How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

If you are a digital marketer and you are presently not using email marketing as a major part of your digital marketing campaigns, you are missing out on a vital and hugely effective marketing tool. Statistically, email has more users than social media, so it is a very popular marketing tool with most digital marketers around the globe. You cannot have an effective email marketing campaign without the right strategy. Your email campaign strategy cannot be right if it does not allow you to open a direct and efficient channel of communication with your customers. But first, you must take quality time to diligently build a credible email list.

 
Even though building a reliable list of email contacts can be quite challenging, without it, you cannot hope to have any successful email marketing campaigns. If however you manage to get it right, it can yield great results for your business down the road. Here is what helps the process to make your email marketing campaigns effective.
 
Consistently Craft High-Quality Content

No matter whatever else you do, your email campaign will not yield any worthwhile results if you do not produce high-quality content very regularly and consistently. Such content even if written or visual must be optimized for emails to enhance its readability. In digital marketing, content is king. The better it is, the more traffic it attracts. The more traffic it attracts, the more leads, conversions and sales you get. It is good quality content that keeps your audience engaged. The content you create is effective if it is created around things and topics within your business’ niche. That is the kind of content that helps to attract more traffic and even sigh-ups.
 
Optimize your Website

You can integrate and optimize your website with strategically placed sign-up widgets and pop-ups.  If your email list is credible, the more email contacts you have, the more emails you can send and the more audience you can convert. To be sure your emails will be effective, you can do A/B testing on them. This test is about the best way to optimize, try out different widgets or pop-ups to get more signups. With Google analytics tools, you can closely monitor and track your progress and customer responses to your email campaigns. The insights from these tools can provide you the vital info you need to redirect, tweak or rejig your marketing strategy and campaign as needed. 

Sign-up with an Email Service Provider

Aside the risk of falling foul of sending unsolicited emails, signing up with a reputable email service provider is usually great for email campaigns. A good way around sending unsolicited emails is to make sure you have express or implied permission from the recipients.  Permission is deemed implied when you currently have some kind of relationship with the contact. Express permission implies that even if you have no previous relationship with the contacts, they have permitted you to send them your marketing emails. When you optimize the user’s points of contact on your website and social media handles, permission is deemed obtained from all sign-ups/subscribers to regularly receive emails through that window.
 
Automate Your Emails

This helps to create and use drip emails effectively. It is hugely effective for timing the release of emails. It comes in very handy to send out a planned and well-executed series of emails that can keep your customers sufficiently engaged. Once you have an automated drip campaign in place, you do not have to worry anymore about sending your emails manually. The automation takes charge as programmed and you’ll then be able to send your emails at the right times and in the right forms. Anytime anyone signs up on your website, automation systems once in place will begin to send them a set of emails at programmed intervals. The info from your analytics tools will enable you to determine what works, what needs changing or what needs modifying for better effectiveness. Your email marketing campaigns tremendously benefit from these efforts.

How to Scale your Online Business for Global Market

For business expansions and increased revenues, many online businesses are going global. That warrants sudden growths in some instances. These sudden growths come with their own unique challenges. The reason marketers now pay more attention to scalability. Global expansion calls for an appropriate scalable strategy of business development. Such strategy ensures your business can manage a substantial increase in demand without a critical drop in quality of service. If your business is scalable, you can manage exponential growth over time even with sustained quality of service. Good management is key to guaranteeing that. With good management, you can effectively combine a high-demand product/service with solid support and production possibilities by scaling essential elements of the business. Some of these elements may be business-specific but you’ll do nicely if you can first fulfill these here universal requirements.

Make Comprehensive Plans

You must plan long term and comprehensively. That is very essential in global business expansions. Have substantial market research before drawing up a plan. This plan must include how to seamlessly reach and serve your customers anywhere they are in the world. Essentially you must plan for your teams, online ads, delivery systems, resources, including financing, international trade, tariffs, taxes and so on.

Automate all Processes you can Automate

To enter a worldwide online market and be able to make some impact, you need to have quality time and resources at your disposal. Both may not be readily available. That calls for automation. To save time and resources, you need to automate certain aspects of your business. Characteristically, automation allows for more efficient use of time and resources and it contributes to a positive customer experience. You can automate emails and deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, generously in your marketing activities. AI can help in automatic language translations, currency conversions, customer service and many other activities that you would otherwise have needed personnel to handle.

Provide Universal Solutions

One great way to scale your business for global audience is to provide products/services that are universally acceptable. What that means is that you can scale your online business worldwide by offering something that is needed across the world. If the product/service you are offering helps to solve a problem for different people from around the world, you can do profitable global business with it. No matter how effective your marketing campaigns are and how great your business funding is, you cannot successfully scale your business on the global market without a substantial demand for your product/service. Providing solutions with universal appeal helps to address that challenge.

Endeavor to Rank Well on Google SERPs

You can hardly market successfully online to a global audience without the help of search engines particularly a major search engine like Google. Google must like your content and rank it high enough for it to reach a global audience better. That calls for a good SEO on your website. A good SEO will help Google to rank your website well enough to send free organic traffic to it from anywhere around the world where keywords/phrases related to the site are used to make searches on Google.

Partner Reputable Logistics Companies

Unless your product is a virtual or digital product, you must arrange to have it delivered as is to any corner of the globe. That calls for partnerships with reputable logistics companies with global delivery experience. Damaged goods, pilfered goods, lost parcels and delivery delays are very bad for international business reputation. Partnering with reputable business services with extensive shipping, handling and storage capabilities can help with scalable growth for your business no matter the surge in future demands.

Fund your Business Adequately

Sudden and rapid business expansion that global reach may require has to be funded adequately. All sources of funding must be on the table at all times. You can get funded by investors, through bank loans or government funding agencies’ grants or a combination of two or more of them. Whichever you use, be sure it is reliable enough to be stepped up when demand suddenly surges. Doing international business successfully is near impossible without adequate funding and adequate funding helps the scalability of your business.

Take Advantage of Outsourcing

Outsourcing certain components of your business helps to bring down costs without lowering standards or outputs. No matter how efficient your business team is, a global business surge may task it to breakable limits particularly when the surge is sudden. So, outsourcing comes in to help out. Because there is a limit to the tasks your team can efficiently handle, you can consider enhancing human resources or outsourcing tasks that are beyond their field of expertise. If your business experiences sudden growth that overstretches your team, to avoid compromising on quality, you can outsource tasks like customer support for instance and still be doing great. Thus, you can always do well to avoid overburdening your team with any work that can be outsourced as and when needed.

Keep a Keen Eye on your Business Analytics

If you market online, without the benefit of analytics data, it is like marketing in the dark. Whatever marketing results you can measure online by way of analytics data should be carefully measured and analyzed. Your analytics data will give reliable info about inbound traffic, sources of traffic, sales growth, trends, conversions and other key performance metrics. The analysis of such data will allow you to develop predictions, attract investors, plan ahead, react to challenges, and make projections/forecasts. That gives you the much needed business confidence about the future of your global business. A good scalable strategy assumes that with such vital knowledge at your fingertips, you are willing, able and ready to take on any business issues as they arise even if occasioned by sudden business surge.

Concluding Thoughts

Even if you are experienced in your business, scaling it online should be deliberately systematic with good planning. Expect challenges like disappointing sales, sudden and unexpected growth surges that may induce loss of quality if adequate care is not taken. There are hardly any of these challenges you cannot handle well enough if you planned well. With a scalable development strategy, you can easily make adjustments as you go along. For so long as you have a good idea what you are up against, you can always take the necessary steps as needed to grow your online business reputation and for your global business to prosper in the long term. That no doubt demands from you quality time and efforts.

7 Ways to Automate Conversations with Your Customers

Maintaining an open line of communication with your customers is key to any successful business relationship. There is real customer satisfaction when your customers know that you’re behind them and are ready to support them every step of the way. This is a win-win relationship which does not necessarily mean you’ll need to spend extra man-hours to keep your lines of communication open. Even if there are a lot of customer service requests, you may not need a human being to handle them all. That is where automation comes in.

Putting automation to work in your business frees you and your employees up to continue to move your business forward, while still keeping a level of support that your customers expect. Here are 7 cost effective ways you can automate that process.

01. By Making Use of New Technologies: The commonest technologies that might assist in the automation process are the use of mobile apps. The most effective of these apps are those which help to walk customers through common issues so they can fix problems themselves without the need for your involvement. Others might use SMS to text a code to a number to get information on their account, a balance due, or to automate the payment process.

02. By Using Technology for Follow-up: Even after you’ve made a sale, it’s still important to keep the lines of communication open to your customers. The follow up helps to increase customer satisfaction by merely letting your customers know that you’re out there if they need you. That helps to address potential problems early on by addressing issues early. Common problems are easier to fix early on. For instance, using a simple automated email might be all that is needed to open a line of communication between you and your customer.

03. By Automating Your Social Media Presence: As many business owners have come to realize, Social media outreach is an important part of their business’ public face. It helps to give potential customers and customers a sense that they’re connected to you. Promotion of what your business offers through social media channels may open up new sales leads, while customers may turn to social media to contact you about issues. There are many social management systems such as HappyFox that can actually filter social media contacts based on the content of the message itself. That helps to take out the work of a middleman to direct queries to the right person. These same systems can also automatically post to your social media accounts, allowing you to automate your marketing strategy and give your content maximum exposure.

04. By Using Surveys: Surveys are fairly common methods of automation. Granted you’re not always going to get a high response rate, the data obtained from well designed surveys are great ways to not only spot potential problems, but also initiate a dialogue with your customers. It helps to keep them short, relevant, and to the point. You may also find it necessary to use your survey answers to initiate further automatic emails to gather additional feedback on areas where the responses might be a cause for concern.

05. By Using the Callback System: These days, even though many consumers may show a preference for using the Internet to communicate with businesses, many still appreciate talking to a human being. Call such people “old school” if you like but they are still out there and in large numbers too. It is because of such people the callback is still a worthy option to include in your customer relationship strategy. On the same pages where you might have a “Chat Now” button, a “Call Me” button might be just as useful. For example, MobiForge software has some great examples of Click to Call or Click to SMS solutions.

06. By Initiating Conversation without Prompting: Smart business owners do not wait for their customers to first reach out to them. They easily recognize such actions their customers may take that might be a clear sign of a need for assistance. For example, a website visitor spending a lot of time in your help pages probably needs some kind of support, while somebody looking through your products and services might benefit from talking with a member of your sales team to assure the sale. There are multiple great tools out there which can help initiate any conversation. Tools like LiveChat and BoldChat, both with customizable audience interactions can really be useful here.

07. By Using a Virtual Assistant to Handle the Simple Things: Just because you’re trying to be proactive doesn’t mean you’ll need to hire additional staff. A good portion of customer service requests are simple in nature, and with chat bots becoming ever more intelligent, automated systems can handle those issues quickly and easily. This frees up your employees to deal with more complex problems. Chat bots such as Botsify (for Facebook Messenger and other apps) can answer those simple questions that might arise from whatever actions your customer is taking on your site.