10 Common eCommerce Business Mistakes to Avoid

In eCommerce business, there are a whole lot of mistakes business owners make daily that can be easily avoided. These mistakes somehow manage to set many of these businesses back. They stunt business growth and even scalability. To avoid these mistakes, here’s what to watch out for:

1. Neglecting the Right Web Design: A Carelessly designed website can cause your eCommerce business a lot of problems. Problems like slow loading times, confusing navigation, and low-resolution images can make your business seem less trustworthy. A good web design really matters because your website is one of the main ways to express your brand identity, build credibility, and interact directly with customers. It is your first point of contact with customers online and the best place to generate sales. Marketing and advertising initiatives often send consumers to the website to learn more or make a purchase. Once a user lands on your eCommerce site, their first impression and browsing experience can directly influence their opinion of your business. It directly affects their buy decisions as well. If you do not have the expertise to build a responsive website yourself, you are best advised to use pre-built templates or professional webmasters to help you build one. 
 
2. Designing a Poor Checkout Experience: Checkout problems like website glitches, limited shipping or payment options, and UX design flaws can increase your abandoned cart rates. This means loss of sales. To avoid this, do not allow a complicated checkout process on your website. If you do, it can lead to lost sales, because each extra step increases the chances of a shopper abandoning a shopping cart and leaving. You can mitigate this by removing unnecessary fields. Adding a progress bar may help keep customers on the purchasing path. Establishing credibility, minimizing steps, and offering consumer-friendly payment and delivery options help build a strong eCommerce checkout experience that encourages customers to complete their orders.

3. Skipping Technical SEO: Optimized blog posts and keyword-rich product pages are only part of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) equation. A site that loads slowly or confuses search engines can lose good ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Be sure your website is well optimized to make it visible to search engines. That helps it ranking. If your website loads fast and is easily crawlable, it is easy for search engines to index. To enhance this, you must always quickly resolve issues like broken links, slow loading times, missing site maps, and inconsistent URL structures before they hurt your search engine ranking.
 
If you periodically run a site audit, it can help you to quickly identify and resolve these website issues. Implementing essential website maintenance tasks and optimizing your website structure with meta titles and schema help to boost your domain authority. This is good for your site SEO.

4. Creating Uninspiring Product Pages: A product page is where shoppers make their buy decisions. It must therefore be inspiring enough to get them to do so. Significantly, generic product pages with blurry photos and thin descriptions easily lose sales to competitors who show customers exactly what they’re buying. High-quality images and detailed descriptions don’t just inform—they help shoppers imagine owning your product. Uninspiring product pages therefore do not help your sales and must be avoided.
 
You can deliberately build compelling product pages by including a variety of high-resolution photos, such as clear product images that show users what to expect. You can use curated lifestyle photography that demonstrates how products fit into everyday life. Make sure to write product descriptions that capture your brand tone and highlight key use cases. Never forget to add a complete list of product specifications and features to help buyers make their buy decisions without stress.

5. Ignoring High-Quality Content: Without high-quality content on your site and social channels, you risk missing out on organic search traffic that can lead to sales. Even if creating high-quality, original content may take time and effort, it is worth it since the practice can help bolster your marketing strategy. Consistent blog posts and social media content let you connect with consumers in an authentic way. Sharing organic content on social media or in email newsletters can help drive brand engagement and build long-term customer relationships.

6. Using Overly Aggressive Marketing Tactics: Relentless discount codes and unceasing emails usually drive most consumers crazy. This can lead to an uncomfortable volume of unsubscribers.  Customers stay engaged when you provide value first—helpful content, brand stories, products that solve problems. Selling them on yours products comes next after you’ve got them engaged.

Emotional marketing engages with your target audience on a deeper level by creating materials and campaigns that evoke emotions and build meaningful relationships between customers and your brand. By humanizing your brand and your customer’s experience, you can forge relationships that go deeper than a discount code or shopping cart reminder emails ever can.
 
7. Ignoring Audience Insights: Without audience insights, businesses often end up prioritizing corporate goals over consumer needs. This usually leads to generic, unappealing results.  Diligent market research can reveal consumer interests, desires, and motivations. This vital insight can be used to develop products and marketing strategies that connect on a personal and emotional level. It is advisable to start with customer needs research and define your target audience through customer surveys, competitor analyses, and third-party industry reports. After establishing a general sense of the market, you can then build buyer personas to enhance your marketing strategy.

8. Choosing Inappropriate Marketing Tools: Selecting the wrong eCommerce platform or CMS can create huge marketing problems for your eCommerce business. The business may suffer duplicate customer records, orders that don’t sync, and inventory counts that don’t match your stock. One mismatched tool can mean hours of manual data entry each week. Wasted time you can ill afford.

To mitigate this, you can work with multiple software tools, such as a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management (CRM) system, an eCommerce platform, and a point-of-sale (POS) system. If however, you are unable to integrate properly, you can face a lot of headaches in tracking orders and customer engagement. Therefore, finding the right eCommerce integration solutions can save you time and improve your return on investment (ROI).
 
9. Lacking Good Customer Service: Customer service interactions are important in shaping brand relationships. Negative support experiences can damage a brand’s reputation and contribute to churn. On the flip side, handling customer concerns efficiently and kindly can help build trust. Providing the right resources can set your customer service team up for success. For instance, using a customer service management or customer relationship management (CRM) platform to organize and keep track of incoming tickets reduces the risk of missed communications. Additionally, establishing clear guidelines and providing a clear script for your customer support can help ensure customers have consistent, positive interactions. This can help your sales a great deal.

10. Ignoring Mobile Users: Presently, mobile commerce is taking a huge chunk of worldwide retail eCommerce. Meaning, no serious eCommerce business can afford to ignore mobile commerce. Your eCommerce website must be optimized for mobile devices if you want to take advantage of this huge chunk of business. So, if your eCommerce site doesn’t display properly on mobile devices, you risk missing out on a significant number of potential customers.

Using responsive web design can greatly improve the mobile customer experience. To ensure a high-quality experience, always endeavor to preview website updates on both mobile and desktop devices before publishing. Other mobile optimization tactics include simplifying filtering and sorting in your product search, including video and zoom views. Also, you must try to avoid pop-ups that cover too much of the screen on mobile devices.  

How Marketing Automation Strategies Help Your Online Business to Grow

Most eCommerce business owners always seek to grow their businesses rapidly. What readily appeals to such people is marketing automation. Marketing automation is simply a way of outsourcing or delegating time-consuming, complex, or repetitive online business tasks to one or more software. Doing this helps to free up valuable time and resources for the business owner to spend on other business tasks. Marketing automation strategy simply means getting more marketing done with less time and resources. If you want to grow your online business fast enough, here is how marketing automation strategies can help you out.

 

Engage Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your Blogging

Blogging remains the most valuable content marketing strategy available to eCommerce business owners. To craft and post high quality and informative content consistently takes quite some time and resources. So, automation comes very handy to help out. As most bloggers very well know, there are many components to blog writing. Some of these components such as pre- and post- tasks do not really involve actual writing. Pre- tasks involve researching content, keyword research, and creating outlines while post- tasks include editing, proofreading and so on. If you want to automate blog post writing, you can decide which part you can do manually yourself and which parts to outsource to AI. Depending on your inclination, you can even use AI to write an entire blog, optimize your blog/social media posts, and improve the quality of your blog posts. With the help of blogging software like Grammarly, Jasper and Crayon, you can turn out more high quality blogs at a faster pace to help grow your business.

Auto-Scheduling of your Social Media Posts

One very important component of social media marketing is by posting content regularly. Doing so is not really that complicated but it is quite tedious due to its repetitiveness. That is where AI automation becomes quite relevant. You can use smart software to produce downloadable analytics reports that help you gauge how your posts are doing, plan your social media posts with a free marketing calendar and even set times for auto-publishing on any social media platform. Smart tools like Socialpilot, CoSchedule and Later come in very handy if you want to automate your social media posts. If you automate your social media posts, you get to post more high quality content at a faster pace to help grow your business.

Auto-Nurture your Leads

To nurture your leads effectively, you must first create a buyer persona. Next step is store highly valuable information about customer profiles in a CRM system and finally to repeatedly send out targeted content and follow-ups to these profiles. If you automate your lead scoring process, you can effectively nurture the leads that you have so far identified as ideal leads. This nurturing involves sending to interested people valuable and interesting content consistently with a view to converting the leads into loyal customers. This process may appear complicated but with the use of a smart software like EngageBay, things can become more easy going and with great results for your business.

Automate your Lead Scoring

A marketing strategy like lead scoring is helpful to businesses when they want to rate their leads or customers. Lead scoring helps eCommerce business owners to form various segments of customers depending on the level of interest they show in the business, their engagement, and other aspects of customer behavior. After this, they can then nurture these leads if they turn out to be worth spending more time and resources on. With the use of marketing tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot Marketing Hub which have in-built lead scoring features, you can automate your lead scoring process for faster and better results. These tools are capable of automating lead scoring by using software that automatically decides what content to send which customer based on their score or their position in the sales funnel. Now that can be really great for the rapid growth of your business.

Automate your Email Marketing List

For quite a while now, eCommerce marketers are relying heavily in email automation to boost their marketing campaigns. Instead of the tedious process of manually sending emails to individual customers, or even having a manually created mailing list, automation has become a great way to go. The best way to automate your email marketing process is to have email integration with dedicated software like MailChimp. This tool not only allows you to send  bulk emails, it also automatically helps out with other vital marketing information like reminding online shoppers about abandoned carts, engaging lost customers again and cross-selling products. The smart tool also automatically adds customers who demonstrate a deeper interest in your emails to a specific mailing list. This singular service is of vital importance to drastically reduce the chances of your emails ending up in spam folders. Even if you find MailChimp not too cool a smart tool to use, you can try PitchBox tool. This tool has an added advantage of helping to create email marketing campaigns and doing link-building
outreach to improve your website SEO. That means more organic traffic to your eCommerce website that can help grow your business.

Wrapping Up

Marketing automating strategy is a practical way of redoubling your efforts in your eCommerce business. If you effectively use AI tools to handle some of your marketing operations, things get progressively better. The foregoing strategies are practical ways to place some of your marketing operations literally in the hands of smart online tools. Doing so is one decision you can never regret taking if and when you see your eCommerce business growing fast mostly because of automation.

Top 8 Awesome Email Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Among digital marketers, email marketing is one of their most widely used digital marketing strategies. The reason is simple. Email is cost-efficient to use and with a very good ROI. In addition, it is typically a simple, clear, and efficient way to communicate with customers and prospective customers. You can only get these advantages from email marketing if your emails get to their recipients. On that score, there’s a lot you must do to ensure that your messages reach the right audience. It is only when they do you can expect to be able to turn your leads into customers efficiently. Therefore, to ensure your emails get to the recipients and as sent, you need the assistance of smart software and tools. These tools are designed to make your marketing easier by helping you to automate several tasks to increase your chances of success. Email marketing tools can help increase engagement with your emails and improve the chances of success with your email marketing strategies. This is why you must carefully choose the most efficient email marketing tools without sacrificing dependability and security. Online, there are numerous email marketing software solutions available for marketers to choose from. Many of these tools offer flexible capabilities/solutions that can be tailored to practically any market. Choosing the right email marketing tools for your email marketing strategy can have a significant impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns.

 

Find below some of the best email marketing tools you can choose from to boost your email marketing campaigns.

1. Mailchimp Tool

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing platform among marketers. It is a very sophisticated platform with fantastic features like drag-and-drop email editor, email notifications, contact segmentation into subgroups, and simple analytics monitoring. Mailchimp is popular with marketers because it has a free plan that enables users to deliver up to 12,000 emails to almost 2,000 recipients regularly. It also offers premium monthly subscriptions for marketers who can afford the fees. One main advantage of Mailchimp is that it enables marketers to configure delivery times depending on time zones and geolocation-based segmentation. In addition to that, marketers can readily integrate Mailchimp with Content Management Systems like Wix and WordPress as well as eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and a variety of other platforms to increase its effectiveness.

2. Benchmark Tool

Benchmark’s email marketing tool is free and comes with a robust marketing package. Benchmark’s email solution is ideal for ambitious email marketing campaigns. This tool provides some complex capabilities like Google Analytics tracking, social network integration, and heat mapping all for free. In addition and if you so desire, you can get a convenient drag and drop builder, minimal automation, and reporting capabilities with Benchmark tool.

3. ActiveCampaign Tool

ActiveCampaign tool boasts of a CRM option and live chats in addition to email marketing. It is a great tool that marketers find helpful to find relevant prospects using tools like lead scoring. This is made possible by integrating a CRM into their marketing operations. You can also use the system to add interactive content to your emails, thereby allowing your audience to have varied experiences depending on your segmentation. ActiveCampaign’s template designer is quite user-friendly and easily adaptable. However, you must be ready to pay subscription fees to take full advantage of ActiveCampaign tool.

4. ClickFunnels Tool

ClickFunnels is an email marketing program that is built around sales and marketing funnels. With ClickFunnels software, marketers can develop an automated succession of landing pages, autoresponders, emails, and webinars. They can do all these even without needing to know how to code. ClickFunnels allows businesses to design whole sales and marketing funnels. The main advantage of this is that the tool brings together automated advertising & distribution solutions all in one place. It provides you the tools and methods to market, distribute, and send messages over the internet. A higher grade version of ClickFunnels tool requires subscription fees to put into operation. Platinum version subscribers can contact customers by focused emails, social networks, text messages, and computer notifications at any moment and from anywhere.

5. MailerLite Tool

MailerLite tool helps marketers to personalize and automate their emails to connect with their customers. MailerLite is quite unique marketing software which stands out for its clear, attractive user interface and responsive customer care. You can easily connect MailerLite to other online programs that allow you to exchange information, simplify workflows, and improve your overall user experience. The tool comes with three editors to help marketers build dynamic and engaging campaigns. If you want to create sophisticated marketing processes, MailerLite is the tool you need. With it, you can use triggers to send emails or change custom fields regularly when interacting with your customers.

6. Instapage Tool

Instapage tool includes most of the things marketers need to create and optimize high-converting landing pages. The tool is handy to provide solutions that help to reduce cost-per-click and increase return on ad expenditure. With Instapage, you can develop appropriate mobile-responsive landing pages and interactions without using a developer. The tool makes it easier to increase visitor engagement and conversion rates by creating distinctive landing page encounters for each advertisement and target audience. A major advantage of Instapage tool is that it has a unique AdMaps function feature. This feature allows you to view your ad campaigns and link ads to suitable post-click web pages all in one location.

7. ConvertKit Tool

ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing tool that is really quite suitable for expert bloggers, content writers, and digital entrepreneurs. The tool is not only powerful, it is quite simple to use. Its most distinctive aspect is that it lets marketers give content and rewards to anyone who signs up for their email newsletters. The tool has simple auto-responders that let marketers generate drip emails using its emailing platform. ConvertKit allows you to send personalized messages to your segmented audience which help to enhance conversions. The tool allows marketers to create and execute email campaigns smoothly and provides them the ability to automate tasks and create customer marketing channels. When compared to other email marketing tools on the market, ConvertKit is really affordable but you can only have access to most of its fine features though, by paid subscription only.

8. GetResponse Tool

GetResponse is a great email marketing tool which is quite suitable for small business marketing. Online marketers use it extensively to create strong, simple emails within one easy-to-use interface. You can effectively use it for landing page optimization, conversion channels, and email automation. GetResponse is also very handy if you want to customize your email subject headings using your recipients’ personal information like the recipient’s identity, birth date, and postal code. If you simply pick this while composing your email subject line, it will be applied to all the contacts you’re emailing with the help of their email IDs. You can easily make email lists with GetResponse in an incredibly simple way.

Tips to Increase E-Commerce Retail Sales with Visual Merchandising

There are many different aspects of your E-commerce business that require special attention. Among them, sales appear to be unarguably the most important. Business owners really worry about what to do daily to keep their sales up. They worry about visual merchandising to keep sales up because they know that about 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual. For smart marketers therefore, visual merchandising is really a key strategy for them to boost sales. Visual merchandising can be a very powerful tool to increase retail sales but first, you must understand your customers. If you do, you can use creative displays effectively to attract attention to your products/services. These displays help to make it easy for your customers to find what they're looking for in your E-commerce store. With the help of digital/internet technology, you can transform a physical or digital environment into an extension of a brand's image, more particularly when the visual merchandising efforts are consistent throughout both the physical and digital environments. One very common example of this with marketers is when they use the same color scheme in-store, on their websites, and in their marketing apps.

If as an e-commerce store owner you want to master the art of visual merchandising, both in-store and online, these here strategies are very handy.

Take Advantage Technology

Worldwide, technology has dramatically changed the way people do business. E-commerce business is a major beneficiary of the advantage of technology in business. The use of smartphones, SMS, POS, computers and business apps are now common place. POS in particular is a great business innovation using cloud-based smart software. This smart software technology provides anytime, anywhere visibility and control on a computer or mobile device with an integrated solution for in-store sales as well online purchases. It is quite convenient to use by both customers and e-commerce business owners and thus an important factor in the merchandising strategy of any business.

Still on technology, a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) tool helps to collect relevant data about what, when, why and how people shop in-store or on your website. With the advantage of such data, the business owner can decide which products to feature, how products can be better grouped together, and specific product preferences of customers.

Know Your Customers, KYC

If you know your customers well enough, you can better market to them. KYC can therefore help to make the difference between being a successful visual merchandiser and a mediocre one.  If you know your customers well enough, you’ll know their buying habits, average spending rates, goods they prefer and so on. That way, you can better design your sales solutions specially to meet these needs. Both in-store and online strategies that can help you to entice more shoppers to come visit your shop and make purchases largely depend on your visual merchandising dexterity. Because visual merchandising is most effective when it’s guided by customer data, you can effectively use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) tool to track your customers and collect the relevant data for products grouping purposes and so on.

Create Captivating Window Displays

Ever heard of “window shopping”? Here is where it derives its relevance. The first impression most shoppers have about your business is through window displays. What they see through the window can actually entice them to go into the shop to have a better look and possibly buy from the shop whether in-shop or online. Because store windows are the first things people see when they come across your business, it is smart marketing to create appealing and/or themed exterior design to attract customers through visuals. Such visual merchandising is about the most effective way to drive potential consumers into entering where can spend their money. Even when shopping online, the homepage of your business website is the first window into your brand that a consumer experiences. It helps with the first impression they make about your brand. This is why you cannot be too careful to ensure that your homepage does exactly that. If you position your homepage well enough, you can effectively use it to interest and excite visitors with compelling images promoting your products/services. However, unlike static window displays, you can use personalization visual merchandising techniques to deliver a more captivating point of entry for your website or app visitors.

Group Your Products

When business owners group products in visual merchandising, it is one great way to attract customer attention and spark their imagination with ideas, particularly how the displayed items can help solve their problems. Clothes sellers can for instance dress up mannequins in different attires to tell consumers how they fit. For home decors, you can set up furniture pieces as they will appear in homes and the visuals alone can attract people to buy them for their homes. Each group of products can also be arranged in the store as they complement one another and that helps visual merchandising. Same tactic can easily be applied to e-commerce stores, and if done correctly, can increase average order value.

Make it Easy for Customers to Find Products

The easier it is for customers to locate what they want in your store, the higher the chances that they’ll buy from you. There could be several shades of arrangements in your store depending on the types of products you are selling. Many business owners like to store their most valuable and trending products in a prominent location to enable customers find them easily. Some usually place high-value or recent items at the front of their stores to induce sales. This is a smart approach to visual merchandising because most customers are always drawn to buy what they see first. If you make it easy for such customers to see what they want to buy fairly quickly, it helps to increase your sales. Even for an e-commerce store, same principle is applicable to maximize engagement online. Smart e-commerce business owners always place high-value products on the homepage of their business websites and optimize navigation to maintain the visitors' attention. It also helps to inspire visitors’ action to click through and make purchases. 

Email Marketing Tips for Current Trends in Communication

Digital marketers are increasingly relying on emails to do business. Because more and more people are taking to shopping online, marketers are also increasing the volumes of emails they are sending. This is partly to be able to reach out and accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs and to reach more people restricted by covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue even when the restrictions begin to ease off.

To sustain the current email marketing trends, these here tips can become very useful to email marketers going forward.

Using AI to Optimize Email Strategy

Email marketers can benefit from more effective emails if they skillfully deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, to optimize their email strategy.  With AI, marketers can easily and accurately analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. Marketers can for instance utilize smart online tools to analyze consumer’s purchase habits and interests. By optimizing the email sending time with these tools, marketers can identify a more suitable angle for their emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

AI can help out to make your emails more captivating and readable thereby reducing the numbers that end up in trash bins. They help to accurately identify your customers’ needs thereby providing the much needed Intel to shoot them the right emails. CRM systems come very handy to make these processes much easier and time saving.

Personalizing Emails

Marketers can leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate well with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. You can use online smart tools to accurately gather customers’ data. From this data, you can analyze their interests and preferences so as to design, craft and deliver more personalized emails that directly speak to their wants and needs. With that personalization, the emails tend to be more effective. These days, many more people are craving personal connection. Many consumers want to feel valued so they respond better to direct and personal touch from marketers. Therefore if you strive to personalize your emails, they help demonstrate your personality and care. That way, more customers can read your emails and really feel connected with you. It helps them to build trust in you as well as your brand.

Using More Interactive Emails

You can engage your customers better if your emails are interactive. The interactive elements in an email don’t have to be too complicated. They can be presented in form of clear and clickable CTA buttons, polls/surveys and quick quizzes to showcase products and or services. The idea is to remove boredom and to give customers the room to help lead the process. This way, customers may really feel that they’re being given options to take their own decisions. Whereas what smart marketers do is to make use of their customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. Such specially customized customer journey tends to convert more sales for the marketer.

Respecting the Privacy of Email Recipients

Customer awareness is now helping to place more emphasis on their privacy. Marketers must beware of this and respect it particularly on how customer data is being used. Trending now and going forward, focusing on customer-data privacy is hugely essential for any digital marketing business. Data privacy regulations may vary from one country to another and all require the right observances, respect and compliance. For this reason, marketers must constantly review extant legislation regarding data privacy with a view to ensuring their email campaigns are in full compliance at all times. If there are any changes in these regulations, as it happens from time to time, marketers must inform their customers of these changes and letting them know how their information will be protected. Doing so helps to increase customers’ trust in your business.

Incorporating User-Generated Content, UGC, in Emails

In digital marketing, UGC is any form of content created by the users of goods and services. The primary source of this content is user feedback. Incorporating UGC into your emails is one great way to increase consumer’s trust in your product/brand. UGC is free and unforced content making it highly convincing and believable. So, if you include customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product/service in your emails, your emails resonate better with your recipients. Customers’ feedback is so impactful that it is said to influence over 90% of consumers to make their buy decisions. To get more UGC, you can cross promote your products/services on social media. That is one great way to gather more user reviews or photos. Many social media users are always happy and tend to appreciate your brand more when they too see their own reviews shared publicly by your brand.

5 Marketing Analytics Tips to Maximize ROI in Your Business

Only digital marketers with the right metrics can correctly monitor their business performance online. That enables them to maximize Return on Investment, ROI in their businesses if they focus more on the tactics that produce the highest ROI. Marketing analytics helps out with the right data to deploy these tactics. With this data, marketers can accurately study and analyze their various marketing strategies with a view to evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of all their marketing activities. That gives them the insights to press on their Key Performance Indicators, KPIs to help maximize ROI. From this, what works best gets done more while what doesn’t get discarded. It then becomes possible to maximize ROI by combining the best parts of the tactics that deliver the best results. You can for instance craft and share more of the type of content that delivers high audience engagement in your content marketing activities.

 

Find below some tested and proven techniques to use marketing analytics to maximize ROI for your business.

1. Create a Good Content Marketing Strategy

A good content marketing strategy helps marketers to attract traffic to their business websites. To maximize this effect, you can rely on marketing analytics to create better blog content that helps to attract more traffic. You get the insights to do so by analyzing the performance of your content to determine which performs best. You can extend this analysis to knowing your audience well enough to serve them the right content that resonates with them. Through these efforts, you can measure the relevant marketing metrics involving total visits, web traffic sources, brand awareness, first time visitors, time on site, returning visitors and suchlike metrics which you can pay more attention to with a view to maximizing your ROI.
 
2. Create Buyer Personas from Analytics Data

Based on marketing analytics results, you can use customer relationship management, CRM data to determine the behavior of your target audience and existing customers. That helps out with your buyer persona. With an ideal buyer persona, you can better market to your audience with corresponding good results to help maximize ROI. Therefore, if you want to use CRM to maximize ROI, pay more attention to knowing your customers well enough, customize your sales and marketing activities to tally with this knowledge, profile and segment your audience well enough to make room for effective marketing.

3. Accurately Measure Relevant Business Metrics

If you use online marketing analytics tools, you can measure the most relevant marketing metrics applicable to your type business. Marketing metrics relevant to your brand help you to create better business marketing strategies to improve sales. Improved sales help to maximize ROI. It is smart marketing therefore to use marketing analytics to check all marketing angles and metrics suitable for the type of business they support. You can then take advantage of the identified strengths to maximize ROI. In this quest, it is recommended that you keep a keen eye on your digital marketing metrics, email marketing metrics, social media metrics, and even offline marketing metrics.

4. Enhance Your Competitiveness with Analytics Data

Marketing analytics decisions are data driven. You can enhance the competitiveness of your business with accurate interpretation and use of your analytics data. To grow your business and enhance its competitiveness, you must use the right tools to develop good marketing intelligence. With this intelligence, you can develop a consistent and well-organized plan to assess the market performance of your business. Good marketing analytics data enable you to conduct quality analysis, understand marketing technology, and optimize marketing campaign recommendations to help this plan. Ultimately, if this plan works out well, it can help generate high ROI.

5. Make your Marketing Campaigns Holistic

It helps to take a holistic look at the bigger picture of your marketing campaigns. All the tactics work in compliment to get good traffic, leads and sales and ultimately higher ROI. It is hugely essential therefore to go beyond single-channel analysis of your marketing activities and take into account the totality and collective relationship of your online and offline marketing activities. Marketing analytics comes very handy here. With marketing analytics, business owners and marketers can take into account all their marketing efforts and in all channels to help them make sound and well-informed business decisions. That helps a great deal with good ROI.

Wrapping Up

There is no gainsaying the fact that marketers can use marketing analytics to maximize ROI. It is from analytics data marketers get to obtain helpful insights about their audience, as well as the effectiveness of the marketing strategies/tactics and campaigns they choose to use. With useful and relevant analytics data about marketing campaigns and marketing channels, marketers get to make informed and smart decisions to increase ROI. These 5 marketing techniques analyzed above are doable and repeatable and if repeated consistently, they help to increase sales, profits and ultimately ROI.

How to Choose a Good Email Marketing Service

To choose the best email marketing service that perfectly fits your needs, you must first decide which tasks you wish to tackle with it. The good news is that whichever email marketing service you choose will most likely provide you with a built-in email template builder. Many of the services support custom email templates. What that means is that you can on your own code your HTML, use a template engine or a third-party email template. The choice quite frankly depends on your preferences and your type of business. There are a variety of email management tools on the internet, but marketers have preferences for bulk email software tools, CRM and user management tools and full-fledged marketing automation tools.

  

Marketers greatly depend on some of these tools to help them with creating and setting email campaigns, managing subscribers and tracking marketing results. Many experienced marketers for a variety of reasons like to recommend Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Sendinblue and AWeber from among several of such services online. These services tend to have features that are fairly common with most others. Many of the services provide a similar set of functions for email marketing but each of them has a particular focus. If the service focus tallies with your marketing needs, it is advisable to settle for such service.

Mailchimp: This is an all-in-one marketing platform featuring such very powerful marketing tools like, email campaigns builder, email automation, real-time analytics, marketing CRM, digital ads, website builder and landing pages. It makes both free options and paid subscription options available to marketers.

 

Sendgrid: This service focuses on both email marketers and developers providing email marketing tools and email API. Its main features are, email automation, email design and templates, email statistics, web API and SMTP service, transactional emails and email validation. It features mostly paid options but with a free plan for very small marketing needs.

Sendinblue: This is a bulk email service that prioritizes the interests of both marketers and sales managers. It provides marketers with an advanced analytics dashboard and a robust range of templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of content. Its main features are, email marketing automation, SMS campaigns, live chat features, in-build CRM, subscriber segmentation, in-built templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of messages, sign-up form designer and lots more. It offers both paid and free options to marketers.

AWeber: AWeber is designed for and aims at helping small businesses with simple but powerful email marketing solutions. Its main features are drag and drop and HTML template editors, subscribers’ segmentation, email automation, split testing, sign-up forms, email tracking and analytics. They offer free trial periods and fully paid subscriptions thereafter. 

How to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy for a Service Business

Many service businesses have since discovered that content marketing on the internet is one of the most powerful lead generation tools they can depend on to grow their businesses. This is because through the internet they can publish thought-provoking content, market their services, follow up with clients/customers, get leads and make sales. Service businesses are hugely dependent on good content to market their businesses online across multi-channel. To do this successfully, they rely on their content marketing strategy to reach the right audience at the right time with their marketing messages. A good content marketing strategy can assist service businesses to reach more customers through high-quality, informative, valuable, relevant, and engaging content.

These here tips can help you to create an effective, customer-attracting content plan to get more leads and customers to grow your service business.

What’s Your Primary Marketing Objective?

If you run a service business, this question must be answered right from the outset of your marketing strategy. Exactly what do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? That is, your primary marketing objective? Content usually serves a variety of purposes for marketers. Some of these purposes include, improving SEO, getting more leads, attracting more backlinks, attracting more website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, growing your email list and so on. Before creating content, these factors must come into play to decide on a primary marketing objective since different types of content usually work to generate different results.

Tap Ideas from Your Audience

What keeps a service business in business is its client/customer base. That is the main audience it serves. Without this audience you cannot remain in the business. So, what is good for your audience is what is good for your business. For this reason, sourcing ideas and suggestions from your audience is good marketing. You can find out from your audience what topics they’re interested in and what questions they have about the services you offer even if by way of email questionnaire, social media posts or through anonymous surveys. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can turn some of the questions/topics into blog posts. Better still, you can create a Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ page on your website from this information.

Create a Content Marketing Schedule

This is one effective way to plan and distribute your content. In matters of content marketing, quality comes first but consistency tends to make the real difference. If you have a credible content marketing strategy in place, it is made more effective when you are writing, publishing, posting, distributing and marketing your content on a regular and reliable schedule. You can engage project management tools like Asana and Monday.com to help you stay on schedule, organize your content details, and ensure that you’re distributing your content regularly across multi-channel.

Diligently Research Keywords for SEO

You cannot have a good SEO for your service business if you do not have searchable keywords to use in your content. That makes it imperative for you to thoroughly research keywords, using online keyword research tools like SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com to find keywords to use on your web pages or in your blog posts. It involves identifying keywords your target audience is searching for to find the type of service your business is rendering. SEO is a bit technical in implementation. You can hire the services of professional webmasters to help you with SEO on your website if you are unable to do it yourself.

Spy on Your Competition

It is smart digital marketing to always keep an eye on what your competition is doing. By doing so, you can get to find out what they are doing better than you and how they are doing it. It is ok to spy on their content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media and even in other web channels. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to search for your competitors’ domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a credible and effective way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site. What your competition is posting on their blogs or social media channels, can give you some very helpful insights on the type of content you can create to increase engagement, boost your brand authority, and even attract more leads and customers to your own website.

Create Linkable Assets

There are many types of linkable assets content marketers like to create and use. These range from research findings to eBooks to guest articles to industry leaders’ interviews to webinars and so on. A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. If such links are from high-quality and reputable sites, they can help to improve your own website’s SEO. An improved SEO helps to increase your website’s rankings, increase traffic and draw in more website visitors. If you are smart enough to share content that services many purposes, you can have just one SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks, boosts engagement on social media, and converts your blog readers into leads/customers. Now, that’s great!

Have Content Distribution Plan

After planning your topics, writing your content, and publishing it, the next thing is to be sure it is widely distributed. That calls for a content distribution plan. The plan allows you to explore all viable ways to widely distribute your content multi-channel to reach as many eyes as possible. You may choose to distribute your content manually if you have the time and the patience. On the alternative, you can use content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to share your content on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and some other web channels like email, Google ads, Blogs, GMB and the likes.

Generate Leads

If you have leads generation as one of your content marketing objectives, you must give your readers ample opportunities to make contact with you. Make sure your website has a CTA feature to invite/direct your visitors to take desired steps. Include contact forms and be sure they are easily noticeable on the service pages of your website. Offer value, by way of downloadable eBooks or infographics on your website posts in exchange for users to provide their email addresses. Have an easily noticeable “contact me” feature on your website to include email address, telephone, chat bot, office address for physical visits. It helps to make it easy for prospects to easily make contact with you. When a contact is made, that is some kind of lead when qualified.
 
Maintain Contact with Prospects

It is just not enough to have leads, the leads must be nurtured. A lead is of no use without a diligent follow up. The contacts information you generate in your business must be used to keep communications open with prospects. Either by regular emails or even occasional telephone calls, if you maintain contact with your prospects, you can turn them to customers. With online Customer Relationship Management, CRM tools, you can keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send customers business information, and much more. These tools are great to help you follow up with every lead to be sure you are not missing out on any new customer opportunities.

Final Thoughts

From the foregoing, you can easily deduce that with good writing skills, the right planning, tools, and great scheduling/distribution, you can create amazing content that helps to grow your service business. The more content you create, the more beneficial experience you’ll have, the more your skills will improve and the better you’ll become at using content to turn prospective visitors into new leads/customers.

8 Effective Software for Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing has been around for quite a while but it is still very popular among digital marketers because of its ease of use and cost effectiveness. The earlier serious drawback of email marketing was having a credible email list but email marketers can now overcome that by tapping into the services of online email marketing services providers via software. Some of these providers render services by way of software/tools that come with a full package of effortlessly delivering emails to your target audience even if in the thousands and providing scheduling and automation services as well. Here are some effective email marketing software/tools you can try on your own. Some of them are highly recommended by expert marketers.

1. Salesflare

Salesflare is an intelligent CRM and email marketing platform, used by thousands of small and medium sized B2B businesses who sell more with less work. It sends automated email sequences, so you can reach out to your leads at scale in a personal way. It automatically fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the leads you're in contact with. In addition, the icing on the cake is, it neatly reminds you when to follow up. 

2. Sender

Sender makes it easy for e-commerce marketers to send automated marketing emails and drive more revenue for a fraction of the price of other email marketing providers, such as Mailchimp or ConstantContact. With 1-click integrations, you can connect your Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, PrestaShop and other webshops and send transaction emails as well as highly converting newsletters in order to grow your business. Sender is everything you need for effective email marketing within a few clicks.

3. ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is a great way to protect your sender reputation for email marketing. It detects and removes known abuse and spam trap emails, temporary addresses, invalid, toxic and catch-all domains. It's not only a powerful tool that boosts deliverability, but it also offers data about your subscribers that you can use when segmenting your lists. ZeroBounce is a fast and easy to use email validator, and it includes an API.

4. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is one of the very few CRM systems that offer email marketing software free of charge. Several things make Bitrix24 quite different from other free email marketing services. First, its customer relationship management software, and this enables you to create any number of static or dynamic segments and craft a unique email campaign for each group of customers or prospects. In addition, if you are thinking about trigger-based emails and email marketing automation, yep, Bitrix24.

5. Omnisend

Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform built for growth-focused ecommerce brands. It helps to convert visitors into customers, create personalized emails in minutes, and automate your email marketing. It uses smart segmentation to create hyper-targeted and relevant email messages, earning you more revenue. Omnisend works with all ecommerce platforms including, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and many more.

6. EngageBay

EngageBay allows you to grow your business with powerful email marketing. You can choose from several ready-made email templates or create your own from a wide array of templates to suit your business needs. You can simply use drag and drop interface to create amazing templates. With EngageBay you can segment and target your subscriber lists, personalize every part of the email and send them in a click. It allows you to design beautiful email templates with rich text formatting. You can track and optimize your campaigns, then analyze your results.

7. EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus is the low-cost email marketing platform offering high deliverability, customized reports and the ability to drip email sequences, import contacts and integrate with forms. With segmentation, users can create highly targeted email campaigns based on the customer data that matters most to their business.

8. Moosend

Moosend is a powerful email marketing platform with world-class features, state-of-the-art marketing automation, and an award-winning user interface. You can use it to manage multiple email campaigns and mailing lists, as well as design and send striking, and responsive newsletters created on the built-in campaign editor. It helps you to upgrade your marketing campaigns with intelligent email automation, personalization tags, landing pages, subscription forms, and meaningful campaign reports.