doesn’t offer a mobile app. Design-focused marketers and ecommerce sellers who want eye catching emails they can turn into Facebook and Instagram ads will gravitate to this tool. Bloggers, content creators, and those looking to quickly grow their subscription lists without worrying about finding design elements and images for each of their emails will be happy with ConvertKit’s simplicity.

And ConvertKit vs. MailChimp is by no means the only small business email matchup out there. We can help you compare the best email marketing and marketing automation software on the market and find the perfect tool for your needs. Visit our marketing automation page or call a Technology Advisor today at 855.718.1369 to get free software recommendations based on your needs in 5 minutes or less.

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