you celebrate your business’ success.

Funnel marketing is a widely-used marketing technique that helps all businesses, small and large, maximize their revenue potential. It’s so widely used that we guarantee you’ve gone through a marketing funnel at least once in your life…maybe even once today.

According to the Kissmetrics blog, a funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach a conversion. The basic marketing funnel is made up of the following 3 steps:

AWARENESS > CONSIDERATION > CONVERSION

Your business needs to be aligned in a way that buyers can make the journey through your marketing funnel from awareness to conversion with as little friction as possible. You need to be the helping hand that shows them that your product is the right product.

However, and this is a big however, before you invest in a proper marketing funnel you need to make sure you have built the proper foundation for your marketing program. The foundation of your marketing program is like the foundation of your house.

Once your foundation is in place, you can start building the three walls of your marketing dream home.

STEP ONE

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is when a customer becomes aware of a need and seek a solution. If your job is their solution then it’s your job to gain your potential customers attention and speak to their pain points.

For example. You’re a dentist who offers teeth whitening services. Your ideal customer are people in need of teeth whitening. You need to be able to get your business and your product offering in front of these people at the time they need to see it.

Traditional marketing to create awareness would have you placing an ad in the local newspaper with hopes a reader would put down their coffee and pick up the phone to contact you about your teeth whitening services. Unfortunately, in today’s age, digital marketing is king and a newspaper ad won’t get you that business.

Since this funnel is all about the basics, we’ll tell you the 4 easiest ways to start creating awareness today.

1.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Moz tells us that SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. This will cost you no money other than the time invested to put the SEO strategy in place.

So when that news loving coffee drinking early riser remembers the date they have this weekend and want their teeth whitened, they’re going to look for a solution. They’ll head to Google and search “Local Teeth Whitening”. With proper SEO in place and a foundational website optimized for SEO, your website will rank higher in the Google search rankings than a competitor not using SEO.

Find out how to improve your marketing with these three user search habits affecting your SEO.

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is the paid version of SEO, with focus shifting from website ranking to paid advertising for top search results.

For example. When we head to Google and search “Local Teeth Whitening”, we see this as the top search result:

This is an example of an SEM ad on the Google Search Network that Crest has spent money on to have it be the top search result in this area. Now, you might not have the same money to spend on ads as Crest, but this is where the help of an SEM expert will find your business search terms that will rank without breaking the bank.

3. Landing Pages

There’s a good chance that when you hear the term “landing page” you think about the home page on your website. In everyday terms you’re right, but in online marketing terms it’s something a little different.

A landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page” or a “destination page”, is a single web page that appears after someone clicks on a search engine optimized link or advertisement.

Take our earlier example of the Crest advertisement that pops up after a search on Google. After clicking the link, we’re brought to the Crest teeth whitening product page and not the homepage. This is because a landing page should bring you to a specific page relating to the ad that pushes you towards an offer.

This is how you put your product of service in front of potential customers looking for a solution to their problem. This is how you put your offer in the right place at the right time.

 4. Social Advertising

It’s only natural nowadays to have social advertising as a key part of any marketing campaign. Traditional advertising, like newspaper ads, took the back seat to social spending in 2013 and are projected to overtake TV spending by the end of this year.

This growing trend is due mainly in part to the everyday consumer’s connectivity to their mobile device and social network, but also the ease of spend tracking and ROI improvements.

Social spending allows businesses to track every dollar spent on digital marketing and know exactly what type of consumer it attracted. A strong social advertising strategy is a must.

STEP TWO

The consideration stage is when consumers actually start evaluating their options for purchase. This is a time to show consumers content about your company or solution. Some examples of content that will allow you to be part of the consideration set are:

• Solution Guides
• Webinars
• Videos
• Brand-Specific Guides

This content often lives on, or is accessible from the Landing Page used in the Awareness stage. You have now moved a potential customer one step further into your marketing funnel and one step closer to converting.

Now to talk conversion…

The conversion stage, also known as the decision stage, is where the marketing funnel meets the sales funnel. Customers are 60% of the way through decision making process before they ever talk to a sales rep or business owner. Increased access to information and the internal desire to be a more knowledgeable consumer is what’s driven this stat up year over year.

The conversion stage is where a consumer is compiling information about the different product options and ruling out the ones that don’t fit. The difference between the consideration stage and the conversion stage is that a consumer is now ready to buy. They’re no long considering if they want to buy, they want to buy.

 Here are some examples of content to share during the conversion stage:

• Comparison Metrics
• Free Trial Offers
• Customer Testimonials

You’ve been holding back, not talking directly about your products, with all your content in the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey, but now is the time to convert your consumer and close the deal.

Use call to actions to make it easy for the consumer to make the buying decision. You want to focus on making the customer experience a positive one. This process of this stage determines whether or not a consumer will simply be a one-time buyer, or a long-term customer. Turn that consumer into your customer over and over again.

This is how you create a funnel with your marketing to drives sales –This is Funnel Marketing.

The post 3 Important Funnel Marketing Basics To Grow Your Business first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

I get it – with the amount of content on the internet today, it’s easy to get caught up. But building foundation is always step one. No matter what marketing channel we are talking about, there are foundational pieces that must be put in place prior to “doing more.”

Foundation Definition: an underlying base or support. If you build a building without “foundation” or support, the building will fall over. Well, it’s the same for your marketing program. Foundation doesn’t mean entry level or beginner. Its about building a solid base that you can build off of, try new things, and drive real results from your efforts.

A website, email marketing strategy, social media plan, and SEO strategy are all key to a business’ success online. Below I outline what I feel is foundation vs. “doing more” for each.

WEBSITE

Nothing upsets me more than seeing brands spend money on pay per click ads for me to click to a website that isn’t optimized, doesn’t have clear call to actions, or forms for me to get in touch.

Foundation

• direct and accurate messaging
• clear call to actions
• clear ways to contact your business
• up to date content
• option to subscribe to newsletter
• Google analytics setup

Doing More

• Pop-up modals
• Exit intent
• Chat
• Web tracking and triggers

EMAIL MARKETING

With the average email program yielding over $40 for every $1 spent, it is crucial that brands stay connected to their audience through email.

Foundation

• Make sure you are CAN-SPAM compliant
• Set expectations for subscribers (types of content, email frequency etc)
• Prepare email templates
• Clear call to actions in emails
• A/B test (subject lines, content)
• Reporting (engagement stats)
• Marketing Automation (welcome, re-engagement, post purchase, cart abandonment, etc)

Doing More

• Segmentation (send personalized email to segments)
• Preference Centre with multiple subscription options
• Web tracking / triggers
• Web search triggers
• Predictive AI
• Inbox Reporting

SOCIAL MEDIA

Having a social strategy is important for brand perception, staying connected and interacting with your audience, and also an opportunity to convert your followers to buy.

Foundation

• Determine your content strategy (identify what types of posts yield the best results)
• Determine posting frequency
• Engage and respond to your followers
• Join in on social conversation
• Ensure posts are consistent with your branding and content guidelines
• Post content that links to your site
• Use hashtags related to content you are posting about so it can be found

Doing More

• Paid Sponsored Content (once you determine types of posts that get the best response)
• Social Advertising (Advertise on social to grow your following or drive traffic elsewhere)
• Live-streaming
• Contests & Giveaways
• Video
• Listening tools – Use a listening tool to identify when topics or your brand are mentioned

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO is an important area of focus, because this is what determines if your brand will be found via search engines like Google and Bing.

Foundation

• Understanding your audience and their search habits
• Ensuring site architecture complies with Google standards
• User experience (easy to navigate and find content)
• Including basic content on your site (about your service or offering)

Doing More

• Keyword research on topics related to your brand
• Naming and organization of images for image search
• Considering semantic phrases
• Advanced content (written with short and long-tail keywords in mind)
• Q&A (directly answer questions related to your topic)

As you can see, building a foundation for your marketing program is no small job. There is A LOT involved in implementing what I consider the base of a good program. Building a successful foundation is what will make your marketing program sore sky high in the future.

The post Building a Foundation For Your Marketing Program first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

SEO is constantly evolving over-time based on how Google is tweaking their algorithms. So much emphasis is put on Google’s algorithms when it comes to strategizing SEO, but it is also important to understand that the way that people are using search engines is also changing.   Here a few examples of how people’s way of searching is evolving, and how your brand can optimize for these changes.

Voice Search

Voice search is getting more accurate, and therefore adoption of voice as a search method is increasing. 20% of searches on Google’s mobile app are voice search. Home devices like Alexa and Google Home are making voice search an everyday thing for the everyday person. So how do you optimize for Natural Language?

• Think about the intent of search and brainstorm your business, product or services. What will people say? Focus on long tail key words – people will most likely say phrases when searching vs. one or two words.
• Add a Q&A page to your website. It is likely that people will be asking questions if they are searching verbally, so make sure your website has the answers. Make sure your business information is accurate, and your business is claimed and optimized on Google.
• Be sure your site is mobile friendly since voice search is mobile.

 Image Search

It is common now for people to search images when looking for information – perhaps a picture of a product or an info-graphic explaining a process.

• Create descriptive, keyword-rich file names to ensure your photos can be found in search. In addition to crawling text on your site, search engines also search for keywords within image file names.
• Optimize Alt Tags- An alt tag is a text alternative when a browser can’t properly render the image. Adding the appropriate alt tag will help your images be found when a keyword associated with that image is searched.
• Reduce file size of your images. Since page load is a factor in search engine ranking, it is important to reduce the file size of your images.
• Image Site Map- Site web crawlers can only find images that are called out in the site’s source code, therefore images locations must be listed in an image site map.

Asking Questions

As people are now expecting to find exact detailed information, it is becoming common for those to search long phrases or ask a search engine questions. What does this mean?

• Focus on researching long tail keywords that are commonly related to your niche.
• Create content on your site that directly answers questions.
• Make sure your article is truly helpful and provides info that goes above and beyond what is asked. Make sure it is relevant, appropriate, detailed, and concise.
• Ensure your domain authority is strong. Individual pages must be authoritative.
• Make your content easy to find. Ensure it is easily accessible through site navigation and available to Google bots to be found.

Conclusion

Due to changes in technology, content being more readily available, and other factors, the way people are searching is always evolving. When studying Google’s search algorithms and how they are analyzing your content, it is important to keep user habits and the way users are searching top of mind.

The post Three User Search Habits Affecting Your SEO first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

If your answer is the latter, you are missing out on opportunities to nurture and engage your subscribers, while most likely missing revenue opportunities.

Here is our list of email marketing automation journey’s that we recommend trying:

Recognize:

Welcome Series – Welcome customers with a strategic series of engaging emails. Make them feel excited to be a subscriber and a current/future customer.

Birthday/Anniversary of sign up – Send reoccurring campaigns to celebrate Birthdays and sign up anniversaries. This makes your recipients feel important. They will noticed that you noticed!

Re-Engage:

One-time inactive customers – Have a process in place for building a relationship with one-time buyers. The goal is to turn them into frequent buying customers.

Regular inactive customers – If a customer has been purchasing regularly, and he/she hasn’t placed an order in a set time-period, determine the reason (if possible) and have a process in place for winning them back.

List cleansing/Re-engagement –If you plan to cleanse recipients off your list that have not engaged with your emails in a set period-of -time, insert these recipients into an aggressive re-engagement series prior to officially cleansing them off your list.

Abandoned Search Re-engagement (via tagged links) – Tag a link to a specific product type.  If a recipient is viewing the product but does not purchase, automatically re-engage them with more emails related to that or similar products.

Reward:

Number of purchases – Offer rewards based on the number of purchases made (example: offer a discount on the 4th purchase)

Total amount spent – Incentivize customers to spend more by offering rewards after spending a certain amount. For example, offer a 5% discount when the customer has spent more than $200 or a 10% discount when the customer has spent over $300.

Purchase:

Product triggers- Follow up with a series of emails once a specific product/service (or product/service type) was purchased.

Revenue triggers – Follow up with a series of emails once a recipient has reached different spending levels.

Standard follow ups- Automate a follow up after X days from purchase.

Feedback/Reviews:

First purchase – make new customers feel like you value their opinion by sending them a message asking for their feedback on their first purchase experience.

When purchasing a product– if you have a certain product or service of interest that you would like to gather feedback on, send a request for feedback every time someone buys it.

Cancelled order – Ask for feedback when order status becomes “cancelled” to understand the reason

Abandoned Cart:

Types of products – send specific messages for customers who have abandoned their cart with certain products.

Specified amount – Send different messages based on the cart total price or number of items, etc

Upsell:

Find opportunities within your product or service set that will allow you to up-sell other products/services. Automate an email or series of emails promoting these products/services.

The post Email Marketing Automation To Maximize Revenue first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

1) Always Take Time to Learn

Online marketing is constantly evolving. And, it’s no longer enough to know high- level marketing concepts. Luckily for all of us, there are tons of great resources online to keep on top of online marketing strategies but more importantly, how to execute and analyze strategies. Here are some of our favourites:

GreaterMarketing.com/blog (Since you are already here!)

The goal of the Greater Blog is to share marketing tips, information on technologies, strategies we are implementing with clients, tests we are running, and other practical examples that will help you advance your business online.

Neil Patel.com/blog

Neil is the master of online marketing. Just when you think you know a lot, another post from Neil Patel will catch your eye and he will teach you something valuable that you can implement right away.

DigitalMarketer.com/blog

The DigitalMarketer team are true digital marketing experts. They teach what you should be doing, but also step by step how you can put concepts into action. Even the most experienced marketers will get value from DM’s blog, training and certifications.

2) Know Your Business

This seems obvious, but we are constantly surprised at the lack of knowledge and attention some business owners have for the details of their business. You must know and understand EVERY detail:

• Every product or service name
• The market, price, and sale price of every product or service
• Buyer demographics
• How have you sold your product or service online before? What worked? What didn’t?
• What channels have you tried? What channels haven’t your tried?

3) Build a Marketing Foundation

With so many marketing opportunities and recommended strategies that could potentially work for your business, it is SO easy to get caught up in “the fancy stuff.” Check out our post on Building a Foundation For Your Marketing Program.

4) Understand The Funnel

We recommend following our blog to learn more details on implementing your funnel and the goals and KPIs associated with each stage, but for the purpose of this post, we want to introduce you to the 3 stages of the funnel:

Top of the funnel – How does your audience become aware or your product or service?

Middle of the funnel – This is when your audience is considering your product or service.

Bottom of the funnel – This is where we convert them to a customer.

To learn more about each stage of the funnel, check out 3 Important Funnel Marketing Basics To Grow Your Business to learn more.

5) Let The Data Make Decisions For You

It is VERY easy in marketing (especially as creative people) to get caught up in what we think looks the best or will work the best based on what we have seen.  All decisions must be data driven! Utilizing the following tools will help you capture meaningful data to make online marketing decisions:

• Google Analytics
• Hubspot
• Optimizely
• Unbounce
• CrazyEgg
• TruConversion
• And more!

6) Be Human

No matter what business you are in, you are most likely marketing to humans. Yes, we even promote human marketing for B2B brands because there will always be a person on the other end who will be making the decision to buy from you. Here are some tips to make your marketing seem human:

• Tell your brand story
• Have your internal team (subject matter experts) write your content
• Know your audience
• Be friendly and fun
• Read it out loud
• Use simple words

7) Test Everything

You won’t know what works until you test. Testing and optimization is a key part of digital marketing that will allow your brand to continuously make improvements.

• Website/Landing Page Layout
• Website/Landing Page Headlines and Content
• Call To Actions
• Colours
• Content Offers & Lead Magnets
• Images
• Brand Tone
• Email Content/Messaging
• Email Subject Lines
• Email Templates
• Blog Titles

8) Use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

The better you know your customer, the easier it will be to maintain and grow your relationship with them. Using a CRM will help you manage your customer lifecycle, improve retention, and help you generate more revenue from each customer. It is important to choose a CRM that also integrates with other platforms you are using for ecommerce, bookings, customer service, email marketing, etc. so you can store your data on each customer all in one place. Here are a few of the top CRMs we recommend checking out:

• Hubspot CRM
• Salesforce
• Zaius
• Pipedrive
• Zoho

9) Make Sure You Have A Blog

If you have a live and operating website, you are most likely looking for your company to be found online and/or promoting your website to potential buyers to learn more about your company. No matter what industry you are in, we recommend incorporating a blog into your website. A blog builds confidence, authority, and sales. If you are able to share relevant information and answer questions that your customers may have through your blog, it will build trust and authority when they are considering making a purchase from you.

Additionally, blog content will help your website be better optimized and found by search engines (SEO). Google determines how it will rank your site for different topics based on your website content. If your blog highlights content related to your business, you have a better chance of ranking higher when your product or service is being searched.

10) Email Marketing

Email marketing is a very effective in helping you stay connected with your audience. It allows you to keep customers informed, while delivering ongoing promotions to help convert your audience into buyers. Many ESPs also allow you to create advanced segments to target your recipients with personalized subject lines, content, offers/promotions, and more. If you aren’t currently running an email program, here are some simple ways to start acquiring email subscribers:

• Timed Website Pop-Up– Add a timed pop up form to your website asking web traffic to subscribe to your email list. This is often in exchange for a small offer or discount.
• Offer a Lead Magnet- A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer a buyer in exchange for their email address. Lead magnets offer value and are often educational – tips & tricks, guides, e-books, webinars. Lead magnets can be offered in pop-up forms, on their own dedicated landing pages, or throughout your site or blog via a Call To Action to download.
• Contests/Promotions- Entry into a contest is a great way to incentivize your audience to share their email.

Check out our post on “Email Marketing Automation To Maximize Your Revenue” to learn more about ways you can automate your email marketing to revenue from email.

The post 10 TIPS TO BECOMING A GREATER MARKETER first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

When you hear the term ‘Funnel Marketing,’ what do you think of? Students going door to door selling their new-and-improved ultimate beer chugging funnel? Perhaps. But this type of funnel marketing won’t help you grow your business as much as it’ll help you celebrate your business’ success.

Funnel marketing is a widely-used marketing technique that helps all businesses, small and large, maximize their revenue potential. It’s so widely used that we guarantee you’ve gone through a marketing funnel at least once in your life…maybe even once today.

According to the Kissmetrics blog, a funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach a conversion. The basic marketing funnel is made up of the following 3 steps:

AWARENESS > CONSIDERATION > CONVERSION

Your business needs to be aligned in a way that buyers can make the journey through your marketing funnel from awareness to conversion with as little friction as possible. You need to be the helping hand that shows them that your product is the right product.

However, and this is a big however, before you invest in a proper marketing funnel you need to make sure you have built the proper foundation for your marketing program. The foundation of your marketing program is like the foundation of your house.

Once your foundation is in place, you can start building the three walls of your marketing dream home.

STEP ONE

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is when a customer becomes aware of a need and seek a solution. If your job is their solution then it’s your job to gain your potential customers attention and speak to their pain points.

For example. You’re a dentist who offers teeth whitening services. Your ideal customer are people in need of teeth whitening. You need to be able to get your business and your product offering in front of these people at the time they need to see it.

Traditional marketing to create awareness would have you placing an ad in the local newspaper with hopes a reader would put down their coffee and pick up the phone to contact you about your teeth whitening services. Unfortunately, in today’s age, digital marketing is king and a newspaper ad won’t get you that business.

Since this funnel is all about the basics, we’ll tell you the 4 easiest ways to start creating awareness today.

1.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Moz tells us that SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. This will cost you no money other than the time invested to put the SEO strategy in place.

So when that news loving coffee drinking early riser remembers the date they have this weekend and want their teeth whitened, they’re going to look for a solution. They’ll head to Google and search “Local Teeth Whitening”. With proper SEO in place and a foundational website optimized for SEO, your website will rank higher in the Google search rankings than a competitor not using SEO.

Find out how to improve your marketing with these three user search habits affecting your SEO.

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is the paid version of SEO, with focus shifting from website ranking to paid advertising for top search results.

For example. When we head to Google and search “Local Teeth Whitening”, we see this as the top search result:

This is an example of an SEM ad on the Google Search Network that Crest has spent money on to have it be the top search result in this area. Now, you might not have the same money to spend on ads as Crest, but this is where the help of an SEM expert will find your business search terms that will rank without breaking the bank.

3. Landing Pages

There’s a good chance that when you hear the term “landing page” you think about the home page on your website. In everyday terms you’re right, but in online marketing terms it’s something a little different.

A landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page” or a “destination page”, is a single web page that appears after someone clicks on a search engine optimized link or advertisement.

Take our earlier example of the Crest advertisement that pops up after a search on Google. After clicking the link, we’re brought to the Crest teeth whitening product page and not the homepage. This is because a landing page should bring you to a specific page relating to the ad that pushes you towards an offer.

This is how you put your product of service in front of potential customers looking for a solution to their problem. This is how you put your offer in the right place at the right time.

 4. Social Advertising

It’s only natural nowadays to have social advertising as a key part of any marketing campaign. Traditional advertising, like newspaper ads, took the back seat to social spending in 2013 and are projected to overtake TV spending by the end of this year.

This growing trend is due mainly in part to the everyday consumer’s connectivity to their mobile device and social network, but also the ease of spend tracking and ROI improvements.

Social spending allows businesses to track every dollar spent on digital marketing and know exactly what type of consumer it attracted. A strong social advertising strategy is a must.

STEP TWO

The consideration stage is when consumers actually start evaluating their options for purchase. This is a time to show consumers content about your company or solution. Some examples of content that will allow you to be part of the consideration set are:

• Solution Guides
• Webinars
• Videos
• Brand-Specific Guides

This content often lives on, or is accessible from the Landing Page used in the Awareness stage. You have now moved a potential customer one step further into your marketing funnel and one step closer to converting.

Now to talk conversion…

The conversion stage, also known as the decision stage, is where the marketing funnel meets the sales funnel. Customers are 60% of the way through decision making process before they ever talk to a sales rep or business owner. Increased access to information and the internal desire to be a more knowledgeable consumer is what’s driven this stat up year over year.

The conversion stage is where a consumer is compiling information about the different product options and ruling out the ones that don’t fit. The difference between the consideration stage and the conversion stage is that a consumer is now ready to buy. They’re no long considering if they want to buy, they want to buy.

 Here are some examples of content to share during the conversion stage:

• Comparison Metrics
• Free Trial Offers
• Customer Testimonials

You’ve been holding back, not talking directly about your products, with all your content in the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey, but now is the time to convert your consumer and close the deal.

Use call to actions to make it easy for the consumer to make the buying decision. You want to focus on making the customer experience a positive one. This process of this stage determines whether or not a consumer will simply be a one-time buyer, or a long-term customer. Turn that consumer into your customer over and over again.

This is how you create a funnel with your marketing to drives sales –This is Funnel Marketing.

The post 3 Important Funnel Marketing Basics to Grow Your Business first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

Being a Greater Marketer isn’t about doing all the fancy cool things that you read about. It is important to understand your own marketing goals, and building the foundation that works for your business. I often speak to business owners who are excited about new technologies and tactics, but when I learn more about their current state, my number one finding is that their marketing is lacking a number of foundational items.

I get it – with the amount of content on the internet today, it’s easy to get caught up. But building foundation is always step one. No matter what marketing channel we are talking about, there are foundational pieces that must be put in place prior to “doing more.”

Foundation Definition: an underlying base or support. If you build a building without “foundation” or support, the building will fall over. Well, it’s the same for your marketing program. Foundation doesn’t mean entry level or beginner. Its about building a solid base that you can build off of, try new things, and drive real results from your efforts.

A website, email marketing strategy, social media plan, and SEO strategy are all key to a business’ success online. Below I outline what I feel is foundation vs. “doing more” for each.

WEBSITE

Nothing upsets me more than seeing brands spend money on pay per click ads for me to click to a website that isn’t optimized, doesn’t have clear call to actions, or forms for me to get in touch.

Foundation

• direct and accurate messaging
• clear call to actions
• clear ways to contact your business
• up to date content
• option to subscribe to newsletter
• Google analytics setup

Doing More

• Pop-up modals
• Exit intent
• Chat
• Web tracking and triggers

EMAIL MARKETING

With the average email program yielding over $40 for every $1 spent, it is crucial that brands stay connected to their audience through email.

Foundation

• Make sure you are CAN-SPAM compliant
• Set expectations for subscribers (types of content, email frequency etc)
• Prepare email templates
• Clear call to actions in emails
• A/B test (subject lines, content)
• Reporting (engagement stats)
• Marketing Automation (welcome, re-engagement, post purchase, cart abandonment, etc)

Doing More

• Segmentation (send personalized email to segments)
• Preference Centre with multiple subscription options
• Web tracking / triggers
• Web search triggers
• Predictive AI
• Inbox Reporting

SOCIAL MEDIA

Having a social strategy is important for brand perception, staying connected and interacting with your audience, and also an opportunity to convert your followers to buy.

Foundation

• Determine your content strategy (identify what types of posts yield the best results)
• Determine posting frequency
• Engage and respond to your followers
• Join in on social conversation
• Ensure posts are consistent with your branding and content guidelines
• Post content that links to your site
• Use hashtags related to content you are posting about so it can be found

Doing More

• Paid Sponsored Content (once you determine types of posts that get the best response)
• Social Advertising (Advertise on social to grow your following or drive traffic elsewhere)
• Live-streaming
• Contests & Giveaways
• Video
• Listening tools – Use a listening tool to identify when topics or your brand are mentioned

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO is an important area of focus, because this is what determines if your brand will be found via search engines like Google and Bing.

Foundation

• Understanding your audience and their search habits
• Ensuring site architecture complies with Google standards
• User experience (easy to navigate and find content)
• Including basic content on your site (about your service or offering)

Doing More

• Keyword research on topics related to your brand
• Naming and organization of images for image search
• Considering semantic phrases
• Advanced content (written with short and long-tail keywords in mind)
• Q&A (directly answer questions related to your topic)

As you can see, building a foundation for your marketing program is no small job. There is A LOT involved in implementing what I consider the base of a good program. Building a successful foundation is what will make your marketing program sore sky high in the future.

The post BUILDING A FOUNDATION FOR YOUR MARKETING PROGRAM first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.

Are your contacts going through an automated email series, or are they sitting dormant in a database?

If your answer is the latter, you are missing out on opportunities to nurture and engage your subscribers, while most likely missing revenue opportunities.

Here is our list of email marketing automation journey’s that we recommend trying:

Recognize:

Welcome Series – Welcome customers with a strategic series of engaging emails. Make them feel excited to be a subscriber and a current/future customer.

Birthday/Anniversary of sign up – Send reoccurring campaigns to celebrate Birthdays and sign up anniversaries. This makes your recipients feel important. They will noticed that you noticed!

Re-Engage:

One-time inactive customers – Have a process in place for building a relationship with one-time buyers. The goal is to turn them into frequent buying customers.

Regular inactive customers – If a customer has been purchasing regularly, and he/she hasn’t placed an order in a set time-period, determine the reason (if possible) and have a process in place for winning them back.

List cleansing/Re-engagement –If you plan to cleanse recipients off your list that have not engaged with your emails in a set period-of -time, insert these recipients into an aggressive re-engagement series prior to officially cleansing them off your list.

Abandoned Search Re-engagement (via tagged links) – Tag a link to a specific product type.  If a recipient is viewing the product but does not purchase, automatically re-engage them with more emails related to that or similar products.

Reward:

Number of purchases – Offer rewards based on the number of purchases made (example: offer a discount on the 4th purchase)

Total amount spent – Incentivize customers to spend more by offering rewards after spending a certain amount. For example, offer a 5% discount when the customer has spent more than $200 or a 10% discount when the customer has spent over $300.

Purchase:

Product triggers- Follow up with a series of emails once a specific product/service (or product/service type) was purchased.

Revenue triggers – Follow up with a series of emails once a recipient has reached different spending levels.

Standard follow ups- Automate a follow up after X days from purchase.

Feedback/Reviews:

First purchase – make new customers feel like you value their opinion by sending them a message asking for their feedback on their first purchase experience.

When purchasing a product– if you have a certain product or service of interest that you would like to gather feedback on, send a request for feedback every time someone buys it.

Cancelled order – Ask for feedback when order status becomes “cancelled” to understand the reason

Abandoned Cart:

Types of products – send specific messages for customers who have abandoned their cart with certain products.

Specified amount – Send different messages based on the cart total price or number of items, etc

Upsell:

Find opportunities within your product or service set that will allow you to up-sell other products/services. Automate an email or series of emails promoting these products/services.

The post EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION TO MAXIMIZE REVENUE first appeared on Greater Marketing Blog.