Category Archives: Marketing

8 FREE AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing in 2024

In the dynamic world of affiliate marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. The race to captivate audiences demands innovative and efficient tools. Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is revolutionizing content creation and audience engagement strategies. Whether you’re refining blog posts, creating resonant podcasts, or designing engaging videos, AI tools are your secret weapon.

Let’s be real, producing a constant stream of content can feel like a full time job. With all the emails to draft, social media updates to write and landing pages to perfect, it’s enough to make your head spin!
But upping your game in content creation doesn’t have to be a grind.
 
  • Email Campaigns: Stop stressing over the perfect wording, we’ve got it covered.
  • Social Media Posts: Let us help you craft posts that will make your followers hit that ‘like’ button faster than you can say ‘engagement’.
  • Landing Pages: Get ready to see conversions like never before with our top-notch landing page content.

These powerful tools leverage artificial intelligence technology to handle tasks like content generation, data analysis, audience segmentation, and more—all with just a few clicks. But not all AI-powered tools are created equal. In this guide, we’ll explore key features of top-tier AI tools and provide examples to take your affiliate marketing campaigns to the next level.

AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing: Your New Best Friend

Alright, let’s break it down. An AI marketing tool is like having a super smart, adaptable assistant who takes care of all the nitty-gritty for you. It’s not just another trigger-based automation system, oh no! It’s a brilliant combo of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP). The more data you feed it, the more it learns and adapts to your team’s unique needs.

  • Boost Your Referrals: The tool identifies your most successful referral sources, so you can focus on the most promising leads.
  • Optimize Your Ads: Let AI take the reins on your Facebook Ads, tailoring them to your specific target audience.
  • Improve Your Landing Pages: AI doesn’t stop at referrals and ads – it also evaluates user behavior on your landing page and recommends changes for better conversions.
  • Perfect Product Descriptions: Plus, AI can create compelling and error-free product descriptions, ideal for any e-commerce business.

What to Consider When Choosing AI Tools?

Wondering how to choose the right AI tool for you? Let’s make it easy! First off, a great AI tool should be user-friendly and flexible, no one wants to spend hours puzzling over complex instructions. Furthermore, it should deliver accurate results, because let’s face it, who has time for mistakes? Lastly, always opt for an AI tool that ensures data security because your privacy matters. So, remember these key pointers the next time you’re on the hunt for the perfect AI tool and save yourself some trouble:

  1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engines are your bread and butter. Look for tools that handle keyword research, content creation, and optimization for a smart internal linking strategy.
  2. Content Generation: Tools like Jasper.ai allow you to swiftly create creative copies for blogs, social media posts, and video scripts in over 25 languages.
  3. Affiliate Tracking and Optimization: Platforms like Scaleo track, analyze, and optimize your affiliate business and campaigns in real time.
  4. Referral Networking: Referral-AI uncovers strong connections within your network to generate valuable referrals for important accounts.
  5. Smart Internal Linking: Link Whisper helps you outrank competitors by strategically linking within your website.

1. Jasper: Your AI Writing Assistant

 

Jasper leads the market as the best overall AI writing assistant. It’s like having a personal content genie! Jasper is a web-based application that aims to help writers of all levels and genres to improve their writing and achieve their goals. Jasper Writing Software offers a range of features that can assist writers in various aspects of their writing process, such as:

  • Content Generation: Provide seed words, and Jasper analyzes them to create phrases, paragraphs, or entire articles. It can whip up a 1,500-word article almost instantly.
  • Templates Galore: With over 50 AI content generation templates—including blog posts, emails, marketing copy, Facebook ads, and SEO meta titles—Jasper covers all bases.
  • Multilingual Support: Jasper speaks 25+ languages.
  • Long-Form Writing: Need a 1,000+ word piece? Jasper’s got you covered.
  • Key Element Identification: Jasper identifies pronouns, verbs, names, and more.

Get 10,000 bonus credits when you sign up with this link

2. Hubspot: Affiliate Marketing Tools

 

As a marketer, you’re constantly juggling multiple tasks: creating ads, managing leads, and analyzing results. It can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re just starting out. But fear not! HubSpot’s free marketing tools are here to simplify your life and help you create a seamless end-to-end customer experience.

Why Use HubSpot’s Free Marketing Tools?

  1. All-in-One Solution: HubSpot offers a suite of free marketing tools that cover everything from lead generation to reporting. No need to piece together different software – it’s all right here.
  2. Budget-Friendly: These tools won’t cost you a dime. You can create effective campaigns without breaking the bank.
  3. Education and Support: HubSpot Academy provides comprehensive training on lead generation and beyond. Plus, our user community is always ready to help.

What Can You Do with HubSpot’s Free Tools?

  1. Generate Leads: Create landing pages, forms, and ads to attract new leads.
  2. Stay Organized: Manage contacts efficiently using built-in contact management features.
  3. Analyze Conversions: Track leads’ activities and learn which pages, offers, and traffic sources drive the most conversions.

Get Started Today

Ready to enhance your marketing efforts? Dive into HubSpot’s free tools and create remarkable experiences for your audience. Remember, it’s not about the budget – it’s about delivering results!

Get more here 

3. Gizzmo: Crafting Affiliate Content with Ease

Grow Your Earnings with Gizzmo WordPress Affiliate Content

 

Gizzmo is designed for Amazon affiliates who need quick content generation. It’s a WordPress content plugin to effortlessly create high-quality, SEO-friendly, revenue-driving Articles directly to your WordPress Here’s why it’s a game-changer:

  • Amazon Optimization: Craft meticulously researched content around Amazon products.
  • SEO-Friendly Headlines: Gizzmo creates headlines, titles, and descriptions that boost Google rankings.
  • Effortless Affiliate Integration: Embed affiliate links seamlessly.

Gizzmo is offering a FREE option including 150 Articles, Product Review Articles, Product Roundup Articles, Complete SEO Toolbox, Affiliate Suite, Automated Post Production, and Amazon Images suggestion.

As a website owner, you’re always on the lookout for ways to enhance your content and boost your revenue. Enter Gizzmo AI, a powerful WordPress plugin designed specifically for publishers and bloggers. In this post, we’ll explore what Gizzmo AI is, how it works, and how it can supercharge your website.

What is Gizzmo AI?

Gizzmo AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool tailored for Amazon affiliates. Its mission? To create high-quality affiliate content effortlessly. Whether you’re writing product reviews, roundups, or informative blog posts, Gizzmo has your back.

How Does Gizzmo AI Work?

  1. Seamless Content Creation: With Gizzmo, you can craft captivating articles enriched with stunning Amazon images in a matter of seconds. Say goodbye to writer’s block!
  2. SEO-Friendly: Gizzmo ensures that your content has SEO-friendly headlines, titles, descriptions, and automatic internal links. Better SEO means better visibility on Google.
  3. Affiliate Monetization: Power up your content with embedded affiliate links and automated affiliate tag integration. Effortless commission generation awaits!
  4. Automated Schema Builder: Gizzmo creates validated JSON-LD structured data markup for your WordPress pages, optimizing them for search engines.
  5. Focus Keyphrase Integration: Input your desired keyphrase, and Gizzmo strategically incorporates it into relevant parts of your article for enhanced SEO performance.

What Types of Content Can Gizzmo Create?

  • Product Review Articles: Dive deep into product features and benefits.
  • Product Roundup Articles: Compare similar products and help readers make informed choices.
  • General Content Articles: Provide broad overviews or analyses of specific topics.
  • Buying Guide Articles: Help readers navigate purchasing decisions.

Monetization Made Simple

  • Dynamic Product Discovery Carousels: Automatically showcase Amazon products in attractive carousels.
  • Affiliate Integration: Boost earnings with site owner’s Amazon tags and convenient “Buy Now” buttons.

Join the Gizzmo Community

By joining the Gizzmo AI community, you open doors to endless benefits. Connect with like-minded individuals passionate about artificial intelligence and technology. Exchange ideas and foster collaborations that push the boundaries of innovation.

Remember, simplicity doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. With Gizzmo AI, you can create compelling content that engages readers while maximizing your earning potential.

Get more here 

4. Scaleo: Optimize Your Campaigns 

partner marketing software

 

Are you new to affiliate marketing? No worries! In this guide, we’ll explore Scaleo’s free marketing tools and how they can help you kickstart your affiliate marketing journey.

Why Choose Scaleo?

  1. Intuitive Interface: Save time with straightforward navigation and easy-to-use functionality.
  2. Visualized Data and Reports: Scaleo offers full data visualization, making informed decisions faster.
  3. Detailed Reporting: Gain insights into partners’ performance with 30+ data points.
  4. Easy Setup Process: Get started in minutes with ready-to-use integrations.
  5. Powerful API: Customize and automate business growth opportunities.

Remember, affiliate marketing can lead from a side hustle to a profitable business providing passive income over time. So dive in, explore Scaleo’s tools, and start your journey today!

Scaleo is offering a free trial plan with full access to all the features. 

Get more here 

5. Jarvis: Your Creative Sidekick

Best AI Assistant
Powered by GPT

 

Jarvis, a fascinating system that connects language models with the broader machine learning community. Jarvis is on a mission to explore artificial general intelligence (AGI) and deliver cutting-edge research to the entire community. It’s like having a helpful AI sidekick by your side!

What is Jarvis?

Jarvis is a collaborative system that combines a large language model (LLM) as the controller with numerous expert models as collaborative executors. The workflow of Jarvis involves four key stages:

  1. Task Planning: Jarvis uses ChatGPT to analyze user requests, understand their intentions, and break them down into solvable tasks.
  2. Model Selection: To solve these planned tasks, ChatGPT selects expert models hosted on Hugging Face based on their descriptions.
  3. Task Execution: Jarvis invokes and executes each selected model, returning the results to ChatGPT.
  4. Response Generation: Based on the results, ChatGPT generates friendly responses for users.

Recent Developments

Here are some recent updates about Jarvis:

  • Easytool: Jarvis now offers Easytool, making tool usage easier for everyone. You can find the code and datasets at EasyTool.
  • TaskBench: Jarvis has also introduced TaskBench for evaluating task automation capabilities of LLMs. The code and datasets are available at TaskBench.
  • Azure Platform and GPT-4: Jarvis now supports the OpenAI service on the Azure platform and integrates with the GPT-4 model.
  • Gradio Demo and Web API: A Gradio demo has been added, along with a web API for accessing intermediate results during task planning and model selection.
  • CLI Mode: Jarvis provides a lightweight experience through CLI mode without deploying models locally.

Your Own AI Assistant

If you’re interested in building your own AI assistant, consider exploring courses like “JARVIS AI 3.0 GPT3 Based AGI Virtual Assistant” on Udemy. In this course, you’ll learn to build a custom artificial intelligence assistant using Python, explore IoT and home automation, and create a fully functional GPT-3 based virtual assistant.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, Jarvis has something to offer. So go ahead, unleash your creativity, and build your very own AI sidekick!

Jarvis is an AI-powered copywriting tool with a creative flair. It will boost your productivity with a rich features set included AI chat, suggestions, translation, rewriting, explanations, and more:

  • Blog Posts & Social Media Content: Jarvis crafts engaging content.
  • Email Campaigns & Landing Pages: Boost conversions with polished copy.
  • Real-Time Optimization: Jarvis adapts to your audience.

Jarvis is completely FREE for all the basic services which are powered by GPT-3.5/4 Turbo

6. Referral-AI: Unlocking the Power of Relationships

Turn your ecosystem’s connections
into your top revenue source

 

Referral-AI is a leading B2B sales intelligence relationship company with a mission: predictable growth at scale for intelligent revenue operators (revops), prospecting, and conversions. But what does that mean? Let’s break it down.

The Basics: Outbound, Inbound, and Nearbound

Before we dive into Referral-AI, let’s quickly review the different types of sales approaches:

  1. Outbound: This is the traditional cold-calling method where sales reps reach out to potential customers.
  2. Inbound: Customers come to you through marketing efforts like content marketing or social media.
  3. Nearbound: This is where Referral-AI shines. It’s all about leveraging existing relationships to connect with potential customers.

How Does Referral-AI Work?

Referral-AI is like having a trusted referral network at your fingertips. Here’s how it works:

  1. Relationship Intelligence: Referral-AI maps your organizational relationships with customers, partners, investors, and even family members. It generates highly personalized outreach to decision-makers in your target accounts.
  2. Leveraging Partnerships: By connecting your CRM to Referral-AI, you can identify partners with the highest probability of closing deals faster. It’s like having an extended sales team.
  3. Automated Outreach: Referral-AI sends automated email-based relationships generated by AI to multiple decision-makers. These emails come from your email server, making them more likely to get noticed.

Why Should You Use Referral-AI?

  1. Faster Sales Cycles: Reach decision-makers faster and reduce sales cycle length by 30%.
  2. Increased Response Rates: Expect a 50% increase in response rates from decision-makers.
  3. Access to Decision-Makers: Reach three times as many decision-makers.

How to Get Started

  1. Onboarding: Identify referrals (board members, investors, partners, colleagues, and customers) and connect your CRM.
  2. Import Your ABM List: Set up your target filter and map your target accounts through existing relationships.
  3. Automate Contact Creation: Automatically create new contacts in HubSpot based on your ABM list.
  4. Effective Outreach: Send automated emails from your server using AI-generated relationships.

Referral-AI is offering a free trial plan with all the basic features. 

7. GetResponse: AI Email Generator 

 

GetResponse is another popular email marketing software option. It offers a wide range of features, including email automation, landing pages, and more:

  • Create and send professional-looking emails with drag-and-drop email creator, free templates, and AI email generator
  • Grow your email list with lead generation tools such as landing pages, popups, forms, and webinars
  • Automate your email marketing with autoresponders, automation workflows, segmentation, and personalization
  • Boost your online sales with e-commerce features such as sales funnels, web push notifications, transactional emails, and integrations with popular platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce
  • Track and analyze your email marketing performance with reports, analytics, A/B testing, and deliverability tools

The Free option includes email marketing, website builder, landing pages, forms and more. Additional Email marketing features, marketing automation and e-commerce options will run you for some extra fees per month, range between $15 to $98.

8. ChatGPT: Conversational Content Creation

Chat GPT chat platform

 

ChatGPT is your friendly chatbot for content ideas. The newer version and more advanced engine of it is the latest and greatest ChatGPT4 that you can read about here.

One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to generate responses in a variety of different styles and tones. In addition you can do the following:

  • Brainstorming Sessions: Generate topic ideas.
  • Natural Language Interaction: ChatGPT understands context.
  • Quick Inspiration: Beat writer’s block.

The basic service is completely FREE. You can use some of the Premium services for additional fees.

Remember that these tools are here to enhance your affiliate marketing efforts. Leverage their power to optimize workflows, personalize content creation, and scale campaigns without breaking a sweat.

— 

Disclosure: Please note that we may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below, at no expense to you, should you decide to purchase a paid plan. This blog does not provide financial advice, it is purely for entertainment and fun.

Best AI Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business Quickly

Have you ever wondered how to make your marketing more effective? Well, the secret weapon might be artificial intelligence (AI). But what is AI? Think of it as a computer brain that learns from experience, a bit like how you learn to ride a bike. Now, imagine that brain doing marketing for you, or alternatively, like having a smart robot that can learn things on its own and assist you with your work. Sounds exciting, right? In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the best AI marketing tools. We’ll talk about their key features, how much they cost, their pros and cons, and my overall impressions.

HubSpot:

 

A Comprehensive Tool for All Your Marketing Needs. First on our list is HubSpot. It’s like a swiss army knife of marketing tools. It does a bit of everything, from email marketing to social media, CRM, scheduling software and so much more. Imagine having a multitasking assistant who can handle multiple things at the same time. That’s what Hubspot does for you! It uses AI to help you understand what your customers want.

Whether you’re in retail, real estate, marketing, sales, construction, or accounting, HubSpot can be a valuable tool for your business. Here’s what you get:

  1. Core CRM Software: HubSpot offers a free core CRM software that allows you to manage contacts, track deals, and view your sales pipeline in real time.
  2. Real-Time Lead Behaviors Notification: Stay on top of assigned leads, form submissions, deal mentions, and more with real-time notifications.
  3. Personalized Email Sequences: Create customized email sequences for both leads and existing customers.

 

HubSpot offers several pricing tiers:

  • Free Plan: Includes one deal pipeline, unlimited users for one team or department, and up to one million contacts, companies, deals, or task details. It’s a great starting point for small businesses.
  • Starter Plan: If you need more features, the Starter Plan starts at $30 per month (billed annually). It includes additional functionalities like calling (up to 15 minutes), templates, notifications (up to 200), snippets (reusable text blurbs), and document uploads.
  • Professional Plan: For more advanced needs, the Professional Plan offers even more features at a higher price point.

I liked that HubSpot has so many different tools in one place, many of them for free. Plus, it’s pretty easy to use. It saves you from the hassle of managing multiple services at the same time. It’s like having a one-stop-shop for all your marketing needs.

  1. Core CRM Software Is Free: You can get started with HubSpot without any upfront costs.
  2. Real-Time Lead Behaviors Notification: Stay informed about lead interactions instantly.
  3. Personalized Email Sequences: Tailor your communication to engage both leads and existing customers effectively.

On the flip side, because it does so much, it can be a bit overwhelming for new users.

  1. Per-User Plans Can Get Expensive for Small Businesses: As your team grows, costs may increase significantly.
  2. Only One Email Per Contact: Keep in mind that you can send only one email per contact.

Overall, I think HubSpot is a great tool, especially if you want to do a lot of different kinds of marketing. HubSpot is well-designed and widely used across various industries. However, consider your business size and future growth when evaluating whether it’s the right fit for you. While HubSpot offers an excellent product, there are more cost-effective alternatives available.

Remember that choosing the right marketing tool depends on your current list size and where you expect it to be in the coming years.

Try Hubspot

Hootsuite:

Hootsuit social media management

 

The Social Media Maestro. Managing multiple social media platforms can be quite a task, right? But what if you had a tool that could manage all your social media platforms in one place? Sounds interesting? That’s exactly what Hootsuite does!

A powerful social media management tool that simplifies the process of handling multiple social media accounts. Whether you’re a professional, part of a small team, or running a small-medium business, Hootsuite has features that can help you streamline your social media marketing efforts.

Before we delve into the details, let’s understand how Hootsuite came to be. Back in the day, before Facebook took over the social media landscape, platforms like Friendster and MySpace made attempts at connecting people online. However, it was Facebook that truly revolutionized social media. Brands quickly realized its potential for running banner ads and engaging with customers. Enter Hootsuite, born out of the need to manage multiple social media accounts effectively.

Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social networks, schedule posts, and measure your success all in one place.

  1. Unified Dashboard: Hootsuite provides a single dashboard where you can design, schedule, and publish content across various networks. From Instagram to Facebook, TikTok to Twitter, YouTube to Pinterest, and more—you can manage them all from one place.
  2. Streams: The Streams feature allows you to monitor different social media channels simultaneously. Set up Streams to track mentions, keywords, hashtags, or posts from specific accounts. It’s not only useful for monitoring but also for content creation and engaging in conversations.
  3. Automatic Scheduling: Save time by scheduling your posts in advance. Hootsuite’s scheduling feature ensures your content reaches your audience at optimal times.
  4. Analytics: Hootsuite Analytics provides in-depth performance reporting. Track metrics like fans and followers, engagement levels, traffic sources, and more. You can even schedule reports for automatic distribution via email—perfect for client reporting.
  5. Collaboration: Assign tasks to team members within Hootsuite. This feature is crucial for businesses providing customer service support on social media.

Hootsuite offers various pricing tiers to suit different needs:

  • Free Account: While limited in functionality, it’s a great way to get started.
  • Paid Plans: Pricing starts at $739 per year for professionals and small teams.

Hootsuite is like your personal social media manager. It saves you time and helps you stay organized.

  • Easy sign-up process
  • Ability to connect multiple accounts (including YouTube)
  • Post scheduling
  • Free account option (albeit with limitations)
  • Intuitive analytics

The interface can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.

  • Learning curve for all features
  • Costs can add up if you need additional team members .

In summary, Hootsuite simplifies social media management by offering essential features like scheduling, monitoring, analytics, and collaboration—all from one platform. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced marketer, Hootsuite can help you stay organized and efficient in your social media efforts.

Remember: Social media marketing is about building relationships with your audience—so use Hootsuite wisely! 

Try Hootsuit

MarketMuse

MarketMuse data driven content

Next, we have MarketMuse. This tool is like a personal assistant that helps you write better content. It uses AI to suggest topics and keywords that will attract more readers. Think about an AI-powered content planning platform that’s famous for its advanced SEO and planning functions. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced marketer, MarketMuse provides valuable insights to enhance your content creation and optimization efforts.

MarketMuse examines the top-ranking pages for your chosen topic and suggests ways to make your content better.

  1. SERP Analysis: MarketMuse excels in analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs). It helps you understand what content ranks well for specific keywords, allowing you to optimize your own content effectively.
  2. Content Optimization: MarketMuse provides topic-based keyword research and content optimization features. These tools help you create high-quality, relevant content that resonates with your audience.
  3. Keyword Relevance: Finding the right keywords is crucial for successful SEO. MarketMuse simplifies this process by suggesting relevant keywords based on your content plan.

MarketMuse offers several pricing tiers:

  • Free: Limited access with basic features.
  • Standard: Priced at $149 per month (or $1500 annually), this plan provides more comprehensive features.
  • Team: For $399 per month (or $3900 annually), the Team plan caters to collaborative efforts.
  • Custom: If you need personalized features, MarketMuse offers custom pricing based on your requirements.

I really liked how MarketMuse helps you understand what your customers are looking for. It can save you a lot of time and guesswork.

  • Advanced SEO Insights: MarketMuse’s SERP analysis and content optimization features are top-notch.
  • Keyword Research Made Easy: Finding relevant keywords becomes a breeze with MarketMuse.
  • Optimized Content Creation: While it won’t replace full-blown SEO efforts, MarketMuse helps you create optimized content efficiently.

However, it’s a bit pricey, especially for smaller businesses.

  • Learning Curve: Some users may find the platform slightly challenging initially.
  • Not a Complete SEO Solution: While powerful, MarketMuse should complement other SEO tools rather than replace them entirely.

Overall, I highly recommend considering MarketMuse for your content marketing needs. With its advanced AI technology, it can greatly improve your content creation process and help you achieve better results.

MarketMuse strikes a balance between simplicity and functionality. It’s an excellent choice for marketers looking to enhance their content strategy without overwhelming complexity. Remember that no tool is a magic bullet; use MarketMuse alongside other SEO practices for optimal results.

Try MarketMuse

Chatfuel

Chatfuel AI Marketing Service

 

Fourth, we’ll look at Chatfuel which we can describe as : Simplifying Business Communication

In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses need efficient tools to streamline communication and enhance customer engagement. Chatbots have emerged as powerful allies, automating interactions and providing timely responses.

It’s a tool that helps you build chatbots. What’s a chatbot? Imagine a robot that can chat with your customers on your website or social media, answering their questions and helping them find what they need.

With Chatfuel, you can build a chatbot without knowing any code. It also lets you customize your chatbot to match your brand.

  1. User-Friendly Interface: Chatfuel’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows even beginners to create chatbots without extensive technical knowledge. No coding required!
  2. AI-Powered Chatbots: With advanced AI technology, Chatfuel enables businesses to build smart chatbots capable of handling complex customer interactions. These bots can provide personalized responses, improving user experience.
  3. Seamless Integrations: Chatfuel smoothly integrates with popular messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This ensures your chatbot reaches your audience where they already spend their time.
  4. Rich Media Support: Enhance your chatbots with images, videos, and GIFs. Visual content makes interactions more engaging and dynamic.
  5. Analytics and Insights: Detailed analytics help you track chatbot performance, identify trends, and optimize effectiveness. Data-driven decisions lead to better outcomes.

Chatfuel offers flexible pricing options:

  1. Free Trial: Test the waters with 50 conversations per month.
  2. Entrepreneur Plan: Starting at $14.99/month, this plan provides 500 conversations.
  3. Startup Plan: For more conversations, the Startup plan begins at $24.99/month.

I was impressed by how easy it is to build a chatbot with Chatfuel. Plus, it can help you assist customers 24/7 without having to hire extra staff.

  • User-friendly interface for easy bot creation.
  • AI-powered chatbots handle complex interactions.
  • Seamless integrations with popular platforms.
  • Rich media support enhances engagement.
  • Detailed analytics for data-driven decisions.

But, there’s a learning curve to figure out how to make the most of it.

  • Free plan limitations on subscribers and interactions.
  • Learning curve for advanced features.
  • Platform dependency on external services like Facebook Messenger.
  • Limited customization options for specific branding needs.
  • Customer support response times could improve.

Overall, Chatfuel is a powerful tool for businesses who want to improve their customer service. The service is worth examining for its ability to build chatbots without any coding knowledge and its potential to enhance your customer service. However, there is a slight learning curve to fully utilize its features.

Chatfuel empowers businesses to improve customer service, lead generation, engagement, and sales. Whether you’re a local brand or a market giant like Adidas or Netflix, Chatfuel’s safe integrations and user-friendly platform make it a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal.

Try Chatfuel

SEMrush

SEMRUSH-SEO-MANAGEMENT

 

Finally, we have SEMrush. It’s a tool that helps you understand how your website is doing compared to others. It uses AI to analyze lots of data and give you insights.

In the vast digital landscape, businesses strive to rank higher in search results and increase their online visibility. Enter SEMrush, an all-in-one SEO platform designed to help achieve these goals.

How SEMrush Works

SEMrush provides an in-depth analysis of websites, offering insights into search engine optimization (SEO), competitor analysis, keyword research, organic traffic growth, backlink insights, SEO auditing, and social media analytics.

SEMrush gives you data about your website’s traffic, the keywords you’re ranking for, and more.

  1. Keyword Research: SEMrush boasts the world’s largest keyword database with over 20 billion keywords. It helps businesses discover relevant keywords for their content.
  2. Rank Tracking: Monitor your website’s performance in search engine rankings over time.
  3. Website Audit: Identify and fix on-page SEO issues to improve your site’s health.
  4. Competitor Analysis: Understand your competitors’ strategies and discover opportunities.
  5. Backlink Insights: Analyze your backlink profile for better link-building strategies.
  6. Local SEO: Optimize for local searches with location-specific keywords.
  7. Social Media Toolkit: Gain insights into your social media performance.
  8. PageImprove: Enhance on-page SEO directly from your Chrome browser.
  9. Keyword Gap Tool: Identify keywords where competitors outperform you.

What Sets SEMrush Apart?

  • Robust Feature Set: SEMrush offers a comprehensive suite of tools for SEO, content marketing, and social media management.
  • Unique Add-ons: Features like online reputation management, heat maps, trends analysis, lead finder, and client portal set SEMrush apart.
  • Industry-Leading API: Access data programmatically for advanced users.

SEMRush pricing

 

  • Free Plan: Limited to 10 requests per day.
  • Paid Plans: Starting at $108.33 per month (billed annually).

  • All-in-one SEO suite.
  • Content marketing tools.
  • Advertising insights.
  • Local SEO support.
  • Social media analytics.

  • Limited free plan.
  • Expensive premium plans.
  • Some features may have a learning curve.
  • No 24-hour customer support.

In conclusion, SEMrush is a powerful tool for improving online visibility and driving organic traffic. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or just starting out, SEMrush has something to offer.

Remember: Keep learning and exploring—your digital success awaits!

Who Is SEMrush Best For?

  • Bloggers and influencers.
  • Businesses of all sizes seeking online growth.
  • Marketing agencies.
Try SEMrush

Final Words

So, there you have it: five of the best AI marketing tools. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, so the best tool for you depends on what you need. Do you want a tool that does it all, like HubSpot? Or do you need something more specialized, like HootSuite, MarketMuse, Chatfuel, or SEMrush? By understanding what each tool offers, you can make an informed decision and take your marketing to the next level.

Ultimately, each of these tools has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to carefully consider your specific needs before making a decision. With these powerful AI marketing tools at your disposal, you can take your marketing strategy to the next level and achieve success in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Disclosure: Please note that we may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below, at no expense to you, should you decide to purchase a paid plan. This blog does not provide financial advice, it is purely for entertainment and fun.

Best AI Email Marketing Tools of 2024 (Tested)

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your audience, whether you want to promote your products, share your content, or build your brand. In fact, email marketing has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. However, with so many email marketing software and services available in the market, how do you choose the best one for your needs?

In this post, we will compare and review some of the best email marketing software and services in 2024, based on their key features, pros and cons, plans and pricing, and more. We hope this will help you make an informed decision and find the best email marketing solution for your business.

HubSpot

HubSpot Marketing Tools

 

One of the most popular email marketing services in the market is HubSpot, a platform that offers a range of free AI tools for marketing, sales, and customer service. In this post, we will review HubSpot’s email marketing service, including its key features, pros and cons, plans and pricing, and overall conclusion.

HubSpot’s email marketing service is part of its Marketing Hub product, which also includes tools for landing pages, forms, ads, social media, SEO, analytics, and more. Here are some of the key features:

Key Features

  • Drag and drop editor: You can create beautiful emails that display perfectly across any device using HubSpot’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor. You can choose from dozens of free templates that are proven to convert, or customize your own layout with images, videos, buttons, and other elements.
  • CRM-powered personalization: You can tailor your emails to each recipient based on their lifecycle stage, list membership, or any information in their contact record. You can use personalization tokens to insert dynamic content such as name, company, location, or custom fields. You can also segment your contacts based on various criteria and send targeted campaigns to different audiences.
  • A/B testing and analytics: You can test different versions of your emails to see which subject lines, content, or CTAs perform better. You can also track the performance of your campaigns with detailed analytics that show you open rates, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, conversions, and more. You can also see how your email marketing impacts your overall marketing goals and revenue.
  • Email deliverability: You can ensure that your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes and avoid spam filters with HubSpot’s email health score. This feature gives you feedback on your email reputation and best practices to improve it. You can also use HubSpot’s own domain to send emails or connect your own domain for more branding control.

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Pros:

  • Easy to use: HubSpot’s email marketing service is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive. You don’t need any coding or design skills to create professional-looking emails that match your brand and style.
  • Integrated with CRM: HubSpot’s email marketing service is built on top of its CRM platform, which means you can leverage your customer data to personalize and segment your emails. You can also sync your email campaigns with other tools in HubSpot’s ecosystem such as landing pages, forms, ads, social media, etc.
  • Powerful features: HubSpot’s email marketing service offers a range of features that can help you create engaging and effective campaigns. You can use drag-and-drop editor, personalization tokens, A/B testing, analytics, email health score, and more to optimize your emails for conversions and revenue.

Cons:

  • Pricey: HubSpot’s email marketing service is not cheap compared to other alternatives in the market. The free plan only allows you to send up to 2,000 emails per month and has limited features. The paid plans start from $50 per month for up to 1,000 contacts and go up to $3,200 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.
  • Limited customization: HubSpot’s email marketing service offers a lot of templates and elements to choose from, but it also limits your customization options. For example, you cannot edit the HTML or CSS code of your emails or use custom fonts or colors. You also cannot create complex layouts or animations with the drag-and-drop editor.
  • Learning curve: HubSpot’s email marketing service is easy to use once you get familiar with it, but it also has a learning curve. You need to understand how HubSpot’s CRM works and how to set up your contacts, lists, workflows, etc. You also need to learn how to use the various features and tools in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub.

 

Plans and Pricing

HubSpot Plans and pricing

 

HubSpot’s email marketing service is available in four plans: Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. Here is a summary of the plans and pricing:

  • Free: You can send up to 2,000 emails per month and use basic features such as drag-and-drop editor, CRM integration, email health score, and analytics. You also get access to HubSpot’s free CRM and other tools such as forms, live chat, and ads.
  • Starter: You can send up to 5x your contact tier per month and use additional features such as personalization tokens, A/B testing, list segmentation, and email tracking. You also get access to HubSpot’s other tools such as landing pages, social media, SEO, and more. The price starts from $45 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers.
  • Professional: You can send up to 10x your contact tier per month and use advanced features such as smart content, smart send times, video hosting, and marketing automation. You also get access to HubSpot’s other tools such as blog, CMS, analytics, and more. The price starts from $95 per month for up to 2,000 subscribers.
  • Enterprise: You can send up to 10x your contact tier per month and use premium features such as adaptive testing, custom reporting, partitioning, and single sign-on. You also get access to HubSpot’s other tools such as revenue attribution, account-based marketing, predictive lead scoring, and more. The price starts from $395 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers.
Hubspot price list

You can also add more contacts to any plan for an additional fee. You can check the latest pricing and details on HubSpot’s website.

Overall Conclusion

HubSpot’s email marketing service is a powerful and easy-to-use platform that can help you create and send professional, personalized, and relevant emails to your audience and customers. It offers a range of features and tools that can help you optimize your campaigns for conversions and revenue. It also integrates seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM and other products to create a unified marketing experience.

However, HubSpot’s email marketing service is also expensive compared to other alternatives in the market. It also has some limitations in terms of customization and flexibility. It also requires some time and effort to learn how to use it effectively.

Therefore, HubSpot’s email marketing service is best suited for marketers who are looking for a comprehensive and integrated solution that can handle all their email marketing needs. It is also ideal for marketers who have a large budget and a high volume of contacts. However, if you are looking for a cheaper or simpler option that can still deliver results, you may want to consider other email marketing services in the market.

Brevo

Brevo Email Marketing

 

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is another well-known email marketing service that offers a range of features for small and medium-sized businesses.

Key Features

  • Email Marketing: Brevo lets you create and send beautiful email campaigns using drag-and-drop templates, personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing. You can also track and optimize your email performance with real-time analytics and reports.
  • SMS Marketing: Sendinblue allows you to send text messages to your contacts with the same ease as email. You can use SMS for transactional messages, reminders, confirmations, promotions, and more.
  • Marketing Automation: Brevo enables you to automate your marketing workflows with triggers and actions. You can set up email and SMS sequences based on user behavior, such as cart abandonment, welcome emails, birthday messages, etc.
  • CRM: Brevo includes a basic CRM tool that helps you manage your contacts and sales pipeline. You can add notes, tasks, deals, and custom fields to your contacts, and sync them with your email and SMS campaigns.
  • Chat: Brevo offers a live chat feature that lets you communicate with your website visitors in real time. You can customize your chat widget, set up chatbots, and integrate with other platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
  • Transactional Email: Brevo provides a reliable email API that delivers your transactional emails with a 99% delivery rate. You can send emails such as password resets, order confirmations, invoices, etc., with dynamic content and personalization.

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Pros:

  • Free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day and store unlimited contacts
  • Simple and transparent pricing structure that is based on the number of emails you send per month. You can also choose a pay-as-you-go option for SMS credits
  • User-friendly interface that makes it easy to create and manage your email marketing campaigns
  • Wide range of integrations with other platforms and tools, such as WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, etc.

Cons:

  • Strict verification process that may take some time before you can start sending emails. You may need to provide proof of identity and consent from your contacts
  • Some limitations on the data import and export functions. You may not be able to import or export large files or certain formats
  • Separate service for advanced template creation that requires an additional fee. You may not be able to customize your templates as much as you want without this service.

 

Plans and Pricing

Brevo Email Marketing Pricing

 

Brevo has four main plans: Free, Lite, Premium, and Enterprise:

  • The Free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day and store unlimited contacts. It also includes email marketing, SMS marketing (pay-as-you-go), CRM, chat (one agent), transactional email (API only), landing pages (one page), signup forms (one form), Facebook ads (one ad), and segmentation (one segment).
  • The Starter plan starts at $25 per month for 10,000 emails and goes up to $99 per month for 100,000 emails. It includes everything in the Free plan plus no daily sending limit, A/B testing (email only), advanced statistics (email only), email support (12 hours), phone support (12 hours), landing pages (five pages), signup forms (five forms), Facebook ads (five ads), segmentation (five segments), marketing automation workflows (five workflows), transactional email (SMTP + API), chatbots (one bot), WhatsApp Business API integration (pay-as-you-go).
  • The Business plan starts at $65 per month for 20,000 emails and goes up to $599 per month for 1 million emails. It includes everything in the Lite plan plus multi-user access (three users), advanced statistics (email + SMS), email support (24/7), phone support (24/7), landing pages (unlimited pages), signup forms (unlimited forms), Facebook ads (unlimited ads), segmentation (unlimited segments), marketing automation workflows (unlimited workflows), chatbots (unlimited bots), WhatsApp Business API integration (free setup + pay-as-you-go).
  • The Brevo Plus plan is a custom plan for larger organizations that need more than 1 million emails per month. It includes everything in the Premium plan plus dedicated account manager, priority sending, custom setup, custom reporting, custom volume and pricing, and more.

Overall Conclusion

Brevo is a great email marketing service for small and medium-sized businesses that want to grow their email list, send engaging email campaigns, and automate their marketing workflows. It offers a range of features, such as email marketing, SMS marketing, CRM, chat, transactional email, and more, at an affordable price. It also has a user-friendly interface and a wide range of integrations with other platforms and tools.

However, Brevo also has some drawbacks, such as a strict verification process, some limitations on data import and export, and a separate service for advanced template creation. You may also need to upgrade to a higher plan to access some of the features, such as A/B testing, advanced statistics, chatbots, WhatsApp Business API integration, etc.

Overall, Brevo is a good choice for email marketing if you are looking for a simple and transparent pricing structure, a generous free plan, and a comprehensive marketing hub that covers email, SMS, chat, and more.

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns Email Marketing

 

One of the email marketing services that you might want to consider is Zoho Campaigns. Zoho Campaigns is part of the Zoho suite of products, which offers various solutions for business productivity and collaboration. Zoho Campaigns allows you to design beautiful emails, segment your contacts, automate your workflows, and measure your results.

Key Features

  • Drag-and-drop editor: You can easily create stunning emails with the drag-and-drop editor, which lets you customize your layout, add images, videos, buttons, social media icons, and more. You can also choose from over 250 pre-designed templates or import your own HTML code.
  • Contact management: You can import your contacts from various sources, such as Zoho CRM, Google Contacts, Eventbrite, Shopify, and more. You can also segment your contacts based on various criteria, such as demographics, behavior, preferences, and more. This way, you can send personalized and relevant emails to each segment.
  • Automation: You can automate your email campaigns based on triggers and actions. For example, you can send a welcome email when someone subscribes to your list, send a follow-up email when someone opens or clicks your email, send a reminder email when someone abandons their cart, and more. You can also create workflows to nurture your leads and move them along the sales funnel.
  • Analytics: You can track and measure the performance of your email campaigns with various metrics, such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, and more. You can also view detailed reports on your campaign activity, subscriber behavior, device usage, location, and more. You can also integrate Zoho Campaigns with Google Analytics to get more insights into your website traffic and conversions.
  • A/B testing: You can test different versions of your emails to see which one performs better. You can test various elements of your emails, such as subject line, sender name, content, layout, images, call-to-action buttons, and more. You can also set your test duration and sample size and let Zoho Campaigns automatically send the winning version to the rest of your list.
  • Social media integration: You can integrate Zoho Campaigns with various social media platforms, such as Facebook,

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Pros:

  • Generous free plan that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers.
  • Integrates seamlessly with other Zoho apps as well as popular third-party services like WordPress, Shopify, Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, etc.
  • Provides a lot of flexibility and customization options for creating and sending emails.
  • Supports multiple languages and currencies for global email marketing.
  • It has a responsive and helpful customer support team that is available via phone, email, chat, or social media.

Cons:

  • Steep learning curve for beginners who might find it overwhelming or confusing at first.
  • Some limitations on the number of contacts you can import or export at a time.
  • It does not offer advanced features like landing pages or webinars that some competitors do.

 

Plans and Pricing

Zoho plans and pricing

 

Zoho Campaigns offers three pricing plans based on the number of subscribers you have:

  • Free: This plan allows you to send up to 6,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 contacts. It includes all the basic features like drag-and-drop editor, list management, automation, personalization, analytics, social media integration, etc.
  • Standard: This plan allows you to send unlimited emails per month based on the number of subscribers you have. The pricing starts from $3 per month for up to 500 subscribers and goes up to $182 per month for up to 100k subscribers. It includes all the features of the free plan plus advanced features like A/B testing, deliverability tools, advanced ready-made email templates, dynamic content, etc.
  • Professional: This plan allows you to buy email credits based on the number of emails you want to send. The pricing starts from $3.75 for 500 contacts and goes up to $262 for 100k contacts. It includes all the features of the standard plan plus priority support, email polls, cart abandonment and purchase follow-ups with workflows, contact scoring and tags and more.

You can also get a 25% discount if you pay annually instead of monthly.

Overall Conclusion

Zoho Campaigns is a powerful email marketing service that can help you create, send, and track your campaigns with ease and efficiency. It offers a lot of features and integrations that can suit your email marketing needs and goals. It also has a generous free plan and affordable pricing plans that can fit your budget and scale with your business growth.

However, Zoho Campaigns is not perfect; It might be too complex or confusing for beginners or too limited or lacking for advanced users.

Therefore, we recommend that you try Zoho Campaigns for yourself and see if it meets
your expectations and requirements.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing

 

ActiveCampaign is more than just an email marketing service. It is a complete marketing automation platform that allows you to create and manage email campaigns, landing pages, web forms, CRM contacts, sales pipelines, and more.

Key Features

  • Email Marketing: You can create beautiful and responsive emails using ActiveCampaign’s drag-and-drop editor or choose from hundreds of pre-designed templates. You can also use dynamic content and conditional logic to personalize your emails based on your contacts’ behavior and preferences.
  • Marketing Automation: You can automate your entire marketing funnel using ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation builder. You can create workflows based on triggers, actions, and conditions to send targeted emails, SMS messages, web notifications, and more. You can also use automation maps to visualize and optimize your customer journey.
  • Segmentation and Tagging: You can segment your contacts based on various criteria such as location, activity, interests, purchase history, etc. You can also use tags to label your contacts based on their actions or attributes. Segmentation and tagging help you deliver relevant and personalized messages to your audience.
  • CRM and Sales Automation: You can manage your leads and customers using ActiveCampaign’s built-in CRM system. You can create custom fields, stages, tasks, and deals to track your sales pipeline. You can also use sales automation to follow up with your prospects automatically and move them along the funnel.
  • Landing Pages and Web Forms: You can create stunning landing pages and web forms using ActiveCampaign’s easy-to-use tools. You can customize your pages and forms with your own branding, images, videos, etc. You can also use A/B testing to optimize your conversions.
  • Reporting and Analytics: You can measure the performance of your campaigns using ActiveCampaign’s comprehensive reporting and analytics features. You can track metrics such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, revenue, etc. You can also use attribution reporting to understand which channels and campaigns are driving the most sales.

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Pros:

  • Offers advanced features such as automation, segmentation, personalization, CRM, landing pages, etc. that can help you create and manage sophisticated marketing campaigns.
  • User-friendly interface that is easy to navigate and use. It also has a lot of tutorials, guides, videos, and support resources to help you get started and troubleshoot any issues.
  • Flexible pricing structure that is based on the number of contacts you have. You can choose from four plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. Each plan offers different features and benefits depending on your needs.
  • Integrates with over 300 third-party apps and tools such as WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, etc. This allows you to connect ActiveCampaign with your existing tools and platforms.

Cons:

  • It can be overwhelming for beginners or small businesses who don’t need all the advanced features or who have a limited budget. It may take some time and effort to learn how to use ActiveCampaign effectively.
  • Some limitations in terms of email design and customization. For example, you cannot edit the HTML code of your emails or use custom fonts or colors. You also cannot preview how your emails will look on different devices or email clients.
  • Some issues with deliverability and spam complaints. Some users have reported that their emails end up in the spam folder or get blocked by some email providers. This may affect your open rate and reputation.

 

Plans and Pricing

ActiveCampaign Pricing

 

ActiveCampaign offers four plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The pricing of each plan depends on the number of contacts you have.

  • The Lite plan starts from $9 per month for up to 500 contacts. It includes features such as email marketing, marketing automation, newsletter sending, subscription forms, and chat & email support, up to 3 users.
  • The Plus plan starts from $49 per month for up to 500 contacts. It includes all the features of the Lite plan plus: AI content generation,CRM with sales automation, contact & lead scoring, deep data integrations, custom user permissions, custom domain, one-on-one training, up to 3 users.
  • The Professional plan starts from $149 per month for up to 500 contacts. It includes all the features of the Plus plan plus: AI predictive sending, site messaging, attribution reporting, predictive sending, predictive content, win probability, and up to 5 users.
  • The Enterprise plan starts from $249 per month for up to 500 contacts. It includes all the features of the Professional plan plus: custom reporting (beta), custom mail-server domain, dedicated account rep, in-depth onboarding, free design services, free social data, phone support, uptime SLA, and unlimited users.

You can also get a 14-day free trial to test out ActiveCampaign before committing to a paid plan.

Overall Conclusion

ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing service that offers advanced features such as automation,
segmentation, personalization, CRM, landing pages, and more.

It is suitable for businesses that want to create and manage sophisticated marketing campaigns that can drive more conversions and revenue.

However, it may not be the best option for beginners or small businesses who don’t need all the advanced features or who have a limited budget. It also has some limitations in terms of email design
and customization and some issues with deliverability and spam complaints.

Therefore, you should weigh the pros and cons of ActiveCampaign before choosing it for your business.

Moosend

Moosend EmailMarketing

 

Moosend is a platform that helps you create, send and track email campaigns that engage your audience and grow your business.

Key Features

  • Email Marketing: You can create beautiful, professional email campaigns using Moosend’s drag-and-drop newsletter editor or choose from hundreds of ready-made templates. You can also personalize your emails with dynamic content and custom fields, and segment your audience based on their behavior and preferences.
  • Marketing Automation: You can automate your email marketing workflows with Moosend’s intuitive automation builder. You can set up triggers and actions based on your subscribers’ actions, such as cart abandonment, purchase confirmation, welcome series and more. You can also use Moosend’s AI product recommendation feature to send personalized product suggestions to your customers based on their browsing history and purchase patterns.
  • Landing Pages: You can create stunning landing pages with Moosend’s landing page builder. You can choose from a variety of templates or design your own from scratch. You can also integrate your landing pages with your email campaigns and track their performance with Moosend’s analytics tools.
  • Subscription Forms: You can grow your email list with Moosend’s subscription forms. You can create pop-ups, inline forms, floating bars and more with Moosend’s form builder. You can also customize your forms with different colors, fonts, images and animations, and target them to specific segments of your website visitors.
  • Tracking: You can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns with Moosend’s tracking tools. You can see how many people opened, clicked, bounced or unsubscribed from your emails, as well as how much revenue they generated. You can also see how your landing pages and subscription forms are performing, and get insights into your audience’s behavior and interests.

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Pros:

  • Affordable: Moosend has a flexible pricing model that suits different needs and budgets. You can use Moosend for free if you have up to 1,000 subscribers, and pay as you grow for more subscribers and features. Moosend also offers a 20% discount for annual plans and a 15% discount for non-profit organizations.
  • Powerful: Moosend has a robust set of features that help you deliver email marketing campaigns that drive results. You can create personalized, automated and responsive email campaigns that engage your audience and increase conversions. You can also integrate Moosend with other tools and platforms that you use for your business, such as Shopify, WordPress, Zapier and more.
  • Easy to use: Moosend has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to create and manage your email marketing campaigns. You don’t need any coding or design skills to use Moosend’s features.

Cons:

  • Limited support: Moosend offers email and live chat support for its users, but it does not have phone support or a dedicated account manager. You might have to wait for a response or rely on the online help center if you have any issues or questions.
  • Limited templates: Moosend has a decent collection of templates for email campaigns, landing pages and subscription forms, but it could offer more variety and customization options. Some of the templates look outdated or generic, and you might have to tweak them to fit your brand identity and style.
  • Limited analytics: Moosend has basic analytics tools that show you the performance of your email campaigns, landing pages and subscription forms, but it could offer more advanced and in-depth reports. For example, you might want to see how your campaigns perform across different devices, locations or time zones, or how they affect other metrics such as retention or churn.

 

Plans and Pricing

Moosend Plans and pricing

 

Moosend has three main plans: Free, Pro and Enterprise:

  • The Free plan allows you to have up to 1,000 subscribers and access to all the core features of Moosend, including 12,000 emails per month, and basic features such as email marketing, automation, and landing pages.
  • The Pro plan starts from $7 per month (annually) and climbs for up to 1 Million subscribers and gives you access to more features such as unlimited email credits, advanced segmentation, and A/B testing.
  • The Enterprise plan is customized for large businesses that need more subscribers, features and support, with up to 1 Million subscribers. It includes all of the features of the Essential Plan, plus custom development, white-labeling, and dedicated account manager.

Moosend also offers a Pay-as-you-go Plan. This plan is a good option for businesses that only need to send a limited number of emails per month. You only pay for the emails you send, and there are no contracts or commitments.

Moosend offers a 30-day free trial of all of its plans. This gives you a chance to try out the service before you commit to a plan.

Overall Conclusion

Moosend is a great email marketing software that offers a lot of value for its price. It has a simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy to create and manage your email marketing campaigns. It has a powerful and flexible set of features that help you deliver personalized, automated and responsive email campaigns that engage your audience and grow your business. It has a generous and affordable pricing model that suits different needs and budgets. However, Moosend also has some drawbacks, such as limited support, templates and analytics. You might want to compare Moosend with other email marketing software before making a final decision.

GetResponse

GetResponse Email Marketing

 

GetResponse is another popular email marketing software option. It offers a wide range of features, including email automation, landing pages, and webinars.

Key Features

  • Create and send professional-looking emails with drag-and-drop email creator, free templates, and AI email generator
  • Grow your email list with lead generation tools such as landing pages, popups, forms, and webinars
  • Automate your email marketing with autoresponders, automation workflows, segmentation, and personalization
  • Boost your online sales with e-commerce features such as sales funnels, web push notifications, transactional emails, and integrations with popular platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce
  • Track and analyze your email marketing performance with reports, analytics, A/B testing, and deliverability tools

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Pros:

  • Free plan for up to 500 contacts and 1 user, which is great for beginners and small businesses who want to test the service before upgrading
  • User-friendly interface that makes it easy to create and manage your email campaigns
  • Wide range of features and solutions that cater to different types of businesses and goals, from entrepreneurs to large companies
  • High deliverability rate of 99%, which means your emails are more likely to reach your subscribers’ inboxes
  • Responsive customer support team that is available 24/7 via chat, email, and phone

Cons:

  • Does not offer a free trial for its paid plans, which means you have to pay upfront to access its premium features
  • Charges you based on the total number of contacts in your account, not on the number of active subscribers or emails sent
  • Limits some of its features based on the plan you choose, such as automation workflows, webinars, e-commerce features, and custom domains
  • Does not have a native mobile app for managing your email campaigns on the go

 

Plans and Pricing

GetResponse Pricing

 

GetResponse offers four main plans: Free, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, and E-Commerce. The pricing varies depending on the number of contacts you have in your account. Here are the prices for each plan based on 1,000 contacts::

  • Free: $0 per month includes email marketing, website builder, landing pages, forms, popups.
  • Email Marketing: $15.58 per month includes everything in Free plus AI email generator, automation templates, newsletters, basic segmentation, more.
  • Marketing Automation: $48.38 per month includes everything in Email Marketing plus automation builder, webinars, contact scoring, sales funnels, more.
  • Ecommerce: $97.58 per month includes everything in Marketing Automation plus paid webinars, unlimited automation workflows, abandoned cart recovery, transactional emails, promo codes, more.

There is also a custom plan called Max for large clients who need more advanced features and dedicated support. You can contact GetResponse for a custom quote.

Overall Conclusion

GetResponse is a professional email marketing service that offers a lot of value for its price. It has a range of features and solutions that can help you grow your audience, engage with customers, and boost online sales. It also has a high deliverability rate and a responsive customer support team.

However, GetResponse also has some drawbacks that you should consider before choosing it as your email marketing service. It does not offer a free trial for its paid plans, it charges you based on the total number of contacts in your account regardless of their activity level or emails sent frequency , it limits some of its features based on the plan you choose ,and it does not have a native mobile app.

Overall , I would recommend GetResponse to anyone who is looking for a reliable and powerful email marketing service that can handle different types of online marketing needs.

MailerLite

MailerLite Email Marketing

 

If you are looking for a simple, affordable and effective way to grow your online business, you might want to consider MailerLite as your email marketing service. MailerLite is a platform that offers a range of features to help you create, send and manage your email campaigns, as well as build websites, landing pages, signup forms and more.

Key Features

  • Email marketing: You can create engaging newsletters with a drag and drop editor, or use one of the pre-designed templates. You can also segment your audience based on various criteria, such as location, interests, behavior and more. You can also personalize your emails with dynamic content and custom fields.
  • Automation: You can set up automated workflows to send targeted emails based on triggers, such as subscription date, website activity, purchase history and more. You can also use automation templates to quickly build common scenarios, such as welcome series, cart abandonment, re-engagement and more.
  • Website builder: You can create stunning websites with MailerLite’s website builder, which lets you customize your design with a drag and drop interface. You can also add a blog to your website and publish posts with ease.
  • Landing pages: You can create landing pages to collect leads, sell products, promote events and more. You can choose from a variety of templates or create your own from scratch. You can also integrate your landing pages with other tools, such as Stripe, Shopify and WooCommerce.
  • Signup forms: You can grow your email list with various types of signup forms, such as pop-ups, embedded forms, slide-ins and more. You can also use the iPad Subscribe App to collect subscribers offline at events or stores.
  • Digital products: You can sell digital products directly from your email campaigns or landing pages with MailerLite’s digital products feature. You can upload your files, set your price and accept payments via Stripe.
  • Paid newsletter subscriptions: You can monetize your audience by offering paid newsletter subscriptions with MailerLite’s paid newsletter subscriptions feature. You can set up recurring payments via Stripe and manage your subscribers easily.

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Pros:

  • Simple and intuitive interface: MailerLite has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate and use. You don’t need any coding or design skills to create beautiful emails and websites with MailerLite.
  • Affordable pricing: MailerLite has a generous free plan that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 1,000 subscribers. The paid plans start from $10 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails. The pricing is based on the number of subscribers only, not on the features or usage.
  • Excellent customer support: MailerLite has a 24/7 customer support team that is always ready to help you with any issues or questions. You can contact them via live chat, email or phone. They also have a 97% satisfaction rate and a 5-minute average response time on live chat.
  • Integrations: MailerLite integrates with many popular tools and platforms that you might already use for your online business, such as WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, Stripe and more. This allows you to sync your data and automate your workflows seamlessly.

Cons:

  • Limited advanced features: MailerLite is a great option for beginners and small businesses who need a simple and effective email marketing service. However, if you need more advanced features or functionality, such as A/B testing, advanced reporting or CRM integration, you might find MailerLite lacking in some aspects.
  • Strict approval process: MailerLite has a strict approval process for new accounts and campaigns to ensure quality and compliance. This means that you might have to wait for some time before you can start using MailerLite or send your first email. You might also have to provide some proof of your identity and business, such as a website, social media account or phone number.

 

Plans and Pricing

MailerLite Pricing

 

MailerLite has a simple and transparent pricing structure that is based on the number of subscribers you have. You can choose from four plans: Free, $10, $15 and $30 per month. Here is a breakdown of the plans and pricing:

  • Free: You can use MailerLite for free if you have up to 1,000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails per month. You get access to all the features except for live chat support, custom HTML editor, newsletter templates and promotion pop-ups.
  • $10: You can upgrade to the $10 plan if you have up to 1,000 subscribers and want to send unlimited emails per month. You also get access to all the features, including live chat support, custom HTML editor, newsletter templates and promotion pop-ups.
  • $15: You can upgrade to the $15 plan if you have up to 2,500 subscribers and want to send unlimited emails per month. You also get access to all the features, including live chat support, custom HTML editor, newsletter templates and promotion pop-ups.
  • $30: You can upgrade to the $30 plan if you have up to 5,000 subscribers and want to send unlimited emails per month. You also get access to all the features, including live chat support, custom HTML editor, newsletter templates and promotion pop-ups.

You can also choose a custom plan if you have more than 5,000 subscribers or need more features or services. You can contact MailerLite’s sales team for a quote.

Overall Conclusion

MailerLite is a great email marketing service for beginners and small businesses who need a simple, affordable and effective way to grow their online presence and revenue. MailerLite offers a range of features to help you create, send and manage your email campaigns, as well as build websites, landing pages, signup forms and more. MailerLite has a user-friendly interface, a generous free plan, excellent customer support and integrations with many popular tools and platforms. However, MailerLite might not be the best option for you if you need more advanced features or functionality, such as A/B testing, advanced reporting or CRM integration. You might also have to wait for some time before you can start using MailerLite or send your first email due to their strict approval process.

If you are interested in trying out MailerLite for yourself, you can sign up for a free account below and get a free 30-day trial of premium features. No credit card required.

Pabbly

Pabbly Email Marketing

 

Pabbly is an online marketing and sales software that offers various applications to help you grow your business. One of its applications is Pabbly Email Marketing, which claims to be an affordable email marketing solution with high inbox delivery and smart features.

Key Features

  • Unlimited Emails: You can send unlimited emails to your subscribers without any restrictions or extra charges.
  • Inbuilt SMTP Server: You can use Pabbly’s own SMTP server to send your emails or choose from other popular SMTP services like Amazon SES, MailGun, SendGrid, etc.
  • SMTP Routing: You can route your emails through multiple SMTP servers to optimize your deliverability and avoid spam filters.
  • Unlimited Custom Fields: You can create unlimited custom fields to segment your subscribers and personalize your emails.
  • Multi-Step Automations: You can create automated workflows to trigger emails based on various actions and conditions.
  • Drag and Drop Editor: You can design beautiful and responsive emails using Pabbly’s drag and drop editor or choose from hundreds of templates.
  • Advanced Analytics: You can track your email performance with detailed reports on opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.

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Pros:

  • Affordable pricing: Pabbly Email Marketing has a simple and transparent pricing model that starts from $29 per month for 5,000 subscribers. You can also get a 50% discount if you pay for a year in advance. There are no hidden fees or transaction charges.
  • High deliverability: Pabbly Email Marketing claims to have an industry-best inbox delivery rate of 99%. This is because it uses its own SMTP server and allows you to use multiple SMTP services to avoid spam filters and blacklists.
  • Smart features: Pabbly Email Marketing has many smart features that help you create effective email campaigns. For example, you can use autoresponders, scheduling, A/B testing, list cleaning, etc.
  • Customer support: Pabbly Email Marketing has a dedicated customer support team that is available 24/7 via email, chat, phone, and ticket. You can also access a knowledge base, video tutorials, FAQs, etc.

Cons:

  • Limited integrations: Pabbly Email Marketing does not have many integrations with other platforms and tools. You can only integrate it with Pabbly Connect, which is another application from Pabbly that allows you to create automated workflows between different applications.
  • No free plan: Pabbly Email Marketing does not offer a free plan or a free trial. You can only sign up for a paid plan and get a 30-day money-back guarantee.

 

Plans and Pricing

Pabbly Email Marketing Pricing

 

Pabbly Email Marketing has four plans based on the number of subscribers you have. The plans are:

  • Rookie: $24 per month for 5,000 subscribers
  • Pro: $41 per month for 15,000 subscribers
  • Advanced: $83 per month for 50,000 subscribers
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing for more than 50,000 subscribers

All the plans include unlimited emails, inbuilt SMTP server, SMTP routing, unlimited custom fields, multi-step automations, drag and drop editor, advanced analytics, customer support, etc.

You can also get a 50% discount if you pay for a year in advance.

Overall Conclusion

Pabbly Email Marketing is a powerful and affordable email marketing solution that offers high inbox delivery and smart features. It is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses that want to grow their email list and engage their subscribers. However, it may not be the best choice for businesses that need more integrations with other platforms and tools or want to try it out for free before buying.

If you are looking for an email marketing tool that can help you create effective email campaigns without breaking the bank, you should give Pabbly Email Marketing a try. You can sign up for a paid plan and get a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact

 

Constant Contact is a digital and email marketing platform that helps small businesses and nonprofits create, send and track effective online campaigns.

Key Features

  • Easy-to-use email editor with hundreds of pre-designed templates
  • AI and advanced automation tools that generate content and subject lines based on keywords
  • Marketing automation tools that send personalized emails based on triggers and segments
  • SMS marketing feature that allows sending text messages to customers
  • Social media marketing tools that schedule posts, create ads and monitor performance
  • Contact management tools that import, organize and update contacts from various sources
  • Real-time analytics and reporting tools that measure email and campaign performance
  • Subject line testing feature that compares two subject lines and sends the best one
  • Mobile app that enables managing contacts, editing emails and uploading images on the go

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Pros:

  • Offers a free trial for 60 days with no credit card required
  • Has a high deliverability rate of over 97%
  • Provides 24/7 phone and chat support, as well as online resources and webinars
  • Integrates with over 400 apps and services, such as Shopify, WordPress and Salesforce
  • Has a 30-day money-back guarantee for paid plans

Cons:

  • Does not offer a free plan, unlike some of its competitors
  • Charges based on the number of contacts, not the number of emails sent
  • Has limited customization options for email templates and landing pages
  • Does not support advanced features such as A/B testing, dynamic content and behavioral targeting

 

Plans and Pricing

Constant Contact Pricing

 

Constant Contact offers three main plans:

  • Free Trial Constant Contact offers a free 14-day trial of all of its plans. This gives you a chance to try out the platform and see if it’s right for your business.
  • Lite Plan: The Lite Plan costs $12 per month for up to 500 contacts. There is an additional charge of $0.002 per email sent above 500 emails. The Lite Plan is the most basic plan and is designed for businesses with up to 500 contacts. It includes the following features: Basic email marketing, Easy-to-use templates, and Contact management Basic reporting.
  • Standard Plan: The Standard Plan costs $35 per month for up to 5,000 contacts. There is an additional charge of $0.002 per email sent above 5,000 emails.The Standard Plan is a good option for businesses with up to 5,000 contacts. It includes all of the features of the Lite Plan, plus the following: Advanced segmentation, Automation tools, AI Content Generator, and Premium support.
  • Premium Plan: The Premium Plan costs $80 per month for up to 50,000 contacts. There is an additional charge of $0.002 per email sent above 50,000 emails. The Premium Plan is the most comprehensive plan and is designed for businesses with up to 50,000 contacts. It includes all of the features of the Standard Plan, plus the following: Customized automations, Customized segmentation, Advanced reporting, and Premium ads.
  • Custom Plans: If you need more than 50,000 contacts, Constant Contact can create a custom plan for you. To learn more, contact Constant Contact sales.

Overall Conclusion

Constant Contact is a reliable and user-friendly email marketing platform that offers a range of features and tools to help small businesses and nonprofits grow their online presence and reach their target audience. It has a high deliverability rate, a generous free trial period, a responsive customer support team and a wide range of integrations. However, it also has some drawbacks such as the lack of a free plan, the contact-based pricing model, the limited customization options and the absence of some advanced features. Therefore, Constant Contact may be a good choice for beginners or those who need a simple and effective email marketing solution but may not be suitable for those who need more flexibility or sophistication in their campaigns.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp

 

Mailchimp is one of the most well-known and widely used email marketing platforms in the world. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating, sending, and managing email campaigns, as well as other marketing channels such as websites, landing pages, social ads, and postcards. Mailchimp is ideal for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to do more than just email marketing.

Key Features

  • Beginner-friendly email builder with drag-and-drop functionality and pre-designed templates
  • Advanced segmentation and personalization options based on subscriber behavior and preferences
  • Powerful automation features that let you send targeted messages based on triggers and workflows
  • Integration with hundreds of apps and services, including e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, and analytics tools
  • A/B testing and reporting tools that help you optimize your campaigns and measure your performance
  • Free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers

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Pros:

  • Easy to use and set up
  • Flexible and scalable plans that suit different needs and budgets
  • All-in-one marketing platform that covers multiple channels
  • Generous free plan that allows up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 emails per month

Cons:

  • Limited customization options for email templates
  • Higher pricing tiers can get expensive compared to other platforms
  • Customer support is not available on the free plan

 

Plans and Pricing

Mailchimp offers four plans: Free, Essentials, Standard, and Premium:

  • The Free plan allows up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 emails per month, with basic features such as email builder, segmentation, automation, and reporting.
  • The Essentials plan starts at $13 per month for up to 500 contacts and 10x more emails than the Free plan. It also includes features such as A/B testing, custom branding, multi-step journeys, and 24/7 email and chat support.
  • The Standard plan starts at $20 per month for up to 500 contacts and 12x more emails than the Free plan. It also includes features such as behavioral targeting, dynamic content, custom templates, retargeting ads, advanced insights, and surveys.
  • The Premium plan starts at $350 per month for up to 10,000 contacts and unlimited emails. It also includes features such as advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, comparative reporting, phone support, unlimited seats, and role-based access.

Overall Conclusion

Mailchimp is a great choice for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to do more than just email marketing. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools that cover multiple channels and help you create engaging campaigns. It also has a generous free plan that lets you test the platform before upgrading. However, if you are looking for more customization options or lower pricing tiers, you may want to consider other platforms.

More Services To Consider:

Hoppy Copy

Hoppy Copy Email Marketing

Hoppy Copy’s goal is to be the #1 tool for email marketing content, so you can easily create powerful emails that drive leads, sales, and build your brand.

What is Hoppy Copy? It’s an AI copywriting assistant that produces powerful, persuasive copy for dozens of email marketing campaigns, drips, newsletters, and more—in seconds!

Copywriting is one of the most difficult skills in marketing, yet it’s the most important, especially when it comes to email marketing. Because you’re not just writing to inform or entertain your reader—you’re writing to persuade them to do something. And to come up with the right ideas, angles, and language can take hours of trial and error. Not to mention, if you are growing your brand to 6-7 figures and beyond, it typically requires sending A LOT of emails, each customized to different personas and lists.

That’s where Hoppy Copy can help.

Hoppy Copy helps you quickly spin up copy ideas for these emails, sequences, ads, landing pages, and more. And if you’re already a great writer, we save you countless hours by coming up with new ideas on the fly.

Hoppy Copy is perfect for anyone who needs help stepping up their marketing copy. Or, experienced copywriters who need that extra bit of inspiration & want to speed up their workflow.

  • 40+ AI email templates, to start generating everything from drips, lead nurtures, welcome flows, and more (+ new templates coming every month)
  • 10+ Additional AI templates to generate the rest of your marketing copy (ads, social media posts, youtube scripts and more)
  • Advanced Notion-style Editor where you can make edits to copy on the fly (add CTAs, Emojis, Tone etc.)
  • Spam check to ensure your emails land in the inbox
  • Multiple Docs & Project Folders
  • 35+ Languages
  • Grammarly Integration
  • Collaborate with colleagues & clients with Workspaces
  • Simple UI
  • Starter $23 per month for up to 20,000 words generated
  • Pro: $39 per month for up to 100,000 words generated
  • Pro+: $79 per month for 300,000 subscribers

The market is flooded with AI tools, with most using general language models that try to write everything for everyone. These models are not trained to write email marketing copy. Our AI, however, is trained to do this. And it’s the only one we know of that’s designed specifically for email marketers.

TRY Hoppy Copy

How to choose an email marketing software?

When choosing an email marketing software or service, you should consider the following key features:

  • Ease of use: How easy is it to create and send email campaigns, manage your contacts, segment your audience, and track your performance?
  • Design and customization: How many templates and design options are available? How much can you customize your emails to match your brand and style?
  • Deliverability and spam compliance: How reliable is the delivery of your emails? How well does the software or service comply with the spam laws and regulations?
  • Automation and integration: How much can you automate your email marketing campaigns based on triggers, actions, and behaviors? How well does the software or service integrate with other tools and platforms that you use?
  • Support and resources: How responsive and helpful is the customer support team? How many resources and tutorials are available to help you learn and improve your email marketing skills?

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Disclosure: Please note that we may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below, at no expense to you, should you decide to purchase a paid plan. This blog does not provide financial advice, it is purely for entertainment and fun.

The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Influencer Marketing

Today, the world’s most rising form of marketing is influencer marketing. About 40% of companies have started allotting a huge budget for influencer marketing and 80% believe that influencer marketing helps them achieve their company objectives. With the internet being accessible to almost everyone in the US, plus some of the biggest ISPs like Xfinity and Spectrum internet offering cheap internet, there are a lot of influencers with huge followers online. However, still, most of the people are unaware of how to take advantage of them.

What is Influencer Marketing?

The fusion of traditional and modern marketing methods is influencer marketing. It is a technique that corporations use by working with prominent bloggers, vloggers, or social media users to market their goods and services. These influencers hold a large following and a dedicated audience with which brands can gain recognition and even generate sales.

How does it work?

Influencer marketing is considered to successfully work with companies of all types and sizes, irrespective of whether you are a startup and want to create awareness, or a major company trying to promote a new line or push a particular product to offer. Brands would typically approach an influencer and pay them to make content regarding the products or services offered by a company. The influencer subsequently updates and shares the contents with their social network – typically Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

The price is traditionally negotiated and paid before the content has been produced to the influencer –generally based on the following size of the creator and surprisingly not on content quality.

Creating the Plan

Since 47% of users now use Adblock technology, influencer marketing is by all means the fastest and most efficient way of creating premium content for the consumers it is intended to attract. The strategic marketing approach can instantly boost brand awareness and supercharge sales.

Only ask yourself some crucial questions to get going first…

Why Use it?

In a survey carried out by the Keller Fay Party, 82 percent of respondents indicated that they were likely to obey an influencer ‘s advice. And, 70 percent of the young generation prefers goods promoted by non-celebrity influencers, according to a major Cultural Prejudice poll. Consumers are mostly attracted by micro-influencers because they are relevant, intriguing, and amiable – promoted by real people who themselves use and are satisfied by the brand and item. The engagement rates of micro-influencers have been shown to be higher than other big celebrities. Although major celebrities can set a massive network, it is highly likely that most of their followers won’t be in your brand – most of them being passive spectators instead of being active.

Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have devoted followers that are primarily engaged in their work. According to research, 3k to 10k is the ‘top pick’ for marketing, since, the engagement rate is inversely proportional to the audience size.

What is your Objective?

It is important to provide a specific campaign goal as it tells the content creator precisely what you expect of them. The first step towards creating exclusive, entertaining content for your brand is to prepare your approach and to identify your goals. It is all down to discovering out which technique best suits you.

Try to figure out what you want: is it boosting sales? Establish the image of your brand? You want to meet customers who are unaware of your company, or engage in the main target market?

For good quality material, a simple, succinct summary is important. This may be an inspiring vision across the board of your mood, a connection to a website, a discount code, and a submission that builds visibility and dedication.

How To Choose Suitable Influencers For Your Business?

After making a list of influencers, it is about time you find out who is worth talking to about partnering with you. You surely did some of this already while creating the list, but you ought to focus on discovering the right influencers for your company.

You have to deal with trustworthy and appreciable people. People who are effective and match your style and objectives. Therefore, observe their audience engagement, the audience must match well with the people you are targeting. Perhaps you should not spend time dealing with influencers that do not have a strong identity, your best option is to create a positive product experience – growing engagement levels and the impact of your potential relationship.

How To Sustain Healthy Influencer Relationships?

Influencers are smart enough to know how to best utilize their channels to boost the message of a brand in a way that works effectively for their followers. It is also very important to address the influencers with courtesy and compassion while choosing them – it is a partnership after all!

Final Thought

Most of influencer marketing lasts a couple of months only. However, taking the right approach with planning can prove to be extremely successful for your business, fulfilling all your goals be it creating brand awareness or generating profitable sales revenue.

Step by Step on How to Set Up Your Business Blog

The beauty of the blog is its ability to connect a business with its audience. That could be its customers, its stakeholders, its clients or even its employees. A blog is an excellent choice of online content that can drive traffic towards your product or your services, entertain readers and promote your brand.

If your business doesn’t have one, it could be that you haven’t known where exactly to start.

Come up with your idea

An idea might be good, but if you don’t believe in it, will you put the work in to make it a success? Your blog premise should be coming from your heart, something that you are passionate about, compliments your product and entertains the reader.

Something ground-breaking wouldn’t hurt, but it doesn’t always have to be complicated. Straightforward content like answering frequently asked questions or listicles, articles in the form of a list, are often useful.

Decide on your platform

If you already have your own website, you will probably want to start your blog there, on a new page. Make sure it is evident from the home page and a distinctive part of your brand – the blog could have a slightly different font or web design to the more “business” parts of your site.

If you’re creating your blog from scratch, there are several easy to use platforms you can choose from, for example, Blogger or WordPress.

Choose your writer

Maybe you are a wordsmith yourself, and within your business, you have the time to sit down and get creative. If you do, fantastic. If not, you might want to hire a blog writer or, if that isn’t financially viable, pay writers on a freelance basis to do so. If there is a budding blogger in your ranks already, offer them the opportunity to show off their knowledge and flair.

Alternatives to in-house writing are explained by Click Intelligence with guest blogging a popular option. Whoever it is uploading on your blog, their content should be tailored to your company, creative and engaging.

Promote your blog

Once your blog is up and running, you want people to read it. You’ve had the bright idea, your product is golden, and your writer is talented. That’s all going to waste if nobody is paying any attention.

Improving your social media presence will help provide you with a platform on which you can share your blog. If you already have an active social media channel, use it to share out your blog using hashtags and linking to relevant pages. This will improve the chances of your post being seen and, hopefully, clicked on.

Getting guest writers or doing interviews is another excellent way to promote your blog. If somebody has been interviewed for one of your articles, they are sure to share it in their circles and increase your reputation. You should also post regularly so that people don’t click on your blog and see that it hasn’t been updated in months and forget about you.

Conclusion

Blogs are an easy but exciting way to converse with your audience, drive traffic to your website and keep your brand fresh. Remember to be creative and produce a varied range of content. Once there is a decent number of posts on your blog, your audience is more likely to come back again, or spend longer clicking around your website. Most of all, make it a fun part of your business.

9 Effective Email Marketing Tips That’ll Help You Generate More Leads and Revenue

Leads, leads, leads, they are wanted by everybody, and once you have some, you want more. When you do get longer, you want far many better-quality ones. It’s all part of conducting business. When we have done a survey of small business owners earlier this year, 45 percent of them said their biggest challenge is revenue generation.

Getting them is another matter while everybody wants more leads. Lead generation is a whole specialty unto itself. There are lots of strategies. Some are more successful than others, and some are more expensive. Most experienced salespeople enjoy the ways that were proven. The lead generation tactics which don’t cost an arm and a leg do not need a staff of ten and do not expect a degree. Just like useful, that is a humble old email.

In its crux, marketing is about building confidence with your own existing and potential clients. To accomplish that, you may work with a personalized transactional email, a promotional email, free shipping coupons, and anything else that will encourage devotion. Email creates a brief list of approaches for lead creation, but Ascend reminded all of us it is. The email came in as the most effective online tactics for lead production.

Read on if you would like to test out the # 1 technique for lead gen, or if you want some new ideas for how exactly to get your email lead gen better. All these are some of the methods around:

Effective Newsletter

A newsletter is a traditional means of boosting your brand and staying on top-of-the-mind of one’s visitors. However, what Entrepreneurs miss would always be to make them enlightening and relevant to their clients. Most of the newsletters are too self-promotional when they should be quite the opposite.

It’s necessary to continue to keep the viewer and their interests once you craft a message. Build the information of most newsletters based on customers their interests, pain points, frequently asked questions. You may also consult with several eBooks’ newsletters (based on web analytics along with societal networking metrics), that you’ve sent before and design accordingly.

More Cost-Effective than Traditional Marketing.

Email marketing is relatively inexpensive in comparison with other traditional marketing tactics such as direct mail and print press. While these conventional print marketing tactics require you to shell out money on printing and advertisement space, email marketing requires just a small investment of resources and time at developing content. Along with relatively low operational expenses, email marketing additionally offers an attractive return on investment (ROI). According to a report from DBS Data, organizations can expect an average yield of 38 for every $1 they spend on marketing.

Peoples Check their Email Almost Everyday

How often you open your email on the mobile product or your pc? Whether it’s work-related or personal, most people today check their email at least once every day to see what new messages they have received. To make sure, they assess their inbox 20 times each day. And 68.9 percent of those recipients receptive marketing messages using their mobiles 2-3 days each week. It usually means that email marketing provides small businesses the advantage of getting before their audience. The easy fact your customers check their email every day could be the essential benefit.

Automate your Sales Cycle

Email marketing automation allows you to boost your earnings cycle. Your business can utilize email automation tools to develop trickle campaigns, which send email messages to individuals within a group program, helping you make automated touchpoints with clients.

You might set automation attempts up to trigger specific messages when an individual chooses an action on your website. For example, if the customer visits your pricing site but then leaves your site, you can reach out to them via an automatic message to be sure they haven’t any further questions.

Easy to Track and Measure

With email marketing, you can look at how many people reading are starting, and even clicking through your articles. It enables you to see just how much of a return on investment these campaigns are currently offering your business and to decide if your email promotions are successful. Since you make alterations to messaging subject lines and kinds of supplies, you’re able to carry on to track success to find out which strategies are bringing you the most useful results.

Reach an Already Engaged audience

Email marketing is one of that only platform which consumers ask to receive. Messages sent by most organizations using the platform to people individuals who have signed up to get them. It will enable conversions that are higher as a company is targeting.

It is possible to send unsolicited marketing messages. However, this is only likely to frighten consumers and lead to a brand image. As a business that offers email marketing applications, we suggest that you don’t use lists for the email marketing — as the outcomes, you’ll notice from acquiring customers and growing your record will cause results.

People Prefer Email

Customers and your leads are more inclined to see and do it on your marketing emails because lots of these are currently excited about receiving this kind of communication from you. According to Marketing Sherpa, 72 percent of U.S. adults prefer email communications from businesses. That compared to only 17 percent of U.S. adults that prefer communicating through social networking channels.

Content is Shareable

Make your email content sharable. It helps enhance your reach and deliver networking. Add share buttons in your email, which let Making your email marketing content shareable and accessible.

You Can Reach People on Any Device

More and more people are assessing their email from their mobile devices. Based on the most recent figures published, 41.9 percent of email opens using smartphones. What does this mean for your business? You may use email marketing to reach people no matter what sort of device they’re on, improving visibility, or where they are and reach over time. Make sure that your mails are simple to open and read from mobile devices, paying attention to image sizes as well as the total amount of text.

 

Step by Step on How to Optimize Any Content for Search Engines

Search engine optimization is arguably the most crucial part of the content game, after content itself. Search engines and content are two peas in a pod; your audience uses search engines to find the answers you create content to provide. If you’re not visible on search engines, your ideal audience can’t see the great content you’ve put out or convert to paying customers.

Search engine optimization is what you need if you’re trying to bring in new audiences; remember, great content is nothing if it doesn’t reach the people who need it. Moreover, more reads mean more leads and ultimately, more money for you. If your content keeps coming up when people search for related keywords, they’d be more inclined to trust and patronize you. In this article, we show you how to optimize content for search engines in a few easy-to-apply steps.

Create Your Content Strategy with SEO in Mind

A common mistake people make is that they create good content strategies but leave out search engine optimization. SEO isn’t just a promotional tool to bring in after you’ve created content; it should be the basis of your content strategy.

A good content strategy is premised on keyword and user intent research to find out what your target audience wants, what they’re likely to search for, and how you can meet these needs. When your content strategy begins with this, it’ll be much easier to create optimized content and rank on Google’s algorithm.

Create High-quality Content

After you’ve created your SEO based content strategy, the next step is to create high-quality content that’s relevant to the keywords you use. To calculate the relevance of your post and rank it, Google’s algorithms also check user experience and how long visitors stay on your page. If users typically leave your page within a few seconds of opening it, Google will mark your page as being irrelevant and give it a low rank.

Pro Tip: When you create high-quality content, your readers are likely to share it with their network, contact you for further information, and be willing to pay for your services.

To create high-quality content, pick out 1-2 long-tail keywords (more on this below) to center your post on. With the keywords in mind, you can create organically optimized content. When you have a clear and narrow topic – because you’re answering a particular question instead of writing broadly – it’s easier to create content where the keywords flow naturally.

Incorporate Long-tail Keywords that Match the User Intent

Ranking on SEO isn’t about using as many keywords as possible; in fact, using many keywords can hurt your SEO because Google considers this keyword stuffing, i.e. using many keywords to aid ranking. Using many keywords also takes away from the user experience, which is something Google uses to check if you meet the needs of your visitors.

What you want to do is focus on a few long-tail keywords (phrases with 3-4 words) that your reader is likely to search. This helps you keep the focus of your post narrow enough, so you spend your time optimizing for a few keywords and keep you focused on answering a particular question your reader has.

When you focus on long-tail keywords – which are usually question based – you’re more likely to attract visitors who will read your entire post, and have a higher chance of converting and earning you money.

Include the Chosen Keywords in Specific Areas of Your Post

There are certain essential areas of your post where you should include your keywords; these are your Title tag, URL, meta description, headers and body.

Your title tag is the first contact the Search Engine, and the readers have with your post. It’s how they know if your post is relevant to the search. Google’s algorithms cut off your title tag after the first 60 characters, so ensure you put the keywords in the first 60 characters of your title tag.

Your URL, unique to every post, is another thing search engines look at to know what your post is about and rank it. Take advantage of your ability to customize your URL to optimize it for SEO by including as many as two keywords in it.

A meta description is the short description of a page that comes up on SERPs. This can be a section of your post with the relevant keyword or a specially curated summary. When writing your meta description, include your long-tail keywords, try to answer the question the reader is asking without giving so much away that they don’t need to open your page anymore. Also, keep in mind that meta descriptions are cut off after the first 300 characters so keep your copy straight and to the point.

Your keywords should be included in your headings and throughout your copy in organic ways that won’t come across as keyword stuffing and get you penalized. Focus on providing the information your readers need, and you’ll find that the keywords flow naturally into the text, whether directly or with synonyms.

Create Keyword Clusters

Since you’re focusing on 1-2 long-tail keywords per post, you won’t be able to speak about a topic in one post completely. This is where keyword clusters come in. What this means is that instead of having several posts with similar keywords who’d have to compete for ranking, you’d have a group of posts with the same primary keyword but different long-tail keywords, so they don’t compete for ranking on the same SERPs.

Using keyword clusters also drives traffic to several pages on your blog with just one search. How does this work? Well, the posts in the cluster – since they answer specific questions regarding a broad topic – would link to each other. Therefore, if a reader wants to know more, he’d be inclined to click on the hyperlink to your other posts. In essence, you’re getting views on several posts from one search engine query.

Conclusion

Optimizing your content for search engines is like the proverbial journey of a thousand miles; it begins with your first step. It can seem like a daunting task, but once you start, it gets easier. Remember to keep the focus on creating content your readers want to see and not on search engine visibility. Once you provide useful content and implement the right strategy, visibility is sure to follow.

5 Great Customer Retention Ideas That Work

An army of loyal customers is every company’s goal. Yet, it’s one that can be quite hard to accomplish. Here are 5 ideas for customer retention that work.

1. Know Your Business

Having your own business means much more than having a job and paying you salary. Your basic roles are in finance, administration, marketing, and the responsibility of personnel. You need to know what you can deal with yourself and which parts you’re going to need help with. One person can rarely succeed in all of these to get the best results.

Many companies are run by people with great business acumen, yet they fail because they don’t have all the information they need to do their job. This includes a clear notion of marketing mix, market segment, customer service, target markets, product selection, promotional activities and pricing tactics. You need a well-devised business plan if you want to succeed. This will help you make the right decisions.

2. Pay for Good Training

Train your employees to always be available. Retail has always been about interacting with shoppers. Yet, staffs are often so busy multitasking that they ignore customers who are obviously looking for help. They need to be trained and taught that no task is more important than paying attention to customers because customers pay their salary.

If you have a larger company, you should train your managers to be the best salespersons. A manager probably won’t recognize, analyze, and give direction when a sale is lost if he or she doesn’t have the background knowledge to begin with. A good manager will know how to make a sale.

Finally, teach your managers how to train their associates. It can be that staffs are promoted to managerial positions not based on skills, but on how long they’ve been working for a company, and the disastrous results soon follow. They need proper retail sales training themselves if they’re to manage effectively. It takes more than criticism or praise. Both approaches can create a lot of damage to your staff that are left adrift.

3. Get a Reliable POS System

A full-scale POS solution like Aloha POS is of paramount importance to customer retention. It will allow you to efficiently manage all your back office activities. Reliable systems are rich in features to optimize inventory management and take the guesswork out of purchasing decisions.

A POS system addresses the needs of businesses in many sectors and industries, including grocery stores, convenience stores, apparel, fashion, and sporting goods, liquor, gift shops, and specialty stores.

Among its advantages are the following:

  • Top-Notch Order Fulfillment
  • Robust Email Marketing
  • eCommerce
  • Inventory Management

You’ll be able to attract more customers by offering better value. You’ll also be able to offer more opportunities to shop at your store. It’s your job to give your customers what they want, because if you don’t, they will stop doing business with you. The products and services you provide should be in tune with customers’ needs and wants.

4. Sustain your Unique Image

To attract more customers and understand them better, develop a unique image. This image is important and is a function of your marketing materials and efforts. Customers create their perceptions of your store from your name, location, web site appearance, products, prices, visual merchandising, displays, signs, business cards, customer service, newsletters, advertising material, and anything else that relates to your business.

Try to think like your customers do; buy, show, sell, and give them interesting information (not only what’s interesting to you). Your success is determined by the customer.

To maximize your online revenue, you need to develop a website where to sell your products. You can build the site yourself if you are familiar with HTML or similar programs and codes. It is essential that you determine the niche of your website. Some niches are less lucrative than others. You have to find a balanced relationship between passion and profit until you start making money.

For many years, many people have been selling private label products through sites like Amazon. The profit potential of the Amazon FBA program is huge. You need to make a product, choose a manufacturer and start selling this product on Amazon. The first step is having the right keywords. To obtain long-term customers, you need to acquire them to begin with, and this isn’t very easy either.

Also ,use multiple channels for customer service. This creates an opportunity to create an omni-channel experience, where the customer’s experience with the brand is consistent across different channels and devices. This brings about loyalty and greater customer satisfaction because it makes your customer service offer user-friendlier, which is exactly what your brand needs when your customers need assurance they will be served well, as always.

5. Market Based on Good Customer Experiences

Share any and all positive customer experiences with your brand with as many other people as possible. Collect customer feedback and share your reviews to inform your customers of the perks that your company can provide. Sharing “success” stories across an omni-channel communication system will be viable because new customers tend to trust old and loyal ones more than advertising. To maximize value, leverage these interactions effectively.

Creating customer loyalty is no easy feat, but know that customers are driven by their goals like all people and they will be loyal to the company that can meet their needs. If your competitor offers them a better deal, their positive experience with your company doesn’t matter. The customer will go for the better deal.

To build customer loyalty, you need to be aware of your customers’ needs very well. A multi-channel service system is one of the best ways to stay connected with your customers, particularly if they need help with something. Your customers will have better access to your service staff, which will generate a higher number of customer interactions. The more often you can interact with your customers, the better your chances of influencing their experience and retaining them.

How Augmented Reality Represents A Marketing Bonanza

The mobile augmented reality (AR) market is projected to reach a staggering $79.77 Billion by 2022 and will be one of the fastest growing sectors in upcoming years.

Functionality has already spread far and wide. Emergency responders use AR to help them train to coordinate dangerous situations. In healthcare, an AR scanner called AccuVein projects vein density on a patient’s arm in real time so injections and taking blood can be quick and easy. Another App can even project surgeon’s hands onto another doctor so they can match movements for complex procedures.

AR is prevalent in helping those with disabilities. Recently, Temple University received part of a larger AR related grant to create glasses that would facilitate captioning for live performance for HOH and Deaf patrons. The same tech can be used for ESL or Foreign language speakers.   

However, people probably best recognize AR from games like Pokemon Go — where frenzied players were able to capture their favorite creature avatars in order to gain advancement in the game. Retailers at the time were quick to realize that a Pokemon stop near (or in) their location meant increased foot traffic and tried to capitalize on the phenomenon.  

From there marketers could truly realize the potential for AR tech. Ostensibly there are a few of major avenues where AR intersects with marketing right now.

Wayfinding

Google Glass ended up looking a little goofy, but the technology promised by apps like Google Lens, which gives consumers ways to access businesses easily just by looking at the facade, may revive the glasses wearable. In AR, companies can offer discounts and coupons that entice passersby or using software like wikitude, the app can actually lead a customer to their desired location. Already, Gatwick Airport uses a sophisticated wayfinding AR feature to help people get to their gates quickly and efficiently. It is possible for any business to incorporate this kind of tech too.

AR is usually thought of as a way to add imagery to a screen, but it can also be used as a focusing tool to take away distractions. For example, there is tech being designed to help grocery shoppers get only what they need for a recipe or to see only gluten free options so they don’t pick the wrong items.    

Product Pre-Assessment

Another way AR is being used effectively in retail markets is in product assessment prior to purchase. This is accomplished in a number of innovative ways by smart retailers. Ikea’s virtual catalog has become a standout in the area with the ability to scan your room and digitally place a piece of their furniture in a spot of your choosing so customers can see how they like the look and color of something before purchase.

Other retailers have created variations on this same theme. Warby Parker scans your face and places their glasses on you, so you can avoid going to the store to try on all their styles. L’Oreal has a way to see how their makeup might look if you were to apply it. Clothing retailers also are allowing shoppers to visualize clothing without going to a changing room. And some even make changing room options easier with smart mirrors that allow you to see the garment you are wearing in different styles or colors without having to search around the racks.

In a similar vein, architects, interior designers and the real estate industry has taken up AR for their marketing efforts. Prospective clients can virtually visit their construction projects or look at their current furniture in a planned new house.

Improved Engagement

Other retailers have seen how AR helps with general product engagement. Lego has created AR stimulated kits that “come to life” when seen with their app. Disney has similar functionality with their coloring books. Movie posters also have been using AR to target cinema goers, giving them an additional thrilling glimpse into a film while waiting in line for popcorn.

Is AR Tech Too complicated for me?

The most intriguing part is how AR is becoming more democratic in its use. Applications like Adobe Spark AR and Apple’s ARkit allow anyone to get in on the ground floor with things like Instagram logos and simple AR additions to branding.

The question of how to assess metrics however, is still evolving. How does an AR view compare with a video view, for example? Marketing consultancies like CleverTap provide strategies to connect meaningfully with demographics and to assess ROI — and they also have get to know AR articles and infographics to help marketers get the hang of why and how to use AR for their own products.

See the infographic below for a quick guide to the ins-and-outs of AR tech. The best part, however, is that the applications for AR are still being worked out. Anyone could have the next innovation in AR in the marketing sphere — maybe a floating fish that eats your emotions will be the next big thing. Or maybe you have a good new idea.

Best practices for writing a follow-up email

Technology has certainly changed the way we talk to and reach out to established and potential customers (and family and friends, of course). Sure, we can “talk” to them broadly when it comes to websites and social media—letting everyone in on events and news and important information. But email has replaced a lot of the one-on-one conversations we used to have on the phone or in person. And email has become a great way to introduce, or to re-introduce, oneself to those potential and established customers.

That’s why one of the worst feelings is when you reach out to someone and don’t hear anything back—just silence. There are lots of questions that probably race through your head. So what do you do—abandon email as communication the second time around? On the contrary: Sending a followup email is something you can and should do, and can do well. This graphic explains it.

When They Don’t Respond, Here’s How You Write a Follow-Up Email

What are DMP-DSP Hybrids and How Can They Help Marketers?

Back in the day, to advertise your new product, you would have to put up a billboard, or pay for a full-page ad in a major magazine. Then, in 1993, the first internet ad was created. Now the internet is filled with countless “billboards” — everything from a small travel blog with an ardent following to CNN Money is ready and willing to accept your dollars to display your ads. At the same time, advertisers are awash with user information, thanks to the ubiquity of cookies and big data. However, that treasure trove of insights is just noise unless it can be organized, analyzed, and used.

Marketers need specialized tools to make sense of it all. They require platforms that will help them get a grip on the massive amount of customer data available, so they can use that information to effectively advertise to the right audience for the right price.

These tools are known as data management platforms (DMPs), which organize huge amounts of information, and demand side platforms (DSPs), which analyze DMPs and use that information to bid on and place digital ads. DMPs and DSPs need each other to create a successful digital advertising ecosystem. That’s why it’s no surprise the latest innovation is DMP-DSP hybrid platforms.

Is a DMP-DSP hybrid the right call for your advertising department? Before you make that decision, you need to understand how DMPs and DSPs work. Then you can appreciate the unique benefits and drawbacks a DMP-DSP hybrid platform presents.

What is a data management platform?

For almost the entire history of the marketing profession, the biggest challenge advertisers faced was trying to collect information about their target audience. Then the internet and cookies (text files that let websites know you’ve visited before) happened. Now, sifting through audience data is like trying to drink from a firehose. Salesforce describes the challenge like this: “The people [whom advertisers] most care about are constantly investigating, considering, starting and stopping transactions. Further, those consumers leave a robust — but daunting — sea of clues and data signals in their wake across a dizzying array of platforms, channels, and devices.”

Making sense of this data is the challenge data management platforms are designed to solve. Jack Marshall defines DMPs in an article for Digiday as “a data warehouse. It’s a piece of software that sucks up, sorts, and houses information, then spits it out in a way that’s useful for marketers, publishers, and other businesses.”

In other words, DMPs collect the firehose of data and turn it into useful, understandable insights. DMPs can absorb your company’s data (known as first-party data), including survey responses, customer website activity (including actions like cart abandonment), and social media engagement. DMPs can then sync this information with second-party data from your partners, and third-party information from data suppliers.

With DMPs, your company can benefit from:

  • Advanced audience segmentation and analytics
  • Brand refinement
  • Website, social media, and app analytics
  • Content personalization
  • Price and inventory readjustments based on audience analytics

Overall, your DMP can provide you with a much greater and more nuanced understanding of your buyer personas, which can lead to stronger marketing. One of the most useful attributes of a DMP, however, is its ability to connect with and talk to a demand side platform. A DMP provides the information a DSP needs to make better advertising purchases on your behalf.

What is a demand side platform?

The internet is big: It is full of websites, e-zines, message boards, and social media hubs where your audience likes to hang out. A human can’t track down every single potential advertising platform, much less figure out the best ones to use to reach their ideal audience.

Enter the demand side platform. This software can do all of that work for you as long as it has enough useful information to work with. A DSP uses the information and insights from your DMP to bid on available digital media advertising slots on your behalf. The program uses real-time bidding (RTB) and connects to existing ad exchanges and supply side platforms (SSP). The good news is that you don’t need to know how all the internal mechanics work to use a DSP.

Once a DSP is in place and fueled by good information from a well-fed DMP, it will help you get your digital ads to the right people at the right place for the right amount of money. Best of all, this is all done automatically. A good DSP will also allow you to analyze your advertising results so you can tweak your advertising and get a bigger bang for your buck.

What is a DMP-DSP hybrid?

In a DMP-DSP hybrid, these platforms exist in a symbiotic relationship. One of the primary uses of a DMP is to feed its information to a DSP. This information allows a DSP to provide you with better-targeted ad buys. Without a DSP, a DMP would essentially be just a big repository of information. Without a DMP, a DSP would be flying blind as it tried to book digital ad placements.

When DMPs and DSPs were first introduced to the digital advertising landscape, they existed as separate platforms. Advertisers would have to purchase both a DMP and a DSP, then link them together. Recently, some DMP and DSP providers have started to offer DMP-DSP hybrid platforms. A hybrid can either be a DMP with DSP capabilities or a DSP with DMP capabilities.

Either way, a DMP-DSP hybrid works as both a DMP and a DSP platform. It absorbs and organizes information and uses that information to place digital ads on behalf of an advertiser. Before you go out shopping for a DMP-DSP hybrid, let’s look at some of its benefits and drawbacks.

Should you invest in a DMP-DSP hybrid?

The benefit of the DMP-DSP hybrid is obvious. Instead of owning two separate systems that have to talk to each other — which could lead to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and higher costs — a DMP-DSP hybrid is a single system. You only have to work with one vendor, and the system is more streamlined and synced than it would be with two separate systems.

Investing in a DMP-DSP hybrid may seem like a no-brainer, but there are notable drawbacks. Michael Sweeny of PIWIK Pro points out that within the hybrid model, “the DMP component is only useful in the context of media buying — it can’t be used for anything else (such as personalizing the content on a website).” Additionally, your hybrid vendor may be able to use your DMP information for its own purposes, which threatens your control over your own user information.

Choose the best option for you.

At the end of the day, use common sense. Do research on the available DMPs, DSPs, and hybrid options. Make sure you are clear on your goals, budget, and personal preferences. Carefully study the features of each available system and decide which setup works best for you. You may appreciate the simplicity of a DMP-DSP hybrid, or you may prefer a standalone DMP that gives you greater functionality and more control over your user data. Now that you know your options, you can make the best decision for your company.

 

By Jessica Bennett

Great Techniques of Using Digital Signage for Developing Followers for Your Brand

There is so much competition in business today that if you are unable to adopt the best practices in marketing, you could simply sink in no time.  The ability to adapt and manage change had always been remarkable for businesses, but it was never as much relevant as it is today. This is perhaps a reason for the popularity of digital signage’s that have become the essential tool in branding. Despite the traditional and online avenues of branding still doing good, digital signage’s have given marketers a shot in the arm as it enables them to take a direct approach to connecting brands with consumers. No matter how good your products or services might be, just upholding it in front of customers will do little good for your business. You have to connect the brand with customers to influence them in choosing it.

Digital signage’s are much more than the electronic restaurant menu board as it plays a major role in building brands and even go a few steps ahead to earn value for it. In simple words, if you are keen to acquire brand equity, you should know how to use digital signage’s to your advantage.  The aim should be to build a cult following for your brand by projecting it as a concept that relates closely to people’s lifestyle and does not remain merely a product or service. If you look at some top brands like Google or Apple, you would realize how these brands have infiltrated into our lives and have become a part of it.  When searching for anything, we tell people to ‘Google’ it as the brand has become synonymous with searches.

It’s a lifestyle and not a brand

To turn your brand into an extension of a lifestyle, you can use digital signage’s that help to display content that moves beyond product features. There is a certain freshness about digital signage’s. Its immersive qualities create closeness with customers that help to build an identity for your brand that is distinctly different and easily recognizable. The colors, the logo, the fonts and the design in presenting content has the marks of your brand that remains immersed in the content. Use of images and videos make the content more expressive.  You can extend your brand messaging by using digital signage’s intelligently. Choose from various options ranging from interactive brand activation to attractive digital window displays. Providing various digital experiences to customers helps to drive home the brand message with ease.

In this article, we will focus on the various ways that digital signage’s can help you develop a cult following for your brand.

Tell your story

To touch the hearts of customers and bring bands closer to them, the lesser you speak directly about product features better it is. The idea behind the approach is to create a personalized experience with the brand first by convincing customers about the value they could derive from it. When customers become confident about the brand, they would automatically buy it.  For creating a personalized experience, you have to tell a story about the brand that captures the imagination of customers.  The digital signage is an excellent platform for telling stories.You can capitalize on its ability to engage and educate the customers and even influence their behavior and decision about buying by inspiring them.

Create customer engagement

When you can develop a cult following for your brand, it becomes easy to use digital signage’s for engaging closely with customers.  The advantage of using digital signage’s is that it allows customers to interact with the brand by using the interactive features of touch screens. Several users can access information about the brand at the same time without causing any inconvenience to other users as you can set up several screens for displaying the content.  By using advanced technology, it is possible to collect useful customer data from digital signage’s with face recognition features that not only recognizes customers but also collects various demographic data. You can use the data to sever more targeted content for better engagement.

Encourage sharing

Humans have the innate tendency to share experiences that excite them. Digital signage’s provide the opportunity of displaying high-quality content that attracts customers and encourages them to share it with others. Visual content, in particular, stimulates the brain faster and generates positive reactions that result in sharing of content. Word of mouth about the high-quality content would spread far and wide and you could experience more footfalls at the store. Soon you would find customers turning loyal to you.

While people might argue if digital signage’s are outstanding or not, there cannot be any debate about its ability to make you stand out from the crowd. It brings people closer to the brand and provides the opportunity of creating a lasting impact for your brand.

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 Author Bio: Karen Anthony is a Business Tech Analyst.  She has exploited the benefits of the electronic restaurant menu board as it plays a major role in building brands in the restaurant industry.

How To Write An Email People Will Actually Open

 

Despite email lists being an age-old technique, it is still one of best marketing assets that you have from a business perspective. In fact, almost 59% of all B2B marketers state that this is their preferred method when it comes to developing interest, and fishing for leads.

But… it’s not that easy.

Out of the millions of email campaigns out there, the highest industry open rate is a mere 28%, the worst part about that? Only 5-percent of this 30% actually bothered to click on the links in the email (the place where the magic happens).

Woah…

Enough of the statistics! Let’s get into our tips to help you write emails that capture the attention span of potential leads and drive them down your sales funnel.

Your Subject Line Will Either Make Or Break Your Email Campaign

The attention span of your perfect customer is eight-seconds. That’s it. In this time, your email needs to stand out against the crowd in their inbox. It needs to create interest, and desire to open the email, and find out what all the buzz is about.

Subject lines need to be short, descriptive and to the point. Remember, what you can see on your computer – is not necessarily what you will be able to see on a smartphone (where majority of consumers spend their time).

Typically, you should aim to keep your subject lines under 50 characters. That’s the safe zone. Also – studies have shown that the subject line should only have the first letter of the first word capitalized. Leaving the rest lowercase actually has an impact on your open rate.

The Preheader Text – Furthering Your Net

The next thing you want to pay attention to is the first couple of lines in your email. This is also known as the preheader text. From an inbox standpoint, the first sentence (roughly 8-10 words) is shown right next to the subject line.

It is important that this matches your subject line, which will further the intrigue you create. Leading them down the yellow brick road to clicking your email and giving it a quick read.

Personalization Is The Way To Go

In the digital era, segregation is crazy. More people are spending their times feeling connected while being isolated in their home then actually going out and enjoying social experiences. This all leads to the craving to feel like they are a part of a community.

Which is why your email campaigns need to include some form of personalization.

For example, your lead generation tool should capture the email address, and at least the first-name of the individual signing up. This will mean you can send a nifty “Hey John Doe”, which consumers appreciate.

Another great idea.

Make use of your list segregation. This is a great way to not only lead your customers through the sales funnel. But also, to build brand trust, and create desire behind the product or service that you have on offer.

Send Through An Awesome Video To Improve Lead Conversion And Click Through Rates

You hear it all the time. Including images and videos in your email marketing campaigns is a big no-no.

Well, it’s partly true.

It all depends on the engagement that you have on your email lists. The reason why some consider this as a no-no is because these emails are more likely to end up in the spam folder. But if you have loyal subscribers that look out for your email on a regular basis – this is not a problem you need to worry about.

Which is where you can take full advantage of videos in your email to improve lead conversions. It could be anything really. For example, a cool animated video explaining exactly how your service works. There are companies that can help you record and send video, while minimizing the risk of ending up in the “no mans land” spam folder.

Be Consistent With Your Email Newsletters (Probably The Most Important Part)

Marketing in modern society is based on the AIDA principle. Which is essentially creating awareness of your brand, driving interest to your product/service, instilling a desire into potential customers, which then turns into an action when they purchase what you have on offer.

The entire ideology behind a marketing campaign is to take them from “being interested” to having enough “desire” to actually click through and pay you for your product/service.

But if they never know when to expect an email, you are losing half of your influence.

Which is why being consistent is super important. Now, we are not saying you need to worry about posting on a daily basis. But we would recommend having a specific day of the week, at roughly the same time when subscribers can expect your email.

Time Your Emails Properly

The next important part of getting your emails opened is the timing. Which still falls under the being consistent flag.

For example, if you have a blog that focuses on healthy recipes for breakfast. Sending a newsletter in the evening wouldn’t exactly help, now would it?

Make sure you know where the majority of your audience is, and what time best suits them for the type of content you will be sending their way. Keep these tips in mind and you’ll be sending better emails in no time.

 

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Author Bio: Susan Ranford is an expert on career coaching, business advice, and workplace rights. She has written for New York Jobs, IAmWire, and ZipJob. In her blogging and writing, she seeks to shed light on issues related to employment, business, and finance to help others understand different industries and find the right job fit for them.

How to Use Social Media to Boost In-Store Sales

Most retailers will have at the very least set up the main social media profiles. The problem is that not many people use their social media profiles effectively and they generally only update sporadically. This infographic from Colourfast will hopefully help as it looks at how retailers can use social media to boost in-store sales. The reality is that a well-managed social can help to drive your business forward so it really isn’t an area that should be ignored.

Communicating with your customers on social media has become just as important as over email or over the phone so it might be worth hiring a social media manager or at the very least have someone within the company who has experience with social media keeping them updated.

See the full infographic now to learn about how your store can use social media more effectively. Hopefully you will learn a few things from it.

How To Make Your Side-Business Thrive – Modern Marketing

When you are an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter if you are a baby boomer, a millennial or even a generation X. We all share that one common trait, we hate working for someone else. So, we work insane hours (that make our friends look at us in awe) to get a side business off the ground.

The big problem?

Despite global markets being in a fluid state of motion, consumer budgets are growing tighter.

Even worse?

Trust has never been harder to earn from a business perspective.

So, there you have it. If you are not seeing the results you were hoping for from your business –

it’s probably because you need to start thinking outside the box.

Which is exactly what I want to help you with in this article. We include three tips to help you start off the right way straight from the word go.

Step One | The Most Important Step – Know Your Business

Here is a prime example, back in 2016 a young entrepreneur started a fitness blog. It all started on Instagram, and grew from there. But over time, the lack of vision, and the failure to launch a brand-image irreparably hurt the business.

This step may be common knowledge, but we cannot emphasize how important it is to know your business.

When you are working a full-time job, and trying to launch a business on the side – you will get distracted. You will lose focus.

Which is why the first thing you want to do is define your business. Ask yourself what is your vision? Where do you want the business to be in 5-years?

But the most important aspect of your written plan should be what problem do you solve for customers? What makes you unique over competitors, and why are potential customers interested in that?

Here is a guide to writing a simple business plan for complete beginners.

Don’t Be Afraid To Think Outside The Box – Being Different Is A Good Thing

Here is a scary fact, over 543,000 businesses are started up MONTHLY in America. That’s right people just like you, looking to escape their mundane office jobs.

But it gets worse.

More than half of these businesses fail – every month.

Now there are tons of reasons why. From a lack of work ethic, right down to an unclear vision for the business. But another reason why businesses fail more than they succeed is because they forget in the business world – you want to stick out like a sore thumb.

You want to offer a unique angle to a service or product that your competitors are offering.

Whether it be through unique, high-quality social media content. Informative blog posts and podcasts, cut-edge discounts and specials… or if you really want to be unique, why not revolutionize your marketing campaign; personalize with customers and build trust by creating your own cards.

There are so many ways that you can differentiate yourself – it is important to take the time and put some thought into it. You’re trying to be better than the other businesses out there. Don’t think you can’t come up with the next big thing. Put some real thought into it and you’ll be surprised with the results.

Failure Is The Skipping Stone To Success

The biggest mistake you can make is to harbour jealousy when it comes to entrepreneurs who have made it in life.

“We all reap the seeds that we sow”

What you may forget is these individuals in the nice cars, with the dough to show off. The businesses that are considered pioneers in the industry; there is nothing different behind their business and yours.

These were not overnight success stories. You need to be prepared to fail. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, even Gary Vaynerchuk all hit their own stumbling blocks, and look where they are now.

Whether it’s as simple as a bad review from a new client, or a huge milestone falls for the roof – stay strong, and keep working. You will make it as long as you never lose sight of the end goal.

Here are some great tips to help you cope with business failure.

Make Sure You Maximize Your Productivity Daily

We all have those days. Where we think we are working hard. We seem to be super busy. But at the end of the day, we look back and think, “How did I waste so much time today.”

The problem is.

When you are trying to work 2-jobs at once, well… wasting time is not something you can afford. We all have the same minutes, hours, and seconds in a day – it’s a simple matter of how you invest them.

A great tip is to make use of organization tools, I personally love Trello, it keeps me on my game at all times.

If you really want to maximize your after-hour work productivity to exponentially grow your business, make use of a sweet little time productivity trick known as Pomodoro. Which essentially involves removing distractions for 25-minutes at a time, and focusing solely on work.

These tips will help you excel at your job. Keep these in mind – and think of new strategies to help you along the way. Your ideas will really help you and you’ll be thankful in the long run.

 

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Author Bio:

Susan Ranford is an expert on career coaching, business advice, and workplace rights. She has written for New York Jobs, IAmWire, and ZipJob. In her blogging and writing, she seeks to shed light on issues related to employment, business, and finance to help others understand different industries and find the right job fit for them.

 

8 Ways to Strengthen Your Awesome Brand Online and Offline

Your company’s brand is a work in progress, so it’s important to always look for ways you can improve it. Whether you are refining your messaging, choosing a consistent color scheme, or finding your voice on social media, strengthening your brand is an ongoing project that happens on- and offline.

How to Strengthen Your Brand Online

Learning the most effective ways to do both can help you build a stronger brand for your company overall, which can help you keep your customers coming back while reach out to new ones. Here are a few tips to help you build up your brand online:

1. Blog Frequently

Blogging is crucial for any business seeking to reach new customers online. A well-maintained blog can keep your business at the top of search engines, which makes it easier for potential customers who need the services you offer to find you.

Focus on creating high-quality, engaging and relevant content for your target audience, and add new content regularly. Consider guest blogging on related sites, or extending such an invitation from your site to industry professionals. Your blogs can showcase your expertise to potential customers and could help them decide to seek out your services.

2. Create a Social Media Presence

Social media offers businesses a simple, effective, and low-cost means to stay in touch with their current customers and to reach new ones. Create profiles on the sites most likely to be used by potential customers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.

You’ll be able to easily share content, post updates about your business, or address complaints as they arise. This can help to build a strong connection between your business and its customers, since they will be able to interact with your business directly and can see that their concerns matter to it.

3. Share Testimonials

A glowing testimonial from a previous customer can provide dividends for your business for years to come, especially if they are famous or well-known in your industry. Many customers determine where they will make a purchase from based on online reviews, and a collection of testimonials could help to win their business.

A testimonial provides your business with social proof and gives potential customers a chance to learn about your services and expertise from people just like them. Ask some of your customers who were especially satisfied to leave you a review, and consider posting them on a special section of your website.

4. Find Your Personality

Consumers today are more likely to frequent a business that has a recognizable personality than one which has a bland or generic voice. It may take some time, but finding your business’s unique voice can help you better connect with customers and provide them with a personalized experience.

Every business is different and will have its own way of appealing to its buyer personas. Take some time to experiment and create a unified voice for all of your communications which speaks to the customers you are trying to attract.

Whether you opt for a snarky, social-media savvy persona perfect for reaching millennials or a more reserved, sophisticated persona which can connect with professionals getting ready for retirement, finding the right voice for your company is crucial to building a successful brand.

How to Strengthen Your Brand Offline

While making effective use of the Internet is crucial to the success of any business, keeping your brand strong offline is just as important. Whether through stunningly designed business cards, elaborate print collateral or full production television commercials, brand strengthening happens at all levels:

5. Define Your Brand (in Opposition to Competitors)

What makes your brand different, or better, from your competitors? If you don’t know this, your customers won’t either. Placing this front and center in any marketing campaign can help you easily distinguish your business. This can also provide inspiration for your marketing efforts.

You’ll be able to highlight some quality of your business which is superior to your competitors, and can inform potential customers of what you have to offer, especially if you are new to the market. Buyers could immediately take an interest in your business and see what you have to offer.

6. Keep Fonts, Colors and Logos Consistent

Your customers need to be able to quickly identify your business from your competitors. The last thing you should do is confuse them with multiple color schemes, too many fonts, or chaotic logos.

Choosing a consistent font, color scheme and logo can help to make your brand more recognizable to customers and can make your own marketing efforts easier. You’ll have fewer moving parts to keep track of and can better build campaigns around a definite aesthetic, feeling or lifestyle, which itself can serve as inspiration for future campaigns.

7. Create Your Niche

Part of what makes a marketing campaign a success is its specificity. Focusing your marketing efforts on baby boomers getting ready for retirement isn’t nearly as effective as focusing on professionals with advanced degrees in the same age group who require financial consulting services to prepare for retirement in the next ten years.

Limitations can prove to be powerful aids when it comes to finding clients, as you’ll be able to automatically filter out many people who won’t be interested in your services, and can instead focus on the handful who are actively looking for your services.

8. Set Deadlines

You could have an endless well of ideas for your marketing campaign, but if none of them come to fruiting, they won’t be worth anything. You can easily spend too much time modifying your original idea to try to cover too many angles at once, and come up with a campaign that lacks a clear focus and which is ineffective at reaching any particular audience.

Setting a deadline can help you focus your efforts on a handful of ideas without losing control of them.

Building your brand is a long-term project, and it’s not uncommon for companies to change their brand multiple times. Don’t be afraid to experiment in order to find the brand that best suits your business, but always make sure each element contributes to a complete experience for your customers.

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With over 18 years in business, Silkcards specializes in unique and beautiful print that reflects a brand’s image and makes a positive first impression.

5 Golden Rules for Introducing Your Business to Online Audience

The digital revolution in India has encouraged many businesses to opt for their website. Two major things can be observed here: First, even the brick and mortar businesses that earlier refused to go for online operations have also started investing on the digital presence, and secondly, the businesses don’t stop at just building their own website and social media pages. They want their websites to be professionally and strategically designed to market their business and eventually increase the revenue. In short, the website creation is not just an option for the Indian businesses that want to grow- it is the mandatory condition. So, let us see the best practices to adopt while designing or marketing a website geared to make your presence stronger and increase the revenue:

Don’t be just another site by overselling

Millions of websites float on the digital ocean just like a number of huge ships and small boats that are laden with a number of items they are hawking to sell. Right from the world tour to mundane industrial tools, these sites sell almost anything under the Sun.

Being exposed to 5000+ messages geared towards marketing the product the consumer today has actually developed contempt towards commercially motivated messages forcing them to buy the products he doesn’t want. Hence any attempt at over-selling will ironically diminish your chances to sell your products or services. Besides, when everyone is overselling and you also join the bandwagon with the similar semblance- where lays the uniqueness, the innovative appeal. Instead of selling the products sell the “purpose-designed content presented in most natural format. Let genuineness guide the content and ensure that the content should be captivating, interesting and above all informative.

Content is really the king – Respect it

The content should complement the products you offer and subtly reveal it to the clients during the natural course of reading. Three things that will offer you a distinct appeal will be – the language, media, and knowledge. In fact, the aim should not be to make sales or acquire a client but to establish a definite rapport with the reader that would start a long lasting relation. This approach will help you to acquire loyalty and eventually converts readers into client. Whether you are finalizing the content of the website or writing company blogs, always ensure that you should use the simple language, a beautiful flow and some genuine knowledge in your content.

Change with time

You also need to assess the present scenario identify the obliterated practices and shunning them the same time you can identify the present shift in trends and predict the futuristic strategy. That will offer eh cutting edge over your clients. For example, e current trend is to value images much more than content. People of today now need something quick that does not to be read while squinting but could be seen while effortlessly. Hence employing n infographic can be the best way pp enjoy the attention.

Graphics attract but is moderate

You should also ensure that the audience should get the swift entry while they type for any search. You can offer a number of infographics that will allow you the entry a well-designed calendar. Besides the mobile search have now surpassed he desktop search. Hence a having a mobile enabled infographic can be the best choice.

While design plays a key role in impacting the audience you need to be very careful while designing your site. The major objectives of a site are not to overstuff your site with design elements but to offer a design that is most relevant with r studying habits.

Minimalism is the Mantra

Go for minimalism when it comes to eh designing. Opt for the simple design with brand specific features. Whether it is design, content, colors or programming the minimalistic approach will offer you a good rapport with the audience and will play a major role in increasing your reach while widening the opportunities to sell. There should be a Concord symphony between the design and content. The design should caress the eyes while communicant g with the audience in a nutshell.

10 Ways To Make Your Lead Generation Website Convert On The First Visit

 

You’ve invested a lot into your lead generation website to get eyes on it, but it’s not enough that people just look at it. It’s extremely important that your lead generation website is able to drive visitors to conversion, and what you might not know is that they need to convert right away. Straight North examined more than 300,000 sales leads and discovered something surprising — 84 percent of conversions happened on the first visit. When visitors came back to the page multiple times, their chances of converting plummeted.

The following presentation outlines these shocking statistics, and lays out some tried-and-true methods for re-engineering a website to drive higher conversions on the first visit. After all, there’s too much riding on your website to leave anything to chance, especially when the chances become so much slimmer with each visit.

 

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Author Bio: Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy at Straight North — an Internet marketing agency that provides SEO and PPC services — and has more than 25 years of marketing and sales experience. Brad has been featured on leading business sites including Forbes and Entrepreneur.

The Ultimate Guide to Choose the Right Image for Your Landing Pages

 

Web design is an extension of page design, and when it comes to page design, there are plenty of rules and principles for putting together a winning website. Landing pages can be tricky; they have many elements to them that require careful consideration;

  1. The main headline
  2. Subtitle
  3. The call to action button
  4. Social Proof
  5. Dedicated content
  6. The form and fields people need to fill in
  7. and of course the main hero image

While each element is equally important and cannot work without the other, the image and the colors we use on our landing page have the largest impact on our customer’s initial impressions of us, their experience and as a result, our conversion rates.

Since our brains process images much faster than text, the first thing our potential customer sees on the landing page is the image and it is all that’s standing between your customer bouncing from the page or choosing to read more or convert.

How to choose an image strategy for your landing page

The main hero image is meant to help potential customers see the value in our offer within the first couple of seconds, understand what’s in it for them and why they should take the next step in our customer journey vs. the competitor’s.

On average we see between 4000-10,000 messages a day, we’re constantly bombarded with ads, text messages, calls and content everywhere, the possibilities and options online are endless and tiring.

This is one of the main reasons potential customers easily and almost automatically navigate from one site to another without giving as much as thought for the page they just visited. As consumers we move quickly from one competitor to another until something clicks in our brain and catches our attention. That something is the value, the “What’s In It For Me?”

whats-int-for-me

To stand out from your competitors and gain your customer’s attention (therefore increase conversion rates), the hero image on every landing page, email campaign and especially your website should project immediate value to your customer.

This isn’t an image of your product, service or features, it’s an image that highlights the emotional value customers gain from being your customers (e.g increase self confidence, get appreciated by your boss or find true love). As I mentioned at Mozcon, insurance companies don’t sell insurance policy, they sell peace of mind; a happy carefree family.

While most landing pages show an image of the product, platform or service they’re providing, we’ve ran countless tests proving time and time again that value wins almost every time.

For example, this company provides an all-in-one solution for creating birthday and party invitations. While the original landing page featured images of the different templates available and featured a product focused headline: “Custom online invitations in minutes”

original-landing-page

The variation we created visualized the party scene for our potential customers. Utilizing different colors to enhance certain feelings, an image of the park, a picnic basket and a dog this variation focused on helping people envision the perfect party, which starts with a great invitation. The results: 65% uplift in purchased subscriptions!

landing-page-variation-1

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that yourself.

There Are 3 Ways to Define Your Image Strategy

Before setting down to design your landing page and randomly choose your image, take some time to follow the 3 step process we use to define the customer’s value and the images we want to test:

Step 1: Talk to your customers

The great thing about talking to customers is that they have all the answers. They know why they purchased an item or service and have a clear reason for doing so. However, most customers will give you a list of tactical reasons for their purchase. This happens due to our brain’s tendency to rationalize our purchases, we may purchase on emotion but our brain quickly finds a way to rationalize that decision. For example – buying an expensive suit, or that lamp you don’t really need is then explained by attaining a good deal for it or your sudden need for more light around the house.

So a great way to discover your value and avoid technical answers is asking them how they would feel about removing certain items from your stock or certain features from your platform. This will give you a clearer understanding of the real value people find in your service. You can also ask what may have stopped them from converting and more importantly, ask them about THEM: What are their dreams, aspirations and even what scares them – get to know them so you can offer relevant, more compelling images, colors and content.

Talk to your team

Your customer success team, your sales team and anyone who talks to your customers on a daily or weekly basis can provide key insights. They know what people complain about, what their main issues are and what people find exciting. Talk to your team, interview them and learn how they view the customer, what values they believe you offer and compare these to your customer interviews.

Analyze direct and indirect competitor sites

NO I’m not suggesting you copy from your competitors in anyway. What I am saying is that you should analyse the testimonials and especially the reviews found on your competitor’s site. This comes straight from Joanna Wiebe’s research process: See what reviews customers are leaving, what bothers them and what they care about to discover what you need to highlight on your landing page and what value you should focus on.

Once you’ve compiled all this data together you’ll be able to define the image strategy you want to test. The next step,  is finding these images that highlight the value and have all of the qualities you’re looking for. Below are 6 rules you should follow once you’ve defined you’re strategy and ready to choose an image for your landing page:

6 Rules for Choosing a Landing Page Image

#1 Use Real, Relatable and Authentic Images

A successful image is one that your customers can to relate to. Either by seeing themselves in the image or someone they would want to be like, someone that reflects their challenges and values, or someone they can and want to connect to.

Use authentic images of people and avoid ones that are clearly stock photos, bought for the sake of the page. Best case scenario – use real images of your customers or your team, if you can’t use those choose your images wisely. A quick google images search can show you how many companies are already using that image. Ask yourself, is this image authentic? Will my customers relate to it? Or does it look like this (in case this isn’t clear –> this is a bad image!):

team-corporate-people-group-office-company

Mailchimp’s new homepage redesign (launched just a few weeks) ago baffles me. The image is clearly a stock photo image (if not… then bad execution) that feels cold and has no relation to their headline “Being yourself makes all the difference”. Does this image represent their target audience? The colorful background with different shapes, colors and palm leaves distracts the customer and has no value that I can personally detect.  As a Mailchimp customer, personally I don’t feel comfortable with this women staring me in the eye and telling me to be myself.  This image feels fake and I have a hard time relating to it in anyway.

mailchimp-new-homepage

Gusto on the other hand, has an image of a women sitting in front of her desk smiling. Now, granted I don’t really know if this a real photo of an HR person or a stock photo but it feels real and the connection between the image and headline is clear. I can immediately resonate with it, it’s authentic and relatable to HR personnel who do it all.  Gusto makes the main image work with the strategy of the page, makes it about the customer and as opposed to the lady staring at us from Mailchimp’s new design, this women doesn’t feel alienating – she feels welcoming, someone you might want to meet. This is the difference between using authentic images that relate to your target audience vs. images that just look nice and have a “cool” composition.

good-landing-page-example

#2 Reduce Visual Noise

“With great power, comes great responsibility” – As we’ve seen, our image captures most of the attentive mind of our landing page visitor, it’s almost always the first thing we see and it’s what determines if we should hang around a take a few more seconds to read and understand the offer. This means, that other than choosing a good strategic image, we also need to think about reducing the noise it creates so it doesn’t have a negative affect. We need to make sure it’s easy for customers to quickly see what’s in it for them and asses our services. How do you do that? By following these 3 simple rules:

  • Ensure high contrast between the image and the page content so it doesn’t “drown” out the text, making it hard for people to read, like this for example:

landing-page-examples

  • Ensure the photo is distraction “clean” as possible and helps customers focus only on the most important elements of it unlike the landing page below for example. There’s so much going on within this image that it’s hard to focus on anything. Not to mention the fact that this is yet another common image used by thousands of startups to show  another “unique” office space. This image has nothing to do with the service. How exactly does an image of random people in an office make you feel that this a “new model for talent development”? Clean images, mean using only the objects that help get the message across, remove any details that can cause confusion or stress on the eyes.

landing-page-examples-1

  • Consider the colors you use – colors have an emotional effect on us and can assist us in saying things without actually spelling them to people. For example, you don’t have to say you’re trustworthy, you could (in Western cultures) use blue for that.  Also, remember to reduce the amount of colors you use so it’s easier on the eyes and easy to take in.

#3 Use Images as Direction Cues

Our main image is there to create a certain atmosphere and feeling, but it’s also there to navigate the customer in the right direction and point them towards the next step (whether it’s subscribing, downloading something or simply reading more).  You can use your main image as a directional cue to show people what to do next like the visual below.

You’ll notice that all elements (computer, paper, earphones and pens) are placed around the call to action button making that the main focal point of the page. Granted, I’m not sure this is the best image to use to sell a UX class, since it’s only showing specific elements you’re going to use during the course, but doesn’t explain why you should actually take it. However the placement of elements is done well.

landing-page-tips

Perhaps a better example is by ‘Here One’. As you can see they’re using their main character (seems authentic and wearing product) to point with his entire body towards the call to action button.

image-landing-page-tips

#4 Avoid carousels and auto play videos

While tempting, carousels confuse visitors and make it hard on them to focus on the action they need to take so don’t use them. This is actually a well known fact and many case studies have shown that rotating images reduce conversion rates. And so do automatic background videos! instead of reading your content and taking the next step, the visitor is now engaged in a moving video that’s distracting and has nothing to do with your goal. Have multiple images in mind? Test them, don’t use them all at once.

#5 Consider Mobile

Just because an image performs well on desktop, does not mean it will work or look well on mobile. First, you’ve got the fact that technically the image may look bad on mobile:

  • It may look stretched
  • Take too long to load
  • Completely dominate the page
  • Move all your content below the fold
  • or simply won’t make sense to a visitor on mobile.

Let’s look at the same example by ‘Here One’: it looks and works great on desktop. However, on mobile it’s a different story. The image of the guy and the colors they’re using make it hard to read the text. It’s not immediately clear what this product is and could be perceived as a hearing aid rather than advanced, cool earphones. The strategy of this image, doesn’t work well on mobile.

mobile-version-1-e1478795856894

#6 A/B test your Strategies

Once you have an hypothesis for your image strategy, take the time to test it vs. the one you already have. In fact, test different strategies, for example an image of your product or someone using the product vs. an customer centric image. This is not only a great way to validate your hypothesis but also a good way to show numbers, figures and facts to your team who might have a hard time getting behind this new initiative. A/B testing image strategies instead of just simple elements such as the color of the  call to action button will give you greater insights that can then be presented to your team for convincing them to get on board.

Image Checklist

Use the following checklist and process to define the images for every landing page, email campaign or website you launch:

  • Define the goal of your page (e.g – subscribe, download)
  • Evaluate current image strategy (Does it highlight the customer or yourself?)
  • Use heatmaps to determine current image (e.g – is it a focal point, are people clicking on it)
  • Conduct customer surveys
  • Conduct interviews with team
  • Analyse competitor websites for reviews and testimonials
  • Combine all data to define a customer centric image strategy
  • Choose image (using the 6 rules)
  • Launch A/B test of current variation vs. new variation

 

Over to You

Remember that the image doesn’t work alone, it’s part of a whole composition working with the copy, your fonts, colors and call to action button. All elements together should be geared towards helping the customer immediately seeing what’s in it for them and helping them take the next step.

 

This post originally published on Talia Wolf’s blog

SMS, Apps or Email? Customer Engagement Strategies Analysed [Infographic]

 

For marketing to be considered effective, it needs to prompt action from its targeted audience to enough of a degree that the brand ultimately recoups more in revenue than what it spent to initiate the campaign. Marketers need to communicate the right message in the right format at the right time, or else consumers will simply ignore the message. It also needs to be done through the most appropriate channel of communication, whether that is via an app, email marketing or SMS.

When making this decision, marketers must consider a series of factors. Do they want to communicate a lengthy or succinct message? Do they need instant reaction from their targeted customer base? What is the main demographic being targeted? If the campaign needs a swift response, the brevity and immediacy of SMS makes this an ideal option. Indeed, research shows that the general populace is far more likely to respond to a text message than an email, as people’s normal behaviour with the medium is to reply immediately.

This infographic from Neon SMS in Ireland analyses the three main marketing communication channels, picking out the main pros and cons of each one. Selecting the most appropriate medium for your campaign could prove to be the difference between enormous success and expensive failure.

Report: The Real ROI of Social Media Marketing

social-media-facebook

Social media and digital marketing is everywhere. Any brand attempting to promote, engage, and connect with their target audience in today’s day and age is using social media to market to their constituents. While only 10 years old, social media has become a catalyst in restoring the one to one relationship between brands and consumers.

In its 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Social Media Examiner, a leader in the space, has provided invaluable insight as to how brands and individuals are using social media for marketing purposes.

Interestingly, the most important question (“What is the ROI of social media?”)remains to be answered in a concrete manner. Does that mean that social media will disappear? Probably not. What this report does seem to document is that, with the initial trend of social media integration behind us, companies and brands are now transitioning to a point requiring a more transparent and clearer reporting for concrete results of social media marketing.

The Highlights

After reviewing Top Rank’s analysis of the report, which enumerates five major benefits of social media on business, there are some additional findings which warrant discussion and should be raised for longer term consideration.

The Role of Video Marketing

While nearly 60% of marketers already utilize video in their marketing efforts, 72% indicated that video marketing is part of their short term goals to integrate into their digital strategy. Especially with recent changes on Facebook, video marketing is clearly an important channel for content creation and marketing.

In fact, in the study, learning to create videos is the number one area that marketers wish to increase their knowledge and expertise.

Growth of Podcasting in Digital Mix

To date, only 10% of marketers are using podcasting as a tool to create content and engage with an audience.

Why?

Like video, podcasting requires a significant investment in resources to produce a final product. While Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram represent platforms on which content can be automated or quickly shared, podcasting can only be distributed after the raw content has been edited and modified for optimal brand promotion. Unlike blog content, which can be edited in real time, the time and energy involved prior to distributing podcast content, dissuades many marketing teams from integrating this form of content.

Interestingly, the small group of marketers using podcasting praise its value and high engagement rates since the content is automatically pushed and syndicated to a user’s phone or desktop via a platform like Itunes. While content on a blog can be sent via email, the simplicity of podcast syndication and ability to listen at one’s leisure signifies a user controlled experience with which other forms of content are unable to compete.

The Secondary Benefits of Social Media Marketing

The report does indicate that those marketers involved in social media for over two years are actually seeing sales from the relationships and communities that they’ve established. To date, the secondary benefits (branding, exposure, partnerships, lead gen, cost savings, search rankings) outweigh the direct impact of social media on business revenue.

An intriguing development in the secondary benefits of social media is the ability for content writing and social conversation to enable a brand or personality to position themselves as thought leaders within an industry.

In today’s digital space, these secondary benefits are indeed significant, within the context of a brand’s ability to solidify the opportunities into concrete sales. Briefly stated, search ranking, for example, does help a brand gain advantage over its competitors on search engines. If, however, the user is directed to a site that is not optimized for conversion or otherwise confusing, the benefit of search engine optimization has proven to be insignificant.

Measuring the ROI of Social Media

One of the most significant results that emerged from the study is that only 42% of marketers can actually measure the direct result of their marketing efforts. While the number does show 5% increase from 2014, and 16% increase from 2013, the results still do raise questions in terms of return on investment.

Many of the marketers claiming this challenge are ill-equipped with the necessary reporting tools or do not invest the necessary time on social media as the primary factors in their inability to show direct ROI.

What are some of the most effective social media platforms?

An important aspect of the report was a list of the top seven social media platforms being used by marketers. In order of usage- Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram. Instagram did increase its position by 8% and, despite the common notion that Google+ is becoming more insignificant, the social media platform increased by 2% since 2014.

An important distinction made in the report is the social media platforms used by B2B vs B2C marketers. B2C marketers focus on Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram. These four are highly visual based platforms that resonate with consumers looking for visually appealing content prior to making purchase decisions.

For B2B marketers, the focus shifts to Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and Slideshare. The reason for this differential is that B2B marketing efforts focus on establishing relationships, industry related content and understanding the employee within the context of his or her professional role.

As marketers prepare for future social media efforts, both B2B and B2C efforts are shifting their efforts to increase usage on Twitter, learning to leverage video marketing and integrating Instagram into their overall digital strategy. Again, while many individuals in the social media sphere shy away from Google+, the report indicates that 78% of marketers plan to maintain or increase their activities on this platform.

With regards to newer social media platforms including Snapchat, the report indicates a low rate of interest of marketers to integrate Snapchat or other new social platforms into their overall marketing efforts.

In terms of Snapchat, the reasons could be lack of interest, lack of familiarity with usability or associating Snapchat with an audience incongruent with their target audience. For other new platforms, marketers could be showing a sense of complacency to constantly learn and integrate new platforms or they could be more interested in proving value in the core, more commonly accepted, platforms before venturing into new ones.

For those marketers who are comfortable with being early adopters in new platforms or are willing to risk venturing into new territories, these platforms do indeed present significant opportunities.

Like Top Rank, I agree that a very important result from the 2015 Social Media Examiner report is the ability of marketers to quantify specific objectives and show results that meet these goals. With this report, an important question that remains unanswered in the social media marketing sphere is which benefits play a more significant role direct or indirect sales benefits?

 

This post was originally published on noholtzbarred blog

The Ultimate List Of AB Testing

Creative-Design

Building a conversion optimization strategy is a process. You’ve spent time on tracking, analyzing, building a hypothesis and building your test. Moments before you launch, take the time to go over the following AB test checklist to make sure you have everything you need and to ensure your test results are meaningful and scalable.

Everything you need to do before launching:

The first thing to do when you decide to start testing is ask yourself where you’re going to test. That’s where planning comes in. Usually you want to start where you can both have the biggest impact and also learn the most. Oftentimes, this is at the top of the funnel where there are the most users, but take a look at this section and see what works best for you.

  • Measure your website’s performance (Read more about where to start and what to track)

  • Use heatmaps to understand user behavior (Read more about heatmaps to increase conversion)

  • Define your goal – (e.g – registrations, sales)

  • Define KPI’s – what will you track?

  • How long will it take you to reach significance? Make sure to chose a part of the funnel that will generate results and matter.

  • If you have other tests planned or ongoing – would yours conflict?
  • Choose the best platform for your test

CREATIVE CHECKLIST

The design process of a test is where you make the difference. Knowing what to test and how will be the difference between a successful or failed test. The steps you take to optimize your assets will determine if your test results in relevant or non-essential conclusions. Here’s what you need to make sure of before you complete your new variation:

The Call to Action Button:

  • You have one call to action (CTA)

  • Your CTA is above the fold

  • The text on your call to action contains no more than one or two words

  • Your CTA is clear – people will know what to do immediately

  • The call to action button stands out – in color and size

The Content:

  • The content focuses on value – not features

  • Your headline matches your message on ads

  • Your title is actionable and tells people what to do

  • You’re using one font type
  • Your unique selling proposition is clear

  • You’re using social proof – testimonial, customer logos, reviews

  • Your keywords are relevant to your SEO needs

  • All text is HTML for SEO

  • You are mobile focused
  • You have no or a minimum of links on the page

The Main Visual:

  • You have no more than 2 main colors on your page

  • The visual compliments your USP

  • The visual directs user attention to the call to action

  • The visual projects trust and reliability

The Registration Form:

  • Requires a minimum of fields to get started

  • Required fields are easy to distinguish from non required fields

  • Highlights your USP and why people should sign up
  • You have a confirmation page/layer

  • You send a confirmation email to signups

PRE-LAUNCH CHECKLIST

Before launching your test, there are a few important elements you have to check. This AB testing checklist may take sometime to go through but once you move forward with your test, you’ll know it has been set up in the best way. You should always be sure that the changes you made are working well and are trackable:

 

  • Your goals are set up in Google Analytics

  • Your goals are set up in AdWords (if relevant)

  • Your Google Analytics tracking code has been implemented

  • Google Analytics events have been set

  • Images are rendering correctly
  • Adwords account is connected to analytics (if relevant)

  • Ecommerce tracking is enabled (if relevant)

  • Goals are firing within Google Analytics

  • Segmentation is correct: your experiment is appearing to the right audience

  • Page load time is at minimum – use Google’s speed test tool

  • Variation is compatible with all browsers using BrowserStack

  • Demographics and Interest reports are enabled on GA

  • All links work (and send to the right page)

  • All links open in new tab

  • Links have anchor text

  • Image size is at minimum

  • Variation is compatible with mobile or excludes mobile traffic

  • You’ve QA’d the entire funnel of your variation (not just the page you’re working on)

  • Heatmaps are working well

  • You’ve located any 404 non existing pages

  • Lead box is working correctly

  • Your main title is in H1

  • Experiment parameters are setup

Time to launch that test!

THE AFTERMATH

A test isn’t complete until we’ve reached conclusions, analyzed our results and have a plan for our next steps:

  • Test for a minimum of 7 days – to make sure there aren’t any changes due to special occasions or unknown criteria

  • Make sure you reach statistical significance. Don’t be quick to the trigger – allow tests to run to their full extent until you’ve reached significant validity

  • Analyze the data and draw conclusions

  • Get the team involved – the best way to keep testing is to showcase your results to others and get them on board with testing

  • Take the next steps – optimize

TOOLS

There are many tools that can make your job easier and faster:

  • Hotjar – The all in one solution for heatmaps, surveys, analysis and visitor recordings. If you haven’t tried it yet you’re definitely missing out.

  • Invision – Use invision for better communication around design and creative. Comment and collaborate on creative projects with your team and clients.
  • VWO – Like Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer allows you to edit pages via its sleek user interface and AB test them without needing developers or designers.

  • Webmaster tools – Google’s webmaster tools lets webmasters tell search engines about their site to make it understandable by bots and maximize visibility to people.

  • Kissmetrics – Analytics platforms like these, in conjunction with Google Analytics, can give you access to extra-accurate and different types of reporting

  • Site speed checker – Speed checkers such as Google PageSpeed tool allow you to assess the load time of your page and learn of ways to optimize it

  • Test Significance Calculator – Sometimes, for one reason or another, we run AB tests outside of a true testing platform and just wind up with raw data. Having a significance calculator allows you to determine statistical significance in these scenarios.

 

This post was originally published on Conversioner blog

14 Great Free Online Resources To Boost Traffic To Your Blog

Traffic

Congratulations, you’ve started a blog for your business. Content Marketing is one of the key ways to drive online leads to your business, so you’re off to a good start.

But how can you find the best topics to write about, the best design tools and the best ways to distribute your content? Just as importantly, how can you do it all without breaking the bank?

To help your business we’ve collected 14 awesome free resources to help you grow your blog traffic. How do we know they are awesome? We’ve tried and tested them for ourselves, and we’ve only included the tools that we’ve seen have really made a difference to our blog traffic.

1. Generate Content Ideas- from BuzzSumo

Starting a blog isn’t the hard part, knowing what to write is. Start off with BuzzSumo to check what content on your online site drives the most traffic, as well as what your competitors are writing about that is getting them attention from your potential customers.

BuzzSumo

2. Check interest and Influencers with Topsy

You can also use Topsy to check that there is a general interest in your topic, and to learn which influencers are already talking about your topic. You can then embed their tweets in your posts, or quote them to add value to your blog, and interest for your readers.

Topsy

3. Brainstorm topics with Hubspot’s Free Blog Topic Generator

Have a general idea about what to write about now but can’t seem to put the words together in a catchy way? You need Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator. Just put in a few nouns related to your topic of choice and this fantastic free resource will create a ton of great headline options to inspire you.

Hubspot-headline-generator

4. Craft The Perfect Title with Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer

Once you’ve got some headline options you need to craft the perfect headline to grab your readers’ attention. I’m a huge fan of Co-Schedule’s headline analyzer to help create that perfect headline. Enter in your headline of choice and you’ll get both an analysis and an overall score to hone your title to perfection.

Co-schedule-headline

5. Use Evernote for Content Structuring and Brainstorming

Once you’ve crafted your headline you can start collecting ideas for your blog post. I love using Evernote for this, but you can also simply open a Google Doc and share it with your team. Collect all your ideas and begin to shape your blog content.

Evernote

6. Use Atomic Reach for Testing and Honing Your Content

Written out a blog post outline? Great! Now you just need to check it is relevant and interesting for your audience. We’ve been testing out the Atomic Reach App, for exactly this purpose, and we are loving how easy it makes it to check your content.

It not only checks it for appropriate sentence length, spelling mistakes and more, it also lets you know if your content is relevant for your audience.

Atomic

Ready to launch your beautifully crafted, appropriate content into the blogisphere? Wait a minute! You’ve forgotten images. Posts with images have a 50% higher click rate, so if you want to stand out from the crowd you’ll need interesting and appropriate images.

7. Beautiful, free images from Canva

Canva is a freemium service which helps you design beautiful images to accompany your blog posts. Whilst many templates will cost you a token $1 to use, there are enough free options to help a beginner blogger create beautiful, functional images.

canva

8. Free images for social media, including great collages from PicMonkey

Another fantastic free resource for creating images for your blog posts is PicMonkey. PicMonkey not only offers you a great choice of free backgrounds and fonts, but can also create perfect collages for your blog needs, perfect for tool roundups, or posts about influencers in your field.

PicMonkey

9. Super simple design for your blog from Pablo

Looking for even more options for gorgeous graphics to help your blog post stand out? We’re loving the beautiful new tool from the team over at Buffer, Pablo.  Pablo is simplicity itself, enabling you to create wonderful images in mere seconds.

Pablo

So you’ve picked your topic, you’ve written your headline, you’ve finished your content, and you’ve added beautiful images to really show off your work. Now what?

Without distribution nobody is going to get to your content. You don’t need an enterprise budget to distribute your content to your target audience. There are some fantastic free tools to get you started without paying a dollar.

10. Social Media Distribution the easy way with Buffer

Buffer is a fantastic free social scheduling tool to help you distribute your content across all your social networks. You don’t need any social media knowledge to be able to use Buffer, which really is the simplest social media tool around, and totally free.

Buffer

11. Promote your blog via your email signature with WiseStamp

When promoting your blog post don’t just add it to your Buffer and forget about it. Add your blog link to your email signature with WiseStamp and every email you send out becomes a blog promotion tool. Promoting a company blog? Double, triple or quadruple your blog exposure by using a team signature solution like WiseStamp for Business.

wisestamp

12. Add a call to action to your blog with Snip.ly

Snip.ly is an ingenious little free tool which allows you to add a personalized call to action to either your content, or somebody else’s content. You can use snip.ly to drive your blog traffic by linking to other content from authoritative sources on a similar topic, and adding a snip.ly call to action to drive readers to your content. You can also add a call to action to your blog with snip.ly to convert more of your readers into users.

snip.ly

13. Track and amplify to your blog progress with Mention

I love Mention! Mention pulls up your footprint from the web and social media, so you can track exactly who is sharing your blog, and where. By being responsive to your readers you can double your blog traffic, as well as engage and create dialogue by looking for people asking the question that your blog post answers.

mention

14. Test, and retest with Google Analytics

You’ve sent your blog post out, and with our free tools at your disposal, your traffic is looking good. Use Google Analytics to monitor not only your numbers, but also your traffic referrals, so you can thank your users, make any relevant changes to your blog post, and craft even better content next time.

Google_Analytics

 

This is a guest post by Naomi Goldberg, a British-born content marketer and mummy to three, crafting and promoting content and social for WiseStamp for Business.

This post was originally published on WiseStamp blog

These Numbers Show Exactly Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy [INFOGRAPHIC]

Digital Marketing is probably the fastest growing channel for the delivery of sustainable growth and jobs for businesses and individuals. The digital space is experiencing exponential growth with the aim of bringing more marketing potential and money into the online world. This is true across all industries as the economy evolves and more marketers shift money into digital.

Here are some important statistics about Digital Marketing and why you should be considering a digital strategy as well.

Digital-Marketing-Fund

Infographic is courtesy of Dot Com Infoway

Here Are Some Of The Most Important Conversion Optimization Numbers You Should Know About

It is that time of the year again when everyone rushes to sum up the year and plan for the next. So these past few weeks we have been working on getting as many numbers as possible to understand the current conversion optimization statistics. Understanding what marketers are doing, how shoppers are behaving, what devices people are converting on and more importantly what to look forward to in 2015 can be a crucial part of your plans for the upcoming year.

Here are some very interesting numbers coming up from this year’s companies and spenders:

  • 63% of marketers optimize websites based on intuition & best practices.
  • 73% of companies have no idea why consumers abandon their shopping carts.
  • Poor A/B testing methodologies are costing online retailers up to $13bn a year in lost revenue.

Here’s what you all should look at in the conversion optimization statistics infographic below:

2014:

  • What marketers are doing
  • How Customers Are Spending
  • Conversion by traffic
  • Conversion by Devices
  • Mobile Apps Numbers
  • Where & When to Invest in Social Marketing
  • Making Videos Convert
  • Retail Numbers and Stats

2015:

  • What’s next?

Conversion-optimization-numbers-2014

This post was originally published on Conversioner blog

15 Landing Page Design Examples And What They Can Teach Us

Most  marketers spend the majority of their time and budget on driving users to their sites and landing pages, but very little thought is given to the experience the user has once they reach there. In fact, companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site, but only $1 to convert them (Eisenberg Holdings). This lack of attention and investment in landing page optimization is a huge missed opportunity for organizations.

landing-page-examples

 Learning From Others

A great place to get started in optimizing your own pages is to look at common landing page examples and mistakes that many companies are making on a daily basis. In this article I’ll explore 15 landing pages’ major mistakes and offer different tests you can run to increase conversion:

6 Elements Addressed in Each Landing Page Design

1. Call To Action (CTA) – This is the most important part of the landing page as it is the end goal for what you want the action you want the user to perform. The CTA should be the first natural object a visitor sees. An effective landing page services on clear objective (e.g. sign up, leave their contact information, download a whitepaper, request a demo, or buy now). The call to action should represent the only action you can take on the landing page, which means removing any menus or links on the page. The CTA should also stand out from all other elements by using high contrast, bright colors, and strategic placement. Lastly, make it absolutely clear what the user will get when they click on it. For more information on CTA’s, check out this detailed article on Call to Action Buttons.

2. Messaging – An effective landing page talks about benefits, not features:
Putting the customer in the spotlight, not your product or service. Good messaging conveys the change a customer will experience in their daily lives with your product, not how amazing your product is. This message should also be conveyed in a matter of seconds. Providing convincing information to allow a visitor to make a decision. Understanding the experience a visitor needs to go through is key to higher conversions.

3. Registration Forms – If the goal of your page is to capture leads or contact information, your landing page will have a registration form. Creating an effective, and high converting registration form involves several factors and there are several ways to increase their conversion:

a. Minimize your request – ask for the minimum possible
b. Be precise- Explain the reason for singing up and be specific.
c. Call to action – make sure to have a clear call to action that indicates the next steps that need to be taken.
d. Guide the user – Help users understand where they are, and where they’re going. Use indicators, explanation fields and don’t surprise the user.
e. Consider social signups – Following the minimizing requests necessity, introduce social connect for easier signup.

There are many other elements to take into consideration, and we’ll discuss them when we dig deeper in to our landing page examples.

4. Page Structure– The look, feel, and overall structure of a landing page will have a large impact on how it performs, and ultimately conversion. Minimalist design tends to perform better, so be sure to maintain a clean landing page with clear navigation and little distraction. The most important content should be placed at the top of the page, or “above the fold.” This way a user does not have to scroll in order to get all of the necessary information to convert.

5. Images – I know, I’m probably like a broken record by now BUT: Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. The Image is IMPORTANT.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and having an image that captures your visitors’ attention, or stirs emotion can make or break landing page performance. Some things to keep in mind:

a. Use imagery to add meaning: either to the brand, or to the content
b. Get more meaning from fewer graphics
c. Use images deliberately to support your message and communication goals
d. Remember the landing page’s goal and the users’ goals, and apply graphics in subtle proportions

6. Colors – Believe it or not, color has a powerful influence on our emotions and decision-making abilities. Colors are a great way to communicate emotions in a matter of seconds. Checkout this extensive article on color psychology.

So, lets take a look at these landing page critiques and learn as much as possible from them. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on the landing pages. If you’d like to have your landing page critiqued next, send a quick email to [email protected].

—-

GolfLinked

Landing page examples

I know I’m not the targeted audience, BUT:

What’s in it for me? So this is the BEST app for connecting golfers. Great, but how is it going to change my life? Circling back to messaging –> it should be about the customer not the app. What’s in it for the user?

Let’s talk about the image –the image is one of the most dominating elements on your landing page and can be used not only to convey a message but to direct users attention to other important elements. The image shows a golf player with his back to us (which makes it impersonal) but further more, the image is distracting. In fact the first thing a visitor notices on the page is the iPhone and not the call to action, which is what we want them to notice.

The Call to action is placed on his butt. Enough said. No one wants to click on anyone’s butt.

Stop emphasizing your logo and even worst making it clickable, companies do this all the time. It’s attention grabbing, if you’re not Apple or another huge brand there’s no need to highlight your logo. Move it out of the spotlight.

The use of colors – Green is a great color for creating a fresh, clean and new feeling.  Green also serves as a great natural color that is easy on the eyes.

What to test:

  • Have your image facing/pointing at the call to action button – it will focus the visitor’s attention in the right direction. Finding an image that works for golf isn’t easy at all, we ran a similar test last year.

 

HookFeed

Landing page Examples

The headline is really vague. My customers are my business? What do you do? Why should I use this product? It doesn’t give me enough of an insight to how this will make my life much easier. I’m not sure how segmented are the visitors arriving on this page, but it lacks a more in-depth explanation.

Great use of social proof quotes, especially from Stripe’s co-founder. People love to feel others like them are using the same products and services as they are.

Nice call to action, contrasted from the rest of the page, stands out and it is the first natural elements my eyes focus on.

Extremely Confusing Funnel – The call to action button opens a confusing list of options. You’ve just gotten people to tryout your free trial but instead you’re confusing people and asking them for too much.

Hookefeed 2

  2 Elements You Can Test:

  • Before showing them a list of prices, start by collecting their email details that way you can follow up on them if they leave.
  • Once they’ve entered their email address, send them to the product and have your list of offers in a layer above it. This way, customers will feel they’re just a step away from reaching the product and will complete the funnel.

 

Present

Landing page examples

The image of the girl conveys a great feeling of excitement and adventure. For an app that wants to get you excited about capturing your life in video, it does a great job. One comment: Flip her! Get her to look the other direction.

The messaging is great – “A social Video Diary, capturing your life’s journey.” I know what this is, I know how it will improve my life and I can get this in less than 5 seconds.

What do you want a visitor to do? Find out more, download the app or subscribe? All 3 buttons on the page have the same weight and it’s not clear what the target is.

What To Test:

  • Flipping the girls image to look at the CTA
  • Try using the “Win an iPhone 6″ competition as an exit pop, so that when people come to leave they have a last minute proposition.
  • If you want to subscribe Android users to a mailing list, you can do that with a simple link under the “Download App” button asking: “Android user?” a click on that can open a subscribe window.

 

StampReady

landing page example

 

What is your call to action? Are you trying to get people to watch the video? Or register?

Everything’s grey. You need to use your design and colors to point the visitor in the natural direction of the call to action.

Nice work on the signup form, it’s short and to the point. I would however change the color of “Register account” to something different than grey, more actionable and I would think about changing the messaging on the call to action to something more exciting.

stampready 2

The messaging doesn’t tell me anything. What are you offering? Why is StampReady better for me? How is it going to simplify my life? I’m also not sure about having the name of your company in the headline. The headline is meant to give you the big picture in under 3 seconds, unless you’re a well known brand, that won’t work.

What to Test:

  • The image/video in the background says nothing about the service. As you’re already showing a video as your main call to action, I would have a static image in the background that would give more of a feeling of what StampReady is for its customers.
  • Add a clear call to action
  • Change the messaging
  • Add color to page

 

PeekCalendar

landing page examples

What’s the CTA? “Watch the video” or “Get it”? choose.

What do you want me to look at? This is similar to the previous comment. There’s so much going on with colors, images, text, screenshots, buttons I have no idea what the flow is, what I’m suppose to do or what your app does.

I’d definitely test one main image, or if you’re set on having 2 then less colors, more focus. Also, note how you can barley read the “watch the video” text, it almost blends in with the background…

Where’s the emotion? Where’s the “This is the answer to all your scheduling turmoil’s?” (and there are soooo many!!) A pair of hands holding an iPhone with a calendar that looks just any other isn’t the answer.

Love the title, calendars are extremely hard to manage (like email) and I like the reference to it being humanized for actual people to use.

Things to test:

Find the right image

  • Test using a screenshot from the app that shows the actual difference and value you bring
  • If you can’t, then test using an image that conveys emotion (no screenshots or iPhones), just an image that says “this is how you will look like/feel once you use our app.”

 

Munchery

landing page examples

The use of images could be optimized. A great way to direct users attention to the call to action button is using the images themselves as indicators. For example, instead of having the corn facing outwards, have it facing the call to action button. Basically all elements on the landing page should point to the call to action.

I’d definitely look into focusing the user on one message only that explains the service quicker.

Actionable call to action messaging: “View Menu” – I know exactly where I’m heading with it and it gives a safe feeling.

Great use of colors to provoke emotion, arouse the taste buds and basically make people hungry.

What to Test:

  • The Messaging doesn’t explain the product.  In fact, you have to read the fine print to really understand what Munchery do ‘Wholesome Meals In a Snap’ could be a site with recipes… There’stoo much text and it’s hard to take in. Try reducing the text “Order expertly…” and see if you can use it as your headline.

 

Frank & Oak

Frank & Oak

The messaging is completely vague. Why should I discover Frank & Oak? Similar to the case of StampReady, putting your brand’s name in the headline is like answering a question with a question. You’re basically asking people to read more and investigate, people don’t have time for that.

Too many ‘Call to Action’ buttons. Both their colors are in complete contrast to each other and the background and I don’t understand what you prefer I’d do: Signup with facebook or my email? It’s extremely important to have one call to action, if you want to give people another way of signing up offer it under the large call to action button in a way of a link.

What to test:

  • The image is a controversy, on one hand it’s doing great use in pointing towards the call to action. On the other hand, he has his head pointing down and he looks sad. Depending on culture, an image of a person staring at the user is too intrusive, but no eye contact whatsoever creates the sense of detachment, depression and seclusion. I’d test a different image, still pointing at the CTA but something more cheerful.

 

Mixioapp

Mixioapp

To understand Mixioapp I had to do some scrolling, downloading and watching.

The messaging isn’t clear enough to understand how this works or when. The amount of text under the main headline is basically telling visitors “Don’t read this!”

The call to action button almost doesn’t exist. Located on the far top right corner in the same white color that all other elements on the page are in, it’s hard to see how people even notice it.

To play fair, I checked the page on my mobile device and was surprised to find that although it is a downloadable app, there was absolutely no call to action to be found. Basically, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to be told how to use this app. Not to mention to be told what this app is…

The use of color on the landing page is important. Mixioapp’s messaging is all about taking pictures while on an adventure or just on a daily basis when magical things happen. Green represents fresh, new and growth, which is just what their targeted audience needs.

 

One Hour Translation

One hour transaltion

 

It’s easy to get what you do, but the first thing that appears on this landing page is clutter. The amount of colors and things going on this page is overwhelming.

The amount of call to action buttons is distracting and hard to comprehend. There’s no room to breath. Do you want people to fill in the form? Or do you want people to click on ”Get an instant quote”? The page can benefit from some cleaning up and redefining the goals of the landing page.

The amount of text is also an issue, all the text is on the right of the page and as a result you get is headline attached to a subtitle the additional text, the form and the security icons. Keep in mind that people may need al this info in bullets + the text needs more spacing.

I cannot say this enough: Marketing isn’t about the product or service, it’s about the change you make in a consumers life. Being the world’s fastest translation agency is fantastic but it’s about you, not the customer. I’d definitely mention it, but would try and test over headlines with a more targeted message to the customers.

I love using icons to ensure trust and security; the use of badges and certificates is a great way toenhance brand security. In One-hour translations’ case I would suggest repositioning them in a place that would give them more emphasis.

What to test:

  • A good way to emphasis an element is to give it some white space. Whitespace will help differentiate between the important and the less.
  • Cleaning the page completely. Removing text, all the elements and amount of colors.

 

 Dynado

Dynado

 

It took me too long to understand what Dynado is offering. “Better All-In-One communications” could be so many products… why are there random words highlighted below the headline? It makes it extremely hard to read the text and understand what they do.

There are literally hundreds of products out there today doing team management and communications. I have no idea why Dyando is better than others.

Using random stock photos of people around a computer does not help their case. Most companies use a task management and communication tool for teams that are remote… they don’t sit around looking at a computer together so I’m not sure what they were going for here.

What to test:

The call to action button has two issues that I’d fix:

  • The first is the text – the title of the page says Dynado and the headline of page uses the word ‘Better’ as part of the sentence, so most people have no idea that “Better” is the name of the product and it’s very confusing.
  • The other thing I’d test is the color of the button, I don’t usually do these kinds of tests (before testing strategies) but the white text on the neon green button make my eyes squint.

 

daPulse

dapulse

 

I decided to critique daPulse as a second point of view on team collaboration platforms (full disclosure, I used to work with these guys):

The messaging is great, as mentioned before the world is crowded with different platforms and products and it is extremely important to stand out and say how your product benefits the customer. This is true to all industries, your competitors are doing the same as you more or less and it’s up to you to show your customers the emotional benefits in purchasing your product or software. It’s not about being the best product, it’s about making a change in your customers life.

Appealing to managers on a personal level and telling them they’re going to become amazing managers is what categorizes daPulse as different (Great job!).

The signup area is a little over crowded, I would definitely test moving the “free 30 days trial” sentence below the form and giving it less emphasis. Visually, I’d also enlarge the top part of the page to give it more emphasis and in turn enlarge the signup area.

Notice how the image in the background amplifies the “connecting remote teams” theme; although not a clear image and I’m not quite sure what the gold in the corner stands for, the idea of worldwide collaboration is clear and precise.

What to test:

  • I’d consider using the testimonials and trust elements in a more prominent position on the page (right now it’s at the bottom).
  • I don’t know how targeted and segmented are the visitors arriving on this page but I’d consider further clarifying what it is that you do by adding a subtitle.

 

The John Maxwell Team

John Maxwell

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at this page is: A coach of what? Very vague headlineand I’m not sure why it is in quotes. I’d move the part about “leadership” to the headline.

Starting a video automatically is extremely annoying. Don’t do it.

The registration form is short and to the point, I would however merge the first and last name fields. I’d also work on the text above the fields, as it is very hard to read clearly.

The messaging of the entire page is about life’s transformation and then the call to action button says, “click here to get started”, I’d consider trying “Change your life today!” or something along those lines.

What to test:

  • The call to action should also be a contrasting color to the rest of the page. I’d also consider adding some type of background color.

 

Cricket IP Security Cameras

Cricket

The use of the color Green on the call to action button is very good as it is the general direction in which a visitor will look at.

The list of benefits is great but I can’t read it. White space is crucial here, and I’d also increase the headline to make it more noticeable.

Great use of security elements and icons blow the call to action.

What to test:

  • I know they’re selling security cameras but that image is just terrible. No emotion, no interest and no purpose other than showing the visitor what the camera looks like. When talking about security you want to make visitors feel secure and peaceful before even purchasing the product. Show them how safe they’ll be once they acquire this camera.

 

Last but not least

dating-app

A company that will be launching their dating app in 1.5 months sent this landing page to me and asked me to review it. Their goal for now is to sign up people, so that once they launch they can send them the news and get them engaged. As there’s not a lot to go on, this will be short but I do have some important comments.

This is a screen capture from a standard screen, which means you have a bug and it needs to be fixed, as I can’t read that sentence at the bottom

The hierarchy of elements on your landing page doesn’t make sense. It seems that your logo and company name are more important than the sign up form. I’d enlarge the signup field and button and give it much more weight. In addition the black stipe stands out more than other elements on the page and is hovering all the attention. I’d consider changing the color, moving it lower in the page.

What does “invite me” mean? This again to do with the messaging, you need to put yourself out there and not by compering yourself to your competitors. Explain what happens when you signup, what is the value and why it’s worth your visitors while.

What to test:

  • Your messaging gives the visitor absolutely no value; you’re basically just saying you’re an alternative to Tinder. Nothing about your product, why it’s different or how it will make a change in the world of online dating. There are literally thousands of online dating platforms; you have to give people a reason to signup, because right now there isn’t one.

This concludes this month’s landing page examples and critiques. I hope you get a few ideas from these landing pages critiques and I’d love to hear about them. If you have any questions about my comments let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear them.

 

This post was originally published on Conversioner blog

Here’s How To Increase Conversions Using Color Psychology Methods

Colors, can have a tremendous impact on a consumer’s decision to purchase. With today’s 3 seconds to convince visitors to convert kind of world it’s important to use colors, images and messaging the best way we can. As our brains process images 60,000 times quicker than text, color can have a huge impact on your landing page’s conversion rate. In the following article we will explores the emotional power color has on our brains and decisions, along with tips for how you can incorporate color psychology into your landing page designs.

The Emotional Power of Color

Colors are a way of communicating certain messages and feelings in a matter of seconds.  When we use the right colors, they can have an emotional effect on our visitors and direct them in to action.  According to Kissmetrics, 85% of shoppers place color as the primary reason for why they buy a product and color increases brand recognition by 80%.  People are also said to make subconscious decisions in under 90 seconds, and color is a great way to trigger action.

Emotional-triggers-of-colors

Segmenting Colors by Gender & Age

In general when we design our landing pages we don’t put a large emphasis on gender unless we’re targeting our product to a specific gender. We use colors to portray specific emotions and make a memorable experience for our client’s users. Depending upon the type of product or service you offer, and the industry in which you operate, gender preferences may play heavily into purchase decisions.  It pays to understand which colors persuade a particular gender to stay on a page or make a purchase.

According to research from Sherwin-Williams colors that appeal most to women are blue, purple and green while orange, brown, and gray are least appealing.

Earlier this year we worked on a women’s ecommerce store selling prom dresses in the US. in this test we introduced the color pink to project calm, hopeful and positive feelings towards shopping prom dresses online. The color pink was introduced to more than just the banner or background, the images on the page were given a pink hue and were all directing to a certain type of experience – our goal was to help women (mothers and daughters) experience the delight of shopping online in a world of calm and positive emotions . These changes and others increased revenues by 86%.

Before:

Web-colors-1

After:

Web-colors-2

According to the same research from Sherwin-Williams, men preferred blue, green, and black, while brown, orange, and purple were the least loved.  Again, again and again we see that the emphasis shouldn’t be on the gender or age but on the experience you’re creating for the visitor.

When designing your landing page you should also take into account the age of your audience.  You may already have a clear sense of the age of your audience, or if you are using Google Analytics, you can find this information under the Audience tab.  Children and younger generations tend to prefer warmer colors that are associated with positivity and high energy.  These include red, orange, pink, and yellow.  Brown, purple, yellow, and blue are generally associated with sadness and negativity by children.

 

Colors & Types of Consumers

 

Color also has a unique ability to attract certain types of consumers and impact shopping behavior.

  • Impulse shoppers tend to gravitate toward black, red orange, and royal blue.  This is evidenced by the colors found in fast food, outlet malls, and clearance sales.
  • Shoppers on a budget tend to be influenced by navy blue and teal.  This is evidenced by the typical color schemes found in large department stores and retail banking.
  • Traditional buyers are drawn to pink, sky blue, and rose.  Clothing stores will use these customers to attract traditional buyers to their shops.

Designing For Emotion

Color is one of the most subtle and effective ways to instill a specific emotion.   Colors can make us feel happy or sad, relaxed or hungry.  Different research shows that certain colors elicit particular emotions, and by understanding the psychology of color you can establish an emotional connection with consumers.

Yellow

Yellow is a great color to give a gentle energy to a landing page. It is mainly used to inspire happiness, laughter, hope, and sunshine. However, you should use yellow sparingly as it can also irritate the eyes if it is overused. In the landing page below we used the color yellow and other yellow elements to generate fun and sunshine.

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Red

Red can be a great way to draw attention to an element, like a call to action, but use in moderation as the color can become overwhelming.  Red can can bring out emotions of  passion and love, as well as anger or danger. Red also has a tendency to cause us to feel hungry, which is why you see fast food chains like KFC and McDonalds make heavy use of these colors in their branding.

Green

The use of the color green can be done to emphasis regeneration, clean, health and wealth.  Green is commonly found in financial institutions, as it is indicates growth, financial health, and possibility. Earlier this year we introduced the colors green to establish a look and feel of wealth, relaxation, fresh and new. Green is also known as being the easiest color our eyes can process making it easier for us to focus on other elements on the landing page.

This increased conversions by 65% in the first round.

From:

Original-Landing-Page

To:

Landing-page-variation-1

Orange

Orange is more inviting than Red, but still grabs attention.  Orange is one of the most common colors for creating call to action buttons. Earlier this year we discussed Fanta’s use of the color orange and

Blue

Seeing the color blue causes the body to release chemicals that are calming, which causes it to evoke feelings of soothing, calmness, and spirituality.  Dark blue is commonly found in corporate designs because it promotes stability and professionalism.  Lighter blues give a more relaxing and friendly feel.  Take Twitter and Facebook, for example.

Blue-landing-page

Purple

This color is associated with creativity, royalty, nostalgia, and wealth.  Like blue it can also have a calm and soothing effect, however depending on the shade it can also be used to create intrigue.  Purple can be used to make a design appear more luxurious or wealthy, and is often used in beauty and anti-aging products.

 

The Impact of Color on Conversions

There are plenty of examples where a simple change in the color of increased sales and conversions, since other than copy, design and color play a huge role in the success or failure of any landing page or product. Although changing an elements color on a landing page can have great impact on conversions, it is very hard to analyze results from these types of tests and scale from them. Deciding on the colors of your landing page or brand is more than just the color of your Call to Action button, it’s a strategy. Since colors portray emotions, you can use them in a way that communicates a certain experience.

I just got back from Europe and witnessed all of the McDonalds chains around me in Green. It intrigued me to understand why such a strong brand known for its RED color would change to Green and apparently McDonalds is swapping its traditional red backdrop for a deep Green — to promote a more eco-friendly image in Europe. The power of color.

McDonalds isn’t alone, in a marketing study, Heinz changed the color of their signature ketchup bottle from red to green and sold over 10 million bottles in seven months, resulting in sales of $23 million.

What’s Next?

With all of the information and data provided you should be able to start incorporating color psychology into your landing page designs in order to see which colors resonate with your target audience.  It’s important to understand that work does not end with simply creating a landing page and that continual testing of copy, layout, imagery, and particularly color is need to truly impact conversions.   How have you incorporated color into your designs?

 

This post was originally published on Conversioner blog