Our Digital Marketing Automation Methodology – INFOGRAPHIC

 

How we revolutionize digital marketing campaigns?

Customer Journey Audit

We start with what you have.

Our intelligent programs analyze all your historical sales data.

The software tears through as many data in an hour as it would take a human week to analyze.

The Result

A clear, top-down summary of your “Customer Journey”.

You’ll know exactly what worked in the past, by what degree.

The “sweet-spot” becomes clearer.

The single most effective way to position your offering.

Marketing System Build

We know your customer journey, so now we can lay down the tarmac to make it smoother for future customers.

Traffic

1. Create customer personas.
2. Craft engaging content that speaks to their individual needs.
3. Paid promotion and organic traffic are used to hook in more potential customers.

Engagement

1. Define the length of sales funnel – How long do we need to nurture prospects?
2. More content is produced that goes into greater detail and value.
3. Remarketing means anyone who touches your website can be brought back in.

Sale

1. Your products or services are promoted in a way that leaves customers happy about how they were sold to, and willing to buy again.
2. Everything leading up to the sale is tracked. Nothing is left in the dark.

Our systems give you 20/20 vision into the traffic you reach.

Profit Optimization

The system is built to make optimization easy.

• Track the result of every dollar spent.
• Group individuals into segments.
• Split test what works on each segment.

Squeeze every last drop from every dollar spent.

Real-Time Content Personalization

Dynamic Content = Content that changes depending on who’s looking at it and when.

e.g. auto-updating copyright notice in a website footer.

Go far deeper with self-adjusting email newsletters and web pages. Make all your content ultra-relevant to every prospect.

Future-Proof Your Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is being eaten up by A.I… and that’s a good thing.

Machine learning enables software to plow through mountains of data, allowing marketers (like you) to take their heads out of mind-numbing spreadsheets and focus on the important questions.

Track who clicks what, when, and where.

Make content that tailors itself to different visitors.

Test different theories to find out what really makes you money.

 

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My Process For Setting Up A Solid Call Tracking System INFOGRAPHIC

 

Phase 1: Choose A Call Tracking Provider

Always use a SaaS service with cloud PBX technology. They will be able to handle any sudden peaks in traffic, and troubleshoot other issues.

In-house call tracking is what large corporations have been doing for a long time, and it takes the resources of a corporation to make that option viable. SaaS has opened this technology up to the rest of us.

It also makes sense to choose a call tracking provider who is also a Google Partner. Click here for the list. My personal preference is RingoStat.

Phase 2: Set Up A Tracking Number

If you’re a business that operates locally, get a local number. This helps give you an SEO bump.

Get a call-tracking enabled phone number.

Set the destination number.
This is your business’s root phone number.

Use that number for a marketing campaign that you want to illuminate.
Don’t muddy the waters by using it everywhere. When you want to compare two different marketing channels, use two different numbers.

Phase 3: Hook Up Analytics

If you’re using Google Adwords, you’re now ready to get maximum mileage out of the “Click to Call” feature. Pop a tracking number into that field, and you’ll have added a layer of Google Analytics on that number.

Google Analytics is a common integration for call tracking platforms, so you can use it even without an Adwords campaign. Double check that the platform you want to choose has this feature before you hand over your credit card number.

Focus on one metric above all others – First-time callers. It will take about 3 to 6 months of call data for this metric to emerge from the noise, since at the start, everyone will “technically” be a first-time caller.

Phase 4: Generate More Calls

The next chapter is packed with my favorite techniques for increasing the volume of inbound calls.

The “master technique”, however, is deceptively simple.

Test.

Now that you have tracking in place, you can watch any change you make to your marketing systems ripple through your results. However, that won’t help you much if you make changes at random.

Be a scientist about it. Choose one thing to test at a time, and keep everything else the same. Implement the test, and wait until you have statistical significance before you make a decision on the change you’ve made one way or the other.

This is the one principle to rule them all when it comes to optimizing your results in business.

Test, track, analyze, repeat.

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Call Intelligence: Advanced Call Tracking INFOGRAPHIC

What would you do if you could track the number of times your leads expressed interest or raised objections, or even the level of sales skill your phone reps exhibit?

These are known as conversational metrics, and they’re only possible with call intelligence.

It’s expensive now, but in the near future, I’m sure it will become much more affordable.

Using call intelligence to its full potential requires following these three basic steps:

1. Gather Useful Insights
2. Personalize the Customer Experience
3. Strategize with the Data

Gather Useful Insights

Call intelligence addresses the blind spot in your marketing analytics. Use it to attribute revenue and conversions back to your marketing campaigns and get in-depth insights about your customers.

Call intelligence can capture the following data points (and more):

• Peak phone call times
• Repeat vs. new call
• Call outcome
• Average call duration
• Geographic location
• Caller intent
• Phone type
• Demographic data

This kind of data is either impossible or time-consuming to track any other way. That’s why I’m so sure this is the future. When this technology becomes more affordable (just as basic call-tracking has done over the past decade), any business will be able to fill up the last gaps in their analytics and see exactly what’s making them money.

Personalize the Customer Experience

Custom Call Experiences

For example, set up distinct menu prompts for first-time callers and repeat callers. This customization can even be based on the caller’s online activity.

Leverage Conversation Analytics

Use signals from a phone call to customize a caller’s experience after the fact. For example, put them on retargeting or nurturing campaigns depending on keywords they say during the call. Or use the results of phone calls to test different sales scripts, thereby improving the experience of all callers.

Follow-Up Right

Put callers into follow-up campaigns based on call activity. Since you know their entire journey, online and offline, you’ll make sure the right message goes to the right person at the right time. No more accidently retargeting a converted customer with a discount for something they just bought!1

Act on the Data

1. Double Down on Successful CampaignsWith call intelligence, you don’t just know which channels bring you the most calls. You know which bring you the best leads.
2. Determine actual conversion pathsDo most people call straight from a well-placed search ad? Or do they decide to call only after some email nurturing? See their whole history laid out in front of you.
3. Tie revenue to phone callsInstead of measuring success by call volume (which can be very misleading), measure it by actual revenue and know which cogs in your machine are making the cash register ring.
4. Test and OptimizeThere are many things that could make your sales jump up, and with a stable tracking system, it’s fun to experiment. Review the results at the end of the week or month or quarter.

Phone number tests:

• Position
• Size
• Font / Style

Landing page tests:

• Calls to action
• Messaging
• Design

The 3 Core Benefits to Using Call Intelligence

1. Increase in call volume
2. Better lead quality
3. Greater marketing ROI

You don’t have to change your phone number or do anything with your phone system.

1. Increase in Call Volume. With insights into what’s actually driving phone calls, you’ll know how to drive more. e.g.
2. Better Lead Quality. Improve the entire customer journey, including their experience on the phone, so you can get more of those high-value calls.
3. Greater Marketing ROI. With proper analytics setup, you can improve all your channels constantly. The first step is seeing the exact ROI of every channel, laid out in front of you. The second is watching it go up.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

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What Are The Dangers Of Call Tracking? – INFOGRAPHIC

I hear a lot of common concerns about call tracking. Most are quite valid, so let’s address them here to make sure you don’t make the mistakes that many do.

Keeping the same number (for NAP consistency and vanity numbers)

Your Name, Address, and Phone number ought to be consistent across the indexed web. This is NAP consistency, which is an important ranking factor in modern local search.

Solution:

1. Dynamic Number Insertion
2. Using Javascript to swap out numbers, depending on the visitor.
3. Keep the number semi-consistent
4. Your rankings won’t take a massive hit. Keeping one number per paid campaign, for example, will help you much more in marketing intelligence than it could hurt you in SEO.

Your SEO guy holding onto your numbers

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but some shady SEO practices are going on out there. Some agencies try to keep their finger on the button of your campaigns, so if you want to show them the door, all the progress they’ve made for you goes with them.

There are two steps to preventing this:

1. Educate yourself on how call tracking works. Use it on your own for at least one advertisement, just to get a solid understanding of the process.
2. Make sure any contract you have with an external marketing team addresses the ownership of numbers generated for call tracking purposes.

Dirty numbers

Eventually, a phone number goes around the block. It doesn’t commonly cause a problem, but from time to time you might get a brand new call tracking number that another business once used. It might have been a spa resort or a drug dealer. There’s often no way to find out. Either way, you’ll get a few calls from disappointed callers looking for the other business. It’s a small price to pay. The longer you use a dirty number, the fewer wrong calls you’ll get (and it’s rare in any case).

If you’re concerned with having a number which used to be associated with something shady, simply do a Google search with the number in quotation marks, including the various ways phones are written (with/without the area code, with/without the digits grouped together). If it’s not indexed by Google, there’s nothing to worry about.

Legal Concerns

In the United States, call recording is legal from cost to cost. There are some regulations, which depend on the state. See this article by Digital Media Law to read up on these regulations. Before you begin, simply check whether you need to be registered as a call recorder in areas you will be targeting.

Most regulations simply require you to notifying the caller that their conversation will be recorded. I’m sure you’ve heard a pre-recorded message telling you this in the past.

*Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and nothing I say qualifies as legal advice.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide.

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

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Marketing Automation For Small Businesses – Guide

TOC

1. Marketing Automation? What Is That?
2. Who Should Use Marketing Automation?
3. Why Do We Need Marketing Automation?
4. What Is Marketing Automation?
5. 4 Useful Steps That Will Help You Kick-start Your Marketing Automation
6. 7 Steps On How To Make Money Using Marketing Automation
7. Why do companies use marketing automation?
8. 6 Software Applications That Will Help You With Marketing Automation
9. DO’S And DON’TS When Using Systems To Automate Your Marketing
10. Digital Marketing Automation Checklist
11. What’s Next? The Future Of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation? What is that?

Did you ever wonder where some of your customers come from?

Let me guess, you burned all your advertising budget online, got few leads and got flagged as a spammer just because you were not promoting the right product to the right audience.

It happens all too often.

Don’t worry, we understand you and we want to tell you how to solve this challenge.

But before we go on with this guide let’s destroy some myths. The myth that marketing automation is “impersonal”, “inhuman” and full of “spam”.

Here’s the big picture: Marketing automation is actually all about personalization, or in other words, messages tailored to individual people.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this before, where you surf online for shoes, browse some websites looking for the perfect pair, and then suddenly all the ads you saw online were about shoes.

I bet you thought, “Hm…this is strange.”

Then maybe you started to see a pair of shoes on websites, Facebook and you even got an email about them with a discount coupon.

The discount made up your mind, and you bought those shoes.

Let me tell you…those ads were not a coincidence. They were there because those shoes companies knew what you wanted. They knew what you were interested in because of what you browsed in their website, so they started to tell you more with the help of ads and emails.

This is what we call remarketing.

When a client gives you personal information such as e-mail, you now have permission to share with him anything you want. The challenge is to make sure it’s also what he wants, and to never make him feel like you’re spam- ming him.

With the help of marketing automation you know what your customers are looking for on your website and for what price. After you know what they need, you can send them different e-mails, automatically tailored to what they’re interested in. This creates a relationship with them, proving that you know what each person wants and needs.

Who Should Use Marketing Automation?

First thing’s first. Maybe you are wondering if your business is suitable for implementing marketing automation.

We think that using this kind of solution can take small and medium businesses to the next level and help them grow.

Marketing Automation is not something that comes without any other action from your side. That action is called investment. You want results, so keep in mind that in order to have results, you have to be ready to invest, otherwise this guide might not help you that much.

At the same time, if you haven’t done any online advertising before, maybe you should start now, and come back to this guide after you’ve had some experience.

Let me give you a visual look of how marketing automation goes.

If you want to implement marketing automation, first you need to start building your assets:

Track the behaviour of your leads so you better understand your audience, and know how to interact with them.

You need to ask yourself this: What do your customers need?
Once you know that, marketing automation will help you give them what they want.

Why Do We Need Marketing Automation?

A little bit of history

In case you were wondering, marketing 15K automation has existed since 1992. Yes, 1992.
Now, in order (for you) to understand how things evolved, I need to take you through the story. Follow me…

Marketing automation started before it was actually called marketing automation.
The question that was always the same was, “How do we (as a company) help somebody stay engaged with us?”

Email Marketing

It was easy to promote your business through email marketing in the early 1990’s, because Microsoft’s new hotmail service was handing out free accounts to anyone that signed up. Email marketing grew very fast. Because it was new technology, users would read every email carefully. Eventually, spammers abused email and the public gradually put up their guard, making it harder for good marketers to get through to people.

SEO

In 1995, Yahoo started to gain popularity as a search engine. Their algorithm was simple, and marketers found simple ways to game the system and get on the first page of search results using keyword density and automated backlinks. By the end of the century the practice of search engine optimization was well established.

 

Smartphones

Soon, smartphones arrived on the scene. Marketers realized that they could offer people more content and ways to interact because they had the freedom of accessing the internet while on the move.

 

Inbound Marketing

With so many devices helping people connect to the internet, marketers needed to be even more visible. They had to use engaging content (like articles, videos, and infographics) to hook more buyers. They needed to educate their audience about their product because people began to expect to know more about a product before buying.

Marketing Automation

After social media became popular with the public, the marketers followed suit. The various platforms were very challenging for the marketers, so marketing automation was invented to helped them connect with people through email, search, and social.

 

Let’s have a look at the evolution of marketing automation. The first tool was Unica in 1992.

After people started to use the internet more and more, companies started to promote themselves online, and nowadays this phenomenon has reached such level that most marketing has a bigger impact online.

Eventually, companies became aware of the fact that in order to have more profit, they needed to invest in marketing automation. Note that marketing behavior always follows buyer behavior. When the public changes their behavior, we need to update ours. It’s the way of the world.

What Is Marketing Automation?

By definition, marketing automation is the practice of automating all parts of the customer journey that don’t need direct human input (i.e. the boring stuff) so that marketers can focus more on strategy. Because of this rise in efficiency and creative focus, marketing automation always makes campaigns more lucrative if done right.

Automation software helps you track the actions of customers online, so you can provide them with truly relevant content until they are ready to buy. All this data also informs your strategy by “lifting the lid” off the internet so you can peek inside and see what’s going on.

“Marketing automation democratizes the highest levels of marketing best practice. Even the smallest of teams can incorporate automation to perform complex workflows routinely and at low cost.”

(Marketing Automation for Small Business, LeadPages)

“Campaign workflow can be designed within the tool and then executed automatically; once a campaign has run its course, a range of analytics tools can measure its performance to understand what worked well and what did not.” (What is Marketing Automation?, TrustRadius)

“Using behavioral inputs from multiple channels such as social clicks, viewing a pricing page or consuming a particular piece of content gives marketers the context they need to fully understand a lead’s challenges and how to guide them down the funnel. The most effective marketing automation not only collects data from multiple channels but uses those various channels to send their marketing messages as well. That means the success of your campaign relies less on the email and fully utilizes the various channels that influence a buyer’s decision.”

(What is Marketing Automation? HubSpot )

“Without marketing automation, you are just guessing – just hoping that people will take the bait and be ready to buy your products. Statistics show that buyers don’t do that. They want to learn at their own pace and be reached when they need more information or are ready to buy. A well- constructed marketing automation strategy makes that a reality.” – John McTigue, Kuno Creative – Marketo

“91% of the users who had a success of their business say marketing automation is an important factor.” – Marketo & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)

“8% of B2C and 21% of B2B marketers find Marketing Automation one of their Top Digital Priorities.” – Adobe“Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing” (2014)

Marketers say that marketing automation helps them save their time (74%), and increases their CRM (68%). They have a better and more timely communication with their customers (58%).– Adestra Marketer vs Machine (2015)

“B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales-pipeline contribution by 10%.” Forrester Research “The Forrester Wave Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors” (2014)

4 Useful Steps That Will Help You Kick-Start Your Marketing Automation

Step 1

Send an email invitation to check/view/read/download some of your newest content – send this to the list of people who are interested in that type of subject.

Step 2

Send a thank you message to everyone that checked/viewed/read/downloaded from your previous email.

 

 

Step 3

Wait a few days (approx.3) and send them a follow-up email where you offer them another article similar to the topic you send a few days ago. For example use case study.

Step 4

Once you know who opened that mail and who downloaded your content, your sales team can start nurturing them with more relevant content. These people have indicated they will be more likely to buy from you, which is why you should put a focus on them.

7 Steps On How To Make More Money Using Marketing Automation

1. Outrun your competitors

“63% of companies who use marketing automation are outgrowing those who don’t.” (Lenskold and Pedowitz, 2013 – Today their company is a distinguished leader in the development and implementation of ROI processes. They work with companies like MasterCard, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Seagate, Kodak, Siemens, American Century Investments, and ADM)

Relevant data leads to happy customers and high conversion rates.

2. See the effect of marketing efforts with the help of the data

Marketing automation can show us the steps that potential buyers are taking once they make contact with your company. It shows us which strategies had more effect on converting them into leads.

3. Run programs through different channels

We use many channels to connect with our audience. Each channel has a different “culture” and should be handled differently. We need to control the content we show and to measure the effects of each type of communication we try.

4. Save time

When you “program” your campaigns and watch them run, you don’t have a worry about forgetting anything. The software will do most of the work for you.

5. Collect data for your business

You will have more traffic and more information about that traffic.
By getting to know your potential buyers you can improve your advertising campaigns and the communication between you and your audience.

6. Improve your CRM

With so many data about how your customers are behaving, what they like, and what they want less of, your relationship to them will vastly improve. Turn them into ambassadors!

7. Tailor the experience

Marketing automation helps you educate your users and tailor their experience with you. What leads to sales is the personalization and the relevancy of what you say to them.

Why Do Companies Use Marketing Automation?

Because it works. Because it brings them profit.

Let’s take some case studies of both small and big businesses and see how marketing automation increased their profits.

Paper Style

Paper Style targets brides and brides-to-be. They base their campaigns on what these brides search for on their website. They had 3 primary action types that would change what content their visitors would receive from them.

1. Clicking on links about weddings from their email newsletter. 2. Buying products used for weddings.
3. Looking at any page on their website that had a connection with a wedding.

They paid attention to all the behaviors of their possible buyers and took action when possible. For example, if a bride-to-be would purchase an item from their website, they would send a “thank you” email a few days later. But if friends of the bride would buy a bridesmaid accessory, they would also receive wedding gift ideas.

Did it work?
Yes. They had an increase of 330% in revenue per mailing and a click rate increase of 16%.

Barrack Obama Campaign

Still not convinced?

Let’s take Barack Obama’s political campaign as another example.

In 2012, Obama was running for president for the second time. His team used marketing automation with their volunteers through the website you can see above. Marketers would recognize that page as a landing page designed to collect information.

Obama’s team knew the area where every volunteer lived and could track their activity on the site. Time was not wasted on the volunteers that were not that active on their platform.

The result of this campaign, as you can guess, was the re-election.

Let’s take another example.

Cincom Systems

Cincom Systems is a private company that offers software solutions. They were having trouble establishing which buyers were coming from their newsletter. Here’s how they figured it out.

First, they collected their buyers’ information (from the subscribe button from their page) and started to track them. They analyzed their content and the impact it had on their audience: newsletter, blogs, emails and so on, and adapted them to their reader’s expectations.

Then they analyzed their data about their readers and created different strategies to engage with them even more. For example, Cincom would ask for the size of their companies. Once they learned this, they would ask for more specific information later on. This way they had a highly detailed profile of each contact.

Did it work?

• Their open rate improved by 256%
• Their click-to-open rate increased by 1,941%.
• They identified 1,513 new potential opportunities.
• They had an average of 18 new sales per week.

Acteva

Acteva is a company that offers services such as online payment, online registration, and ticketing. They started using marketing automation because they needed to improve their ROI and their targeting system. They created content campaigns for their visitors, personalized based on the information the visitor gave them on the landing page.

How did marketing automation work for them?

• Their ROI increased by 350%.
• They had 100% growth in the areas in which they used marketing automation.
• Their revenue increased by $2m.

6 Software Applications That Will Help You With Marketing Automation

We’ve said a lot about marketing automation so far: We shared our insights, we told you why you should use it, and what it’s done for others.

But we haven’t discussed who can help you automate your marketing. Which tools are best? Which companies can you trust?

Just for you, we made a list of 7 applications you should take into consideration when you decide it’s time to use marketing automation. There are much more out there, but because this guide is mostly for small businesses, we will tell you the ones that are the best mix of affordability and power.

1. Sales Manago

“Our software enables our customers to achieve outstanding sales results by implementing a complete range of automated and personalized marketing in a multichannel environment.”

• Has a wide range of features (social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, advertising network, dynamic website content).
• Makes it easy to use the data you collect without getting overwhelming.
• Number 1 marketing automation for B2C in Europe.

Our recommendation for small and medium businesses.

2. Hubspot
“It was time to make the marketing and sales process human. Time to treat buyers like people, not numbers on a spreadsheet.”

• Place an accent on inbound marketing (educating people; raising awareness).
• Have a very good relationship with their customers.
• Gives you a platform that allows you to optimize every single part of your sales funnel.

 

3. Salesforce

“Salesforce is much more than just a CRM solution. It brings together all your customer information in a single, integrated platform.”

• Uses the CRM system by tracking the history of the client – email, service requests, and even phone calls.
• Helps you collaborate easily with colleagues, also through mobile.
• Works great with social media such as Facebook or Instagram.

4. ActiveCampaign

“We believe in intelligence-driven marketing. Marketers get better results. Contact get a need-driven & respectful experience.”

• Gives you many pricing options.
  Focused on e-mail marketing, sales and CRM.
• They show you exactly how to use it with a library of videos with instructions.
• Very simple to use, it allows you to send relevant emails to specific groups of customers based on actions they’ve taken.
• You can organize your campaigns using a flowchart and send emails accordingly.

5. GetResponse

“Among us, you’ll find experts in various fields who stay creative and open to new knowledge and experiences.”

• You can become an affiliate to their business and receive 33% commission after every paid account you recommend.
• Great at email marketing automation specifically.
• You can start small by not having to pay a lot for the first few thousands of subscribers.

6. InfusionSoft

“We accelerate small business growth in technology, sales, and marketing strategy, and a community of industry leaders, business owners, coaches, and consultants.”

• Infusionsoft Mobile have many features which allow you to work where you are (upload, access, and edit contact information, communicate with customers, view, create, and complete tasks, etc.)
• This app tracks your customers and their behavior, then it shows you your task-list including communications with contacts, appointments, and info about the customers related to those tasks.
• Includes some great e-commerce features.

Funnel Lead Marketing – Example

 

DO’S and DONT’S When Using Systems To Automate Your Marketing

Don’t just automate your current process without revisiting your goals and strategy.

Marketing automation is a multiplier. If you’re already executing a bad strategy, accelerating it with automation software could be disastrous.

Make sure your goals and strategies line up with customer needs and expectations. If you’re not sure, begin slowly, and carefully track how your audience responds during the first few weeks.

Do integrate marketing automation with your inbound marketing strategy.

With marketing automation, there is no need to send a general, broad message to your entire contact list that will end up getting deleted or marked as spam because it’s not relevant.

 

Do send highly targeted and specific content to a narrow audience.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Say that you’ve engaged with a company; maybe you’ve downloaded a piece of their content and really loved what you read. The next email you get is a completely different topic that has nothing to do with the thing that made you interested in the first place. Wouldn’t it make more impact if you received an email that continued to dive further into the topic of the content you already read?

Don’t forget about your existing customers.

Selling is hard work. Many companies are so focused on generating new revenue that they forget about their current customers: The group of people that already have an affinity for what they are selling, and most likely want to buy more.

 

Do set up customer engagement campaigns to keep your current customers happy and coming back for

Keeping your customers engaged with content marketing is an essential piece of growing your company. Nurture those relationships by sending segmented, customer-only content, that will educate and encourage them to keep coming back to your company for thought leadership and expertise.

Digital Marketing Automation Checklist

 

Marketing automation is all about three things: strategy, relationships and time.

Give yourself some time to really think about the strategy and prepare for the implementation. As they say “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

1. What do you want?

• From the perspective of the customer? What am I looking for?
• From your perspective? What will get you to your goals?

2. What does your lead want from you?

3. Where are finding you now?

4. What and Who?

• What happened?
• Who needs to know about it?
• What’s the action to be taken?
• Who should be taking that action?

5. Set implementation goals for:

• Month
• Quarter

They will help you get on the right track in moments of crisis.

6. Take action.
7. Revise and analyze your steps.

8. Don’t give up before the payoff!

What’s Next? The Future Of Marketing Automation

One of the best things about Marketing Automation is its efficiency. With relevant technology you’re able to manage leads and finally benefit from the content you create to the maximum degree.

It helps you build long-term relationships with your customers and to manage their preferences. You already know it. There are two sides to everything. And it’s worth to look ahead and see if you’re taking the right course.

Find out some insights/predictions about the future of technology and marketing. See how they can work and turn into profits for your small business.

“The integrated messaging activities will be based on detailed subscriber profiles including precious cross-channel information.”

René Kulka – Email Marketing Evangelist at optivo, Consultant, and author of E-Mail-Marketing: Das umfassende Praxis-Handbuch

“Marketing automation is still in the early innings. And the way marketing automation is used is still evolving.” (…) In the next phase, marketing automation will solve far more than demand generation – it will be used to deliver a better customer experience from brand awareness through customer retention and loyalty. Marketing automation will serve as the command center for orchestrating prospect and customer communications in Account-Based Marketing. And marketing automation will be the big data platform used by marketers to make smarter decisions and to better understand their customers. We’re excited to play a role in helping companies better understand their business and meet their customer’s needs.”

Andy MacMillan – CEO at Act-On Software, Inc.

“Marketing automation needs leads, and while content is the most potent fuel for lead generation, managing and leveraging that growing library of content will be vital in order to fully utilize marketing automation.” “Too many systems still don’t connect. It’s time to stop using Excel spreadsheets as the glue that holds your marketing operations together, manually collecting data from disparate systems.”

Jeff Cohen – Oracle.com

In our opinion, the integration of marketing and technology is certain and it’ll be developing. Be aware of that and see for yourself what marketing automation can bring to your small business.

Whatever you do, don’t get left behind!

 

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Stop Wasting Time And Start High-Value Inbound Calls - INFOGRAPHIC

When you have a robust call tracking system in place, you feel excited to invest in a new campaign, because even if it doesn’t work the way you’d hope, you know the data you’ll get from it will be true and useful.

Website

Make your site call-friendly. Independent market research company Ipsos found that 70% of mobile searchers use click-to-call. At the very least, this means hyper-linking the telephone number on your website with “tel:+441010101010” for example. Be sure to include the area code at the start of the number to make it clickable.

Callback Widgets

Add more design and functionality with a callback widget. Most digital marketing blogs will persuade you to put share buttons on your website that follow the user as they scroll. But you don’t pay the bills with shares, do you? You pay them with the sales that happen on the phone. So why not replace your share buttons with a call button that follows the user as they navigate your website, and keep your call staff only a quick tap away at any moment.

Landing Pages

Pages with a telephone number convert better than those without, even if the number is never called. If your goal is to get calls, do one better by making the number more inviting with a callback widget or other click-to-call button. You don’t have to be techy to pull this off. There are many tools available today for creating beautiful landing pages. Among my favorites are:

• Unbounce.com

• Instapages.com

• Landingi.com

Add coupons to your landing pages to help prompt on-the-fence leads to action. Make sure they know that quoting their unique coupon code over the phone is the only way they will get the discount. Don’t be afraid to give them a fat discount either. The phone is a great place to upsell, and repeat custom is worth the initial cut in price. The critical thing with a landing page is getting them past the hump of tapping that call button.

Adwords

With Google Adwords, the majority have focused on getting people to click, but search advertising can be even more effective for inbound calls. You can create as many different campaigns as you have target demos. Optimize them for calls with phone-specific calls to action:

• Call Now
• Call Only Promotion
• Discounts Over The Phone Only
• Free Estimates Fast Over The Phone
• Discover What We Can Do For You Over a Short and Fast Phone Call

Pro Hack: In the Adwords interface you can add a location extension, which will present your phone number listed in Google My Business. Maybe people, especially from the desktop, will call that number without clicking. No click means you don’t pay a penny. Free calls!

Bing & Yahoo

When you’ve found a groove that works in Google Adwords, it’s a cinch to import the same campaign into Bing or Yahoo Search. These widely used Google-alternatives might not have as huge a user base, but they are certainly big enough, and they are more relaxed about what you can do in your campaign.

Pro Hack: Add your phone number in the display URL of your Bing Ad. This can lead to free calls.

Social Media

With a Facebook business page, you’ll have the option to set up a call campaign. You’ll have the same audience targeting features as you would with any other social ad campaign.

Use promo numbers for your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and any other platforms where your target demographic spends time. Have your social media managers handle the phone calls from those platforms so your other sales agents can focus on their own specialty channels.

Citations

Your business citations should be plastered all over the internet, and be as consistent as possible. The same title, the same email, the same description, and the same telephone number on all your citations helps your search results in Google Maps.

The downside of using the same number on every citation means that you cannot differentiate traffic from different citation sources. My recommendation is to take this trade-off. Citation traffic is organic traffic and therefore is not the most critical kind to dissect.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

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How 3 Companies Plugged Their Revenue Leaks

If you’re just about to get into call tracking, I’m excited for you. You’re about to identify and plug up major revenue leakages and grow your bottom line. Here are three cases of companies doing just that.

1) Fannit Marketing agency Fannit was being wrongly accused.

Their client thought Fannit wasn’t doing their job. It looked like lead generation was too low. However, by tracking where phone calls came from and how effective each call was, they discovered the problem wasn’t in lead gen at all.

The problem was in sales.

The phone agents didn’t know the answers to many of the questions that leads had. Spotting this gap in their process added $250,000 of potential annual revenue for the client.

2) Hotel Grand Lucayan Knowing what’s working is sometimes enough to transform a business from “flirting with broke” to stable and growing.

As a luxury vacation resort in the Bahamas, Hotel Grand Lucayan spent most of their marketing budget on Atlanta. That’s where most inbound flights to the Bahamas came from, so it seemed to make sense.

After implementing call tracking, however, they found advertising in certain areas in the US northeast and Florida worked far better. They now knew their highest performing areas down to the zip code.

Grand Lucayan’s phone conversion rate went up by 157%.

We live in a multi-channel world.

To win, you need to be omni-channel.

3) Paychex 

To be omnichannel, you need to have a clear view of your customers’ buying cycles. No gaps. If you’re tracking click through rates but not inbound calls from specific ads, for example, you simply can’t know how well they’re performing.

Paychex reduced cost per acquisition by 43% and increased leads generated by 95% when they started tracking calls.

They found their Adwords campaign was doing more than twice as well as they thought, and they zeroed in on their best keywords. They also reduced their ad spend during peak times when the staff was often overwhelmed by call volume, thereby reducing their cost without losing any sales.

I, for one, like to know where my money is going. I like to see how each dollar is performing, and how much return I’m getting from my investments.

I’m willing to bet you do too.

 

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

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How To Track Calls For Beginners Like A Boss – INFOGRAPHIC

Imagine if you could track calls like you track clicks.

Wouldn’t you like to track the results produced by individual sales reps, individual calls, or calls that come from particular marketing channels?

Once you have this knowledge, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from tunnel-vision to 20/20. The phone is often the critical junction where a sale is made or lost.

I know you’re busy, so to prevent any wasted time for you or your team, I made this guide. Below you’ll find the step by step system I use with my clients to set up basic call tracking from scratch. Also, learn how to move into advanced call tracking (known as call intelligence).

What is Call Tracking?

Basic call tracking is the use of unique numbers (generated automatically) to track the source and efficacy of your inbound phone calls. Use a different number for each marketing campaigns, and your call tracking software can measure the true results of each channel.

Advanced call tracking involves the automatic analysis of phone conversations, pre-recorded voice menus, and auto-scheduled call flows. We’ll cover that later on.

What You Stand to Gain

There are five main benefits to call tracking:

1.     Know your ROI. You’ll know for sure how much money all your marketing efforts (and investments) bring into the business.

2.     Watch the right KPIs. Forget bounce rate. The phone contains much more critical metrics.

3.     Increase call conversion. Inbound calls convert extremely well already, and by tracking results, you can run tests to optimize sales.

4.     Call intelligence. With advanced call tracking, you’ll know the full picture of every lead who winds up on the phone.

5.     Find and fix money-leaks. Uncover gaps in knowledge or skill within your staff that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Know your ROI

Time and again, businesses who try call tracking find huge discrepancies in their sales and marketing systems. You might be pouring money into something you assume is giving you a return when it’s not, and simultaneously ignoring something that’s doubling every dollar you put into it!

Without call tracking, how will you keep your marketing channels accountable? Instead of hearing a monthly tally of keyword rank, bounce rates, unique visits, and other “slightly useful” figures, wouldn’t it be simpler to see how many phone calls each channel has generated for you?

With call recordings, you’ll also know the quality of calls coming from various channels. You can find real gold mines this way!

Watch the right KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are simply metrics that matter to your business.

Many of us working in local SEO have focused on KPIs based on rankings and traffic. Not because they’re necessarily the best metrics to follow, but because it has been easiest to track them for a long time. Relying on these metrics nowadays, however, does not make sense. With the rise of personalized search and internet directories, they miss a lot of conversions.

For example, when someone searches for a local plumber and calls directly from the SERPs, you wouldn’t see that as a click-through. And yet, it could be the hottest lead you got that day! A rankings and traffic report is blind to those valuable phone calls.

Increase call conversion

Calls are highly profitable.

According to Google, inbound phone calls are 10–15 times more likely to convert than inbound web leads. BIA/Kelsey notes that 61% of businesses rate their inbound phone calls as “excellent leads,” while only 52% rate leads from the web as excellent. Most high-ticket products and services depend on phone calls to close the sale, and they’re the most important sales to be tracking!

You can only sustainably improve what you measure. When you know what’s bringing in the most calls, and how many calls vs. sales you get, you can start running tests and optimizing your sales systems. Until then, you’re in the dark.

Call intelligence

Going beyond call tracking and recording, those with the budget can also get “call intelligence” to get to work for them.

· Know how many phone calls are first-time and how many are repeated.

· Get alerted when someone who was on the phone a week ago shows up on your website again.

· Automatically assess the sales skills of your telephone sales reps.

· Track how many times a customer showed interest in purchasing, without having to sit through recordings.

· And much more.

Find and fix money-leaks

It’s time your receptionists and other call agents were accountable for their performance on the phone. It’s not about being “Big Brother” or pointing fingers. It’s about helping them improve and become masters of their job, to become an even more valuable asset to the business that pays their wage!

For example, they might have knowledge gaps that they feel too busy or too embarrassed to mention or fix themselves, leading them to stumble through customer questions and lose sales. Advanced call tracking is great at figuring out where phone performance can be improved.

As long as your workforce is happy to learn (as they should be!), then performance-tracking will be good news for everyone.

 

 

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

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Improve your Optimization Program

We know sometimes it gets difficult to reach a point where you can say you are satisfied fully with your testing activities. But the struggle is real, getting good results is not trivial. It is planned and it requires a mature conversion model to be able to optimize the programs you have.

The question now is, how do you do that?

Lucky you, we actually have components for a successful optimization program. Scroll for more!

1. Culture arround CRO

While Spiderman said, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ we say, ‘with great culture, comes great process and result’. To do this, you will need an executive sponsor who believes in testing. The internal sharing of results, sharing of success and failures also helps in creating a healthy working culture in the company and the people working for it.

The organizational culture of an organization is one important part that brings profitable results. Every company/organization/multinational, call it however you want, is first born by having an idendity. This identity goes on and gets developed and evoluates in such way that every person who works in the same place has similar behaviors and beliefs.

The key in making people have similar attitudes is by engaging them. As a leader it’s a very big task which needs to be done and it needs to be done correctly.

How? Find your own culture and how you want to be represented and recognised as an entity. We all know that Apple is known for innovating constantly. Or Nike supports you to have your horizons open. It’s what this is all about. Create a culture that represents you as persons and that represents your product also. Find similarities between you and the product. Make it personal. People like emotional advertising.

Your next steps should be:

• Have an identity.
• Have a plan on how you want to use that identity.
• Have an engagement plan.
• Create a culture and make people believe in it.
• Invest emotionally and financially in your team.

2. Team

There isn’t just one man behind every successful result, but a number of them. You will need a dedicated developer, one who knows the ins and outs of the program. You will then create a custom testing team, a group of experts doing different methodologies and processes to ensure excellent testing.’

Teamwork is one of the greatest tools any kind of organization can have. Individuals are very great at their job. But individuals who work together can be excellent. You know what they say, “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” In any process of your work, you must have in mind team work.

What you need is actually easy. To have people in your team who are great at what they do, and then find ways of making them work together.

We can give you some examples in this situation:

• Have weekly meetings with everyone from each department and discuss what happened so far and what has to happen next. You never know when the developer guy will give some great inputs to the seller guy.
• Have task force meetings weekly. Take two or three people from different areas (that complete each other and are essential to each other at the same time), and have them work in a structured way and by objectives. Having an objective in mind every week and knowing that you need to accomplish it because your  teammates depend on that is really good for increasing the responsibility in people and also increasing the conversion rates for the upcoming results of the company.
• Have feedback sessions. Actually, you don’t even need special “sessions” for that. What you need is to create this culture, that feedbacks are very important. And they are. How will you know if you are doing the correct job? How do you know if you are evolving? How will you know if you are helping your team evaluate? And so on.

We just gave you a few small tips to start with, but now you can implement in your team whatever feel right and helps with the CRO because every team has different needs and need to be approached differently.

3. Tools and Systems

There are many many tools that you can use in order to view, verify, learn about clients etc. What is next for you is to find the best way possible to do this. What is the methodology you want to use? Why is that one the good one for you? How can you put into practice what you have acknowledged?

Always start with the data, the analytics. Remember the mantra, the more data you have, the better results you get. But never isolate data, some companies make this grave mistake of not integrating their data, the voice of the customers, the offline system they get.

The cross-disciplinary teams will do brainstorming in order to come with assumptions and solutions to the assumptions. For example, who are the target customers? What are their needs? What problems could arise from these needs? How do we solve these problems?

For qualitative testing, some tools that can help are Click Tale, User Testing and others that are data driven.

4. Process

Processes are one of the best parts of the entire activity. Now you can put into practice what you’ve learnt, work together as a team according to the organization values and see your results.

The steps are actually easy when you come down to it. First is to gather the data and to develop it. There are three documents that you will need to every test:

• experiment design
• a concept
• final results.

What you can do is to put together the test idea, create a concept out of it and build the code for it. Essentially, you will need the QA script. You do this prelaunch and post-launch.

5. Strategy

There are varying strategies in optimization results.

1. Validating the results of the test.
2. Buckshot Approach, which is simply saying blind testing. Some are just oblivious to the testing tools so what they do is they test it to all the features.
3. Some others are focused on winning; they are not into the needs of the customers.
4. Know the customers. This approach is among the ones you can use. Having an insight into the needs of the customers is important. It helps in building trust, it helps in improving results.

Remember, getting good results depends on the data and how the data are being processed. Make sure that you have a great team working for you. Make it data driven for better testing!

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8 Quick steps which help you increase your Conversion Rate !

It's high-time to increase your conversion rate right now,  because it's a foundation of a high sales volume. Remember, increased conversion rate means increased profits. Let's talk real, what's conversion rate in the first place?

Conversion Rates Defined

Simply put, these rates are the percentage of customers taking the specific actions you want. For example, the percentage of proposals you have won or percentage of clients who filled out forms on your website, percentage of visitors and buyers of products in your website.

 

Secrets to Improving Rates

1. Do the AB Test

The first thing to do is testing, then testing, and testing. AB testing is a method that helps you turn your visitors into customers. AB testing will help you know which of your products works best for the clients.

Example:

If you have two web pages (A and B), and you want to know which one garners more traffic, which one gets more purchase, then you can do AB testing. It will help you cut down expenses from your non-working page and keep the one that works. It's good to have more web pages that are working, and it's best to know which among the sites has more conversion rates.

 

2. Catch Attention with Compelling Value Proposition

Your proposition is an important conversion factor. A proposition is an offer you give to the clients. It's the reason why clients stick to your site; it's what you say that entice your clients to go to you instead of the competitor.

One way to do it is to tweak the content of your web pages: the colors and sizes, the images, the bonuses, the first things that clients see when they visit your page.

Making a value proposition requires immense knowledge about your business, what you offer. You need to figure out the unique features of your products and services. With the proposition comes effective bridging. You must be able to articulate it properly in a way that will be understood by the customers.

To know whether the proposition works, you can use AB testing.

 

3. Be clear about your services and benefits.

Having a Unique Selling Proposition is important, but what is also very important is that your viewers understand what you offer. Be simple when you talk about your business. Let your visitors know the features of your services and how they make a difference. Give them visual information of the use of the services and how they are delivered.

Be specific when you talk about their benefits. If they don't understand from the first two sentences what they can win, you have just lost some potential clients.

 

4. Take it Slow

Some others make the mistake of rushing the clients to their services when they are only visiting and browsing. Take it slow. You must build trust with the clients, develop rapport, and provide the service you said you would. Don't show your hands from the first time, just get their email address and keep the communication open.

 

5. Get their e-mails for a better communication

 

Why a better communication you might ask? Because everyone has an e-mail account, and everyone checks it a few times a week. If not every day. So be sure you have a subscribe button on your page. This way it will be easier for you to keep in touch with your audience and engage them with your products and services.

An e-mail will help you increase your conversion rate because now you have a better understanding about the number of visitors on your website.

6. Divide your audience

Visitors are different people with different needs. Some know what their needs are, some don't. But the goals of every visitor are different. While some will spend minutes on your website deciding whether to buy or not, others will purchase in a few seconds. For this reason, you need to segment your viewers by creating different experiences for them.

Let's take as an example e-mail marketing campaigns. Suppose you are sending an e-mail to 100 people, that redirects your visitors to a landing page.  From those 100 people, 80 will not be interested, 10 will click the button and another 10 will actually see your product from your landing page.

Now that you have this important information, you can use it to your advantage. Having your clients being tracked, now it's easy for you to figure out what to do with those 10 who only clicked, and with the other 80 who didn't click at all. For the first group, you can send personalized e-mails with different offers, to increase your conversion rate. For the second group, you can give a coupon.

7. Adjust your site based on your user's behavior

Your page should be engaging enough so your visitors feel attracted enough that they want to stay. Brand and design are important assets that, once you perfect them, your users will feel that they are on the right page. 

Personalizing your website taking into consideration your customers behavior is what you need to do. Nowadays people are the ones in charge of the purchase process. Once they know what they want to buy, they will make a research and eventually will choose from what they think it's best for them. 

So don't be afraid to mold your website. For example, if you have some potential clients from other countries but your business doesn't distribute products abroad, let them know. 

8. Get Rid of the Jargons

Remember KISS, ‘Keep it short and simple. It's difficult to win them with the business language, but easier to win them with the language they know. Make it clear and concise. Don't use words that you wouldn't use in your normal conversation.

 

Track your Conversion Rate

Tracking is best done on a daily and monthly basis. This will make you see the problems and correct them. There are a number of tools you can use that can track your metrics and improve your profits. The key to your sales and profits is your conversion rates. So as soon as today, start improving your rates.

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